# Punch/Volume 147/Issue 3832/A Marne Footnote

A MARNE FOOTNOTE.
There was a battlefield, I was told, with a ruined village near it, about as far from Paris as Sevenoaks is from London, and I decided to see it. The preliminaries, they said, would be difficult, but only patience was needed patience and one's papers all in order. It would be necessary to go to the War Bureau, opposite the Invalides.
I went to the War Bureau opposite the Invalides one afternoon. I rang the bell and a smiling French soldier opened the door. Within were long passages and other smiling French soliders in little knots guarding the approaches, all very bureaucratic. The head of the first knot referred me to the second knot; the head of the second referred me to a third. The head of this knot, which guarded the approach to the particular military mandarin whom I needed or thought I needed, smiled more than any of them, and, having heard my story, said that that was certainly the place to obtain leave. But it was unwise and even impossible to go by any other way than road, as the railway was needed for soldiers and munitions of war, and therefore I must bring my chauffeur with me, with his papers, which must be examined and passed.
My chauffeur? I possessed no such thing. Necessary then to provide myself with a chauffeur at once. Out I went in a fusillade of courtesies and sought a chauffeur. I visited a taxi rank and stopped this man and that, but all shied at the distance. At last one said that his garage would provide me with a car. So off to the garage we went, and there I had an interview with a manager, who declined to believe that permission for the expedition would be made at all, except possibly to oblige a person of great importance. Was I a person of great importance? he asked. Was I? I wondered. No, I thought not. Very well then, he considered it best to drop the project.
I came away and hailed another taxi, driven by a shaggy grey hearthrug. I told him my difficulties, and he at once offered to drive me anywhere and made no bones about the distance whatever. So it was arranged that he should for me on the morrow—say Tuesday, at a quarter to eleven, and we would then get through the preliminaries and my lunch comfortably by noon and be off and away. So do heathrugs talk with foreigners—light-heartedly and confident. But Heaven disposes. For when we reached the Bureau at a minute after eleven the next morning the smiling janitor told us we were too late. Too late at eleven? Yes, the office in question was closed between eleven and two; we must return at two.
"But the day will be over," I said; "the light will have gone. Another day lost!" Nothing on earth can crystallize and solidify so swiftly and impacably as the French official face. At these words his smile vanished. He was not angry or threatening—merely granite. Those were the rules, and how could anyone question them? At two, he repeated; and again I left the building, this time not bowing quite so effusively, but suppressing a thousand criticisms which might have been spoken were not the French our allies.
Three hours to kill in a city where everything is shut. No Louvre, no Carnavalet! However, the time went, chiefly over lunch, and at two we were there again, the hearthrug and I, and were shown into a waiting-room where far too many other persons had already assembled. To me this congestion seemed deplorable; but the hearthrug merely grinned. It was all a new experience to him, and his meter was registering the time. We waited, I suppose, forty minutes and then came our turn, and we were led to a little room where sat a typical elderly French officer at a table. He had white moustaches and was in uniform with blue and red about it. I bowed, he bowed, the hearthrug grovelled. I explained my need, and he replied instantly that I had come to the wrong place; the right place was the Conciergerie.
Another rebuff! In England I might have told him that it was one of his own idiotic men who had told me otherwise, but of what use would that be in France? In France a thing is or is not, and there is no getting round it if it is not. French officials are portcullises, and they drop as suddenly and as effectively. Knowing this, so far from showing resentment or irritation, I bowed and made my thanks as though I had come for no other purpose than a dose of frustration; and again we left this cursed Bureau.
I re-entered the taxi, which, judging by the meter, I should very soon have completely paid for, and we hurtled away (for the hearthrug was a demon driver) to Paris's Scotland Yard. Here were more passage, more little rooms, more inflexible officials. I had bowed to half-a-dozen and explained my errand before at last the right one was reached, and him the hearthrug grovelled to again and called "Mon Colonel." He sat at a table in a little room, and beside him, all on the same side of the table, sat three civilians. On the wall behind ws a map of France. What they did all day, I wondered, and how much they were paid for it; for we were the only clients, and the usggestio nof the place was one of anecdotage and persiflage rather than toil . They acted with the utmost unanimity. First "Mon Colonel" scrutinised my passport, and then the others, in turn, scrutinised it. What did I want to go to ——— for? (The name is suppressed because it is two or three months since the battle was fought there.) I replied that my motive was pure curiosity. Did I know it was a very dull town? I wanted to see the battlefield. That would be triste too. Yes, I knew, but I was interested. "Mon Colonel" shrugged and wrote on a piece of paper and passed the paper to the first civilian, who wrote something else and passed it on, and finally the last one got it and discovered a mistake in the second civilian's writing, and the mistake had to be initialled by all the lot, each making great play with a blotter, and at last the precious document was handed to me and I was really free to start. But it was now dark.
The road from ——— leaves the town by a hill, crosses a canal, and then mounts and winds, and mounts again, and dips and mounts, between fields of stubble, with curcular straw-stacks as their only occupants. The first intimation of anything untoward, besides the want of life, was the spire of the little white vilage of ——— on the distant hill, which surely had been damaged. As one drew nearer it was clear that not only had the spire been damaged, but that the houses had been damaged too. The place seemed empty and under a ban.
I stoped the car outside, at the remains of a burned shed, and walked along the desolate main street. All the windows were broken; the walls were indented with little holes or perforated with big ones. The roofs were in ruins. Here was the post-office; it is now half demolished and boarded up. There was the inn; it is now empty and forlorn. Half the great clock face leant against a wall. Everyone had fled—it is a "deserted village" with a vengeance: nothing left but a few fowls. Everything was damaged; but the church had suffered most. Half of the shingled spire was destroyed, most of the roof, and the great bronze bell lay among the débris on the ground. It is as though the enemy's policy was to intimidate the simple fok through the failure of their supernatural stronghold. "If the church is so pregnable, then what chance have we?"—that is the question which it was hoped would be asked; or so I imagined as I stood before this ruined ​sanctuary. Where, I wondered, are those villagers now, and what chances are there of the rebuilding of these old peaceful homes, so secure and placid only four months ago?
And then I walked to the battlefield a few hundred yards away, and only too distinguishable as such by the little cheap tricolors on the hastily-dug graves among the stubble and the ricks. Hitherto I had always associated these ricks with the art of Claude Monet, and seeing the one had recalled the other; but henceforward I shall think of those poor pathetic graves sprinkled among them, at all kinds of odd angles to each other—for evidently the holes were dug parallel with the bodies besides them—each with a little wooded cross hastily tacked together, and on some the remnants of the soldier's coat or cap, or even boots, and on some the blue, white and red. As far as one can distinguish, these little crosses break the view: some against the sky-line, for it is hilly about here, others against the dark soil.
It was a day of lucid November sunshine. The sky was blue and the air mild. A heavy dew lay on the earth. Not a dound could be heard; not a leaf fluttered. No sign of life. We were alone, save for the stubble and the ricks and the wooden crosses and the little flags. How near the dead seemed: nearer than in any cemetery.
Suddenly a distant booming sounded; then another and another. It was the guns at either Soissons or Rheims—the first thunder of man's hatred of man I had ever heard.
So I, too, non-combatant, as Anno-Domini forces me to be, know something of war—a very little, it is true, but enough to make a difference when I read the letters from the trenches or meet a Belgian village refugee.