Читать книгу A Village in Picardy онлайн

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Yet we entered the winter far less warmly housed than they. Our two-room baraques were supplemented in time by six portable houses which we had brought from America; two we used as dormitories and the other four as a dispensary, a store, a kitchen, and a dining room. Our furnishings were of the simplest; camp beds, a stove for each building, a table, camp stools, and shelves. Our wood—when we had any—was chopped by a vigorous old lady who walked a mile and a half from the nearest village to do it. Our laundry was done upon a stove a foot square in a small building known as the Morgue: such having been its use during the German occupation. Marie made our cuisine on her range in a hut which she had built into the ruins of her cottage. Zélie carried food and dishes in baskets to and fro from kitchen to dining room, a quarter of a mile apart. The one luxury of our existence was hot water, prepared by Marcel in a huge cauldron, and brought in covered metal pitchers to our doors.

Only once did Marcel fail us, and that was because the rightful owner of the cauldron left the basse-cour for her newly erected baraque. She requested our kind permission to transport thither her property. “There is another cauldron at Buverchy, which I think you could rent in place of mine,” she suggested. “It belonged to my cousin, Mme. Bouvet, and is now in Mme. Josse’s yard. No one is using it.” Marcel was dispatched to make inquiries, and later, with horse and wagon, to fetch the cauldron home. But meantime there had dawned a morning when we were not wakened by the clump-clump of Marcel’s sabots, and the setting down of the water jug with a thud upon the frozen ground.