Читать книгу A Village in Picardy - Ruth Louise Gaines - Страница 7

Table of Contents

In Canizy, after the Germans were through with it, not one of its forty-seven houses stood intact. Most were roofless shells, or fallen heaps of brick. An occasional ell, a barn, a rabbit hutch, or a chicken house,—such were the shelters into which the returning villagers crept. Nor was there furniture. Pillage had preceded destruction and loaded wagons had borne away the plunder of household linen, feather mattresses, clothes presses, chairs or anything practicable, into Germany. Scattered through the ruins to this day lie iron bedsteads twisted by fire, the metal stands of the housewives’ sewing machines, broken farm tools and fire-cracked stoves. One day, beside a half-demolished wall, I came upon a group of little girls playing house. They had marked off their rooms with broken bricks, set up for a stove a rusty brazier, and stocked their imaginary cupboards with fragments of gay china. A grey, drizzling day it was, and their toy ménage had no roof. But was it more cheerless than the hovels they called their homes, where their mothers, like them, had gathered in the wreckage left by the Germans,—a stove here, a kettle there, and a “Boche” bed of unplaned planks, perhaps, with an improvised mattress of grass? I paused to regard the play house. “What is this room,” I inquired. “La cuisine,” was the quick reply. “And this?” “La salle à manger.” “But this next?” “Une salle à manger,” came the chorus. “Then all the rest are salles à manger?” “Assurément,” with merry laughter. “O, I see. Are you then so hungry at your house?” And I turned away with an uncomfortable conviction that they were.

—Encore un autre petit frère?

—Oui, un petit belge.

[What, another little brother?

Yes, a little Belgian.]

One after another, if you listen, the Village mothers will tell of their return; with what hope against hope they looked for some trace of vanished husbands, sons and daughters; with what despair they realised the utter ruin. “My cat,” said one, “was the only living thing I found. She was waiting for me on the doorstep.” But those were fortunate who found even the door sills remaining to their homes. Those who were shelterless took possession of some semi-habitable corner of their neighbour’s outbuildings, or even of cellars, and furnished them with what they could find. As I went about among them, in an effort to supply immediate needs, I was continually told: “That cupboard, you understand, is not mine. I am taking care of it for Mme. Huillard, who is with the Boches. When she returns, I must give it up.” “This bed,”—a very comfortable one, by the way—“belongs to M. de Curé, whom the Germans made prisoner.” “Those blankets an English soldier gave me.” “This stove”—in answer to a query as to whether a new one would not be appreciated—“well, to be sure, it has no legs, but one props it with bricks, et ça marche, tout de même!” The boast of the Prussians in regard to their handiwork was true: “Tout le pays n’est qu’un immense et triste désert, sans arbre, ni buisson, ni maison. Nos pionniers ont scié ou haché les arbres qui, pendant des journées entières, se sont abattus jusqu’à ce que le sol fût rasé. Les puits sont comblés, les villages anéantis. Des cartouches de dynamite éclatent partout. L’atmosphère est obscurcie de poussière et de fumée.”[4]

By the time of the arrival of our Unit, six months after the Great Retreat, our villagers had recovered from the shock of their sorrow. They had managed to save enough bedding and clothing for actual warmth; they had planted and worked their gardens; they were used to the simplest terms of life. This courage rather than the too-evident squalor, was what impressed one on a first visit to Canizy. Dumb endurance drew one’s heart as no protestations could have done. It made me long to make my home among my villagers, so that I might the more quickly meet their needs.

But this could not be, because every habitable cranny was crowded to capacity. Hence it was that I lodged with the rest of the Unit, four miles away, at the Château de Bon-Séjour. Again, you will not find my château so called upon the map. It is merely a name that represents to me six months of hardship, of comradeship and of some small achievement that made the whole worth while.

At the Château, then, but not in it, lived the Unit. For the Château, a German Headquarters, and a most comfortable one, in its day, had been wrecked in the best German style. There were seventeen of us, American college women, to whom the Government had entrusted the task of reconstructing thirty-six of the 25,000 square miles of devastated France. Two were doctors, three nurses, four chauffeurs, and the rest social workers. Among them were a cobbler, a carpenter, a farmer, a domestic science expert; and of other manual labor there was nothing to which they did not turn their hands. It was in the golden days of early September that my companions reached the Château allotted them in that indefinite area known as the War Zone, and became from that moment a part of the Third Army of France. But I, for reasons best known to the passport bureau of that army, did not arrive until October. The seventy-mile run from Paris was made in our own truck, driven by two of our chauffeurs. As we cleared the dusty suburbs and took the highway northward, war seemed very far away. To be sure, we often passed grey camions rumbling to or from the front, or saw fleeting automobiles containing officer’s whiz by. But the country, the fields of stacked grain or of freshly seeded wheat; the apple orchards,—sometimes miles of trees along the roadside festooned with red fruit,—poplared vistas of smoke-blue hill and valley, with church spires and red roofs in the distance,—all these spoke of peace. Even the air lay in a motionless amber haze, spiced with apples and wood smoke and ferns touched by frost. But suddenly war was upon us. As we topped a sharp rise we came upon an empty dugout, about which stood a shell-shattered grove. Lopped orchards followed, zig-zag trenches, a bombarded village set in fields bearing no crop but barbed-wire entanglements and tall weeds turned brown. The country became flatter as we hurried along, intent on reaching the Château before dark. At intervals we made detours around crumpled bridges. Occasionally a sentry halted us, to be shown our permits known as feuilles bleues. By this time the sun was setting and caught and turned to gold a squadron of aeroplanes. Like great dragon-flies they coursed and wheeled and presently alighted, to run along the fields to their canvas-domed hangars. In the after-glow, we could still see occasional peasants or soldiers working late at ploughing with oxen or tractors. But otherwise, mile on mile, the brown plain, dotted here and there with scraggly thickets, lay deserted.

It was dusk when we turned off the main road between the half dozen dynamited farm-houses that once formed a tiny village, past the little church, and into the gate of the Château. To the rear of this ruined mass, set in a row as soldiers would set them, were the three baraques, or temporary shacks, which the Army had made ready for us. Very cheerful they looked that night with the lamplight streaming from open doors and windows, and the smell of savoury stew upon the air.

But morning revealed what darkness had hidden: the destruction which this estate shared with the entire countryside. Of the noble spruces and poplars, which had formed the two main avenues leading the one to the church and the other to the highway, only a ragged line remained; the rest lay as they had been felled, in tangles of crossed trunks. The Château itself, an imposing building as one viewed it through the frame of a scrolled wrought-iron gate, proved to be a rectangle of roofless walls. The water-tower, draped in flaming ampelopsis, no longer held the reservoir which had supplied in former days the mansion, the greenhouses, the servants’ quarters and the stables. The greenhouses themselves, the jardin d’hiver, and the orangerie, where were grown hot-house fruits, retained scarcely one unbroken pane of glass. Dynamite had been employed freely; but—an instance of German economy—the main roof of the greenhouse had been demolished by the well-calculated fall of a heavy spruce. In this same greenhouse were the remains of a white tiled tank, and a heating plant which had involved the construction of three new buildings. “Voilà,” said Marcel, the sixteen-year-old son of the gardener, as he pointed it out, “the officers’ bath.”

Marcel and his mother (whom, we think, the Germans left behind because of her too shrewd tongue) still take unbounded pride in the place. Even before repairs were made on her own cottage, Marie routed Marcel out of a morning to weed the flower beds and to fence off what, by courtesy, she calls the lawn. By this last manœuvre she renders difficult both the entrance and exit of our cars. She also refuses to open for us the wicket for foot passengers, probably because in the days of Mme. la Baronne’s hospitality there were none. Here entertaining was done on a patrician scale. A French officer who stopped in passing, told us how he was in the habit of coming each year to hunt in season. There was a gallery of famous pictures. In short, the Château of his friend, Mme. la Baronne, was the show place of the countryside. “To think,” said he, as he pointed to a sign still standing beside the gate, “to think that dogs were forbidden,—and yet the Germans came here!” Marie, having been left by her mistress in charge of the property, carries the responsibility with seriousness. A letter arrives: Mme. la Baronne desires that the vegetable garden be always locked, and that no trees be cut. It is she, doubtless, who directs that the lawn be preserved. “Poor Madame,” sighs Marie, “she little knows. Pray heaven she may never return to see what the Boches have done!”

With Marie’s and Marcel’s help, one can reconstruct from the ruins the gracious comfort of the old estate, the hospitable kitchen, the chambers warm in winter and tree-shaded in summer, the wide balustrades where the guests sat in long summer gloamings, courting the breeze. It was Marcel who pointed out the view one gains from the steps of the Château, straight through gaping doors and windows, to the sundial from which radiated the alleys of the grove: bronze oaks and beeches, golden plane trees, spruces and tasselled pines.

How is the beauty of that day departed! Half of the grove lies now a waste of scrubby second growth and fallen timber, for here the Germans employed Russian prisoners as lumbermen. No longer the huntsmen and their ladies pace the alleys. Now, on almost any day you may see old women dragging branches from the woods to the basse-cour, to be cut up for fuel. Twenty-six of them, no men, and only two children, the wretched villagers had found in the Baronne’s stables their only shelter after the razing of their homes.

Yet we entered the winter far less warmly housed than they. Our two-room baraques were supplemented in time by six portable houses which we had brought from America; two we used as dormitories and the other four as a dispensary, a store, a kitchen, and a dining room. Our furnishings were of the simplest; camp beds, a stove for each building, a table, camp stools, and shelves. Our wood—when we had any—was chopped by a vigorous old lady who walked a mile and a half from the nearest village to do it. Our laundry was done upon a stove a foot square in a small building known as the Morgue: such having been its use during the German occupation. Marie made our cuisine on her range in a hut which she had built into the ruins of her cottage. Zélie carried food and dishes in baskets to and fro from kitchen to dining room, a quarter of a mile apart. The one luxury of our existence was hot water, prepared by Marcel in a huge cauldron, and brought in covered metal pitchers to our doors.

Only once did Marcel fail us, and that was because the rightful owner of the cauldron left the basse-cour for her newly erected baraque. She requested our kind permission to transport thither her property. “There is another cauldron at Buverchy, which I think you could rent in place of mine,” she suggested. “It belonged to my cousin, Mme. Bouvet, and is now in Mme. Josse’s yard. No one is using it.” Marcel was dispatched to make inquiries, and later, with horse and wagon, to fetch the cauldron home. But meantime there had dawned a morning when we were not wakened by the clump-clump of Marcel’s sabots, and the setting down of the water jug with a thud upon the frozen ground.

For wood, we depended largely on the chivalry of nearby encampments of troops, French, English, Canadian or American, to whom our need became apparent. For food, we were supplied by the Army with our quota of bread and a soldier, M. Jean, to fetch it. Vegetables and some fruit we obtained from our villages, of which we had sixteen in our charge. Often these were presents, thrust upon us through gratitude; nor could we pay for them. Meat was plentiful in all the towns of the Zone, where the Army was charged with supplying the civilian population with food. Anyone, going on any errand, marketed; and the dispensary jitney, which might have started in the morning with doctors, nurses, kits, and relief supplies, often returned at night overflowing with cabbages, potatoes, pounds of roast, bags of coal, and bidons of oil.

Our relief supplies came through more regular channels, largely from Paris, where one member of the Unit devoted all her time to buying. These were either shipped to the nearest railroad station, or sent by the French Army, free of charge, in a thundering camion. We never knew when to expect this last, nor what it would contain. Sunday seemed a favourite day for its arrival. On one occasion, there were three pigs, loose and hungry, and no pen to put them in; seventy-five crated chickens followed, with the request that the number be verified, and the crates returned. Such were the colonel’s orders. But, seeing that the Unit carpenter had to construct a chicken yard, this command was modified by a judicious distribution of cigarettes. Mixed cargoes of Red Cross boxes, stoves, bundles of wool from the Bon Marché which had burst en route, and sundries, were even harder to deal with.

We had no store room. The cave of the Château, seeping with tons of débris which in places bent with its weight the steel ceiling, and open along one whole side to the elements,—this contained our dairy, our lumber, our fuel, our vegetables, our groceries, and our relief supplies. It abounded in rats, cats, and bats. But such as it was, it was the centre of our activities. By night often weirdly lighted with candles, by day never empty, laughter rather than complaints floated from its dim interior. Here we held our first store; here the children who had trudged over from Canizy, Hombleux or Esmery-Hallon waited in line for their milk; here were assembled and tied up the thousands of packages for our fêtes de Noël. As winter advanced, we prepared for a day in the cave by encasing our feet in peasants’ socks and sabots, and our hands in worsted mittens. The soldiers in the trenches had nothing on us.

Whether at home or on the road, our days were long and arduous, and seldom what we had planned. Even Sunday became part of the working week, for then we attempted to entertain our official supervisors and co-laborers, and all chance acquaintances. M. le Commandant of the Third Army has dined with us; the ladies of the American Fund for French Wounded, under whom we held our section, have come to call; the Friends walk over from Esmery-Hallon where they are building baraques for the commune; a lonesome Ambulance boy who has tramped ten miles and must retrace his steps before dark, drops in; a squad of Canadian Foresters rides through the gate; reporters, accompanied by a French officer, harry us with questions. But most frequent, and most welcome of all our visitors, are our countrymen, the—th New York Engineers. They came from home, those men, to be the first of our army under fire. But during the early days of the autumn, their talk was not of their work, but of ours. They brought us slat walks, called duck walks, to keep us out of the mud, and wood, and benches, and stoves. They came with mandolins and guitars and violins to give an entertainment to our villagers, and stayed for a buffet dinner and dance. They sent their trucks to take us in turn to a party at their encampment. But all that was before the Cambrai drive. As we, in our baraques, listened night and day to that bombardment, we little knew the heroic part taken in it by our Engineers. Surprised, unarmed, with pick and shovel they stood and fought; and later, hastily equipped with rifles, helped save the day for England on the bitterly contested front. But you have doubtless read of them in the papers, for they were the first of our soldiers to die in battle and to be mentioned in the orders of the day.