And then, of course, there were other bad moments and days, meaner, pettier enemies to fight, when it took all of one’s self-control to prevent explosions of irritability from overwrought nerves; quarrelsome bitterness, which comes from brooding on grievances; sudden captious hatred for other people’s mannerisms, which, in all prison-camps, almost as much as physical suffering, embittered and poisoned prison-life for the high-strung, finely organized, twentieth century prisoners of the Great War. Forty women, with lowered physical health, with heightened nervous sensibility, used to fastidious privacy, now shut up together in one room, with no chance ever to escape each other, crowded each other morally almost as much as physically. Octavie told me there were days when she would have liked to slap them, weak, wavering, superstitious souls that they seemed to her, and turn her face to the wall in her bunk to concentrate on hating the human race. And one of the devout Catholics told me that she often longed so intensely for her old atmosphere of belief and faith that she was almost ill. But they adopted as their battle-cry, “All together to defend our civilization!” and, clinging fiercely to this resolve, they fought away from everything that might have separated them and struggled out on ground common to them all.
Then Winter was there again, endless, empty, gray days. There was sickness in the camp, a terrible wave of influenza, carrying off hundreds all around them. They redoubled their cleanliness, boiled every drop of water, exercised, played, mended, studied, cooked, sang, kept steadily on with the ordered precision of their lives. But old Mme. Rouart, the one they loved the most of all, who led the silent prayer of every evening, fell ill, endured silently a few bitter days of suffering, died, and was borne out from among them to be buried in alien soil. Three others were desperately ill, lay near to death, and slowly recovered. Tragedy drew them more closely together than ever, as they realized how utterly they depended on each other, and after this there were fewer struggles against black days of bad temper. The little boy was seven months old now, laughed and crowed, and played with his fingers.
Time seemed to stand still for them, as they fought to protect their little shining taper of civilization, feeding it from their hearts and minds. When they went outdoors for the daily escape from their room to the sandy, hard-trodden desert of the prison yard, they seemed with their neat, threadbare, faded, well-mended garments, with their gray, carefully dressed hair, their pale faces, clean and quiet, with brave eyes and smiling lips, like another order of being from the shaggy, dirt-crusted, broken-down Polish and Russian soldiers, whose corrals were on each side of them, lying listlessly in the drizzling mist or quarreling among themselves. They were known by this time all over the camp, and the demoralized, desperate men watched the decent Frenchwomen with that most humanizing of emotions, respect.
Do you see them, those gaunt, heart-sick women, shoulder to shoulder, indomitable in the patient use of their intelligence, in their long triumphant battle against the weakness and evil in their own nature, which were, as they had known from the first, the only things in the world which could harm them?
What a race to belong to!
Well, then came the end, foreshadowed by weeks of excited rumor, a confused, bewildered period of guesses and half hopes, when nobody, not even the guards, knew what was happening at the front. The camp was all one crazy uproar, no newspaper, no certainty of anything. Our little group of women clung to each other, as the world rocked round them, till the evening when the guards came running to take them to the train. Not an instant to spare; the thousands of other prisoners were yelling in the riot which, the next day, tore the camp to pieces. They huddled on their clothes and fled into the wild confusion of the journey, standing up in locked cattle-cars, frantic to know what was happening, with no idea in the world where they were or where the train was taking them, until the moment when the jolting cars stopped, the locked doors were broken open and French voices out of the darkness cried, “Mesdames, vous êtes chez vous!”
They were at home, at their own station, a faint gray light showing the well-known pointed roofs of their own city, the massive tower of the old Town Hall black against the dawn. On the same platform, where they had seen so many deported prisoners return, vermin-ridden, filthy, half-imbecile, a burden to themselves and their families, there they were, lean and worn and pale, but stronger, better, finer human beings than they had been before. Half-awed by the greatness of their victory, they stood there, like ghosts who had fought their way back from the grave, peering out through the dim light at their own homes.
That’s where the story ought to end, oughtn’t it?
But you know as well as I do that five years have passed since that morning when they stood there, awe-struck and transfigured. And I cannot conceal the fact that I have seen them all again, a good many times since then.
What are they doing with themselves now? Well, the last time I made a round of visits among them, I found the housewives concerned about their preserves and the hang of their skirts; the business-women deep in calculations about how to get around the sinful rate of exchange. The mothers were bringing up their children very hard, as we all do, very much concerned about their knowing the children of the right people and no others. The teachers were grumbling about the delay in the promised raise of their pay and complaining about the tyranny of the Directrice of their Lycée. Young Mme. Baudoin, now that her children are old enough to go to school, often leaves them with the servants and runs off to Brussels or Paris for a few days of fun. All the returned hostages have grown quite stout, and they have taken up bridge whist with enthusiasm, once more.