Chapter 3

It was nearly half past eight when we reached Esbly; the town was absolutely dark. Père was there with the donkey cart, and it took nearly an hour and a half to climb the hill to Huiry. It was pitch dark, and oh, so cold! Both Condé and Voisins, as well as Esbly, had street lamps--gas--before the war, but it was cut off when mobilization began, and so the road was black. This ordinary voyage seemed like journeying in a wilderness, and I was as tired as if I had been to London, which I take to be the hardest trip for the time it consumes that I know. I used to go to London in seven hours, and this trip to Paris and back had taken four hours and a half by train and three by carriage.

I found your letter dated September 25--in reply to my first one mailed after the battle. I am shocked to hear that I was spectacular. I did not mean to be. I apologize. Please imagine me very red in the face and feeling a little bit silly. I should not mind your looking on me as a heroine and all those other names you throw at me if I had had time to flee along the roads with all I could save of my home on my back, as I saw thousands doing.

But I cannot pick up your bouquets, considering that all I had to do was "sit tight" for a few days, and watch--at a safe distance--a battle sweep back. All you must say about that is "she did have luck." That's what I say every day.

As our railway communication is to be cut again, I am hurrying this off, not knowing when I can send another. But as you see, I have no news to write--just words to remind you of me, and say that all is well with me in this world where it is so ill for many.

V

November 7, 1914

IT was not until I got out my letter-book this morning that I realized that I had let three weeks go by without writing to you. I have no excuse to offer, unless the suspense of the war may pass as one.

We have settled down to a long war, and though we have settled down with hope, I can tell you every day demands its courage.

The fall of Antwerp was accepted as inevitable, but it gave us all a sad day. It was no use to write you things of that sort. You, I presume, do not need to be told, although you are so far away, that for me, personally, it could only increase the grief I felt that Washington had not made the protest I expected when the Belgian frontier was crossed. It would have been only a moral effort, but it would have been a blow between the eyes for the nervous Germans.

All the words we get from the front tell us that the boys are standing the winter in the trenches very well. They've simply got to--that is all there is to that.

Amélie is more astonished than I am. When she first realized that they had got to stay out there in the rain and the mud and the cold, she just gasped out that they never would stand it.

I asked her what they would do then--lie down and let the Germans ride over them? Her only reply was that they would all die. It is hard for her to realize yet the resistance of her own race.

I am realizing in several ways, in a small sense, what the men are enduring. I take my bit of daily exercise walking round my garden. I always have to carry a trowel in my sweater pocket, and I stop every ten steps to dig the cakes of mud off my sabots. I take up a good bit of my landed property at every step. So I can guess, at least, what it must be out in the trenches. This highly cultivated, well-fertilized French soil has its inconveniences in a country where the ground rarely freezes as it does in New England.

Also I am very cold.

When I came out here I found that the coal dealer was willing to deliver coal to me once a week. I had a long, covered box along the wall of the kitchen which held an ample supply of coal for the week. The system had two advantages--it enabled me to do my trading in the commune, which I liked, and it relieved Amélie from having to carry heavy hods of coal in all weathers from the grange outside. But, alas, the railroad communications being cut--no coal! I had big wood enough to take me through the first weeks, and have some still, but it will hardly last me to Christmas--nor does the open fire heat the house as the salamandre did. But it is wartime, and I must not complain--yet.

You accuse me in your last letter of being flippant in what seems to you tragic circumstances. I am sorry that I make that impression on you. I am not a bit flippant. I can only advise you to come over here, and live a little in this atmosphere, and see how you would feel. I am afraid that no amount of imagining what one will or will not do prepares one to know what one will really do face to face with such actualities as I live amongst. I must confess that had I had anyone dear to me here, anyone for whose safety or moral courage I was--or imagined I was--responsible (for, after all, we are responsible for no one), my frame of mind and perhaps my acts might have been different. I don't know. Why, none of the men that Î see have the air of feeling they are heroes--they just seem to think of it all as if it were merely "in the day's work."

For example, do you remember that handsome younger brother of my sculptor friend--the English boy who was in the heavy artillery, and had been in China and North Nigeria with Sir Frederick Ludgard as an aide-de-camp, and finally as assistant governor general? Well, he was with the first division of the British Expedition which landed in France in the middle of August. He made all that long, hard retreat from Belgium to the Marne, and was in the terrible Battle of the Rivers. I am enclosing a letter I have just received from him, because I think it very characteristic. Besides, if you remember him, I am sure that it will interest you. I don't know where it is from--they are not allowed to tell. It came, as army letters do, without any stamp--the carriage is free--with the round red stamp of the censor, a crown in the middle, and the words "Passed by the Censor," and the number printed around it. Here it is:

My dearest M-

October 30, 1914

Last night I heard your account of your experiences between September 1 and 9, and it made me boil anew with disappointment that my attempts to reach Huiry on September 4 were frustrated. I was disappointed enough at the time, but then my regret was tempered by the thought that you were probably safe in Paris, and I should only find an empty house at La Creste. Now that I know that I should have found you--you!!!--it makes me wild, even after this interval of time, to have missed a sight of you. Now let me tell you how it came about that you nearly received a visit from me.

I left England August 17, with the 48th Heavy Battery (3d division). We landed at Rouen, and went by train, via Amiens, to Houtmont, a few kilometres west of Mauberge. There we detrained one morning at two o'clock, marched through Malplaquet into Belgium, and came in contact with the enemy at once.

The story of the English retreat must be familiar to you by now. It was a wonderful experience. I am glad to have gone through it, though I am not anxious to undergo such a time again. We crossed the Marne at Meaux, on September 3, marching due east to Signy-Signets. Funnily enough it was not until I had actually crossed the Marne that I suddenly realized that I was in your vicinity. Our route, unfortunately, led right away from you, and I could not ask to get away while we were actually on the march, and possibly going many miles in another direction. The following day, however--the 4th--we retraced our steps somewhat, and halted to bivouac a short distance west of a village named La Haute Maison--roughly about six miles from you. I immediately asked permission to ride over to Huiry. The Major, with much regret, declined to let me leave, and, since we received orders to march again an hour later, he was right. We marched all that night. I have marked out our road with arrows on the little map enclosed. We reached a place called Fontenay about 8.30 the next morning, by which time I was twenty miles from you, and not in a condition to want anything but sleep and food. That was our farthest point south. But, sad to say, in our advance we went by a road farther east, and quite out of reach of you, and crossed the Marne at a place called Nanteuil. I got your first letter about one day's march south of Mons.

Best love, dearest M------. Write again.

Isn't that a calm way to state such a trying experience as that retreat? It is only a sample of a soldier's letter.

If he were disappointed you can imagine that I was. Luckily I had seen him in June, when he was here on a visit, having just returned from North Nigeria, after five years in the civil service, to take up his grade in the army, little dreaming there was to be a war at once.

If he had come that afternoon imagine what I should have felt to see him ride down by the picket at the gate. He would have found me pouring tea for Captain Edwards of the Bedfords. It would have surely added a touch of reality to the battle of the next days. Of course I knew he was somewhere out there, but to have seen him actually riding away to it would have been different. Yet it might not, for I am sure his conversation would have been as calm as his letters, and they read as much as if he were taking an exciting pleasure trip, with interesting risks thrown in, as anything else. That is so English. On some future day I suppose we shall sit together on the lawn--he will probably lie on it--and swap wonderful stories, for I am going to be one of the veterans of this war.

I must own that when I read the letter I found it suggestive of the days that are gone. Imagine marching through Malplaquet and over all that West Flanders country with its memories of Marlborough, and where, had the Dutch left the Duke a free hand, he would have marched on Paris--with other Allies--as he did on Lille. I must own that history, with its records of bitter enemies yesterday, bosom friends today, does not inspire one with much hope of seeing the dreamer's vision of universal peace realized.

Still, I must confess that the attitude of French and English to one another today is almost thrilling. The English Tommy Atkins and the French poilu are delightful together. For that matter, the French peasants love the English. They never saw any before, and their admiration and devotion to "Tommee," as they call him, is unbounded. They think him so "chic," and he is.

No one--not even I, who so love them--could ever accuse the "piou- piou" of being chic.

The French conscript in his misfits has too long been the object of affectionate sarcasm and the subject of caricature to be unfamiliar to the smiles of the whole world.

You see the army outfits are made in three sizes only. So far as my observation goes none of the three measurements fits anyone today, and as for the man who is a real "between"--well, he is in a sad box. But what of that? He doesn't seem to care. He is so occupied today fighting, just as he did in the days of the great Napoleon, that no one cares a rap how he looks--and surely he does not.

You might think he would be a bit self-conscious regarding his appearance when he comes in contact with his smarter looking Ally. Not a bit of it. The poilu just admires Tommy and is proud of him. I do wish you could see them together. The poilu would hug Tommy and plant a kiss on each of his cheeks--if he dared. But, needless to say, that is the last sort of thing Tommy wants. So, faute de mieux the poilu walks as close to Tommy as he can--when he gets a chance-- and the undemonstrative, sure-of-himself Tommy permits it without a smile--which is doing well. Still, in his own way Tommy admires back-- it is mutual.

The Englishman may learn to unbend--I don't know. The spirit which has carried him all over the world, rubbed him against all sorts of conditions and so many civilizations without changing his character, and made of him the one race immune to home-sickness, has persisted for centuries, and may be so bred in the bone, fibre, and soul of the race as to persist forever. It may have made his legs and his spine so straight that he can't unbend. He has his own kind of fun, but it's mostly of the sporting sort. He will, I imagine, hardly contract the Frenchman's sort, which is so largely on his lips, and in his mentality, and has given the race the most mobile faces in the world.

I am enclosing a copy of the little map Captain S------sent me. It may give you an idea of the route the English were moving on during the battle, and the long forced march they made after the fighting of the two weeks ending August 30.

I imagine they were all too tired to note how beautiful the country was. It was lovely weather, and coming down the route from Haute Maison, by La Chapelle, to the old moated town of Crécy-en-Brie at sunset, must have been beautiful; and then climbing by Voulangis to the Forest of Crécy on the way to Fontenay by moonlight even more lovely, with the panorama of Villiers and the valley of the Morin seen through the trees of the winding road, with Montbarbin standing, outlined in white light, on the top of a hill, like a fairy town. Tired as they were, I do hope there were some among them who could still look with a dreamer's eyes on these pictures.

Actually the only work I have done of late has been to dig a little in the garden, preparing for winter. I did not take my geraniums up until last week. As for the dahlias I wrote you about, they became almost a scandal in the commune. They grew and grew, like Jack's beanstalk-- prodigiously. I can't think of any other word to express it. They were eight feet high and full of flowers, which we cut for the Jour des Morts. I know you won't believe that, but it is true. A few days later there came a wind-storm, and when it was over, in spite of the heavy poles I put in to hold them up, they were laid as flat as though the German cavalry had passed over them. I was heart-broken, but Père only shrugged his shoulders and remarked: "If one will live on the top of a hill facing the north what can one expect?" And I had no reply to make. Fortunately the wind can't blow my panorama away, though at present I don't often look out at it. I content myself by playing in the garden on the south side, and, if I go out at all, it is to walk through the orchards and look over the valley of the Morin, towards the south.

My, but I'm cold--too cold to tell you about. The ends of my fingers hurt the keys of my machine.

VI

November 28, 1914

I am sorry that, as you say in your letter of October 16, just received, you are disappointed that I "do not write you more about the war." Dear child, I am not seeing any of it. We are settled down here to a life that is nearly normal--much more normal than I dreamed could be possible forty miles from the front. We are still in the zone of military operations, and probably shall be until spring, at least. Our communications with the outside world are frequently cut. We get our mail with great irregularity. Even our local mail goes to Meaux, and is held there five days, as the simplest way of exercising the censorship. It takes nearly ten days to get an answer to a letter to Paris.

All that I see which actually reminds me of the war--now that we are used to the absence of the men--I see on the route nationale, when I drive down to Couilly. Across the fields it is a short and pretty walk. Amélie makes it in twenty minutes. I could, if it were not for climbing that terrible hill to get back.

Besides, the mud is inches deep. I have a queer little four-wheeled cart, covered, if I want to unroll the curtains. I call it my perambulator, and really, with Ninette hitched in, I am like an overgrown baby in its baby carriage, and any nurse I ever knew would push a perambulator faster than that donkey drags mine. Yet it just suits my mood. I sit comfortably in it, and travel slowly--time being non-existent--so slowly that I can watch the wheat sprout, and gaze at the birds and the view and the clouds. I do hold on to the reins--just for looks--though I have no need to, and I doubt if Ninette suspects me of doing anything so foolish. On the road I always meet officers riding along, military cars flying along, army couriers spluttering along on motor-cycles, heavy motor transports groaning up hill, or thundering down, and now and then a long train of motor-ambulances. Almost any morning, at nine, I can see the long line of camions carrying the revitaillement towards the front, and the other afternoon, as I was driving up the hill, I met a train of ambulances coming down. The big grey things slid, one after another, around the curve of the Demi-Lune, and simply flew by me, raising such a cloud of dust that after I had counted thirty, I found I could not see them, and the continual tooting of the horns began to make Ninette nervous--she had never seen anything like that before-- so, for fear she might do some trick she never had done in her life, like shying, and also for fear that the drivers, who were rushing by exactly in the middle of the road, might not see me in the dust, or a car might skid, I slid out, and led my equipage the rest of the way. I do assure you these are actually all the war signs we see, though, of course, we still hear the cannon.

But, though we don't see it, we feel it in many ways. My neighbors feel it more than I do! For one example--the fruit crop this year has been an absolute loss. Luckily the cassis got away before the war was declared, but we hear it was a loss to the buyers, and it was held in the Channel ports, necessarily, and was spoiled. But apples and pears had no market. In ordinary years purchasers come to buy the trees, and send their own pickers and packers, and what was not sold in that way went to the big Saturday market at Meaux. This year there is no market at Meaux. The town is still partly empty, and the railroad cannot carry produce now. This is a tragic loss to the small cultivator, though, as yet, he is not suffering, and he usually puts all such winnings into his stocking.

We still have no coal to speak of. I am burning wood in the salon-- and green wood at that. The big blaze--when I can get it--suits my house better than the salamandre did. But I cannot get a temperature above 42 Fahrenheit. I am used to sixty, and I remember you used to find that too low in Paris. I blister my face, and freeze my back, just as we used to in the old days of glorious October at the farm in New Sharon, where my mother was born, and where I spent my summers and part of the autumn in my school-days.

You might think it would be easy to get wood. It is not. The army takes a lot of it, and those who, in ordinary winters, have wood to sell, have to keep it for themselves this year. Père has cut down all the old trees he could find--old prune trees, old apple trees, old chestnut trees--and it is not the best of firewood. I hated to see even that done, but he claimed that he wanted to clear a couple of pieces of land, and I try to believe him. Did you ever burn green wood? If you have, enough said!

Unluckily--since you expect me to write often--I am a creature of habit.

I never could write as you can, with a pad on my knees, huddled over the fire. I suppose that I could have acquired the habit if I had begun my education at the Sorbonne, instead of polishing off there. I remember when I first began to haunt that university, eighteen years ago, how amazed I was to see the students huddled into a small space with overcoats and hats on their knees, a note-book on top of them, an ink-pot in one hand and a pen in the other, and, in spite of obstacles, absorbed in the lecture. I used to wonder if they had ever heard of "stylos," even while I understood, as I never had done before, the real love of learning that marks the race. Alas! I have to be halfway comfortable before I can half accomplish anything.

I am thankful to say that the temperature has been moderating a little, and life about me has been active. One day it was the big threshing- machine, and the work was largely done by women, and the air was full of throbbing and dust. Yesterday it was the cider-press, and I stood about, at Amélie's, in the sun, half the afternoon, watching the motor hash the apples, and the press squeeze out the yellow juice, which rushed foaming into big vats. Did you ever drink cider like that?

It is the only way I like it. It carried me back to my girlhood and the summers in the Sandy River valley. I don't know why it is, of late, that my mind turns so often back to those days, and with such affection. Perhaps it is only because I find myself once more living in the country. It may be true that life is a circle, and as one approaches the end the beginning becomes visible, and associated with both the beginning and end of mine there is a war. However it is to be explained, there remains the fact that my middle distances are getting wiped out.

In these still nights, when I cannot sleep, I think more often than of anything else of the road running down the hill by the farm at New Sharon, and of the sounds of the horses and wagons as they came down and crossed the wooden bridge over the brook, and of the voices--so strange in the night--as they passed. There were more night sounds in those memories than I ever hear here--more crickets, more turnings over of Nature, asleep or awake. I rarely hear many night sounds here. From sundown, when people go clattering by in their wooden shoes from the fields, to daylight, when the birds awake, all is silence. I looked out into the moonlight before I closed my shutters last night. I might have been alone in the world. Yet I like it.

The country is lovely here in winter--so different from what I remember of it at home. My lawn is still green, so is the corbeille d'argent in the garden border, which is still full of silvery bunches of bloom, and will be all winter. The violets are still in bloom. Even the trees here never get black as they do in New England, for the trunks and branches are always covered with green moss. That is the dampness. Of course, we never have the dry invigorating cold that makes a New England winter so wonderful. I don't say that one is more beautiful than the other, only that each is different in its charm. After all, Life, wherever one sees it, is, if one has eyes, a wonderful pageant, the greatest spectacular melodrama I can imagine. I'm glad to have seen it. I have not always had an orchestra stall, but what of that? One ought to see things at several angles and from several elevations, you know.

VII

December 5, 1914

We have been having some beautiful weather.

Yesterday Amélie and I took advantage of it to make a pilgrimage across the Marne, to decorate the graves on the battlefield at Chambry. Crowds went out on All Soul's Day, but I never like doing anything, even making a pilgrimage, in a crowd.

You can realize how near it is, and what an easy trip it will be in normal times, when I tell you that we left Esbly for Meaux at half past one--only ten minutes by train--and were back in the station at Meaux at quarter to four, and had visited Monthyon, Villeroy, Neufmontier, Penchard, Chauconin, Barcy, Chambry, and Vareddes.