A Hilltop on the Marne - Mildred Aldrich
I have just heard that there are two trains a day on which civilians can
go up to Paris IF THERE ARE PLACES LEFT after the army is accommodated.
There is no guaranty that I can get back the same day. Still, I am
going to risk it. I am afraid to be any longer without money, though
goodness knows what I can do with it. Besides, I find that all my
friends are flying, and I feel as if I should like to say "good-bye"--I
don't know why, but I feel like indulging the impulse. Anyway, I am
going to try it. I am going armed with every sort of paper--provisional
passport from our consul, permis de sejour from my mayor here, and a
local permit to enter and leave Paris, which does not allow me to stay
inside the fortifications after six o'clock at night, unless I get
myself identified at the prefecture of the arrondissement in which I
propose to stay and have my passport vised.
X
August 24, 1914.
I seem to be able to get my letters off to you much more regularly than
I dared to hope.
I went up to Paris on the 19th, and had to stay over one night. The
trip up was long and tedious, but interesting. There were soldiers
everywhere. It amused me almost to tears to see the guards all along
the line. We hear so much of the wonderful equipment of the German
army. Germany has been spending fortunes for years on its equipment.
French taxpayers have kicked for years against spending public moneys on
war preparations. The guards all along the railroad were not a jot
better got up than those in our little commune. There they stand all
along the track in their patched trousers and blouses and sabots, with a
band round the left arm, a broken soldier cap, and a gun on the
shoulder. Luckily the uniform and shaved head do not make the soldier.
Just before we reached Chelles we saw the first signs of actual war
preparations, as there we ran inside the wire entanglements that protect
the approach to the outer fortifications at Paris, and at Pantin we saw
the first concentration of trains--miles and miles of made-up trains all
carrying the Red Cross on their doors, and line after line of trucks
with gray ammunition wagons, and cannons. We were being constantly held
up to let trainloads of soldiers and horses pass. In the station we saw
a long train being made up of men going to some point on the line to
join their regiments. It was a crowd of men who looked the lower
laboring class. They were in their working clothes, many of them almost
in rags, each carrying in a bundle, or a twine bag, his few belongings,
and some of them with a loaf of bread under the arm. It looked as
little martial as possible but for the stern look in the eyes of even
the commonest of them. I waited on the platform to see the train pull
out. There was no one to see these men off. They all seemed to
realize. I hope they did. I remembered the remark of the woman
regarding her husband when she saw him go: "After all, I am only his
wife. France is his mother"; and I hoped these poor men, to whom Fate
seemed not to have been very kind, had at least that thought in the back
of their minds.
I found Paris quiet, and every one calm--that is to say, every one but
the foreigners, struggling like people in a panic to escape. In spite
of the sad news--Brussels occupied Thursday, Namur fallen Monday--there
is no sign of discouragement, and no sign of defeat. If it were not for
the excitement around the steamship offices the city would be almost as
still as death. But all the foreigners, caught here by the
unexpectedness of the war, seemed to be fighting to get off by the same
train and the same day to catch the first ship, and they seemed to have
little realization that, first of all, France must move her troops and
war material. I heard it said--it may not be true--that some of the
consular officers were to blame for this, and that there was a rumor
abroad among foreigners that Paris was sure to be invested, and that
foreigners had been advised to get out, so that there should be as few
people inside the fortifications as possible. This rumor, however, was
prevalent only among foreigners. No French people that I saw seemed to
have any such feeling. Apart from the excitement which prevailed in the
vicinity of the steamship offices and banks the city had a deserted
look. The Paris that you knew exists no longer. Compared with it this
Paris is a dead city. Almost every shop is closed, and must be until the
great number of men gone to the front can be replaced in some way.
There are streets in which every closed front bears, under a paper flag
pasted on shutter or door, a sign saying, "Closed on account of the
mobilization"; or, "All the men with the colors."
There are almost no men in the streets. There are no busses or
tramways, and cabs and automobiles are rare. Some branches of the
underground are running at certain hours, and the irregular service must
continue until women, and men unfit for military service, replace the
men so suddenly called to the flag, and that will take time, especially
as so many of the organizers as well as conductors and engineers have
gone. It is the same with the big shops. However, that is not
important. No one is in the humor to buy anything except food.
It took me a long time to get about. I had to walk everywhere and my
friends live a long way apart, and I am a miserable walker. I found it
impossible to get back that night, so I took refuge with one of my
friends who is sailing on Saturday. Every one seems to be sailing on
that day, and most of them don't seem to care much how they get
away--"ameliorated steerage," as they call it, seems to be the fate of
many of them. I can assure you that I was glad enough to get back the
next day. Silent as it is here, it is no more so than Paris, and not
nearly so sad, for the change is not so great. Paris is no longer our
Paris, lovely as it still is.
I do not feel in the mood to do much. I work in my garden
intermittently, and the harvest bug (bete rouge we call him here) gets
in his work unintermittently on me. If things were normal this
introduction to the bete rouge would have seemed to me a tragedy. As it
is, it is unpleasantly unimportant. I clean house intermittently; read
intermittently; write letters intermittently. That reminds me, do read
Leon Daudet's "Fantomes et Vivantes"--the first volumes of his memoirs.
He is a terrible example of "Le fils a papa." I don't know why it is
that a vicious writer, absolutely lacking in reverence, can hold one's
attention so much better than a kindly one can. In this book Daudet
simply smashes idols, tears down illusions, dances gleefully on sacred
traditions, and I lay awake half the night reading him,--and forgot the
advancing Germans. The book comes down only to 1880, so most of the men
he writes about are dead, and most of them, like Victor Hugo, for
example, come off very sadly.
Well, I am reconciled to living a long time now,--much longer than I
wanted to before this awful thing came to pass,--just to see all the
mighty good that will result from the struggle. I am convinced, no
matter what happens, of the final result. I am sure even now, when the
Germans have actually crossed the frontier, that France will not be
crushed this time, even if she be beaten down to Bordeaux, with her back
against the Bay of Biscay. Besides, did you ever know the English
bulldog to let go? But it is the horror of such a war in our times that
bears so heavily on my soul. After all, "civilization" is a word we
have invented, and its meaning is hardly more than relative, just as is
the word "religion."
There are problems in the events that the logical spirit finds it hard
to face. In every Protestant church the laws of Moses are printed on
tablets on either side of the pulpit. On those laws our civil code is
founded. "Thou shalt not kill," says the law. For thousands of years
the law has punished the individual who settled his private quarrels
with his fists or any more effective weapon, and reserved to itself the
right to exact "an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth." And here we
are today, in the twentieth century, when intelligent people have long
been striving after a spiritual explanation of the meaning of life,
trying to prove its upward trend, trying to beat out of it materialism,
endeavoring to find in altruism a road to happiness, and governments can
still find no better way to settle their disputes than wholesale
slaughter, and that with weapons no so-called civilized man should ever
have invented nor any so-called civilized government ever permitted to
be made. The theory that the death penalty was a preventive of murder
has long ago been exploded. The theory that by making war horrible, war
could be prevented, is being exploded to-day.
And yet--I KNOW that if the thought be taken out of life that it is
worth while to die for an idea a great factor in the making of national
spirit will be gone. I KNOW that a long peace makes for weakness in a
race. I KNOW that without war there is still death. To me this last
fact is the consolation. It is finer to die voluntarily for an idea
deliberately faced, than to die of old age in one's bed; and the grief
of parting no one ever born can escape. Still it is puzzling to us
simple folk--the feeling that fundamental things do not change: that the
balance of good and evil has not changed. We change our fashions, we
change our habits, we discover now and then another of the secrets
Nature has hidden, that delving man may be kept busy and
interested. We pride ourselves that science at least has
progressed, that we are cleaner than our progenitors. Yet we are no
cleaner than the Greeks and Romans in the days when Athens and Rome
ruled the world, nor do we know in what cycle all we know to-day was
known and lost. Oh, I can hear you claiming more happiness for the
masses! I wonder. There is no actual buying and selling in open slave
markets, it is true, but the men who built the Pyramids and dragged the
stone for Hadrian's Villa, were they any worse off really than the
workers in the mines today? Upon my soul, I don't know. Life is only a
span between the Unknown and the Unknowable. Living is made up in all
centuries of just so many emotions. We have never, so far as I know,
invented any new one. It is too bad to throw these things at you on
paper which can't answer back as you would, and right sharply I know.
Nothing going on here except the passing now and then of a long line of
Paris street busses on the way to the front. They are all mobilized and
going as heroically to the front as if they were human, and going to get
smashed up just the same. It does give me a queer sensation to see them
climbing this hill. The little Montmartre-Saint-Pierre bus, that
climbs up the hill to the funicular in front of Sacre-Coeur, came up the
hill bravely. It was built to climb a hill. But the Bastille-Madeleine
and the Ternes-Fille de Calvaine, and Saint-Sulpice-Villette just
groaned and panted and had to have their traction changed every few
steps. I thought they would never get up, but they did.
Another day it was the automobile delivery wagons of the Louvre, the
Bon Marche, the Printemps, Petit-Saint-Thomas, La Belle Jardiniere,
Potin--all the automobiles with which you are so familiar in the
streets of Paris. Of course those are much lighter, and came up
bravely. As a rule they are all loaded. It is as easy to take men to
the front, and material, that way as by railroad, since the cars go.
Only once have I seen any attempt at pleasantry on these occasions.
One procession went out the other day with all sorts of funny
inscriptions, some not at all pretty, many blackguarding the Kaiser,
and of course one with the inevitable "A Berlin" the first battle-cry
of 1870. This time there has been very little of that. I confess it
gave me a kind of shiver to see "A Berlin--pour notre plaisir" all
over the bus. "On to Berlin!" I don't see that that can be hoped for
unless the Germans are beaten to a finish on the Rhine and the allied
armies cross Germany as conquerors, unopposed. If they only could! It
would only be what is due to Belgium that King Albert should lead the
procession "Under the Lindens." But I doubt if the maddest war
optimist hopes for anything so well deserved as that. I don't dare
to, sure as I am of seeing Germany beaten to her knees before the war
is closed.
XI
September 8, 1914.
Oh, the things I have seen and felt since I last wrote to you over two
weeks ago. Here I am again cut off from the world, and have been since
the first of the month. For a week now I have known nothing of what was
going on in the world outside the limits of my own vision. For that
matter, since the Germans crossed the frontier our news of the war has
been meager. We got the calm, constant reiteration--"Left wing--held by
the English--forced to retreat a little." All the same, the general
impression was, that in spite of that, "all was well." I suppose it was
wise.
On Sunday week,--that was August 30,--Amelie walked to Esbly, and came
back with the news that they were rushing trains full of wounded
soldiers and Belgian refugies through toward Paris, and that the
ambulance there was quite insufficient for the work it had to do. So
Monday and Tuesday we drove down in the donkey cart to carry bread and
fruit, water and cigarettes, and to "lend a hand."
It was a pretty terrible sight. There were long trains of wounded
soldiers. There was train after train crowded with Belgians--well-dressed
women and children (evidently all in their Sunday best)--packed on to
open trucks, sitting on straw, in the burning sun, without shelter,
covered with dust, hungry and thirsty. The sight set me to doing
some hard thinking after I got home that first night. But it was
not until Tuesday afternoon that I got my first hint of the truth. That
afternoon, while I was standing on the platform, I heard a drum beat in
the street, and sent Amelie out to see what was going on. She came back
at once to say that it was the garde champetre calling on the
inhabitants to carry all their guns, revolvers, etc., to the mairie
before sundown. That meant the disarming of our departement, and it
flashed through my mind that the Germans must be nearer than the
official announcements had told us.
While I stood reflecting a moment,--it looked serious,--I saw
approaching from the west side of the track a procession of wagons.
Amelie ran down the track to the crossing to see what it meant, and came
back at once to tell me that they were evacuating the towns to the north
of us.
I handed the basket of fruit I was holding into a coach of the train
just pulling into the station, and threw my last package of cigarettes
after it; and, without a word, Amelie and I went out into the street,
untied the donkey, climbed into the wagon, and started for home.
By the time we got to the road which leads east to Montry, whence there
is a road over the hill to the south, it was full of the flying crowd.
It was a sad sight. The procession led in both directions as far as we
could see. There were huge wagons of grain; there were herds of cattle,
flocks of sheep; there were wagons full of household effects, with often
as many as twenty people sitting aloft; there were carriages; there were
automobiles with the occupants crowded in among bundles done up in
sheets; there were women pushing overloaded handcarts; there were women
pushing baby-carriages; there were dogs and cats, and goats; there was
every sort of a vehicle you ever saw, drawn by every sort of beast that
can draw, from dogs to oxen, from boys to donkeys. Here and there was
a man on horseback, riding along the line, trying to keep it moving in
order and to encourage the weary. Every one was calm and silent. There
was no talking, no complaining.
The whole road was, however, blocked, and, even had our donkey wished
to pass,--which she did not,--we could not. We simply fell into the
procession, as soon as we found a place. Amelie and I did not say a
word to each other until we reached the road that turns off to the
Chateau de Conde; but I did speak to a man on horseback, who proved to
be the intendant of one of the chateaux at Daumartin, and with another
who was the mayor. I simply asked from where these people had come, and
was told that they were evacuating Daumartin and all the towns on the
plain between there and Meaux, which meant that Monthyon, Neufmortier,
Penchard, Chauconin, Barcy, Chambry,--in fact, all the villages visible
from my garden were being evacuated by order of the military powers.
One of the most disquieting things about this was to see the effect of
the procession as it passed along the road. All the way from Esbly to
Montry people began to pack at once, and the speed with which they fell
into the procession was disconcerting.
When we finally escaped from the crowd into the poplar-shaded avenue
which leads to the Chateau de Conde, I turned to look at Amelie for the
first time. I had had time to get a good hold of myself.
"Well, Amelie?" I said.
"Oh, madame," she replied, "I shall stay."
"And so shall I," I answered; but I added, "I think I must make an
effort to get to Paris to-morrow, and I think you had better come with
me. I shall not go, of course, unless I am sure of being able to get
back. We may as well face the truth: if this means that Paris is in
danger, or if it means that we may in our turn be forced to move on, I
must get some money so as to be ready."
"Very well, madame," she replied as cheerfully as if the rumble of the
procession behind us were not still in our ears.
The next morning--that was September 2--I woke just before daylight.
There was a continual rumble in the air. At first I thought it was the
passing of more refugies on the road. I threw open my blinds, and then
realized that the noise was in the other direction--from the route
nationale. I listened. I said to myself, "If that is not artillery,
then I never heard any."
Sure enough, when Amelie came to get breakfast, she announced that the
English soldiers were at the Demi-Lune. The infantry was camped there,
and the artillery had descended to Couilly and was mounting the hill on
the other side of the Morin--between us and Paris.
I said a sort of "Hm," and told her to ask Pere to harness at once. As
we had no idea of the hours of the trains, or even if there were any, it
was best to get to Esbly as early as possible. It was nine o'clock when
we arrived, to find that there should be a train at half past. The
station was full. I hunted up the chef de gare, and asked him if I
could be sure of being able to return if I went up to Paris.
He looked at me in perfect amazement.
"You want to come back?" he asked.
"Sure," I replied.
"You can," he answered, "if you take a train about four o'clock. That
may be the last."
I very nearly said, "Jiminy-cricket!"
The train ran into the station on time, but you never saw such a sight.
It was packed as the Brookline street-cars used to be on the days of a
baseball game. Men were absolutely hanging on the roof; women were
packed on the steps that led up to the imperials to the third-class
coaches. It was a perilous-looking sight. I opened a dozen
coaches--all packed, standing room as well as seats, which is ordinarily
against the law. I was about to give it up when a man said to me,
"Madame, there are some coaches at the rear that look as if they were
empty."
I made a dash down the long platform, yanked open a door, and was about
to ask if I might get in, when I saw that the coach was full of wounded
soldiers in khaki, lying about on the floor as well as the seats. I was
so shocked that if the station master, who had run after me, had not
caught me I should have fallen backward.
"Sh! madame," he whispered, "I'll find you a place"; and in another
moment I found myself, with Amelie, in a compartment where there were
already eight women, a young man, two children, and heaps of
hand-luggage--bundles in sheets, twine bags just bulging, paper parcels,
and valises. Almost as soon as we were in, the train pulled slowly out
of the station.
I learned from the women that Meaux was being evacuated. No one was
remaining but the soldiers in the barracks and the archbishop. They had
been ordered out by the army the night before, and the railroad was
taking them free. They were escaping with what they could carry in
bundles, as they could take no baggage. Their calm was remarkable-not a
complaint from any one. They were of all classes, but the barriers were
down.
The young man had come from farther up the line-a newspaper chap, who
had given me his seat, and was sitting on a bundle. I asked him if he
knew where the Germans were, and he replied that on this wing they were
at Compiegne, that the center was advancing on Coulommier, but he did
not know where the Crown Prince's division was.
I was glad I had made the effort to get to town, for this began to look
as if they might succeed in arriving before the circle of steel that
surrounds Paris, and God knows what good that seventy-five miles of
fortifications will be against the long-range cannon that battered down
Liege. I had only one wish--to get back to my hut on the hill; I did
not seem to want anything else.
Just before the train ran into Lagny--our first stop--I was surprised to
see British soldiers washing their horses in the river, so I was not
surprised to find the station full of men in khaki. They were sleeping
on the benches along the wall, and standing about, in groups. As to
many of the French on the train this was their first sight of the men in
khaki, and as there were Scotch there in their kilts, there was a good
deal of excitement.
The train made a long stop in the effort to put more people into the
already overcrowded coaches. I leaned forward, wishing to get some
news, and the funny thing was that I could not think how to speak to
those boys in English. You may think that an affectation. It wasn't.
Finally I desperately sang out:--
"Hulloa, boys."
You should have seen them dash for the window. I suppose that their
native tongue sounded good to them so far from home.
"Where did you come from?" I asked.
"From up yonder--a place called La Fere," one of them replied.
"What regiment?" I asked.
"Any one else here speak English?" he questioned, running his eyes along
the faces thrust out of the windows.
I told him no one did.
"Well," he said, "we are all that is left of the North Irish Horse and a
regiment of Scotch Borderers."
"What are you doing here?"
"Retreating--and waiting for orders. How far are we from Paris?"
I told him about seventeen miles. He sighed, and remarked that he
thought they were nearer, and as the train started I had the idea in the
back of my head that these boys actually expected to retreat inside the
fortifications. La! la!
Instead of the half-hour the train usually takes to get up from here to
Paris, we were two hours.
I found Paris much more normal than when I was there two weeks ago,
though still quite unlike itself; every one perfectly calm and no one
with the slightest suspicion that the battle line was so near--hardly
more than ten miles beyond the outer forts. I transacted my business
quickly--saw only one person, which was wiser than I knew then, and
caught the four o'clock train back--we were almost the only passengers.
I had told Pere not to come after us--it was so uncertain when we could
get back, and I had always been able to get a carriage at the hotel in
Esbly.
We reached Esbly at about six o'clock to find the stream of emigrants
still passing, although the roads were not so crowded as they had been
the previous day. I ran over to the hotel to order the carriage--to be
told that Esbly was evacuated, the ambulance had gone, all the horses
had been sold that afternoon to people who were flying. There I was
faced with a walk of five miles--lame and tired. Just as I had made up
my mind that what had to be done could be done,--die or no die,--Amelie
came running across the street to say:--
"Did you ever see such luck? Here is the old cart horse of Cousine
Georges and the wagon!"
Cousine Georges had fled, it seems, since we left, and her horse had
been left at Esbly to fetch the schoolmistress and her husband. So we
all climbed in. The schoolmistress and her husband did not go far,
however. We discovered before we had got out of Esbly that Couilly had
been evacuated during the day, and that a great many people had left
Voisins; that the civil government had gone to Coutevroult; that the
Croix Rouge had gone. So the schoolmistress and her husband, to whom
all this was amazing news, climbed out of the wagon, and made a dash
back to the station to attempt to get back to Paris. I do hope they
succeeded.
Amelie and I dismissed the man who had driven the wagon down, and jogged
on by ourselves. I sat on a board in the back of the covered cart, only
too glad for any sort of locomotion which was not "shank's mare."