The Day of Glory

by Dorothy Canfield Fisher

I did not think it necessary to translate all this to the American who now shook hands with both of us and turned away. The Frenchman, too, after a look at the clock in the church-tower, made his compliments, saluted, and disappeared.

I walked forward and, coming to the church door, stepped inside. It was as though I had stepped into another world. I had found the only place in town where there were no soldiers. The great, gray, dim, vaulted interior was empty.

After the beat of the marching feet outside, after the shuffling to and fro of the innumerable men quartered in town, after the noisy shops crowded with khaki uniforms, after the incessant thunderous passage of the artillery and munitions-camions—the long, hushed quiet of the empty church rang loud in my ears. I wondered for just an instant if there could be any military regulation, forbidding our soldiers to enter the church; and even as I wondered, the door opened and a boy in khaki stepped in—one out of all those hordes. He crossed himself, took a rosary out of his pocket, knelt, and began his prayers.

Thirty-thousand soldiers were in that town that day. Whatever else we are, I reflected, we are not a people of mystics.

But then I remembered the American soldier who had said that Belgium was a good enough whetstone for his bayonet. I remembered the rough, gloomy farmer who did not want to shirk his share of the world’s dirty work. Perhaps there are various kinds of mystics.

Once outside the church I turned to look up Madame Larconneur, the valiant market-gardener who had been one of my neighbors, a tired young war-widow, with two little children, whom I had watched toiling early and late, day and night, to keep intact the little property left her by her dead soldier husband. I had watched her, drawing from the soil of her big garden, wet quite literally by her sweat, the livelihood for her fatherless little girls. I wondered what the bombardment of the town had done to her and her small, priceless home.

I found the street, I found the other houses there, but where her little, painfully, well-kept house had stood was a heap of stones and rubble, and in the place of her long, carefully tended rows of beans and cabbages and potatoes, were shell-holes where the chalky barren subsoil streaked the surface, and where the fertile black earth, fruit of years of labor, was irrevocably buried out of sight. Before all this, in her poor, neat black, stood the war-widow with her children.

I sprang forward, horrified, the tears on my cheeks. “Oh, Madame Larconneur, how awful! How awful!” I cried, putting out both hands to her.

She turned a white, quiet face on me and smiled, a smile that made me feel infinitely humble. “My little girls are not hurt,” she said, drawing them to her, “and as for all this—why, if it is a part of getting other people’s homes restored to them”—her gesture said that the price was not too high.

The look in her sunken eyes took me for an instant up into a very high place of courage and steadfastness. For the first time that day, the knot in my throat stopped aching. I was proud to have her put her work-deformed hands in mine and to feel on my cheeks her sister’s kiss.