Round about Bar-le-Duc

by Susanne R. Day

The cold, too, was penetrating, it ate through their scanty clothes, it bit through flesh to the very bone. The stove was an irony, a tiny flame in a frozen desert. Every one was perished, Madame Malhomme not least of all, for, seeing her daughter shivering, she stripped off her only petticoat and forced her to put it on.

At night they lay in their clothes under their miserable blankets. (Bar-le-Duc is not a very large nor a very rich town, and in giving what it did to such numbers of people it showed itself generous indeed. In ordinary times its population is not more, and is probably less, than 17,000, so an influx of 4000 destitute refugees taxed it heavily.)

The unavoidable publicities of their existence filled the women with shame and dismay. Sleeping "comme des bêtes sur la paille,"[4] or, more often still, lying awake staring out into the unfriendly dark, what dreams, what memories must have been theirs! How often they must have seen the village, its cosy little homes, each with its garden basking in the sun, the river flowing by, and the great osier beds that were the pride of them all.

They seem to have lived very much to themselves, these sturdy artisans, rarely leaving their valley, and intermarrying to an unusual extent. You find the same names cropping up again and again: Jacquemot, Riot, or Malhomme. Like Quakers, every one seemed to be the cousin of every one else. And they were well-to-do. It is safe to presume that there was no poverty in the village. Their baskets were justly famous throughout France, and the average family wage was about £3 a week. In addition they had the produce of their garden, the inevitable pig being fattened for the high destiny of the soupe au lard, rabbits and poultry. If Heaven denied them the gift of physical beauty it had not been niggardly in other respects. Best of all, it gave them the gift of labour. In the spring pruning and tending the osier, then cutting it, and piling it into great stacks which had to be saturated with water every day during the hot weather, planting and digging in their gardens, looking after the rabbits and the pig, and in winter plying their trade. Life moved serenely and contentedly in Vaux-les-Palamies until the dark angel of destruction passed over it and brushed it with his wings.

The Basket-makers don't like the Boche; indeed, they entertain a reasonable prejudice against him. He foisted himself upon them, making their lives a burden to them; he was coarse, brutal and overbearing, he no more considered their feelings than he would those of a rotten cabbage-stalk thrown out upon the refuse-heap of a German town. He stayed with them for a week. When he went away he bequeathed them a prolific legacy. Madame Malhomme will tell you of it if you ask her—at least she will when she knows you well. She is not proud of it.

"Ah, qu'ils sont sales, ces Boches," she says with a shudder. She bought insecticide, she was afraid to look her neighbours in the face. It did not occur to her at first that her troubles were not personal and individual. Then one day she screwed up her courage and asked the question. The answers were all in the affirmative. No one was without.

So when news came that the Boche was returning, Vaux-les-Palamies girded up its loins and fled. Shells were falling on the village, so they dared not spend time in extensive packings; in fact, they made little if any attempt to pack at all. Madame's sister-in-law was wounded in the shoulder, and the wound, untended for days, began to crawl. Her description of it does not remind you of a rose-scented garden. It was thrust on me as a privilege. So was a view of the shoulder. The latter was no longer crawling. It was exquisitely white and clean, but it had a hole in it into which a child might drive its fist.

And so after much tribulation they found themselves in Bar-le-Duc, and theirs was the only instance that came under our notice of a village emigrating en masse, and settling itself tribally into its new quarters. Even the Mayor came with them, and it was he who eventually succeeded in getting a supply of osier and putting them into touch with a market again. But their activities are sadly restricted, and they make none of their famous baskets de fantaisie now, the osier being dear and much of it bad, so their profit is very, very small.

I was in Bar for some months before I met Madame Jacquemot. And then it was Madame B. who introduced me to her. Her mother, an old lady of eighty-two, had been in hospital; was now rather better, and back again with her family in the rue Maréchale. Would the Society give her sheets? As the dispenser of other people's bounty I graciously opined that it would, and calling on Madame Jacquemot, told her so. Her mother was startlingly like the old lady at No. 49, small, thin, wiry, and bird-like in her movements. She had had shingles, poor soul, and talked of the ceinture de feu which had scorched her weary little body. She talked of the Germans too. Ah, then you should have seen her! How her eyes flashed! She would straighten herself and all her tiny frame would become infused with a majesty, a dignity that transfigured her. Once a German soldier demanded something of her, and when she told him quite truthfully that she had not got it, he doubled his fist and dealt her a staggering blow on the breast. And she was such a little scrap of humanity, just an old, old woman with a brave, tender heart and the cleanest and honestest of souls. She got her sheets and a good warm shawl—I am afraid we took very special trouble with that paquet, choosing the best of our little gifts for her—and soon afterwards I went to see her again. As we sat in the dusky room while Madame Jacquemot told stories, describing the method of cultivating the osier, showing how the baskets are made, the old lady began to cough and "hem" and make fluttering movements with her hands. Madame Jacquemot, thickset and broad-beamed like most of her people—she had a fleshy nose and blue eyes, I remember, hair turning grey, a pallid, rather unhealthy complexion and a humorous mouth—got up, and going to an inner room returned almost immediately with a quaintly-shaped basket in her hands. The old lady took it from her and held it out to me.

"It is for you," she said. "And when you go home to England you will tell people that it was made for you by an old woman of eighty-two, a refugee, who was ill and in hospital for months. I chose the osier specially, there is not a bad bit in the basket. And it is long, long since I have made a basket. I haven't made one since we left home. But I wanted to make one for you because you have been kind to us."