A Hilltop on the Marne - Mildred Aldrich
VI
August 2, 1914.
Well, dear, what looked impossible is evidently coming to pass.
Early yesterday morning the garde champetre--who is the only thing in
the way of a policeman that we have--marched up the road beating his
drum. At every crossroad he stopped and read an order. I heard him at
the foot of the hill, but I waited for him to pass. At the top of the
hill he stopped to paste a bill on the door of the carriage-house on
Pere Abelard's farm. You can imagine me,--in my long studio apron, with
my head tied up in a muslin cap,--running up the hill to join the group
of poor women of the hamlet, to read the proclamation to the armies of
land and sea--the order for the mobilization of the French military and
naval forces--headed by its crossed French flags. It was the first
experience in my life of a thing like that. I had a cold chill down my
spine as I realized that it was not so easy as I had thought to separate
myself from Life. We stood there together--a little group of women--and
silently read it through--this command for the rising up of a Nation.
No need for the men to read it. Each with his military papers in his
pocket knew the moment he heard the drum what it meant, and knew equally
well his place. I was a foreigner among them, but I forgot that, and if
any of them remembered they made no sign. We did not say a word to one
another. I silently returned to my garden and sat down. War again!
This time war close by--not war about which one can read, as one reads
it in the newspapers, as you will read it in the States, far away from
it, but war right here--if the Germans can cross the frontier.
It came as a sort of shock, though I might have realized it yesterday
when several of the men of the commune came to say au revoir, with the
information that they were joining their regiments, but I felt as if
some way other than cannon might be found out of the situation. War had
not been declared--has not to-day. Still, things rarely go to this
length and stop there. Judging by this morning's papers Germany really
wants it. She could have, had she wished, held stupid Austria back from
the throat of poor Servia, not yet recovered from her two Balkan wars.
I imagine this letter will turn into a sort of diary, as it is difficult
to say when I shall be able to get any mail matter off. All our
communications with the outside world--except by road--were cut this
morning by order of the War Bureau. Our railroad is the road to all the
eastern frontiers--the trains to Belgium as well as to Metz and
Strasbourg pass within sight of my garden. If you don't know what that
means--just look on a map and you will realize that the army that
advances, whether by road or by train, will pass by me.
During the mobilization, which will take weeks,--not only is France not
ready, all the world knows that her fortified towns are mostly only
fortified on the map,--civilians, the mails, and such things must make
way for soldiers and war materials. I shall continue to write. It will
make me feel in touch still; it will be something to do: besides, any
time some one may go up to town by road and I thus have a chance to send
it.
VII
August 3, 1914.
Well--war is declared.
I passed a rather restless night. I fancy every one in France did. All
night I heard a murmur of voices, such an unusual thing here. It simply
meant that the town was awake and, the night being warm, every one was
out of doors.
All day to-day aeroplanes have been flying between Paris and the
frontier. Everything that flies seems to go right over my roof. Early
this morning I saw two machines meet, right over my garden, circle about
each other as if signaling, and fly off together. I could not help
feeling as if one chapter of Wells's "War in the Air" had come to pass.
It did make me realize how rapidly the aeroplane had developed into a
real weapon of war. I remember so well, no longer ago than Exposition
year,--that was 1900,--that I was standing, one day, in the old Galerie
des Machines, with a young engineer from Boston. Over our heads was a
huge model of a flying machine. It had never flown, but it was the
nearest thing to success that had been accomplished--and it expected to
fly some time. So did Darius Green, and people were still skeptical.
As he looked up at it, the engineer said: "Hang it all, that dashed old
thing will fly one day, but I shall probably not live to see it."
He was only thirty at that time, and it was such a few years after that
it did fly, and no time at all, once it rose in the air to stay there,
before it crossed the Channel. It is wonderful to think that after
centuries of effort the thing flew in my time--and that I am sitting in
my garden to-day, watching it sail overhead, like a bird, looking so
steady and so sure. I can see them for miles as they approach and for
miles after they pass. Often they disappear from view, not because they
have passed a horizon line, but simply because they have passed out of
the range of my vision-? becoming smaller and smaller, until they seem
no bigger than a tiny bird, so small that if I take my eyes off the
speck in the sky I cannot find it again. It is awe-compelling to
remember how these cars in the air change all military tactics. It will
be almost impossible to make any big movement that may not be discovered
by the opponent.
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 pass 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 passed
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 passes through. I
suppose you are glad that you got away before this came to pass.
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 classe. 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 classes 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
passing, 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 pass 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 class; 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 pass, 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 passed
that guard in the same way--and disappeared. It did not pass 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 passport 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
circumstances 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 principal 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
glasses 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 Godot. 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 'Godot, 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 class.
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 nobility, 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 attitude 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
pronounce 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.