Love of life, self-esteem, a dislike for bloodshed, and a natural dread of blows kept them from the front. They thought but of one goal: to cling at any price to safety.

I wrote "at any price" on purpose. Several of them boasted they had paid for not being sent to the front. Where, when, how, to whom, I do not know. By what mysterious bribery, by what surrept.i.tious palm-greasing other people will perhaps establish. The truth of such things is not easy to ascertain. I can only state that two officers and a sergeant, belonging to different regiments, told those in whose houses they lodged, one in Laon, the others in Morny and Jouville, that they had paid from 4000 francs to 6000 francs to get leave to keep out of danger's way. Thus they obtained a few months' respite, after which they had to pay again or endanger their lives.

When we were at Jouville, a stout sergeant, nicknamed Tripe, well-nigh died of an apoplectic stroke on hearing he was ordered to go to the front. "I have paid 4000 francs to be exempted from fighting. I thought the war wouldn't last so long! And now I have no money left!" Mad with rage, he dashed his helmet right across the room, and this martial attribute was picked up with its point all awry. As to private soldiers who told their hosts they had acted in the same way, I will not even try to count them, they are too many.

The other officers owned a certain number of qualities in common.

According to the individuals, one of these characteristics eclipsed the others, and the dominant feature helped us to cla.s.sify the fools.

Of the sentimentalists, Herr Mayor was the best specimen. His eyes cast upon the blue sky, he murmured his regrets in a voice broken by tears: "His wife ... so many griefs ... and so many dead ... how dreadful is war! If only we could make a Holy Alliance of the peoples!" I must say that Herr Mayor kept his sensibility in his pocket, and took it out only at dessert. In the discharge of his duties he forgot this faculty completely.

The pompous officers were more entertaining. Such was a certain cavalry officer who at the end of September put up for a few days at M.

Lonet's. His name ended in "ski," he twirled his mustachio after the Polish fashion, and drew himself up most elegantly. Once upon a time he happened to go through the drawing-room, where Genevieve was talking with Mme. Lonet. The surprise sent a thrill through him: "Why! two pretty women! Quick! let us show off!"

And the braggart began to hold forth in praise of Germany.

"Ah! _mesdames_, the emperor is extremely satisfied with the march of our army. Our gallant soldiers laugh at obstacles, and advance as if by miracle."

This speech was made shortly after the battle of the Marne.

Unfortunately the hearers, as well as the orator, were unacquainted with the event, which, had they known of it, would have given yet more meaning to the gentleman's discourse.

The same _Rittmeister_ could not refrain from delivering high-sounding addresses to all whom he met. In case of need he even fell back on the man who split the wood or the maid of all work. "Have you seen," he would say, "have you seen our splendid Imperial Guard? Have you noticed the gait of our soldiers? Do you know that no troops in the world are to be compared with them?" And for a revictualling cart that rattled by, for a soldier's shirt drying on a hedge, he would pour forth his soul in dithyrambs on Germany's greatness, invincibility, and might. You will think, no doubt, that the first and foremost soldier of the Prussian army, the supreme chief of our enemy, would take his place, not without the radiance of a star, among his _confreres_ of pomposity.

Another pompous talker, a sub-lieutenant and former law student, lodged in the spring of 1915 at Mme. Lantois'. He set up for a linguist, and wanted us to believe he knew French better than we. Once I brought him a demand-note to sign. He carped at a word I used. I tried to defend my prose, but he stopped me with a motion of his hand:

"I know the word and how to use it."

I had nothing to do but hold my tongue, so I did, like one thunderstruck. Unfortunately the eloquent rascal took it into his head to turn his stay in France to account. Are we to suppose he thought he would thus acquire a few niceties of speech of which he was ignorant?

n.o.body knows. But he was often to be seen seated in the big kitchen, devoutly listening to the conversation of the workers, to the stories of the old people of the farm, to whom Mme. Lantois spoke sharply when they lingered too long. The lieutenant knew how to listen, how to learn, how to remember what he heard. For one day we heard him say, thumping his fist on the table:

"Je savions ce que je disions!"

Among our guests were a great many sybarites. Is Barbu's love of creature comforts still remembered? And the many cushions necessary to uphold his person? Can you imagine that some of them, before choosing their room, felt the elasticity of the mattresses, tried the softness of the blankets, inspected the fineness of the sheets? Are the nice afternoon-naps already forgotten?

"We are at war! but that is no reason to give up comfort. Let us have carpets and cushions, wadding and down! We are sybarites!"

The category, to which we come now, the brutes, is the most scandalously celebrated. The present war has been its triumph. I must say we never saw these gentlemen at their best, such as they showed themselves in a.s.saults, in pillage, in ma.s.sacre, in arson. We did see them as brutes in their treatment of a peaceful, submissive, terrified population,--brutes who thought they had drawn in their claws. Bouillot, for instance, was a beautiful specimen of the kind, but we saw many another. For instance, there was the hero, who had a small boy of Jouville bound fast to a post during an icy cold afternoon. There was that other who knocked down the shepherd-boy of Aulnois, and gave him a good horse-whipping. The poor boy had gone beyond the frontier of the commune with his cattle:

"What am I to do?" he said. "My master's meadow is in Vivaise. I must feed my flock, and at the office they won't give me a pa.s.s. They say I don't want one to go those few steps."

I should never finish telling the high deeds of those scoundrels, and I have still to sing the praises of the revellers. They were many in number, and I think more dangerous than the rest. They came to France, allured by the depravity they attributed to us, and it was they who brought to us their vices, particularly those exclusive to their race, on which I had rather not insist. No doubt they thought that they would do a pious work in helping to pervert a country which they hated. Be that as it may, they eagerly exerted themselves to this end, and did their best to transform the country behind the front into a vast brothel. Of course such creatures had not the least respect for the house which sheltered them. An old lady in Morny was deeply shocked at being forced to provide two fast girls of Laon with lodging and board for some days, and many a country house, which had never looked upon other than peaceful scenes, was scared at revels, the noise of which made the very window-panes tremble.

Bubenpech was a remarkably vicious specimen. A bottle of champagne was never emptied in the province without his presence. He was at every feast, he took part in every rejoicing; he rarely came home before two or three o'clock in the morning. He had a pretty taste in wine and nice dinners. Besides, he looked upon himself as Don Juan, and expected every one to yield to him. No thought hindered his caprices. One day he asked a young girl publicly to come and see him in his rooms. Another day we saw him towards dusk kiss two loose girls in the open street. To be at perfect liberty, he sent to prison, under some pretence or another, a man whose daughter he was paying court to. He inscribed, among the women inspected by the police, the name of a young girl who, though not very respectable, had done no harm but reject his advances. With real Gallic humour our good villagers were careful to catalogue the great deeds of our guests, chiefly when heroines from the other side of the Rhine came upon the scene.

One Sunday morning, about ten o'clock, there appeared at our house a little German nurse of the Red Cross, dark-haired, smart, and--a fact hardly to be believed--pretty; but the lady had a peevish air--an air only.

"Lieutenant Bubenpech?"

"Out."

With all possible speed the orderly went to fetch the officer. Bubenpech came back as fast as he could, shut himself up with the little dame, and did not move until four o'clock in the afternoon, forgetful of his lunch. And the orderly, who timidly presented himself for duty, was roughly sent away from the closed door.

"Oh," said Mme. Valaine, shocked, "such impudence! in my house!"

The neighbours made jokes and watched the door. They even laid wagers: they will come out; they won't. At last the couple came out, and disappeared on foot towards Laon.

A moment after a murmur was heard:

"What does it mean?"

To show his disregard of decency, Bubenpech had thrown his window wide open before going out. And now the whole village gathered about our windows and jeered at the shameless disorder of the room and bed.

So, while some officers clearly belonged to such and such a category, they all possessed to a certain degree the qualities peculiar to the other cla.s.ses. But there were real mongrels among them. For instance, you can imagine for yourself a sentimental-fine-talker and a sybarite-who-cared-for-his-skin or a brutish-reveller. And there was a sameness in all, a family resemblance. Prussian militarism, hypocrisy, and haughtiness were smeared over them all like a thick coat of paint.

All showed an extreme satisfaction with their own race and person. In short, you have but to scratch the Prussian to find the barbarian.

Should an opportunity offer, or even no opportunity, they can all be unreasonable, harsh, unrelenting.

These gentlemen enjoyed themselves.

In a physical sense, you can easily picture to yourself those revellers.

They were not handsome--at least we never came across one we thought handsome, in spite of our efforts to be impartial. Save Bouillot, we never saw a very tall one. They were either long and threadlike, or short and fat. Those who thought they had a look of Apollo you might reproach with thick wrists and ankles, large hips, and heavy feet. Most of them had shapely hands, and very often well-kept nails. Their features were unpleasing from being shockingly irregular or freezingly regular; their hard eyes belied the false kindness of their smile. At a distance, their stiff and starched gait, their mechanical movement; at close quarters, their voice, their smell, their whole being made us bristle with hostility. For a trifle we would have snarled at them like a dog, and every day their presence lay heavier on our hearts.

Their smell! Some people deny its reality. Let them go to the North of France! When you have lodged Prussian officers--very clean people, no doubt--you may air the room eight days running, and it will not lose the smell _sui generis_ which impregnates it, and every inhabitant of the village, from the Mayor down to the smallest child, would turn up his nose on entering the room, and say:

"Faugh! it smells of Prussians here!"

Such as they were, the gentlemen amused themselves. Some maintained even that they made conquests. I am touching here on a very delicate subject--the relations between the invaders and the women of the invaded countries. There has been much talk of rape. Compared with the crimes committed in Belgium and in Lorraine, the misdeeds we shall mention are but little things. To be sure, there were rapes, but, thanks be to G.o.d, they were few, and they took place at the beginning of the invasion, chiefly after the Germans' retreat on the Marne. In Jouville I heard many a sad story. There was the story of a young woman of Chevregny who went mad after her misfortune, and of several old women too. For, hardly credible as it seems, old women often fell victims to acts of violence, because they lacked agility to run away. At Braye, several soldiers fell upon a woman of eighty, knocked her down, and beat her most unmercifully. At Chamouille, in October 1914, a few women were living in a cellar, frightened to death. "One evening," one of them told me, "we heard a loud cry; there was a falling of stones, and a young woman tumbled down into the cellar through a sh.e.l.l-hole. Thus she escaped from her pursuers, but her companion, an old woman of sixty-eight, fell defenceless into the hands of the filthy fellows."

Ah, we had many proofs of the respect the Germans have for old age!

A woman of Cerny, eighty-seven years old, small and white-haired, with red eyes and a shaking head, told us how she had left her lodging. "I had a small bundle of clothes ready lying on the table. But the soldiers did not allow me to go in and take it; they beat me. As I didn't go--I had money, too, in my bundle--they forced me to go; they all flocked around me, they were twelve, and ... how am I to say it?..." In short, the twelve rascals had driven the poor old woman out of her house by directing towards her that which a famous statue innocently eternises in Brussels. Stripped of her spare clothes and money, filthy, disgusted at what she had seen, the unhappy woman had to go to a neighbour to beg for a bodice and a petticoat, that she might cast away her soiled clothes.

When the Germans settled themselves upon us, these feats of the satyr were no longer common. Here and there evil deeds were still spoken of, and a doctor of the neighbourhood told us in the spring of 1915 that nearly every week there was an act of violence. I must confess that many a woman was the victim of her own imprudence. When you have lived all your life in a quiet village, among kind people, you have some difficulty in believing that you must be on your guard for months together, that you are for ever surrounded with brutes. So more than one villager had reason to regret having gone alone to the forest, or having persisted in living in a lonely house.

But the systematic brutalities, the collective a.s.saults, which marked the beginning, were no longer known. The method had changed. There were acts of violence which were no less terrible for being moral. In many a village whose inhabitants suffered hunger, the children were provided with bread and soup. Yes, but this privilege was reserved for the children whose mothers showed themselves complaisant towards the soldiers. And these women accepted dishonour, because they could not bear to see their little ones pine away and die, while others could not withstand the troubles and vexations that lay in store for good women.

A cry of reprobation and horror arose when we heard that the conduct of all women was not blameless. In the first place there were the women of the lowest cla.s.s. Even Boule de suif herself would have been tamed after daily relations with the German soldiers. Of course a few black sheep are a disgrace to the flock, and I can fancy women-haters shrugging their shoulders in scorn when they hear of this.

Gently, sir--a truce to jeering. More than one person wearing a beard gave abundant proof of an equal complaisance. Alas, traitors were to be found among us. For instance, there were those who welcomed the Germans with a smile, and revealed to them the resources of the place. There were those, the foulest of all, who denounced French soldiers hidden in the woods or those who fed the fugitives. There were those who, for a little money or food, pointed out the hiding-places of his neighbours, and thus surrendered to the enemy wine, grain, potatoes, even money and jewels. But I am pleased to say that such despicable wretches were rare, and on the whole the population was proud and dignified, and opposed to the invaders' dishonesty a solid brotherhood, which no troubles, no persecutions could lessen or fatigue. And yet we led a grievous life; the Germans seemed to aim at making it as hard as possible, while theirs was as merry as can be.

The winter had been painful, but the summer was still more so. We had less liberty and less food. We were allowed to leave the place we lived in but three times a week, and on stated days. Besides, we had to ask for a pa.s.s two days beforehand, and pay seventy-five centimes for it when it was granted, which was not always the case. It was almost impossible to go to the country from Laon, and for weeks together n.o.body was allowed to leave the town. One day pa.s.sports had been freely given to the people, tradesmen mostly who went to Marle to buy raw sugar--a yellowish sticky substance with a taste of glue--and a little b.u.t.ter, precious goods that were still to be found there in small quant.i.ties.

They all came back furious. At different points of the road, level-crossings, outskirts of villages, they had all been arrested.

Men and women had been then entirely stripped of their garments, and searched according to rule. Nurses of the Red Cross and soldiers showed equal zeal in the task, which had a practical object--the gathering of all gold and even silver coins of five francs which pockets and purses might contain. The sum seized, it must be said, was replaced by notes of the Reichsbank.

The victims thought the joke a very bad one, and I am sure Thomas of Marle's bones must have turned in his grave. To think that on this n.o.bleman's own territory soldiers arrested and robbed the pa.s.sers-by, and he not there to help! And, what is worse, the aggressors were German troopers, and the victims good and loyal French citizens! What does your shade regret, O famous plunderer? To be unable to fight for your countrymen, or to have no share in the robbery?

I need not say that after that no gold pieces ever ventured out on the roads.

A pa.s.s also was necessary to go out into the country, and you were expected to have an ident.i.ty card in your pocket if you but stood on your threshold. All papers had to be renewed every fortnight.