CHAPTER XI LES PETITS SOLDATS

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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: “The children laugh; they do not know that our world is destroyed, and it is well.”

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 the ChÂteau of a morning for his quart can of milk. Mud, rain, snow, it was all one to him. By the hand, he often brought a younger cousin, Albert, aged six. Chubby-faced and sturdy of leg was Albert, clad in a diminutive khaki suit, and a brown visored cap which failed to blight his red cheeks. Robert, being brave and unconscious, whistled the merry call he had been taught, “Bob White, Bob White!” and smiled at all the world. But Albert, being shy, buried his small nose between cap and muffler, hung his head, and if pressed too far by unsought civilities, presented his back.

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 since the Retreat, their life has consisted of skulking more or less among the ruins. Raiding aeroplanes, by night or day, drop bombs in their vicinity; for Canizy lies near to Ham, the munition centre of the St. Quentin front. They hear the bombardments; and the rumours fly that the Boches are advancing. Will the lines hold? Their mothers keep eyes and ears open to the eastward. One refuses to buy a stove, because she thinks it is too risky an investment; her husband is sure the Germans will return, and a stove, it cannot be carried away. “What will you do then, if the Germans come?” I ask. “Fly,” is the universal reply. “We know the Boches; better to die than remain.

Et les momes Boches ils embrassent leur pÈre? ...

[And do the little Boche children hug their father?]

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 made last autumn as in times of peace, revealed it. The girls danced about it like sprites, touching it spitefully with their toes. “Take care,” I cried. “Come away.” Merry laughter greeted my alarm. “There are many of them,” said dare-devil ThÉrÈse; “they do no harm.” Nevertheless, knowing that a farmer had been killed while ploughing, not far away, by just such a shell, I sent word to the military authorities who removed this particular obus, before the next Sunday’s mass. The Government recognises the danger, and prints large placards of warning, which are hung up in the schoolrooms.

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 such dilapidated interior bore, beside the warning against spent shells, the following “Fable for the day,” written in the teacher’s slant hand upon the blackboard: “At our last breath, we shall have nothing. Since we have neither father nor mother, we are now orphans. Nevertheless, we must do right. We must do right because it is right.”

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 lingering perhaps in Offoy on some belated errand. Like the rabbits he must stay under cover until the fusillades should cease. Yet the children of the village were not wholly neglected. It was their former teacher, now resident in Hombleux, who taught them the stirring Petit Soldat. And from Offoy came M. l’AumÔnier, of whom you shall hear later, to teach them the catechism and to receive them into the church. “They are very gentils, the children of Canizy,” he assured me one day. “They are not like the children of the other villages. They have brave parents; they are well brought up.”

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 look like that of a faithful, whipped dog in his eyes,—Elmire Carlier, whose lovely mouth is carved in patience, the Tabarys, ragged and elfin—these are the children of Picardy. But where is the spontaneity of childhood? Where may one find it in the track of war?

Garde À vous!

Compagnie!... halte!

[Company ... halt!]

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. The babies come, with older sister nurses; and on the outskirts may be seen bent grandfather or grandmother, forgetting sorrow for the moment, in watching the romping groups. And even after the store automobile, stripped of its merchandise, honks persistently its desire to be off, the joy of that brief hour is perpetuated in the books that the teacher leaves behind. Who so proud then as the boy or girl singled out to be the owner of a book for a whole week? Contes des FÉes, petites histoires, the rondes themselves; they are treasures comparable to fairy gold. Yet reading never seems to interfere with duty; Raymond, or DÉsirÉ, or Adrien, you are likely to meet them as usual en route to Voyennes for apples, or returning from Ham with loaves of bread hanging, like life preservers, about their necks; they pasture the few cows; they feed the rabbits; they bring wood and dig coal,—they are the men of Canizy.

Such grow to be the soldiers of whom France is proud; those older children, the poilus, whom all the world has come to know. Long ago Julius CÆsar knew them also, and Hirtius Pansa wrote of them: “They make war with honour, without deceit and without artifice.” Brought up to adore la Patrie, singing of death, as of glory, the little soldier of France marches to-day as did the child in the Children’s Crusade. Across three thousand miles I hear his refrain:

Point de chagrin,
Point de chagrin,
Il a sa gourde, il a sa pipe,
C’est un gaillard toujours en train.

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                           

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