Ralph Hale Mottram

“ Skene, who at home would hardly have walked to the end of the street with such an object—Madeleine, who had hardly heard of such a thing before she went to Amiens—went to the nearest cinema because it was war-time and no one wanted to think. Walking in the brisk air of a Parisian winter evening, good meat and drink within them, they enjoyed themselves prodigiously, Skene because he had existed in dubious snatches of comfort for a long time, and was likely to so exist for an indefinite period—Madeleine because of the reality of a man at her side. ”

“ There existed in Madeleine, as in so many women of those days, the queerest contradiction. Fearing daily and desperately the very worst—death to their loved man—they never could believe in it happening, often even when it did actually happen, as was usual in those years. Relieved, respited at least from the major anxiety—for Georges must be in hospital or depot somewhere, and out of the fighting, Madeleine began to be a prey to a lesser—to know what had happened to him? which led her curiosity to explore the unknown at least once a day. ”

“ Descending at Schaexen Halte, Madeleine and her father made their way to the block of white marquees and tents that almost filled the manor pasture of Naes’ farm. In spite of the fresh air, the smell of anæsthetics and disinfectants hung over the duck-board paths and cindered drives, and mingled with the odor of cooking maconochie and the smoke of a giant incinerator that, never quenched, burned the daily load of discarded clothing and bandages, filthy with human refuse and trench mud. ”

“ A black figure had risen behind the trunk of a tree with a sharp “Hish!” She fell sideways, clutching an elm sapling that bent with her, staring. The figure made two steps towards her, and she, petrified, could only maintain her balance and stare. Then with infinite relief she heard: “Tiens, it’s you, Madeleine! What do you want?”
“Why, Monsieur le Baron, I didn’t know you!”
“Be quiet then. There is some one wandering round the château. It may be the Bosche!”
“What, are they here?”
“The village has been formally evacuated. One expects them from one moment to another!” ”

“ Leaving the old horse, with perfect confidence, looking down his nose into a laurel bush, Madeleine took her basket on her arm, and entered the great square kitchen.
One of the things that renders life so easy in France is the absence of change. Anywhere outside Paris, and often in it, change seems to have worn itself out, and to have ceased. In that remote corner of Flanders, Madeleine had no shyness, hesitation, or doubt, in entering the house of her father’s landlord and her lover’s mother. ”

“ Madeleine did so. Like all those strong enough to stand it, she felt a kind of exaltation rising above any fear. Many a man felt like her that night. The long-distance bombardment, under which a human being was matched against a lump of steel as large and many times harder than himself, was over. To it succeeded the direct struggle of man against man, with machine gun, rifle and grenade. The Bosche were no longer awe-inspiring once they got beyond the range of their big guns. Let them come, the sooner the better. The great offensive had been threatened for months. ”

“ THE late summer of 1917, the summer of Haig’s offensive from Ypres, was one of the wettest of the war, but the days following Madeleine’s return opened fine.
She was up betimes, and soon made herself apparent in the life of the farm. Harvest must begin the moment things were dry enough, and before they became too dry, so that the cut grain would neither sprout as it lay, nor spill itself as it fell. Besides herself and her father, they had Berthe, and the family of Belgian refugees, two boys too young for service, and eight women of all ages. ”

“ Madeleine, who wanted the men out of the way, let it pass for politeness that she took the carafe of beer and two hastily washed glasses into the kitchen, swabbed the table and invited the Baron to place himself. She went back to her wringer, leaving the door into the scullery open. One never knew. She had kept her secret in her heart ever since her visit to the English hospital. She had no news, and had been able to think of no new way of getting even with the War, but she had forgotten nothing, forgiven nothing, renounced nothing. ”

“ Her trance was broken by the sound of field-boots on the steps that led down from the dining-room. Two officers were passing to the door, middle-aged junior officers of infantry or artillery, with cleaned-up, discolored uniforms, and faces and voices of those who had been “through it,” and had a good deal more to go through before they would have done with “it”—“it” being the War. Madeleine had seen hundreds such, going up to the line, coming down from the line, sitting round her father’s table, taking charge of parties of men, with shy resolution. ”

“ He was doing so now, and Madeleine, if she thought about it at all, thought like this: “Poor old father, he’s making old bones; it’s the boys he misses,” when she saw Jerome drop his hoe and run to the lorry to help out a woman with a shawl over her head.
In another moment Madeleine had no doubt. It was her sister Marie from Laventie. In a moment she was out. The men on the lorry, with the queer, dumb, unexpected kindliness of the poorer Englishman, were handing down Emilienne, Marie’s little girl, in a sort of frozen stupor of cold and fright. ”

“ The British Great Head-quarters, then still functioning in complete disunity with Great Head-quarters of France, and often in good-humored disregard of the advice given it, went on butting, like an obstinate ram, at the same place. This, though it surprised the Germans more than the most subtle strategy would have done, cost the lives of many a thousand English soldiers. It was necessary to economize and economize again. The reserve corps would have to disappear, the line northward be more sparsely held. Here the long chain of action and reaction touched Madeleine. ”

“ The next day the horizon to the south and east was black with pillars of smoke. By night these became pillars of flame, biblical, ominous. The incessant sounds of battle changed in timbre. The heavy bombardment ceased. Nearer and nearer crept the rattle of machine guns. Madeleine had one or two errands, and returning by the village shortly afterwards, was astonished to find all the shops shut. Vanhove, the butcher, was loading his best brass bedstead and mattress on to—what of all conceivable vehicles? Madeleine stared before she took it in. It was the roller, the road roller. None other. ”

“ Could he get her a lift in a car or lorry to the English base to which alone, so he said, casualties passing through English clearing-stations would go? In a moment she saw her mistake, she had asked too much, had run across some inexplicable—to her, unreasonable, prejudice in the young officer’s mind. She knew well enough that it was forbidden for civilians to travel in British vehicles, but had counted hastily on his position as an officer and her powers of persuasion. He began to use commonplaces, to inquire how she was getting on with the troops at the farm. ”

“ Near by, in the corner where Naes used to grow his maize, was a small neat cemetery of little mounds with inscribed wooden crosses, destined to grow with the years into a bigger area than the hospital and the sidings together, until lawyers had to argue out the compensation due to Naes for the expropriation. At this point luck deserted Madeleine, for no sooner had she and her father got into conversation with an orderly, than up rolled a convoy of a dozen ambulances, out ran all the available orderlies, and the whole place hummed like a railway station. ”

“ Madeleine cleared the table and served dinner to Jacobs and the Baron, who would sit over it, drinking canteen whisky and discussing in English-French and French-English the submarine menace and surface drainage, by means of any daily papers they had gleaned during the day’s wandering, and with the help of Madeleine’s translation. By the time both were ready to return to their never-made “beds” in the château, the veterans would come clattering back, the mules going at an unearthly amble in the darkness, and all was ready for the morrow. ”

“ The great square block of a house, the main building of the older castle, whose wings had been thrown into its moat, whose forecourt had become flower gardens in the revolution of 1790, went on its even way under her iron rule, undisturbed by wars. The presence of a mess of English officers in the Baron’s quarters, east of the main staircase, the absence of young Master Georges, of all the men-servants, and of some of the women who had gone to work on farms, did not throw Placide out of her stride. ”

“ She was not really convinced until the Baron walked into her empty dining-room.
“Good day, Madeleine, you have lost all your clients.”
Looking up from her knitting, she said gravely:
“It seems so!” But secretly she now believed it. If it were not true he would not have come. He disliked the crowd of junior officers who joked about his beard.
What was to be done? Not retain an empty restaurant where no one ever came. She saw enough at home in the evenings to know that Marie was firmly settled in, and didn’t want her. The situation was beyond her. ”

“ But it was a Paris bereft of men, many a shutter closed; a Paris as yet unhaunted by Americans, but beginning to be desperate in its pleasures. What its best historians, its great lovers, Murger or Victor Hugo, would have thought of it, cannot be conjectured. Its fabled gaiety was gone for good. Its heroism had that poisoned quality that makes women cover broken hearts with cheap finery.{158}
Madeleine, who had never imagined a town of the size before, spent the first two months quietly taking it all in. She had the sense to see that she must start all over again. ”

“ The condition of her father might have weighed heavily on Madeleine’s mind had it been her only preoccupation, but fortunately it was not. First of all there was work. She was working harder than anybody ever works in England. From before the gray wet winter dawn, until long after the solitary army candle had been lighted in the kitchen, making grotesque shadows in the broken glass of the oriel window, her hands were never still, tugging, smoothing, shifting earth, timber, wire, weeds, produce; housework, cooking, mending, were relaxations. ”

“ Skene waved and was gone. Madeleine turned and went. “Know what you’ve been doing” rang in her ears. A smile curled the corners of her mouth. Men looked after her again now that she was alone. She walked, taking pleasure in exercise and the keen air, to the little hotel in the stony street, paid the bill, with the money Skene had given her, reclaimed her hold-all, strained to bursting with the things he had bought for her. Then she demanded a taxi, which she dismissed in front of the Pantheon, and walked on foot to Monsieur and Madame Petit’s. ”

“ At that instant steps and voices could be heard on the terrace surrounding the house, which, on account of the winding of the drive by way of the old moat, was just above the level of their eyes. The Baron, quivering all over, not with fear, but{233} with sporting instinct, brought his spiked camp stool to the charge, and tiptoed noiselessly up the bank. Madeleine, clutching her skirt with one hand, swinging herself up by the undergrowth with the other, arrived beside him just in time to see two familiar Australian figures looming leisurely in the darkness. ”

“ Thus the public in the street could see the legs and half the bodies of the diners, but not their faces. Outside, a great sign-board, swung English-fashion on a bracket, depicted an alleged Flemish peasant-woman, in national costume, with international features, and the immemorial vulgarity of such efforts. Madeleine never even guessed that the square of brilliant paint was an allegorical representation of herself, and would have been much astonished to have been told so. ”

“ Seldom was the farm without its happy-go-lucky khaki crowd, whose slang, mixed with Indian words learned from old regular soldiers, and cheerful attempts at anglicized French phrases, Madeleine learned and used, as she learned the decorous politeness of the older officers, the shy good humor of the younger ones. Many a good sum did Blanquart pay her for billeting, many a neat bill did she receipt for anxious Mess Presidents. ”

“ Old Vanderlynden, if he ever spoke of her to others, used not the peasant’s usual “Ma fille”—“my little girl,” but “Ma demoiselle”—“my young lady.” Her dress indicated nothing, for etiquette forbade her going beyond the farm in her old worn “every-day” and apron, clogs and upturned sleeves. Old men and women and children were plowing, manuring and weed-burning in the fields bordering the hedgeless road. She spoke to no one, and no one spoke to her. ”

“ Thus came what Politicians called “Peace,” but mostly French people, realists in a sense that the English public never is, spoke of it as the “era of La Galette”—the cake which one could eat and yet have again, the pie in which every one’s finger might be—the lucky-bag into which all might dip. ”