Round about Bar-le-Duc

by Susanne R. Day

"Ah, Mademoiselle, you do not know what I have suffered."

So Madame would settle herself to the tale, and that was the moment when ... when ... when doubt grew, then certainty, and "Half-a-league, half-a-league, half-a-league onward" hammered an accompaniment on the brain.

In the evening we sorted out our notes and made up our case papers. These latter should yield rich harvest to the future historian if they are preserved, and if the good God has endowed him with a sense of humour. He could make such delicious "copy" from them. For the individuality of the worker stamped itself upon the papers even more legibly than the biography of the case. There are lots of gems scattered through them, but the one I like best lies in the column headed Medical Relief, and runs as follows—

Aug. 26. Madame Guiot has pneumonia. Condition serious.

Aug. 31. Madame quite comfortable.

Sept. 2. Madame has died. (Nurse's initials appended.)

In the papers you may read that such and such a house is infested with vermin; that Mademoiselle Wurtz is said, by the neighbours, to drink; that Madame Dablainville is filthy and lives like a pig; that the life of Madame Hache falls regrettably below accepted standards of morality; and that Madame Bontemps, who probably never owned three pocket-handkerchiefs in her life, declares that she lost sixty pairs of handspun linen sheets, four dozen chemises, and pillow and bolster cases innumerable when the Germans burnt her home.

You may also read how Mademoiselle Rose Perrotin was nursing a sick father when the Boches took possession of her village; how the Commandant ordered her to leave, and how she, with tears streaming down her large fat face, begged to be allowed to remain. Her father was dying. It was impossible to leave him. But German Commandants care little for filial feelings. Mademoiselle Rose (a blossom withering on its stem) had a figure like a monolith but a heart of gold. Even though they shot her she would not go away. They did not shoot her. They quietly placed her on the outskirts of the village and bade her begone. Next day she crept back again. She prayed, she wept, she implored, she entreated. When a monolith weeps even Emperors succumb. So did the Commandant. A day, two days, passed, and then her father died. They must have been very dreadful days, but worse was to follow. No one would bury the dead Frenchman. She had to leave him lying there—I gathered, however, that a grave was subsequently dug for him in unconsecrated ground—and walk, and walk, and walk, mile after mile, kilométre after kilométre, longing to weep, nay, to cascade tears; but, "Figurez-vous, Mademoiselle. Ah, quelle misère. I had not got a pocket-handkerchief!"

That a father should die, that is Fate, but that one should not have a pocket-handkerchief!... She wept afresh because she had not been able to weep then, and I believe that I shall carry to my grave a vision of stout, monolithic, utterly prosaic Mademoiselle Rose toiling across half a Department of France weeping because she had no pocket-handkerchief in which to mourn for her honoured dead.

Or you may read of little André Moldinot, who was alone in the fields when he saw the Germans coming, and who ran away, drifting he doesn't know how to Bar-le-Duc, where he has remained in the care of kindly people, hearing no news of his family, not knowing whether they are alive or dead. Or of the old man, whose name I have forgotten—was it Galzandat?—who fought with the English in the Crimea, and who lived with fourteen other people (women and children) in a stifling hole in the rue Polval. Or of that awful room in the street near the Canal where thirty people ate and drank and slept and quarrelled a whole winter through—a room unspeakable in its dirt and untidiness. Old rags lay heaped on the floor, dirty crockery, potato, carrot and turnip peelings littered the greasy table, big palliasses strewed the corners, loathsome bedclothes crawling on them. On strings stretched from wall to wall clothes were drying (one inmate was a washerwoman), an old witch-like creature with matted, unkempt locks flitted about, and in the far corner, on the day I went there, two priests were offering ghostly counsel to a weeping woman.

Misery makes strange bedfellows, and the cyclone of war flung together people who, in ordinary circumstances, would have been far removed from one another's orbit. At first the good and the bad, the clean and the dirty, the thrifty and the drunken herded together, too wretched to complain, too crushed and despondent to hope for better things. But gradually temperament asserted itself, and one by one, as opportunity arose and their circumstances improved, the respectable ceased to rub elbows with the dissolute, and they found quarters of their own either through their own exertions or through the help of their friends. Monsieur C. and Madame B. (wise, witty, kindly Madame B.) were especially energetic in this respect.