Dearer my Gaulish Loire than Tiber's Latin stream.
Dearer my little hill of Liré than Mount Palatinus,
And than sea-airs the sweet air of Anjou.
Till yesterday that voice still spoke for the unchanging life of France. The peasant remained where his forefathers had broken the fields and loaded the wains. Why should he be seeking strange lands, like the troubled races? He found his place of peace long ago. To what country can he travel where the sun is pleasanter on happy fields? What people can he visit who have the dignity and simplicity of his neighbors?
Then the hordes from the north came down, eager to win this sunny quietness, curious to surprise the secret of this Latin race, with its sense of form and style, its charm, its sweet reasonableness. Why are these Southerners loved? Why do their accomplishments conquer the world so gently, so irresistibly? Surely this hidden beauty will yield to violence. So it came, that dark flood from the north, pouring over the fertile provinces, breaking the peace of these peasants. Something was destroyed where the human spirit had made its home for a longer time than the individual life: a channel for the generations. Their fields are still red with the poppy, but their young men who reaped are busy on redder fields. Their village street is crumbled stone, through which the thistle thrusts. The altar of their church is sour with rain water, and the goodness of life is a legend that was slain in a moment of time. A modern city can be rebuilt. An ancient village can never be rebuilt. That soft rhythm of its days was caught from old buildings and a slowly ripening tradition. Something distinguished has passed out of life. What perished at Rheims in the matchless unreturning light of its windows was only a larger loss. A quiet radiance was on these villages, too.
Still the peasants return to the place they know. Even their dead are more living than the faces of strangers in cities. The rocks in the gutter once held their home. There is sadness in a place where people have lived and been happy, and now count their dead. It is desolate in a way wild nature never is, for the raw wilderness groups itself into beauty and order. It would have been better to let the forest thicken through centuries, than to inherit the home where one day the roof-tree is razed by the invader. These peasants are not hysterical. They are only broken-hearted. They tell their story in a quiet key, in simple words, with a kind of grayness of recital. There are certain experiences so appalling to the consciousness that it can never reveal the elements of its distress, because what was done killed what could tell. But the light of the day is never seen again with the same eyes after the moment that witnessed a child tortured, or one's dearest shot down like a clay pigeon. The girl, who was made for happiness, when she is wife and mother, will pass on a consciousness of pain which had never been in her line before. The thing that happened in a moment will echo in the troubled voices of her children, and a familiar music is broken.
III
"MON GAMIN"
One day when I was in Lorraine, a woman came to me carrying in her hands a boy's cap, and a piece of rope. She was a peasant woman about forty years of age, named Madame Plaid. She said:
"You see, Monsieur, I found him in the fields. He was not in the house when the Germans came here. I thought that my little scamp (mon gamin) was in danger, so I looked everywhere for him. He was fourteen years old, only that, at least he would have been in September, but he seemed to be all of nineteen with his height and his size.