Wounded and a Prisoner of War, by an Exchanged Officer

by Malcolm V. Hay

St Andrew's Day.—Captain Lloyd is very much worse. Mme. Buquet goes to see him every day at 2 P.M., carrying a note from me and a custard pudding made by Mme. Tondeur. There was never a more motherly soul than Mme. Tondeur. And there never was a cook so excellent and yet so good-tempered, so pestered with visitors in the kitchen, yet always smiling and with a kind word for each one. Wounded men able to hobble out of the Salle cinq, or down from the other wards upstairs, loved to sit in a corner of her kitchen and peel potatoes or wash dishes and listen to the day's gossip. What with nurses and orderlies, stray visitors from the town, soldiers on crutches, all congregating in the kitchen, which might have been the H.Q. of the hospital, it was indeed a wonder that Mme. Tondeur could produce such an excellent dinner.

When M. Vampouille, of his own idea and specially to please me, cured a piece of bacon à l'anglaise, Mme. Tondeur and I put our heads together over the cooking of bacon and eggs. The simple barbarity of English cooking is always puzzling to French people. My dish, which started on the range as bacon and eggs, arrived on the table as an omelette au jambon.

What a sordid thing is a boiled potato in comparison with "des pommes frites"! We had fried potatoes one day a week, on which occasion all available hands were turned on to the work of peeling and slicing, no unskilled labour, when wastage is not to be endured. For every ward there was a large dish piled high, golden, crisp, and scalding hot and appetising—good to take with one's fingers like fine pastry, very different from the soppy, flaccid, colourless British imitation.

Every morning Mme. Tondeur prepared the custard pudding in a small dish, which was then wrapped up in a napkin ready to be carried by Mme. Buquet to our poor friend at the Hôpital Civil. "Ah, mon Lieutenant," she used to say, "what a joy it is to do something to help, even if so little. I also have a son in the trenches, and I pray le bon Dieu to send him back to me, even with a leg or an arm less I would not complain. Si seulement je le savais comme vous!"

Here in England, far from the presence of war, it is impossible to realise the suffering of these unfortunate people in the North of France who have never been allowed to get news from the trenches, who will not know of the death of husband or son for months and years after. No correspondence is allowed even with neutral countries. Though the land under German occupation is a place of misery and desolation, it has one redeeming feature—there are no pseudo-conscientious objectors. German invasion and occupation of Britain would not be too high a price to pay for the extirpation of this national dry-rot.

One who has lived long months among these despairing people writes to say how hard it is for those outside the German zone to realise the misery of invasion. "Old men and little children work in the fields with neither horses nor oxen nor ploughs. In many places German soldiers plough and sow, desecrating the soil of France.... And when in France I hear it said that the war is without end, that the strain is too great, I think of those who live in the invaded districts, those who are exiled from France under the enemy yoke and yet do not despair, but wait with patient confidence for the hour of deliverance; perhaps they have some right to say the strain is hard to bear."

I do not envy the man, be he ploughman, starred tradesman, or merely possessed of a sickly conscience, who can apply for leave to stay at home, while old men and little children till the fields of Northern France without horses, oxen, or ploughs, under the hard rule of the Hun.

We were a sad party on that St Andrew's Day at the Hôpital 106. Mme. Buquet came in the afternoon rather later than usual to the little room, where the old Colonel and I sat playing piquet, bringing sad news from the Civil Hospital. Poor Captain Lloyd was not expected to live more than a few hours.

We sat silently while the twilight melted into darkness. When a friend is dying those that watch and busy themselves with small services can find therein some small consolation. But we, weighed down in mind, powerless to influence in any degree the inevitable order of fate, found the pattern of the universe a hard reading.

To die is unimportant and common to all, the only important thing is the manner of our leaving. Captain Lloyd, my friend whom I have never seen, showed how the spirit of a man can rise above the saddest catastrophe of war and throw a gleam of light on the apparently hopeless and senseless maze of human misery.