Round about Bar-le-Duc

by Susanne R. Day

One lad of twenty, who told me the same tale, was home on leave when I chanced to visit his mother and found the family at lunch. To celebrate his return they were having a little feast—the feast consisting of a tin of sardines and a bottle of red wine, in addition to the usual soup and bread. The boy was a handsome creature, full of life and high spirits, and in no way daunted by experiences that would have tried the nerve of many an older man. He had been buried alive three times, twice by the collapse of a trench, once by that of a dug-out into which he and four others crawled under a storm of shells. "Fortunately I was the first to go in, for a shell burst just outside, ploomb! killed three and wounded one of my companions. The wounded man and I dug and scratched our way out at the back."

He, too, he said, had been without food for four days.

"Weren't you hungry?" his mother asked, but he shook his head.

"One isn't hungry when the copain (pal) on the right is blown to atoms, and the copain on the left is bleeding to death." Then followed casualty details that filled us with horror.

"I saw men go mad up there. They dashed their brains out against walls, they shot themselves. Oh, it was just hell! The shells fell so thick you could hardly put a franc between them—thousands in an hour. The French lost heavily, but the Germans.... I tell you, Mademoiselle, I have seen them climbing over a wall of their own dead that high"—he touched his breast—"to get at us. They came on in close formation, drunk with ether. Oh, yes, it is quite true, we could smell the ether in the French trenches. I have seen the first lines throw away their rifles and link arms as they staggered to attack. Oh, we fauché'd them! But for me, I like the bayonet, you drive it in, you twist it round"—he made an expressive noise impossible to reproduce—"they are afraid of the bayonet, the Boches. Ah, it is fine...."

He is the only man I have ever spoken to who told me he wanted to go back.

Day after day we watched breathlessly for the communiqués; evening after evening we went to the market hoping for better news, but there was no lifting as yet in the storm-cloud that hung above the horizon. And still the refugees poured through. We spent the greater part of each day at the market now, snatching meals at odd hours, and turning our hands to anything. We swept floors, we stuffed palliasses with straw—but we don't recommend this as a parlour game—we helped to serve meals, we washed never-diminishing piles of plates and bowls, forks and knives, we put old ladies to bed, we made cups of chocolate for them when they were unable to tackle the pot-au-feu, we chopped mountains of bread and cheese (our hands were like charwomen's), we distributed chocolate and "scarlet stew"—both gifts from the American Relief Committee—we sorted the sheep from the goats at night and—the garde apart—kept the new dormitory select. We became expert in cutting up enormous joints of meat, our implements a short-handled knife invariably coated with grease, a fork when we could get one, and a small wooden board. So expert, indeed, that one day a woman hovered round as we sliced and cut and hacked, watching us intently for some minutes. Then, "Are you a butcher?" she asked. It was an equivocal compliment, but well meant. You see, she was a butcher herself, and I suppose it would have comforted her to talk to one of the fraternity.

And as we slice the turmoil rises round us. A woman sits down to table and bursts into violent uncontrolled weeping; a poor old creature wanders forlornly about, finally making her way past the counter to the boiler where the soup is bubbling. What does she want? "To put some wood on the fire. She is cold, and where is her chair? Some one has taken it away." Her brain has given way under the strain of the last five days and she thinks she is at home. Snatches of conversation float above the din. "It is three days since I have touched hot food." "We slept in the fields last night." "Mais abandonner tout." Tears follow this pathetic little phrase. A man and woman together, both over eighty, white-haired and palsied, stray up to the counter. They cannot eat, they want so very little, just some wine. The woman's skirts drip as she waits; she has fallen into a stream as she fled from the bombardment. They are established in a corner where they mutter and nod, gibberish mostly, for the old man's wits are wandering.

Suddenly the table begins to rock, one end rises convulsively from the ground, plates and dishes begin to slide ominously. An earthquake? Only a great brindled hound that some one tied to the table leg when we were not watching. He lay down, slept happily, smelled dinner, has risen to his majestic height and a wreck is upon us. The table sways more ominously, then Fate, in the shape of the pretty Pre-Raphaelitish femme-de-ménage of the market, swoops down upon him and sends him yowling into the crowd, through which he cuts a cataclysmal way. Dogs materialise out of space, we are sometimes tempted to believe. They live desperate lives, are under everybody's feet, appear, and disappear meteor-wise, leaving trails of oaths behind them. A small child plants himself on the floor, and seizing one of these itinerant quadrupeds, tries to make it eat its own tail. The dog prefers to eat the child; a wild skirmish ensues, there are shrieks and yowls that rend the heavens, then a covey of women kick the dog into space, and snatching up the child, carry him to the inner room, where they hold a parliament over him amid a babel of tongues that puts biblical history to shame.