Home Fires in France

Outside, all night long, there thundered the rumbling passage of the artillery and camions.

In the morning, when Sylvie and Raoul awoke, they found Simone crouched in a corner of their mother's room, sobbing endlessly tears of sheer nervous exhaustion. But out from their mother's white, white face on the pillow looked triumphant eyes. She drew the covers down a little and lifted her arm. "See, children, a little new brother."

As she spoke she thrust out of her mind, with a violence like that with which she had expelled the ruffian from the door, the thought that the little brother would probably never see his father. It was no moment to allow herself the weakness of a personal sorrow. She must marshal her little forces. "Come, Sylvie dear. Simone is all tired out; you must get us something to eat, and then you and Simone must bring in all you can of what is left in the kitchen and hide it here under mother's bed." She had thought out her plan in the night.

During the next days Madeleine was wholly unable to stand on her feet. From her bed she gave her orders—desperate, last-resort orders to a defeated garrison. The apartment was constantly invaded by ravenously hungry and thirsty men, but her room was not entered. The first morning the door to her room had been opened brusquely, and a gray-haired under-officer entered hastily. He stopped short when he saw Madeleine's drawn white face on the pillow, with the little red, bald head beside her. He went out as abruptly as he had gone in and chalked something on the door. Thereafter no one came in; although not infrequently, as though to see if the chalked notice were true, the door was opened suddenly and a head with a spiked helmet thrust in. This inspection of a sick woman's room could and did continually happen without the slightest warning. Madeleine was buffeted by an angry shame which she put aside sternly, lest it make her unfit to nurse her baby.

They lived during this time on what happened to be left in the kitchen, after that first day of pillage, some packages of macaroni, tapioca, and cornstarch, part of a little cheese, some salt fish, two or three boxes of biscuits, a little sugar, a little flour. They did unsavory cooking over the open fire till their small supply of wood gave out. The children submitted docilely to this régime, cowed by their mother's fierce command not for an instant to go out of her sight. But the little maid, volatile and childish, could not endure life without bread. She begged to be allowed to go out, to slip along the alley to the Hospice and beg a loaf from Sister Ste. Lucie. There must be bread somewhere in town, she argued, unable to conceive of a world without bread. And in the daytime the sentries would let her pass.

Madeleine forbade her to leave the room, but on the third day when her mistress was occupied with the baby she slipped out and was gone. She did not come back that day or the next. They never saw or heard of her from that moment.

Madeleine and the children continued to live in that one room, shaken by the incessant rumble of the passing artillery wagons and by the hurrying tread of booted feet. They heard now and again incursions into the other rooms of their home, and as long as there were loud voices and trampling and clattering dishes, the children crept into bed beside Madeleine and the baby, cowering together under the poor protection of their mother's powerless arms. They never dared speak above a whisper during those days. They heard laughing, shouting, cursing, snoring in the rooms all around them. Once they heard pistol shots, followed by a great splintering crash of glass and shouts of wild mirth.

Madeleine lost all count of the days, of everything but the diminishing stock of food. She tried repeatedly to sit up, she tried to put her feet to the floor, but she felt her head swim and fell back in bed. She had little strength left to struggle now. The food was almost gone, and her courage was almost gone. As though the walls of the room were closing in on her, the approach of the spent, beaten desire to die began to close in on her. What was the use of struggling on? If she could only kill the children and herself ... there was no hope.

One morning Sylvie said in a loud, startled whisper: "Oh, maman, they are going the other way! Back towards Lorat ... and yet they are still hurrying as fast as ever ... faster!"

Madeleine felt her hair raise itself on her scalp. She sat up in bed. "Sylvie, are you sure?"

And when the child answered, always in her strained whisper, "Yes, yes, I am sure," her mother sprang out of bed with a bound and ran to the window.

It was true. The dusty-gray tide had turned. They were raging past the house, the horses straining at the heavy artillery wagons, lashed into a clumsy canter by the drivers, leaning far forward, straining, urging; the haggard men, reeling in fatigue, stumbling under their heavy packs, pressing forward in a dog-trot; the officers with red angry faces, barking out incessant commands for more haste ... and their backs were turned to Paris!

The Frenchwoman, looking down on them, threw her arms up over her head in a wild gesture of exultation. They were going back!

She felt as strong as ever she had in her life. She dressed herself, set the wretched room in some sort of order, and managed to prepare an edible dish out of soaked tapioca and sugar. The children ate it with relish, comforted by their mother's new aspect.

About two o'clock that night Madeleine awoke to an awful sense of impending calamity. Something had happened, some tremendous change had come over the world. She lay still for a long moment, hearing only the beating of her own heart. Then she realized that she heard nothing but that, that the thunder of the trampling feet had stopped. She got out of bed carefully, trying not to waken the children, but Sylvie, her nerves aquiver, heard and called out in a frightened whisper, "Maman, maman! What is it?" She caught her mother's arm, and the two went together to the window. They leaned out, looked to right and left, and fell to weeping in each other's arms. Under the quiet stars, the village street was perfectly empty.

The next morning Madeleine made the children swallow a little food before, all together, the baby in his mother's arms, they ventured out from their prison-room. They found their house gutted and sacked and sullied to the remotest corner. The old brocade on the chairs in the salon had been slit to ribbons by sword-slashes, the big plate-glass windows over the mantel-pieces had each been shattered into a million pieces, all the silver was gone from the drawers, every piece of linen had disappeared, the curtains had been torn down and carried away, and every bit of bedding had gone, every sheet, every blanket, every eiderdown quilt. The mattresses had been left, each having been cut open its entire length and sedulously filled with filth.

The kitchen, emptied of all its shining copper and enamel utensils, was one litter of splintered wood, remnants of furniture which had been cut up with the ax for fuel. Madeleine recognized pieces of her mahogany beds there. Through the kitchen window she looked down into the walled space which had been the garden and saw it a bare, trampled stable-yard, with heaps of manure at each end. She looked at all this in perfect silence, the children clinging to her skirts, the baby sleeping on her arm. She looked at it, but days passed before she really believed that what she saw was real.

A woman's voice called quaveringly from the landing: "Madame Brismantier, are you there? Are you alive? The Germans have gone." Madeleine stepped to the landing and saw old Sister Ste. Lucie, her face which had always been so rosy and fresh, as gray as ashes under her black-and-white coif. She leaned against the wall as she stood. At the sight of the sleeping baby in Madeleine's arms, the gray face smiled, the wonderful smile which women, even those vowed to childlessness, give to a new mother. "Oh, your baby came," she said. "Boy or girl?"

"Yes," said Madeleine, "he came. A boy. A nice little boy." For one instant the two women stood there in that abomination of desolation, with death all around them, looking down at the baby, and smiling.

Then Sœur Ste. Lucie said: "There is nothing left in the pharmacy, I see. I thought maybe they might have left something, by chance, but I see everything is smashed to pieces. You don't happen to have any supplies up here, do you? We need bandages horribly at the Hospice, for the wounded. There are forty there."

Madeleine knew the minute size of the little Hospice and exclaimed: "Forty! Where do you put them?"

"Oh, everywhere, on the floor, up and down the hall, in the kitchen. But we haven't a thing except hot water to use for them; all the sheets were torn up two days ago, what they hadn't stolen! If I only had a little iodine, or any sort of antiseptic. Their wounds are too awful, all infected, and nothing ..."

Without knowing it Madeleine took a first step forward into a new life. "There's plenty of everything," she said. "I hid them all in the far room of the cellar."

"God grant 'they' didn't find them!" breathed the nun.

Madeleine lighted a candle, left the sleeping baby in the charge of Sylvie, and went with Sœur Ste. Lucie down into the cellar. They found it littered and blocked with emptied and broken bottles. A strange hoarse breathing from a dark corner frightened them. Lifting her candle, Madeleine brought to view a German soldier, dead-drunk, snoring, his face swollen and red. The women let him lie as an object of no importance and turned to the hanging shelves. They heaved a long sigh; the blind was still there, untouched. Madeleine's device was successful.

As they looked among the heaped-up supplies from the pharmacy for bandages and antiseptics, Sœur Ste. Lucie told Madeleine very briefly what had been happening. Madeleine listened in a terrible silence. Neither she nor the nun had strength to spare for exclamations. Nor could any words of theirs have been adequate. The news needed no comment. M. le Maire was dead, shot in front of the Town Hall, on the ground that there had been weapons found in one of the houses. "You know in the Bouvines' house they had some Malay creeses and a Japanese sword hanging up in M. Bouvines' study, things his sailor uncle brought back. The Mayor never thought to take those down, and they wouldn't give him time to explain. M. le Curé was dead, nobody knew or ever would know why—found dead of starvation, strapped to a bed in an attic room of a house occupied by some German officers. Perhaps he had been forgotten by the person who had tied him there...." The nun's voice died away in sobs. She had been brought up under M. le Curé's protection all her life and loved him like a father.

Madeleine sorted bandages in silence, her throat very dry and harsh. Later Sœur Ste. Lucie went on, trying to speak more collectedly: "The worst of trying to care for these wounded is not being able to understand what they say."

"How so?" asked Madeleine, not understanding in the least.

"Why, I don't speak German."

Madeleine stopped short, her hands full of bandages. "Are they German wounded? Are we getting these things for German soldiers?"

Sœur Ste. Lucie nodded gravely. "Yes, I felt just so, too, at first. But when I saw them wounded, bleeding, so sick, worn out.... How would you like German women to treat your husband if he should be wounded in Germany? We are all nothing but wretched sinners in the sight of God. And are we not taught to do good to our enemies?"

Of all this (which meant in reality simply that Sœur Ste. Lucie was a warm-hearted woman whose professional habit had been for forty years to succor the afflicted) Madeleine took in very little at the time, although it was to come back to her again and again. At the moment she thought that she did not believe a single word of it. She certainly did not at all think that we are the best of us but wretched sinners, and she had as remotely academic a belief as any other twentieth-century dweller in the desirability of doing good to your enemies. The idea of Jules wounded in Germany did indeed bring a flood of confused emotions into her mind. If Germany should be invaded, would Frenchmen be stamping into strangers' houses and taking the food out of the mouths of the owners, would they...?

"Well," said Sœur Ste. Lucie, impatient of her trance-like stare.

It was none of what she had been thinking which now moved Madeleine to say automatically, "Oh, of course we'll have to give them the bandages and the peroxide." She could not have named the blind impulse which drove her to say this, beyond that a sort of angry self-respect was mixed with it. Her head ached furiously, whirling with fatigue and lack of food, her back ached as though it were being beaten with hammers. She renounced any attempt to think.

"Here," said Sœur Ste. Lucie, staggering herself with exhaustion. "The baby is only a few days old. You're not fit to be doing this."

Madeleine, who had lain flat on her back for two weeks after the birth of the other two children, shook her head. "No, no, I can do it as well as you. You look fearfully tired."

"I haven't had my clothes off for ten days," said the nun. "And I'm sixty-two years old."

In the street door, with her basket of bandages on her arm, Sœur Ste. Lucie stood looking around her at the desolate filth-strewn shop, the million pieces of glass which had been its big windows covering the floor, its counter hacked and broken with axes. She said: "We haven't any mayor and the priest is dead, and we haven't any pharmacy and the baker is mobilized, and there isn't one strong, well man left in town. How are we going to live?"

Madeleine took another step, hesitating, along the new road. She leaned against the counter to ease her aching body and put back her hair to look around her at the wreck and ruin of her husband's business. She said in a faint voice: "I wonder if I could keep the pharmacy open. I used to help Jules with the accounts, I know a little about where he bought and how he kept his records. I wonder if I could—enough for the simpler things?"

"You have already," said the nun, as she went away, "and the first things you have given out are bandages for your enemies. God will not forget that."

Madeleine received this with an impatient shrug. She was not at all glad that her first act had been to help the suffering among her enemies. She had hated doing it, had only done it because of some confused sense of decency. She heartily wished she had not had it to do. But if it had been necessary, she would have done it again ... and yet to do it for those men who had murdered M. le Maire, so blameless and M. le Curé—so defenseless!... No, these were not the same men who lay bleeding to death in the Hospice to whom she had sent bandages. They had not murdered ... as yet!

Her head throbbed feverishly. She renounced again the effort to think, and thrusting all this ferment down into her subconsciousness she turned to the urgent needs of the moment. It seemed to her that she could not breathe till she had set the pharmacy as far as possible in the order Jules had left it. This feeling, imperious and intense, was her only refuge against her certainty that Jules was killed, that she would never see him again. Without an attempt to set to rights even a corner of the desolated little home, upstairs, she began toiling up and down the cellar stairs carrying back the glass jars, the pots, the boxes, and bottles and drawers. It seemed to her, in her dazed confusion, that somehow she was doing something for Jules in saving his pharmacy which he had so much cared for, that she was almost keeping him from dying by working with all her might for him there....

In the middle of the morning she went upstairs and found that Sylvie, working with Raoul, had cleared the kitchen of the worst of the rubbish. In a pot-closet under the sink there were two old saucepans which had not been stolen. Madeleine made a fire, stoically using her own broken-up furniture, and, putting a few potatoes (the last of their provisions) on to boil, sat down to nurse the hungry baby.

"Maman dear," said Sylvie, still in the strained whisper of the days of terror. She could not speak aloud for weeks. "Maman dear," she whispered, "in the salon, in the dining-room, I wanted to try to clean it, but it is all nasty, like where animals have been."

"Hush!" said her mother firmly. "Don't think about that. Don't look in there. It'll make you sick if you do. Stay here, tend the fire, watch the baby, and play with Raoul." She outlined this program with decision and hurried back downstairs to go on with the execution of one conceived in the same spirit. If she could only get the pharmacy to look a little as it had when Jules had left it, it seemed to her that Jules would seem less lost to her.

She shoveled the incredible quantity of broken glass back through the shop into what had been her garden, hardening herself against a qualm of horror at the closer view of the wreckage there. The two big sycamore trees had been cut down and sawn into lengths to use for fuel in the open fire, the burned-out embers of which lay in a black ring where the arbor had stood.

She went back to her work hastily, knowing that if she stopped for an instant to look, she would be lost.

At noon she went upstairs, and with the children lunched on potatoes and salt.

She was putting the last of the innumerable drawers back in its place, after having tried it in all the other possible places, when a poorly dressed, rough-haired, scrawny little boy came into the shop. Madeleine knew him by sight, the six-year-old grandson of Madame Dulcet, a bedridden, old, poor woman on Poulaine Street. The little boy said that he had come to get those powders for his grandmother's asthma. She hadn't slept any for two nights. As he spoke he wound the string about a top and prepared to spin it, nonchalantly. Looking at his cheerful, dirty little face, Madeleine felt herself a thousand years old, separated for always and always from youth which would never know what she had known.

"I don't know anything about your grandmother's asthma powders," she said. The little boy insisted, astonished that a grown person did not know everything. "He always kept them. Grandmère used to send me twice a week to get them. Grandmère will scold me awfully if I don't take them back. She's scolding all the time now, because the Germans took our soup-kettle and our frying-pan. We haven't got anything left to cook with."

The memory of her immensely greater losses rose burningly to Madeleine's mind. "They took all my sheets!" she cried impulsively,—"every one!"

"Oh," said the little boy indifferently, "we never had any sheets, anyhow." This did not seem an important statement to him, apparently; but to Madeleine, her old world shattered, emerging into new horizons, beaten upon by a thousand new impressions, it rang loudly. The Germans, then, had only put her in the situation in which a woman, like herself, had always lived ... and that within a stone's throw of these well-filled linen-closets of hers! There was something strange about that, something which she would like to ponder, if only her head did not ache so terribly. The little boy said, insistently, "He always gave me the powders, right away!"

Through obscure complicated mental processes, of which she had only the dimmest perceptions, Jules had always given the powders ... how strange it was that precisely a bedridden woman who had most need of them should have owned no sheets ... there came to her a great desire to send that old woman the medicine she needed. "You go outside and spin your top for a while," she said to the child; "I'll call you when I'm ready."

She went upstairs. Holding her skirts high to keep them out of the filth, she picked her way to the bookcase. Books were scattered all about the room, torn, cut, trampled on, defiled; but for the most part those with handsome bindings had been chosen for destruction. On the top shelf, sober in their drab, gray-linen binding, stood Jules' big record-books, intact. She carried down an armful of them to the pharmacy, and opened the latest one, the one which Jules had put away with his own hand the day he had left her.

The sight of the pages covered with Jules' neat, clear handwriting brought a rush of scalding tears to her eyes. Her bosom heaved in the beginning of sobs. She laid down the book, and, taking hold of the counter with all her strength, she forced herself to draw one long, regular breath after another, holding her head high.

When her heart was beating quietly again, quietly and heavily, in her breast, she opened the book and began studying the pages. Jules set everything down in writing, it being his idea that a pharmacist had no other defense against making those occasional mistakes inevitable to human nature, but which must not occur in his profession.

Madeleine read: "March 10, sold 100 quinine pills to M. Augier. Stock low. Made 100 more, using quinine from the Cochard Company's laboratories. Filled prescription...." Madeleine's eyes leaped over the hieroglyphics of the pharmaceutical terms and ran up and down the pages, filled with such items, looking for the name Duguet. She had almost given up when she saw, dated July 30, 1914, the entry: "Made up fresh supply Mme. Duguet asthma powders, prescription 457. Dr. Millier. Drawer No. 17."

Madeleine ran behind the counter and pulled out No. 17. She found there a little pasteboard box marked, "Duguet."

"Oh, boy, little boy!" she called.

When the child came in she asked, "Did your grandmother ever get any other medicine here?"

"No," said the grandson of the bedridden woman, "she hasn't got anything else the matter with her."

"Well," said the pharmacist's wife, "here is her medicine." She put the box in his hand.

"Oh, we never get more than four at a time," he told her. "She never has the money to pay for more. Here it is. Granny hid it in her hair so the Germans wouldn't get it. She hid all we have. She's got more than five francs, all safe."

He put a small silver coin in her hand and departed.

The mention of the meager sum of hidden money made Madeleine think of her own dextrously concealed little fortune. She had noticed at once on entering the shop that the arrangement of false shelves which concealed the safe had not been detected, and was intact. She pushed the spring, the shelves swung back, and disclosed the door of the safe just as usual. She began to turn the knob of the combination lock. It worked smoothly and in a moment the heavy door swung open. The safe was entirely empty, swept clear of all the papers, titles, deeds, bonds which had covered its shelves.

As actually as though he stood there again, Madeleine saw the polite pseudo-Swiss geological gentleman, thanking Jules for the temporary use of his excellent safe.

She was petrified by this new blow, feeling the very ground give way under her feet. A cold, cold wind of necessity and stress blew upon her. The walled and sheltered refuge in which she had lived all her life was utterly cast down and in ruins. The realization came to her, like something intolerable, indecent, that she, Madeleine Brismantier, was now as poor as that old bedridden neighbor had been all her life ... all her life....

Somehow, that had something to do with those sheets which she had had and the other woman had not ... her mind came back with a mortal sickness to the knowledge that she had now nothing, nothing to depend upon except her own strength and labor—just like a poor woman. She was a poor woman!

Somebody was weeping and tugging at her skirts. She looked down blindly. It was Raoul, her little son. He was sobbing and saying: "Sylvie said not to come, but I couldn't stand it any more. I'm hungry! I'm hungry, and there isn't a thing left upstairs to eat! I'm hungry! I'm hungry!"

Madeleine put her hand to her head and thought. What had happened? Oh yes, all their money had been stolen, all ... but Raoul was hungry, the children must have something to eat. "Hush, my darling," she said to the little boy, "go back upstairs and tell Sylvie to come here and look out for the shop while I go out and find something to eat."

She went down the silent, empty street, before the silent empty houses staring at her out of their shattered windows, and found not a soul abroad. At the farm, in the outskirts of town, she saw smoke rising from the chimney and went into the courtyard. The young farmer's wife was there, feeding a little cluster of hens, and weeping like a child. She stared at the newcomer for a moment without recognizing her. Madeleine looked ten years older than she had a fortnight ago.

"Oh, madame, we had three hundred hens, and they left us just these eight that they couldn't catch! And they killed all but two of our thirty cows; we'd raised them ourselves from calves up. They killed them there before the very door and cooked them over a fire in the courtyard, and they broke up everything of wood to burn in the fire, all our hoes and rake handles, and the farm-wagon and ... oh, what will my husband say when he knows!"

Madeleine had a passing glimpse of herself as though in a convex mirror, distorted but recognizable. She said, "They didn't hurt you or your husband's mother, did they?"

"No, they were drunk all the time and they didn't know what they were doing mostly. We could hide from them."

"Then your husband will not care at all about the cows and pigs and farm-wagons," said Madeleine very firmly, as though she were speaking to Sylvie. The young farmer's wife responded automatically to the note of authority in Madeleine's voice. "Don't you think he will?" she asked simply, reassured somewhat, wiping away her tears.

"No, and you are very lucky to have so much left," said Madeleine. "I have nothing, nothing at all for my children to eat, and no money to buy anything." She heard herself saying this with astonishment as though it were the first time she had heard it.

The young wife was horrified, sympathetic, a little elated to have one whom she had always considered her superior come asking her for aid; for Madeleine stood there, her empty basket on her arm, asking for aid, silently, helplessly.

"Oh, we have things left to eat!" she said. She put some eggs in Madeleine's basket, several pieces of veal left from the last animal killed which the Germans had not had time entirely to consume, and, priceless treasure, a long loaf of bread. "Yes, the wife of the baker got up at two o'clock last night, when she heard the last of the Germans go by, and started to heat her oven. She had hidden some flour in barrels behind her rabbit hutches, and this morning she baked a batch of bread. It's not so good as the baker's of course, but she says she will do better as she learns."

Madeleine turned back down the empty, silent street before the empty silent houses with their wrecked windows. A child came whistling along behind her, the little grandson of the bedridden Madame Duguet. Madeleine did what she had never done before in her life. She stopped him, made him take off his cap and put into it a part of her loaf of bread and one of the pieces of meat.

"Oh, meat!" cried the child. "We never had meat before!"

He set off at a run and disappeared.

As she passed the butcher-shop, she saw an old man hobbling about on crutches, attempting to sweep up the last of the broken glass. It was the father of the butcher. She stepped in, and stooping, held the dustpan for him. He recognized her, after a moment's surprise at the alteration in her expression, and said, "Merci, madame." They worked together silently a moment, and then he said: "I'm going to try to keep Louis' business open for him. I think I can till he gets back. The war can't be long. You, madame, will you be going back to your parents?"

Madeleine walked out without speaking. She could not have answered him if she had tried. In front of the Town Hall she saw a tall old woman in black toiling up the steps with a large package under each arm. She put down her basket and went to help. It was the white-haired wife of the old mayor, who turned a ghastly face on Madeleine to explain: "I am bringing back the papers to put them in place as he always kept them. And then I shall stay here to guard them and to do his work till somebody else can come." She laid the portfolios down on a desk and said in a low, strange voice, looking out of the window: "It was before that wall. I heard the shots."

Madeleine clasped her hands together tightly, convulsively, in a gesture of utter horror, of utter sympathy, and looked wildly at the older woman. The wife of the mayor said: "I must go back to the house now and get more of the papers. Everything must be in order." She added, as they went down the steps together: "What will you do about going on with your husband's business? Will you go back to live with your mother? We need a pharmacy so much in town. There will be no doctor, you know. You would have to be everything in that way."

This time Madeleine answered at once: "Yes, oh yes, I shall keep the pharmacy open. I already know about the accounts and the simple things. And I have thought how I can study my husband's books on pharmacy, at night after the children are in bed. I can learn. Jules learned."

She stooped to pick up her basket. The other woman went her way. Madeleine stepped forward into a new and awful and wonderful world along a new and thorny and danger-beset path into a new and terrifying and pleasureless life.

A wave of something stern and mighty swelled within her. She put down her head and walked forward strongly, as though breasting and conquering a great wind.

BY DOROTHY CANFIELD

BY SIMEON STRUNSKY

BY MARGARET WIDDEMER

By ROMAIN ROLLAND