Round about Bar-le-Duc

by Susanne R. Day

I

"The French are evacuating some villages near Verdun, and I hear there are a number of refugees at the Marché Couvert to-night," one of the coterie remarked as she came in one evening from her rounds. It seemed a little odd that villages should be evacuated by the French just then, but we had long since ceased to be surprised at anything. In the War Zone everything is possible and the unexpected is the probable, so we piled on waterproofs and goloshes and woollies, for it was a cold, wet night, and set forth in all our panoply of ugliness for the Covered Market.

The streets were as dark as the pit, only a pale cold gleam showing where the river lay. The sky was heavily overcast, a keen wind cut down from the north. The pavement on the quay was broken and rough, we splashed into pools, we jolted into crevasses, we bent our heads to the whistling storm, we reached the market at last. The wide gates were open, and the vast floor, with its rows of empty stalls, loomed like a vault before us. The heavy, sickly odour of stale vegetables, of sausage and of meat, of unaired space where humanity throngs on several days a week clutched at us as we went in. We were to become very familiar with it in the weeks that followed—weeks during which it daily grew heavier, sicklier, more nauseating, more horrible.

On the left of the market as you enter from the quay there is a broad wooden staircase which leads to a still broader wooden gallery that runs right round the building. At the top we turned to the right. The gallery was dimly lighted, dark figures huddled on it here and there; we crossed the lower end and found ourselves in a wide space, really a large unenclosed room which had been hastily improvised as a kitchen. A short counter divided it into two very unequal portions, in the smaller being some old armoires, two large steamers or boilers, a table piled with plates, dishes and small and handleless bowls, used instead of cups. Another littered with glasses, and in the corner a big barrel of wine.

Two or three women were probing the contents of the boilers; men rushed excitedly about, one was chopping bread, another filling jugs with wine, a garde-champêtre with a hoarse voice was shouting unintelligible orders, a gendarme or two hung about getting in everybody's way, and in the outer space seethed a mob of men, women and children in every condition of dishevelment, mud, misery and distress. Five or six long tables with benches of the light garden-seat variety crossed this space. Seated as tightly as they could be squeezed together were more refugees devouring a steaming soup. Everything wore an air of confusion; the light was bad, one paraffin lamp swaying dimly over the scene. We saw a door, guarded by two officials, garde-champêtres, or something of the kind; we passed through, and there we saw a sight which I am convinced no one of us will ever forget.

Picture an enormous room, like a barrack dormitory. There are windows—some five or six—on each side. Half-way down and opposite one another there are two stoves in which good fires are burning. The glow from the open doors falls on the gloom and throws into relief the stooped figures, broken with fatigue, that cluster dejectedly round them. A lamp throws fitful shadows. The air is brown. Perhaps you think this an absurd thing to say, but it was so. It hung like a pale brown veil over the room, and as weeks went by the colour deepened, and in breathing it one had the sensation of drawing something solid into one's lungs. It smelt, too, with an indescribable smell that became intensified every day, until at last a time came when it required a definite effort to penetrate it. It seemed to hurl you back from the doorway; you began to think it must be sentient. It was certainly stifling, poisonous, fœtid, and as I write I seem to feel it in my nostrils again, seem to feel the same nausea that seized us when we breathed it then. Over all the floor-space there is straw, thick, tossed-up straw, through which, running past the stoves, are two narrow lanes, one down either side. And on the straw lie human beings, not many as yet, only those who have supped, or who, waiting for the meal, have thrown themselves down in the last stages of physical and mental exhaustion. Babies wail, women are sobbing, the gardes-champêtres shout in rough voices. Bales, bundles, hand-grips, baskets lie on the straw; there an old woman is lying wretchedly, her head on a canvas bag; here two boys are sprawling across one another in heavy, uncouth, abandoned attitudes.

We go about among the people talking to them, but they are dazed and weary. Did we learn that night that the great attack upon Verdun had begun, or did we only know of it some days later? So packed with incident were those first days I cannot remember, but it seems to me now that knowledge came later, and that we came home that night wondering, questioning, our hearts filled with pity for those we had left homeless upon that awful straw.

We came again into the outer room. More refugees were arriving, little groups of bewildered creatures, muddy, travel-stained, dog-weary, yet wonderfully patient and resigned. There are no sanitary arrangements of any kind in the building, there is not a basin, nor a towel, nor a cake of soap of which the refugees can make use.

The next evening we go again, supposing that the evacuation must be complete, that this river of human misery will cease to flow through the town, but little by little we realise that it is only beginning.