On our own playground, perhaps, sometimes. Yet the children had to be encouraged to play. They might remember the words of the rondes which have lately become familiar to American children also through the illustrations of Boutet de Monville, but they no longer curtseyed as the beautiful gentlemen and the beautiful ladies should sur le pont d’Avignon. They no longer had books to read. A prayer book, a hymnal, sometimes the family records; these were all the literature saved in their mothers’ sacks of flight. But the play teacher draws our waifs of the war as if with a magic flute; even M. Lanne’s cows come trooping with the children, because the boy who herds them cannot come without. The babies come, with older sister nurses; and on the outskirts may be seen bent grandfather or grandmother, forgetting sorrow for the moment, in watching the romping groups. And even after the store automobile, stripped of its merchandise, honks persistently its desire to be off, the joy of that brief hour is perpetuated in the books that the teacher leaves behind. Who so proud then as the boy or girl singled out to be the owner of a book for a whole week? Contes des Fées, petites histoires, the rondes themselves; they are treasures comparable to fairy gold. Yet reading never seems to interfere with duty; Raymond, or Désiré, or Adrien, you are likely to meet them as usual en route to Voyennes for apples, or returning from Ham with loaves of bread hanging, like life preservers, about their necks; they pasture the few cows; they feed the rabbits; they bring wood and dig coal,—they are the men of Canizy.
Such grow to be the soldiers of whom France is proud; those older children, the poilus, whom all the world has come to know. Long ago Julius Cæsar knew them also, and Hirtius Pansa wrote of them: “They make war with honour, without deceit and without artifice.” Brought up to adore la Patrie, singing of death, as of glory, the little soldier of France marches to-day as did the child in the Children’s Crusade. Across three thousand miles I hear his refrain:
Point de chagrin,
Point de chagrin,
Il a sa gourde, il a sa pipe,
C’est un gaillard toujours en train.
CHAPTER XII
M. L’AUMÔNIER
In Canizy, one found always something new. It might be an obus, or a soldier en permission, or a family réfugiée, or a baraque. I learned to expect the unexpected. Having carefully negotiated with M. Lanne for certain timbers and chicken wiring which formed the basis for a roof of which I had need, I was prepared to see that they had vanished overnight, and to express neither surprise nor indignation when I was told that they were transformed into the foundation for Mme. Picard’s baraques. Having left glass, diamond cutter, putty, brads, and a list of those who needed the panes, I was not discouraged when week after week went by without M. Augustin’s cutting them. The fact that M. Noulin had brought the materials over in his cart, and held them on his premises, was doubtless reason enough why M. Augustin stayed his hand. At all events, it seemed wiser to leave the solution of this problem to the village; and the last I knew, it hinged on the return of a soldier en permission, a glazier by trade. He, all the world assured me, would actually out the glass!