THE NATIVES
“Bonnjoor, Madame!”
“Bonjour, M’sieu!”
“Avvy voo pang, Madame?”
“Braëd? But yes, M’sieu. How much you want? Two? Seize sous, M’sieu.”
“Howmuch does the woman say, Buster?”
“Sixteen sous, cuckoo!”
“Well, here’s five francs.”
“Ah, but, M’sieu! Me no monnaie! No chanch! Attendez, je vous donnerai du papier.”
Madame searches in the innermost recesses of an old drawer, and produces one French penny, two sous, a two-franc bill of the Commune of Lisseville, stuck together with bits of sticking-paper, a very dirty one-franc bill labelled St. Omer, and two 50-centimes notes from somewhere the other side of Amiens.
“Je regrette, M’sieu,” Madame waves her hands in the air, “mais c’est tout ce que j’ai.... All dat I ’ave, M’sieu!”
The transaction, which has taken a full tenminutes, is at last completed. They are very long-suffering, the natives, taken on the whole. In the first place “C’est la guerre.” Secondly, they, too, have soldier husbands, sons, and brothers and cousins serving in the Grandes Armées. Is it to be expected that they be well treated unlesswedoourshare? And—these British soldiers, they have much money. And they are generous for the most part.
So Madame, whose husband is in Champagne, gives up the best bedroom to Messieurs les Officiers, and sleeps with her baby in the attic. The batmen use her poële, and sit around it in the evening drinking her coffee. Le Commandant buys butter, milk, eggs—“mais, mon dieu, one would think a hen laid an egg every hour to hear him! Trois douzaine! But, Monsieur, I have but six poules, and they overwork themselves already! There is not another egg above eleven dans tous le pays, M’sieu. Champagne? But yes, certainement. Bénédictine? Ah, non, M’sieu, it is défendu, and we sold the last bottle to an officier with skirts a week ago. Un treès bon officier, M’sieu; he stay two days, and make love to Juliette. Juliette fiancée? Tiens, shehas a million, M’sieu, to hear them talk, like every pretty girl in France. So soon you enter the doorway, M’sieu, and see Juliette, you say ‘Moi fiancé, vous?’ You are très taquin—verree bad boys—les Anglais!”
Sometimes there is war, red war. Madame enters, wringing her hands, her hair suggestive of lamentation and despair. She wishes to see M’sieu l’Officier who speaks a little French.
“Ah, M’sieu, but it is terrible. I give to the Ordonnances my fire, my cook-pots, and a bed of good hay in the stable, next to the cows, and what do they do? M’sieu, they steal my gate that was put there by my grandfather—he who won a decoration in soixante et six—and they get a little axe and make of it fire-wood! And in the early morning they milk the cows. Ah, but, M’sieu, I will go to the Maire and make a réclammation! Fifteen francs for a new gate, and seventeen sous for the milk that they have stolen! And the cuillers! Before the war I buy a new set, with Henri, of twenty-four cuillers. Where are they? All but three are volées, M’sieu! It is not juste. M’sieu le Capitaine who was here a week ago last Dimanche—for I wentto Mass—say it is a dam shame, M’sieu. I do not like to make the trouble, M’sieu, but I must live. La veuve Marnot over yonder, two houses down the street on the left-hand side, she could have a hundred gates burned and say nothing. She is très riche. They say the Mayor make déjà his advances. But me, what shall I do, my gate a desecration in the stoves, M’sieu, and the milk of my cows drunk by the maudits ordonnances!”
Note in the mess president’s accounts: “To one gate (burned) and milk stolen, 7.50 francs.”
All over France and Belgium little stores have grown and flourished. They sell tinned goods without limit, from cigarettes, through lobster, to peaches.
Both are practical countries.
In nearly all these boutiques there is a pretty girl. Both nations have learned the commercial value of a pretty girl. It increases the credit side of the business 75 per cent. In the Estaminets it is the same, only more so. Their turnover is a thing which will be spoken of by their great-grandchildren with bated breath.
More cases than one are known where thelonely soldier has made a proposal, in form, to the fair débitante who nightly handed him his beer over the bar of a little Estaminet. Sometimes he has been accepted pour l’amour de sa cassette—sometimes “pour l’amour de ses beaux yeux!”
In a little hamlet several days’ march behind the firing-line, lived a widow. She was a grass-widow before Verdun, and there she became “veuve.” She was a tall, handsome woman, twenty-seven or twenty-eight perhaps, and her small feet and ankles, the proud carriage of her head, and the delicate aquiline nose bespoke her above the peasantry. She kept a little café at the junction of three cross-roads. The natives know her as Madame de Maupin.
Why “de” you ask? Because her father was a French count and her mother was a femme de chambre. The affair made an esclandre of some magnitude many years ago. Madame de Maupin was fille naturelle. She married, at the wishes of her old harridan of a mother, a labourer of the village. She despised her husband. He was uncouth and a peasant. In her the cloven hoof showed little. Despite no advantages of educationshe had the instincts of her aristocratic father. The natives disliked her for that reason.
Madame de Maupin kept a café. Until the soldiers came it did not pay, but she would not keep an Estaminet. It was so hopelessly “vulgaire.” After closing hours, between eight and ten, Madame de Maupin held her Court. Officers gathered in the little back room, and she entertained them, while they drank. She had wit, and she was very handsome. One of her little court, a young officer, fell in love with her. Her husband was dead.
Her lover had money, many acres, and position. He proposed to her. She loved him and—she refused him, “because,” she said simply, “you would not be happy.”
He was sent to the Somme.
Madame de Maupin closed her Estaminet and vanished.
There is a story told, which no one believes, of a woman, dressed in a private’s uniform of the British army, who was found, killed, among the ruins of Thiepval. She lay beside a wounded officer, who died of his woundssoon after. He had been tended by some one, for his wounds were dressed. In his tunic pocket was a woman’s photograph, but a piece of shrapnel had disfigured it beyond recognition.
But, as I said, no one believes the story.