Round about Bar-le-Duc

by Susanne R. Day

From Monsieur C., who used to assure us that we dispensed our gifts with a délicatesse that was parfait, and Madame K. showering baskets of luscious raspberries, to the poorest refugee who begged us to drink a glass of wine with her, or who deeply regretted her inability to make some little return for the help we had given her, they outvied one another in refuting the age-old libel on the character of the French.

"But," cries some acidulated critic, "you would have us believe that the poilu is a blue-winged angel, and the civilian too perfect to live." Far from it. The poilu is only a man, the civilian only human, and I have yet to learn that either—be he man or human—is perfect any more than he, or his equivalent is perfect even in this perfect English island in the sea. There are soldiers who.... There are civilians who....

I guess the devil doesn't inject original sin into them with a two-pronged hypodermic syringe any more than he injects it into us. The good and the evil sprout up together, or are they the spiritual Siamese twin that is born of every one of us to be a perpetual confusion to our minds, a bewilderment to our bodies and a most difficult progeny to rear at the best of times? For as surely as you encourage one of the twins the other sets up a roar, sometimes they howl together, sometimes one stuffs his fist down the other's throat. And the bad one is hard to kill, and the good one has a tendency to rickets. No wonder it is a funny muddle of a world.

And the French have their twin too, only theirs say la-la and ours say damn, and if they keep an over-sharp eye on the sous, do we turn our noses up at excess profits?

Of course some of them are greedy, perhaps greedier on the whole than we are. Would any English village lock its wells when thirsty children wailed at its door? I know an Irish one would not. But the French are thrifty, and the majority of them would live comfortably on what a British family wastes. They work hard too. They are incredibly industrious, perhaps because they have to be.

France has not yet been inoculated with the virus of philanthropy, an escape on which she may possibly be congratulated. The country is not covered with a network of charitable societies overlapping and criss-crossing like railway lines at a junction, nor have French women of birth, independent means and superfluous energy our genius for managing other people's affairs so well there is no time to look after our own. The deserving poor run no risk of being pauperised, the undeserving don't keep secretaries, committees and tribes of enthusiastic females labouring heavily at their heels. The French family in difficulties has to depend on its own resources, its own wit, its own initiative and energy, and when I think of the way our refugees dug themselves in in Bar-le-Duc, and scratched and scraped, and hammered and battered at that inhospitable soil till they forced a living from its breast, my faith in philanthropy and the helping hand begins to wane.

Of course there are hard cases, where a little intelligent human sympathy would transform suffering and sorrow into contentment and joy, cases that send me flying remorsefully back to the altar of organised charity with an offering in outstretched hand, but above all these, over all the agony of war the stern independence of French character has ridden supreme.

So let their faults speak for themselves. Who am I that I should expose them to a pitiless world? Have I not faults of my own? See how I have kept poor Madame Pierrot gathering dahlias in her garden, and my comrade in adventure eating grapes upon a very stony seat. So long that now there is no time to tell you how we walked to Laimont and investigated more ruins there, and then how we walked to Mussey where we comfortably missed our train, and how a Good Samaritan directed us to a house, and how in the house we found a little old lady whose son had been missing since August 1914, and who pathetically wondered whether we could get news of him, and how a sauf-conduit had to be coaxed from the Mayor, and the little old lady's horse harnessed to a car, and how two chairs were planted in the car and we superficially planted on the chairs, and how the old lady and a brigand clambered on to the board in front, and how we drove down to Bar as the sun was setting. Nor can I tell you how nearly we were run into by a motor-car, nor how the old lady explained that the brigand was malheureusement nearly blind, and that she, still more malheureusement, was rather deaf, nor how we prayed as we clung desperately to the chairs which slid and wobbled and rocked and oscillated, and rattled our bones while all the military motor-cars in France sought our extermination.

Nor can I tell you how at a dangerous crossing the brigand drew up his steed, and set up a wail because he had forgotten his cigarettes, nor how one escapading female produced State Express which made him splutter and cough, and nearly wreck us in the ditch (though English tobacco is not nearly so strong as French), nor how we came at last to Bar-le-Duc, nor how the old lady demanded a ridiculously small fee for the journey, nor how I lost a glove, and the sentries eyed us with suspicion, and the brigand who was blind and la patronne who was deaf drove away in the fading light to Mussey, the aroma of State Express trailing out behind them, and the old horse plodding wearily in the dust.