The older and weaker women among the Tourciennes group, who could not holystone the floor and carry water and wood, were set at the lighter tasks, the endless mending which kept their garments from becoming mere rags, peeling turnips, washing dishes, “making the beds” as they called the process of drying and airing the straw in the bunks.
Every day they went out in all weathers, and exercised and played ball with their home-made, straw-stuffed balls, and every evening they played games, checkers, guessing games, capped rimes, told stories and sang. They all “studied singing” and sang in twos, trios, quartets, or the whole forty in a chorus. They sang anything any one could remember, old folk-songs of which there are such an infinite variety in French, ballads, church-chants, songs from operas.
Octavie told me that one evening, when the false news which was constantly served to them was specially bad, when they had been told that half the French Army was taken prisoner, and the other half in retreat south of Paris, they sang with the tears running down their cheeks, but still sang, and kept their hearts from breaking.
Every day there were “lessons.” Octavie was the only trained teacher among them, so that her courses in general science and in economic history were the most professional of the instructions given; but she sedulously attended the “courses” given by the others, putting her disciplined mind on the matter they had to present, and by adroit questionings and summarizings, helped them to order it coherently and logically. Once a week they had dramatics, scenes out of Molière, or Labiche, or Shakespeare, or Courteline, farce, tragedy, drama, anything of which anybody had any recollection, with improvisations in the passages which nobody could remember. The German guards looked on astonished at the spirit and dash of the acting, and the laughter and applause from the bunks, where the audience was installed to leave the room clear for a stage. Mme. Baudoin told me that she had never begun to suck the marrow out of the meaty Molière comedies, as she did in the stifling days of midsummer when they were giving a series of his plays.
By midsummer they had learned that one of the younger married women had been pregnant when she left France, that a French child was to be born in that German prison. How they all yearned over the homesick young mother! How important old Mme. Rouart became with her medical and nurse’s lore! What anxious consultations about the preparations of the layette, manufactured out of spare undergarments and a pair of precious linen sheets brought from home. They were supposed to have medical attention furnished in the prison, but they had seen too much of the brutal roughness of the overworked and indifferent army-surgeons of the camp, not to feel a horror at the thought of their attending delicate little Mme. Larçonneur. She begged them desperately not to call in a doctor, but themselves to help her through her black hours. They were terrified at the responsibility, and as her time drew near, with the ups and downs of those last days, they were almost as frightened and tremulous as she.
But the night when she called out in a strangled voice that she needed help, found them all organized, each one with her work planned: some who sprang from their beds to heat water; Mme. Rouart prepared as far as her poor substitute for a nurse’s outfit would allow her; others ready to lift the shivering, groaning woman from her own bunk to the one which had been cleaned, sterilized with boiling water, and kept ready. The others, who could not help, lay in their beds, their hands clenched tightly in sympathy with the suffering of their comrade, shaken to the heart, as the old drama of human life opened solemnly there in that poor place.
When the baby came, his high-pitched cry was like a shout of triumph.
“All well,” announced the nurse to the anxious women, “a fine little boy. No! nobody must stir! Perfect quiet for Mme. Larçonneur.” She busied herself with the mother, while her two assistants oiled the baby and wrapped him in flannel, gloating over the perfections of his tiny finished body, and murmuring to the faces showing over the bunks, “Such a beauty! Such a darling! His little hands!—Oh, see how he fights us!”
The next morning they formed in line to worship him as he lay sleeping beside his mother, and although the sight brought a fierce stab of misery to all the mothers who had left their children behind, the little boy brought into their lives an element of tenderness and hopeful forward-looking which was curative medicine for their sick, women’s hearts.
For in spite of all Octavie’s moral and physical therapeutics, there were intolerable moments and hours and days for all of them. Women, loving women, used to a life-time of care for others, used to the most united family life, left for months at a time without the slightest news of those they had left, could not, valiantly as they might try, master the fury of longing and anxiety which sprang upon them in the midst of the courageously planned life which they led. They all came to recognize in others the sudden whiteness, the trembling hands, the fixed, unseeing eyes blinded by tears. As far as loving whole-hearted sympathy could ease human hearts, such moments of unendurable pain were tempered by a deep sense of the sharing by all of each one’s sorrow.