Willa Cather (1873–1947). One of Ours. 1922.
Book Five: “Bidding the Eagles of the West Fly On”XVII
W
As soon as Captain Maxey and the wounded men had been started on their long journey to the rear, carried by the prisoners, the whole company turned in and slept for twelve hours—all but Sergeant Hicks, who sat in the house off the square, beside the body of his chum.
The next day the Americans came to life as if they were new men, just created in a new world. And the people of the town came to life … excitement, change, something to look forward to at last! A new flag, le drapeau étoilé, floated along with the tricolour in the square. At sunset the soldiers stood in formation behind it and sang “The Star Spangled Banner” with uncovered heads. The old people watched them from the doorways. The Americans were the first to bring “Madelon” to Beaufort. The fact that the village had never heard this song, that the children stood round begging for it, “Chantez-vous la Madelon!” made the soldiers realize how far and how long out of the world these villagers had been. The German occupation was like a deafness which nothing pierced but their own arrogant martial airs.
Before Claude was out of bed after his first long sleep, a runner arrived from Colonel Scott, notifying him that he was in charge of the Company until further orders. The German prisoners had buried their own dead and dug graves for the Americans before they were sent off to the rear. Claude and David were billeted at the edge of the town, with the woman who had given Captain Maxey his first information, when they marched in yesterday morning. Their hostess told them, at their mid-day breakfast, that the old dame who was shot in the square, and the little girl, were to be buried this afternoon. Claude decided that the Americans might as well have their funeral at the same time. He thought he would ask the priest to say a prayer at the graves, and he and David set off through the brilliant, rustling autumn sunshine to find the Curé’s house. It was next the church, with a high-walled garden behind it. Over the bell-pull in the outer wall was a card on which was written, “Tirez fort.”
The priest himself came out to them, an old man who seemed weak like his doorbell. He stood in his black cap, holding his hands against his breast to keep them from shaking, and looked very old indeed,—broken, hopeless, as if he were sick of this world and done with it. Nowhere in France had Claude seen a face so sad as his. Yes, he would say a prayer. It was better to have Christian burial, and they were far from home, poor fellows! David asked him whether the German rule had been very oppressive, but the old man did not answer clearly, and his hands began to shake so uncontrollably over his cassock that they went away to spare him embarrassment.
“He seems a little gone in the head, don’t you think?” Claude remarked.
“I suppose the war has used him up. How can he celebrate mass when his hands quiver so?” As they crossed the church steps, David touched Claude’s arm and pointed into the square. “Look, every doughboy has a girl already! Some of them have trotted out fatigue caps! I supposed they’d thrown them all away!”
Those who had no caps stood with their helmets under their arms, in attitudes of exaggerated gallantry, talking to the women,—who seemed all to have errands abroad. Some of them let the boys carry their baskets. One soldier was giving a delighted little girl a ride on his back.
After the funeral every man in the Company found some sympathetic woman to talk to about his fallen comrades. All the garden flowers and bead wreaths in Beaufort had been carried out and put on the American graves. When the squad fired over them and the bugle sounded, the girls and their mothers wept. Poor Willy Katz, for instance, could never have had such a funeral in South Omaha.
The next night the soldiers began teaching the girls to dance the “Pas Seul” and the “Fausse Trot.” They had found an old violin in the town; and Oscar, the Swede, scraped away on it. They danced every evening. Claude saw that a good deal was going on, and he lectured his men at parade. But he realized that he might as well scold at the sparrows. Here was a village with several hundred women, and only the grandmothers had husbands. All the men were in the army; hadn’t even been home on leave since the Germans first took the place. The girls had been shut up for four years with young men who incessantly coveted them, and whom they must constantly outwit. The situation had been intolerable—and prolonged. The Americans found themselves in the position of Adam in the garden.
“Did you know, sir,” said Bert Fuller breathlessly as he overtook Claude in the street after parade, “that these lovely girls had to go out in the fields and work, raising things for those dirty pigs to eat? Yes, sir, had to work in the fields, under German sentinels; marched out in the morning and back at night like convicts! It’s sure up to us to give them a good time now.”
One couldn’t walk out of an evening without meeting loitering couples in the dusky streets and lanes. The boys had lost all their bashfulness about trying to speak French. They declared they could get along in France with three verbs, and all, happily, in the first conjugation: manger, aimer, payer,—quite enough! They called Beaufort “our town,” and they were called “our Americans.” They were going to come back after the war, and marry the girls, and put in water-works!
“Chez-moi, sir!” Bill Gates called to Claude, saluting with a bloody hand, as he stood skinning rabbits before the door of his billet. “Bunny casualties are heavy in town this week!”
“You know, Wheeler,” David remarked one morning as they were shaving, “I think Maxey would come back here on one leg if he knew about these excursions into the forest after mushrooms.”
“Maybe.”
“Aren’t you going to put a stop to them?”
“Not I!” Claude jerked, setting the corners of his mouth grimly. “If the girls, or their people, make complaint to me, I’ll interfere. Not otherwise. I’ve thought the matter over.”
“Oh, the girls—” David laughed softly. “Well, it’s something to acquire a taste for mushrooms. They don’t get them at home, do they?”
When, after eight days, the Americans had orders to march, there was mourning in every house. On their last night in town, the officers received pressing invitations to the dance in the square. Claude went for a few moments, and looked on. David was dancing every dance, but Hicks was nowhere to be seen. The poor fellow had been out of everything. Claude went over to the church to see whether he might be moping in the graveyard.
There, as he walked about, Claude stopped to look at a grave that stood off by itself, under a privet hedge, with withered leaves and a little French flag on it. The old woman with whom they stayed had told them the story of this grave.
The Curé’s niece was buried there. She was the prettiest girl in Beaufort, it seemed, and she had a love affair with a German officer and disgraced the town. He was a young Bavarian, quartered with this same old woman who told them the story, and she said he was a nice boy, handsome and gentle, and used to sit up half the night in the garden with his head in his hands—homesick, lovesick. He was always after this Marie Louise; never pressed her, but was always there, grew up out of the ground under her feet, the old woman said. The girl hated Germans, like all the rest, and flouted him. He was sent to the front. Then he came back, sick and almost deaf, after one of the slaughters at Verdun, and stayed a long while. That spring a story got about that some woman met him at night in the German graveyard. The Germans had taken the land behind the church for their cemetery, and it joined the wall of the Curé’s garden. When the women went out into the fields to plant the crops, Marie Louise used to slip away from the others and meet her Bavarian in the forest. The girls were sure of it now; and they treated her with disdain. But nobody was brave enough to say anything to the Curé. One day, when she was with her Bavarian in the wood, she snatched up his revolver from the ground and shot herself. She was a Frenchwoman at heart, their hostess said.
“And the Bavarian?” Claude asked David later. The story had become so complicated he could not follow it.
“He justified her, and promptly. He took the same pistol and shot himself through the temples. His orderly, stationed at the edge of the thicket to keep watch, heard the first shot and ran toward them. He saw the officer take up the smoking pistol and turn it on himself. But the Kommandant couldn’t believe that one of his officers had so much feeling. He held an enquête, dragged the girl’s mother and uncle into court, and tried to establish that they were in conspiracy with her to seduce and murder a German officer. The orderly was made to tell the whole story; how and where they began to meet. Though he wasn’t very delicate about the details he divulged, he stuck to his statement that he saw Lieutenant Müller shoot himself with his own hand, and the Kommandant failed to prove his case. The old Curé had known nothing of all this until he heard it aired in the military court. Marie Louise had lived in his house since she was a child, and was like his daughter. He had a stroke or something, and has been like this ever since. The girl’s friends forgave her, and when she was buried off alone by the hedge, they began to take flowers to her grave. The Kommandant put up an affiche on the hedge, forbidding any one to decorate the grave. Apparently, nothing during the German occupation stirred up more feeling than poor Marie Louise.”
It would stir anybody, Claude reflected. There was her lonely little grave, the shadow of the privet hedge falling across it. There, at the foot of the Curé’s garden, was the German cemetery, with heavy cement crosses,—some of them with long inscriptions; lines from their poets, and couplets from old hymns. Lieutenant Müller was there somewhere, probably. Strange, how their story stood out in a world of suffering. That was a kind of misery he hadn’t happened to think of before; but the same thing must have occurred again and again in the occupied territory. He would never forget the Curé’s hands, his dim, suffering eyes.
Claude recognized David crossing the pavement in front of the church, and went back to meet him.
“Hello! I mistook you for Hicks at first. I thought he might be out here.” David sat down on the steps and lit a cigarette.
“So did I. I came out to look for him.”
“Oh, I expect he’s found some shoulder to cry on. Do you realize, Claude, you and I are the only men in the Company who haven’t got engaged? Some of the married men have got engaged twice. It’s a good thing we’re pulling out, or we’d have banns and a bunch of christenings to look after.”
“All the same,” murmured Claude, “I like the women of this country, as far as I’ve seen them.” While they sat smoking in silence, his mind went back to the quiet scene he had watched on the steps of that other church, on his first night in France; the country girl in the moonlight, bending over her sick soldier.
When they walked back across the square, over the crackling leaves, the dance was breaking up. Oscar was playing “Home, Sweet Home,” for the last waltz.
“Le dernier baiser,” said David. “Well, tomorrow we’ll be gone, and the chances are we won’t come back this way.”