Home Fires in France Part 5

The voice stops abruptly. In the resultant silence I move uneasily.... I find Deschamps' talk heartbreaking enough, but his silences terrify me.

I try to arouse him from his bleak brooding reverie....

"You had hares too, didn't you, and hens, and a pig...? That must have helped out with the living."

He comes to himself with a start. "Oh, it was my wife who kept the animals. She has such a hand for making them thrive. They were like her other children. Those little chicks, they never died, always prospered, grew so fat. We always had one or two to sell when she went to town to market. Angele used to dress them herself, so that we could have the feathers. Then she put them in one of the neat baskets she made from the willow sprouts on the side of our little stream, with a clean white cloth over them, as clean as her neckerchief. Angele is as neat as a nun, always. Our house shone with cleanness ..." He breaks off abruptly.

"I have shown you the photograph of Angele and Raoul, haven't I, madame?"

I hold out my hand and gaze again, as I have so many times before, into the quiet eyes of the young peasant woman with the st.u.r.dy little boy at her side. "She is very pretty, your wife," I say, "and your little boy looks so strong and vigorous."

"I hear," he said with a great heave of his broad chest, now so sunken, "that the Boches have taken all the livestock away from the owners, all the hens and pigs and hares, and sent them to Germany. Perhaps Raoul and Angele have not enough to eat ... perhaps there is even no house there now ... a cousin of mine saw a refugee from his own region ... who had seen the place where his house had been!... it had been sh.e.l.led, there was ..." His mouth sets hard in an angry line of horror.

I bestir myself. This is the sort of talk Deschamps must not be allowed.

"M. Deschamps," I say, "I shall be writing soon to that group of American friends who gave the money for your articulated arm. Have you any message to send them? I think they are planning to send some more money to help you...."

He waves it away with a great gesture. "Money can't do anything for me,"

he says bitterly, adding quickly: "Not of course that I am not very, very grateful for the so-costly artificial arm. It means I can earn their living again, if ever Angele...."

I break in once more: "But I promised them a statement of all your case, you know, the dates and places and everything. Could you just run over them again...?"

But I do not listen as he goes wearily over the old story as familiar to me now as to him: mobilized the first day, was in the Battle of the Marne, advanced to B----, was wounded there in the leg, taken to a hospital in an American ambulance, cured, returned to the trenches; wounded in the shoulder, taken to the hospital, cured, returned to the trenches ... all this time with no news whatever from his family, knowing that his region was occupied by the invaders, hearing stories of how the women and children were treated.... Fought during the winter of 1914-15, wounded in three places in June, 1915, taken to the hospital where his arm was amputated. While there, heard indirectly that his wife and child were still alive. As soon as the articulated arm (paid for out of my blessed fund of American money) allowed him to work, he had begun to learn the tinner's trade, since a one-armed man could no longer be a miner. Now he had pa.s.sed his apprenticeship and could soon be ready to earn his living.

I knew all this laborious, heroic, commonplace story already, and looked through it at the hospital pallor on the haggard face, at the dreadful soft whiteness of the hands so obviously meant to be hard and brown, at the slack looseness of the great frame, at a man on the point of losing his desire to live....

"What use is it to earn money when not a cent can I send to them up there, when I can hear nothing from Angele beyond that line on a post-card once in three months? Madame, you have education, _why_ will they not allow a wife to write to her husband?"

I have only the old answer to the old question: "We suppose they are afraid of spies, of people sending information to France."

"But why do they _keep_ Angele there? Why don't they let women go to their husbands? What harm can that do? Why do they make it a h.e.l.l on earth for them and then refuse to let them go?"

I had for this only the usual murmur: "A few _are_ allowed to come away."

He struck his hands together. "So few! When they last said they would allow some women and children to come to France, only a fifteenth part of those who asked for leave were allowed to come. Why? Why? What has Angele to do with the war?"

He gets up for the restless pacing about our little living-room which always ends his visits. "I think I shall go mad, madame. I am there in the hospital, two hundred of us in one great room ... oh, they are kind enough to us, we have enough to eat. But we are not children. It is not enough to have food and a roof. Two hundred men there ... what a life ... for fourteen months! Nothing to work for, nothing to live for, no home, no family, not even a chance to go back to the trenches. The other men drink as much as they can get money for. I never drank in my life. Madame, do you suppose it would make me sleep to drink?"

"See here, M. Deschamps," I say, moving to my desk, "I will write again to the Spanish Emba.s.sy. I will tell them again about Angele and Raoul, they will send the request to the German authorities in your town ...

perhaps _this_ time ..." It is a perilous stimulant to administer to a sick heart, but what other have I? So I sit, swallowing the lump in my throat, and once more make out the application which never has any result.

"There," I say, putting it into an envelope with hands that are not very steady--"there, my friend, you mail that. And now you must go, or the night-nurse will scold you for being late."

He reaches for his cap, his old shabby cap with the bullet hole through it, and stands fumbling with it, his head hanging. He towers above me, gaunt, powerful, as pitiably defenseless as any little child. I wink back the tears which threaten to come, shake his hand hard, and tell him to be sure to come again the next time he has the "_cafard_". He nods absently and shuffles to the door. "You will pardon me, madame ... but when I think that my little Raoul has perhaps not enough to eat, and I am not ..."

He has gone his lonely way to the hospital bed which is all he has for home. I go back to the cool dark bedroom and look down at my sleeping children.

There is no reason for it ... why should I feel guilty to see them rosy and safe?

II

When I come in from the street, very tired, after a talk with a war-widow about ways and means for taking care of her children, I find him in the living-room, the hearty, broad-faced fellow, smiling, giving me his great, farm-laborer's hand, thanking me for the last package of goodies ... as though he had not just come through the inferno of the attack at M----. "The package never arrived at a better moment," he said gaily. "We had been on awfully short rations for three days ... in a sh.e.l.l-hole, you know." I know that I do not know it all, but it is futile to try to draw fine distinctions with Groissard, cheeriest and simplest of "permissionnaires," always the same, always open-faced and clear-eyed, always emanating quiet confidence and always seeing it about him. If there are any tired or disheartened or apprehensive or perplexed soldiers in the army, they pa.s.s unperceived of Groissard's honest eyes.

His companions are all ... to hear him talk ... as brave, as untroubled, as single-hearted as he. They never complain--that is, if Groissard's account of them is accurate: they think as little as possible about anything but food and packages from the rear and jokes. And when they do think, it is always only to be sure that everybody must hold hard and stick it out quite to the end. As long as "they" are on French soil, of course there is nothing else for an honest Frenchman to do. And they are all honest Frenchmen around Groissard.

"Oh yes, madame," he says simply, balancing my little boy on his knee, "the spirit of the army is excellent. Why shouldn't it be? We're going to get them, you know. And you ought to see our regimental fireless cookers now. They're great! The cooks fill them up at the kitchen at the rear, quite out of range, you know, where there's no danger of a sh.e.l.l upsetting the pots, and then the men bring the big fireless cookers up on mitrailleuse carriages that can go anywhere. They worm their way clear up to us in the first-line trenches, and our ragout is piping hot.

It's like sitting down to the table at the farm at home. There's nothing so good for the spirit of an army as hot _rasta_. And your packages, the packages madame sends with the money from her American friends ... why, the days when they come it's like being a kid again, and having a birthday! And then we get two days out of five for rest at the rear, you know, except when there is a _very_ big attack going on. We're not so badly off at all!"

"During those big attacks aren't you sometimes cut off from food supplies?" I ask.

"Oh, not so often. The longest one was three days and four nights, and we had our emergency rations for half that time." He tosses my fat little son up in the air and catches him deftly in his great farm laborer's hands, butcher's hands. The children adore Groissard, and his furloughs are festivals for them. As for me, I have an endless curiosity about him. I can never be done with questioning him, with trying to find out what is underneath his good-natured acceptance of the present insane scheme of the universe; I sometimes descend to ba.n.a.lities, the foolish questions schoolgirls ask. I lower my voice: "Groissard, did you ever--have you ever had to ... I don't mean firing off your rifle at a distant crowd, I mean in close quarters...?"

"Have I killed many Boches, you mean, madame?" he breaks through my mincing, twentieth-century false-modesty about naming a fact I accept ... since I accept Groissard! "Oh yes, a good many. We fought all over Mort-Homme, you know; and we were in the last attack on Hill 304.

There was a good deal of hand-to-hand work there, of course." He turns the delighted baby upside down and right-side up, and smiles sunnily at the resultant shrieks of mirth.

I try again: "Do you see many prisoners, Groissard?" He is always ready to answer questions, although he cannot understand my interest in such commonplace details.

"Yes indeed, madame, ever so many. Just the day before this 'permission'

began, day before yesterday it was, we brought in a squad of twenty from a short section of trench we had taken. I'm not likely to forget them for _one_ while! Our cook, who is from the South and loses his head easily, went and cooked up for them at three o'clock in the afternoon every last beefsteak we were going to have for dinner that night. We didn't have a thing but beans left! But we didn't grumble very much, either. They were the coldest, hungriest-looking lot you ever saw. It did your heart good to see the way they got around those beefsteaks!"

I gaze at him baffled. "But, Groissard, you kill them. You are there to kill them! What can you care whether they have beefsteaks or not."

He stops playing with the baby to look at me, round-eyed with astonishment. "I'm not there to kill _prisoners_!" he says, with an unanswerable simplicity. And I lose myself again in a maze of conjecture and speculation.

III

"Oh, it's got to stop, that's all; it's too sickening, too imbecile, too monstrous!"

It is the _brancardier_ talking, the one who had been a prosperous sugar-broker before the war, and who has been a first-line stretcher-carrier since the beginning of the war. If you think you have any idea what it has meant to be first-line stretcher-carrier for three years, you have only to hear Paul Arbagnan talk for five minutes to guess at the extent of your ignorance. He is just back from the front, on a twenty-four hours' furlough, granted after a terrible fortnight under incessant fire. He sits in the midst of our family group, beside his older brother, the despatch-carrier, also here "_en permission_."

The brother was before the war a professor of political economy. From the worn blue uniforms of both brothers swings the _croix de guerre_ gloriously. The younger one's face is thin and very brown, his blue eyes look out at us with an irritable flicker. The mud dried on his clumsy boots crumbles off in great flakes on my polished floor. His hard, grimy hand with broken nails (which had been so fine and well-kept before the war) teases and pulls at his close-clipped hair, now as grizzled with silver as that of a man twenty years his senior.

A harmless elderly relative murmurs something sentimental about the mud on the floor being sacred earth, like that the Crusaders brought back from Jerusalem, and the inevitable explosion takes place. "Oh, you people at the rear, your silly chatter about heroism and holy causes!

You don't know what you are talking about. There ought to be a law to make all the civilian population keep silence about the war. You have no idea, not the faintest glimmering of a notion of what life is at the front! If you _had_...! My _croix de guerre_! Don't you suppose I would give it back ten times over if I could forget what I feel deliberately to leave a mortally wounded man to die because I have orders to select (if my stretcher has not room enough for all) only those who may get well enough to go back and fight again. Without having known what it is, you've no right to say a word, to have an opinion or a thought about it, you safe, clean, soft, gossiping people at the rear! The dirt ...! Why, the bath I had this morning here in Paris was the first time I have taken my clothes off, except to hunt for vermin, for twenty-two days. Do you know what your body is like, what your clothes are like, what your socks are like, when you have lived and cooked and sweat and slept and bled in them for twenty-two days? Of course you don't. No civilized being does. And until you do, less talk from you about the heroism of the soldier! Filth, that's what war is, and dirty diseases lying in wait for decent men. And cold, cold day and night, cold that brutalizes, that degenerates you till you would sell your soul, your mother's soul to be warm again. And mud, not clean country mud, but filth, and up to your eyes and beyond, horrible infected mud splashing upon the emergency bandage you are trying to put on a wound. And the wounded ... see here, when the newspapers speak complacently of the superb artillery preparation which after three days of cannon-duel silences the enemy's batteries, do you know what that means to me? It means I am squatting all day in an underground shelter, with twenty wounded, the German sh.e.l.ls falling one a minute over my head, my supplies of bandages gone, my anaesthetics gone, no cotton, not even a cup of water left. To see them die there, begging for help, calling for their mothers ... to crouch there helpless, all day long, hearing the sh.e.l.ls falling, and wondering which one will come through the roof--oh, you have plenty of time to think the whole proposition over, the business you're in. You have time, let me tell you, to have your own opinion of the imbecility of setting one highly civilized man down in filth and degradation to shoot at others. When some idiot of a journalist, reporting the war, speaks of the warlike ardor of the men, how it is difficult to restrain them until the order to charge is given ... when we read such paragraphs in the papers ... if you could hear the snarl that goes up! We 'charge'

when the word of command is given, yes, because we know nothing better to do, but ..."

The sentimental aunt breaks in resolutely: "Of course, it's very n.o.ble of you, Paul; the fact is simply that you don't or won't recognize your own courage."

"Courage, nonsense! A rat in a hole, surrounded by other rats putrefying ... that's what I am in my underground shelter! What else can I do? What else can we any of us do? We can't get away! There wouldn't be anywhere to go if we did! But when I think of the people at the rear, how they don't know, will never know, the sickening hours the troops live through. See here! No sensitive, civilized being can forget it if he has only _once_ been wholly filthy, wholly b.e.s.t.i.a.l ... and we have been that, time without number. When I come back to Paris on furlough and look at the crowds in the Paris streets, the old men with white collars, and clean skins, the women with curled hair and silk stockings, I could _kill_ them, when I think that they will have a voice in the future, will affect what will be done hereafter about war ..."

"Time for your train, Paul," warns the elder brother soberly.

The man who had been reviling the life of a soldier springs instantly to his feet and looks anxiously at his watch. He claps on his blue steel casque.

We try to give a light touch to the last of his stay. "How medieval those helmets make you look!"

He is not to be distracted. "Put it further back, stone-age, cannibalistic," he cries bitterly, marching out hurriedly so that he may be promptly at his task.

The elder brother comes back from the door, a dim, patient smile on his lips. "Oh, Paul, poor boy! He takes it hard! He takes it hard!" he murmurs. "Who would think to hear him that he is accounted the best _brancardier_ in his section? He is the one always sent out to do the impossible, and he always goes, silently, and does it. After this last engagement, he had shown such _bravoure_, they wanted to have him cited again, to give him the palms to wear above his _croix_. But he said he had had his share, that others had done as much as he, and he persuaded them to give the _croix_ to one of the other _brancardiers_, a stevedore from Ma.r.s.eilles who can't read or write. You are perhaps not surprised to know that he is adored by his comrades."