Читать книгу A Village in Picardy онлайн

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But our villagers, though equally pillaged in the year 1917, were not doomed to death. The Germans had retreated before the advancing French and British armies, and the ruins of Canizy ere long were held by Scottish troops.

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In Canizy, after the Germans were through with it, not one of its forty-seven houses stood intact. Most were roofless shells, or fallen heaps of brick. An occasional ell, a barn, a rabbit hutch, or a chicken house,—such were the shelters into which the returning villagers crept. Nor was there furniture. Pillage had preceded destruction and loaded wagons had borne away the plunder of household linen, feather mattresses, clothes presses, chairs or anything practicable, into Germany. Scattered through the ruins to this day lie iron bedsteads twisted by fire, the metal stands of the housewives’ sewing machines, broken farm tools and fire-cracked stoves. One day, beside a half-demolished wall, I came upon a group of little girls playing house. They had marked off their rooms with broken bricks, set up for a stove a rusty brazier, and stocked their imaginary cupboards with fragments of gay china. A grey, drizzling day it was, and their toy ménage had no roof. But was it more cheerless than the hovels they called their homes, where their mothers, like them, had gathered in the wreckage left by the Germans,—a stove here, a kettle there, and a “Boche” bed of unplaned planks, perhaps, with an improvised mattress of grass? I paused to regard the play house. “What is this room,” I inquired. “La cuisine,” was the quick reply. “And this?” “La salle à manger.” “But this next?” “Une salle à manger,” came the chorus. “Then all the rest are salles à manger?” “Assurément,” with merry laughter. “O, I see. Are you then so hungry at your house?” And I turned away with an uncomfortable conviction that they were.