“And the people, how do you get on with them?”
The camions had passed and the street was again filled with American infantry, trudging forward with an air of resolute endurance.
“Well enough, they don’t cheat you. I forgot and left a fifty-franc bill lying on the table of a house where I’d bought some eggs, and the next morning the woman sent her little girl over to camp to give it back. Real poor-appearing folk they were, too. But I’ve had enough. I want to get home. Uncle Sam’s good enough for me. I want to hurry up and win the war and beat it back to God’s country.”
He fell away before the sudden assault on me of an old, old man and his old wife, with the dirt, the hunted look, the crumpled clothes, the desperate eyes of refugees: “Madame, Madame, help us! We cannot make them understand, the Americans! We want to go back to Villers-le-Petit. We want to see what is left of our house and garden. We want to start in to repair the house—and our potatoes must be dug.”
I had passed that morning through what was left of their village. For a moment I saw their old, tired, anxious faces dimly as though across the long stretch of shattered heaps of masonry. I answered evasively, “But you know they are not allowing civilian population to go back as yet. All this region is still shelled. It’s far too dangerous.”
They gave together an exclamation of impatience as though over the futilities of children’s talk. “But, Madame, if we do not care about the danger. We never cared! We would not have left, ever, if the soldiers had not taken us away in camions—our garden and vineyard just at the time when they needed attention every hour. Well, we will not wait for permission; we will go back anyhow. The American soldiers are not bad, are they, Madame? They would surely not fire on an old man and his wife going back to their homes? If Madame would only write on a piece of paper that we only want to go back to our home to take care of it—”
Their quavering old voices came to me indistinctly through the steady thudding advance of all those feet, come from so far, on so great, so high, so perilous a mission; come so far, many of them, to meet death more than half-way—the poor, old, cramped people before me, blind and deaf to the immensity of the earthquake, seeing nothing but that the comfort of their own lives was in danger. I had a nervous revulsion of feeling and broke the news to them more abruptly than I would have thought possible a moment before. “There is nothing left to Villers-de-Petit. There is nothing left to go back to.”
Well, they were not so cramped, so blind, so small, my poor old people. They took the news standing, and after the first clutch at each other’s wrinkled hands, after the first paling of their already ashy faces, they did not flinch.
“But the crops, Madame. The vineyards. Are they all gone, too?”
“No, very little damage done there. Everything was kept, of course, intact for camouflage, and the retreat was so rapid there was not enough time for destruction.”