Chapter VIII: Part II: “On les aura” (4)

The War had been full of surprises--had been one great catastrophic surprise, since its declaration, and had kept up its pyrotechnic suddenness of change through all its four years. But the change that extinguished it outdid all else in strangeness. Late in October, the inhabitants of the château and the farm had heard the familiar sound of twelve-inch shells falling in Dunkirk, and never dreamed that they were never to hear that sound again. All day the roads and rail had been busy with French and English troops. They had halted in and around Hondebecq and passed on. The inhabitants of the farm and the château little dreamed that no more were to pass that way. The days and nights became quieter and ever more strangely quiet. There was a continual tension of the ear to catch that familiar rat-tat-tat, swish, boom. No sound came. Then, early in gray November, Jacobs and the Baron returned earlier than usual from their eternal cycling tour. In all the cellars of Hazebrouck, in all the hastily contrived, already-forgotten “strong points” in the area, they had not found one unburied mule, one neglected latrine. Or Jacobs had forgotten to take map references, for both were excited. Instead, they bent over a day-old English paper, that pretended to have the terms of the Armistice.

At first it was mere meaningless words. Nothing happened. The daily life of Hondebecq did not change. But soon a phenomenon was observed. Up the solid gray pavé road that Napoleon built from Lille to Dunkirk, along which the victorious armies of mid-October had advanced, there flowed, in the opposite direction, another human stream. No army this, and nothing victorious about it, though here and there a dirty old hat, or wonderfully made, decrepit wheelbarrow was decorated with the flags of the Allies, bought from Germans who had been selling them during the last weeks in the French industrial area. By one and two, here a family, there an individual with a dog, all those civilians who had been swept within the German lines in the offensives of 1914 or 1918, were walking home. Such a home-coming surely never was since misery began. Doré used to picture such events in his illustrations to the Bible, but no one has even seen the like in reality. For censors had been strict, and the line of trenches where the Allies had fronted the Germans unpassable. Many a man of the Flemish border, or the Somme downs, had hoped to find his house or his field spared, and had to go to look himself in order to be finally disillusioned. Madeleine, superintending the cleaning of the fields, the weed burning, and autumn plowing, saw them come incuriously, not able to realize that even she, who had seen the whole War through, with the trenches only just beyond the sight of her eyes and never out of her hearing, had only now to begin to learn what it really had been.

She left the veterans and the mules, busy in the fields, and stood, for a few moments, on the edge of the pavé, where the by-road to the farm left it, watching the melancholy procession. True, some were laughing, or greeted her with a cheer, but the general impression of those pinched faces and anxious eyes, above worn and filthy clothes, gave a better idea than any historian will ever do, of the rigors of the blockade. Madeleine gained from the sight just her first inkling of the irreparable loss, that was to weigh upon the lifetime of her generation. War, the Leviathan, was giving up that which it had swallowed, but there was no biblical jubilation in them, none of those sharp terrors that, in scripture, foretell everlasting joy. Madeleine, better than any Bible-reading Protestant, comprehended. These poor souls (as she called them to herself, pityingly, for they had been “caught out,” a defect she did not admit) had now got to work to catch up the wastage. A bright chance for most of them!

She returned to the farm, and now, finally convinced of the Armistice, yoked the mules to the strongest tackle she could find amid the abandoned and salvaged engineer stores that Jacobs had gathered, and began to pull away the barbed wire that laced the farm about, fifty yards at a time.

* * * * *

She worked thus with the veterans, beating, shouting at, jerking the mouths of the mules, tugging, cutting, coiling the rusted venomous strands, piling the stout pickets on one side for further use, until it was nearly dark. Hastening home to prepare supper she noticed a dark bent figure standing irresolutely in the courtyard. She was walking over the slippery furrows by aid of a half pick-handle, but, though thus armed, was unafraid, and found something unaccountably familiar in that listless bent-shouldered form. Coming up to it, she gave a cry. It was the ghost of Jerome Vanderlynden. She took him by the hand, called him “Father,” told him with a choke in her voice that she was glad to see him back. He just stared at her, but when spoken to with decision, sat in the settle by the stove, and smiled at the warmth and the smell of food. Other sign of animation he would not give, nor could she elicit what he thought, or how he had found his way home. When her veterans came in from the stable, she introduced him, and they displayed all the kindliness of their sort, seemed to understand at a glance the nature of the case, called him “Poor old gentleman” and offered him a ration cigarette, which he took, and immediately laid aside, as if he did not know its use. He appeared better for the food and rest, and was willing to be led to the bare tiled bedroom in which he had always occupied the crazy old double bed, where his children had been born and his wife had died, and which, with the big old press, two pegs, and two photos of the children, constituted the whole furniture. He allowed Madeleine to help him off with his sodden, shapeless boots, rolled on the bed, and slept. Madeleine covered him and left him. In the morning he appeared, awakened apparently by habit, or the smell of food, but replied only by vacant looks to his daughter’s questions--pertinently designed as they were--“What has happened to the horse and tumbril?” “Where have you been?” “Do you remember me?”

To the blandishments of the veterans (well-meant attempts to cheer him up), he paid no regard. It was not Jerome Vanderlynden who had returned. It was his ghost, something that, having lost its human mortal life, could not quite die, but must wander about the scenes to which it was accustomed, handle the objects it had used, but nothing more.

* * * * *

The condition of her father might have weighed heavily on Madeleine’s mind had it been her only preoccupation, but fortunately it was not. First of all there was work. She was working harder than anybody ever works in England. From before the gray wet winter dawn, until long after the solitary army candle had been lighted in the kitchen, making grotesque shadows in the broken glass of the oriel window, her hands were never still, tugging, smoothing, shifting earth, timber, wire, weeds, produce; housework, cooking, mending, were relaxations. Her mind and voice, thinking for and directing the veterans, the mules, presently the four bullocks and two milch cows, she contrived to obtain from those wandering loose after the break-up of the trench lines, were never still except during the six or so hours that she slept. She regarded the Armistice as a piece of personal good luck. She would get the ground into some sort of order before the spring sowing. There would be manure, too, now that she had beasts, and with manure at hand, no Fleming ever quite loses heart. But besides work, the Peace that had so suddenly descended upon earth (without, alas, bringing that Goodwill supposed for centuries to accompany it) proved itself more inexorable than War.

Things began to move, released from the numbing strangulation of four and a quarter years. Jacobs and the veterans got orders to proceed to Courtrai, and continue the good work of cleansing the ornamental waters of that town from the use to which the German officers had put them. This disturbance of her source of labor gave Madeleine some moments’ thought, but the sight of the Dequidt family, trudging back to their farm on foot, having been returned from evacuation in the Cherbourg district, opened up a new means of dealing with the problem. Her farm was nearly in order, her house more or less intact, her larder stocked with the good tinned stuff of the British Expeditionary Force Canteen. Theirs would not be so. She would give of her ample store, in return for work. There was one duty with which, however, she preferred to trust the two veterans, rather than any of her neighbors. Now that they were going, she thought of them in the terms in which she had once thought of a lieutenant called Skene. They were willing and well behaved. Moreover, they were going back to England (indicated by their saying to her, “What Ho, for Blighty,” many times a day), so that they were safe. With smiles and encouraging words she led them to the foot of the shot tower. It was badly cracked by the shell that had hit the top, and great lumps of brickwork, a yard cube, had fallen, blocking the door; elm beams a foot square lay jammed across the broken floor. It took three hours’ hard work to effect an entrance. Then Madeleine kneeled down, put her arms through the broken boards, and fished up a length of stout iron chain. “Pull,” she commanded, handing it over. The veterans, spitting on their hands, and setting their heels against the cobbles, called “Heave-ho!” as the chain emerged link by link. Finally, with a clatter and smash, a great iron box was retrieved. Madeleine unhooked it from the chain and bade them carry it to the house.

Once she had it on the kitchen table, having wiped the worst of the muddy water from it, and assured herself it was intact, she gave a sigh of relief. It was the savings of her father’s lifetime, that had been withdrawn from the Savings Bank, when Hazebrouck was first bombarded, and hidden thus by her. Seeing it before her, Madeleine made what the French call a “gesture”--one of those actions prompted by emotions deeper than reason--in this case by the only genuine feeling at the base of the otherwise politician-manufactured Entente Cordiale. She had found the English friends in need, not too exacting, fairly ready to pay for what they wanted. They had been a comfort at the beginning of, through the long length of, and now at the daily growing aftermath of disillusionment with, the War. She took two notes, 20 francs each, from her purse, and distributed them to the veterans. Those members of England’s Last Hope pocketed the money, exclaiming with one voice, “Thank you, Maddam,” winking solemnly at each other.

That evening Jacobs took his leave, and she charged him for exactly what he had had. He departed into the darkness, to catch the newly established train service over the hastily repaired line, the veterans wheeling his valise and their own packs on a salved Lewis-gun hand cart.

* * * * *

With the departure of that party the British Army in Flanders finally left the Spanish Farm, after four years. The longed-for golden reign of Peace was re-established. And anything less golden cannot be imagined. Madeleine lost no time in getting into touch with the evacuated neighbors now returning to their farms. They were nearly all women, and though they were willing enough to work, they had neither the dexterity nor the resources of the British Army. Madeleine wished indeed, before many weeks were over, that the War had lasted longer. There was the big kitchen window, not to mention sundry other panes broken by carelessness, or by concussion of bombing and shelling, to be re-glazed. There were leaks in the roof to mend, there was the shot tower to rebuild--unless indeed she built some other stowage room for all the things it used to hold--sacks, “fertilizer,” tools, roots, grain, hops, spare cart covers, timber. There were nineteen gates missing, endless lengths of hedge and ditch practically to be made over again. The hurdles were all gone, and worst of all, the great fifteen-feet hop-poles and stout wire. As was usual throughout French Flanders, the British Army had burned every piece of wood upon the farm. Madeleine did not blame them. A French or any other army would have done the same. There was, however, one good job that the War had done: the tall elms round the pasture had been completely barked by the numerous mounted units that had succeeded each other. They would die, and the proprietor (the Baron, to wit) would do well to sell them at once, while the price was so high. The ground would be disencumbered, more grass would grow and the great roots would no longer suck up all the manure one put down. The only loser would be the Baron. It was his affair.

* * * * *

For already Peace had brought that endless attempt to go one better than one’s neighbor, which, for four years, had been hidden under the more immediate necessity to go one better than the Bosche. Thus Madeleine, perceiving that whatever the eventual scheme of compensation, she must pay, in the first instance, nearly all the loss occasioned, began actually to grudge the English their demobilization. Had they (and their dumps of material) remained in the neighborhood, she would have got them to do plumbing and glazing, ditching and joinery, and to give her good telephone wire, aeroplane canvas, oil, paint and nails. Instead of which, every day that she went as far as the Lille road, she saw trainloads of useful English, singing and cheering on their way to Dunkirk, where they were being demobbed by thousands a day. So she grew bitter, and having no one else to blame (for who could blame old Jerome, wandering helpless like a worn-out horse) she began to blame the English for going away. Madame la Baronne had returned to the château. Placide was once more functioning, and the Baron was only seen at the farm on his walks, as before the offensive of 1918. So that there was absolutely no one but the English to blame for having departed so inopportunely. There was nothing exceptional in Madeleine’s case. It was, indeed, the common feeling in all those French and Flemish farms on the border of what had been the trenches (the frontiers of civilization) and was now the Devastated Area (something no one wanted, and everybody was tired of hearing about). This being so, the Government, depending upon votes, saw that something must be done to retain those sources of its power and emoluments, less they be filched by Bolsheviks, Germans, Socialists or other enemies--in fact by persons who might come to wield the power, and enjoy the resulting advantages, which every government looks upon as the permanent reward of the endless corruption by which it has maintained itself in power.

Thus, about this time, Madeleine began to hear of things called “Reparations,” that the Germans were going to be made to pay. She was invited to inscribe at the Mairie the list of damage done by the War to the farm. She went to see Monsieur Blanquart, and furnished him with a list that totaled 131,415 francs 41 centimes (the total market value of the farm in 1914 being about 120,000 francs). Monsieur Blanquart inscribed the lot. He did more. Like every one else, he felt that he had had an atrocious time for many years, and that nothing was too good for him. Keeping in close touch with his daughter Cécile, at Amiens, he had been quite sharp enough to see how things were shaping. He had hung in the windows of his little parlor, and all round the mayoral office at the Estaminet de la Mairie, in place of the patriotic appeals by M. Deschanel to fortitude and patience, in place of lists of conscripts, and of ever-mounting food prices, little cards inscribed “Blanquart, financial agent”; “Blanquart, bonds, shares, assurances.” He unfolded golden schemes to Madeleine, who listened with her special “stupid peasant” expression that she kept for the occasions when she was thinking hard. Her list of war damages was based not so much on facts and figures as on her one idea of any monetary transaction--namely, to ask twice as much as a thing is worth, in the certainty that you will be beaten down by at least a quarter. She was no more deceived by the talk in the papers than by Blanquart’s “financial operations.” She knew how difficult it was for her to part with money or money’s worth, and judged the Germans, and Blanquart’s stocks and shares, by her own standards. Pay! Not likely, Germans or Royal Dutch, not if they could help it. But standing hatless and vacant-faced before Blanquart, she was working out in her mind one of her slowly conceived plans, so much less simple than one would have supposed from her appearance. She had enough cash in the iron box to buy two horses and get along until harvest.

“Look here, Monsieur Blanquart, I’ll take 50,000 francs’ worth of your bonds, and pay you when I get my ‘Reparations.’”

But Blanquart had not lived in the village all those years for nothing. “You comprehend,” he replied, “your reparations are subject to discussion!”

“No doubt; but I suppose one will pay us something!”

“Undoubtedly, but how much?--That’s the point!”

Madeleine got up and moved toward the door. “Oh, well, it’s a pity!” she said.

Blanquart hated to see her go. She was one of the richest “heiresses” in the village (as heiresses go in France), and there was only Marie to divide it with her when old Jerome died. Moreover, she had quite a reputation for the part she had played in the last phases of the War, and it would be a great help to be able to say to the others: “Madeleine Vanderlynden has taken 50,000.” He offered: “Look here, I’ll buy your reparations for 40,000!”

“No, nothing to be done,” was the answer, hand on the latch.

In his heart Monsieur Blanquart pested the sacred peasants. But something must be arranged. “Very well, I sell you 40,000 worth of securities, and you can pay me when you get your ‘Reparations’!”

Madeleine left the doorway and came back to the table. Looking through his stocked portfolio she chose only bearer bonds (coupons appealed to her; the less tangible dividend warrant or inscribed or registered stock did not), some national, some industrial, some lottery. Thus armed, she returned to the farm.

* * * * *

Thus came what Politicians called “Peace,” but mostly French people, realists in a sense that the English public never is, spoke of it as the “era of La Galette”--the cake which one could eat and yet have again, the pie in which every one’s finger might be--the lucky-bag into which all might dip.

Upon the mentality of France, with its dominant peasant outlook, only one deep impression was made. The Germans were beaten. Therefore their money could be got at. Anyone who did not get at it was a fool, simply. This was not piracy. The Germans had invited a contest, and lost. The loser pays--that is logic as well as human nature. When the first hints were dropped that there might be delays, even a dwindling of the golden stream that was to flow from Berlin--public feeling became so strong that Government had hastily to vote sums “on account of” the Reparations to be exacted. In every village, men, and more often women, asked each other: “What have you estimated your damages at?” “What have you received on account?” In place of the War-time watchwords “La Patrie est en danger” and “On les aura,” there might very reasonably have been displayed another: “La Galette”--The Cake that every one might take. “L’assiette au beurre”--The butter-dish to grease every itching palm. “Le pot au vin”--The loving-cup that was ever full.

* * * * *

Before she could put the War finally away from her, Madeleine had to go through a process which might be called in English, the laying of ghosts. Without active belief in the supernatural, and prone to laughter at those who dared not pass the Kruysabel, after dusk, without crossing themselves (this superstition was one of the safeguards that had kept her meetings with Georges secure), she preserved to the full the clear feeling of all primitives, that the Living are connected with, influenced by, the Departed. The most immediate case was that of her father. Jerome Vanderlynden had never recovered his reason, but had recaptured a few words, and most of his bodily functions. What had been done, or not done, to him, during his eight months behind the German lines, will never be known. A neighbor, also swallowed up by the swift invasion of April, 1918, had seen him, near Lille, working in a field, under German direction, but had not been recognized. At that date, even, the old man had lost his senses. He bore no particular signs of ill-usage, other than the common starvation caused by blockade, and, after weeks of loving care, Madeleine, nearest to him, most like him of all people on earth, managed to make out what he mumbled to himself, with that scared look, when his food was set before him: “There’s nothing left to eat!” he whispered, with a frightened glance around. Then, when coaxed, he would eat, rapidly, defensively.

Madeleine, no theorist, came to the conclusion that the fact that he had been interrupted in the middle of sowing his potatoes, and had then found the stock of food at Marie’s farm destroyed or taken, had unhinged his mind. At that she had to leave it, and although the old man’s iron health did not vary, she had sorrowfully to admit that, as father and parent, as companion and guide, he was gone from her, just as effectively as though she had buried him in the churchyard, beneath the battered, spireless old church, that filled all one side of the grande place of the village. So strongly did she feel this, that she refused to let the curé worry him about his soul.

Thus was one ghost laid.

* * * * *

There was another ghost, one that haunted her with no material presence, did not inhabit the farm, but hovered, a dim gray figure at the back of her mind.

About Christmas, 1919, in the dead slack of the year, when most of the clearing of the land was done, when the autumn sowing was over and it was too early for the spring one, she had leisure to go up to the Kruysabel. She had neglected this ceremony since the invasion of 1918, chiefly because the disappearance of her father had left the whole weight of the farm on her shoulders, partly because, steadfast as she was, she changed as must every living thing, and Georges was receding from her, with the past. She knew that the place had been fortified into a “strong point,” and had she not known, she would have guessed from the fact that the wooden-gate was gone, and the alley that led up the hill, beaten into pulp by military traffic. She scrambled up among the undergrowth, untouched save for shell-holes, and a few places where the vegetation had fired, or hung gray and sickly, reeking of gas. This made her frown and put on her expression as of one about to smack a naughty child. At the top, treading some barbed wire, she came out into the little clearing, leapt a half-decayed trench, and stood by the hunting shelter. Outwardly it was not much changed. A woman, looking at it with the eyes of Madeleine, could see that it was no longer the same place, although its greeny-gray woodland color, and shape that blurred into the surrounding undergrowth, had been carefully preserved, so that it was probably imperceptible to the best glasses a few hundred yards away. The door was undone, and she pushed it open, stood and gasped. Nothing in the previous four years and a half had quite prepared her for what she found. The place had been skilfully gutted. Not only the glass from the windows, the whole of the rugs, cushions, seats, and fittings were gone, but the actual partitions had been removed, leaving the brick chimney-piece alone supporting an empty shell. The trap of the cellar had been forced, and in the aperture left was a steel and concrete “pill-box,” its machine gun embrasures level with the window-sills. At the opposite end, just where there had stood the divan on which she had held Georges in her arms, the floor had been torn up, the earth dug away, to make room for a similar erection. The only recognizable remains of the furniture were some of the animal heads and photographs of hunting groups, all adorned with mustaches or other attributes, obscene or merely grotesque, in army indelible pencil, or fastened with field telephone wire. It took Madeleine’s plodding mind a moment to size it all up, from the gas-gong hanging from a nail, to the painted wooden notice-board, in English: “Any person found using this Strong Point as a latrine will be severely dealt with. C.R.E. Defence lines.”

Then she let the door swing to, turned her back on the place, and walked away. It was not in her to philosophize. What had been done, she felt like a personal injury. If the place had merely been dirtied and damaged by billeting or shell-fire, she would have shrugged her shoulders and put it straight. But this systematic conversion struck deep at her sense of personal possession. They had challenged her right to something she felt to be most deeply her own. For once she was at a loss, was done, beaten, did not know how to adjust herself, hit back. Georges seemed smaller, further off, than she had ever felt him. Her love for him now seemed almost ridiculous, temporary, and forever done with. She was aroused from her reverie by the thick undergrowth that barred her steps, and realized that she was walking down the northeastern slope of the wood, with her back to the farm. That recalled her to herself. She retraced her steps, skirted the clearing, dodged the trenches and wire, and descended the hill towards home, head up, face impenetrable, mistress of herself. But in her heart she was banking up the slow burning fires of resentment. The less easy it was to find legitimate fuel for them, the more she fed them with the first thing or person that came to hand, feeling herself wronged and slighted by all the world.

* * * * *

There remained one more ghost to be laid, one thin wraith that Madeleine hardly noticed, hovering at the back of her war-memories. She did not call up this last apparition, it came to her.

As gray January slid into February, she became aware, amid her engrossing preoccupation with the farm, that a Labor Corps battalion was working on the clearance of the neighboring trenchlines. They were composed of German prisoners and Chinese, officered by a few English. Presently an orderly called, a German orderly, sent to buy eggs. She sent him about his business, curtly. This brought an officer, fair, bald, thickset, speaking little French. He smiled at her with an irritating cocksureness, and inquired for her father. Then she recognized him. It was the Lieutenant Millgate who had come to the farm late one night in 1915 with Lieutenant Skene, to join the Easthamptons. She found him some eggs for old times’ sake, charged him a pre-war price and forgot him again. He was no ghost; he was an insignificant fact, and did not haunt her.

But there came a gray day when he reappeared, and not alone. Another officer in khaki, taller but slighter, was riding behind him, and tried to greet old Jerome, who ignored the greeting. Before she knew what had happened, Geoffrey Skene stood before her. Almost mechanically, for she could not say what she felt, she bade him enter and sit down. Once he was seated, following her with his eyes, all her vindictiveness found vent in the words:

“Will you have some coffee? The Allies stole all our wine!” Then she softened again, and gave him good coffee, because, like all women, she had a tender spot somewhere for a man who had once desired her. But it was only for a moment. He sat there, unaltered, just as he had sat when she had sent him to deliver a message to Georges. And the thought that Georges had gone out of her life, and that this lesser man of hers was on his way to England, to go out of her life just as effectually, hurt her possessive and domineering instincts. She said bitterly, “I lost my fiancé, after all!” and as he murmured some condolence her spleen overcame her, and she lashed out with her tongue at all the damage done to the farm and to her father, the destruction of her brothers and Georges, at all the work there was to do, and no one to do it.

She saw Millgate fidget, heard him say in English, “Come on!” Then she saw Skene rise, bid her good-bye, and go. She moved to the door, but for the life of her she could not say if she wanted him to go or stay.

Then, as he swung his leg, in its soiled army clothes, over his horse’s back, straightened up, and clattered away, she knew. She did not want him, had never wanted him, nor any Englishman, nor anything English. He was just one of the things the War, the cursed War, had brought on her, and now it, and they, were going. Good riddance. Nor was her feeling unreasonable. The only thing she and Skene had in common, was the War. The War removed, they had absolutely no means of contact. Their case was not isolated. It was national.

* * * * *

So Madeleine remained in the Spanish Farm, and saw no more English, for the Labor Corps soon broke up and went, and she did not care. She was engrossed in one thing only: to get back, sou by sou, everything that had been lost or destroyed, plundered or shattered, by friend or foe, and pay herself for everything she had suffered and dared. And as there was a Madeleine more or less, widowed and childless, bereaved and soured, in every farm in northeastern France, she became a portent. Statesmen feared or wondered at her, schemers and the new business men served her and themselves through her, while philosophers shuddered. For she was the Spanish Farm, the implacable spirit of that borderland so often fought over, never really conquered. She was that spirit that forgets nothing and forgives nothing, but maintains itself, amid all disasters, and necessarily. For she was perhaps the most concrete expression of humanity’s instinctive survival in spite of its own perversity and ignorance. There must she stand, slow-burning revenge incarnate, until a better, gentler time.