Home Fires in France

by Dorothy Canfield Fisher

I

I was tucking the children into bed after their bath, my rosy, romping, noisy children, when "le soldat Deschamps" was announced. Deschamps is the man from the north of France, who had been a coal-miner before the war, the man whose wife and little boy are still "up there," the man who has not seen his family since he kissed them the fourth of August three years ago.

A veil seemed to drop between me and the faces of my rosy, romping, noisy children....

I went slowly along the hall to our living-room. Yes there he was, poor Deschamps, the big, powerfully built fellow, a little thinner, a little more gaunt, a little whiter than when I had seen him last, although that was only a week ago. He rose up, very tall in his worn gray-blue uniform, not so neatly brushed as it had been, and put out a flaccid hand. "Bonsoir, madame ... excuse me for coming again so soon. I know I ought not to take your time. But when we are allowed to go out ... where shall I go? I know so few people in Paris" ... as though one would not be willing to give time when there is so tragically nothing else to give him!

I say something cordial, take up my sewing, and settle myself for what I know is coming. Poor Deschamps! He needs only a word or two of sympathy when out he pours it all in a rush, the heartsick desolation of the uprooted exile, the disintegrating misery of the home-loving man without a home. Of late, alas! it does not come out very coherently. "You see, madame, we were so well off there. What could a man ask for more? My day in the mine began at four in the morning, but I was free at two in the afternoon, and I am very strong, as you see, so that I could go on working out of doors as long as the daylight lasted. We had our own house paid for, our own! And a big, big garden. I earned ten francs a day cash in the mines, and we almost lived out of our garden, so we were saving all the time. Our boy was to have a good schooling. Perhaps, we thought, he might be like Pasteur. You know his father was a simple tanner. My wife never had to work for others, never! She could stay there and have everything clean and pleasant and take care of the boy. We were so happy and always well.... We both worked in the garden, and people who garden are never sick. And always contented. And our garden ... you ought to see it ... all the potatoes we could eat I raised there, and early ones too! And all the cabbages and some to sell. The coal company sold us cheap all the manure we wanted from their stables, and I could make the land as rich, as rich! Such early vegetables! Better than any you can buy in the towns. And the winter ones ... you should see how we protect our cabbages in the winter...."

The monologue has carried the big fellow out of his chair now. He is grasping an imaginary spade, a heap of imaginary cabbages by his side. "So ... we sprinkle sand first, and then cabbages all laid so ... you understand...." The voice goes on and on, almost the voice of a person hypnotized.

I lose my perception of what he is saying as I gaze at his sunken eyes fixed on homely, much-loved scenes I cannot see.

"The best place for the carrots was the sloping bit of ground near the big oak...." He sees it, his big oak, there before him. He makes me see it, and what it meant to him. This was the man whom the twentieth century forced to march away, to kill, and be killed.

"... And little Raoul used to help; yes, with his little hands he would pat down the sand and laugh to see his finger-marks."

The voice stops abruptly. In the resultant silence I move uneasily.... I find Deschamps' talk heartbreaking enough, but his silences terrify me. I try to arouse him from his bleak brooding reverie....

"You had hares too, didn't you, and hens, and a pig...? That must have helped out with the living."

He comes to himself with a start. "Oh, it was my wife who kept the animals. She has such a hand for making them thrive. They were like her other children. Those little chicks, they never died, always prospered, grew so fat. We always had one or two to sell when she went to town to market. Angèle used to dress them herself, so that we could have the feathers. Then she put them in one of the neat baskets she made from the willow sprouts on the side of our little stream, with a clean white cloth over them, as clean as her neckerchief. Angèle is as neat as a nun, always. Our house shone with cleanness ..." He breaks off abruptly. "I have shown you the photograph of Angèle and Raoul, haven't I, madame?"

I hold out my hand and gaze again, as I have so many times before, into the quiet eyes of the young peasant woman with the sturdy little boy at her side. "She is very pretty, your wife," I say, "and your little boy looks so strong and vigorous."

"I hear," he said with a great heave of his broad chest, now so sunken, "that the Boches have taken all the livestock away from the owners, all the hens and pigs and hares, and sent them to Germany. Perhaps Raoul and Angèle have not enough to eat ... perhaps there is even no house there now ... a cousin of mine saw a refugee from his own region ... who had seen the place where his house had been!... it had been shelled, there was ..." His mouth sets hard in an angry line of horror.

I bestir myself. This is the sort of talk Deschamps must not be allowed.

"M. Deschamps," I say, "I shall be writing soon to that group of American friends who gave the money for your articulated arm. Have you any message to send them? I think they are planning to send some more money to help you...."

He waves it away with a great gesture. "Money can't do anything for me," he says bitterly, adding quickly: "Not of course that I am not very, very grateful for the so-costly artificial arm. It means I can earn their living again, if ever Angèle...."

I break in once more: "But I promised them a statement of all your case, you know, the dates and places and everything. Could you just run over them again...?"

But I do not listen as he goes wearily over the old story as familiar to me now as to him: mobilized the first day, was in the Battle of the Marne, advanced to B——, was wounded there in the leg, taken to a hospital in an American ambulance, cured, returned to the trenches; wounded in the shoulder, taken to the hospital, cured, returned to the trenches ... all this time with no news whatever from his family, knowing that his region was occupied by the invaders, hearing stories of how the women and children were treated.... Fought during the winter of 1914-15, wounded in three places in June, 1915, taken to the hospital where his arm was amputated. While there, heard indirectly that his wife and child were still alive. As soon as the articulated arm (paid for out of my blessed fund of American money) allowed him to work, he had begun to learn the tinner's trade, since a one-armed man could no longer be a miner. Now he had passed his apprenticeship and could soon be ready to earn his living.

I knew all this laborious, heroic, commonplace story already, and looked through it at the hospital pallor on the haggard face, at the dreadful soft whiteness of the hands so obviously meant to be hard and brown, at the slack looseness of the great frame, at a man on the point of losing his desire to live....

"What use is it to earn money when not a cent can I send to them up there, when I can hear nothing from Angèle beyond that line on a post-card once in three months? Madame, you have education, why will they not allow a wife to write to her husband?"

I have only the old answer to the old question: "We suppose they are afraid of spies, of people sending information to France."

"But why do they keep Angèle there? Why don't they let women go to their husbands? What harm can that do? Why do they make it a hell on earth for them and then refuse to let them go?"

I had for this only the usual murmur: "A few are allowed to come away."

He struck his hands together. "So few! When they last said they would allow some women and children to come to France, only a fifteenth part of those who asked for leave were allowed to come. Why? Why? What has Angèle to do with the war?"

He gets up for the restless pacing about our little living-room which always ends his visits. "I think I shall go mad, madame. I am there in the hospital, two hundred of us in one great room ... oh, they are kind enough to us, we have enough to eat. But we are not children. It is not enough to have food and a roof. Two hundred men there ... what a life ... for fourteen months! Nothing to work for, nothing to live for, no home, no family, not even a chance to go back to the trenches. The other men drink as much as they can get money for. I never drank in my life. Madame, do you suppose it would make me sleep to drink?"

"See here, M. Deschamps," I say, moving to my desk, "I will write again to the Spanish Embassy. I will tell them again about Angèle and Raoul, they will send the request to the German authorities in your town ... perhaps this time ..." It is a perilous stimulant to administer to a sick heart, but what other have I? So I sit, swallowing the lump in my throat, and once more make out the application which never has any result.

"There," I say, putting it into an envelope with hands that are not very steady—"there, my friend, you mail that. And now you must go, or the night-nurse will scold you for being late."

He reaches for his cap, his old shabby cap with the bullet hole through it, and stands fumbling with it, his head hanging. He towers above me, gaunt, powerful, as pitiably defenseless as any little child. I wink back the tears which threaten to come, shake his hand hard, and tell him to be sure to come again the next time he has the "cafard". He nods absently and shuffles to the door. "You will pardon me, madame ... but when I think that my little Raoul has perhaps not enough to eat, and I am not ..."

He has gone his lonely way to the hospital bed which is all he has for home. I go back to the cool dark bedroom and look down at my sleeping children.

There is no reason for it ... why should I feel guilty to see them rosy and safe?