Our Part in the Great War

"Doucement," said the old man. ("Gently.")

We went to his home, his new home, a brick house, built by the English Quakers, who have helped in much of this reconstruction work. He and his wife live looking out on the ruin of their old home.

"Here was my bed," he said, "and here the chimney plate."

He showed the location and the size of each familiar thing by gestures and measurements of his hands. Nine of the neighbors had lain out in the field, while the Germans burned the village. He took me down into the cave, where he had later hidden; the stout vaulted cellar under the ruined house.

"It is fine and dry," I suggested.

"Not dry," he answered, pointing to the roof. I felt it. It was wet and cold.

"I slept here," he said, "away from the entrance where I could be seen."

His wife was made easier by talking with us.

"How many milliards will bring us back our happiness?" she asked. "War is hard on civilians. My husband is seventy-eight years old."

The cupboard in her new home stood gaping, because it had no doors.

"I have asked the carpenter in Revigny to come and make those doors," she explained, "but he is always too busy with coffins; twenty-five and thirty coffins a day."

These are for the dead of Verdun.

When the Germans left Sommeilles, French officers found in one of the cellars seven bodies: those of Monsieur and Madame Alcide Adnot, a woman, thirty-five years old, and her four children, eleven years, five, four, and a year and a half old. The man had been shot, the young mother with the right forearm cut off, and the body violated, the little girl violated, one of the children with his head cut off. All were lying in a pool of blood, with the splatter reaching a distance of ninety centimeters. The Germans had burned the house, thinking that the fire would destroy the evidence of their severity, but the flames had not penetrated to the cellar.

Sommeilles is in one of the loveliest sections of Europe, where the fields lie fertile under a temperate sun, and the little rivers glide under green willow trees. Villages of peasants have clustered here through centuries. One or two of the hundreds of builders that lifted Rheims and Chartres would wander from the larger work to the village church and give their skill to the portal, adding a choiceness of stone carving and some bit of grotesquerie. Scattered through the valleys of the Marne, and Meuse, and Moselle, you come on these snatches of the great accent, all the lovelier for their quiet setting and unfulfilled renown.

The peasant knew he was part of a natural process, a slow, long-continuing growth, whose beginnings were not yesterday, and whose purpose would not end with his little life. And the aspect of the visible world which reinforced this inner sense was the look of his Town Hall and his church, his own home and the homes of his neighbors – the work of no hasty builders. In the stout stone house, with its gray slabs of solidity, he and his father had lived, and his grandfather, and on back through the generations. There his son would grow up, and one day inherit the house and its goods, the gay garden and the unfailing fields.

Things are dear to them, for time has touched them with affectionate association. The baker's wife at Florent in the Argonne is a strapping ruddy woman of thirty years of age, instinct with fun and pluck, and contemptuous of German bombs. But the entrance to her cellar is protected by sand-bags and enormous logs.

"You are often shelled?" asked my friend.

"A little, nearly every day," she answered. "But it's all right in the cellar. For instance, I have removed my lovely furniture down there. It is safe in the shelter."

"Oh, then, you care more for your furniture than you do for your own safety?"

"Why," she answered, "you can't get another set of furniture so easily as all that." And she spoke of a clock and other wedding-presents as precious to her.

A family group in Vassincourt welcomed us in the room they had built out of tile and beams in what was once the shed. The man was blue-eyed and fair of hair, the woman with a burning brown eye, the daughter with loosely hanging hair and a touch of wildness. The family had gone to the hill at the south and watched their village and their home burn. They had returned to find the pigs ripped open. The destruction of live stock was something more to them than lost property, than dead meat. There is an intimate sense of kinship between a peasant and his live stock – the horse that carries him to market, his cows and pigs, the ducks that bathe in the pool of his barnyard and the hens that bathe in the roadside dust. No other property is so personal. They had lost their two sons in the war. The woman in speaking of the French soldiers called them "Ces Messieurs," "these gentlemen."

In this village is a bran-new wooden shed, "Café des Amis," with the motto, "A la Renaissance," "To the Rebirth."

In Sermaize, nearly five hundred men marched away to fight. When the Germans fell on the town, 2,200 were living there. Of these 1,700 have returned. There are 150 wooden sheds for them, and a score of new brick dwellings, and twenty-four brick houses are now being built. Six hundred are living in the big hotel, once used in connection with the mineral springs for which the place was famous: its full name is Sermaize-les-Bains. Eight hundred of the 840 houses were shelled and burned – one-third by bombardment, two-thirds by a house to house burning.

The Hotel des Voyageurs is a clean new wooden shed, with a small dining-room. This is built on the ruins of the old hotel. The woman proprietor said to me:

"We had a grand hotel, with twelve great bedrooms and two dining-rooms. It was a fine large place."

The Café des Alliés is a small wooden shed, looking like the store-room of a logging camp. We talked with the proprietor and his wife. They used to be manufacturers of springs, but their business was burned, their son is dead in the war, and they are too old to get together money and resume the old work. So they are running a counter of soft drinks, beer and post cards. The burning of their store has ended their life for them.

We talked with the acting Mayor of Sermaize, Paul François Grosbois-Constant. He is a merchant, fifty-four years old. The Germans burned his six houses, which represented his lifetime of savings.

"The Germans used pastilles in burning our houses," he said, "little round lozenges, the size of a twenty-five-centime piece (this is the same size as an American quarter of a dollar). These hop about and spurt out fire. They took fifty of our inhabitants and put them under arrest, some for one day, others for three days. Five or six of our people were made to dress in soldiers' coats and casques, and were then forced to mount guard at the bridges. The pillage was widespread. The wife and the daughter of Auguste Brocard were so frightened by the Germans that they jumped into the river, the river Saulx. Brocard tried to save them, but was held back by the Germans. Later, when he took out the dead bodies from the river, he found a bullet hole in the head of each."

As we drove away from Sermaize, I saw in the village square that a fountain was feebly playing, lifting a thin jet of water a few inches above the basin.

II

THE HOMELESS

We are a nomadic race, thriving on change. Apartment houses are our tents: many of us preempt a new flat every moving day. This is in part an inheritance from our pioneer readiness to strike camp and go further. It is the adaptability of a restless seeking. It is also the gift made by limitless supplies of immigrants, who, having torn up their roots from places where their family line had lived for a thousand years, pass from street to street, and from city to city, of the new country, with no heavy investment of affection in the local habitation. Once the silver cord of ancestral memory is loosened, there is little in the new life to bind it together. The wanderer flows on with the flowing life about him. To many of us it would be an effort of memory to tell where we were living ten years ago. The outline of the building is already dim.

The peasant of France has found a truth of life in planting himself solidly in one place, with an abiding love for his own people, for the house and the village where he was born. Four centuries ago the French poet wrote:

Heureux qui comme Ulysse a fait un beau voyage
Ou comme cestuy-là qui conquit la Toison
Et puis est retourné plein d'usage et raison
Vivre entre ses parents le reste de son âge.

Quand revoiray-je hélas! de mon petit village
Fumer la cheminée, et en quelle saison
Revoiray-je le clos de ma pauvre maison
Qui m'est une province, et beaucoup davantage.

Plus me plaist le sejour qu'out basty mes ayeux
Que des palais romains le front audacieux
Plus que le marbre dur me plaist l'ardoise fine.

Plus mon Loyre gaulois que le Tybre latin
Plus mon petit Liré que le mont Palatin
Et plus que l'air marin la douceur Angevine.

Happy the man who like Ulysses has traveled far and wide,
Or like that other who won the Golden Fleece,
And then wended home full worn and full wise,
To spend among his own folk the remainder of his days.

When shall I see once more alack! above my little hamlet
Rise the chimney smoke, and in what season of the year
Shall I see once more the garden of my humble home,
Which is a wide province in my eyes, and even more.

Dearer to my heart is the home my forefathers built
Than the cloud-capped tops of haughty Roman palaces.
Dearer than hardest marble the fine slate of my roof.

Dearer my Gaulish Loire than Tiber's Latin stream.