! TALES OF 
 WARTIME FRANCE
 
 TALES OF WARTIME FRANCE
 
 TALES 
 OF WARTIME FRANCE 
 
 BY 
 CONTEMPORARY FRENCH WRITERS 
 
 Illustrating the Spirit of 
 the French People at War 
 
 TRANSLATED BY 
 WILLIAM L. McPHERSON 
 
 WITH FOREWORD BY 
 FREDERIC R. COUDERT 
 
 NEW YORK 
 
 DODD, MEAD AND COMPANY 
 1918 

 
 Copyright, 1918 
 By DODD, MEAD & COMPANY, Inc.
 
 FOREWORD 
 
 To us Americans France has become almost a mystic 
 word, carrying with it a picture of suffering and heroism. 
 The Marne and Verdun stand out as the great " check 
 battles " of the modern world, where the oldest and most 
 sympathetic of European peoples again, after an interval 
 of centuries, stopped the inroad of a new and more terri- 
 ble barbarism; that in which brutish appetite is served by 
 all the devices of modern science. 
 
 The great lines of the conflict we all know. They are 
 revealed to us by the daily press and contemporary his- 
 tory. These are the broad outlines of the story, but there 
 is much more to the picture that we do not see and that 
 the imagination can scarce conjure the simple devotion 
 of obscure persons, the silent suffering of little children, 
 the long agony of the women in the invaded districts, the 
 quiet heroism of the humble folk whose names will never 
 adorn the pages of history. It is the recital of incidents 
 sudi as are contained in these little stories that reveals to 
 us the very soul of France itself, as it can be revealed in 
 no formal oration or state document. 
 
 When a poor refugee woman whose home had been 
 
 2031070
 
 vi FOREWORD 
 
 burned and invalid husband done to death, in reply to 
 my query as to whether she had any children, answered 
 simply, that the Lord had at least spared her that added 
 suffering, I realized as I never otherwise could what the 
 Hun invasion really meant. 
 
 When little children who had returned to the wrecked 
 villages in Lorraine, with their mothers, to aid in culti- 
 vating the rescued soil of France, showed me the place 
 where they had seen " Grandpere shot," one felt that such 
 children could never be quite like the others. 
 
 French literary skill of the highest order has been em- 
 ployed in depicting these incidents of the war with a 
 pathos and power scarce equalled in history. The writ- 
 ers, in many cases soldiers or participants in the scenes 
 which they describe, have been able to interpret with that 
 insight and power so native to the French mind, these 
 
 The Tribune has rendered a real service in publishing 
 an admirable translation of some of these little master- 
 pieces, which must otherwise have escaped the attention 
 of the American reader. One derives from them some 
 idea of what the sacrifice has meant to France, how it 
 has been borne, and what multiple forms it has taken. 
 Who can ever forget Daudet's stories of the invasion of 
 1870? "La Derniere Classe" leaves an indelible im- 
 pression of the continued tragedy of Alsace. 
 
 One rises from the reading of the stories in this book
 
 FOREWORD vii 
 
 with a profound sense of the " pity of it all," tempered 
 only by the thought that our own America has really 
 understood and will persevere to the end that all this 
 Calvary shall not have been in vain! 
 
 FREDERIC R. COUDERT. 
 New York, Feb. 20, 1918.
 
 CONTENTS 
 
 FOREWORD. Frederic R. Coudert v 
 
 INTRODUCTION xi 
 
 BY ALFRED MACHARD 
 
 PAGE 
 
 REPATRIATION 1 
 
 BY MAURICE LEVEL 
 
 UNDER ETHER (1918) 7 
 
 THE SPIRIT OF ALSACE 13 
 
 AT THE MOVIES 24 
 
 THE LITTLE SOLDIER (1918) 30 
 
 THE GREAT SCENE 36 
 
 AFTER THE WAR 42 
 
 BY FREDERIC BOUTET 
 
 THE MESSENGER 48 
 
 THE CONVALESCENT'S RETURN 54 
 
 THE MEDALLION 59 
 
 THE PROMISE 65 
 
 BY PIERRE MILLE 
 
 How THEY Do IT 70 
 
 THE APOLOGUE OF KADIR BAKCH .... 78 
 
 THE MAN WHO WAS AFRAID ...... 83 
 
 THE SOLDIER WHO CONQUERED SLEEP ... 90 
 is
 
 x CONTENTS 
 
 BY MME. LUCIE DELARUE-MADRUS 
 
 PAGE 
 
 THE GODMOTHER 97 
 
 THE GODMOTHER II 103 
 
 THE RED ROSE 109 
 
 THE RIVALS 115 
 
 BY RENE BENJAMIN 
 
 ** IN A ROADSTEAD OF FRANCE 121 
 
 THE SIMPLICITY OF HEROISM 128 
 
 THE HINDOO COMMISSARIAT 134 
 
 BY JEAN AICARD 
 
 * MARIETTE'S GIFT 142 
 
 ANONYMOUS 
 
 THE SONATA TO THE STAR 153 
 
 * THE PIPE 160 
 
 * THE RENDEZVOUS 167 
 
 * THE VOICE OF THE CHURCH BELL .... 173 
 THE SACRIFICE 180 
 
 ** THE SLACKER WITH A SOUL 188 
 
 * THE EVOCATION 195 
 
 *** Triple starred (the highest excellence) in Edward J. 
 O'Brien's "Best Short Stories" of 1916 and 1917. 
 
 ** Double starred (the next highest standard) in "Best Short 
 Stories " of 1916 and 1917. 
 
 * Single starred (the next highest standard of excellence) in 
 " Best Short Stories " of 1916 and 1917.
 
 INTRODUCTION 
 
 These translations first appeared in the Sunday issues 
 of the New York Tribune, in 1916-'18, and the trans- 
 lator's thanks are due to Mr. Ogden Reid, Editor-in-Chief 
 of the Tribune, for permission to republish them in 
 book form. 
 
 The series had a double purpose. It was intended, in 
 the first place, to furnish each week a worth while piece 
 of fiction notable in literary quality and also illus- 
 trating the experiences and emotional reactions of a na- 
 tion at war. The war has profoundly affected French 
 life and thought. Four years of endurance and sacri- 
 fice have therefore left their impress on French litera- 
 ture; and in no field of letters is their impress more 
 noticeable than in the field of the short story a field 
 in which French writers have always excelled. As a 
 vehicle for the expression of the mood and temper of a 
 people in time of stress the French short story has taken 
 on since 1914 new flexibility and power. 
 
 It was the translator's purpose, in the second place, to 
 stimulate American interest in the French short story 
 writers of today, who have gotten so close to the real
 
 xii INTRODUCTION 
 
 spirit of France. America and France are drawing to- 
 gether again. New ties of friendship and intimacy are 
 being formed and Americans are beginning to feel that 
 in working toward a better knowledge of France and the 
 French they are building intelligently for the future. 
 We are sending hundreds of thousands of soldiers to 
 fight on French soil. Nearly every American household 
 has a relative or friend either in France or on the way 
 there, and our interest in the people, the language, the 
 mental outlook and the culture with which we as a nation 
 are now coming into the closest contact is being stimu- 
 lated as it never has been before, or ever could have 
 been, by polite but formal exchanges of friendly senti- 
 ments between the Governments of the two republics, by 
 a century old sense of gratitude to our generous ally in 
 the Revolutionary War, or by occasional after-dinner 
 evocations of the shades of Washington and Lafayette. 
 Before this war ends a new American-French Alliance 
 will be cemented. It will bring a rapprochement in 
 thought and understanding, in which a wider cultivation 
 of French literature in this country will undoubtedly 
 play an important part. This book is intended to be a 
 contribution to such a rapprochement. 
 
 The stories contained in this volume will introduce 
 to the American reading public, writers most of whom 
 have come to the fore with the war. Take a volume of 
 "Qui Etes Vous?" (the French "Who's Who") of a
 
 INTRODUCTION xiii 
 
 date as late as 1910 (the latest available in the New York 
 Public Library) and you will find in it no mention of 
 Maurice Level, Frederic Boutet, Rene Benjamin or Al- 
 fred Machard. Yet these are the men who are doing the 
 largest share of the brilliant fiction of the war fit suc- 
 cessors in the field of the short story to Daudet and Mau- 
 passant, but exhibiting a simplicity and breadth of feel- 
 ing in which those more sophisticated and more purely 
 literary masters were somewhat deficient. 
 
 You will find, of course, in the French " Who's Who " 
 Jean Aicard, one of the oldest of The Immortals, now 
 past his seventieth year, poet, dramatist and novelist, a 
 venerable figure in the literary world of Paris. He has 
 written the charming war pastoral, " Mariette's Gift." 
 
 You will also find Mme. Lucie Delarue-Madrus, four 
 of whose stories appear in this collection. She is a poet, 
 novelist and dramatist, who made her reputation before 
 the war. She has turned to writing short war stories 
 delicately finished and full of poetic imagination. " The 
 Rivals " is a good example of her graver style. The 
 other three stories, which deal with a unique French 
 war institution the godmother to the poilus are in 
 a lighter and more sparkling vein. All of them show the 
 dexterity of a highly trained writer. 
 
 Pierre Mille had also an established literary reputation 
 in the period before the war. He is fifty-four years old 
 and has had a brilliant career as an author and journalist.
 
 xiv INTRODUCTION 
 
 In his younger days he was a bureau chief in the French 
 Secretariat General of Madagascar and was sent on vari- 
 ous official missions to West Africa, the Congo, Indo- 
 China and British India. His book on the Belgian 
 Congo, "Au Congo Beige," published in 1899, was 
 crowned by the Academy. He was the correspondent of 
 " Le Journal des Debats " in the Greco-Turkish War of 
 1897, and has written extensively for " Le Journal," " Le 
 Petit Journal," " Le Temps," " La Revue de Paris " and 
 " La Revue des Deux Mondes." 
 
 His short stories have both finish and virility. He is 
 equally at home writing about colonials, Arabs, or negro 
 fighters from Senegal; about Greeks or Serbians; about 
 French poilus or British soldiers and these last are 
 certainly a final test of the equipment of any French 
 writer. Mille has imagination, clarity and humour. 
 The four stories which are included in this volume show 
 him in different moods. But from all of them one gets 
 an impression of intellectual vigour and high technical 
 proficiency. 
 
 In the group of newer authors Maurice Level is repre- 
 sented by the largest number of stories. His fertility is 
 remarkable. And the average quality of his work is very 
 high. Level has a style something like that of de Mau- 
 passant. It is brusque, concise, stripped of all impedi- 
 ments. It wastes no words and pushes breathlessly to 
 the climax. Its virility and dramatic force are best
 
 INTRODUCTION 
 
 xv 
 
 illustrated in " Under Ether," " At the Movies," and 
 " The Spirit of Alsace." " After the War " is playfully 
 sardonic. " The Great Scene " has a hard and technical 
 brilliancy. On the contrary " The Little Soldier " is en- 
 gagingly tender and poetic. Compactness in form, sim- 
 plicity in manner and an unerring eye for the denoue- 
 ment are Level's chief virtues. 
 
 Frederic Boutet is almost as prolific as Level. He 
 covers a wide range in his choice of subjects, but his 
 manner is singularly consistent. He creates an atmos- 
 phere of his own. In his best stories there is a peculiar 
 charm of sobriety. Like Level, he is a master in the 
 terse and compact expression of an idea, feeling or situa- 
 tion. But, unlike Level, he has a singular moderation 
 and reticence of manner. He abhors crashing effects. 
 In speaking of a volume of his war stories, recently pub- 
 lished in France, the literary editor of " L'Humanite " 
 made this just and felicitous remark: " Here one finds 
 again the sober manner of Boutet, who seeks to produce 
 his effects by presenting the realistic side of things, not 
 by exciting artificially the imagination and nerves of the 
 reader." 
 
 The title of M. Boutet's book was " Those Who Wait 
 for Them." This aptly suggests the motive of most of 
 his work. He is, so to speak, the laureate, not of the 
 fighting men at the front, but of those who stay behind, 
 but who nevertheless have their part in the war and its
 
 xvi INTRODUCTION 
 
 emotions and sacrifices. All four of his stories in this 
 collection concern life behind the lines. The sentiment 
 in them is grave, delicately refracted and unobtrusive. 
 In " The Convalescent's Return " there is also a gentle 
 touch of irony. 
 
 If Boutet is the laureate of those who wait at home 
 Rene Benjamin is the laureate of the French poilus. No 
 one stands ahead of him as a celebrater of the heroism 
 and endurance of the French soldier. He has two moods. 
 In the first he is robust, almost brutal, in his realism. 
 There is a reason for this, since the background of war, 
 against which the soldierly virtues stand out, is undeni- 
 ably brutal. This first mood is uppermost in " Gas- 
 pard," his war novel. In the second mood he is a prose 
 poet, vividly imaginative and almost romantic in spirit. 
 "In a Roadstead of France" and "The Simplicity of 
 Heroism" show to advantage his more delicate and po- 
 etic manner. M. Benjamin has also written many ad- 
 mirable war sketches, dealing with the Allied armies in 
 France first with the British and latterly with the 
 American. "The Hindoo Commissariat" is more of a 
 sketch than a story. But it is included in this volume be- 
 cause of its limpid style and imaginative quality. 
 
 Alfred Machard, whose touching story, " Repatria- 
 tion," comes first in this collection, has shown a keen ap- 
 preciation of that part of the great war tragedy in which 
 children figure. In this field it is easy to fall into an
 
 INTRODUCTION xvii 
 
 exaggerated vein of pathos. M. Machard has avoided 
 that temptation. His style is marked by admirable re- 
 straint. " Repatriation " is one of the best examples 
 of his vivid but self-controlled and not over-emotional- 
 ized manner. 
 
 The seven anonymous stories included in the book 
 came to the translator in reprint form. In some in- 
 stances the names of the writers may have been acci- 
 dentally suppressed. Information which may lead to 
 a determination of authorship in these cases is invited 
 and will be welcomed. 
 
 The translator's confidence in the unusual quality of 
 the stories here collected has been strongly confirmed by 
 the judgment passed on them in Mr. Robert J. O'Brien's 
 listings of the best short stories appearing in American 
 magazines and periodicals in 1916 and 1917. Of the 
 thirty pieces in this volume two were first published in 
 1916 Benjamin's " In a Roadstead of France " and 
 " The Sacrifice," anonymous. Two were first published 
 in 1918 Level's "Under Ether" and "The Little 
 Soldier." Of the twenty-eight which appeared in 1916 
 and 1917 twenty-two figured on Mr. O'Brien's honor 
 roll. Two were triple-starred, three were double-starred 
 and fourteen were single starred. Of the two triple 
 starred one is by Boutet and one anonymous. Of the 
 three double starred one is by Level, one is by Benjamin 
 and one is anonymous. Of the fourteen single starred
 
 xviii INTRODUCTION 
 
 three are by Level, three by Boutet, three by Mille, one 
 by Machard, one by Aicard and three are anonymous. 
 These notations are shown in the table of contents. 
 The translator's thanks are also due to Mr. O'Brien for 
 his personal interest in the publication in book form 
 
 of these stories. 
 
 WILLIAM L. MCPHERSON. 
 
 Feb. 20, 1918.
 
 TALES OF WARTIME FRANCE
 
 TALES OF 
 WARTIME FRANCE 
 
 REPATRIATION 
 ALFRED MACHARD 
 
 FOR more than twenty-four hours they had been trav- 
 elling across Germany, shut in like animals, in a 
 cattle car in which there still lingered an acrid odour of 
 the stable. At one of the stations where the train stopped 
 a big Prussian had come in, grumbling, to attach to the 
 roof of the car a sort of miner's lamp, with an open 
 flame. And since they were afraid of him he began to 
 laugh with a cruel laugh which exposed three whole 
 teeth and some blueish tooth stumps. 
 
 One of them, braver or more resolute than the others, 
 went up to him. 
 
 " Mr. Soldier," she asked, " in case one of us should 
 die on the train, what would you do? " 
 
 The Prussian reflected a moment. He seemed almost 
 to smile. Then he extended his hairy paws and went 
 through the motions of taking hold of a corpse and toss- 
 ing it roughly through the open door. No matter where 
 1
 
 2 TALES OF WARTIME FRANCE 
 
 into the ditch, perhaps, which ran alongside the rail- 
 road track. 
 
 "Bah! I would do like that! Ha! ha! Just like 
 that! " 
 
 And he appeared to enjoy hugely their terror, which 
 expressed itself in a shivery cry. But as the train began 
 to move again he jumped quickly on the running board, 
 pushed the sliding door to and padlocked it with two 
 turns of his key. 
 
 The train now plunged along amid a thunder of turn- 
 ing wheels. 
 
 Then, in the shadow, the group of little girls dissolved 
 and exposed to view, on a bed of straw, a motionless 
 and haggard figure, racked with coughing. 
 
 A voice said: 
 
 " It may be still far away the frontier. If only she 
 doesn't die before we get to Switzerland. The Prussian 
 has said so. They would throw her out; she would re- 
 main in Germany. And her mamma is waiting for her 
 at the railroad station. Her mamma would not see her! 
 Oh! She would never see her! " 
 
 They were a score of poor little children from occu- 
 pied French territory whom His Majesty William II, 
 Emperor of Germany and King of Prussia, had consented 
 to return to their families after two years of war. It was 
 the evening of the day before when they boarded the 
 train. They did not know one another then, for they had
 
 REPATRIATION 3 
 
 been collected from all the corners of the invaded de- 
 partments of France. But no sooner were they thrown 
 together, locked in their rolling prison, than they began 
 to kiss one another, like little sisters who had met after 
 a long separation. 
 
 The following morning, at dawn, little Ginette Pinson 
 had a coughing spell. A little blood on them had en- 
 larged her lips, as paint enlarges those of an actress, and 
 she had clenched her hands on her breast as if to wrest 
 from it the source of her suffering. 
 
 Poor Ginette! She was nine years old and she looked 
 scarcely six, so much had the privations of life in the 
 occupied district emaciated her. Her cough, becoming 
 hoarser and shorter all the time, turned toward evening 
 into a rattle, and, all at once, just after the rude Prussian 
 left the car, the last agony brought a cold perspiration 
 to the brow of the dying child, choked her nostrils, 
 turned her finger nails violet and forced open her mouth 
 in a last desperate struggle for breath. 
 
 The little ones scarcely dared to bend over Ginette, so 
 much had the approach of death unnerved them. And 
 yet their children's eyes had seen along the roads, at the 
 time of the flight from Northern France, many grinning 
 faces of corpses. 
 
 It was now completely dark outside. The wind, which 
 whistled through the spaces of the night, made the tele- 
 graph wires sing and tremble. Suddenly Ginette col-
 
 4 TALES OF WARTIME FRANCE 
 
 lapsed. She raised her arms stiffly and let them fall 
 again. Then, her eyes shrinking back under the half- 
 closed lids, she lay entirely motionless. 
 
 It was over. 
 
 A voice cried: 
 
 "She is dead!" 
 
 They all shuddered. 
 
 "Ah! Ginette! Ginette! " 
 
 The train slowed down. The brakes made a grind- 
 ing sound. 
 
 " Maybe we are there," said one of the children, hope- 
 fully. 
 
 " I believe that we are going to be a long time in Ger- 
 many," said another. "And if they come in they will 
 take Ginette away." 
 
 "And her mamma! And her mamma!" sighed a 
 pitiful voice. 
 
 They sobbed as they thought of that poor mamma 
 who was awaiting down there in the night, on the plat- 
 form of a little Swiss station, the long-hoped-for return 
 of her daughter. 
 
 Who would dare to tell her: 
 
 "Ginette is dead. She was left behind in Germany. 
 The Prussians kept her." 
 
 The train stopped. A key, outside, scraping, sought 
 the keyhole of the padlock. The inspecting officer, 
 doubtless, was about to enter. And Ginette? Would
 
 REPATRIATION 5 
 
 they let Ginette be carried off by these accursed Ger- 
 mans? 
 
 "And her mamma! And her mamma! " 
 
 The key a second time clicked against the bolt. Then 
 a hand unloosed the padlock. 
 
 " Quick ! Do as I say ! " ordered in her shrill voice 
 Marie Clavet, the brave little one who some hours back 
 had dared to question the Prussian soldier. " We will 
 seem to have been sleeping. I am going to rock 
 Ginette in my arms. But don't leave me alone. You 
 must be by me. I want to feel your hands on me. We 
 will arrange ourselves in a group." 
 
 When a soldier entered, swinging a big lantern and 
 lighting the way for an officer, they were all together 
 at one end of the car, some seated, others stretched on 
 the straw as if asleep. At the sound of footsteps they 
 appeared to awaken and sat upright, rubbing their eyes. 
 They surrounded Marie Clavet. Marie Clavet rocked 
 the dead girl and sang to her. She was pale and 
 trembling. 
 
 The soldier lifted the lantern. The officer stumblingly 
 called the names. 
 
 " Jeanne Perceval ! " 
 
 " Present ! " answered a frightened voice. 
 
 " Emilie Francoeur! Georgette Myrtil! Pauline 
 Berouard! Marie Louise Gamier! Renee Bridelange! 
 Henriette Brindlelouc! Ginette Pinson! "
 
 6 TALES OF WARTIME FRANCE 
 
 A long silence. 
 
 " Ginette Pinson ! " the officer repeated impatiently. 
 
 Then Marie Clavet spoke. 
 
 " She is asleep, Monsieur. She has been sick and I 
 am nursing her." 
 
 The soldier stepped forward. The little girls held 
 their breath. Outside there was a loud blast from the 
 locomotive. The man raised his lantern. He cast its 
 light full on Marie Clavet's head, her face bent over 
 to throw a shadow on the face of the dead child. 
 
 " Yes, she is asleep," said the soldier, rejoining the 
 officer. 
 
 The rollcall continued. When it was finished the two 
 Prussians left the car. Then the train, the whistle blow- 
 ing, slowly crossed the frontier.
 
 UNDER ETHER 
 MAURICE LEVEL 
 
 Ethe evenings, when the wounded were asleep, when 
 Jiere were left burning in the halls only the Argand 
 lamps, shaded by hoods of cardboard, the old doctor 
 used to take a little turn up and down the road. 
 
 His pipe stuck between his teeth, he used to climb 
 the little hill, from which through the trees he could 
 see the denuded plain, the villages, whose mutilated pro- 
 files made strange, sharp-drawn figures against the sky, 
 and, further off, St. Quentin, which for eight days past 
 had been illuminated by the glare of incendiary fires. 
 
 Then, his back bent forward, his hands in his pockets, 
 he watched going up in smoke the city in which for 
 twenty years he had visited the poor and the rich the 
 peaceful little city where formerly the old people whom 
 he had cared for and the children whom he had brought 
 into the world greeted him as he passed by; the sorrow- 
 ful little city, now in captivity, where his mother awaited 
 him. Now and then, as the wind blew aside the smoke 
 and the flames licked the black horizon, he would say: 
 
 " It is the factory which is afire. Or maybe it is 
 the city hall or the church." 
 7
 
 8 TALES OF WARTIME FRANCE 
 
 Clenching his fists, his lips trembling, he made his 
 way back to the hospital older, more weary, heavier 
 at heart. 
 
 On the mornings of the days of the attacks, when the 
 cannon passed at a gallop, when the tread of regiments 
 on the march echoed through the silence, he stole softly 
 from his bed to watch, buoyed with the hope that this 
 time at last they were going to retake his city; that he 
 would re-enter it and see there once more his old mother, 
 his old home and his old friends. 
 
 But when he saw the soldiers coming back, when the 
 thunder of the cannonade slackened and died away, he 
 would sigh, " Not this time, either," and resume his tasks. 
 
 One day when there had been sharp fighting, they 
 brought into the hospital a batch of wounded prisoners. 
 One of them, a feldwebel (sergeant-major), whose shoul- 
 der was shattered by a shell, astonished him by the dig- 
 nity of his bearing and the refinement of his talk. Ex- 
 amining the wound, he asked the prisoner in German : 
 
 " Where do you come from? " 
 
 " From Magdeburg, in Saxony, Monsieur le Medecin- 
 Majeur," replied the sub-officer, in good French. 
 
 "Ah," said the doctor, with an intonation of regret, 
 for he had hoped that the wounded man was an Alsa- 
 tian, conscripted by force. The latter seemed to under- 
 stand, and murmured: 
 
 " What can you expect, Doctor? War is war. But
 
 UNDER ETHER 9 
 
 that doesn't prevent me from loving France, where I 
 grew up." 
 
 Of a sudden the blood mounted to the face of the old 
 surgeon. Pushing up his glasses and looking sternly at 
 the prisoner, he hurled at him this question : 
 
 " And are you not ashamed to ravage this country, to 
 ruin these poor people, who before the war, received 
 you with kindness? " 
 
 "Yes," the other answered softly. "I am often 
 ashamed. For my part I have always striven to be hu- 
 mane, to be just, to avoid mistreating anybody and to 
 alleviate mistreatment by others as far as lay in my 
 power. The combat over, one becomes a human being 
 again; and the inhabitants of the occupied regions are 
 not responsible. Their persons and their property ought 
 to be sacred. I have to apologize for those of my com- 
 panions who have not understood this. For instance, 
 my regiment has been for the last six months at St. 
 Quentin " 
 
 The doctor gave a start. 
 
 "You have been at St. Quentin for six months? I 
 come from St. Quentin. Perhaps you can give me some 
 news. Often in the evenings I see fires now in one 
 quarter of the city, now in another. You haven't de- 
 stroyed the place systematically, have you, as you did 
 Noyon, Peronne and Bapaume? " 
 
 " Alas, Doctor, that is a foul blot on our arms."
 
 10 TALES OF WARTIME FRANCE 
 
 " But," pursued the surgeon, his voice almost choked, 
 " you have been burning only public buildings, haven't 
 you? Not private houses? " 
 
 " No ; the private houses are practically untouched up 
 to now." 
 
 "Ah! Do you know a street called Beffroi Street? " 
 
 " I know it very well. It is there 
 
 '* It is there that my old mother lives," said the doctor 
 slowly. " My name is Journau. Do you know my 
 mother? " 
 
 ** I was quartered in her house." 
 
 "Ah! Mon Dieu! How is she? " 
 
 " She is well very well. She is a very worthy per- 
 son and I suffered from the annoyance which our pres- 
 ence caused her. I, too, have an old mother in Magde- 
 burg, and I thought of her when I saw your mother 
 weeping. But such is war! " 
 
 The doctor breathed freely. Big tears ran down his 
 cheeks. But he collected himself, and, bending again 
 over the wound, he announced: 
 
 " We are going to put you to sleep right away. It is 
 nothing serious. You will soon be well." 
 
 While they washed the wound with tincture of iodine 
 and an assistant got ready to administer ether, the 
 wounded man gave some more details: 
 
 " Yes, your mother is well and suffers no inconveni- 
 ences. The house is always in order, as if for a fete.
 
 UNDER ETHER 11 
 
 Her rooms are so neat and the floors so scrupulously 
 polished that it is a pleasure to look at them in passing. 
 She waters her flowers; she trims her rose bushes. An 
 attractive house! A fine woman! " 
 
 Then his voice wavered a little; he grew stiff; soon he 
 relaxed and softly passed into slumber. 
 
 In the midst of the operation he gave a start, turned 
 his head to one side and babbled some meaningless 
 words. The assistant was about to administer more gas, 
 but the surgeon stopped him. 
 
 " Not too much. We are nearly through." 
 
 The prisoner began to talk again. This time his 
 words were precise, his phrases clean-cut. His voice, 
 which a little while before had been so calm, became 
 harsh and imperious, and he smiled between his phrases 
 with a huge smile which shook his abdomen and his 
 arms. 
 
 " Go ahead! Go ahead! Take that old wardrobe out 
 and burn it! Break it open for me first! Linen? 
 That's good to wipe our shoes with. What does she 
 say? A spigot for the wine casks? Ho, there, the rest 
 of you! Get an ax and draw the wine out in buckets." 
 
 The doctor's hand trembled. 
 
 "Hurrah! " the wounded man went on. "Seize the 
 old woman! Tie her to a chair if she is obstinate! She 
 has a son who is an officer? Ha! Ha! Slap her on the 
 head till she gives us the key to her strong box! "
 
 12 TALES OF WARTIME FRANCE 
 
 The old doctor stood erect, very pale. For an instant 
 his terrible eyes ran from his fingers to the neck of the 
 Boche. Then, in a very low voice he said to his assist- 
 ant, as he bent down again: 
 
 " Give him a little more gas. Unless you do so I am 
 afraid I can't go ahead."
 
 THE SPIRIT OF ALSACE 
 MAURICE LEVEL 
 
 nPHE house of M. Hermann was the third to the left on 
 J- the Place au Cuir, facing the market. A shop occu- 
 pied the ground floor a gloomy ground floor, where it 
 was often necessary to light the lamps before sunset. 
 
 In the springtime the linden trees on the sidewalk filled 
 it with a perfume of honey, which mingled with the crude 
 odour of linens and cottons. When winter came, one saw 
 the storks, abandoning Alsace, fly by just over the roofs 
 in a long, noisy train. 
 
 Hidden in the back of his shop, ignoring Sundays and 
 feast days, M. Hermann came and went, pushing his lad- 
 der, rolling and unrolling his pieces, stopping only to 
 verify his change, to measure his cloth twice, to sell to 
 his patrons bodices and blue blouses, or trousers, which 
 kept for weeks, in spite of the rain and wind, the deep 
 creases worn in them on the shelves. Once a year he 
 closed his shutters and disappeared. Then the neigh- 
 bours said : 
 
 "M. Hermann has gone to Haguenau to gather his 
 hops." 
 
 Because M. Hermann had still down there his old par- 
 13
 
 14 TALES OF WARTIME FRANCE 
 
 ents, a little farm and a house a fine house, which the 
 Prussians had turned into a casino for the officers, since 
 it stood near the new barracks. 
 
 He was there on July 30, 1914, and returned on the 
 day when they posted on the walls the notice of mo- 
 bilization. The whole village was en fete. The old 
 people smiled and rubbed their hands. The young 
 people went away singing, their bags over their shoul- 
 ders. Standing on his front doorstep, he watched what 
 was going on, but said nothing. Presently the Mayor, 
 M. Schmoll, a veteran of the War of 1870-71, came up 
 to him and slapped him on the shoulder, exclaiming: 
 
 " This time, Monsieur Hermann, they are going to get 
 back our old country for us. And the thing will not be 
 dragged out. Before the storks sing their farewell I 
 wish to see, in Strasburg, if my chop is still waiting for 
 me in the Cafe a la Mesange, at my old table near the 
 wine tun." 
 
 M. Hermann nodded his head gravely and answered: 
 ** I hope you may find it there, Monsieur Schmoll." 
 That same evening a squadron of dragoons passed 
 through the village on a trot. The next morning a bat- 
 talion of chasseurs made a brief halt. The people 
 pressed about them on the main road, throwing them 
 flowers, and crying " au revoir " to the soldiers. 
 
 Then for two days one heard nothing and saw noth- 
 ing but a French aeroplane, which wheeled for a mo-
 
 THE SPIRIT OF ALSACE 15 
 
 ment in the sky and then disappeared. But on the third 
 day, early in the morning, they heard a distant cannon- 
 ade, and about 2 o'clock the chasseurs passed through 
 again without singing, grey with dust, followed soon by 
 gendarmes, weary and begrimed. The gendarmes 
 stopped in the village square. The inhabitants came 
 running to hear the news. M. Schmoll, the Mayor, very 
 pale, came up and asked: 
 
 " Have things gone wrong, brigadier? " 
 
 " They didn't go very well, Monsieur le Maire. We 
 are retreating, and the Boches are following us closely. 
 It is necessary that the women and children and all the 
 young men between sixteen and nineteen should leave the 
 village. They must start within two hours. It is the 
 provost's order." 
 
 M. Schmoll read the paper, folded it and put it into 
 his pocket. Then, turning to the group around him, he 
 said: 
 
 " My friends, you have heard what the brigadier said. 
 You must leave. Only those whom duty or advanced age 
 detains may stay behind. You others, put your most 
 valuable possessions in wagons, lock your doors and 
 go!" 
 
 He stopped there, because his emotion choked him. 
 Gathering himself together again he added: 
 
 " But it will not be for long, if it please God." 
 
 About 5 o'clock the Germans entered, playing their
 
 16 TALES OF WARTIME FRANCE 
 
 fifes and beating on their flat drums. Before the 
 Mayor's office, wearing his scarf, his military medal and 
 his medal of 1870 pinned on his coat, M. Schmoll 
 awaited them. 
 
 First they seized the post office and the railroad station. 
 Then they requisitioned forage and wine. Finally, the 
 sentinels having been placed, the officer who commanded 
 the troop said: 
 
 " You will guarantee with your person the security of 
 my soldiers. If one of them is insulted I shall arrest 
 you. If one of them is injured you shall be hanged." 
 
 M. Schmoll straightened out his angular figure. 
 
 " So long as your men respect the lives and honour 
 of the inhabitants, no one will do them any harm. That 
 is all that I can guarantee you." 
 
 The officer slapped his boot and grinned. 
 
 " Agreed. And now take me to Hermann, the draper." 
 
 M. Schmoll was speechless for a minute. 
 
 " Hermann, the draper? Do you know him? " 
 
 " Probably. Let us go." 
 
 M. Schmoll bit his lips and obeyed. 
 
 When he saw the officer and the Mayor enter M. Her- 
 mann came to the door of his shop, putting on his spec- 
 tacles. The officer took a seat at the counter, looked 
 around and said: 
 
 " Your house at Haguenau is more comfortable than 
 this one, M. Hermann. But, no matter. Take a chair.
 
 THE SPIRIT OF ALSACE 17 
 
 You are an intelligent man. I want to talk with you. 
 How many head of cattle are there in the village? " 
 
 M. Schmoll interrupted. 
 
 " Monsieur Hermann is not authorized to answer that. 
 I alone " 
 
 "You will speak when I address you," said the offi- 
 cer. " Answer me, Monsieur Hermann." 
 
 " But, Monsieur le Commandant," the merchant pro- 
 tested, " it is very difficult for me to give you anything 
 like an exact answer. I do not know very precisely." 
 
 " Good, good. You will inform yourself and tell me 
 tomorrow. Besides, I need wine, beer and groceries. 
 I count on you to make your Mayor understand what I 
 want. He appears not to have a correct notion of his 
 obligations to His Majesty's troops, or to realize that 
 what he is not ready to deliver to us voluntarily we will 
 certainly take from him by force." 
 
 M. Schmoll clenched his fists. 
 
 " I have no obligation to fulfil to the enemies of my 
 country. As for the duties with which I am charged, I 
 do not need anybody to inform me about them." 
 
 The officer did not deign to understand. He lifted his 
 eyes to the shelves. 
 
 " On my word, Monsieur Hermann, you have a fine 
 stock here." 
 
 " It is at your service, Monsieur le Commandant," an- 
 swered the draper with a bow.
 
 18 TALES OF WARTIME FRANCE 
 
 The officer now inquired about a watering place for 
 the horses and about the vehicles available in the village. 
 He also asked what had become of the three canvases by 
 distinguished painters which were known to hang in the 
 chateau of M. de Pignerol. 
 
 " The watering place is a hundred metres beyond the 
 slaughter house. You will find some carriages at the 
 shop of Mathias, the blacksmith. As for the paintings, 
 I think that the servants of M. le Marquis have carried 
 them away." 
 
 "Too bad! Too bad! " said the officer, half to him- 
 self. " They were to be sent to the museum in Berlin. 
 But we shall be quits if we find them a little further on." 
 
 Having said this he reflected a second, and recapitu- 
 lated, under his breath: 
 
 "The wine, the beer, the groceries, the vehicles, the 
 watering place." 
 
 Then he arose. 
 
 Night had come. M. Hermann placed a lamp on the 
 counter. The officer lighted a cigarette and went on: 
 
 "One thing more. By what road did the French 
 leave? " 
 
 " By the main road, I suppose." 
 
 " I doubt it. But I don't mean the civilians. I mean 
 the soldiers." 
 
 M. Hermann hesitated.
 
 THE SPIRIT OF ALSACE 19 
 
 " Mon Dieu ! Monsieur le Commandant, I don't 
 know." 
 
 The officer shrugged his shoulders. 
 
 " Come, come ! No foolishness ! " 
 
 He said this in so brutal a tone that the merchant was 
 visibly troubled. 
 
 "Well " 
 
 He stopped, shamed by the look on M. SchmolFs face. 
 But he was afraid of the Prussian, and answered slowly: 
 
 "Well, they had to take " 
 
 " You mustn't tell that! You have no right to ! " cried 
 M. Schmoll. 
 
 " Be quiet ! " shouted the officer. " Continue, Mon- 
 sieur Hermann." 
 
 But M. Schmoll burst in: 
 
 " Monsieur Hermann, be silent ! I order you to say 
 nothing. While I am alive no one shall betray our sol- 
 diers. Monsieur Hermann, I forbid you to do it. Be- 
 sides, you don't know. You know nothing. He knows 
 nothing whatever, Monsieur." 
 
 The officer took a step toward him. 
 
 " But you? You know, don't you? " 
 
 " I do. But if you put twenty bayonets at my breast 
 I will not tell." 
 
 M. Hermann bent his head and turned his skull cap 
 between his fingers.
 
 20 TALES OF WARTIME FRANCE 
 
 The officer yawned and stretched himself and then said, 
 without paying any attention to the protests of M. 
 Schmoll : 
 
 " You hesitate? So be it! I am going to let you re- 
 flect for a while die time it takes me to smoke a cig- 
 arette outside. I shall be back in five minutes. Try to 
 decide by then. I give you that cdvice." 
 
 When he was gone M. Schmoll took the merchant's 
 hands. 
 
 " You won't say anything, will you, Monsieur Her- 
 mann? It was only for the sake of gaining time that 
 you seemed to yield? " 
 
 M. Hermann disengaged himself and passed behind 
 the counter. He had raised his head and spoke with pre- 
 cision. 
 
 " I am going to tell him. If I could I should remain 
 silent. All that I possess is in the hands of the Ger- 
 mans, both on this side of the frontier and on the other. 
 He has told you. What we do not do voluntarily they 
 will make us do by force. The law of the victor is a 
 terrible law. Believe me, Monsieur Schmoll, at our age 
 we must know how to incline ourselves to it." 
 
 M. Schmoll lifted his arms. 
 
 " Is it you who talk like that? You! " 
 
 The officer, who was walking before the door, stopped 
 to relight his cigarette. M. Hermann answered: 
 
 "What would you have me do? I am only an old dry-
 
 THE SPIRIT OF ALSACE 21 
 
 goods merchant. We have not wished the war, you or I. 
 We were living in peace. Then why " 
 
 "Be silent! " cried M. Schmoll. "Be silent! I am 
 ashamed of you." 
 
 The officer re-entered. 
 
 "Have you decided?" 
 
 " I am at your orders," murmured M. Hermann. 
 
 " The sooner the better ! Get your hat and let us go. 
 You know the road? " 
 
 " Very well." 
 
 " You will serve us then as a guide. Let us get under 
 way and quickly." 
 
 M. Schmoll stammered: 
 
 "Wretch! Wretch!" 
 
 The officer pushed him into the street. 
 
 " You, Mayor, come with us! " 
 
 M. Hermann exchanged his slippers for heavy shoes, 
 drew on his cloak, locked his cash drawer, put up the 
 shop shutters, extinguished the lamp and followed the 
 others out. 
 
 In the Place four companies were assembled. They 
 put M. Schmoll between two men and the troop set out, 
 M. Hermann leading. M. Schmoll tried to escape. 
 They pushed him back into the ranks with the butts of 
 their rifles. He cried aloud, pointing to M. Hermann : 
 
 " Look at the traitor! Vive la France! " 
 
 Leaving the village, they followed the national road.
 
 22 TALES OF WARTIME FRANCE 
 
 Then they took a road leading across the fields. Some 
 distance away, to the left, a bridge crossed the river. But 
 M. Hermann showed them a ford, over which the whole 
 troop passed, scarcely wetting themselves. 
 
 " My faith! " exclaimed the officer. " We have gained 
 almost four good kilometres. At this rate we ought to 
 fall on their rear guard before daylight." 
 
 The night was so black that one could hardly see three 
 feet ahead of him. Each time in the course of the march 
 that they came near together M. Schmoll hissed at the 
 dark figure of the guide: 
 
 "Boche! Prussian!" 
 
 At first M. Hermann simply shrugged his shoulders. 
 Finally, becoming annoyed, he asked the soldiers to put 
 a handkerchief over the mayor's mouth. 
 
 After having marched a good hour they entered a wood. 
 At a junction where three roads crossed M. Hermann 
 said: 
 
 " One second, so that I am sure I don't make a mistake. 
 In the daylight I should have no trouble, but in pitchy 
 blackness like this! " 
 
 They advanced very carefully. The company to the 
 rear, which had not preserved its distance, pushed 
 against the company preceding it. The company in the 
 lead had almost come to a halt. The column was 
 thrown into confusion. M. Schmoll found himself
 
 THE SPIRIT OF ALSACE 23 
 
 against M. Hermann. The trees were so tangled that the 
 troops could neither advance nor retire. 
 
 In the semi-panic M. Hermann gave a command in an 
 undertone to M. Schmoll: 
 
 "Lie down! For God's sake, lie down! " 
 
 Then, turning about and waving his hat, he shouted at 
 the top of his voice: 
 
 "Chasseurs of the 10th! I have brought them to 
 you! Fire into their ranks! "
 
 AT THE MOVIES 
 MAURICE LEVEL 
 
 E simple little phrases, such as one uses who has re- 
 peated the same thing over and over again, the woman 
 in mourning was telling her story to a neighbour during 
 the intermission at the moving picture show. In these 
 war times one makes acquaintances very easily. Any 
 one individual's sufferings are but a part and parcel of 
 the sufferings of the community at large. 
 
 " Yes, madam, I lost my husband two years ago my 
 husband that was to be, the father of my little boy. We 
 were to be married in the autumn. He was killed at 
 once at the very beginning of the war." 
 
 " If he had to go, it was better that he shouldn't have 
 suffered the hardships of the trenches for a couple of 
 years." 
 
 " Perhaps, yes; perhaps, no. For, at least, we should 
 have seen him again, and he would have written. While 
 
 this way My little son here, who is nearly seven 
 
 years old he hardly remembers his father. Think of 
 
 it! My husband was mobilized among the very first. 
 
 He was not yet twenty-six. Already for eight days he 
 
 24
 
 AT THE MOVIES 25 
 
 had told me : 'It will be war. You will see.' But, 
 like so many others, I wouldn't believe it. 
 
 " One evening, returning from his office, he said to me: 
 ' It has come. I am off tonight.' I wanted to make 
 him up a bundle of clothing, with some linen. But he 
 wouldn't wait. He scarcely listened to me. At such a 
 time one could almost believe that nothing counts any 
 longer with a man! I had just put the little one to bed. 
 He kissed the boy, he kissed me and then he made for 
 the street on the run. In the street he turned to wave me 
 a good-bye and then jumped into a cab. It was the 31st 
 of July. Since then I have heard no news of him. With- 
 out doubt he was killed in one of the first battles. I know 
 neither where, nor how, nor even whether they were able 
 to find and bury him. Not one thing." 
 
 "Perhaps he is a prisoner! How can anybody tell? 
 I have known persons who have gotten news after many 
 months." 
 
 " Oh ! I no longer have any hope. It is more than 
 two years, remember. Well, that was to be my fate. At 
 any rate, I have my little boy; he helps me to live. 
 Poor little fellow! A childhood like his is not very 
 cheerful. To see always about the house a sad figure, 
 with reddened eyes! Until recently I didn't care to go 
 out. Then I decided to take him to the picture shows in 
 order to amuse him. The picture show is not like the 
 theatre. One can go to it, even if one is in mourning."
 
 26 TALES OF WARTIME FRANCE 
 
 The electric bell sounded. The people took their 
 places again. A soldier passed by. He wore a military 
 medal, the Croix de Guerre. The child, leaning over to 
 his mother, asked: 
 
 " Is he like that, my papa? " 
 
 She stroked his hair softly. 
 
 "Yes, my dear." 
 
 "With medals like that, too? " 
 
 For a child a brave soldier ought always to have 
 medals. The mother answered: 
 
 "Yes, dear." 
 
 With his head turned, his hand in his mother's hand, 
 the child gazed eagerly at the soldier. 
 
 The lights went out and a picture title appeared on 
 the screen. 
 
 "The War in 1914." 
 
 " Are we going to see the war? " asked the child. 
 
 "Yes, my dear. Look." 
 
 At first streets were shown a chaos of half-demol- 
 ished houses, beams smashed, walls shattered, a mass of 
 black ruins almost without form. 
 
 "What is that? " asked the child. 
 
 "A village." 
 
 " That a village ? There is nothing there." 
 
 But a dog ran about among the ruins, and a little boy 
 also, who stumbled over the stones. Then came a wide 
 plain. The shells had dug enormous holes in it and
 
 AT THE MOVIES 27 
 
 along the road as far as the eye could reach even to 
 the horizon, where heavy clouds of smoke gathered and 
 then dissolved one could see only the big trees, razed 
 almost to the ground, tumbled right and left among the 
 fields. On the trunks, already dead, some leaves still 
 fluttered in the wind. 
 
 " And that? What is that? " asked the child. 
 
 " The country, my dear." 
 
 " Is that the country? There is nothing there." 
 
 " It was beautiful once," said the mother, trembling. 
 " The Germans have destroyed everything." 
 
 The boy gave a sidelong glance at the soldier. 
 
 But already, in another film, troops defiled. In a 
 heavy rain cavalrymen trotted along the roads bordered 
 by ruins, field artillery guns were dragged at a gallop, 
 jolting, rolling, plunging into and rising out of the ruts. 
 In passing one saw the artillerymen laugh and the offi- 
 cers lift their arms, turning in their saddles. 
 
 "What is that? " asked the boy. 
 
 " The pursuit, my dear," murmured the mother, press- 
 ing him close against her. 
 
 " Are they running after the Boches to capture them? " 
 
 "Yes, my dear." 
 
 And behind the cavalrymen appeared the infantrymen, 
 spattered with mud, their shoulders sagging under their 
 heavy packs. 
 
 " Are they going to fight? " the child asked.
 
 28 TALES OF WARTIME FRANCE 
 
 " Yes, dear," 
 
 To her all the soldiers were like her poor, missing hus- 
 band. In their ranks, under each helmet, in each move- 
 ment, it was he whom she saw. And the little fellow, 
 more collected, more grave, asked in an almost inaudible 
 voice: 
 
 " Was papa like that? " 
 
 Then when all artillerymen, cavalrymen and infan- 
 trymen had passed, a long file of prisoners appeared. 
 One saw them first fleeing under the fire of their own 
 cannon to our lines, then in the camps, then in huddled 
 groups about the coffee kettles. Some were very young 
 and others were old; some with stupefied faces and a 
 melancholy bearing, others with an air of insolence. 
 Still others lay on the ground, a miry horde, conquered, 
 disarmed. The mother sighed. 
 
 " See them. Look at them well, my son. They are 
 Boches." 
 
 And the film unrolled their story. They were neither 
 presentable nor brilliant. They were no longer swag- 
 gerers. Famished, gesticulating, jostling one another, 
 they crowded about a French soldier, who was distribut- 
 ing rations, and as they got their allowance they scat- 
 tered to eat it, shamefacedly and apart. 
 
 " Are they soldiers? " asked the child. 
 
 But the mother was weeping too much to answer. 
 
 Suddenly among those downcast figures a bestial and
 
 AT THE MOVIES 29 
 
 joyous figure appeared. He was a clean-shaven trooper, 
 his cap over his ear, who, in the face of the public, alone 
 on the screen, cynically, his eyes batted, his cheeks pro- 
 truding, consumed with huge bites his piece of bread. 
 
 " Oh, mama," said the child. " Mama, see how ugly 
 that one is." 
 
 And the mother, having looked up through her tears, 
 gave a cry a terrible, heartrending cry. 
 
 For that German glutton, that man who laughed at the 
 hate of a whole hallful of people, was her husband her 
 husband, who, she believed, had died in our ranks.
 
 THE LITTLE SOLDIER 
 MAURICE LEVEL 
 
 OHE listened, her elbow on the table, her chin in her 
 ^ hands. While he spoke he gazed at her with eager 
 eyes the eyes of amorous youth. He was telling her 
 the story of his life of his brief memories of boyhood, 
 of college, the ending of his studies; the war, his ardent 
 desire to fight, his mother's fears and, finally, his dream 
 of fighting realized. 
 
 She interrupted him: 
 
 "How old are you?" 
 
 "Eighteen years." 
 
 She smiled and laid her finger on the narrow ribbon 
 which he wore on his coat. 
 
 "What is this?" 
 
 " That is the emblem of those wounded in battle." 
 
 " Have you been wounded? " 
 
 " Yes," he answered, without attaching any importance 
 to it. 
 
 Moved by the thought of this mere boy stricken down, 
 lying in a ditch, she murmured, with an air of almost 
 maternal interest and concern: 
 
 " Poor little fellow! And when were you wounded? " 
 30
 
 THE LITTLE SOLDIER 31 
 
 "AttheMarne." 
 
 " Was it a serious wound? " 
 
 He answered negligently, pointing to his breast: 
 
 " A piece of shell went through there." 
 
 And as she insisted, anxious to have all the details, he 
 told her what he knew about the war: The hard retreat; 
 the triple daily marches to the rear; then the advance, the 
 roads encumbered with wreckage and bodies, the trees 
 uprooted; the men struggling against fatigue and sleep 
 and able to see nothing ahead of them but a dead plain 
 and a grey horizon; the sudden thunder of the artillery; 
 the blow which one never sees or knows of, but which 
 strikes one to the ground; then the awakening to con- 
 sciousness at a relief station, removal to a distant hos- 
 pital, long months of rest under a gracious sky, convales- 
 cence and, finally, the furlough home. 
 
 She took one of his hands in hers and repeated : 
 
 " Poor little fellow ! And will you return to the 
 front? " 
 
 " I hope to." 
 
 They got up. The wood, this springtime night, was 
 filled with shadows and perfumes. She walked along, 
 leaning on his arm, stroking with her ungloved hand the 
 rude cloth of his cloak. At moments, when the moon 
 shone on them from between the trees, she glanced ad- 
 miringly at his delicate little figure, his shining eyes and 
 his beardless cheeks. He scarcely spoke now, forget-
 
 32 TALES OF WARTIME FRANCE 
 
 ting the war, surrendering himself to the tenderness of 
 the moment, seeking words and promises, but finding 
 only soft pressures and sighs with which to express the 
 feelings of his heart. 
 
 Then suddenly the sky became black, the trees tossed, 
 the wind bent the small ones double and whistled among 
 the great oaks with a noise like bullets. She said: 
 
 "A storm is coming. We must hurry home." 
 
 " Why? It is so pleasant here." 
 
 In fact, they were happy there, in spite of the storm 
 happy to be alone in the wood, so alone that the wood 
 seemed to belong to them. She smiled as they made a 
 little detour from the main path. 
 
 " If I were not with a soldier I should be afraid." 
 
 These words filled him with pride and he pressed her 
 arm softly. Then the rain began to fall, and they sought 
 shelter under some trees. With her thin dress and her 
 light taffeta mantle she could not help trembling. They 
 thought that they were sheltered, but the drops reached 
 them gradually and then the shower turned into a steady 
 downpour. He expressed concern about her being so 
 lightly clothed. She answered: 
 
 " That is nothing. But how about you? " 
 
 " Me? I have been in worse storms than this." 
 
 She excused herself for having asked him such a ques- 
 tion. 
 
 " It was foolish, of course. You are a soldier."
 
 THE LITTLE SOLDIER 33 
 
 Time passed. The rain beat through their leafy cov- 
 ering. The far-off street lamps seemed enveloped in a 
 watery haze. No conveyances were in sight. 
 
 " We must go home, all the same," she said. 
 
 " You are right," he replied. " But you cannot walk 
 through the rain this way. You are already drenched. 
 You are cold. It is dark. Nobody will see you. I am 
 going to put my cloak over your shoulders." 
 
 She refused. 
 
 " And how about yourself? " 
 
 "Nonsense. Let me do it, please." 
 
 He unbuttoned his cloak and softly laid it over her. 
 This time it was he who was maternal in manner. They 
 hurried along, smiling, through the rain, but each one 
 worried about the other. 
 
 "Are you all right? " 
 
 " All right. And you? Aren't you cold? " 
 
 " Not at all." 
 
 " I should never forgive myself if you were taken ill 
 again." 
 
 At a roadhouse they found a carriage. As he shiv- 
 ered a little she put her hand on his jacket. 
 
 " You are wet through." 
 
 " It is nothing at all." 
 
 " When you get home you must change your clothes 
 at once." 
 
 " I promise you that I will."
 
 34 TALES OF WARTIME FRANCE 
 
 She heard his teeth chatter. 
 
 " I am heartbroken. If you should fall ill " 
 
 "But you didn't catch cold; that was the only im- 
 portant thing." 
 
 He thought of nothing else than of gazing at her, of 
 cuddling up against her, stroking affectionately the big 
 cloak which for a few minutes had sheltered her. On 
 parting with him she said: 
 
 " Above all, let me hear from you soon." 
 
 Then he kissed her hand and let her enter her house. 
 
 A week went by without her hearing anything from 
 him. She did not dare to go herself and inquire about 
 him. One day she passed by the house in which he 
 lived. They had put straw in the street. That evening 
 she decided to telephone. 
 
 They told her that the little soldier was ill in fact, 
 very ill. And one morning she received a letter, the 
 envelope bordered in black. He was dead. Stupefied, 
 she read and re-read that frightful line: 
 
 " Jean Louis Verrier, corporal of the 7th Infantry." 
 
 Her little soldier! Her poor little soldier! She fol- 
 lowed the funeral procession, her eyes fixed on the 
 hearse, which went jolting along draped with a tri-colour 
 bunting and with the blue cloak with which he had cov- 
 ered her. 
 
 Afterward a desire to know something more about this 
 poor youth, of whom she really knew so little, led her
 
 THE LITTLE SOLDIER 35 
 
 to pass again by the house in which he had lived. Some 
 men had just removed the furnishings. She approached 
 the janitress and said to her: 
 
 " Mon Dieu, but he went quickly." 
 
 "Alas! " sighed the good woman. "They had little 
 hope that he would pull through." 
 
 " It was his wound, I suppose? " 
 
 " Oh ! his wound that would never have carried him 
 off. That would have healed. But he had weak lungs. 
 In spite of that, they could never prevent him from tak- 
 ing risks. All those fatigues, all those hardships 
 they were too much for him. He got pneumonia. He 
 was passed along for six months from one hospital to an- 
 other, refusing always to be mustered out. They thought 
 that he was better. He must have committed some im- 
 prudence. He got pneumonia again, and that finished 
 him." 
 
 She answered: 
 
 " Thank you, madame." 
 
 And thinking of the spirit of that adolescent, who had 
 marched toward death for a beautiful ideal, and then, 
 for the simple joy of being gallant toward a woman, had 
 carried with him to the tomb no other trophies than a 
 piece of ribbon and a woman's smile, she sighed: 
 
 " He was a man."
 
 THE GREAT SCENE 
 MAURICE LEVEL 
 
 A VOICE mounted from the depths of the obscurity 
 in which the main floor of the theatre was left, de- 
 spite the glare of the six dusty stage lamps. 
 
 " That's not the way, Monsieur Fanjard. Won't you 
 do it over again? " 
 
 Fanjard, who had been perched on a chair, which rep- 
 resented the staircase of a chateau, jumped down and 
 made his way to the front of the stage. Respectfully, 
 yet not without a certain hauteur his foot on the 
 prompter's cubbyhole, his elbow on his knee and his hand 
 held to his ear like an ear trumpet he asked : 
 
 " What is it, monsieur? " 
 
 The author called back at the top of his voice, as if 
 making head against a tumult: 
 
 " I should like to have in that passage more ardour, 
 more passion, more grief. Do you understand? " 
 
 " I understand," answered Fanjard, with a bow. 
 
 The author would have been glad to elaborate his 
 meaning. But Fanjard, having already returned to his 
 chair staircase and said to his comrades, " Let us do it, 
 36
 
 THE GREAT SCENE 37 
 
 over, my friends," played the climax of the scene again 
 just as he had played it before. 
 
 "That's not right yet! That's not right yet! " cried 
 the author. " You are on the first step. Mile. Ravignan 
 lifts her arms toward you. You stop her with a gesture. 
 ' What is it? ' A silence, you understand, mademoiselle? 
 A silence, a simple silence! You, Monsieur Fanjard, 
 you ask her, almost in a whisper: ' Your brother? My 
 son? ' You bow your head, mademoiselle. That is 
 enough. He has understood you. Then you, Monsieur 
 Fanjard, you utter a cry, a harrowing cry; all the rest 
 of the scene is only a sob. You see what I want. Let 
 us try it again ! " 
 
 With a glacial patience Fanjard played the scene over. 
 But this time his articulation was hardly any more im- 
 passioned, and his gestures, barely sketched out, seemed 
 to die away, as if succumbing to some invisible obstacle. 
 
 Five o'clock sounded and the players left the stage. 
 The author rejoined Fanjard in the wings. After having 
 gesticulated, shouted and fumed for three hours, he had 
 a moist skin, a dry tongue and a hoarse voice. Fanjard, 
 as he made his way toward his dressing room, listened 
 to the other composedly. He was an old actor, reckoned 
 as one of the glories of the stage, and all its noblest tra- 
 ditions survived in him. The author had thrown an arm 
 across his shoulders and talked to him as they walked 
 along.
 
 38 TALES OF WARTIME FRANCE 
 
 " It is the capital scene, my dear sir. If it doesn't go 
 the whole piece will fail. What it needs is emotion, 
 grandeur, despair. Don't hesitate to let yourself go. 
 You can make, and you ought to make, something sen- 
 sational out of it It is just the scene for you." 
 
 " I see I see very well what you wish. But at re- 
 hearsal I can't let myself go. I need costume, light, at- 
 mosphere. But don't worry." 
 
 Still the author insisted, timid and firm at the same 
 time: 
 
 " Certainly I won't worry. Certainly. But I should 
 like to have you, once before the first night, only once, 
 show me your real quality. Only once; just once. 
 Think of it. We are only three days from the premiere." 
 
 " Don't worry," repeated Fanjard. 
 
 Then he went away. 
 
 At this moment the director passed by. He asked 
 with a pleasant smile: 
 
 " Well, how does it go? Are you satisfied? " 
 
 " Satisfied? My dear man, my piece is ruined you 
 understand, ruined. Mile. Ravignan is passable. The 
 light effects are a fizzle; Fanjard is bad, bad, bad! " 
 
 The director tried to calm him. He had heard many 
 others talk that way, and he knew that in the theatre, bet- 
 ter than anywhere else, everything somehow works out. 
 Fanjard was an artist, sure, conscientious, incapable of 
 slighting his roles, let him play them two hundred times.
 
 THE GREAT SCENE 39 
 
 Obstinate? Yes. Unequal at rehearsals? Possibly. 
 But exceeding all expectations when the curtain went up. 
 
 The author, still skeptical, shook his head. 
 
 " Let us wait and see, my dear master," the director 
 protested. (And when a director thus addresses an au- 
 thor who has only a vague claim to such a title, he is us- 
 ing his ultimate argument.) Let us wait and see. Have 
 more confidence. I am as much interested in the suc- 
 cess of your piece as you are. Don't get worried yourself 
 and don't worry him. He is so-so now, perhaps ; only 
 so-so. But he will be superb. That I guarantee you." 
 
 The first night arrived. 
 
 In the back of a box, alongside the director, the author 
 listened to his play. The first part of it was a torture. 
 With each spectator who entered late, with each seat 
 slammed down, he had the feeling that humanity in gen- 
 eral was in a conspiracy to ruin him. Yet the director 
 kept whispering to him: 
 
 " It's a go. It's a go." 
 
 After the first curtain he wanted to go up to the dress- 
 ing rooms and give some last suggestions to the actors. 
 But the director dissuaded him. 
 
 " Let them alone. Don't bother them. Believe me, it 
 will be a success." 
 
 The second act had a succes d'estime, and the curtain
 
 40 TALES OF WARTIME FRANCE 
 
 rose for the third act. Fanjard finally appeared, de- 
 scending the staircase with an air of nobility. Mile. 
 Ravignan stretched out her arms toward him. He 
 stopped her with a gesture and said, " What is it? " And 
 then, in a low tone, "Your brother? My son? " She 
 bowed her head, and he, just as at the rehearsals, with- 
 out a cry, without a sob, began his set speech. 
 
 Clinging to the arms of his velvet-covered seat, arch- 
 ing his shoulders, the author growled out, as if he thought 
 he could communicate his own fire to the actor: 
 
 "Let go! Let go! Let go! " 
 
 But Fanjard continued to the end in a colourless voice. 
 While the curtain descended amid merely courteous ap- 
 plause, the author ran to the wings. The fury which 
 he had held back for eight days nearly strangled him. 
 Fanjard was returning to his dressing room. 
 
 " Well, are you satisfied? " the author shouted at him. 
 " You have wrecked my play. Yes, you were going to re- 
 serve yourself for the first performance! You should 
 have talent, my dear sir, before you have genius. Ef- 
 fects are not improvised. They are produced by hard 
 work. And, besides, what a role you had! What a 
 scene! A scene to raise the house. A father, a father, 
 who has only one love, one joy in the world his son. 
 They tell him of his son's death, and you stand there 
 tranquil, half stupefied! I declaimed the scene, even in 
 writing it. I shouted it."
 
 THE GREAT SCENE 41 
 
 Then the old actor answered softly, without anger, 
 without indignation, without any show of wounded pride : 
 
 "You are wrong, monsieur; and that is because, for- 
 tunately for you, you don't know. I learned only four 
 hours ago of the death of my son, killed at Craonne; and 
 I did not cry aloud then any more than I do now."
 
 AFTER THE WAR: 
 MAURICE LEVEL 
 
 A LTHOUGH he was a colonel, a Prussian baron, a 
 * veteran officer of the Guard and the possessor of a 
 castle on the banks of the Rhine, at which His Majesty 
 the Kaiser had once stopped for a few hours, in other 
 respects this Boche had a spirit rather generous for a 
 Boche. 
 
 Having served two years at Paris as an embassy at- 
 tache, he recalled that sojourn with infinite graciousness, 
 and never advertised more than was necessary the fact 
 that he had spent two other years in the same city as an 
 employe in a little restaurant near the Champ-de-Mars, 
 frequented by orderlies of the officers of the ficole de 
 Guerre. In this capacity he had acquired a real respect 
 for the French soldier for his discretion and the affec- 
 tionate attachment which he bears his chiefs. 
 
 Certainly, war seemed to him a legitimate thing. But 
 he practised it, to use his own expression, " in a chival- 
 rous manner." 
 
 In the house which he occupied he would have felt 
 himself at fault if he had not left his card once a month 
 on his involuntary hostesses, if he had not sent them in- 
 42
 
 AFTER THE WAR 43 
 
 vitations, with a program, for the military musicals, and, 
 on Sedan Day, a card for the review. At that, he was 
 astonished that these ladies were not more appreciative of 
 such delicate attentions. 
 
 In the line of service he showed himself strict (as was 
 proper), but not brutal. He went so far as to speak to 
 the under-officers as if they were almost human beings, 
 and, in the evening, on the Mall, to converse with lieu- 
 tenants who were neither noble nor long connected with 
 the army (the war had so decimated the ranks of the 
 others!). He even struck up a friendship, so to speak, 
 with one of these, an attractive fellow, obsequious, cor- 
 rect, well educated, too, for an ordinary plebeian. With 
 him the colonel talked freely and confidentially. 
 
 " When we shall have won the war I should like to 
 live in Paris again. It is a very agreeable city. The 
 Bois de Boulogne is exquisite at all seasons of the year; 
 the theatres show excellent taste, and the women are 
 charming." 
 
 " I was highly delighted with the visit I made there in 
 July, 1914," answered the lieutenant. "One can do 
 business easily, the people are hospitable, and, if one 
 wishes to live the sort of life there that he lives at home, 
 our compatriots are so numerous that, in the evenings, 
 we can gather together just like a family. I speak of 
 conditions before the war, of course." 
 
 "Before the war! Before the war!" repeated the
 
 44 TALES OF WARTIME FRANCE 
 
 colonel a little abstractedly. " I feel that after the war 
 all that will be considerably changed. Sometimes I 
 read the Paris newspapers, and I am pained to see what a 
 hostile feeling there is against us. The devil! War 
 is war. We did not wish to make war, did we? We 
 were forced to make it. 
 
 " Our superiority in all branches of human activity is 
 such that no people can resist us. That is a fact. Why 
 don't the French admit it? Since we are the most cul- 
 tured nation on earth the chosen people, you might 
 say why don't they let themselves be guided by us? 
 We should realize great things together. But there the 
 old Latin obstinacy comes in. How regrettable it is on 
 their part! For I tell you this between ourselves 
 I am very fond of the French." 
 
 " So am I, Colonel." 
 
 Thus exchanging ideas they regained the town, where 
 in the twilight the demolished houses stood out jagged 
 against the sky, since the horizon was lighted everywhere 
 with conflagrations. The colonel sighed: 
 
 " Look at that. Don't you believe that it cuts a sensi- 
 tive German to the heart to see such a spectacle? There 
 is the farm with the big mill on it a fine farm, a per- 
 fect milling establishment, a magnificent investment. 
 But it will all be in ashes tomorrow. Whose fault will 
 that be? " 
 
 " It is war," the lieutenant suggested, urbanely.
 
 AFTER THE WAR 45 
 
 " Indispensable destructions, which the superior in- 
 terest of our armies amply justifies. That is another 
 thing which the French fail to understand." 
 
 " Yet it is all very simple." 
 
 The colonel threw away his cigar, which had gone out, 
 stopped and lifted his finger. 
 
 " Under all circumstances, Lieutenant, remember this," 
 he said. " It may be that for strategic reasons we shall 
 abandon this country. Let us root tip the roads, destroy 
 the bridges, turn the streams out of their courses, fell the 
 trees and throw them across the highways let us do 
 everything, in a word, which the security of our armies 
 requires. But let us commit no depredations on the in- 
 habitants. For myself, I intend to set an example. In 
 the house in which I live I shall see to it that nobody 
 touches anything. In proportion as you have found me 
 paternal and considerate, you will find me, if my orders 
 are not scrupulously obeyed, a man of iron." 
 
 The event which the colonel foresaw arrived. His 
 regiment retreated. In conformity with instructions not 
 a tree was left standing, nor a bridge on its arches, nor a 
 stream in its bed. The work was accomplished method- 
 ically; explosions succeeded one another at regular inter- 
 vals. The house which the colonel lived in alone re- 
 mained intact, with its old balconies of wrought iron, 
 its garden of flowers, its windows hung with curtains. 
 
 The colonel departed with regret, carrying with him a
 
 46 TALES OF WARTIME FRANCE 
 
 few souvenirs two silver candlesticks, a clock, a silver 
 gilded water glass mere trifles. But he left the furni- 
 ture shining, the table linen carefully folded, the floors 
 waxed like glass. 
 
 He had already reached the open country when he re- 
 called that he had forgotten to leave a P. P. C. card. 
 Desirous of being impeccable to the last extreme, he re- 
 traced his steps. But on entering his apartments he 
 stopped, stupefied at first, then bursting with fury. 
 
 With blows from a pick four soldiers were demolishing 
 the bathroom and the water pipes. Seeing him, the men 
 redoubled their ardour. He shouted to them: 
 
 " Swine! I shall have you shot! " 
 
 A fifth man appeared, his sleeves rolled up, a hammer 
 in his hand. It was the lieutenant who had been so 
 amiable and correct. 
 
 " You? Is it you I find here? " bellowed the colonel. 
 " You, who know my ideas? I shall send you before a 
 court martial ! " 
 
 "At your orders," answered the officer, clicking his 
 heels. "But excuse me, Colonel. All this installation 
 comes from the firm of Schwein, Boelleri & Co., of Mann- 
 heim, of which I am the representative for Northern 
 France. Our house alone possesses these replacement 
 parts. And after the war, I thought, how simple it 
 would be for these people to apply to us for the plumbing 
 fittings. It would be a very natural way of resuming bus-
 
 AFTER THE WAR 47 
 
 iness relations. As trifling as the thing seems, it con- 
 cerns our industry in the highest degree." 
 
 "Well, that is different," said the colonel gravely. 
 " Deutschland ueber alles! Consider that I have said 
 nothing at all." 
 
 Reassured by these words, the lieutenant finished de- 
 molishing, with a well directed blow of his hammer, a 
 syphon which had hitherto resisted his attack.
 
 THE MESSENGER 
 FREDERIC BOUTET 
 
 rE narrow shop front was painted green. The in- 
 -erior was all filled with plants in pots and with 
 flowers arranged in vases. Since the sun, which was 
 unclouded that day, shone in from the front, the little 
 shop took on the aspect of a sheltered springtime nook, 
 enjoying a mildness which was as premature as it was 
 charming. 
 
 A soldier, who came from the direction of Montpar- 
 nasse, had stopped and was gazing at a big tuft of an- 
 emones. 
 
 " Well, soldier, are you looking for a bouquet? " 
 
 The soldier raised his eyes. It was the proprietress, a 
 young woman with brown hair and greyish eyes, which 
 sparkled with candour and confidence. 
 
 " A bouquet? No," he answered in a voice composed 
 and almost drawling. "But, you see, I am a gardener 
 by trade. And I love flowers." 
 
 "Are you Mme. Bertha Maret? " he added, glancing 
 at the name written across the glass door. 
 
 " Yes, I am. But why do you ask? " 
 48
 
 THE MESSENGER 49 
 
 "My name is Antoine Lavaud and I had last year in 
 my section a comrade whose name was Maret." 
 
 "Ah! Won't you come inside?" said the young 
 woman with a little start. 
 
 He followed her into the shop, fresh and fragrant, 
 smelling of earth and flowers. He took off his cloak, 
 but remained standing. He was short in body, thick-set, 
 with a round head set on rounded shoulders, and a coun- 
 tenance extraordinarily pockmarked. In his little eyes 
 there was an expression shrewd, peaceable and winning. 
 
 " What was your comrade's first name? " the young 
 woman asked brusquely. 
 
 "Louis, I believe. Yes, that was it; Louis Maret 
 a big blond, a very good-looking fellow. Do you know 
 him? " 
 
 " Is it a long time since you saw him last? " she said, 
 ignoring his question. 
 
 " Oh, it must be several months. You see, I was 
 wounded." 
 
 After a pause she declared: 
 
 " I am not acquainted with the person you mention. 
 If that is what you wish to know, now you know it." 
 
 She turned away to arrange a mimosa. Her fingers 
 trembled as she touched its fragile leaves. The soldier 
 went away. 
 
 Some days afterwards he returned. Very quietly he 
 entered the little shop.
 
 50 TALES OF WARTIME FRANCE 
 
 " Excuse me if I disturb you," he said to the young 
 woman. " But the other day, when I spoke to you about 
 this Louis Maret, I believe I annoyed you. I didn't mean 
 to do so." 
 
 She fixed her grey eyes squarely on him. He had the 
 air of an honest, well-meaning man, and, after all, she 
 could not suppress her desire for news. 
 
 "I was quick the other day," she said. "But, you 
 see Louis Maret well, he was my husband. For 
 five years he made me very unhappy. I endured every- 
 thing everything, you understand. When he left me, 
 four years and a half ago, I felt almost like an old 
 woman. I had suffered so much. He went away three 
 times and three times I pardoned him. We had a fine 
 establishment and a business which was doing well. He 
 squandered all that I had and left me on the street with 
 three children, the youngest only two months old. Since 
 then nothing not a word. The money that I didn't 
 care about but the other things. I believe that it 
 amused him to torment me. He saw to it that I should 
 know all about his misconduct. When I was delivered of 
 him for good I succeeded in forgetting him. Now, for 
 me, it is finished. That is why I told you the other day 
 that I didn't know him." 
 
 " Yes. I understand," said Antoine Levaud, as pla- 
 cidly as ever. " When we were together he told me, with- 
 out going into details, that he had behaved very badly
 
 THE MESSENGER 51 
 
 toward his family. Probably he was sorry. Down there 
 one reflects one changes, you see." 
 
 " Nonsense," she answered, shrugging her shoulders. 
 "Why would he have changed? Yes. When the war 
 began, I believed that he would come to see me before 
 going to the front. That he would write me a line, at 
 least. But no. And when he came back on leave he 
 looked up the woman for whom he left me the last time. 
 I know him. But it is all the same to me now. It 
 is finished. I have my children to raise, and my 
 occupation is a hard one. There are times, in the busy 
 season, that I go three or four nights without sleep- 
 ing." 
 
 She went off to serve a customer. 
 
 " Tell me," she asked, sharply, when she returned, 
 " would you have done that? Would you have deserted 
 your wife and your children? " 
 
 " Certainly not. But, you see, I have no wife and no 
 children," he answered, softly. 
 
 From that day on he reappeared regularly. His visits 
 to the shop seemed to please him immensely. He insisted 
 on sweeping the floor: he watered the flowers. Most 
 frequently he sat down and talked with the young woman. 
 They discussed horticulture or exchanged views in gen- 
 eral, and they always agreed perfectly. From time to 
 time Lavaud dropped some phrases, evidently prepared 
 in advance, about repentance and forgiveness, in con-
 
 52 TALES OF WARTIME FRANCE 
 
 nection with which he mentioned the name of Louis 
 Maret. 
 
 One day he arrived early in the afternoon, seated him- 
 self opposite the young wife, who was preparing a sheaf 
 of leaves, and said with the greatest calmness: 
 
 "I am a liar!" 
 
 She raised her eyes in astonishment. He continued: 
 
 ** Listen to me. Maret was wounded the same day I 
 was, and was brought here to the same hospital. Only 
 he was more seriously wounded than I was, and he 
 is " 
 
 "Dead? He is dead! And I never saw him again! 
 And I have never had a chance to take care of him! " 
 
 She sprang up, very pale. 
 
 "No, no. He is not dead. He is getting along all 
 right. One can see that you love him," said Antoine 
 Lavaud, watching her closely. 
 
 " What I have said I agreed with him to say. We are 
 intimate friends, and he has told me everything. He 
 thought that you would never pardon him, and he sent 
 me to try to arrange things little by little. He has re- 
 pented, and he has been very wretched, you know." 
 
 " Where is he? " she cried. " Take me to him." 
 
 " He is at the door. He is waiting there. It is the first 
 time he has been allowed to go out." 
 
 She listened no longer. She rushed to the door and 
 was now sobbing as she embraced a man who had just
 
 THE MESSENGER 53 
 
 entered and whom she could not in the bottom of her 
 heart help feeling glad to find so aged and so changed, 
 since thus, she thought, he would be perhaps more safely 
 hers. 
 
 Antoine Lavaud slipped away without being noticed. 
 
 " I have succeeded ; I am happy," he said to himself, 
 out in the street. But suddenly he felt a bitter pang, and 
 he comprehended that in that little shop, fresh and fra- 
 grant, smelling of earth and flowers, he had passed the 
 moments which were the sweetest in all his life in the 
 company of an unforgettable woman with grey eyes 
 who loved another whom he had brought back to her.
 
 THE CONVALESCENT'S RETURN 
 FREDERIC BOUTET 
 
 QUITTING the little suburban railway station, Pierre 
 walked along the main road at a rapid pace. He 
 was very excited and very happy. He was going to see 
 her again. He pictured in advance the surprise and 
 joy of the young woman, and now he no longer had the 
 doubts which, after his separation from her, had at first 
 tormented him. By dint of recalling the incidents of 
 the past he was more and more persuaded that he did 
 not exaggerate their significance. His hope had become 
 a certainty. When he saw from afar the wrought iron 
 gate of the park and the house among the trees he gave 
 a start. He had passed there, only a few months ago, so 
 many hours of atrocious suffering and anguish, and then 
 so many hours of ravishing joy, returning to life along- 
 side of her. But he felt a sudden disquietude. Maybe 
 she was not there any longer. He hurried to the gate, 
 and when they told him that she had come that day, as 
 usual, and that she was in the park, he experienced a 
 thrill of the profoundest delight. 
 
 He plunged into the overgrown pathways, wild and 
 charming with their rank grasses and their deep shade, 
 64
 
 THE CONVALESCENT'S RETURN 55 
 
 athwart which the afternoon sun shot, through the tall 
 trees, some brilliant shafts of sunlight. 
 
 Pierre stopped suddenly. He saw a short way off the 
 very person whom he was seeking. He stood motion- 
 less. She was in the same spot to which they used to 
 come the autumn before. She was seated on the bench 
 on which they had sat so many times, side by side. But 
 she was not alone. A wounded man was beside her, just 
 as he himself used to be beside her. 
 
 Cautiously, on tiptoes, gliding behind the bushes, he 
 drew near and, concealed behind a clump of trees in the 
 rear of the bench, he watched and listened. And he was 
 so upset that he feared the beating of his heart would 
 disclose his presence. 
 
 Presently the young woman got up and led the 
 wounded man back to the house, where she turned him 
 over to a nurse. Pierre, taking another path, followed 
 her, and when he saw her alone he approached and 
 greeted her. 
 
 " Madame," he began, in a voice almost choked with 
 emotion. 
 
 She turned her head toward him. He thought that 
 she was prettier than ever, but in the tender and serious 
 eyes which were bent upon him he saw only an expression 
 of indifference. 
 
 " Monsieur? " she said, in a questioning tone. 
 
 Turning pale, he cried out, brokenly:
 
 56 TALES OF WARTIME FRANCE 
 
 " Don't you recognize me? " 
 
 She was evidently surprised, and hesitated for a few 
 seconds. Then her countenance cleared. 
 
 " Ah, yes, yes. Pierre Marsier. Now I remember you 
 very well. You were under treatment here six months 
 ago. And your arm is it better? You were seriously 
 wounded in the arm and breast, weren't you? " 
 
 "Yes. My arm is better. It is still weak and its 
 strength will never come back completely. But it gives 
 me no trouble." 
 
 He stopped short. It was not to talk of his wounds 
 that he had come back. And after a minute, his face 
 contracted into a frown, he repeated: 
 
 " You did not recognize me? " 
 
 " I did not expect in the least to see you and in your 
 civilian clothes. Now that you are no longer a soldier, 
 have you gone back to your business? You were in a 
 bank, I believe? " she asked in a tone of cordial interest. 
 
 " No, I am engaged in industry," he murmured. 
 
 Side by side they walked a few steps down the path, 
 and the young woman began again, very amiably: 
 
 " And it occurred to you to come back to our hospital? 
 That was very courteous." 
 
 Pierre halted and looked her straight in the face. 
 
 ** I came back to see you you ' 
 
 She gave a little start. He continued: 
 
 " Yes. And I almost thought you would be expecting
 
 THE CONVALESCENT'S RETURN 57 
 
 me. You were so devoted, so sweet, so good, so tender 
 to me. Don't you remember? And the hours which we 
 spent together and our conversations? Then I be- 
 lieved When I went away from here I was not able 
 to have a talk with you because you were ill and you 
 didn't come to the hospital for some time. I have been 
 in the South and I couldn't write. For that matter, I 
 preferred to come back in person. And you didn't 
 recognize me! And on getting here I saw you seated 
 on the bench on our bench with another wounded 
 man." 
 
 "Well, what of that? " she asked in astonishment. 
 
 " I got up close to you. I hid myself in the bushes in 
 order to see you and hear you. You said to him the same 
 words which you said to me. You had for him the same 
 soft and affectionate manner the same smile as you had 
 for me. He held your hand just as I had held it." 
 
 " Well, what of that? " she said again, very calmly. 
 
 "What of that? What of that? Don't you under- 
 stand? I had fancied I had hoped I thought that 
 you were not indifferent to me. I knew that you were 
 free and were alone, as I was. I came back to make a 
 proposal to you and I find you exactly the same with 
 others as you were with me." 
 
 The young woman reddened slightly and a look of 
 sternness came into her eyes. 
 
 " M. Marsier," she said, " I exert myself to console in
 
 58 TALES OF WARTIME FRANCE 
 
 some measure those who have no one else to console them 
 and who have need of tenderness and affection while 
 they are struggling back to life." 
 
 He made no answer. He realized all the injustice of 
 his reproaches. He realized that he had been self-de- 
 ceived in fancying that she loved him just because he 
 loved her and in taking her compassion for tenderness. 
 But he realized above all the bitterness of his own dis- 
 appointment. 
 
 " But see here," she continued, very gently, " you know 
 very well that there was never anything in my words or 
 
 actions which could have led you to believe . I 
 
 took care of you to the best of my ability. Naturally I 
 was sympathetic. You were a wounded man." 
 
 " Yes, a wounded man like the others," he replied, 
 sardonically. 
 
 " But now you no longer need me. You are cured." 
 
 She held out her hand to him very graciously. Then 
 she turned and re-entered the hospital. 
 
 But he walked away across the park, looking back 
 with envy to his days of suffering and convalescence.
 
 THE MEDALLION 
 FREDERIC BOUTET 
 
 THE sun never penetrated into the narrow little street, 
 and the shop, shut in behind a large house which 
 faced on another street, was sombre and silent as a cave. 
 Dingy with dirt and thick with dust, the front windows 
 had become opaque. Over the door one could read in 
 defaced letters: "Barbinet: Effects Bought and Sold." 
 
 Denise, without hesitating, pushed open the door. In 
 the shadows, from which came a smell of mouldiness, 
 among the heterogeneous objects which filled the shop 
 from one wall to another and from floor to ceiling, she 
 sought the eyes of Barbinet. 
 
 Suddenly she started. Silently he had appeared be- 
 side her, coming from behind a mattress which hung sus- 
 pended from a crosspiece. He was a thin old man, 
 gnarled, yellow, bald, full of wrinkles, lost in a brown 
 greatcoat of seedy looking plush. He fixed on Denise 
 his little, cautious eyes, blinking and reddened about the 
 borders. 
 
 The young woman's resolution suddenly vanished. 
 She could find no words to say, and her emotion made 
 59
 
 60 TALES OF WARTIME FRANCE 
 
 her appear even more frail and childish than ever in her 
 poor, shabby dress. 
 
 " I came for the medallion," she stammered. 
 
 "What medallion?" 
 
 " You know. The gold medallion which I left in pawn 
 with you six months ago. It is necessary for me to have 
 it back. My husband will soon return. I don't want 
 him to know." 
 
 "Oh, yes! Oh, yes!" 
 
 With his methodical deliberation he went to a case, 
 hidden under the old curtains which shut off the back of 
 the shop, and brought out a little box, with a ticket which 
 he examined. 
 
 " That makes eighty-seven francs, with the last month 
 unpaid." 
 
 "Eighty-seven francs! As much as that!" 
 
 She made a movement as if half stunned. But she 
 soon recovered herself. 
 
 "Wejl, you must know the amount better than I do. 
 But, see, just now I haven't the money. So I have come 
 to ask if you wouldn't give me back the medallion for a 
 week. I will return it to you." 
 
 " I can't do that," said the old man, in his dead voice. 
 " I am sorry I can't do that." 
 
 He retreated, with the box and the ticket, toward the 
 case. Denise, alarmed, caught him by the arm. 
 
 " Wait, I beg of you! Listen to me! I must have it!
 
 THE MEDALLION 61 
 
 I am going to explain the situation to you. My husband 
 gave it to me. He had it from his family. It is the first 
 thing he ever gave me. He values it highly, and he 
 knows how much I value it because he gave it to me. I 
 have never parted with it before. But when Louis was 
 wounded I needed money to go to see him. I had none. 
 I was sick and could not work. Then I thought of the 
 medallion. But, you understand, my husband does not 
 know that I was sick. It would have been the last straw 
 if I had told him. He torments himself enough about 
 me, because we have no relatives at all. We were mar- 
 ried four months before the war. I was only eighteen 
 years old. But my aunt, with whom I lived, had just 
 died, and Louis s#id that I was too young to live all alone. 
 Think what anxiety he has had since he has been away. 
 Now if he sees me without the medallion he will suspect 
 something. He will question me, and I shall be com- 
 pelled to tell him the truth. You will give it to me, 
 won't you? Only for a week." 
 
 She stopped, casting an imploring look at the old man. 
 She had forced herself to tell him her story calmly and 
 clearly. The situation was, in her eyes, a poignantly 
 tragic one, and it was so easy, she thought, to straighten 
 it out without damage to any one that she could not imag- 
 ine the pawnbroker refusing her request. 
 
 M. Barbinet had listened to her with attention. 
 
 " It cannot be done," he repeated, at the end. " That
 
 62 TALES OF WARTIME FRANCE 
 
 sort of thing cannot be done in business. Think of it 
 yourself. That would be too convenient for everybody. 
 You need money, for one reason or another. You know 
 that there is in the neighbourhood some one who can help 
 you. You look him up. You promise everything, and 
 then when you have spent the money you come back and 
 say: 'I cannot pay, but give me back the medallion 
 all the same.' No; I have said my last word. Give 
 me eighty-seven francs and I will return the medal- 
 lion." 
 
 "But I haven't the eighty-seven francs. The little 
 money that I have been able to scrape up I need to en- 
 tertain Louis. Think of it. He will come home for so 
 short a time, and he will be so happy. But if things go 
 wrong he will return to the front with an uneasiness 
 which he will never be able to shake off. When I go to 
 meet him he will ask me why I am not wearing the medal- 
 lion. No, no ; it is impossible. Give it to me." 
 
 " Find the money. Eighty -seven francs it is not a 
 fortune. You can manage it," the old man added, be- 
 tween his teeth. 
 
 He did not say how it could be managed. Nor did 
 Denise ask him. She sobbed, murmured supplications 
 and began again, with a broken voice, her humble story. 
 M. Barbinet reflected. Without doubt he was moved. 
 He gave a little cough, went to his desk and came back 
 with a sheet of paper on which he had written some lines.
 
 THE MEDALLION 63 
 
 " Don't cry any more," he said benevolently. " It is 
 bad for the eyes. I wish to show my confidence in you. 
 You see that I am an honest man, and that they are wrong 
 who speak evil of me in the neighbourhood. Sign this. 
 It says that I give you, for the purpose of exhibiting it, 
 a medallion which belongs to me and which you obligate 
 yourself to return to me within eight days. Now, if you 
 don't bring it back, that will be an admitted theft. And 
 people who steal get arrested. Besides, you will pay a 
 double interest. Do you agree? " 
 
 "Yes," she said. 
 
 It was all the same to her. She wanted the medal- 
 lion. That was all. She signed the paper and went 
 away radiant, carrying it with her. 
 
 She had it on her neck when her husband arrived the 
 next day. He noticed it with satisfaction, and the young 
 wife had no difficulty in making him believe that she 
 lacked for nothing. 
 
 The last day, when, with tears in her eyes, she was 
 helping him to pack his bag, he said to her suddenly: 
 
 " I have something to ask of you, my little Denise. 
 Give me the medallion. I wish to carry it with me. It 
 will be a little of you that I shall have out there." 
 
 " I shall not leave my picture in it, you understand," 
 he added laughingly. " I am going to put yours into 
 it." 
 
 She did not hesitate. She handed him the medallion.
 
 64 TALES OF WARTIME FRANCE 
 
 He slipped into it a picture of his young wife and said, 
 half apologetically: 
 
 " You don't think that I am foolish, do you? You 
 know out there one has no false shame about loving those 
 whom he loves. And it will give me the greatest pleas- 
 ure to have with me something that you have worn so 
 long." 
 
 The next morning he went away. Denise found her- 
 self alone on the railroad platform. 
 
 Then for the first time she thought, with a shock, of M. 
 Bar bine t. She began to tremble with fear.
 
 THE PROMISE 
 FREDERIC BOUTET 
 
 afternoon was wearing on. The threat of a com- 
 ing storm had deepened the shade of the forest as 
 the soldier who was following the wooded path debouched 
 into a large clearing. He recognized this at once, re- 
 membering the description of it which had been given 
 to him, and he also recognized by its ivy-covered roof 
 the house which he was seeking. In haste he crossed the 
 clearing and, as the first drops of rain imprinted them- 
 selves in the dust of the path, he knocked at the door, 
 which was promptly opened. 
 
 "M. Maray? " he asked. 
 
 " Papa is not here; he has gone to town," answered a 
 fresh voice. " But if you wish to see his assistant, he 
 lives only a little distance away." 
 
 A young girl had appeared on the doorstep, followed 
 by a huge dog, who growled and whom she told to keep 
 quiet. She seemed to be about sixteen or seventeen years 
 old. In her grey cloth dress she looked tall and well 
 developed. Her clear face showed lines that were still 
 childish; but her eyes were serious, calm, serene. With
 
 66 TALES OF WARTIME FRANCE 
 
 her hand she brushed from her brow some unruly strands 
 of chestnut hair. 
 
 " I wanted to speak first to M. Maray," the soldier 
 stammered. 
 
 On seeing her he had recoiled involuntarily, and she 
 now gazed at him with astonishment, for he was obvi- 
 ously and painfully embarrassed, and that didn't go well 
 with his great height, his vigorous features and his frank 
 and open expression. 
 
 " If I could come back again," he murmured. " But 
 that is impossible. I must take my train this evening. 
 And after all it is you you are the one with whom I 
 must speak." 
 
 The young girl had scarcely caught those last words, 
 so violent was the beating of the rain. She asked him 
 to enter the house, and closed the door after him. They 
 both remained standing in a large, dimly-lighted room. 
 
 " I see that you do not know," he began, feeling his 
 way. " I thought that you might already have had some 
 news. I wanted to break it first to your father. But I 
 am obliged to return at once, and I must keep the prom- 
 ise which I gave. I came from the front, you know. 
 My name is Jean Vautier, and I was the comrade of one 
 whom you know well. Yes Paul Tullier. He is 
 wounded gravely, very gravely " 
 
 " Mon Dieu! " she cried. " He is not Tell me 
 
 the truth! "
 
 THE PROMISE 67 
 
 He made no answer, realizing that she understood. 
 He was grieved and annoyed that he should have told his 
 tragic news so abruptly, when he had intended to lead 
 up to it more circumspectly. Venturing to look at the 
 young girl, he saw that she had turned pale and that her 
 cheeks were wet with tears. But he had a feeling of sur- 
 prise. There was no trace there of that terrible despair 
 which he had feared to see. He began again, in a low 
 voice : 
 
 " I promised him to bring here, if anything should 
 happen to him, some of his effects as souvenirs. 
 Here they are." 
 
 On the table between them he placed a little package, 
 tied with a black ribbon. 
 
 "Mon Dieu! Mon Dieu! Poor Louise! What a 
 misfortune ! " murmured the young girl. 
 
 "Louise? You are not Louise? You are not Paul's 
 fiancee? " 
 
 " No, no," she answered, shuddering in confusion and 
 anguish. " Louise is my sister. She is twenty years 
 old. They were engaged before the war. I was only 
 fourteen then. Poor Louise! She loved him so much! 
 These last days she has been very uneasy. She had re- 
 ceived no letter for a long time. She went to town 
 with papa to try to get some news." 
 
 " You are Emilie? " said the soldier. " He talked to 
 me about you but as if you were a child."
 
 68 TALES OF WARTIME FRANCE 
 
 " Yes, I am Emilie," she replied. 
 
 After a moment of silence he began again, motioning 
 to the package: 
 
 " That is for your sister. He said that I must bring 
 it here if anything happened to him. He fell beside me, 
 killed on the spot. As soon as I was able to do so I kept 
 my promise. He was my best comrade, Tullier; for 
 months we were together. When he made me swear to 
 come here he offered to do the same thing for me, if I 
 should fall. Only, in my case, it was not worth while." 
 
 " Why? " asked Emilie, raising her eyes. 
 
 "Why?" he returned, with a forced smile. "Be- 
 cause I am alone in the world absolutely alone. I 
 have neither parents, nor relatives, nor fiancee nobody 
 who cares for me. In short, I am without any personal 
 attachments. And even down there, you know, there 
 are moments when it is hard to have to say that. But I 
 am talking about things which do not interest you." 
 
 She said softly that they did interest her. Then the 
 soldier, after a little hesitation, ventured another ques- 
 tion. 
 
 " Have you a fiance down there? " 
 
 She shook her head and her face reddened. They 
 stood there silent, both under the spell of a vague feel- 
 ing of tenderness, with which was mingled the sadness 
 of mourning, evoked by the poor souvenirs which lay on 
 the table between them. The soldier thought confusedly
 
 THE PROMISE 69 
 
 o*f the death which he had so narrowly escaped, and he 
 had an imperious desire to live and to love, the image in 
 which that desire flowered being that of a budding young 
 girl with chestnut hair. But he did not dare to put his 
 thoughts into words. He merely said: 
 
 " I must go. But I should like to ask a favour of you 
 before I go. Will you allow me to tell a comrade, if 
 anything happens to me, to send you some things which 
 I shall leave behind? That will not displease you? " 
 
 She looked at him, her grey eyes filled with pity and 
 emotion, and, trembling a little, answered: 
 
 " You will come back I am sure you will come 
 back." 
 
 Hesitating to read the true meaning of her look and 
 tone, he said very softly: 
 
 "I shall come back here?" 
 
 She nodded assent. He took her hand, bent across the 
 table on which the little package lay and awkwardly 
 kissed her on the forehead. Then he went away in the 
 dusk, following the path through the woods, which smelt 
 of verdure and freshly moistened earth.
 
 HOW THEY DO IT 
 PIERRE MILLE 
 
 IN what you are going to read there is nothing but 
 the reproduction of an actual experience. No fic- 
 tion no embellishment. Only cruel and hard reality. 
 
 Major P , who had just inspected the hospital 
 
 units of a cantonment, was about to re-enter his auto- 
 mobile. He was walking along with his nose in his note- 
 book, dragging one of his boots after the other out of the 
 clinging mud of the roadway. He was thinking of noth- 
 ing in particular except the tedium of the trip back to 
 general headquarters over a familiar route, against a 
 keen north wind whose sting he could already feel in 
 his nostrils. Coming from a depot for the wounded be- 
 hind the lines he was to make his way to another point 
 in the rear. That was all. 
 
 His mind was not occupied with the details of the in- 
 spection which he had just made and made in a ra- 
 ther superficial fashion. There was nothing out of the 
 ordinary run to report. Everything was going along 
 about as usual not too well and yet not too badly. 
 The war would last. He didn't even wish to guess how 
 long it would last, judging that problem to be insoluble 
 70
 
 HOW THEY DO IT 71 
 
 and any mental effort expended on it to be uselessly dis- 
 turbing. One must do his best from day to day and think 
 as little as possible of things not brought to one's im- 
 mediate attention. That was the attitude of mind he 
 sought to cultivate, gratefully taking lessons from the 
 thousands of simple soldiers with whom he came in con- 
 tact, who had acquired instinctively that philosophy of 
 acceptance which he could attain to only by a powerful 
 effort of the will. 
 
 Suddenly the sound of a cannonade, very near him, 
 made him lift his head. An artillery duel so far 
 from the contact trenches, so far from the enemy? At 
 that moment his hand touched the door of the auto. The 
 chauffeur, his nose in the air, deeply interested, said to 
 him: 
 
 " They are firing at a German aeroplane, Major." 
 
 Then looking up into the sky (which was very clear 
 that day because of the north wind) in the same direc- 
 tion in which the soldier was looking, he saw an enemy 
 observer. It was a biplane flying at a height of 1,500 
 to 1,800 metres, not seeming at all disquieted by the little 
 fleeces of white smoke which, with a faint, far-off sound, 
 burst into view about its insect body a body like that 
 of an exaggerated dragon-fly. All the gunners of the 
 cantonment and of the surrounding district were firing 
 incessantly at that aerial target. 
 
 The major shrugged his shoulders. He had seen the
 
 72 TALES OF WARTIME FRANCE 
 
 same thing a hundred times before and knew that a hit 
 from the ground was rare almost impossible. It was 
 as if one should try to shoot a pigeon with a rifle. Such 
 spectacles were good for the blues. But, for himself, 
 he was blase. He was sceptical, so far as results went. 
 It was good powder thrown away much too much good 
 powder. Let the enemy fliers spy on our lines, so long 
 as our fliers also spy on theirs. It 'is a game that two 
 can play. 
 
 " Let us start," he said to the chauffeur. " We have 
 forty kilometres to go." 
 
 Wrapping himself in his greatcoat, he took his seat, 
 and the chauffeur got out to crank up. But the cranker 
 remained motionless in his hands. 
 
 " Major," he said with shining eyes, " there's another 
 machine coming one of ours to give the Boches a 
 fight! " 
 
 The cantonment was situated in a spreading valley. 
 On one side the hills which dominated it were wooded; 
 on the other side they were bare. On that side there had 
 once been tilled fields long ago, in an epoch which 
 seemed infinitely removed, lost in the shadows of time 
 before the war. The French machine had mounted like 
 a sparrow hawk from some hiding place in the dark, mo- 
 tionless woods. It resembled a hawk, a bird of prey, 
 rapid and direct, intrepid and slender. So very slender! 
 Much smaller than the enemy, who had not seen it com-
 
 HOW THEY DO IT 73 
 
 ing at first and now attempted to escape, like a wild duck 
 or a heron which flees before a falcon unhooded by the 
 hunter. 
 
 " It is a new model," cried the chauffeur, who was very 
 
 excited. " I saw it once before at X . They showed 
 
 it to me. It is driven by a single operator, who ma- 
 noeuvres his machine gun with a special device, so that 
 he doesn't have to lose his direction. Ah, that is marvel- 
 lous! That is marvellous! And how fast he goes! He 
 could give the Boche a handicap of thirty kilometres an 
 hour." 
 
 The frail machine, the man who was its brain and the 
 deadly mitrailleuse were all one beautifully welded unit. 
 They dashed ahead, filling the imagination with a sense 
 of almost illimitable ferocity. The pursued bird knew 
 now that it was much too late to flee, that there was no 
 time left to escape. It sought to defend itself. It also 
 was armed, and one could hear the crackling of its ma- 
 chine gun. But the pursuer disdained to respond. It 
 commenced to mount in great, sweeping circles to 
 mount whirling, as does its brother, the hawk, when it 
 wishes to dominate and swoop down upon a sparrow. 
 Not that the French machine wished to swoop down. 
 Simply by taking advantage of its superior climbing 
 power it avoided the fire of its antagonist. 
 
 "Look at the Boche!" shouted the chauffeur. "It 
 is as if he was weighted down. He cannot put a bullet
 
 74 TALES OF WARTIME FRANCE 
 
 into the Frenchman now not a single one. Ah, if 
 only I were not so old! " 
 
 All the automobile mechanicians all who know how 
 to tinker with a motor when they have spent some 
 'time at the front, dream of becoming aviators. The 
 thing which they drive disgusts them, because it cannot 
 leave the earth. 
 
 And when the hawk-like machine had reached the 
 height of its flight, determined in advance to the second, 
 it inclined its body with a cold and cruel precision, 
 pointed its beak, the muzzle of its mitrailleuse, toward 
 the doomed sparrow and began to fire. The other also 
 continued to fire, but at random and to no purpose, head- 
 lessly, like a bird squawking from fear. 
 
 All at once the French machine ceased firing and took 
 again to planing deliberate, silent, sinister and cer- 
 tain, like the hawk which waits and watches. It had 
 accomplished its work. It had now only to wait. That 
 it knew. 
 
 The big German dragon-fly tilted desperately and, on 
 the right side, the double wing suddenly broke. One 
 could hear nothing; it was too high up. It broke, in 
 horrible silence. Undoubtedly the pilot attempted to 
 restore the machine's balance, for the frame tilted sharply 
 on the other plane; and then, on the other side, the double 
 wing broke. One saw the vast pinions come together 
 like a closing fan. And the machine fell fell like a
 
 HOW THEY DO IT 75 
 
 stone. No; rather like a poor, wounded bird, crippled 
 by a gunshot wound. 
 
 The major thought no longer of returning to general 
 headquarters. He said to the chauffeur : 
 
 " Did you see where it fell? Can you track it down? " 
 
 "In the woods, in the woods! " cried the chauffeur, 
 turning his crank. " Certainly I can find it." 
 
 He drove like a madman. Reaching a crossroads in 
 the forest, he stopped. 
 
 " It is in there. We must get out," he said, pointing 
 to a spot in behind the big, weather-browned trees. 
 
 Some soldiers, too, coming from no one knew where, 
 ran ahead of them and showed the way. 
 
 Through the vault of interlaced branches the dead 
 aeroplane had bored a passageway like the track of a 
 huge meteor. One of the two men who had flown in it 
 probably the mechanician had disappeared under 
 the motor, which had ploughed deep into the earth. 
 
 They loosened this heavy mass and it fell sidewise on 
 the ground. 
 
 " Cover it up ! " cried a soldier, putting his hands 
 over his eyes. " Cover it up ! " 
 
 The mechanician had had his two thighs severed, as 
 if by some huge ax, by the weight of the motor. The 
 trunk of his body was only a gaping, frightful, pulpy 
 mass, with a heart exposed which still beat. Some one 
 threw a cloak over the corpse.
 
 76 TALES OF WARTIME FRANCE 
 
 " And the other one? " said a soldier. " There were 
 two." 
 
 They found the body of the other German some feet 
 away. The branches had caught him in falling and torn 
 him from his seat. One saw his breast rise and fall like 
 a forge bellows. Then he expired. The soldiers drew 
 out their knives. They wanted to divide among them- 
 selves the buttons on his uniform. 
 
 " These men died bravely," said the major. " Respect 
 their remains! " 
 
 And because he had shoulder straps on they obeyed 
 
 " How cold it is! " exclaimed one of the soldiers. 
 
 And their teeth began to chatter there in the pres- 
 ence of the dead. 
 
 " And what became of our flier? " asked one, in order 
 to break the spell cast by death. 
 
 " He has not yet come down," answered a comrade. 
 " Maybe he thought there was another job for him to 
 do." 
 
 The next day, having decided to pass the night in the 
 cantonment, the major saw the aviator return. The 
 victor of the evening before left his machine in the fields 
 and came into the hospital to warm his hands. He was 
 a child, hardly nineteen years old, with cheeks as downy 
 as a peach and innocent eyes.
 
 HOW THEY DO IT 77 
 
 "Well," said the major, "you brought one down 
 
 yesterday, didn't you? " 
 
 " Oh," he answered carelessly, " it was my twelfth." 
 And he warmed his stiffened fingers nonchalantly over 
 
 the stove.
 
 THE APOLOGUE OF KADIR BAKCH 
 PIERRE MILLE 
 
 KADIR BAKCH was khitmatgar, that is to say, sub- 
 officer, in a regiment of Sikhs, which fought on the 
 Yser in 1914. One day the major sent one of the offi- 
 cers of his battalion, a Lieutenant Robinson, with a let- 
 ter to the nearest French command. And he said to 
 Kadir Bakch: 
 
 " You will go with him. If he falls, you will pick up 
 the letter and carry it to its address. It must be de- 
 livered." 
 
 " That is good talk." answered Kadir Bakch, whose 
 English was rather crude. 
 
 It happened that Lieutenant Robinson was killed out- 
 right by a shrapnel ball, which entered his left eye and 
 came out through the back of his head. Kadir Bakch 
 had his left shoulder shattered. But that did not pre- 
 vent him from picking up the letter and carrying it to the 
 French battalion, as he had been ordered to do. 
 
 That is why this Sikh sub-officer, although he belonged 
 
 to the English army, was carried from headquarters a 
 
 few moments later to one of our hospitals. They 
 
 thought that he was too severely wounded to be sent 
 
 78
 
 THE APOLOGUE OF KADIR BAKCH 79 
 
 back to his corps. And he found that his neighbour in 
 the hospital ward was Adrien Vermot, who also spoke 
 English. 
 
 " Your English is much too good for me," declared the 
 khitmatgar. " It is a gentleman's English. But that 
 will make no difference." 
 
 Then he asked his neighbour what was the matter with 
 him. Such curiosity is natural with wounded men, even 
 if they come from India. 
 
 " I am going to die," answered Vermot, very sadly. 
 
 " Ah ! " said Kadir Bakch, simply. It seemed to him 
 altogether natural that men should die in war. The news 
 did not move him. 
 
 " I have a bullet in the spinal marrow," the wounded 
 Frenchman continued. " I can't move my legs any 
 longer. And the paralysis will spread. I know in 
 five or six days. I have no pain. Only I would like to 
 see my mother." 
 
 It took him, in fact, five or six days to die, as he had 
 said it would. And at times he was delirious. Then 
 Kadir Bakch did not understand him at all, because he 
 expressed himself in French. But, if he had understood, 
 he would not have been much better off. Adrien Ver- 
 mot begged for life, like a child. He was only twenty- 
 two years old. He said also that he could not under- 
 stand death why he should die what purpose would 
 be served by his dying. He wanted to live to know
 
 80 TALES OF WARTIME FRANCE 
 
 whether he had been the victor whether France had 
 won the war. He wished to know if, in truth, he had 
 or had not died in vain a horrible question, which 
 men were still to face for so long a time. 
 
 Kadir Bakch discovered that he could soothe his neigh- 
 bour by chanting long Hindoo recitatives in a low voice. 
 And he did this at first without any great sense of pity, 
 but merely because it annoyed him to hear such lamenta- 
 tions in a strange tongue. Yet he ended by loving the 
 dying man. 
 
 " He is a sahib," thought the old soldier, " and he is 
 just the age of my own son." 
 
 Kadir Bakch loved his son. 
 
 Finally Vermot, who was very weak, but now com- 
 pletely conscious, asked the Sikh: 
 
 "What is that you are singing? " 
 
 " Legends," answered the khitmatgar. " They are the 
 legends of my country. People chant them without 
 knowing exactly what they mean. The last one was this: 
 One day Buddha had gathered together his disciples. 
 They were all seated on the ground, and the disciples 
 listened to Buddha, who was showing them the way." 
 
 "What way? " asked the dying man. 
 
 " The way to the Nirvana to enjoy the supreme hap- 
 piness of non-existence. All at once a terrible figure 
 appeared before them. It was Siva, the great god, my 
 god. See, I have his sign tattooed on my forehead. It
 
 THE APOLOGUE OF KADIR BAKCH 81 
 
 was Siva, the unspeakable, the Destroyer and the Creator, 
 the Soul of the World the war which kills and the re- 
 generator of men and things through the allurements of 
 love. Male and female, with three eyes, his throat blue 
 because he has to poison himself drinking up the sea, all 
 the waters of the sea. His body girdled with human 
 skulls; his head crowned with the moon the fecund 
 moon. 
 
 " All the disciples were blinded. They no longer saw 
 anything; they were enveloped in the blackness of night. 
 They were all lost in the night except Vradzaham, the 
 wisest of them, whose science saved him. But he under- 
 stood only in part. He saw this god, magnificent and 
 terrible, but he did not know who he was. 
 
 " Then, turning to Buddha, the omniscient master, he 
 said: 
 
 " ' I know all the stars and all the divinities, equal in 
 number to the sands of the Ganges. But I have never seen 
 this glorious being. Who is he? ' 
 
 " And Buddha answered him: * He is yourself.' " 
 
 " How was that?" asked the dying man. 
 
 " Yes, it was so," explained Kadir Bakch, very gravely. 
 " Every man contains in himself death and regenera- 
 tion. But no one realizes it. It requires an illumina- 
 tion to know it. When he had seen Siva and had con- 
 ceived that Siva and he were one, Vradzaham entered into 
 the supreme blessedness. I mean to say that he died, in
 
 82 TALES OF WARTIME FRANCE 
 
 order to escape reincarnation, in order to enter into the 
 Soul of the World. So the legend tells us." 
 
 Then the eyes of Adrien Vermot, who was about to 
 die, grew soft and brilliant. 
 
 " You, Indian," he said " I can hardly recall your 
 name you, Indian, I have not understood all this as 
 you understand it; but I have understood. It is France 
 which has revealed herself to herself in this atrocious war. 
 She has faced it and she has not faltered. She has faced 
 it and she has recognized herself in me in me, who am 
 about to die, in all those who are to die. I can go now. 
 I know." 
 
 "Sahib," asked the old Khitmatgar " Sahib, who 
 resemble my son, do you still want to see your mother? " 
 
 " Yes, I should like to see her," answered Vermot, very 
 calmly. " I would repeat to her what you have said. 
 What an extraordinary thing this is that you have told 
 me! And I believe that you believe it, too." 
 
 "I? It is possible," said the khitmatgar. "All the 
 world does not understand the sense of the prayers which 
 it says. But the sense is in the prayers. Sahib, shall I 
 call the woman in the blouse, that she may give you the 
 injection which causes sleep? " 
 
 " Yes," said the wounded man, submissively. 
 
 And soon after that he died.
 
 THE MAN WHO WAS AFRAID 
 PIERRE MILLE 
 
 Eis impossible for me to tell you why the soldier 
 Cruchard was a victim of fear of a fear which 
 never showed any abatement, which had not quitted him 
 for a day, or an hour, or a minute in the six months which 
 he had been at the front. It might, if you reflect on it, 
 be more natural to put the question the other way and 
 to wonder how it can happen that among three million 
 men there are so few who are afraid, or so many, at 
 least, who know how to conquer fear. Remember that 
 before this war they were all like you and me that 
 they were afraid of the dark and its mysteries when they 
 were children; that later they were afraid of the deep 
 water, of the fire which burned, of the horses which 
 dashed by them in the streets; of bad dogs, of pain, of 
 death, of things with which they were unfamiliar or which 
 they knew only too well. They were like you, like me, 
 like all the world. 
 
 And, all of a sudden, here are these three million men 
 precipitated into the midst of the most frightful and 
 most general cataclysm the world has ever known. What 
 is the ferocity of nature compared with that of man? 
 And with what feeble means nature works compared with
 
 84 TALES OF WARTIME FRANCE 
 
 those which man employs! What is the destruction of 
 St. Pierre in Martinique by the volcano of Mount Pelee, 
 which cost only forty thousand lives the price of a 
 single battle in this war which has lasted for more than 
 three years and a half what is the wrecking of Messina 
 by an earthquake alongside the hurricane of shells which 
 for the last forty-two months has pounded, ground, re- 
 duced to impalpable dust hundreds of villages and towns, 
 and then hundreds more? 
 
 And yet we see these three million men, who resemble 
 you and me, face each day this terror, without succumb- 
 ing to it. See how these men, day after day, with their 
 muddy feet, with their miry feet set in the paths of glory, 
 trample down and master the most legitimate and primi- 
 tive of instincts the first to be born, the last to dis- 
 appear the instinct of self-preservation. 
 
 Explain this miracle as you will. Invoke discipline, 
 invoke patriotism, contagion of example and familiarity 
 with danger, the treasures of energy and abnegation ac- 
 cumulated by the race, the will of intelligence triumph- 
 ing over the hesitations of the flesh it remains none 
 the less a miracle. 
 
 Only the miracle was not produced in Cruchard's case. 
 Let us assume that the others are super-men. He re- 
 mained only a natural human being and therefore 
 nothing very much to boast about.
 
 THE MAN WHO WAS AFRAID 85 
 
 Perhaps he had begun wrong. I once had a dog like 
 that, in whose ears some one had foolishly discharged a 
 gun the first day he was taken out to hunt. He retained 
 an insurmountable horror of firearms. When he saw a 
 gun he slunk away, his tail between his legs and hid in 
 a cellar or a garret. 
 
 The events of the war, the first time he mixed into 
 them, produced the same effect on Cruchard. He never 
 recovered from his first fit of fear. On the contrary, its 
 effects seemed to magnify with every new and disagree- 
 able experience to which he was subjected. So that he 
 reached the point not only of saying that he was afraid 
 when he had reasons to be afraid and to conduct himself 
 accordingly, but of talking about his fear when the causes 
 of it had provisionally disappeared; of living in an an- 
 guish of dangers to come, of groaning and trembling by 
 day, of trembling and groaning by night. He was not 
 simply a useless soldier and a bad soldier. He was a 
 dangerous and demoralizing soldier. He spread the 
 contagion of his own panic. 
 
 They tried punishing him. He decided, without con- 
 cealment, that no punishment could be equal to the dis- 
 comfort of doing the things which could save him from 
 punishment. His superiors tried to play on his feelings. 
 They appealed to his honour, to his pride. But in vain. 
 He answered: 
 
 " What would you have? I am afraid. That is a
 
 86 TALES OF WARTIME FRANCE 
 
 thing one cannot help. And I shall die of fear that 
 is certain. But it is still more certain that I would ra- 
 ther die of fear than by a bullet, by the explosion of a 
 shrapnel or a bomb, or by a 320 shell, or any other of 
 those miserable contrivances which make such a terri- 
 fying noise. Oh! that noise! I want to get away from 
 it." 
 
 His only intrepidity was that of obstinacy. It ended 
 by wearing out opposition. They had some scruples 
 about shooting such a poor devil. You see, too, that he 
 never absolutely refused to obey. He merely said that 
 he was afraid and that it was impossible for any one to 
 discharge one's duty when he was in a state of terror all 
 the time. The colonel, to whom the case was submitted, 
 finally said: 
 
 "What does this man do in civil life? " 
 
 They looked up his record and found that he was a 
 baker's apprentice. 
 
 " Well," said the colonel, " why not make a baker out 
 of him? Send him into the military bakeshop any- 
 where, only so he leaves us in peace." 
 
 That is how Cruchard won his personal victory before 
 the Allied armies won theirs. He kneaded pans of 
 dough, put them in the oven and took them out again 
 and declared himself completely satisfied. Unfortu-
 
 THE MAN WHO WAS AFRAID 87 
 
 nately there was a change in administration. One re- 
 sult of this change was to revive the soldier Cruchard's 
 mental agony and his creepings of the flesh. An order 
 came which sent back to the front, to the first line, all the 
 men of his class. 
 
 This period of pacific repose had not altered his soul. 
 Cruchard asked on arriving at the front: 
 
 "Is it always bad here? " 
 
 " Worse than ever," they told him. " Those pigs are 
 always inventing something new. One has no longer a 
 minute of tranquillity. The sector is becoming disgust- 
 ing. You have only to look at the ground." 
 
 As far as his eyes could see the soil was torn up, to a 
 depth of eighteen feet, as by the wheels of some gigantic 
 chariot. And it continues its work the chariot. 
 Great shells buried themselves in the fearful mixture of 
 slime, blood and corpses and then burst under the mass 
 with enormous rumblings. It was as if the globe, the 
 whole globe, had a stomachache and was revenging it- 
 self by crushing the little human beings who were lying 
 flat on its surface. Cruchard felt deathly sick. 
 
 " I want to get away from here," he said. " This is 
 no sensible place to be. It is no place to stay. They 
 sent me to the rear. They found that it was just and 
 useful to give me a good place in the rear. They had 
 no right to change their minds." 
 
 " Old man," his comrades told him, with a sort of
 
 88 TALES OF WARTIME FRANCE 
 
 compassion, " it's all in the day's work. You're here 
 and you'll have to stay here. It is the same thing with 
 everybody." 
 
 " But it oughtn't to be the same thing with everybody. 
 As for me, I tell you that I'm afraid." 
 
 But they only shrugged their shoulders. As if being 
 afraid made any difference! 
 
 Weeks passed and Cruchard's terror increased. One 
 day he reached a decision, all in a shiver: 
 
 " There is nothing else to do. I must write to my 
 sister." 
 
 They joked with him. 
 
 "Who is she, your sister? Is she the foster mother 
 of Lyautey? The cook of Poincare? The cousin of 
 the King of Montenegro? And even, you know, if she 
 were all these at once " 
 
 But that didn't prevent him from announcing pres- 
 ently: 
 
 "I've done it I'm not going to stay here. I have 
 written to my sister." 
 
 They thought that his fright had made him a little 
 foolish. But one morning an order arrived at head- 
 quarters. The soldier Cruchard was demobilized. He 
 was the only person whom this news did not surprise. 
 He contented himself with saying:
 
 THE MAN WHO WAS AFRAID 89 
 
 " That was only natural, inasmuch as I had written to 
 my sister." 
 
 They surrounded him. I am obliged to say that they 
 envied him. He had become a personage, since he had 
 done a thing which they considered impossible. The 
 most stringent laws were waived in his favour. And 
 who, then, was this all-powerful sister? He told them: 
 
 " Her husband is a cattle feeder. At Clamart." 
 
 " What of that? " 
 
 " For a long time she pursued me to do it. She said 
 to me : * It is your opportunity. If you want to get 
 away here is your chance. Marry Jules's cousin.' But 
 that didn't appeal to me. I must confess that she is not 
 appetizing. I should have preferred some other way. 
 All the same, when I saw how it was here I thought: 
 ' Anything is better than this life.' And I wrote to my 
 sister : ' Marry her. Marry her at once for me by 
 proxy.' It seems that she did so, for I am demobilized." 
 
 " But what had the fact that you married the lady to 
 do with demobilization? " 
 
 "I was just going to tell you," explained Cruchard, 
 with a sigh. " She is a widow, with three girls and 
 three boys. So I have been demobilized as the father of 
 six children." 
 
 And this story is really true.
 
 THE SOLDIER WHO CONQUERED SLEEP 
 PIERRE MILLE 
 
 HE was a little sergeant, very young, undoubtedly of 
 the class of 1914. Pinned to his coat he wore the 
 Croix de Guerre. At the sight of the captain, alongside 
 of whom I was walking the afternoon of one of the last 
 Sundays in July, he saluted hurriedly. It was not on his 
 part the ordinary salute imposed by discipline the 
 salute which every subordinate owes to his superior. 
 These two men knew each other. I recognized that fact 
 from the warmth of the gesture. I recognized it also 
 from the manner in which the officer responded to the 
 homage of the youthful soldier. He stopped and began 
 a conversation: 
 
 " Well, my boy, are you on leave? " 
 
 The face of the young sub-officer lighted up. It be- 
 came sublime in its enthusiasm, its devotion, its admira- 
 tion, its gratitude and its love yes, in its love. We 
 had the right, before the war, to believe that the visage 
 of a very young man could be transfigured only by a 
 meeting with the first woman he has ever loved. Today 
 we know better. We know that a young man will never 
 give himself as completely to a woman as to a chief
 
 SOLDIER WHO CONQUERED SLEEP 91 
 
 whom he has recognized on the field of battle to be really 
 a chief. 
 
 It is necessary to describe things as they are. If a 
 man vows to a woman, on a certain occasion, that he is 
 ready to die for her, it is very seldom that she puts him 
 under any obligation to perform that supreme sacrifice. 
 But that same oath is the basis of military discipline. 
 And in the latter case it must be kept. And it is kept. 
 
 So this injunction of fatal self-abnegation is all the 
 more certain to embody itself in some particular being, 
 chosen because of one knows not what mysterious quali- 
 ties a man who possesses, sometimes unwittingly, the 
 gift of authority and of whom those who follow him 
 say: "We will die for him! " That love the love 
 of the soldier for his chief is the highest of all loves. 
 Women can never help being jealous of it. 
 
 The little sub-officer had blushed with joy. He stam- 
 mered : 
 
 " Yes, my captain, I am on leave. Yes, my captain. 
 And you, too, as I see! That gives me pleasure! " 
 
 He was incapable of expressing himself any more 
 clearly. And I felt that what he meant to say was: 
 
 " It gives me the greatest pleasure to see that you are 
 still alive, as I am more pleasure, indeed, than to know 
 that I am still alive." 
 
 " Do you still recite Latin verses, you young intel- 
 lectual? " asked the captain.
 
 92 TALES OF WARTIME FRANCE 
 
 The sub-officer had the air of not understanding. 
 Perhaps he didn't catch the point. 
 
 "And they have given you that," continued the cap- 
 tain, putting his finger on the Croix de Guerre. " That 
 will go well later on your frock coat when you are a 
 professor." 
 
 " Oh, my captain," said the boy, " you know very well 
 that it was you that you are the one to whom I owe 
 it." 
 
 " My boy," answered the captain, " the decisions of 
 the military tribunals are always right Good-bye." 
 
 " That little fellow," said the captain to me, " is natu- 
 rally chic. He is about the best I have in my company. 
 On one occasion he was magnificent. And no one will 
 ever know about it if I don't tell you the story. It is 
 I who framed the recommendation on which he received 
 that cross; and the recommendation was untrue. A lie 
 from beginning to end, I repeat. Yet I could not do 
 otherwise. 
 
 " You understand what a ' tir de barrage ' is? When 
 an attack is launched the enemy establishes in advance 
 of the position assaulted a curtain of projectiles a 
 curtain which ought to be maintained, if the supply of 
 munitions lasts long enough, until the physical, and espe- 
 cially the moral, forces of the adversary are exhausted. 
 It is a curtain of steel against which he is going to hurl 
 himself, if he has the energy to complete his advance.
 
 SOLDIER WHO CONQUERED SLEEP 93 
 
 " The first lines of the attack melt away. The others 
 have to lie down and wait. That is where courage is re- 
 quired for lying down and waiting. Less well in 
 hand, less determined to die rather than not reach their 
 goal, the troops recoil. There is nothing else to do but 
 to begin over again, if one can. 
 
 " That little blond whom you have just seen was then 
 only a corporal. He had been with my company but 
 two months when he set out with his section to carry the 
 
 trenches at N . The other section was in support 
 
 and I accompanied it. 
 
 " Many things happened. The bombardment was 
 frightful. It seemed to me that the attack had failed. 
 Our losses were severe, most of the officers being dis- 
 abled. I was astonished to come through myself with- 
 out a scratch. As they often tell me, I must be * var- 
 nished.' But what astonished me more, and greatly up- 
 set me, was not to see the other section come back. It 
 had completely disappeared. It was impossible for me 
 to distinguish the place which it had occupied, or even 
 to guess where the section was. For it no longer fired a 
 shot. There was no sign of a man. Had it been cap- 
 tured in a body? Or worse? 
 
 " Finally I decided to go forward myself and hunt 
 for it. The route was not comfortable. But at last I 
 arrived. I arrived, and I must tell you that it is a dis- 
 agreeable, an infinitely disagreeable, sensation to ap-
 
 94 TALES OF WARTIME FRANCE 
 
 proach, all alone and in cold blood, a hell which one has 
 quitted only a short time before, when one was sur- 
 rounded by his men, when one still had hopes of success, 
 when, in a word, one was in the heat of an attack. 
 
 " When I discovered the section which I was seeking 
 I saw that it was on the inner edge of that abominable 
 curtain of fire, of monstrous explosions and of death, 
 having attempted in vain to recross it. And when I said 
 hell, a moment ago, I meant what I said. There was the 
 rending and tearing of the hundreds of big shells, which 
 cut away like razors or crush like hammers everything 
 they strike stones, trees or men. There were the dis- 
 placements of the air caused by the explosions, which 
 loosen the muscles from the chest, which can kill one in 
 an instant by stopping the beating of the heart. And 
 there was the incessant and fearful din. The displace- 
 ments of the air, as I told you, can arrest the movements 
 of the heart. The noise, the shock of the noise, is pow- 
 erful enough to halt the mechanism of the brain. 
 
 " The section was there, almost intact. It seemed to 
 lack not more than fifteen men. But those whom I 
 saw the survivors, the entire remnant were they not 
 dead? Lying in the brushwood, and especially in the 
 holes dug by the big shells, they seemed inert; they 
 made no movement. Crawling behind the brushwood, 
 almost flat on my stomach, I ran across a trench where 
 some one was evidently still alive and stirring.
 
 SOLDIER WHO CONQUERED SLEEP 95 
 
 " It was the boy whom you just saw, the corporal of 
 the class of 1914, come from the Sorbonne or the Nor- 
 mal, I don't remember which. He was making very 
 queer motions, as if he was forcing himself to gesticu- 
 late. And at the same time he was mumbling incompre- 
 hensible things. At the moment when I came upon him 
 he was declaiming: 
 
 Et jam nox humida coela 
 Praecipitat suadentque cadentia sidera somnos. 
 
 " I had gone through the Lyceum and I recognized 
 Virgil. He stopped short when he saw me and blushed 
 a little, at the same time, I thought, lifting his eyes to me 
 with an absolute confidence eyes which were deli- 
 ciously clear. 
 
 " ' How about the others? ' I asked. 
 
 " ' Lieutenant D. is dead. Lieutenant V. is wounded. 
 The adjutant is wounded. The men? The men are 
 asleep, my captain. I didn't want them to go back. But 
 I couldn't prevent them from going to sleep, because of 
 the noise.' 
 
 " And that was true. It is an effect of this incessant 
 cannonading of this thunder that racks the brain 
 that it reduces one internally to a sort of pulp. A new 
 means for hypnotizers to put their subjects to sleep with, 
 but a very costly one. Men sleep in spite of themselves, 
 as in hypnosis or delirium. 
 
 "'And you? 'I said.
 
 96 TALES OF WARTIME FRANCE 
 
 " * When I saw that,' he answered, ' I thought that the 
 essential thing was to stay here. I said to them: 
 " Sleep. For me I will see to it that I don't go to sleep. 
 And that will be all that I shall need to do." And I did 
 see to it. I made gestures, I talked and I recited.' 
 
 " In that way he held the section there this boy. I 
 reflected a moment, and then dashed off an order on a 
 sheet of my notebook. 
 
 " * I shall watch now,' I said to him. ' Carry this to 
 the rear. Our advance must not be lost.' 
 
 " It was in this way that the ground conquered on 
 that side was preserved for us. But when I wanted to 
 recommend this boy for mention in the regimental order 
 of the day I saw that I could never tell the truth 
 never! On paper, you see, all this would have a semi- 
 comic air. And how to invent some variant of it? No, 
 it wasn't possible. It wasn't possible. 
 
 " So I wrote: 
 
 " ' He contributed to hold the ground won by the sec- 
 tion, all of whose officers had been disabled, by encour- 
 aging it during the long hours by voice and gestures.' 
 
 " A pure fiction, was it not, from beginning to end ? 
 But you will admit that he earned them all the same 
 his citation and his cross."
 
 THE GODMOTHER 
 MME. LUCIE DELARUE-MADRUS 
 
 WITH a sigh Geo loosened the package of letters 
 which the Bureau of Good Works was in the habit 
 of sending her each week. Too delicate for hospital 
 work, she had tried many other things since 1914 before 
 deciding upon her true function in the Great War. At 
 last she had discovered her proper role. It was to be 
 herself a correspondent and to find other correspond- 
 ents for soldiers who wish to have godmothers, longing 
 for the little blue postage stamp which so brightens the 
 sombre life of the trenches. 
 
 Patiently Geo began to read the letters. About her 
 the dismantled condition of her studio showed that she 
 had painted little or nothing in the last three years. A 
 cushion fell to the floor; the cat moved over on the divan 
 closer to her mistress. Then the old serving woman 
 entered to carry away the tea tray the little solitary 
 tea which the young woman had taken while continuing 
 to read the soldiers' missives a task which she always 
 found extremely interesting. 
 
 Those who have never been able to have children 
 often care for orphans in order to appease their heart 
 97
 
 98 TALES OF WARTIME FRANCE 
 
 emptiness. Geo wrote to the poilus so as to feel that 
 she had some one at the front. 
 
 To have some one at the front, some one for whom to 
 tremble, some one to grow tender over or to take pride 
 in that is today a prime necessity for the feminine 
 heart. A woman of our time suffers if she is not on an 
 equality in this respect with all the others. To be like 
 the others that is also a form of Sacred Union. Our 
 feelings are the same, whether death is concerned or 
 glory. Joy and grief are shared equally. That is why 
 the sorrows of war, despite its horror, are perhaps lighter 
 to bear than the sorrows of peace. No woman today 
 feels isolated, whatever may be her misfortune or her 
 happiness. There is among women a new mental war 
 mood, which has all the authority of an established 
 fashion. 
 
 Geo, alone in her class, suffered in solitude. All 
 those letters to which she wrote answers were tinged with 
 a sense of unreality. Twenty godsons were not worth 
 one husband. 
 
 Wearily she let fall into her lap the letter which she 
 was reading. Her big grey eyes stared at vacancy; her 
 hand brushed back from her brow a tangle of henna- 
 coloured curls. 
 
 " What in the world has become of him? " 
 
 She reviewed her short life. She was now a little more 
 than twenty-eight years old. She could have been, like
 
 THE GODMOTHER 99 
 
 the others, a wife and a mother. Married before she 
 was twenty to a good and attractive man, who chose her 
 because he loved her, she had not then truly understood 
 her destiny. 
 
 It was an epoch that before the war when people 
 talked much about " living their lives." That formula 
 meant a good many things to a good many persons. It 
 covered exploits even more venturesome than those of 
 a little personage like Geo. 
 
 Geo was called at that time Mme. Charles Bouvier, 
 and one can well believe that that simple designation 
 and status hardly satisfied her ambitions. Having mar- 
 ried in order to obtain her freedom (for she was, after 
 all, too honest and too conventional to quit her family 
 and live all alone) , she had opposed to the loyal tender- 
 ness of her good fellow of a husband the bold laugh 
 the Nietzschean laugh of the epoch. 
 
 Sentiment? Husband? Children? Home? 
 
 The young wife had genius, so she thought. A year 
 after her marriage she rented a studio. And because 
 she was entering her twentieth year, like all other young 
 girls of that age her conception of the future was pre- 
 cise and unalterable. That age has no soul, just as a 
 new house has none. It still smells of the plaster. 
 
 The little wife, like so many others, constructed her 
 life according to her own ideas, as if one could fabri- 
 cate it out of hand. Her only thought was to break, to
 
 100 TALES OF WARTIME FRANCE 
 
 slash and to turn things upside down. At twenty-three 
 she was divorced. Her husband, wearied and broken, 
 had disappeared completely from her life. 
 
 She was free! She dropped her married name and 
 even her family name. She became Geo. As Geo, sim- 
 ply, she aspired to fame and glory. 
 
 Naturally there was no question of love in the case. 
 Does one yield to sentiment, or even to sensuality, when 
 one is determined to live one's own life? Geo, quite 
 alone, facing her own future, her dowry recovered, 
 wedded her art. 
 
 War. 
 
 Besides transforming the five parts of the world, it is 
 going, according to circumstances, to disarrange and re- 
 arrange everything, even in the smallest cells of the so- 
 cial beehive. Like an acid, it is going to cause dissolu- 
 tion in one place and precipitation in another. 
 
 In the month of August, 1914, Geo suddenly realized 
 that she had no talent and had been living in a world 
 of self-deception. Her parents were dead. She had 
 lost track of her former husband. With all the violence 
 f the moral revulsion which had laid hold of her, with 
 all the romantic feeling with which the first months of 
 the war were impregnated, she multiplied her efforts to 
 get in touch once more with her divorce. He was a sol- 
 dier he, too and as such she knew that he would 
 prove a hero.
 
 THE GODMOTHER 101 
 
 A hero! But her efforts were vain. Perhaps he had 
 fallen in love with another woman; perhaps he had been 
 killed or taken prisoner. 
 
 Geo takes up again the letter, the reading of which had 
 been interrupted by her long reverie. Once more she 
 sighs: 
 
 " This lieutenant here, I know to whom I shall turn 
 him over. Yes, she is just the sort of person he needs." 
 
 Another envelope opened; another letter unfolded. 
 
 " Ladies, I am ashamed to address myself to your 
 bureau. To deliver one's soul to an agency, even an 
 agency as discreet as yours it is horrible. But I am 
 so lonely, ladies doubly lonely amid the terrors of 
 war; doubly lonely because I formerly dreamed myself 
 a dream of happiness. If she whom I loved and who for 
 three years was my wife had understood me " 
 
 With trembling hands Geo almost tears the page, so 
 eagerly does she turn it in order to see the signature. 
 Among the numerals and abbreviations it is there this 
 perfectly legible, electrifying signature: 
 
 " Adjutant Charles Bouvier." 
 
 Geo jumps to her feet. Erect, she resumes her reading, 
 while the cat, awakened with a start, yawns and stretches 
 on the divan. 
 
 " Find me a correspondent a friend to whom I can 
 tell my troubles. I cannot keep them to myself any 
 longer. My parents died when I was a child. I have
 
 102 TALES OF WARTIME FRANCE 
 
 neither brother nor sister. It is said: 'It is not good 
 for man to be alone.' For five years I have been alone. 
 I cannot endure it any longer. But now that my life is 
 in perpetual danger, I need more than ever a soul linked 
 with my own with my soul, so menaced in this frail 
 habitat of a soldier's body. And then, I have just re- 
 ceived the Croix de Guerre. It is so melancholy that 
 there is no one to be proud of me." 
 
 "Quick, my pen! Quick, my ink! " 
 
 Geo has no married name and no family name. But 
 she needs no other name than Geo to be a godmother to 
 soldiers. No one was likely to know her, in spite of her 
 painting. Nor will she need to disguise her handwriting. 
 Did she recognize at once her former husband's hand- 
 writing? 
 
 " Monsieur PAdjutant, I wish to be your godmother. 
 For I also am lonely and broken in spirit. But I must 
 make one condition. It is that you shall not know my 
 real name. For you I shall be Geo and nothing else. 
 And you can tell me all the wrongs that have been done 
 to you. I shall understand them, believe me, better 
 than anybody else." 
 
 Pen in air, the young wife smiles sadly, tenderly. 
 Then she bends over and continues her letter. And her 
 fingers tremble constantly as she writes.
 
 THE GODMOTHER II 
 MME. LUCIE DELARUE-MADRUS 
 
 T HAVE already told you how Geo, divorced, became 
 A by the merest accident the godmother of her poor 
 husband, that lawful adorer of whom, before the war, 
 she had disembarrassed herself so quickly, with all the 
 unconscious cruelty of youth, in order " to live her own 
 life," as so many others do. 
 
 Now the correspondence between them is well estab- 
 lished. Adjutant Charles Bouvier doesn't know that the 
 godmother to whom he writes with so much ardour is his 
 former wife. He doesn't know her name or her age, 
 since it was on that condition that she agreed to accept 
 him as a godson. 
 
 Geo, alone as usual in her studio, where she has not 
 painted since the war began, settles down to open the 
 thick military letter, a letter weighted with the self- 
 revelations of an unknown soul, an unknown soul which 
 is also the soul of her ex-husband. 
 
 From habit rather than from desire she begins by light- 
 ing a cigarette. Then she installs herself on the divan 
 and passes her right hand carelessly through her short, 
 henna-stained curls. At twenty-eight there is no neces- 
 sity for colouring them. But the henna is a detail in the 
 103
 
 104 TALES OF WARTIME FRANCE 
 
 Latin Quarter make-up which Geo, in spite of her dissat- 
 isfaction with it, has not yet reached the point of giving 
 up. Women who have no children often become their 
 own dolls; and that leads them into extravagances and 
 eccentricities. 
 
 "My godmother, you asked me in your last letter to 
 tell you what I think of women, since I speak of them all 
 the time and neglect to write you anything about the 
 war. Such a curiosity on your part leads me to believe 
 that you are still young, in spite of all your bitterness. 
 And that thought delights me, because one can never be 
 truly understood except by his contemporaries. Chil- 
 dren love the company of other children. Young people 
 love the society of young people, and so on. As for me, 
 I am now entering my second youth; and so are you, it 
 seems to me. 
 
 " So, now that I have told you all my life, I am going 
 to try to express my soul to you. What I say will not be 
 very original. I am a man, like other men, or, rather, a 
 Frenchman, like other Frenchmen preoccupied, that is, 
 before everything else, with women. To be so is the in- 
 destructible inheritance of our Latin race. 
 
 " You understand well that this preoccupation is not 
 due solely to sensual unrest, but comes primarily from a 
 deep feeling of tenderness, in which there remains, as it 
 were, a souvenir of that infancy which was so gently 
 cradled at a mother's breast.
 
 THE GODMOTHER 105 
 
 " What do I think of women? You alone, godmother, 
 shall know. My wife, my cruel little wife, never knew 
 at all. She was too young to understand my secrets and 
 I was too young to tell them to her. Moreover, there 
 are things which one can write, but which one could 
 never say in the actual presence of another, hindered by 
 all the restraints of self-consciousness and modesty. 
 
 " To you, who are unknown, who are invisible, I can 
 give these ' confidences of a man.' 
 
 ** I can't tell you better what I think of women than 
 by setting forth what I like in women. 
 
 " A woman ! I, a man, a simple man, a man like all 
 the rest, demand and wish that a woman be, before all 
 else, a woman that is to say, my opposite. I want her 
 to be a continual surprise to me, with that charm which 
 is always an element of surprise. I want to smile and 
 even to laugh sometimes, with amused astonishment, on 
 discovering her to be in every way different from me. I 
 wish her soul to be feminine. I wish that soul to be, as 
 in electricity, the negative pole, just as mine is the posi- 
 tive pole. Then there will be a play of sparks between 
 us. 
 
 " While I, the positive element, earn outside the means 
 to maintain the domestic establishment, I want her, the 
 negative element, to be the mysterious spirit of the home, 
 that spirit through which the miracle of daily life is ac- 
 complished the miracle of order and direction in the
 
 106 TALES OF WARTIME FRANCE 
 
 household. All my being, absorbed in work without, 
 counts on her for repose in that interior, made miracu- 
 lous by her presence. In hours of difficulty I expect 
 from her, also, good advice, rather murmured than 
 spoken, which, once again outside, I shall follow with- 
 out realizing too much the influence on my life which 
 my wife, that priestless-like authority, exercises. 
 
 "My beloved, my collaborator, my guide that is 
 my wife. I give her, you see, the role of a domestic 
 providence. But, perhaps, you smile pityingly over this 
 masculine dream, in which the management of the house- 
 hold incomprehensible marvel in the eyes of a man 
 holds almost as large a place as passion. 
 
 " Godmother, do not smile ! Let me tell you, rather, 
 if you have a daughter, how to bring her up so that she 
 may make a man happy, and at the same time be happy 
 herself. Teach her, certainly, to be as attractive as pos- 
 sible; gracious under all circumstances, and even co- 
 quettish in her style and tastes. Let her learn some 
 agreeable art music, especially, which quickens the 
 intimate emotion of the hearth. Let her study a foreign 
 language English, if you wish a valuable resource 
 added to other resources. 
 
 " But, godmother, above everything else and you 
 must pardon me for going back to things so material 
 teach her to use her hands, to keep house, to manage the 
 kitchen, because it is a great superiority for a lady to be
 
 THE GODMOTHER 107 
 
 able in an emergency to care for her husband and her 
 children as a daughter of the people does. 
 
 "See, godmother, what gratitude can enter into the 
 tenderness of a man well cared for by his wife. There 
 can be no doubt about it. I, a poor soldier in this great 
 war it is because of the lack of them on my part that 
 I have emphasized all those things of which I speak. 
 Abandoned while I was very young by the wife whom I 
 loved so much, I lived two years as an orphan before I 
 lived three years in the trenches. And nobody can be 
 more of an orphan, believe me, than a man without a 
 wife. 
 
 "All men have not been to as a hard a school as I 
 have been to. But, speaking for all men, I can say to 
 you: 'Women, women, while we, the fighters at the 
 front, are eminently men, you must be eminently women 
 in order to re-establish the equilibrium. Don't be trivial 
 and frivolous, as my wife was; cultivated to the point of 
 aridity, restless, self-assertive, a sort of men in miniature, 
 creatures in transition whom their own logic would lead 
 to grow moustaches. I know well that there is such a 
 thing as feminism; and I have no quarrel with it. It is a 
 necessity; that's all there is about it. And, certainly, I 
 would permit women to be as long as they care to be on 
 wit and intelligence. But let them not cut their hair 
 short! " 
 
 Geo didn't finish her letter. A little cry, a little
 
 108 TALES OF WARTIME FRANCE 
 
 jump. Throwing the sheets on the floor, she ran to the 
 mirror. What consternation! She had her hair cut 
 short. With a jerk she pulled open the door and entered 
 her dressing room. There, before the big triple mirror, 
 in a fever, she tried with the aid of some hairpins to twist 
 her short locks into a knot.
 
 THE RED ROSE 
 MME. LUCIE DELARUE-MADRUS 
 
 ALONG the streets, of an early morning, jolted the 
 cab on whose cushions a young woman sat curled 
 up, her head bent forward and her arms relaxed. 
 
 We do not realize yet that a cab is a museum exhibit, 
 the relic of a past which is always receding further and 
 further a cab, that antiquity, almost as full of charm 
 as the Sedan chair, the vehicle of ladies in crinoline and 
 shawls, an obsolete equipage in the depths of which our 
 epoch displays, with so little sense of anachronism, the 
 too short skirts and modest hats of the Great War. 
 
 As to Geo's skirt, of sombre material, it exposed only 
 her ankle; and her hat, of a deep, rich shade, was above 
 all things reasonable. 
 
 With what care she had chosen her present toilette! 
 With what patience, with the aid of little combs, she had 
 gathered in a knot the strands of her short hair. 
 
 After the four months in which she, as a godmother, 
 had been corresponding with her divorced husband, who 
 suspected no imposition, she felt today her high spirits 
 and audacity oozing away and giving place to the most 
 palpitating terror. 
 
 After having done so much to win him back, was she 
 109
 
 110 TALES OF WARTIME FRANCE 
 
 not going to lose him forever that loyal, good fellow, 
 that hero so misunderstood by her in the days of peace, 
 whom she now desired with all her heart to have back 
 again as her life's companion? 
 
 She opened for a last time her little bag to take out 
 of it his letter of the week preceding. She wished to 
 read it over in order to give herself new courage. 
 
 The slight inrush of air caused by the motion of the 
 cab made the pages flutter in her trembling fingers. 
 
 " Godmother, at this moment, when I am about to re- 
 turn from the front for six days only I want to 
 ask you very humbly to come to the station to meet me. 
 For four months I have borne with calmness your irritat- 
 ing incognito. I know that I am going to bear with calm- 
 ness the long hours of the trip which brings me to you. 
 But the minutes which it would take me to go from the 
 station to your street I could not endure those minutes. 
 That's the way it is. You know very well that that is 
 always the way. 
 
 " To see you, godmother ! Will you please hold in 
 your hand a red rose, which you will lift above your 
 head in the crowd. So I shall go straight toward the 
 colours of my lady, and we shall look into each other's 
 eyes. 
 
 " Madame and all the godmothers of this war 
 you don't know with what courage one supports the suf- 
 ferings and dangers of the trenches when one knows that
 
 THE RED ROSE 111 
 
 a woman is watching over him in thought. Thus is his- 
 tory resurrected. The ladies of France have mounted 
 once more to the towers, while the warriors of France 
 have once more donned their helmets. Believe me, the 
 desire to fight for a woman respectfully, as it is done 
 on the stained glass of a church window is the true 
 basis of the institution of war-time godmothers. You 
 can always set a caricature alongside a portrait. And 
 the purest profile can cast on the wall a grotesque 
 shadow. The war has lasted too long for us to remain 
 lyric. Yet everything has not been lost, believe me, so 
 far as poetry and sentiment are concerned. 
 
 " Godmother, I do not know you yet. Still, I have 
 seen you, since I have seen your soul. Listen to me. 
 You have never in your letters wished to allow me to 
 guess whether you were young or old, beautiful or 
 homely. But there will be no disillusionment for me, 
 whatever your appearance. For if you are old, you 
 shall be the mother I no longer possess. If you are 
 young, you shall be the wife whom I have lost. If you 
 are an old maid, you shall be the sister I have never 
 had. 
 
 " Behold, your malice is in this fashion completely dis- 
 armed. You will not see in me the figure, disappointed 
 or triumphant, which you wished to see. At the stage 
 at which we are your physical appearance has no very 
 great importance for me. That will be just the affair of
 
 112 TALES OF WARTIME FRANCE 
 
 a first look. The surprise over, we shall take up our 
 correspondence where we left it off in our letters; and all 
 will be well." 
 
 Geo had only time enough to put the letter back into 
 her bag. The cab pulled up before the station an ant- 
 hill painted a faint war blue. The haste with which she 
 dismounted, paid the driver and made her way into the 
 swarming main hall left her no time to think. In these 
 war-time stations there is an atmosphere of excitement 
 which affects the most easy-going. Even they seem to 
 catch the spirit of the hard pressed, straining locomo- 
 tives. Geo was not late. Nevertheless she started to run, 
 because she felt compelled, like the others, to plunge into 
 the throng, even at the risk of having her hat almost 
 jostled off her head. 
 
 Before the exit gate from the train shed she stopped 
 and, with a beating heart, wormed her way into the group 
 assembled there. Only then she recovered her self-pos- 
 session, and her first act was to look at the red rose which 
 she wore in her corsage. 
 
 His signal! Suddenly she lifted the rose above her 
 head, a splash of crimson colour at the end of the long 
 stem, just as if it was her own heart lifted up there on the 
 tip of a tall staff. The thought brought a weak smile 
 to her lips. 
 
 " He expects almost anything. But he never expected 
 this."
 
 THE RED ROSE 113 
 
 In an obscure way she was jealous of herself, since 
 her husband wished to love her merely in her quality of 
 an unknown. 
 
 "Anyhow, he says that my personal appearance is of 
 no consequence. Then he is not ready to fall in love in 
 the true sense. And I have no reason to be jealous." 
 
 A sharp hissing of escaping steam rising from the 
 depths below startled her. Her whole being cried out, 
 " He is coming ! " 
 
 And as the mass of arriving passengers hove into sight, 
 at the first appearance of a horizon blue uniform she 
 raised her right arm and balanced her rose. For a 
 second she felt an impulse to lower it and to disappear 
 forever. But she had no time to yield to her hesitations. 
 She saw her husband. 
 
 The same as ever, though looking larger in his uni- 
 form, he was gazing into people's eyes, embarrassing 
 himself and embarrassing others. Then she became 
 aware that he saw her. Instinctively she lowered her 
 head as he pushed toward her. 
 
 When he was there she slowly let her arm sink and 
 lifted her face. 
 
 "Ah! "he said. 
 
 In that exclamation were mingled stupefaction, resent- 
 ment and joy. A step backward marked his recoil from 
 a past which he had wished to shut out of his thoughts. 
 But with that recoil he recovered his balance. And
 
 114 TALES OF WARTIME FRANCE 
 
 while he grasped Geo's two wrists with a gesture which 
 still betrayed something of anger the red rose shed its 
 petals on their four hands softly, as if to fill their fu- 
 ture with fragrance.
 
 THE RIVALS 
 MME. LUCIE DELARUE-MADRUS 
 
 AS the little steamer began to move away Gizelle, tall, 
 slender, dark complexioned, supporting herself on 
 the rail, waved her adieus with her handkerchief. On 
 the pier her friend, nonchalantly motioning with his 
 gloved hand, smiled after her. 
 
 She admired him for his grace of manner and his air of 
 gentle irony an elegant civilian amid the horizon blue 
 throng of soldiers. Was it possible to believe that a man 
 so thoroughly Parisian in look and carriage was for- 
 eign-born? 
 
 His perfect taste, his urbanity of spirit, even the slight 
 sneer of scepticism with which he held in check any ex- 
 pression of emotion these traits made him the heart- 
 breaker that he was a man whom young women could 
 adore only with anguish, since they knew very well that 
 they could never have any empire over a nature like his. 
 
 "I love him," thought Gizelle. Little by little his 
 silhouette was lost in the mass and the details of the 
 quay faded out the quay in which Gizelle had taken 
 so much delight the night before because it is, so to 
 speak, on a level with the sea, and the waves, when there 
 115
 
 116 TALES OF WARTIME FRANCE 
 
 is a swell, dash over it and break in foam among the legs 
 of the tables in the adjoining cafe. 
 
 " It is Venice over again," she had said on arriving. 
 
 Now, on the steamer, she was midway in the roadstead 
 of Toulon, a blue bath into which the shores, with their 
 spreading pine trees, come down to dip their feet. She 
 saw the mountains behind the city. They seemed at 
 anchor in the port, like huge armoured ships. 
 
 " It is beautiful! " she said to herself. But, habituated 
 to the light, half cynical indifference of her friend, she 
 soon turned her mind to other things. 
 
 She was still astonished that she had remembered sud- 
 denly, that morning, that there was a grave which she 
 ought to visit in the roadstead of Toulon. Does one 
 often think of such things when one is in love? 
 
 This journey to the Midi was a journey of love. 
 Gizelle had not yet begun her honeymoon. She was 
 merely celebrating her second betrothal a betrothal 
 less hedged about with formalities than her first one. A 
 widow, she had decided to remarry to wed this charm- 
 ing foreigner. And this in spite of the fact that after 
 almost ten years of dubious happiness in that estate she 
 had believed that she had been completely cured of 
 matrimony. But when one is in love, it seems that one 
 re-acquires youth, enthusiasm and inexperience. One is 
 always twenty years old when one is in love even 
 when one is thirty-four.
 
 THE RIVALS 117 
 
 Gizelle, seated on a bench beside some strangers, felt 
 herself rocked soothingly by the rhythm of the little 
 steamer. How she missed her brilliant companion ! But 
 meanwhile she sought to give a certain austerity to her 
 thoughts, since, after all, she was making a pilgrimage 
 to a tomb. 
 
 A poor young fellow, hardly more than a boy, had 
 loved her, as had many others in the days before the war, 
 when she was a newly-made widow and felt the joy of 
 her liberation. She had smiled at him, but only politely. 
 He was an emotional adolescent, trying at times, lacking 
 in elegance, lyrical in temperament, with large ideas and 
 with eyes of azure, set in a face dominated by a powerful 
 nose. How he had suffered because of her! Gizelle 
 thought of that only after she had heard of his death. 
 With a weak heart and properly exempt from service, 
 he had nevertheless yielded to his enthusiasm and joined 
 the army. He had caught a fever at Salonica and had 
 come home to die there in the Toulon harbour, at Saint 
 Mandrier Hospital. 
 
 Gizelle had learned these details from his family at the 
 time of his death. 
 
 Forgotten since then, with everything else, they now 
 came back to her mind. The last sigh of the poor fellow 
 had been lyric, like all the rest of his life. Certainly 
 he had never mastered his emotions with a sneer. 
 
 Gizelle looked dreamily at the roadstead and then at
 
 118 TALES OF WARTIME FRANCE 
 
 the bouquet of roses which she held on her knees. That 
 was all she had, and it was already droopy. It was her 
 bouquet de corsage, the bouquet which her betrothed 
 offered her each morning. Where could one find flowers 
 in Toulon for a grave, when one had only time to catch 
 the boat? She had only these the four roses which 
 she wore a bouquet still fresh and cool, but at the 
 same time a little the worse from use from having been 
 carried about since morning. 
 
 Saint Mandrier ! 
 
 Gizelle disembarked. The gardens of the hospital, ex- 
 otic, perfumed with eucalyptus; the white buildings, 
 gleaming palaces of suffering, immaculate asylums of 
 healing or of death; the beautiful, sloping, Romanesque 
 park which leads up to the cemetery she saw these 
 things with a beating heart. 
 
 " It is up there at the top," they told her. " You have 
 only to push open the gate." 
 
 She made the ascent. The paths wound about under 
 balsam-laden pines. The open sea was visible across the 
 slopes. The little pebbles, round and white, sparkled 
 in the shade, like jewels. A brooklet meandered here 
 and there. Gizelle still climbed, trailing the scent of the 
 roses behind her. 
 
 She pushed open the gate. What a beautiful garden 
 for the living was this place filled with the dead ! Gizelle 
 was all alone in the shadow of the majestic trees. But
 
 THE RIVALS 119 
 
 how many there were, nevertheless, about her! She 
 saw aligned, shoulder to shoulder, still in the military 
 manner, the hundreds of little white crosses which repre- 
 sented soldiers. She read the names. She read the ages. 
 "Twenty years." "Twenty-five years." "Twenty-one 
 years." " Twenty years." " Twenty years." 
 
 A light cry, a shudder. Gizelle remains rooted to the 
 spot. The grave which she has been seeking is before 
 her. All at once, "Paul! " she murmurs: "My poor 
 little Paul! " 
 
 She cannot realize that this rectangle of earth, this 
 wooden cross painted white, amid so many other crosses, 
 represent the amorous youth who stuttered when he 
 spoke and whose azure eyes, separated by his long, mas- 
 sive nose, were irradiated with the fire of a noble imagi- 
 nation. 
 
 " He went to war an enthusiast. He died an enthusi- 
 ast. He must have loved me in the same way. He was 
 a hero. He was not a Parisian, perhaps. But he was a 
 Frenchman." 
 
 In the shadow of the tall, poetic pine trees Gizelle 
 kneels down. She is no longer ashamed of her emotion. 
 She holds out her four roses her roses of love to 
 the dead man. And there, in a low voice, she speaks to 
 an invisible listener, as have so many women in this 
 war. So many mothers to their sons. So many wives 
 to their husbands.
 
 120 TALES OF WARTIME FRANCE 
 
 That evening the same little steamer brought her back 
 to Toulon. Her ironical, elegant, charming admirer, on 
 the spray-beaten quay which resembled Venice, watched 
 coming toward him the frail steamer which bore his love. 
 At a certain distance he commenced to distinguish the 
 tall, slender, dark-complexioned Gizelle, leaning upon 
 the rail. But she made no sign of recognition and wel- 
 come with her handkerchief. She no longer had the 
 roses in her hands. 
 
 And the foreigner, smiling, sure of himself, did not 
 know that he had lost everything that on the grave 
 of the dead youth, along with his four- j%^es, the amorous 
 Gizelle had left her heart.
 
 IN A ROADSTEAD OF FRANCE 
 RENE BENJAMIN 
 
 EACH smaller city of France has its own regiment. 
 That regiment, at full strength at the beginning of 
 the war, has been more than once decimated, and the 
 city now sends it recruits, clothing and munitions, as a 
 mother sends packages to her child. The wounded who 
 have been cured return to get guns, knapsacks and car- 
 tridges. They stay a little while long enough to taste 
 the wine or the cider of the country. Then they go away. 
 And in the trenches, on calm days, smoking their pipes, 
 they dream of the quiet of the provincial town, a hun- 
 dred leagues away from the shells. 
 
 But certain cities have no soldiers those which the 
 sea bathes, where the wind blows fresh and salty from 
 the ocean stretches. These are the home stations of the 
 sailors, not of the men who fight on land. There the city 
 regiments are the crews of the warships. Instead of be- 
 ing reformed and reorganized in a gloomy barracks, these 
 crews are received in a roadstead, under an open sky, in 
 the free air. The Depot, that sinister and cavernous 
 rendezvous, becomes the Arsenal, a place of light and life 
 and movement. Here is no quadrangle or court sur- 
 121
 
 122 TALES OF WARTIME FRANCE 
 
 rounded by walls. Battleships, cruisers, bridges, be- 
 tween-decks, masts, fighting tops, from which one can 
 see clear to the horizon. Instead of a troop housed in 
 buildings, a fleet, men and vessels, which, in order that 
 it may refit, the country holds in sheltered waters. It is 
 inspiring to see one of these great ports when the ships 
 come back to it, worn and war stained. 
 
 Last week I saw them. I traversed the roadstead of 
 Toulon on one of those poor ferryboats which ply about 
 the harbour, and Which look so pitiful with their aged 
 carcasses, their scaled and spotted sides and their thin 
 smokestacks that one is tempted to think of each of 
 them: "It must be a derelict fished up somewhere by 
 a wrecking company." 
 
 We passed before a Russian battleship with five huge 
 stacks, bizarre and startling. Then we came upon the 
 transports, all painted grey, transformed merchant ships, 
 powerful and beautiful, which constitute one of the most 
 precious shares of our patrimony, which are our riches 
 and our strength, which in time of peace have carried so 
 many Frenchmen to the fairy lands of the Orient, and 
 which now in their war trim wait to bear soldiers and 
 cannon to Salonica. 
 
 Our old, wheezing ferryboat was carrying us along 
 that line in which was drawn up all the best that mari- 
 time France can boast of, when I heard a young soldier, 
 seated near me, say to a woman:
 
 IN A ROADSTEAD OF FRANCE 123 
 
 " How fine it is! And how beautiful! Isn't it splen- 
 did my roadstead and don't you love it? " 
 
 I turned. I could not see him very well, at most a 
 three-quarter view. I noticed only that he wore smoked 
 glasses, although the day was then overcast and the sun- 
 light was in no sense dazzling. But the skies cleared. 
 It seemed as if the light clouds melted away and the 
 sun, now fairly low, showered us with its rays of 
 gold. 
 
 The young woman to whom the soldier was talking 
 opened her umbrella, which was of a mauve shade. She 
 tenderly sheltered her friend, and as I watched her (in- 
 discreetly, perhaps) she gave me an indefinable look, at 
 once appealing and troubled a look which I did not 
 understand, but which revealed to me, all of a sudden, 
 the splendid beauty of her eyes. 
 
 What a feminine charm there was in that look! Pu- 
 pils of deep black, a very soft, white skin, and under the 
 eye, in that visage, young, pure and highbred, a small 
 blue vein, light and delicate, which gave to that feature 
 through which the heart most clearly shows its emotions 
 a note of adorable sensibility. 
 
 To have seen her was enough. I understood that I 
 had beside me two lovers. For all that, there was no 
 sparkle of gaiety on his face. But I could feel his 
 tenderness. I knew that he was a poet in spirit, with 
 something almost epic about him.
 
 124 TALES OF WARTIME FRANCE 
 
 Although he spoke in a low voice, the light wind car- 
 ried his words in my direction. He said to her: 
 
 " My little one, my heart beats to be again among these 
 scenes. And you, tell me if you " 
 
 She replied in a repressed voice: 
 
 " My dear, I am very happy." 
 
 "How I love you! But is it not fine the sunset 
 over there? " 
 
 She answered, her voice still more repressed: 
 
 " It is very fine." 
 
 And I remarked that the umbrella trembled a little in 
 her hand. 
 
 He continued: 
 
 " Down there, you see, facing us, at the entry to the 
 roadstead " 
 
 She responded, turning toward him: 
 
 " My love. I see everything." 
 
 She pressed his hand, looking at him with all the 
 ardour in her eyes. 
 
 Then, in a much lower tone, he doubtless whispered 
 to her some words of love and thanks which I could not 
 hear. Suddenly, raising his voice again and speaking 
 almost jubilantly, he continued: 
 
 " Ah ! To escape from the winter trenches, and then 
 from that stifling hospital, and to feel the sun once more 
 on one's shoulders! Look, dearest; look, my love; see 
 down there what I am going to point out to you "
 
 IN A ROADSTEAD OF FRANCE 125 
 
 She made a nervous gesture, and then, almost 
 brusquely: 
 
 " That big battleship hides it all. But it is very beau- 
 tiful." 
 
 We were passing, in fact, before one of those superb 
 monsters and he said to her, stammering in confusion 
 this time: 
 
 "Ah! A battleship? But when we shall have passed 
 it, you will see what I was talking about." 
 
 He was silent for a minute. Then he began again 
 (and from the way in which he held his head I could 
 tell that he had an ear more sensitive to sounds than 
 people ordinarily have) . He began: 
 
 " Do you see the sea gulls? " 
 
 " I see them." 
 
 " Charming little beasts, swift and agile; see them 
 fly about the great warships. They surround them, pay 
 homage to them, guard them. They represent a sort of 
 winged joy. They suggest something poetic amid this 
 conglomeration of iron monsters. And when the sky is 
 blue as it is today, with this sun look at their 
 stomachs. Their little white stomachs! They give out 
 a reflection of the blue as they fly." 
 
 She said: 
 
 " It is true. It is charming. . . . We are arriving." 
 
 He asked very quickly: 
 
 " Do you see the city? "
 
 126 TALES OF WARTIME FRANCE 
 
 " I think I do." 
 
 " Do you find it so beautiful? " 
 
 "No. Oh, no. It is " 
 
 "How happily it is situated! Look at the quay. 
 And how good everything smells! An odour so whole- 
 some and so robust, of brine and of pitch ! Ah, they are 
 fine, the battleships! Tell me, don't they look wonder- 
 ful this evening? " 
 
 " Very wonderful." 
 
 " Yes, yes. It is rudely, ruggedly chic, our France." 
 
 With those manly words of confidence on his lips he 
 arose, for the boat was coming alongside the pier. The 
 young wife gently took his arm, with a charming gesture, 
 half of love, half of pity. The sun, now glorious and 
 unshadowed, bathed with the golden rays of its setting 
 sea and quay, ships and men. A luminous evening, 
 charged with hope, the portent of victory and a reason 
 for thinking of victory, a true feast for the eyes. 
 
 Close together, elbows touching, one supporting the 
 other, with a sort of amorous caress in each movement 
 as they walked, they stepped down from the ferryboat. 
 And when, on the gangplank, his foot stumbled a little 
 an old man of the people who watched them, as I did, said 
 to me gruffly: 
 
 " One sees sorry things in these bad times. But there 
 are some people who are the real stuff. He is blind, that 
 man there, monsieur."
 
 IN A ROADSTEAD OF FRANCE 127 
 
 He raised his hand to his hat as if to salute. Then 
 he added : 
 
 " Since the attack in Champagne. I know him well. 
 He is from here. And the young wife she is his nurse, 
 whom he has married. She is a Russian. They are 
 making a honeymoon trip. He is showing her his coun- 
 try. So he shows her everything, poor fellow; and he 
 doesn't want to have too much the air of not seeing it 
 himself." 
 
 With that he winked his eye, like a man rich in expe- 
 rience. Then he added: 
 
 " That, monsieur, is gallantry heroized. That is what 
 I call it. And it is found nowhere else than in France."
 
 THE SIMPLICITY OF HEROISM 
 RENE BENJAMIN 
 
 IT was at a first-aid post at C , on a quiet evening. 
 I was saying to the major: " What is especially ad- 
 mirable in our men is the simplicity with which they 
 bear themselves with which they face death. People 
 tell them that they are heroes. They shrug their shoul- 
 ders. That word has been hackneyed by too much legen- 
 dary boasting. It repels today these simple people, 
 whose resignation is so unostentatious. Watch them in 
 the heat of action. No words for effect, no prepared 
 gestures. They do what they have to do, as they are told 
 to do it, and die, if necessary, because in these times to 
 die that is only an incident of life. Almost always 
 they are simple, very simple." 
 
 The major listened to me without answering. I 
 pressed him. 
 
 " Is that not your opinion your real opinion? And 
 you see them at such close quarters, at the moment of 
 their worst suffering, when a man thinks less than ever 
 of assuming an attitude." 
 
 He replied: 
 
 128
 
 THE SIMPLICITY OF HEROISM 129 
 
 " I follow you and I believe you. But personally 
 what do I know? I am very badly situated to know. 
 A wounded man arrives. I am in a hurry to examine 
 him. As to what he thinks I am too busy to concern 
 myself. I forget all about the man and his morale. 
 How have I the time? I must try to save him. To in- 
 terest myself especially in one is to neglect another. 
 The war may last thirty years, my friend. I shall have 
 seen stomachs torn open, brains laid bare and limbs 
 smashed to jelly. But I shall know nothing, absolutely 
 nothing, of our Frenchmen. I bend over them. But I 
 have no reaction. Still less have I any leisure. Or, 
 when I have any, there is no one here to study. While I 
 dine I run over one or two newspapers which my wife 
 sends me, and I read in them brilliant stories of the war 
 written by journalists, who, without doubt, are safe at 
 home, but in whom I have every confidence because they 
 satisfy my old belief that the soldier of our country al- 
 ways has a plume in his helmet." 
 
 I tossed my head and he continued: 
 
 " I notice your air. In your opinion, I am at the stage 
 of the ' History of France, Illustrated for Children.' My 
 dear sir, I am nai've, like so many men who are entirely 
 absorbed in action." 
 
 " But," I said, " at least you hear them talk your 
 wounded." 
 
 " They pass out of sight. I forget."
 
 130 TALES OF WARTIME FRANCE 
 
 " And your hospital attendants. They remain with 
 you. Learn from them human simplicity." 
 
 " Oh, yes, on that point I read 
 
 " But it isn't necessary to read. All that is fabricated 
 at the rear. Or, if you must read, you ought to read 
 Vigny. The page where Vigny, in * Servitude and 
 Grandeur,' describes the terrible explosion of the donjon 
 of Vincennes. Suddenly, in a courtyard, against a wall, 
 he finds a head separated from a body. It is that of an 
 adjutant, who, for sixty pages or more, has been the 
 hero of the story. At that coup de theatre the reader 
 gives a shudder. But Vigny adds tranquilly: 'At that 
 moment a young soldier, a fresh, rosy-cheeked blond, 
 bent down to take from the smoke-stained trunk a black 
 silk cravat.' " 
 
 " That is still a good story," said the major. 
 
 " Look, my dear man," I continued, " at the funeral 
 sermon human and admirable which we hear every 
 day. Over against death there is always life, which, 
 without fear or worry, continues its normal, habitual 
 routine. Listen ! I recall our first man killed in Au- 
 gust, 1914. It is always terrible, you know the first. 
 After the tenth the emotion subsides. But the first one 
 to be a 'victim,' as they say the first whom all the 
 others see fall one can never chase that souvenir out 
 of his memory. 
 
 "Very well. The first victim in my regiment was
 
 THE SIMPLICITY OF HEROISM 131 
 
 struck at the entrance to a village which was attacked 
 and captured. Very easily, too; for the Germans were 
 so afraid to defend it that they evacuated it. Toward 
 evening we occupied it. But in a few hours an order 
 came to retire. We were relieved. Chasseurs replaced 
 us or rather they were to replace us. In any case, we 
 had a formal order to withdraw at once. 
 
 " It was necessary that the Boches, who were only two 
 hundred metres (not further) away from us, should not 
 suspect our departure. A remarkable trick to play on 
 them and one which appears improbable in this fright- 
 ful war. But we went through a quarter of an hour of 
 high comedy in that village an episode more absurd 
 than heroic, a sort of adventure taken from the history 
 of ancient Greece. Those who entered most into the 
 spirit of it took off their shoes. The others marched 
 on their tip-toes. One heard nervous laughs, half sup- 
 pressed. Finally, under the very noses of the Boches, 
 we left the village completely empty. Yes, my friend, 
 without a single defender. 
 
 " No, pardon me, there was one that first man of the 
 regiment to get killed. We found him against the wall 
 of a house, on his knees, in the position of a man who 
 kneels in order to aim better. He had remained in that 
 position, his body a little stiffened and his arms low- 
 ered, with the rifle, which weighed him down, still in his 
 hands.
 
 132 TALES OF WARTIME FRANCE 
 
 " It was startling, but curiously impressive there in 
 the twilight. We were leaving him to guard that Lor- 
 raine village until the Chasseurs should arrive. In pass- 
 ing him each of us straightened himself up as if to sa- 
 lute. Then my neighbour, who was a big-hearted Nor- 
 man, said to me in a voice thick with regret: 
 " * Did you see? He lost his handkerchief.' 
 " Yes, that material detail had caused my comrade more 
 distress, perhaps, than the sight of the corpse. By his 
 expression I saw that he thought of it for a long time. A 
 handkerchief which falls, a handkerchief lost, which one 
 has no time to pick up, what a misfortune! And, with 
 utter candour, he had preserved in this tragic moment 
 all the simplicity of his nature, assuming from the very 
 outset the habit of looking in a neighbourly manner at 
 death." 
 
 The major listened to me, always attentive. He said: 
 " It is true that that is fine that it is life as it is." 
 He had not finished his phrase when two stretcher bear- 
 ers brought in a sergeant who had a shell wound in his 
 stomach. He tossed on his stretcher and kept saying: 
 "There it is! Oh! There it is! " 
 It seemed to me at first that he merely wished to say: 
 " I am hit I have a piece of shell there." 
 
 But while the major undressed him with the aid of the 
 two bearers, I understood all of a sudden that he felt he 
 was going to die and was a prey to the terror of that
 
 THE SIMPLICITY OF HEROISM 133 
 
 dreaded passage. I immediately took his hand, while 
 they examined him, and before the doctor's diagnosis 
 was completed I said to him: 
 
 " It is nothing, really nothing at all." 
 
 But the major, with a clear voice one of those voices 
 which affirm too much in order the better to cover an 
 untruth pronounced judgment: 
 
 " Don't worry at all about it. You will be around 
 again in fifteen days." 
 
 The sergeant hadn't the strength to answer. He began 
 to choke. His body was convulsed. It grew stiff. The 
 major made me a sign that the case was desperate. We 
 stretched him out, holding him as gently as we could, and 
 all at once the unfortunate man, becoming calm and 
 relaxing in order to die, turned his eyes, full of tender- 
 ness, toward us, as if to say: "Well, if it must be so, 
 good-bye." 
 
 Then he stammered this simple and heroic soldier, 
 in a breathless, agonizing tone: 
 
 " Ah, mon Dieu! What will my wife say? " 
 
 Was that a theatrical speech, one for effect on the 
 public and in the newspapers? 
 
 The major and I looked at each other. He discovered 
 now the admirable simplicity of true heroes. And as I 
 saw his eyes through mist I didn't know whether it was 
 he who wept or I.
 
 THE HINDOO COMMISSARIAT 
 RENE BENJAMIN 
 
 FOM the depths of the auto I ventured this common- 
 place remark: 
 
 "Ah! There's a Hindoo!" 
 
 The British officer made a sign to the driver to stop, 
 and said: 
 
 " Let us get out." 
 
 The tall soldier from the Indies, beautiful as the 
 first man must have been beautiful, with a silky beard, 
 a skin tanned by the rays of an ardent sun, the brow of a 
 dreamer, with all the ease of manner natural to persons 
 well born this type of a marvellous country, standing 
 at the entrance of a tent which seemed dwarfed beside 
 him, was nonchalantly cutting with a curved knife blade 
 a piece of wood which had the shape of a man's throat. 
 
 Seeing the major, he neither moved nor saluted. But 
 his look expressed a certain sweetness and friendliness 
 a friendliness wholly immobile and contemplative. 
 
 It would be useless to bother him. The major called 
 a young Scotchman, saying to me: 
 
 "The Scotch they are the politest fellows in Eng- 
 land." 
 
 134
 
 THE HINDOO COMMISSARIAT 135 
 
 At the same moment a second auto stopped and an- 
 other officer got out, accompanied by a civilian. They 
 introduced us. 
 
 " M. Benjamin, important French journalist." 
 
 *'M. Persigris, distinguished Parisian, manufacturer 
 of conserves." 
 
 We exchanged greetings without conviction, each of 
 us being quite indifferent to the other. Then, following 
 the young Scotchman, we entered a vast barracks where 
 there was nothing to be seen but bags vulgar bags 
 piled on top of one another. And already I regretted 
 the mysterious eyes of the Hindoo when I saw those of 
 Persigris suddenly grow bright, and that personage, who 
 had a pronounced stomach and breathed heavily, said 
 in a grave tone: 
 
 " Ah ! Let us see some of these." 
 
 The Scotchman was agile and easily disentangled the 
 bags. From a pile taller than three men he disengaged 
 a bag four times as big as himself and commenced 
 emptying it, while the major said: 
 
 " It is the food for the Hindoos. The Hindoos it 
 was difficult to feed them; but to feed them well was 
 important." 
 
 Plunging his hand into the first bag the young Scotch- 
 man drew out of it little white, powdery roots, and the 
 dealer in conserves asked in a wheezy voice: 
 
 " What are those dirty little things? "
 
 136 TALES OF WARTIME FRANCE 
 
 " Ginger roots," said the major amiably. 
 
 Then my compatriot tasted them greedily, like a 
 boy. He turned, coughed and trembled slightly. 
 
 " It is unheard of to feed such stuff." 
 
 The Scotchman had the good fortune not to understand 
 the language of conserve makers. He busied himself 
 opening another bag, from which he drew some little 
 dried things, vegetables or fruits, in a fine, friable en- 
 velope, such as onions have. 
 
 "Ah! That! That's better," said the conserve 
 dealer. 
 
 Already he was rubbing one and opening his mouth. 
 But the major made a gesture. 
 
 " Take care ! Important ! " 
 
 "What do you mean by 'important'?" 
 
 The manufacturer of conserves spoke like a buzzing 
 hornet. 
 
 " I said * emportant,' " replied the major. " You will 
 have a raging mouth. That is pimento." 
 
 " Is all that pimento? " asked the conserve maker. 
 
 " Oh," said the major, imperturbably, " the other bar- 
 racks is also filled with pimento." 
 
 " They are crazy," said M. Persigris. 
 
 Untiringly the Scotchman, kneeling under his folded 
 skirt, which swelled out drolly, knocked open a case with 
 a hammer and fished out of it two zinc boxes, which he 
 handed down to us. With his knife he slit open the lids
 
 THE HINDOO COMMISSARIAT 137 
 
 and let us see a yellow paste, which the merchant 
 smelled. 
 
 " Butter," said the major with a smile. 
 
 " But it is rancid," snapped M. Persigris. 
 
 " Butter from the Indies," replied the major. 
 
 " Made from rhinoceros milk? " returned M. Persigris. 
 
 Like the Scotchman, we assumed the air of not under- 
 standing him, the major out of politeness, I out of pity. 
 
 "And with this, what else do they put in their giz- 
 zards? " 
 
 The Scotchman, admirable fellow, had just made with 
 two quick motions a breach in a metal cask and held out 
 to us something which resembled a potato. In appear- 
 ance it was bizarre, wrinkled, dirty. 
 
 The merchant exclaimed: 
 
 " That is a prize bit! Is it fish bait? " 
 
 The major gave an indulgent smile. 
 
 " It is sugar," he said, phlegmatically. 
 
 "Sugar?" 
 
 " Sugar for them." 
 
 "But what sort of sugar?" 
 
 "Taste it!" 
 
 "Ah! Ah! Ah! Ah!" 
 
 He spit it out. 
 
 The major explained to me: "A mixture of honey and 
 cinnamon." 
 
 The great man burst into a laugh. He went out to
 
 138 TALES OF WARTIME FRANCE 
 
 get a little air. He was choking himself with his guffaws. 
 
 " These people are really comic." 
 
 Then, swelling himself out, his hands behind his back, 
 he became all of a sudden pompous. 
 
 " Since the government has sent me to see all this (he 
 looked at me), I can say to these gentlemen (he turned 
 to the British officers) that in my opinion (he gazed ad- 
 miringly at his stomach) there ought to be a possibility 
 of replacing all this merchandise with equivalents which 
 we manufacture." 
 
 The major smiled with a certain air of finesse. 
 
 "These Hindoos, what do they want? Sauces which 
 will set their mouths on fire? Well, we'll make them 
 for them. Only what is it that they stick in their 
 sauces? " 
 
 With all possible good will the major answered: 
 
 "They eat she-goats." 
 
 "What an idea! " 
 
 " She-goats killed how shall I say it? Well, killed 
 in a certain fashion." 
 
 "So? Then all we have to do is to make them be- 
 lieve that we killed the she-goats that way." 
 
 Decidedly, this man who with myself represented 
 France among the English, was getting on my nerves. I 
 stepped away. I turned again toward the admirable 
 Hindoo. He had squatted himself down and with some 
 dry twigs had lighted beside his tent a clear fire, which
 
 THE HINDOO COMMISSARIAT 139 
 
 crackled, flared and leaped aloft and which cast against 
 the shadows of the approaching night a cheering light, 
 a gleam of hope, a ray of poesy. 
 
 It is the hour dreaded by armies that when the 
 night descends upon things and men. The most hard- 
 ened soldier feels an uneasiness coming over him. The 
 heaven above him, which is the purest joy to his eyes, 
 the heaven which sends him all that is best in his life, the 
 clear day and its warmth when the heaven is obscured, 
 when it disappears, when it weighs upon the earth instead 
 of filling it with cheer and gladness, in war, where hearts 
 are heavy with misery, it is the hour when each one gets 
 restless and, even among so many comrades, suffers be- 
 cause he feels himself alone. 
 
 The mystery of the world, the strangeness of life, more 
 agonizing than ever when one is in daily contact with 
 death, assails men at that time and tugs at their throats. 
 Only they have that divine resource in reserve, the fire; 
 and one sees all the opaque tents become suddenly trans- 
 parent and stand out fairy-like in the sombre night. 
 
 The Hindoo, warming his hands, contemplated the 
 little darting flames which came from his open-air fire- 
 place like kisses thrown to him by some good genie, and 
 his eyelids closed contentedly. Of what was he thinking 
 this man who loves she-goat's flesh, with pimento; 
 rancid butter and cinnamon mixed with honey? 
 
 Is the enigma of existence not profound enough to
 
 140 TALES OF WARTIME FRANCE 
 
 make us tolerant of his answers to it, of his peculiar hab- 
 its of reverie? And at a time when reason is certainly 
 at a discount may it not be that there is more good sense 
 in his rigid rules of life than in the sneers of a merchant 
 of conserves whom the war has made rich? 
 
 The major, without saying a word, had instinctively 
 divined all this. But in his character of an Englishman, 
 who cares nothing for discussion in the abstract, he 
 replied smilingly in mere monosyllables to this great 
 man. 
 
 After they had tramped about for a while in the mud 
 I saw them direct their steps again toward our autos. I 
 rejoined them. There the major, forced to it, no doubt, 
 by banalities which had become tiresome, went as far as 
 to say in his usual amiable manner: 
 
 " But it is their religion, is it not? We cannot un- 
 derstand it. But we have to respect it." 
 
 There reigned at that moment in this bit of country 
 ravaged by the war a deadly silence. And those simple 
 words, spoken without any pretentiousness, almost with 
 an accent of tenderness, seemed to me full of profound 
 wisdom. 
 
 We saluted one another once more. With his head 
 still uncovered the conserve merchant said pompously: 
 
 " When I get out of business I shall go to India." 
 
 " Oh," answered the major, " I am afiaid you won't 
 have time to see much."
 
 THE HINDOO COMMISSARIAT 141 
 
 " I shall stay there," answered the merchant, " as long 
 as may be necessary three months, six months." 
 
 " You will see nothing at all, then," said the major. 
 
 "Why?" 
 
 " It is too immense, is it not? Too incredible? In 
 men and also in things." 
 
 " You have been there? " 
 
 " Yes. I have been about there a good deal. But it 
 is too big. I have not understood it very well." 
 
 " You were not there long enough? " 
 
 "Exactly." 
 
 " But how long were you there? " 
 
 The major lowered his eyes, as if he wanted to excuse 
 himself. Then he answered: 
 
 " Twenty-three years." 
 
 The manufacturer of conserves knit his brows. Then 
 he got into his auto without another word. The dark- 
 ness became dense and depressing. 
 
 The major got into the auto with me. We were both 
 silent. But when we were under way, jolting around in 
 the wagon, he leaned against my friendly shoulder and 
 said, half in a whisper: 
 
 "We haven't time is it not so? We men haven't 
 time to know everything to understand everything. It 
 generally happens that night comes too soon."
 
 MARIETTE'S GIFT 
 JEAN AICARD 
 
 HPHE Southern springtime had all the ardours of sum- 
 -- mer. It was June already. The reddening wheat 
 stalks awaited the harvest and, over-weighted, bent their 
 heads toward the earth, to which the seed grains, in or- 
 der to grow again, wished to return all the more 
 promptly. For all that which lives must die in order to 
 be requickened. 
 
 They were very heavy, those wheat heads, and, balan- 
 cing themselves, they touched one another amorously, 
 caressingly and that made a little rustling noise. A 
 song of love, murmuring, rhythmic, came from them as 
 they were stirred by the evening breezes and that song 
 entered into the hearts of the young girls who, toward 
 evening, went to the covered well to refill with fresh wa- 
 ter the glazed pitchers which a day of sunshine had made 
 lukewarm even in the shade of the farmhouses with their 
 shutters drawn. 
 
 Mariette comes to the well. She holds by the handle, 
 
 like a basket, the green pitcher on the sides of which the 
 
 setting sun outlines sparkling, reddish squares. The 
 
 well is covered from top to bottom with verdure. An 
 
 142
 
 MARIETTE'S GIFT 143 
 
 ancient ivy, very thick, which draws the bees, envelops 
 it, and over the dome its loose stems wave like plumes. 
 Under this cupola a little door opens, the stone beneath 
 which forms a sill. It is like a little rustic temple, dedi- 
 cated to the spring, to the water sprite who lives at the 
 bottom of this fresh cave, dug vertically by the hand of 
 man. 
 
 Mariette opens the door. The fresh breath of im- 
 prisoned water mounts to the lighted opening. It wishes 
 to be freed, to exhale itself into the radiant warmth of 
 the summer, which is already at hand. 
 
 Mariette always rejoices to open the door through 
 which comes to her that caressing freshness, which 
 spreads across her visage and penetrates her whole body. 
 Water is the treasure of warm countries. One locks it 
 up jealously and at the hours when it is liberated one 
 enjoys voluptuously all its charms. 
 
 That is why, on drawing toward her the bucket attached 
 to the pulley, to see if it is not inhabited by some pretty 
 tree frog, Mariette smiles with happiness. Then she 
 releases the bucket, holding the rope firmly with her 
 strong young arms. The bucket descends to the joyous 
 wheezing of the old iron pulley. 
 
 The bucket descends, strikes the water and fills. The 
 young girl, bent over, her body vibrant, tugs at the rope. 
 The bucket mounts heavily. She leans with both arms 
 upon the rope, releases it with one hand in order to
 
 144 TALES OF WARTIME FRANCE 
 
 grasp it further up with the other so graceful in all her 
 movements that she reminds one of wild animals in free- 
 dom, who believe that they are entirely alone and unob- 
 served in one of their native fastnesses. 
 
 She believes that she is alone. But she is not. 
 
 Behind a pile of wood, under the neighbouring shed, 
 some one has approached very stealthily. It is Tonin, 
 the young sailor. Tonin, who likes her very much and 
 who wants to marry her. She also likes Tonin, but she 
 prefers Victorin, who is two years younger. Victorin 
 is only eighteen years old just her own age. She 
 prefers Victorin, or at least she thinks she does. Vic- 
 torin will not be a sailor. He doesn't love the sea, but 
 the land which one works and which gives in return its 
 yield. And then Tonin has never told Mariette that he 
 loves her. Only she believes that things stand that way, 
 and the eyes of young girls can see love even when it 
 thinks itself unseen. Love always reveals itself. 
 
 The bucket rises and is getting heavier and heavier, one 
 would think. Tonin advances softly. She doesn't hear 
 him and suddenly she feels herself grasped about her 
 body by two strong arms which hold her fast. In her 
 surprise she lets go the rope. But Tonin has adroitly 
 taken the precaution to put his foot on the serpentine 
 coil of hemp which lies unrolled behind the young girl. 
 So the bucket doesn't fall. 
 
 " Let me go, Tonin! I shall tell my mother! "
 
 MARIETTAS GIFT 145 
 
 He smiles and kisses her on her lips, on her neck and 
 on her hair. She slips between the fingers of the young 
 lover and escapes him. 
 
 " Pull up the bucket as a penalty! " 
 
 He obeys. The wooden vessel rises rapidly, appears 
 in the frame of the little door, balanced, oscillating, let- 
 ting pour over its rim, indented by usage, little chaplets 
 of water drops, transparent pearls, all smiling to see the 
 light of day. 
 
 " Thank you, Tonin ! " 
 
 " You pardon me, Mariette? " 
 
 " Yes, because you are brave at heart. I know it." 
 
 With us " brave " means " good and well-behaved." 
 
 " And then," she adds, " I have never before seen you 
 dressed as a sailor. It is true that you are a good look- 
 ing fellow, like that, although with your shirt, with its 
 collar open to the breast, and the pompon on your cap, 
 you look something like a girl." 
 
 " A girl ! " he answers. " Girls like me you want to 
 beware of, Mariette. But not of me; for it is with a good 
 motive that I have come to see you." 
 
 " Ah," she replies, dreamily. 
 
 Now the bucket is placed on the margin of the well 
 and the water looks so fresh that one is eager to drink it. 
 Like a bird Mariette bends over and drinks. 
 
 " It is lucky, the water that you drink, Mariette," he 
 says. " And you yourself are so fresh and pure that
 
 146 TALES OF WARTIME FRANCE 
 
 you resemble it. One could drink you up in a glass of 
 water." 
 
 And when the lips of the young girl have quit the rim 
 of the bucket he places his own there in the same place. 
 It is love that they drink at the close of this spring day. 
 
 " Where are you going, like this, Tonin? " 
 
 " Mariette," he answers, " I am now a sailor. I have 
 come to tell you that I love you. I have not dared to do 
 so until now. But being obliged to go away this eve- 
 ning has given me courage. Listen! I know that Vic- 
 torin pays court to you. So I have some fears. And 
 I ask you not to give me an answer right away. Take 
 your time! Reflect! Study him and then choose. 
 Adieu, my little Mariette. We shall see each other 
 again. I haven't much property to my name. But I 
 have a little. Think about it. But wait, let me fill 
 your pitcher and carry it home for you." 
 
 "No," she says, "Victorin would hear about it. It 
 is true that we are not yet engaged, he and I. But it is 
 certain that I like him and he knows it very well. Adieu, 
 Tonin. I would rather carry my pitcher alone." 
 
 She started off, carrying her pitcher by the handle, like 
 a basket her green, glazed pitcher, glittering in the 
 last rays of the sun. But she was troubled. Her heart 
 beat visibly under her corsage. Tonin felt that he had 
 made something of an impression on her and called to 
 her from a distance:
 
 MARIETTE'S GIFT 147 
 
 " Before the end of the year, if you decide for me, 
 send me in a letter, on board my ship, a leaf of the ivy 
 which covers your well. You need not write anything. 
 I shall know what you mean to say, Mariette. Because 
 the ivy leaf has the same shape as a heart." 
 
 She turned about uncertainly, and in spite of herself, 
 afraid of losing too quickly a hope of love, she threw 
 him a kiss with her free hand. 
 
 Some months later Tonin, the fusileer of marines, lay 
 on a couch in the naval hospital of Sainte Anne, at Tou- 
 lon. Tonin was one of the heroes of Dixmude. The 
 poor young man had shown there a most admirable gal- 
 lantry. But, wounded by a shell explosion, he had been 
 obliged to submit to the amputation of his left arm. 
 And though Tonin, before his comrades, preserved ap- 
 pearances, joked and made light of his affliction, at the 
 bottom of his heart he felt a profound despair. From 
 the beginning, and with reason, he had said that, thus 
 disfigured, he was no longer a fiance worthy of the Mar- 
 iette who was so physically attractive, of the pretty little 
 girl with the willowy body, so full of graces, of the Ma- 
 riette of the well, the well covered with ivy. 
 
 Oh! That ivy shading and guarding the well! There 
 had been nights of fever in which Tonin saw it again con- 
 stantly, stirred and ruffled by the wind and taking a thou- 
 sand changing, fantastic forms. Now faces made grim-
 
 148 TALES OF WARTIME FRANCE 
 
 aces at him from between the clusters of foliage, and 
 they were the faces of German soldiers peeping at Tonin, 
 a sentinel far away from his comrades. Now he seemed 
 to see the mouths of cannon thrust from the verdure, then 
 bursts of flame; then he heard the sound of pebbles 
 rolled by the sea which the machine guns make. Some- 
 times all the bees and all the angry wasps which rove 
 about the ivy and the well, in which they find something 
 to eat and drink, precipitated themselves on him in 
 swarms, and all, all of them, set to stinging his left arm, 
 his mutilated arm, in which he now felt these myriads 
 of bites. 
 
 "No. No. Poor me! It is certain that I can no 
 longer be a husband worthy of her ! " 
 
 He kept repeating this to himself in a mechanical way, 
 and sometimes, when he felt himself alone in the vast 
 hall where his fellow patients slept, Tonin put his head 
 under his bed covers and wept. 
 
 Nobody paid him a visit. Tonin was an orphan. 
 There remained of his family only his old grandmother, 
 who was now very feeble and altogether incapable of 
 quitting, in midwinter, her poor corner by the fire. So 
 Tonin, fusileer in the infantry of the marine, who had 
 borne himself like a hero on the banks of the Yser, wept 
 like a little child. 
 
 He had reason for doing so. For at that very moment 
 Mariette was shuddering with horror at the idea of see-
 
 MARIETTAS GIFT 149 
 
 ing him again, mutilated, with his arm cut off. Her 
 imagination pictured the poor empty sleeve, hanging free, 
 and she turned away her head to look at something else, 
 as if what she saw in imagination was really there be- 
 fore her eyes. 
 
 Then Tonin's rival appeared to her in a more advan- 
 tageous light than ever. She met him and smiled at 
 him from afar, calling to him even before he called to 
 her. Without doubt, the military conscription law would 
 take him, too, after a while. But who knows? The war 
 might end perhaps very soon. And it is the present, 
 after all, that counts. What is in the future is unreal and 
 may remain unreal. Tonin belonged now to the maimed 
 and the halt. Victorin was sound in body a man like 
 all the rest of the world. 
 
 So when Victorin came to say to her, " Before going 
 away to service I should like to know, Mariette, whether, 
 on my return, I can count on our being married," she 
 had replied: "Come tomorrow to see my mother; she 
 will give you an answer." 
 
 And Victorin had gone away, completely happy. 
 
 The old grandmother is incapable of writing a letter, 
 and without knowing that Tonin has courted Mariette 
 she sends for her, because Mariette is clever. And 
 Mariette comes. 
 
 " Good day, grandmother! " 
 
 " You have heard of our misfortune? "
 
 150 TALES OF WARTIME FRANCE 
 
 "Yes, grandmother, I have. And I am sorry for 
 you." 
 
 " I have sent for you to ask you to write for me a little 
 letter to my Tonin, who is still in the hospital at Toulon." 
 
 Mariette begins to write. The grandmother dictates: 
 
 " My poor Tonin, I cannot go to see you in your hos- 
 pital, because my legs will not carry me. But I think 
 of you often. And this is to tell you that I want for 
 nothing; for you have left enough to support me and the 
 notary delivers my allowance regularly. Our neighbour 
 Catherine helps me as much as she can. It is a shame 
 that she doesn't know how to write. If she did you 
 would have heard from me more frequently. 
 
 " You have always been a good boy and you should 
 not despair. Handsome as you are, my dear grandson, 
 and in spite of the misfortune which has overtaken you, 
 you will find a good and brave wife. I assure you of 
 this, for I understand the reason why you have suffered 
 and that it was for our defence. 
 
 " But I write to tell you that New Year's Day is com- 
 ing and that I have made some little savings in order to 
 send you a present and to give you the sort of pleasure 
 which you used to have when you were a little child. 
 Let me know in your reply what I can send you which 
 will please you most or what you are most in need of. 
 Your grandmother, who loves you, signs her name with
 
 MARIETTAS GIFT 151 
 
 After the letter was finished: 
 
 " My dear, you will put the letter in the post, will 
 you not? " 
 
 " Yes, grandmother, tomorrow morning, without fail." 
 
 And Mariette departs, carrying the letter with her. 
 She said to herself: 
 
 " It did not occur to grandmother to say that it was I 
 who held the pen. So much the better; it is not well 
 that he should think of me." 
 
 Home again, Mariette, since it was near sun-down, 
 took her glazed pitcher and went to the well. 
 
 It was winter. The setting sun was red red as in 
 June but cold. In the ivy there were neither wasps 
 nor buzzing bees. She opened the well door. An icy 
 breath came up from below, which made her shiver, as 
 if it had come from a tomb. The pulley made a grating 
 noise and its cry sounded like a groan heard through 
 tears. She drew the bucket up from the well, and each 
 time that one of her arms let go the rope to grasp it 
 higher up she thought with dread of Tonin's amputated 
 arm. Never, never, would he come to the well to draw 
 water for her. Never again would he seize her body in 
 his two arms. Poor Tonin! Poor Tonin! 
 
 Then she seated herself on the sill of the well, and, 
 with her face hidden in her hands, Mariette wept. 
 
 She wept a long time. Then she went back home, 
 opened the grandmother's letter and added some lines:
 
 152 TALES OF WARTIME FRANCE 
 
 " It is your little friend Mariette who holds the pen 
 and writes all this. And she tells me to tell you not to 
 worry yourself thinking about a gift which will please 
 you most. And she will send it in the letter, so that it 
 will reach you tomorrow, which is New Year's Eve." 
 
 On his bed in the hospital Tonin opens a letter. Some- 
 thing falls out of it. It is an ivy leaf. 
 
 He utters a cry of joy which makes all the wounded 
 men in the big hall lift their heads. They all understood 
 very quickly, for a beautiful young girl runs toward 
 Tonin's bed and they murmur: 
 
 " It is his promised bride." 
 
 She did not wish to arrive until after he had received 
 the letter, so that he might not have too much joy all 
 at once. And, in fact, his happiness chokes him. But 
 he has strength to cry out to his comrades, while he 
 embraces Mariette with his good arm: 
 
 " Think of it, my friends ! She takes me as I am. 
 She has brought me herself as a New Year's gift! "
 
 THE SONATA TO THE STAR 
 ANONYMOUS 
 
 iO be no longer alone at last! To have you with 
 me for a little while! " 
 
 Seated at his wife's feet, Jacques Nancy gazed up at 
 her tenderly. She "had arrived, two days before, in the 
 little village in the Vosges where Jacques lived, behind 
 the front, while his regiment had its respite from first- 
 line duty. Enraptured, he kissed the tips of her slender 
 fingers or contemplated her adorable face, rose-coloured 
 as a fuchsia beneath her black hair braids. 
 
 " Darling," she said, with a caressing touch on his 
 shoulder, " it is really charming here this room hung 
 with cretonne, the view over the fringed fir trees, and, 
 in the garden, all the roses blooming so unconsciously 
 under this tragic sky." 
 
 " More than that, Laura. Every evening the serenade 
 of the Boche cannon. It is intermission time just now." 
 
 She looked about her. Then she added: 
 
 " I am especially pleased that you have a piano." 
 
 And, certainly, for a young composer, the use of a 
 piano is an infinitely precious thing. 
 
 "Nevertheless, I hardly ever open it," he answered. 
 153
 
 154 TALES OF WARTIME FRANCE 
 
 " Now, with you here, this beautiful night in June, I am 
 going to play a little in your honour. I am going to 
 crown you with a garland of harmony." 
 
 Quickly taken with the idea, he arose, opened the pi- 
 ano and awakened the soul of its sonorous keyboard. 
 The resonance of the chords travelled in swelling waves 
 out into the balmy night, itself immobile as a lake of si- 
 lence. Cherishing her husband's art and devoted to his 
 fame, Laura listened with eager attention. 
 
 First came some arpeggios, with liquid notes, as if to 
 prove the suppleness of the player's fingers and the 
 docility of the instrument. Then a melody appeared, 
 trembled, hesitated, became defined, and, suddenly, sure 
 of itself, rolled forth robustly, with many nuances a 
 musical creation, born in this night of tenderness, which 
 seemed to live and pulsate, all armed to capture the 
 hearts and thrill the nerves of the multitude. 
 
 Laura grew pale with excitement as she listened. 
 
 She expected an improvisation, facile and brilliant. 
 But her musical ear detected in Jacques's composition a 
 new quality, an accent of profundity, hitherto unheard, 
 the sacred touch of the grand art. No, she was not de- 
 ceived. An inspiration dominated the young composer. 
 A god was there, invisible and glowing, teaching him 
 an original harmony, high and pure. On the edge of 
 the field of battle, in the presence of Death and Love, 
 genius was visiting the young musician. Outside the
 
 THE SONATA TO THE STAR 155 
 
 deep night seemed to listen also, with its nightingales 
 and its roses. 
 
 And Jacques, self-absorbed, felt mounting in him, like 
 a mysterious fountain jet, a lavish and ardent inspira- 
 tion. Speechless, he vibrated to the melody which came 
 from his fingers and his heart. All the passionate sweet- 
 ness of the hour, the presence of his beautiful wife, the 
 force of the Heroic Life were translated into his music. 
 It equalled the work of the masters. It would gain im- 
 mortality. 
 
 Suddenly the cannon thundered again three, ten, 
 twenty shots. The air was filled with terrific concus- 
 sions. Jacques murmured: 
 
 " They are beginning to bombard the Fontaine-le- 
 Prince Road, over which our supply convoys pass." 
 
 And, with a sonorous fortissimo, he dominated the 
 noise of the bombardment. To the amorous andante 
 succeeded a tempest of sumptuous accords and, with a 
 burst of lyricism, the sonata completed itself like a trum- 
 pet call. 
 
 Jacques sprang from his chair. Laura grasped his 
 hands. He said, almost breathlessly: 
 
 " It was beautiful, wasn't it? Never until tonight 
 have I had the certitude of having composed a real work. 
 It needs only a transition passage. I feel it so per- 
 fect, so pure! Yet I have a deadly fear that I shall not 
 be able to put it into music."
 
 156 TALES OF WARTIME FRANCE 
 
 " You will be able," she answered fervently. " While 
 listening to you I watched, there, on your right, that 
 rising star. It is your star, Jacques." 
 
 "No; you are my star," said Jacques. "I feel that 
 I shall succeed because I am sustained by your tender- 
 ness. And I dedicate to you my ' Sonata to the Star.' 
 But I am exhausted. I am going to sleep for a few 
 hours. When I awake I shall write out my composition. 
 Laura, I am very happy." 
 
 Throwing himself on a divan, he fell asleep. 
 
 Some one knocked on the door. Noiselessly Laura 
 opened it. She recognized a sergeant, a friend of her 
 husband's. 
 
 " Is Lieutenant Nancy here, madame? " 
 
 " He is asleep. But I am his wife." 
 
 " I recognize you now, madame. Here is an urgent 
 message for the lieutenant. He is to carry it to Captain 
 Berger, at the place indicated." 
 
 The man saluted and went away. Laura looked at the 
 address. Captain Berger was at Fontaine-le-Prince. 
 
 She gave a shudder. 
 
 Her husband had shown her the clock tower of that 
 village and the road which led to it an unsheltered 
 road which the shells were even now riddling with holes. 
 The evening before three messengers had been killed on 
 this road, and now Jacques, in his turn, was to travel 
 over it.
 
 THE SONATA TO THE STAR 157 
 
 A frightful panic seized the young wife. With her 
 fear for her husband's safety another thought mingled: 
 
 "And the sonata? " 
 
 That work, the first work born of his genius, an im- 
 mortal message of art to men? And the melodic in- 
 spiration, perfect and pure, which he felt working in 
 him? Ought he to go, risk his life, die and leave nothing 
 behind him? 
 
 Thinking of his danger, she was wrung with an atro- 
 cious anguish. No, it was impossible that before the 
 morning came he should expose himself to sudden death. 
 She would courageously accept for her husband the most 
 perilous of duties, and thereby assure his glory, one 
 work the more for France and immortality for his name. 
 
 The letter was to be delivered at once. 
 
 She hesitated no longer. Had he not said that she was 
 his star? And ought she not to protect his genius? 
 Wrapping her husband's greatcoat about her, fitting his 
 kepi to her head, and pulling down the hood of the coat, 
 she stole silently into the shed, got out the motorcycle 
 and started off into the night, filled with the thunder of 
 cannon. Now she was returning, bent over the machine, 
 fortified by her own heroism, proud to have fulfilled her 
 mission and not a little astonished that she should have 
 undertaken it. What unknown force sometimes takes 
 possession of us! Captain Berger, ready to get under 
 way, mounted on his horse, had received her in the sha-
 
 158 TALES OF WARTIME FRANCE 
 
 dow and had not recognized a woman's face under the 
 lowered hood. 
 
 Now, having escaped death twenty times, she was com- 
 ing back with all possible speed. Mon Dieu! Perhaps 
 Jacques would not have passed uninjured through the 
 shell fire, as she had done. There came to her a joyous 
 contempt of danger. She no longer believed in it. She 
 felt herself immune. Her goal drew near. The bom- 
 bardment diminished in intensity. A supply convoy 
 passed her. 
 
 A shell burst in the road. There was a cry in the 
 night. Horses neighed; men cursed. But the convoy 
 reformed and passed on, leaving in the darkness the 
 single victim of the projectile, a woman who had fallen 
 to the ground, her body half shattered by the exploding 
 shell. 
 
 She had not lost consciousness. She still breathed, her 
 mouth full of warm blood, having but one thought of 
 devotion and love. 
 
 " Fortunately it was not he! " 
 
 She dragged herself along the road, caught a glimpse 
 of the house with the garden full of roses and, suddenly, 
 a melody came floating toward her. 
 
 It was the principal theme of the Sonata. The chef 
 d'ceuvre, free, powerful and noble, was at last per- 
 fected. Perhaps Jacques, in his fever of composition, 
 had not yet noticed his wife's disappearance. The can-
 
 THE SONATA TO THE STAR 159 
 
 non were silent, and, as if a pure victim had been needed 
 to nourish his genius, again the inspiration burned in him 
 like a lambent flame. He developed the new rhythm, 
 which was going to enchant the multitude. The pure and 
 perfect phrase mounted into the night, a rounded curve 
 of melody, and, like a cradle song or a requiem, the 
 " Sonata to the Star" soothed the dying Laura's last 
 agony.
 
 THE PIPE 
 ANONYMOUS 
 
 IT was a beautiful meerschaum pipe, with a mouth- 
 piece of amber. It represented a zouave's face, 
 cheery and genial, terminating in a double-pointed beard. 
 The tassel of the cap hung down on the neck. 
 
 The day when Louis Journee received this pipe that 
 was an eventful day. One hasn't many distractions in 
 the trenches, and the hours drag along with a desolating 
 tediousness. So the arrival of packages is a powerful 
 dispeller of ennui. 
 
 For a long time nothing had come for Journee. He 
 had no relatives, to his knowledge, and was practically 
 alone in the world. He had lived in the streets of Paris 
 no one knew just how, tenacious of existence, as cats 
 are; by no means good looking, shabby and thin, with a 
 face which seemed to have been carved out of a radish. 
 He had no trade and was forced to make a living out of 
 whatever came along. He was a philosopher in his 
 way. He had learned at least two things. First, that 
 one is never really happy; and, second, that one can 
 always manage not to starve to death. 
 
 Louis Journee had been at the front five months when 
 a package was sent to him through the agency of a relief 
 160
 
 THE PIPE 161 
 
 society. It contained some knitted things. The person 
 who made them also sent a gracious little letter. Her 
 name was Mile. Descossoles. She was certainly one of 
 those maiden ladies who, in a corner of some remote 
 province, seek without much success to satisfy those de- 
 sires for service which flower in a heart which doesn't 
 know how to grow old. 
 
 Journee had much natural politeness. He judged that 
 the gift, even though sent thus indirectly, deserved a per- 
 sonal acknowledgment. He wrote, with some difficulty, 
 a few words of thanks. That bit of a letter quite upset 
 Mile. Descossoles, who trembled with emotion, in her 
 morose solitude, at the idea of having an interest in some 
 one at the front. Wild with joy, she at once constituted 
 herself the godmother of Journee, and began to send 
 him linen, chocolate and boxes of conserves. A regular 
 correspondence established itself between the soldier 
 and his godmother. 
 
 She finally asked him what special thing he wanted 
 most. He refused at first to say. She insisted. At last 
 he told her that it was a pipe. 
 
 Then it came, all white and gold, extravagant, comic, 
 luxurious, like an object in a showcase. His comrades 
 gathered about him. They regarded the gift with some- 
 thing like veneration. 
 
 Some of them said, their eyes sparkling with covetous-
 
 162 TALES OF WARTIME FRANCE 
 
 " For a pipe, that is really a pipe." 
 
 Journee decided finally to fill it and light it. He 
 smoked it with a feeling of blessedness, his brain full of 
 vague and happy ideas, penetrated with the confused feel- 
 ing that this day was the most memorable in his life, 
 and that a man who could smoke such a pipe was at least 
 the equal of kings. 
 
 The next day Migot, a blacksmith of rude appearance 
 but with a sardonic fancy, called out to him: 
 
 " Say, Journee, if you are killed by the Boches we 
 shall inherit your pipe." 
 
 This pleasantry appealed to all the men. They found 
 it so droll that not a day passed without one of them re- 
 peating it. The most stupid repeated it, as well as the 
 most intelligent. Pallons, who was a poor devil of a 
 shepherd and half an idiot, used it no less than Goul- 
 lainne. who was professor in a faculty. 
 
 " Try to get killed quickly, so that we may inherit your 
 pipe! 
 
 At first Journee felt cold chills running down his back; 
 for he had no desire whatever to be killed. But after a 
 while he got used to this specimen of poilu facetiousness. 
 
 In writing to his godmother he passed the saying along 
 to her, with a certain pride in showing how general was 
 the opinion of his comrades on that point. But for fear 
 that his benefactress might think ill of his fellows he 
 added candidly:
 
 THE PIPE 163 
 
 " But all this, mademoiselle, is only a jest." 
 
 Mile. Descossoles found the pleasantries of the trenches 
 rather peculiar. For her part, she could not understand 
 the humour of that kind of badinage. 
 
 One morning very early they asked for volunteers to 
 reconnoitre the enemy's positions. Journee offered him- 
 self, as did three others. They crawled to the top of an 
 eminence which dominated the most advanced German 
 lines. While the sergeant who accompanied them noted 
 the lay of the land the men slid down behind the ridge, 
 which protected them. Seated there, they lighted their 
 pipes. Suddenly a shell burst in their midst. 
 
 Journee had the upper part of his body torn off and 
 thrown some feet away. The others fell, mangled by the 
 explosion. Only the sergeant escaped. He left his dan- 
 gerous position and returned slowly to find his company. 
 
 "What's the matter?" they asked him. "You are 
 alone." 
 
 " A shell," he answered. " All killed." 
 
 "And Journee?" 
 
 " Journee is there with the others." 
 
 Journee was very popular with his comrades. Their 
 faces became grave. Day broke tardily, pale and list- 
 less, as if saddened at what it was about to see. 
 
 When night came again the sergeant decided that they 
 should go to look for the dead men in order to bury them 
 within the lines. Many offered themselves for that mis-
 
 164 TALES OF WARTIME FRANCE 
 
 sion. Goullainne and Pallons wished to bring in Jour- 
 nee. The sergeant guided them. From watching so 
 many nights the soldiers had gotten so that they could 
 see pretty well in the darkness. They discovered in the 
 underbrush the dead of the night before. They brought 
 them back for burial. 
 
 Safe in the rear, they searched the corpses for their 
 identification papers and for souvenirs. 
 
 " And the pipe? " said Migot, when they went through 
 Journee's pockets. 
 
 " He was smoking when he was killed," answered the 
 sergeant. 
 
 They could not find the pipe. Goullainne recalled 
 that he thought he had seen it in the underbrush. 
 
 " For Heaven's sake! " cried Migot. " Why didn't you 
 pick it up? " 
 
 " You'll have to go and get it yourself." 
 
 " I'll go. Journee has always said that he would be- 
 queath it to us, if he were killed. A beautiful pipe like 
 that would you leave it to the Germans? " 
 
 " You are a fool," said the sergeant. " Are you going 
 to go back there now? " 
 
 In fact, the bombardment had begun again. All the 
 ground in front of the trenches was slashed with shells. 
 Migot shrugged his shoulders and left the shelter. He 
 crawled slowly and nonchalantly. Dawn came. One
 
 THE PIPE 165 
 
 could hear nothing but the incessant roar of the cannon. 
 The sun's rays were reflected on the blue tips of the grass. 
 
 On a certain large space the soil was dug up here and 
 there and the undergrowth was destroyed. On the earth 
 there were brown spots. 
 
 " Here is the place," Migot said to himself. 
 
 He looked about him. In a moment or two he spied 
 some feet away Journee's beautiful pipe. He put it in 
 his pocket and returned without mishap. 
 
 He was received with shouts of laughter. 
 
 " Have you got it? " 
 
 " I surely have it." 
 
 " But while you were away we buried the owner." 
 
 Migot walked to the place where Goullainne and Pal- 
 Ions were still digging Journee's grave. The remains 
 rested on a sheet. Migot looked at them. He felt a 
 strange tugging at his heart. Here was another who 
 would never return! What a brave fellow Journee was! 
 
 Suddenly he felt in his pocket the pipe, the beautiful 
 pipe. It was heavy as stone. He remembered his 
 ghastly pleasantry and was ashamed. How could he 
 keep that which had been the last consolation of his 
 comrade? 
 
 He drew out the white meerschaum pipe with the 
 laughing face of the zouave, and placed it on the sheet 
 which held what remained of Journee.
 
 166 TALES OF WARTIME FRANCE 
 
 " Here," he said to the volunteer gravediggers, " bury 
 this, too. Journee ought to have it with him wherever 
 he goes. It came from the only woman in the world 
 who ever gave him even a little of her love."
 
 I 
 
 THE RENDEZVOUS 
 ANONYMOUS 
 
 N the interval between the moment when she heard 
 the train signal and the moment when the cars pulled 
 in under the arches of the station she reviewed her life 
 or, at least, the years, months and hours of which she 
 had retained the most poignant memories. 
 
 Her marriage, her monotonous and, then, unhappy 
 life in a little garrison town; her uncongenial home, dif- 
 ferences in tastes, quarrels; the emptiness of the days, 
 the solitude of the evenings; the sleepless nights, in which 
 one longs regretfully for that which might have been and 
 in which one dreads the dawn and what each new morn- 
 ing must bring in the way of weariness, discouragement 
 and ennui. 
 
 The Place, planted with linden trees, where, when one 
 day she had complained of being neglected, her husband 
 had simply shrugged his shoulders; the little street, its 
 paving stones encircled with moss (with the straight, 
 narrow windows, behind which one is sure there are 
 watchful eyes and alert ears), where, when she had said 
 to him: "I am a virtuous woman; I wish to remain a 
 virtuous woman; but you push me too far," he had 
 167
 
 168 TALES OF WARTIME FRANCE 
 
 turned on her brutally, as he opened the door of their 
 house, and answered : " Don't bore me by talking about 
 your virtue." Next, the meeting with him whom she 
 ought to have known long before their great love with 
 its poisoned joys. Then the resolution to break with 
 everything, the confession, the divorce refused her by 
 her husband, without anger, with a grin, maliciously. 
 And, finally, the war: the chilling solitude; the anguish 
 of feeling her thoughts divided, after all, between two 
 persons; the dispatch announcing her husband's death. 
 
 The train was in the station. Among the faces appear- 
 ing at the doors she recognized at once the one which she 
 sought. People jostled her; she dared not run and 
 mingle with the crowd. A year weighted with anxieties 
 separated them. A happiness created by a bereavement 
 so brutal reunited them. She waited for him to see her, 
 to call to her, to make some sign. He recognized her 
 and walked quickly toward her. 
 
 On the platform, where no one knew them, where she 
 was only a woman among so many other women awaiting 
 eagerly the return of a soldier, nothing would have pre- 
 vented him from taking her into his arms. But he 
 stopped in front of her, his head uncovered. They re- 
 mained face to face, without either speaking. Couples 
 passed close by them; old women embraced little troop- 
 ers, and old men, clad in blue, with caps of blue, lifted 
 from the ground and kissed little children, who stared at
 
 THE RENDEZVOUS 169 
 
 them with wide open eyes. They caught on the wing 
 scraps of conversation like these: 
 
 "You look well! How he has grown! You are not 
 tired? It was great luck that I could come just now! " 
 
 They looked and listened and were astonished they 
 who perhaps more than any others had waited for this 
 moment to be the only ones looking and listening. 
 
 Having made their rendezvous in a strange city in 
 order to have more freedom, the station door once passed, 
 they felt the unfamiliarity of their surroundings even to 
 the point of exchanging only commonplace remarks. 
 
 "What shall we do? " 
 
 " I don't know. I arrived here only an hour ago. 
 What would you like to do? " 
 
 " Suppose we take a carriage? " 
 
 An old cab stood outside the station. The driver 
 asked: 
 
 " Where shall I drive you, Lieutenant? " 
 
 " We don't want to go anywhere in particular. Show 
 us the city." 
 
 The horses set off at a trot. They drove across the 
 town. The jolting on the pavements made the windows 
 rattle. Each pressed the other's hand in silence. In a 
 street where the grade was steep and the horses dropped 
 into a walk, she murmured: 
 
 " You seem changed different." 
 
 "Changed? I?"
 
 170 TALES OF WARTIME FRANCE 
 
 " Somehow I get that impression " 
 
 " Not at all. No; I assure you." 
 
 The windows began to rattle again, and again they 
 were silenced by the deafening clatter. The country 
 came into sight a valley through which a river flowed. 
 
 The driver began to extol the view. They got out 
 of the cab and, leaning against the parapet of a bridge, 
 looked at the prospect. They were alone. He said, 
 awkwardly: 
 
 "Don't be displeased if I am if I appear sad. 
 The emotion of seeing you after so many events the 
 brain-fag " 
 
 "I don't blame you; I understand. I am also upset 
 and very much troubled. Tomorrow " 
 
 " Tomorrow I shall go back." 
 
 "Tomorrow? Why? I thought that you had taken 
 seven days' leave." 
 
 He felt embarrassed in his lie. 
 
 " I couldn't get that much. Some other time " 
 
 " Some other time? Perhaps we ought never to meet 
 again." 
 
 He protested. But so unconvincingly that he stopped 
 short, realizing how insincere his words must sound. 
 Their hands dropped apart, without either seeming to 
 notice it. A little puff of wind blew the crepe veil on 
 the officer's shoulder. He removed it and said in a low 
 voice:
 
 THE RENDEZVOUS 171 
 
 " I am lying. You are right about it. I am no longer 
 the same. That is neither my fault nor yours. When I 
 went away I had only you in my heart, and I still have 
 only you. But something has happened the death 
 of your husband. That death upset my thoughts and 
 my plans upset them altogether. If I had learned 
 of it by chance, perhaps I should have seen in it only the 
 release it brought to you and me. But I was there when 
 he fell. 
 
 "As he lay on the ground he called out to the men: 
 'Don't bother about me; it is nothing. I shall rejoin 
 you.' 
 
 " He dragged himself as far as the captured trench, 
 in order to encourage them to hold it and to see how they 
 installed themselves in it. He talked to them with a gen- 
 tleness and a clearness which were remarkable. To the 
 sergeant, who held him, propped up, he said : ' You will 
 cite this evening such a one, and such a one and such a 
 one, who have all fought well. You will cancel the or- 
 der I made yesterday for the punishment of the trum- 
 peter.' 
 
 " Then he had the roll called. When the list was fin- 
 ished, he said: ' I am happy; it has not cost us too dear.' 
 
 "With that he closed his eyes. I have seen others 
 fall others who were my friends. Never have I felt 
 what I felt at that moment. 
 
 " Since then, when I wish to think of our past happi-
 
 172 TALES OF WARTIME FRANCE 
 
 ness, of your saddened life, of your sufferings, of the 
 recompense which I have promised you and which you 
 so richly deserve, I cannot I cannot. Something in 
 me effaces all those ideas. He died too well." 
 
 She bowed her head. The driver rejoined them. 
 
 "Without wishing to be officious, Madame and Mon- 
 sieur, you ought not to stay here any longer. When the 
 sun sets the chill here is very treacherous." 
 
 And, as they got into the cab again, he added: 
 
 " See, madame already shivers."
 
 THE VOICE OF THE CHURCH BELL 
 ANONYMOUS 
 
 TFrHEN the 9th Artillery entered Grand-Bourg, fol- 
 VV lowing a successful advance by the Chasseurs 
 Alpins, there was a general exclamation of distress at 
 the sight of the wreck and ruin which had been wrought 
 in the ancient village. 
 
 Silence and death hovered over a shapeless mass of 
 rubbish. Only a few half demolished houses remained. 
 The church, its interior wrecked by the bombardment, 
 exposed to the village square a gaping hole, through 
 which one could see in the shadowy background the half- 
 shattered glass-work of the altar. But no one ventured 
 inside the building; for its clock tower made a tempting 
 mark and it was really a miracle that the enemy's shells 
 had not yet razed it. 
 
 " Well, my friend," the poilus confided to one another, 
 "for a frolicsome fellow this place certainly lacks at- 
 tractions." 
 
 " It lacks women," added the fault-finders. 
 
 As a matter of fact, of the 1,000 inhabitants of the 
 village only a few peasants had stayed behind the 
 obdurate few who could not bring themselves under any 
 173
 
 174 TALES OF WARTIME FRANCE 
 
 circumstances to abandon their cherished parcels of 
 ground. And it would have been easier to find a gold 
 louis in the ruins than to run across a pretty girl in the 
 deserted streets. 
 
 So when the comrades of Quartermaster Pierre 
 Schwartz saw him in the company of a young girl there 
 was a general buzz of surprise. 
 
 "Lucky fellow! You certainly have the knack of 
 striking pay dirt! " 
 
 " But where on earth did you run across her? " 
 
 " Listen ! I put myself down for her sister, if she has 
 one." 
 
 The wits all turned their batteries on Schwartz. He 
 let them talk. Then, little by little, he confessed his ad- 
 venture. 
 
 He was born in Petit-Bourg, a village about three kilo- 
 metres from Grand-Bourg. He had known Fanchette, 
 his good friend, since her infancy. As children they 
 had played together and gone to the same school. As 
 soon as he had arrived here his first thought was to go 
 and look for her. He had been fortunate enough to find 
 her, and now his only idea was to marry her, after the 
 war, and cultivate, with her aid, the little farm which 
 he had inherited from his parents. 
 
 From that day the love affair of the sub-officer was ac- 
 cepted as something entirely proper and natural, and the 
 chiefs shut their eyes when, in the evenings, Pierre went
 
 THE VOICE OF THE CHURCH BELL 175 
 
 off to join Fanchette in the square in front of the village 
 church. 
 
 That evening there was snow in the air and the falling 
 flakes covered the ground with a light ermine mantle. 
 A silence, broken only by the sharp whistling of the 
 wind, filled the earth and the sky. 
 
 " A fine night for bandits not excluding the Boches," 
 the poilus declared. 
 
 When they saw Pierre Schwartz slip out to go meet 
 his fiancee, they said, more in pity than in envy: 
 
 " Must he get frost bitten for her? " 
 
 And the sceptics added: 
 
 " It is a sure thing that she will never be there." 
 
 But they deceived themselves. Fanchette was there, 
 in the doorway of the church, more nervous than was 
 usual with her. When she saw Pierre her eyes spar- 
 kled. 
 
 " Is it you, Pierre? " 
 
 "Yes, it is I. What miserable weather! " 
 
 " Don't say that; it is just the kind of weather we need." 
 
 " What? Has it been decided? " 
 
 "Yes; for tonight. See, here is the package of rock- 
 ets. Have you the caps? " 
 
 " Then it is all in dead earnest? " 
 
 " Certainly. I have just seen Captain Fenshexer. He 
 told me that he counts on you to direct his attack." 
 
 " I understand. I'll climb up the tower."
 
 176 TALES OF WARTIME FRANCE 
 
 He gave a last kiss to his fiancee, who conducted him 
 to the foot of his chosen observatory. 
 
 Up there the vast plain, like a white winding sheet, 
 stretched away below him. His glance, familiarized to 
 this country, scanned the horizon without difficulty. No 
 patrol was crawling behind the bushes. Down below, at 
 1,500 metres, he made out the Boche trenches, the line of 
 which as traced in the snow in an almost imperceptible 
 undulation. Still further away the enemy's artillery, 
 concealed in a little wood, was ready to fire at the first 
 signal. 
 
 That signal he, Pierre Schwartz, under-officer in the 
 French army, was expected to give. By what succession 
 of false steps had he, heretofore an honest man, arrived 
 at the point of committing treason? He could hardly 
 have told. It was Fanchette who drew him on. But he 
 had permitted himself, almost without a protest, to be 
 led astray. 
 
 He had lied to his comrades when he said that he had 
 known her since childhood. She had existed for him 
 only since the accursed day when he had met her after 
 revisiting Petit-Bourg. And at once she had swept him 
 off his feet, with her great eyes flashing with sorceries. 
 Undoubtedly they were engaged. But in order to buy the 
 little farm which Fanchette coveted, money was needed; 
 and both of them were poor. It was then that she had 
 promised him the necessary cash if he would agree to
 
 THE VOICE OF THE CHURCH BELL 177 
 
 set off, some evening, from the top of the church tower, 
 rockets bursting in the direction of the French batteries. 
 It would be a matter of only a few minutes, and nobody 
 but themselves would know anything about it. 
 
 He had consented to that shameful bargain. And 
 now the hour had come for him to keep his word. His 
 heart beat violently, his hands trembled with cold, the 
 sweat stood on his brow and, although he was certain 
 that he was alone, he turned his head to see if any one 
 was watching him. 
 
 But no, he was alone, quite alone; and he had given 
 his promise. He would keep his wrrd, for he knew that 
 Fanchette would be his only on that condition. With a 
 quick movement of the hand he broke the cord with 
 which the rockets were tied together. 
 
 But suddenly from a distance, from across the French 
 border, the sound of a church bell came solemnly through 
 the silence of the night. It was a soft, low peal, whose 
 dying notes just about reached him. It seemed to him 
 that the flakes of snow about him were so many tiny bells 
 tintinnabulating across space. That bell how well he 
 knew it! It was the church bell of his native village, 
 which, this evening, faithful to the tradition of centuries, 
 proclaimed the fete of Candlemas the special fete of 
 the region. Each peal resounded in his heart and evoked 
 from the past the souvenirs of his childhood. 
 
 It was that bell which had sounded the happiest hours
 
 178 TALES OF WARTIME FRANCE 
 
 of his youth; hours of innocence, hours of joy and hours 
 of sorrow, hours of hope and hours of love. All these 
 hours, for ever past, seemed now to rise from their tomb 
 and to come to dance about him a dance of memories. 
 Absorbed by his recollections, he abandoned himself to 
 dreams, forgetting that the instant had come to launch 
 the signal agreed on with the enemy. 
 
 All at once Fanchette, running up the tower stairway, 
 stood beside him. 
 
 " Well, what are you waiting for? Our plan is work- 
 ing wonderfully. They have left their trenches. See 
 them down there, a hundred yards from the French lines. 
 Send off the rockets! " 
 
 "Yes, yes. Wait a minute. Here goes. But no 
 no. After all, that would be too shameful ! " 
 
 Quickly, before Fanchette had realized what he was 
 doing, he had grasped the bell rope, and with all his 
 strength, with a full swing of his arms, he sounded an 
 alarm. 
 
 The next minutes were tragic. Awakened in their 
 trenches, the French infantrymen began to fire their ma- 
 chine guns, which, in the twinkling of an eye, swept the 
 ranks of the Germans moving forward through the snow. 
 The French batteries, on their part, by a barrage fire, 
 prevented the advance of German reinforcements. 
 
 But the bell tower, up to now respected by the enemy,
 
 THE VOICE OF THE CHURCH BELL 179 
 
 became a target on which the German cannon vented their 
 fury. 
 
 Fanchette, understanding the consequences of Pierre's 
 action, tried to flee. But he held her fast. 
 
 "No, no; you shall not go! It was you who guided 
 me here. You shall die with me." 
 
 There was a fierce struggle between the lovers. It 
 lasted several minutes. Then the bell tower crumbled 
 with a frightful crash, crushing under its weight Fan- 
 chette, the temptress, and Pierre Schwartz, dead in order 
 that the voice of the church bell of his native village 
 should remain for ever a French voice.
 
 THE SACRIFICE 
 ANONYMOUS 
 
 ' A N eagle, Philip; I tell you it is an eagle, over 
 -t"i_ there above the Gothard. He planes well, that 
 bird. Ah! when shall we see once more our dear pigeons 
 in France? At home I am a great pigeon fancier. It 
 is my principal occupation. And you, Philip, what is 
 yours? " 
 
 " I, Jacques, am an explorer." 
 " Not a commonplace profession, that ! " 
 "And an ardent one, I assure you. I am devoured 
 with impatience to explore again the fever-ridden jungles 
 of Africa, where the rhinoceroses range. Ah, the deadly 
 idleness of captivity! " 
 
 Both sighed, recalling in thought the bustling morn- 
 ing when they had last quitted the hangar at Belfort in a 
 new aeroplane the circles in the pure, icy air, the keen 
 joy at seeing flee before their French wings the wings of a 
 prudent German Taube. Then, suddenly, the fog, be- 
 wilderment, lost bearings, a mistaken descent in Swiss 
 territory, internment, captivity, their dreams of fame 
 and heroism shattered. Since then months and months 
 dragging wearily along in a Swiss fortress, where they 
 180
 
 THE SACRIFICE 181 
 
 were esteemed and hospitably treated yet carefully 
 watched. 
 
 " I suppose you hardly ever think of such a thing as 
 making a home and having a family? " asked Jacques, 
 the observer, of Philip, the pilot. 
 
 " On the contrary. When one risks his life he ought 
 to feel that there is another life behind him which will 
 continue the furrow. I want to have children and a 
 hearthstone to which to come to rest myself between my 
 exploring expeditions." 
 
 " But under such conditions it ought to be difficult to 
 find a wife." 
 
 " Don?t worry; I have found her," answered Philip, 
 smiling. 
 
 A ripple of sweetness passed over his hard, adventur- 
 ous face the face of a condottiere. In imagination he 
 saw the pure and tranquil silhouette of Claire, his fian- 
 cee, the little friend of his boyhood, with her grave eyes 
 and her almond complexion. 
 
 That young girl, devoted and very straight-forward, 
 satisfied the need which Philip had of a confidante. 
 Then, when he travelled in the rough African country, 
 he would be able to preserve the pure flame of his hearth- 
 stone. He could always, without suspicion, kiss her 
 smooth brow and confide to her little, rosy ear his proj- 
 ects for still greater discoveries. 
 
 He jumped up suddenly, for an attendant appeared,
 
 182 TALES OF WARTIME FRANCE 
 
 bringing letters for the two prisoners. Each seized his 
 own and ensconced himself in an easy chair. Philip, 
 overjoyed, recognized the handwriting of his fiancee. 
 
 He opened the missive with a leisurely sense of enjoy- 
 ment, anticipating the pleasure which would come to 
 him from those lines the simple recital of a nurse oc- 
 cupied for eighteen months at the bedsides of the 
 wounded. 
 
 But all of a sudden a certain disorder in the customary 
 sober arrangement of the lines struck him, and surprised, 
 keenly attentive, he read on: 
 
 " Dear Philip : If you were here I should know how 
 to tell you what embarrasses me. But how shall I write 
 it? Let me say, first of all, that my life belongs to you 
 
 and all my love. So you will counsel me, will you 
 not, since you are my strength? 
 
 " Recently they brought into our hospital Pierre Gran- 
 val, the well known aviator, who in the course of his 
 fourteenth fight with the German airmen was gravely 
 wounded. Very gravely, alas! He scarcely could tell 
 what was happening when they pinned on his breast the 
 Cross of the Legion of Honour. 
 
 " Since then we have cared for his poor, damaged eyes. 
 For a long time we believed that we could save his sight. 
 But at last a day came when his vision was extinguished 
 
 when he knew that he would be totally blind.
 
 THE SACRIFICE 183 
 
 " The nurses here have cared with the tenderest devo- 
 tion for this young hero, so harshly penalized both in 
 the present and in the future. He saw the most attrac- 
 tive among us, all bending over him, before he became 
 blind. How was it that he noticed me, more than the 
 others? 
 
 " Why me, who felt for him nothing but pity? Why 
 did I inspire in him an attachment which I was not will- 
 ing to return? 
 
 " I swear to you, Philip, when Pierre declared his love 
 for me, however much I regretted rejecting him, I did it 
 without hesitation. I changed my assignment. He no 
 longer heard my voice or my step. I hoped he would 
 forget me. 
 
 " But one day he wished to go to find me in the hall 
 on the floor below, where I then was. His strength 
 failed him. He fell on the stone steps and crushed his 
 head badly. We thought he was not going to survive. 
 Philip, there is not a woman who would not have wept 
 to be the cause of the despair and death of this unfortu- 
 nate man. In return for the life which he offered his 
 country, should he find only indifference on the part of 
 her for whom he cared? And what was I to do, when, 
 dying, he implored me not to reject his love? 
 
 " I have been a woman, weak or over-sympathetic, as 
 you wish. I lied to him out of pity. I said to him that 
 I returned his feeling, that I would marry him, as he
 
 184 TALES OF WARTIME FRANCE 
 
 had entreated me to do. To a dying person why refuse 
 that supreme joy? Death was to efface all. 
 
 " But he has survived. Today he is almost recovered 
 from his last wound. Blind, he has faith in me as in his 
 guiding star. I am the only reason for his wishing to 
 live. In desperation I call to you. 
 
 " Philip, it is you, so brave you who have not yet 
 had time to make yourself illustrious whom I love. 
 My heart is in accord with my pledge. It is you alone 
 who are able to inspire my soul. 
 
 " Philip, what shall I do? " 
 
 Philip rose hastily from his chair. He felt stifled, 
 suffocated, and went out to the parapet which ran along 
 the cliff of the fortress. He turned his head from side 
 to side, sniffing the air of the nearby glaciers. He was 
 stupefied, indignant, outraged in his tenderest sentiments. 
 
 Was it Claire who wrote thus? Claire the fiancee of 
 another, Claire demanding back her promise to him in 
 order to marry Granval? No, perhaps she was only, 
 as she said, the victim of a sort of feminine nervosity 
 of her too ready pity for any one who suffered. He 
 would admit that she had been merely imprudent. But 
 how could she hesitate between him, her fiance for years, 
 and " this person "? 
 
 He felt a lump of wrath gathering in his throat. In- 
 stinctively his hands stiffened, as if he were going to
 
 THE SACRIFICE 185 
 
 strangle his rival. Then, suddenly, he had a feeling of 
 reaction. Something like an involuntary sense of 
 shame assailed him. 
 
 " This person ! " Could he forget that " this person " 
 was Pierre Granval, whose boundless audacity, whose 
 supple and perfect skill he had so often admired and 
 envied that Pierre over whom he had wept in spite of 
 the ardour of his rivalry? Yes, he had shed tears of un- 
 feigned grief, true fraternal tears, when he read in the 
 newspapers that this young, unvanquished eagle had been 
 hopelessly disabled. And it was he, a mutilated hero, 
 whom he had today called " this person "! 
 
 So Pierre was blind. The greatest of afflictions, mused 
 Philip, was all that Fate had had to offer this young man 
 in recompense for his high services. 
 
 Blind! And he held out his poor, trembling hand 
 toward a woman the only one who did not love him 
 the only one who could not love him. She seemed will- 
 ing, however, to devote her life to him. 
 
 Once more Philip gave a start. No, he could not con- 
 sent to that unreasonable sacrifice. He could not say 
 to Claire, the chosen partner of his life: " Be the com- 
 panion of that unfortunate man! " That would be ab- 
 surd. After all, Pierre had only run the chances of 
 war. 
 
 But he, Philip, was he running the frightful risk of 
 becoming blind? He was here, in the shelter of these
 
 186 TALES OF WARTIME FRANCE 
 
 strong walls, breathing the tonic air of the icy mountain 
 peaks, making his muscles flexible for future use, while 
 others were going through agonies on the field of battle. 
 
 He shook his head, wishing to chase away an impor- 
 tunate thought which kept gathering strength in spite 
 of him. Turning, he saw before him the massive moun- 
 tain ridges, heaped up, majestic, wearing like diadems 
 their coldly glittering, bluish-tinted glaciers. 
 
 The clarity of their lines, the pure nudity of the 
 snows which lay on their summits struck him with all 
 the force of a revelation. Under the rays of the setting 
 sun the whole range stood out, severe, commanding, in- 
 domitable. 
 
 He felt, in spite of himself, its imperious grandeur. A 
 mute cry of valour, of intrepidity, came from those 
 jagged peaks. The weakness of the flesh, the tender 
 shrinkings of the heart, counted for nothing in the face 
 of those eternal rocks, which man could not scale with- 
 out torn and bleeding hands. An image of lofty virtue 
 rose out of those snows. 
 
 All-powerful Nature lifted the soul of Philip up to its 
 own height, and the young man could not restrain him- 
 self from evoking in his imagination two men, equally 
 bold, brave and young, of whom one marched on toward 
 life, his hands open to all its realizations, the future 
 ahead of him, love beside him, while the other, without
 
 THE SACRIFICE 187 
 
 a future and without love, remained on the roadway, mo- 
 tionless and silent. 
 
 Then, brusquely, he understood that an inescapable 
 duty had imposed itself on him, just as suffering and 
 death impose themselves inescapably on all of us. 
 Without parleying, without hesitation, he re-entered his 
 room, threw himself in a seat at his table and began to 
 write feverishly: 
 
 " Claire, it is not for me, who, protected in the pres- 
 ent, have all of life ahead of me, to despoil my brother 
 martyr; and whatever pangs I may experience " 
 
 Surely in time of peace this man would not have acted 
 thus. But war justifies all heroic madnesses. Though 
 making some men brutes, it raises many, many others of 
 nobler mould to summits of unselfishness and super- 
 manhood.
 
 A SLACKER WITH A SOUL 
 ANONYMOUS 
 
 Marseilles express had arrived in the station. 
 Franchise hastened along the platform, distancing 
 her chaperon. She caught sight of Jean, who was step- 
 ping off the train. He looked pale and delicate and was 
 carrying a heavy valise. She ran toward him. They 
 clasped hands. 
 
 " Why don't you kiss each other? " exclaimed Fran- 
 goise's attendant, who had joined them. 
 
 A little awkwardly he kissed the young girl's fore- 
 head, without a word. It was she who murmured: 
 
 "My darling fiance!" 
 
 They were hurried along by the crowd. 
 
 Striking in appearance, with her fresh colour, her 
 corsage bouquet of roses, her springy step, Franchise 
 attracted all eyes. She demanded of her companion a 
 thousand details of his voyage. For his part he an- 
 swered in an almost stifled voice. Yes, everything 
 had gone very smoothly. And he cast sidelong 
 glances at her, with an air at once admiring and 
 troubled. 
 
 The chaperon went to look after the baggage.
 
 A SLACKER WITH A SOUL 189 
 
 " Sit on a bench and wait for me," she ordered. 
 
 They seated themselves side by side. But a certain 
 sense of embarrassment separated them. 
 
 " My dear Jean," she asked, " do you still have those 
 torturing thoughts? " 
 
 They looked at each other. What would drive that 
 shadow away? It was her smile that made the young 
 man's face lighten. He murmured: 
 
 " To see you that has already done me so much 
 good." 
 
 Silent for some minutes, they reviewed their long 
 separation. Engaged in July of 1914 and expecting to 
 be married the following October, more than thirty 
 months of torment had intervened. Jean has been 
 nominated professor of the lycee at Constantino, Tunis. 
 Their letters remained the only link between them. 
 
 Exempted for good, Jean still made every effort to get 
 into the army. He was refused again and again. How 
 many examinations he had passed! Accepted finally 
 into the auxiliary force, a bad attack of bronchitis meant 
 for him a definite retirement from military service. 
 
 Oh! The heart-rending letters that Frangoise had re- 
 ceived from him since then! This nervous, impression- 
 able youth had vibrated to the appeal of a country in 
 arms. He had burned to do his part down there among 
 the glorious youth of France. But his wish had been 
 denied.
 
 190 TALES OF WARTIME FRANCE 
 
 He suffered a humiliation and a despair which time 
 did not allay. All his comrades were at the front. That 
 was what caused him the keenest pangs. To his fiancee 
 alone he confided that, not being able to write letters 
 without shame at dating them from a point so far distant 
 from the scene of action, he had dropped all other cor- 
 respondence. She assumed a bantering attitude at first. 
 She refused to take his scruples seriously. That was the 
 worst thing she could do. Presently he avowed to her 
 that he doubted whether he would have the courage to 
 show himself again in her house. She being the daugh- 
 ter of an officer, and her three brothers having gone to 
 the war (one of them fallen in the first campaign and 
 the other two continually exposed) he felt himself un- 
 worthy to enter her family. So he offered to release 
 her from her promise, whatever suffering that release 
 might cost him. 
 
 Her answer came, prompt and comforting. Fran- 
 Qoise told him that she appreciated his delicacy of feel- 
 ing, and his regrets, which she shared with him. But 
 to condemn him, that would be foolish. He a slacker? 
 Nothing of the kind. One must distinguish between 
 those who could not go and those who didn't want to go. 
 In conclusion, she asked him (and her invitation was 
 both urgent and affectionate) to cross the Mediterranean 
 when his next vacation came. They would see each 
 other; they would come to a clearer understanding.
 
 A SLACKER WITH A SOUL 191 
 
 So he had come. 
 
 " The slacker, the slacker at the rear. It is he who 
 makes you persecute yourself," she scolded him gently. 
 "Forget him!" 
 
 In a low voice he thanked her, pressing her hands. 
 But he began again to tell her of his inquietudes of 
 the sense of shame which always pursued him. He 
 questioned whether he could risk making some visits dur- 
 ing his stay in Paris, for fear of being indifferently re- 
 ceived. Might it not happen that women in the street 
 would point their fingers at him? Or might they not 
 abuse him, a civilian of his age wearing neither a rib- 
 bon nor a brassard? And they would be right! A use- 
 less Frenchman! A true parasite on the nation! 
 
 Jean seemed to shrink and shrivel, and his look indi- 
 cated fear of the mob or of robust poilus shouldering 
 him off, to the manifest delight of the public. 
 
 " Oh, be quiet! " repeated Franchise. 
 
 She tried to deny, for his sake, that public opinion was 
 unjust and cruel to that extent. But she did not con- 
 vince him. 
 
 The trunks were identified and they were ready to 
 leave the station. Nonnou, always devoted, volunteered 
 to see the baggage safe home. They two, who had a 
 detour to make (he was going first to greet his mother), 
 decided to take the metro. 
 
 Even in the first class sections seats were scarce at
 
 192 TALES OF WARTIME FRANCE 
 
 this hour. They boarded the train in a crush and could 
 find no places. They were even separated. Jean found 
 himself crowded against a zouave who wore a military 
 medal. He had his arm in a sling and his face encircled 
 with bandages. Thrown against him by a sudden jerk 
 of the car, Jean muttered some excuses, which the zouave 
 answered only with a deep growl. 
 
 Stations succeeded one another. Passengers alighted. 
 There was a seat free. Some one motioned to the 
 wounded man. Jean made way for the other to pass. 
 But in doing so he dropped his cane, over which the 
 zouave stumbled. A general murmur of disapprobation 
 arose. The zouave sank heavily into the seat. 
 
 The compartment gradually emptied. Frangoise, in 
 her turn, was able to get a place beside the wounded man. 
 Jean propped himself against a door, fatigued by his 
 long trip. Another vacant seat. He looked around to 
 see if there was not a poilu, a woman or an old man to 
 whom to offer it. There was none. Discreetly he 
 slipped into it. 
 
 All the interest of the passengers centred in the 
 wounded soldier. A neighbour ventured to engage him 
 in conversation. And he, in a hoarse voice, told about 
 his double wound about his arm, which he could no 
 longer use, and his cheek, shattered by a bullet. 
 
 Jean lowered his eyes. He thought, during the re-
 
 A SLACKER WITH A SOUL 193 
 
 cital, that he discerned something in the attitude of the 
 listeners which was intended as a reproach to him even 
 as a challenge. Frangoise, separated from him, vainly 
 attempted to reassure him by her smiles. Now the poilu 
 grew more excited. He talked of the risks which he had 
 run, of the duty to his country which he had fulfilled. 
 He used one bitter phrase: Ah, if all the rest had only 
 done what he had done! Jean felt himself crushed. 
 
 The zouave stopped talking. Presently, shifting in his 
 seat, he manifested signs of impatience. An idea 
 gripped Jean. His own valise had been slipped by 
 Frangoise under the seat. Maybe it inconvenienced the 
 man? He lifted his eyes. The other glared at him in- 
 solently. Apparently an outburst was imminent. He 
 grew red. What should he answer if attacked? His 
 tongue already froze to the roof of his mouth. 
 
 Jean shuddered. It was coming. 
 
 The zouave stood up and came toward him. He al- 
 ready addressed him: 
 
 "Monsieur! " 
 
 The heavy brows of the man, exposed under his band- 
 age, exaggerated the menacing expression of his face. 
 The scandal which Jean had dreaded so much was about 
 to be precipitated. Mon Dieu, how he regretted having 
 made his voyage to Paris! How he wished himself 
 buried deep under the earth!
 
 194 TALES OF WARTIME FRANCE 
 
 And the poilu, bending over him, fairly shouted at 
 him: 
 
 " In order to accommodate the little lady, I will change 
 places with you, if you wish! "
 
 THE EVOCATION 
 
 ANONYMOUS 
 
 THE chateau, which we reached toward evening, carry- 
 ing with us our friend Urbain, who had a bullet 
 wound in his breast, had suffered but little from the 
 battle. Some shells had smashed the roofs and damaged 
 the portico the result of a short but violent encounter 
 in the park and the adjoining woods. Our zouaves had 
 driven out of the building the staff of a German division. 
 But the Bavarians, the night before, had hastily removed 
 all the rich and costly furniture. We wandered through 
 the empty rooms, and finally I gave orders to set up the 
 stretcher in a salon on the first floor. 
 
 It was a vast salon, done in white, with three tall win- 
 dows, whose window panes were broken, but whose in- 
 side shutters could be closed to keep out the cool air of 
 the night. Bullets had shattered, here and there, the 
 fine Louis XIV mouldings and bits of plaster littered the 
 floor. Nevertheless, the proportions of the room, of 
 its chimney piece and of all its ornamental details were 
 so just and harmonious and the whiteness was of so soft 
 an ivory shade that one felt in it a sensation of tran- 
 195
 
 196 TALES OF WARTIME FRANCE 
 
 quillity, especially after escaping into it from the storm 
 and tumult without. 
 
 In the middle of the room the single piece of furni- 
 ture left intact by some miracle stood a piano, a grand 
 piano, isolated in this white silence like a huge sarcoph- 
 agus in ebony. The brutes had neither carried it away 
 nor demolished it. Seeing it, my heart jumped. I 
 thought of those coffins draped in black which are left 
 in the middle of a room before the body is to be taken 
 away, and I cast a strange glance at poor Lieutenant 
 Urbain, my brother in arms, whom our comrades had 
 deposited in a corner, arranging his improvised couch by 
 the light of a dull lantern. He was livid. His shirt 
 was stained with blood. And I felt myself assailed by 
 a nameless fear as I turned my eyes from the wounded 
 man to the huge instrument in the middle of the room, 
 which looked for all the world like a gloomy, glittering 
 sepulchre. 
 
 We seated ourselves at Urbain 's bedside Lieutenant 
 Fleury and myself resolved to await the arrival of the 
 surgeon-major. Fleury was a big fellow, genial and gay. 
 In civil life he was a composer and a pianist of high repu- 
 tation. At Chateau Thierry, before the departure of our 
 regiment, he delighted our circle by playing the Allied 
 national hymns and all the other martial and patriotic 
 airs which were demanded. For those who loved music 
 he played the classics. But this evening he was as sad
 
 THE EVOCATION 197 
 
 as I was, and as harassed and weary; and he walked past 
 the big piano with a look of indifference. 
 
 The major finally came, examined our friend at length, 
 and took off and replaced the bandages. Then he shook 
 his head. I understood. He led me aside and told me 
 that there was very little hope, but that he would re- 
 main with us, being as well off there as anywhere else, 
 since his next tour of duty at the hospital in the park 
 would not begin until daylight. 
 
 We were then, the three of us, in that vast room, all 
 white and empty, between an inert, wounded man on the 
 one side and, on the other, that huge, black mass, whose 
 presence had from the beginning suggested to my imag- 
 ination something fantastic and fatal. The lantern was 
 placed on one of the corners of the piano. We no longer 
 heard any noises outside. Even the sound of the distant 
 cannonading had died away. 
 
 A certain time passed. We did not sleep, but we re- 
 mained rigid and stupefied. Suddenly we heard Urbain's 
 voice a voice transformed and softened, which seemed 
 to come from a distance. 
 
 "Are you there, Fleury? " 
 
 We were startled. Fleury answered: 
 
 " Yes, I am here with Fresnel and the major. What 
 is it? " 
 
 " Fleury," said Urbain, " listen ! I wish I wish 
 that you would go to the piano and play something."
 
 198 TALES OF WARTIME FRANCE 
 
 " You are foolish, my dear fellow," replied Fleury, 
 forcing an accent of gaiety. " You need to get some 
 sleep. I will play you all the music you want when you 
 are convalescent." 
 
 " I shall never be convalescent. Listen to me ! And 
 you three, all of you, listen to me! I have a fiancee at 
 home, in Anjou. Her name is Fanny. She is pretty, 
 she is good, she is very intelligent. She lives in a cha- 
 teau like this, and in the big, white salon there is a grand 
 piano, just like this one. She plays delightfully on sum- 
 mer evenings. There are three or four of us, and the 
 light is dim. Play for me, Fleury! I shall see her. I 
 shall be again in her house; I shall be with her. Play 
 me something which she plays. I will tell you what to 
 play. Do this for me. You have always been oblig- 
 ing. Do it." 
 
 We shuddered. The major murmured: 
 
 " You may play. There is no hope for him." 
 
 Fleury got up and opened the piano, and Urbain said 
 to him, breathlessly: 
 
 ** Thanks. Come and shake my hand. You are a true 
 friend. Now play the Chopin etude in la you know 
 it, don't you? " 
 
 And in the oppressive silence of this chamber of agony 
 began the strangest and most sinister concert that could 
 be imagined. By the unsteady light of the lantern I 
 saw Fleury's face, very pale and grave. He played as
 
 THE EVOCATION 199 
 
 if he were at prayer as, doubtless, he had never played 
 before in all his life. And little by little the magic of 
 the harmony mastered us. We forgot everything time, 
 place, reality, death. About that piano we were friends 
 assembled for an intimate reunion. 
 
 When the artist had finished, Urbain, from the depths 
 of the shadow, spoke again: 
 
 " I see her. She is here with us. Play again. She 
 knows, as you do, Schumann's ' Papillons.' Don't make 
 a protest, Fleury. Don't tell me that he was a German. 
 He was a pure and sane genius. Let me hear it again, as 
 in Anjou on those summer evenings, before I die. No, 
 don't tell me that I am not going to die. I know it, I 
 feel it. Don't tell me anything, but play " 
 
 And Fleury, trembling, played Schumann's ** Papil- 
 lons." At each pause in the immortal suite of caprices 
 we turned toward our friend. He passed gently into a 
 delirium. We heard him murmur: "Thanks, Fanny; 
 thanks." 
 
 And the force of suggestion in that thought was such 
 that I believed that I saw wander by, wrapped in a sort 
 of penumbra, the white, blonde figure of a young girl. 
 This lasted until the major, who was watching, bent over 
 the couch, turned brusquely around, laid his hand on 
 the shoulder of the pianist, who was still playing, and 
 said in a hoarse voice: 
 
 " Stop ! He cannot hear you now."
 
 200 TALES OF WARTIME FRANCE 
 
 The brilliant arpeggio broke off abruptly in painful 
 silence. Fleury put his elbows on the keyboard. Over- 
 come by grief, by the music and by insomnia, he broke 
 down in a convulsion of sobs and tears. 
 
 THE END
 
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