Round about Bar-le-Duc

by Susanne R. Day

Consequently, when people tell me they go to the War Zone in singleness of purpose, anxious only to succour the stricken, I take leave to be incredulous. The thing is impossible. Every one who isn't a slug likes to go to the War Zone, every one who isn't an animated suet-pudding wants to see a battlefield, or a devastated village, or a trench, or a dug-out, and we all want souvenirs de la guerre, shell cases, bits of bomb or shrapnel, the head of the Crown Prince on a charger, or the helmet of a Death's Head Hussar. And do we not all love adventure, and variety—unless fear has made imbeciles of us, and the chance of distinguishing ourselves, of winning the Legion of Honour in a shell-swept village, or the Croix de Guerre under the iron rain of a Taube?

I believe we do, though few of us confess it. We prefer to look superior, to pretend we "care nothing for all that," and so I cry, "Hypocrites! Search your hearts for your motives and you will find them as complex as the machinery that keeps you alive."

Search mine for my motive and you will find it compounded of many simples, but of their nature and composition it is not for me to speak. Has it not been written that I am a modest woman?

And methinks indifferent honest. That is why I am going to tell you about Villers-aux-Vents. You must not labour under a delusion that life was all hard work and no play in the War Zone.

It was no high-souled purpose that led us to Villers. It was just curiosity, common curiosity. Later on we spent a night (Saturday night, of course) at Greux, and visited the shrine of Jeanne D'Arc at Domremy, but that was not out of curiosity. It was hero-worship coupled with a passion for historical research.

And we planned to go to Toul and Nancy. Now when people make plans they should carry them out. The gods rarely send the dish of opportunity round a second time, and when the Carnet d'Étranger chained us body and soul to l'autorité compétente militaire there was no second time. The dish had gone by; it would never come again.

Wherefore I am wrath with the gods, and still more wrath with myself, for I have not seen Nancy, and I have not seen Toul, and if the old grognard had been in good humour I might even have gone to Verdun. Maddening, isn't it? Especially as then, when our work was only, so to speak, getting into its stride, we might have virtuously spared the time. Later on when it increased, and when we bowed to a Directrice who has found the secret of perpetual motion, we worked Saturday, Sundays and all sometimes; but in 1915 we were not yet super-normal men. We could still enjoy a holiday. And so we decided to go to Villers-aux-Vents. To go before winter had snatched the gold mantle from the limbs of autumn, to go while yet the sun was high and the long day stretched before us, languorous, beautiful.

And the manner of our going was thus, by train to Révigny at 7.20 a.m., and then on foot over the road.

Now it is written that if you get into a westward-bound omnibus train at Bar-le-Duc, in fulness of time you will arrive at Révigny. The train will be packed with soldiers, so of course you travel first-or second-class, thereby incurring a small measure of seclusion and a larger one of boredom. In Class Three it is never dull. You may be offered cakes or a hunk of bread which has entered into unwilling alliance with sausage, you may be invited to drink the health of the Allies in rank red wine, or you may be offered a faithful heart, lifelong adoration and an income of five sous a day. Or (but for this you must keep your ears wide open, for the train makes un bruit infernale, and speech is a rapid, vivacious, eager thing in France) you may hear tales of the war, episodes of the trenches, comments upon the method of the Boche, things many of them hardly fit for publication but drawn naked and quivering from the wells of life.

Unless he has been refreshing a vigorous thirst, the poilu is rarely unmanageable. He is the cheekiest thing in the universe, he has a twinkle in his eye that can set a whole street aflame, and he is filled with an accommodating desire to go with you just as far as you please. Nevertheless, he can take a hint quicker than any man I know, and his genius in extricating himself from a difficult situation is that of the inspired tactician.