Round about Bar-le-Duc

by Susanne R. Day

Sometimes these worthies were hard of heart, assuring us that no one in the commune was necessitous, but we knew from experience that the official mind is sometimes a superficial mind, judging by externals only, so we persisted in our demand, and were invariably satisfied in the end. Others, and they were in a large majority, met us with open arms, cheerfully placed their time and their knowledge at our disposal, were hospitable, helpful and kind, and careful to draw our attention to specially deserving cases. Once when on a tour of inquiry we stumbled into a village during the luncheon hour. A regiment was resting there, and, as the first English who presumably had set foot in it, we were immediately surrounded by an admiring and critical crowd, some imaginative members of which murmured the ominous word Spy. The Mayor's house indicated, we rapped at the door, and in response to a gruff Entrez found ourselves in a small and very crowded kitchen, where a good pot-au-feu was being discussed at a large round table. The situation was sufficiently embarrassing, especially as the Mayor, being deaf, heard only a few words of our introductory speech, and promptly wished all refugees at the devil. A list? He was weary of lists. Every one wanted lists, the Préfet wanted lists, the Ministre de l'Intérieur wanted lists. And now we came and demanded them. Who the—well, who were we that he should set his quill a-driving on our behalf?

"Shout 'Anglaises' at him." It was a ticklish moment. He was on the point of throwing us out neck and crop. The advice was taken, the roar might have been heard in Bar.

"English? You are English?"

Have you ever seen a raging lion suddenly transform itself into a nice brown-eyed dog? We have, in that little kitchen in a remote village of the Meuse. Our hands were grasped, the Mayor was beaming. A list? He would give us twenty lists. English? Our hands were shaken till our fingers nearly dropped off, and if we had eaten up all the pot-au-feu Monsieur would have deemed it an honour. However, we didn't eat it. Monsieur's family was gazing at it with hungry eyes, and even the best of Ententes may be strained too far.

When we reached the street again the crowd had fraternised with our chauffeur, and we drove away under a pyrotechnical display of smiles.

Another day a soldier suddenly sprang off the pavement, jumped on the step of the motor-car, thrust some freshly-roasted chestnuts into my hand and was gone before I could cry, "Thank you."

We met many priests in these peripatetic adventures, the stout, practical and pompous, the autocratic, the negligent (there was one who regretted he could tell us nothing: "I have only been fifteen months here, so I don't yet know the people"), the old—I remember a visit to a presbytery in the Aube, and finding there a charming, gentle, diffident creature, a lover of books, poor, spiritual, half-detached from this world, very close to the next. He had a fine church, pure Gothic, a joy to the eye of the connoisseur, but no congregation. Only a wee handful of people who met each Sunday in a side chapel, the great unfilled vault of the church telling its own tale of changed thought and agnostic days.

But most intimately of all we came to know the Abbé B. who lived in our own town of Bar, because, greatly daring, we rang one evening at his door and asked him to teach us French.

We had heard of him from Eugénie, and knew that he taught at the École St Louis, that he was a refugee—he escaped from M. on his bicycle a few minutes before the Germans entered it—and that his church and his village were in ruins. But we had never seen him, and when, having rung his bell, escape was no longer possible, an awful thought shattered us. Suppose he were fat and greasy and dull? Could any ingenuity extract us from the situation into which we had thrust ourselves? We felt sure it could not, so we followed Eugénie with quaking hearts, followed her to the garden where we found a short, dark man with a humorous mouth and an ugly, attractive face, busily planting peas. We nodded our satisfaction to one another, and before we left the arrangement was made.