Those Times and These

by Irvin S. Cobb

You think this state of apathy could not come to pass? Well, I know that it can, because with my own eyes I saw it coming to pass in the times while yet the war was new; while it yet was a shock and an affront to our beliefs; and you must remember that now I write of a much later time, when the world war had become the world's custom.

Also, could you have looked in upon the surviving remnant of the inhabitants of Courney, you would have had a clearer and fuller corroboration of the fact I state, because then you would have seen that here in this place lived only those who were too old or too feeble to care, or else were too young to understand.

All tallied, there were not more then than twenty remaining of two or three hundred who once had been counted as the people of this inconsequential village; and of these but two were individuals in what ordinarily would be called the prime of life.

One of these two was a French petty officer, whose eyes had been shot out, and who, having been left behind in the first retreat toward Paris, had been forgotten, and had stayed behind ever since. The other had likewise been a soldier. He was a Breton peasant. His disability seemed slight enough when he sustained it. A bullet bored across the small of his back, missing the spine. But the bullet bore with it minute fragments of his uniform coat; and so laden with filth had his outer garments become, after weeks and months of service in the field, that, with the fragments of cloth, germs of tetanus had been carried into his flesh also, and lockjaw had followed.

Being as strong as a bullock, he had weathered the hideous agonies of his disease; but it left him beset with an affliction like a queer sort of palsy, which affected his limbs, his tongue, and the nerves and muscles of his face.

Continually he twitched all over. He moved by a series of spasmodic jerks, and when he sought to speak the sounds he uttered came out from his contorted throat in slobbery, unintelligible gasps and grunts. He was sane enough, but he had the look about him of being an idiot.

Besides these two there were three or four very aged, very infirm men on the edge of their dotage; likewise some women, including one masterful, high-tempered old woman and a younger woman who wept continuously, with a monotonous mewing sound, for a husband who was dead in battle and for a fourteen-year-old son who had vanished altogether out of her life, and who, for all she knew, was dead too. The rest were children—young children, and a baby or so. There were no sizable youths whatsoever, and no girls verging on maidenhood, remaining in this place.

So this small group was what was left of Courney. Their houses being gone and family ties for the most part wiped out, they consorted together in a rude communal system which a common misery had forced upon them. Theirs was the primitive socialism that the cave dweller may have known in his tribe. As I say, their houses were gone; so they denned in holes where the cellars under the houses had been. Time had been when they fled to the shelter of these holes as the fighting, swinging northward or southward, included Courney in its orbit.

Afterward they had contrived patchwork roofage to keep out the worst of the weather; and now they called these underground shelters home, which was an insult to the word home. Once they had had horse meat to eat—the flesh of killed cavalry mounts and wagon teams. Now perforce they were vegetarians, living upon cabbages and beets and potatoes which grew half wild in the old garden patches, and on a coarse bran bread made of a flour ground by hand out of the grain that sprouted in fields where real harvests formerly had grown.

The more robust and capable among the adults cultivated these poor crops in a pecking and puny sort of way. The children went clothed in ancient rags, which partly covered their undeveloped and stunted bodies, and played in the rubbish; and sometimes in their play they delved too deep and uncovered grisly and horrible objects. On sunny days the blind soldier and the palsied one sat in the sunshine, and when it rained they took refuge with the others in whichever of the leaky burrows was handiest for them to reach. If they walked the Breton towed his mate in a crippling, zigzag course, for one lacked the eyes to see where he went and the other lacked the ability to steer his afflicted legs on a direct line.