A Village in Picardy

by Ruth Gaines

Before my arrival, the routeing of our three cars had already been decided. Three times a week the Dispensary was held at Canizy, and once a week, on Monday, our largest truck, turned into a peddler’s cart with shining tinware, sabots, soap, fascinators, stockings and other articles of clothing, made there its first stop. On the seat back of the driver and the storekeeper, or if there were not room for a seat, on top of the hampers, went also the children’s department, consisting of two members. While the mothers, grandmothers and elder sisters gathered at the honk of the horn about the truck, the children, equally eager, followed the teachers to an open field for games. Or, did it rain, I have seen them of all ages from fourteen years to fourteen months, huddled in a shed, listening open-mouthed to the same tales our children love, which begin, in French as in English, with “Once upon a time.”

But when, after a three-days’ inspection of our outlying domain, I asked our Director for the village of Canizy, I was given charge of all branches of our work there. This meant not interference but close coöperation with the other members of the Unit already occupied with its problems. Of all our villages, Canizy was the most beloved, not, perhaps, because its need was greatest, but because its isolation was most complete. No one could do enough for it. Were a sewing-machine to be repaired, the head of our automobile department, a mechanical genius, spent hours making it “marcher.” The doctors, with their own hands, took time to scrub the children’s heads. They came to me with every need that they found on their rounds, with the neighbourhood gossip, and with kindly advice. The teachers gave me the names of children requiring shoes; and, as the work developed, asked in turn for recommendations in regard to opening a children’s library. To the farm department, I made requests that we buy largely of fodder and vegetables, until we had literally hundreds of kilos of pumpkins, turnips and carrots bedded for us in the cellars, on call. To this department went also requisitions that Mme. Cordier be supplied with a pig, or M. Noulin with five hens, or Mme. Gense with a goat. Or, were there shipments of furniture to be delivered, one called again on the automobile department, which even through the drifts and cold of winter, kept at least one of its engines thawed and running every day.

—C’est un boche ce blessé là?

—Non, M’sieu le Major, c’est le cheval du capitaine.

[Is that wounded man a Boche?

No, Major, he’s the captain’s horse.]

It will be seen that our scheme of material relief followed closely that laid down by the Government. Our method was simple: where the Government supplies were on hand, or adequate, we used them; whatever was lacking, even up to kitchen ranges costing three hundred francs, we attempted to supply. In this we had not only our own resources to draw on, but to a limited extent, those of the American Fund for French Wounded, and to a much larger extent, those of the Red Cross. In a huge truck came the goods from the Red Cross, driven by a would-be aviator who, when asked his name, replied bashfully, “Call me Dave.” “Dave” was frequently accompanied by another youth of like ambition, named Bill. And I will say that they handled their truck as if it were already a flying-machine. The first consignment of hundreds of sheets and blankets, the truck and the driver, all were overturned in our moat. It took a day to get them out. The next mishap was a head-on collision with our front gate. But the last, which I learned of just before I left, will best illustrate their imaginative turn of mind. Bill, the intrepid, having attempted to traverse a ploughed field, left his machine there mired to the body, and spent the night with us. He seemed a trifle apprehensive as to how his “boss” would take this exploit. Willing workers, however, were Dave and Bill. Unannounced, they came exploding up the driveway under orders to work for us all day. And many a time have we risked our necks with them, perched on the high front seat, careering along at what seemed like sixty miles an hour.

But for my part, my usual mode of travel was on foot, and my orbit bounded by the Château, Hombleux and Canizy. In any case, even though I went over by motor, I was dropped at my village and walked back across the fields. As I grew better acquainted with the villagers, I came and went at will, spending almost all the daylight hours—few enough in winter—with them. Every one has heard of the mud in the trenches. The clayey soil of our district, admirably adapted to the making of bricks, lends itself equally well to the making of mud. Continually churned by camions and marching troops, it becomes on the highways of the consistency of a purée, through which, high-booted and short-skirted, one wades. It is therefore a relief to turn off by the footpath beyond Hombleux, though it plunges for the first quarter of a mile through a bog. Of a sunny day, birds sing in the hollow, wee pinsons perched on ragged hedges answering one another with fairy flutes. Farther on, yellow-breasted finches dart over patches of mustard as yellow, and sing as they fly. Raucous crows, whose gray-barred wings make them far more decorative than ours, and the even more strikingly marked magpies, darken in great flocks the newly ploughed and seeded wheatfields which in increasing areas border the path. A sudden movement sends them whirring like a black and white cloud against the sky. Often above them courses a flier of another sort, a scout aeroplane probably, holding its way from the aviation fields in our rear, to the front. It rasps the heavens like a taut bow; by listening to the beat of its engines one can determine whether it be French or Boche. For Boche planes come over us frequently, on bombing raids; and sometimes one does not have to look or listen long to know that an air battle is taking place overhead. The sharp reports; the white puffs of our guns, the black plumes of the enemy’s; the glint of the sunlight on careening sails high up in the blue,—it all passes like a panorama, of which we do not know the end. Other sounds also are familiar to us on our plain, when from the Chemin des Dames, or St. Quentin, or Cambrai, the great guns boom. Like surges they shake and reverberate; and when, as often happens, the sea-fog rolls in from the Channel, one can well fancy them the breakers of a mighty storm. So they are, out there, on our front, where the living dyke of the poilus holds back the German flood.