Part 4 (1/2)

Still, I must confess that the att.i.tude 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 Crecy-en-Brie at sunset, must have been beautiful; and then climbing by Voulangis to the Forest of Crecy 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 pa.s.sed over them. I was heart-broken, but Pere 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 censors.h.i.+p.

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.

Amelie 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 rus.h.i.+ng 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 a.s.sure 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 ca.s.sis 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 Sat.u.r.day 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. Pere 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 polis.h.i.+ng 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 s.p.a.ce 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.