Sommeilles is in one of the loveliest sections of Europe, where the fields lie fertile under a temperate sun, and the little rivers glide under green willow trees. Villages of peasants have clustered here through centuries. One or two of the hundreds of builders that lifted Rheims and Chartres would wander from the larger work to the village church and give their skill to the portal, adding a choiceness of stone carving and some bit of grotesquerie. Scattered through the valleys of the Marne, and Meuse, and Moselle, you come on these snatches of the great accent, all the lovelier for their quiet setting and unfulfilled renown.
The peasant knew he was part of a natural process, a slow, long-continuing growth, whose beginnings were not yesterday, and whose purpose would not end with his little life. And the aspect of the visible world which reinforced this inner sense was the look of his Town Hall and his church, his own home and the homes of his neighbors—the work of no hasty builders. In the stout stone house, with its gray slabs of solidity, he and his father had lived, and his grandfather, and on back through the generations. There his son would grow up, and one day inherit the house and its goods, the gay garden and the unfailing fields.
Things are dear to them, for time has touched them with affectionate association. The baker's wife at Florent in the Argonne is a strapping ruddy woman of thirty years of age, instinct with fun and pluck, and contemptuous of German bombs. But the entrance to her cellar is protected by sand-bags and enormous logs.
"You are often shelled?" asked my friend.
"A little, nearly every day," she answered. "But it's all right in the cellar. For instance, I have removed my lovely furniture down there. It is safe in the shelter."
"Oh, then, you care more for your furniture than you do for your own safety?"
"Why," she answered, "you can't get another set of furniture so easily as all that." And she spoke of a clock and other wedding-presents as precious to her.
A family group in Vassincourt welcomed us in the room they had built out of tile and beams in what was once the shed. The man was blue-eyed and fair of hair, the woman with a burning brown eye, the daughter with loosely hanging hair and a touch of wildness. The family had gone to the hill at the south and watched their village and their home burn. They had returned to find the pigs ripped open. The destruction of live stock was something more to them than lost property, than dead meat. There is an intimate sense of kinship between a peasant and his live stock—the horse that carries him to market, his cows and pigs, the ducks that bathe in the pool of his barnyard and the hens that bathe in the roadside dust. No other property is so personal. They had lost their two sons in the war. The woman in speaking of the French soldiers called them "Ces Messieurs," "these gentlemen."
In this village is a bran-new wooden shed, "Café des Amis," with the motto, "A la Renaissance," "To the Rebirth."