ROUND ABOUT
BAR-LE-DUC

BY
SUSANNE R. DAY
AUTHOR OF "THE AMAZING PHILANTHROPISTS," ETC.

London
SKEFFINGTON & SON, LTD.
34 SOUTHAMPTON STREET, STRAND, W.C. 2
PUBLISHERS TO HIS MAJESTY THE KING

TO

CAROL

FOR WHOSE EYES

THIS BOOK WAS WRITTEN

[PREFACE]

TO CAROL

Dear, you asked me to write for you the story of my work and adventures in France, and through all the agonising hours of incubation and parturition you have given me your unfailing sympathy, encouragement and help. You have even chastened me (it was a devastating hour!) for my—and, I believe, for the book's—good, and when we discovered that the original form—that of intimate personal letters written directly to you—did not suit the subject matter, you acquiesced generously in a change, the need for which I, at least, shall ever deplore.

And now that the last words have been written and Finis lies upon the page, I know how short it all falls of my ideal and how unworthy it is of your high hope of me. And yet I dare to offer it to you, knowing that what is good in it is yours, deep delver that you are for the gold that lies—somewhere—in every human heart.

Twenty months in the war zone ought, one would imagine, to have provided me with countless hair-breadth escapes, thrills, and perhaps even shockers with which to regale you, but the adventures are all those of other people, an occasional flight to a cellar in a raid being all we could claim of danger. And so, instead of being a book about English women in France, it is mainly a book about French women in their own country, and therein lies its chief, if not its only claim to merit.

Humanness was the quality which above all others you asked for, and if it possesses that I shall know it has not been written in vain.

Susanne R. Day.

London,
January 1918.

[CONTENTS]

[ROUND ABOUT BAR-LE-DUC]

[CHAPTER I]

MAINLY INTRODUCTORY

Relief Work in the War Zone. It did sound exciting. No wonder I volunteered, but, oh dear! great was the plenitude of my ignorance. I vaguely understood that we were to distribute clothes and rabbits, kitchen utensils, guano and other delectable necessaries to a stricken people, but not that we were to wear a uniform and that the uniform would be made "by post." If I had there might never have been a chapter to write nor a tale to tell.

That uniform!—shall I ever forget it? Or the figure I cut when I put it on? Of course, like any sensible female woman, I wanted to have it made by my own tailor and in my own way. Strict adherence to the general scheme, of course, with reasonable modification to suit the individual. But Authority said NO. Only by one man and in one place could that uniform be made. Frankly sceptical at first, I am now a devout believer. For it was certainly unique; perhaps in strict truth I ought to say that several specimens of it were unique. There was one—but this is a modest tale told by a modest woman. Stifle curiosity, and be content with knowing that the less cannot contain the greater. And then let us go hence and ponder upon the sweet reasonableness of man, or at least of one man who, when asked to produce the uniform hats, replied, "But what for, Madam?"

"Well, to try on, of course."

"Try on? Why ever should you want to do that?"

Perhaps you won't believe this? But it is true.

Oh, the agonies of those last days of preparation, and the heartrending impossibility of getting any really useful or practical information about an outfit!

"Wear pyjamas, a mess-tin, and a water-bottle. And of course you must have a sleeping-bag and a bath."

This was at least encouraging. Were we going to sleep à la belle étoile, a heap of stones our pillow, our roof the sky? You can imagine how I thrilled. But there was the bath. Even in France.... I relinquished the stars with a sigh and realised that Authority was talking learnedly about the uniform, talking swiftly, confidently, assuredly, and as I listened conviction grew that once arrayed in it every difficulty and danger would melt away, and the French nation prostrate itself before my blushing feet in one concentrated desire to pay homage and assist. One danger certainly melted away, but, alas! it took Romance with it. As a moral life-belt that uniform has never been equalled.

And then there was the kit-bag. Ye gods, I KNOW that villainous thing was possessed of the devil. From the day I found it, lying a discouraged heap upon my bedroom floor, to the day when it tucked itself on board ship in direct defiance of my orders and invited the Germans to come and torpedo it—which they promptly did—it never ceased to annoy. It lost its key in Paris, and on arrival at Sermaize declined to allow itself to be opened. It was dumped in my "bedroom" (of which more later), the lock was forced, Sermaize settled itself to slumber. I proceeded to unpack, plunged in a hand and drew forth—a pair of blue serge trousers.

Wild yells for help brought Sermaize to my door. What the owner of the trousers thought when his broken-locked bag was flung back upon him, history does not relate. He had opened what he thought was HIS bag, so possibly he was beyond speech. He was a shy young man and he had never been in France before.

If the thing—the bag, I mean, not the shy young man—had been pretty or artistic one might have forgiven it all its sins. Iniquity should always be beautiful. But that bag was plain, mais d'une laideur effroyable. Just for all the world like a monstrous obscene sausage, green with putrefaction and decay. What I said when I tried to pack is not fit for a young and modest ear. I planted it on its hind legs, seized a pair of boots, tried to immure them in its depths, slipped and fell into it head foremost. It was then the devil chuckled. I heard him. He had been waiting, you see—he knew.

It is some consolation that a certain not-to-be-named friend was not on the hotel steps as I stole forth that torrid June morning. Every imp of the thousand that possess her would have danced with glee. How she would have laughed: for there I was, the not-to-be-tried-on-uniform-hat, a grotesque little inverted pudding-bowl of a thing, perched like a fungoid growth on the top of my head, the uniform itself hanging blanket-like about my shrinking form (it was heavy enough for the arctic regions), a water-bottle which had refused point-blank to go into the kit-bag hanging over one shoulder, and a bulging brown knapsack jutting blasphemously from my back. What a vision! Tartarin of Tarascon climbing the Alps with an ironmonger's shop on his back fades ignominiously in comparison. But then I wasn't just climbing commonplace tourist-haunted Alps. I was going "to the Front." At least, so my family said when making pointed and highly encouraging remarks about my will. That the "Front" in question was twenty miles from a trench was a mere detail. Why go to the War Zone if you don't swagger? I swaggered. Not much, you know—just the faintest æsthetic suspicion of a swagger, and then.... Then Nemesis fell—fell as I passed a mirror, and saw.... I crawled on all fours into France.

I crawled on all fours into Paris. Think of it, Paris! No wonder French women murmured, "Mais, Mademoiselle, vous êtes très devouée." I am a modest woman (I have mentioned this before, but it bears repetition), but whenever I thought of that uniform I believed them.

If Paris had not been at war she would probably have arrested me at the Douane, and I should have deserved it. Fancy insulting her by wearing such clothes, and on such a night—a clear, purple, perfect summer night, when she lay like a fairy city caught in the silvery nets of the moon. And yet there was a strange, ominous hush over it all. The city lying quiet and, oh, so still! It seemed to be waiting, waiting, a cup from which the wine had been poured upon the red floor of war.

Wandering along the deserted quays, wondering what the morrow would bring.... What a night that was, the sheer exquisite beauty of it! The Conciergerie dark against the sky, the gleaming path of the river, and then the Louvre and the Tuileries all hushed to languorous, passionate beauty in the arms of the moon.

Don't you love Paris, every stone of her? I do. But I was not allowed to stay there. Inexorable Fate sent me the next morning in a taxi and a state of excusable excitement to the Gare de l'Est, where, kit-bag, mess-tin, water-bottle and all, I was immured in the Paris-Nancy express and borne away through a morning of glittering sunshine to Vitry-le-François, there to be deposited upon the platform and in the arms of a grey-coated and becomingly-expectant young man.

[CHAPTER II]

EN ROUTE—SERMAIZE-LES-BAINS

I

Like Bartley Fallon of immortal memory, "if there's any ill luck at all in the world, 'tis on meself it falls." Needless to say, I was not allowed to remain in the arms of that nice young man; and indeed, to give him his due, he showed no overwhelming desire to keep me there. The embodiment of all Quakerly propriety, he conducted me with befitting ceremony to the station just as the sun began to drop down the long hills of the sky, and sent me forth once more, this time with a ticket for Sermaize-les-Bains in my pocket. My proverbial luck held good—that is to say, bad. The train was an Omnibus. Do you know what that means? No? Then I shall tell you. It is the philosopher of locomotion, the last thing in, the final triumph of, thoughtful, leisurely progression. Its phlegm is sheerly imperturbable, its serenity of that large-souled order which cataclysms cannot ruffle nor revolutions disturb. A destination? It shrugs its shoulder. Yes, somewhere, across illimitable continents, across incalculable æons of time. The world is beautiful, haste the expression of a vulgar age. To travel hopefully is to arrive. It hopes. Eventually, if God is good, it arrives.

And so did we, after long consultative visits to small wayside stations, and after much meditative meandering through sunset-coloured lands. Arrived—ah, can you wonder at it?—with just a little catch in our throats and a shamed mistiness of vision, for had we not seen, there in that little clump of undergrowth outside the wood, a lonely cross, fenced with a rustic paling, an old red mouldering képi hanging on the point? And then in the field another ... and again another
... mute, pitiful, inspiring witnesses of the grim
tragedy of war.

And then came Sermaize, once a thriving little town, a thing of streets and HOMES, of warm firelit rooms where the great game of Life was played out day by day, where the stakes were Love and Laughter, and Success and Failure and Death, where men and women met, it might be on such a night as this—a night to dream in and to love, a night when the slow pulse of the Eternal Sea beat quietly upon the ear—met to tell the age-old story while the world itself stood still to listen, and out of the silence enchantment grew, and old standards and old values passed away and a new Heaven and a new Earth were born.

Once a thing of streets and homes! Ah, there lies the real tragedy of the ruined village. Bricks and mortar? Yes. You may tell the tale to the last ultimate sou if you will, count it all up, mark it all down in francs and centimes, tell me that here in one brief hour the Germans did so much damage, destroyed so many thousand pounds worth of property, ground such and such an ancient monument to useless powder, but who can count the cost, or appraise the value of the things which no money can buy, that only human lives can pay for?

One ruined village is exactly like every other ruined village you may say with absolute truth, and yet be wrong. A freak of successful destruction here, a fantastic failure there, may give a touch of individuality, even a hint of the grotesque. That tall chimney, how oddly it leans against the sky. That archway standing when everything about it is rubble and dust. That bit of twisted iron-work, writhing like an uncouth monster, that stairway climbing ridiculously into space. Yes, they are all alike, these villages, and all heartrendingly different. For each has its hidden story of broken lives to tell, of human hopes and human ambitions dashed remorselessly to earth, of human friendships severed, of human loves torn and bleeding, trampled under the red heel of war. Lying there in the moonlight, Sermaize possessed an awful dignity. In life it may have been sordid and commonplace, in death, wrapped in the silver shroud of the moon, it was sublime.

As we passed through the broken piles of masonry and brick-and iron-work every inch of the road throbbed with its history, the ruins became infused with life and—was it phantasy? a trick of the night? of the dream-compelling moon?—out of the dark shadows came the phantoms of men and women and little children, their eyes wide with fear and longing, their empty hands outstretched....

Home! They cried the word aloud, and the night was filled with their crying.

And so we passed. Looking back now, I think the dominant emotion of the moment was one of rage, of blind, impotent, ravening fury against the senseless cruelty that could be guilty of such a thing. For the destruction of Sermaize-les-Bains was not a grim necessity of war. It was a sacrifice to the pride of the All-Highest.

In a heat that was sheerly tropical the battle had raged to and fro. The Grande Place had been torn to atoms by the long-range German guns, then came hand-to-hand fighting in the streets, and the Germans in possession. The inhabitants, terrified, for the most part fled to the woods. Some remained, but among them unfortunately not the Mayor. He had gone away early in the morning. He was, perhaps, a simple-minded person. He cannot have realised how inestimable a privilege it is to receive a German Commandant in the "Town Hall" he has just blown to infinitesimal fragments. It may even be—though it is difficult to believe it—that, conscious of the privilege, he yet dared to despise it. Whatever the reason the fact remains—he was not there. What an insult to German pride, what a blow to German prestige! No wonder the Commandant strode into the street and in a voice trembling with righteous indignation gave the order, "Pillage and Fire."

Oh, it was a merry game that, and played to a magnificent finish. The houses were stripped as human ghouls stripped the dead upon Napoleonic battlefields; glass, china, furniture, pictures, silver, heirlooms cherished through many a generation, it was a glorious harvest, and what was not worth the gleaning was piled into heaps and burned.

There are certain pastilles, innocent-looking things like a man's coat button, round and black, with a hole in the middle. They say the German army came into France with strings of them round their necks, for in the German army every contingency is provided for, every destructive device supplied even to the last least ultimate detail. Its organisers take no risks. They never throw the dice with Chance. Luck? They don't believe in luck. They believe in efficiency and careful scientific preparation, in clean-cut work, with no tags or loose ends of humanity hanging from it. The human equation is merely a cog upon the machine, and yet it is the one that is going to destroy them in the end.

So they brought their pastilles into France just as they brought their expert packers to ensure the safe transit into Germany of all perishable loot. And if ever you see some of those pastilles framed at Selfridge's and ask yourself if they could really be effective—they are so small, so very harmless-looking—remember Sermaize and the waste of charred rubbish lying desolate under the moon. Some one—I think Maurice Genevoix, in Sous Verdun—tells how, in the early days of war, French soldiers were sometimes horrified to see a bullet-stricken German suddenly catch fire, become a living torch, blazing, terrible. At first they were quite unable to account for it. You see, they didn't know about the pastilles then. Later, when they did, they understood. I was told in Sermaize that a German aeroplane, flying low over the roofs, sprayed them with petrol that day. If true, it was quite an unnecessary waste of valuable material. The pastilles were more than equal to the occasion. But so was the French hotel-keeper who, coming back when the Germans had commenced their long march home, and finding his house in desiccated fragments, promptly put up a rough wooden shelter, and hung out his sign-board, "Café des Ruines!"

II

No one should go to Sermaize without paying a visit to M. le Curé. He stayed with his people till his home was tumbling about his ears, and even then he hung on, in the cellar. Driven out by fire, he collected such fugitives as were at hand and helped them through the woods to a place of safety. Of the events and incidents of that flight, of the dramatic episodes of the bombardment and subsequent fighting—there was a story of a French officer, for instance, who came tumbling into the cellar demanding food and drink in the midst of all the hell, and who devoured both, M. le Curé confessing that his own appetite at the moment was not quite up to its usual form, howitzer shells being a poor substitute for, shall we say, a gin-and-bitters?—it is not for me to speak. He has told the tale himself elsewhere, and if in the telling he has been half as witty, as epigrammatic, as vivid and as humorous as he was when he lectured in the Common-room at Sermaize, then all I can say is, buy the book even if you have to pawn your last pair of boots to find the money for it.

A rare type, M. le Curé. An intellectual, once the owner and lover (the terms are, unhappily, not always synonymous) of a fine library, now in ashes, a man who could be generous even to an ungenerous foe, and remind an audience—one member, at least, of which was no Pacifist—that according to the German code the Mayor should have remained in the town, and that he, M. le Curé, had been able to collect no evidence of cruelty to, or outrage upon, an individual.

That lecture is one of the things that will live in my memory. For the Curé was not possessed of a library of some two thousand volumes for nothing, and whatever his Bishop's opinion may be on the subject, I take leave to believe that Anatole France, De Maupassant, Verlaine and Baudelaire jostled many a horrified divine upon the shelves. For his style was what a sound knowledge of French literature had made it. He could dare to be improper—oh, so deliciously, subtly improper! A word, a tone, a gesture—a history. And his audience? Well, I mustn't tell you about that, and perhaps the sense of utter incongruity was born entirely of my own imagination. But to hear him describe how he spent the night in a crowded railway-station waiting-room where many things that should be decently hidden were revealed, and where he, a respectable celibate divine, shared a pallet with dames of varying ages and attractiveness ... and.... The veil just drawn aside fell down again upon the scene, and English propriety came to its own with a shudder.

Yes, if you are wise you will visit M. le Curé. And ask him to tell you how he disguised himself as a drover, and how, when in defiance of all authority he came back to Sermaize, he himself swept and cleaned out the big room which the Germans had used as a hospital, and which they had befouled and filthied, leaving vessels full of offal and indescribable loathlinesses, where blood was thick on walls and floor; a room that stank, putrid, abominable. It was German filth, and German beastliness, and French women, their hearts still hot within them, would not touch it.

And ask him to tell you how nearly he was killed by a shell which fell on an outhouse in which he was taking shelter, and how he was called up, and as a soldier of France was told to lead a horse to some village whose name I have forgotten, and how he, who hardly knew one end of a horse from another, led it, and on arriving at the village met an irate officer.

"And what are you doing here?"

"I do not know."

"Your regiment?"

"I haven't one."

"And the horse?"

A shrug, what indeed of the horse?

Three days later he was wearing his cassock again.

Once, when escaping from Sermaize he was nearly shot by some French soldiers. There were only a few of them, and their nerves had been shattered. Nerves do give way sometimes when an avalanche sweeps over them, and the Germans came into France like a thousand avalanches. And so these poor wretches, separated from their regiment, fled. It was probably the wisest thing they could do under the circumstances. "Sauve qui peut." There are few cries more terrible than that. But a village lay in the line of flight, and in the village there was good red wine. It was a hot day, France was lost, Paris capitulating, and man a thirsty animal. A corporal rescued M. le Curé when his back was against the wall and rifles, describing wild circles, were threatening him; finally, the nerveless ones went back to their regiment and fought gloriously for France, and Paris did not capitulate after all.

III

With a howl of bitter anguish Tante Joséphine collapsed upon the ground, and the earth shook. For Tante Joséphine was fat, and her bones were buried beyond all hope of recovery under great pendulous masses of quivering, perspiring flesh. And she had walked, mais, pensez donc!—walked thousands of accursed miles through the woods, she had tripped over roots, she had been hoisted over banks, she had crashed like an avalanche down trenches and drains. She was no longer a woman, she was a bath—behold the perspiration!—she was an ache, mon Dieu! not one, but five million villainous aches; she was a lurid fire of profanity. For while she, Tante Joséphine, walked and fell and "larded the green earth," Grandmère lay in the brouette and refused to be evicted. At first Tante Joséphine tried to get in too. Surely the war which had worked so many miracles would transform her into a telescope, but the war was unkind, and Pierre, pauvre petit gosse! had been temporarily submerged in a sea of agitated fat from which he had been rescued with difficulty. And Grandmère was only eighty-two, whereas she, Tante Joséphine, was sixty.

All day long her eyes had turned to the brouette, and to Grandmère lying back like a queen. No, she could bear it no longer. If she did not ride she would die, or be taken by the Germans, and her blood would be on Grandmère's head, and shadowed by remorse would be all that selfish woman's days. The wood resounded with the bellowings, and the green earth trembled because Tante Joséphine, as she sat on it, trembled with wrath and fatigue and desolation and woe.

Grandmère stirred in the brouette. At eighty-two one is not so active as one was at twenty, but one isn't old, ma foi! Père Bronchot was old. He would be ninety-four at Toussaint, but she—oh, she could still show that big soft thing of a Tante Joséphine what it was to be a woman of France. She was always a weakling, was Joséphine, fit only for pasturage. And so behold the quivering mountain ludicrously piling itself upon the brouette, Pierre, a pensive look in his eye, standing by the while. He staggered as he caught up the handles. The chariot swayed ominously. The mountain became a volcano spurting forth fire. The chariot steadied, and then very slowly resumed its way. Half a kilomètre, three-quarters, a whole. Grandmère was strangely silent, for at eighty-two one is not so young as one was at twenty, and kilomètres grow strangely long as the years go by.

Tante Joséphine snored. Pierre ceased to push.

"Allons, Allons. Pierre, que veux-tu? Is it that the Germans shall catch us and make of you a stew for their supper?" Tante Joséphine had wakened up.

"I am tired."

"Ah, paresseux." The volcano became active again.

Pierre looked at Grandmère. How old she was! And why did she look so white as she trailed her feet bravely through the wood?

"Grandmère is ill. She must ride!"

What Tante Joséphine said the woods have gathered to their breast. Pierre became pensive, then he smiled. "Eh, bien. En route."

The kilomètre becomes very long when one is eighty-two, but Grandmère was a daughter of France. Her head was high, her eye steadfast as she plodded on, taking no notice of the way, never seeing the deep drain that ran beside the path. But Pierre saw it. He must have, because he saw everything. He was made that way. And that is why Tante Joséphine has never been able to understand why she dreamed she was rolling down a precipice with a railway train rolling on top of her, and wakened to find herself deep in the soft mould at the bottom of the drain, the brouette reclining on—well, on the highest promontory of her coast-line, while Pierre and Grandmère peered over the top with the eyes of celestial explorers who look down suddenly into hell.

So and in such wise was the manner of their going. Of the return Tante Joséphine does not speak. For a time they hid in the woods, other good Sermaizians with them. How did they live? Ah, don't ask me that! They existed, somehow, as birds and squirrels exist, perhaps, and then one day they said they were going home. I am not at all sure that the authorities wanted to have them there. For only a handful of houses remained, and though many a cellar was still intact under the ruins, cellars, considered as human habitation, may, without undue exaggeration, be said to lack some of the advantages of modern civilisation. How was Tante Joséphine, how were the stained and battered scarecrows that accompanied her to provide for themselves during the winter? Would broken bricks make bread? Would fire-eaten iron-work make a blanket? Authority might protest, Sermaizians did not care. They crept into the cellars that numbed them to the very marrow on cold days, living like badgers and foxes in their dark, comfortless holes, enduring bitter cold and terrible privation, lacking food and clothes and fire and light, but telling themselves that they were at home and sucking good comfort from the telling.

Needless to say, there weren't nearly enough cellars to go round, and direful things might have happened but for a lucky accident. Hidden in the woods about a mile from the town was an old Hydropathic Establishment, known as La Source, which had escaped the general destruction. Into it, regardless of its dirt and its bleak, excessive discomfort swarmed some three hundred of the sinistrés, there to huddle the long winter away.

As an example of its special attractions, let me tell you of one woman who lived with her two children in a tiny room, the walls of which streamed with damp, which had no fireplace, no heating possibilities of any kind, and whose sole furniture consisted of a barrow and one thin blanket.

From the point of view of the Relief worker an ideal case. Beautiful misery, you know. It could hardly be surpassed.

A Society—a very modest Society; it has repeatedly warned me that it dislikes publicity, so I heroically refrain from mentioning its name[1]—swept down upon the ruins early in 1915, and taking possession of one of the buildings at La Source, made the theatre its Common-room, the billiard-room its bedroom, and a top-loft a general dumping-ground, whose contents included a camp bed but no sheets, a tin basin and jug, an apologetic towel and, let me think—I can't remember a dressing-table or a mirror. It was a very modest Society, you remember, and the sum of its vanity——? Well, it perpetrated the uniform. Let it rest in peace.

Wherefore and because of which things a grey-clad apparition, moving through the moonlight like some hideous spectre of woe, arrived that warm June night at La Source, and was ushered into a room where innumerable people were drinking cocoa, rushing about, talking—ye gods, how they talked!—smoking.... I was more frightened than I have ever been in my life. I am not used to crowds, and to my fevered imagination every unit was a battalion. Then because I was hotter and thirstier than a grain of sand in a sun-scorched desert, cocoa was thrust upon me—cocoa! I drank it, loathing it, and wondered why everybody seemed to be drinking out of the same mug.

Then a young man seized my kit-bag. "Come along." My hair began to rise. I had been prepared for a great deal, but this.... I looked at the young man, he looked at me. The situation, at all events, did not lack piquancy! It was indeed a Sentimental Journey that I was making, and Sterne.... But the inimitable episode was not to repeat itself. My only room-mate was a bat.

[CHAPTER III]

FIRST IMPRESSIONS

I

Sermaize, however, was not to be the scene of my future labours. The honour was reserved for Bar-le-Duc, the captital city of the Meuse, the seat of a Prefecture, and proud manufacturer of a very special jam, "Confitures de Bar-le-Duc." The mouth waters at the very thought of it, but desire develops a limp when you have seen the initial processes of manufacture; for these consist in the removal by means of a finely-cut quill of every pip from every currant about to be boiled in the sacrificial pan. As you go through the streets in July you see white and crimson patches on the ground. They look disgustingly like something that has been chewed and spumed forth again. They are the discarded currant pips, for only the skin and pulp are made into jam.

This unpipping (have we any adequate translation for épepiner?), paid for at the rate of about four sous a pound, is sometimes carried on under the cleanliest of home conditions, but occasionally one sees a group of women at work round a table that makes jam for the moment the least appetising of comestibles. Nevertheless, if the good God ever places a pot of Confiture de Bar-le-Duc upon your table, eat it; eat it à la Russe with a spoon—don't insult it with bread—and you will become a god with nectar on your lips.

There were about four thousand refugees in Bar. That is why I was there too. And before I had been ten minutes in the town a hard-voiced woman said, "Would you please carry those seaux hygiéniques (sanitary pails) upstairs?" So much for my anticipatory thrills. If I ever go to heaven I shall be put in the back garden.

À la guerre, comme à la guerre. I carried the pails—a work of supererogation as it subsequently transpired, for they all had to be brought down again promptly, so heavily were they in demand.

For the sanitation of Bar-le-Duc has yet to be born.[2] One can't call arrangements that date from the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries sanitation, one can only call them self-advertisement. Until I went to Bar I never knew that the air could be solid with smell. One might as well walk up a sewer as up the Rue de l'Horloge on a hot day. Every man, woman and child in the town ought to have died of diphtheria, typhoid, septic poisoning, of a dozen gruesome diseases long ago. If smells could kill, Bar would be as depopulated as the Dead Cities of the Zuyder Zee. But the French seem to thrive on smells, though in all fairness I must admit that once or twice a grumble reached me. But that was when the cesspool under the window was discharging its contents into the yard.

The hard-voiced woman was hygienically mad. She imported a Sanitary Inspector, an ironic anomaly, who used to blush apoplectically through meals because she would discuss the undiscussable with him. "I hope you are not squeamish? We don't mind these things here," she said to me. "It is so stupid to be a prude."

Frankly, I could have slain that woman. She wasn't fit to live. The climax came on a broiling day when we were all exhausted and not a little sick from heat and smell. She pleasingly entertained us at dinner with a graphic description of a tubercular hip which she had been dressing. There was a manure heap outside the window of the sick child's room. It crawled with flies. So did the room. So did the hip.

She went back to the native sphere she should never have left a few days later, but in the meantime she had obsessed us all with a firm belief in the value of the seau hygiénique. Every refugee family should have one. Our first care must be to provide it. The obsession drove us into strange difficulties, as, for example, once in a neighbouring village where, trusting to my companion to keep the kindly but inquisitive Curé who accompanied us too deeply engaged in conversation to hear what I was saying, I asked the mother of a large family if she would like us to give her one.

"Qu'est que c'est? What did you say?"

Gentle as my murmur had been, M. le Curé was down on me like a shot. The woman who hesitates is lost. Anything is better than embarrassment. I repeated the question.

"Ce n'est pas nécessaire. Il y a un jardin," was his electrifying reply, and we filed out after him, with new ideas on French social questions simmering in our heads.

More embarrassing still, though, was a visit to a dear old couple living high up in a small room in a narrow fœtid street. Madame Legrand was a dear, with a round chubby face and the brightest of blue eyes, a complexion like a rosy apple and dimples like a girl's. She wore a spotlessly white mob-cap with a coquettish little frill round it, and she was just as clean and as fresh and as sonsy as if she had stepped out of her little cottage to go to Mass. Her husband was a rather picturesque creature, with a crimson cummerbund round his waist. He had been a garde-forêt, and together they had saved and scraped, living frugally and decently, putting money by every year until at last they were able to buy a cottage and an acre or two of land. Then the war came and the Germans, and the cottage was burnt, and the poor old things fled to Bar-le-Duc, homeless and beggared, possessed of nothing in all the world but just the clothes on their backs.

The garde-forêt was talking to my companion. I broached the all-important subject to Madame.

"Vous avez un seau hygiénique?" (I admit it was vilely put.)

"Mais oui, Mademoiselle. Voulez-vous ...?" Before I could stop her she had flourished it out upon the floor. It seems there are no limits to French hospitality, but there are to what even a commonplace English woman can face with stoical calm. Lest worse befall we fled. Somehow our sanitary researches lacked enthusiasm after that.

II

"Bar-le-Duc, an ancient and historical city of the Meuse, is beautifully situated on the banks of the Ornain."

That, of course, is how I should have commenced Chapter III, and then, with Baedekered solemnity, have described its streets, its canals, its railway-station—a dull affair until a bomb blew its glass roof to fragments; when it became quaintly skeletonic—its woods and hills, its churches and its monuments.

Only I never do anything quite as I ought to, and my capacity for getting into mischief is unlimited. I can't bear the level highways of Life, cut like a Route Nationale straight from point to point, white, steam-rollered, respectable, horrible. For me the by-ways and the lanes, the hedges smelling of wild roses and woodbine, or a-fire with berry and burning leaf, the cross-cuts leading you know not whither, but delightfully sure to surprise you in the end. What if the surprise is sometimes in a bog, in the mire, or in a thicket of furze? More often than not it is in Fairyland.

And so grant me your indulgence if I wander a little, loitering in the green meadows, plunging through the dim woods of experience. Especially as I am going to be good now and explain Bar and the refugees.

As I told you, there were some four thousand of them, from the Argonne, the Ardennes, Luxembourg, and many a frontier village such as Longuyon or Longwy. And Bar received them coldly. It dubbed them, without distinction of person, "ces sales émigrés," forgetting that the dirt and squalor of their appearance was due to adversity and not to any fault of their own. Forgetting, too, that it had very nearly been émigré itself. For the Germans came within five miles of it. From the town shells could be seen bursting high up the valley; the blaze of burning villages reddened the evening sky. Trains poured out laden with terrified inhabitants fearing the worst, all the hospitals were evacuated, and down the roads from the battle, from Mussey, from Vassincourt, from Laimont and Révigny came the wounded, a long procession of maimed and broken men. They lay in the streets, on door-steps, in the station-yard, they fell, dying, by canal and river bank. Kindly women, thrusting their own fear aside, ministered to them, the cannon thundering at their very door. And with the wounded came the refugees. What a procession that must have been. Women have told me of it. Told me how, after days—even weeks—of semi-starvation, lying in the open at night, exposed to rain and sun, often unable to get even a drink of water (for to their eternal shame many a village locked its wells, refusing to open them even for parched and wailing children), they found themselves caught in the backwash of the battle. To all the other horrors of flight was added this. Men, it might be their own sons, or husbands, or brothers, blood-stained remnants of humanity plodding wearily, desperately down the road, while in the fields and in the ditches lay mangled, encarnadined things that the very sun itself must have shuddered to look upon. Old feeble men and women fell out and died by the way, a mother carried her dead baby for three nights and three days, for there was no one to bury it, and the God of Life robed himself in the trappings of Death as he gathered exhausted mother and new-born babe in his arms.

And so they came to Bar. In the big dormitories of the Caserne Oudinot straw was laid on the floor, and there they were lodged, some after a night's rest to set wearily forth again, others to remain in the town, for the tide had turned and the Germans were in retreat.

There must have been an unusually large number of houses to let in Bar before the war; many, we know, had been condemned by the authorities, and, truth to tell, I don't wonder at it. "House to let" did not imply, as you might suppose, that it was untenanted, especially if the house was in the rue des Grangettes, or rue Oudinot, rue de Véel, or rue de l'Horloge. The tenants paid no rent. They had been in possession for years, possibly centuries. They were as numerous as the sands of the sea-shore, and they had all the élan, the joie de vivre, the vivacity and the tactical genius of the French nation. They welcomed the unhappy refugees—I was going to say vociferously, remembering the soldier who, billeted in a Kerry village, complained that the fleas sat up and barked at him.

The rooms, though dirty, unsanitary and swarming with the terror that hoppeth in the noonday (there were other and even worse plagues as well), were a shelter. The war would be over in three months, and one would be going home again. In the meantime one could endure the palliasse (a great sack filled with straw and laid on the floor, and on which four, five, seven or even more people slept at night), one could cower under the single blanket provided by the town, not undressing, of course; that would be to perish. One could learn to share the narrowest of quarters with nine, eleven, even fifteen other people; one could tighten one's belt when hunger came—and it came very often during those first hard months—but one could not endure the hostile looks of the tradespeople, and the sales émigrés spit at one in the streets.

The refugees, however, had one good friend; monsieur C., an ex-mayor of the town and a man whose "heart was open as day to melting charity," made their cause his own. And perhaps because of him, perhaps out of its own good heart, the town, officially considered, did its best for them. It gave them clean straw for their palliasses; it saw that no room was without a stove; it established a market for them when it discovered that the shopkeepers, exploiting misery, were scandalously overcharging for their goods; it declined to take rent from mothers with young families; and it appointed a doctor who gave medical attention free.

All very good and helpful, but mere drops in the bucket of refugee needs. You see the war had caught them unawares, and at first, no doubt for wise military reasons, the authorities discouraged flight. People who might have packed up necessaries and escaped in good order found themselves driven like cattle through the country, the Germans at their heels, the smallest of bundles clutched under their arms, and the gendarmes shouting "Vîte, Vîte, Depêchez-vous, depêchez-vous," till reason itself trembled in the balance.

Some, too, had remembered the war of Soixante-Dix, when the Prussians, marching to victory, treated the civilians kindly. "They passed through our village laughing and singing songs," old women have told me. Some atrocities there were, even then; but, compared with those of the present war, only the spasmodic outbursts of boyhood in a rage.

Consequently, flight was often delayed till the last moment, delayed till it was too late, and, caught by the tide, some found themselves prisoners behind the lines. Those who got away saved practically nothing. Sometimes a few family papers, sometimes the bas de laine, the storehouse of their savings, sometimes a change of linen, most often nothing at all.

"Mais rien, Mademoiselle. Je vous assure, rien du tout, du tout, du tout. Pas ça," and with the familiar gesture a forefinger nail would catch behind a front tooth and then click sharply outwards. When talking to an excited Meusienne, it is well to be wary. One must not stand too near, for she is sure to thrust her face close to your own, and when the finger flies out it no longer answers to the helm. It may end its unbridled career anywhere, and commit awful havoc in the ending, for the nail of the Meusienne is not a nail, it is a talon.

No wonder the poor souls needed help. No wonder they besieged our door when the news went forth that "Les Anglaises" had come to town and were distributing clothes and utensils, chairs, garde-mangers (small safes in which to keep their food, the fly pest being sheerly horrible), sheets, blankets—anything and everything that destitute humanity needs and is grateful for. Their faith in us, after a few months of work, became profound. They believed we could evolve anything, anywhere and at a moment's notice. If stern necessity obliged us to refuse, they had a touching way of saying, "Eh bien, ce sera pour une autre fois"[3]—a politeness which extricated them gracefully from a difficult position, but left us struggling in the net of circumstance and unaccountably convinced that when they called again "our purse, our person, our extremest means would lie all unlocked to their occasion."

III

But these little amenities of relief only thrust themselves upon me by degrees. At first, during the torrid summer weeks, everything was so new and so strange there were no clean-cut outlines at all. Before one impression had focused itself upon the mind another was claiming place. My brain—if you could have examined it—must have looked like a photographic plate exposed some dozens of times by a careless amateur. From the general mistiness and blur only a few things stand out. The stifling heat, the awful smells, the unending succession of weeping and hysterical women, and last, but not least, les puces.

Did you ever hear the story of the Irish farmer who said he "did not grudge them their bite and their sup, but what he could not stand was the continule thramping"? Well, the thramping was maddening. I believe I never paid a visit to a refugee in those days without becoming the exercising ground for light cavalry. People sitting quietly in our Common-room working at case-papers would suddenly dash away, to come back some minutes later in rage and exasperation. The cavalry still manœuvred. A mere patrol of two or three could be dealt with, but the poor wretch who had a regiment nearly qualified for a lunatic asylum.

Every visit we paid renewed our afflictions, and the houses, old and long untenanted, being so disgustingly dirty, we endured mental agonies—in addition to physical ones—when we thought of the filth from which the plague had come. Oddly enough, we did not suffer so much the next summer, and we were mercifully spared the attentions of other less active but even more horrible forms of entomological life.

You see, it was a rule—and as experience proved a very wise rule—of our Society that no help should be given unless the applicant had been visited and full particulars of his, or her, condition ascertained. Roughly speaking, we found out where he had come from, his previous occupation and station in life, the size of his farm if he had one and the amount of his stock, horses, cattle, sheep, pigs, poultry, rabbits, etc.; we made notes on his housing conditions, tabulated the members of his family, their ages and sex, their present employment and the amount of wages earned. All of which took time.

Armed with a notebook and pencil, we would sally forth, to grope our way up pitch-dark staircases, knock at innumerable doors, dash past the murky corner where the cesspool lay—I know houses in which it is under the stairs—and at last run the refugee to earth.

Then followed the usual routine. A chair—generally broken or minus a back—or a stool dragged forth with an apology for its poverty: "Quand on est émigrée, vous savez, Madame—ou Mademoiselle, je ne sais pas?" and then the torrent. A word sufficed to unloose it. Only a fool would try to stem it.

"Ah, Mademoiselle, you do not know what I have suffered."

So Madame would settle herself to the tale, and that was the moment when ... when ... when doubt grew, then certainty, and "Half-a-league, half-a-league, half-a-league onward" hammered an accompaniment on the brain.

In the evening we sorted out our notes and made up our case papers. These latter should yield rich harvest to the future historian if they are preserved, and if the good God has endowed him with a sense of humour. He could make such delicious "copy" from them. For the individuality of the worker stamped itself upon the papers even more legibly than the biography of the case. There are lots of gems scattered through them, but the one I like best lies in the column headed Medical Relief, and runs as follows—

Aug. 26. Madame Guiot has pneumonia. Condition serious.

Aug. 31. Madame quite comfortable.

Sept. 2. Madame has died. (Nurse's initials appended.)

In the papers you may read that such and such a house is infested with vermin; that Mademoiselle Wurtz is said, by the neighbours, to drink; that Madame Dablainville is filthy and lives like a pig; that the life of Madame Hache falls regrettably below accepted standards of morality; and that Madame Bontemps, who probably never owned three pocket-handkerchiefs in her life, declares that she lost sixty pairs of handspun linen sheets, four dozen chemises, and pillow and bolster cases innumerable when the Germans burnt her home.

You may also read how Mademoiselle Rose Perrotin was nursing a sick father when the Boches took possession of her village; how the Commandant ordered her to leave, and how she, with tears streaming down her large fat face, begged to be allowed to remain. Her father was dying. It was impossible to leave him. But German Commandants care little for filial feelings. Mademoiselle Rose (a blossom withering on its stem) had a figure like a monolith but a heart of gold. Even though they shot her she would not go away. They did not shoot her. They quietly placed her on the outskirts of the village and bade her begone. Next day she crept back again. She prayed, she wept, she implored, she entreated. When a monolith weeps even Emperors succumb. So did the Commandant. A day, two days, passed, and then her father died. They must have been very dreadful days, but worse was to follow. No one would bury the dead Frenchman. She had to leave him lying there—I gathered, however, that a grave was subsequently dug for him in unconsecrated ground—and walk, and walk, and walk, mile after mile, kilométre after kilométre, longing to weep, nay, to cascade tears; but, "Figurez-vous, Mademoiselle. Ah, quelle misère. I had not got a pocket-handkerchief!"

That a father should die, that is Fate, but that one should not have a pocket-handkerchief!... She wept afresh because she had not been able to weep then, and I believe that I shall carry to my grave a vision of stout, monolithic, utterly prosaic Mademoiselle Rose toiling across half a Department of France weeping because she had no pocket-handkerchief in which to mourn for her honoured dead.

Or you may read of little André Moldinot, who was alone in the fields when he saw the Germans coming, and who ran away, drifting he doesn't know how to Bar-le-Duc, where he has remained in the care of kindly people, hearing no news of his family, not knowing whether they are alive or dead. Or of the old man, whose name I have forgotten—was it Galzandat?—who fought with the English in the Crimea, and who lived with fourteen other people (women and children) in a stifling hole in the rue Polval. Or of that awful room in the street near the Canal where thirty people ate and drank and slept and quarrelled a whole winter through—a room unspeakable in its dirt and untidiness. Old rags lay heaped on the floor, dirty crockery, potato, carrot and turnip peelings littered the greasy table, big palliasses strewed the corners, loathsome bedclothes crawling on them. On strings stretched from wall to wall clothes were drying (one inmate was a washerwoman), an old witch-like creature with matted, unkempt locks flitted about, and in the far corner, on the day I went there, two priests were offering ghostly counsel to a weeping woman.

Misery makes strange bedfellows, and the cyclone of war flung together people who, in ordinary circumstances, would have been far removed from one another's orbit. At first the good and the bad, the clean and the dirty, the thrifty and the drunken herded together, too wretched to complain, too crushed and despondent to hope for better things. But gradually temperament asserted itself, and one by one, as opportunity arose and their circumstances improved, the respectable ceased to rub elbows with the dissolute, and they found quarters of their own either through their own exertions or through the help of their friends. Monsieur C. and Madame B. (wise, witty, kindly Madame B.) were especially energetic in this respect.

So we soon began to feel comfortably assured that the tenants of Maison Blanpain and of one or two other rookeries were the scum of the refugee pool, idle, disreputable, swearing, undeserving vagabonds every one. They took us in gloriously many a time, they fooled us to the top of our sentimental bent—at first—but we could not have done without them. For though Virtue may bathe the world in still, white light, it is Vice that splashes the dancing colours over it.

IV

Yes, I suppose we were taken in at times!

On the outskirts of Bar, beyond the Faubourg Marbot, lies a wood called the Bois de Maestricht. The way to it lies through a narrow winding valley of great beauty, especially in the autumn when the fires of the dying year are ablaze in wood and field. Just at the end of the road where the woods crush down and engulf it is a long strip of meadow, a nocturne in green and purple when the autumn crocus is in flower, and in the woods are violets and wild strawberries, and long trails of lesser periwinkle, ivy crimson and white, and hellebore and oxlips and all sorts of delicious things, with, from just one point on one of the countless uphill paths, a view of Bar, so exquisite, so ethereal it almost seems like a glimpse of some far dream-silvered land.

And it was here, just on the edge of the wood, in a small rough shack, that Madame Martin and her family took up their abode. The shack consisted of one room, not long and certainly not wide, a slice of which, rudely partitioned off, did duty as a cow-house. Here lived Madame Martin and her husband, her granddaughter Alice, a small boy suffering from a malady which caused severe abdominal distention, and one or two other children. Le Père Battin, whose relationship was obscure but presumably deeply-rooted in the family soil, shared the cow-end with his beloved vache, a noble beast and, like himself, a refugee.

Le Père Battin always averred that he had adopted the cow, it being obviously an orphan, homeless and a beggar, but my own firm conviction is that he stole it. It was a kindly cow and a generous, for it proceeded speedily to enrich him with a calf which, unlike most refugee babies, throve amazingly, and when I saw it took up so much space in the narrow shed there was hardly room enough for its mother. How Le Père Battin squeezed himself in as well is a pure wonder. But squeeze he did, and when delicately suggesting that a gift of sheets from "Les Anglaises" would completely assuage the miseries of his lot, he showed me his bed. It was in the feeding-trough. One hurried glance was enough. I no longer wondered why the first visitor to the Martin abode, having unwisely settled down for a chat, spent the rest of the day and the greater part of the night in fruitless chase. I did not settle down. "It was fear, O Little Hunter, it was fear."

Nor did I give the sheets. The cow would have eaten them.

I remarked that the day was hot, and repaired to the garden (a wilderness of weeds and despairing flowers), and there Madame entertained me.

She was an ideal "case." Just the person whose photograph should be sent to kindly, generous souls at home. She was small, active, rather witty, a good talker, with darting brown eyes and a bewitching grin. She wore a befrilled cap, and oh, she could flatter with her tongue! A nice old soul in spite of the villainy with which Père Battin subsequently charged her. Her first visitor—she who unfortunately sat down—fell a victim on the spot. So did we all. Heaven had made Madame that way. It was inevitable. So all the riches of our earth were poured forth for her, and she devoured largely of our substance. Then the girl Alice developed throat trouble and was ministered to by our nurse, and she, I grieve to say, coming home one day from the Bois, hinted dark things about Alice—things which made our righteous judgment to stand on end. We continued to pet Madame Martin; we did everything we could for her except eat her jam. Having seen the shack, and le Père Battin and that one overcrowded room where flies in dense black swarms settled on everything, where dogs scratched and where age-old dirt gathered more dirt to its arms with the dawning of every day, that jam pot contained so many possibilities, we felt that to eat its contents would be sheer murder.

And so the autumn wore away and winter came, and then one day as I was going through the valley to visit some woodcutters in the Bois, I met le Père Battin driving home his cow. And he stopped me. Once when speaking of the Emperor of Austria he had said, "Il est en train de mourir? Bon. On a eu bien assez de ces lapins-là." (He is dying? Good. We have had enough of such rabbits.)

A man who can discuss an Emperor in such terms is not lightly to be passed by, but I stood as far from him as possible. I did not till then believe that anybody could be as dirty as Father Battin and live.

But he thrust himself close, looking fearfully about him, sinking his voice to a hoarse whisper.

"Did I know the truth about the Martins? That Alice had gone to Révigny? There were soldiers there." He nodded sapiently. "But Alice was la vraie Comtesse de——" He mentioned a hyphenated name. "Yes. It was true. She was married. A young man, a fool. Mon Dieu, but a fool. She might live in a shack in the Bois and her grandmother might be an old peasant woman, but she was a Comtesse, wife of the Comte de——."

I took leave to suppose that Père Battin was mad.

But he was circumstantial. "Yes. Her husband had left her. An affair of a few weeks. Every gendarme in the town knew. And Madame knew. Knew and made money out of it. Many a good franc she had put in her pocket. But the gendarmes were watching, and one day the old woman and Alice would...." Again he murmured unprintable things.

"Monsieur, you are ridiculous." Alice Martin a Comtesse! No wonder I laughed. But he insisted. He kept on repeating it.

"La vraie Comtesse de——" But now she was....

The dark sayings of the district nurse came back to my mind and I wondered. But Père Battin was offensive to ear and eye. I wished him bonjour, watching him trailing down the path, his vache ruminatingly leading, and then went on my way to the wood.

An hour later Madame Martin came running down the hill to greet me. She had seen me go by and waited. In her hand was a bunch of flowers, the best, least discouraged from her untended garden.

"For Mademoiselle," she said, and as she held them out her smile scattered gold dust upon my heart.

Now do you think le Père Battin's story was true?

[CHAPTER IV]

À TRAVERS BAR-LE-DUC

Whether it was or not, it has come rather too soon in my narrative, I am afraid. It has carried me far away from the days when the quaint individual charm of Bar-le-Duc began to assert itself, little by little, slowly, but with such cumulative effect that in the end we grew to love it.

Our work took us into every lane and street, but it was the Ville-Haute that I loved best. I wish I could describe it to you as it lies on the hill; wish I could take you up the steep narrow lane that leads to the rue St Jean, and then into the rue de l'Armurier which bends like a giant S and is so narrow you fancy you could touch the houses on either side by stretching out your arms. Small boys tobogganed down it in the great frost last year. It was rare sport for the small boys, but disastrous to sober-minded propriety which occasionally found that it, too, was tobogganing—but not on a tray—and with an absence of grace and premeditation that were devastating in their results.

Indeed, the Ville-Haute was a death-trap during those weeks. There were slides everywhere. The Place St Pierre was scarred with them, the wonderful Place which, pear-shaped, wide at the top, narrowing to its lower end, lies encircled in the arms of the rue des Dues de Bar and of the rue des Grangettes. And at the top, commandingly in the centre stands the church of St Pierre—once St Maze—where the famous statue, the "Squelette," is now buried so many fathoms deep in sandbags nothing can be seen of it at all. It is said that Mr. Edmund Gosse once came to spend a night in Bar and was so bewitched by its beauty he remained for several weeks, writing a charming little romance about it in which the "Squelette" plays a prominent part. And, indeed, the only way to know Bar is to live in it. It would be quite easy to tell you of the Tour de l'Horloge standing on guard on the hill; of the fifteenth-and sixteenth-century houses; of the Pont Nôtre Dame; of the Canal des Usines which always reminded me of Bruges; of the river winding through the Lower Town, tall poplars standing sentinel along the banks; of the great canal that cuts a fine almost parallel to that of the river and which, if only you followed it far enough, would bring you at last to the Rhine; of winding Polval that is so exquisite in snow and on a moonlit night, with its houses piled one above the other like an old Italian town; or of the fine arched gate that leads to the Place du Château and that led there when the stately Dukes of Bar held court in the street that bears their name, and led there, too, when Charles Stuart lived in the High Town and dreamed perhaps of a kingdom beyond the seas. Of all these things and of the beautiful cloistered sixteenth-century College in the rue Gilles de Trêves one might speak, exhausting the mines of their adjectives and similes, but would you be any closer to the soul of the town? I doubt it, and so I refrain from description. For Bar depends for its beauty and its distinctive charm on something more than mere outline. Colour, atmosphere, some ghostly raiment of the past still clinging to its limbs, and over all the views over the valley—yes, the soul is elusive and intangible; you will find it most surely under the white rays of the moon.

The views are simply intoxicating, but if you want to see one of the finest you must make the acquaintance of a certain Madame—Madame, shall we say, Schneider? Any name will do if only it is Teutonic enough. She loomed upon our horizon as the purveyor of corduroy trousers. Oh, not for a profit. She, bien entendu, was a philanthropist disposing of the salvage of a large shop, the owner of which was a refugee. The trousers being much needed at the moment we bought them, but many months afterwards she came with serge garments that were not even remotely connected with a refugee, so I am prone to believe that she was not quite so disinterested as she would have had us believe.

To visit her you must climb to the Ville-Haute, and there in a house panelled throughout (such woodwork—old, old, old—my very eyes water at the thought of it), you will find a long low room with a wide window springing like a balcony over the gulf that lies under the rue Chavé. And from the window you can look far over the town which lies beneath you, over the silver path of river and canal to the Côte Ste Catherine, the steep hill, once a vineyard, that rises on the other side; you can see the aviation ground, and you can follow the white ribbon of road that runs past Naives to St Mihiel. And you can look up and down the valley for miles—to Fains, to Mussey and beyond, on one hand to Longeville, and Trouville on the other. And Marbot lies all unlocked under your eyes, and Maestricht, and the beautiful hill over which, if you are wise, you will one day walk to Resson.

From Place Tribel, from innumerable coigns of vantage, the view is equally beautiful, though not, I think, quite so extensive. Which, perhaps coupled with her aggressively Teutonic name, accounted for the suspicious looks cast last winter upon Madame Schneider. A spy! Oh, yes, a devout Catholic always at the Mass, but a spy. Did she not leave Bar on the very morning of the big air raid, returning that night? And didn't every one know that she signalled by means of lights movements of troops and of aeroplanes to other spies hidden on the hill beyond Naives? The preposterous story gained ground. Then one day we thrilled to hear that Madame Schneider had been arrested. She disappeared for a while—we never knew whether anything had been proved against her—and then when we had forgotten all about her I met her in the Place St Pierre. She was coming out of the church, but she bowed her head and passed by.

Perhaps, after all this, you won't care to visit her? But then you will go down to your grave sorrowing, because you will never see those Boiseries, nor that view.

Other things beside the beauty of the town began to creep into prominence too, of course, and among them the supreme patience and courage of our refugee women. In circumstances that might have crushed the strongest they fought gamely and with few exceptions conquered. I take my hat off to the French nation. We know how its men can fight, some day I hope the world will know how its women can endure. Remember that they were given no separation allowances until January 1915, and the allowance when it did come was a pittance. One franc twenty-five centimes per day for each adult, fifty centimes a day for each child up to the age of sixteen; or, roughly speaking, 1s. a day and 4½d. per day. What would our English women say to that? It barely sufficed for food. Indeed, as time went on and prices rose I dare to say it did not even suffice for food. The refugee woman, possessed of not one stick of furniture—except in the case of farmers who were able to bring away some household goods in their carts—of not one cup or plate or jug or spoon, without needles, thread, or scissors, without even a comb, and all too often without even a change of linen, had to manage as best she could. That she did manage is the triumph of French thrift and cleverness in turning everything to account. We heard of them making duvets by filling sacks with dried leaves; one woman actually collected enough thistle-down for the purpose. They clung desperately to their standards, they would trudge miles to the woods in order to get a faggot for their fire, they took any and every kind of work that offered, they refused to become submerged.

And gradually they began to assume individuality. Families and family histories began to limn themselves on the brain as did the life of the streets, things as well as people.

Some of these histories I must tell you later on; to-night, for some odd reason, little Mademoiselle Froment is in my mind. She was not a refugee, but I owe her a debt of eternal gratitude, for when I fled to her immediately on arrival she condoled with me in my sartorial afflictions and promptly made me garments in which without shame I could worship the Goddess of Reason. Later on the uniform was chopped up and re-made, becoming wearable, but never smart. Even French magic could not accomplish that.

Poor little Mademoiselle Froment, so patient with all my ignorances, my complete inability to understand the value of what she called "le mouvement" of my gown, and my hurried dips into Bellows as she volubly discursed of the fashions. Last summer when she was making me some more clothes she was sad indeed. Her only and adored brother, who had passed scatheless through the inferno at Verdun, was killed on the Somme.

"My hurried dips into Bellows." Does that mean anything, or does it sound like transcendental nonsense? Bellows, by the way, is not a thing to blow the fire with, it is a dictionary—a pocket dictionary worth its weight in good red gold. And to my copy hangs a tale. Can you endure a little autobiography?

During my week-end at Sermaize I heard more French than I had heard, I suppose, in all my life before, or at least I heard new words in such bewildering profusion that I really believe Bellows saved my life. I carried him about, I referred to him at frequent intervals. I flatter myself that with his aid I made myself intelligible even when discussing the technique of agriculture and other such abstruse subjects.

But it is Bellows' deplorable misfortune to look rather like a Prayer Book, or a Bible. And so it befell that when I had been some weeks at Bar a Sermaizian Relief Worker made anxious inquiries as to my character. "She seems such an odd sort of person because, though she reads her Bible ostentatiously in public, she smokes, and we once heard her say...." After all, does it really matter what they heard me say?

After which confession of my sins I must tell you about the Temple, the shrine of French Protestantism in Bar. There we stood up to pray, and we sat down to sing the most lugubrious hymns it has ever been my lot to listen to. The church is large, and the congregation is small. On the hottest day in summer it struck chill, in winter it was a refrigerator. The pastor, being mobilisé, his place was generally taken by an earnest and I am sure devout being, who having congratulated the present generation, the first time I went there, upon having been chosen to defend the cause of justice and of truth, proceeded to dwell with the most heartrending emphasis upon every detail of the suffering and sorrow the war—the defence upon which he congratulated us!—has caused. He spared us nothing. Not even the shell-riven soldier with white face upturned questioningly to the stars. Not even the fear-racked mother or wife to whom one day the dreaded message comes. Then when he had reduced every one to abysmal depression and many to silent pitiful tears, he cried, "Soyez des optimistes," and seemed to think that the crying would suffice. Why? Ah, don't ask me that! Perhaps the war is too big a thing for the preachers to handle. The platitudes of years have been drowned by the mutter of the guns and the long sad wail of broken, shattered humanity.

Yes, the Temple depressed me. Writing of it even now sends me into the profundities. It was all so cheerless, so dreary. In spite of the drop of Huguenot blood in my veins, the Temple and I are in nothing akin.

So let us away—away from the cold shadows and the cheerless creed, from the joyless God and the altar where Beauty lies dead, out into the boulevard where the trees are in leaf and the sun is shining, and where you may see a regiment go by in its horizon blue, or a battery of artillery with its camouflaged guns. Smoke is pouring from the chimney of the regimental kitchen, how jolly it looks curling up against the sky! and sitting by the driver of the third ammunition cart is a fox terrier who knows so much about war he will be a field-marshal when he lives again. Or we may see a team of woodcutters with the trunks of mighty trees slung on axles with great chains and drawn tandemwise by two or three horses, and hear the lame newsvendor at the corner near l'église St Jean calling his "Le Gé, le Pay-Gé, et le Petit-Parisien." Pronounce the g soft in Gé, of course, for it stands for Le Journal, and Pay-Gé for Le Petit Journal, all of which, together with the Continental Daily Mail, can be bought in Bar each day shortly after one o'clock unless the trains happen to be running late. During the Verdun rush they sometimes did not arrive at all.

A more musical cry, however, is that of the rabbit-skin man, "Peau de li-è-vre, Peau de li-è-vre," with a delicious lilting cadence on li-è-vre. I never discovered what he gave in exchange for the skins, but it was certainly not money.

Or the Tambour may take up his position at the corner of the street, the Tambour who swells with pride and civic dignity. A sharp tap-tap on his drum, the crowd collects and then in a hoarse roar he shouts his decree. It may concern mad dogs, or the water supply, or the day on which the allocation will be given to the emigrés, or it may be instructions how to behave during an air raid. Whatever it is, it is extremely difficult to make sense of it, as a motor-car and a huge military lorry are sure to crash past as he roars. But nothing disconcerts him. He shouts to his appointed end, and then with a swaggering roll on his drum marches off to the next street-crossing.

If luck is with us as we prowl along we may see—and, oh, it is indeed a vision!—our butcheress Marguerite dive into a neighbouring shop. Dive in such a connection is a poetic license, for if a description of Marguerite must begin in military phrase it must equally surely end in architectural. If on the front there were two strong salients, in the rear was a flying buttress. Marguerite—delicious irony of nomenclature—was exceedingly short, her hair was black as a raven's wing, her eyes were brown, and her cheeks, full-blown, were red as a ripe, ripe cherry. Over the salients she wore vast tracts of white apron plentifully besmeared with blood. So were her hands, so was her shop. It was the goriest butchery I have ever seen. As "Madame" (I shall tell you about her later on) did all our shopping, it was my fortune to visit Marguerite but once a month. Had I been obliged to visit her twice I should now be a vegetarian living on nuts.

Sometimes Marguerite cast aside the loathsome evidences of her trade and donned a smart black costume and a velvet hat with feathers in it. Then indeed she was the vision radiant, and never shall I forget meeting her on the boulevard one day when a covey of Taubes were bombing the town. Hearing something like a traction-engine snorting behind me, I turned and beheld Marguerite, whose walk was a fat, plethoric waddle, panting down the street. Every feather in her hat was stiff with fright, her mouth was open, she was breathing like a man under an anæsthetic, and—by the transcendental gods I swear it!—the buttress was flying. Marguerite RAN.

But she has a soul, though you may not believe it. She must have, for on the reeking offal-strewn table that adorns her shop she sets almost daily a vase of flowers. Perhaps in spite of her offensive messiness she doesn't really enjoy being a butcher.

During that first summer, although so near the Front, Bar was rather a quiet place where soldiers—Territorials?—in all sorts of odd uniforms drifted by (I once saw a man in a red cap, a khaki coat, blue trousers and knee-high yellow boots), while civilians went placidly about their affairs. Our flat was on the Boulevard de la Rochelle, and so on the high road to Verdun and St Mihiel, a stroke of good luck that sometimes interfered sadly with our work. For many a regiment went marching by, sometimes with colours flying and bands playing, gay and gallant, impertinent, jolly fellows with a quip for every petticoat in the street and a lightly blown kiss for every face at a window. But there were days when no light jest set the women giggling, days when the marching men were beaten to the very earth with weariness, stained with mud, bowed beneath their packs, eyes set straight in front of them, seeing nothing but the interminable road, the road that led from the trenches and—at last—to rest. Far away we could hear the ominous mutter of the guns, now rising, now falling, now catching up earth and air and sky into a wild clamour of sound. No need to ask why the men did not look up as they went by, no need to wonder at the strained, set faces. Perhaps in their ears as in ours there rang, high above the dull heavy burden of the cannon-song, the thin chanting of the priests who, so many desolate times a day, trod the road that leads to the Garden of Sacrifice where sleep so many of the sons of France. Ah, I can hear them now, and see the pitiful little processions winding down from every quarter of the town, the priest mechanically chanting, a few soldiers grouped round the coffin, a weeping woman or two following close behind. Of late—since Verdun, I think—the tiny guard of honour no longer treads the road, and the friendless soldier dying far from home goes alone to his last resting-place upon the hill.

There the open graves are always waiting. The wooden black crosses have spread far out over the hill-side, climbing up and across till no one dare estimate their number. Five thousand, a grave-digger told us long, long ago. Since then Verdun has written her name in blood across the sky, Verdun impregnable because her rampart was the heart of the manhood of France, Verdun supreme because the flower of that manhood laid down their lives in order to keep her so.

Yes, the chanting of the priests brings an odd lump into one's throat, but one day we saw a little ceremony that moved us more deeply still.

It was early morning, a strain of martial music rose on the air. We hurried to the windows and saw a company of soldiers coming down the boulevard. They passed our house, marched to the far end, halted, and then turning, ranged themselves in a great semicircle beyond the window. To say that their movements lacked the cleanness and precision which an English regiment would have shown is to put the matter mildly. Their business was to form three sides of a square. They formed it, shuffling and dodging, elbowing, scraping their feet, falling into their places by the Grace of God while a fat fussy officer skirmished about for all the world like an agitated curate at a Sunday School treat.

The fourth side of the square consisted of the pavement and a crowd of women, children and lads, a crowd with a gap in the middle where, like a rock rising above the waters of sympathy, stood two chairs on which two soldiers, mutilés de la guerre, were sitting. Brave men both. They had distinguished themselves in fight, and this morning France was to do them honour.

An officer read aloud something we could not hear, and then a general stepped forward and pinned the Croix de Guerre upon their breasts, and colonels and staff officers shook them by the hand, and the band broke into the Marseillaise and the watching crowd tried to raise a cheer. But their voice died in their throat, no sound would come, for the Song of the Guns was in their ears and out across the hills their own men were fighting, to come home to them, perhaps, one day as these men had come, or it might be never to come home at all. The cheer became a sob, the voice of a stricken nation, of suffering heart-sick womanhood waiting ... waiting.

So the band played a lively tune and the soldiers marched away, the crowd melted silently about its daily work and for a time the boulevard was deserted, deserted save for him who sat huddled into his deep arm-chair, the Croix de Guerre upon his breast and the pitiless sunlight streaming down upon the pavements he would never tread again.

A few weeks later the bands march by again. It is evening, and the shadows are lengthening. We mingle with the crowd and see a tall, stern man with aloof, inflexible, unsmiling face pass up and down the lines of the guard of honour drawn up to receive him. A shorter, stouter man is at his side.

"Vive Kitchenaire!"

The densely packed crowds take up the cry. "Vive l'Angleterre!" Ah, it is God Save the King that the band is playing now. "Vive Kitchenaire." Again the shout goes up. The short, stout man greets the crowd, and a mighty roar responds. "Vive Joffre." He smiles, but his companion never unbends. As the glorious Marseillaise thunders on the air, with unseeing eyes and ears that surely do not hear he turns away, and the dark passage of the house swallows him up.

"Vive Kitchenaire!"

The echoes have hardly died away when a tear-choked voice greets me. "Ah, Mademoiselle, but the news is bad to-day." Tears are rolling down the little Frenchwoman's face. So deep is her grief I fear a personal loss. But she shakes her head. No, it is not that. She hands me a paper and, stunned, I read the news. As I cross the street and turn towards home the world seems shadowed. Sorrow has drawn her veils closely about the town—sorrow for the man whom it trusted and whose privilege it had been to honour.

[CHAPTER V]

SETTLING-IN

Our first duty on arriving in the town was to go to the Bureau de Police and ask for a permis de séjour. We understood that without it there would be short shrift and a shorter journey into a world which has not yet been surveyed. So we sallied forth to the Bureau at break of day, and there we interviewed an old grognard—the only really grumpy person I met in France—who scowled at us and scolded us and called the devil to witness that these English names are barbarous, the chatter of monkeys, unintelligible to any civilised ear. We soothed him with shaking knees; suppose he refused us permission to reside in the town? And presently he melted. He never really liquified, you know, there was always a crust; but once or twice on subsequent occasions a drop, just a teeny, weeny drop of the milk of human kindness oozed through. He demanded our photographs, and when he saw my "finished-while-you-wait" his belief in our Simian ancestry took indestructible form. The number of my photographs now scattered over France on imposing documents is incalculable, and the number of times I have had to howl my age into unsympathetic ears so great that all my natural modesty in dealing with so delicate a subject has wilted away.

The grognard dismissed us at length, feeling like the worm that perisheth, and a fortnight or so later presented us with our permis de séjour (which warned us that any infringement of its regulations would expose us to immediate arrest as spies), and with an esoteric document called an Extrait du Registre d'Immatriculation whose purpose in history we were never able to determine. No one ever asked to see it, no one ever asked to see our permis de séjour, in fact the gendarmes of the town showed a reprehensible lack of interest in our proceedings.

In addition to these we were provided as time went on with a carte d'identité, a permission to circulate on a bicycle in districts specified, a permission to take photographs not of military interest, and later on with a carnet d'étranger which gripped us in a tight fist, kept us at the end of a very short chain, and made us rue the day we were born. And of course we had our passports as well.

Not being a cyclist, I used that particular permission when tramping on the Sabbath beyond the confines of the town. Once a bright military star tried to stop some one who followed my example. "It is a permission to cycle. You are on foot," he argued.

"But the bicycle could not get here without me," she replied, and her merciless logic dimmed his light.

As for me, I carried all my papers on all occasions that took me past a sentry. It offended my freeborn British independence to be held up by a blue-coated creature with a bayonet in his hand on a road that I choose to grace with my presence, and so I took a mild revenge. The stoutest sentry quailed before such evidence of rectitude, and indeed we secretly believed that sheer curiosity prompted many a "Halte-là."

Once as I trudged a road far from Bar two gorgeous individuals mounted on prancing chargers swept past me. A moment later they drew rein, and with those eyes of seventh sense that are at the back of every woman's head I knew they were studying my retreating form. A lunatic or a spy? Surely only one or the other would wear that grey dress. A shout, "Holà." I marched on. If French military police wish to accost me they must observe at least a measure of propriety. Again the "Holà." My shoulders crinkled. Would a bullet whiz between? A thunder of galloping hoofs, a horse racing by in a cloud of dust, a swirl and a gendarme majestically barring the way.

"Where are you going, Madame?"

Stifling a desire to ask what business it was of his, I replied suavely—

"To Bar-le-Duc."

"Bar-le-Duc? But it is miles from here."

"Eh bien? What of it? On se promene."

"I must ask to see your papers."

Out they all came, a goodly bunch. He took them, appalled. He fingered them; he stared.

"Madame is English?"

"But certainly? What did Monsieur suppose?"

The papers are thrust into my hand, he salutes, flicks his horse with a spur, and I am alone on the undulating road with the woods just touched by spring's soft wing, spreading all about me.

But this happened when sentries and bayonets had lost their terror. There were days when we treated them with more respect. Familiarity breeds contempt—when one knows that the bayonet is not sharpened.

Our papers in order, our heads no longer wobbling on our shoulders, our next duty was to call on the élite of the town. In France you don't wait to be called upon, you call. It was nerve-racking work for two miserable foreigners, one of whom had almost no French, while that of the other abjectly deserted her in moments of perturbation. But we survived it, perhaps because every one was out. Only at Madame B.'s did we find people at home, and she—how she must have sighed when we departed! We all laboured heavily in the vineyard, but fright, shyness, the barrier of language prevented us—on that day at least—from gathering much fruit. Exhausted, humbled to the dust, thinking of all the brilliant things we might have said if only we could have taken the invaluable Bellows with us, we crawled home to seek comfort in a brioche de Lorraine and a cup of China tea which we had to make for ourselves, as "Madame" had not yet learned the method. In fact there were many things she had not learned, and one of them was what the English understand by the word rubbish. It was a subject on which for many a day her views and ours unhappily rarely coincided. Once we caught her in the Common-room, casting baleful eyes on cherished treasures.

"Do you wish that I shall throw away these ordures, Mademoiselle?" she asked.

Ordures! Ye gods! A bucketful of gladioli and stocks and all sorts of delicious things gathered in the curé's garden at Naives, and she called them ordures. With a shriek we fell upon her and her broom. Did she not know they were flowers? What devil of ignorance possessed her that she should call them rubbish?

"Flowers! bien entendu, but what does one want with flowers in a sitting-room? The petals fall, they are des ordures." Again the insulting word.

"Don't you like flowers, Madame?" we asked, and she turned resigned eyes to ours. These English! Perhaps the good God who made them understood them, but as for her, Odille Drouet ... With a shrug she consigned us to the limbo of the inscrutable. A garden was the place for flowers, why should we bring them into the house?

French logic. Why, indeed?

Madame never understood us, but I think she grew to tolerate us in the end, and perhaps even to like us a little for our own queer sakes. Once, when she had been with us for a few weeks, she exclaimed so bitterly, "I wish I had never seen the English," we wondered what we could possibly have done to offend her. Agitated inquiries relieved our minds. We were merely a disagreeable incident of the war. If the Germans had not pillaged France we would not have come to Bar-le-Duc. Cause and effect linked us with the Boche in her mind, and I think she never looked at us without seeing the Crown Prince leering over our shoulder.

A woman of strange passivity of temper, a fatalist—like so many of her countrymen—she had a face that Botticelli would have worshipped. Masses of dark hair exquisitely neat were coiled on her head (why, oh why, do our English women wear hats? Is not half a French woman's attraction in the simple dignity of the uncovered head? I never realised the vulgarising properties of hat till I lived in France), her eyes were dark, her brows delicately pencilled, her features regular. Gentleness, resignation, patience were all we saw in her. She had one of the saddest faces I have ever seen.

No doubt she had good reason to be sad. Her husband, a well-to-do farmer, died of consumption in the years before the war, and she who now cooked and scrubbed and dusted and tidied for us once drove her own buggy, once ruled a comfortable house and superintended the vagaries of three servants. In her fine old cupboards were stores of handspun linen sheets, sixty pairs at least, and ten or twelve dozen handspun, handmade chemises. Six lits montés testified to the luxury of her home; on the walls hung rare pottery, Lunéville, Sarréguemin and the like.

A lit monté is a definite sign of affluence, and well it may be so. The French understand at least two things thoroughly—sauces and beds. Incidentally I believe that the French woman does not exist who cannot make a good omelette. I saw one made once in five minutes over a smoky wood fire, the pan poised scientifically on two or three crosswise sticks. An English woman cooking on such an altar would have offered us an imitation of chamois leather, charred, toughened and impregnated with smoke. Madame the wife of the Mayor of Vavincourt offered us—dare I describe it? Perhaps one day I shall write a sonnet to that omelette; it must not be dishonoured in prose.

Yes, the French can cook, and they can make beds, and unless you have stretched your wearied limbs in a real lit monté, unless you have sunk fathoms deep in its downy nest and have felt the light, exquisite warmth of the duvet steal through your limbs, you have never known what comfort is.

You gaze at it with awe when you see it first, wondering how you are to get in. I know women who had to climb upon a chair every night in order to scale the feathery heights. For my own part, being long of limb, I found a flying leap the most graceful means of access, but there are connoisseurs who recommend a short ladder.

Piled on the top of a palliasse and a mattress are a huge bed of feathers, spotless sheets, a single blanket, a coverlet, and then the crimson silk-covered duvet, over which is spread a canopy of lace. The cost must be fabulous, though oddly enough no one ever mentioned a probable price. But no refugee can speak of her lost lits montés without tears.

Madame had six of them, and cattle in her byre, and horses in her stable, and all the costly implements of a well-stocked farm. Yet for months she lived with her little girl, her father, and her mother in a single room in the Place de la Halle, a dark, narrow, grimy room that no soap and water could clean. Her bed was a sack of straw laid upon the ground, and—until the Society provided them—she had no sheets, no pillow-cases, indeed I doubt if she even had a pillow. Her farm is razed to the ground, and no doubt some fat unimaginative sausage-filled Hausfrau sleeps under her sheets and cuddles contentedly under her duvet o' nights.

The little party of four were six weeks on the road to Bar from that farm beyond Montfaucon, and during the whole time they never ate hot food and rarely cooked food. No wonder Madame seldom laughed— those weeks of haunting fear and present misery were never forgotten—no wonder it was months before we shook her out of her settled apathy and saw some life, some animation grow again in her quiet face.

If sometimes we felt inclined to shake her for other reasons than those of humanity her caution was to blame. Never did she commit herself. To every question inviting an opinion she returned the same exasperating reply, "C'est comme vous voulez, Mademoiselle." I believe if we had asked her to buy antelopes' tongues and kangaroos' tails for dinner she would have replied equably, tonelessly, "C'est comme vous voulez."

Whether the point at issue was a warm winter jacket, or a table, or a holiday on the Sabbath, or cabbage for dinner, the answer was always the same. Once in a moment of excitement—but this was when she had got used to us, and found we were not so awful as we looked—she exclaimed, "Oh, mais taisez-vous, Mademoiselle," and we felt as if an earthquake had riven the town.

Later she developed a quiet humour, but she always remained aloof. Unlike Madame Philipot who succeeded her, she never showed the least interest in the refugees who besieged our door. "C'est une dame." The head insinuated through the door would be withdrawn and we left to the joys of conjecture. The "lady" might be that ragged villain from the rue Phulpin, wife of a shepherd, a drunken dissolute vagabond who pawned her all for liquor, or it might be Madame B., while "C'est un Monsieur" might conceal a General of Division, or the Service de Ville claiming two francs for delivery of a parcel, in its cryptic folds.

She had no curiosity, vulgar or intellectual, that we could discover. She was invariably patient, sweet-tempered, gentle of voice, courteous of phrase. She came to her work punctually at seven; going home, unless cataclysms happened, at twelve. If the cataclysms did occur, even through no fault of our own, we felt as guilty as if we had murdered babies in their sleep, Madame being an orderly soul who detested irregularity. And punctually at half-past four she would come back again, cook the dinner, wash up la vaisselle and quietly disappear at eight.

The manner of her going was characteristic.

French women seem to have a horror of being out alone after dark (perhaps they have excellent reason for it, they know their countrymen better than I do), and Madame was no exception to the rule. Perhaps she was merely bowing her head to national code, the rigid comme il faut, perhaps it was a question of temperament. Anyway the fact emerged, Madame would not walk home alone. Who, then, should accompany her? Her parents were old and nearly bedridden, she had no husband, brother, or friend. The crazy English who careered about at all hours of the day and night? We had our work to do.

Juliana was ordered to fetch her. This savouring of adventure and responsibility fell in with Juliana's mood. She consented. Now she was her mother's younger daughter and her age was twelve. Can you understand the psychology of it? This is how I read it. A child was safe on the soldier-frequented road, a mother with her child would not be intercepted, but a good-looking woman alone—well, as the French say, that was quite another paire de bottines.

What would have happened had Juliana declined the honour, I simply dare not conjecture. For that damsel did precisely as she pleased. Her mother's passivity, fatalism, call it what you will, was the mainspring of all her relations with her children. "Que voulez-vous? She wishes it." Or quite simply, "Juliana does not wish it," closed the door against all remonstrance. Madame was a strong-willed woman, she never yielded an iota to us, but her children ruled. When the elder girl, aged fourteen and well-placed with a good family in Paris, came to Bar for a fortnight and then refused to go back, Madame shrugged. Some one in Paris may have been, indeed was, seriously inconvenienced, but "Que voulez-vous?"

"Don't you wish her to go back, Madame?"

"But certainly. What should she do here? It is not fit for a young girl, but que voul——" We fled.

Parental authority seems to be a negligible quantity in France. So far as I could see children did very much as they liked, and were often spoiled to the verge of objectionableness. Yet the steadfastness, courage, thoughtfulness and whole-souled sanity of many a young girl—or a child—would put older and wiser heads to shame.

A puzzling people, these French, who refute to-morrow nearly every opinion they tempt you to formulate about them to-day.

If English women struggling with "chars" and "generals" knew the value of a French femme de ménage there would be a stampede across the Channel in search of her. She does your marketing much more cheaply than you could do it yourself, she keeps her accounts neatly, she is punctual, scrupulously honest, dependable and trustworthy. She may not be clean with British cleanness, her dusting may be superficial (her own phrase, "passer un torchon," aptly describes it), but she understands comfort, and in nearly twenty months' experience of her I never knew a dinner spoiled or a dish unpalatably served.

Of course it is arguable that Madame was not a femme de ménage, nor of the servant class at all. Granted! But there were others. There was the bonne à tout faire (general servant) of the old curé at N. who ruled him with a rod of iron and cooked him dinners fit for a king. And there was Eugénie, the Abbé B.'s Eugénie, who, loving him with a dog-like devotion, was his counsellor and his friend. She corrected him for his good when she thought he needed it, but she mothered and cared for him in his exile from his loved village—French trenches run through it to-day—as only a single-minded woman could.

Yes, Madame—whether ours or some one else's—is a treasure, and we guarded ours as the apple of our eye. There were moments when we positively cringed before her, so afraid were we that she might leave us; for she hated cooking, hers having always been the life of the fields, and though no self-respecting Frenchwoman regards herself as a servant or as a menial, there must have been many hours when the cruelty of her position bit deep. Nevertheless she bore with us for a year, and then the air raids began. And the air raids shattered the nerves of Juliana—a brave little soul, but delicate (we feared tainted with her father's malady); and flight in the night to the nearest cellar, unfortunately some distance away, brought the shadow of Death too close to the home. So the elders counselled flight. Juliana begged to be taken away. Madame wished to remain. The matter hung in uncertainty for some days, then eight alarms and two raids in twenty-four hours settled it.

The alarms began on Friday morning; on Saturday Madame told us that the old people would stay in Bar no longer and she had applied for the necessary papers. They were going south to the Ain on the morrow. Not a word of regret or apology for leaving us at a moment's notice, or for giving us no time in which to replace her. Why apologise since she could neither alter nor prevent? She went through no wish of her own, went at midday, just walked out as she had done every day for a year, but came back next morning to say good-bye and ask us to store some odds and ends. When she had a settled address would we send them on?

So she went away, and our memory of her is of one who never fought circumstances, never wrestled with Fate. When the storms beat upon her, when rude winds blew, she bowed her head and allowed them to carry her where they listed. I think the spring of her life must have broken on that August day when she turned her cattle out on the fields and, closing the door behind her, walked out of her house for ever.

[CHAPTER VI]

THE BASKET-MAKERS OF VAUX-LES-PALAMIES

The long hot days of summer pursued their stifling way, yet were all too short for the work we had in hand. There were families to be visited, case-papers to be written up, card-indexes to be filled in, and bales to be unpacked. There were clothes to be sorted, there were people in their hundreds to be fitted with coats and trousers and shirts and underlinen and skirts and blouses, and the thousand and one things to be coped with in the Clothes-room. When Satan visits Relief workers he always lives in the Clothes-room. And there he takes a malicious delight in turning the contents of the shelves upside down and in hiding from view the outfit you chose so carefully yesterday evening for Madame Hougelot, or Madame Collignon, so that when you come to look for it in the morning, lo! it is gone. And Madame is waiting with her six children on the stairs, and the hall is a whirlpool of slowly-circling humanity, who want everything under the sun and much that is above it.

Truly the way of the Relief worker is hard. But it has its compensations. You live for a month, for instance, on one exquisite episode. You are giving a party; you have invited some fifteen hundred guests. You spread them out over several days, bien entendu, and in the generosity of your heart you decide that each shall have a present. You sit at the receipt of custom, issuing your cards with the name of each guest written thereon, and to you comes Madame Ponnain. (That is not her real name, but it serves.) Yes, she is a refugee and she has two children. She would like three cards. Bon. You inscribe her name, you gaze at her questioningly.

"There is Georgette, she has two years."

Bon. Georgette is inscribed.

And then?

Madame hesitates. There is the baby.

Bon. His are?

"Eh bien, il n'est pas encore au monde."

You suggest that the unborn cannot ...

"Mais mademoiselle—si il y a des étrennes (gifts)?"

Perhaps, perhaps; one doesn't know. The Ponnains were a people of much discrimination. He might arrive in time. Quel dommage, then, if he had no ticket!

He discriminated.

He gets his ticket, and you register anew your homage to French foresightfulness and thrift.

And then you go back to the Clothes-room. You climb over mountains of petticoats and chemises, all of the same size and all made to fit a child of three. There are thousands of them, they obsess you. You dream at night that you are smothering under a hill of petticoats while irate refugees, whose children are all over five and half-naked, hurl the chemises and—other things at you, uttering round French maledictions in ear-splitting tones. You wade through the wretched things, you eat them, sleep them; your brain reels, you say things about work-parties which, if published, would cause an explosion, and the Pope would excommunicate you and the Foreign Office hand you your passports. You write frantic letters to headquarters, then you grow cold, waxing sarcastic. You hint that marriage as an institution existed in France before 1912, and that the first baby was not born in that year of blindfold peace. And you add a rider to the effect that many, indeed most, of your cherished émigrées are not slum-dwellers fighting for rags at a jumble sale, but respectable people who don't go about in ragged trousers or with splashes of brown or yellow paint on a blue serge dress. Then you are conscience-stricken, for some of the bales have been packed by Sanity, and the contents collected by Reason. There are many white crows in the flock.

A ring at the door interrupts, perhaps happily, your epistolary labours. It is the Service de Ville, a surly person but faithful. He has six bales. They are immense. You go down, you try to roll one up the stairs. Your comrade in labour is four feet six and weighs seven stone. The bale weighs—or seems to weigh—a ton. Sisyphus is not more impotent than you. Then an angel appears. It is Madame. "I heard the efforts," she remarks, and indeed our puffings and pantings and blowings and swearings must have been audible almost at the Front. She puts her solid shoulder under the bale. It floats lightly up the stairs. Then you begin to unpack. It is dirty work, and destroys the whiteness of your hands. Never mind. Remember les pauvres émigrées, and that we are si devouée, you know.

Everything under heaven has, I verily believe, come at one time or another out of our bales—except live stock and joints of beef. Concertinas in senile decay, mandolines without keys, guitars without strings, jam leaking over a velvet gown, tons of old newspapers and magazines—all English, of course, and subsequently sold as waste-paper, hats that have braved many a battle and breeze, boots without soles, ball dresses, satin slippers (what do people think refugees need in the War Zone?), greasy articles of apparel, the mere handling of which makes our fingers shine, dirty underlinen, single socks and stockings, married socks that are like the Irishman's shirt—made of holes, another hundred dozen of petticoats for children aged three, and once—how we laughed over it!—a red velvet dress that I swear had been filched from an organ-grinder's monkey, and with it a pair of-of—well, you know. They were made of blue serge, and when held out at width stretched all across the Common-room. The biggest Mynheer that ever smoked a pipe by the Zuyder Zee would have been lost in them, and as they were neither male nor female, only some sort "of giddy harumphrodite" could have worn them.

Sometimes we fell upon stale cough lozenges, on mouldering biscuits, on dried fruits, on chocolate, on chewing-gum, on moth-eaten bearskin rugs, or on a brilliant yellow satin coverlet with LOVE in large green capitals on it. The tale is unending, but it was not all tragic. There were many days when our hearts sang in gladness, when good, useful, sensible things emerged from the bales and we fitted our people out in style.

But all the rubbish in the world must have been dumped upon France in the last two years. Never has there been such a sweeping out of cupboards, such a rummaging of dust-bins. The hobble skirts that submerged us at one period nearly drove us into an early grave. Picture us, with a skirt in hand. It is twenty-seven inches round the tail, perhaps twenty-three round the waist. And Madame, who waits with such touching confidence in the discrimination of Les Anglaises, tells you that she is forte. As you look at her you believe it. It is half a day's journey to walk round her. You pace the wide circle thoughtfully, you make rapid calculations, you give it up. The thing simply cannot be done. And you send up a wild prayer that before ever there comes another war French women of the fields will take to artificial means of restraining their figures. As it is, like Marguerite, many of them occupy vast continents of space when they take their walks abroad. And when they stand on the staircase, smiling deprecatingly at you, and you have nothing that will fit....

And when it does fit it is blue, or green, and they have a passion for black. Something discreet. Something they can go to Mass in. I often wonder why they worship their God in such dolorous guise. Something, too, they can mourn in. So many are en deuil. Once a woman who came for clothes demanded black, refusing a good coat because it was blue. The cousin of her husband had died five months before, and never had she been able to mourn him. If the English would give her un peu de deuil? She waited weeks. She got it and went forth smiling happily upon an appreciative world, ready to mourn at last.

The weather is stifling, the Clothes-room an inferno. The last visitor for the morning has been sent contentedly away—she may come back to-morrow, though, and tell us that the dress of Madeleine does not fit, and may she have one the same as that which Madame Charton got? Now the dress of Madame Charton's Marie was new and of good serge, whereas that of Madeleine was slightly worn and of light summer material. But then Marie had an old petticoat, whereas Madeleine had a new one. But this concession to equality finds no favour in the eyes of Madeleine's mother. She has looked upon the serge and lusted after it. We suggest that a tuck, a little arrangement.... She goes away. And in the house in rue Paradis there is lamentation, and Marie, I grieve to say, lifts up her shrill treble and crows. It is one of the minor tragedies of life. Alas, that there are so many!

But as Madame the mother of Madeleine departs, we know nothing of the reckoning that waits us on the morrow. We only know that we promised to go and see the Basket-makers to-day, that time is flying, and haste suicidal with the thermometer at steaming-point.

"Madame, we are going out. We cannot see any one else."

Bon. Madame is a Cerberus. She will write down the names of callers and so ease our minds while we are away.

We fling on our hats, we arm ourselves with pencil and notebook, and wend our way up the Avenue du Château to the rue des Ducs de Bar. It is well to choose this route sometimes, though it is longer than that of the rue St. Jean, for it goes past the old gateway and shows you the view over the rue de Véel. It is wise to look down on the rue de Véel; it is rather foolhardy to walk in it. For motor-lorries whiz through it at a murderous speed, garbage makes meteoric flights from windows, the drainage screams to Heaven, every house is a tenement house, most of them are foul and vermin-ridden, and all are packed with refugees.

Well, perhaps not quite all. Even the rue de Véel has its bright particular spots, one of them being the house, set a little back from the street, in which Pétain, "On-les-aura Pétain," lived during the battle of Verdun. The street lies in a deep hollow, with cultivated hills rising steeply above it. Higher up there are woods on the far side, while above the sweeping Avenue du Château the houses are piled one above the other in tumbled, picturesque confusion.

Once in the rue des Ducs we go straight to No. 49, through a double-winged door into a courtyard, up a flight of worn steps into a wee narrow lobby, rather dark and noisome, and then, if any one cries Entrez! in response to our knock, into a great wide room.