Читать книгу A Village in Picardy онлайн

8 страница из 20

The civic life of the village centred about its public school and its teacher, and, of course, its curé and its church. The monotony of toil was relieved by market days and fête days and first communions and neighbourhood gatherings. Of these last I have seen a few pictures, groups of wrinkled grandparents and sturdy sons and grandchildren stiffly posed in Sunday best, yet happy in spite of it. Behind them pleached pear trees or grape vines make an appliqué against a patterned brick wall. But there are not many of the pictures even left, for you will understand, the Germans systematically searched them out and burned them in great piles. The one that I remember best, a poor mother had torn out of its frame the night of her flight. “I could not think well,” she said. “The Boches had wrenched my Coralie away—so lovely a child that every one on the streets of Ham turned to look at her curls as she walked—but I did save this. See, there she is,—how pretty and good, and that is my eldest, a soldier. He is dead. And that, with the accordion, is my seventeen-year-old Raoul, like his sister, a prisonnier civil. What do the Boches do, think you,” she continued, “with such? One hears nothing, nothing. Never a letter, never a message. Even when Mme. Lefèvre and Mme. Ponchon returned, they brought no word. The prisoners, evidently they are separated. One is told that they work and starve,—that is all.”