We arrived here last night about dusk. The poilus as we passed stared at us as if we were so many lunatics. Rattentout is on the right bank of the Meuse, about six miles from the trenches. This means for one thing that you must carry a gas-mask with you wherever you go. One even sees the little children, what few of them are left, trudging about with small-sized masks slung over their shoulders. The Y. here is short of masks and as yet M.—the only canteen worker besides myself to come with the advance guard—and I have none. This morning when the Chief went out he hung his mask on a peg in the hall. “If anything happens,” he said to M. and me, “you two can settle it between you, which shall have it.”
Our home here is in a lordly mansion, evidently the Big House of the village. French officers were living here before we came. The regiment to which they belonged moving out just as we arrived, they graciously made over the house to us. The officers had started a vegetable garden in the back-yard and this they relinquished with deep regret, one young lieutenant fairly having tears in his eyes as he took a last survey of his rows of tiny lettuce and young cabbages.
Today is to be given over to house-cleaning, and getting settled. Tomorrow the troops are due to begin detraining at the two points Landrecourt and Dugny and we are to be there to serve them hot chocolate.
Last night we took our supper at the dingy little house next door, a surprisingly delicious meal, bread and butter, omelette, salad and cocoa. The house next door is one of the half-dozen or so in town still inhabited by civilians. The family consists of grandmother, mother and little girl of five; the husband is in the trenches. The child Pauline is half sick with a feverish cold. They could get no medicine, the mother fretted; we promised some from Bar-le-Duc. The house itself is painfully unkempt and dirty, yet Pauline is always fresh in a spotless white pinafore, her glossy hair immaculately brushed. This morning we went to the house next door again for bread and coffee.
“Did you sleep last night?” asked Madame.
“But yes,—and you?”
She shook her head. “I was afraid of the Boche aeroplanes. I could hear them overhead.”
“But I should think you would be used to them by now.”
“Ah! But that makes no difference!”
What consideration keeps her here, clinging to the very door-step of the war, as it were, hounded as she is, by terrors? Just the one reason, I suppose,—that she has nowhere else to go.