Part 8

There arose a great wail from the mothers whose sons were conscripts. The rest asked in trembling, “Will it touch us?”

“Us!” echoed Picot, the tailor, in contempt. “How should it touch us? Our braves will be in Berlin with another fortnight. The paper says so.”

The people were silent; they were not sure what he meant by Berlin, and they were afraid to ask.

“My boy! my boy!” wailed one woman, smiting her breast. Her son was in the army.

“Marengo!” murmured Reine Allix, thinking of that far-off time in her dim youth when the horseman had flown through the dusky street and the bonfire had blazed on the highest hill above the river.

“Bread will be dear,” muttered Mathurin, the miller, going onward with his foot-weary mule. Bernadou stood silent, with his roses dry and thirsty round him.

“Why art thou sad?” whispered Margot, with wistful eyes. “Thou art exempt from war service, my love?”

Bernadou shook his head. “The poor will suffer somehow,” was all he answered.

Yet to him, as to all the Berceau, the news was not very terrible, because it was so vague and distant--an evil so far off and shapeless.

Monsieur Picot, the tailor, who alone could read, ran from house to house, from group to group, breathless, gay, and triumphant, telling them all that in two weeks more their brethren would sup in the king’s palace at Berlin; and the people believed and laughed and chattered, and, standing outside their doors in the cool nights, thought that some good had come to them and theirs.

Only Reine Allix looked up to the hill above the river and murmured, “When we lit the bonfire there, Claudis lay dead;” and Bernadou, standing musing among his roses, said, with a smile that was very grave, “Margot, see here! When Picot shouted, ‘A Berlin!’ he trod on my Gloire de Dijon rose and killed it.”

The sultry heats and cloudless nights of the wondrous and awful summer of the year 1870 passed by, and to the Berceau de Dieu it was a summer of fair promise and noble harvest, and never had the land brought forth in richer profusion for man and beast. Some of the youngest and ablest-bodied labourers were indeed drawn away to join those swift trains that hurried thousands and tens of thousands to the frontier by the Rhine. But most of the male population were married, and were the fathers of young children; and the village was only moved to a thrill of love and of honest pride to think how its young Louis and Jean and Andre and Valentin were gone full of high hope and high spirit, to come back, maybe,--who could say not?--with epaulets and ribbons of honour. Why they were gone they knew not very clearly, but their superiors affirmed that they were gone to make greater the greatness of France; and the folk of the Berceau believed it, having in a corner of their quiet hearts a certain vague, dormant, yet deep-rooted love, on which was written the name of their country.

News came slowly and seldom to the Berceau. Unless some one of the men rode his mule to the little town, which was but very rarely, or unless some peddler came through the village with a news-sheet or so in his pack or rumours and tidings on his lips, nothing that was done beyond its fields and woods came to it. And the truth of what it heard it had no means of measuring or sifting. It believed what it was told, without questioning; and as it reaped the harvests in the rich hot sun of August, its peasants laboured cheerily in the simple and firm belief that mighty things were being done for them and theirs in the far eastern provinces by their great army, and that Louis and Jean and Andre and Valentin and the rest--though indeed no tidings had been heard of them--were safe and well and glorious somewhere, away where the sun rose, in the sacked palaces of the German king. Reine Allix alone of them was serious and sorrowful, she whose memories stretched back over the wide space of near a century.

“Why art thou anxious, gran’mere?” they said to her. “There is no cause. Our army is victorious everywhere; and they say our lads will send us all the Prussians’ corn and cattle, so that the very beggars will have their stomachs full.”

But Reine Allix shook her head, sitting knitting in the sun. “My children, I remember the days of my youth. Our army was victorious then; at least, they said so. Well, all I know is that little Claudis and the boys with him never came back; and as for bread, you could not get it for love or money, and the people lay dead of famine out on the public roads.”

“But that is so long ago, gran’mere!” they urged.

Reine Allix nodded. “Yes, it is long ago, my dears. But I do not think that things change very much.”

They were silent out of respect for her, but among themselves they said, “She is very old. Nothing is as it was in her time.”

One evening, when the sun was setting red over the reapen fields, two riders on trembling and sinking horses went through the village using whip and spur, and scarcely drew rein as they shouted to the cottagers to know whether they had seen go by a man running for his life. The people replied that they had seen nothing of the kind, and the horsemen pressed on, jamming their spurs into their poor beasts’ steaming flanks. “If you see him, catch and hang him,” they shouted, as they scoured away; “he is a Prussian spy!”

“A Prussian!” the villagers echoed, with a stupid stare--“a Prussian in France!”

One of the riders looked over his shoulder for a moment. “You fools! do you not know? We are beaten,--beaten everywhere,--and the Prussian pigs march on Paris.”

The spy was not seen in the Berceau, but the news brought by his pursuers scared sleep from the eyes of every grown man that night in the little village. “It is the accursed Empire!” screamed the patriots of the wine-shop. But the rest of the people were too terrified and down-stricken to take heed of empires or patriots; they only thought of Louis and Jean and Andre and Valentin; and they collected round Reine Allix, who said to them, “My children, for love of money all our fairest fruits and flowers--yea, even to the best blossoms of our maidenhood--were sent to be bought and sold in Paris. We sinned therein, and this is the will of God.”

This was all for a time that they heard. It was a place lowly and obscure enough to be left in peace. The law pounced down on it once or twice and carried off a few more of its men for army service, and arms were sent to it from its neighbouring town, and an old soldier of the First Empire tried to instruct its remaining sons in their use. But he had no apt pupil except Bernadou, who soon learned to handle a musket with skill and with precision, and who carried his straight form gallantly and well, though his words were seldom heard and his eyes were always sad.

“You will not be called till the last, Bernadou,” said the old soldier; “you are married, and maintain your grandam and wife and child. But a strong, muscular, well-built youth like you should not wait to be called; you should volunteer to serve France.”

“I will serve France when my time comes,” said Bernadou, simply, in answer. But he would not leave his fields barren, and his orchard uncared for, and his wife to sicken and starve, and his grandmother to perish alone in her ninety-third year. They jeered and flouted and upbraided him, those patriots who screamed against the fallen Empire in the wine-shop; but he looked them straight in the eyes, and held his peace, and did his daily work.

“If he is called, he will not be found wanting,” said Reine Allix, who knew him better than did even the young wife whom he loved.

Bernadou clung to his home with a dogged devotion. He would not go from it to fight unless compelled, but for it he would have fought like a lion. His love for his country was only an indefinite, shadowy existence that was not clear to him; he could not save a land that he had never seen, a capital that was only to him as an empty name; nor could he comprehend the danger that his nation ran, nor could he desire to go forth and spend his life-blood in defence of things unknown to him. He was only a peasant, and he could not read nor greatly understand. But affection for his birthplace was a passion with him, mute indeed, but deep-seated as an oak. For his birthplace he would have struggled as a man can only struggle when supreme love as well as duty nerves his arm. Neither he nor Reine Allix could see that a man’s duty might lie from home, but in that home both were alike ready to dare anything and to suffer everything. It was a narrow form of patriotism, yet it had nobleness, endurance, and patience in it; in song it has been oftentimes deified as heroism, but in modern warfare it is punished as the blackest crime.

So Bernadou tarried in his cottage till he should be called, keeping watch by night over the safety of his village, and by day doing all he could to aid the deserted wives and mothers of the place by the tilling of their ground for them and the tending of such poor cattle as were left in their desolate fields. He and Margot and Reine Allix, between them, fed many mouths that would otherwise have been closed in death by famine, and denied themselves all except the barest and most meagre subsistence, that they might give away the little they possessed.