My Home in the Field of Honor Part 13

St. Quentin! Then the Germans were on our soil! The Belgians were right--they were evidently advancing rapidly. But why worry? We were safe as long as we had the French army between us and them.

Thought as yet the day was but a couple of hours old, I was weary. This business of hotel-keeping on so large it scale with so little a.s.sistance was beginning to tell on my strength. I opened the gate and told George and Leon to welcome any who wished to come in, and then repairing to the kitchen, I sat down and began helping the others prepare vegetables. The discovery that in spite of all their good will guests had necessarily left many traces of their pa.s.sage, brought me to my feet again, and we were all hard at work when a haggard female face looked in at the kitchen window.

"Is there a doctor here?"

"No,--but--"

The woman burst into tears. Madame Guix and I hurried out into the court. "My baby--I can't seem to warm her," moaned the poor mother.

"She hasn't eaten anything since yesterday."

And stretching out her arms, the woman showed us an infant that she had been carrying in her ap.r.o.n. It was dead.

I had difficulty in overcoming my emotion, but Madame Guix took the poor little corpse into her arms, and I helped the mother to an arm chair in the refectory.

A cup of strong coffee brought back a little color to her wan cheeks and she told us she was from Charleville. The Taubes had got in their sinister work to good advantage among the civil population but they were merely the forerunners of another and heavier bombardment. The townspeople had fled in their night clothes.

"Are you alone?"

"Yes--I'm not a native of Charleville. My husband and I have only been married a year. He left the second of August and the baby was born the tenth. She's only three weeks old."

No wonder the mother looked haggard--one hundred and fifty miles on foot, with a newborn infant in her arms, fleeing for her life before the barbarous hordes!

I pressed another cup of coffee with a drop of brandy in it upon her.

She looked appealingly at both of us and then drank.

"Was your husband good to you?" asked Madame Guix.

"Ah, yes, Madame."

"Do you love him well enough to endure another sacrifice like a true wife and mother that you are?"

"Yes."

And then we told her that her baby bad gone--gone to a brighter Country where war is unknown. She looked at us in amazement, and burying her head on her arm, sobbed silently but submissively.

"Come, come, you must sleep--and when you are rested we will help you to find room in a cart which will take you towards your parents."

She cast a long, loving look at her first born, and let herself be led away.

All we could do was to make an official declaration of the death at the town hall. A small linen sheet served as shroud, a clean, flower-lined soap box formed that baby's coffin, and Greorge and I were the grave diggers and chief mourners, who laid the tiny body at rest in the little vine-grown churchyard. War willed it thus.

When I got back from the cemetery I found another load of refugees installed in the courtyard. This time they proved to be a hotel keeper and her servants from the Ardennes. They, however, had foreseen that flight was imminent and had carefully packed a greater part of their household belongings and valuables onto several wagons, taking care that all were well balanced and properly loaded so as to carry the maximum weight without tiring the horses. They needed less attention than the others had required, for when I explained that the house was theirs, they went about their work swiftly and silently, getting in no one's way and attending to every want of their mistress, who sat in her coupe and gave orders.

Later on they were joined by the occupants of numerous other equipages, all from the same district--but with whom I had but little intercourse.

From one poor woman, however, I learned that her two daughters, aged sixteen and seventeen, had been lost from the party for two days. They were in the cart with the curate who had stopped to water his horse, thus losing his place in line. When they had reached the spot where the road forked, which direction had he taken? What had become of them? She pinned her name and route on the refectory wall, begging me to give it to them if they ever inquired for her. To my knowledge they never pa.s.sed.

At luncheon Madame Guix announced that Yvonne was better. Far from well, but better. That was a load off my mind.

The mother of the poor little infant we had buried was peacefully slumbering on a cot in the hospital, and presently Leon came in to say that old Cesar had put his hoof on the ground for the first time in four days. Bravo! I felt much relieved.

And still the carts rolled down the valley, their noise echoing between the hills. To-day there was no respite: right on through the heat of noon they rumbled past, thicker and faster it seemed to me.

"Bother them!" I thought. "They make so much noise that we couldn't hear the cannon if it were only a mile distant." And hoping that perhaps I might seek some a.s.surance from that sound, I was about to set off for the highest spot in the park to listen. At the door, however, I was accosted by one of the two men who, for several days had been bundling my hay in the stable lofts. He pleaded illness. Would I pay him and let him go? He would come back to-morrow and finish if he felt better.

As there was nothing unusual in his request, I settled his account and told him to go and rest. I now know that he was a German spy, and have recently learned that a fortnight later he was caught and shot at Villers-Cotterets.

I wonder what possessed me to make that long weary climb. Evidently I found out what I wanted to know, but the news was anything but rea.s.suring. I heard the cannon distinctly: so distinctly that I was a trifle unnerved. Not only had my ears caught the long ever-steady rolling (already observed three days since) but I had been able to make out a difference in the caliber of each piece that fired, and added to it all was a funny clattering sound, as when one drags a wooden stick along an iron barred fence. _La Fere_ is putting up a heroic defense, I thought, blissfully unconscious of the fact that it is utterly impossible to hear a cannon at that distance--at half, no, even a quarter of that distance. Judge then for yourselves what was its proximity to Villiers!

For two days now the course in nursing had been abandoned, not for lack of enthusiasm but because each housewife had more than she could attend to at home. The chateau was not the only place where refugees halted, and all the villagers had done their best to make the travelers comfortable. From where I stood overlooking the two valleys, I could see the interminable line of carts on all roads within scope of my view, and in every farm yard as well as on the side of the main thoroughfares, vehicles were drawn up and thin columns of blue smoke rising heavenward, told that the evening meal was under way.

The population of my own courtyard had quadrupled by five o'clock.

People from St. Quentin, Ternier, Chauny--each with a tale of horror and sorrow--sought refuge for the night. Madame Guix was permanently established in the dispensary, and a line was formed as in front of the city clinics, each one waiting his turn, hoping that she might be able to relieve his suffering. At dusk a cart turned into the drive and a gray-haired man asked if we had a litter on which to carry his son to the house.

"What was the matter?" I inquired.

"A cough--such a bad cough."

I went with him towards the wagon, and there beheld the sad spectacle of a youth in the last stages of tuberculosis. Thin beyond description, a living skeleton, the poor boy turned his great gla.s.sy eyes towards me in supplication. I drew the father aside. It was best to be frank. I shook my head and said it would be useless to move his son. We had no doctor, and his illness was beyond our competence. Cover him well, and try to reach a big city as soon as possible.

As I turned away, a st.u.r.dy youth tapped me gently on the arm, begging shelter for his great-grandmother, a woman ninety-three years old, whom he had carried on his back all the way from St. Quentin. A cot in the entrance hall was all prudence permitted me to offer, and it was charming to see how tenderly the young fellow bore the poor little withered woman to her resting-place. She was so dazed that I fear she hardly realized what was happening, but tears of grat.i.tude streamed down her cheeks when her boy appeared with a bowl of hot soup, coaxing her to drink, like a child, and finally curling up on the rug beside her bed.

Five times that evening the great refectory table was surrounded by hungry men and women; five times I ladled out soup and vegetables to forty persons, and five times we all helped to wash up. So when all was finally cleaned away, and Madame Guix and I fell exhausted onto two kitchen chairs, it was well onto eleven P. M.

My clever nurse informed me that she had arranged for the departure in a cart of the mother whose baby we had buried, and I in turn told her of my climb in the park and the approach of the cannon. It was evident that the Germans were bearing down on us, and swiftly. When we looked at the map and saw the names of the cities, towns and villages whose populations had succeeded each other down the road, it was clear that the French must be beating a forced retreat, or (and this was unlikely) panic had spread so quickly that the whole north of France was now moving south on a fool's errand. We cast this second hypothesis aside.

We had heard too many tales of woe and seen too much misery to believe anything of the sort. Well, and then what? Our case was simple--either the Germans would be stopped before they reached us, or the French army would put in an appearance, in which latter case it would be time enough to leave, unless we were officially evacuated before! Having adopted this simple line of conduct, we retired, quite satisfied and not in the least uneasy.

In the cool gray dawn of Wednesday morning, September second, when I opened my shutters and looked out into the little square that faces the chateau, I was amazed to see that the refugees who had halted there were in carts and wagons whose signs were most familiar. They came from Soissons!

"h.e.l.lo," thought I, "I'll go and see what they have to say! Things must be getting very bad if a big city like Soissons suddenly takes to its heels." (Soissons is but little over twenty miles from Villiers.) As I came down stairs I heard the drum roll, and George, who just then appeared with the milk, announced that the requisition of horses which should have taken place at Chateau-Thierry that morning, was indefinitely postponed. That was hardly rea.s.suring, especially as it was the first official news we had received in a long time.

So busy were we helping those who had slept at the chateau to depart, that I had no time to put my first intentions into execution, and when finally I had a moment, I looked out of the window and saw that my friends from Soissons had vanished. They, too: well, well, well!

I was not astonished; in fact I gave the matter but little heed. We had taken our resolutions the night before and had no time to stop every five minutes and question as to whether we were right or wrong. At noon, however, when an old peasant woman called me through the kitchen window and announced that all Charly was leaving post haste, I must admit that I winced, but only for a second. If I had listened to all the different rumors that had been noised abroad within the last week I would have been a fit subject for a lunatic asylum by then!

Resolved, however, to get at the core of the matter, I sent George to Charly (our market town, four miles away) to see what he could find out.

He returned on his bicycle at luncheon time, bearing the following astonis.h.i.+ng information.

The hotel keeper and his wife, alarmed by the arrival of the Soissonais, had taken their auto and started for that city in quest of news.

They had returned an hour later, having been unable to pa.s.s Oulchy-le-Chateau, fifteen miles from Charly, where all the bridges were cut or blown up! They were making their preparations for departure.

"And," continued George, in an excited tone, "as I came past the _Gendarmerie_ the _brigadier_ called to me and said good-bye. All the _gendarmes_ had received orders to leave at once for their depot at--."

(The name of some town the other side of the Marne, which I cannot remember.)

Instead of frightening me this information stimulated my nerves, which were beginning to be depressed by much work and little news.

"Good," I said. "Now then, we can expect the soldiers at any minute.

Poke up the fire, Julie, and we'll fall to work to have hot soup ready when our boys arrive."