From one of these women, a lady named Mme. Duterque, who had left Arras with a small boy and girl, I heard the story of her experiences in the bombarded town. There were hundreds of women who had similar stories, but this one is typical enough of all those individual experiences of women who quite suddenly, and almost without warning, found themselves victims of the Invasion.
She was in her dressing-room in one of the old houses of the Grande Place in Arras, when at half-past nine in the morning the first shell burst over the town very close to her own dwelling-place. For days there had been distant firing on the heights round Arras, but now this shell came with a different, closer, more terrible sound.
"It seemed to annihilate me for a moment," said Mme. Duterque. "It stunned all my senses with a frightful shock. A few moments later I recovered myself and thought anxiously of my little girl who had gone to school as usual a few streets away. I was overjoyed when she came trotting home, quite unafraid, although by this time the shells were falling in various parts of the town."
On the previous night Mme. Duterque had already made preparations in case the town should be bombarded. Her house, like most of the old houses in Arras, had a great cellar, with a vaulted roof, almost as strong as a castle dungeon. She had stocked it with a supply of sardines and bread and other provisions, and as soon as she had her little daughter safe indoors again she took her children and the nurse down to this subterranean hiding-place, where there was greater safety. The cave, as she called it, was dimly lighted with a paraffin lamp, and was very damp and chilly, but it was good to be there in this hiding-place, for at regular intervals she could hear the terrible buzzing noises of a shell, like some gigantic hornet, followed by its exploding boom; and then, more awful still, the crash of a neighbouring house falling into ruins.
"Strange to say," said Mme. Duterque, "after my first shock I had no sense of fear, and listened only with an intense interest to the noise of these shells, estimating their distance by their sound. I could tell quite easily when they were close overhead, and when they fell in another part of the town, and it seemed to me that I could almost tell which of my friends' houses had been hit. My children, too, were strangely fearless. They seemed to think it an exciting adventure to be here in the great cellar, making picnic meals by the light of a dim lamp. My little boy amused himself by playing canes (hop-scotch), and my daughter was very cheerful. Still, after a little while we suffered. I had forgotten to bring down water or wine, and we also craved for something more comforting than cold sardines. In spite of the noise of houses falling into ruins—and at any moment mine might fall above my head—I went upstairs and began to cook some macaroni. I had to retreat in a hurry, as a shell burst quite close to my house, and for a moment I thought that I should be buried under my own roof. But I went up again in one of the intervals of silence, found the macaroni cooked to a turn and even ventured to peep out of doors. There I saw a dreadful sight. The whole of the Grande Place was littered with broken roofs and shattered walls, and several of the houses were burning furiously. From other parts of the town there came up great volumes of smoke and the red glare of flames."
For three days Mme. Duterque kept to her cellar. Unknown to herself, her husband, who had come from Boulogne to rescue her, was watching the battle from one of the heights outside the town, which he was forbidden to enter by the soldiers. On a Thursday morning she resolved to leave the shelter of her underground vault. News had been brought to her by a daring neighbour that the Germans had worked round by the railway station and might enter the town.
"I had no fear of German shells," she said, "but I had a great fear of German officers and soldiers. Imagine my fate if I had been caught by them, with my little daughter. For the first time I was filled with a horrible fear, and I decided to fly from Arras at all costs."
With her children and the nurse, she made her way through the streets, above which the shells were still crashing, and glanced with horror at all the destruction about her. The Hôtel de Ville was practically destroyed, though at that time the famous belfry still stood erect above the ruined town, chiming out the hours of this tragedy.
Mme. Duterque told me her story with great simplicity and without any self-consciousness of her fine courage. She was only one of those thousands of women in France who, with a spiritual courage beyond one's understanding, endured the horrors of this war. It was good to talk with them, and I was left wondering at such a spirit.
It was with many of these fugitives that I made my way back. Away in the neighbourhood of Hazebrouck the guns were still booming, and across the fields the outposts of French cavalry were waiting for the enemy.