Round about Bar-le-Duc

by Susanne R. Day

"Study the habits of that which can be lateral to all points of the compass at once when you try to catch it," was the frivolous reply. Well, opportunities were not wanting. We decided to take lessons. And then promptly forgot all about Taubes. That is one of the unintentional blessings incidental to their career. When they are not showering bombs on you, you eliminate them from consciousness. Perhaps, in spite of all the damage they have done, they are still too new, too unnatural to be accepted. A raid is just an evil nightmare—for those who suffer no bodily harm. It brings you as a nightmare does to the very edge of some desperate enterprise; you feel the cold, awful fear; you are held in the grip of some deadly unimagined thing that holds you, forces you down, something you cannot see, something you do not understand, but that you know is hideous, terrible in its happening. The noise breaks on your brain, the noise that is only the symptom of the ill.... Then silence shuts down ... and you awake....

Once, at least for us, the awakening was a tragic one. Ascension Day. A clear, warm summer sky, windless, perfect. Dinner just over in the town. Shops opening again. Life stirring in the streets. An ideal moment for those who are quick to take advantage of such. There was no signal to warn us of what was coming, no time for pedestrians to distance themselves laterally or otherwise. Death found them as they walked through the streets, or gossiped in the station yard. The Place de la Gare became a shambles. Women—why dilate on the horror? Forty people were killed outright, over a hundred were wounded, and of these many subsequently died. In our cellar we listened to the storm, then when it was over we went through the town seeking out our people, anxious to help. We saw horses, mangled and bleeding, lying on the quay-side, a tree riven near the Pont Nôtre Dame, blood flowing in the gutters, telegraph wires lying in grotesque loops and coils on the roadway or hanging in festoons from the façades of houses. (An underground wire was laid down after this.) Glass—we walked on a carpet of glass, and in the houses we saw things that "God nor man ever should look upon."

Saw too, then and in subsequent raids, how Death, if he has marked you for his own, will claim you even though you hide, even though you seek the "safe" shelter you trust in so implicitly, but which plays the traitor and opens the gate to the Enemy who knocks. Madame Albert; the old sick woman. Now the eldest Savard girl, a tall, graceful, handsome creature, just twenty years of age. With a number of others including her mother, younger sister, and several soldiers (oh, yes, soldiers "cower" too, and are not always the last to dive to shelter), she fled to the nearest cellar when the raid began, but the entrance was not properly closed, and when a bomb burst in the yard outside, splinters killed five of the soldiers, and wounded her so cruelly she died that night.

Then there was Madame Bertrand, pursued by a malignant spirit of evil. Twice a refugee, she came to Bar in February, drifting from the market to the Maison Blanpain, where within six weeks of her arrival two of her three children had died. (Her husband was a soldier, of course.) One contracted diphtheria, the other was struck down by some virulent and never-diagnosed complaint which lasted just twenty-four hours. Expecting shortly to become a mother again, Madame was standing at her house door that sunny June day when a bomb fell in the street. She was killed instantly.

A fortnight later the little boy who brought parcels from the épicerie died. He, like Mademoiselle Savard, was in a cellar, but a fragment of shell came through the tiny soupirail (ventilation grating)....

II

In June, the town looked as if it were preparing for a siege. The stage direction, "Excursions and alarums," was interpolated extravagantly over all the drama of our life. If we had been rabbits we might have enjoyed it, there being something slightly facetious, not to say hilarious, in the flirt of the white bob as it scurries to cover, but as actors in the said drama we soon ceased to find it amusing. It interfered so confoundedly with our work! Worst of all, it unsettled our people.

The sang-froid of some of the shopkeepers, however, was magnificent. They simply put their shutters up, pinned a label on the door and went south or west, to wait till the rafale blew over. Before going, Monsieur was always at pains to inform us that he, for his part, was indifferent, but Madame, alas, Madame! Nerves.... An eloquent shrug that in no way dimmed the brilliance of Madame's smile as she gazed at us from behind his unconscious back. We, for our part, blushed for our sex. Then he asked us if we, too, had not fear? Saying no, we felt unaccountably bombastic. We read braggart in his eye, we scarcely dared to hope he would not read froussard in ours. Politely he hoped that when he returned our valuable custom would again be his? Reassured, he stretched a more or less grimy hand over the counter, we laid ours upon it, suspicions vanished! With the word devouée gleaming like a halo round our unworthy heads, we stepped again into the street, there to admire a vista of shutters.

(It may be of interest to psychologists that shopkeepers without wives, and shopkeepers without husbands, generally elected to remain in the town. They kept, however, their shutters down. Monsieur X., running out to close his during a raid, was blown to atoms. One learns wisdom—by experience—in the War Zone.)