On the Edge of the War Zone Part 16

You don't have to look very deep into the present situation to discover that, psychologically, it is queer. Marriage is, after all, in so many cla.s.ses, a habit. Here are the women of the cla.s.s to which I refer working very little harder than in the days before the war. Only, for nearly two years they have had no drinking man to come home at midnight either quarrelsome or sulky; no man's big appet.i.te to cook for; no man to wash for or to mend for. They have lived in absolute peace, gone to bed early to a long, unbroken sleep, and get twenty- five cents a day government aid, plus ten cents for each child. As they all raise their own vegetables, keep chickens and rabbits, and often a goat, manage to have a little to take to market, and a little time every week to work for other people, and get war prices for their time,--well, I imagine you can work out the problem yourself.'

Mind you, there is not one of these women, who, in her way, will not a.s.sure you that she loves her husband. She would be drawn and quartered before she would harm him. If anything happens to him she will weep bitterly. But, under my breath, I can a.s.sure you that there is many a woman of that cla.s.s a widow today who is better off for it, and so are her children. The husband who died "en hero," the father dead for his country, is a finer figure in the family life than the living man ever was or could have been.

Of course, it is in the middle cla.s.ses, where the wives have to be kept, where marriage is less a partnership than in the working cla.s.ses and among the humbler commercial cla.s.ses, that there is so much suffering. But that is the cla.s.s which invariably suffers most in any disaster.

I do not know how characteristic of the race the qualities I find among these people are, nor can I, for lack of experience, be sure in what degree they are absolutely different from those of any cla.s.s in the States. For example--this craving to own one's home. Almost no one here pays rent. There is a lad at the foot of the hill, in Voisins, who was married just before the war. He has a tiny house of two rooms and kitchen which he bought just before his marriage for the sum of one hundred and fifty francs--less than thirty dollars. He paid a small sum down, and the rest at the rate of twenty cents a week. There is a small piece of land with it, on which he does about as intensive farming as I ever saw. But it is his own.

The woman who works in my garden owns her place. She has been paying for it almost ever since she was married,--sixteen years ago,-- and has still forty dollars to pay. She cultivates her own garden, raises her own chickens and rabbits, and always has some to sell. Her husband works in the fields for other people, or in the quarries, and she considers herself prosperous, as she has been able to keep her children in school, and owes no one a penny, except, of course, the sum due on her little place. She has worked since she was nine, but her children have not, and, when she dies, there will be something for them, if it is no more than the little place. In all probability, before that time comes, she will have bought more land--to own ground is the dream of these people, and they do it in such a strange way.

I remember in my girlhood, when I knew the Sandy River Valley country so well, that when a farmer wanted to buy more land he always tried, at no matter what sacrifice, to get a piece adjoining what he already owned, and put a fence around it. It is different here.

People own a piece of land here, and a piece there, and another piece miles away, and there are no fences.

For example, around Pere Abelard's house there is a fruit garden and a kitchen garden. The rest of his land is all over the place. He has a big piece of woodland at Pont aux Dames, where he was born, and another on the route de Mareuil. He has a field on the route de Couilly, and another on the side of the hill on the route de Meaux, and he has a small patch of fruit trees and a potato field on the chemin Madame, and another big piece of gra.s.sland running down the hill from Huiry to Conde.

Almost nothing is fenced in. Grain fields, potato patches, beet fields belonging to different people touch each other without any other barrier than the white stones, almost level with the soil, put in by the surveyors.

Of course they are always in litigation, but, as I told you, a lawsuit is a cachet of respectability in France.

As for separating a French man or woman from the land--it is almost impossible. The piece of woodland that Abelard owns at Pont aux Dames is called "Le Paradis." It is a part of his mother's estate, and his sister, who lives across the Morin, owns the adjoining lot. It is of no use to anyone. They neither of them ever dream of cutting the wood. Now and then, when we drive, we go and look at it, and Pere tells funny stories of the things he did there when he was a lad. It is full of game, and not long ago he had an offer for it. The sum was not big, but invested would have added five hundred francs a year to his income. But no one could make either him or his sister resolve to part with it. So there it lies idle, and the only thing it serves for is to add to the tax bill every year. But they would rather own land than have money in the bank. Land can't run away. They can go and look at it, press their feet on it, and realize that it is theirs.

I am afraid the next generation is going to be different, and the disturbing thing is that it is the women who are changing. So many of them, who never left the country before, are working in the ammunition factories and earning unheard-of money, and spending it, which is a radical and alarming feature of the situation.

You spoke in one of your recent letters of the awful cost of this war in money. But you must remember that the money is not lost. It is only redistributed. Whether or not the redistribution is a danger is something none of us can know yet; that is a thing only the future can show. One thing is certain, it has forcibly liberated women.

You ask how the cats are. They are remarkable. Khaki gets more savage every day, and less like what I imagined a house cat ought to be. He has thrashed every cat in the commune except Didine, and never got a scratch to show for it. But he has never scratched me. I slapped him the other day. He slapped back,--but with a velvet paw, never even showed a claw.

Didn't you always think a cat hated water? I am sure I did. He goes out in all weathers. Last winter he played in the snow like a child, and rolled in it, and no rainstorm can keep him in the house. The other day he insisted on going out in a pouring rain, and I got anxious about him. Finally I went to the door and called him, and, after a while, he walked out of the dog's kennel, gave me a reproachful look as if to say, "Can't you leave a chap in peace?" and returned to the kennel.

The one thing he really hates is to have me leave the house. He goes where his sweet will leads him, but he seems to think that I should be always on the spot.

XXIV

May 23, 1916

I begin to believe that we shall have no normal settled weather until all this cannon play is over. We've had most unseasonable hailstorms which have knocked all the buds off the fruit-trees, so, in addition to other annoyances, we shall have no fruit this year.

There is nothing new here except that General Foch is in the ambulance at Meaux. No one knows it; not a word has appeared in the newspapers. It was the result of a stupid, but unavoidable, automobile accident. To avoid running over a woman and child on a road near here, the automobile, in which he was travelling rapidly in company with his son-in-law, ran against a tree and smashed. Luckily he was not seriously hurt, though his head got damaged.

On Thursday Poincare pa.s.sed over our hill, with Briand, en route to meet Joffre at the General's bedside. I did not see them, but some of the people at Quincy did. It was a lucky escape for Foch. He would have hated to die during this war of a simple, unmilitary automobile accident, and the army could ill afford just now to lose one of the heroes of the Marne. Carefully as the fact has been concealed, we knew it here through our ambulance, which is a branch of that at Meaux, where he is being nursed.

Three months since the battle at Verdun began, and it is still going on, with the Germans hardly more than four miles from the city, and yet it begins to look as if they knew themselves that the battle--the most terrible the world has ever seen--was a failure. Still, I have changed my mind. I begin to believe that had Germany centred all her forces on that frontier in August, 1914, when her first-line troops were available, and their hopes high, she would probably have pa.s.sed. No one can know that, but it is likely, and many military men think so. Isn't it a sort of poetic justice to think that it is even possible that had Germany fought an honorable war she might have got to Paris? "Whom the G.o.ds destroy, they first make mad."

I do nothing but work in the garden on rare days when it does not rain, and listen to the cannon. That can't be very interesting stuff to make a letter of. The silence here, which was so dear to me in the days when I was preparing the place, still hangs over it. But, oh, the difference! Now and then, in spite of one's self, the very thought of all that is going on so very near us refuses to take its place and keep in the perspective, it simply jumps out of the frame of patriotism and the welfare of the future. Then the only thing to do is to hunt for the visible consolations--and one always finds them.

For example--wouldn't it seem logical that such a warfare would brutalize the men who are actually in it? It doesn't. It seems to have just the contrary effect. I can't tell you how good the men are to one another, or how gentle they are to the children. It is strange that it should be so, but it is. I don't try to understand it, I merely set it down for you.

XXV

June 16, 1916

You can imagine how trying and unseasonable the weather is when I tell you that I not only had a fire yesterday, but that I went to bed with a hot.w.a.ter bottle. Imagine it! I have only been able to eat out-of-doors once so far.

This is not a letter--just a line, lest you worry if you do not hear that I am well. I am too anxiously watching that see-saw at Verdun, with the German army only four miles from the city, at the end of the fourth month, to talk about myself, and in no position to write about things which you know. One gets dumb, though not hopeless. To add to our anxieties the crops are not going to be good. It was continually wet at planting time, and so cold, and there has been so little sun that potatoes are rotting in the fields already, and the harvest will be meagre. The grain, especially that planted last fall, is fairly good, but, as I told you, after the tempest we had, there is to be no fruit. When I say none, I absolutely mean none. I have not one cherry. Louise counted six prunes on my eight trees, and I have just four pears and not a single apple. Pere's big orchard is in the same condition. In addition, owing to the terrible dampness,--the ground is wet all the time,--the slugs eat up all the salad, spoil all the strawberries, and chew off every young green thing that puts its head above the ground, and that in spite of very hard work on my part. Every morning early, and every afternoon, at sundown, I put in an hour's hard work,-- hard, disgusting work,--picking them up with the tongs and dropping them into boiling water. So you see every kind of war is going on at the same time. Where is the good of wishing a bad harvest on Germany, when we get it ourselves at the same time? However, I suppose that you in the States can help us out, and England has jolly well fixed it so that no one can easily help Germany out.

XXVI

August 4, 1916

Well, here we are in the third year of the war, as Kitchener foresaw, and still with a long way to go to the frontier.

Thanks, by the way, for the article about Kitchener. After all, what can one say of such an end for such a man, after such a career, in which so many times he might have found a soldier's death--then to be drowned like a rat, doing his duty? It leaves one simply speechless. I was, you see. I hadn't a comment to throw at you.

It's hot at last, I'm thankful to say, and equally thankful that the news from the front is good. It is nothing to throw one's hat in the air about, but every inch in the right direction is at least prophetic.

Nothing to tell you about. Not the smallest thing happens here. I do nothing but read my paper, fuss in the garden, which looks very pretty, do up a bundle for my filleul once in a while, write a few letters, and drive about, at sundown, in my perambulator. If that is not an absurd life for a lady in the war zone in these days, I 'd like to know what it is.

I hope this weather will last. It is good for the war and good for the crops. But I am afraid I shall hope in vain.

XXVII

September 30, 1916

This has been the strangest summer I ever knew. There have been so few really summer days. I could count the hot days on my fingers.

None of the things have happened on which I counted.