Journal of Small Things

by Helen Mackay

Invaded Town, Wednesday, July 5th

To-day I was shown a letter that came—I was not told by what means—from one of the invaded towns of the North. It was the letter of a girl who with her father kept an old book-shop in the Place de l'Eglise. It was written to her sister, married in Paris, from whom they had had no news since the war began, but to whom they had managed to get word through—I do not know how—once or twice.

The letter, received only yesterday, was dated January 16. It told of a thing that had been vaguely rumoured here, that the papers had not mentioned, and that had passed for the most part unbelieved. The girl supposed her sister would have heard, and would be terrified for them, and was anxious to let her know that they were safe. I imagine the girl with a smooth blonde head and grave blue eyes, and the father, thin and stooping, with delicate white features and white hair, and a black skull-cap.

The letter began by saying that they were very well, and that the house was but slightly damaged. Aunt Emeline was with them, as her house was quite in ruins: she had been got out from behind the falling of the stair wall. It was impossible to go to the house of Cousine Thérèse, but she was safe with the children at the neighbour Payen's. The whole family had escaped miraculously. The girl said that in the midst of such terrible suffering they were ashamed to have suffered scarcely at all. It seemed as if they were not bearing their part of the sacrifice.

She had thought, that night, it was the house falling, and she had leaped out of bed, thinking she must go to her father. The shock had lasted ten seconds. She had had time to get in the dark half-way across the rocking floor, and to realize it was not only the house but the whole city that was rent and sundered. She had had time to think, "It must be an earthquake."

"That is what they tried, at first, to say it was," she wrote, "an earthquake. But we know that it was an explosion brought about by one of us. It was the Arsenal and the casemates of the eighteen bridges full of powder, between the three chief gates of the town, that were blown up. It was one of their most important depôts of munitions, where they had stored enough powder and high explosives to feed their Northern army for ten months. No one knows who did it. They have posted up offers of high reward for any one who finds the author of what they now call 'the criminal accident.'

"In all the towns of the North, where windows were broken and doors torn out of their frames, and where it was at first thought to be an earthquake, they have now put up posters on the walls, in their language and ours, demanding information about the 'criminal.'

"But even if there are some who know, not one will betray. Moreover, he is surely safe from betrayal, dead and buried somewhere under the ruins he himself caused for the sake of his country."

The letter went on to tell of the town so sacrificed: streets and quarters destroyed entirely, not a house anywhere but was more or less injured, the least harmed streets deep in broken glass and blocked with fallen tiles and stones. The whole town was become a place of homeless and wounded and dead.

The young girl kept repeating that no one complained; it was for the sake of their country. The homeless people in the streets said to one another, "It is less than our soldiers suffer in the trenches."

She wrote of things she had seen in that night: a father carrying his boy, of perhaps fifteen years, in his arms, not believing he was dead; a woman they could not get near, under the ruins, alive, her child killed beside her; a woman gone mad, running in the streets, shrieking a man's name; another woman, running also, with her baby in her arms, begging every one she met to mend it, for its head had been cut off.

All the less unhappy people had taken in the homeless; of the inhabitants of all the ruined houses, by the next night less than fifty were left to the care of the town.

The girl wrote: "The people of the town are admirable, the homeless with the rest; we know that the sacrifice is for our country, and we make it gladly. The terrible suffering of the town is offered up for victory and peace."

She went on to tell of little things: "Your room we have given to a mother with three babies; I have Aunt Emeline with me, sleeping in father's room, for mine is not safe—the roof of the next house has fallen against its roof. Father sleeps in the room behind the shop, and in the shop we have found place to take in ten of the destitute. The shock threw most of the books out of their cases, and loosened the cases from the walls, so that we have had to prop them up. The books are heaped out of the way of the mattresses of the homeless. I thought father would worry about the books; you know, he has always felt them to be live things; but he has no thought for them. He is in the Place all day, trying to help clear away the glass and stones. The tower of the church has fallen all across the Place. All the windows in the town are broken, and there is no glass to be had for mending them. We live behind paper windows, in a gloom that does depress one."

The letter went from one subject to another, nervously and rather confusedly. She told of immense blocks of stone, hurled from great distances into the streets; of the fronts of houses ripped out, and the stories dropped or sagging; of Aunt Emeline's poor little belongings all lost—the portrait of great-grandfather; how the enormous factories of —— and —— had served as a screen to protect the town, or else it had been destroyed completely; of one of the little homeless children in the book-shop who kept all the time saying her prayers, "Little Jesus, stay with us; little Jesus, stay with us," and how her name was Cecilette; of the bitter cold that made it all more cruel; and, always, how they were proud to offer up the sacrifice for their country. She sent her love, and her father's, always more and more tenderly. It seemed as if their love for Mariette, of whom they had no word, increased every day. She kept saying over and over how proud the town was, to have made the sacrifice; and what a brave thing for, perhaps, one man alone to have brought about.