Susanne R. Day

“ And now there was M. Phillipot all alone in the maudite petite maison at Révigny. "Is it that he can live alone? Pensez donc, Mademoiselle! I, moi qui vous parle, must give up my good place with my friends whom I love, to whom I have accustomed myself, and live in that desert of a Révigny. Is it that I shall earn good money there? Monsieur? Il ne gagne rien, mais rien du tout. Pas ça." She clicked a nail against a front tooth and shot an expressive finger into the air.
"Then he must come to Bar-le-Duc." ”

“ Amusement, distraction there is none. No club-room where he may foregather comfortably, no cheery canteen with billiards and games, no shops in which if he has money he can spend it. Blank, cheerless, uncared-for nothingness. He gets into mischief—what can you expect? He goes back to the trenches, and shamed eyes are averted and hearts weighed with care hide behind bravado as he goes.
Sometimes you hear, "The men are so weary and so dispirited they do no harm." They are like dream people, moving through a world of shadows. ”

“ A reconnaissance from which all his men got back safely, Paul last of all, crawling on hands and knees ... raises himself to take a necessary observation ... a sniper ... a swift bullet ... a merciful death ... and an old heart bleeding from a wound that will never heal.
"If we see Death in front of us we care no more for it than we do for that." A Zouave held a glass of lemonade high above the canteen counter. "For that is the honour of the regiment. Death?" he shrugged. "One will die, sans doute. At Verdun, on the Somme, n'importe! ”

“ 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. ”

“ Ah, mademoiselle, do you think the war will soon be over? Si seulement...." To die and be buried among her own people. To die at home. It was all she asked for, all she had left to wish for in the world. She would look at me with imploring, trustful eyes. Les Anglaises, they must know. Surely I could tell her? And in the autumn one would say, "It will be over in the spring," and in the winter cry, "Ah yes, in the summer." But spring came and summer followed, and still the guns reverberated across the hills, and winter came and the Harvest of Death was still in the reaping. ”

“ It does not set its iron heel upon our hearts and laugh when the red blood spurts upon the ground; it does not take our chastity in its filthy hands and batten upon it in the market-place; it doesn't rob us of liberty, nor of honour, nor does it break our altars, spuming its bestialities over the sacred flame. Our inner sanctuaries are still holy and undefiled. Those whom we have given have gone clear-eyed and pure-hearted to the White Temple of Sacrifice, there to lay their gift upon the outstretched hand of God: not one has died in shame. ”

“ But the awful sleeping accommodation weighed heavily on our consciences—the brown pall of atmosphere, the fœtid SOLID smell, the murky lamp, the fitful glow of the fires, and on the floor on the dirty inadequate straw a dense mass of human beings. Lying in their clothes just as they came from the station, or as they left the big camions in which many were driven down, not daring even to unlace their boots, they were wedged so tightly we thought not even a child could have found space. Some, tossing in their sleep, had flung themselves across neighbours too exhausted to protest ”

“ 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? ”

“ For the great military machine which exists in order that an unshakable bulwark may be set up between the invader and the civilians whom he would crush is, in its turn, and in order to keep that bulwark firm, obliged to crush them himself. In the War Zone (it is not too much to say it) the civilian is an incubus, an impediment, a most infernal nuisance. He gets so confoundedly in the way. And he is swept out of it as ruthlessly as a hospital matron sweeps dust out of her wards. ”

“ She seized me with delighted hands, and it was then that the uniform earned my bitterest reproach, for into its pockets, whose size suggested that they were originally intended to hold the guano and rabbits of agricultural relief, went the pears. One might as well argue with a megatherium as with Madame when her mind was made up. So I had to stand in the kitchen growing bulkier and bulkier, with knobs and hillocks and boulders and tussocks sprouting all over me, feeling like a fatted calf, and longing for kindly darkness to swallow me up. ”

“ Even an omnibus train starts some time, and generally when you least expect it.
At Mussey if you crane your head out of the window you may see two wounded German prisoners, white-faced, mud-caked wretches who provoke no comment. At Révigny you will see soldiers (if I told you how many pass through in a day the Censor would order me to be immersed in a vat of official ink) ; and you will see ruins. The Town Hall is an eyeless skeleton leering down the road, the Grande Place—there is no Grande Place, there is only a scattered confusion of fire-charred stones and desiccated brick. ”

“ 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. ”

“ All the misery, all the suffering, all the heart-break of war seemed concentrated there, and then quite suddenly out of ugliness and squalor came beauty. A tall woman with resigned, beautiful face detached [Pg 185] herself from the throng, a naked baby wrapped in a towel in her arms. As unconcernedly, as unselfconsciously as if she were at home in her own kitchen she came to the table, filled a basin with warm water, and sitting down, bathed the lusty crowing thing that kicked, and chewed its fists, gurgling with delight. ”

“ 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. ”

“ They poured through Bar-le-Duc in hundreds, the roar of traffic thundering down the Boulevard all day long. In the night we would lie awake listening. It sounded like a rough sea dragging back from a stone-strewn shore. Once, if soldier tales be true, "the Boches could have walked into Verdun with their rifles over their shoulders. Four days and four nights we lay in the open, Mademoiselle. Our trenches were blown to pieces, we were cut off by the barrage, we had no food but our emergency rations, no ammunition could reach us. ”

“ Not in one phase, nor in one era, not in one great crisis nor even in a myriad does the heart of a people express itself fully. From birth to death, from its first feeble primitive struggles as it emerges from the Womb of Time to its last death-throe as it sinks back again into the Nothingness from which it came, it gathers to itself new forces, new aspirations, new voices, new gods, new altars, new preachers, new goals, new Heavens, new Hells, new readings of the Riddle that only Eternity will solve. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Over all the floor-space there is straw, thick, tossed-up straw, through which, running past the stoves, are two narrow lanes, one down either side. And on the straw lie human beings, not many as yet, only those who have supped, or who, waiting for the meal, have thrown themselves down in the last stages of physical and mental exhaustion. Babies wail, women are sobbing, the gardes-champêtres shout in rough voices. Bales, bundles, hand-grips, baskets lie on the straw; there an old woman is lying wretchedly, her head on a canvas bag ”

“ 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. ”

“ We knew what the ground is like all along the blood-stained Front, hundreds of miles of it fought over for four interminable years, its soil enriched by the hallowed dead, torn and lacerated by shells, incalculable tons of iron piercing its breast, and knew, too, that Death lurks cunningly in many an unexploded bomb or mortar or shell, and that prolonged and costly sanitation will be necessary before man dare live on it again. ”

“ Gifts of fruit and flowers came constantly to our door, our bidons were miraculously filled with paraffin in a famine which we, being foolish virgins, had not foreseen, or, foreseeing, had not guarded against, and once in the heavy frost, when wood was unobtainable in the town and the supply ordered from Sermaize was over-long in coming, our lives were saved by a bag of oak blocks which scented the house, and boulets that made the stove glow with magnificent ardour. ”

“ 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. ”

“ We hear that the civil hospital is full, that babies have been born on the journey down—been born and have died and were buried by the way. Despair rides on many a shoulder, fear still darkens many eyes. Some have escaped from a storm of shell-fire, many have had to walk long distances, for the railway lines have been cut. Verdun is isolated—Nixieville is the nearest point to which a train may go—and all have left their homes unguarded, some being already blown to atoms, others momently threatened with a like fate. ”

“ The poilu deserves our sympathy. He is, to my mind, one of the most tragic figures of the war. He is pursued by a fatalism as relentless as it is hopeless, and whether he is ill or well is subjected to much unnecessary discomfort. He hates war, he hates the trenches, he loathes the life of the trenches, he wants nothing so much in the world as his own hearthstone. He is often despairing, and convinced of defeat. ("Mademoiselle, never can we drive the Boche from his trenches, never!") ”

“ Now the speech of that graceless creature, swaying lightly above the crowd, was everything that a canteen or war-time speech ought not to be. It began with abuse of capitalists—well, they deserved it, perhaps. It taxed them with all responsibility for the war, it yearned passionately to see them in the trenches. There, at least, we were in accord. We know a few.... But when it went on to say that the masses who fought were fools, that they should "down tools," that the German is too rich, too powerful, too well-organised, too supreme a militarist ever to be defeated.... ”

“ However, you must not think that the canteen kept us in a state of soppy sentiment, or even of perfervid sympathy. Sanity was the mood that suited it best. Presence of mind the quality that made for success. A sense of humour the saving grace that made both the former possible. When a thin, dark individual leans upon the counter for half an hour or more, silent, ruminative, pondering—it is a quiet night, no rush—gather your forces together. ”