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Title: Alsace in rust and gold
Author: Edith Louise Coues O'Shaughnessy
Release date: March 29, 2025 [eBook #75745]
Language: English
Original publication: New York: Harper & Brothers, 1920
Credits: MWS and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive/Canadian Libraries)
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK ALSACE IN RUST AND GOLD ***
ALSACE IN RUST AND GOLD
[Illustration]
BOOKS BY EDITH O’SHAUGHNESSY
ALSACE IN RUST AND GOLD
MY LORRAINE JOURNAL
DIPLOMATIC DAYS
HARPER & BROTHERS, NEW YORK
[ESTABLISHED 1817]
[Illustration: THE RIVER DOLLER AT MASEVAUX]
ALSACE
IN RUST AND GOLD
_by_
EDITH O’SHAUGHNESSY
[MRS. NELSON O’SHAUGHNESSY]
AUTHOR OF
_“A Diplomat’s Wife in Mexico”
“My Lorraine Journal” Etc._
ILLUSTRATED
[Illustration]
HARPER & BROTHERS PUBLISHERS
NEW YORK AND LONDON
ALSACE IN RUST AND GOLD
Copyright 1920, by Harper & Brothers
Printed in the United States of America
Published March, 1920
B U
CONTENTS
CHAP. PAGE
PREFACE ix
I. THE JOURNEY THERE 1
II. ALL SAINTS’ DAY, NOVEMBER, 1918 13
III. FÊTE DES MORTS, NOVEMBER, 1918 23
IV. THANN AND OLD THANN 34
V. THE BALLON D’ALSACE 43
VI. LA POPOTE 55
VII. THE HOUSES OF THE CHANOINESSES 65
VIII. LUNCHEON AT BITSCHWILLER. THE MISSION IN RESIDENCE AT
ST.-AMARIN. SAINT-ODILE 81
IX. THE “FIELD OF LIES” AND LAIMBACH 100
X. THE VALLEY OF THE THUR 110
XI. THE RE-GALLICIZING OF ALSACE 120
XII. THE HARTMANNSWILLERKOPF 131
XIII. “LES CRÊTES.” “DÉJEUNER” AT CAMP WAGRAM. THE FREUNDSTEIN
AND ITS PHANTOMS 140
XIV. RETURN TO MASEVAUX 156
XV. THE VIGIL OF THE ARMISTICE 159
XVI. DIES GLORIÆ 175
ILLUSTRATIONS
THE RIVER DOLLER AT MASEVAUX _Frontispiece_
THE FOURTH OF JULY, 1918, IN ALSACE _Facing page_ 14
PLACE DU MARCHÉ, MASEVAUX, JULY 14, 1918 ” 14
THANN AND ITS VINEYARDS ” 34
COMMANDANT POULET ” 56
THANN. THE CATHEDRAL PORTAL ” 82
THANN. LA VIEILLE TOUR ” 114
AMERICAN TROOPS AT MASEVAUX CELEBRATING THE FOURTH OF JULY ” 132
FRENCH TROOPS AT MASEVAUX CELEBRATING THE FALL OF THE
BASTILE, JULY 14TH ” 132
AMERICA AND ALSACE ” 172
PREFACE
Strangely caught up out of the rut and routine of Paris war-work, not
even choosing my direction (the Fates did that), contributing, however,
the eternal readiness of my soul, which the poet says is all, I was
conveyed, as on a magic carpet, to the blue valleys and the rust and
gold and jasper hills of Alsace, where the color is laid on thick,
thick. There I was one, during many historic days, of the delightful
group of blue-clad, scarred, decorated officers forming the French
Military Mission, which since the autumn of 1914 had administered the
little reconquered triangle of Alsace and planted in it the seed for the
re-Gallicizing of Alsace-Lorraine. It was a bit of French history in the
making, which detached itself quite peculiarly free from the mass of war
happenings, somewhat as a medallion from that against which it is placed.
My little book shows how humanly and simply the men of the French
Military Mission, accustomed to supreme events, together with a woman
from over the seas, lived through those thirteen historic days preceding
the armistice. It will perhaps be worth the reader’s while—I mean the
nice, bright, perceptive reader’s while—for mostly the throbbing,
high-colored beauty of Alsace is veiled by dusty, argumentative,
statistical pamphlets, so many of which are printed, so few of which are
read. I once saw a great building full of such, and dozens of them were
presented me for my sins, though I had never thought to read another book
on Alsace, much less to write one. I see once again how foolish is the
man or woman who says to the fountain, “I will never more drink of thy
water.”
In this record there are no polemics and no statistics. I have added
nothing to each day’s happenings, which run along as life is apt to run
along, even in supreme moments, and, Heaven help me, I have concealed
nothing. It is because of all this that perhaps those who, like myself,
have wept much and laughed much in their lives, will not ungladly
accompany me to a corner on the sorrowful and glorious chart of the
autumn of 1918.
EDITH O’SHAUGHNESSY.
PARIS, 33 RUE DE L’UNIVERSITÉ, _February, 1919_.
ALSACE IN RUST AND GOLD
I
THE JOURNEY THERE
And this is what a woman was thinking, as she walked the platform of
the Gare de l’Est at seven o’clock on a foggy October morning of 1918,
waiting to take the train to the front.
“Why, when trials and tribulations await us in every land, when every
dearest affection is accompanied by its related grief and every
achievement by the phantom of its early hope—why this illimitable ardor
of the soul, pressing us forward into new combinations?” ...
A few days before I had learned that Masevaux, the capital of that small
triangle of Alsace, reconquered since the August of 1914, would be my
journey’s term. Looking in the guide-book, I found Masevaux at the very
end—on page four hundred and ninety, to be precise, and the book has
but four hundred and ninety-nine pages in all—and it had seemed far,
far, and the world an immensity, with few corners for the heart. I have
realized since that it was only the chill of the unknown into which I was
to venture, drawn inevitably as steel to the magnet or the needle to the
north, by that very ardor of the soul....
I had not slept at all the night before—I never do when I am to take
an early train to pass out into new ways—and the somewhat dispiriting
influences of “that little hour before dawn” were still with me as I
stepped into my compartment and took my seat, while a captain of dragoons
lifted my small leather valise and my not large Japanese straw basket to
the rack. Settling myself, a bit chilly, into the depths of my fur coat,
slipped on over my uniform, I looked out upon the throng of officers and
soldiers, as many Americans as French, perhaps even more.
Standing near my window was a blue-clad colonel, with many decorations
and a black band on his arm. He was carrying a small bouquet of what
seemed like wild-flowers, and he embraced in farewell a woman in deepest
black who would bear no more children....
Then a very young, crape-clad mother, carrying several pasteboard boxes,
with three small children clinging to her skirts, hurried down the
platform to get into a third-class compartment.
But with it all I was conscious that the blue and khaki war was receding,
its strange deeds, which had seemed cut in such high relief, were even
then blurred against the red background, the background itself fading.
“Eyes look your last, arms take your last embrace” of the world horror,
the world beauty, where sorrow has so often been above sorrow and where
many “chariots have been burned to smoke.” ...
In the compartment are five French officers with dark rings under their
eyes. I don’t know whether it is wounds or the effects of the _perm_.[1]
Anyway, they almost immediately take attitudes inviting slumber. A young
woman all in purple, whether third or fourth mourning I know not (it’s
well done, though it couldn’t pass unnoticed), sits by one of the windows
and waggles a short-vamped, very-high-heeled, bronze-shoed foot and
rattles a gold vanity-box. From the neighboring compartment came classic
expressions: “Can you beat it?” and “Search me.” My heart salutes the
Stars and Stripes. The whistle blows, and the train starts for the very
end of the guide-book.
_8.30._—Read the masterly editorial of Jacques Bainville in _L’Action
Française_, “Où est le piège?” (“Where is the snare?”) while going
through the ugliest suburbs in the world, inclosing the most beautiful
city in the world. And more beautiful than ever is Paris in uniform.
Her delicate gray streets are mosaicked in horizon-blue, burnished with
khaki, aglitter with decorations. (Oh, those men of the alert, expectant
step, or those other broken ones dragging themselves along on canes and
crutches!) Who has not seen Paris in uniform knows not her beauty, bright
and terrible as an army in array; enchantment for the eye, bitter-sweet
wine for the soul. And again, who has not seen her violet-nighted,
black-girdled by the river, wearing for gems a rare emerald or ruby or
sapphire light, and silent in her dark, enfolding beauty, knows her not.
So lovers will remember her, and those whose sons are gone.
_9.30._—Looking out of the window on fields and forests and groves.
White-stemmed, yellow-leaved birches burn like torches in a pale, thin
mist. The plowed fields are black with crows; it would seem to be a good
year for them. We are due at Belfort at 3.35, but a large-paunched, very
loquacious man blocking the corridor—his voice has not ceased since we
started—tells a fellow-passenger that, with the delays caused by the
shifting of troops and material, we’ll be lucky if we get there by seven.
_10.30._—Rampillon with its beautiful old church, having two rows of
Gothic windows and several medieval towers, seen from a foreground of
smooth tilled fields. Over the green and yellow and brown world stretches
a silver heaven, tarnished with yellowish-gray clouds.
_Longueville._—Interminable trains of French and American troops cross
one another. The French train has various barometrical indications of
war-weather in chalk. _Guillaume, O là là, là là_; and the favorite and
unrepeatable word —— mingles with _Le plaisir d’aller à Paris_, _O les
belles filles_, _Adieu à jamais, Boches_.
The cars containing American troops are inarticulate. They haven’t been
at it long enough to express themselves.
The handsome young officer next me opens conversation by asking me for my
_L’Action Française_. Having previously torn out the article of Jacques
Bainville, and wiped the windows with the rest, I pass it over to him
with a smile. It wasn’t tempting.
A group of Americans are standing in the corridor. I hear, “I’d like to
burn the Rhine.” And the answer: “I don’t care what you burn, but I don’t
ever want to see the Statue of Liberty from _this_ side again. Me for
home. There’s more in it in one week in the clinic in little old Chicago
than here in a month, in spite of the hunks of material. Leaving some to
die or bandaging men in a hurry that you’ll never see again, and dead
tired all the time. No, siree! No war thrills for me.” And then, all
being devotees of Esculapius, they fall to talking about diseases, civil
as well as military.
The loquacious party (he hasn’t stopped even to take breath) says to his
companion that he’s going to surprise his wife, who thinks he’s in Paris.
Whatever else she’s enjoying, she must be enjoying the silence, and I do
hope he’ll make a lot of noise when he opens the door.
The young French officer next me with the _Légion d’Honneur_, _Croix de
Guerre_, four palms and two stars, tells me he is with the Americans at
Langres, which is _camouflé_ these war-days as A.P.O. 714, the ancient
hill-town of the Haute-Marne being the setting for the celebrated
“University” of the A.E.F.
_11 o’clock, Romilly._—Near here, in the old Abbey of Scellières, was
buried Voltaire, _l’enfant gâté du monde qu’il gâta_ (“spoiled child of
the world that he spoiled”), having been refused ecclesiastical burial in
Paris. And from here he journeyed in his dust to the Panthéon.
At St.-Mesmin the sun came out, and the dull, plowed fields were suddenly
spread with great covers, as of old-gold velvet, tucked in about the
slender feet of pine forests.
Now all this pleasant soil of France has many histories, and St.-Mesmin
is where the priest Maximin (you see whence the name) was sent by the
Bishop of Troyes to implore the mercy of Attila in favor of the great
city. For answer the terrible king of the Huns put him to death. Against
the sky is the tower of a twelfth-century church. A collection of objects
in a field that I thought were plows turned out to be cannon.
_Troyes._—Not a glimpse of the cathedral. Immeasurably long troop-train
fills the station on one side of us. On the other a gorgeous (it’s the
only word for it) American Red Cross train. Pressed against the windows,
lying or sitting, were pale men of my race. I waved and smiled, and
languid hands went up in answer. The box cars on the other side were
filled with blue-clad men. Over the doors were green boughs, on the sides
chalked portraits of the Kaiser, _Dur à croquer_, _Mort à Guillaume_,
etc. And everywhere the once so familiar _On les aura_ is converted
into _Nous les avons_.[2] Through the slits in the top of the cars were
faces of _poilus_ looking out, just as one sees cattle looking out;
then a long line of other box cars with American, khaki-capped heads
also looking out of the slits in the top, while the side doors too were
crowded with sitting, standing, leaning doughboys. Again I waved from my
window, and every cap was lifted.
There was a young man standing at the door of some sort of a refrigerator
car, and he wore a wonderful goat-skin coat. Being so near my window I
spoke to him, and said:
“It’s a fine coat you are wearing.”
“I’ll tell you in the spring,” was the prompt answer. “They’ve just
given them out to us. You try living next to the cold storage.” He then
proceeded to blow into some mottled fingers, after which he pulled a long
tuft of hair from his coat. “I’m molting,” he added, as he held it up,
“and winter’s coming.”
And he didn’t know whence he had come nor whither he was going. Then
either his train moved or mine did—I couldn’t tell which—and I saw him no
more.
_Vandœuvres-sur-Barse._—Wood, wood, piled high on every kind of wheeled
thing. Forests from which it had been cut showing sharp and thin,
fringing the gold-brown fields under the luminous noonday heaven. And
here for a moment the green was so delicate and the yellow so tender,
that I had a fleeting illusion of spring as I looked out.
Then I fell to talking with some young officers of the 131st Artillery
from Texas, but nothing that I remember. They had made no impression on
France, neither did France seem to have made any impression on them.
_Bar-sur-Aube._—Old houses, old walls, blue hills, a white road leading
over one of them. Strange church tower, with a round, many-windowed top,
and in each window hangs an old bell. A great trainload of American
infantry “going up,” the station, too, flooded with khaki, and another
train passed crowded with _poilus_ evidently _en permission_, making
rather fundamental toilets.
And around about Bar, as we slipped out, was a silver-vaulted world of
terra-cotta and purple hills, green and brown fields, silver hayricks,
silver sheep grazing near, and warm, brindled cattle, many green-painted
bee-hives, and fruit trees trained against pink walls. Gentle slopes,
later to become the Alps, appeared, and beech forests, like very worn
India shawls, clung to them, and a row of nearby poplars had each its
nimbus of yellow light.
About this time, having had a hasty cup of tea at six, I began to be
so hungry that the luster went from the landscape and my eyes received
nothing more. I didn’t care whether the talkative man gave his wife a
surprise or not, and the two Americans of the Texan Artillery section had
long since also ceased to interest me, when I heard a “nosy” voice saying:
“Gosh! I tell you, boys, there’s big money to be made over here after
the war. All you have to do is to hang out the sign, ‘American Dentist,’
and your waiting-room’ll burst.” I sat down and nearly slept by the
side of the six-foot dozing handsome officer, with the beautiful blue
uniform, and yellow pipings on his trousers and cap, and five service and
three wound stripes, and the number 414 on his collar, besides a lot of
decorations on his breast.
_1.30, Chaumont._—Sitting in the dining-car, finishing an excellent
lunch. Of course, in common with the rest of the world, I’ve heard a good
deal about Chaumont, but I can say that on the word of honor of an honest
woman the only thing I saw in khaki in that famous station of the A.E.F.
Headquarters was an emaciated Y.M.C.A. man about five feet four inches
high, with an umbrella and a straw basket.
Of course, I’m familiar with the phrases, “Chaumont has put its
foot down,” “Chaumont won’t have it,” “Everything will be decided at
Chaumont”; and once, entering a Paris restaurant, I heard the words,
“It’s all Chaumont’s fault.”
Then the fog closed in, a thick, impenetrable fog, and that’s all I know
or ever will know of Chaumont, as I’m going back to Paris _via_ Nancy. So
be it.
On a nearby new railroad embankment, the figure of a _poilu_—the classic
figure—the coat pinned back from his knees, bayoneted rifle over his
shoulder, loomed up immeasurably large in the fog, while he watched the
labors of a lusty, husky set of German prisoners, the familiar “P.G.”[3]
stamped on their backs. A little farther along was another laughing,
rosy-faced group of four of the same, watched over by one of their own
under-officers. I could only see his field-gray back stamped with his
P.G., but as his men were so unrestrainedly hilarious, there is no reason
to suppose that _he_ was frowning.
_4 o’clock, Culmont-Chalindrey._—Already three hours late. Fog-enveloped
train of box cars filled with slightly wounded doughboys peering through
the narrow slit at the top, bandaged eyes, noses, the same kind of groups
looking out of the door. Suddenly everything seems dreary. I am tired,
and wonder why, oh! why I came, and if the war is going to last forever
and forever, and it is the hour of the day when those who have not slept
the night before know profound discouragement and the noonday devil has
ceased to walk, flicking his whip.
_Vitrey._—Station full of Americans and wood—wood—wood, as if every tree
in France had been cut. “Wood by the pound is how you buy it over here,
all the same,” disdainfully remarked the Minnesotan artilleryman serving
in the Texan regiment, as we stood looking out of the window.
And if the journey down seems long, remember that life, too, is made up
of wearisome and long things—that it is indeed but a pilgrimage, and
mostly through a land more desert than this of Burgundy.
And in the end this book may justify itself, though of that I know as
little as you.
At Vitrey there is a detachment of mustard-tinted, khaki-clad,
red-_checchiaed_ Moroccan _tirailleurs_, exceedingly exotic-appearing,
sitting on their accoutrement or leaning against the bare scaffolding
of a new addition to the station. There came into my mind what an unwed
friend told me of a conversation with a dying _tirailleur_, to whom she
was giving a _tisane_ in a long, dim, hospital room at two o’clock in
the morning. He looked at her and said suddenly in his strange French:
“Woman, I know thy look; thou and many like thee have not been embraced
in love. In my village thou wouldst be a grandmother” (I had never
thought of her as old, but the _tirailleur_ knew that, as the men of his
race rated women, she was old—old, and no one would have followed her
to the well.) He continued: “If no man is to enfold thee, why not be as
those of the great white coifs, who have given themselves to Allah? They
have not thy look.” Then he went into delirium and cried out in his own
tongue and picked at his sheet, and when she came that way again he was
dead.
_6 P.M., Vesoul Station._—Writing by the light that comes in from the
gas-jet. Dim American forms silhouetted in the great station. Partake of
the loneliness that possesses the soul of American youth in France on a
foggy autumn night. One of them said to me to-day, with a curious, dulled
look in his eye, a brooding, neurasthenic eye, “I’m the kind that gets
killed the last day of the war.”
Then a presence apparent only by the light of his cigarette, a being with
an accent not immediately placeable, half cockney, half Middle-West,
calls out, “Say, does anybody know when we pull into Belfort?”
It had, all the same, something of confidence-inspiring, so I briskly
chirped up:
“Oh, in an hour or two or three.”
“Well, I took the eight-o’clock train from Paris last night.”
Chorus: “You mean this morning?”
“I mean last night, and going ever since.”
“What have you been doing in between times?”
“Going, going,” he answered, casually, “and as you see, going still!”
“How did you manage to get on this train?”
“I don’t know. There I was and here I am, and God knows where my kit is.
I’m a flier, and I’ve got to have my things,” he ended, rather irritably,
and then there was another conversation about “burning the Rhine.”
After interminable hours—two of them—we came to Lure, and everybody
seemed to be getting out, even the woman in purple, and there was a
fumbling with pocket-lamps and the voice of my country crying, “Where’s
that d—— door, anyway?”
The young man who started last night came into my compartment as the
train jerked out of the station, and he was a Canadian aviator _en route_
for the big camp of the Royal Independent Air Corps at Chatenoir. Before
the war he had been a chartered accountant. “But,” he said, “once in the
air, never again can I sit at a desk, crushed in by four walls.” And he
told stories of hair-breadth escapes of himself and his comrades, and of
combats in the air—once he had had his knee broken—and then he suddenly
cried out in a sharp voice: “God! I’m tired! Somebody let me know if we
ever get there,” and flung himself in a corner, and went to sleep, I hope.
A young American officer standing smoking in the corridor, with whom I
had sat at lunch, turned on his pocket-lamp for an instant during the
ensuing silence, and said, “Do you mind if I come in?” Then, in the pitch
darkness, lighting one cigarette from the other, and very lonely, I
think, he almost immediately began to talk about himself, and his story
might be called the story of the young man who was and wasn’t married.
Stripped of non-essentials, it was this: He had become engaged at a
“co-ed.” school, as he called it, some years before, and when he was
drafted, in the possible event of his being ordered abroad, the twain
decided to get married instead of waiting a few more years. One Sunday
morning in November they hunted up a clergyman and the knot was tied.
They then had lunch at the station and she took her train and he went
back to his camp. She was an army nurse and he was in the Engineers.
Now, as inclination alone could have caused them to unite (there wasn’t
the ghost of another reason apparent; they hadn’t even mentioned the
matter to their families), the sequel of the story becomes somewhat
interesting; in fact, quite incomprehensible, let us say, to the Latin;
even I myself was a bit muddled as to the whereforeness of it all.
Well, to continue. The next time they meet is when Fate, not quite
unmindful of them, sends him as instructor to a camp in the Middle West
on the outskirts of the very town where her people live, and she goes to
spend a three days’ leave with them.
The not-too-eager and certainly not-over-inventive bridegroom (whatever
combinations may have been in his mind, neither he nor history records)
gets a few hours’ leave and goes to spend Sunday at the home of his bride.
I begin to breathe. But not at all. Her people, innocent as the new moon
of the marriage, ask a few neighbors in for lunch—to make it pleasant for
them. The bride was to return that very same afternoon to her hospital.
They did walk to the station (under the same umbrella, I hope) and there
they said good-by.
“It was what you might call a quiet wedding,” I hazarded at this stage,
and it was too dark to see if he caught the point. Please bear in mind
that this was a marriage of inclination; no other explanation, I repeat,
being possible. And the luncheon took place the end of January.
The next time the situation seems about to clear up is in the golden
month of August, she having been transferred to the military hospital
near the camp to which he, in the meantime, had been transferred as
instructor. It seemed providential and again I breathe, thinking, “Love
will find a way.” Not at all. The bride rings him up the Sabbath morning
after his arrival (Sunday is evidently a bad day for that young man) and
tells him her orders take her to Camp Sill that night. The next day he
gets orders to report for overseas duty, and here we sit in the dark, on
the outskirts of Belfort! He breaks the silence later, with a certain
eagerness in his voice (not, however, for his distant bride, who, I also
gather, still bears her maiden name): “I do hope if we beat them I get
a chance to go into Germany with the troops. I’ve wandered all my life
[he’s between twenty-five and thirty] and sometimes I wonder how I’ll
take to living in one place and bringing up a family.”
In the dark I wondered, too.
_Later, much later._—To-morrow, All Saints’ Day, there will be some
crowding of the heavens, and the day after, the Feast of the Dead, all
France will be a-hurrying to her graves.
II
ALL SAINTS’ DAY, NOVEMBER, 1918
_Evening._—Masevaux, a town of old fountains and old inns with charming
old signs hanging out, the pebbly Doller running through it under
ancient, balconied houses, and over all hanging faint odors of its
century-old tanneries. A long day, but not too long.
Punctually at eight-thirty I had descended the flashy stairway of the
“Tonneau d’Or” at Belfort to find the officer sent to meet me finishing
his coffee and reading the morning papers, always comforting these days.
In a thin fog, we start out of town, passing under the antique high wall
of the castle against the rock of which “The Lion” has been carved. Now
all has been done that it is humanly possible to do with granite and a
lion, but of that more another time—perhaps. I can’t stop now except to
say that the hand that fashioned it fashioned also the Statue of Liberty
in New York harbor.
We meet, just out of Belfort, a funeral procession—three coffins, two
draped with the Tricolor, one with the Stars and Stripes. Making the
sign of the cross, I commended three souls to Heaven. I always remember,
accompanying a beloved one of my blood to his narrow dwelling, how sweet,
how very sweet, it was to see the gesture of that sign, and the lifted
hats of those we met, saluting him on his last journey. Though I do not
care inordinately how or when or where I lose my flesh, that much I would
like done to me—in passing.
Nestled in the corner of a broad, sloping field was a cemetery, a new
cemetery, with French and American flags flying from its crowded graves,
and many men were busy digging, and we heard the crunch of shovels in
cold, gravelly earth as we passed, and yet I thought how well, how very
well, the soldier sleeps!...
We were on the flat road that leads to Cernay, where the Germans have
lain intrenched since the beginning of the war.
Shifting masses of horizon-blue, velvety in the thin mist, appear,
disappear down white roads, between fields of barbed wire and against
horizons of rusty beeches. In the villages black-robed women and children
and old men are coming out of rose-colored churches or standing by
elaborate, very decorative rose-colored fountains. There is the distant
sound of cannon. It is again the front.
At Masevaux, I find myself drawing up under some yellowing lindens
in front of the building of the Military Mission—once the German
_Kommandantur_, in turn once the nave of the old church of the Abbey of
Masevaux. I walk over a rich carpet of rustling leaves to the door, and
am shown up the broad, stone stairway of an immaculately kept building.
Commandant Poulet having been called that morning to St.-Amarin, I am
taken into a charming corner room hung with a wall-paper that might have
been designed by Hansi, where a young, light-haired man with dark rings
under his eyes, who knows both battles and desks, was sitting at a big
table.
We looked at each other, I must confess, with some curiosity, though
of the politest. I, to see what the Military Mission might be going
to offer, but prepared to be very easily and very much pleased, he,
doubtless, to see what had been “wished on” them for the next week. It
_might_ so easily have been awful, instead of a niceish lady who has
both wept and laughed, and known many lands and many men. He asks me
what I would like to do that morning. Not having the ghost of an idea
what there is to do, I answer, “Everything is interesting,” and give a
somewhat free Gallicization of “beauty lieth in the eye of the beholder.”
This was received approvingly, even hopefully, and he tells me that in
the afternoon I am to attend a ceremony in the military cemetery at
Moosch, in another valley.
[Illustration: THE FOURTH OF JULY, 1918, IN ALSACE]
[Illustration: PLACE DU MARCHÉ, MASEVAUX, JULY 14, 1918]
About this time I begin to remember that it is “La Toussaint,” and
I say that if possible I should like to go to church. This, too, is
encouragingly easy and I am turned over to an officer whose wife and two
children have been in Brussels for four years, he himself a deserter from
the German army.
When we reached the church, built of _grès rose_, evidently and happily,
from its abundance, the building stone of this colorful corner of the
world, and which can take on the loveliest of _patines_ in even a
generation or two, I find it overflowing with the faithful, many blue men
standing on its pink steps. The curé, followed, I hope, by his flock, was
off on a longish sermon, and for a good half-hour I was washed and blown
about on a sea of mixed metaphor, though it did not seem too long, for
mind and imagination were flinging themselves about reconquered lands and
border peoples, and I only really “came to,” so to speak, when a great
and splendid organ sounded and a deep, harmonious choir of men’s voices
joined it. Then I knew I was indeed on the frontier, where music lingers,
and amorously it would seem, near the last of the mad, Romantic peoples.
When we passed out there was the noise of guns and everybody was looking
up at little white balls of shrapnel unrolling themselves about some
black specks in the blue, blue sky. It was the familiar firing on German
airplanes.
Then I was led to this charming old house, which is one of six placed
at right angles, on two sides of the Place du Chapitre. It proved to be
part of the old convent, done over by Kléber when he cultivated the arts
of peace rather than those of war. It belongs to four agreeable sisters,
the Demoiselles Braun, whose brother, also a deserter from the German
ranks, was killed in Champagne. They were rehanging the portraits of
their ancestors.[4] Whereby hangs the tale of two American nurses who,
quartered there some weeks before, had left the water running in the tub
one night, after which the drawing-room ceiling fell in and the paper
peeled in hall and vestibule. Hence the rehanging of the ancestors, at
their own, I mean the sisters’, expense.
They take me up a beautiful, but very worn, stairway, with a
time-polished oaken balustrade, and I find myself in a paneled room,
looking out on the square shaped like this:
[Illustration]
Many motors are drawn up in front of the Mission under the yellowing
lindens. The old red inn of “Les Lions d’Or” is directly opposite, and on
the left of the square at right angles with me are the four other houses
once dwelt in by the _chanoinesses_ when it was decided that each should
have her own establishment. The square is roughly, anciently paved,
with grass growing in between the cobblestones, and Mademoiselle Braun,
who showed me to my room, told me the steps of the old stairway were so
uneven because after the Revolution (during which the Chapter had been
dispersed) the house was long used as a school and they had been worn by
generations of young feet running up and down.
_At 12.15_—I am conveyed to _la popote_[5] for luncheon. More officers
inspect me—I them also—and then we proceed to the consuming of an
excellent meal, to the very exhilarating accompaniment of the news of the
capitulation of Turkey, and a light, easy touching on other prospective
and pleasant changes.
Now as, owing to circumstances too long to enter into, I hadn’t eaten
since noon the day before, passing by Chaumont, I did full justice to a
rabbit white as snow, garnished with noodles of the same hue, flooded by
a delicious golden sauce. I only fleetingly remembered that I ordinarily
avoid the little beast as food; for dessert we had a great cake filled
with chocolate and whipped cream, such a one as I had not seen for many
a month and year. A bottle of champagne was opened in joy at the Turkish
news. And we drank to everything and to everybody—even to the health of
the “Sick Man of Europe,” not, however, sicker than several others at
that moment, as some one cheerfully added. It was all very pleasant, and
I felt that everything was for the best in the best of war worlds.
At 2.30 I start out with Captain Tirman over a smooth road, _camouflé_,
kilometer after kilometer, with screens of wire netting interwoven with
broom and pine branches, for the road runs along the side of hills which
slope down to the valley where the Germans lie intrenched. Everywhere are
shell-holes, new and old. We stopped on a high place and, getting out,
peered through a hole in the screen. Spread out before my eyes was the
rich plain of Alsace, one of the world’s gardens. Something crystal and
shimmering half veiled its loveliness, but its beauty and richness I knew
for the beauty and the richness of a thousand years of blood, and many
men had found it fair and panted for its beauty and died for it.
In the distance, very white and shining, were the chimneys of Mulhouse,
and a pale-blue line against the horizon was the Black Forest. All the
time there was the sound of cannon, ours and theirs, reverberating
through the hills. I was greatly moved, and started to go higher up in
the field, but Captain Tirman stopped me, saying: “It will be better for
you to get away with your souvenirs than to take them unrecorded with you
to the grave. The Boches shell anything they see; and we haven’t got our
masks, either, in case they send a gas-bomb.”
The roadsides were planted with cherry trees, scarlet-leaved, the
_kirschbaum_ of Alsace. The hills had great patches of velvety,
rust-colored beeches; dark pines traced black patterns through them,
yellow larches shone here and there like torches; a soft sun was
dispersing the last of the delicate, noonday mists.
Then we slipped into the valley of the Thur, where lies the ancient town
of Thann. From afar I saw the lacy, gray belfry of its cathedral, pressed
against other heights of velvet rust and burnished gold. Nearby, the hill
of the Engelburg, with its broken, overturned tower like a great ring, a
souvenir of Turenne’s campaign during the Thirty Years’ War, was soft
and lovely, too. The long street was sun-bathed, and filled with the
black-bowed peasants of story-books, and the blue soldiery of the great
war. I wanted to stop by a pink fountain, near the richly carved portal
of the cathedral, but we feared to be late for the ceremony at Moosch and
hurried on.
At a place called Bitschwiller, however, we were obliged to wait while
an almost endless procession of black-clad old men, women, and children,
and blue-clad soldiers wound across the road, from its pink church to the
distant green and yellow cemetery.
Furthermore, the Fifteenth New York Infantry—black, black, black—is
quartered at Bitschwiller, and the most exotic sight I have ever seen
were those khaki-clad negroes in that valley, already very high-colored.
Suddenly against the steep hill, like a picture slightly tilted back, we
came in sight of the square cemetery of Moosch.
Above and below it was framed by a line of helmeted men in khaki, and
as we neared I saw they were _our_ black troops; the horizon-blue of
a French infantry regiment made the frame at the two sides. High,
high up were a group of white- and black-gowned priests, and red- and
white-gowned acolytes swinging their censers. At the top of the steep
stairway, running down the middle of the black-crossed cemetery, was
a sacerdotal figure, with outstretched arms, exhorting, and around
about the whole were groups of women and children. We left the motor
and walked over to the cemetery, where I found myself standing near
the resting-place of Norman Hall, the first American to die in Alsace.
From the tall, black cross floats the Stars and Stripes, and some one
had planted chrysanthemums thick on his grave. Peace to him. He lies
not far from General Serret, who fell, too, on the nearby sacrificial
Hartmannswillerkopf, where commingled lie fifty thousand who at the word
of command had put out each other’s light.
After the sermon the negro band of the Fifteenth played some grave and
measured music, the French infantry band then something a little too gay.
As one of the officers said afterward, “_Cela a presque frisé la polka_.”
Then the “Marseillaise” sounded and “The Star-spangled Banner.” I felt my
veil wet against my eyes and my lips atremble as I thought, a second time
that day, how well, how very well, the soldier sleeps.
Above the cemetery in a higher contour of eternal hill was a great patch
of yellow and black and rust-colored forest against a clear blue-white
sky, in which tiny black specks were moving eastward.
We waited to watch the negro troops defile. They appeared very smartly
dressed till the eye got to their feet, and such a collection of ripped,
torn, cut, down-at-the-heel footgear was never seen! They seem to be
a flat-footed race, too. I spoke to a couple of darkies very much _en
repos_, who were leaning against a fence, near the motor, as I got in.
One answered, with a broad grin, “You an American from America?”
“Yes.”
“Well, have you heard dis here war’s about over?” The coalest-black one
then contributes this to the conversation:
“When peace is signed dis here nigger starts to walk home.”
“What about the ocean?”
“I’ll take a swim, lady; the water can’t be no colder and no damper dan
dis here ‘Alice’ land.”
The mulatto by his side said, “I subscribes,” and became a pale gray at
the bare idea of getting colder or damper.
Then we see Commandant Poulet, tall, blue-clad, with high decorations
a-shine, coming toward us, and he and many officers are presented to me,
after which I change into his motor, and we start out over a magnificent
military road built since the war. It was begun and completed almost
miraculously, it would seem, in little more than a year, and over it,
safely hidden from German guns, come and go the great military supplies
of the Alsatian front—troops, artillery, munitions, food, ambulances.
As we mount, mysterious, dissolving twilight views present themselves
near red cherry trees, burn against distant blue hills, yellow larches
illuminate other “hilltops hearsed with pines,” and the beech woods are
a deep, deep purple. Then we plunge into the dimness of the great cedar
forests of the Route Joffre, talking, but not too much, in the large,
enfolding twilight, of the war, and of Alsace of to-day. Commandant
Poulet has been in charge of the Military Mission since Christmas Day of
1914, and I thought, rolling over the broad road, contemporaneous with
his administration, how out of thousands, nay millions of men, his part
during these war years had been to construct and not destroy. He told me
that almost his first official act was to be present at the burial of
Norman Hall on December 26, 1915.
As we issue from the dark forest we find ourselves on a crest overlooking
many other twilit hills. There is a pale, pale yellow still burning in
the west, and the most timid of evening stars shines above it. Then we
dip into the deep blue valley where Masevaux lies.
Peasants are hurrying to their villages, and there is a continuous, but
dull, sound of cannon. In the chill of the fallen night we arrive at the
Place du Chapitre, the town dark, dark as we enter it, and no light in
any house. Having seen my pleasant room only in daytime, I proceeded in
hunting for the light to try to turn on a barometer, then by another
door feeling my way along, I fumbled about an arrangement of mandolin
and pipe, then, as a last resort, I sought light from a stuffed owl.
After which I went into the corridor and, re-entering the room, found the
electric button just where it ought to be—by the door.
A saving hour of solitude before I am fetched for dinner, which was
very pleasant, but I can’t tell about it now, for sleep, dear sleep, is
touching me, and it is two days and a night since it has been near.
III
FÊTE DES MORTS, NOVEMBER, 1918
Church again, seemingly in company with the entire population, civil and
military, after which I _flanéd_ in the old streets of Masevaux, word
having been brought that no motor was available for our projected trip to
Dannemarie. Indeed, I had early noticed from my window much mounting in
hot haste, accompanied by the lively sound of two kinds of firing. Some
_coup de main_, I suppose.
I strolled about under an uncertain sun, occasionally sensible of that
delicate, not unpleasant smell of bark and leather hanging on a windless
air. About me was that world of blue-clad soldiers, black-robed women,
and many children were playing in the pink and gray streets; a group
of little girls were skipping rope to the words _ein_, _zwei_, _drei_,
_quatre_, _cinq_, _six_!
The post-office of modern Teutonic origin still wears, high up and
indifferently, the Double Eagle, though the more accessible _Kaiserliches
Post-Amt_ has been removed. A little farther down the street is the old
inn of the “Golden Eagle” whose historic sign dates from Napoleonic days,
and which, as was pointed out to me, turns its golden back disdainfully
to the black, double face of the once proud eagle of the post-office.
And this inn of the “Golden Eagle” hangs its charming sign out on a
corner of the square called “La Halle aux Blés” (the Grain Market),
surrounded by sloping-roofed, roomy houses. In the center is a
rose-colored fountain, with three diminishing rose-shaped basins around
a carved central column.
And the cobblestoned square with its good fountain and its comfortable
houses—there’s even a stable and a garage on one side—has something
cozy about it, its atmosphere that of a place long used by human
beings for the homelike customs of “the simple life,” which last bears
no resemblance to that occasionally practised at great expense and
inconvenience by those who “need a change” and can afford one.
American troops passed through the Halle aux Blés on the 30th of May of
this year, again on the 4th of July, and on the 14th, too, always drawing
themselves up at last in the Place du Marché, one end of which is my
Place du Chapitre. There, under the lindens, General Hahn and General
Boissoudy watched them deploy, while gaily attired Alsatian girls grouped
about the fountain acclaimed them, and from every window hung the Stars
and Stripes.
Then I found myself wandering out on the road to Belfort, past the
high, grassy eminence known as the “Ringelstein,” once crowned by the
proud castle of Duke Mason, founder of Masevaux. Traces of ancient
walls embowered in ivy are still to be seen, and at its base are many
old outbuildings of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, once
dependencies of the Abbey and the Chapter, and when you are not expecting
it you find old inscriptions and bits of carving plastered into them.
On one high-roofed outhouse was a large crown and three fleurs-de-lis.
Blasted through one end of the great rock of the Ringelstein rims the
railway. And there is a near view of the red and green and yellow roofs
of the houses of the _chanoinesses_ confounding themselves with the
autumn foliage of the trees which embower them.
I begin to know a little of the early history of Masevaux, enveloped in
legends and many contrary tales—Masevaux, ruled now by abbots, now by
feudal lords, belonging sometimes to the House of Austria, sometimes to
the House of France.
And the first legend is that of its foundation. How the lord of the
country, by name Mason, a nephew of Saint-Odile, was feasting in his
castle of this same Ringelstein, and the wines of Burgundy and Alsace and
of the Rhine were flowing, and a troubadour was reciting a tale of war
and love, when suddenly Duke Mason cries out:
“Soul of my soul, misfortune is happening to my son! Night is falling.
Where is he?” And he goes to the window and looks out. Some one answers:
“Fear not, illustrious father of so dear a child. He has doubtless
tarried with the holy fathers of Moutiers.” But the night gets blacker,
the lords and ladies drop their golden hanaps and the troubadour is still.
Then Mason, in the grip of deeper presentiment, cries out, “Who loves
me to the succor of my son!” And they seek with torches for the child.
Alas! the white body of Mason’s son, born of a dead, beloved wife, is
found floating upon the little stream, and Mason, pressing what was once
his child to his heart, cries out: “Nothing can ever give me joy again.
I will build a monastery wherein to pass my days until God calls me from
this heavy world.” And that is the origin of Masevaux—Masmunster. The
legend has it, too, that on moonless nights the child returns, weeping,
because he did not live long enough to read all the beautiful stories
inscribed by the gods, the prophets and the wise, concerning the sons
of men. And as I looked up at the great grass- and vine-covered rock
whereon the castle of Mason once rose, the Doller flowing at its base,
the cannon of the great war sounded. Down the white road was disappearing
a battalion of blue-clad men, going toward the black and rust and
yellow of the hills—a red cherry tree between me and them. Then I turned
back into the town and hied me to the _popote_, where some half-dozen
extremely agreeable men were awaiting me, as well as a sustaining repast.
The American _communiqué_ was immediately and very appreciatively read
out. Our victorious advance was continuing along the Meuse (known as the
“Muse” by the doughboy), the First American Army attacking on the west
bank in liaison with the Fourth French Army on the left. Then we looked
over the Turkish armistice terms, quite satisfyingly comprehensive from
the opening of the Dardanelles to promises on the part of the Turks not
to speak to any of their former friends.
And we talked of how from the terrace of Versailles, where the German
Empire was proclaimed, the statesmen of the world will watch the twilight
descending upon Walhalla and its gods; and here in Alsace the crash of
falling temples can be heard.
After lunch I went with Lieutenant Lavallée to see a bit of Alsace from
within, for he was to invite various mayors of villages to go to Paris
for the “Fêtes Alsaciennes,” to be held the middle of November, and also
to select a discreet number of veterans of 1870 and school-children of
1918 to accompany them.
We went first to Gewenheim, a somewhat war-battered village and, as
we entered it, Lavallée pointed out the iron plate on the sign-post,
indicating the name of the village and the department. Like many others
of the Haut Rhin (Upper Rhine), after 1870 it had been quite simply
turned and marked in German. This proved most convenient and economical,
for all the French Military Mission had to do when they came to Alsace in
1914 was to turn them back as they had been before 1870!
The mayor’s house, one of the usual dwellings with a small door for
humans and a big door for harvests, had been much damaged. Passing
in through a sagging entrance, we found the mayor, the classic,
horny-fisted, wrinkle-faced mayor of a village, with cobwebs and straw
and other substances adhering to his coat, but possessed of a certain
air of dignity and authority notwithstanding. There was a moment’s
silence after the lieutenant gave him the invitation, pride visibly
wrestling with parsimony, accompanied by the working up and down of a
very prominent Adam’s apple. He accepted finally with a sort of “I am a
man” expression, but there was a quite apparent melting of his being when
he found that it was the State that would defray expenses. Then the wife
of his bosom, who had helped him make and save his money, came in and
showed us some of their “best” shell-holes, and a statue of the Virgin of
Lourdes under a large glass bell which had not a scratch, even, though
everything around had been shattered.
There was also a lithograph of Henner’s red-headed “Alsatian Girl,” who
hangs in every home and every railway station, and is used for loans
and appeals and calendars and advertisements of complexion washes and
hair-dyes; and she was once a charming creature, before familiarity bred
contempt.
The worthy couple then fell to a discussion in Alsatian German as to
which of the veterans would be possible candidates for the trip to Paris.
There seemed to be something the matter with every one mentioned. Rudler,
Franzi, was nice and it was a pity that his rheumatism prevented his
getting about, as he had lost his dung-heap, though not his house, in a
recent bombardment and needed distraction. It wasn’t quite clear to me
_how_ you _could_ lose a possession of that kind, but I wasn’t at the
front to ask questions, so I let it pass.
Handrupp, Hansi’s, eyes were giving him trouble. If he went, a boy would
have to go to lead him about, and, even so, would he be welcome in Paris
if it were known that his daughter, old enough to know better, had run
away with a German?
First names, it will be noticed, came last, and last names first, a relic
of German order. Another incautious but evidently esteemed veteran, by
name Bauer, Seppi, had fallen from a hayrick last summer and would never
walk again. It was like looking at the back of the web of Fate, and I
found myself wondering with somewhat of exasperation, “for this had a
hero’s death at Gravelotte or Villersexel or Saint-Privat been denied
him, where angels would have awaited his strong, young body to take it
to the heaven of those who die for country?” Suddenly the _dulce et
decora_ of so dying was quite clear to me, and Bauer, Seppi, who fell
from the hayrick last summer, and all his still extant contemporaries,
had the tragic part—as would these men of the great war some forty or
fifty years hence, who were now going about with an astonished yet proud
consciousness that, _ex millibus_, _they_ had been chosen and been spared.
But as Lavallée very justly remarked, “What would happen to the world
if everybody died young?” I suppose he is right, and I bethought myself
that there are those who must await threescore and ten before the reasons
for their having been born are apparent; the “Tiger,” for instance, and
Moses, and many others.
We then visited the curé, living at the very end of the village
toward the lines. He was called from the church where he was hearing
confessions, and Lavallée proceeded to ask him which of the schoolboys he
recommended; wideawake ones, without, of course, being obstreperous, were
wanted. Something, disappearing almost as swiftly as it came, passed over
the curé’s face. It was a look of sudden, nearly overwhelming desire to
go himself, and the immediate realization of the impossibility of that or
anything else that meant change.
On the round center-table was a book, _Deo Ignoto_, and _L’Echo de
Paris_. A little harmonium with manuscript-music on its rack was near
the bed; on the walls were shiny lithographs of three popes, and an
illuminated Lord’s Prayer in German. As the upper rooms of the house
were “unhealthy,” on account of the raids and bombardments, the curé
lived and breathed and had his being downstairs in this one room, with a
rather boisterous yellow dog that kept sniffing at my gaiters. He was a
large man, with a naturally masterful eye, who would have been at home
in many places, occupied with many things, but he had lived, and would
die, Curé of Gewenheim. And he at least owed the Germans a temporary
widening of his activities, for Gewenheim is but three kilometers from
the firing-line.
Then we crossed the muddy street to the schoolhouse to confer with
the nuns concerning little girls, and were greeted by a dark-eyed,
sparkling-faced Sister, very gifted by nature, who would have graced
any drawing-room. There was something of elegance even in the way she
had the washing of the stairs cease to allow us to pass up, and in the
way she removed piles of coarse linen from the chairs in the room to
which she conducted us. Then another Sister, not so bright, though she
evidently ranked the gifted one, came in, and together they pondered
the names of possible little girls. I had a feeling of being behind the
scenes, and recognized how orderly and reasonable is the working of a
so-often fortuitously appearing Fate, as they decided who should, or
should not, take the journey to Paris. I thought, too, that it would have
been well-nigh intolerable to me, had I been a little girl in Gewenheim,
not to be among those chosen to go. But there was no longing on either
of _their_ faces. Especially the charming one radiated happiness and
content. And how true that nothing can enter the heart that is not
already there! I wondered if I, to whom so much of life is known—its
glories and its miseries—possessed what that graceful woman had found in
the dullest routine of duty imaginable. _She_ knew whither she was bound,
also whence she had come. In comparison, shaking, shifting, uneasy,
appeared the compass of my life....
A bottle of quite sour white wine was produced and they watched Lavallée
and myself drink; no escape possible.
They are of the Sisters of the Divine Providence with their mother-house
at Ribeauville, who have taught in the schools of Alsace for generations.
After leaving them, we visited the inn, entering into the _Gastzimmer_
through a tiny antechamber of a shop, where thread and candles and oil
for lamps, socks, and a few other strict essentials were sold. The
black-toothed, thin-haired landlady, Tritter by name, might have been
of any age, but a handsome boy of fifteen or thereabouts, with a bad
cough, calling her “Mother,” gave a possible limit. A good-looking,
high-complexioned girl appeared breathless from a bethumbed back
door, arranging two little curls under her ears. After the greetings,
Lieutenant Lavallée said:
“Have you had any news of your daughter Odile?”
“Not since last winter from Colmar,” both mother and sister answer;
“the parcels we sent her, they cost each fifteen francs, have not been
received. She was hungry when she wrote.”
Then was poured out a confused story concerning the capture of a squad of
Germans with their gun, in the autumn of 1914. A few days after the event
the sisters had been standing in the street in front of their door, when
a German officer came up and said to Odile, the younger:
“You are wanted for a moment.” She followed him to another officer on
horseback, waiting in a field. They had not seen her since. Then it
appeared that it was the baker’s wife who through jealousy had denounced
the pretty Odile (the rôle of the baker himself was not indicated), but
such an expression of hatred for the baker’s wife, rather than for the
Germans, came over the mother’s visage that I was reminded of faces
in pre-Raphaelite pictures—I mean those on the goat side in Judgment
Day scenes. It was evidently one of those obscure yet ruthless village
tragedies set in the frame of equally ruthless war.
When we came out we copied an old inscription over the house door of
a man, Louis Vogler by name, who, returning from a campaign, had been
decorated with the Legion of Honor in 1816, and had recorded the fact for
all time over his door, his decoration even being carved in with the rest.
Evidently a man who, having done a deed, was not content that it
should be writ only in water (or blood), but had it put squarely and
clearly over the door of the house to which he returned; and was he
not justified? For here it is being recorded some hundred years after,
instead of having been carried away on the great river of Napoleonic
deeds.
Then, through several wet villages, groups of girls with their felt
slippers stuck into their clacking wooden sabots (very comfortable
footgear, it appears) pass groups of blue-clad soldiers, and words are
exchanged. I couldn’t hear, but by the looks accompanying them and the
giggles I judged them to be the eternal words exchanged in all ages
between soldiers and future mothers of the race. And there is a verse,
old as the army, which runs:
_Le négligent troupier_
_Qui laisse passer l’heure_
_Et trop longtemps demeure_
_Sera puni par son sous-officier._[6]
Everywhere along the road, through the mist, detachments of blue-clad
men would appear and disappear. I thought with a touch of sadness, an
esthetic sadness, to be sure, that this extreme beauty of dissolving
distances would be lost when the world of blue-clad men would have
disappeared, replaced by men in shabby, nondescript, civilian clothes, or
by _des types à melon ou à tube_—those wearing derby hats or cylinders.
Near Rodern, between some lines of poplars, a helmeted cavalryman, with
his detachment, rode by on a great black horse. He was bending slightly
forward, his lance in his hand, his eyes looking straight ahead, his
ample, light-blue tunic almost concealing his saddle. He was a pure
French type, pale of face, with black hair, black mustache, slanting
nose, and I knew him for the archetypal Gallic warrior as he has appeared
through the ages, making epics for France.
At Bourbach-le-Haut, Lieutenant Lavallée was to invite a last mayor
to partake of the trip to Paris, and hunt up some remaining veterans.
Whatever gentle thirst I had had for mayors and veterans being now
quite slaked, I went to the little church, instead of to the _Mairie_.
Through the half-open door came light and chanting sounds. I went in to
find a dim interior, with an ancient arch framing the altar space, in
front of which was a narrow, black coffin. Only some very old bit of
mortality, waxy and shrunken, could lie within. Women, children, and what
may have been veterans were saying the rosary in German—the Sorrowful
Mysteries—and I thought on my dead, and on that dear and holy brother
born into the world on this day long years ago. In Alsace he had desired
and received, dreaming and adolescent, the baptismal waters.
Sadness invaded me, even as the dreary night was invading the day, and
I would have groaned aloud, but I saw Lieutenant Lavallée standing by
me. Haunted by the mournful chanting, with its mysterious indications,
“_Jetz und in der Stunde unseres Absterbens, Amen_,” I passed out into
falling night and rain; dark masses of mountain loomed up, lighter spaces
were the stretching valleys. Soon we found ourselves on the deep road to
Masevaux, I lonelier than the loneliest of the dark and hurrying clouds.
IV
THANN AND OLD THANN
_Sunday morning, November 3d._—Awakened at six by heavy firing. After
wondering what could be happening, I remember that life, as far as I
am concerned, is for the moment largely joy, or rather joyous riding,
with a series of agreeable French officers (they certainly are of an
amiability!), in a series of large, powerful military motors, through a
series of beautiful autumnal hills, over a series of the newest and most
wonderful of war roads.
Enough church-going, however, as will have been noticed, to keep me
mindful that man, and woman, too, is grass, and though it, or rather she,
springs up in the morning, she may be cut down by night, and that this
bending of the hills is by the journeys of her eternity.
Well, to get to the point, or rather to Thann. We started out early, at
nine, for I was to find a Mass in the cathedral, after which we were to
proceed to Vieux Thann, where war has not spared the church nor left
worshipers.
Again we took the screened road overhanging the valley. Again we stopped
on an eminence and climbed into a field, and again I was shown the blue
valley, over the tops of some red cherry trees. Nothing detached itself
from gradations of velvety mists and beaming distances, but I knew that
on the grape-planted slopes of an unseen river that other wine of defeat
was being drunk from cups held stiffly to unwilling lips.
[Illustration: THANN AND ITS VINEYARDS]
As we dipped down into the valley of the Thur, the belfry of the church
of Thann appeared, so mistily, lacily soft that its form and substance
seemed but as something breathed into the air, at any moment to be
dissolved, against hills that were like brocaded stuffs, whose gold would
be very thick if one turned them wrong side out. My heart was stirred
because of the fairness of the Sabbath world.
We drew up in front of the gorgeous portal of the cathedral, once a deep
pink, but with time grown paler and softer at all its edges, and whose
boardings and sandbags now partly hide the carved story of the life of
Christ and His Mother. We grope our way in through several swinging
doors, and find the high, Gothic space filled with a misty yellow light
coming in through narrow windows, covered with oiled paper, the precious
stained-glass having been long since removed.
Little by little the forms of kneeling women and children, and many
soldiers standing, detach themselves from the lovely gloom. The green
vestment of the priest at the altar, on which are six tall, crystal,
wide-branched candelabra, misty like the rest, is the only spot of color,
for the splashes of horizon-blue become nearly white after a strange
fashion of this color in dim light, whether of church or falling night.
In the ancient wrought-iron pulpit the curé was just finishing a sermon
in French, immediately beginning one in German. It appears that as the
_communiqués_ improve, the French sermon gets longer, and the German
shorter, and mercifully neither is long.
We passed out quickly after the “_Ite, missa est_.” I had been feeling
that Captain B—— might be in a hurry, but when I looked about to see if
he were fidgeting, I found him doing what any _miles gloriosus_ should be
doing from time to time, saying his prayers.
And this is the story of the building of the church of Thann, and of its
arms, which bear a single pine tree.
Death found the holy Bishop Théobald in the Umbrian Valley, and, knowing
that his hour had come, he said to his servitor Maternus, who knelt
weeping by his side:
“Thou knowest I leave no worldly goods, for the poor have needed what
I had. But this sapphire ring, dear memory of her once loved, take it,
thou, that worms may not dwell within it.” And then he entered into
contemplation, saying nothing further of the things of earth.
When Maternus had made ready to hide his master’s body from the light,
he tried to take the ring from its finger. But with the ring came the
finger, and both were inclosed as in a shining rim.
Maternus, greatly wondering, hid the precious relic in a hollow place in
his staff and started back to Alsace, begging his bread along the way.
After many delays, having been set upon by wicked men and molested by
prowling animals, he finally arrived in the valley of the Thur.
Exhausted, he laid himself down to rest, placing against a pine tree the
precious staff. The next morning he was awakened by the ringing of the
Angelus, and when he started to grasp his staff he found that it was as
if grafted on to the great pine, while to left and right were burning two
tall, pale, sapphire flames.
At this moment the lord of the Engelburg came by, the ruins of whose
great castle are those one sees rising above the town of Thann. He had
perceived the two blue flames from afar and, hastening to find out what
they signified, he recognized Maternus, faithful servitor of his friend
Théobald.
Maternus then related the death of the saint in the Umbrian plain,
showing him the finger and the ring; whereupon the lord of the Engelburg,
weeping and sighing, cried:
“Oh! my precious friend Théobald; oh! my dearly loved sister Adelaide,
this is thy betrothal ring, and these two sapphire flames announce thy
union in dear heaven!” (In those days they were quick to see divine
meanings.)
Now, the so well-loved Adelaide, in her green youth, had been struck by
a bolt from heaven, after which Théobald, for whom the whole round earth
held nothing more of value, had consecrated himself to God.
The lord of the Engelburg, his gaze fixed upon the luminous finger and
the familiar blue ring, knew soon the too often hidden will of God, and
cried out again:
“Here I will build a church, and its reliquary shall contain this
precious ring and finger.”
And so was built the church and monastery of Thann, and about them
grew the town, and during long centuries on the vigil of the feast of
Saint-Théobald, a freshly cut pine tree was placed in front of the
cathedral, flanked by two great wax candles. Nor can any one, even of the
very positive-minded, who look no farther than stones and mortar for all
meanings, give a better reason for the arms of Thann.
Then we motored on toward Vieux Thann, half destroyed, and evacuated
since 1914, but were obliged to leave the too visible motor on the
outskirts of the village, creeping close along a very high screen of wire
and broom branches that we might not be seen by the enemy. For we were
in the plain of Cernay, now known as the Ochsenfeld, once called the
“Field of Lies,” where the three sons of Louis le Débonnaire routed their
father’s army. Lothair, Louis, and Pépin were their names. But of all
this another time.
Vieux Thann is a half-demolished, echoing, empty town, with a background
of neglected vineyards on very close-pressing hills.
Everywhere were signs of German war occupation. The schoolhouse had
been their evacuation hospital, and one of the old inns bore the sign,
“Verband-Station.” The only living things in Vieux Thann were the
fountains, quite lovely in the pink-stoned, gracious Alsatian way, with
their gentle, unhurried streams of crystal water. It all reminded me
vaguely of Pompeii, even in the misty light of a northern Indian summer
sun.
Above, in the perfect blue, the usual firing on German airplanes was
going on. Long after the black specks had disappeared to the east
the little, round, soft, compact balls of shrapnel were still slowly
unfolding themselves.
About fifteen hundred feet from us were the battle-lines, where the
French and Germans have faced each other in the “Field of Lies” since
1914.
One of the battered inns, “Zum Goldenen Lamm,” has its once lovely old
sign still hanging out, but the golden lamb is gone, and only his golden
feet and the green wreath of laurel that once entwined him remain.
And to what winds had the dwellers of the great village been scattered?
Where had they been received, unwillingly, by strangers, those hosts of
refugees, fleeing from their homes, red with excitement, bright-eyed,
voluble? I’ve seen them, too, after months of treading up another’s
stairs and eating of the salt bread of charity—pale, silent, dispirited,
returning to villages like Vieux Thann, to see their all among disorderly
piles of fallen stones and crumbling mortar....
Back to the living city, to an increasing sound of cannon, but the
Sabbath stillness was so deep nothing seemed really to disturb it.
The cathedral with its single, finely pointed tower was like a needle
everywhere threading up long streets. I had a desire to see it empty,
and as I entered, its perfect proportions gave me a sweet and satisfying
welcome. The red lamp of the sanctuary was now the only spot of color
in the thick yellow gloom, out of which line and proportion gradually
detached themselves. The celebrated choir-stalls had been removed to
Sewen, but above the altar of the Virgin is a Gothic triptych, and the
beautiful pulpit is of fifteenth-century wrought-iron. We groped our
way into a low, vaulted chapel which existed even before the church was
built, passing a tombstone bearing the arms of the house of Ferrette, a
family once all-powerful in these valleys. Over the altar of the chapel
is an ancient statue of Saint-Théobald. He has a long, thin, shaven,
upper-class face, his eyes are bent, and he is looking perhaps as he did
shortly before death found him in the Umbrian Valley. It is the visage of
a man having done with personal things, and a great pity is woven into
the downward curves of the benignant face.
We drove back to Masevaux, over one of the splendid new war roads, rising
and dipping through forest-covered hills. The brilliant sun shone athwart
each leaf, still dewy and sparkling, and a strong, rich, autumnal smell
exuded from the earth. It reminded Captain Bernard of hunting before the
war, that carefree _chasse d’avant-guerre_, and I thought of Hungarian
castles, and long days in forests, walking through rustling leaves, or
sitting silently in glades with men in green-brown hunting garb, awaiting
the game. In the evening, shining dinner-tables, and talk about the day’s
bag by men in pink hunting-coats and women wearing their best gowns and
all their jewels.... And much that is no more.
We descended at the _popote_ as the hand of the church clock pointed
to 12.15. Blue-clad officers were standing by the windows reading the
Belfort morning paper just arrived, and the Paris newspapers of the day
before, as I went in.
The enemy is beating his retreat through the Argonne Forest, to the
sound of the hour of destiny, and there are armistice and abdication
rumors, and indications that they want to _sauver les meubles_, or, as
they would say, seeing they’ve got into a bad business, _retten was zu
retten ist_—_i.e._, German unity, which, saved, means all is saved. But
there are strange dissolvents infiltrating everywhere, scarcely any
substance can resist, and the blood of peoples boiling over, and much
good broth spilling, and too many cooks everywhere. For what man but
wants to try his ’prentice hand at seasoning of the mess? And it was all
talked about to the consuming of Mère Labonne’s especially excellent
Sunday dinner, an example of _la vraie, la délicieuse cuisine française
bourgeoise_. There were _pieds de veau_ that melted in the mouth, and
creamed potatoes, after which a very delicious _hachis_, with some
sort of horseradish sauce, and when I remark that it has also a touch
of garlic, Sérin cries out, “But not at all—it’s only horseradish.” On
my being supported by everybody at the table, he finally says, with an
innocent but somewhat discomfited smile, “It’s true that there must be a
lot for _me_ to notice it.” Then he tells with gusto of a repast in his
dear Toulouse where there was a whole cold pheasant for each guest, and
each pheasant was blanketed with such a thick cream of garlic that the
bird itself could scarcely be seen. “It was exquisite,” he added. “I dare
say; one can even smell it here,” some one cruelly finished.
Then they spoke of how the French had supported captivity better than the
English, and why.
“We always talk while eating,” said Bernard, “no matter how scanty or
ignoble the repast. It’s our hour for relaxation.” (Any one lunching or
dining at French officers’ messes will have noticed this.) “But with the
English it is different. They eat silently, and in captivity they easily
get the spleen and fall into melancholy, because the food isn’t served
as they would like, or because they can’t wash or shave or exercise.”
And I told the story of the brother of a French friend whom I had
recently seen, just back from nearly four years’ captivity, who returned
in such a stout, rosy condition that his sister was ashamed to show him,
and when asked about her _pauvre frère_ would blush.
We sat long, talking now of books, now of personages, now of local
happenings, Sérin telling of passing that morning through one of the
smaller villages where even the young girls had saluted him with a
military salute as he rode by—and one of the officers said, with a flash,
“_Très délivrées celles-là!_”(“Very delivered, those!”) Then some one
told the story of the man who came down to Masevaux to make a book on
Alsace and, seeing the line of the trenches marked that day in blue on
the commandant’s map, remarked, in a _dégagé_ way, “_Le Rhin, n’est-ce
pas?_” (“The Rhine, I suppose?”)
“Not yet,” was the quiet answer.
He then rushed them all off their feet for ten hours, after which, having
got what _he_ wanted, he went back to Paris and wrote his book. And from
what I hear it wasn’t a bad book, either. Though one of the officers said
he knew he could do the same about Prague or Peking, that he’d never
seen, with some books, a good pair of scissors and as much paste as he
wanted.
All is handled lightly, as only a group of Frenchmen could handle it,
_glissant, n’appuyant jamais_, each bringing his little gift of wit
and culture, enjoying the impersonal with the same pleasure as the
personal, in the French way. Of course, the _communiqués_ are as honey
after four years of bitter herbs, very bitter, even though distilled in
extinguishable hope.
And I must say that to me lively and untrammeled conversation is the
salt of daily life; and if, as it sometimes happens, one’s own thoughts
are expanded, brightened, and returned to one, it is indeed delectable
above all things, the true salt to be used in quantities (if you can
get it). For, alas! the majority of people have no ideas, when you come
down to it, or, having a few, they are pig-headed and look but into
the converging point of the angle, knowing nothing of the splendor of
diverging lines where self is swallowed up in unself. And there are
the close-headed, whose minds work slowly in a cramped way, or not at
all, and they are forever complaining that they only think of things to
say when they get home and the lights are out. They might just as well
not think of them (one sometimes doubts if they really do) for all the
good they are to their neighbors. And there are those very thin-skinned
ones who immediately get contentious, and think the arrow is meant for
them instead of the universe at large, and one could go on indefinitely
through the list of impenetrable heads, to whom the blow of an ax is as
the brush of a feather, or cushiony heads that once dented, however,
never regain their contours, and many, many others. These all need
material sauces, good, rich sauces to their food, or they would find
it tasteless, not having even a pinch of this other salt to season it
with. And they are mostly those who do not work, but whose fathers
worked—sometimes even their mothers—and _oh, là là_, the subject is
endless, for everybody talks—even those who have nothing to say.
V
THE BALLON D’ALSACE
_Sunday afternoon._—At two o’clock I started out with Captain Bernard
and Captain Antoni for the great mountain known as the Ballon[7]
d’Alsace, sometimes called, too, “the knot of Europe,” in an especially
high-powered motor (I never know the mark of any of them, distinguishing
a Ford from a Rolls-Royce only by the generally pampered feeling
pervading me when in the latter).
The Ballon rises like a wall at the very end of the valley of the Doller,
and we passed through many villages, shining pinkly in the prismatic
November afternoon, where there was much going into church for vespers,
of blue- or black-clad figures. The thirteenth century-towered church
of Sewen is on a slight eminence in the heart of the village, and the
cemetery around it was crowded with the faithful, regretting their dead,
or some, perhaps, for one reason or another (What know I?), feeling,
“’Tis better they lie there.” “Live long, but not too long for others,”
is an excellent device.
The charming lake of Sewen, though far from the village, seen from a
certain angle, reflects the tower of the church and is, they told me,
of Moorish origin. These valleys and hills seem everywhere like open
books concerning the dim, dim youth of the earth; I had a sense of my
transitories, with those lessons written everywhere. And it is autumn,
too.
We got out at the immense reservoir of Alfelt which dams up dangerous
springtime floods with its giant wall of masonry, for from the “knot of
Europe” loosened waters flow to the North Sea and to the Mediterranean.
Climbing to the top of the rocky elevation, we read on the monument the
date of the inauguration of the reservoir, 1884, and the name, Prince
Hohenlohe Schillingfurst, Statthalter.
And, looking down, the shining villages through which we had just passed,
Sewen, Oberbruck, Niederbruck, Masevaux, are like beads on the thread of
the lovely valley, lying between the breasts of the hills.
The mountain-ringed lake of the reservoir reflects the rich coloring
of the hills in which it is set; white-stemmed, yellow-leaved birches,
blood-red cherry trees; rust-colored beeches, larch trees shining like
torches borne by wanderers, on black pine slopes; all is seen twice—once
on the hills and once in the mirror of the lake.
Then we mount up, up, up, twisting and turning over the magnificent
military road, made like so many others since the war, to become some day
the joy of tourists, when, thousands upon ten thousands, nay, millions
upon millions, they shall come from over ocean and mountain to see what
it all looks like and get the belated thrill.
Violet hills become black, outlined against a copper-colored band of
western horizon. Captain Bernard points out some English airplanes just
over our heads, tiny, tiny specks hanging in a high waste of heaven, and
I wonder if in one of them sits my friend, the chartered accountant of
the Belfort train, fulfilling his destiny in the air.
We leave the motor at the highest point of the road, where trees no
longer grow, and start to climb the grassy crest, patterned with great
brown patches of barbed-wire defenses. Captain Bernard’s sharp eyes
soon discerned the _chicanes_, intricate, almost indistinguishable
pathways through the wire, and if one knew them one could get through
without leaving one’s clothes. Breathless, we arrived at the _table
d’orientation_ and find ourselves looking out over what seemed the edge
of the universe. In front of us lay the gorgeous panorama of the Alps
and behind it the wide band of copper-colored sky, with here and there
a burnishing of glaciers by the dipping sun. To our left stretched the
immense and splendid valley of the Rhine, behind it the Black Forest,
clearly yet softly outlined against a paler horizon. One could have
rolled the whole earth like a ball from the feet. I felt as if suddenly
freed from any heaviness of the flesh, and Goethe’s soaring words brushed
against my mind, and beckoned me on—those words he cried after he had
reached the Brocken and was looking down on a cloud-covered Germany.
_Dem Geier gleich_
_Der auf schweren Morgenwolken_
_Mit sanftem Fittig ruhend,_
_Nach Beute schaut,_
_Schwebe mein Lied._[8]
I knew those vast expanses for material out of which a new earth, if
not a new heaven, must be formed, on some eighth day of creation. And
the new earth was to be made out of old and conflicting desires, worn,
yet persistent passions, small, yet greedy thoughts, the whole about as
facile as the weighing of the winds, making one almost feel that He who
worked with new materials those first seven days had the easier part.
I was filled, too, with a great longing for an improbable wisdom and
strength to be breathed into the men who are to reharness the plunging,
escaping destinies of the nations. Each man that has his hands on the
reins seems like some one clinging to a runaway horse, trying to dominate
a relentless, unreasoning, reckless course.
Reverberating through the eternal hills was the sound of heavy cannon;
and before my mind came a vision of the great forges wherein they were
formed, men working day and night in hot, dim, noisy spaces—Creusot and
Krupp and Skoda, and all the rest....
Some near summit hid the dread Hartmannswillerkopf, the “Verdun” of
Alsace, and one of the officers spoke of that winter of 1916, when its
snow was always pink with blood and black with death—“tens of thousands
sleep there.” I thought of the souls breathed out into that pure, high
ether, like to this, but cold, cold, almost as tenuous as the immortal
stuff commingling with it.
Then we started to the other edge of the summit, whence we might look
into _l’élégante et douloureuse Lorraine_, for one side of the Ballon
slopes toward Alsace and the other toward Lorraine.
As we threaded our way carefully through more _chicanes_ of barbed-wire
defenses “that you had to have your nose in before they could be
distinguished,” I discerned on the crag three familiar silhouettes,
outlined against the heavens toward the Lorraine slope. And as things are
rarely in their proper setting nowadays, there on the Ballon d’Alsace
were three dusty Y.M.C.A. men who had come from their _cantine_ at
Belfort. We spoke to them and gave our names, and the brightest one,
Tallant was his name, asked if I were the wife of my husband—and said
he’d been on the Mexican border.
Then we told them where the _table d’orientation_ was, but forgot to
point out the _chicanes_, and we saw them from a distance entangled in
barbed wire. Their souls were safe, I hope, but heaven help those khaki
clothes!
And looking down into Lorraine from my splendid height was as if looking
into another world, for its distances were bronze and silver and pale
green.
Great black spots of shadow cast by wasteful masses of white clouds were
lying heavily over those new and ancient battle-fields. Forever obliged
to protect themselves from some invader, the villages hide rather than
display themselves, and are barely detached from the silvery brown of
the plain, crossed here and there by the bosky lines of the Meuse, or
those of the great canal joining the French river to the Rhine. And each
tiny hill has been an altar or a fortress, often both at once. Over the
majestic, melancholy stretch Romans have passed, the hosts of Attila,
Normans, Germans, Burgundians, Swedes, English, and many others. Now its
white roads sound to the tramp of American armies, are encumbered by
giant quantities of war material brought from over the seas. And of all
who have passed over it, of the most ancient even, much remains. Close
against one another are Roman encampments, feudal castles, the two-sided,
two-faced bastion defenses of Vauban, the great, mined earthworks of
modern times, and now in leafy darknesses are the cement emplacements of
the big guns of the twentieth century.
But alas! as I turned to go, pulling my gaze from the wide horizon (a
pale, pale pink where it covered the western way to the city that is the
heart of France), I saw on that slope, directly under me, a cruel statue
of Jeanne d’Arc. A stiff yet boneless Pucelle sat astride an equally
stiff yet boneless steed; both seemed about to drop into space, the
mountain falling away from them, and both were of a dreadful superfluity!
However, one isn’t so plagued with horrid modern statues in Alsace as
in other places I have been, for they run rather to fountains and living
waters. At St.-Amarin, for instance, I don’t remember anything later or
more personal than the fiery Gallic cock, “_der spuckende Welschhahn_,”
surmounting a sphere, borne in turn by the column of the 1830 fountain;
and the fountain in the Place du Chapitre at Masevaux, bearing the date
1768, has a single, lovely column, too, on whose top burns a stone flame
in an urn. And the shaft of the fountain of the wine-growers at Thann is
a mass of rich yet noble carving, surmounted by a helmeted figure bearing
a shield on his back. Furthermore, crystal water flows into its six-sided
emblazoned basin.
I think of the statue of Thiers, _Libérateur du Territoire_, in that
dusty, begonia-planted, iron-railed plot in front of the station at
Nancy, and I could weep.
But hereabout I haven’t found a single nineteenth-century statesman
in frock-coat and top-hat, done in granite, nor any bronze female
pointing him the way to a dubious heaven, with a long finger and a heavy
palm-branch—and so may it remain.
Certainly the _très chic chef_ of the Military Mission will be well
punished for _his_ good works in Alsace if they ever raise a statue to
him. For they will make him, too, out of either bronze or marble with a
_plaque de commissaire_ on his frock-coated breast, and heaven knows what
kind of a hat they’ll put on him, or how the fancy will seize them to do
his hair! And the statue won’t be of lapis lazuli, as it should be, nor
of pale sapphire, nor of dull turquoise, nor of any of the lovely blue
stones of the earth, alone fit to perpetuate the beauty of the blue-clad
men who have written France’s greatest epic. Blue-clad men splashed about
fountains at twilight, blue-clad men taking form and substance as they
emerge out of gray mountain mists, blue-clad men weaving their cerulean
patterns through the woof of long-trunked pine forests, blue-clad men
like bits of turquoise embedded in the matrix of white roads, and what
know I besides?
As I gave a sigh for Art and a prayer for the serried ranks of her
erring devotees, I found myself looking into another splendid valley,
toward Giromagny, near where is a height known as La Planche des Belles
Filles, after a story of the Thirty Years’ War, when men with blue eyes
and very light hair and skin were for a while masters of the domains of
Belfort and Ferrette. After the best manner of invading armies, ’tis
recorded that these Swedes committed many excesses, and dark-eyed girls
lay concealed in the forest, and when they feared their hiding-place had
been discovered they fled to the mountains, but even there they were
pursued by the hosts of fair-haired, fair-skinned, blue-eyed men, bent
on the most elemental of errands. And again they fled precipitately,
scarcely knowing their direction. When they got to the top they found
themselves on a great ledge of rock and in their distress they tumbled
from the height onto other rocks below, and the blue-eyed, fair-skinned,
fair-haired men from the North knew them not. Hence the “Ledge of the
Beautiful Girls.”
And then we took a last look at the vast heaping of the Alps; to the
left, the Jungfrau and the Mönsch, to the right, Mont Blanc, the whole
great mass outlined against that persistent dark-red band. The glacier of
the Jungfrau was as if in conflagration; Mont Blanc was soft and roseate,
yet its beauty left me cold.
Captain Bernard said he had climbed the Ballon many times and only twice
before had he seen the great panorama; but as, alack! to him who does not
want shall be given, except for their gorgeousness, I would have turned
from them indifferently, had not my beloved mother been dwelling almost
in the shadow of Mont Blanc.
But one[9] has written, as men of genius write of things in times of
peace, of this Ballon d’Alsace. He who brought out from his Gallo-British
mind new things and old has said in one of the most charming of books:
“Then on the left you have all the Germanies, a great sea of confused and
dreaming people, lost in philosophies and creating music, frozen for the
moment under a foreign rigidity, but some day to thaw again and to give a
word to us others. They cannot remain long apart from visions.” I thought
they have, indeed, given a “word.” But when again the “visions”?
I turned and followed my two blue-clad officers down the Alsatian
slope, over the gray grass, threading neatly through the _chicanes_ of
the brown, barbed-wire defenses, and got into the motor waiting on the
roadway once known as that of the Dukes of Lorraine.
We were silent as we started down the great mountain. I was again wrapped
in thoughts of the New Day to be created out of old and rotting stuffs,
and of the death of heroes. The hills were velvet-palled against the
deepening crimson band of light.
Later, a _panne_, and we waited in a violet-valleyed world, illumined
only by white candelabraed torches of strangely luminous larch and birch,
while the prudent yet daring chauffeur changed the tire.
A great khaki-colored motor passed us, marked with two stars, filled with
khaki-clad men of my race, going up, up, whence we had come.
Then we stopped at the little restaurant of Alfeld. The lake of many
colors was dark and mysterious. Its high tints had been dipped in
something deep in the hours since last I saw it, though strange blues
and purples and rust colors were still reflected in it, and the light of
a single, very yellow birch had not yet been snuffed. At the restaurant
four glasses of white liqueur were poured for us (one, of course, for
the chauffeur), distilled from raspberries, the odor of the berry very
strong, and long afterward the taste, the _arrière-goût_, remains in the
mouth, as if one had just eaten the fruit. But one of the officers said,
“All the same, it doesn’t equal a good _quetsch_ or _kirsch_ or, above
all, a good _mirabelle_.”
And then we dipped into the darkening valley of the Doller and through
dim villages found the way to Masevaux and the house on the Place du
Chapitre, where the Demoiselles Braun had tea awaiting us, and there
were stories told that made us laugh. And one was of the renowned 15th
Dragoons, so long quartered there, which, briefly—and humanly—is this:
At intervals after their departure little dragoons saw the light of
a war-world, and, to be exact, fifty in all saw it. The curé was
broken-hearted at the ravages among his sheep, but he was also a
practical, long-sighted curé, so he wrote, presenting his idea of the
matter before the colonel of the regiment, with the result that from
the savings-box of that same regiment a sum was subtracted to provide
ten years later for the first communion and confirmation clothes of the
fifty! (Would you have thought of it?) Then, casting about in his mind
how he could further improve the general situation, this time not so much
from the temporal point of view as from that of eternity, he decided upon
a pilgrimage—a pilgrimage of reparation to Huppach, where is the shrine
known as that of the Virgin of Klein Einsiedeln, near Sewen, through
which we had just passed. He announced the pilgrimage from the pulpit,
then took the further precaution of rounding up his strayed sheep in
person, and in person conducting them to Huppach to offer up prayers and
tears to the Virgin of Klein Einsiedeln. There were so many of them,
however, and they were mostly so young, that history does not record the
pilgrimage as being entirely without smiles—and God have mercy on us all!
But the curé was not yet (so to speak) out of the woods, for fate
replaced the Dragoons by another regiment, having, as it happened, a
colonel possessed of a boundless love for his men and who couldn’t do
enough for them (or rather have the inhabitants of Masevaux do enough for
them).
“The inhabitants of Masevaux are very nice, very nice indeed,” quoth he,
“but the happiness of my men above everything. We left three thousand on
the battlefield last week, and the others need distraction—of a pleasant
sort. My men above everything.”
So the colonel who loved his men with a boundless love and, furthermore,
was not one to waste time in vain endeavors to portray the eternal
feminine as undesirable, nor to render the chase unpopular, caused dances
to be organized on this very Place du Chapitre, under these very linden
trees, then heavy-scented, and every evening. The curé, foreseeing
trouble, with the aid of Heaven and his own undiscourageable will, had
them suppressed after eight days (eight days is a long time) of wrestling
with leagued powers both civil and military. And again God have mercy on
us all!
Now the virtuous, I mean the truly virtuous (that is, the untried,
untempted virtuous), mustn’t throw stones at Masevaux nor at this book,
but rather remember that anything could have happened to anybody had
everything been different. And even so, hasn’t a lot happened to many of
you? You know a good deal better than I do just how much.
To the _popote_ at seven-thirty, and before I’m an hour older I’m going
to tell you about the _popote_. And you’ll wish you had been there
instead of hearing about it—as runs the classic expression, “_Regarder
manger des glaces_,” and I give the translation, “Watch others eat
ice-cream,” partly because I want you all to know just what I mean, and
partly because some one in the United States wrote to my publishers that
_My Lorraine Journal_ was a nice book, but couldn’t they suggest to me
that I write my books either in French or English.
MRS. O’S.: “But, my dear Mr. Graham” (his name is Graham, and this may be
his chance of immortality), “I couldn’t write one entirely in French to
save my soul, and to save my soul I’d find it impossible when everything
I’m writing about takes place in France not to slip into _la belle
langue_ occasionally.”
MR. GRAHAM (from a distance): “Occasionally! There you’re at it again.
Occasionally!” (It does get on his nerves.)
MRS. O’S.: “And there is another saying to the effect that ‘_On ne
peut pas contenter tout le monde et son père_.’ That is to say, dear
Mr. Graham, that you can’t please everybody and your father as well,
and this, of course, mostly applies to young men (are you a son or are
you a father?) trying to win smiles outside family circles—and father
ultimately paying the bills. But as it occurs to me here, there must be
some connection.”
MR. GRAHAM: “I don’t see it. And while I’m about it, I’d like to tell you
a thing or two concerning those Mexican books of yours. The Spanish was
awful—even _The Yale Review_ and _The Nation_ noticed it.”
MRS. O’S. (getting a bit nasty): “It’s about all either of them did
notice, especially _The Yale Review_; and nobody loves me on _The
Nation_, but it was entirely the printer’s fault. He received them
immaculate. I turned my face to the wall for three days after a glance at
_A Diplomat’s Wife_. But then you probably don’t remember how perfectly
sweet about these very books _The North American Review_ was (a man with
the most perceptive of souls and a neat flair for the imponderabilities,
named Lawrence Gilman, does _their_ book reviews), also _The New
Republic_, which possesses a man named Alvin Johnson, inexorably sure
about the humanities, separating with a single, infallible gesture the
goats of letters from the sheep (but he still thinks, alas! that all men
are born free and equal). And _The New York Sun_ was kind, kind, and _The
New York Evening Post_, too, and they do say this latter rarely says
anything nice about people till they’re dead and can’t enjoy it, and _The
New York Tribune_, which has the reputation of being very particular
about itself, and _The New York Times_, which never jokes and is known as
a searcher after truth.”
Mr. Graham, dreadfully bored with me, mumbles something like “this is
what you get when you try to do somebody a good turn.” I couldn’t catch
it all, as he’d doubtless continued farther on his journey through the
great Northwest. He wrote from one of a chain of “Grand Trunk Pacific
Hotels,” and all I can think of to call after him is _Bon voyage_, though
he won’t like it.
And now back to Masevaux in the valley of the Doller—Masevaux smelling a
bit like nice leather things in expensive shops, with a hint of falling
leaves.
VI
LA POPOTE
And how shall he who has not dined be strong? And how shall he who is
not girded fight? And how shall he who has not wept laugh? And how shall
he who hath not made a free offering of his life find it? And many other
things occur to me, but enough for the wise of heart.
And now for _la popote_, which is in what was once the house of the
Oberforster, in a street doubtless always muddy, looking out on the
church, and it is square, of gray stucco, and red brick with a hall
running through the center, like many and many a house.
The woodwork is everywhere painted brown and the wall-paper, too,
is brown, a lighter, depressing brown. Above the dining-table is a
ponderous, imitation-bronze chandelier, but its cruel light now shines on
blue-clad men who have fought the good fight, agreeable, cultivated men
of the world, and it touches strongly scar and galloon and decoration of
these, selected _ex millibus et ex millibus_, by hidden powers, to return
from battlefield and trench....
It’s the Oberforster’s glass that we use; it’s his imitation-bronze
fruit-dish that is now filled with dark, rich grapes of victory. It’s
his imitation-tin and real-glass punch-bowl that is on the table by the
window. On the porcelain stove that heats well, too well (I sit with my
back close to it), is a _dégagé_ marble bibelot, the heads of a man and a
woman in _basso-rilievo_ cut in an obtrusively chance bit of marble, and
it bears the motto, “_Amor condusse noi_.” Perhaps on their honeymoon,
the Oberforster and his bride had made the classic _Italienische Reise_,
and had pressed closely, so closely against each other in the railway
carriage, that the apprehensive fellow-voyagers shut their eyes or sought
another compartment. The Teutonic “will to live” is irresistible, and
when it’s at work there’s nothing to be done except get out of the way.
Theirs were the lithographs representing beings of the Biedermayer epoch,
theirs the many-tiered machine-turned, walnut sideboard. Theirs was
(I know not how it got into that company of _ersatz_ and imitation) a
beautiful old glass carafe, a shepherd and a sacrificial lamb engraved
upon it (perhaps once a church vessel), but in it was a stopper, half
cork and half tin, with an imitation turquoise in the middle.
Theirs was a smoking-set of imitation tin whose massive ash-receiver in
the most horrid _art nouveau_ continually mocked the delicate spirals of
smoke. Said the commandant one evening, flicking his cigar-ash into the
dreadful thing:
“That invasion was almost as bad as this. You could have bought an
ash-receiver like it in every big shop in Paris.”
“And in every little one,” finished Laferrière. “Thank God the frontier
_is_ closed, even at the price.”
In the corner between the windows was an upright piano piled with the
best of music, and there was a large and completely uninteresting
turned-wood clock, stopped at 12.25 on August 7th, four years ago.
And the man that earned and owned it all is dead in a soldier’s grave,
and the woman, Anna by name, weeps somewhere her lost love and the
equally lost gods of her household. _Et c’est la guerre._
[Illustration: COMMANDANT POULET]
As for Madame Labonne’s cooking, she knows her business, and if it
weren’t the obvious duty of those sitting about the table to take the
gifts the gods and Madame Labonne provide, I should feel I were living
much too well.
She gives us a _gâteau à la crème_ that disappears smoothly, leaving but
an exquisite memory. She has another _gâteau à l’oignon_ (don’t turn
away; it’s perfectly delicious and takes a day to make the onion part),
her _filets_ melt in the mouth, and her _purées_ are the insubstantial
fabric of a dream. When she serves the classic Alsatian dish of
sauerkraut decorated with boiled potatoes and shining pieces of melting
pork, you don’t really need to eat for twenty-four hours, and wouldn’t go
to the _popote_ except for the conversation and the company. Sometimes
the officers, the unwedded ones, think of marrying Madame Labonne—she’s
fat and about sixty and doesn’t try to look young (by her works alone
they shall know her), and the married ones think of trying to introduce
her into their happy homes in some rôle or other.
And when they move into the rich, shining Alsatian plain, that they
have looked down upon these four long years, she is to take part in the
triumphal procession.
And this is how we generally find ourselves placed at table. I sit on
the right of Commandant Poulet, who, somewhat as a prince of story, for
these four years has administered with much calm, with great good sense,
with wide understanding, and, above all, with immense tact and kindness,
the not always simple affairs of the delivered ones of the reconquered
triangle.
Only he can know the difficulties of the French Military Mission, though
all may see the results. It is a land flowing with honey if not with milk
(the busy bee in and out of war-time doth its work, though, it would
seem, not so the cow).
In full maturity it has been given to Commandant Poulet to see results,
and sometimes I have looked almost in and at a man whose strange lot
during the war years has been constructive work. His first public
appearance was when, as _tout jeune lieutenant remplissant des bouts de
table_, he accompanied President Loubet to St. Petersburg on his 1902
visit. Since then many honors have been his, and here in Alsace he has
been both Paul and Apollo, for he has reaped where he has planted and God
_has_ given the increase. _Très chic_, in his horizon-blue, with his high
decorations on his breast, _et très homme du monde_. This is what I see
and it seems very fair. Of his personal life what can I know?—except that
it must be as the life of all that walk the earth, disillusion succeeding
illusion, grief tripping up joy; for there is no getting away from the
old verses:
_Ainsi du mal au bien,_
_De la joie à la peine_
_Passe la vie humaine._
Somewhere in Lorraine the commandant has a destroyed château. But he can
always dwell in the dwelling of his labors in Alsace.
Vis-à-vis is his first aide, Captain Tirman, whom I saw on my arrival,
always with deep rings under his eyes, too much in rooms and bending over
desks—_il boit le travail_. Entirely devoted to his chief. He is musical,
too, and sometimes while waiting in the dining-room for the mess to
assemble we find him playing Beethoven or Bach, or more recent and more
compromising Germans, from the piles of the Oberforster’s music on the
Oberforster’s piano. _La musique n’a pas de patrie_—for musical men who
have fought. (But let a zealous _civil_ far from the front hear a strain
of Schumann or Brahms issuing from some window and he runs straightway
to the police.) Captain Tirman wears the Legion of Honor and the _Croix
de Guerre_, and is so pale, I am told, because of the hard campaigns he
has passed through, and wounds and illness. He is always in charge in the
absence of the commandant, but though _être Tirmannisé_ is one of the
gentle jokes of the _popote_, no signs of tyranny were apparent to me.
Captain Bernard, second aide, is, like the commandant, from Lorraine, and
had prepared himself for the Paris bar. He conducted himself admirably
during the war, Laferrière tells me. Wounded three times, he bears a
great scar—_sa belle cicatrice_, as his comrades proudly call it—on his
forehead (Verdun, August, 1916) and over his heart _la Légion d’Honneur_
and the _Croix de Guerre_. Always very carefully dressed—_tiré à quatre
épingles_ (pulled out by four pins), as they nearly all are.
At his right sits Captain Sérin from Toulouse, the only Meridional at the
table. He is very straightforward and uncomplicated, I should judge, as
regards his psychology, with the rather objective eye of the man from the
south. (They don’t dream the way we farther north do.) He sees a joke at
any distance and is the sort, they tell me, who would obey as simply as
he would breathe, without a thought of hesitation, an order unto death.
The sort that when told to bring up reinforcements at a moment when it
seems impossible, quite simply does it, and it only _happens_ to happen
that he is living. He is not tall, but wide of shoulder, holding himself
very straight, and on his breast there are ribbons, too. He is chief of
the Gendarme Service, the first and last provost of Alsace reconquered.
On the other side of Captain Bernard sits Captain Toussaint, chief of the
Forestry Service of the Masevaux district, clad in bottle-green, with
silver bugles on his collar and the Legion of Honor and other decorations
on his breast, _d’une grande bonté_, his comrades tell me. He is from
the north, from Douai (his brother was killed at the front), tall, slim,
pale-faced, lantern-jawed, everything is in his eyes—in the _regard_, as
some one said of him—and much of his life is passed alone in forests. So
different from Captains Bernard and Lavallée, living in Paris, between
whom he generally sits; and he nearly always comes in late from his
forests for luncheon and dinner.
“For Toussaint, Creation is represented by the first day when the heavens
were formed, and everything that came afterward had something to do with
forests,” some one said last night, as he was talking rather hotly about
the war-time cutting down of the trees of France, and the influence the
loss of forests had on the life of nations. _Très catholique_, also;
but then these men of the Mission, with all of whom I have entered
tabernacles, are of an extreme reverence. What they “believe” I know not.
Lieutenant Laferrière sits sometimes by me, sometimes at the end of the
table. He has early gray hair, a fresh complexion, gray-blue eyes with
a certain inwardness of expression, a smiling movement of the lips when
speaking, and, with all his wit, an extreme kindness in human judgments.
Indeed, I am struck by something of softness and patience in the eyes of
each one of these men to whom nothing of war is foreign, who have looked
on all combinations of mortal anguish, and whose eyes at times, too, have
had the red look, the hard, bright look of men who have just killed.
Laferrière is very cultivated after the way of us dwellers in cities.
He was Doctor of Law at the University of Lille. On the 2d of August,
1914, he closed his books, after which, as under-officer, he had lived
for months that closely packed life of the trenches, “where one was
never physically a moment alone” (hardest of all hardships, I have heard
fastidious men say), then he had been called as jurist to the Mission.
Emotional, but through circumstances or will, how can I know? giving the
effect of having dominated the personal—to what point also I know not.
Lieutenant Lavallée, but recently come from Paris, sits at another
end. His personality is less striking than some of the others at the
table, though he has _une tête un peu mauresque_, like pictures of the
_Conquistadores_, and is inclined to solemnity of mien. He has a charming
voice, fresh, with warm notes in it, and sometimes of an evening sings
Breton _chansons populaires_. We especially like the one concerning _la
douce Annette_, who spun a fatal love-story with a certain Pierre who
wouldn’t let go her hand.
There is one, Stroll by name, now absent, but his comrades evidently love
him, for I often hear, “What a pity Stroll isn’t here”; or, “That is
Stroll’s story.”
Also for a few days _en visite_ like myself is Captain Antoni, born at
Strasbourg, but very French in appearance, a tall, _svelte_, thin-faced
man with a rising and falling inflexion in his voice, who has been
through the whole campaign and wears many decorations. He said last night
that the fighting at Verdun, especially that at Hill 304, was the worst
he had seen.
At this moment the Verdun sector, which knows the blood of men of many
climes, is moist with that of _my_ countrymen.
Now this is part of what I see as I sit at table with these men. The
common patriotic effort tends to screen the personal life of each, of
which I know nothing. But I do know that destiny is largely formed by
character and endowments, and, barring the fact that time and chance
happeneth to all, I would be tempted to wager that when such or such a
thing came to such or such a one, _thus_ he received it—gift or blow—thus
he used it, once his own. So unescapable and visible are the sequences of
character.
Sometimes we play bridge in the evening, pleasant, easy bridge, anybody
taking a card back when once played, and changing his mind about
declarations. As they so truly say, “_Nous jouons pour nous amuser_.”
And yesterday there appeared on the table the famous _cafetière_ and
Sérin, his face shining with a great light, performed the rites. It was
one of those large, high glass bulbs with a nickel coffee-pot below. Dry
coffee is put into the glass bulb, water into the pot, an alcohol-lamp
beneath, and the whole is hermetically sealed. After which, according to
the mysterious and wonderful laws of nature, the water rises and wets
the coffee; it must rise thrice, giving forth at the same time volcanic
sounds. During the ceremony nothing else is thought of. The officiating
high priest is harried with liturgical suggestions, or unkind remarks
are made about his natural endowments. As that corked spout of the pot,
horrid with potentialities, is turned now toward one, now toward the
other, men who would have given their lives without a thought in the
trenches, get nervous and call to Sérin, “_Dis-donc, tu vas me crever un
œil!_” “Not toward Madame. It would be too terrible,” etc., etc., and
in the end the spout, with all its possibilities, is turned toward the
Oberforster’s made-in-Germany clock. After which one has a delicious cup
of coffee and conversation becomes normal.[10]
Last night I found they were talking about giving a certificate of
good conduct to one of them who is married, to take home with him to
reassure his wife. A comrade, after a little badinage in the Latin
manner, but very discreet I must say, objects: “But now there won’t be
any _permissions_,” and, doubtfully, “We would have to give him the
certificate for three whole months.”
Then, like the antiphon of some song, a voice said, “_Trois mois, c’est
long_.”
Another said, “_Trois mois, c’est très long_.”
Another, with a sigh, “_C’est trop long_....” And I to smile—within
myself.
Then a stumbling home on an invisible but strong horizon-blue arm,
through the inky streets, ankle-deep in mud. Sometimes I haven’t known
which one of the various kind arms it was, the electric pocket-lamp only
occasionally making the darkness more manifest. No one to bump into, as
circulation in the streets is forbidden after nine o’clock, on account of
possible espionage.
And you will say these are pleasant days!
_Later._—Hunting in the bookcase, I found a small diamond-printed copy
of _Hermann und Dorothea_. As, to the sound of near night-firing, I
turned its smooth old pages, I realized it for one of the most completely
objective works of genius ever born into the world. No thread of its
maker’s identity is woven with it, no color of his personal experience.
I felt but a sense of his complete and serene equilibrium, though the
stream of words, bearing those golden thoughts, was so softly flowing, so
crystal-clear, that it made me remember a line from another of Goethe’s
poems, as subjective as this is objective:
_Der Geist ist Bräutigam._
_Wort sei die Braut._
In the little preface I found that the poet, in his old age, was wont to
say of _Hermann und Dorothea_ that of his long poems it was almost the
only one that gave him pleasure. I seemed to understand what he meant. By
reason of its complete objectivity, he could have had no consciousness
of that inadequacy familiar to mortals contemplating anything formed
from themselves. No suffering had attended its birth; rather it would
seem to have formed itself spontaneously on the heights out of some
plastic stuff, light and bright as summer air, imperishable as granite.
It did not recall to Goethe (nor does it to one who reads) that night of
personal anguish, that day of emptiness, that hour of longing, nor even
some glimpsing, vistaed moment wherein personal fulfilment held out its
shining, shadowy hand.
In spite of the sound of cannon and the smarting of my eyes from the
strain of the tiny Gothic print, for a moment within myself an almost
equal feeling of harmony arose, taking a form of Peace, like an antique
statue, free yet restrained, noble yet persuasive; bearing no one’s mark,
nor any signs of workmanship, except that stamped by its own beauty. Then
it vanished, leaving the little book to throb between my hands to the
beat of my own times. Though generations had passed on and other wars
were being fought, and the word “freedom” was again on every lip, as
always, the women, the children, the old, were paying the heaviest tithes
of invasion. Had I not seen like streams of fugitive populations flooding
into Paris that hideous spring of 1918, heard the cries of anguish from
those fleeing before an enemy army? Then also death and birth waited not
on circumstance, and love and hate, fear and hope, hurry and exhaustion,
were at work in strange commingling. I had seen deeds of succor, too,
like unto those of the lovers, proffered in boundless devotion, by
nameless, uncounted men and women, coming from the world’s ends to
minister to its woe.
A vision of _toux ceux qui ont bu à la coupe amère de cette époque_
passed before me. Deeply sighing, I at last put out my light, thinking
“war is war,” needing no adjectives, and of the changelessness of the
human heart, however the formulas may be multiplied and renewed; and
forever _Væ victis_!
VII
THE HOUSES OF THE CHANOINESSES
THE COMMANDANT TRACES THE RECONQUERED TRIANGLE ON MY MAP. THE MILITARY
MISSION
_Monday, November 4th._—Dreamed of old griefs and awakened with the heavy
taste their memory can even now distil. Raining. The yellow-and-brown
carpet under the lindens of the Place du Chapitre is wet and dull and the
few leaves still on the trees are soft and heavy, the houses damp and
shabby. “The old wounds burn,” even here, where all is new and bright,
and fancy flings itself delicately, amorously, consolingly about the
pleasant happenings of each day.... Fortunately my breakfast is brought
early by a smiling maid, who enters, bringing with her the aroma of fresh
tea and the delicately scented, dark-green, liquid honey of these pine
forests. There is that blessed volatilization of night-grief, and I arise
to another pleasant day, knowing once again, however, that everywhere the
old ghosts find one....
The rainy light coming in seems but to darken the oak-paneled room. What
there is of wall-paper is a darkish blue with a narrow frieze of red. The
curtains are stripes of red-and-blue cloth. Even the daytime cover of the
very comfortable eider-downed bed is of the same red-and-blue-striped
stuff. It was because they were the colors of the French uniform that the
young man once living herein, under German rule, chose them.
But he himself is gone, gone the hope of his house. One of his sisters
was saying to me last night as I tarried for a few minutes in the little
sitting-room, where I had first found them all rehanging the portraits of
their ancestors:
“The price for peace is so high and terrifying that one can’t yet rejoice
in it. Rather one says to oneself in desolation, ‘and all that was so
precious is gone, that in the end one may sit around deserted fireplaces,
or try to find shelter under bombarded roofs, and be at grips with the
terrible _après-guerre_!’” And of her brother:
“At least he fell for the cause that is so dear to us;” she added after a
moment’s silence, “it might so easily have been otherwise.”
I have noticed everywhere a great pride tempering grief over fallen
beloved dead. Even in mothers’ hearts this pride is strong enough to
console. They know why their sons were born, and to many a death of glory
has been as a second birth; he whom they lost is, in some way, laid a
second time, bright, beautiful, complete, in their arms, and _safe_ from
life. And they are blessed who so mourn.
Sometimes there are further griefs. I knew a mother of twin sons; one
had fallen far away, a gentle, young, musician son, in a fierce, unequal
conflict, whose details she was not spared; the other had been brought
back to her on his twenty-first birthday a sightless stump. I cannot
forget her as she stood, tall, black-veiled, by a pillared door, like an
antique statue of grief, her eyes as dry as marble eyes. And though she,
too, said:
“At least I know why I bore them, and it was for something more than
myself,” the obsession of a further grief was in her eyes as she added,
“_I must not die first_—and he is so young!”
Here on the borderland I find there is often an additional reason for
pride, where Fate, which could so easily have willed it otherwise,
sometimes has allowed the beloved to die for the beloved cause, as did
the brother whose room is now mine. And this is his story, or rather
the end of it. Those first four days of August, 1914, he had gone about
the mountain heights and passes with his field-glass continually at his
eyes to see if help were not coming from the hills in the guise of the
_pantalons rouges_. But on the fourth day he was obliged to accompany his
regiment into Germany, where he stayed three months. On hearing of the
battle of the Marne through a French prisoner, he cried, “_Nous avons
eu là une belle victoire!_” (“We have had a great victory!”) and he was
put under arrest. His one idea being to desert, he asked to go into the
lines again, knowing there would be no opportunity, if he remained in
prison, training recruits. His chance came when he was fighting against
the English in the north. His chiefs being killed or wounded, he, as
under-officer, found himself in command of a company of a hundred and
fifty men. With him deserted ninety-seven others. Later, he fell fighting
in the French lines near Tahure. And this (it is perhaps much) is all I
know of him or ever shall; if he were beloved of a woman or had loved
many, I know not. He, the last of his race, took his name with him to the
grave.
All that surrounds me as I write was his. His the full bookshelves, with
an elaborate set of a _Geschichte der Literatur_, and a _Welt-Geschichte_
in many volumes, his the books of early boyhood, of travel, the many
old, little books of prayer in tooled and beveled bindings of a
generation or two ago, and the piles of the _Revue des Deux Mondes_. Two
eighteenth-century maps hang on the walls, one of “Alsatia,” with queer
German names for familiar places, and another of “Gallia,” and there is
an incomparable, white, porcelain stove which heats quickly and gives out
its pleasant heat during long hours.
On a little corner shelf is an old engraving of the last _chanoinesse_
of the Chapter of Masevaux, Xavière de Ferrette. She is dressed in full
canonicals, with a large ruched coif and ermine-trimmed mantle; some high
order in a Maltese-cross design is suspended from the broad ribbon worn
across her breast, and in her hands is a richly embossed prayer-book.
The long face with its immensely high forehead has a full-lipped, very
human mouth, and in the right, upper corner is her sixteen-quartered coat
of arms.
The story of the Chapter would make good, though long, reading, for, like
many other things in this part of the world, it begins with Charlemagne
and ends with the French Revolution. Of both France seems equally proud,
and certainly _il y en a pour tous les goûts_.
Women always seem to have had great influence on the life of their times
in Alsace. Not even those with the vote and all the rights, together
with all the privileges of our times, can pretend to half the influence
of certain holy women of the so-called dark ages. They built on hilltops
and in valleys those many citadels of peace whose traces still are to be
seen, where life was free from violence, and, like sweet odors uncorked,
their good deeds have perfumed the ages. Saint-Odile, _Vierge Candide
et Forte_, daughter of Duke Atalric, is patroness of Alsace, and in her
many have sought the feminine ideal of the Alsatian soul; and there are
Saint-Richarde, tried by fire for a guiltless love, wife of Louis the
Fat, and Herrade, Abbess of Hohenburg, author of the famous _Hortus
Deliciarum_, preserved through seven centuries and destroyed in the siege
of Strasbourg in 1870. These are but a few, and the histories of the
secular dwellers in the Rhine Valley, spectacular though they were, seem
often quite colorless contrasted with those of these saints of the Holy
Roman Empire.
The first monks and pilgrims to come to Alsace were from Ireland (the
last of these before the very end of the world will doubtless also come
from Erin). It would appear that even in those days it could not be said
of the Irish that they were neither hot nor cold, which is probably one
of the reasons “why God loves them.” In the lovely rivered plains and
great forests of the Rhine Valley it was they who built the first chapels
and traced the first paths. It was an Irish monk whom Atalric, hoping for
a son, consulted before the birth of his daughter; but of Saint-Odile
another time.
The house next the one wherein I dwell was that of the abbess, and now
belongs to Madame Auguste Lauth.
It, too, has a beautiful stairway, with a time-polished oaken balustrade,
and it contains the great room of noble proportions and lovely panelings
(still heated by the celebrated porcelain stove, fit only for a museum),
where the ladies of the Chapter assembled in their rich toilets and great
coifs to go to the church, reached by a two-storied gallery, which old
prints show as having a most distinguished air, with its sloping roof
pierced with oval windows and its pleasant proportions. But the upper
story and the roof were done away with in the nineteenth century, which
has demolished so much (not always in heat of battle), and it is now but
a long, formless building used for some sort of storehouse connected
with the Koechlin manufactories. And the way the six houses came to be
constructed was this:
The Abbess Xavière de Ferrette, a woman of resolution and energy, as
one can easily see by the high forehead and long jaw, becoming alarmed
at the increasing expenses of the Chapter and the equally decreasing
revenues, decided on some radical remedies. Through the Middle Ages, down
to her time, the _chanoinesses_ had lived under one roof, and, according
to the holy rule, ate together. But with them fared so many outsiders,
their friends and their friends’ friends, with their domestics, that
they found themselves being literally eaten out of house and home. The
abbess called a solemn meeting wherein they arranged for the building of
separate houses, whose construction was given into the hands of Kléber,
then architect and inspector of the royal buildings at Belfort. Pictures
of Kléber, known rather impersonally to Americans by the Parisian avenue
that bears his name, abound in Alsace, and show a sensitive, artistic
face, with a pleasure-loving mouth above a short chin, and a halo of
light, curly hair. He met an early death in Napoleon’s Egyptian campaign.
“_Il avait six pieds en tout_,” his contemporaries were wont admiringly
to say of him.
In these separate houses, with garden attached, each _chanoinesse_ was to
live alone with her _demoiselle_, who at her death would step into her
very comfortable shoes, and the abbess only was to receive guests in the
name of the Chapter.
The house I lodged in was that of the Chanoinesse von Reutner. These
dames had to make their titles very clear to their earthly mansions,
each having to possess sixteen quarterings evenly balanced, eight on her
father’s side and eight on her mother’s side. Gentlemen were chosen to
give their word on this somewhat elusive subject, and methought ’twas
well they didn’t have to put their hand in the fire at the same time,
for what can be sworn to with certainty of those things which have their
origin on the mysterious borderland of the emotions? However....
The _chanoinesses_ belonged mostly to the great families of Alsace, the
Masevaux, the Ferrettes, though the records show many German names like
Furstenburg and Seckingen, or French like Beauffrémont and Fontenoy.
Sometimes the Abbey and Chapter were under French domination, sometimes
under Austrian, sometimes they would be ceded to noble families like
those of the Counts of Bollwiller and of Fugger, and in many ways their
history had been checkered since their foundation in the eighth century.
And as for the Thirty Years’ War, they could have told tales of the
Swedish invasion scarcely to be beaten by certain tales of our days.
Indeed, so complicated is the history of those times, every shade and
branch of combatant having fought against every other shade and branch,
in kaleidoscopic changes, that when Turenne, allied with the Spaniards,
revolted against the king, Louis XIV, it was a Swede, Rosen by name, who
helped the Maréchal du Plessis Praslin to conquer him at Réthel. Rosen,
who with his brothers had come originally from Livonia with the armies
of Gustavus Adolphus, then promptly put on his standard a tower falling
on a rose-bush in full bloom, with the device, _Malgré la Tour les Roses
fleuriront_.[11]
In turning over pages concerning the involved chronicles of this
borderland, I feel once again that history is, of all things, the most
difficult to write, because of having to do with facts, and what more
elusive than facts, eternally subjective? Even this simplest record of
historic days is as different from one that another might have written
about the same things as if it dealt, instead, let us say, with the
genial suggestion of letting the Hottentots and the Zulus have their own
government. It is that fantasy-awakening thing called temperament that
is forever at work with facts, one thing always suggestive of another,
rather than explanatory of itself, and I frankly rejoice that the
“primrose by the river’s brim” _is_ to me something more than a primrose.
I am now such a long way from the history of the Chapter that there is
scarcely time to get back, and so I will finish quickly by saying that in
the epoch preceding the Revolution it found itself entangled in various
temporal affairs, especially lawsuits with the inhabitants concerning
their convenient but disappearing feudal rights. Otherwise life was
probably not too strenuous for the _chanoinesses_. As nothing escapes the
influence of its hour and age, why should one think the Chapter entirely
escaped those of that light, pervading, charming, inconsequent, rich
thing known as the eighteenth century, where everything seems to have
finished by a song, or a witty quatrain, or by delicious angels holding
up holy-water founts in the shape of lovely shells.
_To the popote at 12.15._—Its windows look out on the unmistakably plain
timepiece in the church tower, and everybody knows when anybody is late,
and just how late, and there’s a nice little green box on the table
designed for fines, but only intermittently insisted on.
Commandant Poulet greets me with the words, “At three o’clock to-day
Austria ceases hostilities.” Something cruel and red seemed suddenly
rolled away.
In a flash I saw that Viennese pre-war world I had known so well,
partaking tranquilly of the pleasant things of life, public events making
little noise, intellectual passion absent—or discouraged, and things
easy, easy—except for those dying of hunger. But that world has been
burned to ashes, and the winds of destiny are about to scatter even them.
Then, as usual, some one read the American _communiqué_.
And to the deeds of the First Army must be added those of the National
Guard, for the words Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas, Missouri, Colorado, New
Mexico, New York, New Jersey, are stamped in fadeless red upon the
villages and banks of the Meuse.
We talked long, and at two o’clock, as we arose from table, I knew that
those others to the east had already arisen from the bitter meal of
defeat, and after the manner of human hearts were adjusting themselves
to the things that _are_. And perhaps there in Vienna they may not find
it so difficult. They’ve been defeated before and they’re far enough east
to have a touch of fatalism.
_Later._—Through mist and low-hanging clouds and rain with Captain
Bernard to Sewen, where we visited first the school. Neat rows of sabots
were in the hallway, all alike to _me_, but it appears some spirit in the
feet leads each unmistakably to his or her own pair. A dozen children
only were in the schoolroom, the others ill with grippe.
The school-teacher, a tall, horizon-blue-clad Frenchman, with kind eyes
and a decoration on his breast, had just finished the dictation. Its
subject was _de la viande_ (concerning meat). Looking at the copy-book of
the nearest little boy, very blue-eyed, I read _de la fiande_, and his
dictation was further embellished by sounds reminiscent of German rule.
“_Chez le bourgé, le tinton, le charcoutier, le boutin, le zocisse_,” but
as I said, that’s their German ear—and little by little it will be done
away with and “French as she is spoke” will take its place. One small boy
who wrote a beautiful, copper-plate hand was stone-deaf, but he had dear,
questioning eyes and something patient in his being. I asked, when we
came out, if nothing could be done for him. But the master said, with a
terrible finality, “His father is an alcoholic.”
It is evidently not without result that they distil their _quetsch_
and their _kirsch_, their rose haws and their gentian, and everything
else that has the merest embryo of a fruit or a berry or leaf in these
pleasant valleys; as to which the bright-eyed, Italian-looking curé
initiated us further, as you will see.
Leaving the school, we went to the church, beautifully familiar to me
against the sky, but completely and, from our point of view, hopelessly
modernized within; though I couldn’t help feeling that for those who come
from dingy farms and dung-heaps the crude splendor of that house of God
must be greatly comforting.
The old ossuary chapel nearby, with its fifteenth-century vaulting, was
crowded with beautiful things from the church at Thann. The carvings
on the choir stalls, of the most delicate workmanship, were amusing to
boot, nothing human being foreign to the artists that made them. One
figure forming an arm-rest had a swollen cheek bound up in a cloth, and,
furthermore, he evidently had an ache in the center of his being, for
he was doubled up, his hands pressed close to his person in the classic
position of one so suffering. Another showed a man leaning over, with
delicately modeled back, his head in his hands, but _his_ ache was very
manifestly spiritual. Another had a goiter, and monkeys and parrots
abounded, the native fancy of the fifteenth century evidently being out
on a loose snaffle. A celebrated row of musical angels were so delicately
carved, with cymbal and harp and bugle and lyre and flute, that they
would be well placed in some vitrine rather than high on a choir stall
in a dim Gothic church. The celebrated statue in stone of Saint-Théobald
from the column of his fountain at Thann had been brought here for
safety, too, and I fingered it as well as many another thing generally
beyond reach.
As we came out, the clock in the tower of the church struck three. The
great and disastrous Austrian war-act was finished.
It was a moment beyond words, and as we walked silently over to the
curé’s house I thought of the cruel, interminable lists of dead and
wounded and missing in the Vienna newspapers that winter of 1915, when
the Russians were flooding Galicia and spilling over the ridges of the
Carpathians. The curé, however, young, with fine, Italian face-bones,
and frayed and spotted cassock, somewhat changed our thoughts by bringing
out various of the thirty-four specimens of distilled liqueurs which are
the pride and playthings of these valleys, explaining to us with snapping
eyes special variations of his distillings. Holding a bottle and a glass
up against the light in his long, thin _primitif_ hands, he poured me
slowly something wrested from the mountain-ash (I had thought I might as
well have a completely new sensation), and I went about the rest of the
afternoon feeling as if a hot stone were lodged in my breast.
Arrived at Masevaux, we drove to a house on the Place du Chapitre, where
I found another interior of the kind I am now familiar with—that of the
high and comfortable Alsatian bourgeoisie.
Madame Chagué, large, white-haired, energetic, intelligent, agreeable,
received us flanked by an amiable married daughter and a thin, upstanding
veteran, his ribbon of honor in his buttonhole. But, to be perfectly
frank, the veterans get on my nerves. It’s the picture of what the
gorgeous young heroes of our great war will be one day, _sans_ eyes,
_sans_ teeth, _sans_ hair, _sans_ everything, and _toutes les fins sont
tristes_.
“Now,” said Madame Chagué when once started and tea had been poured
(accompanied by cakes you don’t get a chance to serve unless you are
_délivré_, and you have to be well delivered, or else never in bondage,
to get the chance to eat them), “the government must proceed with a good
deal of caution as well as consideration. The Alsatians aren’t like
anybody but themselves. They mustn’t lay hands on our little ideas and
ways, ‘_ces Messieurs de l’Administration ont compris cela_’ [with an
appreciative look at Bernard]. We held on all these years, awaiting the
day of deliverance. _Enfin_, for two generations we have looked on the
reconquest of Alsace as the coming of heaven upon earth, as if that once
come to pass, there would be nothing more to desire.”
She said all these things with an appraising light in her eye; being a
clever old lady, in the four years since she had been “delivered,” she
had doubtless found that life is life—even though there is a great choice
as to whom one wants to live it out with, and how.
About this time the veteran was encouraged to tell a few of his 1870
experiences, and I felt as my grandchildren, if I ever have any, will
feel when the veterans of 1918 will tell what they did “single-handed in
the trenches,” or how, “as the only man left of their regiment,” they had
held back the invaders, or how they hid in a barn and let them go by and
then gave the alarm, “and a whole battalion had to surrender,” or what
know I? Politely, but without eagerness, I listened, the 1870 veterans
almost “spoiling the war” for me, with their eternal illustration of
the flatness of not dying on the battlefield. I tried to bring the
conversation back to 1918—leaving a rather long and not very clear
account of how he kept his ancient, beloved, red _képi_ under glass, or
next his heart, or pressed in an album, I rather forget which. I wanted
to hear the story of the famous entry of the _Pantalons Rouges_ into
Masevaux on August 7, 1914, where they have been ever since, though now
changed into this celestial blue, which decorates the earth (as I have
frequently said, and doubtless will again) as never before has it been
decorated by any men of any age or any war. Pictures of “_La Guerre en
Dentelles_,” or gallooned and be-caped and be-frogged officers with
lances or drawn swords on horseback, charging the enemy in the typical
poses of Lasalle, or “_La Vieille Garde_,” or Wellington or Blücher at
Waterloo, or anything else that ever was, are dull beside the strange,
appealing beauty of the blue battalions of the twentieth century.
I listened to Madame Chagué telling of the glad reception of those who
entered Masevaux on that 7th of August, houses and hearts flung wide
open, how everywhere the upper windows were crowded with women and
children leaning out to see them come over the dark mountains and along
the bright roads. Many left that same night, as they did from Thann and
Bitschwiller and Moosch and all the towns about, marching on to Mulhouse,
which they took only to be driven out, and since then many red-trousered
ghosts walk the otherwise unmystical, industrial streets of Mulhouse.
Three weeks later Mulhouse was again entered, and again, with many
losses, other red pantaloons were driven out, since which the chimneys of
Mulhouse have smoked a German smoke to a German heaven.
Madame Chagué is very Catholic, too, and bristles at the bare idea of any
government, even the “Tiger’s,” taking liberties with the ancient faith.
They want a bishop of their own, an Alsatian shepherd—“_faut pas nous
bousculer dans nos petites habitudes_”—she kept repeating. I wondered
what the Tiger and all the imitation tigers would say when they come to
learn just how they feel here. There’s the most Gordian of knots awaiting
them, for it appears that the Germans gave three thousand marks a year to
each curé, and the French government, less enamoured of the ministers of
God, doesn’t give any. However, that is only one of a series of knots on
a very long string, and patient and very deft fingers will be needed for
the untying.
In each of these comfortable houses authentic ancestors look from the
walls, ancestors who knew the Thirty Years’ War, or the Napoleonic
campaigns, or 1870, or ancestors-to-be who have seen the World War.
And all the dwellers of these large-roomed, high-roofed, deep-windowed
houses, having been delivered, in turn deliver themselves of their
sensations, thoughts, emotions, acts, on being delivered. One might,
I dimly foresaw, do to one’s breast what the wedding guest did to his
when he heard the loud bassoon. That I may not seem unkind, I want to
say another last word about the veterans, the so often toothless, bent,
sightless, forgetful veterans. They would be all right in themselves, if
they weren’t so horribly illustrative. They seem to be saying all the
time, “If Mortality doesn’t get you one way, it does another,” till you
think that short agony on the battlefield, and long glory, are greatly
preferable to decay and no glory. And no veteran will keep this my little
book on the table by his bed. He would know, too well, that I am right.
Later, as I slipped across the cobbly square to my house, and mounted the
broad oaken stairway to my room, a feeling of nostalgia possessed me at
the thought of leaving Alsace, to which but a few short days before I had
seemed so unrelated. This bit of French history in the making, molded by
the men of the grave, kind eyes, whose comradery with one another is so
unfailing and whose courtesy to me is so exquisite, had become dear to
me, and, too, I was looking on something that would never be again. The
web was shifting, other figures were to be woven in it. Fate was to pull
new things as well as old out from its storehouse and proceed with its
endless combinations. Masevaux, capital of Alsace Reconquered, would be
overshadowed by Strasbourg, by Metz, by Colmar, by Mulhouse. But it will
have had again a little day, which is all an individual or a town can
reasonably ask, standing under the changeless stars.
As I went to the _popote_, low over the houses stretched the Great Bear,
so vast, so splendid, that it seemed almost alone in a heaven growing
misty toward its edges, though Alcor, the Starry Horseman, was twinkling
strangely bright close to Mizar. But the autumnal stars hanging over the
rich-colored hills of Alsace have not the brilliancy of those that I saw
above the gray-white Châlons plain, that late, red October of 1917.
After dinner Commandant Poulet drew on my map the boundaries of _Alsace
Reconquise_, as it is now, this fourth day of November. But as he drew
I knew he was feeling that it was a fleeting, vanishing thing he was
recording, for he stopped a moment, as a man might stop following a wind
or tracing a line in water.
Then as we sat, some half-dozen of us, about the dining-table, under the
hard light of the Oberforster’s chandelier, the commandant, flicking his
cigar ash into the Oberforster’s dreadful ash-receiver, told me something
of the history of the Mission, which is briefly this.
Though French troops entered the valleys of the Doller, the Thur, and
the Largue on the 7th of August, 1914, the French administration of that
little triangle of Alsace Reconquered, as I found it, was organized
only in November of the same year. Its first form was purely military,
the authorities responsible for the civil population being also in
command of the military operations, the final word in all that concerned
Alsace coming from the general in command of the Seventh Army, in whose
sector it was. These were successively Generals de Maud’huy, Villaret,
Debeney, and de Boissaudy. The little triangle was first divided into
two territories only, that of the valley of the Largue, with Dannemarie
as its capital, that of the valley of the Thur with Thann as capital.
Masevaux at that time did not form a distinct territory, but was an
annex, as it were, of Thann, as also was St.-Amarin.
The officers administering the territories were chosen mostly from the
reserve—men whose former avocations had prepared them for the various
rôles they were to fill in Alsace. They were members of the _Conseil
d’Etat_, of the _Cour des Comptes_, magistrates, _Gardes des Forêts et
des Eaux_, together with many others belonging to technical professions.
The first _Capitaine Administrateur_ was Captain Heurtel, in civil life
_Maître des Requêtes au Conseil d’Etat_. Though seriously wounded at the
very beginning of the war, in December of 1914, he asked to be again
sent to the front. He met his death at Verdun in 1916. His successor was
Commandant Poulet, _Conseiller d’Etat_, who took up office on Christmas
Day, 1914.
In July, 1917, the Mission was detached from the General Headquarters
and placed under the Ministry of War. Its new name, expressive of
enlarged activities, was changed to _Mission Militaire Administrative en
Alsace_ (Military Administrative Mission in Alsace), the central office
being transferred to Masevaux, which Fate had placed half-way between
St.-Amarin at one end of the reconquered triangle and Dannemarie at the
other.
Ever since, in and out of the building of the German _Kommandantur_, once
the nave of the old Abbey, men clad in horizon-blue have been coming and
going, busied about affairs after the French way, the ancient town of
Masevaux entering into the unexpected enjoyment of what might be called
an Indian summer. Nothing else has happened to it, so far as I can see,
since the Revolution, when the Chapter was suppressed and the Goddess
Reason briefly installed in the Abbey. And Masevaux loves and cherishes
its brief glory as only lovely and transient things are loved and
cherished.[12]
VIII
LUNCHEON AT BITSCHWILLER. THE MISSION IN RESIDENCE AT ST.-AMARIN.
SAINT-ODILE
_November 5th._—Awakened early, early by the sound of heavy firing.
Later, looking out of the square, I see the market in full swing. Against
the inn of Les Lions d’Or, with its comfortable courtyard and two red
wings, stands a wagon-load of hay with a pale-green cover thrown over it.
Carts of cabbages and carrots, drawn by white oxen, are pulled up under
the yellowing trees. The black of the clothes of the women making their
purchases cuts in very hard. Blue-clad men come and go; several motors
are standing before the door of the Administration. The shining, diffused
light of the mist-hidden sun rounds every corner and fills up every space
with a pleasant softness.
At eleven I start out with the commandant, Captain Sérin, and Lieutenant
Laferrière to motor to Thann through a world of rust and green and
gold-colored hills, under the whitest of heavens. So soft and shining
is the beauty of the lovely earth, and so soon to pass into the winter,
that I say to the commandant how like the transient beauty of a woman
of forty-five are these delicate, hazy hills with their cashmere shawls
still twisted about their shoulders, drawn up over their heads, dropping
down to their green-valleyed feet. I mean the woman of forty-five who is
still loved.
Again we stopped on the crest between the valleys of Masevaux and of
Thann, and again we stopped and peered through the wire-and-pine screen,
out toward Mulhouse and the Rhine and the Black Forest. The valley was
blue and shining. Even the windows of the great, white building of the
_Idioten-Anstalt_, where the Germans are bivouacked, were visible. Beyond
were the high towers of their potassium-works. As those three men stood
looking out over the rich plain I thought, “Always will I remember the
officers of the Mission like that, standing on the heights, shading their
eyes with their hands as they looked down into the land of Egypt, wherein
the Lord was to lead them....”
New shell-holes were all about us, and there was a sharp, continual
reverberation of cannon among the cashmere-shawled hills.
At Thann we stopped for a moment by the fountain near the church (in
peace-times, the old statue of St.-Théobald that I saw at Sewen surmounts
the charming column), the commandant having been saluted by a young
American officer, leading by the hand a little girl of seven or eight, in
Alsatian costume—huge black bow, black velvet bodice, full white skirts.
He was quite simply a young man whose parents had gone to America, he
himself had fought on the Mexican border, got his commission, and was
proudly—oh, so proudly and so smilingly—walking his native streets of
Thann with his little niece.
We are _en route_ to lunch with M. and Madame Galland, at Bitschwiller,
who receive us as agreeable people of the world receive their guests in
all quarters of the globe. They were of those who could have gone, yet
remained, during the many bombardments of the town—_noblesse oblige_, and
have been a blessing to the valley.
[Illustration: THANN. THE CATHEDRAL PORTAL]
Madame Galland, with powdered hair, slender, delicate of feature and
of form, dressing older than she is, might have looked out of a Latour
pastel. M. Galland, too, is fine-featured, well groomed, agreeable, and
there was a handsome daughter with a quietly sorrowful expression on her
young face. It is a house from every one of whose many wide windows one
saw gold leaves hanging on black branches, behind them warm, rust-colored
hills, traced with pale-yellow larches and stamped with black patterns
of pine. Within, the rooms were beautiful with blue-clad men. There was
an agreeable and suave odor of kindness and unstintingness about the
house, mingling with that of the ease of people of the world, and the
surety of those in authority, altogether a _good_ house. Eight or ten
officers besides ourselves sat down to the usual delicious and abundant
Alsatian luncheon, the conversation intimate enough to have color,
general enough not to exclude the stranger within the gates. And it
ran after this way, beginning with accounts of that last day of July,
1914, when _Kriegsgefahrzustand_ had been proclaimed in the valley and
they were completely cut off from the outer world, witnessing only the
sinister passing and repassing of regiments of dragoons and detachments
of artillery. M. Galland had procured all the flour and dried vegetables
possible at Mulhouse to ration the population of Bitschwiller in case of
need, and collected what money he could. The days passed in suspense,
till the 6th of August, when they remarked much coming and going of
troops; on the 7th the German cavalry was seen beating a hasty retreat.
A _Brigadier de Chasseurs_, mounted on a great black horse, is the first
Frenchman they see, advancing alone, looking slowly about him, his
revolver in his hands, fearing some snare. Then the _Pantalons Rouges_
pour into the valley, flowers at every bayonet and in every tunic, and
the Gallands receive the first French general to enter Alsace since
1870, General Superbie, commanding the 41st Brigade. At two o’clock,
after refreshments had been offered from every house, the regiment took
the road to Mulhouse, where that same night many of them had their
“rendezvous with death.”
The talk then fell on that mysterious thing called luck, and how the
soldier must have it, be _chançard_, if he were to come through, and of
generals who, like General Liautey, wouldn’t have under them any save
notoriously lucky officers. And there was much heedless joking (with
the Fates perhaps listening). I, who never say even within myself, “I
_will_ do thus and so,” without adding “if God will,” remarked at last,
propitiatingly, that “’twas somewhat difficult to tell _beforehand_ who
was going to be lucky.”
“But for military purposes,” dryly remarked an officer who had not yet
spoken, “one needs to be lucky only as long as the war lasts,” which
being hideously true, we turned to the less elusive subject of the
rich and easy living of the peasants in this part of the world since
the war, and how they, even like unto those other tens of thousands of
“war-workers,” will “miss” it. They had become accustomed to the troops,
and there was the thrice blessed _popote_ in which they more or less
shared. And when the Americans came things were still better in a still
better world. For they were very free with their money (though no one
could understand a word that they said), and then they went, and the
French troops came again, and there was something very pleasant about
their return. Though they didn’t have the money of the Americans, they
could be conversed with and they would lend a hand in the garden, and
were always joking with the children, and helped with the crops, and the
virtues of the Americans, if not their money, were somewhat forgotten.
They were, in places, even remembered as a nuisance, wanting everything
cleared up, stupid bores about the dung-heap, “and will you believe it,
Monsieur,” one of them said to Laferrière, “they even washed their dishes
with _soap_, and you couldn’t give the dishwater to the pigs!”
After which I related Colonel Burnside’s “best short story,” also
concerning the peasant point of view. When he was in Lorraine with
his men, at the well-named watery (not watering) place called
Demanges-aux-Eaux, a delegation of villagers waited on him, with the
complaint that the Americans made so much noise at night that the _sheep_
couldn’t sleep!
And we finished luncheon gaily, to the rather distant sound of German
guns, with the story of the wife of a (or probably the) French soap
manufacturer in Tonquin who came to the Gallands’ for convalescence
after “war-strain.” How she charmed them with her singing, especially
of children’s songs, delighted them with the reserve and modesty of her
conduct, and after two months turned out to have been once a well-known,
café-chantant singer with the proverbial “past and many brilliant
presents,” enjoying a glimpse of home-life in Alsace.
Coffee was poured by the handsome daughter, who with her firm yet
delicate profile, and rich, dark hair drawn heavily back, looked like
some model for a head on a bank-note or medallion. Her mother, saying to
me, “_Vous êtes femme de cœur_” took me apart and told me her history.
And perhaps because so much had been buried in the great war of youthful
love and hope, I may record a little of this story; its grief is typical
in simplicity and purity of many countless thousands in this land of
France.
For months she had been beloved by a handsome young _chasseur_ stationed
with his regiment at Bitschwiller, one of many officers to frequent the
hospitable house of the Gallands. His photograph on a table shows him
tall, broad-shouldered, straight-eyed, kind-mouthed. On account of the
uncertainties of his life he did not declare himself while there, but
immediately afterward, doubtless because of some presentiment, he wrote
to the mother telling of his love. This was found to be returned and they
became fiancés.
A few weeks after he was killed in Flanders, in one of the Mont Kemmel
combats, a ball striking him in the forehead as he leaped from a trench
to lead a counter-attack.
He was one of ten sons. Six of his brothers had fallen, too. Awed, I
asked concerning her who had borne them, but she had gone to her grave
long before the World War; though I knew her not, thinking of the mother
of the Maccabees, and many like her, I thanked God that those seven
wounds had been spared a mother’s heart. Then we returned to the young
girl’s story.
“But never to have looked into each other’s eyes and exchanged the glance
of love,” I said, “it’s a shadowy and heavy grief for her youth to bear.
Would it not have been better for them to have been united?”
The mother answered, after a pause, “There was no time.”
“But this can’t be the end for her; she’s only beginning life!” I said,
and thought of the great, sorrowing hosts of these young widows of the
heart alone, and of the vexed question in their families, as to whether
it was better to become a widow or remain a maid.
“She said to me only the other day, ‘I have all that I need for my whole
life.’”
“She will find that the heart is not like that,” I cried; “it doesn’t
seem able to content itself even with the sweetest and holiest things of
memory. It’s forever reaching out.”
For a moment we stood with clasped hands, looking out to the hills whence
despair had so often come, and Madame Galland added, quite simply,
“Fifty thousand sleep around about us.”
For one of the many-colored hills, pressing close to the broad windows
of the salons, separated us from the Molkenrain and the sacramental
Hartmannswillerkopf.
In the nearest, that rises without any perspective immediately from
the house, is an old quarry, and it is there that since four years
the workers in M. Galland’s factory are sheltered during the frequent
bombardments of the town, for in what once was used for constructing
spinning-machines eleven million shells have been turned out, all of
which is quite well known to the enemy.
The pleasant odor of the house followed us to the motor and even as we
rolled swiftly down the valley of the Thur, past Moosch, against whose
hill, still like a picture tilted back, lies the military cemetery, cut
out of the rust and gold-colored hill, with its black splashes of pines.
Again peace to those who lie there.
Everywhere negro troops, sitting, standing, leaning, lying (a good deal
of leaning and lying). An occasional forlorn-looking white officer. It is
the same Fifteenth New York Infantry.
“I am told they were all, before they were drafted, lift-boys and
newsboys and bootblacks and railway-car porters,” said one of the
officers.
“You mustn’t class these last with the others. You don’t know the majesty
and authority of the Pullman-car porter. He’s as final as the Germans
think the Fourteen Points are,” I answered.
I had felt myself somewhat exotic when I arrived in Masevaux; but I’m
blotted into the landscape, one with Alsace, compared to these sons of
Ham, clad in khaki, who fill the blue-and-gold valley of the Thur.
Then we roll into the long street of the village of St.-Amarin, named
after the saint to whom a saint friend said, upon seeing him about to
make himself scarce at the approach of assassins, “_If you miss this
opportunity for martyrdom, you may never get another!_” (It all depends
on what you want and what your friends can do for you, and it isn’t a bit
like politics.) But I’ll tell the story of St.-Amarin another time.
The town that bears his name is long and rambling. There is a pink church
tower surmounted by a slate-roofed top, shaped something like a turban
with a point like those on helmets, and there is the fountain bearing
the date 1830, and on its column is perched the Gallic cock, and it
is the pride of the long street and vies with the church square as a
meeting-place.
But this is 1918 and the commandant, who loves St.-Amarin, as I can see
by the gentle, almost affectionate way he looks about, shows me first the
cinematograph, in a sort of club for soldiers. It has been a Mecca of
warmth and comfort since three years for those coming down from frozen
mountain-sides. Pictures by George Scott (good pictures) decorate it, and
fancy is unbridled where the enemy is concerned.
The Crown Prince is represented in a _loge_ with a voluptuous actress
twice his size, and, furthermore, the artist, not content with mere paint
and canvas, has given him real wooden legs which dangle from the painted
sides of the painted _loge_. The Prince of —— said to an officer showing
him about, “And even so you have flattered my cousin.”
Franz Joseph, shrunken by years, is represented huddled up in another
_loge_, with another actress, but it didn’t strike me as funny, nor did
it recall in any way the tales of his very unspectacular friendship with
the faithful Käthe Schratt.
A little way down the street is the pleasant officers’ club, with books
and papers, deep chairs and long divans. I dwell a little on the comfort
of it all, thinking what it has meant to half or entirely frozen men
coming down from those relentless winter heights.
Then we go to the Bureaux de l’Administration across the way, which had
been the headquarters of the “Mission Militaire d’Alsace” until it was
transferred to Masevaux a year ago.
It, too, is in what was once the Oberforster’s house, only _its_ walls
had been hung by the commandant with ancient souvenirs picked up in the
valley; old engravings of Alsatian generals, Rapp, Kléber, and Lefèvre,
Duke of Dantzig, this last vanquished husband of Madame Sans-Gêne as well
as victorious general of France. And there are some old engravings of the
portals of the church at Thann, and 1860 street scenes, with bombazined
women and high-collared men. An enormous flag of Louis Philippe decorates
one corner, and many horns and antlers of the Oberforster’s time hang in
the entrance-hall. There is a busy, pleasant coming and going of men who
like their work.
More officers are presented, and there is much joking about our Masevaux
_popote_ and odious comparisons. We tell them proudly of the new
coffee-pot, but the haughty chef of the St.-Amarin _popote_ answers that
it was needed, and probably we had at last heard what people really
thought about the coffee at the Masevaux mess. I am to lunch here on
Thursday and see—or rather, _taste_!
And all love St.-Amarin and its wide valley, even those who now live at
Masevaux.
Home by the Route Joffre with Sérin and Laferrière. A rising up over
indigo mountains, blackening at their base, blotted against the strange
white sky, white even now at sunset, then a drop into the dark valley
of Masevaux, talking of politics, theirs and mine, things of wisdom and
valiance done or undone. And the end in sight. Though Laferrière said:
“I am not sure that they will feel so conquered. They will proudly record
the dates of their great victories, and their historians will tell of
their sweeping invasions; one must confess they have had great generals.
They will doubtless reproach their statesmen with not having made better
alliances, and decry their _gaffes_. But as for fighting, they will
feel that men may fight one to two, one to three or to four or even
five, but that no one can fight the world. _Tenez_, for Napoleon, after
Waterloo, there was nothing more personally, but his victories remain
among the great military glories of history.” On the crest as we started
to drop into the valley, in that pale, pale sky above a blue, blue hill,
something almost like words was written in delicate gold, in long looping
characters, by the unseen, setting sun. I know not what they spelled, but
I think it was Peace, lovely Peace....
Thinking my day fairly over, I had just taken off my things and lain
me down when word was brought up that Captain Bernard was waiting for
me. Put on my hat in total blackness, the electric light again out all
over Masevaux, my candle snuffed, and in a darkness which conceals the
whereabouts of the match-box, as well as minor accessories like gloves
and veil, I depart to take tea at another large manufacturer’s, where
I find more handsome girls of the coming generation. Delicious little
bobbin-shaped doughnuts, called _shankelé_, are served with tea, and
there was brought out a great tricolor flag whose staff was surmounted
with the eagle of Napoleon III. It was of matchless, uncrushable silk,
dipped in unfading dyes. After Sedan, like many and many another, it
had been put in a long box and nailed against the beams in the attic,
remaining so hidden until the visit of President Poincaré in the winter
of 1915.
Then home through black and muddy streets, full of hurrying, stumbling
forms. Later the cheerful _popote_.
And then before I went to sleep I read again the story of Saint-Odile
according to Edouard Schuré, and it runs somewhat like this:[13]
At the end of the seventh century a powerful Frank of the Rhine Valley,
Atalric, was named Duke of Alsace by Childeric II, one of the last of the
Merovingian kings.
He was like many of his kind, fierce and implacable, worshiping neither
pagan divinities nor the one God.
He dwelt in a great castle near the town of Obernay in the Vosges, and
here one day he received the visit of an Irish monk and gave him shelter,
according to the custom of the time.
Thinking to improve the opportunity, the duke said to him:
“Those who wear the priestly garb boast of miraculous powers. If that be
true, demand of thy God that my wife Bereswinde, now with child, bear me
a son and heir.”
At that the monk threw himself on his knees, remaining long in prayer in
spite of Atalric’s impatience.
When at last the holy man arose, he said:
“No one can change the will of Heaven. Thy wife will bring forth a
daughter, and thy life will be one long struggle with her. But in the end
the dove will vanquish the lion.”
Atalric’s first thought was to have the unpleasant prophet well flogged,
but he finally contented himself by chasing him from the castle to the
accompaniment of his choicest maledictions.
When, a few days later, the gentle Bereswinde in fear and trembling (her
lord having made no secret of what he expected) gave birth to a blind
daughter, such a rage possessed Atalric that the dwellers in the castle
thought their last hour had come. Bereswinde’s feelings are not recorded.
The duke declared loudly that he did not intend to endure such dishonor,
and that if the child were not promptly hidden he would with his own
hands make away with it.
Fortunately Bereswinde had a sister who was abbess of the Convent of
Baume-les-Dames in Burgundy. To her the child was sent, and the legend
has it that Odile recovered her sight at the touch of the baptismal
waters, thus symbolizing the opening of her eyes to spiritual light in
the darkness of a barbarian age.
She was tenderly reared by the abbess, who, however, told her nothing of
her princely birth, letting her think she was the child of parents killed
in war, though, as she grew in years and beauty, she was treated as a
princess; her charm and gentleness were so great that it was recorded
that birds and even deer would eat from her hands as she wandered in
the forest clearings. Often at night in her cell she had strange and
beautiful visions. The most frequent was that of an angel of shining
though severe visage, who would appear presenting her now with roses, now
with lilies, the perfume enfolding her as if in some heavenly felicity.
But once as day was about to break she had quite a different vision.
It was that of a proud and beautiful adolescent who wore, as did the
Frankish lords of the times, a gray tunic with a leathern girdle, while
his golden hair fell freely about his shoulders. His long sword was
suspended from a strap decorated with shining plaques of gold. The purple
border of his tunic showed him indeed to be a prince, and in his mien
there was both pride and gentleness.
Odile’s heart leaped up and she was about to address him when suddenly he
vanished, and the angel of the austere visage took his place, holding out
a cross of ebony on which hung an ivory Christ. The next night, and many
after, the young lord returned. At last he came carrying in his hands
a crown of gold. Odile was about to grasp it, when the angel, graver
and sterner than before, stepped between them and presented to Odile a
jeweled chalice. Thinking she was to partake of the Saving Host, Odile
pressed it to her lips. What was her horror when she found it filled
with blood still hot and throbbing. So great was her trouble that on
awakening she recounted her dream to the abbess, who then revealed to her
the secret of her birth. How her gentle mother, worn by the harsh tempers
of the duke, was long since dead, and her father had sworn never to look
upon her face. The image in the dream was that of her young brother,
Adalbert, born after her, and heir to the duchy. “But,” added the abbess,
“beware of seeking out thy fierce father; thy mother is no longer there
to defend thee. Stay rather here, for thou art destined at my death to
become abbess of this convent.”
But Odile was so deeply moved by this glimpse of the glory of her race
and the promise of fraternal love that she could not resist the desire
to contemplate with her earthly eyes the brother whose image had so
enchanted her, to enfold him, if even for a single time, in her arms. By
a faithful servitor she despatched a letter to him, saying in it: “I am
Odile, thine unknown sister. If thou lovest me as I thee, obtain from my
father that I enter into my daughterly estate. I salute thee tenderly. At
thought of thee my heart blossoms like a lily in the desert.”
This letter acted as a charm upon Adalbert, awaking in his youthful heart
all generous and romantic sentiments. He cried, “Who is this sister whose
words are sweeter than those of a betrothed?”
A tender desire seized him to make her his companion and coheir and to
give her back her rank and family estate. He answered, “Trust but in me.
I will arrange all things for the best.”
Shortly after, while his father was absent at the chase, he sent to
Baume-les-Dames a splendid chariot drawn by six richly caparisoned
horses. With it went a numerous retinue, that Odile might return to her
father’s house in a way befitting her estate. And now begins the tragedy.
Atalric is in the banquet-hall of his castle of Obernay, where his
birthday is being celebrated with great pomp and circumstance. It is the
day, too, that he has chosen to present his son and heir to his vassals.
About the tables, groaning under the weight of gold and silver dishes,
his many courtiers are sitting, drinking from great horns of aurochs or
clanking their burnished hanaps. Atalric, happening to go to the window,
espies in the plain a chariot approaching, drawn by six horses; banners
are flying and palms waving. Above it float the ducal colors.
He cries out in surprise, “Who is it that approaches?”
Adalbert answers with all the valiance of his young and trusting heart,
“It is thy daughter Odile come to beg thy mercy.”
“Who is the dolt that counseled her return?”
“It is I who called her, and on this day of thy feast I beg thy grace for
her.”
“How has she, who desires my death, been able to bewitch you?” cries
Atalric, pale and stiff with anger.
Adalbert protests, invoking his father’s pity, the honor of the family,
and his own brotherly love, but Atalric, beside himself, commands the
youth to cast his sister from the threshold. Adalbert refuses.
“If it must be done, do it thyself,” he answers, proudly. Upon this the
duke menaces his son with disinheritance if he does not immediately
obey. But Adalbert, drawing his sword, lays it at his father’s feet,
telling him that rather than fail in fraternal love he will give up his
heritage. This fills his father with so blind a fury that he gives his
son a great blow upon the temple with the hilt of his sword.
The stroke is mortal, and Adalbert falls to the ground. The vassals
crowd in fear at one end of the great hall, while Atalric stands alone,
petrified by the horror of his crime.
At this moment in the fullness of her young beauty, dressed as a bride
for her nuptials, Odile enters the hall. A single look suffices. She
gives a great cry and throws herself on her knees by her dying brother.
She clasps his bleeding head, she kisses his glazing eyes, and in that
single kiss, that one despairing embrace, the pain of the whole world
transpierces her gentle breast. It is the chalice of blood the angel once
put to her lips. The dreadful crime of her father, the loss of her adored
brother, to whom she had been mystically united by a more than fraternal
bond, turn all her desires to the other world; the first young innocent
love of family is changed into solicitude for all who are suffering in
that barbarian world. Her novitiate begins.
Atalric, devoured by remorse, though still impenitent, did not dare cast
his daughter out, but he spoke no word to her, harboring always in his
heart the prediction of the Irish monk, “The dove will overcome the lion.”
In order to avoid him, Odile spent her days mostly in the great forests
that surrounded the castle, often climbing to the heights of Altitona.
Under the shadow of those great trees, high as the nave of some
cathedral, she no longer heard the striking of the hours of human time.
All things appeared to her under the guise of eternity. Her beautiful
brother, her unique love, was dead, almost as a martyr. Why should she
not in turn gather for herself a palm like to that he carried as he
roamed the heavenly fields?
One day, as she was deeply meditating these things, she found herself
midway up the great hill, when, enveloped in a blinding light, the angel
of her dreams in the convent of Burgundy suddenly appeared. His wings,
touched with glory, were widely unfolded, and his face shone like the
sun. With an imperious yet protecting gesture he pointed to the top of
the mountain, where were seen the crumbling remains of a Roman camp,
saying to her soul, “There, Odile, is thy home; there shalt thou dwell
and gather to thee others whose thoughts are holy and whose wills are
bent to service.”
Odile remained long in ecstasy. When she had recovered her fleshly sight
the angel was gone, but she had understood. On the heights of Altitona
she was to build a sanctuary which should be a refuge of peace, a
fortress of prayer, a citadel of God. It was vocation.
Strangely increased in beauty, she returned at night-fall to the castle,
and this added beauty was observed by all.
Shortly after Atalric, through pride and also to get rid of her,
conceived the design of marrying her to a great Austrasian lord from
Metz, then his guest, who had been struck by love for her. He called her
to him, and told her his intention. She answered gently:
“Father, thou canst not give me to any man. Thou knowest I am vowed to
Christ alone.”
The duke, enraged at her resistance, but grown somewhat wary by
experience, sought out a docile monk and commanded him to impress upon
Odile the wisdom of obedience, by which she might placate him and even
win his heart. But all was in vain. Then he conceived the black idea of
delivering his daughter by force into the arms of the Austrasian lord,
thinking, once she had been embraced by the lover, she would consent to
marriage. He sent two armed men to seize her in a grotto where she was
accustomed to pray. Hardened by the fierce design that filled his heart,
he cried out when she was brought before him, “The Lord of Austrasia
awaits thee for betrothal; willingly or unwillingly thou shalt be his.”
Odile, knowing the supreme moment had come, answered: “Thou hast already
killed thy son. Wouldst thou also cause the death of thy daughter? If
thou bindest me to the arms of this man I will not survive my shame, but
I will kill myself. Thus thou wilt be the cause not only of the death of
my body, but of my soul as well, and thou wilt thyself be destined to
eternal damnation.”
“Little care I for the other world. In this I am and will remain the
master.”
“That in truth thou art,” she answered, gently, “but listen to me and
recognize the goodness of my God. Allow me instead to build a sanctuary
upon the heights of Altitona; thou wilt thus be delivered from me for all
time. There I, and those gathered with me, will pray for thee. I feel a
strange power within me.”
Atalric made a violent gesture, but she continued without flinching,
“Menace me, trample me under-foot, but tremble before this image,” and
she took from her bosom the ivory Christ hanging from the ebon cross.
In that moment, as father and daughter faced each other, the powers of
heaven and hell, of spiritual promise and unregenerate will, were arrayed
in combat. But Atalric did not at first give way. Suddenly, however, the
countenance of Odile became more terrible than that of a warrior, and her
whole mien was wrapped in an angelic majesty. In her dilated eyes Atalric
thought for an instant that he saw the bleeding image of his murdered
son. An intolerable pain filled his heart, and he cried out under the
irresistible pressure of the heavenly will: “Thou hast conquered. Do as
thou wilt, but never let me look upon thy face.”
“Thou wilt see me in the other life,” answered his child.
The legend adds that Atalric, regretting his moment of weakness, did not
immediately renounce his evil designs. Odile was obliged to flee before
his increasing wrath and was pursued by him and the Austrasian lord,
accompanied by many armed men, even beyond the Rhine.
But at the moment when they were about to seize her, at the foot of
a mountain where there seemed no issue, the rock parted suddenly and
received her. A few minutes later it again opened and Odile appeared
enveloped in a supernatural light, declaring to her awestruck pursuers
that she belonged forever to Christ alone. Then Atalric and the
Austrasian lord turned silently and left the spot. The dove had conquered
the lion.
The legend has transformed her father’s momentary conversion to her will
into the physical image of the suddenly sundered rock. But in the end it
is all the same, for Odile, _Vierge Candide et Forte_, represents forever
the victory of the transfigured soul over brute force, the incalculable
power of faith sealed by sacrifice, the saving breath of the invisible
world breathed into the visible.
During centuries the great Benedictine Convent of Mount Saint-Odile
(Odilienberg) performed its works of faith and mansuetude in that
barbarian and ruthless world; the voices of Taran, the God of War, and
of Rosmertha, the Goddess of Life and Love, according to the pagan ways,
were replaced by another, promising eternal felicities to those born
again in Christ.
From a wall of _grès rose_, this same _grès rose_ that I have found as
building-stone for temple and home and fountain all over Alsace, Odile,
needing one day to give instant refreshment to an old man spent with
fatigue, caused the spring of crystal water to gush forth from which
pilgrims still drink. And in the Chapel, called that of Tears, is a
deeply indented stone, worn, it is said, by the knees of the saint as
she knelt there praying for the release of the soul of her father (long
dead and unpenitent) from the pains of purgatory. The legend has it that
only toward the end of her life was she able to accomplish this, when at
last the chalice of blood the angel once gave her was transmuted into an
elixir of eternal life.
The redemption of the soul of Atalric signifies, too, the conversion of
the Merovingian world to Christianity, and to a new will to give up life
that it might be found again—and many other things that it is difficult
to tell of in words, but the soul can perceive them.
And on the Odilienberg has beat for centuries the very heart, as it were,
of Alsace; above its throb being laid, passionately, now a hand from the
West, now one from the East....
To this day, they who at evening ascend its heights and wander under the
lindens of the terrace built above the old pagan wall, looking out upon
the splendid panorama of the Vosges, breathe the mystical fragrance of
the lily and the rose that perfumed the last sigh of Saint-Odile.
These things I am not able to know of myself, for the Odilienberg is
still in German hands.
IX
THE “FIELD OF LIES” AND LAIMBACH
_Faro come colui che piange._—DANTE
_November 6th._—And to-morrow I am to pass into the sweet, broad valley
of the Thur and there dwell. I ask neither how nor why, knowing it will
be vastly pleasant, though a somewhat startled feeling overtakes me at
the thought of leaving Masevaux, _tout ce qui finit est si court_. For
a fleeting, nostalgic moment I think, too, “What am I about, binding
sheaves in this rich corner of the earth that is not mine?”
As we gather for lunch, some one reads the sweeping clauses of the
conditions of the armistice with Austria-Hungary. Nothing is left save
hunger and disorder. I wonder if those to whom one of the “first aims of
the war is the dismemberment of the Dual Monarchy” see, in their passion,
what it will mean to surround the centripetal force of Germany with
floating, unsteady bits, that inevitably will be drawn to it. Some one
hazarded the remark, evidently not so trite as we once thought it, that
“if Austria didn’t exist, she would have to be invented.” Passion seems
more than ever to be its own blind end, and, looking at those men, I
thought, have we not fought and died the good death for other and further
ends?
Then Laferrière began reading the American _communiqué_. We are but
five miles from the Sedan-Metz line, one of the principal lines of
communication of the Germans!
As in a dream I listen to the deeds of _my_ soldiers, recited in the most
beautiful of French, as many deeds of many men have been recited to many
women through the ages.
“_Ce matin la Ière Armée a repris son attaque. En dépit d’une
résistance désespérée nos troupes [américaines] ont forcé le
passage de la Meuse à Brieulles et à Cléry-le-Petit._” ...
“_Beaumont, nœud de routes important, est tombé devant nos
troupes victorieuses qui se sont avancées jusqu’au Bois de
l’Hospice à deux milles au nord de Beaumont. Au cours de leur
avance elles se sont emparées de Létanne. A Beaumont, nous
avons délivré 500 citoyens français qui ont salué nos soldats
comme leurs libérateurs...._
“_L’avance des deux derniers jours a amené en certains points
notre ligne à cinq milles de la voie ferrée Sedan-Metz, une des
principales lignes de communication des armées allemandes._”[14]
As we sit down the commandant tells me they had been picking all sorts
of strange things out of the air that morning, the ether stamped with
unaccustomed names. He had just got a message, not meant for French ears,
bearing a new signature, Ebert; the day before he had got one bearing
that of Scheidemann. It is like a further dream of a dream, these things
that are borne “upon the sightless couriers of the air.”
At two o’clock I started out with Bernard and Laferrière, the latter on
the errand of rounding up an actor in one of those obscure yet deadly
village dramas.
“Generally I have little to do; they know they are well off,” he said,
and we agreed that it was indeed a pity to be pursued by original sin
even unto these pleasant valleys.
We descend at Rammersmatt, a quite unsinful-looking place, and while he
is gone Bernard and I visit the old church, beautifully held in the cleft
of the hill, lying against another hill, looking down on the plain of
Cernay, toward the German lines. It is this same plain of Cernay, which
I mentioned before, that was known in the old days as the “_Champ de
Mensonges_.” There Ariovistus was defeated by Caæsar. There, too, Louis
le Débonnaire was attacked by his three sons and betrayed by his army,
and ever since it has been justly known as the “Field of Lies.” Centuries
later the Swedes vanquished the imperial armies there under a Duke of
Lorraine. To-day it is that thing known as “No Man’s Land,” brown with
barbed-wire entanglements and rough with shell-holes—and other things
besides.
Back of it are the zigzagging German lines. It is, too, the place of
the century-old legend of the Niedecker’s young Thierry who, wandering
there one night, saw strange sights. He had not drained a single glass
of the _Rang de Thann_, nor of the red wine of Turckheim, called “_Sang
des Turcs_,” but was dreaming, as an adolescent does, of everything and
nothing, when suddenly the very stones of the valley began to move, and
great fissures showed in the earth. From them issued thousands upon
thousands of warriors of bygone times, striking against their shields and
crying out in strange, hoarse voices, “_Hodeīdah! Hodeīdah!_”
Finally a man taller than all the others, Louis le Débonnaire, son of
Charlemagne it was, his long, silvery hair surmounted by a gold and
jeweled crown, jumped on a white horse and called by name, one after the
other, the chiefs of his cohorts, who answered, “Here.”
Then the king, groaning with great groans, spoke beseechingly the names
of the sons he had begotten, Lothaire, Louis, and Pépin.
But Lothaire, Louis, and Pépin mocked him and to further wound him caused
to be brought on the battlefield his nephew, Bernard, he who had taken
arms against him and whose eyes the king had caused to be put out (and
for this the king knew little sleep).
Then as the battle begins the sightless Bernard jumps up behind the
king’s saddle, paralyzing his every movement. But at the very height of
the combat, above its clash and shoutings, the third hour of morning
sounds from a church tower, and suddenly the earth receives again the
ancient host and all is as before. Only Thierry from the Niedeckers lay
as if dead.
And the Field of Lies, _le Champ de Mensonges_, is said to be the spot
where the children of earth will be assembled at the Day of Judgment,
for what crime can equal that of the sons of Louis, who conquered,
imprisoned, and caused to die of grief a father whose only fault was
that he loved them too well? It is even said that it is the troops of
Louis who will sound the brazen trumps to awaken the dead for their last
accounting.
Now I see it as “No Man’s Land,” rusty and brown with patches of barbed
wire, rough with great shell-holes, but they say that even in intervals
of peace it is never so luxuriantly fertile as are the fields that lie
about it....
A white, very white afternoon heaven stretches above us. Very violent
cannonading.
“_C’est nous—c’est le Boche_,” Bernard repeats from time to time. Then
his sharp eye distinguishes a group of German airplanes, and, looking
where he points, I see five spots black, black in the white sky.
They, too, are immediately fired on. I hear over my head the great
swish made by the shells from the guns placed on a hill behind us—or so
sounding. My ear is not quick to distinguish directions in these echoing
hills.
Little balls of snow-white shrapnel, like beautifully wound balls of
fleecy wool, gently unloosen themselves about the black spots of the five
airplanes, which, after a while, disappear to the east.
Though not so overcome as the Niedecker’s Thierry, I feel that my eyes,
too, have looked on a strange spectacle.
Then Laferrière rejoins us. By the pleased look on his face we guess that
he hasn’t made the wages of sin too high, and we continue on our way
under the late, and still very white, afternoon sky. Suddenly the heavily
plated, thickly enameled rust and gold and black of the hillsides seem to
disappear and the earth is green again, young and tenderly green, like
spring, but how and why? It lasted but a few minutes, for on the slopes
toward Thann there was again the autumnal gleam of gold and rust, and
spots of fathomless black.
Entering Laimbach, we stopped to get the mayor, who was to conduct us
to the old Jesuit church, half-way between his village and the village
of Otzwiller, or rather its site, for Otzwiller disappeared completely
during the Thirty Years’ War, wherein each lovely Alsatian valley had
been sacked and burned and destroyed, and friends of yesterday were
enemies of to-day, and _vice versa_.
The mayor was a voluble, amiable mayor, who had conserved, during those
many German years, a vast amount of creaking, noisy, unpleasant French.
His village was ancient, high-roofed, many-fountained, and had been much
shelled. The streets were full of children playing, blue soldiers were
walking about, girls were leaning out of the windows to give and get a
greeting, or being pinched as they giggled about the streets, clicking
their sabots in the mud. As we passed out the white sky darkened suddenly
and a hard red began to burn in the west. We found ourselves nearing a
half-demolished fifteenth-century church, placed strangely between the
battered, living village and the ghostly village of the Thirty Years’
War. It was of _grès rose_ and had been built on the foundations of an
even earlier one, and near it was a shell-shot, ancient, high, red-roofed
presbytery. For generations the church had been a shrine of St.-Blaise,
and on every 3d of February the mayor told us (but sadly, as one speaking
of a pleasant past) there had been a great pilgrimage made by those
suffering from throat maladies.
Now over all was hanging a penetrating atmosphere of bootless desolation,
and I was suddenly seized with an anxious feeling that I should be about
the secret lonely business of my soul. Life seemed unbearably sad and
short, and “where was the place of eternal happiness, the place where the
Barbarian need be feared no more?” ...[15]
In front of the church had been placed, somewhat indiscreetly, the
officers thought, a big battery. And the mayor said, too, apologetically,
“_Evitément z’édait mal joizi par écard à l’éclise_,” for the battery had
soon been sighted. After the church had received many shells right in her
pink and lovely bosom, it had been moved some forty meters away, but even
so it had again been _repérée_, and the church had suffered the usual
fate of churches near batteries. Some fine old columns were left in the
apse, of the delicious _grès rose_. For a moment Laferrière and I stood
scaling off bits of the disfiguring gray plaster and wondering why it had
ever been put on, it and all the other gray stucco that a certain austere
century had plastered over gorgeous building-stone everywhere in Europe.
The church, like the village of the Thirty Years’ War, will soon be but
a name, for its walls are cracked and sagging, and with another winter’s
frost they will crumble and fall. Through the roofless nave we walked
over a mass of torn-up old mosaic flooring, and heaps of gaudy modern
stained glass fallen from the lovely, ancient, pointed windows.
It was getting dark as we passed out into the disorderly cemetery,
between the church and the battery (and even for a cemetery very
uninviting, torn up as it was by recent shells). Ends of coffins were
sticking out, shabby, twisted, bead wreaths and muddy, discolored
tricolor badges lay about, while in the middle of a once tidy family
plot, by name Hilz, was a huge new shell-hole of only the day before.
The mayor gave a shudder as he looked at his own familiar graveyard,
where his parents and his friends had been laid—though not to rest. He
was out for the first time after grippe and he said, with a determined
look and in his most creaking French, “If I have to die, all right, but
I’ve forbidden my daughter to bury me here.” Many, many had also fallen
in the fields, and everywhere thin earth lay over damp, shallow graves
marked by shabby, crooked crosses. Meadow mists were beginning to rise
and the copper-colored edge had hardened in the sky. I felt again an
inexpressible discouragement. I tried to think of Peace, so near, so
hotly desired, so redly pursued, but I could only perceive the damp
meadow, the demolished church, the gun-emplacements, the disorderly,
shelled cemetery, and the humid odor of death and mold and rotting
leaves. As yet nothing seemed to have risen incorruptible.
We turned and went again along the dark, damp valley road till we reached
the village with its consoling hum of life. Through the dusky street
washed the lovely soft blue of soldiers; a group stood with some girls
around the beautiful fountain, deeply pink in the half-light, built
in the fifteenth century by the Jesuits, though the mayor insisted on
placing the Sons of Loyola in the fourteenth. In fact, the Jesuits and
the fourteenth century were one in his mind. Then, as far as he was
concerned, came the war of 1914. He wanted us to come into his house to
partake of some brand of white liqueur—as I have said the people of these
valleys distil all and every bright-colored fruit of their earth. It
would seem that the whole flora of Alsace can be used to this end, and no
matter which of God’s colors go into their alembics, passing through, it
comes out pure white, to befuddle the heads and harden the stomachs of
the populace—and little boys are born with the burden of deafness. Though
twilight enveloped us, I knew the look that must be on the mayor’s face,
and something a bit phosphorescent came into his eyes as he spoke of a
_petite mirabelle_. Fortunately, it was too late to accept.
A few minutes later we found ourselves on the screened road to Masevaux,
moving slowly, without lights, the road overlooking the Field of Lies,
where the Germans watched.
Above the hills in front of us was a very thin, very long, very red,
crescent moon. No one spoke.
Doubtless the officers, like myself, were wondering upon what, when it
was full and white, its light would shine. Now it was turned to blood.
The roads were crowded with rattling artillery wagons, transporting guns
and supplies under cover of the deep, blue night. Once or twice on some
hillside, turned away from the German valley, was the leaping of a flame,
from the fire of a group of _artilleurs_, who were to wait the morning on
wooded slopes.
Thoughts of the ghostly village of Otzwiller, now but a name, pursued
me, and of the Swedish invasion. And the miseries of the Thirty Years’
War seemed to confound themselves with these of the war I know so well,
while the night deepened, under the long, thin, red moon, hanging behind
black-palled hills, in a heaven that still had an edge of copper.
A church bell sounded and something flying swiftly touched me at that
hour of the evening sacrifice, and I knew then that those who tread the
olives are rarely anointed with the oil, and I cried out within myself
suddenly and in despair, a long-unremembered line of the great Italian:
“_Faro come colui che piange._”
X
THE VALLEY OF THE THUR
_November 7th, St.-Amarin._—This morning farewell, perhaps a long
farewell, to Masevaux, and I now dwell in the broad, sweet valley of
the Thur. I had felt many pains of parting while putting my things into
the Japanese straw basket and the little leather valise. This was quite
a simple act, for I flatter myself that those receptacles contain only
essentials, though I had long since begun to wish that I had brought
another dress for evening, feeling a bit dull always buttoned up in my
uniform, and only a white shirt changed from a blue one to mark the
difference between morning and evening. One of those 1918 dresses, that
can be carried in the pocket without making it bulge, would not have
added perceptibly to the weight of my accoutrement, and would have
brightened up the _popotes_. The light from the Oberforster’s chandelier
at Masevaux was as pitiless as that which beats about thrones—and
presidential chairs (which much resemble them)—and ladies _en mission_
should come prepared.
Before leaving I went to say good-by to Mère Labonne, who showed me the
good things in preparation for luncheon and begged me to stay—scrambled
eggs with truffles, two _poulets_ ready for roasting, a tart _au mocha_
that she was frosting on a marble table. But the look of one who goes was
in my eyes, and she ceased to insist.
Return to the Place du Chapitre; many officers and motors under the
yellowing trees in front of the _Kommandantur_, a general arriving, some
sort of delegation departing. I say a thousand thanks to the amiable,
cultivated, agreeable Demoiselles Braun, three of whom wear decorations
for their war-work in hospitals, for contagious diseases, and one,
Stéphanie, “_qui n’a pas dit son dernier mot_,” is charming after the way
of the perceptive, witty women of the seventeenth or eighteenth century.
Then I find myself getting into the motor of the commandant, who, in
the meantime, has greeted and sped the general on his way. His face has
something shining about it as he gives the great news, written on the no
longer insubstantial air, of the German demand for an armistice. Then
he reads the _communiqué_ from the Belfort newspaper as we drive out of
Masevaux, telling us more about the Germans in full retreat, and the
Americans close behind them at _Sedan_! What a rustling of the pages of
history! The mind leaps to new things, life normal again, and all forces
bent to reconstruction.
As we pass over the screened road to Thann, where we are to lunch
with the military mayor, Captain Saint-Girons, the net of broom and
pine camouflage, screening the valley where the Germans are, suddenly
seemed some monument of ancient history; and, unlike the noisy hours of
yesterday, there was no sound of cannon.
Arrived at Thann, it is we who give the great, the unbelievable, the
unrealizable news of the demand for an armistice to Captain Saint-Girons,
who, with several uniformed schoolmasters, is waiting in front of the
Mairie to receive us. And our “feet are beautiful as the feet of them
that bring the Gospel of Peace and glad tidings of good things.”
I think for a moment how strange for _me_ to carry it to them, to these
men, who have fought for it, who have waited for it, watched for it, bled
for it—but everything is strange in this strangest of all strange worlds.
Going into the house, we find other schoolmasters, with some bright-eyed
little boys ranging in years from seven to twelve.
Then to lunch. I sit on the commandant’s right, Captain Gasquet,
_adjoint_ of the mayor, on my other side, the mayor himself opposite, the
schoolmasters placed prudently and watchfully near that selected flock,
who enliven the ends of the table. Now these little Alsatian hopefuls are
very bright of eye, rosy of cheek, and on their good behavior, which, in
spite of lurking potentialities, persisted during the lunch, even when a
glow, doubtless not unaccustomed, tinged their cheeks, as they drank the
wine of their own hillsides.
At dessert I asked Commandant Poulet to drink to Sedan, the _new_ Sedan.
I thought within myself, “Is it not even now as a temple being cleansed
and glorified in the chalice of the blood of _my_ people, the blood of
the khaki-clad youths from over the seas, whom Fate, since all time, had
decreed to unseal it?” Tears came to my eyes, there was a deep beat in my
breast.
And it had been forty-eight years and two months and seven days since it
was torn from a vanquished France.
I scarcely remember what was said of the day’s events; feeling, rather
than thought, was flooding about the table, and it was in gratitude,
in wonderment, and rather silently, for a group of Frenchmen, that the
luncheon proceeded. Each was thinking perhaps of his part of loss and
grief making up the victory.
Names of Americans who had visited Thann were spoken: Dr. Herbert Adams
Gibbons, long the friend of Alsace, and in some wise, as I told them, the
god of the machine directing my steps to them; Mr. John Weare; and others
whom I don’t recall. There had been, too, a fair and fleeting vision of
Mrs. Bliss one snowy winter day.
Many beautiful words were said of my country, and in that hour I think
it was, to them of the reconquered triangle, “_dulce et decora_” to have
even the least of the daughters of the Stars and Stripes at their board,
that hers should have been among the feet bringing “the glad tidings of
good things.”
When coffee and _quetsch_ and cigarettes were passed around, the
schoolmasters made ready to pour some of the heady white liqueur into the
glasses of even the smallest of the little boys, but the commandant said,
“No,” and cigarettes only are offered to the babes. I would put my hand
in the fire (knowing I could draw it out unsinged) that it was not the
first time they had puffed “caporals.” The seven-year-old one held his
with an astounding ease, not entirely hereditary. When he had finished he
was stood on a chair, from which he recited “_Le Loup et l’Agneau_,” the
lines concerning the now extremely well-demonstrated “_La raison du plus
fort est toujours la meilleure_,” being given almost at a breath, one
word tightly tied to another in quite an ingenious way.
An older one, whose naturally flashing eye was slightly restrained only
by the solemnity of the occasion, gave us the equally classic, “_Maidre
corpeau sur un arbre bergé_.” He hadn’t been caught so young, and the old
Adam in the shape of his German accent was heavy upon him. Then, standing
in a row, they sang “_Le Chant du Départ_,” that greatest of all the
wars’ marching songs, and the childish voices cut my heart like a knife,
and tears were loosened, and through their blur I seemed to see the march
of the generations of Alsace adown the ages, fulfilling the shifting,
cruel destinies of border peoples. Ghosts of the Thirty Years’ War, of
the Napoleonic wars, of 1870, and of 1914, and of the other dateless
struggles that have ravaged their rich valleys, come before me. I weep
and weep, and my handkerchief is a microscopic, damp, gray ball. I have
an idea that pride of sex alone restrained the blue-clad men from tears.
Peace, lovely Peace, desired like the morning, was arising, but her light
was to shine on rivers of blood, running through such black ruins that
her glory and her sweetness, and even her hope, hurt with a great hurt,
and I thought again on those who, empty-armed, must yet rejoice....
Afterward I strolled along the banks of the pebbly Thur with the
commandant and Captain Saint-Girons. There is a river-path leading under
balconied, red-roofed houses, or by gray walls, and there is an old round
tower having a caplike roof with a point on the top, and against it are
silhouetted a poplar and a sycamore. Nearly everywhere the lovely gray
lace spire of the cathedral shows above roof or tree or chimney; and it
is said that though Strasbourg’s cathedral is higher and Friburg’s is
wider, Thann’s is the loveliest.[16]
When the Mission had its headquarters at Thann, the commandant and
Captain Saint-Girons were wont to walk along this path in the afternoon,
holding a sort of tribunal, receiving petitions, granting favors,
righting differences that may occur even among the delivered, quite after
the fashion of Saint-Louis receiving the petitions of his people under
the great tree.
The river flows through the heart of the lovely old town, badly bombarded
in spots. To our left as we walked rose the deep-colored hills in the
full afternoon burnishing of their deep rusty reds and pale gilts.
As we pass up the steep winding road we meet the Duc de Trévise,
under-lieutenant, with a sketch in his hand of a shell-shot historic
corner of Thann, the commandant wishing to save at least a memorial
wherever he can. Furthermore, Thann was black-spotted with our negro
troops. Sometimes I stopped and spoke, sometimes I waved as I passed,
just to see the full, white-toothed smile against the exotic background.
[Illustration: THANN. LA VIEILLE TOUR]
The orphanage toward which we are bound is in the old Château de
Marsilly, beautifully situated in the cleft of its own hill and restored
not too cruelly. Close above it rises the Engelberg, the tower of whose
castle was blown up when Turenne practised the arts of war in the valley.
Part of it lies like a great ring, and is called the “Eye of the Witch.”
To our right as we mount is a V-shaped glimpse of the valley where the
Germans lie intrenched, formed by close, rich hillsides, on which lie in
lovely, ruglike designs the vineyards of _l’heureuse Alsace féconde en
vignobles_.
A charming, vivacious nun whose age was unguessable by twenty years,
dark-eyed and satin-skinned, whose manners could not have been surpassed
for ease by any woman of the great world, greets us. I think for the
thousandth time how perfect the polish the conventual life gives. I have
seen in peasant cottages the rooms wherein they were born, these women
of restrained gesture, of dignified mien, of easy charm in conversation,
of finished courtesy, and realize again that something invisible,
imponderable, yet all-powerful, shapes the coarse block, polishes the
rough surface, till there is no resemblance to that out of which it was
hewn.
As we turn to go down we stand for a moment looking again through the
V-shaped cleft at the rich, blue plain held by the enemy.
“How often,” said Captain Saint-Girons, after a silence, “it has
seemed to me like the Promised Land, and how often during these four
interminable years have I longed to look at these hills _from_ the plain.”
“Now all is fulfilling itself,” I answered.
The commandant said nothing, but his gaze, too, was fixed on the wide
horizon.
Then we visited the military cemetery, a pleasant place, as cemeteries
go, with many trees, and fallen, rustling leaves, and a few late-blooming
flowers. Many sons of France were lying there since “the beginning”;
others had been but lately laid away. The two officers stood for a moment
with uncovered heads by the graves of four comrades of the Mission,
killed by a bomb in front of the Mairie, as they were going in for lunch.
Again I bowed my head and tears were loosened. Never as in this war has
“death been made so proud with pure and princely beauty.” How can we so
soon be engaged in “business as usual,” compete with the splendor of
these dead?
Then we pass down the valley of the Thur, so greatly loved by those who
dwell therein, inclosed by purple and dark-amber hills, but inclosed
easily, widely, leaving room for fancy, for delight, with no sense of
being shut in by heaps of earth that press too tight.
As we enter St.-Amarin, the long, central street is like a pale-blue
ribbon, for through it a battalion of some Marseilles regiment is
passing. As my eye received it I knew the lovely picture for some
bleaching daguerreotype, its color and lineaments to fade in the bright
light of peace. We stop a moment at the Administration building and see
again M. de Maroussem, to whom, on meeting him first at Madame Galland’s,
I had said, “You are an Englishman?” And to those who have frequented
international worlds I don’t need to say how he looks. To others I would
say that he is tall, blond, athletic, wearing easily a well-cut, not too
new uniform, and having a perceptive blue eye (which, however, is really
a very French eye when one takes a second look). One would have known
that he hunted in England and had polo-ponies in France. In civil life he
is a banker.
Now among other things he is chef of the St.-Amarin _popote_ and tells
me dinner is at 7.45 “tapant.” The hour is near wherein I am to be shown
how far superior the St.-Amarin _popote_ is to that of Masevaux.
Then the commandant accompanies me to the house of M. Helmer, the
well-known Alsatian lawyer who is counsel for the Mission. Also it was
he who defended Hansi when he was brought before the German courts and
condemned for _lèse-majesté_.[17]
From the great bowed window of Madame Helmer’s drawing-room I could look
down the suddenly mystical-seeming valley, discerned by the spirit rather
than the eye at 4.30 of a November afternoon. It was but a stretch of
white filmy substance between violet hills, under a gray-green heaven,
with something warm and precious at its western edge. Such a passing of
the day as the saints of old would have loved.
Hung along the wall opposite the great window are engravings of the
Mantegna frieze from Hampton Court, and there were many books.
After tea the commandant took his leave and Madame Helmer showed me to
my comfortable room where I had thirty saving minutes, horizontal and in
the dark, fully conscious, but completely resting, thought consecutive
but not active, flowing in a smooth way between banks of quiet nerves in
quiet flesh.
“Seven forty-five tapant” finds me again at the Administration building,
whither M. Helmer accompanied me, and it is very pleasant as I enter.
Commandant Poulet is sitting at a huge desk signing papers, more
blue-clad officers and two _infirmières_ are presented, after which we
pass into the dining-room, whose doors are flung open in classic style by
a well-trained orderly. In Masevaux we simply gathered and sat down. Now
the mess-table of St.-Amarin has a decided touch of elegance, too, in the
way of pink-shaded candles, and in the middle there was an arrangement
of chrysanthemums and autumn leaves. Instead of a Mère Labonne they have
a _cordon bleu_ who performs his rites very suitably in the dark-blue
uniform of the chasseurs. We sit down to a dinner that might have been
served with pride at Voisin’s or the Café de Paris, where all except
the chairs is extra and getting back a cane or hat costs the remaining
eye (if one remains) of the head. I am indeed impressed, as I was meant
to be, and M. de Maroussem might have said, “Didn’t I tell you so?” in
his pure and pleasant English. I sat between the commandant and Captain
Perdrizet, chief of the Forestry Service of the Thann district, and
to the sound of cannon, which in spite of peace prospects was heavily
firing over the Hartmannswillerkopf, we consumed _carpes à la Flamande_,
a course of game elaborately presented with all its feathers, finishing
with _poires Bordaloue_, the whole perpetuated on a charming menu card
decorated with the classic Alsatian stork by Andrieux, one of the
officers of the mess.
As I sat down I saw in front of me a sign over the door leading into
the pantry, a somewhat Y.M.C.A.-ish sign, “_Sois sobre et tu vivras
longtemps_” (“Be sober and you will live long”), and de Maroussem’s
feelings were almost hurt when I asked if perhaps behind me there was one
that said, “_Mange peu et tu seras invité souvent_” (“Eat little and you
will be invited often”). And when it came time for coffee and cigarettes
and some especially old _quetsch_ he brought out the book, “The Friends
of France,” that I had first seen at Harry Sleeper’s in Gloucester Bay, a
thousand years ago, it seemed, and we turned to the death and citation of
Norman Hall, Commandant Poulet recalling again that he had begun his work
in Alsace on the 25th of December, 1914, and on the 26th he had stood by
Norman Hall’s open grave.
Then a radio, just received, concerning the Parlementaries, is discussed;
among them is slated von Hintze, leading to talk of the days when I had
known him in Mexico. Count Oberndorf, too, husband of a dear and charming
friend of Dutch and American birth, was on the list, and we spoke of
Vienna as it had been—and was no more. _Sic transit_ ... though I thought
within myself, as I looked, for a flashing moment, down the vista of
history, many things return.
It was late when two officers accompanied me to my dwelling, to the
sucking sound of boots in mud, and under a starless sky hanging dark
and heavy over a black, black earth. At last I could draw literally the
drapery of my couch about me and lie down to dreams of _my_ men in blood
and glory before Sedan.
XI
THE RE-GALLICIZING OF ALSACE
_November 8th, St.-Amarin, Night._—Fancy and feeling too quickened for
sleep. If there is anything I did not see or anything I did not feel, in
and about St.-Amarin, I challenge some one of the Mission to produce it.
This was my day, or rather half of it. At 8.45 Lieutenant Fress,
Inspector of Schools, came to fetch me, and not knowing how to be late
(alack!), I am on the stairs as he rings the bell. We pass out into a
white, rather flat November world toward the schoolhouses, everywhere the
clean odor of freshly hewn wood and sawdust hanging on the November air.
Now the re-Gallicizing of Alsace is one of the most interesting political
operations I have ever seen, and Heaven knows I’ve seen many in many
lands. But this washing out and marking in of history on the clean slate
of childhood is different from anything else, though easier than most
things, the eye of youth glancing easily from earth to heaven and from
heaven to earth—and soft and eager the slate of its mind.
The St.-Amarin schoolhouse is a large, solid building, its walls hung
everywhere with huge war-posters, all of those one sees in Paris and many
besides.
The classes for the smaller children, in accordance with the traditions
of the valley, here also are in the hands of the Sisters of “The Divine
Providence,” who, in the earliest years of the nineteenth century,
opened in St.-Amarin the first school for girls. The other classes are
taught by carefully selected Alsatian teachers or by mobilized French
schoolmasters. Formerly French was the language of honor, for the
well-to-do only, but now this article, once “of luxury,” is for all the
language of their country and their heart, and pride mixes with the zeal
with which the peasants pursue _la belle langue_—not always successfully.
For in these border regions the tongue has an un-Gallic thickness; the
voice is placed far back in the throat, with a strong accent on the
tonic, nothing of the light flinging from the lips that makes the beauty
of the French language and its conquest so difficult.
We begin with a class of small children, where a smiling, almost
exuberantly happy nun is teaching a group of little delivered darlings to
sing, “_il y avait une bergère et ron, ron, ron, petit pat à pon_”—to my
surprise, in the latest manner of Jacques Dalcroze. They evidently mean
to keep abreast of the times here in Alsace.
While they recited I looked about. The room was large, light, and
superheated by a small, black, iron stove fiercely burning. On the wall
were maps of the Old World, and, I had almost said, of the world to come,
for new divisions of countries were indicated. Among the many posters and
in the place of honor was a big colored text, which I afterward saw in
every room, with the head-line, “_Pourquoi on ne peut pas conclure une
paix fondée sur la parole de l’Allemagne_” (“Why one cannot make a peace
founded on the word of Germany”).
The children were literally as good as gold. No scuffling of feet nor
restless rubbing about on the seats. I remarked this as we left the room
after listening to “_Le Loup et l’Agneau_” recited in those shrill, thin
voices, and Lieutenant Fress said, with a smile:
“What remains of the Boche discipline makes them docile and attentive
scholars; they are often several hours in class without needing to be
reprimanded for chattering or lack of attention.”
Later I delicately inquired about ink-throwing or “spitballs,” but it
appeared they’re unknown.
We then betook ourselves upstairs to a class of older girls, from ten
to thirteen or thereabouts, to whom Lieutenant Fress, with the greatest
confidence, put the most difficult questions. It was a class of French
history, and he began boldly with the Druids and finished with the war of
1914. He has a gift for teaching, and was so easy with those children,
whom I should have been embarrassed, not to say terrified, to approach,
that the answers came pleasantly and quickly. When at a certain moment,
however, there was a delay, I got anxious, thinking to myself, suppose
the Sister or Lieutenant Fress were to say to the class:
“You don’t know? Then we must ask this _aimable_ lady who has come across
the ocean to visit you. _She_ will tell us.” And of Charles the Fat,
then engaging our attention, I only remembered vaguely that he had had
a saintly wife of whom he grew tired. There were other questions, too,
about Louis of Aquitaine, which awakened only the faintest echoes in
memory, but which to my relief were answered to complete satisfaction by
a determined, dark-eyed, round-faced girl of twelve or thereabouts.
Lieutenant Fress then asked who could recite “_La Laitière et le Pot au
Lait_.” All hands shot up, and the recitation proceeded with much _brio_.
“What does this teach us?” he boldly asked at the end.
At this a heavy-jawed, but very bright, near-together-eyed girl raised
her hand without a second’s hesitation, and equally without a second’s
hesitation answered:
“To think only of the present.” As is elegantly expressed in the enemies’
tongue, that girl wasn’t one of whom it would be said she would be “left
hanging,” except of course as regards the imponderabilities.
Lieutenant Fress: “But is it well to think only of the present? What of
imagination, and things that may happen in the future?”
A small, undersized girl with a deep-blue eye somewhat nervously answered:
“In imagination one builds castles in Spain.”
This was encouraging, but what she called _châteaux d’Espagne_ seemed
not, however, to find great favor, for a silence fell on that bright-eyed
class.
“But isn’t that all right?” continued Lieutenant Fress, giving a fillip.
“Must we think only of the things we can see and touch?”
At the mention of seeing and touching, hands again shot up. He indicated
a thick-haired, heavy-browed girl.
“In thinking of the things she doesn’t see, the good housewife would
forget to cook the dinner, _et cela serait tommage_,” was the answer
coming from the deepest depths of her consciousness.
On which we leave the schoolroom, with its extremely practical
atmosphere, the argument being unanswerable, even by Lieutenant Fress.
I could but think on that long line of peasants who have wrestled with
realities, begotten, brought forth, tilled the soil, baked the bread,
struggling all the time with their border-destiny, nature and history,
even more than their own wills, having made them what they are. It
struck me as reasonable that they should be a canny set, those little
girls. Something alert, perceptive of realities, was forming them, they
could not be over-given to dreams, for which one is both sorry and glad,
according to the way one happens to feel about human things at the
moment—and not necessarily the way they are. Even Marcus Aurelius tells
us that “if a thing displease us” (I suppose he only forgot to add,
“or if a thing please us”) “it is not that thing, but our view of that
thing.” And certainly a lot of perfectly good things are spoiled by the
point of view.
In the next room they were having a lesson in American history, quite in
the note everywhere these days, and I know the Sister saw the hand of God
as I entered at that special moment (she was a quiet-eyed, not very young
Sister, who had trod further paths than those of learning). Then and
there I heard the tale of the Boston Tea-party, and its consequences, of
the War of the Rebellion, and the name of Lincoln, pronounced “Lancone,”
who “wanted all men to be free and equal,” sounded through the room. No
one, of course, expressed a doubt, nor ever will in schoolrooms, that men
aren’t free, neither are they equal. As for myself, I thank God nearly
every morning that some men always will be better than others, realizing
that there is more difference between man and man than between man and
beast, which truth was recalled to me but shortly by an equalitarian
friend of the New Republic—but it’s not for schools, like many other
truths. Even Saint Paul can do nothing except cry out, “Shall not the
potter have power to shape the vessel as he will, some to honor, some
to dishonor?” which again recognizes the fact of inequality without
explaining it. However, there’s no use going into that now.
I soon found myself in a class of boys of twelve to fifteen years of age.
They were having a lesson in German, and were reading a “piece” called
“_Der arme Sepp_,” the history of whose misfortunes (he was a stable-boy,
and the horse ran away and the wagon was broken, and he was received by
his master with blows) didn’t seem to stick; for after it had been read
out no boy, in answer to Lieutenant Fress’s questions, could recount the
short and simple annals of poor Sepp.
They weren’t nearly so bright as the girls. Dull-eyed, pimply-faced,
squeaky-voiced, they were wrestling with something that was for the time
stronger than books—the eternal _Frühlings Erwachen_, that has always
occupied philosophers and scientists—though not so much parents, who are
apt to avoid the issues involved.
We passed finally into a class where young women were dissecting _Les
Obsèques de la Lionne_, under the guidance of a brown-bearded, one-armed
teacher in uniform. It was a small room, and you could have cut the
air with a knife. And for the mist I could scarcely see the placard
“_Pourquoi on ne peut pas conclure une paix fondée sur la parole
d’Allemagne_” and the portraits of Clémenceau and Poincaré.
About this time I began to understand that La Fontaine is the pillar of
the French educational system; and there is no doubt that he _did_ clear
up a lot of doubtful things, in the most liquid use of the clearest of
all languages.
We listened here to dissertations on the falseness of courts and
courtiers, the charms of which were not touched on. How those who
frequented them learned disastrous habits of dissimulation, not to
say lying, and how ’twas better to live in obscurity (which for some
reason is always supposed to be cheerful and where nobody ever lies
perhaps because it isn’t worth while). Courts are not in favor anywhere
just now, but everybody will admit they’ve had a glorious past; and as
for democracy’s future, which the Bolsheviki and the New Freedom are
decidedly handicapping, they _may_ run it a close second. This class
was not so interesting, however, as were the children’s—discussions of
intellectual propositions by people who aren’t intellectual being an
awful bore at any time.
Toward the end there was a horrid moment, Lieutenant Fress bearing up
with equanimity, when the over-bold teacher, interrupting the reading,
asked the meaning of the word “_apothéose_.” Dead silence.
“_Continuez_,” he finally said, though a young woman with an immense
amount of corn-colored hair waved low about some spectacled blue eyes,
and wearing a large silver pin with the word “_Adieu_” on it, showed
signs of being about to bring forth the answer.
They finished the fable in unison in their strong border-accent, which
seemed to get thicker and thicker as we got farther up the flights of
learning.
_Amusez les rois par tes songes,_
_Flattez-les, payez les d’agréables mensonges._
_Quelque intignation dont leur cœur soit rembli,_
_Ils goberont l’abbât, vous serez leur ami._
But methought it isn’t anything like what the “people” will have to
“swallow,” when everybody is free and nobody is equal. And I wondered
again at those who think to change the destinies of nations from without,
by formulas or commands, when each evolves mysteriously, mystically,
inevitably from within, out of its own particular shape and substance
and strength. Even one from over the seas, clad in the supremest power a
great nation has ever lent a mortal, though he pull the earth to pieces
in the attempt, cannot change this law of nature. “_Que direz-vous, races
futures?_”
And time respects nothing that is done without it.
As we came out into the square, little boys were bringing in armfuls of
wood for their schoolroom stoves, others were already noisily scampering
home for dinner in the crisp, sawdusty air; straight columns of smoke
from many chimneys evoked women standing about noonday fires; there was a
homely, human feeling about it all....
As I went through the school it seemed to me that the types of the
children were modified in two ways, inclining now toward the elongated
head, with pointed chin, dark hair, dark eyes, and mantling color, now
toward the round-headed, square-jawed, blond type, with full, dreamy,
blue eyes. But under these modifications one felt that there was a
persistent something that was their own, neither German nor French nor
anything else, for all the mingling; the Alsatian root and stem, with an
inalienable, peculiar life mounting in it, its very own, its race-gift.
And this essential gift, this rich, diverse inheritance, had been
received from each point of the compass. From the south, through the
defiles of the Alps, the great Latin traditions had infiltered. From the
north and east had come Germanic thought, with its mystical reactions,
its metaphysical inclinations, its marvelous legends, and its romantic
chronicles of gods and half-gods. From the west, from Gaul, came grace
and courtesy and the deathless wish for liberty. Was ever a people more
richly endowed? Yet, how shall even such a seed grow if it never lie
quiet in the warm darkness of the earth?...
Then I turned from the paths of learning, and went over to the very
well-kept ambulance, in charge, since several years, of the ladies from
Mulhouse, whom I had met at dinner the night before.
And I stood by the bed of a dying negro of the Fifteenth New York
Infantry, his eyes already glazed, and thought how he was to leave the
broad valley of the Thur for that other wider Valley of the Soul, where,
it is said, we are all of one color. And I am inclined to believe it, for
the further I go, even in this life, the less real difference I find in
people; even the white, unfortunately, are extraordinarily alike about
most things; and one can but wonder why the few high differences, rather
than the low and easy likenesses, are discouraged by so many good men.
Then I sought out the church of pink stone, passing a pink fountain
in the chestnut-planted square it fronts on, where blue-clad soldiers
were coming and going, busy about their midday meal. And, entering the
church, I thought, after commending the soul of the negro to its Maker,
of St.-Amarin, who has given his name to the broad, sweet valley and its
pleasant town.
The chronicles have it that he erected an oratory hereabouts with his
own hands. Later when St.-Prix, the holy bishop of Auvergne, was passing
by, on his way to the court of Childeric to obtain permission to build
a church, he stopped at the oratory to rest and found its builder lying
ill of a fever. St.-Prix making the sign of the cross upon his breast,
immediately the fever falls, and Amarin finds himself bathed in a gentle
sweat. He arises, gives thanks to God, and in gratitude offers to
accompany St.-Prix to the king’s court.
Now, some time before, St.-Prix had run afoul of a vicious, thick-souled
man named Hector, Count of Marseille. The matter being brought to court,
in the final judgment the holy bishop had been acquitted, and the wicked
Hector convicted and put to death.
But the family of Hector was proud and vengeful and powerful (in our days
we’ve seen such), and learning that St.-Prix had set out on the journey,
sent a squad of archers and other soldiery to make away with him _en
route_.
These came upon him, accompanied by St.-Amarin, in a village known as
Volvic. Now when Amarin saw the assassins stretching their bows, the
first thought of the natural man was to get out of harm’s way. But
St.-Prix, further advanced in sanctity and therefore more perceptive
of the invisibilities, seizing him by the arm, said to him the words,
alas! so incomprehensible to us, children of the age: “If you lose this
opportunity for martyrdom, you will perhaps never find it again!”
At this Amarin stood his ground, though one has a feeling from the little
one knows of him that he had a natural love for life. He was the first to
be massacred, “his soul leaving his body in the company of angels.”
The assassins, thinking their work well done, were about to depart, when
St.-Prix called to them, saying: “But I am he whom you seek. Do with me
what you will.” Whereupon one of the evil men, Radebert by name, gave him
a sword-thrust through the breast. And as he cried out the words each one
of us should ever have ready on his tongue (Heaven knows they are needed
often enough), “Forgive them, Lord, they know not what they do,” another
thrust caused his brains to spurt from his head. Whereupon angels were
seen again descending, and the murderers, appalled by a great light that
filled the valley, took their flight.
Sitting quietly in the pink church of St.-Amarin (its interior is noble
of breadth and length, though not high), I thought how sweet is the
mystical gift, and that one but stingily endowed in other ways, without
houses or lands, or even learning or beauty or grace, if he have but the
inner light, draws many unto him.
So alluring are such that kings in anguish call for them; even the
wasters of life, they know not why, sometimes seek them out; others have
been known to forget their money-making, or stop their spending, and
render themselves physically uncomfortable, trying to get at the strange
and secret gift they offer.
For the permanent interest of life is the unseen, and neither visible
joys nor visible griefs can compete with it, nor any of the ways of the
flesh, however pleasant or however straight.
And who would not sometimes dwell on these inner stages of the
life-journey? With joy on the first period, which is that of innocence,
passing with a sigh to the second, which is that of deviation; with
a moistening of the dry heart to the third, that of reconciliation.
Finally in humility to the fourth and last, which is that of pilgrimage,
where the soul, accepting the two great natural abhorrences, old age and
dissolution, hopeth for redemption and renewal....
And then I found the clock was striking twelve and I left the inner
world (alas! rarely is my stay in it long, even if no clock strikes) and
hurried to the _popote_.
XII
THE HARTMANNSWILLERKOPF
“_Now thou art come upon a feast of death_”
Very pleasant luncheon, after the accounting of the flesh, though not
dallied over, as Captain Perdrizet, a man (Heaven reward him; I never
can) of much _élan_ and quite a little perception of values, suggested
changing my afternoon program, which was that of calling on various
members of the high and comfortable bourgeoisie, whose “fleeting
mansions” are known to me in many lands. When I found that, instead of
basking in the comforts of this same bourgeoisie, eating their sweet and
pleasant cakes, sitting in their deep armchairs, looking at the portraits
of their ancestors, fingering their bric-à-brac and looking out at their
view, I might, if the special commander of the special sector so willed
it, make a pilgrimage to the sacramental Hartmannswillerkopf, where
fifty thousand sleep—and where others even then as we spoke were laying
themselves down, my heart was greatly quickened and my soul, after its
manner, began to burn.
The sun was coming out between heavy showers as Captain Perdrizet and I
departed hastily for Wesserling, where the permission was to be got. Now
Wesserling rather deserves a page of its own, for many reasons, though,
having a single thought—that of the pilgrimage—I gave but a glance
at the very interesting little war-museum, stamped hastily on memory
the quite delicious emplacement of the old château, now divided into
various large and comfortable dwellings of the people on whom I was to
call, and commanding the lovely valley to the west. Captain Perdrizet,
who proved at every step to be a man of sequence as well as enthusiasm,
took me straight to Commandant de Saint-Denis. After some conversation,
which I politely didn’t catch, but which terminated by: “_Oui, si c’est
comme ça_” (I looked perhaps more reasonable than I felt with that heat
about my heart), “but I must telephone to the commandant of the sector
at Camp Wagram, and from there you must proceed with an armed escort.”
Gratefully, but with exceeding celerity, we shook the dust of the
_Kommandantur_ from our feet, and returned through the valley as far as
Willer, when we began to rise in a world of mist and breaking light, from
time to time deluged by a diamond-like shower. Up, up through hills that
one can no longer call changeless, for they are hills with their heads
nicked off, neither branch nor leaf left on the stumps that outline their
notched and shabby crests. Past batteries and gun-emplacements, embedded
in wet foliage, many of them made by American troops last summer. Deep
through a world of rusty beeches, with pine forests splashed like ink
on near hills, here and there the torch of a larch—_mélèze_, it is
called—and it is the only one of its family that grows yellow in autumn
and sheds its foliage, and doubtless kind heaven made it so, that it
might be a lamp in dark forests. There was the sound of rushing waters;
and everywhere that beauty of moving, blue, helmeted figures afoot, on
horseback, or on muleback was woven into highway and forest path, and to
mind came immortal verses, of which I changed two words:
Know’st thou the mountain-bridge that hangs on cloud?
_Blue men_ in mist grope o’er the torrent loud.
In caves lie coiled the dragon’s ancient brood.
For do not everywhere “in caves” great guns “lie coiled” whose “ancient
brood” are these munition-heaps spawned upon the mountain-side?
[Illustration: AMERICAN TROOPS AT MASEVAUX CELEBRATING THE FOURTH OF JULY]
[Illustration: FRENCH TROOPS AT MASEVAUX CELEBRATING THE FALL OF THE
BASTILE, JULY 14TH]
Up, still up, past a long convoy of munitions and food mounting slowly
and heavily to the sacrificial Hartmannswillerkopf, which seems like
a great altar under whose stone lie many saints—and the number of its
cemeteries is one hundred and thirteen, while God alone knows the
unnamed, unnumbered graves, and those yet to be dug. I find that rarely
do the bones of soldiers travel far, and so it should be, for what spot,
even of a father’s inheritance, is so truly his as that where he has
fallen? No litigation of man can despoil him of it, and even when he and
his deeds are forgotten it is still his. So let him lie.
Everywhere from the forest came strong, damp odors of things fugitive
and deciduous. The violently released sap of shell-splintered and broken
trees mingled its odors with that other natural smell of falling leaf.
Lush mosses exuding still deeper, earthier odors were folded about the
broken shafts in soft, green velvet swathings. And some of these forest
wounds were new, some old and almost healed, like the human griefs of the
war.
At a sharp turn in the road we leave the motor, passing on foot many
camouflaged dugouts, and, somewhat breathless, reach the collection of
low wooden huts known as “Camp Wagram.” Each little building has layers
of fresh pine branches on its roof, and its sides are painted in piebald
or zebra-like patterns.
We were shown into the dugout of the commandant, commanding the 363d
Infantry, whom we found writing at a little pine table. He received us
smiling, and not surprised, our visit having been announced by telephone.
A smallish man with very attentive eyes, whose quiet exterior and strong
Burgundy accent cover, I am told, a heart of gold, together with quick
judgment and complete fearlessness.
He gives me a military cape to replace my heavy fur coat, and we start
out to Camp Meudon, farther up, where we are presented to another
commandant who is frankly, though politely, surprised to see a woman
where no woman has been.
A few harmless jokes about being at Meudon, yet, alas! so far from
Paris, are exchanged, after which, followed by the armed escort, we
mount through the wet, shabby forest to the very top of the Molkenrain.
There crouching in some bushes we peer out through them to the
Hartmannswillerkopf, that culminating, coveted point of the great
plateau, where men have wrestled unto death these four years past. Brown,
withered, not a tree on it left, its form is traversed only by a long
black line—the German trenches.
Behind and on each side of “Le Hartmann,” as it is called “for short,” is
a great, misty, German plain; toward the left, in the extreme background,
is the three-crested hill of the “Hohkoenigsberg”; great flamelike
patches of cloud lay upon it, transmuting its stones and mortar into
something gorgeous and unsubstantial. To our right and beyond stretched
another great German plain, in front of which curtains of sun-shot cloud
were falling and rising. One moment villages and fields and white ribbons
of road shone, the next they would be blotted out by pillars of mist, and
others came into view.
“If they see us, they will fire,” warned the commandant as I made an
involuntary movement to rise, when another quick diamond-like shower beat
about us.
“But isn’t it too dark?” I asked; that world of the Hartmann sector
seemed so indistinct in shifting light and rain.
“They’ve seen us when it was darker than this,” he answered, rather
grimly, with the expression of one remembering lost men.
Passing to another vantage-ground of the Molkenrain, whence we could see
the Sudel, now entirely in French hands, we met a group of blue men,
emerging beautifully out of the colored mist under the silver heaven.
They were carrying hot soup to other blue men in the brown trenches of
the Hartmann.
Standing for no uncompleted emotions as far as the Hartmann is concerned,
Captain Perdrizet stopped a glowing-eyed, red-cheeked, black-haired
Meridional stripling and told him to let me have a taste from the can he
was carrying. I drank, thinking “there are many ways of winning the war,”
from a dipper for which a trusty, much-camouflaged hand had first to hunt
in its steaming depths. As I thanked him I wondered within myself should
I wish him a quick young death or a long life and a toothless old age? As
will be seen I’m obsessed by the veterans.
About this time Commandant Moreteaux said: “But Madame will only have
seen the Hartmann in mist and rain. Why not come a second time and lunch
with me to-morrow?”
I looked at Captain Perdrizet, he at me, and both being, as I have
said, mortals of “first movement,” and knowing holy enthusiasm, we
accept—though I bethink me somewhat late of our chief, the commandant of
the Military Mission, who marks the shining course of my Alsatian hours,
and who might have other plans. It was “to see.”
As we came down in the gathering gloom, over the shell-ravaged sides of
the mountain, I was conscious of a deep, in some way sweet, feeling that
I might be going to see, to _feel_, it all again. And, too, as is the way
of the heart, it seemed then somewhat to belong to me.
I was not as one who never more will pass.
Everywhere in the brown, wet forest pale-blue forms stood aside to make
way for us. As we reached Camp Wagram, where I re-exchanged the long,
blue military cape for my coat, great shots began to echo through the
hills, and the flare of guns illuminated the thin, dark, scraggly crests.
It was still war. Near, so near, men were breathing out their souls, to
be “scattered by winds and high, tempestuous gusts.”
As we stood making our adieux, a radio was brought to Commandant
Moreteaux, and we heard then and there that Foch had received the German
Parlementaries, and given them seventy-two hours, from eleven o’clock
of that day, Friday, to say “Yes” or to say “No.” Nobody spoke when he
ceased reading. It seemed suddenly like the world’s end.
And it’s a good, quick place to get one’s world-news, there in the
Hartmannswillerkopf sector!
Then we said another and quite hasty _au revoir_, fearing night would
descend upon the valley before we could, for the motor had to go without
lights, and there was many a turn and twist at which to take a skidding
chance at fate.
The forest got blacker and blacker, there was the sound of rushing
waters, the rattle of munition-wagons, the stamp of hoofs, and voices of
dimly outlined men whose tunics were quite white in the twilight. The
odors, too, deepened with the coming darkness. I was chilled in body and
soul, for were not they also there, those other tens of thousands, whose
beds were dug in these damp hills, mingling in some way with the living?
How close the two worlds are I never knew until this war, where death is
ever near, and sometimes sweet, and often, often young. The hoary Reaper
with his scythe has been replaced by a figure, lithe and strong, a bugle
in his hand.
As we reached the dark valley the cannon cracked again, again the
night sky was illumined. The unnatural shapes of trees fallen one
against the other at sharp angles were black in the twilight fog; the
road was a loose, wet ribbon; more waters rushed. And who would see
the Hartmannswillerkopf in sunshine? This damp, gray, afternoon robe
of consecration, clasped with its clasp of emerald, carnelian, topaz,
amethyst, like to the clasp of a high-priest, is its true garb. And the
wide mantle of the November night was folding close over all its beauty
and its grief.
At Bitschwiller we call on Madame Jules Scheuer. She knows irremediable
grief and bears it with a noble courage. One of her sons fell far from
her in Champagne; the other, mortally wounded on the Hartmann, was
brought down one winter night to die in her arms, and lies forever in
the sweet, broad valley of the Thur, claiming so little of his vast
inheritance....
To the _popote_ at eight. Six Protestant pastors had been announced to
dine with us, two of mine in the act of being convoyed through Alsace
by four of theirs. The Americans were “looking over the ground,” they
delicately informed me. I didn’t ask “what ground”; with my name it might
have sounded argumentative, which I never, never am.
Now during these days of my Alsatian visit I had thought, at intervals,
that it might very possibly be a nuisance to have a woman always tagging
at some polite heel or other, but when I saw that six pastors could
happen to them all at once, I then and there ceased forever feeling
apologetic. I even fell to thinking that they hadn’t done so badly when
they got me.
I can’t say that, at dinner, all went as merry as a marriage feast,
because the Americans didn’t speak French, nor the officers English,
except de Maroussem, who could but didn’t, even seeming but remotely
interested in watching them consume the plenteous repast. And as for
myself, I was too dull with fatigue and too spent with the emotions of
the Hartmann to be able to do any “paying in person.” For a time, too,
those men of my race were the strangers to me, not the blue-clad men of
the Mission.
Suddenly, as we were unsuspectingly taking our coffee, one of the
shepherds began saying prayers over us with a drop in his voice after
each sentence, thanking God for their being there, for our being there,
for Alsace being there, and I don’t remember what else, save that it was
fairly comprehensive. After which everybody signed everybody’s menu, and
then as they were on the run through the garden of Alsace, lingering
nowhere, though scattering possibly seedless blessings everywhere,
they said good-by and went out forever into the rain. And they ought
to have thanked God for the dinner, which was a triumph, with vintage
wines served by two orderlies, under Monsieur de Maroussem’s chic though
somewhat detached eye.
As the door closed we fell to talking as people would when six clergymen
who came all at once leave all at once, though unexpectedly one came back
for his umbrella—producing a momentary hush.
One of mine had generously given me several boxes of cigarettes, produced
from deep, sagging pockets, and we stopped to have an “evangelical
puff” as some one called it, while I tried to explain what “nervous
prostration” is to those Frenchmen—and to explain why the largest of the
American clergymen, very nice, and looking like a lion-tamer, as some
one remarked, could have had it, and been in bed with it, for a year.
“_Chacun a sa petite misère_,” one of them said, “_mais c’est étrange,
tout de même._”
One of the officers of the St.-Amarin _popote_, Debrix, is the image
of the famous Coligny, and so called by his comrades, but he is, it
appears, an excellent Papist, while Perdrizet, who, if he had on a suit
of mail, might have borne the banner of the Virgin, following Godefroy
de Bouillon into Jerusalem, is an equally excellent Protestant, his
family having fled to Montbéliard after the revocation of the Edict of
Nantes, and these two are continually being joked about their natural—or
unnatural—camouflage. But in these days nobody really cares, alack!
alack! what anybody believes, scarcely, alack! what anybody does,
especially if they are quiet about it and it doesn’t interfere with the
other person’s plans. And that’s why the war will be forgotten just as
soon as the newspapers stop talking about it and business looks up and
the women get new clothes, which they need. However, as the dead soldiers
will mostly be in heaven, their smiles won’t be too unkind, though their
language!—if it’s anything like what I’ve discovered they use on earth!
I was finally convoyed home by a largish contingent of the sons of Mars.
As soon as we stepped from the door we were in ankle-deep mud; the sky,
black and flat and close, had a vaultlike heaviness, and the fog was
so clinging that I was as if wrapped in some soft, wet stuff. Monsieur
and Madame Helmer were kindly waiting up for me, but mercifully let
our good-night be short. And here I am with no more thought of sleep
than a meadow-lark at dawn, though that’s my only resemblance to the
meadow-lark, for I am tired, dead-tired, and my hair is still wet with
the mists of the Hartmann.
And how shall one sleep who has so lately touched the fringe of the
mountain-couch where many soldiers lie?
XIII
“LES CRÊTES.” “DÉJEUNER” AT CAMP WAGRAM. THE FREUNDSTEIN AND ITS PHANTOMS
_November 9th._—This morning at eight-thirty we started out, Captain
Perdrizet, Lieutenant Debrix, and I, for the famous trip along the crest
of the mountains that, on one side, hang over the valley of the Thur, and
on the other fall toward the Germanies. Having beheld with my eyes the
first and second line defenses of these crests and of the “Hartmann,” I
have come to some slight realization of how men have lived (and died)
four winters through on these weather- and shell-swept heights.
We had to go to the very end of the shining valley before beginning the
ascent to the crests, passing Wesserling, situated so charmingly on its
eminence in the ancient moraine, commanding the valley from both ways.
Once upon a time the Château of Wesserling belonged to Prince Löwenstein,
Abbot of Murbach, the history of the great Abbey of Murbach being closely
bound up with that of these valleys, for Charlemagne gave to the first
abbot, St.-Pyrmin, the whole country of the Thur, with St.-Amarin and
Thann and all the lesser towns. In the eighteenth century the Abbey was
converted into a noble Chapter with residence, and a big new church, at
Guebwiller, now in German hands. But the Chapter had a short life there,
and probably not a gay one, and during the Revolution it was suppressed.
The vineyards round about have been renowned since time immemorial, and
on Guebwiller’s southern slopes there is a wine celebrated even among
the most celebrated of Alsace, which enlivens without making noisy, and
inspires without depressing (evidently what the juice of the grape was
meant to do when the vine grew on the first hillsides of the world). It
is called “_Kitterle brisemollets_” (“Kitterle break your calves”), those
whom it delights evidently not journeying far, except in fancy.
A great book could be written about the wines of Alsace, the soft,
gleaming, light-colored wines of this land of sunny slopes, which may
become even as a Mecca for pilgrims arriving “dry” from over the seas. In
fact, quite a delightful perspective opens itself out.
From Wolxheim comes a wine, once the favorite of Napoleon, which was
always found on the imperial table. There are the wines of Rouffach,
“home town” of the husband of Madame Sans-Gêne; of Kaisersberg, known
fashionably and pertinently as “Montlibre” for a short space during the
Revolution, and by the “Rang” of Thann; Alsatians once swore, “_Que
le Rang te heurte!_” (“May the Rang strike you!”) There is, too, an
exceptional, ancient, red vintage called “_Sang des Turcs_,” whose name
recalls the twilight days of Turkish invasions and Soliman the Great.
But the Alsatian wines are mostly made from compact bunches of little,
white, sweet grapes, with irislike colors shading them richly. The
inhabitants, holding their _pinard_ in great veneration, feel it a
sacred duty to see that it is _good_. It is called colloquially “_thé
d’Octobre_” (“October tea”) one of the officers told me, after the manner
of the famous “_purée septembrale_” (“September purée”) of Rabelais,
who, it appears, greatly appreciated the wines of these hillsides. But
they are pitiless concerning poor wines, which they call “fiddlers’
wines,” or “_Sans-le-Sou_,” or “_gratte-gosier_” (“throat-scratcher”),
and “_grimpe-muraille_” (“wall-climber”), as he who drinks them is apt
to try that and other useless feats, instead of sitting and dreaming or
joking and being happy. These bad wines are also known collectively and
disdainfully as _vins des trois hommes_ (wines of three men) because
it appears it takes three men to accomplish the feat of drinking a
single glass—the man who supports the drinker, the man who forces the
treacherous liquid down his throat, and the third the unhappy victim.
Now the once rich soil of the ancient mellow vineyards has got thin and
stony; for the men who have grown them have been occupied with killing
these past four years, and neglect for even a season can spoil the best
and oldest vines.
In times of peace there are many textile manufactories in these valleys,
too. After the Napoleonic wars _la main d’œuvre_ (labor) was scarce, just
as it will be after our war, workmen being brought even from India, and
to this day in the midst of modern machinery here, in the valley, there
are places where they still keep to the ancient block system of stamping
cloth, with the ritual hammer-stroke, this process giving more fadeless
and beautiful colors than any machine-stamped, aniline-dyed stuffs that
ever were. Such cloths are still called “_Indiennes_.”
And all around here the Swedes did as tidy a bit of work as was ever
done by invading armies, the seventeenth century being for the valley a
century of ravage and desolation. In one of the books[18] Mr. Helmer gave
me last night I read that the cantons were so reduced during the Thirty
Years’ War that places like Bitschwiller could register but four adults
and eleven children, Moosch eleven adults and twenty-three children,
St.-Amarin thirteen adults and forty-four children, and so on, the chief
of their diet being acorns and roots and mice and other classic nutriment
of epochs of destruction. There were moments when the Imperials, the
Swedes, the French, and the Lorrains disputed the territory, and various
troops camped on the Hartmannswiller and descended to the valley—and
the _Roi Très Catholique_ was the ally of the Swedes, and the Abbey
and its territories were under the Holy German Empire. But whoever was
momentarily in possession, it was always disastrous for the inhabitants
of the valley—and of what the children suffered these fatal figures I
have quoted evoke some dull perception.
As we pass the pleasant villages of Fellering and Odern and Krüt, all
shining in the radiance of a strong though intermittent sun, with here
and there scarfs of rainbow-like mists draped about them, we foolishly
mocked the weather wisdom of Mr. Helmer, who, on being asked as we
started out, if the weather would hold, had regretfully said, “No.”
At Krüt we start to ascend the Wildenstein. Gorgeous matutinal effects
continued their prismatic play everywhere on soft and fathomless black
hills, the yellow lights on the _mélèze_ almost outshining the sun. On
one mountain-side they made a line as would some procession of pilgrims
bearing torches, and one almost thought one saw cowled heads and heard
the chanting of a “_Pilgerchor_.”
The air we were breathing was strong yet tenuous, and I felt a great
refreshment and exhilaration.
In these wide days of bending the hills, of folding the valleys, there
has been, as it were, some unpacking of my mind, some shaking out of my
soul, things long hidden have come to light, and the patched lining of
memory has been freshened. Almost every event has appeared, accompanied
by its secret meanings, in its relationship to secondary, generally
unapparent, significances. I have had, too, a quickened sensitiveness to
the beauty of the natural world. And can a journey do more for one than
this?
It was a stiff mount to Huss in a sort of distilled pine fragrance,
with a continual looking back, where the billowing lightsome pink and
yellow scarfs, woven of sun and mist, were flinging themselves more and
more wastefully about the shining valleys. Near the top our motor’s
_bougies_ got clogged with oil, and a thin, white fog, now opaque, now
sun-shot, began to close in on us. We arranged the _bougies_, but there
was nothing for human hands to do about that white fog, and we found
ourselves suddenly, at a turn in the road, tightly inclosed by it, and
were seemingly alone on the heights, where the only thing that appeared
to grow and thrive were the stretches of wire entanglements, like great
patches of dried heather. Everywhere were groupings of black crosses,
with their tricolor badges, above wind-swept, fog-enveloped, sun-bathed
graves, dug on these treeless heights.
But there, in that thin, high air, I suddenly became conscious of the
volatilization of the spirit, and knew those graves indeed for empty....
One last time, as we passed Camp Boussat, named after the colonel who
fell here, and looking like a mining-camp, the mist shifted, showing the
jeweled, gossamer-clad valley, and then we were again fog-locked, and
I saw its beauty no more—only brown seas of wire entanglements losing
themselves in those shrouds of cottony white, which lifted here and there
to show some detail of the strange life on the bleak crests. There were
dugouts everywhere, and very low buildings camouflaged in wood-colors and
crisscross designs. In them were men washing, men cooking, men smoking,
all in astonishment, which sometimes gave place to grins, and doubtless
pleasantries in the best Gallic manner, at the appearance of the weaker
sex on their grim, bare mountain-tops.
We passed endless gun-emplacements, and cemented munition-depots, barely
visible through thick layers of pine branches, and near them heads would
be sticking out of what seemed mere holes in the earth.
About this time Captain Perdrizet, whose ardent spirit had been
considerably dampened by the closing in of that thick, cold fog, began
also to fear we should be late for _déjeuner_ at Camp Wagram, from which,
it appeared, we were separated by several valleys and a few hills of the
eternal sort. The motor’s _bougies_ got clogged again (what part of its
being they are I know not); the chauffeur got moody, Captain Perdrizet
more visibly vexed, Debrix quieter and more philosophic (he is a
_littérateur_ when there’s no war, and has written a beautiful poem about
Thann); as for myself, knowing strange and enkindling things were behind
me, others doubtless before me, and that whatever happened would be
interesting, I felt myself sweetly detached from time and circumstances,
which for one of deadly punctuality is saying much.
A peculiarity of the motor’s ailment was that it couldn’t go down as
fast as it could go up, so, a-limp, a-crawl, a-hump, we descended into
a valley packed extravagantly with that thick, unspun cotton-like
atmosphere, leaving the dead and living alike to their bare heights. At a
certain village whose name I forget (I can hear the reader saying, “Thank
God she has forgotten it, and we can perhaps get on to Camp Wagram for
lunch”)—at a certain village, however, I repeat, two ravens went across
our path, going to the left of the motor. Said Perdrizet, on taking in
the dire occurrence, his color like to the white fog and his hair and
mustache like to the raven’s, “We’ll never get there!”
Now I am superstitious, too, and glory in it, for, though it gives me a
good deal of otherwise avoidable worry, it colors life. From time to time
friends and circumstances load me with a new one, and I go staggering
on. Two ravens crossing the road to the left _was_ a novelty, and I see
anxious days to come when motoring for engagements where one must be in
time—or one thinks one must. And superstition has nothing to do with
the processes of the brain, rather lodges itself elusively anywhere and
everywhere in one’s being.
The two officers consulted their timepieces again, finding a trifling
and consoling difference of twenty minutes (looked at from one way). The
chauffeur’s watch didn’t go, and I never carry one. As the motor stopped
again, Perdrizet began to fidget extremely much, and to say that if it
weren’t for me he’d kill the chauffeur, and decided that we couldn’t take
in the village of Goldbach, almost entirely destroyed in this war, where
Madame Sans-Gêne first saw the light of day, and later the duke.
However, in spite of the two ravens and the _Erdwible_,[19] or other
spirits of those forest-hills, we at last found ourselves twisting up
the road to Camp Wagram, an hour late, and we began to sound noisily
the horn of arrival. The commandant and his young captain had been long
awaiting us on their hillside. With many apologies on our part because
of the delay, and on theirs because of the fog, we went into the little,
low mess-room built of rough boards, with its heavy camouflage of fresh
pine branches on its low roof, its windows of oiled paper, and its sides
painted like a green-and-yellow tiger.
The commandant did something to his watch as we sat down, and then
gallantly yet unblushingly remarked that it was just 12.30, but that
even _had_ we been late it would have only meant a longer anticipation
of something pleasant. My companions both gave smiles of satisfaction
for that, on the Hartmann, where men are almost entirely concerned with
killing or being killed, the commandant was living up to the French
reputation in more ways than one. I thought, too, that it was a very
happy beginning, looking well, so to speak, among the _hors d’œuvre_.
Captain Perdrizet had told me the day before that if the commandant
had to requisition every man and mule in the sector there would be an
excellent lunch. Now the very good food was accompanied by a delicious,
warm Burgundy from the commandant’s own part of the world, and at dessert
a bottle of Pommery & Greno, very cold, a souvenir of his service in
Champagne, was poured. All drank sparingly of both, after the manner
of Latins. Some asked delicately, even humbly, as one really wanting
information, concerning the rumor that the United States were “going
dry,” and wondered why it was to be. I rather wondered myself, up there
on the Hartmann, forgetful for a moment of the unpleasant things I know
about distilled liquors in the Home of the Free and the Land of the Brave.
Said the commandant, puzzled, looking at his not large glass of ruby
liquid, “_Un peu de vin en mangeant, tout de même?_ ...” (“But a little
wine at one’s meals?...”)
Said another officer, with a quickly restrained gesture of distaste:
“_Est-ce vrai qu’il faut boire seul et debout et entre les repas en
Amérique?_” (“Is it true that one must drink alone and standing up and
between meals in America?”)
I was saved an answer to this question, which was a fairly near picture
of some of the national customs, by the shaking, deafening sound
of an exploding shell. Those paper windows didn’t seem to mind it,
though everything on the table rattled. The commandant looked at the
captain, who disappeared, returning almost immediately to say that an
artilleryman with his horses had been killed—and the doctor, who had
started to the door, sat down again.
A few minutes later, as we were beginning the _tournedos grillés, maître
d’hôtel_, the telephone rang, and a radio was brought in hot and given to
me for a souvenir. It was one sent by the German parlementaries saying
that as they were unable to get back to Germany by road on account of
broken bridges, they would be obliged to proceed by air, and that their
’plane would be marked by two white flames—_zwei weisse Flammen_.
“It sounds safe, but all the same I don’t envy the officer detailed to
accompany them,” said somebody; and they all smiled and seemed glad they
weren’t in the airplane. I’ve noticed in the past two or three days that
military men are beginning to prize life again.
I was sitting opposite the commandant, on my right was Doctor Lantieri
with four stripes on his sleeve, and on my left was young Captain de
Santis, who had met us. Curiously enough, both were of Corsican descent,
and showed it so distinctly that when some one mentioned the great
Italian bag of Austrian prisoners after the cessation of hostilities, and
how the “Tiger” had said you simply couldn’t hold them back, I got a bit
worried, though nobody else seemed to mind.
The young captain took from his pocket a couple of proclamations dropped
by German aviators on the Hartmann yesterday—and furthermore presented me
with a large panoramic view of the Champagne sector, where he had fought.
I thought it was something rightly belonging to his family, but there was
that in his proud, Corsican gesture which forbade refusal.
=The German People Offers Peace.=
The new German democratic government has this programme:
=“The will of the people is the highest law.”=
The German people wants quickly to end the slaughter.
The new German popular government therefore has offered an
=Armistice=
and has declared itself ready for
=Peace=
on the basis of justice and reconciliation of nations.
It is the will of the German people that it should live in
peace with all peoples, honestly and loyally.
What has the new German popular government done so far to put
into practice the will of the people and to prove its good and
upright intentions?
a) The new German government has appealed to President
Wilson to bring about peace.
=It has recognized and accepted all the principles which
President Wilson proclaimed as a basis for a general
lasting peace of justice among the nations.=
b) The new German government has solemnly declared its
readiness to evacuate =Belgium= and to restore it.
c) The new German government is ready to come to an honest
understanding with France about
=Alsace-Lorraine.=
d) The new German government has restricted the =U-boat War=.
=No passengers steamers not carrying troops
or war material will be attacked in future.=
e) The new German government has declared that it will
withdraw all German troops back over the German frontier.
f)—The new German government has asked the Allied
Governments to name commissioners to agree upon the
practical measures of the evacuation of Belgium and France.
These are the deeds of the new German popular government. Can
these be called mere words, or bluff, or propaganda?
Who is to blame, if an armistice is not called now?
Who is to blame if daily thousands of brave soldiers needlessly
have to shed their blood and die?
Who is to blame, if the hitherto undestroyed towns and villages
of France and Belgium sink in ashes?
Who is to blame, if hundreds of thousands of unhappy women and
children are driven from their homes to hunger and freeze?
=The German people offers its hand for peace.=
After which, being the only woman who had ever lunched in the H.W.K.
sector, I was photographed by the doctor with the four stripes. Then in a
fog thickly enfolding us, as well as the mountains, we started out with
gas-masks, compasses and pistols, plus an armed escort, toward the German
lines, for they wanted to show me the ruins of the Castle of Freundstein,
now an observation post, directly overhanging the great plain I had seen
yesterday. Much banter between the commandant and Captain Perdrizet,
their eyes very alert, as to the right road, the one that wouldn’t lead
us into the enemies’ hands. Suddenly a firing of French guns began right
over our befogged heads, with a near swish and crack, and answering
duller German guns. In the thick fog, even those men accustomed to
sensations seemed quite keyed up, and the commandant had become like some
woodsman, looking closely at the trunks of battered trees, some with old
scars, some with new, and other indications, invisible to me, along the
path. Finally, at a certain crossroad, he stopped, saying: “_That_ would
lead us straight to them. Even now a pointed casque might appear, though,
with the probable armistice in sight, they will be less venturesome.”
I: “What would they do?”
He: “Throw hand-grenades first and then”—he looked at the others—“there’d
be a scuffle.”
It didn’t sound attractive, I must say, the potentialities of the fog
seeming even quite horrid, and I was entirely ready to hunt in the
opposite direction for the path to the Freundstein, which, according to
the compass, lay pleasantly due west. Dreadful, unexploded things, too,
were lying about, in new and ancient shell-holes, and there was much
careful stepping among broken tree-trunks and half-demolished barbed
wire, and I got a horrid rip in the last of my American boots.
Here and there was a black cross, and the possibility of being underneath
one, instead of above one, if we _did_ meet a German patrol, came before
me. With all one’s poetizing or philosophizing, there _is_ a difference,
and one’s a long time dead—as I know Lieutenant Lavallée would agree.
Suddenly the path began to rise, the commandant giving an exclamation of
relief as he saw a steep ladder almost in front of us, apparently leaning
against a wall of fog. Captain Perdrizet’s eyes began to shine again;
he’d been quite subdued, not to say cast down.
“It’s like a scene of opera, isn’t it?” he exclaimed. And then he
proceeded up the ladder, tipped, it seemed, at an angle of forty-five
degrees the wrong way, I wondering how on earth I was to get down,
unless I fell. Then we descend from a ledge over heaps of century-old,
moss-grown mortar deep into the tower, and, passing through a long,
subterranean passage, find ourselves in a tiny, closet-like room of
ageless masonry. Stationed at an opening are two men with telephones
over their ears, binoculars, compass, and charts lying on the sill of
the opening in the masonry, which is shaped like this ⌓ and looks to
the northeast, toward the Hartmann and the Sudel, and other consecrated
heights, as well as the great, covered German plain—whose contours were
more impenetrably veiled than its future. I had had a feeling, crouching
in the wet bushes the day before, gazing out on its wide splendors in
shifting sun and shower, that I would look no more upon it, nor upon the
little, worn, brown crest of the Hartmann, cut by the black line of the
German trenches, running through the naked wilderness of branchless
trees—though I had not known why.
When we had blithely retraced our steps to the highroad, cracking many
uncomplicated jokes, pleasing largely because we felt that kindness
toward the universe so distinctive of the front, when no actual killing
is going on, we suddenly encountered, almost bumping into them, two
swearing, sweating, heavily laden _poilus_, who had got lost in the
fog looking for their detachment. On seeing us they threw down their
accoutrement on a wet bank and expressions strong and classic began to
cut the air. A sergeant, risen up from somewhere at the unmistakable
sounds, ran toward them, calling and gesticulating wildly. But, wiping
their brows, they continued. They had taken the last step they were
going to on that so-and-so and so-and-so mountain, and if they found
their detachment or not they _enfiché’d_ themselves, only they didn’t
use this elegant word to express their sentiments. The sergeant got more
excited, and cried, “_Espèces de types_” and.... At this the commandant,
foreseeing that the artillery exchange might get too loud for feminine
ears, said to the biggest one (both were enormous), seeing his number:
“You are looking for Camp Meudon, _mon ami_. It’s farther up; in an hour
you are there. Follow the path up and always to the right.”
On which, like lambs, they who had sworn not to move from that spot till
the hill crumbled shouldered their accoutrement, thanked Perdrizet in
the best French manner for the cigarettes he gave them, and disappeared
quickly, the strains of “Madelon” being loudly borne back to us on the
fog.
“_Ce sont des enfants_” (“They are children”), said the commandant, with
his kind smile, “and _good_ children.”
And that was the last word I heard concerning the war and “_les enfants
de la Patrie_” on the Hartmann, for the hour of farewells had come.
And how deep was the mutual well-wishing enfolding that moment those who
have seen peace breaking over the graves of the Hartmann, as I and they
saw it, alone can know.
As we parted, they taking a higher path, disappearing almost immediately
in the fog, and we the lower road back to the motor, I suddenly
understood, too, the new look one sees in all men’s faces. Everywhere it
is the same. It is that of men who have been ready to die, to “separate
from the pleasant habit of existence, the sweet fable of living,” but who
suddenly know they need not die, at least not now—nor _that_ way.
Coming down the heavily shrouded mountain-slope as quickly as possible,
to be in time for my adieux to St.-Amarin before hastening over to
Masevaux that same evening, Captain Perdrizet told me the legend of
the “Phantoms of Freundstein.” I was then at a point of fatigue where
present emotions were no longer possible, and time works such wonders
that the most tragic tale of Freundstein, the Rock of Friends, was even
as a poultice. And I could still be interested in hearing that to this
very day there is a proverb, “_Er isch vom Freundstein_” (“He is from
Freundstein”), which, said of a man, means so hospitable is he that his
house belongs to his friends. And the legend runs after this fashion:
The last of the lords of Freundstein, Count Jerome, had a beautiful
daughter, Christine by name, whom he adored, and whom he took with him
everywhere, even to the chase, for which purpose a gorgeous litter had
been made wherein she might rest. The Lord of Geroldseck, passing by one
day, saw her as she lay asleep. Struck by her loveliness, he swore then
and there that he would make her his.
Soon after he proceeded to Freundstein to ask her hand in marriage, but
she answered that it was useless, as her heart already belonged to a
certain very noble cavalier of Thann. Her father gave the same answer.
One night a great noise was heard before the gates of Freundstein; it was
the Lord of Geroldseck come with his vassals to take the castle and its
lovely young châtelaine by assault. Freundstein resisted for three days.
Then, seeing it was in vain, Christine and her father took final refuge
in the high tower whose ruins rise above the chamber where we found the
men with the telephones strapped to their ears. There had once been a
sloping stairway in the tower, so broad that a horseman might ascend it.
Up this road the Lord of Geroldseck pursued them. Arrived at the top,
he was about to seize the girl, but her father, taking her in his arms,
leaped with her into space. The gesture that Geroldseck made to retain
her whom he loved caused him to lose his own balance, and he, too, fell
and was killed. And their ghosts forever haunt the spot, and the echo,
no matter what words are cried to the hills, always gives back the last,
despairing call of Geroldseck:
“_Je t’aurai, je t’aurai, je t’aurai._”[20]
XIV
RETURN TO MASEVAUX
_November 9th._—I was received so warmly by the amiable Demoiselles
Braun, who had my room ready for me; so kindly by Captain Bernard, who
came a moment afterward to tell me he would call for me at seven-fifteen;
so dearly by Laferrière, who also called for me, that I felt I had
indeed got “home.” As we were walking along to the _popote_ Captain
Tirman joined us in the darkness and told us that Bavaria had proclaimed
itself a republic, and that there was news (military news by radio) of
the abdication of the Kaiser. Somebody cried, “_Demain, de quoi demain
sera-t-il fait?_” as we entered the house where the little cat, the
forgetful, unabashed little cat, who but three short days before had done
such well-nigh disastrous things to my fur coat, also awaited me.
Again a charming dinner, conversation about that first August of the
war, the retreat from Mons, of Charleroi, and many, many other places;
of forced marches and aching feet; of fatigue and hunger and thirst,
now packed away gloriously in memory, though sometimes the strange look
appeared on their faces as they talked. Stories were told of those who
had gone to “_faire un bridge à Limoges_”[21] and remained there, and
of others, like Mangin, who had come back, Mangin, the booty of whose
glorious Tenth Army now overflows the Place de la Concorde. And of Foch
who had _nearly_ gone there. And of the immense glory hanging over each
and every battlefield, for, though black crosses were evoked, each was
entwined with colors too bright for human eyes. And then we turned our
thoughts from _tempus lachrymarum_ to the New Day, in whose sun, though
not like to the brightness of those fallen, we all shine. The _long_
destiny is heavy and dark beside the light, bright way of heroes, and
never did one realize till now how truly the gods love those whom they
snatch young. We, after all, as one of the officers remarked, will die in
our beds or by accident—and is it so desirable?
Then Sérin told his oft-repeated, but now dearly loved, story of “_Bravo,
Capitano_,” of the _Capitano_ who thanked the Madonna for the thirteen
trenches and the sea of barbed wire between himself and the enemy, but
which I won’t tell. And Captain Antoni told the story of the wounded
Boche who was given the _Croix de Guerre_, and how the French general
said, as he entered the hospital ward:
“Are these the brave men who so valiantly held their position on
the twenty-fourth? With inexpressible pleasure I give each one his
well-merited _Croix de Guerre_,” and then proceeded down the line of
beds. On Number 33 was lying a man with closely bandaged head, only one
gleaming eye visible, and the _Croix de Guerre_ was pinned also on his
valiant breast, and if it was removed by the Angel of Death or by orders
of the colonel I forget. Neither is it recorded if the German smiled.
And I told of the swift passing of the autos, mine and the commandant’s,
on the dark hills of the Route Joffre, when I was coming back from
St.-Amarin and he going there. How sadly I had seen its kind lights
rise along the heights and disappear, and there had been no friendly
handclasp on the hills, nor words of thanks from me in the dim light of
the blurred Pleiades and the young, half-veiled, white moon.
After dinner some one hazarded the word “bridge,” but there must have
been that in my eye making for solitude rather than companionship, for
the next thing I heard from some Frenchman, perceptive as to woman’s
looks, was:
“_Madame est sans doute bien fatiguée et nous jouerons demain._”
And soon I was stumbling home on one or two or three blue-sleeved arms,
in the inky darkness of a starless and moonless Masevaux.
I had found St.-Amarin charming, and I left with deep regret, but at
Masevaux I was experiencing the sensation, very agreeable, I must say, of
one who, having wandered, returns to his or her first love; and any one
who has done it will know exactly how I felt, and I don’t have to tell
them. As for those who have never returned, they wouldn’t understand if I
did explain.
XV
THE VIGIL OF THE ARMISTICE
“_The Star is fall’n and Time is at his period_”
_November 11th, 1 A.M._—At ten-thirty Captain Tirman came back to the
_popote_ where we were playing bridge—Sérin, Laferrière, Toussaint, and
I. He was very pale, but there was something shining about his face.
“_Ça y est, l’armistice._”
Dead silence; we don’t even drop our cards. In his excitement a very
naughty soldier’s word escapes him. He turns away in consternation,
and the others, somewhat appalled, too, at last drop their cards. I
try not to smile. General recovery; they hope I didn’t catch it. It
was sufficient, however, to break that strange feeling of _absence_ of
feeling that each one of us was experiencing.
“_Alors c’est fini, la guerre_,” some one finally said in a dazed way,
and with the words the cruel thing seemed to drop heavily from us, as
would some hideous, exhausting burden.
Toussaint, with his far look of one who loves forests, very strongly
marked, said, “To think that it has found us like this playing bridge at
the _popote_!”
Sérin: “I’ll not go to bed to-night.”
I: “Oh, my friends!” and then nothing more—my knees suddenly as if broken.
Laferrière (very quietly, after a pause): “I cannot but think of those
who are not here.” And his words evoked great shining bands of the
dear young, pressed closely, one against the other, out of their flesh,
crowding the heavens.
Then Sérin, again with his _bon sourire d’enfant_, “_Il faut boire_.”
A bottle of _Asti spumante_ is produced by Laferrière, who in a dreamy
way remembers that he is _chef de popote_. The stock of champagne is
exhausted. Nearly every day, and sometimes twice a day for the past week,
have not the radios, plucked out of the air by the commandant, plus the
beauteous _communiqués_, necessitated the opening of bottles even unto
the last?
Sérin, as we drink, all of us paralyzed by the sudden cessation of the
world-horror, tells how one of his gendarmes would keep referring to the
armistice as “_la Mistie_,” in two words, and we drink to _la Mistie_.
But in spite of the too, too simple joke, how still, yet stern was each
one’s heart!
About this time Toussaint seizes from the stove the marble “hunk” (it’s
the only word for it), “_Amor condusse noi_,” and makes as if to throw it
at the dead and gone Oberforster’s clock, stopped, as I said, some four
years ago at 12.25.
Sérin again, with his most childlike expression: “_La Paix a éclaté!_
Peace has broken out, and I will break out worse than peace if I don’t do
something!”
As I have said, Masevaux at that hour—it had got to be eleven o’clock—was
as lustrous as an ink-pot, and all being still the prey of a strange
paralysis of feeling, nobody suggested anything.
Peace, lovely, precious peace, dreamed of, desired through years of
anguish, so _redly_ bought in money of the heart’s blood, was ours! Those
crowding hosts gone out into the “dateless night” seemed suddenly to
return, the only moving things on a stunned earth. They had not renounced
in vain the dear clothing of the flesh.
But how could we understand in one moment the immensity of what had
happened? Never have I felt myself so small, so almost non-existent—an
insect that had fortuitously _not_ been crushed. But the soul’s great
converging point _was_ reached. The war was done and won. Men need no
longer kill each other by the tens of thousands, nor need women by the
millions, because of it, weep.
We touched glasses again, but quietly, oh so quietly!
Some one sighs and no one speaks. After a while Toussaint, standing by
the stove, again fingers “_Amor noi condusse_,” but it is taken out of
his hands by one of the officers. Then Sérin suggests waking up the
curé, getting the keys of the church, and ringing the bells. Tirman,
in authority in the absence of the commandant, still at St.-Amarin, is
gripped by that conservatism known to each and every one in command at
great moments, and becomes cautious, even suspicious.
“_Mais non, c’est peut-être tout de même une blague. Attendons jusqu’à
demain._” (He has quite recovered from his naughty word.)
Some one insists, “But Headquarters wouldn’t joke about a thing like
that.”
Tirman, however, sits down at the piano, breaks out into the “Beautiful
Blue Danube” and refuses to have the bells rung.
Sérin: “But what can one do here at Masevaux, black as the ace of spades
and everybody snoring! _A Paris, il y aurait moyen de fêter même si c’est
une blague!_”
I: “You are ready for anything.”
He: “_Et comment!_” With a light in his straightforward _good_ soldier’s
eye, and somewhat as a child longing for the impossible, “Just think of
them in Paris, the restaurants full, _et des femmes sentant bon_!”[22]
Then four dazed officers accompanied by a dazed lady proceeded to awaken
the postmaster from his slumbers. That heroic expression of rejoicing
accomplished, we groped our way to the Place du Chapitre. In one of
the _chanoinesse_ houses Captain Bernard also dwells. Sometimes he has
headaches on account of his wound, and to-night he had left us early to
go home. On his not answering, some one hazarded the remark, “Perhaps
he isn’t there” (Heaven knows there’s nowhere else to be but where one
belongs, at Masevaux!), and it proved, indeed, to be pure defamation, for
after a while he appeared at his window, or rather one heard him saying:
“What’s the matter? I was sleeping the sleep of the just.”
“_Ça y est, l’armistice_,” some one cried out.
Then that man, who had been through every campaign and would forever wear
“Verdun” stamped on his brow, made no answer.
And the night was dark, dark, the lovely moon too young to wait up, even
for peace. We stumbled across the roughly paved square to my dwelling,
and there we clasped hands with a strange, new clasp, and I, the woman
and the American, wanted to say something, anything, but I had only
begun, “_Mes chers amis_,” when I felt my voice break. I turned quickly
and went in. What need to speak? Hearts lay open that night.
_2 A.M._—Have been reading to quiet the heavily throbbing nerves. Picked
out of the bookcase an hour ago _L’Histoire des Elèves de St.-Clément,
Metz_, 1871. The names Gravelotte, St.-Privat, Malmaison, Sedan, confuse
themselves in my mind with Ypres, Verdun, with Belleau Woods, with
St.-Mihiel, Suippes, Eparges. I remember being told that in a terraced
cemetery at St.-Mihiel three thousand Germans sleep. Though friend or
foe, this night I see them all arisen, standing each one by his grave,
clad in horizon-blue, khaki—or field-gray, all those who at some word
of command had left the “pleasant habit of living, the sweet fable of
existence,” and I whispered in great need of consolation, “I know that my
Redeemer liveth and at the last day we shall rise.”
_3 A.M._—And how shall sleep come, lovely sleep, desired like the
morning? I slept not that night of the 3d of August which held the whole
war in its darkness, and now with the youth of the world lying in “the
grave’s quiet consummation,” shall I sleep?
Then slowly I became conscious of emanations from a giant, near people
in defeat, not knowing what new thing to will, casting off the old
fidelities, which once had given them the horn of human plenty. Thrones
were shaking; “when _peoples_ rage, _kings_ must weep”; a world was to be
remade out of empty places and blood.... I remembered how a poet[23] had
cried out, as a prophet, after that other war:
_Ton peuple vivra,_
_Mais ton empire penche, Allemagne!..._
And then I fell to thinking on love, I know not why, unless it was for
the millions of lovers taken so suddenly from the world, or because of
those yet left. How shall I say? But I knew that there were three things,
not two—the lover, the beloved, and love. And of this last and separate
thing one can have, in extremely sensitive states, impersonal cognizance,
when for some reason (again what know I?) fancy has been set free,
imagination stirred, and they go flinging themselves, not so much about
the personal as about the common destiny. For a moment, so brief that it
was gone even as it came, my soul caught the light that hangs over dear,
persistent, far, illusory hills of fancy and inclination, and felt the
mysterious break of feeling on the dim, shadowy lake of the heart. Vague,
beaming forms passed along its shores, dissolving, lambent outlines,
awakening desire for all the beauty of the wide earth, for things not in
my personal destiny, and which, if they were to be, would be no better
than that which is, not even so good. It was the greed of the human
heart....
And I cried out from my many-times-turned pillow, “O Life, O Love, O
Death, O too, too fragile illusion of existence!”
_4 A.M._—A soft, rich-toned bell is striking. A cold breath comes in at
the window, a cock crows. There is the first sound of the click of sabots
across the square; the Day of Peace is about to break over the world.
But here in the bed of the young deserter from the German ranks, dead in
Champagne, the war still has me in its arms and presses me close to its
cold, oozing breast. The familiar odor of drying blood comes to me. Old
groans strike on my ear. Those who, dying, are not dead crowd about me,
and the “blue-black cloud” envelops me. I am weary unto dissolution. And
Sleep, darling Sleep—not even a brush of your wings against me!
In this early morning, in the “little hour before dawn,” the grief of the
world sits tight about my heart—the icy hurt for things dead and gone,
and the heaviness of those who awaken to a world empty of what was once
the heart’s concern and desire.
Old distastes, too, press on me, old distastes, I say, not hates. How
hate any one like unto myself, hurrying along the night-path to the
grave, mutual, frightened possessors of a shadowy, urgent immortality?
For these last few years I have entered, as it were, into some knowledge
of charity, not that I like everybody, but I have come to realize that
the distaste is often in myself and not due to some fault or lesser
excellence in others. Truly in this whole journey I have encountered but
two whom in an idle, hazy way I did not like; one was of an amorphic
species and the other had judgments too violent, and at the same time too
conventional and platitudinous, to permit interest. But even of these I
shall ultimately think with indulgence.
_5 A.M._—Closed the book recording the deeds of those young, long, long
fallen of St.-Clément’s school, and I pass to thinking how the word now
on the lips of the world is freedom.
But is not the deepest wish of the human heart for love which is never
free, but always in bond to that which is its hope and its desire? And I
cried out concerning freedom what once in the world’s greatest hour was
cried out concerning truth, “What is it?” and begged that it might show
its true form and aspect, above all to one who, invested with incredible
power by a great people, would seem to hold even the lightnings in his
hand.
More sabots click across the square, and a pale light sifts in at the top
of the curtains. It’s the eighth day of Creation. Innumerable men have
stood (and so near me) their last night through in the trenches....
Yesterday with its happenings seems a thousand years ago. I had motored
with Laferrière to lunch at Dannemarie across a rich plain, through
Morzwiller, where Alan Seeger spent a week with the Foreign Legion, and
spun who knows which of his young and gorgeous fancies?
Now, as then, the long street of Morzwiller was crowded with a highly
colored, exotic regiment, and we were stopped a moment by a detachment
passing. In front of the red-roofed, cream-colored inn, with its
yellowing grapevine clinging close and flat, a young officer in the
strong, mustard-tinted khaki and red _checchia_ of the Moroccans was
getting off his horse, a blooded, white, long-tailed beast of Araby; on
his breast was a blaze of decorations and there was something implacable
in his young glance as he looked about, and something very straight in
his mien—a man who had been at his enemy’s very throat, or drawn the
sucking bayonet out all red. Two or three men of his regiment, wearing
also their crimson _checchias_, were sitting at a table drinking a
light-yellow wine. A woman came out, emptied a pail, called to a cat. A
very young girl behind her made a slight sign to one of the men sitting
at the table. In another minute we had passed on.
Everywhere in the rich fields were great brown stretches of barbed-wire
entanglements, repeating the rusty tones of the beech forests which
fringe them. I asked Laferrière what would become of those thousands upon
thousands of kilometers of barbed wire. He answered indifferently, as one
does of things past, “Little by little the peasants will use the poles
for their kitchen fires and the wire for their hedges.”
And we continue through that flat yellow and green and brown world to
Dannemarie, one of the “territories” of the reconquered triangle, drawing
up before some sort of government building, known to German and to French
administrators, in and out of which American soldiers are now passing.
I ask one of them where their officers are quartered, thinking to pay
my respects after lunch. There is a vagueness as he asks of a passing
comrade, “Say, ’ain’t we got a major somewhere here?” The flooding
Americanism of my soul is for a moment stemmed; then we go over to the
_popote_, where we are to lunch with Lieutenant Ditandy, in charge at
Dannemarie. Laferrière, always ready to praise his comrades, tells me
that he is possessed of much energy, good sense, and decision (rather in
our American way, I found later) and the “territory” has flourished under
him.
Pleasant lunch, enlivened by some last German salvos, which shook the
windows and caused the glasses on the table to ring. Much and easy
conversation—as we ate the classic Alsatian dish of sauerkraut, boiled
potatoes, and pork, and the equally classic pancakes—mostly about
the irrealizable and irreconcilable dreams of small and penniless
nations, springing up like poor and unthrifty relations at the day of
inheritance. And how amusing, even, the adjustments might become, once
the blood-letting had ceased, though everybody felt more or less of a
pricking in the thumbs at the thought of _l’après-guerre_. One could not
then foresee that the movement of the Peace Conference would be about
as rapid as that of the notoriously timeless glacier. Nor was it given
to prophets to foretell the exceeding glitter of its generalities, nor
how those same small nations, without a cent in their pockets, some
even without pockets, like the Zulus and Hottentots, would multiply a
hundredfold in its dewy shade. The metaphors are mixed, though not more
so than the theme, and unfortunately it _won’t_ “be all the same in a
hundred years,” everything having been taken into account except the
future.
After lunch we start out in the motor driven by the swift yet careful
chauffeur, accompanied by a doctor _à deux galons_, who speaks English
very well, but doesn’t understand a word I say—and my English is
generally intelligible, though perhaps one wouldn’t know right away if I
came from England or the United States.
We passed the high, broken, pink viaduct of the railway, looking, against
the near Swiss hills, like a bit of aqueduct in the Roman Campagna,
though without any beauty of light. It had been destroyed the first days
of the war, rebuilt, again destroyed, and then abandoned.
We were running straight toward the trenches, through that green and gold
and brown autumn world, the road screened by wire netting interwoven with
pine branches and broom, and there were kilometers of cloth screening,
too, torn and flapping. The lines are but a few yards distant, and
everywhere between us and them are the brown lakes of barbed wire.
At St.-Léger an infantry band is playing the terrible, the gentle, the
dolorous, the gorgeous, the human, the superhuman “_Sambre et Meuse_,”
which will forever evoke those seventeen hundred thousand sons of France
who to its beat marched to their death. We stop to listen. A veteran
of 1870 (no village seems to be complete without one or more) comes
out, his green-and-yellow ribbon in his rusty buttonhole, and gives
Lieutenant Ditandy a toothless, palsied salute. Black-clad women are
grouped about the blue-clad band, under a great yellow chestnut tree. The
mustard-tinted khaki and red _checchias_ of a passing Moroccan regiment
give a last deep accent to the color of the scene. And for a long way our
road runs like this:
[Illustration]
We continue swiftly through villages shot to bits and deserted save for
the troops, _Quatrième Zouaves mixtes_, they mostly are, quartered within
their crumbling walls. There are tattered cloth screens for camouflage
hung across the streets, as electioneering signs would be hung, or the
banners of festivities and welcome. Open-mouthed, the soldiers see the
auto pass where for two years no wheeled thing has rolled. If men went
there they slipped silently behind the screens and under cover of night,
with food and munitions or carrying wounded men.
As for me, I begin to feel like a cross between Joan of Arc and Madame
Poincaré.
Lieutenant Ditandy points out “_le Bec de Canard_,” the duck’s bill, a
long tongue of Swiss territory that juts in comfortingly between the
French and German lines, and is greatly beloved by everybody.
On the outskirts of the battered village of Seppois we pause; a few more
turns of the wheel and we would be in full sight of the German lines. I
make good my woman’s reputation for lack of sense of responsibility and
beg to proceed. Lieutenant Ditandy, however, caps daring by a somewhat
belated prudence (there is something bold and hard in his eye when it’s
turned toward the enemy), saying:
“We ought not to be here; as it is, our safe return depends on whether a
German officer sees us and, seeing us, thinks he might as well turn the
mitrailleuses on. The first man to be killed in the war was killed near
here—it would be too stupid to be the last.”
Laferrière: “Not to speak of the incident it would create, and if the
colonel sees us—well, the prison at Seppois isn’t inviting.” So we turned
toward the Swiss frontier instead, and I thought deeply, sweetly on her
so dear, so near, as I looked toward these hills enfolding her, the best
loved of my heart.
Then we turned another way, passing again through Seppois. Arab troops
are quartered there, and we were held up by the sentinel, who wanted
to see our papers. He was dark of color, delicate of hand, straight of
nose, and wore his military coat buttoned by one of its top buttons in
such a way that it fell with an effect of burnous. He couldn’t read
French characters, so he called to another thin, small-handed, straight,
coffee-colored man, who might have been his twin, who couldn’t read them,
either, and finally they both threw up their slender hands, resembling
those of some antique bronze of an adolescent, after which we passed
on. And I told Sérin’s story of the Arab guard who held him up one dark
night, in the trenches, but generously gave him the countersign, saying
to him, “_Si tu ne dis pas tire-lire, tu ne passes pas!_” (“You can’t
pass unless you say tire-lire!”)
They’re cold, these Arabs, they’re gray with cold, and they don’t know
why they fight, nor whom, but they follow their officer to the death,
and, if he falls, lose heart under these gray skies with which Allah
seems only remotely connected.
And then we turned back and went through young woods where countless
thousands, no, millions of shells were piled on shelflike receptacles,
as one would pile bottles of wine on cellar shelves. Everywhere were the
words “_Route interdite_,” “_Défense de passer_,” and we passed, until
we came to Faverois, with its old, old church on the top of a tiny hill,
over which the town spilled. The broad, low steps of the church were
made of ancient tomb slabs, and, stooping, I saw, on one of them, half
obliterated, “_in pace_,” and “16—.”
There was much that was unspoiled, or more likely forgotten, in the
interior. A suave-expressioned St.-Sebastian, with dimpled limbs, so
evidently unfit for the arrows that transfixed them, and something
yearning and earthly about his eyes, was above the Louis XV altar; quite
unmistakably he was of the gay century. In another niche was an unknown
saint, dressed like a personage of opera; three plumes were on his head
and he wore a golden shirt of mail and high, fringed boots. At the
side-altars were charming, very pure models of angels, and bow-knots and
shells (I mean, for once, _sea_-shells). As we came out we noticed that
the roof of the church was painted a silver-white and that of the old
house nearby, with the round tower, was painted the same way, and other
houses, too, and when we asked why they told us it shone like crystal at
night and was to warn airplanes of their nearness to the Swiss frontier.
A blue group of _poilus_ was standing on the crest of the street, looking
at a newspaper. One cried out in a loud voice, “_Guillaume a ——_,” only
one can’t write the word. And going up we saw the news of the Kaiser’s
abdication in letters quite American in size.
Then in a very understandable zeal that I should miss nothing, the doctor
_à deux galons_, espying a khaki figure, said, “There comes an American,”
and I saw approaching a blond, round-faced young man with spectacles.
Something leaped within me as I turned to him. But he answered me in the
stiffest German accent possible, “Ja, pig news”; and when I said, “Yes,
we’ve won the war!” he answered, “Well, I do t’ink we god ’um shust now.”
Unreasonably, the thing that had leaped within me lay down. I said,
“Good-by.” He said, “So long.” And so much for American meeting American
on the hill of the village of Faverois.
Laferrière had marched all through this country, _sac-au-dos_, and in one
place he buried a comrade, and in another he knew hunger and thirst, and
in another he had watched the day break after a night battle. There is a
history to Faverois, too, but I don’t know it, and it’s just as well,
for I would be sure to tell it in this long vigil, and I _must_ finish
with the war.
Back to Dannemarie, the chauffeur driving like the wind, and Lieutenant
Ditandy finds out where the American officers have their headquarters.
There is a battalion[24] attached to the Seventh French Army. I am
conducted over a muddy street, past two classic dung-heaps, the kind so
evidently handed down from father to son, and go up some dark backstairs,
and there Colonel Wing and Major Griffiths are rung up by an orderly.
I give my name, and they all know of me. In a moment appear, young and
slim and untried and eager, the colonel and the major, glad to see an
American woman in Dannemarie. And then they took me to their more than
simple quarters out through another door and another court, where there
was the usual mud, but only the scent of a vanished dung-heap. How many
good American dollars they had “planked down” for this priceless compound
I know not. After a while we walked back to the motor waiting in the
square, and I presented them to the French officers. One of them said he
had been at Plattsburg with my husband that first historic summer, and
spoke of General Wood, whose aide he had then been, saying, with a flush,
“He is the greatest man in the United States, as well as the greatest
general,” and there in the square of Dannemarie I thought, “_Magna est
veritas_,” and then, “Too late, too late.”
On our way home, not far out of the town, we come across a group of
Americans and French colonials standing by the road. Lying on the
embankment was a young man with a fractured skull, his face deathly pale,
except for the contusions, already swollen and blue. His hair was matted
with blood and his red _checchia_ lay in the ditch. The stern young
officer of the many decorations (there were three rows of them) that I
had seen descending at the inn at Morzwiller, was there, on his beautiful
mare, and he held the halter of another very good beast, the one that
had just unhorsed his rider. We got out and the young man was placed
carefully in our motor to be taken to the hospital at Dannemarie, after
which we started to walk back to Masevaux—about thirty kilometers. In
war-time you don’t wonder “can you do it,” you just start out; sometimes
you get there alive, sometimes you don’t. This turned out all right, for
shortly after our motor, which had met an ambulance, came back for us.
[Illustration: AMERICA AND ALSACE]
And then we found ourselves passing through a sunset-world, cut by a
bar of level light, so strangely thick where it touched the golden
earth that it was almost like a ledge or a wall over which we looked
into wind-still, purple forests, and above us, like the tarnished gilt
ceiling of a temple, was the pale, amber sky. We talked somewhat of hope,
somewhat of life, from which the red thing had so suddenly gone, as
they alone can talk who have laid their heads close against the cruel,
beautiful, full breast of war.
As we drove into the Place du Chapitre a delicate white moon, seen
through the nearly bare lindens, was hanging in a deepening sky, close
above the soft, dark roofs of the houses of the _chanoinesses_. There was
no breath of wind. No cannon sounded. One’s heart, too, I found, was very
still. Millions of men waited face to face in dark lines, and that same
moon touched their bayonets, their helmets, and their drinking-cups. The
sun had set upon the last day of the World War....
The maid who brings my breakfast as I lie half dead, but not asleep,
after the burning, consuming night, opens my blinds.
French and American flags are flying from many windows. Something wets
my eyes. Then—if in my flesh or out of it I know not—I see a strange
brightness filling the Place du Chapitre, and a further glory bathes my
being in such sweet and cooling waters that I again am strong to pass,
with the Sons of Victory, into the New Day.
In the old house are sounds of feet running to and fro. From our windows
also blue and white and red flags are being hung. In the street are
heard, “_Ça y est_,” and “_L’armistice est signé_.”
XVI
DIES GLORIÆ
“_O Eastern Star! Peace, peace!_”
And I arose and went to the church where there was a great ceremony, for
it was the feast of St.-Martin, patron of Masevaux, as well as the end of
the war....
Afterward I stood outside on the wide rose-gray steps, under a sky of
matchless silver-blue, among groups of villagers, soldiers, and officers.
A blue infantry band, grouped under that blue vault against the pink
church, played the “Marseillaise” and “_Sambre et Meuse_,” with a great
blare of trumpets, quickening the heart-beats, then “The Star-Spangled
Banner,” and many eyes were wet with tears of hope and loneliness.
Amid the throng I noticed some new silhouettes, always in groups. They
were those of husky young men in civilian holiday garb; flat, black
hats, short, black jackets coming only to the waist, long, tight, black
trousers, pink vests, and high, white collars. These young men, who
looked no one straight in the eye, were strange-souled ones who had
burned with no fever of combat; the lamp of no cause had shone before
their faces; they had known no country for whom ’twas sweet and fitting
to die. Free not to serve in the French army, out of reach of the German
authorities, they had passed from adolescence to manhood during the
World War unsplashed by blood. And they will be a generation apart.
Even as they appeared on the day of victory in groups, apart. Later, in
tribulation of maturity, in weakness of old age and fear of death, they
may sigh that they were not among those who “dying are not dead,” and
would exchange the worn drapery of their couches for the “blue-black
cloud.” And those who have not known a hot youth will know a cold old age.
A motor was standing under the lindens of the Place du Chapitre and by
it a black-bearded, giant chauffeur who might have been among the hosts
of Louis le Débonnaire on the Field of Lies. I got in with Laferrière
and he took me up on a hillside, and from the height showed me a last
time the kingdoms and principalities into which his race had come. The
plain shone in a blue and exceeding beauty; we ourselves were caught
in a glistening web of air shot with color by the low-arching November
sun. Marking the course of the great river was a line of mist shimmering
in the same warm-tinted sun of Indian summer. “_L’été de St.-Martin_”
indeed. Here and there villages shone brighter than day, and the hills
were deep-colored, yet soft and unsubstantial. Victory, like a shining,
soft-rolled ball whose tangles were hidden, was in our hands—or like to a
crystal sphere as yet undarkened by events.
The grass of our hillside was dew-wet in the sun, white and frosty in the
shade. Each fallen, rust-colored beech leaf, each scarlet cherry leaf,
was set with something glittering. All, all was a-shine. Even the heart,
too, after the dark years.
I cried within myself, though I might have said it aloud, “O beauty of
life, why art thou so often hidden?” And I had in mind the eternal years,
though the newborn hour of victory was so passing sweet upon the hillside.
And looking at the splendid river whose course was marked by the shining
band of mist, I thought how deep the Lorelei was hidden in its timeless
waters, though ’tis said she betrays but once those listening to her
song. And long since, for the noise of battle, the hypnotic chanting of
the Rhine-maidens lulling their nation to dreams of boundless might had
not been heard. I thought, too, how the blood of the world’s armies had
put out the circle of fire about Brünnhilde, though whence it was first
kindled it may be again rekindled; and for all our dead—and theirs—in
the middle of Europe there are, I know not how many, tens of millions
to whom the fire-music is their light and heat, the river the symbol of
their strength; and what to do with it all? Walhalla has been destroyed
in the greatest roar of sound mortal ears have ever heard, but that
which wrought its pillars and its walls is still there, and in other
wide-doored mansions Wotan’s warriors may drink again deep cups of
hydromel.
Siegfried lies dead upon his bier, but Brünnhilde’s candle throws a
light upon his face, and though Loge seems no longer at his post, it
is believed he waits somewhere unseen, protecting, as best he may, the
Walkyries’ unquiet sleep, until they wake and ride again, crying, “_Je
ho, je te ho!_” inciting to battle and to sacrifice.
And as nations always have the governments their mystical qualities
create, in spite of the great defeat in the West and the solvent forces
in the East, I thought, “Is anything really changed in Germany of that
which makes each nation like only unto itself?” Old things may take new
names, but, the blood-madness past, they will walk again the banks of
their great river—listen once again to the Rhine-maidens, and Lorelei,
combing her hair, will sing once more for them, while the wonder-working
music that has so scorched us will draw again its circle. And the German
people may be more portentous in defeat than when their armies were
spilling over Europe—only, one who says this too soon will be stoned and
one who thinks it not at all be deceived.
Then from some distant church tower softly sounded the first noontide of
peace, and, turning, I left the Germanies to their predestined fate. “He
beheld and melted the nations,” and truly of them may be said “_Glück und
Unglück wird Gesang_.”
For to each one his own, and the power of rhythmic sound over the world’s
will can no more be separated from that nation’s destinies than can
certain inborn qualities of the French be separated from theirs. That
pervading sense of style, that illuminating, stimulating art, their
conversation, that incomparable arrangement of words, their prose; or,
in the mystical realm, that bright and singular thing they denominate
“_la Gloire_,” which one of my countrywomen[25] has written of in golden
words, and that other peculiar and essential translation into habit and
custom of the word “_honneur_,” and many more deathless qualities that
make France what she is and not something else....
Then I found myself following Laferrière over another diamond-set path
of rustling autumn leaves, and we got into the motor and went down the
hill into the beflagged and crowded town, drawn so brightly, yet so
transiently, out of its antique obscurity.
At the _popote_ many guests were assembled, among them three men of the
Anglo-Saxon race, come to eat in Masevaux the first-fruits of victory,
and later, not so very much later, perhaps that very night, they were to
tell of it to the world, each seeming to have, as it were, the end of a
telegraph wire cuddled in his pocket by his stylographic pen.
Many, I knew not who they were, came in after lunch to salute the
commandant, whose house and heart were wide open that day. Black-robed,
tremulous women, youngish officers with very lined faces on which,
over night-loss and night-grief, was written something at once soft
and shining and eager; but, with all the coming and going, a strange
new quiet pervaded everything. Noise had, for a time, gone from the
border-world.
Afterward we were taken up to see the room once lived in by Anna,
the wife, or rather widow, of the Oberforster. In it was the most
extraordinary piece of furniture, designed to occupy two sides of a
corner, that I have ever seen. It was a divan, a narrow, hard divan, at
right angles with itself and upholstered in mauve rep. Above the narrow
seat and reaching nearly to the ceiling was a series of mirrors set in
woodwork like many panes of glass, the mirror parts too high to see
oneself in. On the floor near it was a hard, tasseled cushion of old-gold
satin on which I am sure no foot had ever rested, for it seemed rather
to belong to the dread family of bric-à-brac. On the divan was a small,
woolen-lace cushion bearing the words “_nur ein Viertelstündchen_” in
shaded silks.
Voluptuous the divan was not, neither was it respectable, nor
comfortable, nor practical, nor anything natural to a divan, but it
doubtless represented some dim longing of the soul of her who bought and
installed it, some formless inclination toward beauty, out of the daily
round of the good housewife; perhaps even a “soul storm,” after the Ibsen
manner, had so externalized itself. Who knows, or ever will know, or
cares?
The wide bed was of the newest and horridest of _art nouveau_, and over
it was a spread of many pieces of coffee-colored machine-made lace put
together with colored wools. There was a writing-table near the window
at which you couldn’t write, for all the writing space was taken up with
little drawers or tiny jutting-out shelves, and an imitation bronze
vase, holding some faded artificial roses, was built into it, where
the hand would naturally slip along when writing. Over it, between the
windows, hung an illuminated verse, “_Allein soll ich denn reisen? die
Heimat ist so schön._” From the Oberforster’s album some one took and
presented to me a photograph of Anna, which I couldn’t connect with
that room, a rather sharp-nosed, mild-eyed woman whose head was leaning
against her husband’s head. And the husband is one among millions
of husbands who lie in their graves, for whom the pleasant habit of
existence is no more.
Downstairs on their upright piano, in the corner of the dining-room, are
those high piles of music of the masters, and much of it is arranged for
four hands.
In the afternoon a great weariness came upon me, and the light of victory
seemed to pale, but I knew that it was only within myself, because of the
long vigil in which I had burned both oil and wick. I stood listening
for a while to the military bands in the Halle aux Blés and the Place du
Marché, but the gorgeous fanfare of the trumpets reached me only dully,
as from a great distance.
Then many little boys, after the eternal manner of little boys, began to
set off firecrackers, and the sudden noises hurt my ears.
I went to my room, but was too wearied to compose myself to rest, and
soon came out, chilly and wandering. The sun had set upon the square and
something cold had began to come up from the earth; I seemed to have
finished both joy and mourning. I thought that perhaps forever I would be
alone, unable to partake of the world’s gladness.
I could not remember, in that afternoon ebb of vitality, that with
the evening hours would come rushing in the tide of nervous strength,
bringing again warmth to my heart, light to my spirit, and that
buoyantly I would be treading the _Via Triumphalis_ of this borderland.
A little later in a blue twilight, bluer close to the earth where those
many Sons of Victory pressed, I walked out with Laferrière past the
ancient, evocative Ringelstein, along the Doller, and we called on a very
charming woman who had also seen the war of 1870—Madame Caillaux. She
gave us a perfect cup of tea and was flanked by no veteran, and she, the
portion of whose youth and age had been war, was calm with the pleasant
calm of those who harmoniously have sewed together the ends of life.
When we came out a pale white moon had arisen over some black cedars
planted near the door, and as we walked slowly back, saluted by blue-clad
men, or standing aside to let munition-wagons rattle by, Laferrière told
me of some of the glorious deeds of his comrades of the _popote_, though
no word of himself.
In the Place du Chapitre the populace was already gathered about the
fountain of the stone flame. It was like looking at an old print,
recording old victories and old rejoicings, together with the eternal
hope of the people that new victories, unlike the old, may mean new
things for them.
I felt through my single being the surge of the generations, and against
my hand the beat of the changeless human heart, forever quickened or
retarded by the same things. Loving, hating, desiring, forgetting, and
finally relinquishing its beat, because it must. Though I remembered that
in all times there are men who prefer something else to life....
In the evening Madame Mény gave a great dinner for the officers of the
Mission, to which I was also bidden. Madame Mény is the daughter of
Madame Chagué and lives next door to her mother in an ancestral home
with high, sloping roof and deep windows, giving on the Place du Marché,
overlooking the fountain, which I can’t see from my window. The officers
wore all their decorations and even gloves, and I felt as a wren might
feel among the birds of paradise, and I wished again that I had brought
a good dress and something sparkling for my breast. When dinner was half
through came Captain Bacquart from Paris, belated on that Belfort train,
still at its old tricks. He was slightly condescending, as one might be
coming from the City of Light to the dusky provinces, but everything
he had to tell, even the things he had heard in the greatest solemnity
from Ministers of State, had been grabbed by the Mission out of the air
before he left Paris, and in addition everybody knew a lot of things
he didn’t know, that had happened while he was on the way. But we did
smile at the story of the routing out of a station-master, whose trust
was train-schedules and lost articles rather than events, to be asked
whether he knew if the armistice had been signed, by the species every
station-master hates even in peace-times—that is to say, travelers—and
“_Saperlotte!_” and “_Nom de Dieu!_” rose to the station vault when he
found that _that_ was what they wanted him for!
After dinner there was music and for a last time I heard Lavallée sing of
“_la douce Annette_.” Then another officer whom I had not seen before,
Lieutenant Ruchez, sang in a veiled but flooding voice many of Schumann’s
songs. It began by the commandant asking for the “Two Grenadiers,” and
for a time the old wounds ceased to burn, even though we thought of those
many whose prayer had been “Bury me in the earth of France.” On that
night of victory he sang, too, in his musician’s voice, “_Du meine Seele,
du mein Herz_,” and “_Ich grölle nicht wenn auch das Herz mir bricht_,”
and nobody found it strange. They knew how for all time lovers will
tremble at the words, “_Ewig verlor’ nes Lieb_,” or in ecstasy cry out,
“_Du meine Seele, du mein Herz_,” to the impulse of the immortal music.
Afterward we sang the “Marseillaise” with further and deeper thought of
those hosts who to its sound had gone up to a death of glory.
Then M. Mény opened more champagne and each one drained a last time the
red-gold hanap of victory.
And many, many shades haunt these borderlands, the clash of spear on
armor mingling with the roar of 75’s and 420’s.
When we came out midnight was striking. The ancient square was dark and
still where all the evening distorted forms had gesticulated in the flare
of torches, crying of victory and, too, of freedom, the word I scarcely
dare breathe, so strange and terrible may be its meaning.... Though what
shall more deeply move us than the hope that the unborn inclination of
our soul toward love in freedom shall find its being and its breath?...
The commandant and his staff accompanied me a last time across the
starless, moonless square to my dwelling, where there was a close
handclasping of friends in victory, for had I not been caught up in the
apotheosis of the Mission? I felt for a moment, as I stood on the broad
steps, like a figure in the background of some great allegorical painting.
For these men, as for me, the “moving finger having writ, was moving on.”
Soon they would go from the hillside to the plain they had so long looked
down upon. And the scroll of their history there is tightly rolled, nor
can any man say what is written on it.
But this they knew, and with a point of sadness, that their work of
intimate companionship, of trust, of hope and dolor shared in the valleys
of St.-Amarin, Masevaux, and Dannemarie was already in the past. And all
endings are sad, even those of victory.
The next morning, in a pale, chill, shifting fog, through which I had
glimpses of _camions_ full of shivering, velvet-bodiced, black-bowed
children _en route_ for the Belfort train to Paris, and huddled veterans
bound the same way, I passed forever from Masevaux, as a wind that goeth
and returneth not.
THE END
FOOTNOTES
[1] Permission.
[2] “We’ll get them,” and “we’ve got them.”
[3] _Prisonnier de Guerre_ (Prisoner of War).
[4] NOTE.—As far back as the end of the sixteenth century, there is, in
the annals of Masevaux, mention of the tanneries of the Braun family.
[5] Officers’ mess.
[6]
And the forgetful trooper
Who lets the hour pass
And dallies too long, alas!
Will be punished by his under-officer.
[7] The word “ballon” comes from the patois, _bolong_, _bois long_, which
took its name from the great forest, “La Selva Vosagus,” once covering
the Alsatian plain and its mountains.
[8]
Like to the hawk
That on auroral clouds
Doth rest his velvet wings,
Looking for prey,
So hovers my song.
[9] Hilaire Belloc, _The Road to Rome_.
[10] A letter from Laferrière of November 20th, recounting national
events, and the breaking up of the little group, says also: “_La
cafetière, la fameuse cafetière a une large felure qui fait craindre sa
fin prochaine. Ce serait un symbole?_”
[11] In spite of the Tower (Turenne was a La Tour d’Auvergne) the Roses
will bloom.
[12] After the signing of the armistice and the French occupation of the
two provinces in their entirety, another reorganization became necessary.
To each of the three divisions of Alsace-Lorraine was sent a _Commissaire
de la République_—the Commandant (I had almost said my Commandant)
Poulet was given charge of Upper Alsace with residence in the ancient
and comely town of Colmar. To Lower Alsace with residence at Strasbourg
was appointed M. le Conseiller d’Etat Maringer with the title of High
Commissioner, and to M. Mirman, the celebrated Mayor of Nancy, was given
Lorraine with residence at Metz.
[13] Edouard Schuré, _L’Alsace Française, Rêves et Combats_.
[14] AMERICAN COMMUNIQUÉS
_Tuesday morning._
This morning the First Army resumed the attack. In spite of desperate
opposition our troops have forced a crossing of the Meuse at Brieulles
and at Cléry-le-Petit. They are now developing a new line in the heavily
wooded and very difficult terrain on the heights east of the river
between these two points.
On the entire front the enemy is opposing our advance with heavy
artillery and machine-gun fire, notwithstanding which we are making
excellent progress. The west bank of the Meuse, as far north as opposite
Pouilly, lies in our hands.
In the course of several successful raids in the Voivre, detachments
of the Second Army have penetrated the enemy’s trenches, destroying
material, dugouts, and emplacements, and capturing prisoners.
_Tuesday evening._
The First Army under Lieut.-Gen. Liggett has continued its success.
Crossing the river south of Dun-sur-Meuse under a heavy artillery fire
which frequently wrecked the new constructed bridges, the troops of
Maj.-Gen. Hines’s Corps fought their way up the slopes of the east bank.
Breaking the enemy’s strong resistance, they captured Hills 292, 260,
Liny-devant-Dun, and drove him from the Bois de Châtillon.
During the afternoon our gains in this sector were extended northward;
Dun-sur-Meuse was captured and our line pushed forward a mile beyond
that town, as far as the village of Nièlly. The troops of Maj.-Gen.
Sunmerall’s Corps reached the river at Cesse and Luzy and mopped up the
forest of Jaulnay.
The important road center of Beaumont fell before our victorious forces,
who pushed on to the Bois de l’Hospice, two miles north of that town,
capturing in their advance the village of Létanne.
At Beaumont we liberated five hundred French citizens, who welcomed our
soldiers as deliverers.
The advance of the past two days has carried our line to points within
five miles of the Sedan-Metz railroad, the main line of communications of
the German armies. Between Beaumont and Bar Maj.-Gen. Dickman’s Corps,
in close liaison with the French Fourth Army on its left, pushed forward
under heavy artillery and machine-gun fire through the rugged forest
areas beyond Stonne.
The villages of Yoncq, La Basace, and Stonne were taken.
We have taken to-day west of the Meuse 51 additional guns, making a total
of more than 150 since November 1st.
Thirty of our bombing planes executed a successful raid on Mouzon
and Raucourt this morning, dropping over two tons of bombs with good
effect. Reconnaissance and pursuit squadrons carried out many successful
missions, machine-gunning enemy troops and greatly assisting the advance
of our troops.
Seventeen enemy planes were shot down and two enemy balloons burned.
Seven of our planes are missing.
[15] And now let all those come who love Paradise, the place of quiet,
the place of safety, the place of eternal happiness, the place where
the Barbarian may be feared no more.—ST. AUGUSTINE, _Upon the Barbarian
Persecution_.
[16] “S’Strassburger Münster isch s’höschet, s’Friburgers’ dickscht, aver
S’Thanner s’fienecht.”
[17] Some of the jokes that were Hansi’s undoing were exceedingly
harmless, as, for instance, the domestic revelations of Frau Professor
Kugelberg, who answers to the correspondence column the following: “No,
I never throw away the old trousers of my husband. I have had great
success with cutting them skilfully and employing the least worn parts,
in constructing for my young daughters charming and dainty corset-covers,
which have the merit also of being very inexpensive. Trimmed with white
ribbons, these corset-covers have quite a virginal air, but also with
apple-green and cherry-red bows they can be made most attractive.” As for
“Professor Knatschke” he is now a classic. The Alsatians have, in a very
marked degree, what one might call the wit of border peoples, the tongue
often being the only weapon left them.
[18] Gilles Sifferlen, _La Vallée de St.-Amarin_, 1908.
[19] Fairies: kindred to the “green people” of Ireland.
[20] “I will have thee, I will have thee, I will have thee.”
[21] “To play bridge at Limoges” means that an officer is temporarily—or
permanently—retired before the age limit. “_Être limogé_,” to be limoged,
is another familiar form.
[22] The next morning I learned that Sérin, who had been “ready for
anything, _et comment_,” had gathered together, being chief of the
Gendarme Service, those of his men who were watching over the slumbers of
Masevaux and quite simply “opened wine” for them, drinking solemnly again
to “_la Mistie_,” while they as solemnly drank to the health of their
respected chief. So do great hours fulfil themselves in little ways.
[23] Victor Hugo, _Alsace et Lorraine_, 1872.
Thy people will live,
But thine empire topples, Germany!...
[24] Battery B, 42d Artillery C.A.C.
[25] Edith Wharton.
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