CHAPTER VIII
VIGNETTES
The interesting thing about the various places where Waacs are housed, which I saw, is that no two of them were alike in atmosphere. I had rather dreaded much seeing of camps, but, as a matter of fact, though I saw two, they were totally unlike each other, while the other three places that I saw each had an aspect, a character, unlike the others. One was a convalescent home for Waacs, set amidst pine-trees, a house of deep wide stairs, airy rooms, long cushioned chairs, and flowers, where one might well be content to be just-not-well for a long time; the others were houses where those Waacs lived who were not in camps.
Four jaunty châlets, chalk-white in the sun, hung with painted galleries, face the rolling sand-dunes, behind them the sea, a darker blue than any of the shadows of land on such a high-keyed day. They are little pleasure-villas, these châlets, fancy erections for summer visitors, built in the days when this little Plage was a resort for Parisians playing at rusticity. Delicious artificial useless-looking creations, bearing apparently about as much relation to a normal house as a boudoir-cap does to a bowler. Yet they are charming as only little French pleasure-villas can be, and to the receptive mind it is their artificiality that makes such a delightful note of—well, not decadence, but dilettantism—in this rolling sandy place, where only the hand of Nature is to be seen all around, no town, no village even, impinging on the curving skylines, the very road up to their doors but a track in the sand.
In these villas live incongruous Waacs, their khaki-clad forms swing up the wooden stairs to the galleries, and lean from the windows, always open their widest, night and day. Less incongruous the stout boots and khaki inside, as, though the chintzes are bright and gay, there is an aspect of stern utility, combined with an austerity that somehow suits the blank sandiness of the surroundings. In each little scrubbed room are two beds, each—for the Waacs live in true Army fashion—with its dark grey blankets folded up at the head of the bare mattress; in the sick bay alone the beds are covered with bright blue counterpanes. In the recreation room and the Forewomen's Mess are easy chairs of wicker and flowers and pictures. It is all done as charmingly as it can be with a strict eye to suitability; it is community life, of course, but brought as nearly as possible to that feeling of individuality which makes a home with a small "h" instead of with the dreaded capital.
This other house was as great a contrast to the bare little châlets as it well could be. It also was at a Plage, it too had been built for pleasure, but for pleasure de luxe, not of simple bourgeois families. The wide hall with its polished floor, its great carved mantels, its dining-room with gleaming woods and glossy table and sparkling glass, its big lounge with tall windows, where the girls dance and play the piano—all was as different from the bleached scrubbed wood of the châlets as it well could be. Yet the spirit informing the whole was the same, the bedrooms as austere in essence even if they boasted carved marble-topped chests, and even here the Army had found things to improve, such as the making of paths at the back of the house of round tins sunk in the earth, and steps of tin biscuit boxes, ingenious arrangements to save getting your feet wet on a muddy day as you go in and out on the endless errands of domesticity. And, as I sat at lunch in the gleaming dining-room, where the wood fire burned on the wide stone hearth, I heard the girls practising for a musical play they were shortly to produce.