Ou t’en vas-tu, soldat de France, Tout equipÉ, prÊt au combat, Ou t’en vas-tu, petit soldat? C’est comme il plaÎt À la Patrie, Je n’ai qu’ À suivre les tambours. Gloire au drapeau, Gloire au drapeau. J’aimerais bien revoir la France, Mais bravement mourir est beau. So, in chorus, sang the children of my village, day after day, as they marched and circled about us up and down the streets. A catching tune; a laughing eye; did they realise that only twelve miles away on the firing line their soldiers were dying for the glory of the flag? No, it was not possible for them, fugitives though they themselves had been, to live the horrors of war. As Mme. Gabrielle said: Yet it would be hard to find a more manly group of boys in any land than those of Canizy. They were soldiers, even in their dress; blue caps, and blue or khaki blouses and trousers which their mothers had cut and made from the cast-off coats of passing troops, English or French as the case might be. Stockings also were of a military colour; for as Mme. Marie Gense explained: “One can find stockings in the trenches sometimes,—dirty, of course, and ragged; but they can be washed and raveled, and the yarn is excellent.” So it came about that little Robert had one pair of stockings with blue tops and khaki feet, because, you understand, there was not enough wool of one colour to complete them. Above his wooden sabots, the straight splicing was plainly visible, if he were ever en repos. But my memory of Robert is of tireless feet that twinkled almost as merrily as his eyes. It was no hardship for him to walk the eight miles back and forth to It would be small wonder if all the children of Canizy had been shy. With their elders they were virtual prisoners during the German occupation. They had no incentive to gather in groups, no church and no school. Rather, they were taught to slip in and out in silence lest they attract sinister attention. One of our little soldiers to the end of his life will carry a mark of German brutality in a hand maimed by a too well aimed grenade. Even in the fields, a child cannot play. One day I was taken by a bevy of laughing little girls to see an obus which had fallen in the graveyard near the entrance to the church. It had lain there some months unexploded, hidden by grass and weeds. But the preparations for All Saints’ Day, as punctiliously The schools themselves are depressing enough, for against no class of buildings did the Germans vent more hatred. Throughout the devastated area, they were completely destroyed. Ecole des Filles, or Ecole des GarÇons may still be seen in white capitals adorning a gaping arch or a jagged wall. But the schools, such as they are, are held in half-ruined dwellings, or in baraques. One In Canizy, as I have said, there was no school. The walls even of the former school building were razed to the ground. But the children were supposed to attend the school of another commune, that of Offoy, a mile and a half distant along the canal. This seemingly simple provision for education was made impossible by the fact that regiments continuously en repos at Offoy used the sandy buttes formed by the Somme at this point for mitrailleuse practice. One saw them every afternoon at half past two, bringing out their gruesome targets, in the shape of a human head and shoulders, and sentineling the crossroads with notices and red flags. Then woe to the urchin Well brought up, yes, in all the usages of docility and endurance. Shifting of troops, obedience to military masters, slavery and pillage, such are the facts which these children have learned for three years. But grafted as the lesson has been upon a spirit gentle by nature, the result is terrible in its sombreness. Robert Gense, uncannily helpful; Raymond Carpentier, threadbare and bowed at fourteen,—a On our own playground, perhaps, sometimes. Yet the children had to be encouraged to play. They might remember the words of the rondes which have lately become familiar to American children also through the illustrations of Boutet de Monville, but they no longer curtseyed as the beautiful gentlemen and the beautiful ladies should sur le pont d’Avignon. They no longer had books to read. A prayer book, a hymnal, sometimes the family records; these were all the literature saved in their mothers’ sacks of flight. But the play teacher draws our waifs of the war as if with a magic flute; even M. Lanne’s cows come trooping with the children, because the boy who herds them cannot come without. Such grow to be the soldiers of whom France is proud; those older children, the poilus, whom Point de chagrin, Point de chagrin, Il a sa gourde, il a sa pipe, C’est un gaillard toujours en train. |