Journal of Small Things

Trains

Two trains are side-tracked in the fields, beyond the little country station, where the wheat is already bronzed and heavy-headed, and the poppies flame through it, and where there is all the music of grasshoppers and crickets and birds.

One is a train of men coming back from the Front on leave, and very gay. They are all laughing and singing in the carriages. They are all getting themselves tidied up, for shortly they will be in Paris. The officers in several of the carriages have managed to get some water, and are scrubbing luxuriously, with tin-cups and soup-plates for basins. Soapy faces appear at the windows. The men have opened the carriage doors all along the train and got out to tumble about in the grass at the edge of the train. They pick buttercups that grow close to the rails, and some of them have wandered off into the tall wheat to gather poppies.

The second train on the siding is full of wounded, who must wait, like the permissionnaires, to let pass the munition and troop trains going out. The wounded are quite comfortably arranged on their tiers of stretchers; the doctors and orderlies have all the needed things, and move about competently, up and down the train. It is strange how quiet the train of wounded is. It is only here and there along it that one hears moaning or a cry.

A munition train crawls by, all grey. It is nothing that the permissionnaires or wounded need notice.

Then, after a time, that seems very long, comes a troop-train going out. The men in the troop train hang out of the windows and look silently upon all the things they are passing in the fields, that seem so full of peace and so kind.

They wave to the permissionnaires, who are silent for a moment, watching them as they go. And then they pass the train of wounded, some of whom look up at them.

Monday, July 24th—5.30 of the morning

Pérot has just gone.

He was noiselessly creeping down the outside stairs from his attic room. But I was waiting at the door on the landing, and made him come in for a minute to the apartment.

He sat, loaded down with all his campaign things, in the little yellow chair, and I sat in the big yellow chair, and we looked at one another.

It is odd how one never can say any of the things to them; and how, always, they understand perfectly all the things one would say if one could.

He looked very ill, poor boy. Ten days' leave of convalescence after five months in the hospital has really not given him enough time to pick up. And he worries so. He can try to eat, but he cannot sleep at all. All night he thinks and thinks.

I know so very well just what he thinks.

He has never had many words with which to tell me, for he has had all his short life to work so hard that he could get little time for learning to express himself. But sometimes he says, "If I knew they were dead——"

They are his two little sisters. The mother died five years ago, the father several years before that. He helped his mother when he was still a schoolboy to take care of the little sisters, Célestine and Marie; and when the mother was dead he took care of them alone. Now he is twenty-four years old, and Célestine is seventeen and Marie sixteen.

Since the day he left, two years less just eleven days ago, he has had no word of them at all.

Others from those invaded countries have had perhaps messages, a postal card, some sort of a letter; but he had had no word.

An application we got through for him to the maire of the nearest large town has had only the answer that the farm exists no more and that nothing has been known of the two young girls.

It was the "le mauvais sang qu'il faisait," as Madame Marthe said, that kept him so long from getting well. His wound in the shoulder was pretty bad, but what was worse was his unceasing grief and dread. He would have died, of the wound and that, if he had not been so young and northern and strong.

His wound got itself well. The new ones needed his place in the hospital. He was given ten days' sick leave, and came to spend it in the room upstairs, because he had nowhere else to go.

Now his leave has come to an end, and he is going back to his depôt, and then to the Front. I may never see him again, my poor boy, whose face goes white and red, and white and red, and whose blue northern eyes fill with tears if one speaks kindly to him.

He sat in the little yellow chair and I sat in the big yellow chair, and we looked at each other in the wet grey early morning.

I said, "They gave you a good breakfast?"

"Oh, yes, madame."

"And your little package, for lunch in the train?"

"Oh, yes, madame, and the cigarettes."

"Some letter-paper to write to me on?"

"Yes, madame."

"You have all the money you need, you are sure, my child?"

"Oh, yes, madame, much more than I need. I still have that twenty francs."

"You promise to let me know if I can do anything for you?"

"Yes, madame."

"And you will take care of yourself, please, Pérot."

"Yes, madame."

The clock struck once, the first quarter hour past five.

"You must go, my child."

He stood up.

I went to the door with him.

"You would not have liked me to come to the train, Pérot?"

"No, madame, because I should have cried; I am so stupid, madame."

"I would have cried too. And so, my child—until a less sad day."

"Madame—thank you."

"No, I thank you, little soldier."

Wednesday, July 26th

This morning, at the hospital, one of the Verdun men came up from the convalescent ward downstairs, where he was sent when they evacuated for the Somme, to say good-bye to us. He is well enough, and he is going back. He is one of the older men, one of those who have the look of worrying about wives and babies. He has been twice wounded. The first was a bad wound; he had taken long to get over it in some hospital of the provinces, and to be able to go back and be wounded again. Now he is going back for the third time.

I remember his having told me, at first, when he was quite ill and talked with fever, that he was terribly afraid of Verdun. He said he did not mind what they did with him if only they did not send him back to Verdun. He said he was afraid of the bayonet. He could kill with the gun, he said, but not with the bayonet. He said he stood paralyzed when it was the moment to strike with the bayonet, and could not strike.

It was after he left my ward that his wife had come up from the Limousin, and brought the two little girls to visit him. I never saw her, but I remember how happy he was. He told me his wife could not stay long because she had to go back and take care of the cows. They had two cows, he said.

Now he bade good-bye to Madame Marthe, who was washing her hands with sublimé after a dressing, and who gave him a sharp red elbow to shake.

He said good-bye to the men in the ward, each one in turn, and stood a minute looking at his old place and said, "One was well off there."

I went to the door with him.

It was very hot in the ward, and there were flies buzzing.

I thought: To be going back to that, when one knows it already; to be going back to that, when one has no longer youth's élan and carelessness; when one has to worry over labour and poverty left behind.

I suppose he saw something in my face of what I felt, for he said, in a kind, pitying way, as if to help me, "Do not be sad, madame." And he said the thing they all say, all of them, "I' faut b'en, tous les copains sont là."

"All the others are there."

And then, this afternoon, I heard another soldier say that.

It was in the rue de la Paix. He was giving an order to the chauffeur. His little boy, in a white piqué dress with a big lace collar, was standing beside him, dancing up and down and hanging on his hand.

His wife leaned out of the window of the motor and called to me as I passed, and he turned. I stopped, and we talked for a minute.

He has been home on a six days' leave and is going back to-night.

He is a captain in the chasseurs à pied. Before the war he was an officer in a smart cavalry regiment, but he had himself transferred into the infantry when the war began. I have heard the men in the hospital talk of him. They say, "C'est un type épatant, celui-là." They say he never sends his men to reconnoitre, but goes himself, always.

He looked very young and splendid in his smart uniform, standing at the door of the motor.

The little boy, always dancing up and down beside him, said, "We've got his picture taken! We've got his picture taken!"

His wife tried to laugh but I saw her eyes in the shadow of her white lace hat. "It's true," she said, "we dragged him to it, poor boy. We had nothing decent of him at all, you know."

She was very lovely in her lovely things, with a heap of red roses beside her on the seat of the motor.

Somehow, that it was all so pretty made it sadder. In the bright street I thought: To go back to that, when one has so much, when one has everything in the world, and is young and full of radiant life.

His wife and I looked at each other.

He smiled down at her, as if it were only for her one need be sorry. "We have had six perfect days," he said, "and you know it must be—the others are there."

I have written those words many times over. But they are the words one hears every day. As the men go back, each one of them from the however different circumstances of his life, that is all they seem to find to say about it. It does not make a fine phrase, but it has come to mean for me a beautiful thing. Behind the great sweep of battles it is one of the things I shall always be glad to have known.

I find myself wanting to put each saying of it away with other memories in this book that for two years has kept me company.

Two years ago—so long ago that I find myself saying, once upon a time—there was a small square tower room that had three windows, narrow and deep-set, the loopholes of ancient defences. Once upon a time the three windows stood open to the night and the garden, and to a sense, somehow, of the friendly crowding up of the little town about the rampart walls, and to the country lying away beyond, sweet in the dark with forest and field.

I know that where war has passed strangers can look into broken houses and see all that was intimate and small and dear betrayed with ruin of stones and lives, and that, like that, people who do not care may glance in passing into the wreck of the north tower room.

The tower had stood for so long, keeping watch over that road to Paris—how strange to think it will keep watch no more! It had looked down, in its long time, on much of war, and held its own through three besiegings—and now it is fallen.

Now it is fallen, the strong tower, in a land that is laid waste, from which peace has been taken away, and joy, out of the plentiful fields.

Already that night was passed beyond the end of the world.

In the morning of that day, the morning of that last Sunday of peace, I had stood in my window over the garden and seen the sunshine, thick and golden after rain, on wet sweet things, lawns and little formal stately paths and box edges and clipped yews, roses and heliotrope and petunias. And I had not known. I had seen the close, soft dream-sky of France full of white clouds above the tops of trees that were green and golden, or sometimes as dark as purple and black. And I had not known.

The white peacocks were spreading their dreams of tails below the terrace, between the crouching sphynxes that years and years of moss and ivy and rose-vines had grown over.

There had been church bells ringing to the voices of the garden, its birds and bees and grasshoppers. And I had not known.

Against the rampart walls I could see, between the trees, the town roofs gathered close, rust-red ancient tiles and thatch that time and weathers had made beautiful, and crooked chimney-pots and blue smoke rising straight and high in the still, blue air.

I could hear the little sounds of the village, together with the garden sounds and the bells.

I could smell hearth fires and fresh-baked bread, together with the new-cut grass and heliotrope and roses.

Every sound had been part of the stillness; all the lines and colours of things belonged together in that soft harmony which is so especially of France. I had thought, how it was France! And I had not known.

I had gone to Mass in the little ancient, dusky church of the village. I had gone down across the parterres, and along the avenue of limes, through the summer woods that were so happy and alive, out at the little green gate in the rampart walls, and down the street of big square old cobbles, between the nestling houses.

And in the church there had been incense and candles, and the white caps of old women, and the wriggling of the children in their Sunday clothes.

When I came back, there were the papers arrived from Paris. And nothing again was ever, ever, to be the same.

That night, not knowing why, I wanted to write down for my own memory notes of just those little things that seem so small, and that went all together to the making of a mood we can no more find to turn to.

I wanted to write of the fragrance of delicate years that abode in my tower room; of the dim, cloudy mirror over the mantel that had reflected so many stories; of how the writing-table stood in the north window, and had nothing but a bowl of sweet-peas and my travelling-desk things on it; and that the window was open, and how all the wet, sweet, quite cold night came in; and that, over the tops of the dark trees, and between the dark cloud masses, I could see all the stars of the Lyre, Vega, blue-white, very big and near, all more brilliant, I thought, than ever I had known them before. I wanted to explain how, somehow, one felt the village, down under the rampart walls, though it slept and made no sound, and how friendly its presence was as it lay so close, protecting and protected, about its ancient burg.

Now the houses are roofless, and the rampart walls are broken. The tower is fallen. Nothing is left unchanged there, to-night, but the shining down of the August stars.

I had dreamed of the hoofbeats of galloping horses and crash of great wheels and of thunder. And all that came, and does not cease. I had dreamed of blood on the castle stairs, dripping and dripping. And they say that there was one night especially, when the castle was so full of wounded men, that there was nowhere left to lay them in any of the rooms, or in the lower halls. They carried them as they were brought in up the stairs to lie on the floor of the Long Gallery. And the blood ran down the stairs.

There was fighting, over and over, up and down, those big square cobbles of the streets and of the market place, and from the doors and windows and roofs of those little houses.

The people of the streets and houses are gone, who knows where, with their poor small bundles, fled long ago, before the hoofbeats and wheels and thunder.

Across these things, how absurd to remember the sweet-peas there were, that Sunday night, in a bowl on a writing-table!

It was very hot in the ward to-day; the flies buzzed horridly up and down the window-panes.

It was a very bad day in the ward. Thirty-four was very low. He had a hæmorrhage yesterday, and all day he seemed to be sinking. It was to-day he received his Croix de Guerre. The captain came up to the ward with another officer and gave it to him, and read his citation out, standing by the bed. But he seemed scarcely to know.

Several other decorations were given also to-day, downstairs in the Salle de Jeu. We had much to do in our ward, and I could not go down.

Our little 17 received his Cross and also his Military medal. He managed to get downstairs and stand up with the others, most of them like himself on crutches. Yesterday he had news of his mother's death. He told me he had never had a father. "Il du être un salaud, ce type-là," he told me. His only brother had been reported missing since more than a year. He kept calling me over every few minutes—when he was back in the ward, and in his bed, very tired—to show me his medals in their two green boxes. He had no one of his own to whom to show them.

There was much big work to be done, and the ward was so clouded all day with the choking blue smoke of iodine from the hot washings and dressings.

Madame Marthe was very nervous, and Madame Alice seemed especially sullen.

I wondered—was it that her poor little Jeanjean is worse again, there, where he has been all these months, in the children's hospital, cared for by others than she?

I was thinking all the day of it, and never dared to ask her.

Madame Marthe stood all day by the bed of 34. She would say to him, "Now breathe, breathe. Now breathe." If ever she stopped saying it, for one instant, he stopped breathing. It was as if the only thing he understood was that he must obey her.

Madame Alice did all she possibly could of her work for her, sullenly, together with her own hard work.

It was a very bad day; I am proud to belong in such days.

I was thinking very much of the garden of the sphynxes and white peacocks, that is in ruin, and of the tower room given over to bats and swallows.

It was beautiful, that mood which is gone, but this is more beautiful.