Round about Bar-le-Duc

by Susanne R. Day

Yes, the Temple depressed me. Writing of it even now sends me into the profundities. It was all so cheerless, so dreary. In spite of the drop of Huguenot blood in my veins, the Temple and I are in nothing akin.

So let us away—away from the cold shadows and the cheerless creed, from the joyless God and the altar where Beauty lies dead, out into the boulevard where the trees are in leaf and the sun is shining, and where you may see a regiment go by in its horizon blue, or a battery of artillery with its camouflaged guns. Smoke is pouring from the chimney of the regimental kitchen, how jolly it looks curling up against the sky! and sitting by the driver of the third ammunition cart is a fox terrier who knows so much about war he will be a field-marshal when he lives again. Or we may see a team of woodcutters with the trunks of mighty trees slung on axles with great chains and drawn tandemwise by two or three horses, and hear the lame newsvendor at the corner near l'église St Jean calling his "Le Gé, le Pay-Gé, et le Petit-Parisien." Pronounce the g soft in Gé, of course, for it stands for Le Journal, and Pay-Gé for Le Petit Journal, all of which, together with the Continental Daily Mail, can be bought in Bar each day shortly after one o'clock unless the trains happen to be running late. During the Verdun rush they sometimes did not arrive at all.

A more musical cry, however, is that of the rabbit-skin man, "Peau de li-è-vre, Peau de li-è-vre," with a delicious lilting cadence on li-è-vre. I never discovered what he gave in exchange for the skins, but it was certainly not money.

Or the Tambour may take up his position at the corner of the street, the Tambour who swells with pride and civic dignity. A sharp tap-tap on his drum, the crowd collects and then in a hoarse roar he shouts his decree. It may concern mad dogs, or the water supply, or the day on which the allocation will be given to the emigrés, or it may be instructions how to behave during an air raid. Whatever it is, it is extremely difficult to make sense of it, as a motor-car and a huge military lorry are sure to crash past as he roars. But nothing disconcerts him. He shouts to his appointed end, and then with a swaggering roll on his drum marches off to the next street-crossing.

If luck is with us as we prowl along we may see—and, oh, it is indeed a vision!—our butcheress Marguerite dive into a neighbouring shop. Dive in such a connection is a poetic license, for if a description of Marguerite must begin in military phrase it must equally surely end in architectural. If on the front there were two strong salients, in the rear was a flying buttress. Marguerite—delicious irony of nomenclature—was exceedingly short, her hair was black as a raven's wing, her eyes were brown, and her cheeks, full-blown, were red as a ripe, ripe cherry. Over the salients she wore vast tracts of white apron plentifully besmeared with blood. So were her hands, so was her shop. It was the goriest butchery I have ever seen. As "Madame" (I shall tell you about her later on) did all our shopping, it was my fortune to visit Marguerite but once a month. Had I been obliged to visit her twice I should now be a vegetarian living on nuts.

Sometimes Marguerite cast aside the loathsome evidences of her trade and donned a smart black costume and a velvet hat with feathers in it. Then indeed she was the vision radiant, and never shall I forget meeting her on the boulevard one day when a covey of Taubes were bombing the town. Hearing something like a traction-engine snorting behind me, I turned and beheld Marguerite, whose walk was a fat, plethoric waddle, panting down the street. Every feather in her hat was stiff with fright, her mouth was open, she was breathing like a man under an anæsthetic, and—by the transcendental gods I swear it!—the buttress was flying. Marguerite RAN.

But she has a soul, though you may not believe it. She must have, for on the reeking offal-strewn table that adorns her shop she sets almost daily a vase of flowers. Perhaps in spite of her offensive messiness she doesn't really enjoy being a butcher.

During that first summer, although so near the Front, Bar was rather a quiet place where soldiers—Territorials?—in all sorts of odd uniforms drifted by (I once saw a man in a red cap, a khaki coat, blue trousers and knee-high yellow boots), while civilians went placidly about their affairs. Our flat was on the Boulevard de la Rochelle, and so on the high road to Verdun and St Mihiel, a stroke of good luck that sometimes interfered sadly with our work. For many a regiment went marching by, sometimes with colours flying and bands playing, gay and gallant, impertinent, jolly fellows with a quip for every petticoat in the street and a lightly blown kiss for every face at a window. But there were days when no light jest set the women giggling, days when the marching men were beaten to the very earth with weariness, stained with mud, bowed beneath their packs, eyes set straight in front of them, seeing nothing but the interminable road, the road that led from the trenches and—at last—to rest. Far away we could hear the ominous mutter of the guns, now rising, now falling, now catching up earth and air and sky into a wild clamour of sound. No need to ask why the men did not look up as they went by, no need to wonder at the strained, set faces. Perhaps in their ears as in ours there rang, high above the dull heavy burden of the cannon-song, the thin chanting of the priests who, so many desolate times a day, trod the road that leads to the Garden of Sacrifice where sleep so many of the sons of France. Ah, I can hear them now, and see the pitiful little processions winding down from every quarter of the town, the priest mechanically chanting, a few soldiers grouped round the coffin, a weeping woman or two following close behind. Of late—since Verdun, I think—the tiny guard of honour no longer treads the road, and the friendless soldier dying far from home goes alone to his last resting-place upon the hill.