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Notes from a French Village in the War Zone

The Permissionaire

Vignettes from Life at the Rear

A Fair Exchange

The Refugee

A Little Kansas Leaven

Eyes for the Blind

The First Time After

Hats

A Honeymoon ... Vive l'Am?rique!

La Pharmacienne

HOME FIRES IN FRANCE

NOTES FROM A FRENCH VILLAGE IN THE WAR ZONE

Perhaps the first thing which brought our boys to a halt, and a long, long look around them, was the age of the place. Apparently it has--the statement is hardly exaggerated--always been there. As a matter of historical fact it has been there for more than a thousand years. On hearing that, the American boys always gasped. They were used to the conception of the great age of "historical" spots, by which they meant cities in which great events have occurred--Paris, Rome, Stratford-on-Avon, Granada. But that an inconsiderable settlement of a thousand inhabitants, where nothing in particular ever happened beyond the birth, life, and death of its people, should have kept its identity through a thousand years gave them, so they said, "a queer feeling." As they stood in the quiet gray street, looking up and down, and taking in the significance of the fact, one could almost visibly see their minds turning away from the text-book idea of the Past as an unreal, sparsely settled period with violent historical characters in doublet and ruff or chain mail thrusting broadswords into one another or signing treaties which condemned all succeeding college students to a new feat of memory; you could almost see their brilliant, shadowless, New World youth deepened and sobered by a momentary perception of the Past as a very long and startlingly real phenomenon, full, scaringly full of real people, entirely like ourselves, going about the business of getting born, being married and dying, with as little conscious regard as we for historical movements and tendencies. They were never done marveling that the sun should have fallen across Crouy streets at the same angle before Columbus discovered America as to-day; that at the time of the French Revolution just as now, the big boys and sturdy men of Crouy should have left the same fields which now lie golden in the sun and have gone out to repel the invader; that people looked up from drawing water at the same fountain which now sparkles under the sycamore trees and saw Catherine de Medici pass on her way north as now they see the gray American Ambulance rattle by.... "And I bet it was over these same cussed hard-heads!" cried the boy from Ohio, trying vainly to ease his car over the knobby paving-stones.

"No, oh no," answered the town notary reasonably. "The streets of Crouy were paved in comparatively recent times, not earlier than 1620."

"Oh, the Pilgrim Fathers!" cried the boy from Connecticut.

"And nothing ever happened here all that time?" queried the boy from California incredulously.

"Nothing," said the notary, "except a great deal of human life."

"Gee! what a lot o' that!" murmured the thoughtful boy from Virginia, his eyes widening imaginatively.

Of course you know the obvious answer. The people who till the fields all live in the villages. If you inhabit such a settlement you hear every morning, very, very early, the slow, heavy tread of the big farm-horses and the rumble of the huge two-wheeled carts going out to work, and one of the picturesque sights of the sunset hour is the procession of the powerful Percherons, their drivers sitting sideways on their broad backs, plodding into the village, both horses and farmers with an inimitable air of leisurely philosophy; of having done a good day's work and letting it go at that; of attempting no last nervous whack at the accumulated pile of things to be done which always lies before every one; with an unembittered acceptance of the facts that there are but twenty-four hours in every day and that it is good to spend part of them eating savory hot soup with one's family. According to temperament, this appearance, only possible, apparently, when you have lived a thousand years in the same place, enormously reposes or enormously exasperates the American observer.

You do not see the cows going out to pasture, or coming back at night through the village streets, because those farmers who have a dairy live on the outskirts of the town, with their big square courtyards adjacent to the fields. The biggest farmhouse of this sort in Crouy is lodged in the remnants of the medieval castle of the old seigneurs where at night the cows ramble in peaceably through the old gate where once the portcullis hung, and stand chewing their cud about the great courtyards whence marauding knights in armor once clattered out to rob.

Of course this arrangement whereby country folk all live in villages turns inside out and upside down most of those conditions which seem to us inevitable accompaniments of country life; for instance, the isolation and loneliness of the women and children. There is no isolation possible here, when, to shake hands with the woman of the next farm, you have only to lean out of your front window and have her lean out of hers, when your children go to get water from the fountain along with all the other children of the region, when you are less than five minutes' walk from church and the grocery-store, when your children can wait till the school-bell is ringing before snatching up their books to go to school.

"But if they are country-people who live in these dry-looking villages," asked our American Ambulance boys, "what makes them huddle up so close together and run the houses into one long wall of buildings that look like tenement-houses? Why don't they have nice front yards like ours, with grass and flowers, and people sitting on the front porch, enjoying life? You can go through village after village here and never see a thing but those ugly, stony streets and long, high, stone walls, and bare, stony houses, and never a soul but maybe an old woman with a gunny sack on her back, or a couple of kids lugging water in a pail."

The best answer to that was to open the door into our own bare, stone house, which, like all the others on the street, presented to the public eye an unalluring, long, gray-white, none-too-clean plastered wall, broken by square windows designed for utility only. The big door opening showed a stone-paved corridor leading straight to what seemed at first glance an earthly Paradise of green; an old, old garden with superb nut-trees, great flowering bushes, a bit of grass, golden graveled paths, and high old gray walls with grapevines and fruit-trees carefully trained against them.

Our American visitor stared about him with dazzled eyes. "What a heavenly place! But who ever would have guessed such a garden was in Crouy!"

"Oh, but this is not one of the really good gardens of the town," we assured him. "This is a poor old neglected one compared with those all around us."

At this we invited him upstairs to a lofty window at the back of the house, leaning from which he had a totally new view of the town whose arid gray streets he had traversed so many times. Back of every one of these gray-white, monotonously aligned plastered houses stretched a garden, often a very large one, always a jewel, gleaming, burnished, and ordered, with high old trees near the house, and flowers and vines; and, back of this pleasure spot, a great fertile stretch of well-kept vegetables and fruit. He stared long, our American, reconstructing his ideas with racial rapidity. On withdrawing his head his first comment was, usually:

"But for the Lord's sake, how ever do they get the money to pay for building all those miles of huge stone walls? It must cost every family a fortune."

Upon learning that those walls had stood exactly there in those very lines for hundreds of years, requiring only to be periodically kept in repair, he sank into another momentary reconstructive meditation.

Then came the inevitable American challenge, the brave new note from the New World which I always rejoiced to hear:

Of course I always went duly through the orthodox historical and social explanations. I pointed out that it was only in comparatively late times--only since that very recent event the French Revolution or the beginning of our life as a nation--that isolated houses in the fields would have been safe; that up to that time people were obliged to huddle together inside the walls of a town at night as a safeguard against having their throats cut; that an age-old habit of apprehension and precaution leaves ineradicable marks on life; and that it still seems entirely natural for French people to conceal their gardens behind ten-foot stone walls with broken bottles on top, although for generations the community life has been as peaceful as that of any drowsy New England village. But, having given this academic explanation, I went on to hazard a guess that age-old habits of fear leave behind them more than material marks, like stone walls and broken bottles. They shape and form human minds into tastes and preferences and prejudices, the uncourageous origin of which the owners of the minds are far from divining.

"You know," I said to our boy from home, "they can't understand our open villages with no fences or walls, with everybody's flowers open to everybody's view, with our pretty girls showing their fresh summer dresses and bright, sweet faces to the chance passerby as well as to the selected few who have the countersign to enter. They can't understand it, and they don't try to, for they don't like it. They don't like our isolated houses. They, like all Europeans, apparently like the feeling of having neighbors near so that they can enjoy shutting them out. They say they like the feeling of 'being all to themselves'; they have a passion for 'privacy' which often seems to mean keeping desirable things away from other people; they can't see how we endure the 'staring eyes of strangers.'"

At this point I was usually interrupted by the boy from home who cried out hotly:

On which proposition we always cordially shook hands.

"Yes," I said sadly, "it does, a little."

Oh, Europe, Europe! seductive old Europe, ever up to thine old game of corrupting the fresh candor of invading barbarians!

Dear boy from home!

Then we went downstairs and visited our modest establishment, typical in a small way of all those about us, and although made up of the same essential features as those of a small American town home, differing in a thousand ways.

"Why, there are apples on this hedge, real apples!" said the American. "Who ever heard of apples on a little low hedge plant?"

The rabbit-hutches being near the kitchen, we usually went next into that red-and-white-tiled room, with the tiny coal-range with the immense open hearth and the portable charcoal-stove, primitive, universal implement.

"But you can't bake your bread in such a play-stove as that," commented the American.

This is usually a low stone building, with an open place in the roof, either covered with glass or open to the air. In the center is a big pool of water, constantly renewed, which gushes in clean and eddies out soapy, carrying with it the impurities of the village linen. Here our housewife finds an assortment of her friends and neighbors, and here she kneels in the open air, in her straw-filled box, and soaps, and beats, and rinses, and scrubs at the spots with her scrubbing-brush , and at the same time hears all the talk of the town, gets whatever news from the outer world is going the rounds, jokes and scolds, sympathizes and laughs, sorrows with and quarrels with her neighbors,--gets, in short, the same refreshing and entire change from the inevitable monotony of the home routine which an American housewife of a more prosperous class gets in her club meeting, and which the American housewife of the same class gets, alas! almost never.

And, yes, the clothes are clean! I know it runs counter to all our fixed ideas and what we are taught in domestic-science classes. I don't pretend to explain it but the fact remains that clothes soaped and beaten and rinsed in cold water, boiled in a boiler over the open fire and dried on the grass, are of the most dazzling whiteness. It is just another wholesome reminder that there are all kinds of ways to kill a cat, and that our own, natural and inevitable as it seems to us, may not even be the most orthodox.

Another such reminder is the fashion in which they manage baths in Crouy. There are not any bathrooms in the houses, nor in the one little inn. And yet the people take plenty of baths, and in big porcelain bathtubs too, bigger and deeper and fuller of hot water than those we have in our houses.

"Yes, of course I prefer a bathtub in my own house. Everybody would. But suppose I haven't money enough to have one? At home, in a town like this, you can only get a bath, or give it to your children, if you have capital enough to buy, install, and keep up a bathroom of your own. Here you can have an even better one, any time you can spare fifteen cents in cash. Which method produces the bigger area of clean skin in a given community?"

You usually end your colloquy by quoting to yourself, laughingly, the grandly American-minded remark of the boy from Illinois, whose reaction to the various eye-openers about him was thus formulated:

"Do you know, the thing we want to do at home is to keep all the good ways of doing this we've got already, and then add all the French ones too."

We laughed over the youthful self-confidence of that ambition, but, as the boy from Illinois would say, "Honestly, do you know, there is something in it."

A large room at the side has been fitted up--oh, so long before domestic science "struck" America--as a kitchen, and here the little girls daily prepare their own luncheons, after having, turn by turn, done the marketing and made up their small accounts under the supervision of an expert teacher. Their rosy cheeks and bright eyes testify to the good training which their own mothers received in this very room, in these very essentials of life.

The gracious, gray-haired owner of the beautiful home has always been so busy with her school and workroom that she almost never runs into Paris, although she is not more than a couple of hours away.

"I've only been there five or six times in my life," she says, shaking her head in mocking contrition, and turning superb old rings around on her soft, wrinkled hands. She adds, with a pretty whimsical smile: "To tell the truth, it bores me awfully when I do go. I have so much to see to here, that I'm uneasy to be away."

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