“Then we will still go back, Madame. We have brought the things for spraying the vineyards as far as here. Surely we can get them to Villers-de-Petit, it is so near now. We can sleep on the ground, anywhere. In another week, you see, Madame, it will be too late to spray. We have enough for ours and our neighbors, too. We can save them if we go now. If Madame would only write on a piece of paper in their language that—”
So I did it. I tore a fly-leaf out of a book lying in the heap of rubbish before the ruins of a bombarded house (it was a treatise on Bach’s chorales by the French organist Widor!) and wrote, “These are two brave old people, inhabitants of Villers-de-Petit, who wish to go back there to work under shell-fire to save what they can of their own and their neighbors’ crops. Theirs is the spirit that is keeping France alive.”
“It probably won’t do you a bit of good,” I said, “but there it is for what it is worth.”
“Oh, once the American soldiers know what we want, they will let us pass, we know.” They went off trustfully, holding my foolish “pass” in their hands.
I turned from them to find another young American soldier standing near me. “How do you do?” I said, smiling at him.
He gave a great start of amazement at the sound of my American accent. “Well, how do you like being in France?” I asked him.
“Gee! Are you really an American woman?” he said incredulously, his young face lighting up as though he saw a member of his own family. “I haven’t talked to one in so long! Why yes, I like France fine. It’s the loveliest country to look at, isn’t it? I didn’t know any country could be kept up so, like a garden. How do they do it without any men left? They must be awfully fine people. I wish I could talk to them some.”
“Who are these soldiers going through to-day?” I asked. “Are they going out to the front line trenches, or coming back? I’ve been told both things.”
He answered with perfect certainty and precision: “Neither. They are Second Division troops, from Ohio mostly, just out of their French training-camp, going up to hold the reserve line. They never have been in action yet.”
Our attention was distracted to the inside of a fruit-shop across the street, a group of American soldiers struggling with the sign-language, a flushed, tired, distracted woman shopkeeper volubly unable to conceive that men with all their senses could not understand her native tongue. I went across to interpret. One of the soldiers in a strong Southern accent said, “Oh golly, yes, if you would do the talkin’ fo’ us. We cyan’t make out whetheh we’ve paid heh or not, and we wondeh if she’d ’low us to sit heah and eat ouh fruit.”