“Eat them!” roared the peasants, “but those things are not good to eat,” and the notion struck them as so droll that their guffaws still came back to me long after they had turned a bend in the highway. Every Frenchman I approached on the subject held the same view. The two miners traveled for hours with a gnawing hunger, or invaded lonely vineyards at imminent risk of capture by the rural gendarmerie, to eat their fill of half-ripe grapes, sour and acrid. But when I, from my safe position outside the hedge, held up a heavily-laden bush, their answer was always the same: “Ah, non, mon vieux. Not any for me.” Obviously I could not regret the bad repute in which the fruit was held, for when hunger overtook me I had but to stop and pick my dinner, and except for the few sous spent for bread and wine, my rations from Fontainebleau to the Swiss frontier cost me nothing.
My tramp continued past Nevers and Moulin, down through the department of Allier to the city of Roanne, stretching along both banks of the upper Loire. A few kilometers beyond, the highway began a winding ascent of the first foothills of the Alps. Even here the cultivation bespoke the thrift of the French peasant. Far up the rugged hillside stretched terraced farms, each stone-faced step of the broad stairways thickly set with grapevines. Higher still a few wrinkled patches in sheltered ravines gave sustenance to the most sturdy toilers. Here it is that may be seen the nearest prototype of that painful figure known far and wide, that stolid being who leans on his mattock, gazing helplessly away into meaningless space; nearest, because his exact original no longer dwells in the fields of France: he has moved southward. Down a glen below the highway the trunk of a tree, broken off some six feet above the ground and with a huge knot on one side, stood out in silhouette against the distant horizon. But for a crudeness of outline one might have imagined the stump a clumsy, ragged peasant, with a child astride his shoulders. I stood surveying this figure, wondering what forces of the elements could have given a mere tree so strange a likeness to a human form, when it suddenly started, moved, and strode away across the gully.
The highway continued to climb. The patches of tilled ground gave way to waving forests where sounded the twittering of birds, and here and there the cheery song of the woodsman or shepherd boy. Some magic there is inherent in the clear air of mountain heights that calls forth song from those that dwell among them.
A typical French roadster who has tramped the highways of Europe for thirty years
The two French miners with whom I tramped in France. Notice shoe laces carried for sale
With sunset came the summit. The road began to descend, the forests fell away, the tiny fields appeared once more, and the ballad of the mountaineer was silent. A colony of laborers, engaged in the construction of a reservoir, gave me greeting from the doors of their temporary shacks, and lower still I turned in at an auberge half-filled with a squad of soldiers.
He is an interesting figure, the French conscript. In his make-up is none of the boisterous braggadocio of the American trooper and of Tommy Atkins, never that scorn for civilians so often characteristic of the voluntary, the mercenary soldier. He feels small inclination to boast of his wisdom even in military matters, for well he knows that the jolly innkeeper may be able to tell a tale of his own days sous le drapeau that makes the conscript’s favorite story weak and insipid by comparison. Then, too, it is hard to be boastful when one is sad at heart; and the French conscript is not happy. To him conscription is a yoke, akin to disease and death, which fate has fastened upon the children of men. He dreads its coming, serves under unexpressed protest, and sets it down in his book of life as three years utterly lost.
There is, indeed, a note of pessimism everywhere prevalent among the masses of France. It is not a universal note, not even a constant one: loud-voiced “calamity-howlers” are less in evidence than in our own optimistic land. But even amid the merry chatter there hovers over every gathering of French workmen a gloominess, an infestivity that speaks of lost hope, of fatalistic despair. Briefly and unconsciously, a craftsman of chance acquaintance summed up this inner feeling of his class: “Ah, mon pauvre pays,” he sighed, “elle n’est plus ce qu’elle était.”