Home fires in France

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CORNELL

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Notes from a French Village in the War Zone . i

The Permissionaire ........ 27

II

When I come in from the street, very tired, after a talk with a war-widow about ways and means for taking care of her children, I find him in the living-room, the ■hearty, broad- faced fellow, smiling, giving me his great, farm-laborer's hand, thanking me for the last package of goodies ... as though he had not just come

^through the inferno of the attack at M . " The

/'package never arrived at a better moment," he said gaily. ^"We had been on awfully short rations for three days . . . in a shell-hole, you know." I know that I do not know it all, but it is futile to try to draw fine distinctions with Groissard, cheeriest and simplest of "permissionnaires," always the same, always open-faced and cleareyed, always emanating quiet confidence and always seeing it about him. If there are any tired or disheartened or apprehensive or perplexed soldiers in the army, they pass unperceived of Groissard's honest eyes. His companions are all . . . to hear him talk ... as brave, as untroubled, as single-hearted as he. They never complain — that is, if Groissard's account of them is accurate : they think as little as possible about anything but food and packages from the rear and jokes. And when they do think, it is always only to be sure that everybody must hold hard and stick it out quite to the end. As long as " they " are on French soil, of course there is nothing else for an honest Frenchman to do. And they are all honest Frenchmen around Groissard.

" Oh yes, madame," he says simply, balancing my little boy on his knee, " the spirit of the army is excellent. Why shouldn't it be? We're going to get them, you know. And you ought to see our regimental fireless cookers now. They're great! The cooks fill them up at the kitchen at the rear, quite out of range, you know, \vhere there's no danger of a shell upsetting the pots, and then the men bring the big fireless cookers up on mitrailleuse carriages that can go anywhere. They worm their way clear up to us in the first-line trenches, and our ragout is piping hot. It's like sitting down to the table at the farm at home. There's nothing so good for the spirit of an army as hot rasta. And your packages, the packages madame sends with the money from her American friends . . . why, the days when they come it's like being a kid again, and having a birthday! And then we get two days out of five for rest at the rear, you know, except when there is a very big attack going on. We're not so badly off at all ! "

" During those big attacks aren't you sometimes cut off from food supplies ? " I ask.

" Oh, not so often. The longest one was three days and four nights, and we had our emergency rations for half that time." He tosses my fat little son up in the air and catches him deftly in his great farm laborer's hands, butcher's hands. The children adore Groissard, and his furloughs are festivals for them. As for me, I have an endless curiosity about him. I can never be done with questioning him, with trying to find out what is underneath his good-natured acceptance of the present insane scheme of the universe; I sometimes descend to banalities, the foolish questions schoolgirls ask. I lower my voice : " Groissard, did you ever — ^have you ever had to ... I don't mean firing off your rifle at a distant crowd, I mean in close quarters . . . ? "

" Have I killed many Boches, you mean, madame ? " he breaks through my mincing, twentieth-century falsemodesty about naming a fact I accept . . . since I accept Groissard ! " Oh yes, a good many. We fought all over Mort-Homme, you know; and we were in the last attack on Hill 304. There was a good deal of hand-to-hand work there, of course." He turns the delighted baby upside down and right-side up, and smiles sunnily at the resultant shrieks of mirth.

I try again : " Do you see many prisoners, Groissard? " He is always ready to answer questions, although he cannot understand my interest in such commonplace details.

"Yes indeed, madame, ever so many. Just the day before this ' permission ' began, day before yesterday it was, we brought in a squad of twenty from a short section of trench we had taken. I'm not likely to forget them for one while! Our cook, who is from the South and loses his head easily, went and cooked up for them at three o'clock in the afternoon every last beefsteak we were going to have for dinner that night. We didn't have a thing but beans left ! But we didn't grumble very much, either. They were the coldest, hungriest-looking lot you ever saw. It did your heart good to see the way they got around those beefsteaks ! "

Igaze at him baffled. " But, Groissard, you kill them. You are there to kill them ! What can you care whether they have beefsteaks or not."

He stops playing with the baby to look at me, roundeyed with astonishment. " I'm not there to kill prisoners! " he says, with an unanswerable simplicity. And I lose myself again in a maze of conjecture and speculation.

Ill

" Oh, it's got to stop, that's all ; it's too sickening, too imbecile, too monstrous ! "

It is the brancardier talking, the one who had been a prosperous sugar-broker before the war, and who has been a first-line stretcher-carrier since the beginning of the war. If you think you have any idea what it has meant to be first-line stretcher-carrier for three years, you have only to hear Paul Arbagnan talk for five minutes to guess at the extent of your ignorance. He is just back from the front, on a twenty-four hours' furlough, granted after a terrible fortnight under incessant fire. He sits in the midst of our family group, beside his older brother, the despatch-carrier, also here " en permission." The brother was before the war a professor of political economy. From the worn blue uniforms of both brothers swings the croix de guerre gloriously. The younger one's face is thin and very brown, his blue eyes look out at us with an irritable flicker. The mud dried on his clumsy boots crumbles off in great flakes on my polished floor. His hard, grimy hand with broken nails (which had been so fine and well-kept before the war) teases and pulls at his closeclipped hair, now as grizzled with silver as that of a man twenty years his senior.

A harmless elderly relative murmurs something sentimental about the mud on the floor being sacred earth, like that the Crusaders brought back from Jerusalem, and the inevitable explosion takes place. " Oh, you people at the rear, your silly chatter about heroism and holy causes! You don't know what you are talking about. There ought to be a law to make all the civilian population keep silence about the war. You have no idea, not the faintest glimmering of a notion of what life is at the front ! If you had . . . ! My croix de guerre! Don't you suppose I would give it back ten times over if I could forget what I feel deliberately to leave a mortally wounded man to die because I have orders to select (if my stretcher has not room enough for all) only those who may get well enough to go back and fight again. Without having known what it is, you've no right to say a word, to have an opinion or a thought about it, you safe, clean, soft, gossiping people at the rear ! The dirt . . . ! Why, the bath I had this morning here in Paris was the first time I have taken my clothes off, except to hunt for vermin, for twenty-two days. Do you know what your body is like, what your clothes are like, what your socks are like, when you have lived and cooked and sweat and slept and bled in them for twenty-two days? Of course you don't. No civilized being does. And until you do, less talk from you about the heroism of the soldier! Filth, that's what war is, and dirty diseases lying in wait for decent men.

And cold, cold day and night, cold that brutalizes, that degenerates you till you would sell your soul, your mother's soul to be warm again. And mud, not clean country mud, but filth, and up to your eyes and beyond, horrible infected mud splashing upon the emergency bandage you are trying to put on a wound. And the wounded . . . see here, when the newspapers speak complacently of the superb artillery preparation which after three days of cannon-duel silences the enemy's batteries, do you know what that means to me? It means I am squatting all day in an underground shelter, with twenty wounded, the German shells falling one a minute over my head, my supplies of bandages gone, my anaesthetics gone, no cotton, not even a cup of water left. To see them die there, begging for help, calling for their mothers ... to crouch there helpless, all day long, hearing the shells falling, and wondering which one will come through the roof — oh, you have plenty of time to think the whole proposition over, the business you're in. You have time, let me tell you, to have your own opinion of the imbecility of setting one highly civilized man down in filth and degradation to shoot at others. When some idiot of a journalist, reporting the war, speaks of the warlike ardor of the men, how it is difificult to restrain them until the order to charge is given . . , when we read such paragraphs in the papers ... if you could hear the snarl that goes up ! We * charge ' when the word of command is given, yes, because we know nothing better to do, but ..."

The sentimental aunt breaks in resolutely : " Of course, it's very noble of you, Paul; the fact is simply that you don't or won't recognize your own courage."

" Courage, nonsense ! A rat in a hole, surrounded by other rats putrefying . . . that's what I am in my underground shelter! What else can I do? What else can we any of us do? We can't get away! There ^wouldn't be anywhere to go if we did! But when I •think of the people at the rear, how they don't know, will never know, the sickening hours the troops live through. See here! No sensitive, civilized being can forget it if he has only once been wholly filthy, wholly bestial . . . and we have been that, time without number. When I come back to Paris on furlough and look at the crowds in the Paris streets, the old men with white collars, and clean skins, the women with curled hair and silk stockings, I could kill them, when I think that they will have a voice in the future, will affect what will be done hereafter about war ..."

" Time for your train, Paul," warns the elder brother soberly.

The man who had been reviling the life of a soldier springs instantly to his feet and looks anxiously at his watch. He claps on his blue steel casque.

We try to give a light touch to the last of his stay. " How medieval those helmets make you look ! "

He is not to be distracted. " Put it further back, stone-age, cannibalistic," he cries bitterly, marching out hurriedly so that he may be promptly at his task.

The elder brother comes back from the door, a dim, patient smile on his lips. " Oh, Paul, poor boy ! He takes it hard ! He takes it hard ! " he murmurs. " Who would think to hear him that he is accounted the best brancardier in his section? He is the one always sent out to do the impossible, and he always goes, silently, and does it. After this last engagement, he had shown such bravoure, they wanted to have him cited again, to give him the palms to wear above his croix. But he said he had had his share, that others had done as much as he, and he persuaded them to give the croix to one of the other brancardiers, a stevedore from Marseilles who can't read or write. You are perhaps not surprised to know that he is adored by his comrades."

" But is it true ... all he says ? " I ask, shivering a little.

" Oh yes, true enough, and more than he says or any one can ever say. But, but ..." He searches for a metaphor and finds it with a smile. " See, Paul is like a man with a fearful toothache ! He can't think of anything else. But that doesn't mean there isn't anything else."

I ask him : " But you, who have been through all that Paul sees, what do you find, besides ? " He hesitates, smiling no longer, and finally brings out in a low tone : "When a mother gives birth to a child, she suffers, suffers horribly. Perhaps all the world is now trying to give birth to a new idea, which we have talked of, but never felt before; the idea that all of us, each of us, is responsible for what happens to all, to each, that we must stick together for good ..." He picks up his steel helmet, and looks at us with his dim, patient, indomitable smile. " It is like a little new baby in more ways than one, that new idea. It has cost us such agony; and it is so small, so weak, so needing all our protection . . . and then also, because ..." his sunken eyes are prophetic, " because it is alive, because it will grow ! "