Blanquart was not at the Mairie, he was measuring fields for an “expertise,” a professional assessment.
Leaving the cart on the road, Madeleine lifted her best skirt and stepped over the clods to him. He was busy and interested in his job, and didn’t want to be dragged home to the Mairie. At her suggestion he wrote the certificate on the next fair page of the big square pocket-book he was covering with figures. He was not very curious about the matter. The Vanderlyndens were the best-known family in the parish. The loss of the two boys was no secret. He was asked every day for the endless certificates, questionnaires, lists and returns by which France is governed: “You are going to join the Society of the Friends of the Prisoners of War, I suppose?”
Madeleine let him suppose, only murmuring that one did what one could in such times.
He wrote: “I, Anastasius Amadeus Blanquart, Secretary of the Mairie of the Commune of Hondebecq, certify that Vanderlynden, Jerome, cultivator, has male relatives mobilized for military service,” and signed.
“Now you’ll want the official stamp. Ask my little Cécile. She knows where it is.”
“Perfectly. And we thank you many times.”
“There is nothing. Always at your service.”
“Good day, Monsieur Blanquart.”
Sure enough, at the schoolhouse, also in all Flemish villages the office of the Mairie, little Cécile Blanquart was proud to affix the official stamp, with its “République Française, Commune de Hondebecq” inscription in violet ink.
So back went the old gig, down the same road it had just come. In the distance rumbled the battle. Each side of the hedgeless road with its grassy stone pavé and “dirt” paths, the rich heavy lands gleamed with moisture in their nakedness, in the pastures the last leaves of the elms fluttered down upon thick grass that soaked and soaked. Flanders, the real Flanders, the strip of black alluvial soil between the chalky downs of France and the gravelly or stony waste border where the Germanic peoples begin, was preparing herself for another fruitful year, as she had, time out of mind, in war and in peace, paying as little attention to this war as to any other of the long series she had seen. And across her breast, on that Route Nationale that a French Emperor had built with stone from Picardy, went old Vanderlynden, child of her soil, inheritor of her endless struggle, and Madeleine, the newer, more self-conscious, better-educated generation, perhaps even more typical of her country than her father, showing the endless adaptability of her mixed border race, absorbing the small steps of human progress, and emerging even more Flemish than before.