I CAME TO MALTOT

By TREVOR ALLEN

ON a hot summer day, between the wars, I tramped over the great corn uplands from Caen and came to Maltot in its sleepy hollow. It is but a small hamlet, and grey-haired madame of the ipicerie was sorry she could offer the visitor only tinned tripe for lunch ; but she was gentle and attentive, her shop was tidy and so Shining clean as to be fragrant, as village shops often are in Normandy.

After lunch I strolled into the little churchyard and found there a granite memorial to the noble family of de Chaisne de Bourmont. The three young Comtes—Rene, Guy, Carle—had fallen in action. The father had died just before the war, the mother shortly after it began, when her sons were away serving. It seemed to me—reading the legend of " unhappy, far-off things and battles long ago "—that death had been a very close bedfellow of this unfortunate family, so I returned to the gentle dame to ask about them. She pointed sadly to an ancient house up the road, beyond a flower-bordered avenue, and told me that the only survivor of that ill-fated line was the young master, a boy of twelve, now being carefully nurtured to carry on the family name.

The other evening I was in Maltot again—listening, on my radio, to the crash and turmoil of battle in that sleepy hollow—tanks, machine-guns, shells, mortars, Moaning Minnies, and the vague voices of men thrusting on through an earthly hell. Where now my gentle grey-haired madame of the epicerie, and the young count of the de Chaisnc de Bourmonts? Should I, ever again, come to Maltot over the ripe cornlands in the peace of a summer day? Could it be the Maltot I had known?

This Normandy campaign probes the heart of you when you have wandered afoot through its villages and loved its people. Front Maltot I wandered down to the Orne, which has a beauty.like that of the Wye, and there boarded the train, intending to stay the night

at Thury-Harcourt, a few miles upstream. The station, perversely, was named, I think, Croisilles, so I missed Thury and found myself,

at sunset, at a halt called Clecy Bourg, with no train back and no sign of an inn in the lush river valley deepening to dusk. But a fellow-traveller of whom I inquired waved me gaily along the lane over the bridge, and I found the Chalet, a homely little hotel all bright walls and chintzes, running water in the bedroom, spotless

linen, and good simple Norman food. A hill stream murmured below my window. The whole valley, with its apple orchards and

black poplars, was odorous as only a river valley can be. I was so captivated that I stayed there a fortnight. I had found, unwittingly, the heart of La Suisse Normande—that part of the Orne which is a miniature sub-Alpine Switzerland.

Monsieur was a bearded Bohemian with memories of th–c Butte of Montmartre, who shuffled about in canvas shoes making sure every- thing was to our liking. Madame slaved in the small kitchen, turning out wonderful meals, stewing jam in the evening, keeping the place spick-and-span. Tired out at the end of the day, she would wander into the salle-a-manger, smile a greeting, take a breath of air at the door, dive back into the kitchen to complete some small chore before bedtime. She, too, was from Paris, and loved the city lights, the shops, the theatres. But she never complained ; our pleasure was hers. And how proud they were of their small country hotel, how solicitous for their guests. I thought of them, afterwards, when I read these words of Anatole France:

" I have a fondness for the inns in little country towns, and I have pleasant memories of all that I have visited. I slept soundly cwand supped gaily. . . . I am on friendly terms with all the world and always kindly disposed towards mine host."

Behind the inn, under the craggy Pain de Sucre hill, was land farmed by a family of dwarfs ; but they were giants at work, tilling every inch of their precious soil from sunrise to sundown, the men reaping with scythes while the women, in sun-bonnets, bound the sheaves and piled them in shocks, the eldest grandmere gleaning and

weeding in the stubble, the youngest grand-daughter driving the cattle frorn milking to pasture. Among the beige corn, in the soft shadows of apple trees, they made a living picture of the kind Lee Hankey and

La Thangue loved to paint. Beneath the corn was a clover catch- crop for the cattle ; dotted here and there were plots of maize, vetch, and sainfoin for fodder ; mere paddocks the size of suburban gardens

had to yield at least one bumper haycock. Nothing of those few acres in the crook of the Orne could be wasted.

One day I followed my hill-stream into a garden of phlox under tall poplars and found there an artist at work. An artificial arm

held the brush stiffly, and he took paint from his palette, or changed from brush to knife, by making a jerky, marionette movement. I

was reminded of Renoir, who had to work with the brush tied to a paralysed hand. The war had broken his poor body—he had hobbled from the village on one good leg—yet there he was, painting away

for dear life, pressing the beauty of that river valley on to canvas. When I spoke to him he told me he was from Paris, and I have never seen so radiant and triumphant a smile on any man's face, or finer zest in the work he was doing. It seemed to me the face of a bearded saint, of a true conqueror with a dual victory—first, over his maimed

body, and then over his art. I read so much of France into that rigid gloved hand, as into that granite memorial to the de Chaisne de Bourmonts, and another war memorial I once saw in a village by the Seine—a cock crowing defiance from the stunted limb of g bare, lopped tree.

And now the tide of war has surged over Maltot. It sweeps 1.1P the Orne to that Clecy valley where mine host and madame and the

little people labour and the broken artist laughed and worked. Has

any country, any people been more crucified by this perverse Germanic urge to hasten the evolution of man from ape to archangel

by bigger and better wars?