Only I never do anything quite as I ought to, and my capacity for getting into mischief is unlimited. I can't bear the level highways of Life, cut like a Route Nationale straight from point to point, white, steam-rollered, respectable, horrible. For me the by-ways and the lanes, the hedges smelling of wild roses and woodbine, or a-fire with berry and burning leaf, the cross-cuts leading you know not whither, but delightfully sure to surprise you in the end. What if the surprise is sometimes in a bog, in the mire, or in a thicket of furze? More often than not it is in Fairyland.
And so grant me your indulgence if I wander a little, loitering in the green meadows, plunging through the dim woods of experience. Especially as I am going to be good now and explain Bar and the refugees.
As I told you, there were some four thousand of them, from the Argonne, the Ardennes, Luxembourg, and many a frontier village such as Longuyon or Longwy. And Bar received them coldly. It dubbed them, without distinction of person, "ces sales émigrés," forgetting that the dirt and squalor of their appearance was due to adversity and not to any fault of their own. Forgetting, too, that it had very nearly been émigré itself. For the Germans came within five miles of it. From the town shells could be seen bursting high up the valley; the blaze of burning villages reddened the evening sky. Trains poured out laden with terrified inhabitants fearing the worst, all the hospitals were evacuated, and down the roads from the battle, from Mussey, from Vassincourt, from Laimont and Révigny came the wounded, a long procession of maimed and broken men. They lay in the streets, on door-steps, in the station-yard, they fell, dying, by canal and river bank. Kindly women, thrusting their own fear aside, ministered to them, the cannon thundering at their very door. And with the wounded came the refugees. What a procession that must have been. Women have told me of it. Told me how, after days—even weeks—of semi-starvation, lying in the open at night, exposed to rain and sun, often unable to get even a drink of water (for to their eternal shame many a village locked its wells, refusing to open them even for parched and wailing children), they found themselves caught in the backwash of the battle. To all the other horrors of flight was added this. Men, it might be their own sons, or husbands, or brothers, blood-stained remnants of humanity plodding wearily, desperately down the road, while in the fields and in the ditches lay mangled, encarnadined things that the very sun itself must have shuddered to look upon. Old feeble men and women fell out and died by the way, a mother carried her dead baby for three nights and three days, for there was no one to bury it, and the God of Life robed himself in the trappings of Death as he gathered exhausted mother and new-born babe in his arms.
And so they came to Bar. In the big dormitories of the Caserne Oudinot straw was laid on the floor, and there they were lodged, some after a night's rest to set wearily forth again, others to remain in the town, for the tide had turned and the Germans were in retreat.
There must have been an unusually large number of houses to let in Bar before the war; many, we know, had been condemned by the authorities, and, truth to tell, I don't wonder at it. "House to let" did not imply, as you might suppose, that it was untenanted, especially if the house was in the rue des Grangettes, or rue Oudinot, rue de Véel, or rue de l'Horloge. The tenants paid no rent. They had been in possession for years, possibly centuries. They were as numerous as the sands of the sea-shore, and they had all the élan, the joie de vivre, the vivacity and the tactical genius of the French nation. They welcomed the unhappy refugees—I was going to say vociferously, remembering the soldier who, billeted in a Kerry village, complained that the fleas sat up and barked at him.
The rooms, though dirty, unsanitary and swarming with the terror that hoppeth in the noonday (there were other and even worse plagues as well), were a shelter. The war would be over in three months, and one would be going home again. In the meantime one could endure the palliasse (a great sack filled with straw and laid on the floor, and on which four, five, seven or even more people slept at night), one could cower under the single blanket provided by the town, not undressing, of course; that would be to perish. One could learn to share the narrowest of quarters with nine, eleven, even fifteen other people; one could tighten one's belt when hunger came—and it came very often during those first hard months—but one could not endure the hostile looks of the tradespeople, and the sales émigrés spit at one in the streets.
The refugees, however, had one good friend; monsieur C., an ex-mayor of the town and a man whose "heart was open as day to melting charity," made their cause his own. And perhaps because of him, perhaps out of its own good heart, the town, officially considered, did its best for them. It gave them clean straw for their palliasses; it saw that no room was without a stove; it established a market for them when it discovered that the shopkeepers, exploiting misery, were scandalously overcharging for their goods; it declined to take rent from mothers with young families; and it appointed a doctor who gave medical attention free.
All very good and helpful, but mere drops in the bucket of refugee needs. You see the war had caught them unawares, and at first, no doubt for wise military reasons, the authorities discouraged flight. People who might have packed up necessaries and escaped in good order found themselves driven like cattle through the country, the Germans at their heels, the smallest of bundles clutched under their arms, and the gendarmes shouting "Vîte, Vîte, Depêchez-vous, depêchez-vous," till reason itself trembled in the balance.
Some, too, had remembered the war of Soixante-Dix, when the Prussians, marching to victory, treated the civilians kindly. "They passed through our village laughing and singing songs," old women have told me. Some atrocities there were, even then; but, compared with those of the present war, only the spasmodic outbursts of boyhood in a rage.
Consequently, flight was often delayed till the last moment, delayed till it was too late, and, caught by the tide, some found themselves prisoners behind the lines. Those who got away saved practically nothing. Sometimes a few family papers, sometimes the bas de laine, the storehouse of their savings, sometimes a change of linen, most often nothing at all.