From Place Tribel, from innumerable coigns of vantage, the view is equally beautiful, though not, I think, quite so extensive. Which, perhaps coupled with her aggressively Teutonic name, accounted for the suspicious looks cast last winter upon Madame Schneider. A spy! Oh, yes, a devout Catholic always at the Mass, but a spy. Did she not leave Bar on the very morning of the big air raid, returning that night? And didn't every one know that she signalled by means of lights movements of troops and of aeroplanes to other spies hidden on the hill beyond Naives? The preposterous story gained ground. Then one day we thrilled to hear that Madame Schneider had been arrested. She disappeared for a while—we never knew whether anything had been proved against her—and then when we had forgotten all about her I met her in the Place St Pierre. She was coming out of the church, but she bowed her head and passed by.
Perhaps, after all this, you won't care to visit her? But then you will go down to your grave sorrowing, because you will never see those Boiseries, nor that view.
Other things beside the beauty of the town began to creep into prominence too, of course, and among them the supreme patience and courage of our refugee women. In circumstances that might have crushed the strongest they fought gamely and with few exceptions conquered. I take my hat off to the French nation. We know how its men can fight, some day I hope the world will know how its women can endure. Remember that they were given no separation allowances until January 1915, and the allowance when it did come was a pittance. One franc twenty-five centimes per day for each adult, fifty centimes a day for each child up to the age of sixteen; or, roughly speaking, 1s. a day and 4½d. per day. What would our English women say to that? It barely sufficed for food. Indeed, as time went on and prices rose I dare to say it did not even suffice for food. The refugee woman, possessed of not one stick of furniture—except in the case of farmers who were able to bring away some household goods in their carts—of not one cup or plate or jug or spoon, without needles, thread, or scissors, without even a comb, and all too often without even a change of linen, had to manage as best she could. That she did manage is the triumph of French thrift and cleverness in turning everything to account. We heard of them making duvets by filling sacks with dried leaves; one woman actually collected enough thistle-down for the purpose. They clung desperately to their standards, they would trudge miles to the woods in order to get a faggot for their fire, they took any and every kind of work that offered, they refused to become submerged.
And gradually they began to assume individuality. Families and family histories began to limn themselves on the brain as did the life of the streets, things as well as people.
Some of these histories I must tell you later on; to-night, for some odd reason, little Mademoiselle Froment is in my mind. She was not a refugee, but I owe her a debt of eternal gratitude, for when I fled to her immediately on arrival she condoled with me in my sartorial afflictions and promptly made me garments in which without shame I could worship the Goddess of Reason. Later on the uniform was chopped up and re-made, becoming wearable, but never smart. Even French magic could not accomplish that.
Poor little Mademoiselle Froment, so patient with all my ignorances, my complete inability to understand the value of what she called "le mouvement" of my gown, and my hurried dips into Bellows as she volubly discursed of the fashions. Last summer when she was making me some more clothes she was sad indeed. Her only and adored brother, who had passed scatheless through the inferno at Verdun, was killed on the Somme.
"My hurried dips into Bellows." Does that mean anything, or does it sound like transcendental nonsense? Bellows, by the way, is not a thing to blow the fire with, it is a dictionary—a pocket dictionary worth its weight in good red gold. And to my copy hangs a tale. Can you endure a little autobiography?
During my week-end at Sermaize I heard more French than I had heard, I suppose, in all my life before, or at least I heard new words in such bewildering profusion that I really believe Bellows saved my life. I carried him about, I referred to him at frequent intervals. I flatter myself that with his aid I made myself intelligible even when discussing the technique of agriculture and other such abstruse subjects.
But it is Bellows' deplorable misfortune to look rather like a Prayer Book, or a Bible. And so it befell that when I had been some weeks at Bar a Sermaizian Relief Worker made anxious inquiries as to my character. "She seems such an odd sort of person because, though she reads her Bible ostentatiously in public, she smokes, and we once heard her say...." After all, does it really matter what they heard me say?
After which confession of my sins I must tell you about the Temple, the shrine of French Protestantism in Bar. There we stood up to pray, and we sat down to sing the most lugubrious hymns it has ever been my lot to listen to. The church is large, and the congregation is small. On the hottest day in summer it struck chill, in winter it was a refrigerator. The pastor, being mobilisé, his place was generally taken by an earnest and I am sure devout being, who having congratulated the present generation, the first time I went there, upon having been chosen to defend the cause of justice and of truth, proceeded to dwell with the most heartrending emphasis upon every detail of the suffering and sorrow the war—the defence upon which he congratulated us!—has caused. He spared us nothing. Not even the shell-riven soldier with white face upturned questioningly to the stars. Not even the fear-racked mother or wife to whom one day the dreaded message comes. Then when he had reduced every one to abysmal depression and many to silent pitiful tears, he cried, "Soyez des optimistes," and seemed to think that the crying would suffice. Why? Ah, don't ask me that! Perhaps the war is too big a thing for the preachers to handle. The platitudes of years have been drowned by the mutter of the guns and the long sad wail of broken, shattered humanity.