Round about Bar-le-Duc

by Susanne R. Day

Of all ways of helping the refugees there was none better than this. How they longed for work! The old people would come begging for knitting or sewing. "Ça change les idées," they would say. Anything rather than sit day after day brooding, thinking, going back over the tragic past, looking out upon the uncertain future. Every franc earned was a franc in the stocking, the bas de laine whose contents were to help to make a home for them once more when the war was over. And what could be better than working at one's own trade, at the thing which one loved and which lay in one's fingers? When the needle was busy the mind was at rest, and despair, that devourer of endurance, slunk abashed out of sight. For they find the time of waiting long, these refugees. Can you wonder? Wherever we went we heard the same story; in village or town we were asked the same question. Each stroke of good fortune, every "push," every fresh batch of prisoners brought the sun through the low-hanging clouds; every reverse, the forced inactivity of winter, drew darkness once more across the sky. In the villages the people who owned horses were fairly well off, they could earn their four francs a day, but the others found little comfort. Work was scarce, their neighbours often as poor as themselves. There are few, if any, big country houses ruled by wealthy, kind-hearted despots in these districts of France. In all our wanderings we found only one village basking in manorial smiles, and enjoying the generosity of a "lady of the house." The needy had to fend for themselves, and work out their own salvation as best they might. The reception given to the Belgians in England read to them like a fairy tale, and fostered wild ideas of England's wealth in their minds. "All the English are rich," they would cry; "have we not heard of les milords anglais?" They received accounts of the poverty in our big cities with polite incredulity; if our own people were starving or naked, why succour foreigners?

Sometimes they smiled a little pityingly. "The English gaspillent tout." Spendthrifts. And they would nod sapient heads, murmuring things it is not expedient to set down. It may even be indiscretion to add that between the French and the Belgians no love is set, some racial hatred having thrust its roots in deep.

It is in the winter that vitality and resistance-power run lowest, especially in the villages, for though work may be found in the fields during the summer, the long dark winter months drag heavily by. Brodeuses would walk eight miles in and eight out again in the most inclement weather to ask for work, others would come as many weary miles to get a hank or two of wool with which to knit socks and shawls. Sometimes one woman would take back work for half a dozen, and always our field of operations spread as village after village was visited and the Society became known.

They came in their tens, they came in their hundreds, I am tempted to swear that they came in their thousands. Madame soon ceased to announce them, they lined the hall, they blocked the staircase, they swirled in the Common-room. There were days when all the resources of the establishment failed, when broderie ran short and wool ran short, when there were no more chemises or matinées waiting to be made up, and when our hair, metaphorically speaking, lay in tufts over the house, plucked from our heads by our distracted fingers. They came for work, they came for clothes, they came for medicine and medical attendance, they came for food—only the very poorest these—they came for condensed milk for their babies, or for farine lactée, or for orders for admission to the Society's hospitals at Châlons and Sermaize, or to ask us to send their children to the Colonies des Vacances, or for paper and packing to make up parcels for husbands at the Front. They came to buy beds and pillows and bolsters at reduced prices and on the instalment plan, paying so much per month according to their means; they came for chairs and cupboards, or for the "trousseau," a gift—it may be reckoned as such, as they only contributed one franc fifty towards the entire cost—of three sheets, four pillow-cases and six towels, each of which had to be hand-stitched or hemmed, and marked or embroidered with the owner's name. They came to ask for white dresses and veils—which they did not get—for candidates for confirmation, they came for sabots and boots, and sometimes they came for the whole lot.

"Well, Madame, ça va bien?" Thus we greeted a hardy old campaigner in the street one day.

"Eh bien, ça va tout doucement." Then with an engaging smile, "I am coming to see you to-morrow."

"Indeed? And what do you want now?" This looks crude, but we laboured under no delusions where Madame Morge was concerned. It was not for the sake of our beaux yeux that she visited us.

"Eh, ma fois, un peu de tout," she replied audaciously, and we shot at her a mendacious, "Don't you know that distributions have ceased?" which left her calling heaven and her gods to witness that the earth was crumbling.

Villagers who lived too far away for personal visits wrote, or their Mayor or their priest wrote for them. We had by this time organised our system, and knew that the person who could supply us with a complete and detailed list was the Mayor, or his secretary the schoolmaster.