On the Edge of the War Zone Part 4

Still, I must confess that the att.i.tude of French and English to one another today is almost thrilling. The English Tommy Atkins and the French poilu are delightful together. For that matter, the French peasants love the English. They never saw any before, and their admiration and devotion to "Tommee," as they call him, is unbounded. They think him so "chic," and he is.

No one--not even I, who so love them--could ever accuse the "piou- piou" of being chic.

The French conscript in his misfits has too long been the object of affectionate sarcasm and the subject of caricature to be unfamiliar to the smiles of the whole world.

You see the army outfits are made in three sizes only. So far as my observation goes none of the three measurements fits anyone today, and as for the man who is a real "between"--well, he is in a sad box.

But what of that? He doesn't seem to care. He is so occupied today fighting, just as he did in the days of the great Napoleon, that no one cares a rap how he looks--and surely he does not.

You might think he would be a bit self-conscious regarding his appearance when he comes in contact with his smarter looking Ally.

Not a bit of it. The poilu just admires Tommy and is proud of him. I do wish you could see them together. The poilu would hug Tommy and plant a kiss on each of his cheeks--if he dared. But, needless to say, that is the last sort of thing Tommy wants. So, faute de mieux the poilu walks as close to Tommy as he can--when he gets a chance-- and the undemonstrative, sure-of-himself Tommy permits it without a smile--which is doing well. Still, in his own way Tommy admires back-- it is mutual.

The Englishman may learn to unbend--I don't know. The spirit which has carried him all over the world, rubbed him against all sorts of conditions and so many civilizations without changing his character, and made of him the one race immune to home-sickness, has persisted for centuries, and may be so bred in the bone, fibre, and soul of the race as to persist forever. It may have made his legs and his spine so straight that he can't unbend. He has his own kind of fun, but it's mostly of the sporting sort. He will, I imagine, hardly contract the Frenchman's sort, which is so largely on his lips, and in his mentality, and has given the race the most mobile faces in the world.

I am enclosing a copy of the little map Captain S------sent me. It may give you an idea of the route the English were moving on during the battle, and the long forced march they made after the fighting of the two weeks ending August 30.

I imagine they were all too tired to note how beautiful the country was.

It was lovely weather, and coming down the route from Haute Maison, by La Chapelle, to the old moated town of Crecy-en-Brie at sunset, must have been beautiful; and then climbing by Voulangis to the Forest of Crecy on the way to Fontenay by moonlight even more lovely, with the panorama of Villiers and the valley of the Morin seen through the trees of the winding road, with Montbarbin standing, outlined in white light, on the top of a hill, like a fairy town. Tired as they were, I do hope there were some among them who could still look with a dreamer's eyes on these pictures.

Actually the only work I have done of late has been to dig a little in the garden, preparing for winter. I did not take my geraniums up until last week. As for the dahlias I wrote you about, they became almost a scandal in the commune. They grew and grew, like Jack's beanstalk-- prodigiously. I can't think of any other word to express it. They were eight feet high and full of flowers, which we cut for the Jour des Morts.

I know you won't believe that, but it is true. A few days later there came a wind-storm, and when it was over, in spite of the heavy poles I put in to hold them up, they were laid as flat as though the German cavalry had pa.s.sed over them. I was heart-broken, but Pere only shrugged his shoulders and remarked: "If one will live on the top of a hill facing the north what can one expect?" And I had no reply to make. Fortunately the wind can't blow my panorama away, though at present I don't often look out at it. I content myself by playing in the garden on the south side, and, if I go out at all, it is to walk through the orchards and look over the valley of the Morin, towards the south.

My, but I'm cold--too cold to tell you about. The ends of my fingers hurt the keys of my machine.

VI

November 28, 1914

I am sorry that, as you say in your letter of October 16, just received, you are disappointed that I "do not write you more about the war."

Dear child, I am not seeing any of it. We are settled down here to a life that is nearly normal--much more normal than I dreamed could be possible forty miles from the front. We are still in the zone of military operations, and probably shall be until spring, at least. Our communications with the outside world are frequently cut. We get our mail with great irregularity. Even our local mail goes to Meaux, and is held there five days, as the simplest way of exercising the censorship.

It takes nearly ten days to get an answer to a letter to Paris.

All that I see which actually reminds me of the war--now that we are used to the absence of the men--I see on the route nationale, when I drive down to Couilly. Across the fields it is a short and pretty walk.

Amelie makes it in twenty minutes. I could, if it were not for climbing that terrible hill to get back.

Besides, the mud is inches deep. I have a queer little four-wheeled cart, covered, if I want to unroll the curtains. I call it my perambulator, and really, with Ninette hitched in, I am like an overgrown baby in its baby carriage, and any nurse I ever knew would push a perambulator faster than that donkey drags mine. Yet it just suits my mood. I sit comfortably in it, and travel slowly--time being non-existent--so slowly that I can watch the wheat sprout, and gaze at the birds and the view and the clouds. I do hold on to the reins--just for looks--though I have no need to, and I doubt if Ninette suspects me of doing anything so foolish. On the road I always meet officers riding along, military cars flying along, army couriers spluttering along on motor-cycles, heavy motor transports groaning up hill, or thundering down, and now and then a long train of motor-ambulances. Almost any morning, at nine, I can see the long line of camions carrying the revitaillement towards the front, and the other afternoon, as I was driving up the hill, I met a train of ambulances coming down. The big grey things slid, one after another, around the curve of the Demi-Lune, and simply flew by me, raising such a cloud of dust that after I had counted thirty, I found I could not see them, and the continual tooting of the horns began to make Ninette nervous--she had never seen anything like that before-- so, for fear she might do some trick she never had done in her life, like shying, and also for fear that the drivers, who were rushing by exactly in the middle of the road, might not see me in the dust, or a car might skid, I slid out, and led my equipage the rest of the way. I do a.s.sure you these are actually all the war signs we see, though, of course, we still hear the cannon.

But, though we don't see it, we feel it in many ways. My neighbors feel it more than I do! For one example--the fruit crop this year has been an absolute loss. Luckily the ca.s.sis got away before the war was declared, but we hear it was a loss to the buyers, and it was held in the Channel ports, necessarily, and was spoiled. But apples and pears had no market. In ordinary years purchasers come to buy the trees, and send their own pickers and packers, and what was not sold in that way went to the big Sat.u.r.day market at Meaux. This year there is no market at Meaux. The town is still partly empty, and the railroad cannot carry produce now. This is a tragic loss to the small cultivator, though, as yet, he is not suffering, and he usually puts all such winnings into his stocking.

We still have no coal to speak of. I am burning wood in the salon-- and green wood at that. The big blaze--when I can get it--suits my house better than the salamandre did. But I cannot get a temperature above 42 Fahrenheit. I am used to sixty, and I remember you used to find that too low in Paris. I blister my face, and freeze my back, just as we used to in the old days of glorious October at the farm in New Sharon, where my mother was born, and where I spent my summers and part of the autumn in my school-days.

You might think it would be easy to get wood. It is not. The army takes a lot of it, and those who, in ordinary winters, have wood to sell, have to keep it for themselves this year. Pere has cut down all the old trees he could find--old prune trees, old apple trees, old chestnut trees--and it is not the best of firewood. I hated to see even that done, but he claimed that he wanted to clear a couple of pieces of land, and I try to believe him. Did you ever burn green wood? If you have, enough said!

Unluckily--since you expect me to write often--I am a creature of habit.

I never could write as you can, with a pad on my knees, huddled over the fire. I suppose that I could have acquired the habit if I had begun my education at the Sorbonne, instead of polishing off there. I remember when I first began to haunt that university, eighteen years ago, how amazed I was to see the students huddled into a small s.p.a.ce with overcoats and hats on their knees, a note-book on top of them, an ink-pot in one hand and a pen in the other, and, in spite of obstacles, absorbed in the lecture. I used to wonder if they had ever heard of "stylos," even while I understood, as I never had done before, the real love of learning that marks the race. Alas! I have to be halfway comfortable before I can half accomplish anything.

I am thankful to say that the temperature has been moderating a little, and life about me has been active. One day it was the big threshing- machine, and the work was largely done by women, and the air was full of throbbing and dust. Yesterday it was the cider-press, and I stood about, at Amelie's, in the sun, half the afternoon, watching the motor hash the apples, and the press squeeze out the yellow juice, which rushed foaming into big vats. Did you ever drink cider like that?

It is the only way I like it. It carried me back to my girlhood and the summers in the Sandy River valley. I don't know why it is, of late, that my mind turns so often back to those days, and with such affection.

Perhaps it is only because I find myself once more living in the country. It may be true that life is a circle, and as one approaches the end the beginning becomes visible, and a.s.sociated with both the beginning and end of mine there is a war. However it is to be explained, there remains the fact that my middle distances are getting wiped out.

In these still nights, when I cannot sleep, I think more often than of anything else of the road running down the hill by the farm at New Sharon, and of the sounds of the horses and wagons as they came down and crossed the wooden bridge over the brook, and of the voices--so strange in the night--as they pa.s.sed. There were more night sounds in those memories than I ever hear here--more crickets, more turnings over of Nature, asleep or awake. I rarely hear many night sounds here. From sundown, when people go clattering by in their wooden shoes from the fields, to daylight, when the birds awake, all is silence. I looked out into the moonlight before I closed my shutters last night. I might have been alone in the world. Yet I like it.

The country is lovely here in winter--so different from what I remember of it at home. My lawn is still green, so is the corbeille d'argent in the garden border, which is still full of silvery bunches of bloom, and will be all winter. The violets are still in bloom. Even the trees here never get black as they do in New England, for the trunks and branches are always covered with green moss. That is the dampness. Of course, we never have the dry invigorating cold that makes a New England winter so wonderful. I don't say that one is more beautiful than the other, only that each is different in its charm.

After all, Life, wherever one sees it, is, if one has eyes, a wonderful pageant, the greatest spectacular melodrama I can imagine. I'm glad to have seen it. I have not always had an orchestra stall, but what of that? One ought to see things at several angles and from several elevations, you know.

VII

December 5, 1914

We have been having some beautiful weather.

Yesterday Amelie and I took advantage of it to make a pilgrimage across the Marne, to decorate the graves on the battlefield at Chambry. Crowds went out on All Soul's Day, but I never like doing anything, even making a pilgrimage, in a crowd.

You can realize how near it is, and what an easy trip it will be in normal times, when I tell you that we left Esbly for Meaux at half past one--only ten minutes by train--and were back in the station at Meaux at quarter to four, and had visited Monthyon, Villeroy, Neufmontier, Penchard, Chauconin, Barcy, Chambry, and Vareddes.

The authorities are not very anxious to have people go out there. Yet nothing to prevent is really done. It only takes a little diplomacy. If I had gone to ask for a pa.s.sport, nine chances out of ten it would have been refused me. I happened to know that the wife of the big livery- stable man at Meaux, an energetic--and, incidentally, a handsome-- woman, who took over the business when her husband joined his regiment, had a couple of automobiles, and would furnish me with all the necessary papers. They are not taxi-cabs, but handsome touring- cars. Her chauffeur carries the proper papers. It seemed to me a very loose arrangement, from a military point of view, even although I was a.s.sured that she did not send out anyone she did not know.

However, I decided to take advantage of it.

While we were waiting at the garage for the car to be got out, and the chauffeur to change his coat, I had a chance to talk with a man who had not left Meaux during the battle, and I learned that there were several important families who had remained with the Archbishop and aided him to organize matters for saving the city, if possible, and protect the property of those who had fled, and that the measures which those sixty citizens, with Archbishop Marbeau at their head, took for the safety of the poor, the care for the wounded and dead, is already one of the proudest doc.u.ments in the annals of the historic town.

But never mind all these things, which the guides will recite for you, I imagine, when you come over to make the grand tour of Fighting France, for on these plains about Meaux you will have to start your pilgrimage.

I confess that my heart beat a little too rapidly when, as we ran out of Meaux, and took the route departmentale of Senlis, a soldier stepped to the middle of the road and held up his gun--baionette au canon.

We stopped.

Were we after all going to be turned back? I had the guilty knowledge that there was no reason why we should not be. I tried to look magnificently unconcerned as I leaned forward to smile at the soldier.

I might have spared myself the effort. He never even glanced inside the car. The examination of the papers was the most cursory thing imaginable--a mere formality. The chauffeur simply held his stamped paper towards the guard. The guard merely glanced at it, lifted his gun, motioned us to proceed--and we proceeded.

It may amuse you to know that we never even showed the paper again. We did meet two gendarmes on bicycles, but they nodded and pa.s.sed us without stopping.

The air was soft, like an early autumn day, rather than December as you know it. There was a haze in the air, but behind it the sun shone.

You know what that French haze is, and what it does to the world, and how, through it, one gets the sort of landscape painters love.

With how many of our pilgrimages together it is a.s.sociated! We have looked through it at the walls of Provins, when the lindens were rosy with the first rising of the sap; we have looked through it at the circular panorama from the top of the ruined tower of Montlhery; we have looked through it across Jean Jacques Rousseau's country, from the lofty terrace of Montmorency, and from the platform in front of the prison of Philippe Auguste's unhappy Danish wife, at Etampes, across the valley of the Juine; and from how many other beautiful spots, not to forget the view up the Seine from the terrace of the Tuileries.

Sometime, I hope, we shall see these plains of the Marne together.

When we do, I trust it will be on just such another atmospheric day as yesterday.