Note 63 — Chapter VII · THE “EFFECT OF SUCTION”

In Courtacon, I found eighteen of the two dozen small brick houses completely destroyed by fire, after having been sacked. The pretext given was that villagers had betrayed the German troops—part of the Guard Cavalry Division—to the Allies. The single room of the village school presented an unforgettable exhibition of malice. Dirty straw, remnants of meals, torn books, and broken cartridge cases littered the floor. Piles of half-burnt straw showed that a hurried attempt had been made to destroy the building; there were two such piles under the bookcase and the tiny school museum, which consisted of a few bottles of metal and chemical specimens. Amid this filthy chaos, the low forms, the master’s desk, and wall-charts inculcating “temperance, kindness, justice, and truth,” stood as they had done on the day before the summer holidays. As I turned to leave, I saw, written across the blackboard in bold, fine writing, evidently as the lesson of that day, the words: “À chaque jour suffit sa peine”—“Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof,” as our English version has it. Under this motto, all unconscious of it, these brutes had slept and wakened to their incendiary work—men of a nation that boasted itself the pioneer in Europe of elementary schooling. Could any recording angel have conceived a more biting irony?