Our first lesson was devastating. The Abbé credited us with the intelligence of children, telling us how to make a plural, and how by adding "e" a masculine word can be changed into a feminine; fort, forte; grand, grande; and so on. Then he gave us a devoir (home work), and we came away feeling like naughty children who have been put into the corner. His parlour was stifling, and how we rejoiced when the weather was fine, and we could hold our class in the garden. I can see him now standing by the low wall under the arbour, his gaze turned far away out across the hills. "It is there," he pointed, "the village. Out there near St Mihiel."
For twenty-seven years he had ministered there, he had seen the children he baptised grow to manhood and womanhood, and had gathered their children, too, into the fold of Christ. He had beautified and adorned the church—how he loved it!—year after year with tireless energy and care, making it more and more perfect, more and more fit for the service of the God he worshipped. And now it is a ruin blown to fragments by the guns of friend and foe alike, and his people are scattered, many of them dead. He came to Bar penniless, owning just the clothes he stood up in, and he told me once that his income, including his salary at the school and a grant from some special fund, was just one hundred francs a month. Scarcely a pound a week.
Once hearing me say that I was not rich, he asked me the amount of my income, adding naïvely, "I do not ask out of curiosity," and I felt mean as I dodged the question, for an income that is "not riches" in England looks wonderfully like wealth in a refugee's parlour in Bar.
All his dream, all his desire is to go back to M. and build his church again. The church the central, the focussing point, then the schoolhouse, then homes for the people, that is his plan; but he has no money, his congregation is destitute—or nearly so—he cannot look to the Government. Whence, then, will help come? So he would question, filling us with intense desire to rush back to England and plead for him and his cause in every market square in the land. He would go back to M. now if they would allow him to, he will go back with or without permission when the slaughter ends.
"The valley is so fertile," he would say; "watered by the Meuse, it is one of the richest in France. Such grass, such a prairie. And after the war we must cultivate, cultivate quickly; they cannot allow land like ours to be idle, and so we shall go back at once."
"But," we said, "will you be able to cultivate? Surely heavy and constant shell-fire makes the land unfit for the plough?"
We knew what the ground is like all along the blood-stained Front, hundreds of miles of it fought over for four interminable years, its soil enriched by the hallowed dead, torn and lacerated by shells, incalculable tons of iron piercing its breast, and knew, too, that Death lurks cunningly in many an unexploded bomb or mortar or shell, and that prolonged and costly sanitation will be necessary before man dare live on it again. Yes, the Abbé knew it too, but knew that a strip of his richest land lay between two hills, the French on one, the Germans on the other, and not a trench dug in all the length between. No wonder hope rode gallantly in his breast, no wonder he saw his people going quietly to their labour, and heard his church bell ringing again its call to peaceful prayer. And then he would revert again to the ever-present problem, the problem of ways and means.
Ah, we in England do not know how that question tortures the heart of stricken France. Shall I tell you of it, leaving the Abbé for the moment to look out across the hills, the reverberant thunder in his ear and infinite longing in his loyal heart?
II