Round about Bar-le-Duc

by Susanne R. Day

Perhaps to-morrow I shall tell you of M. Le Curé.

You see, it was really Madame Lassanne who first brought home to me what war means to the civil population in an invaded district. One guessed it all in a dim way before, of course, every imaginative person does, but not in the way in which pain, desolation of spirit, agony of soul, poignant anxiety drive their roots deep down into Life; nor does one realise how small a thing is human life, how negligible man when compared with the great god of War.

A French medical officer once said to me, "Mademoiselle, in war les civiles n'ont pas le droit d'être malade," and I dared to reply, "Monsieur, ils n'ont guère le droit de vivre." And he assented, for he knew, knew that to a great extent it was true, only too pitiably true. For the great military machine which exists in order that an unshakable bulwark may be set up between the invader and the civilians whom he would crush is, in its turn, and in order to keep that bulwark firm, obliged to crush them himself. In the War Zone (it is not too much to say it) the civilian is an incubus, an impediment, a most infernal nuisance. He gets so confoundedly in the way. And he is swept out of it as ruthlessly as a hospital matron sweeps dust out of her wards. That he is confused and bewildered, thoroughly désorienté, that he may be sick or feeble, that his wife may be about to give birth to a child, that his house is in ashes and that he, once prosperous, is now a destitute pauper, that his children trail pitifully in the dust, footsore, frightened, terror-haunted to the very verge of insanity, all these things from the military point of view matter nothing. And it must be so. They dare not matter. If they did, energies devoted to keeping that human bulwark in the trenches fit and sound might be diverted into other channels, and the effort to ameliorate and save become the hand of destruction, ruining all in order to save a little.

Think of one village. There are thousands, and any one will do. Anxiety and apprehension have lain over it for days, but the inhabitants go about their work, eat, sleep, "carry on" much as usual. Night comes. It is pitch dark. The world is swathed in a murky shroud. At two o'clock loud hammering is heard, the gendarmes are going from house to house beating upon the doors. "Get up, get up; in half an hour you must be gone." Dazed with sleep, riven with fear, grief slowly closing her icy fingers upon their hearts, they stumble from their beds and throw on a few clothes. They look round the rooms filled with things nearly every one of which has a history, things of no intrinsic value, but endeared to them by long association, and it may be by memory of days when Love and Youth went hand in hand to the Gates of Romance and they opened wide at their touch. Things, too, that no money can buy: old armoires wonderfully carved, old china, old pottery, handed down from father to son, from mother to child for generations.

What would one choose in such a moment as that?

"You can take nothing but what you can carry." Nothing. The children clutch at hand and skirt. How can Marie and Germaine and Jean and Robert walk fifteen or twenty kilomètres to safety?

The prudent snatch at their family papers, thrust a little food into a bag and go out into the night. Others gather up useless rubbish because it lies under their hand. The gendarmes are growing impatient. They round up their human flock as a dog rounds up his sheep. Shells are beginning to fall here and there. Some one has been killed—a child. Then a woman. There are cries, a long moan of pain. But the refugees must hurry on.

"Vîte, vîte, depêchez-vous." They stumble down the roads, going they know not whither, following the lanes, the woods, even the fields, for the main road must be kept clear for the army. Hunger, thirst, the torment of an August day must be endured, exhaustion must be combated. Death hovers over them. He stoops and touches now one, now another with his wings, and quietly they slip down upon the parched and baking earth, for they are old and weary, and rest is sweet after the long burden of the day.

But even this is not all. One may believe that at first, engulfed by the instinct of self-preservation, tossed by the whirlwind from one emotion to another and into the lowest pit of physical pain, the mind is too confused, too stunned to realise the full significance of all that is happening.