There must be scores of towns south of Paris which look more or less like this—the young men gone or drilling in the neighborhood, the schools turned into hospitals, the little old provincial hotels sheltering families fled from Paris. There are several such at our hotel, nice, comfortable people—you might think you were in some semi-summer-resort hotel at home—Ridgefield, Conn., for instance, in winter time.
The making of cognac occupies nearly every one, one way or another, and it has made the place next to the richest town of its size in France. They make the cognac, and they make the bottles for it in a glass factory on a hill overlooking the town—about as airy and pleasant a place for a factory as one could imagine. The molten glass is poured into moulds, the moulds closed—psst! a stream of compressed air turned in, the bottles blown, and there you are—a score or so of them turned out every minute. As we came out of the furnace-room into the chilly afternoon a regiment of reservists tramped in from a practise march in the country. Some were young fellows, wearing uniforms for the first time, apparently; some looked like convalescents drafted back into the army. They took one road and we another, and half an hour later swung down the main street of Cognac behind a chorus of shrilling bugles. All over France, south of Paris, they must be marching like this these frosty afternoons.
Coming up from Bordeaux the other night we missed the regular connection and had to spend the night at Saintes. The tall, quizzical, rather grim old landlady of the neat little Hotel de la Gare—characteristic of that rugged France which tourists who only see a few streets in Paris know little about—was plainly puzzled. There we were, two able-bodied men, and P———, saying nothing about being consul, merely remarked that he lived in Cognac. "In Cognac!" the old woman repeated, looking from one to the other, and then added, as one putting an unanswerable question: "But you are not soldiers?"
We went out for a walk in the frosty air before turning in. There was scarce a soul in the streets, but at the other end of the town a handful of young fellows passed on the other side singing. They were boys of the 1915 class who had been called out and in a few days would be getting ready for war. In Paris you will see young fellows just like them, decorated with flags and feathers, driving round town in rattle-trap wagons like picnic parties returning on a summer night at home. Arm in arm and keeping step, these boys of Saintes were singing as they marched:
"Il est rouge et noir et blanc, Et fendu au derriere—d."
"He's red, white, and black, And split up the back!"
They saw themselves, doubtless, marching down the streets of Berlin as now they were marching down the streets of Saintes—and they kept flinging back through the frosty dark:
"Il est rouge—et noir—et blanc—Et fendu—au derriere—d…"
Chapter VI
"The Great Days"