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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.