Well ... we are not Boches!]
In fact, it seemed appalling, as I learned from day to day the problems for which I was myself responsible in Canizy. Not the least of these was its mayor. Unlike his confrère at B——, M. Thuillard had not fled his property until forced to do so with the rest of the villagers immediately prior to the Retreat of 1917. During the occupation, he kept his store as usual. And even though his horses and cattle, his fat rabbits and plump chickens, were requisitioned by the Germans, they say that he was paid for them. To see him, however, housed in a miserable hut, with a dirt floor so uneven that the very chairs looked tipsy; to hear the complaints of his querulous wife, and the references of his daughter to their former comfort, was calculated to enlist one’s sympathy. Mme. Thuillard was ill, and he was lame, and the daughter’s husband was a prisoner, and they had lost heavily, because they had the most to lose. All this they told me over the saucerless cups of black coffee which they offered me “out of a good heart.”
But when I considered the Mayor’s duty to his village, my own heart hardened. Here is the entry I find in my notebook on my first survey of Canizy. “Canizy, dependence of Hombleux, Thuillard, Oscar, in charge. Curé of Voyennes has charge of the children; 4 k. away. No church, no school, no bread, no water fit to drink.” There was something, of course, in the Mayor’s own contention that the village had been forgotten; and one could understand why the Curé came only to burials when one saw him,—so ill he looked. But in M. Thuillard’s barn were two stout horses, and two carts stood before his door. On his own business, he could travel. “Why, then,” I inquired, “has he not fetched the bread supply from Hombleux to which the village is entitled?” “Because he has nothing to gain,” and the good wife I interrogated shrugged her shoulders and laughed. “Look you,” she continued, “M. Thuillard is rich; 26 kilos of money he buried, and it is not in sous.” This rumour, which gave the one-legged Mayor something of the air of a land pirate, I heard on all sides. Even the school teacher of Hombleux repeated it; and her husband, an officer, nodded his head to emphasize his “Oui, c’est vrai.”
Of one of our mayors, however, I would like to record nothing but praise. Widow of a soldier, left with two little girls, and absolutely no other possession in the world, she ruled our home village at the Château with justice and dignity. She never complained. When at last the baraque on the ruins of her farm was completed, all except the fitting of the glass in the windows, she insisted on moving in so that we could make use of the space she vacated in our basse-cour. I met her one bitter evening shortly afterward, as I was returning from Canizy. “Is it not cold in the baraque, Madame?” I asked. “Oh, yes,” she replied, “but what would you? It is so good to be at home!”
CHAPTER IV
O CRUX, AVE
As the aeroplanes fly, Canizy is perhaps three miles from the Château, or reckoned in time, half an hour by motor and an hour on foot. But by either route, one turns into the village at the stark Calvary I have already mentioned, with its half obliterated inscription: Ave, O Crux.
At our first visit, despite our novelty, Canizy regarded us with indifference. We seemed to them doubtless one more of those strange manifestations of the war which had stranded them among their ruins. Incurious, apathetic, they passed us with sidelong glances, and went their ways. But this did not last long. The “Dames Américaines” did such extraordinary things! They gathered and bought up rags; they played with the children; they walked fearlessly, even at night, across the fields to tend a sick baby; they slept—so the village children who had seen their encampment reported—on lits-soldats. The village waked to a new interest, and it came about that one expected to be waited for by the gaunt old cross.