Round about Bar-le-Duc

by Susanne R. Day

Days lengthen into weeks, and still the refugees come through. We know now that Verdun is in danger, that the Germans have advanced twelve kilomètres; we watch breathlessly for news, the town is listening, intent, anxious, and every day the crowds at the market grow denser. We spend much of our time there now, we have brought over basins, and soap and towels; we have put a table in the inner room, so that those who will may refresh themselves and wash. The rooms are packed. There must be at least three hundred or four hundred people, and still more drift in. Some have been in open cattle trucks for thirty-six hours under rain and snow, for the north wind has become keener and the rain has hardened into fine sleety snow; it is bitterly cold, the roads and streets are awash with mud, women's skirts are soddened to the knee, men are splashed shoulder high. A number of people have fallen ill en route, others, seriously ill, have been compelled to leave their beds and struggle as best they might with the healthy in their rush to safety. We hear that the civil hospital is full, that babies have been born on the journey down—been born and have died and were buried by the way. Despair rides on many a shoulder, fear still darkens many eyes. Some have escaped from a storm of shell-fire, many have had to walk long distances, for the railway lines have been cut. Verdun is isolated—Nixieville is the nearest point to which a train may go—and all have left their homes unguarded, some being already blown to atoms, others momently threatened with a like fate.

In spite of all our anxiety as we made our way to the market that second night, laden with basins and jugs, seaux hygiéniques, and various other comforts, we could not help laughing. We must have cut funny figures staggering along in the darkness with our uncouth burdens. Happily it WAS dark, and then not happily, as some one trips over an unseen obstacle and is only saved from an ignominious sprawl in the mire by wild evolutions shattering to the nerve. At the market we cast what might be called our "natural feelings" on one side and bored our way into the throng, our strange utensils and luggage desperately exposed to view. Que voulez-vous? C'est la guerre! The phrase covers many vicissitudes, but it did not cover the shyest of our coterie when, having deposited her burden on the gallery for a moment in order to help a poor woman, she heard a crash and a round French oath, and turning, beheld a certain official doing a weird cake-walk over things that were never intended to be trodden upon by man. It was the same shy member whose indignation at the lack of proper accommodation bore all her native timidity away and enabled her to persuade the same official to curtain off a small corner at the far end of the gallery and furnish it as a toilet-room for the women, a corner which to our eternal amusement was ever afterwards known as "le petit coin des dames anglaises." However, the petit coin was not in existence for two or three days, and while it was in process of manufacture we were more than once moved to violence of language, though we realised that physical fatigue may reach a point at which, if conditions be unfavourable, no veneer of civilisation can save some individuals from a lapse into primitive ways.

In the inner room the crowd was dense as we struggled in with our apparatus for washing. There was something essentially sordid in the scene. The straw looked dirty, the people were muddier, more wretched. Many were weeping, and very many lying in unrestful contorted attitudes upon the ground. In such a crowd no one dare leave her luggage unguarded, and so it was either gripped tightly to the body, even in sleep, or else was utilised as a pillow. And no one of those who came in by train or camion was allowed to bring more than he or she could carry.

All the misery, all the suffering, all the heart-break of war seemed concentrated there, and then quite suddenly out of ugliness and squalor came beauty. A tall woman with resigned, beautiful face detached herself from the throng, a naked baby wrapped in a towel in her arms. As unconcernedly, as unselfconsciously as if she were at home in her own kitchen she came to the table, filled a basin with warm water, and sitting down, bathed the lusty crowing thing that kicked, and chewed its fists, gurgling with delight.

It was the second time she had been evacuated, she told us. She had seven children, her husband was a farmer and well-to-do. Their home destroyed, they had escaped in August 1914, taking refuge in Verdun, where they had remained, gathering a little furniture together again, trying to make a home once more. She neither wept nor complained. I think she was long past both. Fate had taken its will of her, she could but bow her head, impotent in the storm. Her children, in spite of their experiences, looked neat and clean, they were nicely spoken and refined in manner. Soon the dusky shadows of the room swallowed her up and the human whirlpool swirled round us once more, from it emerging Monsieur B., the "certain official," and his wife who merely came to look round, who made no offer to help, and who must not be confounded with THE Madame B. who was the special providence of our lives.

What Monsieur B. thought when he found us more or less in possession I cannot say, but this I know—that he, in common with every one with whom our work brought us into official contact, showed himself sympathetic, helpful, forbearing and kind. He fell in with suggestions that must have seemed to him quixotic to a degree; he never insinuated, as he might have done, that our activities bordered upon interference, nor did he ask us how English officials would have received French women if the situation had been reversed! At first, thinking, no doubt, that the evacuation was only an affair of two or three days, none of the charitable women of the town thought it necessary to visit the Market, so all the care of the unfortunates was left in the hands of some half-dozen men; but later on, as the stream continued to pour through, and the congestion became more and more acute, many women, some after a hard day's work, came in the evenings and helped to serve the meals. Of course, as soon as they took things in hand we slid into the background, though we found our work just as engrossing and as imperative as ever, but how Madame B. could have walked through those rooms that evening and have gone away without making the smallest effort to ameliorate the conditions baffled our comprehension. However, she added to the gaiety of nations by one remark, so we forgave her. Seeing some respectably-dressed women who had obviously neither washed nor combed for days, we indicated the "washing-stand."

"We are too tired to-night," they said. "In the morning...."

"One would have thought they would have found it refreshing," we murmured to Madame B., who was essaying small talk under large difficulties.

"Ah, yes, I cannot understand it. For me, I wash myself every night, even if I am tired." The exquisiteness of that "même si je suis fatiguée" carried us through many a hectic hour.

And hours at the market were apt to be hectic. The serving of meals was a delirium. In vain we begged the guards to keep the door of communication closed, and allow only as many as there was room for at the tables to come to the "dining-room" at a time. They admitted the soundness of the scheme, but they made no attempt to carry it out. Consequently, no sooner was a meal ready than ravenous people poured out in swarms, snatched places at the tables and filled up every inch of space between, ready to fall into a chair the moment it was vacated. We had to elbow, push, worm or drive a way from table to table, from individual to individual; we grew hoarse from shouting "Attention!" We lost time, patience, breath and energy, and meals that might have been served with despatch were a kind of wild scrimmage, through which we "dribbled" with cauldrons of boiling soup or vast platters of meat, with plates piled like the leaning Tower of Pisa—be it written in gold upon our tombstones that the towers never fell—or with telescopic armsful of glasses and bowls. And against us rose not only the solid wall of expectant and famished humanity, but the incoming tide of new arrivals, all of whom had to pass between the tables and the serving counters in order to reach the inner room. Sometimes six hundred had to be fed, sometimes as many as twelve hundred passed through in a day, and—triumph of French organisation—very rarely did supplies run out, very rarely were the big tins of "singe"[10] (which the shy member really supposed was monkey!) brought into play. The meals themselves were excellent. Hot soup from a good pot-au-feu made from beef with quantities of vegetables, then the beef served with its carrots and turnips, leeks, etc., that cooked with it, then cheese or jam, and wine. Coffee and bread in the morning, a three-course meal at midday, another at six—no wonder Bar-le-Duc was eulogised. Never had such a reception been dreamed of. "The food was delicious, excellent.... We shall have grateful memories of Bar."