A Hilltop on the Marne Part 3

Just after breakfast my friend from Voulangis drove over in a great state of excitement, with the proposition that I should pack up and return with her. She seemed alarmed at the idea of my being alone, and seemed to think a group of us was safer. It was a point of view that had not occurred to me, and I was not able to catch it. Still, I was touched at her thoughtfulness, even though I had to say that I proposed to stay right here. When she asked me what I proposed to do if the army came retreating across my garden, I instinctively laughed. It seems so impossible this time that the Germans can pa.s.s the frontier, and get by Verdun and Toul. All the same, that other people were thinking it possible rather brought me up standing. I just looked at the little house I had arranged such a little time ago--I have only been here two months.

She had come over feeling pretty glum--my dear neighbor from Voulangis.

She went away laughing. At the gate she said, "It looks less gloomy to me than it did when I came. I felt such a brave thing driving over here through a country preparing for war. I expected you to put a statue up in your garden 'To a Brave Lady.'"

I stood in the road watching her drive away, and as I turned back to the house it suddenly took on a very human sort of look. There pa.s.sed through my mind a sudden realization, that, according to my habit, I had once again stuck my feet in the ground of a new home--and taken root.

It is a fact. I have often looked at people who seem to keep foot-free.

I never can. If I get pulled up violently by the roots, if I have my earthly possessions pruned away, I always hurry as fast as I can, take root in a new place, and proceed to sprout a new crop of possessions which fix me there. I used, when I was younger, to envy people who could just pack a bag and move on. I am afraid that I never envied them enough to do as they did. If I had I should have done it. I find that life is pretty logical. It is like chemical action--given certain elements to begin with, contact with the fluids of Life give a certain result. After all I fancy every one does about the best he can with the gifts he has to do with. So I imagine we do what is natural to us; if we have the gift of knowing what we want and wanting it hard enough we get it. If we don't, we compromise.

I am closing this up rather hurriedly as one of the boys who joins his regiment at Fontainebleau will mail it in Paris as he pa.s.ses through. I suppose you are glad that you got away before this came to pa.s.s.

VIII

August 10,1914.

I have your cable asking me to come "home" as you call it. Alas, my home is where my books are--they are here. Thanks all the same.

It is a week since I wrote you--and what a week. We have had a sort of intermittent communication with the outside world since the 6th, when, after a week of deprivation, we began to get letters and an occasional newspaper, brought over from Meaux by a boy on a bicycle.

After we were certain, on the 4th of August, that war was being declared all around Germany and Austria, and that England was to back France and Russia, a sort of stupor settled on us all. Day after day Amelie would run to the mairie at Quincy to read the telegraphic bulletin--half a dozen lines of facts--that was all we knew from day to day. It is all we know now.

Day after day I sat in my garden watching the aeroplanes flying over my head, and wishing so hard that I knew what they knew. Often I would see five in the day, and one day ten. Day after day I watched the men of the commune on their way to join their cla.s.se. There was hardly an hour of the day that I did not nod over the hedge to groups of stern, silent men, accompanied by their women, and leading the children by the hand, taking the short cut to the station which leads over the hill, right by my gate, to Couilly. It has been so thrilling that I find myself forgetting that it is tragic. It is so different from anything I ever saw before. Here is a nation--which two weeks ago was torn by political dissension--suddenly united, and with a spirit that I have never seen before.

I am old enough to remember well the days of our Civil War, when regiments of volunteers, with flying flags and bands of music, marched through our streets in Boston, on the way to the front. Crowds of stay-at-homes, throngs of women and children lined the sidewalks, shouting deliriously, and waving handkerchiefs, inspired by the marching soldiers, with guns on their shoulders, and the strains of martial music, varied with the then popular "The girl I left behind me," or, "When this cruel war is over." But this is quite different. There are no marching soldiers, no flying flags, no bands of music. It is the rising up of a Nation as one man--all cla.s.ses shoulder to shoulder, with but one idea--"Lift up your hearts, and long live France." I rather pity those who have not seen it.

Since the day when war was declared, and when the Chamber of Deputies--all party feeling forgotten--stood on its feet and listened to Paul Deschanel's terse, remarkable speech, even here in this little commune, whose silence is broken only by the rumbling of the trains pa.s.sing, in view of my garden, on the way to the frontier, and the footsteps of the groups on the way to the train, I have seen sights that have moved me as nothing I have ever met in life before has done. Day after day I have watched the men and their families pa.s.s silently, and an hour later have seen the women come back leading the children. One day I went to Couilly to see if it was yet possible for me to get to Paris. I happened to be in the station when a train was going out.

Nothing goes over the line yet but men joining their regiments. They were packed in like sardines. There were no uniforms--just a crowd of men--men in blouses, men in patched jackets, well-dressed men--no distinction of cla.s.s; and on the platform the women and children they were leaving. There was no laughter, none of the gayety with which one has so often reproached this race--but neither were there any tears. As the crowded train began to move, bare heads were thrust out of windows, hats were waved, and a great shout of "Vive la France" was answered by piping children's voices, and the choked voices of women--"Vive l'Armee"; and when the train was out of sight the women took the children by the hand, and quietly climbed the hill.

Ever since the 4th of August all our crossroads have been guarded, all our railway gates closed, and also guarded--guarded by men whose only sign of being soldiers is a cap and a gun, men in blouses with a mobilization badge on their left arms, often in patched trousers and sabots, with stern faces and determined eyes, and one thought--"The country is in danger."

There is a crossroad just above my house, which commands the valley on either side, and leads to a little hamlet on the route nationale from Couilly to Meaux, arid is called "La Demi-Lune"--why "Half-Moon" I don't know. It was there, on the 6th, that I saw, for the first time, an armed barricade. The gate at the railway crossing had been opened to let a cart pa.s.s, when an automobile dashed through Saint-Germain, which is on the other side of the track. The guard raised his bayonet in the air, to command the car to stop and show its papers, but it flew by him and dashed up the hill. The poor guard--it was his first experience of that sort--stood staring after the car; but the idea that he ought to fire at it did not occur to him until it was too late. By the time it occurred to him, and he could telephone to the Demi-Lune, it had pa.s.sed that guard in the same way--and disappeared. It did not pa.s.s Meaux. It simply disappeared. It is still known as the "Phantom Car." Within half an hour there was a barricade at the Demi-Lune mounted by armed men--too late, of course. However, it was not really fruitless,--that barricade,--as the very next day they caught three Germans there, disguised as Sisters of Charity--papers all in order--and who would have got by, after they were detected by a little boy's calling attention to their ungloved hands, if it had not been for the number of armed old men on the barricade.

What makes things especially serious here, so near the frontier, and where the military movements must be made, is the presence of so many Germans, and the bitter feeling there is against them. On the night of August 2, just when the troops were beginning to move east, an attempt was made to blow up the railroad bridge at lie de Villenoy, between here and Meaux. The three Germans were caught with the dynamite on them--so the story goes--and are now in the barracks at Meaux. But the most absolute secrecy is preserved about all such things. Not only is all France under martial law: the censorship of the press is absolute.

Every one has to carry his papers, and be provided with a pa.s.sport for which he is liable to be asked in simply crossing a road.

Meaux is full of Germans. The biggest department shop there is a German enterprise. Even Couilly has a German or two, and we had one in our little hamlet. But they've got to get out. Our case is rather pathetic. He was a nice chap, employed in a big fur house in Paris. He came to France when he was fifteen, has never been back, consequently has never done his military service there. Oddly enough, for some reason, he never took out his naturalization papers, so never did his service here. He has no relatives in Germany--that is to say, none with whom he has kept up any correspondence, he says. He earns a good salary, and has always been one of the most generous men in the commune, but circ.u.mstances are against him. Even though he is an intimate friend of our mayor, the commune preferred to be rid of him. He begged not to be sent back to Germany, so he went sadly enough to a concentration camp, pretty well convinced that his career here was over. Still, the French do forget easily.

Couilly had two Germans. One of them--the barber--got out quick. The other did not. But he was quietly informed by some of his neighbors--with pistols in their hands--that his room was better than his company.

The barber occupied a shop in the one princ.i.p.al street in the village, which is, by the way, a comparatively rich place. He had a front shop, which was a cafe, with a well-fitted-up bar. The back, with a well-dressed window on the street, full of toilette articles, was the barber and hairdressing-room, very neatly arranged, with modern set bowls and mirrors, cabinets full of towels, well-filled shelves of all the things that make such a place profitable. You should see it now.

Its broken windows and doors stand open to the weather. The entire interior has been "efficiently" wrecked. It is as systematic a work of destruction as I have ever seen. Not a thing was stolen, but not an article was spared. All the bottles full of things to drink and all the gla.s.ses to drink out of are smashed, so are counters, tables, chairs, and shelving. In the barber shop there is a litter of broken porcelain, broken combs, and smashed-up chairs and boxes among a wreck of hair dyes, perfumes, brillantine, and torn towels, and an odor of aperitifs and cologne over it all.

Every one pretends not to know when it happened. They say, "It was found like that one morning." Every one goes to look at it--no one enters, no one touches anything. They simply say with a smile of scorn, "Good--and so well done."

There are so many things that I wish you could see. They would give you such a new point of view regarding this race--traditionally so gay, so indifferent to many things that you consider moral, so fond of their individual comfort and personal pleasure, and often so rebellious to discipline. You would be surprised--surprised at their unity, surprised at their seriousness, and often touched by their philosophical acceptance of it all.

Amelie has a stepson and daughter. The boy--named Marius--like his father plays the violin. Like many humble musicians his music is his life and he adds handsomely to his salary as a clerk by playing at dances and little concerts, and by giving lessons in the evening. Like his father he is very timid. But he accepted the war without a word, though nothing is more foreign to his nature. It brought it home to me--this rising up of a Nation in self-defense. It is not the marching into battle of an army that has chosen soldiering. It is the marching out of all the people--of every temperament--the rich, the poor, the timid and the bold, the sensitive and the hardened, the ignorant and the scholar--all men, because they happen to be males, called on not only to cry, "Vive la France," but to see to it that she does live if dying for her can keep her alive. It is a compelling idea, isn't it?

Amelie's stepdaughter is married to a big burly chap by the name of Georges G.o.dot. He is a thick-necked, red-faced man--in the dynamite corps on the railroad, the construction department. He is used to hardships. War is as good as anything else to him. When he came to say "good-bye" he said, "Well, if I have the luck to come back--so much the better. If I don't, that will be all right. You can put a placque down below in the cemetery with 'G.o.dot, Georges: Died for the country '; and when my boys grow up they can say to their comrades, 'Papa, you know, he died on the battlefield.' It will be a sort of distinction I am not likely to earn for them any other way"; and off he went. Rather fine for a man of that cla.s.s.

Even the women make no cry. As for the children--even when you would think that they were old enough to understand the meaning of these partings they make no sign, though they seem to understand all the rest of it well enough. There isn't a boy of eight in our commune who cannot tell you how it all came about, and who is not just now full of stories of 1870, which he has heard from grandma and grandpa, for, as is natural, every one talks of 1870 now. I have lived among these people, loved them and believed in them, even when their politics annoyed me, but I confess that they have given me a surprise.

IX

August 17, 1914.

I have Belgium on my soul. Brave little country that has given new proof of its courage and n.o.bility, and surprised the world with a ruler who is a man, as well as king. It occurs to me more than ever to-day in what a wonderful epoch we have lived. I simply can't talk about it.

The suspense is so great. I heard this morning from an officer that the English troops are landing, though he tells me that in London they don't yet know that the Expedition has started. If that is true, it is wonderful. Not a word in the papers yet, but your press is not censored as ours is. I fancy you know these things in New York before we do, although we are now getting a newspaper from Meaux regularly. But there is never anything illuminating in it. The att.i.tude of the world to the Belgian question is a shock to me. I confess to have expected more active indignation at such an outrage.

Everything is very quiet here. Our little commune sent two hundred men only, but to take two hundred able-bodied men away makes a big hole, and upsets life in many ways. For some days we were without bread: bakers gone. But the women took hold and, though the bread is not yet very good, it serves and will as long as flour holds out. No one complains, though we already lack many things. No merchandise can come out yet on the railroads, all the automobiles and most of the horses are gone, and shops are shy of staple things.

Really I don't know which are the more remarkable, the men or the women.

You may have read the proclamation of the Minister of Agriculture to the women of France, calling on them to go into the fields and get in the crops and prepare the ground for the sowing of the winter wheat that the men on returning might not find their fields neglected nor their crops lost. You should have seen the old men and the women and the youngsters respond. It is harvest-time, you know, just as it was in the invasion of 1870.

In a few weeks it will be time to gather the fruit. Even now it is time to pick the black currants, all of which go to England to make the jams and jellies without which no English breakfast table is complete.

For days now the women and children have been climbing the hill at six in the morning, with big hats on their heads, deep baskets on their backs, low stools in their hands. There is a big field of black-currant bushes beside my garden to the south. All day, in the heat, they sit under the bushes picking away. At sundown they carry their heavy baskets to the weighing-machine on the roadside at the foot of the hill, and stand in line to be weighed in and paid by the English buyers for Crosse and Blackwell, Beach, and such houses, who have, I suppose, some special means of transportation.

That work is, however, the regular work for the women and children.

Getting in the grain is not. Yet if you could see them take hold of it you would love them. The old men do double work. Amelie's husband is over seventy. His own work in his fields and orchard would seem too much for him. Yet he and Amelie and the donkey are in the field by three o'clock every morning, and by nine o'clock he is marching down the hill, with his rake and hoe on his shoulder, to help his neighbors.

There is many a woman working in the fields to-day who was not trained to it. I have a neighbor, a rich peasant, whose two sons are at the front. Her only daughter married an officer in the Engineer Corps.

When her husband joined his regiment she came home to her mother with her little boy. I see her every day, in a short skirt and a big hat, leading her boy by the hand, going to the fields to help her mother. If you don't think that is fine, I do. It is only one of many cases right under my eyes.

There are old men here who thought that their days of hard work were over, who are in the fields working like boys. There is our blacksmith--old Pere Marie--lame with rheumatism, with his white-haired wife working in the fields from sunrise to sunset. He cheerfully limps up the hill in his big felt slippers, his wife carrying the lunch basket, and a tiny black-and-tan English dog called "Missy," who is the family baby, and knows lots of tricks, trotting behind, "because," as he says, "she is so much company." The old blacksmith is a veteran of 1870, and was for a long time a prisoner at Konigsburg. He likes nothing better than to rest a bit on a big stone at my gate and talk of 1870. Like all Frenchmen of his type he is wonderfully intelligent, full of humor, and an omnivorous reader.

Almost every day he has a bit of old newspaper in his pocket out of which he reads to la dame Americaine as he calls me, not being able to p.r.o.nounce my name. It is usually something illuminating about the Germans, when it is not something prophetic. It is wonderful how these old chaps take it all to heart.

All the time my heart is out there in the northeast. It is not my country nor my war--yet I feel as if it were both. All my French friends are there, all my neighbors, and any number of English friends will soon be, among them the brother of the sculptor you met at my house last winter and liked so much. He is with the Royal Field Artillery.

His case is rather odd. He came back to England in the spring, after six years in the civil service, to join the army. His leave expired just in time for him to reenter the army and see his first active service in this war. Fortunately men seem to take it all as a matter of course. That consoles some, I find.

I have just heard that there are two trains a day on which civilians can go up to Paris IF THERE ARE PLACES LEFT after the army is accommodated.

There is no guaranty that I can get back the same day. Still, I am going to risk it. I am afraid to be any longer without money, though goodness knows what I can do with it. Besides, I find that all my friends are flying, and I feel as if I should like to say "good-bye"--I don't know why, but I feel like indulging the impulse. Anyway, I am going to try it. I am going armed with every sort of paper--provisional pa.s.sport from our consul, permis de sejour from my mayor here, and a local permit to enter and leave Paris, which does not allow me to stay inside the fortifications after six o'clock at night, unless I get myself identified at the prefecture of the arrondiss.e.m.e.nt in which I propose to stay and have my pa.s.sport vised.

X