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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.