The Project Gutenberg eBook of My Lorraine journal
This ebook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and
most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions
whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms
of the Project Gutenberg License included with this ebook or online
at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States,
you will have to check the laws of the country where you are located
before using this eBook.
Title: My Lorraine journal
Author: Edith Louise Coues O'Shaughnessy
Release date: March 29, 2025 [eBook #75744]
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)
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK MY LORRAINE JOURNAL ***
MY LORRAINE JOURNAL
[Illustration]
BOOKS BY EDITH O’SHAUGHNESSY
A DIPLOMAT’S WIFE IN MEXICO. Illustrated.
DIPLOMATIC DAYS. Illustrated.
HARPER & BROTHERS, NEW YORK
[ESTABLISHED 1817]
[Illustration: DUCAL PALACE, NANCY]
MY LORRAINE
JOURNAL
_by_
EDITH O’SHAUGHNESSY
[MRS. NELSON O’SHAUGHNESSY]
AUTHOR OF
_“A Diplomat’s Wife in Mexico”
and “Diplomatic Days”_
ILLUSTRATED
[Illustration]
HARPER & BROTHERS PUBLISHERS
NEW YORK AND LONDON
MY LORRAINE JOURNAL
Copyright, 1918, by Harper & Brothers
Printed in the United States of America
Published September, 1918
_To
Mrs. William H. Crocker_
_In memory of a lost battle
and in appreciation of
her work in Lorraine_
ILLUSTRATIONS
DUCAL PALACE, NANCY _Frontispiece_
VERDUN AND VICINITY _Facing p._ 4
PLACE STANISLAS, NANCY ” 12
AUTHOR AT VITRIMONT ” 30
CEMETERY, VITRIMONT ” 30
THE BRIDGE AT LUNÉVILLE ” 30
FOUNTAIN OF AMPHITRITE BY JEAN LAMOUR, PLACE STANISLAS,
NANCY ” 38
SOUVENIR MENU OF LUNCHEON AT VERDUN, JUNE 17, 1917 ” 46
OUR PARTY ON THE BATTLE-FIELD AT VERDUN, JUNE 17, 1917 ” 50
IN THE BOYAUX, VERDUN, JUNE 17, 1917 ” 50
SISTER JULIE ” 124
BAS-RELIEF OF THE REFUGEES ” 124
MISS POLK’S WEDDING ” 162
CONTENTS
PAGE
FOREWORD xi
PART I
CHAP.
I. HOW ONE MAY HAPPEN TO GO TO THE FRONT 3
II. NANCY 12
III. LUNÉVILLE 18
IV. VITRIMONT 22
V. LUNÉVILLE AGAIN 28
VI. GERBÉVILLER AND LA SŒUR JULIE 33
VII. BAR-LE-DUC 37
VIII. VERDUN 42
IX. CHÂLONS.—CHÂTEAU DE JEAN D’HEURS.—REVIGNY, THE “LINING” OF
THE FRONT 60
X. MONT FRENET.—LA CHAMPAGNE POUILLEUSE.—THE RETURN 64
PART II
I. BY THE MARNE 77
II. THE CANTEEN AT BAR-LE-DUC 87
III. THEATRICALS AND CAMOUFLAGE 97
IV. THE BURIAL OF PÈRE CAFARD 108
V. A PROVIDENTIAL FORD 112
PART III
LORRAINE IN AUTUMN
“_L’élégante et mélancolique Lorraine_”
I. NANCY AND MOLITOR 121
II. EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY EMANATIONS 131
III. TOUL 144
IV. A STROLL IN NANCY 153
V. VITRIMONT IN AUTUMN 161
VI. AT THE GUÉRINS’ 167
VII. ACROSS LORRAINE 174
VIII. THE CHÂLONS CANTEEN 182
FOREWORD
It will be seen, by the first chapter, how fortuitous though inevitable
was the writing of this little book, begun before the American troops
came to France; yet it happens to concern that part of the war zone
wherein our men are preparing themselves for battle, and which will be
quickened with their blood.
The time has scarcely come to write of the world war; indeed, it is only
between wars that one can write of them, when wisdom, with accompanying
imagination, looks down the great perspectives; now men’s utmost energies
are concentrated upon deeds of passion performed in hope or in despair.
Oliver’s _Ordeal by Battle_ of 1915 remains the most scholarly and
philosophic of the war books; Masefield’s _Gallipoli_ the most artistic.
But even these, and the many, many others, give not so much a sense of
inadequacy as of impossibility.
Letters from strong souls undergoing supreme emotions have emanated
from the trenches or the air. We have mourned young perished singers:
Rupert Brooke, Alan Seeger. But for the most part, and so it must be,
war books are limited to the relation of personal deeds and sufferings,
and descriptions of localities where they have taken place, colored
more or less by the temperament of each—even as I, “_en passant par la
Lorraine_,” wrote these pages.
EDITH COUES O’SHAUGHNESSY.
33 RUE DE L’UNIVERSITÉ, PARIS, _January 19, 1918_.
PART I
CHAPTER I
HOW ONE MAY HAPPEN TO GO TO THE FRONT
PARIS, _Thursday, June 7, 1917_.
Even personal events have their outriders, and this is how an unexpectant
lady, still fiancée to Mexico, received from Destiny various indications
that she was to go there where men, ten thousand upon ten thousand, lay
down their lives _pro patria_. Like everything, it was simple when it had
happened.
At the Foire Saint-Sulpice, where I was serving at the tea-stall, I met
E. M. C., whom I thought in California. After greetings (we had not seen
each other since the fatal month of October, 1916) she said to me:
“You must come down to Lunéville where I have a house, and visit the
village of Vitrimont, that mother is rebuilding.”
I answered: “My dear, I’m still tied to Mexico, and I can see my
publishers frowning all the way across the ocean if the second
much-promised, long-delayed book doesn’t arrive. I oughtn’t even to peep
at anything else for the moment.”
Then, tea victims beginning to crowd in, “business as usual” engaged us
and we parted.
When I got home I found that Joseph Reinach, met but once—Polybe of
the delightful _Commentaires_—had sent me his brochure, _Le Village
Reconstitué_. I still didn’t hear the outriders galloping down the street.
In the evening I dined _chez Laurent_ with Mr. C., known in Mexico. When
I got there I found that his sister, Madame Saint-R. T., Présidente de
La Renaissance des Foyers, was going into Lorraine, to Lunéville itself,
the next day; conversation was almost entirely of the practical work to
be done in the devastated districts, and the deeply engaging _philosophie
de la guerre_, of how one had not only to rebuild villages, but to remake
souls and lives.
_A quoi bon donner des chemises?_ Give tools and implements, or a brace
of rabbits, that nature may take its course and the peasant can say,
“Soon I will have a dozen rabbits, and twenty-five francs that I have
earned.”
Some one observed that it really would be the rabbits, however—it is any
living, productive thing that is of account, beyond all else, in the dead
and silent places of devastation, and gifts of twelve chickens and one
cock are demanded rather even than shoes.
As we were pleasantly dining in the garden, and philosophizing sometimes
with tears, sometimes smiles, a terrific thunder-storm broke over Paris,
and we all crowded into the big central room, with piles of hastily
torn-off, muddy table-linen. We sat talking, however, till they turned
both ourselves and the lights out. As we parted, Madame Saint-R. T.’s
last words were, “But try to come down to Lunéville.”
I thought to myself that night, “Things are getting hot.” I believe in
signs from heaven, and signs from heaven are not to be neglected.
[Illustration: VERDUN AND VICINITY]
On Saturday, when E. M. stopped by for me to go again to the Foire, I
said:
“I believe I _will_ go to Lunéville. What does one do about papers?”
We straightway went to the Rue François Premier, not being in the
_mañana_ class, either of us, and found there a charming specimen of
_jeunesse dorée_, intellectual, “sicklied o’er with the pale cast of
thought,” but doing his bit. Shears for the cutting of red tape were
liberally applied, and my papers were promised in an unprecedented three
days.
As we “swept” out I said to E. M., “You don’t think we were _too_
strenuous?”
She said, “Oh, they are used to us now, though it was a thrilling moment
when you ripped your photograph (such a photograph!) from the duplicate
of your passport!”
The aforementioned charming specimen, M. de P., had said a photograph was
essential; it was Saturday afternoon, the next day was Sunday, and for
some unexplained reason photographers don’t seem to work in France on
Mondays, at least not in war-time.
It was about this time that E. M. said, in a _dégagé_ way: “I am going
down to Verdun with a friend. It’s awfully difficult, and the women who
have been there can be counted on one’s fingers. I wish _you_ could go,
too.”
I said, “That’s out of the question.” But I thought to myself, “We will
see what Fate decides.” It’s a great thing to keep astride of her, anyway.
On account of Sunday coming in between, my papers could not be ready in
time for me to leave with her on Tuesday (they have to be sent to the
_Quartier-Général_ to be stamped), but they were promised for Wednesday
that I might start for Lunéville on Thursday. I went to see E. M. at
her aunt’s, the Princess P.’s, on Monday night for a few last words and
injunctions. I found her after passing through some lovely dove-gray
rooms with priceless old portraits of Polish great, hanging on silvery
walls, and rare bibelots and porcelains discreetly scattered on charming
tables rising from gray carpetings. She greeted me by saying, “It’s all
arranged for you to go to Verdun, too.”
“Verdun!” I cried. “Glory and sorrow of France!”
I didn’t ask how, but thought of the harmonious working of chance that
brings as many gifts as blows in its train.
_Thursday, June 14th, 10.30 a.m._
We slipped out of the station, flooded with waves of blue-clad men, at
eight o’clock, and since then there has been a constant stopping of the
train in green, glade-like places to let troop-trains pass. A while ago
I found myself looking out on a river, and a shiver went over me. It was
the jade-colored, slow-flowing Marne.
White morning-glories are thick on every hedge, and wild roses such
as grow in New England lanes, and there are many thistles, soft and
magenta-colored; lindens, acacias, and poplars abound and hang delicately
over the banks of the river.
Lying open on my lap is the _Revue de Paris_ of June 1st, but I can’t
read even the beautiful “_Lettres d’un Officier Italien_”—(Giosué
Borsi[1]), breathing a deep spirit of conformity to the will of God and
showing the evolution that many an _intellectuel catholique_ of his
generation has gone through in Italy. In his dugout were Dante, Homer,
Ariosto, the Gospels, St. Augustine, Pascal, and _Le Manuel du Parfait
Caporal et les Secours d’Urgence_. And he loved his mother and let her
know it.
All along the route are villages and peaceful country houses, near the
train, bowered in acacia and linden; elder-bushes are in full bloom,
too, and we pass many green kitchen gardens. Women are shaking blankets
out of windows, and looking at the train going to the front, thinking,
who shall say what thoughts?
_Later._
Big movement of troops is delaying us, and it has been a morning spent
among emerald-green hills, pale, like Guatemalan or Bolivian emeralds,
not like the deep-colored gems of the Rue de la Paix. Everywhere are
patches of blue-clad men, marching down white roads between green fields
melting into the blue sky at the point of the eyes’ vision. Still others
are bathing in the pale, warm Marne or resting on its banks. Trains go
past loaded with battered autos, _camions_ and guns coming from the
front, or others with neatly covered, newly repaired machines of death,
going out.
All were silent in the train at first. “_Méfiez-vous, les oreilles
ennemies vous écoutent_” is the device placarded everywhere. In my coupé
some one feeling slightly, very slightly, facetious, had rubbed out the
first two letters of _oreilles_, changed the first “_e_” into an “_f_,”
so that it read, “_Méfiez-vous, les filles ennemies vous écoutent_.” The
ruling passion strong in death!
We pass Epernay, whose little vine-planted hills had run red, before
the treading out of its 1914 wine, with the blood of English and French
heroes.
At last we began to talk, a dark-eyed colonel of infantry with the
_Grand’ Croix de la Légion d’Honneur_ having reached down my bag for me.
It is a historic date for France and for ourselves.
The night before, General Pershing arrived in Paris, with his guerdon
of help, mayhap salvation. All the newspapers had pictures of him and
his staff, their reception at the station, the crowd before the Hôtel
Crillon. One officer told the story of the woman in the crowd who was
so little that there wasn’t the slightest chance of her seeing anything
or anybody. When asked why she was there she answered, “_Mais j’aurai
assisté_,” and that, it seems to me, is the epitome and epitaph of the
generation whose fate it is to see with their eyes the world war.
IN THE STATION, CHÂLONS-SUR-MARNE, _2.30 p.m._
Extreme heat. Train four hours late on account of the movement of troops.
Wave after wave of horizon blue undulates through the station. They are
lying about, standing about, sitting about—the _poilus_. Half hidden by
their equipment, their countless bundles tied around their waists, slung
on their shoulders, under their arms, they seem indescribably weary and
dusty, turned toward the blazing front where the best they can hope is
_la bonne blessure_—theirs not to reason why. Sometimes 30,000 pass
through Châlons in a day.
Now it comes to me that our men—our fresh, eager, beautiful young men,
such as I saw disembark at Vera Cruz—will pass through this same station
to that same blazing front....
By my window, on the siding, is passing an endless train of box-cars,
with four horses in the ends of each car. Between the horses’ forefeet,
pale-blue groups of men are crowded; no room to lie, scarcely to
sit—cramped, hot, with their eternal accoutrement. One bent group was
playing cards, the horses’ heads above them. But mostly they are looking
out at people who are not called upon to die.
_Later._
Pangs of hunger began to assail me as the train pulled out. I went into
the dining-car and had a modest, belated repast of _œufs sur le plat_,
cheese and fruit. At the tables were groups of uniformed men talking in
low voices of what had been and what might have been. As I looked out of
the window, while waiting, my eyes fell upon the first band of prisoners
I had seen—tall, stalwart men, wearing the round white cap with its band
of red—at work on the roads, those veins and arteries of France.
An officer, once the most civilian of civilians, looking like the
pictures of Alexandre Dumas _fils_ on the covers of cheap editions of _La
Dame aux Camélias_, with bushy hair parted on one side, mustache, and
stubby Napoleon, broad face and twinkling eyes, pointed out Sermaize, the
first of the devastated villages we passed, which has been rebuilt by
the English Society of Friends. “Conscientious objectors” don’t intend
to let the sons of Mars do everything, but they can’t keep pace with
the destruction. In _Le Village Reconstitué_ M. Reinach speaks of the
ugliness of the models proposed to the victims, which pass understanding,
and says that even the vocabulary of Huysmans would not suffice to give
the least idea of them. What the peasant wants is “_mon village_,” which
doesn’t at all resemble what the _commis voyageur en laideur_ proposes.
REVIGNY, _4.30 p.m._
I have seen the first black crosses in a green field bounded by clumps
of poplar against the clear sky. Revigny is a mass of ruins, roofless
houses, heaps of mortar, and endless quantities of blue-clad, heavily
laden men coming and going in the station—the eternal waiting, waiting
for transit. Revigny is on the road to Verdun, Alexandre Dumas _fils_
told me. He gets out at Bar-le-Duc, which is now the point of departure
to the fateful fortress. Groups of yellow Annamites are working at the
roads. They are imported for that purpose, being of little use when the
cannon sounds.
Awhile ago two young Breton under-officers, colonials, came into the
compartment. They had been at school together and had not met for ten
years until just now on the train. They watched together the shifting
scenery; one was coming from a young wife, the other from a fiancée.
GONDRECOURT.
Two symmetrical fifteenth-century towers pierce a pale-blue sky. One of
the young Bretons tells me that for some time the train has been making
a great détour, as the straight line to Nancy would take it through
Commercy, daily bombarded by the enemy.
PAGNY, _5.30 o’clock p.m._
Here we pick up the Meuse—and there still follows us the pink-and-gray
ribbon of willow-fringed canal that links the Marne to the Rhine,
and which all day long has looked like the marble the Italians call
_cipollino_. But I remember that its greenness has been but lately
colored with a crimson dye.
TOUL (_where we thread up the Moselle_), _5.50_.
We have just passed Toul. Great barracks are near the station, and
on the opposite hill is the fortress, high against the sky, bound to
Verdun by an uninterrupted series of forts. It is a _place de guerre de
première classe_. The Romans had an encampment here, and Vauban made the
fortifications of his time.
And because the mind is not always held to the thing in view, even though
it be of great moment, I thought how Toul was the town where Hilaire
Belloc did his military service, “was in arms for his sins”; from here it
was that he set out upon the “path to Rome” in fulfilment of his vow.
Other things laid long away in memory came to mind, and I was only jerked
back as my eye was caught by a group of German prisoners being marched
past the station, one soldier, with a pointed bayonet, in front of them
and another behind.
And at Nancy we are to knit up the river Meurthe.
CHAPTER II
NANCY
Nancy, a dream of the eighteenth century, with the réveillé of
twentieth-century guns.
We arrived at Nancy five hours late, at seven o’clock.
No sign of E. M., no sign of anything familiar. Fortunately I was flanked
by Brittany, and a stout heart did the rest. When we found that the next
train for Lunéville would leave at nine o’clock, I asked them to dine
with me and take a little walk about the town. Our luggage—we were all
traveling light, I with a hand-bag and flat straw valise, they with two
iron helmets—was given to the _consigne_ and, after my _sauf-conduit_ had
been stamped in three separate places, we departed.
The square before the station was surging with the usual pale-blue
waves, and as we crossed it the odor of leather and tired feet and hot
men was a good deal stronger than the linden scent. We passed a very
banal statue of Thiers, _Libérateur du Territoire_, and some horrors of
_art nouveau_. A construction with colored-glass windows and unnatural
cupolas and gilding and mushy outlines protruded from a corner, and its
name, for its sins, was Hôtel Excelsior. But we were searching for the
celebrated Place Stanislas. After asking a passer-by, we were directed
to a street whose name I have forgotten, and we started down its rather
distinguished length of gray, well-built houses of another century,
many of them having the double Lorraine cross in red to indicate cellar
accommodations, with the number they could shelter.
[Illustration: PLACE STANISLAS, NANCY]
When, suddenly, we stepped into the Place Stanislas, I almost swooned
with joy. I was in full eighteenth century, in the midst of one of its
most perfect creations, with the low boom of the twentieth-century guns
in the distance.
Quickly my spirit was ravished from the world of combat into the still,
calm, beautiful world of art, within the enchantments of the _grilles_ of
Jean Lamour. A sensation sweet, satisfying, unfelt since the beginning
of the war, invaded me. I gazed entranced upon that delicate tracery of
wrought iron, like some rich guipure, at the four corners of the square
of buildings, its lovely gilding reflecting a soft light; and, outlined
against a heaven colored especially for them—pale blue, with threads
of palest pink, and a hint of gray and yellow—were urns and torches
and figures, half human, half divine, supporting them. The beautiful
fountains in the corners were banked with sand-bags, but their contours
were in harmony with the other _grilles_, and one was surmounted by an
Amphitrite, the other by a Neptune. It was all a symbol of a state of
mind, a flowering of feeling, to which had been vouchsafed a perfection
of expression.
There is an Arc de Triomphe, put up by Stanislas at one end, in honor
of his kingly son-in-law, in front of the Hôtel de Ville, and a statue
of Stanislas himself in the middle, bearing the name “Stanislas,” the
date of 1831, and “_La Lorraine Reconnaissante_.” In looking about, my
eye fell on the Restaurant Stanislas, _dans la note_, certainly, and I
decided to dine there. We found that we had time to investigate a little
further, and turned down by the café into a most lovely linden-scented
square called Place de la Carrière. Through the double lines of trees
between the fountains at the farther end was visible an old palace, and
the square was flanked by houses that courtiers only could have lived
in. It all cried out, “Stay with me awhile.” An old park was at one
side, with trees planted _en quinconce_[2]—chestnuts, ash, trembling
poplars—and everywhere was the penetrating fragrance of the lindens. It
was so sweet and loosening under the shade, after the long hot day in the
train, that the young officers began to talk, one of his fiancée waiting
in _Les Landes_, the other of his wife of a year, seen only twice seven
days. And then again we were silent, and under the flowering trees I was
seized with a great longing for the beautiful and calm, for the arts and
ways of Peace. It seemed to me I could not longer think of this, that,
or the other “offensive,” but that I must see before my eyes, hear with
my ears, feel with my touch, the lovely, the melodic, the benign. _O
bon Jésus!_ Not of the battle-fields, not of _réformés_, of limbless,
sightless men, not of starving, frightened children, not of black-robed
women, not of lonely deaths, not of munition-factories. What is this
world we are in?
I don’t know how long we were silent, but at last one of the young men
said, “We must think of the hour.” Then came a glancing at wrist watches,
rattling of identity disks, and we went back to the café and got a table
by the window, where we could look out on the lovely, calm _ensemble_ and
the fading sky. The menu was brought; it was a meatless day, but with a
snap of the eye the waiter recommended _œufs à la gelée_. We understood
later, when we found, concealed in the bottom of each little dish under
the egg, a thick, round piece of ham. Fried perch, new potatoes, salad,
strawberries and cream, with the celebrated macarons of Nancy—_des Sœurs
Macarons_, as the little piece of paper underneath each says—made a
delicious menu. A certain _petit vin gris du pays_ had been recommended
us with another snap of the eye.
As we sat waiting, one of the officers exclaimed at a giant, lonely,
priestly figure passing through the Place:
“_Le voilà, l’aumônier du 52ème._”
I said, “Do run after him and ask him for dinner, too.”
He came back with the young man and we had a most enjoyable repast. The
chaplain knew all the things about Nancy that we didn’t. He was a huge,
bearded man, who might have been with the hosts of Charlemagne, and was
a native of Commercy, where Stanislas used to go with his court. The two
Bretons were very Catholic and very royalist; when I remarked upon it,
they said, simply, “Oh, we are all that way, _par là_,” and they spoke
names of great men born in Brittany, and the _aumônier_ told tales of
near yesterdays surpassing those of the heroic age. The gayest of the
Bretons, he who had not just left his young wife and his child unborn,
began to sing, “_Voici un sône tout nouveau_,” and suddenly it was a
quarter before nine and we had time only for a dash to the station _d’une
bonne allure militaire_, which left me breathless. The nine-o’clock
train didn’t, however, leave till ten, as it was waiting for the Paris
train, which didn’t arrive at all. Finally, in a strange heat, vagaries
of lightning without thunder or rain—the thunder we _did_ hear wasn’t
the old-time, pleasant, celestial sort, but something with an easily
traceable, regular, decisive sound—we pulled out of the station, I not
knowing where I was going—no address in the town of Lunéville.
A thick, heavy, soft, enveloping night was about us.
Groups of soldiers were lying, sitting, standing in the little stations.
We stopped every few minutes, and I could distinguish them by the light
of cigarette or lantern on their guns and equipment, waiting for motors
to take them to the trenches. At one place I had to descend to show my
_sauf-conduit_; it was inspected and stamped by the flickering light of
a blue-veiled lantern, and I climbed in again. I was beginning to feel a
bit tired, and the end was _not_ in sight.
We descended at Lunéville in complete darkness, a motley crowd of
military and civilians. My companions were due at different points at
dawn—Baccarat and the Forest of Parroy. As I write, they are in the
trenches. They put me into the hands of a _commissaire_ who said he lived
opposite E. M.’s. I waited, standing by the door, while he locked up
the station, looking out on the silhouette of a gutted, roofless house,
showing dimly against the soft night sky. At last there was a sound of
rattling of keys and the _commissaire_ picked me and my luggage up. We
started forth, the only human beings visible, in what seemed a deserted
town—no lights in streets or houses.
As we passed a wide open space the scent of flowering lindens enveloped
me, and with me walked the ghosts of lovely and too-amiable ladies, of
witty rulers loving the arts as well as women—Duke Léopold and Madame de
Craon, King Stanislas and Madame de Boufflers, and Voltaire and Madame du
Châtelet.
We walked seemingly through the entire town toward a freshness of parks,
and in darkness we arrived before a garden gate; silence, and the bell
nowhere to be found. After looking for it in the light of various
matches—vainly, of course—the _commissaire_ had the brilliant idea of
going to the house next door, _la maison de M. le Maire_, the celebrated
M. Keller. A woman came out and showed the bell where nobody would ever
have thought of looking for it, and, furthermore, masked by vines. The
door was finally opened by a tall, slender, white-robed figure with two
black braids showing over her shoulders and a floating scarf. I thought
it a vision of Isolde, but it proved to be Miss P., who cried:
“We had given you up! We waited at Nancy till the train came in, and then
had to motor back as quickly as possible on account of the lights.”
I went in, to find E. M. in a most becoming, slinky, pale-blue satin
_négligé_, also with braids on her shoulders. I’d rather have found
them both in _paniers_, shaking the powder out of their hair. However,
I can’t complain; it was all pretty good as regards the stage-setting.
We embraced. I explained that various zealous guardians of the gates of
Nancy had stamped my _sauf-conduit_, and, as I was certainly the only
one of my species arriving by that train, they should have given news
of me when asked concerning _une Américaine_. Then, as the only healthy
rooms in Lunéville in 1917 are on the ground floor, I departed to one
that had been retained for me at the Hôtel des Vosges. Again through the
soft-scented night, guided by my _commissaire_, to a room of extreme
cleanliness and a most comfortable bed.
It is 2 A.M. I am too tired to sleep. My mind is jacked up by all the
twists and turns of the day. I have been reading the _Cour de Lunéville_,
by Gaston Maugras, found in my room, belonging to E. M.
Three o’clock. Soft, very soft booming of cannon, and a deep-toned bell.
But no “poppy throws around _my_ bed its lulling charities.”
CHAPTER III
LUNÉVILLE
Lunéville, a dream of fair women of old and new times, linden scents, and
circling Taubes and little white puffs of shrapnel against blue skies.
HÔTEL DES VOSGES, _June 15th, 8 a.m._
Have just breakfasted to the gentle accompaniment of firing on a Taube.
Dear old village life began at an early hour, but of course the Taube put
the cocks and the carts and the geese and all the other usual auroral
sounds quite in the background.
My breakfast service is decorated with the same double cross of Lorraine
that I saw on various houses in Nancy indicating comfortable cellar
accommodation. The cross with the _chardon lorrain_ (Lorraine thistle) is
everywhere.
Popping and cannonading going on at a lively rate, and whir of aero
wheels; a beautiful day. Some little white puffs of shrapnel visible from
my window; I must get dressed and investigate.
Cannonading just stopped. I don’t know whether he got off or was got.
The hotel is discreet and clean, _avec un petit air_.
It has been a good house of the good epoch, and over each window are
diverse and charming eighteenth-century _motifs_ in gray stone.
_6.30 p.m._
Just home from Vitrimont in a blinding blaze of sun, in a motor driven by
E. M., and bearing in large letters the words “Commission Californienne
pour la Reconstruction des Villages Dévastés,” a sort of “open sesame,”
and everywhere bayonets were lowered to let us pass. Nerves a-quiver with
another day’s impressions. Tried lying down, but it didn’t go, so I am in
an arm-chair looking out of my Lorraine window in full eighteenth century
as regards setting, but with a very definite tide of twentieth-century
warfare sweeping through it all. Meant to go to church, where there
are special prayers to be offered up, at Benediction, for the needs of
Lorraine, but, though the spirit was willing, the rest of me was like
lead after the hot, full day and two hours in one spot too tempting.
This morning, before I was dressed, E. M. and Mrs. C. P., also staying
in the hotel, appeared, so I hastily harnessed up for the day and
sallied forth with them. We went first to the charming old house of
Mlle. Guérin, and, going in through a wide hallway, stepped out into a
large garden, where, under some trees, several ladies were sitting, one
of them Madame Saint-R. T. We embraced cordially, in the very evident
fulfilment of destiny. Madame Saint-R. T. was reading Pierre Boyé’s _Cour
de Lunéville_, which I matched with Gaston Maugras’s, and then I looked
about me.
The house, gray and long and low, was, until a hundred years ago, a
Capuchin monastery, when it came into the hands of Mlle. Guérin’s family.
There are old linden-trees in the garden, and some tall cedars and roses
not doing very well; and masses of canterbury-bells and geraniums. At one
end of the garden, against the wall, is an ancient statue of the Virgin,
dark, moss-grown, against still darker walls; we placed the flowers we
had gathered on her breast and in the hands of the Child. _Avions_ were
humming above in the perfect sky, and against the faultless blue was a
very white crescent moon just discernible.
After accepting an invitation for dinner that night, we walked out
through the town toward the Château, once the haunt of witty rulers,
philosophers, and of the fair and evidently too-amiable ladies beloved by
them. However, when we got into the great square of the palace I forgot
about them, for, looking up at the statue of Lasalle, born in Metz,
1775, and fallen at the battle of Wagram, 1807, were two Senegalese whom
_we_ looked at as the Lunéville populace might once have looked at the
camels the young Duke Léopold brought back with him from his wars with
the Turks. The juxtaposition was as strange. One of the Senegalese had
on a blue cap, the other a red. We gave each one a franc for cigarettes,
received large-mouthed, white-toothed smiles, and proceeded to look at
the remains of a German _avion_ which had fallen beside the statue the
day before, the most complete wreck possible. The aviator had been killed
and his broken wings were being removed to the Museum. It made me quite
still—there was something so complete about it all, the great Château in
the background, the statue of Lasalle, the two Senegalese, the shattered
Taube!
We walked on rather quietly over the bridge of the Vesouze to the Place
des Carmes—the Place Brûlée, as it is now called. The big Carmelite
convent which formed the square had been used as a barracks for a
generation or so, and one side had been burned with incendiary bombs
when the Germans left, while the other side was untouched. In the
middle was the statue of L’Abbé Grégoire (who made the mistake of being
ahead of his time), and on the pedestal are the words, “_J’ai vécu sans
lâcheté, je veux mourir sans remords_.” We stopped only a moment at the
church—eighteenth century, of course; fine old choir, delicate baroque
designs on the great wooden doors, and dominating towers in a lovely
reddish stone, with charming _motifs_ of urn and scroll, and flying
angels against the sky, or rather _in_ it.
We began to have that “gone” feeling about this time, and turned back
through the town to E.M.’s house, where we were to lunch. It was cool
and charming as we stepped in out of the sun-flooded garden, stripped
of the mystery of the night before, but quite lovely. In old Lunéville
china vases were masses of pink and purple canterbury-bells. It had been
hastily but charmingly got ready for occupancy with old furniture that
nice people in the provinces can put at the disposition of their friends,
and I saw again Miss P., the Isolde of the dim, scented garden of the
night before. After lunch we sat in an arbor jutting into a corner of the
ancient park, drinking our coffee, and eating some Mirror candies just
out from New York—all to the continued hum of _avions_ and the rather
soft crack of guns. Then the motor was announced, or, to be faithful to
reality, somebody said, “We’d better be off.” We put on our veils, got
into the motor, which E.M. cranked herself, and started off to Vitrimont
without any male assistance of any kind.
CHAPTER IV
VITRIMONT
A merciless blaze of sun as we passed out through the town, badly
battered at the end, through the Place Brûlée, leading to the road to
Vitrimont, some three kilometers distant, running through green fields
with their little groups of black crosses. All is softly green and gently
rolling. Vitrimont, and around about it, was the scene of some of the
fiercest fighting of that first August of the war, and Vitrimont itself
was taken and lost at the point of the bayonet seven times in one day
as gray German floods kept rolling in over the green eastern hills. The
village is charmingly placed on a little eminence; sloping down from
it are very fertile meadows, then other thickly wooded hills slope up
against the sky.
We passed through encumbered streets of devastated, roofless houses,
going first to Miss P.’s little dwelling, that she has lived in during
all these months of the superintending of the reconstruction work. It
consists mostly of one perfectly charming room done up in yellow chintz
with a square pattern of pink roses, and some good bits of old furniture,
books, and flowers. She took down from the wall a violin made by a
convalescing soldier out of a cigar-box and drew from it a few soft and
lovely tones. The rest of the house, where she has installed herself
with a woman servant, is typical of the Lorraine peasant houses: a very
wide door to let the harvest-wagons in, a narrow one for human beings, a
narrow hall leading into a kitchen, then the bigger living-room giving
into it, now so charming in its yellow chintz. From the kitchen some
steep stairs lead up into an attic which Miss P. has converted into a
medical dispensary.
Outside, across the street, is a little pergola effect made of boarding,
where one can sit and look out across the softly rolling, wooded hills.
In it are a table and a few chairs and some pots of flowers. We deposited
our tea-things there, and were starting out to make the tour of the
village, when the mayor, in shirt sleeves, loose suspenders, and slipping
trousers (his wife was killed in the 1915 bombardment of Lunéville and
his son fell in the 1914 fighting in Vitrimont), came to welcome us and
do the inevitable stamping of our safe-conducts.
We then proceeded to the old church, one of the first things to be
restored, so that its delicious fifteenth-century vaultings and
window-tracings would be beyond further damage from exposure to the
weather. One of the things _not_ hurt was the dado running around
the interior in the form of painted cloth folds by a misguided
nineteenth-century _curé_. War, with its usual discriminating touch, had
left _that_. In the vestibule are some small, perfect Louis XV holy-water
fonts in the form of shells upheld on angels’ heads. A celebrated
baptismal font was removed to Paris.
We then went to the _maison forte_, as the peasants call what had been
a sort of château, the dwelling of the “first family” of the place.
Its medieval tower was battered beyond repair, and the house itself
pretty well damaged, while some of the rooms still had charming bits of
paneling, and the locks and latches of the doors were perfect examples
of eighteenth-century wrought-iron work. In one of the large rooms, whose
ceiling was broken in by a shell, was a lovely old fireback under a
marble mantel with the arms of the Counts of Vitrimont. By a north window
was sitting a woman working at an embroidery screen with a brilliant
green and silver design; an old man with palsied head was near.
The school also has been rebuilt. A rosy-faced young schoolmistress
received us, and two little boys kept to do their _pensums_ told us the
name of the President of the United States, and showed us Washington
_and_ San Francisco on the map hanging in the room. This having been
satisfactorily gone through with, the punished little boys, with the
usual luck of the wicked, were given chocolates by E. M. and dismissed;
then we walked out into the little cemetery, approached by a narrow
pathway of arching sycamores. It looks out toward the ancient forest of
Vitrimont; in between are more green, undulating fields ripening with
the 1917 harvest. The walls of the cemetery are battered and broken and
monuments and gravestones are overturned. There was furious hand-to-hand
fighting there, and in those first August days the long dead again
mingled with the living. I passed down by broken, sun-baked walls,
reading the names on the crosses as I went, and these are some of them:
_Lieut. Jeannot, 26ème Infanterie, aspirant—Un soldat inconnu—_
_Haye, Louis, Sergent—28 soldats—_
_A notre fils, Charles Diebolt, mort pour la Patrie 1895-1914,
26ème Infanterie—_
_Charles Carron, Musicien; Souvenir d’un camarade, mort au
Champ d’Honneur 31 août 1914—_
A rude wooden cross bears the words:
“_Ci-gît Edouard Durand, fusillé le 25 août 1914 par des lâches._”
As one goes out is the tomb of a young girl; “_Hélène Midon, 18 ans,
victime du 1er septembre 1915—une prière—la plus jolie fille du
village_.” A white and virginal rose has been planted where she lies. In
this cemetery lie, too, the wife and son of the mayor.
The first upspringing of early flowers is everywhere—asters, goldenrod,
wild roses—and the hot sun extracted from each its soft, peculiar
perfume. I picked a seemingly perfect rose from the grave of _un soldat
inconnu_. Its petals immediately fell to the ground. Everything grows
with an almost ironical luxuriousness on the shallow, hastily dug graves.
All over Lorraine is this same flowering; it has been and will be, but
there was no time to ponder on the fate of frontier lands, for we were
next to call on the officer commanding the detachment quartered at
Vitrimont, who was housed in a reconstructed building and who had been
waked from slumber to receive us. When I gave him my boxes of cigarettes
for his men he said that he had received some before for the soldiers who
had the Croix de Guerre. I promptly told him mine were for the soldiers
who had _not_ got it. Mrs. C. P. brought bundles of illustrated papers
and postal cards.
Soldiers are everywhere helping to get in the hay; sweet odors
of freshly cut grass float about on the warm air to the sound of
distant cannonading. However, in spite of everything, it is already
_l’après-guerre_ here, and the delivered population is breathing again,
but it all gives the sensation of something prostrate that needs the
help of strong, fresh hands before it can arise. Mrs. Crocker’s work is
on such a generous, imaginative, sliding scale, and Miss P., untiring
and executive, is of immense tact in dealing with the Lorraine peasant,
a peculiar type demanding peculiar handling. There are numberless
psychological situations needing adjustment in the human as well as
material affairs of devastated villages. Miss P. meets all difficulties
with understanding plus determination. Some are content, some not, with
what is done for them. One woman whose house was completed, and who was
evidently dazzled by the result, said, “It isn’t a house to live in, but
to rent.”
Another, however, when we went into the grange behind her house, pointing
to the posts sustaining the hay-lofts, said: “Will they hold? The old
ones were twice the size.”
Sanitary improvements have been worked out as far as possible, but when
you try to tamper with a peasant’s pile of _fumier_, it’s like tampering
with his purse—and _that’s_ impossible. Quite a good deal of live stock
has been put into Vitrimont.
A soldier stationed with the Vitrimont detachment cranked the motor for
us. His home was near by, and he told us with shining eyes that he had
just bought for ninety francs two pigs. Somebody observed it was the
_premier pig qui coûte_. However that may be, the purchase marked the
remaking of his home.
One is appalled at the time and energy and money necessary for the
rebuilding of this single village—a million francs is the cost
estimated—and materials and workmen are increasingly difficult to get.
One thinks of the hundreds that _aren’t_ being rebuilt. Vitrimont has
certainly been smiled on by heaven _and_ Mrs. C.
As we drove home, fleecy, delicately tinted clouds were pinned together
with mother-of-pearl cross-shaped brooches. It is in the air alone that
there is any “war beauty.”
Soldiers are passing under my window, some in the blue trench-helmets,
with their equipment; some in their fatigue caps, swinging their arms,
free of their eternal burdens; and there are officers afoot or on
horseback, and colonials—marines, we call them—in many kinds of uniforms.
The poster on the old garden wall opposite says: _Alice Raveau viendra
jouer “Werther,” dimanche, le 17 juin, 1917, en matinée_.
Charlotte might have lived in the house behind the wall on which it is
pasted, a gray, smooth-façaded house with a good eighteenth-century door,
and a chestnut and a linden in full bloom. At the café on the corner
soldiers are sitting, laughing and talking, humming, drinking their
_bocks_, reading their papers, or throwing words to women who pass by,
and I thought of the men who pass through these villages, leaving to
women an inexorable burden and an untransmittable joy. Many swallows are
flying about, and above it all, in the colorful afternoon air, _avions_
are humming. On the wings of the French airplanes are stamped a great
circle of color like an eye with red pupil, white retina, and a blue
outer rim. After the hot day, something lovely and cool begins to come in
at the window, and I know soldiers all over Lorraine are resting after
the heat and burden of the day, though in the distance the dull, muffled
sound of cannon continues. Now I must “dress”—that is, put on my other
dress—for the eight-o’clock dinner at Mlle. Guérin’s.
CHAPTER V
MONSIEUR KELLER
LUNÉVILLE, _Saturday, 16th June, 8 a.m._
As I put out my light and opened wide my window last night a rush of
warm, linden-scented air came in, also the thick, soft, meridional voice
of some soldier singing “_En passant par la Lorraine_.” I, too, was
passing through Lorraine, and I got the sleep I didn’t get the night
before.
This morning more whirring of aeroplanes, but peaceful. The Taube got off
yesterday; all the events of Friday were accompanied by that constant
low-flying of aeroplanes, making one feel one was being looked after.
Dinner at Monsieur Guérin’s. Monsieur Keller, the celebrated mayor of
Lunéville, whose tact, courage, and good sense saved Lunéville many
tragedies at the time of the German entry, took me out. He has a lively,
perceptive eye, and, all in all, life seems not to have been unkind to
him, though he has been invaded, and his parents before him. He received
the Germans and said adieu to them all in that month of August. His fine
old dwelling, where the treaty of peace was signed in 1801 between France
and Austria, is next to E. M.’s, and housed at one time one hundred
German soldiers, and the general and his staff were quartered in it. He
was, of course, the bright particular hostage during the occupation, and
was followed about by two officers and four soldiers wherever he went.
“I kept them moving,” he added, with a snap of his perceptive eye.
At Lunéville one hundred and thirty houses were destroyed and there
was much loss of life among civilians. The mayor has, or rather had,
a property near Vitrimont, called Léomont, on a hill where there was
formerly a Roman temple to the moon, and from this Lunéville is supposed
to take its name. The great farm and its ancient buildings were destroyed
during the bombardments of Lunéville and Vitrimont.
“It’s only a war monument now,” he added, philosophically.
It’s the atmosphere of Lunéville that’s so charming to me—this drop into
full eighteenth century, with the boom of twentieth-century cannon in
the distance. In spite of the sound of guns, there is some peace they
can’t destroy. I knew nothing about the French provinces till I got
to Lunéville, and I suppose it’s their immemorial and quite special
atmosphere that I have received. Here the war seems to be a thing of the
past; they think of their _secteur_ only, and of themselves as _libérés_,
and talk of the war in the past tense, and it might be 1814 just as well
as 1914.
A heavenly evening. We walked in the dim old garden smelling of linden.
No lights anywhere, of course, and, though the stars were beautiful,
they didn’t seem to light up anything terrestrial; the only things
blacker than the night were the giant cedars. At dinner was a youngish,
much-decorated general, coming back for a night from the front; though
born in Lunéville it was the first time he had been here since the
war—always fighting in other parts of France. Besides the general there
were Madame Saint-R. T., E. M., and Miss P., who appeared in some sort
of dull-red tunic that she ought always to wear; the mayor and his wife
(she is Gasconne, and very animated, though she said twenty years of
Lunéville had somewhat calmed her); two or three women with husbands at
the front bringing daughters; several young officers; and M. Guérin and
his daughter—the usual war-time composition of dinner-parties in the
provinces, I imagine. Excellent and very lavish repast, _maigre_, of
course, but everything else except meat in profusion. I didn’t get to bed
till after eleven. M. Guérin walked back to the hotel with us, and, while
he and Mrs. C. P. talked, again I was accosted by ghosts of dead rulers
and lovely ladies and philosophers as we crossed the vast, dim Place
Léopold. They, too, had crossed it and been amorous and witty, pleased or
having _vapeurs_, enveloped by linden scent, and the changeless stars had
controlled their destinies.
_Later._
This morning we visited the military hospital in one of the most charming
edifices I have ever seen, an eighteenth-century convent-building.
The first entry on the tableau in the hallway giving the names of the
benefactors was 1761; the last, 1913. It is a two-storied, cloistered,
rambling edifice, with several wide courtyards planted with trees and
flowers, a fountain in the middle of one; in another a statue of the
Virgin; beyond it a sun-baked vegetable garden; and still farther, behind
a hedge, the inevitable little cemetery.
[Illustration: AUTHOR AT VITRIMONT]
[Illustration: CEMETERY, VITRIMONT]
[Illustration: THE BRIDGE AT LUNÉVILLE]
We went through the wards of the hospital, high-ceilinged, spotless,
airy, with the _médecin-chef_, talking with the wounded and distributing
cigarettes.
One of the doctors, also mayor of Gerbéviller, said to us, when we told
him we were going there in the afternoon, “But don’t you want to see the
young German aviator?”
Thinking it quite “in the note,” we went up-stairs again. He unlocked
the door of a large corner room. At a table by a window looking out on
another little tree-planted court was the young eaglet with fractured
“wing”—arm and shoulder—in plaster. He got up with the military salute
as we came in. I begged permission to address him in German, and when
I asked him where he was _zu Hause_, he answered, “Posen,” and that it
was far. He said he was very comfortable, but, with a longing glance at
the patch of sky, added that he was dreadfully bored. I suppose he was,
after being a bird in the blue ether and breaking into secular silences.
He had been there a month, but was still very thin under the cheek-bones
and dark about the eyes, and very young. He turned to the doctor with an
entirely different expression—a sort of shutting down of iron shutters
over the youthful look—on being asked in German if he had all he needed.
“Why have I had no answer to the post-cards I have written my mother?” he
asked, adding, “we also have mothers.”
The _médecin-chef_ said: “You know you can only write once a month; but
write another, all the same, and I will see it is sent off.”
He had a worn French grammar on the table and had been diligently
studying verbs when we entered. The doctor was _so_ nice with him.
There is no bitterness at the front; the more one sees of it the more one
realizes that bitterness is the special prerogative of non-combatants far
from the field. I heard an American woman say to an officer just back
from the front, so newly back that “the look” was still in his eyes:
“I’d like to see you at Cologne, destroying the cathedral. It would serve
the Boches right.”
He looked at her and made answer: “_Ce n’est pas comme ça, madame_.
Enough has been destroyed in the world. Think rather of reconstruction.”
Ah! _les civils!_
Coming out, we met Mlle. des Garets and went with her to her
evacuation hospital near the station, which was a triumph of turning
heterogeneous spaces into a single purpose. Two old railway sheds had
been converted into receiving-rooms, douche-rooms, refectories, and
several eighteenth-century cellars had been so arranged that in case of
bombardment they could stow away fifteen hundred wounded. This seems a
simple enough statement, but just think what stowing away, _suddenly_,
fifteen hundred wounded means! Mlle, des Garets, a daughter of General
des Garets, has been marvelous in her devotion and practicality since the
beginning of the war.
I hear the motor-horn....
CHAPTER VI
GERBÉVILLER AND LA SŒUR JULIE
We started out for Gerbéviller in a blinding sun, over a road leading
through pleasant green meadows. That is one of the strange things of
Lorraine—everywhere destroyed villages and everywhere well-planted
fields, almost as if planted by the ghostly throngs of heroes who lie
within. For in nearly every field there are the little clusters of black
crosses, hung with flowers or the tricolor badge, or quite bare—with the
number of men who lie within, or a date, scarcely ever a name.
We went into the village, very ancient, that owes its name, Ville des
Gerbes, to a miracle performed there by St.-Mansuy, past the completely
destroyed château of the Lambertye family, and, going up a winding
street, reached the house of Sister Julie, the heroine of August, 1914.
On every side were gutted houses and piles of mortar and stones; one
enterprising individual of the fair sex had installed against a resisting
wall Le Café des Ruines, and some soldiers and civilians were sitting on
bits of stone and masonry, drinking their _bocks_ and reading newspapers.
The convent-building is in the principal street, and it was unharmed
save for a little peppering of rifle-fire and a bit of cornice knocked
off—_par la grâce de Dieu_, as Sister Julie afterward told us. Up three
steps, and one finds oneself in a narrow, ancient stone hallway. Turning
to the right, one enters a cool, peaceful room of the convent-parlor
type—a large crucifix, lithographs of the last three popes, horsehair
furniture, white crocheted doilies, everything spotless. In a moment
Sister Julie came in. Her flashing eyes, her determined jaw, show her
always to have been a woman of parts, and yet her whole life is really
crowded into those few eventful days of the latter part of August,
when “they” entered the town. For the rest, the quiet, useful routine
of the nursing and teaching order of St. Charles de Nancy, which had
been _chassé_ at the time of the French Revolution; a few nuns managed
to remain hidden, and the order has been preserved. She is evidently a
responsive soul, for she immediately began to enact the story of the
arrival of the Germans, with a certain art in the presentment of the
tragedy of the little town, gained, no doubt, by many recitals.
The Germans came into the town on the 27th of August, after the heroic
defense of the bridge over the Mortagne by a detachment of fifty-four men
of the 2d Chasseurs from sunrise to sunset, who held up during hours the
brigade of the Bavarian General Clauss. Finally, at five o’clock the gray
hosts got through and passed in with a great sound of tramping feet and
ringing hoof, and, after the manner of invaders, _mettant le feu et le
sang dans le village_. Sister Julie thought her hour also had come. In
the room where we were sitting she had placed her thirteen wounded men,
brought in at intervals during the day. “_Mes petits_,” she called them,
and her eyes shone softly at the memory. She sent the other sisters up to
the attic, and remained alone to face the enemy and to beg that the house
be spared. She went out on the little step, not knowing what fate awaited
her, and found four immense officers on horseback, with their horses’
heads facing her.
“They thought they were Charlemagnes, immense men, with light hair and
light-blue eyes and arched noses and gallooned uniforms. I was like a
dwarf in comparison, and I am not small.” To tell the truth, she is
indeed a “muscular Christian.”
Then began the interrogatory, the ranking officer demanding of her:
“_Sie sprechen Deutsch?_”
She said to us, with a smile:
“I did speak it in my youth, but it wasn’t the moment to recall my
studies, and I didn’t answer, and we remained for a few seconds looking
at each other _comme des chiens de faïence_.[3] I so little on the
house-step, and they so tall on their big horses, and with poignards
drawn from their breast pockets, _pas le beau geste de tirer l’épée du
côté_,” she finished, disdainfully.
Finally, the silence was broken by the ranking officer, whose next words
were in French: “_Nous ne sommes pas des barbares_; you have soldiers and
weapons concealed in your house. Lead the way.”
Then the four officers dismounted and, with pistols in one hand and
poignards in the other, followed Sister Julie into the little room where
the thirteen wounded men were lying. Their helmets touched the ceiling as
they looked about them. Standing by the first bed nearest the door, an
officer pulled down the covers.
“You have arms concealed.”
“We have nothing. You will find only men lying in their blood.”
By this time Sister Julie was not only talking, but acting the scene,
indicating where the beds were, where she had stood, where the four
_chefs_ had entered, and how the eyes of the wounded men followed her.
The officers made the rounds of the beds, pulling down each stained
cover, Sister Julie following to re-cover the men, who were expecting, as
was she, the order to burn the house.
She continued: “They were Bavarians, and when I said: ‘You see, we
have nothing. Leave me my wounded, in the name of Mary most Holy,’ the
commanding officer began to look at the point of his shoe as men do when
they are embarrassed. I have seen surgeons do just that when they are in
doubt about an operation,” she added. “Then he suddenly turned without a
word and went out, followed by the other three, pistols and poignards in
hand. They passed up the street with their detachment, ‘_mettant le feu
et le sang au village; et moi, restée avec mes petits, à remercier le bon
Dieu—et de leur donner à boire_.’”
We gave our little offerings into her generous hands, and sniffed
the scent of freshly baked bread that permeated the corridor. E. M.
photographed her standing on her historic steps, and we went out into the
hot, cobble-stoned street, to the completely ruined Lambertye château,
standing in the midst of a park whose gardens were designed by Louis de
Nesle. Two large and very beautiful porphyry basins near the house were
untouched—not a nick or a scratch. On the great marble fireplace of what
had been the big central hall, now uncovered to the day, we could still
read the words:
Charles de Montmorency
Duc de . . . . mbourg,
Maréchal de France.
Afterward E. M. took some more photographs, and we sped homeward to pack
our belongings and dash into Nancy to get the eight-o’clock train from
there for Bar-le-Duc, to be ready for the high adventure of Verdun early
the next morning.
CHAPTER VII
BAR-LE-DUC
BAR-LE-DUC, _Sunday, June 17th, 2 a.m._
Scribbling in an indescribable brown-upholstered room, where one lies
on the outside of a dark and menacing bed covered by one’s own coat, a
strong odor of stable coming in at the window and a horrid black cat
wandering about. It’s no night to sleep. Two o’clock has just softly
sounded from some old bell. I didn’t hear one o’clock, I am thankful to
say. I was in a sort of trance of fatigue when we got here at eleven.
Miss P. motored us into Nancy, straight into the setting sun. My
eyes were so tired that I didn’t try to pierce the hot glaze, but
there’s a memory of running through green fields, with black crosses,
saline installations (Rosières aux Salines), manufacturing towns
(Dombasle-sur-Meurthe), and Gothic towers (St. Nicholas du Port), and
a dash through the new factory suburbs of Nancy into the delicate and
perfect loveliness of the Place Stanislas. Neither E. M. nor I had a
permit to go to Bar-le-Duc, the point of departure for Verdun, but Mrs.
P. had, so she was deputed to order dinner at the Café Stanislas, while
we went to the Hôtel de Ville to try to find the _Secrétaire Général_,
Mr. Martin, a special friend of E. M.’s, and do what I call “cutting
barbed wire.” It seemed at one time as if the high adventure of Verdun
might have to be abandoned, as the _Secrétaire Général_, who alone could
give us the necessary permission, had been called to Pont-à-Mousson to
investigate the results of a raid of German _avions_ there and at Pompey
that morning. However, when fate has made up its mind that things shall
happen, any deadlock is cleared up by the puppets themselves, literally
on a string this time, for as we were standing there in the room with the
impotent substitute of the _Secrétaire Général_, the telephone rang, and
who was it but the so desired gentleman calling up about something on
the long-distance wire. E. M. literally grabbed the receiver, explained
the situation, and he gave the necessary authority to his substitute,
and we in turn gave the oft-repeated story of our lives from the cradle
to the present moment, and finally could depart with papers in order for
dinner at the Café Stanislas. Again as we walked across the lovely Place
my soul was stirred with memories of peace, love, and the arts of peace.
I seemed to understand anew those words, “The arts of peace,” and in a
half-dream I looked up at the heavens. Again pale, charming faded tints
of blues and grays and pinks were the background for the urns and figures
of the sky-line of the pure and lovely buildings that surround it, and a
crescent moon with something untouched and virginal flung a last charm
about it all.
[Illustration: FOUNTAIN OF AMPHITRITE BY JEAN LAMOUR, PLACE STANISLAS,
NANCY]
We found Mrs. C. P. waiting at the same table at which I had sat two
nights before with the sons of Mars and the man of God. We were just
beginning our dinner when, looking out of the window, we saw something
strange and for a moment unclassifiable, in an almost impossible
juxtaposition of ideas. No one’s mind would be sufficiently mobile to
grasp what it was without blinking a bit. The great, portentous black
cross on its wings was what started the mind working properly. It was
the Taube brought down at Pont-à-Mousson that morning, being drawn on
a _camion_ through the delicious, delicate tracery of Jean Lamour’s
wrought-iron gate!
1755-1917!
We dashed out; a crowd was already gathering. A young French aviator with
a curious look in his eyes was watching it being set up. Having espied
the wings on his uniform, we asked “what and where and how” and are
“they” dead or prisoners? Some one said, “_C’est lui_,” indicating the
young man, who did not answer our questions, but continued to stand quite
still in some sort of dream or _détente_ of nerves. But a man in the
crowd said:
“He brought it down at Pont-à-Mousson, and _they_ are prisoners.” We were
standing by the statue of _Stanislas le Bienfaisant, Stanislas le Bon_,
his reign _le règne des talents, des arts et des vertus_ (these last not
as we know them in 1917), and he _was_ looking on strange things! We went
back to the café, consumed in haste and distraction the very nice little
dinner, topped off by strawberries and cream and the celebrated _macarons
des Sœurs Macarons_, and again I found myself dashing to the station,
which one thinks is near and isn’t, accompanied by my two fair friends,
all going at the same _allure militaire_ that I had taken forty-eight
hours before with the two Breton officers and the Chaplain of the 52d.
Wild dash at the station for our hand-luggage; and stampings of
safe-conduct, then a hunt for the porter, who, with an excess of zeal
(and hope), had reserved a coupé for us and put up the fateful words
_dames seules_. Now there is no such thing as _dames seules_ at the
front. Many officers were standing in the corridor, one on crutches,
so we tore the forbidding words from the windows, and the compartment
automatically, though courteously, filled.
Among them two immense, dark-bearded men from the Midi, with accents to
defeat the enemy, and a pale officer from near the Swiss frontier, as we
afterward discovered. He smiled when I said to the dark one sitting by
me, after the greetings and thanks:
“You come from Marseilles?” (He came from a little place five miles from
there.)
The officer on crutches stretched his leg with a contraction of the face
and a sigh of relief. They were all _en route_ for home, from the same
regiment, the seven precious days of _permission_ counting from the hour
they reach their homes till the hour they leave them, after months in the
field. They had fought in Belgium, on the dunes, these men of the south,
those first eighteen months, up to their waists in water, often for weeks
at a time. They found the Lorraine landscape that so soothed my soul only
fairly pretty, and spoke soft praises of _le Midi_.
They all had the strange, bold, hard, shining look about the eyes, with a
deeper suggestion of sadness, that men just returning from action have.
It is the warrior look—one kills or one is killed, one conquers or is
conquered; there is no _via media_.
The pale officer from Savoy said: “There should never be any war; _c’est
trop terrible_; but, once given the fact that war exists, all means to
victory are justifiable.” And the bright, hard look deepening on his face
made me suddenly think of Charles Martel and Charlemagne, and I knew
it was the way French warriors have looked through the ages, but, oh!
France. “_Oh doux pays!_”
At Bar-le-Duc, dating from the Merovingians, at least, we descended (our
bags passed out of the windows by the officers), and went through a dark,
silent, linden-scented town, obliged to drag our own belongings through
an interminable street, over a bridge across tree-bordered black water,
till we got to this abode, known to men by the name of Hôtel de Metz et
du Commerce. What the devils call it I don’t know; I have just chased the
black cat out, and if I don’t get some sleep I shall not get to Verdun.
There’s no linden scent coming in at my window here.
BAR-LE-DUC, _eight o’clock a.m._
Waiting in the sandy-floored dining-room of the hotel. All three of us
very cross. At dawn not only the light, but the sounds of chopping of
wood, emptying of pails, and invectives of various sorts came in at the
dreadful windows. At seven the maid mounted to know if we wanted the
water in the tea or the tea in the water. That tea “threw” them. Not a
sign of the famous Bar-le-Duc jellies that one has eaten all one’s life,
even _outre-mer_. We compared notes of furry, rumpled sheets, dented
pillows, dark coverlets, dreadful scents, and unmistakable sounds. We are
now somewhat restored by hot and very good _café au lait_, and Mrs. C.
P. is looking out of the door for signs of Mr. de Sinçay, who has just
stepped out of his motor.
CHAPTER VIII
VERDUN
_Verdun! The sound is like a clarion call. Verdun! It is shorty but
gravely harmonious. It is satisfying to the ear, it is quickening to the
soul. Verdun! It is for France the word of words; in it lies the whole
beauty of her language and of her martial glory as well._
_Who shall say it is but a fortuitous collection of letters, this word
Verdun, beautiful as a chalice, that holds the dearest blood of France?
It would not have been the same mystically, perhaps not actually, had it
been Toul or Epinal or even that other melodic sound, Belfort. Verdun!
It is the call through red days and nights, and everywhere the sons of
France rallying to it with great hurryings lest mayhap one be there
before the other, to dye with deeper color the crimson of high deeds.
Verdun, ear and tongue relinquish you regretfully._
_Verdun, glory and sorrow of France, I salute you, Verdun! Verdun!_
Night, silence, and memory turning over the events of the day.
I stopped writing this morning as a gentleman of supreme personal
distinction entered the little sandy-floored café, a gentleman who
should always be arriving in a dark-red, sixty-horse-power Panhard, or
receiving on a terrace with a castle behind him, or sitting in a library
of first editions only, in soft but gorgeous bindings. It was M. de S.,
and we shortly all got into the big auto, we three women on the broad
back seat, M. de S. in front with the military chauffeur. Even the bend
of his long back was _l’élégance suprême_. He said the motor had seen
three years of war-service, but certainly there was something unfatigued
about it as it started out through the ancient streets of Bar-le-Duc, on
the white road to the fateful fortress. The arrow on the first Verdun
sign-post gave a feeling of having shot itself into one’s heart, as well
as pointing the way.
Almost immediately we met a long convoy bringing men back from the front,
ourselves and everything else enveloped in a white plaster-of-Paris-like
cloud of dust. It seemed an endless line, with their camouflaged canvas
tops and sides, painted in great splashes of green and brown. In some
of them the men were singing the _chansons de route_ that soldiers so
love, and many of them had green branches stuck in the sides as a slight
protection against the sun and the shifting white dust. The grass and
flowers of the wayside were as if dipped in whitewash, but the road, like
all the roads of France—those veins of her body of death _and_ life—was
in excellent condition. Next we met a great line of Red Cross convoys,
and all the time we were swinging through ruined villages.
At the entrance to X. the guard stopped us with his bayonet. Our papers
being in _archi_ condition, we passed through the little village of the
_Quartier-Général_ without further hindrance. In front of the Mairie
there is a quaint old fountain with its statue of three women holding up
a _motif_ of flowers in a basket; near by there is an old hostelry, _Le
Raisin Blanc_, in front of which soldiers were sitting, drinking their
_bocks_ and reading newspapers. Turning out again on the white road, we
pass settlements of Red Cross barracks and munition parks, looking for
all the world like mining camps in Western towns at home.
We arrived at Dugny at ten o’clock and descended to look about for a
suitable place for the installing of a canteen, which was partly our
reason for being where we were. There is an old country house in the
middle of the little town, with a coat of arms above the door and lions
crouching on its gates; behind is a lovely ancient park with linden and
elder trees in full blossom, and under them quiet, shady walks. It is
used as an ambulance station, and convalescing men were sitting or lying
about on the ground. We met the _médecin-chef_, who, however, like all
doctors, didn’t care twopence for well soldiers, and was but platonically
interested in the canteen matter—just as the military count out the sick
and wounded soldiers. It’s all in the point of view.
As we stood talking a German aeroplane flew high above Dugny outlined in
a perfect sky. Little white clouds of shrapnel from the vertical guns
began to burst about it in the clear blue, and there was a louder sound
of cannonading as the _avion_ disappeared in some far and upper ether. E.
M.’s brother had been once stationed here for months, and she told the
story of his meeting unexpectedly his cousin Casimir. They were going
different ways with different detachments, and they “held up the war”
while they embraced! Smart officers, ahorse and afoot, convoys going to
the trenches with rations, great carts full of bread, and ambulating
soup-kitchens filled the little street. Verdun was but seven kilometers
distant, and the road lay straight before us as we left Dugny. On the
horizon the outline of the citadel and the towers of the cathedral
showed against the sky. Another endless convoy of ambulances and
_camions_ enveloped us in a choking white dust. This is the lining of the
front, and it is quite easy to see where the war billions go.
We passed into Verdun under the Porte de France, and then went
immediately up to the citadel through the old drawbridge, all dating from
the days of Louis XIV and Vauban, and it was at Verdun that the sons of
Louis the Debonair met to divide the empire of Charlemagne.[4]
We got out by the demolished barracks, and M. de S. went to pay his
respects to the colonel, who was expecting him. As I descended I saw at
my feet a beautiful tiny bird’s nest, which I picked up with a clutching
at the heart. The birds went away that first terrible spring of 1916, the
colonel afterward told me, but they had come back in great numbers in
1917, and were everywhere building their nests, in spite of the continual
bombardments. The citadel was a desolate mass of mortar, stones, rusty
barbed-wire entanglements, blackened and broken tree stumps, but
everywhere, too, were quantities of undiscourageable new green.
We met a young doctor coming across the Place, and fell into conversation
with him. He had been at the front since the beginning, and he was
sad-eyed in spite of his youth. When I spoke of the near-by tenth-century
tower toppling and half-demolished, all that was left of the ancient
church, and the celebrated abbey of Saint-Vannes, and said what a pity
it was that the beautiful things of the old days had to go, he answered,
with a gesture of complete indifference:
“_Qu’est-ce que celà fait? A nous qui restons de faire de nouvelles
choses, et mieux, que n’en out fait nos aïeux._ All the comrades I loved
in the beginning are gone—and what remains, or perishes, of brick and
mortar is of little account beside the sum of living things that is lost.”
Just at this moment M. de S. appeared with the colonel, and the young
philosopher touched his cap. We were then introduced to Colonel Dehaye,
a brilliant officer and delightful _homme du monde_, loving the arts of
peace, as I afterward discovered, as well as practising those of war.
In his hands now lie the destinies of Verdun. He presented us each then
and there with the famous medal of Verdun and an accompanying paper with
his signature, and furthermore gave us an invitation to lunch, which we
accepted with delight after delicate references to sandwiches and wine in
the motor. We spent half an hour walking about the citadel, and he showed
us the most recent damage—of yesterday—when a very especially precise aim
of the Germans had destroyed nearly everything that had been left.
Then we descended really into the bowels of the earth, cemented,
white-tiled, electric-lighted, artificially aired bowels, to the very
depths of the great fortress. To get to the mess-room of the colonel and
his staff we had to pass through a long room where perhaps a hundred
officers were sitting at dinner. There was something deeply impressive
about the dim, long, low length of it, and those groups of men prepared
for battle. Thoughts of Knights Templar and Crusaders came to me, and
there seemed something of consecration about it all. Behind the tables on
the walls were hung helmets and arms.
[Illustration]
[Illustration]
A young officer said to me once, “We don’t tell _all_ our stories there
and we don’t often laugh very loud.” From it we got into the small,
well-lighted mess-room, where kings and presidents and premiers and
generalissime, too, have dined in the past few months.
The staff and Paul Renouard, the painter, were waiting, and we sat down
immediately to an excellent dinner, though the colonel said it was
entirely _à l’improviste_. There were flowers on the table, too, but
these I did suspect were specially for us. The colonel remarked, with the
_hors-d’œuvre_, that he would take us to the battle-field after dinner,
to the famous Fort de Souville, and the repast, instead of a meal, became
the prelude to a supreme climax. The arrival of General Pershing was the
first subject of conversation, accompanied by the most courteous and
appreciative remarks; one of the officers told of the first day when the
Stars and Stripes had appeared in the field with the other flags, and
of the cheers that went up. And they drank to the United States, and we
drank to France; they praised the work of women, and spoke of the immense
moral and practical aid of the entry into the war of the United States.
Whether it would shorten the conflict was another question. To the
captain sitting opposite I said:
“If the soul of the war has a special dwelling-place it is Verdun,”
and told him how the thought of America turned about it those days of
February and March of 1916. “But,” I added, “there was a time when I
thought they might get through.”
The commandant answered quickly from the other end of the table: “Ah,
madame, there was a time when we thought they might get through, _mais
‘ils n’ont pas passé—ils ne passeront pas.’_”
And then I quoted the beautiful phrase of the _Commentaires de Polybe_:[5]
“_Et Verdun y en ruines, avec ses soldats, debouts, toujours dans la
tempête, comme il n’y en a jamais eu de plus beaux ... avec Nivelle,
et avec Pétain, avec l’image de Raynal qui vient roder la nuit dans
les décombres de Vaux et avec le paraphe de Castelnau sur cet autre
Couronné...._”
We ended a most pleasant repast, with its great under throb, by coffee
and tilleul and a little glass of cassis (black-currant cordial), the
native liqueur.
Then, on into a room where we pulled up our coat-collars so no white
would show, slung the bags containing the gas-masks across our chests,
left our flowers, parasols, and other impedimenta, and went out through
the long, dim now empty hall to get into the autos. We waited half an
hour for ours, which had performed the seemingly impossible feat of
getting lost in Verdun. The officers began to get impatient, and M. de S.
to make bitter remarks about his chauffeur; the colonel to walk up and
down. The commandant said, “_Du calme_,” and the colonel answered that
only sous-lieutenants _savent avoir du calme_. “_Ils sont étonnants_,”
said another officer with four stripes on his arm.
Finally our man appeared, with a story no one listened to, Colonel Dehaye
getting in with us, the other officers leading the way in his auto.
It was two o’clock, and a white, burning sun was shining on a white,
burning earth as we drove through the crumbling streets, through houses
in every stage of ruin, to the great plain of La Woèvre, toward the
dreadful, scarred battle-field, where the chariot of God rides the ridges.
Verdun is built to reinforce the natural rampart of the Côtes de Meuse,
to bar the passage of the river’s valley, and cover the Argonne.
As we passed out of the town on one side was a cemetery where sleep
four thousand, on another side sleep twenty thousand—and these are but
a handful to the numbers that lie everywhere in the white, scarred
earth around Verdun. The colonel named various battered places as we
passed—Fleury, Tavannes, etc., and finally we climbed a steep hillside
near the celebrated Fort de Souville, where we left the motors. The
abomination of desolation over which we passed once had been a green,
smiling, wooded, gently rolling hillside. The village of Tavannes was
but a spot of white horror, even with the ground. The hills of Douaumont
and Thiaumont had on their blanched sides only a few blackened stumps of
trees that will not leaf again. To the left as we looked about were the
fateful summits of Le Mort Homme and Hill 304 with a white ribbon of road
running between. We walked along, stumbling over heaps of water-bottles,
haversacks, helmets, cartridge-belts, belonging alike to the invader
and the invaded—bones, skulls, rusty rolls of barbed wire, remains of
_obus_, and mixed with what lies in the earth of fair and brave and dear
are myriads of unexploded shells. The country round Verdun, despite the
rich blood that could render it so fertile, can’t be cultivated for years
on account of the vast quantities of shells buried in it. A man pulls a
piece of wire, and he loses his hand, another tries to clear away bits of
something round, and his head is blown off. One of the officers told us
of societies for the demineralization of battle-fields, but the work is
slow and costly.
Yet a winter’s snows had lain upon it all and spring had breathed over
it since the first awful combats of February, 1916. I knew suddenly some
complete “heartbreak over fallen things” as I stumbled, and, looking
down, saw at my feet a helmet, and by it a skull with insects crawling in
and out the eyes, and a broken gun-stock.
Great and gorgeous patches of scarlet poppies in a profusion never seen
before splash themselves like something else red against the white earth,
or fill great shell hollows and spill and slop over the fields....
The Germans had been shelling a near-by 75 battery that very morning, and
fresh bits of _warm_ shrapnel were lying all about as we twisted in and
out of the _boyaux_. I brought away but a small bit with me, having early
discovered that a small piece is as good a reminder as a big bit, and
much easier to carry. We passed the grave of a soldier buried where he
had fallen, a few hours before. His shallow grave, with its little cross,
was running _red_, but he was mayhap already in his Father’s house of
many mansions.
In many places under the feet scarcely buried bodies gave an elastic
sensation....
We first visited the emplacement of a great gun worked by the most
complicated electric machinery, something that seemed built as strongly
as the Pyramids, revolving on its great axis, at a touch fulfilling that
which it was cast into being to perform. When we came out, we climbed
some last white scarred heights that the colonel called “_Les Pyrénées_,”
and there, stretched out, was the whole great and fateful panorama of
Verdun—“_par où ils n’ont pas passé_.” I thought of the men I had known
who had been engaged in those dreadful attacks, whose mothers and wives
had looked upon them again, and of others still whose wives and mothers
would behold them no more. And I had again a breaking of the heart over
the vast tangle, and cried within myself, “Shall all the world be a
valley of dry bones?”
[Illustration: OUR PARTY ON THE BATTLE-FIELD AT VERDUN, JUNE 17, 1917]
[Illustration: IN THE BOYAUX, VERDUN, JUNE 17, 1917]
Then we hid ourselves in some _boyaux_ well out of sight, for we were
nearing a camouflaged battery, two of whose guns had been silenced
that very morning. In dark woods over beyond Tavannes the Germans were
intrenched, and their shells were also falling thickly over Douaumont and
Thiaumont. It was the front indeed. It was at Tavannes that in a dreadful
moment, in a moment such as can happen anywhere, artillery fire had
been trained on thousands of men who were rushing to the top in a great
charge. And yet I kept thinking of the words of a dead hero, “Nothing but
good can befall the soldier, so he plays his part well.”[6]
At that moment the enemy began to send an unwonted number of shells,
which were exploding just behind Thiaumont, so the colonel told the
captain of artillery—who had joined our party at the gun emplacement—to
answer, and he climbed down a steep decline to his masked battery. In a
few minutes, as we lay hidden in the _boyau_, twenty discharges sounded;
but shells that go up, come down, and on the other side of the hill we
were watching, who shall say what agony? I am so constituted that I
cannot think of the passage of any soul into the next life other than
with awe.
We then descended into the Fort of Souville, down 850 feet, where men
live and breathe and have their being in dimly lighted, damp, narrow
spaces. But it seemed temporarily like heaven to be out of the glare and
the heat. Preceded by lanterns, an officer in front of each one of us, we
crept or felt our way up and down, stumbling through vault-like passages,
where we would come upon men lying asleep in damp, dim places, or writing
by the light of lanterns, or preparing meals in their kitchen, or waiting
at the little dispensary, and then we stumbled up again into the heat,
reverberating from the white hills.
On the way back we passed a little chapel installed in an old cemented
dugout. On the altar were many flowers. I bent and peered into the
dimness, and, as I knelt, it seemed to me that never had I so understood
the words _Introibo ad Altare Dei_. I thought of the Lamb of God, and
martyrs new and old, and the catacombs and the primitive Church.... Again
men in stress were worshiping in the bowels of the earth.
We were photographed against a particularly sinister group of blackened
trees, and we picked up some helmets and bits of _obus_. As I write, the
_couronne_ of one, quite evenly exploded, lies on the little table by my
side.
Just before getting into town the colonel ordered the motor to stop, and
we got out, and, walking through a field of deep, waving grass, found
ourselves in the largest of the cemeteries with its long, even lines of
broad graves where lie, in a last co-mingling, the brothers of France,
and I repeated to myself in a quiver of feeling, “_Scio quod Redemptor
meus vivit et in novissime die resurrecturus sum et in carne mea videbo
Deum Salvatorum meum_.”
All was in beautiful order. The crosses bore sometimes a name, but
oftener a number only: _140 soldats_, or _85 soldats_. The round tricolor
badge hung from every cross. There were a few graves of officers who
could be identified, their bodies having been brought in by friends or
faithful orderlies. How anything could live on those fire-swept hills is
the wonder, not that any one died. Suddenly, again, a great sadness fell
upon me, and as the colonel pointed out the grave of an especially dear
comrade—Colonel Dubois, I think his name was—dead in some heroic manner,
I could look no more.
We finally got back into the green freshness of Verdun, whose normal
state, I see, is to be vine-bowered, tree-shaded, grass-carpeted. After
the scarred and blazing battle-field, and in spite of the ruined streets,
the roofless houses, I had a feeling of refreshment, coming from those
heights where “all the round world is indeed a sepulcher” ... and near
the station is the monument to the heroes fallen at Verdun, in 1870.
Of the Cercle Militaire on the right bank of the Meuse little is left
except the walls, but it is no loss architecturally, and _messieurs les
officiers_ are otherwise engaged. The banks of the Meuse are a pitiful
sight. The old houses that reach over the water are roofless, bits of
mattress hang from broken windows, and heaps of mortar are falling
into the river. The great Porte Chaussée of the fifteenth century,
with its two huge gray towers, is unharmed. We stopped at the theater
for a moment. A big shell last month had made a sort of pudding of it.
We crept in through a large aperture, to find the orchestra stalls
precipitated onto the stage, and the loges sagging, ready to fall. We
then went up into the old, high part of the town, and Colonel Dehaye,
a true lover of the arts, in sadness showed us the cathedral and the
charming old buildings that surround it. The huge church constructed
according to Germanic traditions has two equal transepts, with high and
beautiful vaulting, which is now so damaged that the roof at any time may
fall. Inside were masses of débris, and nothing was left of the famous
stained-glass windows except powdery bits of color on the floor. The
colonel had rescued some old Spanish Stations of the Cross, and had put
in safety a few other portable things of value. We passed out through
the sacristy, which was a scene of disorder, bits of vestment, torn
altar-cloths, and books lying about on the floor.
“But,” I said, “the Germans didn’t get here?”
“Oh,” answered one of the officers, with a smile, “_ce sont nos bons
français_.”
Then we descended into the crypt, the remains of the church that Pope
Eugene III built in the twelfth century. Leading down to it is an old
winding stair, with a delicious eighteenth-century wrought-iron railing.
An artist in a white blouse, sent to restore some frescoes dating
from the twelfth century, was rescuing from too complete destruction
a beautiful figure of Christ with something stern and immutable in
His look, reminding me of the Christ in the church of San Cosmo and
San Damiano in the Roman Forum. We then went into the cloisters, with
lovely and diverse _motifs_ on their vaultings, very much damaged in
parts, a big shell having landed in the courtyard which they inclose. M.
Renouard had stationed himself there with his easel, before a beautiful
arrangement of trees and grass and enchanting old statues on mossy
pedestals. In front of him was a great heap of fallen masonry, and a
beautiful bit of toppling vaulting that the colonel had had propped up by
beams, though he said: “_Demain ou après-demain cela ne sera plus_—it’s
all at the mercy of a shot.” A sculptured Holy Family, somewhat the worse
for _war_, is plastered into one side, dating from the fourteenth century.
From there we passed into what had been a seminary until 1914, and one
of the rooms with rows of _lavabos_ (not of the eighteenth century, as
the colonel observed) looked out on the great plain of La Woèvre, and
again the fateful panorama was unrolled before us. In what had been a
council-room there was an old choir high up over the door, with a little
balcony giving a Spanish effect.
Coming out, at the north side of the church, an ancient Romanesque statue
of Adam and Eve on the outer hemicycle of the apse and some little
windows, also of pure Romanesque, were pointed out to us. In the ground
underneath the statue of Adam and Eve a great shell had opened up a Roman
foundation and walls, formed of immense square blocks of stone, hidden
during ages.
Near the church is the great Cour d’Honneur, once the house of the
bishop, a very perfect example of Louis XIV, making me think of
Versailles; but it, too, has received many a blow in its lovely heart.
One longed so to bandage up all those wounds of war, preserve in being
those lovelinesses of another age.
We then visited the house of Pope Julius II (I forget what he was doing
at Verdun), which, fortunately, has not suffered much up to now, though
it, too, is at the mercy of a shot—to-night, to-morrow, or the next day.
It would make a perfect museum, with its beautiful old door, bearing
inscription and date, through which one passes into a tiny V-shaped court
with a flowering linden-tree, and there are two romantic winding stone
stairways, with something Boccaccioesque about them, leading to the upper
stories.
Though it wasn’t an occasion in which to think how one felt, the flesh
_was_ weary by this time, and we went gladly back to the colonel’s
mess-room, where we had tea, or rather, to be exact, some ice-cold
champagne _coupé d’eau_, and some sort of madeleine, a specialty of
Verdun, which gave us the little flip-up that we needed. Another
specialty of Verdun is the _dragées_ (hard, sugared almonds), but the
factory, so one of the officers said, had been destroyed the year before
in one of the bombardments. Generations of tourists having broken their
teeth on them, however, we wasted no regrets.
The colonel begged us to stay for dinner, and the cinematograph
representation after, but we were obliged to regretfully decline, as
we had to pay our respects to the general at Y——, to whose courtesy M.
de S. owed the safe-conducts to Verdun. As we passed by we looked into
the long, narrow hall where the representations are given, the sight of
which the colonel offered as further inducement. It would have ennobled
for me forever that most boresome of modern things, had I assisted at one
underneath the citadel of Verdun. The hall was hung with flags of the
Allies. With sudden tears I saluted, ours waving among them.
We thanked a thousand times the colonel and his group of officers
standing by the auto at the entrance to the subterranean passage, and
though I had a consciousness of the uncertainty of their lives, I thought
again “Nothing but good can befall the soldier, so he plays his part
well.”
Now comes to mind a conversation I had before I ever dreamed of going
to Verdun, when I talked for three hours of battles and scars with a
young hero wounded on Hill 304, June 9, 1916. He is a flashing-eyed,
straight-featured, tall, slim-waisted young hero who knows what it is to
have made, and with astounding ease, the sacrifice of the life that he
loves so, and drinks in full bumpers. And this is part of what we said,
one of a thousand, of ten thousand, of a hundred thousand happenings, of
which Verdun is the golden frame:
De G.—“There was something hanging about Verdun; ‘_Ils ne
passeront pas, et ils ne sont pas passés_.’ If the enemy could
have but known how thinly, poorly, in so many places it was
defended! It was seemingly the will of Heaven rather than the
strength of mortals that they were not to pass, not man, not
artillery, but the high destiny of nations.
“When I lay during those hours at the _poste d’observation_
on Hill 304, in front of the French army, signaling ‘shell
square 17,’ or 16, or whatever it might be, I could see clearly
the havoc in the German ranks as the shells would fall. Great
groups of men would be blown to atoms and new formations would
press in to take their place. The whole horror was there before
me, mapped out in numbered squares.
“I dismissed all my men except my orderly of the fourth
Zouaves, who wouldn’t have gone, anyway. It was a work I
could do alone, lying with a sand-bag against my head, my
field-glasses in my hand, and before me my field map held down
by four sticks. We lay there just under the crest of the hill
from two o’clock in the morning until the next afternoon,
watching seven attacks. Toward three o’clock I was wounded, and
I knew it was only a question of time and chance when I would
lie like the dead man at my side, that Dueso had been pressing
his feet against, and whose place I had been sent to take.
Almost at the same moment I caught sight of Dueso spinning
around, holding his elbows to his side, and crying out: ‘_Nom
de Dieu! Nom de Dieu!_ I’ve got it in the arm!’—but trying with
the other hand to undo his _cravate_.
“Two jets of blood were now spurting like two faucets from
my leg, the big artery was cut. _Ça y est._ In five minutes
I’ll be dead, I thought, and there came a fainting away and a
thinking not on God, but on still untasted joys of the flesh
and life—not even on my mother’s grief; and waking up after
years, it seemed, and calling for water, and Dueso bending
over me, after a frantic twisting at his _cravate_, and a
frantic pulling and tightening of it about my leg, with one
hand and his teeth, and then a pleasant, happy fainting away. A
delicious sensation of ease invaded me, and I said to myself,
‘_Ce n’est que ça, mourir?_’ (‘Is death only this?’) I have
seen so many men die, and whatever their agonies, if long or
short, minutes or hours or days, as it may happen, just before
dying something gentle and simple takes place.”
E. O’S.—“The inevitable dust to dust, the natural law
fulfilling itself?”
De G.—“It may be. This _rictus de la mort_, I haven’t seen it,
though I have heard men screaming and cursing and praying in
the trenches as they got their blow, and watched their agonies,
but before death something else, softer, always happens. Unless
it comes too suddenly. I remember once being on the dunes in
Belgium, and against the yellow sand men were sitting in red
trousers and _chechias_, and one was telling a tale of laughter
when a shell burst. In a moment the blood of his brains was
flowing red upon the yellow sand, and then it got blue, and
then it sank and was no more, like the laughing man himself
from whom it flowed, and his tale of laughter.... About nine
o’clock we were brought in. Dueso had been lying with his head
under my armpit, and his feet still on the dead man, and we
would both come out of a faint from time to time and ask for
water.
“Dueso! ah, Dueso! for a human being _il est plus chic que
moi_. He had been in jail for various reasons not very _chic_,
and I was warned against him when I took him for my orderly,
but to him I owe my life. Now he is in Salonique, _cité à
l’armée_, knows how to live in those regions, hard as nails,
originally from Tunis; a dark man, with dark mustache and very
big white teeth.”
E. O’S.—“One thinks so often how little the common soldier,
defending honors and riches that he doesn’t share, has to gain.
There is nothing for him, in fact, except to step out into
anonymous death; at a given moment to make the sacrifice of his
life, or his eyes or his limbs, knowing nothing of war except
its horror, rarely any glory, sometimes a mention or a medal,
oftener not. But,” I continued, after we had sat silent for a
while, “who will carry it all on? Few like yourself are left,
and it is not enough. France is bleeding white—France, whose
sons are heroes, not fathers!”
De G.—“What does it matter if we do go? There are the little
ones coming on. It will be like something out of which a whole
piece has been cut and the ends must be sewed together. The
very old, and the very young, the children, are these ends. We
shall have done what we were born to do. This is the immortal
history of France that we have made, her _chant du cygne_, too,
the most beautiful of her epics and it is enough to have lived
for that. To others the carrying on of the generations....”
A pale rose light begins to come in at the window, but sleep cometh not.
Fortunately, if need be, I can do without it, but I must close my eyes
now. He, too, watching over Israel, slumbers not nor sleeps....
CHAPTER IX
CHÂLONS.—CHÂTEAU DE JEAN D’HEURS.—REVIGNY, THE “LINING” OF THE FRONT
Each, on comparing notes, was found to have spent the night on the
outside of the bed. One of the party, who naturally wishes to remain
anonymous, found a _cafard_, the classic cockroach, in her ear toward
dawn, and Aurora was welcomed by no hymn of praise from her.
Now we are sitting drinking lemonade on the pavement in front of the
abode of iniquity. We have been twice through the hot town, which
consists of a modern town around the station, and a picturesque old one
on a hill at the back, to find the proper authorities for the stamping
of our papers with the military _permis_ to go to the château of Jean
d’Heurs, belonging to Madame Achille Fould, for luncheon. We caught the
major by a hair’s breadth; he was disappearing around the corner by the
military _commandature_ on his bicycle. Then to the _préfecture_ for
permission to telephone to Châlons for rooms that night; on returning,
found Miss M. and Miss N. awaiting us. They have been working at the
“Foyer des Alliés” near the station. They want now to get a much-needed
canteen in shape at Châlons, and are asking us to help. The word from the
colonel of Verdun is an “open sesame,” and we will investigate _en route_
to Paris.
CHÂLONS-SUR-MARNE, _10 o’clock p.m._
It’s been as long as to Tipperary since the scrawl at Bar-le-Duc.
At 11.30 we got into the comfortable motor Madame Fould sent to bring
us to Jean d’Heurs’ for lunch. It’s a beautiful old château of the
eighteenth century, given by Napoleon to the Maréchal Oudinot, and in
the Fould family since those days, though not lived in until the war
by the present generation. It made us feel quite like “folks” as a
side-whiskered, highly respectable, rather aged majordomo received us and
led us up a broad stairway and showed us into a big library where Madame
Fould, her seven _infirmières_, and a young officer were waiting. After
that, a perfect lunch in the way of each thing being of the freshest and
most delicate and tasting of itself. The young officer was recovering
from a wound received at Verdun last September, followed by a trepanning,
evidently highly successful, as, in addition to all his senses, he had a
thick mat of hair.
The library, to which we returned for coffee, was lined with the most
precious books in the most precious bindings, one whole side containing
first editions only from Voltaire and J.-J. Rousseau to Châteaubriand and
Taine. And I ran my fingers with such a friendly feeling over some soft
and lustrous bindings.
The vast spaces of the château are now made into wards, and relays of
several hundred men are cared for in them. White hospital beds are pushed
against elaborately frescoed walls and Empire gildings. Everything in
spotless order. Afterward we went out into the beautiful old park, where
convalescent men were sitting or lying about under the great trees. The
park is now closed to visitors, the fair sex from neighboring villages
having been too generous in their offerings on the altar of Priapus. It’s
a lovely spot, and Madame Fould has had her hospital going since the
beginning of the war.
At two o’clock we motored into Revigny, accompanied by the handsome
young trepanned officer, who deposited us at the military headquarters
for the stamping of our safe-conducts. Mrs. C. P., who can put her head
through a stone wall, without injuring it, as neatly as any one I ever
saw, proceeded to perform the feat, with the result that the major in
command gave us all permission for the next _étape_, Châlons. Then Mrs.
C. P.’s young son, serving with the American Ambulance, met us, motoring
over from Z——; a friend came with him, originally from Swarthmore,
Pennsylvania, rather discouraged at the quiet of the _secteur_ in which
he was stationed. But all he has to do is to wait. Everybody at the front
eventually gets what’s “coming to him.” Mrs. C. P.’s boy had on his
_Croix de Guerre_, got for fearless ambulance work at Verdun during one
of the big attacks.
Revigny seen from the inside is a hole of holes—but through it defile
continually the blue-clad men of France. Twelve thousand had already
passed through that day. In the _carrefour_ of the road by the station
is a ceaseless line of convoys coming from or going to Verdun. This once
banal little village has come to have something symbolic about it, though
looking, as one passes by, like dozens of other destroyed villages. But
inside it is the lining of the war—that thing of dust, fatigue, thirst,
hunger, sadness, fear, despondence, hopelessness, running up and down the
gamut of spiritual and physical miseries. “Theirs not to reason why.” ...
The English canteen is the only bright spot in the whole place. Those
sad-eyed men, like us, love and regret, and are beloved and regretted;
women have let them go in fear and dread; and all over Europe it is the
same, east, west, north, and south—all they love they lay down at the
word of command. I watched for an hour the blue stream of heavily laden
men as they passed in, coming up to the counter with their battered
quart cups, drinking their coffee standing, in haste, that the comrade
following might be sure to get his drink, the sweat dripping from their
faces. Fifteen minutes later a great thunder-storm broke, and thousands
of sad-eyed men were huddled together, shelterless, like sheep, suddenly
soaked; the hateful dust became the still more hateful mud. I left it all
in complete desolation of spirit, and wondering, Is God in His heaven?
Revigny was worse to my spiritual sense almost than the
battle-field—there all was consummated. Here the men are still passing up
to sacrifice.
CHAPTER X
MONT FRENET.—LA CHAMPAGNE POUILLEUSE.—THE RETURN
CHÂLONS, _10 p.m._
We dashed into the train at Revigny during the hail-storm, an infernal
kind that didn’t cool the air, and arrived at Châlons at six o’clock.
No cabs, at least none for us, so we begged two Quaker women with the
red-and-white star in the little black triangle on their sleeves, who
were getting into the only visible conveyance, to take our luggage and
deposit it for us at the Hôtel de la Haute Mère Dieu, whose name so
appealed to me. We paid our share of the cab, and all and everything
departed, we on foot. Châlons seems quite without character as one passes
through the streets, though I caught sight of several old churches and,
alone, would have lingered on the busy bridge that spans the Marne.
We got to the Hôtel de la Haute Mère Dieu and interviewed the female
keeper of that special paradise, who said she had nothing for us, had
received no telephone message from the _préfet_ at Bar-le-Duc or any
other _préfet_ from any other place. Then Mrs. C. P.—the Verdun day
and the Bar-le-Duc nights having somewhat stretched our nerves—began
to get annoyed; the desk-lady finally asked us, did we belong to the
Westinghouse Commission, which we didn’t. We then betook ourselves
to the streets. Nothing at the Hôtel d’Angleterre, nothing at the
Hôtel-Restaurant du Renard. We finally asked a large, beady-eyed,
determined-looking female, standing at a door, if she had accommodations
or knew of any one who had. She proved to be the _sage-femme_ of the
quarter and eyed us askance.
Just then appeared a very _comme il faut_, pretty young woman with an
expression at once so charming and so modest that we did not hesitate to
accost her and tell her of our plight—that it looked as if we should be
passing the night _à la belle étoile_ if some one didn’t do something for
us. She hesitated, looked at us, hesitated again. Smashed down on her
head at a smart angle was the identical hat that Mrs. C. P. was wearing,
blue with a twisting of gray, from Reboux. I think that hat crystallized
things, for she ended by saying, sweetly:
“I have a room that I sometimes offer to friends; only,” she added,
“there is a horrible stairway leading to it.”
We turned our backs on the _sage-femme_, doubtless naturally good,
but soured by the constant witnessing of the arrival on the scene of
apparently superfluous human beings (I say “apparently,” for who shall
decide which souls are precious?), and followed those neatly clad, small
feet and slim ankles up a winding stairway that might have been of any
epoch—except the nineteenth or twentieth century, and found ourselves
in a charming little interior, spotlessly clean. “_C’est à votre
disposition_,” she said, and then a servant appeared, a refugee from
Tahure, as we afterward learned, a garrulous refugee. I beat my breast
later on when I heard the loud bassoon, telling Mrs. C. P. that I even
hated refugees and that that one would have, if possible, to contain her
tale till I had had a night’s sleep. At the moment I hated her with all
the unreasoning hatred of the beneficiary for the benefactor.
Well, to make a long story short, closets were opened, the freshest
of embroidered linen sheets, the largest of towels, were got out, and
were left to us in the handsomest of ways _with_ the refugee, the owner
departing to her country house. The refugee managed to get in part of the
story of her life and she brought hot water; she was from Tahure and left
on the run with an aged husband, just before the entry of the enemy.
Then we looked about the pleasant room. The first object I espied
was a pair of manly brown kid gloves, the next a blue gas-mask bag,
and a cigarette-case, with a crest, lying near a volume of Alfred de
Vigny. (Can’t you see them reading it together?) And there was such a
comfortable _chaise-longue_ for him to rest on, and an expensive, very
“comfy” rug and many cushions. As the refugee from Tahure proceeded to
make up the bed and sofa she interspersed the story of _her_ life with
remarks concerning her mistress, like: “_Allez, elles ne sont pas toutes
comme cela, elle a un cœur d’or_”; “_Moi, qui vous le dis, elle n’a pas
une mauvaise pensée_.”
At this juncture we delicately asked, But where does she _live_?
“Oh, he has given her a little château in the environs.” This was a
convenient town apartment with the one big room giving on the Place de
la République; at the back a dining-room and little kitchen. Having
removed the dust of travel, hot water being produced in a jiffy from the
gas-stove on the kitchen range, we descended to take dinner at one of the
restaurants near by. We were so tired about this time that the decalogue
wasn’t much to us, neither the Law nor the Prophets, but be it remembered
of us, we _did_ love our neighbor as ourselves.
When we came back after supper the sofa was spread with large, crisp,
spotless linen sheets, the bed the same, the refugee gone, and here
we are in this clean, low-ceilinged room with eighteenth-century
wood-panelings and charming door-handles of the same period. There is a
crayon of the present tenant reflecting her sweet and candid expression
over the mantelpiece, on which are two Dresden-china figures and a small
white-marble “Young Bacchus”; furthermore an etching by Hellu of the
Duchess of Marlborough, which made one feel quite poised. In fact, there
is nothing _demi_ about it.
The Place de la République is full of soldiers coming and going, and
there are several ambulances of the Scottish Ambulance Corps drawn up
by a big fountain representing three women (typifying the Marne, the
Moselle, and the Agne). Over the soft, warm night is borne the low boom
of cannon. The guard has just called out: “_Faites attention! Lumière au
troisième étage_”—so I must stop.
_Tuesday, 9.30 a.m._
Sitting in the Place de la République on chairs borrowed from a little
lace-shop, and waiting for the cab to come to take us to General Goïgoux,
to whom Madame Fould had given us a letter of introduction. Just
opposite is the inhospitable Hôtel de la Haute Mère Dieu, and I have
been telling Mrs. C. P., who has gone to buy some fruit, of the story of
Voltaire and Madame du Châtelet passing through Châlons _en route_ from
Versailles to Lunéville. At Châlons Madame du Châtelet thought she’d like
to have a bouillon at the Hôtel de la Cloche d’Or, where they stopped
to change horses. (It still exists and is the only one we didn’t try
last night.) It was brought them to their carriage by the _aubergiste_
herself, who had learned from the indiscreet postilion the identity of
the illustrious travelers. When Longchamp, the valet of Voltaire, asks
to pay, she firmly demands a louis d’or for the bouillon. “La divine
Emilie” protests, the woman insists that at her hotel the “price of an
egg, a bouillon, or a dinner is a louis”; then Voltaire gets out and
tries by amiable processes to explain that in no country in the world
did a bouillon ever cost a louis; more cries and reproaches; a crowd
gathers; Voltaire, strong in his right, doesn’t want to give way. Madame
du Châtelet points out the gathering crowd, now quite noisy. Finally
they pay, Voltaire commending to all the devils the hospitable town of
Châlons-sur-Marne; they depart to the accompaniment of the gibes of the
amiable inhabitants. It may be _autre temps_, but not _autres mœurs_;
it’s just like the woman at the desk at the Hôtel de la Haute Mère Dieu,
who wouldn’t take us in, in any sense, last night.
The most awful-looking cab has just drawn up in front of “our” house, and
a smart American ambulance officer is trying to get in.
IN THE TRAIN EN ROUTE FOR PARIS.
The first quiet breath I have drawn, and very comfortable it is to sink
into the broad seats, out of the glare of the setting sun, and feel there
is nothing to inspect save the flying aspect of nature for the next three
hours.
The handsome officer this morning proved to be Mr. B., and he didn’t get
that cab, which, however, we promised to send back to him once we were
deposited at the general’s headquarters.
General Goïgoux is most agreeable. When he asked us where we were lodged,
we threw a stone at the Hôtel de la Haute Mère Dieu and told him of our
Good Samaritan. He gave a grin, if generals are supposed to grin, when
we said that we had not disturbed her to any great extent, as she had,
in addition, a country place where she really lived. We then told him of
our meeting with Miss N. and Miss M., who had asked us to investigate
the canteen prospects on our way back to Paris. The installing of one
has long been the idea of General Goïgoux, who loves his _poilus_, and
he immediately rang the bell on his table—among his books was a German
Baedeker of eastern France—and in a moment a captain with a sad face and
a black band on his arm appeared, and we departed in a huge military auto
to the station to investigate the great railway shed that the general has
requisitioned for canteen purposes.
Going through the streets, we were held up for a moment by a detachment
of prisoners in various uniforms and from various regiments, but all with
P.G. (_prisonnier de guerre_) marked in large letters on their backs.
A tall, upstanding set with ringing tread, not at all unhappy-looking,
despite a something set about their expression, seemingly in very good
physical condition.
Statues of the top-hatted, frock-coated political men of
nineteenth-century France have banalized the public places of every town
in the _doux pays_. They simply can’t compete with the saints and kings
and warriors of the artistic periods—it’s too bad they have tried.
At 12.30 we got back to our pleasant quarters, to find our hostess there,
in a very smart dark-blue serge dress from Jeanne Hallé. In addition to
the château, the shop down-stairs, called “Aux Alliés,” where all sorts
of edible delicacies are sold, belongs to her together with a tall and
beautiful red-haired Frenchwoman. This is her up-stairs resting-place
during the day. We sank on bed and sofa, exhausted by the heat, the visit
to the station to inspect the canteen facilities, which seemed most
promising, visits to two churches, and luncheon in the crowded Restaurant
du Renard. In the church of St.-Alpin white-bloused experts were busy
removing the beautiful sixteenth-century stained-glass windows. “If
’twere done, ’twere well ’twere done quickly.” That continued booming of
guns made one realize at once their fragility and their beauty.
Shortly after, a handsome young officer came in, a gentleman, and
speaking beautiful English. It wasn’t “he,” however, but a friend of
his, and we did a little “society” talk—the weather, the necessity of
learning the languages young, the theater, that Réjane was getting old,
and “_L’Elévation_” was bad for the morals, and fashions, if the skirts
_could_ get shorter—but nothing of the war.
At two o’clock another military auto was announced, which the general
had sent with a doctor to take us to Mont Frenet, four kilometers from
Suippes and six from the German lines. The young officer departed; we
veiled and gloved ourselves and descended, and got into the motor, where
we found a large, dark, military man inclining to _embonpoint_, who
thought he was good-looking, and started out. The first thing we met as
we got out of town on the dusty, blazing highroad was a little funeral
cortége, preceded by a priest. The body of the soldier was draped in
the tricolor, and following to his last rest, close behind, was his
_camarade_, with head bared. He had doubtless expired in the big hospital
near by, one of those lonely hospital deaths that hundreds of thousands
have suffered before transfiguration.
We were in the great plain of the Champagne Pouilleuse that leads to
Suippes, Sainte-Ménehould, and stretches out to Reims—a plain with great,
white, chalky scars of quarries, interspersed with fields and dark
patches of pine woods. I asked the doctor about the site of the ancient
camp of Attila and the battle of the Catalonian fields, but his knowledge
of the matter was vague and his interest perfunctory. I thought afterward
he might have had a more personal afternoon planned than that of taking
two objective-minded ladies to Mont Frenet. There was once a great Roman
road from Bar-le-Duc to Reims, and all about are little churches of the
twelfth and thirteenth centuries, mostly touched up in the eighteenth.
After three-quarters of an hour we found ourselves nearing what might
have been a modern mining settlement. It is the great front hospital of
Mont Frenet. A model establishment organized and conducted by a man of
heart and brain, Doctor Poutrain. Young, _élancé_, alert, he took us the
rounds of his little world, from the door where the ambulances deposit
their wounded, their dying, and oft their dead, where they are sorted
out, through the numberless wards, even to the model wash-houses and
the places where the garments of those brought in are scientifically
separated from their inevitable and deadly live stock.
As we passed through one of the wards, I saw the doctor’s eye change,
and, following it, I perceived, as he quickly went to the bedside, a face
with the death look already on it; and in a moment, with a slight sigh,
a soul had breathed itself out—_en route_ to the heaven of those who die
_pro patria_.
And I thought in great awe, “All I know or ever will know of that human
being is his supreme hour.” And so fortuitous, so sudden was it all that
I had not even time to breathe a word of prayer, nor even to reach out
for his hand. And I, come from so far, so unrelated to him, was thus the
destined witness of his passing. I can’t get it out of my mind.
Doctor Poutrain loves his broken men, and he said, “I want no man who
has been severely wounded or mutilated to leave my hospital without
his decoration.” He had tears in his eyes as he stood by a bed where a
bright-eyed, thin-faced boy was lying with a hip fracture. “He brought a
comrade in, under fire, who was shot off his back as he was carrying him
in.”
In one of the beds an aviator was lying, brought in three days before;
the eyes, the mouth, the whole face had still the peculiar look of
strain. Indeed, three faces stand out in one’s mind—the captivity face,
the hard, shining face and eyes of unwounded men just from the combat,
and the faces of wounded aviators. About this time I noticed the gloomy
look deepening on the face of our accompanying Esculapius, and it
suddenly occurred to me “he is one of those who support with difficulty
the praises of another.” For we _had_ been very explicit in praise of
Doctor Poutrain’s wonderful installation.
It was a slack day, and according to the record in the antechamber there
had only been 517 brought in that day.
We have tea with the _directrice_ of the _gardes-malades_ (ten or twelve
women only), a friend of Madame Fould’s. As we sat there talking I
discovered that the eager _médecin-chef_ had had, before the war, as
hobby, archeology and ethnology, especially of the prehistoric races of
Mexico; that he also possessed one of the few Aztec codices existing—all
of which we discussed to the sound of the German guns and the whirring of
their airplanes.
We finally made our adieux, came home over the hot, unspeakably dusty
road of the Champagne Pouilleuse, unreasonably disappointed that nobody
would give us permission to make a little détour by Suippes, then under
fire. We got back to our headquarters, packed our belongings, and
diffidently brought up the subject of remuneration, which the _belle
châtelaine_ firmly refused. I was traveling light, without a single thing
approaching the superfluous, but Mrs. P. had a breakfast-cap and her
tortoise-shell toilet things and trees for her shoes, and she also found
among her belongings a lovely amber box, which she presented in token
of our gratitude. We _could_ make the garrulous refugee from Tahure not
only happy, but speechless, which was more to the point; and here we are,
looking out on a darkening world, and there are soldiers bathing in the
river, near stacked guns, and everywhere little detachments are marching
down dim roads, and there are the eternal troop- and equipment-trains
going to the front—and I feel an immense regret at leaving it all....
PARIS.
As we were sitting in the dining-car, idly wondering how on earth we were
going to get from the station to our respective abodes once the train had
deposited us at the Gare de l’Est, or planning to spend the night there,
the Marquis de M. passed through the car. His motor was to meet him, and
he gallantly offered transit, that can be above rubies and pearls _par le
temps qui court_.
When we got to Paris at 10.30 we saw in the dim light, as we stepped into
the big motor, _voyagers_ departing with luggage on their backs, or,
preparing to await the dawn, sitting on it. We got into the motor with
Comte de ——, the Marquis himself sitting outside, “for the air,” as he
said, and also because there was no more room inside.
As we rolled along through the dimly lighted streets, the air dense and
hot, a terrific hail- and thunder-storm suddenly deluged the town, and
especially the generous Marquis outside, well punished (as usual) for his
kind act. When, slipping and skidding, we finally pulled up at my hotel,
a very wet gentleman, but remembering his manners, said, “_Au plaisir de
vous revoir, madame_.” (He must really have wished me to all the devils,
where he would never meet me a second time, hoping it was a last as
well as a first meeting.) I had to laugh, also he, the pleasure was so
evidently doubtful. It ended by his betaking his soaking person into the
auto, and I came up-stairs to find my lamps trimmed and burning and my
beloved mother awaiting me to hear “all about it.”
So may one go to the front and return....
PART II
CHAPTER I
BY THE MARNE
GARE DE L’EST, _Wednesday, July 25th_.
No, it isn’t possible, even for one whose business is not that of
stopping bullets, to go toward the combat a second time without a thrill.
Few soldiers in the station; they are mostly at the front, at Craonne and
Le Chemin des Dames and other sacrificial places, and in a week or two
the empty beds in the hospitals will be full again. Some officers are
hastening back from their _permissions_ with pasteboard boxes and other
unwar-like accoutrements. One is sitting by me, a straight-featured young
man with dark-ringed eyes, his _Croix de Guerre_ and _fourragère_,[7]
reading _Brin de Lilas_. In forty-eight hours he may be dead. Another
officer is reading _Cœur d’Orpheline_, and _Le Pays_.
Miss N., with something of serene yet brooding in her being, plus a sense
of humor, arrives with a telegraphic pass from army headquarters at
Châlons, which may or may not “pass” the train conductor.
_Later._
Chelles, where the arts of peace in the form of a vermicelli-factory
testify to the arts of war by having every pane of glass broken; and once
there was a celebrated abbey at Chelles which was destroyed, with a tidy
amount of other things beautiful, at the time of the French Revolution.
Farther along much thinning out of the woods, the beautiful
warmth-giving, shade-giving forests of France. In one place there is a
planting of young, slender trees, and I thought on those other children
of France who must grow to manhood, remake her soul, transmit her
immortality. The first harvest is stacked and yellow, and nature is
densely, deeply green where it had been pale and expectant. Even the
Marne, which we caught up here, has a deeper color than in June, as it
reflects the lush green.
Meaux, with its cathedral rising from the center of the town, untouched
except by time. Meaux has now come to be a sort of joke (“_de deux
maux choisir le moindre_”) which few can resist—I’ve even heard it at
the Théâtre Français—and it’s supposed to be the heart’s desire of the
_embusqué_, far enough from the front not to get hurt, and far enough
from Paris to be out of sight.
Château Thierry, with its first vintage of white grapes, and I bethought
me how the whole of France is one vast wine-press—“He is trampling out
the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored.”
Epernay, with its peculiar church tower. The great building of the
champagne Mercier firm near the station has every window-pane broken,
and part of it is serving as a Red Cross station. The wave of invasion
pressed hard through Epernay that August of 1914.
In the dining-car we sat at a table with two officers—an airman, tall,
deep-eyed, some sort of _tic nerveux_ disturbing his face, with the
_Grand’ Croix de la Légion d’Honneur_ among other decorations; and a
captain of infantry, who had been months at Arras, and at Verdun the
terrible March of 1916.
About the time that the cross-eyed waiter (it was easy, poor soul, to see
why he wasn’t wanted in the trenches) threw the last set of plates with a
deafening crash down the line of diners (the captain of infantry said it
was just like the first-line trenches), the airman, whose nerves couldn’t
stand it, pursued, rather irritably:
“You don’t even read the _communiqués_ any more, I wager. _Oh, les
civils!_”
“I can’t truthfully say I do, always,” I answered, feeling called on to
defend the _sacrés civils_. “After three years of it we are fatigued and
bewildered by the spectacularness of it, the great, dazzling, hideous
mass of it, and you who perish on the battle-field but perform an act
that all must some day perform, only different in that it is far better
done—_dulce et decorum_—but, after all, the same act that we must perform
against our will, at the mercy of some accidental combination. It’s the
same outcome, ‘and one’s a long time dead.’”
After a pause and a deep look, perhaps it is the look men have when alone
in the secular spaces, he answered:
“_Choisir et aimer sa mort, c’est un peu comme choisir sa bien-aimée_,”
and suddenly a flash illuminated my soul, showing me something of the
_dulce_ as well as the _decorum_ of dying for country.
And then we looked out of the window, and there came into my mind a
completely commonplace event that caught my attention in the first
wonderment and horror of the world war. Accompanied by her daughter,
an elderly woman, one August evening of 1914, took the Fifth Avenue
motor-bus to get some fresh air, and they placed themselves on top. At
that epoch, instead of going straight up the Avenue, which was being
repaved around about Thirty-fifth Street, the omnibus took a turn into
Madison Avenue and reappeared again at the north side of Altman’s. Now
the roof of the _porte-cochère_ of Altman’s has a _motif_ of bronzework.
The omnibus lurched just at this point; the head and hair of the old
lady were caught in it; she was lifted up from the top of the omnibus,
remained suspended in air for an instant of time, then dropped to the
pavement, where she breathed out her soul. Doubtless there are those who
will understand why this completely unimportant matter has remained in my
mind—even why I thought of it at that moment.
CHÂLONS-SUR-MARNE, 36 RUE DU PORT DE MARNE.
An 1860 house requisitioned by the military authorities for the _Dames de
la Cantine_.
_6.30 p.m._
Sitting in a little glass-inclosed veranda even with the ground. The
side against the house, in between the doors and windows, is painted
in a crisscross pattern of dark green against light green, and the
woodwork is that favorite but uninspiring shallow brown; a large, empty,
double-decker cage for birds is in a corner. The veranda leads into two
low-ceilinged rooms with parquet flooring and little squares of Brussels
carpet. In the first is a writing-table, some arm-chairs, and a horsehair
sofa is across a corner; brown wallpaper ornamented with the inevitable
oil-paintings of “near” Corots, and “farther” Guido Renis—everything
distinctly early Victorian, and something soothing in its atmosphere
after three lustrums of _art nouveau_. After all we’ve been through in
art lately, early Victorian isn’t as bad as we once thought.
I looked for a moment into the walnut bookcase and found bound volumes of
_La Semaine des Familles_, 1850-60; _Le Musée des Familles_ of the same
dates: _Le Magasin d’Education_, of the eighties; and the curious part
is that here beside the Marne it doesn’t seem of any special country, but
of a special period.
The kitchen leads out of the dining-room (which latter is the spiritual
twin of the _salon_), and has an old, unused fireplace with a high
masonried shelf above it and a beautiful ancient fireback with coat
of arms. Near the high window is a little range and the inevitable
gas-stove. I put my valise in the sitting-room and went out into the old
garden, untouched since the winter’s sleep and the spring’s awakening.
It looks out on the road; beyond is a raised walk along the river, and
across the stream, just opposite, is the station and the evacuation
hospital.
But I was feeling uneasy as I looked about, for I was separated from
my _carnet rouge_,[8] which has been unnecessarily reft from me by a
too-zealous station individual. Miss Mitchell had met us, smiling and
waving, which ought to have been a patent of respectability, from the
other side of a bayonet, the side we wanted to be on; but the man had a
dullish eye and didn’t see that we were birds of a feather, and, anyway,
had just been put in authority and was enjoying his full powers, after
the usual manner of the unaccustomed.
So I departed, and got sopping wet in my only suit (am traveling lighter
even than the first time), and my garments were furthermore ravaged by
falling pollen from a linden-tree under which I had confidingly stood
during the downpour. I was a sight, but I _had_ to get that _carnet
rouge_. Any one who has been in _la zone des armées_ and has been
separated from it will understand the orphaned and anxious feeling that
possessed me.
_Later._
A pale brightening of the western sky after the heavy rain. Two _avions
de chasse_ passing swiftly to the northeast. I wandered out of the
garden, past some modern houses (this part of Châlons, for some reason,
is called Madagascar), taking the little raised earth-walk by the Marne.
The river, always slow-flowing, has an almost imperceptible movement in
front of our house, and there are many grasses and reeds; the banks are
weedy and little green boats are made fast to them, and nature is a bit
motley and untidy. A soldier is fishing on the opposite side near the
station. An officer and a black-robed woman pass. Farther down, the banks
are thickly wooded and the trees glisten after the rain; even the great
railway station is a-shine, where tens of thousands of men pass daily,
together with millions of francs of war material, and it all looks like
some not very sharp wood-cut of the sixties—the kind you wouldn’t buy
if you were looking over a lot; but, somehow, lived in, it is charming.
Then I found myself on a path by the river, with a lush border of
trees, poplar, willow, white birch, ash, hawthorn, and clematis-twined,
wild-grape-vined bushes. On the other side were ripe wheat-fields. Near a
sycamore a man and a woman were locked in an embrace, whether of greeting
or farewell I know not. Neither was very young—this much I saw before
I turned my eyes and went on; but when I passed there again they were
as before, their eyes still closed; and I suddenly knew them for true
lovers, who count not moments, but were lost in some infinity; and for
all I know they may be there yet, and if not they, then others, for the
spaces of love are never empty. To some it may be nonsense that I am
talking, but there are those who will know. All the while there was a
dull boom of cannon, and other men who could love women were giving up
their lives; and I seemed to understand little or nothing, but did not
need to understand, for I had a full heart, which is better than a full
brain. And I cried, as I walked back, “_Domine Deus, Rex Celestis, Pater
omnipotens_,” and left it all—the soft love and the hard death—where it
belongs. And I was glad to have walked for a few moments alone by the
green Marne.
When I got back I found Joseph of the 71st _Chasseurs à pied_ sitting
with Miss N. Joseph thinks we are friends; he _knows_ we are friends,
so different from “world’s” people, who are suspicious and think nobody
loves them, or fatuous and think everybody does.
We sat in the 1860 dining-room. There is a pressed-bronze clock on the
mantelpiece, representing a mild and smiling Turk with a drawn sword—and
there is a sideboard you could find in Barnesville, Maryland, or Squedunk
(I forget _where_ Squedunk is), and the extremely “distant” Guido Renis
decorate the brown walls, without, however, enlivening them.
And this is Joseph’s story—Joseph of the grateful heart, Joseph with two
years and a half of service, Joseph who won’t be twenty till December,
Joseph with his young, round face and flat nose, dark under his pleasant
eyes, and a bit hollow under his cheek-bones, and with decorations on his
chest:
“I never knew my parents; the Fathers brought me up. I have had only good
from them, and when they were _chassés_ I was taken with them to Pisa. I
was going to continue my studies, _mais la guerre, que voulez-vous_? They
call me ‘_le gosse_,’ I was the youngest in the regiment. Now I am alone
in the world since my brothers were killed, one at Verdun three weeks
ago, the other last year on the Somme. I miss the letters,” he added,
simply.
“But, Joseph, tell us how you got your _Croix de Guerre_.”
“Oh, I only happened to save the life of my captain at Verdun. We were
making a reconnaissance, and he fell with a ball in the hip. I started to
bring him in, with a comrade who was hit by a piece of shrapnel in the
head and killed instantly. I caught ‘mine’ in the arm, but I was still
able to drag my captain in by his feet. It was quite simple, and since
then he is very good to me.”
Joseph is _en perm_, his regiment is at Reims, but he spits blood and his
voice is hoarse—he was gassed a few weeks ago.
“It smelt of violets,” he said, “and we didn’t know that anything was the
matter till an officer rushed toward us. Eight of us never got up. I’ll
never speak clearer than this.”
Joseph stayed to supper with us—a supper of _soupe à l’oseille_,
scrambled eggs, and salad, but the brown, dull, little room gradually
seemed to fill with a sifted glory, and we left our meal and went out
to find the whole world dipped in transparent pink, and the great Light
of Day about to disappear, a reddish ball, in a mass of color of an
intenser hue. The delicate willows were like silver candelabra reflected
in the Marne, which now was a satiny pink. The wheat-fields were seas of
burnished gold.
Over all a terrific boom of cannon was borne on the damp evening air. It
seemed impossible to do other than walk magnetically on and on toward
the dreadful sound, out of that world of surpassing beauty toward those
supreme agonies, toward Mourmelon and Reims, where men were laying down
their lives, even as we three women walked the fields at the sunset
hour. I remembered suddenly a picture known and loved years ago—a woman
kneeling by such a river-bank, her hair falling, her face buried in her
hands, called “_Hymnus an die Schönheit_,” but over the pink-and-silver
beauty of _my_ sunset world I heard the deep and dreadful tones of
_their_ cannon, and the answer of the 75’s, which Joseph likened to the
_miaulement d’un chat_—and all the world seemed askew, and I looked
through tears at a golden half-moon that was rising in the pink to add an
unbearable beauty to it all.
IN MY ROOM, _10.30 p.m._
The cannon still booming.
My room also has a dark-brown paper with great white flowers on it—some
cross between peonies and dahlias, if such union is possible—and heavy
mahogany furniture; a few books which I immediately investigated, on a
gimp and tasseled trimmed shelf, for a clue to the one-time dwellers.
Among them were two by Victor Tissot, _Le Pays des Milliards_ and _Les
Prussiens en Allemagne_; the dates were 1873 and 1875, and they told of
that other war; and I looked at Germany through the eyes of forty years
ago as I turned the pages of _Le Pays des Milliards_, listening to the
1917 guns. History was not only repeating itself, but tripping itself up!
Joseph is sleeping in the garden in the steamer-chair. I hear his
gas-cough, a cross between a croupy cough and a whooping-cough. We
wanted him to sleep inside, but he said “_J’étouffe_,” and took the
steamer-chair out under the spreading chestnut-tree, and sleeps the sleep
of youth, even though weary and gassed.
_Thursday, 26th July, 1.30 p.m._
Sitting in the garden, after lunch, where we have had coffee under the
spreading chestnut, ready to go to Bar-le-Duc. _Avions_ are whirring in
the perfect blue, and we plainly hear the cannon. We are to take night
shift at the little _Foyer des Alliés_. When I say that we carry nothing
with us, not more than if we were going to take a stroll about town, one
sees that the journey will be fairly elemental.
Many white butterflies with an unerring instinct for beauty are flying
in and out of the little white ash-tree. And in spite of the boom of
cannon there straightway came to me a dear and fugitive realization that
beauty is the first thing sought by instinct, its earliest and its last
love, its imperishable means and its end. And how every other seeking of
instinct comes after perpetuation, conservation, survival of the strong,
and how it accompanies and pushes the soul toward its transfiguration.
Suddenly, under the rustling chestnut, all about me the murmur of the
gently stirring garden, I found I was mad for beauty, and some liquid,
long, unrepeated lines came to me, I know not why:
_E il pino_
_ha un suono, e il mirto_
_Altro suono, e il ginepro_
_Altro ancora, stromenti_
_diversi_
_Sotto innumerevoli dita._
...
_Che l’anima schiude_
_novella,_
_Su la favola bella_
_Che ieri_
_M’illuse, che oggi t’illude,_
_O Ermione._[9]
When you’re not carrying anything with you except your money and your
safe-conduct, you _can_ dream till it’s time to take the train.
CHAPTER II
THE CANTEEN AT BAR-LE-DUC
_Epitaphe_
_Bénis ceux qui sont morts simplement: en victimes,_
_Et n’ayant de la guerre éprouvé que l’horreur._
_Bénis ceux qui sont morts sans nourrir en leur cœur_
_La haine et tous ses maux, la gloire et tous ses crimes._
_Bénis ceux qui sont morts comme ils avaient vécu:_
_Assidus noblement à de modestes tâches._
_Bénis ceux qui, n’étant ni très braves, ni lâches,_
_N’ont su que résigner leur corps pauvre et vaincu._
_Bénis ceux qui sont morts pour servir et défendre_
_Des honneurs et des biens dont ils n’ont point leur part._
_Bénis ceux qui se sont donnés sans rien attendre_
_De leur postérité, de l’histoire ou de l’art._
_Bénis ceux qui, luttant seulement pour la vie,_
_Ont ignoré les lois qui reposent sur eux,_
_Mais compris en mourant qu’ils sont les malheureux_
_En qui depuis toujours Jésus se sacrifie._
_Bénis, ils le sont tous, et saints entre les morts,_
_Ceux qu’on ne pleure guère et que nul ne renomme:_
_Car, devant les héros, ils ne sont rien que l’Homme;_
_Car, parmi tant de gloire, ils fondent le remords;_
_Car leur don si naïf, ce don de tout leur être,_
_Mêle aux vertus du sol les grâces d’un sang pur,_
_Pour composer, avec tout l’or du blé futur,_
_Les moissons d’un esprit dont l’Amour sera maître._
GEORGES PIOCH.
CHÂLONS, _27th July_.
Half past four. Half an hour ago, _alerte, sirènes_. We hastily arose
from resting, and have just come up from a really charming cellar, with
nice vaulting, evidently much older than the house itself.
Returned from Bar-le-Duc this morning rather sketchy in my mind, blurred
with fatigue, in a compartment with five silent, dead-tired officers.
It’s a great human document, night shift in a canteen. From ten o’clock
till six I watched the _poilus_ fill the _Foyer des Alliés_, in and out,
in and out. From time to time the voice of the station-master called out
some fateful destination. I was thankful for any momentary slackening of
the rush, so that when one gives coffee, chocolate, or bouillon one can
also give a word, the precious word, where all is so anonymous. Between
three and four there was a lessening, and a short, haggard, deep-eyed,
scraggy-mustached man of forty-six, leaning on the counter, said to
me, “I am father of five,” and, showing his blue trousers tucked in
his boots, added, “I am of the attacking troops.” He then shifted his
accoutrement and dug out from his person the photographs of the five
children and his _épouse_, and I think more and more, “it is for the
young to fight.” I can’t bear the look on the faces of the middle-aged
going up to battle.
The _poilu_ trying to find his purse or the photographs of his family,
among everything else in the world that he carries on his person, pressed
tightly against other men carrying the same, feels doubtless the way a
sardine trying to turn over would feel!
The next with whom I spoke was a _gaillard_ with a glancing blue eye,
reddish mustache and high color, from Barcelona, of French parents, and
he insisted on speaking Spanish with me. His brother is professor at
Saint-Nazaire.
“Every time he writes me it is about Mr. Lloyd George instead of about
the family.”
This is a delicate tribute to my supposed English nationality.
“Do you think we are going to win, señorita?”
“Of course,” I answer, “with the help of God. _Dios y victoria_,” I add,
piously.
But as he tosses off his coffee he says, with a gleam, “_Victoria y
Dios_,” and then gives way to a comrade who was at Craonne in April.
He was a man with a softish eye and full-lipped mouth and was probably
naturally flesh-loving, and wanted his coffee very hot, and looked
approvingly at me as I said:
“_Mon ami_, I know all about it, if coffee isn’t _too_ hot, it isn’t hot
enough.”
He ended a conversation about an engagement he had been in by saying:
“The most awful sensation is to see the dust raised by the mitrailleuses
and to know that you have got to walk into it and to see the men ahead of
you stepping with strange steps—and some falling.”
As I said, he was naturally ease-loving and pain-fearing, yet that is the
way _his_ dust may be called on to return to dust.
There are many jokes about shrapnel and shells, but nobody ever jokes
about a bullet. It’s a thing with a single purpose—and you may be it.
Our headquarters are at ——, not far away, and it was at Bar-le-Duc that
I first saw our own men among the French for the same strange purpose.
Something stirred deeply in my heart, with an accompanying searing,
scorching consciousness of what an elemental thing they have come across
the seas to do—quite simply kill or be killed. It’s all to come, for “He
hath loosed the fateful lightning of His terrible swift sword,” and it
is for the young to fight.
At 3.30 they come into the canteen and ask for eighteen fried eggs; they
are oozing with money, and _they_ aren’t feeling sentimental. One of the
four young spread-eagles (he proved to be from Texas, and was changing a
big plug of tobacco from one side of his mouth to the other) said, with
an appraising look at the counter, that he could “buy us out,” and a
second added, “And more, too.”
“How about those coming in later?” I suggest, and then I ask how long
they’ve been here.
“Been here? Just five hundred years,” a small one answers, promptly,
“and the next time the ‘Call’ comes they won’t get me. They can take the
house and the back fence, too, but they won’t get little Joe. This loving
another country’s one on me!”
“Don’t listen to him, lady; he’s homesick. We’re out to can the Kaiser,
and he’ll take some canning yet, but I say next July he will be about as
welcome as a skunk at a lawn-party.”
And then even the homesick one cheered up. The simile made me think of
summer evenings in New England, but I only asked when they were to go
back to ——.
“We ought to have been there at 10.15.”
I gave a stern glance at the big canteen clock. The hands pointed to
3.30. They were then five and a quarter hours late.
“You don’t know ‘_Gun_court.’ It’s a fierce place,” said one, in answer
to the look.
“Aren’t you busy?”
“Holy smoke! She says _are we busy_! Why, we dig ourselves in all day,
and we dig ourselves out all night, and somebody after you all the time.
I don’t call this war. We’re out for real trouble.”
“Well, you’ll get it when you see your officer,” I remarked, unfeelingly.
Just then a _poilu_ whom they seemed to know approached with his ten
centimes. One of the Sammies knocks it out of his hand onto the counter,
points to his own chest, says, “On me, a square meal,” and opens his
bursting purse for me to take whatever is necessary.
The _poilu_, hearing the chink of coin and rustle of paper, says to me,
with eyes the size of saucers, “_Sont-ils tous millionaires?_” ...
Apart from his “private resources,” which seem unlimited, the American
receives just twenty times a day what the Frenchman does.
But how my heart goes out to them, so young, so untried, so generous—and
a sea of blood awaiting them!
Toward morning, when a chill was in the air, a thin-faced, dark-eyed man
with glasses shiveringly drinks his hot chocolate. “It’s too long, the
war,” he says, “two years—even three—_mais cela traîne trop, nos bonnes
qualités s’usent et se perdent_.”
“What were you before the war?”
“My father has a book-shop at Chartres, _j’adorais les livres et une
bonne lampe_,” he added, so simply.
And then a trench-stained comrade came up to him and they talked after
this fashion—one couldn’t have done better oneself—while I mopped up the
counter and refilled my jugs:
“This country pleases me. I will come back and take a turn about after
the war.”
“_Mon vieux_, one should never return to a place where one has been
happy; one is apt to find only regrets and disillusions. You are thinking
of the young _boulangère_ here, but she herself will leave the town after
the hostilities! And then what? _Un seul être vous manque et tout est
dépeuplé!_ But nothing, however, counsels one to return to a place where
one has suffered.”
From this point of view one must say that the life of the _poilu_ is
ideal, for when he will have tried all the fronts, including those of the
Orient, the war will perhaps be over.
And then they slung everything except the kitchen stove on their persons,
and, thanking me, went out to be killed, or, in the very best event, to
get _la bonne blessure_.
One in a thousand, one in ten thousand gets it, _la bonne blessure_,
indeed, not disfiguring, not incapacitating, and afterward, sometimes,
decorations, honors. On the other side they say, “_Glück muss der Soldat
haben_.”
A strange, intense blue, like some outer curtain to the windows,
announced the coming of dawn, and out of it appeared nine men shivering.
“Why are you so cold?” I ask.
“_Il fait du brouillard_,” said one, with a beard in a point and wearing
a _béret_, such a man as would have gone into an inn of Rabelais’s
time, _en route_ for some seat of war; and as he drank his big bowl of
chocolate he added, “_Cela console_; toward dawn one’s courage is low.”
Then a young, stone-deaf man with blue eyes and delicate, pink-skinned
face came in with something vague and searching in his look. I didn’t
realize in the first moment what was the matter, as I asked, did he
want coffee or chocolate, but a comrade pointed to his ears and said,
“Verdun.” He himself smiled, a dear young smile, but sudden tears came to
my eyes and I slopped the coffee.
A little before six we closed the canteen, which is always swept and
garnished between six and seven, and went back to the house where
Miss Worthington, who so admirably runs it in conjunction with Miss
Alexander, lives.
I lay me on a sofa with my shoes unlaced—my feet by that time were
feeling like something boneless and bruised, mashed into something too
small.
Seven-thirty a great knocking at the door.
“_L’alerte! A la cave, madame!_”
I was then in a state where a bomb couldn’t hurry me, but, the knocks
continuing, I finally got up and went down-stairs to find the lower floor
full of people, too _blasé_ to go into the vaulted cellar below.
“_Quelle comédie!_” said one woman. “_Moi, je m’en vais._”
“_Quelle tragédie, si c’est pour vous cette fois_,” answered another,
pressing her baby to her breast.
“The bits of shrapnel from the anti-aircraft guns firing at the
aeroplanes make more victims than the bombs,” said another.
Miss Worthington appeared at that moment, but decided, however, to go
back to bed. I went out into the hot streets; the early sun was shining
in a faultless sky. The _Foyer des Alliés_ had been hastily evacuated at
the _alerte_, according to orders, so I asked for the nearest church,
where I could sit down in peace, or comparative peace, out of the glare
and the heat, not to mention the enemy airplanes. I was directed up the
principal street, told to turn down by the river, and was proceeding
under the dusty poplars to the church of St.-Jean, when suddenly some
beauty of the morning touched my face and a feeling almost of joy
succeeded the fatigue of the night. I was turned from thoughts of men
going to their doom, and destruction coming from the lovely sky, and I
could receive only the morning light, and the glory of the shining river
and the rolling hills was for the moment mine; and I saw how “dying, they
are not dead.” ...
Mass was over when I got to church, but I sat down, crossed myself, and
commended, with a suddenly quiet heart, the world of battle to its God,
and then, instead of _un_lacing my shoes in the sanctuary, I proceeded
to lace them _up_, having walked from my abode with the laces tied about
my ankles; it wasn’t as sloppy as it sounds, considering what was going
on overhead. But I found myself thinking of praying-carpets, and rows of
sandals outside of dim mosques, and things and ways far from Bar-le-Duc.
After twenty minutes of a somewhat hazy contemplation of other than war
mysteries, I went back to the canteen.
Betwixt the time I had left it and my return a bomb had fallen between it
and the station; a large piece of roof had been removed from the station,
and a very neat nick had been made in the corner of the canteen where we
kept our hats and coats and hung up our aprons. The street in between
looked like an earthquake street. I stood quite still for a second of
time—not thinking—you don’t think on such occasions. The Barrisiens, or,
in plain English, the Bar-le-Dukites, were engaged in business as usual.
I then began the cutting up and buttering of endless large slices
of bread, with a Scotchwoman, who has unmodifiable opinions about
Americans—any and all Americans. Even when she only remarks, “I saw two
new people in town yesterday, _very_ American-looking, _very_,” you feel
there’s something the matter with the States, and if you had time you’d
get argumentative, even perhaps annoyed.
Soldiers were coming in again. To one tired, deep-eyed man, sitting
listlessly, with the heavy load slipping, I said:
“_Vous avez le cafard,[10] mon ami?_”
And he answered, suddenly, as if the words had been ejected by a great
force from his soul:
“_Je monte demain_—and I can’t bear the sound the bayonet makes going in.”
I answered, “A hot cup of coffee and you will feel all right again.” But
to myself I said, “There’ll be trouble for him; he _can’t_ any more.”
And then a huge Senegalese, all spinal column and hip, waving a generous
five-franc note in his hands, came along and wanted to know if there was
anybody _bas mariée_ among the ministrants, as he had a day off. The
service is quite variegated, as will be seen from these random specimens.
Last night we walked up the hill of the ancient town. A yellow half-moon,
hanging behind the fourteenth-century tower, further decorated the scene.
We sat on immemorial steps, in a little V-shaped place that framed
the valley and the town, and talked of war and wars. I thought how the
legendary Gaul had wandered over these hills and these wooded stretches,
with his battle-ax and skin about him, and long-haired women had waited
his return, and children had played in front of caves. As the clock on
the tower struck nine a woman appeared, waving her arms and calling
out, “_Une incendie!_” and we went higher up the steps and saw masses
of smoke and flames on one of the hills. It was the huge barracks for
refugees that was burning, and the flames were blowing toward the near-by
encampment for German prisoners. Then we went down the ancient roadway
through the dim, warm, summer streets to the canteen overflowing with
blue-clad men, singing, drinking, disputing. A blue mist of smoke and
breath hung about them, with a smell of hot wool and worn leather—and it
was the war. As I put on my apron I found myself repeating the words:
_Bénis ceux qui sont morts simplement: en victimes,_
_Et n’ayant de la guerre éprouvé que l’horreur._
_Bénis ceux qui sont morts sans nourrir en leur cœur_
_La haine et tous ses maux, la gloire et tous ses crimes._
CHAPTER III
THEATRICALS AND CAMOUFLAGE
_27th July, evening._
This afternoon Lieutenant Robin fetched us to the theatrical
representation the _Division Marocaine_ was to give.
Generals thick as leaves in Vallombrosa were there in a hemicycle about
the stage, pressed close by the flood of _poilus_. Terrible heat in the
great, glass-roofed auditorium, a slanting afternoon sun pouring itself
in like hot gold. Some thousands of spectators; thick odor of _poilu_;
blind being led in; groups of one-legged men naturally gravitating to one
another; groups of one-armed the same. A few _gardes-malades_ from the
hospitals, and ourselves the only women in the audience.
We were presented at the door with some copies of a charming, really
literary newspaper, _L’Horizon, Journal des poilus_, and there was a
little paragraph, “_Hiérarchie française qu’on trouve au Théâtre des
Armées_,” which also described the protocol of seating, “In the first row
near the stage wounded men are lying, immediately behind them wounded men
are sitting, then come ladies, if there are any—and then come officers!”
General Goïgoux and General Abbevillers sat near us.
While waiting we looked at _L’Horizon_ and laughed with General Goïgoux
over a paragraph showing the philosophy of a son of Mars under certain
circumstances, and it was the following:
Nature is kind. She places the remedy near the ill and often
cures, as one has seen, evil by evil.
A woman, too much loved, sent me a letter so cruel that I
didn’t even have the strength to tear it up, but carried it
around in my pocket for weeks.
One night, being quartered in a stable, I took my coat off and
hung it up.
The next day, no letter. A cow had eaten it. Nature is kind.
When General Gouraud, first in command, entered, the “Marseillaise”
sounded, a thrill went through the vast assemblage, and we all arose. _Le
Lion d’Orient_ is tall, intensely straight, his whole thin, khaki-clad
body on parallel lines with his perpendicular armless right sleeve.
Long, straight, brown hair _en brosse_, bronzed skin. His entry was a
thing not to be forgotten. I wondered “Is it the East that stamps great
chiefs with such majesty, that can give them such calm?” and I thought of
Gallipoli—blue seas, battles, wounds, hospital ships. Then the curtain
rose on one of the most delightful theatrical representations I have ever
seen, screamingly funny, and quite chaste.
But all that _entrain_, all that life, to be snuffed out to-morrow or
the next day, or the next? At Craonne or Reims or Verdun or wherever it
may be? And how natural that they should sing of love and women, and say
witty things concerning food and raiment and the government, till the end!
After the performance, during which nobody had ever been so hot before,
the sun moving across the hall and grilling each row in turn, we passed
out in a great jam of _poilus_. One huge man, with the thickest of
meridional accents and red cheeks, and eyes like two black lanterns, and
a coal-black beard, was gesticulating at a small, hook-nosed, blond man.
“_Le Midi, le Midi—qu’est-ce que tu en sais, toi, bêta? Les Anglais
t’ont déjà pris ton trou de Calais, aussi je te demande, sale type_, what
army corps took the _plateau de Craonne_” and he burst into a great laugh
of triumph. Then, borne on the blue waves, we found ourselves in the open
air and realized what we had been breathing.
General Goïgoux presented us to General Gouraud standing by his motor
with several other generals, while a squad of German prisoners, looking
out of the corners of their eyes, were being marched by. His mien was
dignity itself, and out under the sky one was even more conscious of that
harmony of browns and straight lines, that something remote yet majestic
in his being. As we turned to go I saw him speaking to a blind zouave,
and he pressed his hand lingeringly on the man’s shoulder. _Oh, enfants
de la patrie!_
_Saturday, July 28th, 10.30 a.m._
All last night the strange, recurring, sinister sound of the _sirènes_
over the plain of Châlons, and it seemed to me like cries of men of the
Stone Age.
These two days I have been haunted by ghosts of beings of the twilight
ages; elusive emanations, dim suggestions of their psychologies have at
moments possessed me in this city of the Catalaunian Plains.
Rested in my pink-silk wrapper, dead tired—too tired to care whether
“they” got here or not—and stayed in bed during the _alertes_, but I
thought of airmen, attackers and defenders, in the soft summer sky, a
golden half-moon lighting a dim heaven.
Dreamed, but only in snatches, of peace and the ways of peace.
At 4.30 I heard Joseph’s gas-bark and knew he was again with us,
stretched out on the _chaise-longue_ under the chestnut-tree.
As I stood at the window my thoughts went twisting about the stars of
the gorgeous night that was so soon to give way to another summer day,
and I suddenly saw human beings, only as tiny specks, everywhere going
forth at some word of command to their doom. There was a flinging back of
my thoughts upon me, and I turned from my window, as suddenly the chill
of early dawn and the boom of cannon came in, and I could see nothing
for tears and I knew the beauteous earth for what it is—the abode of mad
horrors.
_Later._
Paid my respects to General Goïgoux for an instant of time (I can always
get out quickly) in the old gray house of the Rue Grande Étape, and found
him as always, _distingué_, human, untired, cordial. Officers passing in
and out of his room, and the walls tapestried with maps. Later Colonel
Rolland of the 1st Zouaves, very jaunty in his red fez, adoring his men
and adored by them, and flicking his leg with a short cane having a
deadly knife on a spring in the top, took us to the railroad station, to
inspect the great, dreary sheds that with time, labor, and much energy
are to become _La Cantine Américaine_. Blue-clad men were lying around
like logs in inert bundles on the earthen floor. One had to step over
legs and motley equipment to get anywhere. A dreadful sound of hammering
was echoing through the vast spaces, without, however, seeming to disturb
the slumbers of those men, and I dare say was as a lullaby in comparison
to the first-line trenches.
We stepped into the kitchen. A smiling, twinkling-eyed _cuistot_[11] who
probably had something awful the matter with him—flat-foot or hernia or
something of the kind, or he wouldn’t have been there—with pride asked
us to partake of some of his coffee. He proceeded to dip it from a
great, steaming caldron, pouring it into worn tin cups carefully wiped
first on his much-used apron. My soul responding to echoes of fraternity
enabled me to drink with a smile, which, though it started out rather
sickly, behaved all right as I returned the cup with compliments. The
_cuistot_ said he hoped the _cantine_ would soon be in order, and as he
looked through the small opening through which he shoved the cups to
the _poilus_, rendered still smaller by piles of bread and festoons of
sausage, he added, “_Les têtes de ces dames seront plus consolantes que
la mienne_.” He was a nice, human _cuistot_, though no lover of water
except for making coffee, and then, as we fell into conversation, he
added, “_Si la guerre pouvait finir; mais il y a un fossé de dignité et
personne des deux côtés n’ose le sauter_.” These _poilus_ are astounding!
We then visited Lieutenant Tonzin, who is going to decorate the _cantine_
as never _cantine_ was decorated. He was at the camouflage grounds. As
one knows, camouflage is _de l’art de la guerre le dernier cri_, but the
grounds were discreetly veiled from public gaze, and we were directed
into a little garden, green-treed and sun-flecked. In it was a trestle
with a large, very clever, plaster cast of a _camion_ taking _poilus_
somewhere; they were hanging from every possible place except the wheels,
just such a sight as one constantly sees on the roads near the front.
The gayest sounds of whistling and singing issued from the rather
coquet sun-flooded house behind the garden. Several other young artists
appeared on hearing women’s voices, loving life, adoring art with a new
adoration, and who with something of wonder and much of thankfulness
found themselves for a sweet, brief space in charge of the camouflage
work, with brush and chisel again in hand instead of bayonets.
We looked at the designs for the _cantine_ decorations, quite
charming—but we delicately suggested suppressing the figure of a too
fascinating “mees” that was to embellish the entrance and point to the
_poilus_ the way to those delights. We feared some confusion of thought.
Afterward went to church at Notre Dame, and, sitting there, drew my first
quiet breath in Châlons, out of the hot streets. Beautiful music rolling
through the gray, antique vaulting. A white bier near the altar; some
beloved child was being laid away from sight and hearing and touch and
earthly hope. As I looked about the lovely gray spaces I remembered how
in _La Cathédrale_ Huysmans says the length symbolizes the patience of
the Church during trials and persecutions; the width, that love which
dilates the heart; and the height, our aspirations and our hopes—and
some speechless gratitude overflowed my soul because of being one of the
enduring community to whom, through the gorgeous, terrible ages, nothing
human is foreign. I had a strange, complete sensation of brotherhood and
I saw us all of the great laughing, weeping caravan, winding through the
desert, and the Church compassionate the spot of living waters. And how
“men must endure their going hence, even as their coming hither. Ripeness
is all.” ...
On the same site had once been a pagan temple, and on its altar was the
figure of a Virgin, and at her feet were graven the words, “_Virgini
Parituri_” (“to the Virgin who shall bring forth”). And it had come to
pass.
The most precious of the old windows have lately been put out of harm’s
way, but the ogival tops remain with their jewels of medieval reds and
blues; and on each side, as one looks through the lovely gray vaulting,
are delicate windows of a later epoch, with designs in fawn and green and
yellow.
As I came out behind the mourners following the little white bier, I
noticed again with a sinking of the heart the revolutionary defacement
of the splendid portals. Men in all ages have had seasons of madness,
wherein they destroyed whatever mute and unresisting beauty was within
their reach.
Again through the hot streets—an epic in themselves of war, dust, sun,
blue-clad men, blue-gray automobiles, gallooned officers, and I realized
among other things that without uniforms war would be impossible.
Bought _Le Champ de Bataille de l’Epopée_, also _Le Mannequin d’Osier_,
out of a huge stock of Anatole France’s books, who is evidently a
favorite here. I passed through the old courtyard of the museum,
hermetically sealed _depuis la campagne_, as the porter told me when
I sought his lodge, from which the most savory of noonday smells was
issuing. Uninteresting and entirely beside the point, Buddhist sculptures
fill one side of the court, and then, passing through the portal of a
seventeenth-century church, transported there when the church itself
was being done away with, one finds oneself in a narrow passage on the
walls of which are hung quaint old fire-backs, _plaques de foyer_. The
first is of the eighteenth century, “_l’amour désarmé_” (love was nearly
always disarmed in those days), and this one represented Cupid supporting
a languorous lady. “_Le retour du marché_” of Louis XVI depicted a
housewife returning with a full basket on her arm, and evoked the odor of
the porter’s _pot-au-feu_. A French soldier wounded in the Crimea, 1855,
with his colonel bending over him, might have been any one of a hundred
thousand scenes of to-day. On one were the arms of the King of Spain, and
the date 1608, and on another those of Maria Theresa and her consort,
Francis III, Duke of Lorraine. Their origins were as diverse as the
history of Lorraine itself, and I glimpsed family groups sitting about
hearths, looking at them through the flames.
_Later._
Met to-day two Englishwomen coming out of the hospital. One, nearing
sixty, had something ardent in her charming blue eyes and under austerely
brushed whitening hair; there was a suggestion of banked fires—banked
under ashes of circumstance, probably, as well as time. The other,
somewhat younger, in the full grip of _l’âge dangereux_, had something
inexorable in her regard. When we passed on I asked who they were, and
found they were daily doers of acts of mercy and devotion, and then I
found myself looking for eternal reasons in transient things, under
the impression made by those two women—met only in passing, but whose
emanations I suddenly caught. And I thought: Among the innumerable
phenomena of the war are these women of various ages (though the
phenomenon is most apparent between thirty-five and sixty), brought
for the first time into personal contact with man, other than father
or brother, ministering to his wants, witness of his agonies, awed
spectator of his continual apotheosis, and all the daily transmutations
of the definite and ordinary into the infinite and divine. The world
war gives the one chance for the twisting of conventional fives, lived
along the straightest of fines, into completely unexpected shapes. They
come from abodes of hitherto unescapable virginities, these elemental
women of indescribable innocence, with that warm, wondering look, or
sometimes that determined and inexorable look, upon their faces, these
unchosen and unmated, to become part of the strange lining of the war,
part of the vast patchwork. Not the least strange are these pale, thin
bits, sewn into something riotous, reckless, multicolored, heroic. It’s
a far cry from Shepherd’s Bush or Clapham Junction or Stepney Green
to battle-fields, hospitals, vanishings, potent reminders of forces
withdrawn forever from the world-sum, or, still more, of convalescences
and evocations of returning forces, but _not_ re-established order.
Everywhere the subtle but deathless emanation of the male—his heroisms,
his agonies, his needs, his weakness, and his strength.
Can one wonder at the mighty tide obeying nameless natural laws, like
other tides, that flood the areas where the manhood of the world is
concentrated?
Very hot. Out there in the _Champagne Pouilleuse_ men are marching in
the white dust, resting in the white dust, giving up their lives in the
white dust. Am sitting under the chestnut-tree. A soldier, in civil life
a gardener, has been sent to tidy up our garden, and its _belle patine_
will soon give way to spick-and-spanness. I sensed such a passion of
tenderness in the way he handled his rake that I went over to speak to
him, and this is his history. He is from Cette—_une ville si jolie_—and
he speaks with the heavy accent of his part of the world. He is a
territorial and forms part of the _État-Civil des Champs de Bataille_
(civilian workers on the battle-fields). This doesn’t sound bad, but it
really means that since he was called, eighteen months ago, he, who all
his life has planted flowers, has been digging up dead bodies, hunting in
a literal “body of death” to find the plaques, and then identifying by
means of a map the place where they are found.
“_Madame, je rien pouvais plus._ It was too terrible. I am forty-seven
years old, but I asked to be put among the attacking troops. They
refused, but sent me here. Now in this garden I have found heaven
again.” And his eyes, his soft, suffering eyes, filled with tears.
I asked him about his family—one son is fighting in the Vosges.
“He is six feet four and he so resembles Albert I that they call him _le
roi des Belges_. I lost my daughter a few months ago—a beautiful girl
with curling blond hair. After her fiancé fell at Verdun, she went into
a decline. My other son is young, seventeen, but his turn is near. I
had a beautiful family.” The gardener himself is straight-featured and
straight-browed, caught up how terribly in the wine-press of the war.
“All my life I have been gardener in great houses,” he added, with a
shudder. “The work they gave me _là-bas_ is the most terrible of all.
_On n’y résiste pas à la longue. O les pauvres restes qu’on trouve! O,
Madame!_”
I asked him to bring me the photographs of his family, and his face
brightened for a moment as he stood with his head uncovered. One speaks
to any chance person, and immediately one gets a story that is fit only
to be handled by some master of that incomparable thing, French prose.
_Later._
A while ago investigated the house. Up-stairs is a little room toward the
north, papered in a yellow-and-white pin-stripe design of forty or fifty
years ago. In it is a yellow baroque niche with a shell design at the
top, having a temple or altar-like suggestion, in spite of the too-large,
ugly, marble-topped mahogany wash-stand that fills it. Above the mahogany
bed is a carved wooden holy water font, a little shelf in the corner
for books, and another for a lamp, and there is a window looking out on
small gardens cut up into bits for flowers and vegetables. As I entered
it I seemed to know that some spirit rare and strong enough to project
emanations, sensible even to a stranger long after, had lived, perhaps
died, in it. I settled down immediately in a really not comfortable,
too-small, brown, upholstered arm-chair, sloping forward, and felt
somehow as if I were in choice company, and began to turn the pages of
Bordeaux’s _Dernier jour du Fort de Vaux_, which I had in my hand as I
entered. But something unseen held my attention, not the book. The room
was gently, softly haunted, and the world of spirits was sensibly about
me.... Anyway, the plain of Châlons gives me the creeps.
Joseph, reappearing this afternoon, brought the news that there had been
another air raid on Bar-le-Duc at noon, and they had dropped pounds of
leaflets telling of the Russian defeat, Rumanians retreating, in danger
of being enveloped. The leaflets wound up by saying the Germans were sick
of the war—they supposed the French were—and why not have peace?
CHAPTER IV
THE BURIAL OF PÈRE CAFARD
CHÂLONS, _Sunday, 29th_.
Telegram that M. de Sinçay may be passing through. I would like to see
his _grand seigneur_ contour decorate our 1860 establishment. Go to the
_Bureau de la Place_, and nothing less than a general (Abbevillers)
grasps the receiver and telephones for me to Bar-le-Duc—but without
result. They are all in “our” _secteur_ “of a courtesy”!
Twelve-o’clock mass at Notre Dame. Again rolling music, and the green
vestment of the priest especially beautiful at the end of that high gray
Gothic vista. Many, many military. I thought of an English officer who
said to me not long ago:
“See how the soldier is exalted in the New Testament. It is certainly not
the man of law, the money-changer, the man of politics, nor governors.
When Christ has an especial lesson to show, how often He shows it through
the soldier, even unto the servant of the centurion.”
On returning, found Mrs. S. and Miss E. arrived from the village of
the fifteenth-century towers,[12] and the khaki-clad sons of Mars from
over the seas, their hearts filled with patriotism and their tank with
American _essence_. Coffee under the chestnut-tree, lovely sun filtering
through, and the little white butterflies flying about the little white
ash-tree; and we told stories, being all of us souls that laugh, which we
did, till we couldn’t breathe, at the story of the woman’s-preparedness
meeting in a certain transcendental town where the head of the assembly
in solemn accents besought as many as felt drawn to such work to become
automobilists—“and the moment the Germans set foot in New York rush the
virgins to the West, preferably Kansas City.” In the town of brotherly
love, where a like assemblage was held, an immediate position was
available, March, 1917, with a commission of major-general, to look after
dead soldiers’ widows for another blinking female. _Oh! là, là!_—and when
one thinks we’ve _got_ to win the war!
_Later._
Have just laid down _Le Mannequin d’Osier_, completely dazzled by that
first chapter, so monstrously clever, so diabolically lucid, so icily
logical, so magnetically cynical, and I said to myself, after all, “one
can only write of war in between wars.” I long for a friend to read with
me the pages where M. Roux, on short leave during his years’ military
service, says to M. Bergeret, “_Il y a quatre mois que je n’ai pas
entendu une parole intelligente_,” to the paragraph where M. Bergeret
says, “_Mais nous sommes un peuple de héros et nous croyons toujours que
nous sommes trahis_.” It stimulated a desire for the discussion of things
as they are, over against what one idiotically hopes they may be, with a
bit of imagination concerning the future thrown in.
_July 29th, evening._
In the afternoon we all went to another theatrical representation in
the big hall, given by the _1er Régiment de Marche des Zouaves_. Again
immense concourse. Again the “Marseillaise,” and again the _Lion
d’Orient_ made his majestic entry, and dozens of generals and high
officials followed him, and again all sat forming their glittering
hemicycle in front of the stage. Again a few nurses, some wives of
officers, and the thousands of _poilus_.
A great poster read: “_Vous êtes priés d’assister au convoi, service, et
enterrement du Père Cafard, assassiné par le Communiqué._
“_Le deuil sera conduit par le Pinard, le Jus, la Gniole, le Tabac, et
tous les membres du Chacal hurlant._”
It appears that those of the 1st Zouaves still in hospital had had a rise
in temperature at the thought that their representation might not equal
that of the Moroccan Division of Friday. The _Compère_ was made to look
as much as possible like Colonel Rolland—adored by his men. “_On R’met
Ca!_” has been given in the trenches all over the front, and was just as
funny and amusing as the other, but there was a strange intermezzo about
three o’clock, when the dreadful sun, shining through the glass panes of
the sides (on the roof great squares of canvas had been spread), began
to get fainter. It was like being in the hot-room of a Turkish bath.
Suddenly a darkness fell, accompanied by a deafening and terrifying
noise of a heavy rattling on the roof and a beating in at the sides; the
voices and music were completely drowned and the performance had to be
suspended. Even the officers were beginning to look about—when the lights
suddenly went out and we found ourselves in Stygian blackness at 4.30 of
a summer afternoon, the terrific noise continuing, with the under-note of
the stirring of the thousands assembled. A nameless fear, or something
akin to it, went through the vast assemblage. Finally we realized that
it was heaven, not the enemy, bombarding us, as hailstones, even by
the time they had gone through many hot hands, as big as turkey eggs,
were passed about. There was the sound of breaking glass, water began to
rush in, the heavy canvas, spread on the roof as protection against the
sun, and also to prevent the light from being seen from the air, alone
prevented the roof from breaking in. Finally the lights reappeared and
the performance proceeded to the diminishing sound of heavy rain—but it
was a strange experience. Even those generals of Olympic calm had begun
to “think thoughts” at one moment. It would have been a big “bag,” had
anything been doing, and we all knew it.
Mrs. S. and Miss E. have been persuaded to stay at the house by the
Marne, rather than at La Haute Mère Dieu, and we have arranged to double
up.
I am to motor back to Paris with them to-morrow.
CHAPTER V
A PROVIDENTIAL FORD
PARIS, _July 31st_.
Yesterday, at 8.30 in the damp morning, Lieutenant Robin appeared with
my military pass to return by auto instead of by train, and I said a
special farewell to the gardener, carrying our bags out to the motor
in a passionate tenderness of courtesy. Miss Nott and Miss Mitchell
bade us Godspeed, and we passed over the Marne and out of town. At the
_consigne_ examination of our papers, our charming chauffeuse excited
much attention. An officer standing there with pasteboard box and leather
bag asked if we would give him a lift. The road was unusually empty and
he had been awaiting an act of Providence for two hours. We were it.
He would be in ordinary times a Frenchman of the stereotyped banal sort,
and he was entirely without charm, though I dare say he is known as a
_beau garçon_ in Lyons, where before the war he was _marchand de bois_.
But the war transmutes everything it touches, and he, too, had undergone
the subtle change. He said, quite simply for a man naturally fatuous,
“_Je ne retrouverai jamais ma vie d’autre fois_.” I seemed to see what
that life had been. Small but good business transactions; some success
with women, as I said he would be considered as handsome; the theater;
reading newspapers in a café; talking of the happenings of his quarter
of the town—and the lamp of his soul burning only dimly. But even he has
been caught up in the “chariot that rides the ridges” and must partake of
_la haine et tous ses maux, la gloire et tous ses crimes_. We drop him
at a crossroad and he takes a muddy side-path to the village where his
regiment is billeted.
At another crossway just out of the village of Vertus another officer
was waiting. We called out, “Is this the road to Epernay?” And then, “Do
you want a lift?” This time it was a dark-eyed young man with a kindling
glance and something responsive and mercurial in his being, giving a
sensation of personality, awake, running, a-thrill. He had twenty-four
hours’ permission to go to Paris to see his mother, and had arrived to
see the train pulling out of the little station. He also was waiting
Fate at the crossroads, and crossroads in war-time are a favorite abode
of Fate. He had been wounded near Suippes, lay twenty-four hours in a
shell-hole, and was finally brought in by some man he didn’t know, whose
head was blown off as he was pulling him into the trench. Something deep
rustled in my heart at the vision of the splendor of that anonymity. Six
months in hospital, six months of convalescing, and then a hunger for the
front—_quorum pars fuit_.
We were passing through a beautiful country of vineyards, Vertus, Mesnil,
Avize, in the loveliness of graded greens, malachite, beryl, emerald,
jasper, and stretches of aquamarine where the grapes had been powdered
with the _mélange de Bordeaux_. Everywhere were little sharp, steep
hills, their plantings taking all kinds of lights as they turned to east
or west or south.
At Epernay we wound about the streets till we came to the Hôtel de
l’Europe, marked with a star in the guide; but you see no stars when you
get into its encumbered, dull little courtyard—as slightly modern as
possible—ask for luncheon, any kind of luncheon, and find one can’t have
it or anything till twelve, the only fixed thing, except the _consigne_,
I have discovered in the war zone. We went across the square to the Café
de la Place, where we had _œufs sur le plat_, a yard and a half of thin,
crusty bread, a thick pat of yellow butter, and a bottle of Chablis,
that poured out pinky into our glasses. After which, reinforced and
most cheerful, we went to the Place du Marché, where were many signs of
the campaign of August and September, 1914. Among débris of bombarded
buildings the fruit-market was being held. Plums, peaches, and apricots
were of the most delicious, and we got pounds of them, which later were
to be smashed and mashed and to ruin our dressing-bags and our clothes
and the motor seats as we bumped along. It all came from Paris except the
tiny, sweet, white grapes.
Epernay seems banal, driving through it, but if one thinks a bit, all
sorts of things flash into the mind. It has a Merovingian past, and has
been pillaged innumerable times by innumerable hosts. It belonged to
the Counts of Champagne, to Louise of Savoy; Henry IV besieged it in
person, and Maréchal de Biron fell by his side. Now thinking of its great
champagne industry, into mind come memories of dinner-tables around which
sat white-vested, decorated statesmen, even unto the kind that did not
prevent war, and lovely women, and the toss of repartee, and flash of
jewel and white throat, and all the once-accustomed things no longer ours.
As we got out of Epernay a terrible temptation assailed us. Three
law-abiding women, by reason of original sin, I suppose, were drawn to
take the forbidden road to Reims—Reims, the scarred, the pitiful—Reims,
whose cannon sounded even now in our ears—rather than the straight path
of duty and _sauf-conduits_ to Paris.
“After all, we’re not here to go joy-riding in the war zone,” said
one, virtuously; and then prudence, most dismal of virtues, triumphed,
bolstered up by a look at a well-guarded bridge, and I told the inspiring
story of the principal of the school my mother went to, whose last words
to every graduate class were, “What is duty, young ladies?” And the young
ladies were expected to respond, “A well-spring in the soul.” It isn’t
(and never has been), and our eyes kept sweeping the hill between the
Epernay road and that great plain of Champagne in the midst of which is
set the broken jewel of France. A military auto passed as we stood there,
and an officer waved us onward. We let that hand pointing us to Paris
decide. It was the triumph of prudence—plus a lively sense of favors to
come. Some one muttered, “Had we been going to take the boat on Saturday,
oh, then mayhap, mayhap....”
Dormans. Several kilometers before we got into Dormans little crosses
began to show themselves along the roadside. All through here was heavy
fighting during the battle of the Marne. The first grave we stopped by
bore on its little cross the words, “_Trois Allemands_,” and it was
neatly fenced up with black sticks and wire. We started to climb the
hill, and among the malachite, the beryl, the emerald, the jasper, and
the aquamarine vines were many other graves. Sometimes it would be “_20
Français_,” the red-and-white-and-blue _cocarde_ decorating the cross.
Once it was “_30 Allemands_.” On another was the name “_Lastaud, le 3
septembre, 1914, souvenir d’un ami_.” I thought how friendship has been
glorified in this war.
But mostly it was the continuous gorgeous anonymity of the defenders of
the land that clutched the heart and with them the invaders, pressing
their bayonets and their wills into a land not theirs. I was once
more again before the awful tangle of the world as I looked at these
resting-places. Over beyond the crest of the hill and the forest was
Montmirail. Just a hundred years before, Napoleon had put these names
upon the scrolls of history, and again and then again they had resounded
to marching feet, the terrors of invasion, the heroisms of defense. One
of a group of soldiers passing called out as we stood by one of the
German graves:
“I came through here in 1914.”
“But you still walk the earth,” I answered.
“I got a ball in the hip, all the same, on the top of that hill,” and he
pointed across the road. “_Mais j’ai eu de la chance._” And a look of a
strange and pitiful wonder that he was above the earth, not under it,
flashed for a moment over his young face; then he touched his cap and
went singing down the road with his companions, and I caught the refrain,
“_Ces mots sacrés, ces mots sacrés, gloire et patrie, gloire et patrie_.”
And somehow, after Dormans, we were all quiet. I only remember long,
gray villages, mostly eighteenth century, and many blue soldiers walking
about their broad, central streets, and signs of billetings, “_30 hommes,
2 officiers_,” “_5 hommes, 2 chevaux_,” black-robed women coming out
of little Gothic churches, and children playing, and in between the
villages great avenues of poplar and plane trees. Then we lost the Marne
and picked up the Seine, and passed La Ferté, and Meaux, seen from the
inside, preserved its flavor of “_autres temps, autres mœurs_,” in spite
of the 1917 soldiers billeted there, walking hand in hand with girls who
don’t have a ghost of a chance, in military towns, to get through the war
as they began it.
Entered Paris in a fine drizzle of rain at 6.30. Our charming chauffeuse
dead tired after the long day, but steering us so prudently and yet so
quickly through the wet, crowded streets. Give me a good woman chauffeur
_any day_!—not simply when coming from the front! She takes no chances,
but she makes good time and she gets you there. But somehow one leaves
one’s heart at the front, and I thought to myself as I got to the hotel
door, “It’s not so good, after all, to feel _just safe_ and to be
comfortable.”
PART III
LORRAINE IN AUTUMN
“_L’élégante et mélancolique Lorraine_”
CHAPTER I
NANCY AND MOLITOR
_1.30 p.m., Tuesday, October 9th._
Passing Meaux. Square gray tower of its cathedral against a gray sky, the
gray hemicycle of its lovely apse cutting in against reddish-gray roofs;
gray houses with old towers built into them; yellowing acacia and plane
and willow trees; level corn-fields stripped of their harvest, pheasants
and magpies pecking in them; golden pumpkins; and _betteraves_ showing
red and vermilion roots bursting out of the ground; everything wet—wet.
LIGNY-EN-BARROIS.
Two American soldiers walking up a muddy village street in the dusk; rain
falling; a cinnamon-colored stream slipping by; and a quantity of shabby,
wet foliage and wetter meadows.
GONDRECOURT, _5.40_.
In the extreme point of the angle where the Nancy train seems to turn
back to Paris and where many American soldiers are billeted. Cheerless,
dimly lighted station. Groups of our men standing about, high piles
of United States boxes, marked “Wizard Oats.” Some persuasion of
black-frock-coated “sky pilot” walking up and down and humming, “Pull
for the shore, sailor, pull for the shore” (there _was_ a lot of water
about!), and then in the darkness the train slipped out. There and in
all the dim, wet Lorraine villages about are damp, puzzled, homesick,
forlorn, brave, determined, eager young Americans.
HÔTEL EXCELSIOR ET D’ANGLETERRE, NANCY, _Tuesday evening_.
Cabs at station, hot water, writing-paper, meat, warmth, all sorts of
things you don’t always get on Tuesday in Paris. Everything, in fact,
except light. Dining-room full of officers. _Chic atmosphère de guerre_
began to envelope me, not yet experienced that day. Started from Paris
tired and not particularly receptive, but was conscious of a slow
quickening of sensibility as the hours passed, drawing me within the zone
of armies.
This “chic war atmosphere” is like nothing else. Impersonal and larger
lungs are needed to breathe it. We no longer, so many of us, read of
their battles, but they still fight them, these blue-clad men out here.
In the coal-black evening, stumbling from the station, one realizes it
all once more—and there is some lighting of the soul.
_October 10th._
Nancy in rain and storm, and all night the sound of cannon and gun and
mitrailleuse turned against sweet flesh and blood, the sons of women
dying in agony hard as their mother’s pain, and no way out. Never were
the imaginations of men less elastic; little groups everywhere are hourly
setting this cold grind in motion with a word or a gesture, around green
tables or bending over maps—in a few small spaces deciding the agonies of
millions.
An _avion_ almost tapped at my window once toward morning and reminded me
of a young aviator with whom we talked in the train last night, his face
a-twitch, strange eyes, gloomy, set mouth, once _jeunesse dorée_. A hard
look as he answered:
“_Avion de chasse, il n’y a que cela._” He had been “resting” in the
cavalry, where there was little movement, and he couldn’t stand it. As
for the trenches—
“_O les tranchées! Être avec des gens que je ne connais pas, sous des
conditions indescriptibles; non, je n’en peux plus._”
“Better to fall from the heavens?” I asked him.
And then I realized the disarray of nerves, the complete unfitting of the
being to an earthly habitat, in the knowledge that life is measured by
an almost countable number of hours or days, scarcely weeks, and rarely,
rarely months, and the calling on help from the flower of sleep to fit
one for acts impossible to normal being.
I must say this very evidently “made-in-Germany” hotel is most
comfortable. _Jugend-Stil_ designed bed, exquisitely clean; great white
eiderdown; a munificence of brass electric-light fixtures representing
leaves, with frosted shades running from pale pink to pale green, and
giving plenty of light; the iron shutters tightly pulled down, of
course. Large wash-stand with a huge faucet for hot water, bearing
the name “Jacob”; the heating apparatus by Rückstuhl; the telephone,
“Berliner-system”; electric light and lift the familiar “Schindler.”
Wardrobe and mirror over wash-stand have, like the bed, a design,
not of conventionalized flowers, but of flowers devoid of life. The
inexpressibly sloppy _mollesse_ of _art nouveau_ is in such contrast to
the beautiful precision of touch of the eighteenth century.
At 9.30 E. M. came into my room and said, “We’d better doll up and be
off.” I leave it to the gentlest of readers to surmise what we did before
being off, and I would like to say here that one doesn’t always “doll up”
for others; the process gives to one’s own being a sense of completeness
most sustaining. It comes after that of having one’s clothes put on
properly.
_En route_ to the Prefect’s we met the tall, good-looking blond young son
of Jean de Reszke, “_très chic, cherchant le danger_”; “_en voilà un qui
n’a pas froid aux yeux_,” the only and adored child of his parents. It’s
not a very promising situation for them. But again I thought, “Nothing
but good can befall the soldier, so he play his part well,” and started
to ponder on the incalculable growth of filial piety, and of the love
of mothers, and their griefs, when, suddenly walking along the gray
streets of Nancy, the scene shifted, and it was the Metropolitan Opera
House that I saw—the lights, the red glow, the boxes, the jewels; the
warmth, the stir of the orchestra, the quiet of the listening house, were
about me. It seemed to be the second act of “Tristan and Isolde” after
the duo, when King Mark makes his noble entry and in those unforgetable
accents begins his broken-hearted apostrophe to Tristan, “_Tatest du’s in
Wirklichkeit, wähnst du das?_” And all that unsurpassed and unsurpassable
art of the great Polish brothers was again evoked; one now gathered to
his rest in stress of war, the other knowing a greater fear than for
himself.
Then I found myself in the Place Stanislas under gray morning skies,
instead of the gleaming twilight web. I felt suddenly and acutely the
turning of the seasons and the inexorable advent of winter through which
unsheltered flesh and blood must pass. That ravishing of the spirit I
knew in the warm June sunset was mine no more.
_Later._
Waiting for the motor to drive to Lunéville.
Went with Madame Mirman, the wife of the _Préfet de la Meurthe et
Moselle_, to visit Molitor. It is a huge collection of barrack-buildings
which for three years has contained that terrible precipitation of
old men, women, and children from the devastated districts around
about. They are received in every conceivable condition of hunger,
dirt, disease, and distress of soul. They had been living in the woods
and fields that first summer, and the children running the streets of
half-ruined towns, before being brought to Molitor.
[Illustration: SISTER JULIE]
[Illustration: BAS-RELIEF OF THE REFUGEES
As they passed at Evian—but typical of any group anywhere.]
We went first to the school-building, and into the kindergarten room
where rows of children were making straight lines with beans on little
tables. Very hot and stuffy in the hermetically sealed room, every child
sniffling and sneezing and coughing. There are always faces that stand
out, and in this room, as the children rose and sang a song with patting
of the hands, there was one child of five with gestures so lovely and
movements of the body so rhythmic that one realized afresh the eternal
differences in the seasoning of the human _pâte_. She was between two
clumsy, wooden-faced children, one with a peaked forehead, the other with
a heavy jaw.
We then went up-stairs to a class-room of older boys, and after we had
spoken to the schoolmaster I noticed a handsome boy with shining eyes and
a firm mouth. The master, who was new and wished to become acquainted
with his pupils, had written the following questions on the blackboard:
“Whence do you come? What was the occupation of your parents? Are you
happy at Molitor?” etc. Well, that little boy of eleven, when asked what
he had written, turned out to be a sort of cross between Demosthenes and
Gambetta, and read from his slate an impassioned apostrophe about “_le
flot envahisseur des barbares, quand délivrera-t-on la France martyrisée
de la main destructrice de l’ennemi?_” and to the question, “Are you
happy at Molitor?” the answer was, “_Oui, on est bien à Molitor, mais
rien ne remplace le foyer; quand on a perdu cela, on a tout perdu_.”
The face of the master showed some embarrassment at any restrictions
on happiness at Molitor, but the boy, whose eyes had begun to flame,
continued: “_O quand viendra le jour de la Revanche, le jour sacré de la
délivrance?_” and wound up with something about his blood and the blood
of his children. His father, who was dead, had been employed in the
customs at Avricourt, and his mother now cooked in one of the Molitor
buildings. Then we passed through a room where some fifty women were
sorting and stemming hops; the strong, warm odor enveloped us and the
eyes of the women followed us.
Then out across the immense courtyard to one of the dormitory buildings.
Rows of beds, and above them, around the walls, a line of shelves on
which is every kind of small article that could be carried in flight,
from trimmings for Christmas trees to shrines and little strong-boxes.
As we entered the first room, Madame Mirman said to an old woman with
deep, soft eyes:
“_Comment ça va-t-il aujourd’hui?_”
And with such grace she answered:
“_Oh, Madame, c’est la vieillesse, et on n’en guérit pas._”
Another woman, nursing a rheumatic knee, when asked about her son, who
had been at Molitor on a three days’ permission, put her cracked old hand
over her heart and said, “_Voir un peu sa personne fait oublier tout_.”
In all the big rooms near the long windows women sit bent over embroidery
and passementerie frames. One of them, with thin hair and horny hands,
was working with extreme rapidity on a bright _pailleté_ strip for an
evening gown, a design of silver lilies on white tulle, in such contrast
to her worn face and bent figure.
Many were working at lovely and intricate tea-cloths, with designs of
the Lorraine cross, and thistle, oak and acorn designs, that had been
handed down through generations. Some of the work Madame Mirman is able
to dispose of directly, while some is contracted for with big shops.
When we came down-stairs there was a great sound of young feet and voices
and various noises of well-cared-for children, just dismissed from the
seats of learning, coming up the stone stairway to their dinner.
It’s the threading up of all these destinies, this web of the France to
be, that is the great problem. And oh, how terrible is this uptearing
of human beings, this ghastly showing of the roots! I have seen it
wholesale, east and west. I remember especially the first two evacuations
of Czernowitz and the adjacent towns and villages during the Russian
advance through Galicia. They would flood the streets of Vienna by the
tens of thousands, in pitiful groups, always the same—old men, women, and
children; and it’s all alike, it’s war, the ruthless, the indescribable,
and everywhere the children paying most heavily. Could the war-book of
_children_ be written no eyes could read it for tears....[13]
We went back to luncheon at the Prefecture, where I met M. Mirman, one
of the most striking figures of the war. Since the 12th of August, 1914,
when he took up his duties as _Préfet de la Meurthe et Moselle_, his
handsome, straight-featured face has figured at every gathering of sorrow
or relief. As he sat at his table, surrounded by his six children, he
talked of those first days when Nancy was in danger and it was not known
if _le Grand Couronné_ on which Castelnau had flung his _paraphe could_
protect them, and then he told of many urgent present needs.
After lunch we drove with Madame Mirman to her favorite good work,
_l’école ménagère_.
When we got there the elementary class, girls of thirteen to fourteen,
were chopping herbs and onions to make seasoning for soups in winter, and
putting it up in stone pots. Another class was kneading and rolling out
dough. Then we went into the great sewing-room and turned over the books
of miniature sample pieces of underclothing. When the girls become expert
they are given material and make their own trousseaux.
With a sigh Madame Mirman said: “But I am sad for these girls. The men
who might have been their husbands lie dead on the field of honor, and
there will be no homes for them.”
Something chill and inexorable laid its hand on me as I thought: only
graves, and they leveled out of memory by time; except in the hearts of
mothers, to whom _voir un pen sa personne_ is the supreme joy, and the
knowledge that it can be no more the supreme sorrow.
HÔTEL DES VOSGES, LUNÉVILLE, _11.30 p.m._
A long day. Many pages of the book of life and death turned. Just before
leaving Nancy, made a little tour of the battered station. Scarcely
a pane of glass left anywhere, but in and out of it is the ceaseless
movement of blue-clad men. A few flecks of a strange, dull amber in a
pale-pink sky, the true sunset sky of Nancy. A bishop with a military
cap and a chaplain in khaki pass, lines of _camions_ and Red Cross
ambulances. Suddenly, beyond the station, a dark-winged thing against the
sky is seen to drop, right itself for a moment, then a column of smoke
goes up from it, then a flame, then there is a falling of something
black just behind the twin Gothic towers of St.-Léon. The streets filled
instantly, “_C’est un des nôtres_,” said a man with field-glasses, and
then, death in the sky not being unusual here, they went about their
business, and the long, delicate towers of St.-Léon got black as ink
against the flaming sky. But a man’s soul was being breathed out in some
distant beet-root field or in the forest of Haye. Peace to him!
The next thing I saw, that has become a familiar sight in the last
months, was an American soldier on some sort of permission, and hanging
from his arm, neatly bound, was a pretty little “dictionary”—from whom,
however, came sounds of broken English. The British Expeditionary Force
saved the classics from destruction at one time; now “salvage” seems to
be rather the turn of the American forces. One can only philosophize on
the indestructibility of matter.
The Place Stanislas was a bit out of our way, but when I saw the lovely
Louis XV knots of pink that the orb of day was tying in the sky before he
quite departed I begged for three minutes in its pale loveliness. Against
the delicate ribbons of the sky were urns and figures, urns with stone
flames arising from them, softly glowing, or stone flower-twisted torches
held by winged beings, children and youths or angels I knew not—but I did
know in a flash just how and why the Place Stanislas came into being.
In the gray streets were blue-clad, heavily laden men, and the chill
autumn twilight was falling about them. Oh, Nancy! dream of the past and
yet with so much of the hope of the present within your gates!
As we sped out of town, through the vast manufacturing suburbs, I turned
and saw a bank of orange glory in the west, cut into browns and reds,
with little threadings of gray and green and blue, for all the world
like an ancient Cashmere shawl with light thrown on it.
Night was falling as we passed through St.-Nicolas du Port. The two
immense towers of the church, which dominate the landscape, were cutting
black and cypress-like into the sky. The streets were full of dim
figures—soldiers, overalled men, and many trousered women coming from
munition-factories, with baskets and clinging children, hurrying home to
get the evening meal.
We two American women found ourselves threading our way through it all in
a Ford which E. M. was driving herself, the Ford which in the afternoon
had allowed itself caprices only permissible to lovelier objects, and
there, close behind the French lines, we talked of love and marriage, and
the Church. And these things had been and are for one, and for the other
all to come.
Among its various imperfections, the Ford was one-eyed, and our little
light did not cast its beams very far. We got tangled up into a long
line of _camions_, with blinding headlights, quite extinguishing us as
we hugged the right side of the road. Finally we reached the outpost of
Lunéville, where the guard stopped us, dark and disreputable-looking as
we were, flashed his lantern, saw the lettering on the auto. We cried,
“Vitrimont,” and then passed on. The chill night had completely fallen,
but in the dark fields rose darker crosses that only one’s soul could
see. Peace to them that lie beneath!
Into town safe; drew up at the door of the house that was once an old
Capuchin monastery, groped our way through a dark garden to find a warm
welcome from Mademoiselle Guérin, a shining tea-table, an open fire, many
books, things seemed _too_ well with us.
CHAPTER II
EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY EMANATIONS
_October 11th, 7.30._
Awakened at five o’clock to the sound of cavalry passing under my
windows. I have three, and got the full benefit of the hoofs. I looked
out into a bluish, late-night sky; endless shadowy lines of men that
I knew were blue-clad were defiling, and there was a faint booming of
cannon. Everything that the pitchy blackness of the streets of Lunéville
prevents the inhabitants from doing between 5 and 8 P.M. they do between
5 and 8 A.M. The hour was set back on the 7th, which is why we have
suddenly so much morning and these chopped-off afternoons. It makes the
streets of the old town “hum” in the early hours. No Taubes; the sky too
threatening. Again _chic atmosphère de guerre_.
My big room is charming. The doors have panelings of the great epoch
of Lunéville, but on the walls is a fresh papering of a pinkish _toile
de Jouy_ design, in such good taste, an abyss between it and the
_Jugend-Stil_ of the “Hôtel Excelsior et d’Angleterre”; over each door is
a lunette containing a faded old painting.
The pink-curtained windows have deep embrasures; a fresh, thick,
pale-gray carpet quite covers the floor; on the mantelpiece is a bronze
clock, a large Europa sitting on a small bull. I suspect _it_ is 1830.
In one corner a commodious Louis XV _armoire_. On one of its doors
is carved a peasant’s house and a hunter aiming at a deer half-hidden
in some trees. On the other is a fishing scene and a bridge, and in
the distance a château. The panels are inclosed in charming Pompadour
scrolls, and there is an elaborate wrought-iron lock of the same period.
It seemed to epitomize the life of Lorraine, as well as “the reign of
the arts and talents.” Discovered last night that the electric light is
in the right place, so that a lady can dress for dinner or read in bed
with equal facility. There is all the hot water one could wish, an open
fireplace, but it was with a sigh that I said, as I heard the cannon,
“_Rien ne manque_.” The maid, who had been in England, put our things out
last night with a dainty touch, the ribbons on top; my pink satin négligé
was placed with art across the chair by my bed. In E. M.’s room, equally
comfortable, her pale-blue one was also tastefully displayed. Somehow,
all the physical comfort is so insistently in contrast with what is
being gone through with a few kilometers away, and though my soul can be
supremely content without any of it, I looked for the moment with a new
appreciation on this flicker of comfort behind that dreadful front.
Again we groped through the Place Léopold after dinner at Mlle. Guérin’s,
feeling our way slowly under completely remote stars, Jupiter so
gorgeous that for a moment my heart was afraid. Then I became sensible
of ghostly and lovely companions, the amiable secrets of whose amiable
lives have been revealed to me in many a tome since I crossed that square
in those linden-scented nights of June. Did linden scent, on which a
long chapter could be written, have anything to do with their morals, I
wonder? However that may be, I thought of Duke Léopold going from the
château through the park to the house in the rue de Lorraine to see
the Princesse de Craon, who bore twenty children here in Lunéville,
preserving her beauty and her husband’s love, and that of Duke Léopold as
well, evidently having the secret of squaring the circle without breaking
it (unknown in the twentieth century, when everything “goes bang” if it
is but breathed upon). Then of the wild and witty Chevalier de Boufflers,
painting and making verses, loving and forgetting, whose mother, beloved
of “_Stanislas, Roi de Pologne et Duc de Lorraine et de Bar_,” was the
bright particular star of Stanislas’s Court, as his grandmother had
been of Léopold’s. And how often _La divine Emilie_ and Voltaire passed
through the Place Léopold in their coach to be put up at the Palace
and contribute to the gaiety of nations. They and many others filled
the square, and I was thinking of discreet sedan-chairs coming from
rendezvous rather than of the uncompromised and uncompromising lamp-post
that finally got me, minus the light.
Now I quite dislike getting up from this literally downy couch, with
its dainty pink-lined, lace-trimmed, white-muslin covered eiderdown and
its heaps of soft pillows, to investigate further their _amours_, and
in general the _arts et talents_ of the eighteenth century, but so I
willed it, and so it must be done. For some reason nervous energy is at a
low ebb. There are moments when I throw my life out of the window, when
nothing seems impossible and most things quite easy, but to-day the gray
world outside, _l’élégante et mélancolique Lorraine_, I would consider
well lost for converse with a beloved friend by my fireside.
_October 12th._
Nothing to be found in Lunéville on an October night except your soul,
and if you don’t keep it fairly bright, you won’t find even that. Oh, woe
is me! about six o’clock mine was suddenly too dark and sad for words,
so I betook me to the downy couch of the morning, with a batch of letters
and various books given me by M. Guérin at lunch, some old, some new,
concerning _l’élégante et mélancolique Lorraine_. The Hôtel des Vosges
is ahead of any Ritz that was ever built, and, what’s more, in it your
soul’s your own, even if it is a poor and dark and trembling thing.
My “_Symphonie Pastorale_” letter to —— returned to me. Have just reread
it and pinned it into the Journal. It’s all part of the same.
AIX-LES-BAINS, _vendredi, 27 août, 1917_.
... The orchestra, pale, emasculated, having the minimum of strings—the
musicians of France are dead or in the trenches—seemed without accent
during the first part of the program. “_La Chasse du Jeune Henri_” of
Méhul, “_Les Eolides_” of César Franck, something of Grétry, Dukas,
Saint-Saëns, _enfin_, one of the usual war-time programs. But then
followed the “_Symphonie Pastorale_” and the master’s voice suddenly
swelled the thin sounds, triumphant in the beauty of his order and
splendor.
A.—(_Sensations agréables en arrivant à la Campagne. Allégro ma non
troppo._) I felt myself invaded by a familiar but long-untasted delight
as my ear received the gorgeous consonances, and the lovely theme of
the violins drew me to an interior place. My fancy was set a-wandering
in a world of green glades, and broad meadows covered with asphodel and
belladonna and fringed by dark plantings of pines, such as the master had
wandered in, and “upon my eyes there lay a tear the dream had loosened
from my brain.” In deep serenity I found myself thinking on appearances
of “things wise and fair,” feeling myself in some way included in a
company of paradisaical beings.
Suddenly an almost unbearable spiritual exasperation succeeded
the delight, and I saw a scarred and dreadful scene, like to the
lunar landscape of the battle-field of Verdun, and I knew that my
dwelling-place was a world of blood-madness. I tried to beat off the
invading horror. Hot tears of protest came to my eyes, a feeling of
suffocation clutched my throat, and a something burning wrapped my soul.
Delight was dead.
B.—(_Au bord du Ruisseau. Andante molto moto._) The master spoke again,
in a voice of purling water over smooth stones and through soft grasses;
the music of the lower strings, monotonous, hypnotic, possessed my
fancy. Again the joy with which he was looking on the beauty of the
exterior world tried to communicate itself to me. But my eyes fell on a
white-haired man seated near me, a black band about his arm, dozing or
dreaming, I knew not which. He awakened with a start and groan, and was
doubtless thinking on combat and empty places and “heroes struggling with
heroes and above them the wrathful gods.”
And I thought of Veiled Destinies and high and nameless sacrifices and
children at evening and silent firesides, and broken loves and other
visible and invisible things.
C.—(_Joyeuse réunion de Paysans. Allégro._) Expressing the master’s
deep belief in the goodness of humanity, its deathless adorations, its
inextinguishable hopes.
But the houses of the peasants are empty, even here in Savoy, and
husbands and fathers and sons will cross their thresholds no more. “The
ancients have ceased from the gates, the young men from the choir of the
singers.”
I sat by the stream among the peasants and remembered suddenly two
combatants, an Austrian and a Serb, visited in a hospital in Vienna that
first winter of the war. One had lain by a frozen brook across a fallen
log for two days, his hands and feet alone touching the ground, and
when he was brought in they were black and swollen, and as I saw him he
was but a trunk of a man with dull eyes. And the other, the Serb, with
something wild and burning in his look, and restless hands, had fallen
with his feet in a stream, and he, too, would walk no more; and so one
thinks of brooks and sweet, moving waters these days.
(_Orage—Tempête. Allégro._) The sudden D flat, the world in noise and
horror and protesting hate, and hard, bright-eyed men meeting from East
and West, the sons of the world falling for the sins of the world; and
there is no way out, for all words save that of peace may be spoken. And
I thought on the loneliness of the mind, and knew it for as great or
greater than that of the heart, for mostly humanity lives by its personal
throbs, its desires and its hopes and fears, and these are of such
abundance that there are always contacts. But the loneliness of the mind
is a world where there is scarcely any sound of footsteps, few voices
call, and sometimes it is deathly cold, and that is why I write to _you_
to-night.
I listened again. (_Joie et sentiments de reconnaissance après l’orage.
Allegretto._) And I suddenly realized how unsubstantial, for all their
thickness, are the towers wherein each dwells isolated from some near
happiness, shut off from some close beatitude, that for a dissolving
touch might be his own. And I found that the completed harmonies of the
lovely finale, “_Herr, wir danken Dir_,” were seeking my mortal ear,
and my soul was being regained to tranquillity. My mind was turned from
untimely vanishings, or the despair of men of middle life who go up
to battle, and from all the company of those who “have wrapped about
themselves the blue-black cloud of death,” and I saw again visions,
felicities, progressions, accomplishments. Then, not bearing less
beneficent harmonies, I went out, and Hope, with lovely, veiled, outcast,
undesired Peace, accompanied me through the warm Savoyan night. But
they left me at the door of my dwelling, as the one-armed _concierge_
saluted me, and the one-legged lift-man (symbols of my real world) took
me up-stairs. Now I am alone with thoughts of him who gave to melody its
eternal fashion and to music itself its furthest soul, and would that you
had listened with me!... You who will not, Peace!...
M. Guérin’s book-loving, artistic, perceptive son, _en permission_, with
a dreadful cold, was at lunch, Colonel ——, and several other men. Mr. G.,
whose family have been part owners of the Lunéville porcelain-factories
for one hundred and fifty years, is charming, erudite, and afterward,
over our coffee by his library fire, we talked politics and literature
and music. I had just been reading Madame de Staël’s _De l’Allemagne_,
not at all in favor just now, which I had picked up on her centenary.
“_Une exaltée_,” said one of the officers.
“That is not enough to say of one who always had the courage of her
convictions,” I answered, and recalled the conversation between her and
Benjamin Constant when under the Consulate he threw himself into the
opposition.
“_Voilà_,” he said, “_votre salon rempli de personnes qui vous plaisent;
si je parle demain, il sera désert; pensez-y_.”[14]
And she answered, “_Il faut suivre sa conviction_.”
“She certainly followed out her convictions; but what did Madame de
Staël know of the Germans?” pursued the colonel. “She saw them in the
quite factitious setting of the Weimar Court, and was intoxicated by
the play of mind. Those _beaux esprits_ presented the character and the
future of their race, through rose-colored clouds of Romanticism, to one
of the most charming and gifted women another race had ever produced, _et
puis elle rentre et elle écrit de l’Allemagne! Cela serait comique si ce
n’était pas si triste._”
“Don’t you think both sides played up,” I asked, “at those Weimar
suppers? She was under the charm of philosophers and musicians, and they
under the charm of her wit and appreciation. I keep thinking how they all
enjoyed it—and how those black eyes flashed under the heavy red-and-gold
turban.”
“Without doubt it was more than agreeable. I only complain that she was
in a position to mislead succeeding generations, and did so. She seems to
have had no _flair_, and because she got the personal enthusiasm, the hot
striking of mind against mind, that was at once her gift and her delight,
she glorifies a nation that later makes furious attempts to destroy hers.”
I then remarked, but a bit warily: “Talking of centenaries, I have just
had in my hands the discourse of Wagner on the centenary of Beethoven. It
has fire.”
“We won’t talk of Wagner, the mere memory of a phrase scorches one’s
ear. Beethoven, yes, for all time, but we French can’t listen to Wagner
now. He’s like a hot iron on seared flesh—or a rake in a wound. We want
nothing more to do with the Lohengrins and the Tannhäusers and the
Siegfrieds. I only wish they had been annihilated with their Walhalla.”
“These beings, however, were potential in the German race. Madame de
Staël got their projections, together with the metaphysics of Goethe and
his contemporaries, and carried away with her the memory of a blue-eyed
people lost in metaphysical dreams, passionately loving poetry and music.”
“Yes, and presented them to us as an example of all the social virtues.
Look at history,” said another officer, with a gesture toward the east.
One _can_ talk of other things besides the booming of cannon, even in
Lunéville—but not with complete pleasure.
Then E. M. and I departed to take a _tournée_ about the country. But the
Ford reposing in the Guérins’ garage was completely unresponsive; it
might have been dead. It appears it hates cold weather. A dozen officers
are billeted in the Guérins’ house; two of their orderlies and the butler
tried to crank it. The only signs of life were in the handle, which from
time to time flew round with extraordinary rapidity. We called out to one
not-over-cautious soldier, “Be careful; you will break your arm.”
He only answered:
“If that happens I shall have two or three months of tranquillity.” And
that’s how _he_ felt anent the breaking of his arm!
At last we found ourselves on the road bounded by the meadows of the
silent crosses, skirting the hill of Léomont, with its great scars of
1914 shell-holes, beneath which is a little village with the strange name
of Anthelupt. The Romans were all about here and it was once “Antelucus”
(before the sacred grove), and afterward was a dependence of the priory
of Léomont built on the site of the ancient temple to the moon. Then
we found ourselves on the broad ridge of road leading to Crévic. Great
stretches of Lorraine, _l’élégante et mélancolique Lorraine_, were flung
out before us under rain-clouds and sunbursts—lovely stretches, with
fields of mustard greedy for the light, blowing patches of red-stemmed
osier, and everywhere fields of beet-root in which women and old men and
little children were working, piling high red-white mounds or separating
the wilted leaves into greenish-yellow piles.
Crévic is shot to bits. Of the château of General Lyautey[15] but a few
crumbling walls remain. Though the piles of stones and mortar are covered
with the green of three summers’ growth, still the cannon are booming to
the east and north. The perfectly banal church is intact. People were
walking about the streets and improvised roofs cover some sort of homes,
and there seemed many very little children. We passed out over an old
bridge in a dazzling sunburst, while a great curtain of rain hung to the
west near Dombasle, the smoke-columns of whose hundred chimneys caught
and held and reflected the gorgeous afternoon light, and there were other
great stretches of unspeakable beauty, soft, rolling, and radiant—crying
out about the generations that have bent over them.
The great village of Haraucourt has a lovely destroyed church of pure
Gothic that workmen are at last roofing over; but three winters have
already passed over its beauty, unsheltered and unguarded. We go out
through the village in the direction of Dombasle, and suddenly against
some gorgeous masses of clouds we see an _avion de chasse_, “type
Nieuport,” as E. M., who has ample reason to be expert in things aerial,
tells me. There is a moment when it is a great silver brooch pinning two
gray velvety curtains together, where a ray of blinding light falls. Then
it makes a series of marvelous _vrilles_, and I say to her, “How can men
who do that love finite woman?” A great observation balloon, _saucisse_,
hung in the sky, and another broad shaft of light lay on the far hills
behind which lie intrenched gray-clad men with pointed helmets.
At this moment a _panne_. The only thing in sight is a long line of
war-supply wagons drawn by tired horses, and women and old men and
children bending over their eternal piles of beet-root. But E. M. said,
“Sooner than change that tire, I’ll bury the Ford by the road.” So we
bumped and crawled along till we met a line of _camions_. The first
was driven by a handsome, tall, very small-handed, extremely polite
Frenchman, who knew Fords, having been four months with Piatt Andrew
at the Field Service Ambulance in the rue Raynouard, and who agreed to
change it for us.
A hail-storm, like a pelting of diamonds, as sudden bursts of light
caught it, came up in the middle of the operation, which was finally
completed with expressions of mutual satisfaction. The shining storm
was withdrawn like a curtain, showing the sun on the great stretches,
and Dombasle with the smoke of its hundred chimneys was a thing
of inexpressible beauty, while behind it were the great towers of
St.-Nicolas du Port, for which we decided to make a dash. We got into
it, through Dombasle, as a perfect rainbow rose from the Meurthe and
disappeared into the horizon, where the gray-clad men with the pointed
helmets are intrenched.
“For luck,” said E. M.
But I asked, “Whose luck?” the rainbow evidently being neutral.
We had some difficulty in finding anything but the towers of the church.
There is no square in front; tiny streets encircle it on all sides. But
we at last got into the narrow street in front of the cathedral, which is
called “_Des Trois Pucelles_,” in memory of the three young girls to whom
St.-Nicolas gave a _dot_. I was not alone in remembering that he is the
patron saint of those contemplating matrimony.
The church is of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, and among the
largest of the Gothic churches of Lorraine. Swelling-breasted pigeons
with gorgeous pink and red and green and purple upon their throats were
nestled against the beautiful carvings of the gray portals, and much
soft cooing was going on. Above the central door, in the _trumeau_, is
a statue of the saint said to have been done by the brother of Ligier
Richier, and I thought of the lovely Gothic fireplace by Ligier Richier
himself taken from St.-Mihiel, and now at Ochre Court in Newport.
Noble interior, though the pillars have had the beautiful sharpness
of their chiseling blunted by much painting and whitewashing. There
are remains of early frescoes on some of the croisillons, and near a
door I found a tiny, ancient painting representing scenes in the life
of St.-Nicolas, inclosed in glass in a modern varnished wooden frame.
Somewhere in the pavement of the church is a certain potent slab, and
she who steps upon it is married within the year. Its exact position is
not known, but I told E. M. to take an exhaustive walk about and commend
herself to heaven and the saint.
When we came out into the ancient streets the western sky was aflame and
there were translucent pale greens ahead of us. We turned again toward
the open road and Dombasle, named after a monk of the fifth century.
Hermits brought the first civilization to these forests, followed by the
great bishops and the builder-monks, who constructed the immense abbeys
and the churches of Lorraine. Dombasle from some mysterious wilderness
had become what I saw it that afternoon. From the chimneys of its
munition-factories, against the amber sky, there poured and twisted a
wonder of gray and white and deep brown and violet smoke. The darkening,
soot-blackened streets were overflowing with human energies spilling
themselves into the greedy war-machine. There are vast monotonous
workingmen’s quarters, and everywhere children, little children, being
trampled in the wine-press....
It was dark when we drew up in front of the house of the _maire_, Mr.
Keller, the celebrated house where the Prince de Beauvau was born, where
the beautiful Princesse de Craon had most of the twenty children, where
the Treaty of Lunéville was signed in 1801, and where, in 1914, the
_maire_ lodged the generals of the German army. Madame was still at her
hospital, so we left our cards and came back to the hotel.
Now I must leave the almost Capuan delights of this pleasant room to
motor a hundred kilometers. Nancy, Toul, the antique Tullum, and back, is
the program. It’s raining, it’s hailing, it’s blowing, but I bethink me
of St.-Mansuy and St.-Epvre, the great Bishop of Toul, and those other
saints, St.-Eucarius and St.-Loup, starting out in all kinds of weather,
and of the _œuvre_ that we are to visit, founded last summer for children
gathered in 1917 from villages where there had been bad gas attacks. The
history of Lorraine piles high about me—the cannon boom. What a day to
lie with your life’s blood flowing from you in wet beet-root fields....
The motor horn sounds.
CHAPTER III
TOUL
_October 13th._
We lunched at the Café Stanislas yesterday after the wildest of drives
into Nancy, the Ford seeming like an autumn leaf in the high wind. We
did ourselves well, even I, who care not a farthing what I eat except to
“stoke the engine.” The proprietor, who left Alsace as a boy after 1870,
stood and talked to us, as we ate our _œufs au beurre noir_, as French
people alone can talk. He said “they” came only with fire and sword;
the great Napoleon, who came with the same, had also his “Code” in his
pocket. Then he spoke of the marvelous administration of Germany, the
order and the use made of each one’s capacities, which was why they could
_tenir_.
“We only ask for a leader here in France, to be _bien menés_. All other
things we have in abundance. But if a department is to be organized or
reconstructed, it seems always to be given into the hands of some one
knowing nothing about it.”
In between I kept looking out where against gray skies beings half child,
half angel hold up stone flames, and _panaches_ leaning one against the
other. The gilding of the _grilles_ has a dull gleam through the wet.
The statue of Stanislas _le Bienfaisant_ was black and big. Everybody
was talking about the unexpected visit of the German _avion_ in the bad
weather the night before.
The station was further devastated, a train moving out was wrecked and
many _permissionnaires_ killed, a house near the Hôtel Excelsior et
d’Angleterre was totally demolished, the _avion_ flying very low, not
more than twenty-five meters above the town at one time. After lunch we
went over to the prefect’s house, from where we were to motor with him
to Toul. He could not go with us, as he was out investigating the damage
of the night before, but one of his daughters was waiting for us in the
Prefecture motor.
_Le Grand Couronné_ was but a ridge of mist and clouds as we passed
out of town, but it was there that the Germans were held up and Nancy
was saved that first September of the war, there that was written the
_paraphe de Castelnau_, and from there the German Emperor had looked into
France.
I never should have known Lorraine if I had not seen it gray and wet
under its autumn skies, bands of lemon and amber at sunset finishing
the garb of its gray days. As we sped along I could just distinguish
the landscape—villages lost in the immense stretch of the plains, and
great forests of beech and oak in which are strange, mysterious ponds
(_étangs_), and before my mind passed for an instant images of those
solitaries of the twilight centuries, slipping through them with staff
and scrip, after the Romans, and bringing to the land the things Rome
tried to destroy.
A beautifully kept straight road leads to Toul. From time to time one
sees rusty barbed-wire entanglements and camouflaged trenches, for, on
this road, had the Germans taken Nancy, they would have come to Toul, as
they did in 1870. Outside the town are double ramparts, where the guard
stopped us, but the military chauffeur cried the magic words, “_Monsieur
le Préfet_,” and we passed in through the Porte de Metz, dating from
the time of Vauban, then skirted the town, to get to the barracks of
Luxembourg, where hundreds of little children, first gathered together
by Madame Mirman, are now being taken care of by the American Red Cross.
It is conducted by Doctor Sedgwick, unfortunately in Paris. It seemed a
dreary spot that afternoon, and it has since been confided to me that the
weather is always dreadful there. The barracks are after the new model of
groups of one-storied houses, which, it appears, have also disadvantages,
as well as the large buildings they superseded.[16]
It was raining and hailing and blowing as we made blind dashes from one
to the other with the French directors. A consolation to find oneself in
the dormitories where many blessed tiny babies lay asleep (or howling!)
in little cots or perambulators, out of the horrid cold.
They are not always orphans, but their mothers work in the fields of
Lorraine or in the munitions-factories. Doctor Peel, second in charge,
came at last from a distant building, and met us in the school-room, out
of which a hundred noisy, warm, well-fed children were scuffling. Tea was
offered us, but we came away; time was short and I was a-hungered, after
the cold, windy, wet desolation of the Luxembourg barracks, for a sight
of the beautiful cathedral.
Some one said, “Why ‘sight-seeing’?” but I said, “It’s soul-seeing.” And
there was some lifting of the being as we stepped into the loveliness
of the pale-gray vaulting of the church of St.-Étienne. At the end of
the apse was an immense, high, narrow, blue window, and it reminded me
of Huysmans’s phrase about the cathedral of Chartres, “_Une blonde aux
yeux bleus._” We stepped over worn _pierres tombales_, and as I stood on
one of them, whose date, scarcely decipherable, was fifteen hundred and
something, I looked up and saw in the wall a new marble plaque, and it
was to the memory of “_Jean Bourhis, aviateur-pilote, chevalier de la
Légion d’Honneur, Croix de Guerre, né 1888.... Mort glorieusement pour
la Patrie, le 22 mars, 1916._” And so one’s thoughts are jerked from the
past into the dreadful, sacramental present.
Close by the cathedral is the Hôtel de Ville, once the Episcopal Palace,
a gem of the eighteenth century. We stepped from the little square in
front of the church into the wet, wind-swept garden. At one end is a
flat, round fountain, and behind it is a moss-grown statue of a woman
in contemplation, and one side of the garden is hedged in by the flying
buttresses and gargoyles of the cathedral. Broad, low steps lead down to
its gravel walks from the terrace of the Palace, onto which open long
windows, forming a great hemicycle. I did not need to see it under warm,
sunset skies, with the linden-trees of the garden in full blossom, to be
possessed of its charm.
An American soldier was coming out of the cathedral as we issued from the
garden in a gust of wind which blew my umbrella wrong side out, and when
I and it were righted he was gone. But it’s all a part of history.
We went for a moment to St.-Gengoult, the old Gothic church in the rue
Carnot. (Like every town in Lorraine and in the whole of France there is
a rue Carnot, and it’s horribly monotonous when your soul is aflame.)
As we entered, a thick rich light came through the ancient windows.
A black-robed woman was sobbing before a grave and pitying statue of
St.-Anne—sixteenth or seventeenth century, I didn’t know which—and a
pale, tiny child with a frightened look was standing by her. Again I
thought on the oceans of fear children have passed through in this war,
and again I besought God to take care of His world.
As I passed up the central aisle I saw two American soldiers kneeling
before the high altar. That spot of khaki and its young, unmistakable
silhouette under the gray vaulting of that old church suddenly seemed
momentous beyond anything I had ever seen. It was the country of my birth
and my love pursuing its gigantic destiny down an endless vista, crowded
with uncountable khaki-clad forms, men with souls. The two anonymous
soldiers became typical of each and every Miles Gloriosus since the world
began, and as they knelt there on the altar steps I knew that they had
been laid on that other dreadful altar of the world’s sin....
An open door showed us the way to a lovely Gothic cloister of the
sixteenth century, surrounding a tree- and flower-planted court. It had
a few fresh chippings on its _belle patine_, the results of a bomb which
fell in it a few months ago.
Long lines of soldiers’ socks were hung on strings across one corner of
it, and soldiers were sitting in a little room-like corridor, leading
I know not where, reading newspapers, whistling and writing. Then,
out through a delightful sixteenth-century door into the streets, the
loveliness of Toul imagined rather than really perceived, for the rain
was falling again. Khaki-clad men of the _Division marocaine_, together
with blue-clad companions, were threading their way through the narrow
streets, and there were few women and children. I thought how I had seen
the two towers of the church shining from afar as I passed by in the
train that June evening with the two Bretons whose fate I shall never
know.... Did the one from Nantes return to hold his first-born in his
arms? Or the fiancé return to consummate his nuptials?
Then I caught sight of my own two soldiers standing at the door of a
little tobacco-shop. I suppose it was the nearest resemblance to anything
familiar in Toul, and they were rather cuddling up to it. They smiled
broadly when they heard themselves addressed in what they termed the
“blessed lingo,” and called it “some luck.”
“I was just thinking, ‘me for the coop,’” genially continued the biggest,
raw-boned, lantern-jawed one who had a bad bronchial cold and wore a
muffler about his throat. He turned out to be from Omaha; the smaller
one was from Hackensack, N.J. (with an emphasis on the N.J.). We talked
about simple and unglorious matters, what they had for breakfast, among
other things, and it was, in parenthesis, what any Frenchman would call
a dinner—ham and eggs and oatmeal and white bread (which none save
American soldiers get in France these days) and jam and coffee. They were
from Pagny-sur-Meuse near by—pronounced “Pag-ni” by the Omaha man. The
Hackensack man avoided it. He quite simply wanted “the war to begin,” so
that he might “show the Germans how.”
“We’re sure to lick ’em in the spring,” the one with the cold said, “but
it’s a long time waiting for the fun to begin, and I haven’t been warm
since I got here.”
I asked them how they came into France.
“All I know is that after we got off the boat we were three days in some
sort of a milk-train; there wasn’t room to sit, let alone lie. We drew
lots and I got the baggage-rack; but what saved us was that we could
get out at every station, and, believe me, the fellows that got drunk
were the only ones that pulled in all right—the others were sent up to
hospital soon as they arrived.”
In the best and most persuasive of Y.M.C.A. manners I said to this
special Miles Gloriosus:
“It isn’t a remedy, however, that you could really count on.”
“But I say,” answered the Omaha man, “you’ll own up that it’s worth
trying.”
It was getting late and, the Omaha man having the best of it, we parted
with smiles of mutual appreciation. It’s all so simple—and so momentous.
Then back to Nancy, running swiftly over a white road, the gray sky very
low, and on either side green and yellow and brown fields, and the oak
and beech forest of Haye. The _Grand Couronné_ for a moment was divested
of its mists, and some brightening of the western sky touched its ridge
with a subdued splendor; and then we got into Nancy and were deposited
at the Prefecture, where we made our adieux. We proceeded to the garage
of a stoutish, blond man of pronounced Teuton type and accent, with an
uncertain smile—and a coreless heart, I think—who cranked _la Ford_ (by
the way, Fords change their sex in France), and we started out through
the town that night was enveloping, with but one dull eye to light us to
Lunéville. We thought the trip might prove fairly uncertain, but didn’t
know how much so till there was an impact, in the crowded suburb, and
a horse’s form with legs in air, looking as big as a monster of the
Pliocene age, showed for an instant on our radiator, then fell to the
ground. A crowd immediately gathered, while the driver of the cart
proceeded to tell us what he thought of us in particular and women
drivers in general. But, though unfortunate, we felt blameless, as the
horse had been tied _behind_ the wagon standing at the curb and there
was no light, except something very dim coming from a green-grocer’s.
We departed to the _commissaire de police_ with the man and a couple of
gendarmes, explained that we were willing to do anything and everything
if he would only let us proceed to Lunéville, gave the magic name
“Commission Californienne,” and equally potent reference to the _Préfet
de la Meurthe et Moselle_ whose house we had just left. Then with
beating hearts and a chastened outlook on life—I use the word “outlook”
rather wildly; we couldn’t see anything—we passed out through the great
manufacturing district. Every now and then our feeble ray was swallowed
up by the great lamps of a military auto or the large round headlight
of a _camion_. As we passed through St.-Nicolas du Port and Dombasle
the blue of the soldiers’ tunics took on a strange ghoul-like color, a
white incandescent sort of gray, and the moving forms seemed twice their
natural size. We couldn’t see the streets at all, and the only thing we
wanted to do in all the world was to get to Lunéville and run _la Ford_
into the garage of M. Guérin.
When that was accomplished we decided to say good-by to the proud world,
sent regrets to Mlle. Guérin, and had a much more modest repast served in
my room by the deft maid, whose husband got typhoid fever in the trenches
and died at Epinal last year. Later the mistress of the house came up to
know if we were comfortable, and told us her husband, too, had died of it
in hospital at Toul. And then I read _Les Vieux Châteaux de la Vesouze_,
a modern _Etude lorraine_, and _Promenades autour de Lunéville_, printed
in 1838, to the accompaniment of rattling windows and the heavy boom of
distant cannon. All else was quiet. Near my room is a device plastered
on the wall, _Qui tient à sa tranquillité sait respecter celle des
autres_. Isn’t it nice? It makes one steal in at night, get into slippers
immediately, and ring gently in the morning.
It is still raining, hailing, blowing—dreadfully discouraging weather to
investigate the amours of the eighteenth century, and I have a couple of
twentieth-century idyls right under my eyes, too. I had planned a stroll
in the park to trace the steps of Léopold and Stanislas to the doors of
the fairest of ladies, and Panpan and St.-Lambert and the Chevalier de
Boufflers, and all the other _charmeurs_. I’ll either have to leave them
out of the Journal or do them in some half-dream when I’m back in Paris
and warm! What _they_ did in this sort of weather I don’t know, except
that when they knocked at a door or tapped at a window they were sure of
tender welcomes, they and the easy verses that accompanied them.
CHAPTER IV
A STROLL IN NANCY
_October 15th._
I spent yesterday a-wandering in the old streets of Nancy, between gusts
of wind and rain and great bursts of sun. After much coaxing, _la Ford_
was cajoled into taking the road at 9.30, but as we got to Nancy and into
the Place Stanislas suddenly her front wheels spread apart. E. M. gave
one glance, but not at all the glance of despair she would have given had
it happened on the road, and then flew to seek her waiting bridegroom
at the Hôtel Excelsior et d’Angleterre, while I, less enthusiastically,
sought the blond chauffeur of the coreless heart. He seemed quite human,
as, unscrewing the bar in front, which crumbled softly like a piece of
bread, he held up a piece and said, “_C’était fait pour vous casser le
cou_.”
Seeing the American flag flying from the ground-floor window of one of
the beautiful old buildings of the Place Stanislas, I went in to find
Mrs. Dawson installed in charge of the Nancy branch of the “American Fund
for French Wounded.” It was another novelty for Stanislas to look upon
out of his _right_ eye! He’s been kept busy, these past three years,
looking about him. The large room was filled with furniture M. Mirman is
collecting for refugees—wardrobes, tables, chairs, in and on which were
piles of shirts, vests, sweaters, _cachenez_, handkerchiefs, all from
over the ocean. And really, when one investigates the comfort-bags filled
by too-generous American hands, one has a cupidous feeling. There is a
lavishness in the matter of Colgate’s tooth-paste, for instance, which
one can rarely get for love, and not at all for money, in Paris!
I came away in a gray, slanting rain that made the Place Stanislas look
as if Raffaello had done it over and framed it beautifully in gray. Great
scratchings of rainfall, and soldiers and women hurrying through it.
But _le geste_ is not like the days when Raffaello painted—there are no
skirts to lift up, or, rather, none that need lifting.
Then I crossed over to the Place de la Carrière, where _souvent en ces
aimables lieux des héros et des demi-dieux_ had held their tournaments,
and then into the church of St.-Epvre to get a Mass. The stained-glass
windows, modern and very expensive-looking, were crisscrossed with broad
stripes of paper on the side toward the railway, where the shocks from
the frequent bombing of the station are especially felt. Everywhere in
Nancy the windows are broken, or crisscrossed with paper, or both. The
church was blue with military.
Afterward I walked through the Grande Rue. The ducal palace of the
early sixteenth century, begun by René II, has its door scaffolded and
sandbagged. It is the celebrated _Musée Lorrain_, whose treasures are now
removed further from the frontier. It is here that the body of Charles
III lay in such magnificence that there arose the saying in the sixteenth
century that the three most gorgeous ceremonies in the world were the
consecration of a king of France at Reims, the crowning of an emperor of
Germany at Frankfort, and the obsequies of a duke of Lorraine at Nancy.
I continued down the Grande Rue between groups of _poilus_, officers, and
the usual Sunday population coming from Mass, or getting in last dinner
provisions, to the Porte de Graffe of the fourteenth century, beyond
which is the Porte de la Citadelle, and then the garrison. As one walks
along, the snatches of talk one overhears are “_Bombardé deux fois_,”
“_Pas un vitre qui reste_,” “_Volant très-bas_,” etc.
I came back through the park. In it is a modern iron bandstand,
fortunately copied after the delicious designs of Jean Lamour—only _he_
would have done something to relieve the heavy iron roof. And he quite
certainly caught his inspiration musing about the park one autumn day,
for everywhere I saw charming repetitions of his _grilles_ in that
delicate tracery of yellow leaf against gray trunk and branch.
Old houses give on the park, where one might dream dreams, and find the
world—perhaps well lost. Many windows broken, and more crisscrossing with
bands of paper.
It was getting to be 12.30 when, having been as much of an angel as the
three dimensions permit, I emerged on to the Place Stanislas to see E. M.
approaching with a young blue-clad aviator, with something distinguished
yet modest in his bearing, of whom I instantly thought he is one of those
_qui cherche sa récompense plutôt dans les yeux de ses hommes que dans
les notes de ses chefs_—and so it proved to be. He didn’t even wear the
_brisquets_ of his years of service on his arm.
“_Tout le monde sait que je n’ai pas été trois ans sans rien faire_,” he
said, later, during lunch, which we took in the Café Stanislas, crowded
with gallooned and decorated officers. Several red-and-white marked autos
of the General Staff were waiting before the door, where Stanislas
also could see them, and those beings, half human, half divine, of the
sky-line, framed it all. Afterward I again removed my three dimensions,
hunting for M. Pierre Boyé, the great authority on all things of
Lorraine, M. Guérin having given me a letter to him. On arriving at the
house, through quiet gray streets, there was no answer to my numerous
ringings of the bell, so I came back, drawn irresistibly to the Place
Stanislas. By this time it was aglow in the afternoon light; great masses
of clouds even at 3.30 were tinted with yellow and orange, and every inch
of gilding caught the light. I hailed an antique cab and drove out where
I could look over rolling stretches of country, along the road to Toul.
The brown and yellow fields were aglow, the bronzing forests, too; above
were piled the high and splendid clouds of autumnal Lorraine, and I saw
where Claude le Lorrain had got _his_ masses. The _cocher_ then proceeded
to bring me back to town by a perfectly hideous road, called Quai Claude
le Lorrain—on one side the blackened railway, on the other modern
claptrappy houses with their windows shattered and their roofs damaged.
I then told him to take me to the church of the Cordeliers, where I
stepped suddenly, not only into its late afternoon dimness, but into the
dimness of past ages. A shaft of light from a high window showed me a
dull, rich bit of color on an ancient pillar, in a sort of chapel; and
then my eye fell on what I had come to see, the tomb of the Duchesse
Philippe de Gueldre, widow of René II, bearing the incomparable stamp of
the genius of Ligier Richier.
I tiptoed toward the stone slab where that great lady of another age
is lying asleep, clad in the dark robe of the Poor Clares. Her hands,
folded downward, are clasped at her waist. Under the cowl the pale head
is turned gently, as if in sleep.[17] She is an enduring image of
resignation, not alone for herself, but for all of us who live and die,
we don’t quite know how or why, and who must “endure our going hence even
as our coming hither.”
The church was constructed by her husband, René II, Duke of Lorraine,
to commemorate the deliverance of Nancy and the defeat of Charles the
Bold, Duke of Burgundy, in 1477. Duke René himself had a glorious reign;
for him the arts and letters were the ornament of victory. I discovered
a commemorative monument of my friend Duke Léopold, flanked rather
flamboyantly by unquiet, yet charming, statues of Faith and Hope! Also an
elaborate statue of Katerina Opalinska, the consort of Stanislas, who,
though he had been somewhat forgetful of her in life, had done really
all that a wife could wish in the matter of the tomb. But some virtue
more mystic than the decorative Faith and Hope of the eighteenth century
exhaled from the quiet figure of Philippe de Gueldre.
Near the high altar is the Chapelle Ronde begun by Charles III, the
grandson of René, in 1607, intended as a sepulcher for the princes of
Lorraine, and in a beautiful _grille_ are entwined the arms of Lorraine
and Austria. Then the sacristan came in to light the candles of the
high altar, the church got suddenly quite dark, from the organ came
the strains of “_O quam suavis est, Domine_,” and people began to come
in to Benediction. The blue and vermilion and gold of the mausoleum of
René II faded and one saw only vague outlines of saints and angels, and
a figure of the Eternal Father. It cried out of that other deliverance
of Nancy; but when the world war is over will his widow, Philippe de
Gueldre, _conjunx Piissimi_, still be sleeping quietly, her brown cowl
over her head and her crown at her feet? Her soul “conducted to Paradise
by angels, where martyrs received her and led her into the Holy City
Jerusalem.” The church got quite full, the organist continued to play
early Italian music, and the “Pietà, Signor” of Pergolese rose as I knelt
by Philippe de Gueldre. The great cope of the priest shone, the smell of
incense pervaded the dim spaces, the “_Tantum Ergo_” sounded, and I bowed
my head....
Then out into a world of fading light, found the _cocher_ in the exact
attitude I had left him, and begged him to drive quickly (which was
impossible) to the Hôtel Excelsior et d’Angleterre, bethinking me of the
5.30 train to Lunéville. As we went through the dim, charming streets I
remembered an old verse I had found in one of M. Guérin’s books, by an
unreservedly admiring individual, who said that if he had one foot in
Paradise and the other in Nancy, he would withdraw the one in Paradise,
that both might be in Nancy!
I found waiting at the door of the hotel E. M., the _distingué_ young
aviator, and Don Kelley, _en permission_ for twenty-four hours from
Gondrecourt, strong and eager, since a week at Gondrecourt, since a month
in France for the first time in his life.
The young men took us to the station and deposited us in the train and
made their adieux. For very special reasons at that moment I said to E.
M.:
“If you are going back to Lunéville on _my_ account, don’t!”
The guard had closed the door of the compartment, had sounded his
whistle, but I caught the look in her eye and out we jumped, returning
to the hotel, where we gave what we hoped was a pleasant surprise
party. _Dîner à quatre_ at seven o’clock. About a dozen Americans _en
permission_ were dining among many Frenchmen, and we amused ourselves
investigating the multicolored intricacies of the various uniforms,
aviators, cavalry, infantry, artillery, and the many “grades.” Then again
a dash for the station—Count de L. had to get to Paris, and Don Kelley to
Gondrecourt. The latter said, as we stood in the dark, battered station:
“I am where I would most want to be in the world, and, though I am an
only son, I am where my parents would most wish me to be. When I get back
to Gondrecourt and get into that long, dark shed and see the men rolled
up, and if it is raining, the water dripping in, I shall know it is the
real thing, and those of my generation who have known it and those who
have not will be forever divided.”
Permissions not being among things safely trifled with, we then saw them
into their train, which was leaving first, and crossed the rails to where
ours, dark, filled with returning officers, was waiting; and so out into
the night with all curtains carefully drawn, the stars shining. It was
a _nuit à boches_, one of the officers said, continuing, “It’s often
an obsession with them—for a long time they won’t come near Nancy or
Lunéville, and then every night when it is at all clear they appear.” The
inhabitants can choose (in their minds) between good weather and _avions_
or bad weather and safety.
Trains from Nancy to Lunéville seem to have a way of hunting up stations,
threading them up, and what one does easily in three-quarters of an hour
in a motor takes an hour and a half to three, according to the stops. At
Blainville we descended to show our _sauf-conduits_, the guard standing
just behind a convenient puddle that every one splashed into and then
stepped out of. Finally, Lunéville, night-enveloped, lighted only with
flashes from electric pocket-lamps, like great fireflies. And coming
through the night from Nancy, I kept thinking how France had done enough,
more than enough, the impossible, and what a cold and dreadful grind the
war had become, and of untried young Americans sleeping in dim villages
so near. And many other things that it is bootless to record. _Nous
sommes dedans._
CHAPTER V
VITRIMONT IN AUTUMN
Out of Lunéville over the muddy Vesouze, through the Place Brûlée, and
onto a pasty road, E. M. driving, and, on the back seat, newly wedded
love. As we left the town a dwarf made a face at us and then turned his
back on us with a not over-elegant gesture, for all the world like the
tales of the famous dwarf Bébé, during years the delight of the Court of
Stanislas.
Mustard and osier plantings became the intensest yellow or red, as the
sun fell on them through rifts in dark clouds, and many women, old men,
and children were working in wet beet-root fields, among little groupings
of black crosses....
We got into Vitrimont through streets deep in mud. Such a change! Before
reaching it, instead of the skeleton outline of homes one now sees
orderly rows of red roofs. The work that had seemed almost stationary,
pursued with so much difficulty by Comtesse de B. (Miss Polk), had got
suddenly to a point where it began to show, though the finished houses
will be too damp for habitation this winter, and, like a lot of other
things, must await the spring.
Everywhere in the streets the busy work of reconstruction is proceeding.
Soldiers billeted in Vitrimont are coming and going, helping with
masonry, bringing in great wagons of beet-root, as if they had always
lived there; not _en passant par la Lorraine_. It’s a very human
document, this billeting of soldiers; though, as far as they are
concerned, when they leave a village they only change their residence.
For the women the thing is much more serious. _They_ get a change of
regiment. However, I have no time to muse on this detail of the war.
Things in Vitrimont were simply taking their inevitable course. Nothing
is held back for long, with the generations pressing thick and fast.
Black-aproned children with books on their backs, to whom E. M. gave
little slabs of chocolate, were coming from the new school-house. Old men
were hobbling about, and women bending over embroidery frames, in houses
often half destroyed and hastily roofed over. In the old days Lorraine
furnished beautiful damasks and gold galloons and laces to Paris and
Versailles.
We stopped by a window where a thin-faced woman was just taking from its
frame a beautiful beaded bag such as one would buy very, very dear in the
Rue de la Paix. Near her sat an old woman, her mother, the light falling
on her pale, withered face, wearing a great black-bowed head-dress, a
yellow cat in her lap. It was an _intérieur_ that would have done honor
to any great museum.
We visited Mlle. Antoine, living in a reconstructed street named after
a Polish prince. She escaped to Lunéville with her servant on the day
of the entry of the Germans into the village, August 23, 1914, fleeing
through the ancient forest, but returned to her Lares and Penates a few
days afterward with German passes. She represents culture in the village,
and is clear-eyed, sweet-voiced, but with two red spots on her cheeks—she
is fighting off consumption by living out of doors with her chickens and
live stock, in sabots and apron and shawl. A beautiful old desk was in
her living-room, and there was a discussion as to whether it was Louis
XVI or Directoire, but under any name one would have loved to possess it.
The windows looked out onto the inevitable dung-heap, but beyond were
bronzing forests, and, in between, fields the color of semi-precious
stones.
[Illustration: MISS POLK’S WEDDING
The Comtesse de Buyer (Miss Polk) on the arm of Monsieur Mirman, Prefect
of the Meurthe et Moselle, after her wedding at Vitrimont, September,
1917.]
Hearing the sound of music as we passed the church, we went in and found
some young girls were practising a “_Credo_,” clustered about the little
organ, and wearing brooches with a device of thistle and double Lorraine
cross that Madame de Buyer had given them on her wedding-day. I looked
again upon the lovely old fifteenth-century vaulting, fully restored,
shifting my eye hurriedly from the hideous but seemingly imperishable
dado with its design of painted folds of cloth. At the door the little
holy water fonts, formed of shells held upon two heads of seraphim, gave
me a thrill of joy—and sadness, too, that beauty is so perishable.
Then I turned to the cemetery. The little pathways were muddy beneath the
leafless trees. Bead crosses and wreaths and a few stunted chrysanthemums
decorated the wet graves. All seasons are the same to the dead. I stood
by a breach in the wall near the grave of “_Charles Carron, musicien,
souvenir d’un camarade, 31 août, 1914_,” looking out toward the forest of
Vitrimont. Its autumn garb was soft, discreet, and lovely; more jasper
and amethyst and Chrysoprase and cornelian fields rolled gently in
between it and me. There was the band of yellow like a Greek border to a
garment in the western sky—only that and nothing more, yet some beauty
and sadness chained me to the spot. Quail and woodcock, gray pheasant
and larks, were flying about, and some strongly marked black-and-white
magpies were pecking at something in the nearest field. I asked myself
again, “What is it that stamps Lorraine with such beauty?” General de
Buyer told me that when Pierre Loti came to Vitrimont he said, “_C’est
trop vert_,” and perhaps, after Stamboul and Egypt and the Grecian Isles,
it would seem too green. But I saw, returning there in autumn, that the
soul of Lorraine, _l’élégante et douleureuse_, is like unto tarnished
silver, with its grays, yellows, browns, and purples; that soul that has
suffered, hoped through the generations, whose abiding-places have been
devastated and rebuilt through the centuries. And I knew that one must
see it in autumn, beneath the wasteful splendors of gray clouds, with
their hints of color, red, brown, yellow, and purple, or with sky and
rain melting into one, curtaining the brown, mysterious earth—and, in
between, the beat of the human heart.
It all seemed to show itself through some dissolving light of ages.
Those secular beeches, that I had first seen in their tenderest green,
had become a brilliant yellow, and were turned to the south. The great
bronze oaks looked to the north, obeying laws as inviolable as those
of the human beings passing beneath them. In all these forests round
about Vitrimont, Parroy, and Mondon the legendary lords of the country
hunted; the roads of Gaul disappeared under the great Roman highways
which traversed Lorraine from Langres to Trèves, from Toul to Metz, and
again from Langres to Strasburg. The name Lunéville emerges out of the
night of the tenth century in the person of Étienne, Bishop of Toul,
successor of St.-Gérard, and Folmar I, Count of Lunéville, was married to
Sparhilde, descended from Charlemagne. (To this day I notice that almost
any one who respects himself in these parts talks quite casually of being
descended from Charlemagne, or Charles the Bald, or René the Victorious,
as a Boston man might of the Pilgrim Fathers.) Folmar’s hunting-lodge
was by the muddy Vesouze, over which one passes to get from Lunéville to
Vitrimont. In time it was transformed into a château, and around it grew
a village, which in turn became a fortified town, then the capital of
Léopold and Stanislas.
I stood for a long time by that 1914 breach in the wall, and the grave
of _Charles Carron, musicien_, looking out over the rolling fields in
the late October afternoon, migrating birds passing against the amber
sky, red vines floating from the yellowing branches of oaks and beeches;
near me was a tangle of wild-plum bushes, stiffened blackberry-vines, and
dried ramie. All except the deeds of men seemed sweet. Everything was
in sinuous lines, inclosing the jasper, amethyst, chrysoprase, russet,
jewels of the fields, through which flow the slow rivers, slipping
between bushes of osier and plum, and somewhere there is a slower,
nigrescent canal scarcely a-move between willows and poplars. And those
men who are out there where that dull thunder is!...
I thought how often in her history the men that hunted in her forests
or tilled her fields had reddened them with their blood, or, buried in
them, had increased the harvests, fighting now against one invader,
now another, being continually thrown back from power to power like a
ball, with nothing changeless save the changelessness of their changing
destiny—and its unescapableness.
And how, under Godefroy de Bouillon, a Lorraine prince, the Crusades
began, and under a duke of Lorraine, Charles V, they ended. And of the
holy glory of Jeanne d’Arc. And now, after the lapse of centuries, of the
covenant of our own men.
I realized that the beauty of Lorraine is not entirely of the natural
world.
As we drove back there was a sudden flaming up of that band of lemon. The
western sky became a vast ocean of pink with great white clouds afloat
in it. The red roofs of Lunéville were transfigured, a crimson glow
was flung about the Pompadour towers of the church, outlined against
a blue-white eastern sky. But only for a few minutes. The streets of
Lunéville were already dim as we passed in through the battered suburbs.
We stopped for tea at the house of Madame —— on the outskirts of the
town. It had been occupied by the Germans that first August, and in
one of the _salons_ was a large hole in the wall, stopped up, but not
replastered or papered. “They” had rolled up her rugs and given them to
her, and she and her four young daughters had lived in the upper stories
during the occupation, and seen war very close from their windows. The
only really valuable picture, a Claude Lorrain, I think, was missing. In
the cellars and in the garden, whose walls are still breached and broken,
dead and wounded, living and fighting, Germans and French, had lain.
The usual conjunction of elderly officers and young aviators were there
for tea. Then E. M. and I, closely linked, threaded the black streets to
the Hôtel des Vosges. And there is great sadness in Lorraine in autumn.
CHAPTER VI
AT THE GUÉRINS’
_October 16th._
In the park of the château, sitting on an old stone bench under yellowing
chest nut-trees.
Soldiers are coming and going. The château has been for many years a
barracks. One guardian of the park, of the now so-despised race of
gendarmes, has walked by three times, for I have my little note-book in
my lap and my pencil in my hand and I am plainly not of Lunéville. He is
just passing me again, and I say
“_C’est beau, le parc._”
He answers, “Perhaps in summer,” evidently not stirred by autumnal
Lorraine, and then, “_Madame est en visite?_”
I answer, “Yes, with Miss Crocker.”
That name being magic in these parts, he salutes and passes on.
Of the lovely old bosquets where Stanislas combined his _jets d’eau_,
his _grottes_, his Chinese pavilions, and his _parterres_, the long
avenue and the great flat basin of the fountain, in which black swans are
floating, are all that remain. From the end of this avenue can be seen
the aviation field with its great hangars. The low terraces have borders
of autumn flowers, dahlias, chrysanthemums, red vines, dead leaves,
and moss-grown and charming statues of ancient love-making gods, who
came into their own again in those amorous days. There is a statue to
M. Guérin’s poet son born and dead between two invasions, but a lovely
eighteenth-century statue of a veiled woman renders _mou_ and without
accent the flat, white-marble shaft that commemorates his earthly span
(1874-1908). The statue of Erckmann is also in the nineteenth-century
manner. Is the human race as uncharming as modern sculptors would make
it? One feels apologetic toward the ages to come, and one wants to cry
out that we weren’t so bad, after all, and that seemingly soulless
individual in a frock-coat and baggy trousers and top-hat, looking
so unattractive in white marble, was really a delightful person, an
imaginative lover, a perceptive intellectual, and witty to boot. He would
have been the first to protest against his memorial; and how he would
have hated the geraniums and begonias planted at his base, and the wire
fencing!
Beyond the park, where the trees have been cleared away, is the brown,
reedy Vesouze, a little border of old houses on its banks. Beyond is the
rolling stretch of forest-covered hills and russet and jasper and topaz
fields, and above it all the sunless and gray, but strangely luminous,
noonday heaven of autumnal Lorraine.
_Later._
Wandered about the town. Everywhere charming bits of _autrefois_ arrest
the eye. Over one doorway, between two angels’ heads of pure Louis
XV, was written, “_Fais bien, laisses dire_.” A little farther along,
under a figureless niche, “_Si le cœur t’en dit un ave pour son âme_.”
In the window of a pharmacy near by, occupying a good old house with
flat, gray façade, is a big Lunéville porcelain jar bearing the words
“_Theriaca celestis_,” interwoven among flowered scrolls, and I thought
of eighteenth-century servants going in for herbs and various cures for
masters and mistresses having “vapors.”
The portal of the church reminds me, with its rich, wine-colored tones,
of the _tezontle_ of the Mexican houses of the viceregal period. The
words over the door are “_Au Dieu de Paix_,” the God that this torn
borderland seldom receives, and still rarely keeps, and above is a figure
of Chronos, or the Almighty, I don’t know which.
A large black marble slab without name or date is near the door as one
passes in; underneath lie the remains of Voltaire’s _divine Emilie_.[18]
Having loved much, let us hope much was forgiven her. The choir, pulpit,
and confessionals are very pure Louis XV. Over the organ-loft are the
words “_Laudate Deum in chordis et organo_,” painted in among Pompadour
knots which have been democratically colored red, white, and blue, near
blue and gold fleurs-de-lys of another epoch.
Against the wall of the façade is a marble urn that once contained the
heart of Stanislas, who was very devout, and left no stone unturned,
though he continued to love not alone the arts, to placate the final
judge. He was very fond of music while dining, but on Friday never
permitted any except that of the harp, considered less earthly than
violin and clavecin. He never missed Mass; he was merciful to the poor
and appreciative of the things of the mind. Not a bad showing; one hopes
he’s happy somewhere.
In one of the side altars is a Pietà and three long lists of those just
dead for France, whose
graves are all too young as yet
To have outgrown the sorrow which consigned
Its charge to each;
and then, as I sat quietly thinking upon the passing of heroes, Shelley’s
immortal words kept sounding in my ears:
And if the seal is set,
Here, on one fountain of a mourning mind,
Break it not thou!...
From the world’s bitter wind
Seek shelter in the shadow of the tomb.
What Adonaïs is, why fear we to become?
Lunched at the Guérins’. _La Ford_ being the only means of locomotion
in Lunéville, not even an old horse remaining to pull a cab, we had to
give up the trip to Baccarat, and indeed any trip anywhere. Delighted to
be able to _flâner_ in the old streets without my umbrella being turned
wrong side out.
Overhead the _avions_ were thick; we counted twelve at one time, some
of them flying so low that we could hear words. Observation airplanes,
bombarding airplanes, the swift _avions de chasse_, going in the
direction of the forest of Parroy, where the Germans are intrenched since
the retreat from Lunéville, September, 1914. Parroy and all that part of
the country was completely laid waste in 1636 by Richelieu, who sent the
cheerful report to Louis XIV that “Lorraine was reduced to nothing, and
the inhabitants dead for the most part.”
That conquest of the unsubstantial air seems the greatest of all man’s
achievements. And as I walked along there was an almost perceptible
flinging of my soul into the heavenly spaces and I thought not on battles
and wrecks nor even of hungry children, but rather of the discoverers of
nature’s secrets, the disciples of philosophers, the undiscourageable
lovers of the arts, who everywhere are in the minority, and everywhere
reach the heights, and everywhere in the end control the hosts, even of
battle. And at the sudden dropping of the sun over the lovely Lorraine
fields, become blue with scarcely a hint of the green and brown and
amethyst of a moment ago, the band of yellow fringing the horizon—though
with me walked the ghosts of men who at the word of command invaded or
defended—I was not sad. A lean, brown, unexpectant urchin entered the
town with me. I gave him a two-franc piece and a blessing, _Pax tibi_,
which last, from the look in his eyes, some part of him understood. Then
I turned into the beautiful old house of the mayor where _goûter_ and
bridge had been arranged for us. I rapped with a large and very bright
wrought-iron knocker bearing the date 1781, and, entering, found myself
in a great hallway; to the left is the _escalier d’honneur_, with its
beautiful wrought-iron balustrade. I mounted it, and passed through many
rooms of noble yet thoroughly livable dimensions. They were filled with
officers, some women came from their hospital service in nursing garb,
groups of bright-eyed “_filles à marier_,” and a few young aviators.
The large _salon_ has beautiful panelings, with heavy gilt _motifs_ of
tambour, torch, helmet and shield in the corners. In it was signed the
celebrated Traité de Lunéville, 1801, and it is all very seigneurial.
I found myself seated at a table with the mayor, General —— and Mme.
de C., in nursing garb. I investigated, during a couple of hours,
the surprises of the erratic yet brilliant bridge of the _maire de
Lunéville_, whose delight was to mystify his partner as well as the
adversary, and who, without in the least deserving it, won every rubber.
I had a few bad “distractions,” but who would not, under that roof so
rich in memories?
During the occupation in 1914 the German generals and high officers
entering the town were lodged on the second floor of the old house. The
same thing had happened in 1870.
We came away in pitch darkness at 7.30, but I can now skip and bound
about the dark streets, with the best of them, no more feeling around for
curbs, which seem again to be placed where they are to be expected.
Afterward, dinner at M. Guérin’s. General and Mme. de Buyer, General ——,
M. Guérin’s two sons, one a mitrailleuse officer for the moment near by
at Blainville la Grande, the other the student and lover of the arts
of whom I spoke, and whose every instinct is remote from killing. I
sometimes wonder at the stillness of men like that—except that there is
nothing to be done about it. General de Buyer told us of _lances-flamme_,
of _flamme-snappes_, of the _obus asphyxiants_, which burst without odor
or smoke, but are deadly, all the same. Then the conversation turned on
_le conflit historique entre la race germanique et la nation gauloise_
which had begun before the Roman conquest. M. Guérin told us of places
where still may be seen colossal walls and thick, crumbling towers,
mysterious witness of those legendary conflicts, just as the Place des
Carmes, or Place Brûlée, is witness of those of 1917.
The younger Guérin son was preparing to go into diplomacy when the war
broke out. I said, “Perhaps we will sometime be _en poste_ together,”
and a strange look that the pleasant dinner scene did not allow me to
interpret immediately came over his face.
“_Peut-être_,” he answered, slowly.
I knew a moment afterward that that young man who loves his life was
thinking, “if I am alive.” He has seen so many fall. And suddenly came
into my mind the lines of his poet brother, born and dead between two
invasions:
_Nous sommes, ô mon Dieu, plusieurs dans la cité,_
_A porter haut le lys de la mysticité, ..._
And for an infinitesimal moment, in spite of the pleasant evening meal,
my thoughts, too, turned to invisibilities—his and my last end, and our
veiled destinies.
CHAPTER VII
ACROSS LORRAINE
LUNÉVILLE, _Tuesday, October 16th_.
One last look at the church, whose warm and lovely towers with their
_motifs_ of urn and scroll and angel were shining pinkly in the morning
light. Then through the door of the Hôtel de Ville, built on the site of
the ancient abbey of St.-Rémy, founded in the last years of the tenth
century by Folmar de Lunéville for the repose of his soul and of his
wife’s, and completely done over in the eighteenth century. As I turned
in at the passageway leading through to the other street, old houses on
one side, and on the other plantings of holly against the church walls,
I thought of the saying of the Middle Ages, “_Il fait bon vivre sous la
crosse_” (“It is good to live under the bishops”), and how the peasants
would come in from their hamlets, through the fields and forests, with
their tithes. The monks generally springing from the people showed
themselves more understanding of their wants and their miseries, and were
less apt to overtax them, having fewer needs, than the lords with their
wars, their ambitions, and their grandeurs.
Then one finds oneself in the garden of the Hôtel de Ville, where one
doesn’t think of the Middle Ages, for in it is a figure of a weeping
woman, and on the statue’s base are inscribed the names of young men
fallen in 1870. Life becomes suddenly without reason.
At the station. _L’abri de bombardement pour permissionnaires_ is in an
old convent having a deep cellar, across the railway. We carry our own
luggage, resembling almost any _poilu_, and with grateful hearts think of
what we left behind.
Mont-sur-Meurthe. Flooding sun, many soldiers, no room in the train. The
famous and now classic refrain, “_Faut pas s’en paire_,”[19] floats about
and makes one think how those who wait also serve, and in waiting learn
patience, this new virtue of the Gaul. In regard to virtues, the French
seem to have all those we thought they had, in addition to others we
never suspected them of having.
A man completely bent with grief follows two men carrying a coffin. He
himself carries a huge bead wreath, and his head is bared. Whatever his
sorrow, it is gone out into the eternal, the immeasurable Wisdom, which I
thought, in sudden fear, completely conceals that which it receives.
Dombasle, with its busy station and its great munitions-factories.
Columns of smoke, from purest white to darkest brown, were rising to the
shining heavens, and women in trousers, mothers and mothers-to-be, were
going to work in the factories.
At Rosières immense camouflage works, and then the railway skirts the
great canal. A thin, heavy-haired, very young girl is drawing a huge
canal-boat. Her arms are crossed over her breast; above them is the broad
band by which she tows that behemoth, a thousand times her size. In
accord with some law of matter it is just possible. One thinks of the
building of the Pyramids, and of the unborn.
NANCY, _1.15_.
Lunching at the Café Stanislas and eating my fifth macaroon, “for
remembrance.” The gold guipure of the wrought-iron work makes the square
seem to me like some lovely handkerchief thrown down as a challenge to
memory. And I will _not_ forget.
_Later._
At the station, waiting for the train to pull out. An old man attended to
our luggage; he liked his tip and became talkative as he straightened our
impedimenta in the racks. Three sons killed in the war. Two at Verdun,
the last and youngest at the Chemin des Dames this summer. His toothless
old mouth trembled, and I thought to myself in sudden horror, “God, is
_this_ France?”
LIVERDUN, _3 o’clock_.
A vision of transfigured beauty in the afternoon light. Its high
promontory aglow, every window a-dazzle. Its ancient walls, its old
château, its church, all seemingly made of something pink, unsubstantial,
shining. At the foot of the town flows the Moselle and there is a second
shining moiré ribbon—the great canal leading from the Marne to the Rhine.
Toul. The gorgeous towers of the cathedral are a-shine, too, above the
outline of the great barrack buildings. The vast station is a sea of
blue-clad washing in and out of trains.
At Pagny we pick up the Meuse, _la Meuse aux lignes nonchalantes_.
At Sorcy, wide, shallow expanses of inundation, and reeds and trees grow
out of shining spaces, and meadow-bounded flat horizons stretch away,
and suddenly it seems Oriental, Japanese, in the pink light—what you
will—anything but a historic river of the European war, flowing through
the elegant and sorrowful Lorraine.
And then we find ourselves at Gondrecourt in the tip of the acute angle,
for still, to go the straight road between Nancy and Châlons, we would
have to pass Commercy, daily bombarded by big German guns.
At Gondrecourt, about a dozen American soldiers standing on the platform,
several seeming to have just left their mothers’ knees. We wanted to
speak to the nearest one, but feared we might represent _l’autre danger_.
Great packing-boxes piled everywhere with “U.S. Army” stamped on them—and
how fateful a destination is this little Lorraine town!
At Demanges-aux-Eaux more Americans. An old church, quite mauve, rises up
seemingly from bronze waters, the houses of the surrounding village, blue
and gray. Americans are billeted in these wide-doored Lorraine peasant
houses, or in big stables whose entrances are high enough for great
hay-wagons to pass through.
A talkative military person in the compartment with us. I thought at
first he was a secret agent, he seemed to know so little about the
country; then I realized that he was only rather stupid. And he had an
uncontrollable provincial curiosity about small things, and was quite
_intrigué_ about his traveling companions, who seemed to know all the
things he didn’t know. He was _en permission_, coming from the forest of
Parroy, the other side of Lunéville, where the French and Germans sit
within a few yards of each other. He was quite uninteresting about it
all, but it wasn’t his fault, merely the way he was made. He showed me
his map and the zigzagging German and French lines in the forest, and
then I got suddenly bored and stood in the corridor, and watched the
Meuse get pink and then purple and then a strange glinting black. Down
the streets of little villages would come blue-clad men, smoking and
talking, or getting water and stores for evening meals. And then the sun
disappeared behind the yellow poplars, and a cold, clear night began to
fall. Bridges were guarded by sentries with bayoneted rifles, and old
men and women and children came in from dim beet-root fields, and more
khaki-clad Americans were standing about village streets, or cycling in
the dusk, behind reeds in water, and there were deepening forests, and
black ridges against the last pale lemon glow, and then another little
town, Laneuville, and two American patrols marching up and down with
rifle on shoulder.
And the talkative officer, who had bought newspapers at Gondrecourt,
tells of the pretty spy dancer, Mata Hari, shot that morning in the
prison of Vincennes with warning pomp and circumstance, and of Bolo Pasha
and _l’affaire Turmel_, but as soon as he touches a subject it loses all
vestige of human interest.
“_Ce que nous avons vu d’Anglais parterre à Combes_,” or, “_Qu’il faisait
froid la nuit où nous cédions la ligne aux Anglais_,” or, “_Je suis
toujours là où on cède la ligne_, they say now the Americans will take
the line at Parroy.”
He has been through the whole war without a scratch—Verdun, the Somme,
the Aisne—and now he spends cold, dark nights listening for Germans in
the forest of Parroy, and it hasn’t helped a bit; and he is one that
will get through, when so much of wise and fair will have been gathered
to the Lord. In an unwonted pause I asked him what he was in civil life,
and he answered, “_Fabricant de brosses à dent_.” I know it’s all right,
and there must be tooth-brushes, but we had just come from gallooned
generals, prefects, mayors, smart young aviators, and men living in the
world of books.
Blue mists came up from the meadows and slipped between the hills, and
everywhere black trees grew out of gold water.
LIGNY-EN-BARROIS.
The end of our line at the north, and there is a Gothic church of the
thirteenth century called Notre Dame des Vertus, and in it is the tomb of
the Maréchale de Luxembourg, dead in 1695.
NANÇOIS-TRONVILLE.
More blue meadow mists along gold waters, and soft dark fringes of
willows.
LONGEVILLE.
The evening star and spirals of smoke from little houses, and
blue-clad men melting into the twilight, and the canal a golden band,
with stampings of deepest purple where tree shadows cut across it.
Two American soldiers standing at a road-crossing looking up at the
sign-post. Everywhere the Lorraine twilight is shot with khaki-colored
threads from over the seas—and the three gray sisters spin the inexorable
web.
Bar-le-Duc, looking sick and sorry for itself. Station full of broken
glass, dirt, and piles of demolished masonry. The evening star hangs
above the older town on the hill. No time to get out to see how the
canteen work is going on; but two obliging station employees gave me
news. A whole quarter of the town by the river, near the Hôtel du
Commerce et de Metz, of unsanctified memory, was destroyed ten days ago,
by an air raid.
I asked if anything had happened to the church of St.-Peter, for I
thought of the _chef-d’œuvre_ of Ligier Richier, René de Châlons,[20]
standing in its dim space, holding his heart aloft in his left hand,
eternal offering to his first wife, Louise of Lorraine. How his widow,
Philippe de Gueldre, felt about this before she was laid out in the garb
of the Poor Clares I don’t know.
No longer any night work in the canteen, no lights being permitted.
Our train unlighted, too. New and larger signs indicating cellars and
shelters everywhere. Black moving shapes of _camions_ along the road, and
the evening star following us along the top of the hill of Bar. A squad
of Annamites quitting their work on the road.
_En ces armées singulières_
_Où l’Annam casse des pierres_
_Sur la route de Verdun._
REVIGNY.
Portentous dark shapes of roofless houses and detachments of blue-clad
men going down a winding road, one with the blue twilight. The station
dim, the town completely dark, and the vine-planted hills only soft
masses; the evening star still following us, though she is so close to
the ridge that in a few minutes she will drop behind it. Oh, this passing
of the evening star in a war—autumn behind French hills!
VITRY-LE-FRANÇOIS, _5.45_.
Founded by François Premier near the old town which was burned with its
church full of worshipers, in a fit of anger by Louis VII during his
war with the Count of Champagne. To expiate this crime he undertook
the Second Crusade. Much black ribbon of canal knotted about, one
end of which leads from the heart of France to the Rhine. An endless
train of troops going to the front, men pressed together, sardine- and
herring-like, in each compartment—it made my soul sick—just human masses
weighed down by accoutrement and literally wedged in. A lively dispute
between a thick-set _poilu_ and one of the station employees on behalf
of a slight, blond, very young soldier.
“_Quoi, vous osez engueuler un poilu de quinze ans?_”
And the following crescendo mounts to the broken panes of the station
roof, “_Embusqué, cochon, salaud, vache!_”[21]
There was no answer of protest from the official. And Vitry-le-François
is where Napoleon almost took prisoner the Emperor of Russia, the King of
Prussia, and the Austrian General Schwarzenberg in 1814, and in 1914 it
was bombarded by the Germans, and now American troops pour through it.
CHAPTER VIII
THE CHÂLONS CANTEEN
HÔTEL DE LA HAUTE MÈRE DIEU, CHÂLONS, _October 17th, 1.30 a.m._
Lodged at last with the “High Mother of God.” On arriving, dined in a
low-ceilinged, dingy, dowdy room, but the acetylene lights, the uniforms
and decorations of the officers, made something brilliant, which half
veiled the knowledge of the dark night outside, the approaching winter,
the continuing war.
Afterward, I slipped out with my little electric lamp, through the Place
de la République, almost empty; low and splendid stars hung over the
town. In the rue des Lombards, St.-Alpin was a dark mass, and from its
tower the hour was striking a quarter to nine o’clock.
I turned into the long, perfectly black rue de Marne. Not a single light,
nor any passer-by. I flashed my little lamp to find the curb. There came
a click of wooden-soled shoes from a side street, and a thick voice said,
“_Ah, la dame, pourquoi si vite?_” I passed on like the wind, trembling,
down the deserted street, but when I flashed the lamp to find another
curb, something heavy and stumbling got nearer. And then I didn’t dare to
turn the light on, and I took the wrong turning, and found myself in what
seemed a wilderness of mud and trees, with the click of those following
wooden-soled feet behind, and any woman who has been terrified, she
scarcely knows why, will understand. Finally I stopped behind a dark
mass of trees, with something sucking about in the mud, and mumbling
half-suspected words, and finally retreating.
At that moment a soldier appeared, a gigantic shadow of himself as he
struck a match to light his cigarette, and I asked:
“Is this the rue du Port de Marne?”
He answers, “You have missed your way; you are by the canal,” and he puts
me onto the road again, and then I turn and grope my way to the little
house by the Marne.
Neither Miss Nott nor Miss Mitchell is there, so I depart again, going
over the great Marne bridge to the station. Though I can see nothing, I
hear the regular practised tread of a marching squad, and when I flash my
lamp to find the curb, a little detachment looms up unmeasurably big and
distorted, and the horizon blue becomes that ghostly gray.
In the canteen a thousand men at least. Am quite dazzled by the splendor
of the installation. Warm welcome from Miss Nott and Miss Mitchell, with
the light of a very understandable pride in their eyes. Go behind the
long counter, then through the kitchen to the little dressing-room; take
off my hat, put on a long apron, twist my pale-blue chiffon scarf about
my head and am ready. As I look out over the big room I feel that in
the whole world it is the only place to be. Around me surged those blue
waves; the light caught helmets and drinking-cups; there was the mist of
breath and smoke; the familiar sound of laughing, disputing, humming.
That strange atmosphere of fatality hung over each and every one, yet
with a merciless confusing of destinies in the extreme anonymity of it
all.
Came away at 11.30 enveloped in a strange sidereal light, the stars
still more splendid as the night deepened. Even the memory of tropical
constellations vaulting high altitudes was dimmed. The Great Bear lay
over the left of the Marne bridge, and on the other horizon, over the
Promenade du Jard, where I suddenly remembered that St.-Bernard had
preached the crusade in presence of Pope Eugene and Charles VII, was
Orion, so bright that he alone could have lighted the town of the
Catalaunian fields, and Jupiter seemed like a distant sun, under the soft
blur of the Pleiades. The river was mysterious, yet personal with its new
mantle of history wrapping it sadly, yet tenderly, and with much glory.
Then I was again in the still, dark, long street; no passers-by, no
lights from any window, the clock of St.-Alpin striking midnight, and
Orion concealed to his belt by the houses of the Place de la République.
There was some deep stirring of my heart as I turned in at the door of La
Haute Mère Dieu, leaving the gorgeous heavens to stretch over the wide
plain of Châlons, where the hosts of Attila were defeated, where the
great, misty, tragic, glorious history of Champagne and Lorraine rolls
itself out. Now above it all is the whir of _aeros de chasse_, and a
faint, very faint booming of cannon. The Châlons plain continues to give
me the “creeps.” It is haunting and suggestive in the same way that the
Roman Campagna is haunting and suggestive, though the great bare stretch,
with its bald, chalky scarrings, its dull spots of pine woods, its dust
or mud, has none of the material beauty of the Campagna. Doubtless I’m
within the folds of the mantle of the concentrated, continuous human
passions that cover it.
I trod as lightly as I could through a resounding corridor, having a
profound regard for all sleeping things, past many leather leggings and
spurred boots outside of silent doors.
When I left the canteen, the guard, in answer to my cry, “Sentinelle!”
said, as he opened the gate, “_Ce n’est pas comme à Verdun, où l’on ne
passe pas_”; and then, “_Bonsoir, Mees._” It was so easily and gracefully
said in the inimitable French way.
_October 17th, 7.30 a.m._
Tea, a lukewarm pale-gray beverage, with some still crisp leaves afloat
on the top. I would have been ungrateful if I had not thought of the
Hôtel des Vosges. Mrs. Church, fresh and strong as the morning, though
just back from night shift, boiled some water for me and I blessed
her. The bleakness of this room is indescribable. Two lithographs of
the “_Angelus_” and “_Les Glaneurs_” but add to the desolation. A
red-and-yellow striped paper on the walls; on the floor a worn square
of Brussels carpet; brown woolen curtains; shutters with slats askew; a
large mahogany chest of drawers; a grayish dimity cover to the feather
bed, with machine-stitched _motifs_ showing its ugly yellow case
underneath; linen sheets, large, thick, and clean—and you have almost
any room of La Haute Mère Dieu. Except Mrs. C.’s with its extraordinary
bed, painted cream-color, having large “Empirish” corners formed by
pale green and gilt Egyptian unduly voluptuous Sphinx-like figures, and
a brownish-red plush baldaquin from which depend some yellowish-brown
curtains; the brown carpet with purplish flowers is a protest between the
two, and the rest of the room a riot of gilt mirrors. It’s a room one
couldn’t forget, and why provincial hotels cling so to brown upholstery
I don’t know. They give the effect of being old and dirty even when they
are—_perhaps_—new.
The corridor has been a sounding-board since dawn, and all during the
night _camions_ were being driven over the cobblestones, and motor horns
rent the darkness. My room looks out over an old garden. A tall, dead
tree-trunk has immemorial ivy clinging to it, and there is an old round
well, half covered, and beyond the gate, with ivy and moss-grown urns, is
a street that would have been quiet except for the _camions_; and I can
see a row of distinguished-looking, plain-façaded gray houses of another
century, opposite.
The German General Staff was lodged here before the battle of the Marne,
the chambermaid told me, with a reminiscential gleam in her eyes.
But you see how any one’s personal history, his little wants, his little
habits, are ground out into something quite different by the war-machine.
The only thing any one asks is strength to get through what he has
to do. He doesn’t demand to get through in any special way—just get
through—where so many don’t. Not to be so cold that you can’t use your
hands or your mind, not to be so tired that you can’t stand, not to be so
hungry that you are faint and useless, not to go without sleep till you
don’t care what happens to anybody, especially yourself. Life is fairly
simple, and somehow very satisfactory, on such a basis.
_11.30 p.m._
A long day, with the exception of luncheon at the house on the Marne
and a talk in the garden, where Mrs. Corbin and I sat for a while under
the yellow chestnut-tree, looking out on the brimming, jade-colored,
slow-flowing Marne, talking of destinies, and the illusion of free will,
by which, however, all these high deeds which we witness are done. And
it seems to me the thing called Destiny resides somewhere. It isn’t a
purely subjective affair, created out of the combination of qualities
and opportunities of each, rather something definite and operative
and immutable; but that may only be the way I feel about it now. I am
overcome all the time by the relativity of everything, even of truth.
The little white birch-tree has no leaves, the butterflies are gone, and
winter is close upon the war-world. The gardener has been returned to his
home. What of his sons, I wonder? He has a tender heart.
Miss Stanton lives in the little yellow room with the niche and the
emanations. Now she looks out on yellowing trees; yellow pumpkins lie in
the little wet garden; there is a border of yellow and red nasturtiums
and dahlias. It’s all like some stage-setting. When I said to her, “I
hear you have the little room with the emanations,” she answered, “There
must be something about it; for in spite of the fact that I am not
comfortable, I don’t dislike it.”
I wondered again what soul had inhabited within those four walls and if
the niche had been an altar, and to what god, as I walked along in a
sudden cold mist that began to envelope Châlons.
_Since 10 o’clock._
I have been swept about by varying tides of blue-clad men. Some thought
the _cantine épatante_, others thought sadly and remarked loudly that so
much money being spent on an installation meant that the war was going to
last indefinitely. “_C’est trop long_” one thin, blond man, with deep-set
eyes and bright spots on his cheeks, kept repeating, till one of his
friends in unrepeatable _poilu_ terms told him to “leave the camp.”
Concert in the afternoon, the usual number of extremely good _diseurs_.
In the Salle de Récréation, where it was held, are reclining-chairs and
writing-tables. When I told one not very young _poilu_ that there _was_
such a heaven, he, too, answered, “_Alors la guerre va durer longtemps,
si l’on fait tout cela pour ceux qui restent_.”
Lieutenant Tonzin has converted those old railway sheds into something
most artistic. The walls are painted cream with strips of pale blue;
conventionalized fruit-filled baskets and designs of flowery wreaths
decorate them at intervals. The great roof has drapings of white muslin,
and square, engarlanded shades make the light shine softly on the
blue-clad men coming and going, coming and going.
On the counter are small green bushes. One homesick-eyed gardener _poilu_
from Marseilles, having felt them, wondered what they would do if
watered. “_Les pauvres! Chez nous sont grands comme ça_,” and he raised
his hand toward the roof.
“_Toi, grand serin_,” remarked his comrade; “_tu vois tout toujours dix
fois grandeur naturelle_.”
Whereupon they began the inevitable dispute. I heard the words
“_gueuleton_,” “_qu’est-ce que t’as au bec_,” and the Marseillais finally
calling out, as they retreated, that he thanked God _he_ hadn’t been born
at Caen.
All is so orderly and the jokes mostly relatable. Only when they are
somewhat _allumés_ do they get on the subject of the eternal feminine,
and then the dots are put on the i’s, regarding her rôle on the natural
plane. But even then there is generally some _copain_ to say, “_Ferme
ta gueule_,” or “_Que veux-tu que les mees sachent de tout cela?_” The
legend being that the canteens are served almost exclusively by vestals.
When holding out their “quarts,” they often ask, longingly, “_Pas de
cogneau; pas de gniole?_”[22] When I answered once, “_Pas de pinard[23]
ici_,” the _poilu_ cried back, “_Mais le ‘whisk’! Vous en avez toujours
chez vous!_” Another delicate Anglo-Saxon reference.
Late, in between one of the train rushes, two men came in, violently
disputing as they stood at the counter:
“_C’est une guerre diplomatique, je te dis, cochon, va._”
“_Qu’est-ce que tu dis là, moi, je te dis, sale type, que c’est une
guerre qui ne mène à rien!_”
“_C’est la même chose, nom de—— —nom de—— —t’es bête, espèce
d’acrobate_,” etc., etc.
Another comes in saying, loudly:
“_Cette sacrée guerre, cette sacrée guerre! Qu’est-ce que cela me fait
que je sois boche ou Français? Suis de Roubaix, moi, il me faut manger du
pain sec le reste de mes jours—moi et ma femme et mes cinq enfants._”
When I gave him his cup of steaming _jus_ (coffee), he poured into it,
from his _bidon_, a few drops of _gniole_, and by the time he got to the
door he was singing the well-known refrain:
_Je fus vacciné,_
_Inoculé,_
_Quatr’ fois piqué ..._
Then a train arrived, the great room was flooded again, and no time for
anything except to ask, “_Avez-vous votre quart?_” (the tin cup) our
bowls having given out during the rush; or, “_Prenez votre billet à la
caisse_,” or, in order to relieve the congestion at _la caisse_, one
takes their ten centimes and pours and pours and pours, or indicates the
end of the counter, where the _repas complet_, consisting of soup, meat,
vegetable, and salad, is served. _Boudin_ with potatoes (a hundred yards
of this dark “blood-sausage,” curled up in boxes before being cooked, is
an awful sight), or hash with potatoes, they love, but one and all hate
macaroni with a deep hatred. Sometimes it is served when the potatoes
give out, and they don’t conceal their distaste. They get too much cold
macaroni in the trenches.
It’s always the ones who speak English who have the worst manners. One
rather nice-looking individual came up to the _repas complet_ counter,
saying: “I’m in a ’urry. Got no waiters? Step live.’” No _un_corrupted
Frenchman, even half-seas over, would dream of such a form of address!
Lots of tiny, yellow Annamites in to-day, sounding just the way
they look and looking just the way they sound. One brought back his
salad-plate (accidents will happen in the best canteens) with a little
worm a-move upon its edge, and he made some unintelligible sounds. When
I thoughtlessly asked a _poilu_ what he was saying, the _poilu_, quite
unembarrassed, proceeded to tell me, but _I_ can’t tell _you_! It must go
no further.
Lunched at the house by the Marne, where we talk American politics for a
change, then back. One goes, one returns, and still they flood the vast
room, and one continues the book of the _cantine_, bound in its horizon
blue, with its blood-stained, tear-sealed pages.
A quite peculiar warming of the heart when one’s own khaki-clad men
come in. Early in the afternoon an American appeared at the counter,
accompanied by a French corporal. He had completely forgotten the name
of his town, was driving a _camion_, and said, with a distressed air,
“If I could only find a certain spot in town, I _could_ get back”; and
then added, with a grin, “I suppose you think I’m like the doctor that
could cure fits; but I’ve got to get the fits before I can do anything
else, and I’m late already,” he finished, anxiously. After giving various
descriptions of various localities I hit on the Place de la République,
“with a fountain with three women?” and as I explained to the
under-officer, he said, “You’ve saved little Willie’s life,” and hurried
out.
The names seem the difficult part. One of them, when I asked where he was
billeted, said:
“That’s one on me; it’s got three names; but”—and he beckoned to a
_poilu_ standing near—“this is a pal of mine. When I give him three
knocks on the shoulder he gives the name.”
The _poilu_ didn’t wait for even the first knock before he said,
“Demanges-aux-Eaux,” and then the American treated him to chocolate
and offered him a “Lucky Strike” cigarette and began some exotic
pronunciation of Demanges-aux-Eaux.
There’s always one special thing in every situation in life that comes
hard. Now I must confess that whenever I have to take a damp, dark-brown
cloth in my hand and mop up puddles of spilled chocolate and coffee
from the tiled counter, I feel an invincible repugnance. To-day four
Americans came in together. A nice, tall, evidently perceptive one said,
unexpectedly:
“Just give me that rag.”
As I gratefully surrendered the clammy thing he continued:
“I will be here all the afternoon and you’ll find me mopping any time you
like.” He subsequently ordered four fried eggs apiece for himself and a
_poilu_, and then took a whole box of the little sweet round biscuits
that we were selling rather gingerly by twos and threes, came back from
time to time for bowls of chocolate, when he would cheerfully mop the
counter for me. Finally I said:
“What is your name?”
And he answered: “Smith. There’re a few of us,” he added, and then with a
twinkle, “but I’m John. Now what do you say to a swap?”
“I’m Mrs. O’Shaughnessy.”
“I bet I spot you. I was in Mexico last summer. Say, wasn’t your husband
mixed up with old Huerta?”
I had to answer “yes” to this version of history.
“I wasn’t much on dust when I was down there, but there’s too much water
here. However,” he continued, cheerfully, “we’ve got to tin the Teut or
he’ll tin us.” Then he added, in a confidential voice: “What do you think
of the war? I get mixed sometimes.”
I had noticed a small amethyst ring in the shape of a pansy on one of his
large fingers as he was mopping, so, after disposing of his question in
the briefest and most effective way by remarking that it was “up to us
all” to do every bit we could to win the war, to which he agreed, I asked:
“Are you engaged?”
“To one beaut,” he answered, without an instant’s hesitation. “Met her in
San Antonio last summer, but I guess she’s the kind that waits. Gee! they
were around her like flies, but I shoo’d ’em all off.”
And he pulled out the picture of a girl with large dark eyes half hidden
in love-locks, and showing a lot of white teeth between pleasure-ready
lips. What appeared of her person was clad in the most “peek-a-boo” of
blouses, and there was a twist of white tulle about it all. I wondered if
she was the “kind that waits.” I had a sudden affection for John Smith,
thinking, however, as he passed out of the door, that his identification
disk would be more definite than his name, and then, for an instant, I
pondered on the supremely elemental thing he’s come for.
Damp, cold night had fallen on Châlons, but the canteen was warm and
cheery, and the men who knew little of warmth and cheer were sitting
about in a moment’s comfort, and there came to mind a canteen I know
(oh, far away!) which is presided over by a lady with a mustache like
a majordomo, and there are no night hours in her canteen. She rings an
inexorable bell at the chaste hour of 9.30, and, rainy or dry, warm or
cold, out they go, the _poilus_. Some one with a compassionate heart
remarked to one of the men on a pouring night, as the bell was ringing,
“I am sorry you must go.” He answered, with a glance at the ringer and a
twist of _his_ mustache: “It’s well to choose them that way. It quiets
us.” And he went off singing, “_Depuis le jour où je me suis donnée_.” It
was too funny....
_Friday, October 19th._
A tightening of the heart at leaving that flooding hall—going out again
to pick up the personal life, inconsequential as it now seems. One is
hypnotized by the stream of humanity, drawn into its vortex, finally
rushing along with it, who knows whence or whither. I jerked myself back
by saying, “This is not my bit,” and, “Each one to his own.” There are
many ways of helping win the war.
I saw for a moment General Goïgoux, just back from his _permission_, so
solicitous for the welfare of his men, so pleased with the results of the
canteen, smiling as he said to me:
“_Eh bien, Madame, cela a fait des progrès depuis votre dernière visite._”
There is a quite wonderful entente, and appreciation, on both sides in
Châlons.
I went back into the canteen, and found some _poilus_ in fits of laughter
over a black cat. Now what a black cat evokes in the mind of the _poilu_
I can only suspect; I don’t quite know. Anyway, it’s something that
“makes to laugh”; and our black cat, strayed in weeks ago from who knows
where, and perched near a devoted lady of unmistakable respectability,
lately arrived to help “save France,” furthermore enveloped in a gray
sweater (it’s cold and draughty where she sits behind the small aperture
selling tickets for coffee, chocolate, and _repas complets_), and not in
her nature playful, seems somehow suggestive to the _poilu_. Even when it
perches on the counter by the coffee-jugs it’s the same. We don’t like
to get rid of it; it’s supposed to bring good luck. However, enough, or
perhaps too little, about the black cat.
There is a _surveillant_ supposed to keep order. He is rarely needed, and
if he does say anything, he gets an “_Embusqué!_” thrown at him, between
the eyes. It’s not the day of the civilian employee. This one spends a
good deal of time eating and not paying, and nobody loves him. There is
a favorite story of the _poilu_ saluting a common or garden variety of
policeman, thinking he was a corporal; and when telling of his mistake
afterward he called it “_le plus malheureux jour de mavie_.”
A hitch in the serving of the _complete repasts_. I looked into the
kitchen to see if things couldn’t be hurried up. The group that
met my eyes, of the cook and her assistant wrestling with yards of
blood-sausage, could have been the female pendant to the Laocoön. It was
awful. As I turned back to the counter I heard this bit of conversation
between two _poilus_ waiting for their meal:
“_Tu sais_, when a Canadian sees wood he goes wild. He’ll chop up
anything from a roadside cross to a baby-carriage. They say it is because
of his forests. At —— last spring they took the balusters out of the
house where they were quartered, and that pretty Jeanne you’ve heard
about—_un amour, je te dis_—fell down in the dark and was killed.”
“Each one has his _manie_,” answered his friend, in perfect tolerance.
“_Mais moi, je ne toucherais pas à une croix._” And he proceeded to
cross himself at the bare thought.
A colonel whose name I don’t remember took me into the garden to see the
kiosks that I had so often indicated when the men asked for _pinard_ or
_tabac_. The _guignol_ that I had seen at the camouflage grounds in July
was in place; beyond was the huge bomb-proof shelter built by German
prisoners to contain 2,000 men in case of _avion_ attack. We took a few
steps into its black, moist intricacies. As I came up I found myself
close to a group of some thirty German prisoners being marched past to
work on a cement emplacement for a gun, the large P.G.[24] stamped on
their backs, and wearing their small round caps with the red stripe, and
any kind of clothes. I felt for a moment like an illustration for Cæsar’s
_Commentaries_, or some sort of a Roman watching northern prisoners being
marched by.
The officer who showed me about was one of the twenty-seven men who
escaped from the Fort de Vaux, and had lost his only child on Hill 304.
“I was wounded, and I’m not yet worth much, which is why I am here.
My boy was only twenty-one—_mais c’était une personne faite_—a leader
of men. All, with those qualities, go; I am not alone, alas! in my
_douleur_.”
And that is one of the beautiful things of this sorrowful epoch. Each
thinks upon the others’ grief.... And then I left it all.
The jade-colored Marne is flat, eddyless, brimming over with its autumn
rains, the reeds have disappeared, the trunks of the willows are hidden.
Over the gray bridge flows, unabated, that other stream of war and life.
_Camions_, ambulances, smart red-and-white-marked staff automobiles,
soldiers in every conceivable state of soul and body, “enduring their
going hence even as their coming hither.” English, Americans, Senegalese,
Annamites—a dozen races swell this Gallic flood, and the Gray Sisters
never so busy since the world began.
PARIS, _January 7th, 1918_.
I am waiting to know from one of the most charming of the sons of Gaul,
who has promised to be my intercessor before the powers that be, whether
I am to go to my front—our front—now or not. If, as Amiel says, “_Être
prêt, c’est partir_,” then I am already off.
FINIS
FOOTNOTES
[1] Killed 10th November, 1915, at Zagora, at the head of his battalion.
[2] Planted so that any vista represents the Roman numeral V.
[3] Like porcelain dogs.
[4] Verdun, the Virdunum of the Romans. In the third century a bishopric
was founded there with Saint Saintin as first bishop; 843, the treaty
of Verdun; after the battle of Fontanet the three sons of Louis the
Debonair, Lothair, Louis of Bavaria, and Charles the Bald, divided the
empire of Charlemagne, with the result that not only was France separated
from Germania, but her natural boundaries, the Alps and the Rhine,
were lost; 1792, the Prussians besieged it in force and it was obliged
to capitulate after two days; 1870, a heroic defense lasting nearly
three months ending in capitulation; 1916, _Ils n’ont pas passé, ils ne
passeront pas_.
[5] _Neuvième série._
[6] Alan Seeger, _Letters and Diary_.
[7] Regimental decoration in the form of a cord worn over the left
shoulder, passing under the arm.
[8] The _sauf-conduits_ for the army zones are in the form of little,
red, paper-bound books.
[9] “_La Pioggia nel Pineto._”—D’ANNUNZIO.
[10] In _L’Horizon_ I found these lines from Verlaine, with a few added,
concerning _le Cafard_, by “Bi Bi Bi”:
_Quelle est cette douleur_
_Qui pénètre mon cœur?_
_C’est bien la pire peine_
_De ne savoir pourquoi_
_Sans amour et sans haine_
_Mon cœur a tant de peine._
_En effet, cher Verlaine,_
_C’est bien la pire peine_
_Que ta fameuse peine_
_Et les poilus sans art_
_La nomment le Cafard._
But _le Cafard_ differs from Verlaine’s _peine_ in that it is a very
special kind of world-pain, and very complete; for those in its grip
know _why_, as well as _not_ why, they suffer. The memory of loved and
early things, very probably not to be known again, is part of it. The
consciously unreasonable hope that all will be well in an extremely
uncertain future is another part of it—and underlying it is crushing
physical fatigue, sleeplessness, hunger, cold, heat, the whole smeared
in the blood of brothers and foes, the dull reaction after killing, or
escape from being killed—one can’t feel that there is anything vague
about _le Cafard_.
[11] Cook.
[12] Gondrecourt, the first American encampment in Lorraine.
[13] During the closing days of February, 1918, the air raids on Nancy
were so continuous and so disastrous that Molitor had to be evacuated
and the inmates, the aged and the children, were redistributed in other
parts of France. These words are quite simple to write and to read. Their
significance is beyond expression.
March, 1918, E. O’S.
[14] She received ten refusals for the dinner she was giving the next
night; among them one from Talleyrand, which caused a permanent rupture
in their relations.
[15] Governor-General of Morocco.
[16] The American Red Cross Asylum at Luxembourg (Toul), now under the
very able management of Dr. Maynard Ladd, has accommodations for nearly a
thousand children, well and ill, and a maternity hospital.
The American forces hold the line to the northwest of Toul.
[17] Her epitaph, written by herself, is to the effect that underneath
lies a rotting worm, giving to death the tribute of nature, the earth her
only covering, and begging her sisters, the Poor Clares, to say for her a
_Requiescat in pace_.
_Ci-gist un ver tout en pourriture,_
_Donnant à mort le tribut de la nature._
_Sœur Philippe de Gueldre fust Royne du passé,_
_Terre soulat pour toute couverture._
_Sœurs, dites-lui une requiescat in pace._
_MDXLVII._
[18] Madame du Châtelet, around whose death-bed three men met in
fraternal tolerance, Voltaire, St.-Lambert, and her husband, was buried
here September 11, 1749. In 1793 the tomb was profaned, the lead coffin
stolen, the bones scattered. In 1858 they were gathered up and put in a
modern coffin in which they now repose. She said of herself: “_J’ai reçu
de Dieu une de ces âmes tendres et immuables qui ne savent ni déguiser
ni modérer leurs passions; qui ne connaissent ni l’affaiblissement ni le
dégoût, et dont la ténacité sait résister à tout, même à la certitude de
n’être pas aimée.... Mais un cœur aussi tendre, peut-il être rempli par
un sentiment aussi paisible et aussi faible que l’amitié?_”
[19] “_Faut pas s’en faire_” is one of the most famous phrases of the
French army, and has been described as a combination of two slang
expressions, “To keep your hair on, _de ne pas se faire des cheveux_,”
and “not to hurt your digestion by undue worry, _de ne pas se faire de la
bile_.”
[20] René de Châlons, Prince of Orange, killed in 1544, at the siege of
St.-Dizier. The genius of Ligier Richier has represented him according to
his wish, as his body might have appeared three years _after_ death.
[21] Slacker, pig, dirty-one, cow!
[22] Cognac.
[23] wine.
[24] _Prisonnier de Guerre._
*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK MY LORRAINE JOURNAL ***
Updated editions will replace the previous one—the old editions will
be renamed.
Creating the works from print editions not protected by U.S. copyright
law means that no one owns a United States copyright in these works,
so the Foundation (and you!) can copy and distribute it in the United
States without permission and without paying copyright
royalties. Special rules, set forth in the General Terms of Use part
of this license, apply to copying and distributing Project
Gutenberg™ electronic works to protect the PROJECT GUTENBERG™
concept and trademark. Project Gutenberg is a registered trademark,
and may not be used if you charge for an eBook, except by following
the terms of the trademark license, including paying royalties for use
of the Project Gutenberg trademark. If you do not charge anything for
copies of this eBook, complying with the trademark license is very
easy. You may use this eBook for nearly any purpose such as creation
of derivative works, reports, performances and research. Project
Gutenberg eBooks may be modified and printed and given away—you may
do practically ANYTHING in the United States with eBooks not protected
by U.S. copyright law. Redistribution is subject to the trademark
license, especially commercial redistribution.
START: FULL LICENSE
THE FULL PROJECT GUTENBERG LICENSE
PLEASE READ THIS BEFORE YOU DISTRIBUTE OR USE THIS WORK
To protect the Project Gutenberg™ mission of promoting the free
distribution of electronic works, by using or distributing this work
(or any other work associated in any way with the phrase “Project
Gutenberg”), you agree to comply with all the terms of the Full
Project Gutenberg™ License available with this file or online at
www.gutenberg.org/license.
Section 1. General Terms of Use and Redistributing Project Gutenberg™
electronic works
1.A. By reading or using any part of this Project Gutenberg™
electronic work, you indicate that you have read, understand, agree to
and accept all the terms of this license and intellectual property
(trademark/copyright) agreement. If you do not agree to abide by all
the terms of this agreement, you must cease using and return or
destroy all copies of Project Gutenberg™ electronic works in your
possession. If you paid a fee for obtaining a copy of or access to a
Project Gutenberg™ electronic work and you do not agree to be bound
by the terms of this agreement, you may obtain a refund from the person
or entity to whom you paid the fee as set forth in paragraph 1.E.8.
1.B. “Project Gutenberg” is a registered trademark. It may only be
used on or associated in any way with an electronic work by people who
agree to be bound by the terms of this agreement. There are a few
things that you can do with most Project Gutenberg™ electronic works
even without complying with the full terms of this agreement. See
paragraph 1.C below. There are a lot of things you can do with Project
Gutenberg™ electronic works if you follow the terms of this
agreement and help preserve free future access to Project Gutenberg™
electronic works. See paragraph 1.E below.
1.C. The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation (“the
Foundation” or PGLAF), owns a compilation copyright in the collection
of Project Gutenberg™ electronic works. Nearly all the individual
works in the collection are in the public domain in the United
States. If an individual work is unprotected by copyright law in the
United States and you are located in the United States, we do not
claim a right to prevent you from copying, distributing, performing,
displaying or creating derivative works based on the work as long as
all references to Project Gutenberg are removed. Of course, we hope
that you will support the Project Gutenberg™ mission of promoting
free access to electronic works by freely sharing Project Gutenberg™
works in compliance with the terms of this agreement for keeping the
Project Gutenberg™ name associated with the work. You can easily
comply with the terms of this agreement by keeping this work in the
same format with its attached full Project Gutenberg™ License when
you share it without charge with others.
1.D. The copyright laws of the place where you are located also govern
what you can do with this work. Copyright laws in most countries are
in a constant state of change. If you are outside the United States,
check the laws of your country in addition to the terms of this
agreement before downloading, copying, displaying, performing,
distributing or creating derivative works based on this work or any
other Project Gutenberg™ work. The Foundation makes no
representations concerning the copyright status of any work in any
country other than the United States.
1.E. Unless you have removed all references to Project Gutenberg:
1.E.1. The following sentence, with active links to, or other
immediate access to, the full Project Gutenberg™ License must appear
prominently whenever any copy of a Project Gutenberg™ work (any work
on which the phrase “Project Gutenberg” appears, or with which the
phrase “Project Gutenberg” is associated) is accessed, displayed,
performed, viewed, copied or distributed:
This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most
other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions
whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms
of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online
at www.gutenberg.org. If you
are not located in the United States, you will have to check the laws
of the country where you are located before using this eBook.
1.E.2. If an individual Project Gutenberg™ electronic work is
derived from texts not protected by U.S. copyright law (does not
contain a notice indicating that it is posted with permission of the
copyright holder), the work can be copied and distributed to anyone in
the United States without paying any fees or charges. If you are
redistributing or providing access to a work with the phrase “Project
Gutenberg” associated with or appearing on the work, you must comply
either with the requirements of paragraphs 1.E.1 through 1.E.7 or
obtain permission for the use of the work and the Project Gutenberg™
trademark as set forth in paragraphs 1.E.8 or 1.E.9.
1.E.3. If an individual Project Gutenberg™ electronic work is posted
with the permission of the copyright holder, your use and distribution
must comply with both paragraphs 1.E.1 through 1.E.7 and any
additional terms imposed by the copyright holder. Additional terms
will be linked to the Project Gutenberg™ License for all works
posted with the permission of the copyright holder found at the
beginning of this work.
1.E.4. Do not unlink or detach or remove the full Project Gutenberg™
License terms from this work, or any files containing a part of this
work or any other work associated with Project Gutenberg™.
1.E.5. Do not copy, display, perform, distribute or redistribute this
electronic work, or any part of this electronic work, without
prominently displaying the sentence set forth in paragraph 1.E.1 with
active links or immediate access to the full terms of the Project
Gutenberg™ License.
1.E.6. You may convert to and distribute this work in any binary,
compressed, marked up, nonproprietary or proprietary form, including
any word processing or hypertext form. However, if you provide access
to or distribute copies of a Project Gutenberg™ work in a format
other than “Plain Vanilla ASCII” or other format used in the official
version posted on the official Project Gutenberg™ website
(www.gutenberg.org), you must, at no additional cost, fee or expense
to the user, provide a copy, a means of exporting a copy, or a means
of obtaining a copy upon request, of the work in its original “Plain
Vanilla ASCII” or other form. Any alternate format must include the
full Project Gutenberg™ License as specified in paragraph 1.E.1.
1.E.7. Do not charge a fee for access to, viewing, displaying,
performing, copying or distributing any Project Gutenberg™ works
unless you comply with paragraph 1.E.8 or 1.E.9.
1.E.8. You may charge a reasonable fee for copies of or providing
access to or distributing Project Gutenberg™ electronic works
provided that:
• You pay a royalty fee of 20% of the gross profits you derive from
the use of Project Gutenberg™ works calculated using the method
you already use to calculate your applicable taxes. The fee is owed
to the owner of the Project Gutenberg™ trademark, but he has
agreed to donate royalties under this paragraph to the Project
Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation. Royalty payments must be paid
within 60 days following each date on which you prepare (or are
legally required to prepare) your periodic tax returns. Royalty
payments should be clearly marked as such and sent to the Project
Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation at the address specified in
Section 4, “Information about donations to the Project Gutenberg
Literary Archive Foundation.”
• You provide a full refund of any money paid by a user who notifies
you in writing (or by e-mail) within 30 days of receipt that s/he
does not agree to the terms of the full Project Gutenberg™
License. You must require such a user to return or destroy all
copies of the works possessed in a physical medium and discontinue
all use of and all access to other copies of Project Gutenberg™
works.
• You provide, in accordance with paragraph 1.F.3, a full refund of
any money paid for a work or a replacement copy, if a defect in the
electronic work is discovered and reported to you within 90 days of
receipt of the work.
• You comply with all other terms of this agreement for free
distribution of Project Gutenberg™ works.
1.E.9. If you wish to charge a fee or distribute a Project
Gutenberg™ electronic work or group of works on different terms than
are set forth in this agreement, you must obtain permission in writing
from the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation, the manager of
the Project Gutenberg™ trademark. Contact the Foundation as set
forth in Section 3 below.
1.F.
1.F.1. Project Gutenberg volunteers and employees expend considerable
effort to identify, do copyright research on, transcribe and proofread
works not protected by U.S. copyright law in creating the Project
Gutenberg™ collection. Despite these efforts, Project Gutenberg™
electronic works, and the medium on which they may be stored, may
contain “Defects,” such as, but not limited to, incomplete, inaccurate
or corrupt data, transcription errors, a copyright or other
intellectual property infringement, a defective or damaged disk or
other medium, a computer virus, or computer codes that damage or
cannot be read by your equipment.
1.F.2. LIMITED WARRANTY, DISCLAIMER OF DAMAGES - Except for the “Right
of Replacement or Refund” described in paragraph 1.F.3, the Project
Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation, the owner of the Project
Gutenberg™ trademark, and any other party distributing a Project
Gutenberg™ electronic work under this agreement, disclaim all
liability to you for damages, costs and expenses, including legal
fees. YOU AGREE THAT YOU HAVE NO REMEDIES FOR NEGLIGENCE, STRICT
LIABILITY, BREACH OF WARRANTY OR BREACH OF CONTRACT EXCEPT THOSE
PROVIDED IN PARAGRAPH 1.F.3. YOU AGREE THAT THE FOUNDATION, THE
TRADEMARK OWNER, AND ANY DISTRIBUTOR UNDER THIS AGREEMENT WILL NOT BE
LIABLE TO YOU FOR ACTUAL, DIRECT, INDIRECT, CONSEQUENTIAL, PUNITIVE OR
INCIDENTAL DAMAGES EVEN IF YOU GIVE NOTICE OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH
DAMAGE.
1.F.3. LIMITED RIGHT OF REPLACEMENT OR REFUND - If you discover a
defect in this electronic work within 90 days of receiving it, you can
receive a refund of the money (if any) you paid for it by sending a
written explanation to the person you received the work from. If you
received the work on a physical medium, you must return the medium
with your written explanation. The person or entity that provided you
with the defective work may elect to provide a replacement copy in
lieu of a refund. If you received the work electronically, the person
or entity providing it to you may choose to give you a second
opportunity to receive the work electronically in lieu of a refund. If
the second copy is also defective, you may demand a refund in writing
without further opportunities to fix the problem.
1.F.4. Except for the limited right of replacement or refund set forth
in paragraph 1.F.3, this work is provided to you ‘AS-IS’, WITH NO
OTHER WARRANTIES OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT
LIMITED TO WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY OR FITNESS FOR ANY PURPOSE.
1.F.5. Some states do not allow disclaimers of certain implied
warranties or the exclusion or limitation of certain types of
damages. If any disclaimer or limitation set forth in this agreement
violates the law of the state applicable to this agreement, the
agreement shall be interpreted to make the maximum disclaimer or
limitation permitted by the applicable state law. The invalidity or
unenforceability of any provision of this agreement shall not void the
remaining provisions.
1.F.6. INDEMNITY - You agree to indemnify and hold the Foundation, the
trademark owner, any agent or employee of the Foundation, anyone
providing copies of Project Gutenberg™ electronic works in
accordance with this agreement, and any volunteers associated with the
production, promotion and distribution of Project Gutenberg™
electronic works, harmless from all liability, costs and expenses,
including legal fees, that arise directly or indirectly from any of
the following which you do or cause to occur: (a) distribution of this
or any Project Gutenberg™ work, (b) alteration, modification, or
additions or deletions to any Project Gutenberg™ work, and (c) any
Defect you cause.
Section 2. Information about the Mission of Project Gutenberg™
Project Gutenberg™ is synonymous with the free distribution of
electronic works in formats readable by the widest variety of
computers including obsolete, old, middle-aged and new computers. It
exists because of the efforts of hundreds of volunteers and donations
from people in all walks of life.
Volunteers and financial support to provide volunteers with the
assistance they need are critical to reaching Project Gutenberg™’s
goals and ensuring that the Project Gutenberg™ collection will
remain freely available for generations to come. In 2001, the Project
Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation was created to provide a secure
and permanent future for Project Gutenberg™ and future
generations. To learn more about the Project Gutenberg Literary
Archive Foundation and how your efforts and donations can help, see
Sections 3 and 4 and the Foundation information page at www.gutenberg.org.
Section 3. Information about the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation
The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation is a non-profit
501(c)(3) educational corporation organized under the laws of the
state of Mississippi and granted tax exempt status by the Internal
Revenue Service. The Foundation’s EIN or federal tax identification
number is 64-6221541. Contributions to the Project Gutenberg Literary
Archive Foundation are tax deductible to the full extent permitted by
U.S. federal laws and your state’s laws.
The Foundation’s business office is located at 809 North 1500 West,
Salt Lake City, UT 84116, (801) 596-1887. Email contact links and up
to date contact information can be found at the Foundation’s website
and official page at www.gutenberg.org/contact
Section 4. Information about Donations to the Project Gutenberg
Literary Archive Foundation
Project Gutenberg™ depends upon and cannot survive without widespread
public support and donations to carry out its mission of
increasing the number of public domain and licensed works that can be
freely distributed in machine-readable form accessible by the widest
array of equipment including outdated equipment. Many small donations
($1 to $5,000) are particularly important to maintaining tax exempt
status with the IRS.
The Foundation is committed to complying with the laws regulating
charities and charitable donations in all 50 states of the United
States. Compliance requirements are not uniform and it takes a
considerable effort, much paperwork and many fees to meet and keep up
with these requirements. We do not solicit donations in locations
where we have not received written confirmation of compliance. To SEND
DONATIONS or determine the status of compliance for any particular state
visit www.gutenberg.org/donate.
While we cannot and do not solicit contributions from states where we
have not met the solicitation requirements, we know of no prohibition
against accepting unsolicited donations from donors in such states who
approach us with offers to donate.
International donations are gratefully accepted, but we cannot make
any statements concerning tax treatment of donations received from
outside the United States. U.S. laws alone swamp our small staff.
Please check the Project Gutenberg web pages for current donation
methods and addresses. Donations are accepted in a number of other
ways including checks, online payments and credit card donations. To
donate, please visit: www.gutenberg.org/donate.
Section 5. General Information About Project Gutenberg™ electronic works
Professor Michael S. Hart was the originator of the Project
Gutenberg™ concept of a library of electronic works that could be
freely shared with anyone. For forty years, he produced and
distributed Project Gutenberg™ eBooks with only a loose network of
volunteer support.
Project Gutenberg™ eBooks are often created from several printed
editions, all of which are confirmed as not protected by copyright in
the U.S. unless a copyright notice is included. Thus, we do not
necessarily keep eBooks in compliance with any particular paper
edition.
Most people start at our website which has the main PG search
facility: www.gutenberg.org.
This website includes information about Project Gutenberg™,
including how to make donations to the Project Gutenberg Literary
Archive Foundation, how to help produce our new eBooks, and how to
subscribe to our email newsletter to hear about new eBooks.
