Our Part in the Great War

"My wife," he went on, "has the blood of four races in her, English, Greek, Spanish and French. She is a very energetic woman, and brave. She is a soul. She is a somebody. (Elle est une âme. Elle est quelqu'un.)"

We talked with her. She is brown-eyed and of an olive skin, with gayety and ever-changing expression in the face. But she is near the breaking-point with the grief of her loss, and the constant effort to choke down the hurt. Her laughter goes a little wild. I felt that tears lay close to the lightest thing she said. Her maiden name was Marie-Amélie-Anne Barker.

"When the Germans began to bombard our village," she told me, "my husband and I went down into the cellar. He stayed there a few minutes.

"'Too damp,' he said. He climbed upstairs and sat in the drawing-room through the rest of the bombardment. Every little while I went up to see him, and then came back into the cellar.

"After their bombardment they came in person. In the twilight of early morning they marched in, a very splendid sight, with their great coats thrown over the shoulder. I heard them smash the doors of my neighbors. The people had fled in fright. The soldiers piled the household stuff out in the street. I saw them load a camion with furniture taken from the home of M. Desforges and with material taken from Nordmann, our merchant of novelties.

"A doctor, with the rank of Major, seized the surgical dressings of our hospital, although it was under the Red Cross flag.

"I stood in my door, watching the men go by.

"You are not afraid?" asked one.

"I am not afraid of you," I replied.

"I believed my house would not be burned. It was the house where the German Emperor William the First spent four days in 1870. It was the house where he and Bismarck and Von Moltke mapped out the plan of Sedan. You see it was the finest house in this part of France. Each year since 1871, three or four German officers have come to visit it, taking photographs of it, because of the part it played in their history. I was sure it would not be burned by them.

"I left all my things in it – the silverware, the little trinkets and souvenirs, handed down in my family, and gathered through my lifetime. I said to myself, if I take them out, they will treat it as a deserted house. I will show them we are living there, with everything in sight. I was working through the day at the hospital, caring for the German wounded.

"The soldiers began their burning with the house of a watchmaker. They burned my house. I saw it destroyed bit by bit (morceau par morceau). I saw my husband's study go, and then the drawing-room, and the dining-room. The ivories, the pictures, the bibelots, everything that was dear to me, everything that time had brought me, was burned.

"I said to the German doctor that it was very hard.

"He replied: 'If I had known it was Madame's house, I should have ordered it to be spared.'"

We were silent for a moment. Then Madame Jacquemet said:

"Come and see what we have now."

She led us upstairs to a room which the two beds nearly filled.

"All that I own I keep under the beds," she explained. "See, there are two chairs, two beds. Nothing more. And we had such a beautiful room."

"Why did you burn our homes?" I asked a German officer, after the village was in ruins.

"We didn't burn the place," he answered. "It was French shells that destroyed it."

"I was here," I answered. "There were no French shells."

"The village people fired on our troops," he said.

"I was here," I told him. "The village people did not fire on your troops. The village people ran away."

"An empty town is a town to be pillaged," he explained.

The Mayor took up the story.

"A German officer took me into his room, one day," he said. "He closed the door, and began:

"I am French at heart. I believe that your village was burned as a spectacle for the Crown Prince who has his headquarters over yonder at a village a few kilometers away."

The picture he summoned was so vivid that I said, "Nero – Nero, for whom the destruction of a city and its people was a spectacle. Only this is a little Nero. Out of date and comic, not grandiose and convincing."

Monsieur Jacquemet went on:

"They burned our houses with pastilles, the little round ones with a hole in the middle that jump as they burn. In the Maison Maucolin we found three liters of them. The Thirty-first French Regiment picked them up when they came through, so that no further damage should come of them. The Germans left a sackful in the park belonging to M. Desforges. The sack contained 500 little bags, and each bag had 100 pastilles. Monsieur Grasset threw the sack into water, as a measure of safety."

The Mayor had saved a few pastilles as evidence, and passed one of them around. He has an exact turn of mind. He made out a map of his hilltop, marking with spots and dates the shells that seek his home.

Under one of the oldest of the linden trees – the historian of our party, Lieutenant Madelin, wondered how old: "four, five centuries, perhaps" – we ate an open-air luncheon. Our hosts were the Mayor and his wife. Our fellow-guests were the Captain and the Major – the Major a compact, ruddy, sailor type of man, with the far-seeing look in his blue eyes of one whose gaze comes to focus at the horizon line.

It seemed to me like the simple farm-meals I had so often eaten on the New England hills, in just that rapid sunlight playing through the leaves of great trees, in just that remote clean lift above the dust and hurt of things. I thought to myself, I shall always see the beauty of this little hill rising clear of the ruin of its village.

Then we said good-by, and I saw on the doorstep, sitting motionless and dumb, the mother of a soldier. Her white hair was almost vivid against the decent somber black of her hood, and dress. There was a great patience in her figure, as she sat resting her chin on her hand and looking off into the trees, as if time was nothing any more. For many days the carpenters had not been able to work fast enough to make coffins for the dead of Clermont. She was waiting on the Mayor's doorstep for the coffin of her son.

V

THE LITTLE CORPORAL

We were in the barracks of the Eighth Regiment of Artillery. They have been converted into a home for refugees, but the old insignia of famous victories still adorn the walls. We were talking with Madame Derlon. She is a refugee from Pont-à-Mousson, widowed by German severity. But unlike so many women of Lorraine whom I met, she still could look to her line continuing. For while she sat, slightly bent over and tired, Charles, her fifteen-year-old son ("fifteen and a half, Monsieur"), stood tall and straight at her side. While the mother told me her story, I looked up from her and saw on the wall the escutcheon of the Regiment, and I read in illuminated letters the names of the battles in which it had fought:

"Austerlitz – 1805.

Friedland – 1807.

Sebastopol – 1854.

Solferino – 1859."

At the beginning of the war, her husband was ferryman of the Moselle, she said. He carried civilians and soldiers across. Their little son, then thirteen years old, liked to be near him, and watch the river and the passing of people. The boy had discovered a cellar under the bridge – a fine underground room, well-vaulted, where boy-like he had hidden tobacco and where he often stayed for hours, dreaming of the bold things he would do when his time came, and he would be permitted to enlist. His day was closer than he guessed. A cave is as wonderful to a French boy as it was to Tom Sawyer. Sometimes he made a full adventure of it and slept the night through there.

During the early battles, the bridge had been blown up. So Father Derlon was kept very busy ferrying peasants and stray soldiers from bank to bank. One day three German patrols came along. Charles was standing by the bridge, watching his father sitting in the wherry. The boy stepped down into his underground room to get some tobacco. He was gone only five minutes. When he came back, the three Germans said to him:

"Your father is dead."

It was so. They had climbed the bridge, and fired three times; one explosive bullet had entered the ferryman's head, and two had shattered his arm. The Germans said he had been carrying soldiers across, and that it was wrong to carry soldiers.

"The little one came home crying," said Madame Derlon. "Since that moment, the little one left home without telling me. He did not send me any news of himself. I searched everywhere to try to find a trace of him. Monsieur Louis Marin, the Deputy, told me he had seen a boy like my little one following the soldiers. Actually he had been adopted by the 95th Territorial Regiment."

He told the soldiers that he had just seen his father killed by the Germans. One of the captains took him under his protection. The boy insisted on becoming a fighter. He was brave and they made him Corporal. He fell wounded in action, winning the Croix de Guerre.

Charles Derlon, the little Corporal of the 95th Infantry, has a bright open face, but it is a face into which has passed the look of responsibility. In one moment, he became a man, and he has that quiet dignity of a boy whom older men respect and make a comrade of. He holds himself with the trim shoulders and straight carriage of a little soldier of France.

One of us asked him:

"And weren't you afraid, my boy, of the fight?"