Читать книгу A Village in Picardy онлайн

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In those days, Canizy had a railroad also, and I have heard how for three sous one could travel by it to Nesle. It took only eight minutes then,—but now! By it as well, one went more quickly than by canal to St. Quentin or Péronne with perhaps a hundred huge baskets of vegetables on market day. But the Germans tore up the bed of the railroad and destroyed the locks of the canal. They blew up, too, the bridge on the main highway which used to pass the Calvary at the foot of the village street. Cut off, reached only by a circuitous and deep-rutted road which is impassable at certain hours every day owing to mitrailleuse practice across it, Canizy lapsed into oblivion. As its mayor said on our first visit, “Look you, it has been quite forgotten,—c’est un village tout oublié.”

In 1914, Canizy had 445 inhabitants. Of these, there were perhaps half a dozen substantially well off, such as M. le Maire, possessing ten hectares of wheat land, a herd of seven cows, four horses, thirty rabbits and fifty hens. Besides, M. le Maire, or his wife, was proprietor of one of the three village épiceries. Joined with him in respectful mention by the townspeople are the lessee of the Château, and various owners of property not only in Canizy but in the surrounding country. Of these gentry, not one apparently had been made prisoner by the Germans. They were to be found on their other estates, at Compiègne, at Ham, or in Paris. Even the real mayor was an absentee, so that the acting mayor, lame, red-faced and heady-eyed, was the only representative of landed interests left in the little town. He had had, however, a dozen or more neighbours scarcely less comfortably provided with worldly goods than himself: M. Picard, for instance, who owned extensive market gardens and employed six workers in the fields. He it was who did not suffer even during the German occupation, for was he not placed in charge of the ravitaillement? And though his friends the Germans took him away with them, a prisoner, did not his wife and children live well on his buried money, eh? O, Mme. Picard, elle était riche. There were the Tourets, two brothers, who held connecting high-walled gardens in the centre of the village, and their next door neighbour, the comely widow, Mme. Gabrielle. Directly opposite ranged the Cordier farm, comprising an orchard of 360 trees, ten cows, two bulls, one ox, eighty-seven pigs, three horses, one hundred and fifty chickens, and one hundred and fifty rabbits. Smaller cottages there were, some rented, but most of them owned, where the families raised just enough for their own necessities, or worked for their more prosperous townsfolk. There were the village cobbler, the two store keepers who competed with the mayor, a sprinkling of factory hands who walked along the dyke a mile and a half to work in the brush factory at Offoy, and last on the street, but not least in social importance, the domestics of the Château. There were, too, the poor whom one has always; but in Canizy, so far as I could learn, they consisted of but two shiftless families.