Those Times and These

by Irvin S. Cobb

The wreckage of rafters and beams and house furnishings provided abundant supplies of wood and for fires. By a kind of general assent, headship and authority were vested jointly in the old tempestuous woman and the blind man, for the reasons that she had the strongest body and the most resolute will, and he the keenest mind of them all.

So these people lived along, without a priest to give them comfort by his preaching; without a physician to mend their ailments; with no set code of laws to be administered and none to administer them. Existence for them was reduced to its raw elementals. Since frequently they heard the big guns sounding distantly and faintly, they knew that the war still went on. And, if they gave the matter a thought, to them it seemed that the war always would go on. Time and the passage of time meant little. A day was merely a period of lightness marked at one end by a sunrise and at the other by a sunset; and when that was over and darkness had come, they bedded themselves down under fouled and ragged coverlids and slept the dumb, dreamless sleep of the lower animals. Except for the weeping woman who went about with her red eyes continually streaming and her whining wail forever sounding, no one among them seemingly gave thought to those of their own kinspeople and friends who were dead or scattered or missing.

Well, late one afternoon in the early fall of the year, the workers had quit their tasks and were gathering in toward a common centre, before the oncoming of dusk, when they heard cries and beheld the crotchety old woman who shared leadership with the blinded man, running toward them. She had been gathering beets in one of the patches to the southward of their ruins; and now, as she came at top speed along the path that marked where their main street had once been, threading her way swiftly in and out among the grey mounds of rubbish, she held a burden of the red roots in her long bony arms.

She lumbered up, out of breath, to tell them she had seen soldiers approaching from the south. Since it was from that direction they came, these soldiers doubtlessly would be French soldiers; and, that being so, the dwellers in Courney need feel no fear of mistreatment at their hands. Nevertheless, always before, the coming of soldiers had meant fighting; so, without waiting to spy out their number or to gauge from their movements a hint of their possible intentions, she had hastened to spread the alarm.

“I saw them quite plainly!” she cried out between pants for breath. “They have marched out of the woods yonder—the woods that bound the fields below where the highroad to Laon ran in the old days. And now they are spreading out across the field, to the right and the left. Infantry they are, I think—and they have a machine gun with them.”

“How many, grandmother? How many of them are there?”

It was the eyeless man who asked the question. He had straightened up from where he sat, and stood erect, with his arms groping before him and his nostrils dilated.

“No great number,” answered the old woman; “perhaps two companies—perhaps a battalion. And as they came nearer to me they looked—they looked so queer!”

“How? How? What do you mean by queer?” It was the blind man seeking to know.

She dropped her burden of beetroots and threw out her hands in a gesture of helplessness.