Cantine, Christmas
All the babies seem to me to be blonde and of exactly the same size and quite square, about one year old, square, and very adorable. I never can remember which are the boys and which the girls.
The mothers come from, we don't know where; and are, we don't know what.
Last year there was written on a card and posted on the wall by the door, a thing that I think rather beautiful—
"Toute femme enciente, ou qui nourrit son enfant, peut venir tous les jours prendre ici ses repas de midi et du soir, sans craindre aucune question."
They came, at noon and at dusk, sick, ugly, stupid things, twice a day like that, from two hundred and fifty to three hundred of them. Bearing the children of soldiers, the children that will be France, they came without need of more than making each of them her X in the book on the shelf by the door.
There is not room for more than forty-five at a time at the tables in the room that used to be a butcher's shop. They had to wait in turn outside in the street.
Outside in the ugly, forlorn street they waited, an ugly, forlorn line, in wind or rain.
They all seemed frightened, not of the things that there really were to fear, like sickness and poverty and war, but of just opening the door and coming in and making their mark in the book, and finding places at the tables.
They would have the door always kept shut. The steam of the soup was thick and horrid, always, in the room. I hate the smell of the poor. I hated those deformed, bedraggled, dulled women, as I served their soup. I hated them, because they would have the door kept shut. But I loved them, because their children would be France.
This year we keep Christmas for the babies.
It is odd how beautiful any woman is with a baby in her arms. Especially if she has only a shawl to wrap around herself and the baby, where it lies in the hollow of her arm. The faded, stained, worn shawl, drawn close about her head, falls in long lines down over her shoulders, and is gathered up in new folds around the nestling baby, the little soft shape of it, the little head, round, against her throat.
Like that each one of the women makes you think of a beautiful, wonderful thing.