So they brought their pastilles into France just as they brought their expert packers to ensure the safe transit into Germany of all perishable loot. And if ever you see some of those pastilles framed at Selfridge's and ask yourself if they could really be effective—they are so small, so very harmless-looking—remember Sermaize and the waste of charred rubbish lying desolate under the moon. Some one—I think Maurice Genevoix, in Sous Verdun—tells how, in the early days of war, French soldiers were sometimes horrified to see a bullet-stricken German suddenly catch fire, become a living torch, blazing, terrible. At first they were quite unable to account for it. You see, they didn't know about the pastilles then. Later, when they did, they understood. I was told in Sermaize that a German aeroplane, flying low over the roofs, sprayed them with petrol that day. If true, it was quite an unnecessary waste of valuable material. The pastilles were more than equal to the occasion. But so was the French hotel-keeper who, coming back when the Germans had commenced their long march home, and finding his house in desiccated fragments, promptly put up a rough wooden shelter, and hung out his sign-board, "Café des Ruines!"
II
No one should go to Sermaize without paying a visit to M. le Curé. He stayed with his people till his home was tumbling about his ears, and even then he hung on, in the cellar. Driven out by fire, he collected such fugitives as were at hand and helped them through the woods to a place of safety. Of the events and incidents of that flight, of the dramatic episodes of the bombardment and subsequent fighting—there was a story of a French officer, for instance, who came tumbling into the cellar demanding food and drink in the midst of all the hell, and who devoured both, M. le Curé confessing that his own appetite at the moment was not quite up to its usual form, howitzer shells being a poor substitute for, shall we say, a gin-and-bitters?—it is not for me to speak. He has told the tale himself elsewhere, and if in the telling he has been half as witty, as epigrammatic, as vivid and as humorous as he was when he lectured in the Common-room at Sermaize, then all I can say is, buy the book even if you have to pawn your last pair of boots to find the money for it.
A rare type, M. le Curé. An intellectual, once the owner and lover (the terms are, unhappily, not always synonymous) of a fine library, now in ashes, a man who could be generous even to an ungenerous foe, and remind an audience—one member, at least, of which was no Pacifist—that according to the German code the Mayor should have remained in the town, and that he, M. le Curé, had been able to collect no evidence of cruelty to, or outrage upon, an individual.
That lecture is one of the things that will live in my memory. For the Curé was not possessed of a library of some two thousand volumes for nothing, and whatever his Bishop's opinion may be on the subject, I take leave to believe that Anatole France, De Maupassant, Verlaine and Baudelaire jostled many a horrified divine upon the shelves. For his style was what a sound knowledge of French literature had made it. He could dare to be improper—oh, so deliciously, subtly improper! A word, a tone, a gesture—a history. And his audience? Well, I mustn't tell you about that, and perhaps the sense of utter incongruity was born entirely of my own imagination. But to hear him describe how he spent the night in a crowded railway-station waiting-room where many things that should be decently hidden were revealed, and where he, a respectable celibate divine, shared a pallet with dames of varying ages and attractiveness ... and.... The veil just drawn aside fell down again upon the scene, and English propriety came to its own with a shudder.
Yes, if you are wise you will visit M. le Curé. And ask him to tell you how he disguised himself as a drover, and how, when in defiance of all authority he came back to Sermaize, he himself swept and cleaned out the big room which the Germans had used as a hospital, and which they had befouled and filthied, leaving vessels full of offal and indescribable loathlinesses, where blood was thick on walls and floor; a room that stank, putrid, abominable. It was German filth, and German beastliness, and French women, their hearts still hot within them, would not touch it.
And ask him to tell you how nearly he was killed by a shell which fell on an outhouse in which he was taking shelter, and how he was called up, and as a soldier of France was told to lead a horse to some village whose name I have forgotten, and how he, who hardly knew one end of a horse from another, led it, and on arriving at the village met an irate officer.
"And what are you doing here?"
"I do not know."