A community so homogeneous in its interests, was bound to link itself intimately by marriage as well. The intricacies of the family trees of Canizy were a source of constant mental effort, as one discovered that Mme. Gense was really Mme. Butin, that is, she had at least married M. Butin, and that Germaine Tabary was so called because she was living with her maternal grandparents, whereas her father’s name again was Gense, and her mother was known by the sounding title of Mme. Gense-Tabary. “But why these distinctions?” one continually demanded upon unravelling the puzzles for purposes of record. “Because, otherwise, one would become confused,” was the reply.
—Ils sont là!!!
[They are over there!!!]
Such, peaceful, prosperous, yet stirred by family bickerings enough to spice its days, was Canizy before the war.
Canizy to-day numbers just one hundred souls, fifty being children and fifty adults. It was in March, 1917, that the village was blotted out. Two years and a half of German occupation preceded that event. In every house German soldiers had been billeted; one sees now on the door posts the number of officers and men allotted, or the last warning, perhaps, in regard to concealed fire-arms. For two years and a half the inhabitants had been prisoners, for the same length of time there had been no school and no mass. Yet the villagers do not speak unkindly of their conquerors. They fared better than many, for they fell to the lot of the Bavarians, who are reputed to be more humane than the Prussians. Besides, Picardy is inured to invasions, which for centuries have swept across her plains. By them, fortitude has been inbred.
But one day last spring, the Bavarians filed away northward. Prussians succeeded them. Quickly came the order for the villagers to evacuate their homes. At the same time, the able-bodied, men and women, youths and maidens, were seized and held. Weeping mothers, tottering grandfathers, and helpless children,—the remnant,—were driven forth with what scant possessions they could snatch, to the town of Voyennes, four kilometres away. There, huddled with the like refugees of other villages, they remained ten days. From it they could see the ascending smoke, black by day and red by night, and hear the detonations which marked the destruction of their homes. They returned to the blackened ruins,—as, in the words of a historian of the Thirty Years’ War, their ancestors had done. “Les paysans,” he says, “qui avaient survécu à tant de désastres étaient accourus dans leurs villages aussitôt que les ennemis s’éloignèrent de ce champ de carnage. Mais, sans ressources d’aucune sorte, sans habitations, sans chevaux, sans bestiaux, sans instruments de culture, sans grains pour la semence, que pouvaient-ils faire? Mourir——”[3]
But our villagers, though equally pillaged in the year 1917, were not doomed to death. The Germans had retreated before the advancing French and British armies, and the ruins of Canizy ere long were held by Scottish troops.