Part 8 (2/2)
The town itself seemed to be living on its past, for indubitably it had seen better days. An ancient foundation of the Jesuits now converted into the Map and Printing Department of the R.E.'s, a church whose huge nave had been secularised to the uses of motor transport, a museum which served to incarcerate the German prisoners, all testified to the vanished greatness, as did also the private mansions, which preserved a kind of mystery behind their high-walled gardens and ma.s.sive double doors. There was one such which I never pa.s.sed at night without thinking of the Sieur de Maletroit's door. The streets were narrow, tortuous, and secretive, with many blind alleys and dark closes, and it required no great effort of the imagination--especially at night when not a light showed--to call to mind the ambuscades and adventures with the watch which they must have witnessed some centuries before. The very names of the streets--such as the _Rue d'Arbalete_--held in them something of romance. To find one's billet at night was like a game of blind man's buff, and one felt rather than saw one's way. Not a soul was to be seen, for the whole town was under _droit de siege_, and the civilian inhabitants had to be within doors by nine o'clock, while all the entrances and exits to and from the town were guarded by double sentries night and day. Certain dark doorways also secreted a solitary sentry, and my own office boasted a corporal's guard--presumably because the Field-Cas.h.i.+er had his rooms on the first floor. The sanitation was truly medieval; on either side of the cobbled streets noisome gutters formed an open sewer into which housewives emptied their slop-pails every morning, while mongrel dogs nosed among the garbage. Yet the precincts were not without a certain beauty, and every side of the town was approached through an avenue of limes or poplars. But in winter the sodden landscape was desolate beyond belief, these roads presenting just that aspect of a current of slime in a muddy sea which they suggested to the lonely horseman on the eve of Waterloo in that little cla.s.sic of De Vigny's known to literature as _Laurette_.
Such was the country and such the town in which we were billeted. Now upon a morning in February it happened that I was smoking a cigarette in the little garden, bordered by hedges of box, while waiting for my car, and as I waited I watched Jeanne, with her sleeves rolled up to her elbows and a clothes-peg in her mouth, busy over the wash-tub. ”Vous etes une blanchisseuse, aujourd'hui?” I remarked. She corrected me.
”Non, m'sieu', une lessiveuse.” ”Une lessiveuse?” For answer Jeanne pointed to a linen-bag which was steeping in the tub. The linen-bag contained the ashes of the beech-tree; it is a way of was.h.i.+ng that they have in some parts of France, and very cleansing. To specialise thus is _lessiver_. As we talked in this desultory fas.h.i.+on I let fall a word concerning a journey I was about to undertake to the French lines, a journey that would take me over the battlefield of the Marne. ”La Marne!
Helas, quelle douleur!” said Jeanne, and wiped her eyes with the corner of her ap.r.o.n. ”But it was a glorious victory,” I expostulated. Yes, but Jeanne, it seemed, had lost a brother in the battle of the Marne. She pulled out of her bosom a frayed letter, bleached, stained, and perforated with holes about the size of a s.h.i.+lling, and handed it to me.
I could make nothing of it. She handed me another letter. ”Son camarade,” she explained, and no longer attempted to hide her tears.
And this was what I read:
Le 10 sept., 1914.
CHeRE MADAME--Comme j'etais tres bon camarade avec votre frere Paul Duval et que le malheur vient de lui arriver, je tient a vous le faire savoir, car peut-etre vous serai dans l'inquietude de pas recevoir de ces nouvelles et de ne pas savoir ou il est. Je vous dirai que je vient de lui donner du papier a lettre et une enveloppe pour vous ecrire et aussitot la lettre finit il l'a mis dans son kepi pour vous l'envoye le plus vite possible et malheureus.e.m.e.nt un obus est arriver, et il a etait tue. Heureus.e.m.e.nt nous etions trois pres de l'un l'autre et il n'y a eut de lui de touche. Je vous envoi la pet.i.te lettre qu'il venait de vous faire, et en meme tant vous verrez les trous que les eclats d'obus l'on attrapper. Recevez de moi chere madame mes sinceres salutations.
JULES COPPeE.
Tambour au 151e Regiment d'Inf., 2e Cie 42e Division, Secteur postale 56.
Crude and illiterate though it was, the letter had a certain n.o.ble simplicity. ”Tres gentil,” I remarked as I returned it to Jeanne, and thought the matter at an end. But Jeanne had not done, and, with much circ.u.mlocution and many hesitations, she at last preferred a simple request. I was going to visit the battlefield of the Marne--yes? I a.s.sented. Well, perhaps, perhaps Monsieur would visit Paul's grave, and perhaps if he found it he would take a photograph. ”Why, certainly,” I said, little knowing what I promised. But the request was to have a strange sequel, as you shall hear. Sykes came to say my car was at the door. As I clambered in and turned to wave a farewell, Madame and Jeanne stood on the doorstep to wish me _bon voyage_. ”J'espere que vous tuerez plusieurs Allemands,” cried Madame in a quavering voice.
”Veuillez ne pas...o...b..ier, M'sieu',” cried Jeanne wistfully. I waved my hand, and had soon left rue Robert le Frisson far behind me.
FOOTNOTE:
[8] The town described in this sketch is described not as it is, but as it was some months ago, and nothing is to be inferred from the t.i.tle as to its present significance.
XII
MORT POUR LA PATRIE
Two days later a French staff-officer greeted me in the vestibule of the Hotel de Crillon at Paris. It was the Comte de G----; he had been deputed by the Ministry of War to act as my escort on my tour of the French lines. He proved to be a charming companion. He was a magnificent figure of a man six feet three inches in height at least, an officer of dragoons, and he wore the red and white bra.s.sard, embroidered in gold with a design of forked lightning, which is the prerogative of the staff. A military car with a driver and an orderly in s.h.a.ggy furs awaited us outside on the Place de la Concorde. It was a sumptuous car, upholstered in green corded silk, with nickel fittings, and displaying on its panels the motto _Quand meme_, and the monogram of a famous actress. It had been requisitioned. The air was cold--there had been frost overnight--but the sun was brilliant. As we threaded our way through Paris and its suburbs, a Paris chastened and resolute, I caught a glimpse of the barges upon the Seine with the women standing on the convex hatches hanging out clothes to dry--and I thought of Daudet and _La Belle Nivernaise_. As more and yet more men are called up to the colours women take their place, until the houses of business are like nunneries--with a few aged Fathers Superior. Having had business the day before at the Societe Generale, I had had occasion to reflect on these things as I stood in the counting-house watching some fifty girl typists at work, the room resounding with the tap-tap of their machines, as though fifty thrushes were breaking snails upon a stone. A wizened little clerk, verging upon superannuation, had beguiled my time of waiting with talk of the war: how his wife from Picardy had lost fifteen of her _parents_, while of four painters and paper-hangers who had started doing up his flat on the 2nd of July only one--disabled--had returned to finish the job; the rest were dead. Musing on these things as we drove through the Bois de Vincennes I understood the resolution of our Allies and the significance of the things my companion pointed out to me as we drove: here a row of trees felled to provide a field of fire, there a gun emplacement, and reserve trenches all the way from Paris to Soissons. They are leaving nothing to chance.
Our journey was uneventful until we reached Coulommiers, where we had certain inquiries to make which have nothing to do with this narrative.
We interviewed the _maire_ in his parlour at the Hotel de Ville, a little man, and spirited, who had hung on at his post during the German occupation, and done his best to protect his fellow-townsmen against the l.u.s.t and rapine of the Huns. Under such circ.u.mstances the office of munic.i.p.al magistrate is no sinecure. It is, in fact, a position of deadly peril, for by the doctrine of vicarious punishment, peculiar to the German Staff, an innocent man is held liable with his life for the faults of his fellow-townsmen, and, it may be, for those of the enemy also. Doubtless it appeals to their sinister sense of humour, when two of their own men get drunk and shoot at one another, to execute a French citizen by way of punishment. It happened that during the German occupation of Coulommiers the gas supply gave out. The _maire_ was informed by a choleric commandant that unless gas were forthcoming in twenty-four hours he would be shot. The little man replied quietly: ”M'eteindre, ce n'est pas allumer le gaz.” This illuminating remark appears to have penetrated the dark places of the commandant's mind, and although the gas-jets continued contumacious (the gas-workers were all called up to the colours) the _maire_ was not molested. It was here that we heard a shameful story (for the truth of which I will not vouch) of a certain straggler from our army, a Highlander, who tarried in amorous dalliance and was betrayed by his enchantress to the Huns, who, having deprived him of everything but his kilt, led him mounted upon a horse in Baccha.n.a.lian procession round the town. As to what became of him afterwards nothing was known, but the worst was suspected. The Huns have a short way and b.l.o.o.d.y with British stragglers and despatch-riders and patrols, and I fear that the poor lad expiated his weakness with a cruel death.
At Coulommiers we turned northwards on the road to La Ferte-sous-Jouarre, a pleasant little town on the banks of the Marne, approached by an avenue of plane trees whose dappled trunks are visible for many miles. Here we had lunch at the inn--a dish of perch caught that morning in the waters of the Marne, a delicious cream-cheese, for which La Ferte is justly famous, and a light wine of amber hue and excellent vintage. The landlord's wife waited on us with her own hands, and as she waited talked briskly of the German occupation of the town.
The Huns, it appeared, had been too hustled by the Allies to do much frightfulness beyond the usual looting, but they had inflicted enormous losses on the pigs of La Ferte. It reminded me of the satirical headline in a Paris newspaper, over a paragraph announcing a great slaughter of pigs in Germany owing to the shortage of maize--”Les Bosches s'entregorgent!” Madame told us with much spirit how she had saved her own pig, an endearing infant, by the intimation that a far more succulent pig was to be found higher up the street, and while the Bosches went looking for their victim she had hidden her own in the cellar. Her pig is now a local celebrity. People come from afar to see the pig which escaped the Bosches. For the pigs whom the Bosches love are apt to die young. But what had impressed her most was the treatment meted out by a German officer, a certain von Bulow, who was quartered at the inn, to one of his men. The soldier had been ordered to stick up a lantern outside the officer's quarters, and had been either slow or forgetful. Von Bulow knocked him down, and then, as he lay prostrate, jumped upon him, kicked him, and beat him about the head and face with sabre and riding-whip. The soldier lay still and uttered not a cry.
Madame shuddered at the recollection, ”epouvantable!”
We crossed the _place_ and called on a prominent burgess. He received us hospitably. In the hall of his house was a Uhlan's lance with drooping pennon which excited our curiosity. How had it come here? He was only too pleased to explain. He had taken it from a marauding Uhlan with whom he had engaged in single combat, strangling him with his own hands--so!
I took by the throat the circ.u.mcised dog And smote him, thus!
He held out a pair of large fat hands of the consistency of clay; he was of a full habit and there were pouches under his eyes. In England he would have been a small tradesman, with strong views on total abstinence, accustomed to a diet of high tea, and honoured as the life-long superintendent of a Sunday school. I was more astonished than sceptical, but perhaps, as the Comte suggested in a whisper, the Uhlan was drunk. Here, too, we heard tales of loot, especially among ladies'
wardrobes. It is a curious fact that there is nothing the Hun loves so much as women's underclothing. As to what happens when he gets hold of the _lingerie_ many scandalous stories are told, and none more scandalous than the one which appeared in the whimsical pages of _La Vie Parisienne_. But that is, most emphatically, quite another story.
From La Ferte we drove on to Lizy, where the gendarme, wiping his mouth as he came hurriedly from the inn, told us a harrowing tale, and then to Barcy, where the _maire_, though busy with a pitch-fork upon a manure heap, received us with munic.i.p.al gravity. We were now nearing the battlefield of the Marne, and here and there along the roadside the trunks of the poplars, green with mistletoe, were s.h.i.+vered as though by lightning. Yet nothing could have been more peaceful than the pastoral beauty of the countryside. We pa.s.sed waggons full of roots, drawn by a team of white oxen under the yoke, and by the roadside a thres.h.i.+ng machine was being fed by a knot of old men and young women from an oat-rick. The only hints of the cloud on the horizon were the occasional pa.s.sage of a convoy and the notable absence of young men. As we raced along, the furrows, running at right angles to the road, seemed to be eddying away from us in pleats and curves, and this illusion of a stationary car in a whirling landscape was fortified by the contours of the countryside, which were those of a great plain, great as any sea, stretching away to a horizon of low chalk hills. Suddenly the car slowed down at a signal from my companion and stopped. We got out. Not a sound was to be heard except the mournful hum of the distant thres.h.i.+ng machine, but a peculiar clicking, like the halliard of a flagstaff in a breeze, suddenly caught my ear. The wind was rising, and as I looked around me I saw innumerable little tricolour flags fluttering against small wooden staves. It was the battlefield of the Marne, the scene of that immortal order of Joffre's in which he exhorted the sons of France to conquer or die where they stood. As he had commanded, so had they done. With an emotion too deep for words we each contemplated these plaintive memorials of the heroes who lay where they fell. Our orderly wept and made no effort to hide his tears. I thought of Jeanne's wistful pet.i.tion, but my heart sank, for these graves were to be numbered not by hundreds but by thousands. ”C'est absolument impossible!” said the Comte, to whom I had communicated my quest. A sudden cry from the orderly, who was moving from grave to grave in a close scrutiny of the inscriptions, arrested us. He was standing by a wooden cross, half draped by a tattered blue coat and covered with wreaths of withered myrtle. A kepi pierced with holes lay upon the grave. And sure enough, by some miracle of coincidence, he had found it. On a wooden slab we read these words:
PAUL DUVAL, 151e Reg. d'Inf.
6 sept. 1914 MORT POUR LA PATRIE.
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