We were three automobiles strong when we went out of Nancy, along what
they call the "Lunéville road." That was yesterday, as I write, and
already it seems long ago! The third and biggest car belonged to the
Préfet; gray and military looking, driven by a soldier in uniform; and
this time Dierdre O'Farrell was with us. I was wondering if she went
"under orders," or if she wished to see the sights we were to see--among
them, perhaps, her elusive doctor!
We turned south, leaving town, and presently passed--at
Dombasle--astonishingly huge salt-works, with rubble-heaps tall as minor
pyramids. On each apex stood a thing like the form of a giant black
woman in a waggling gas-mask and a helmet. I could have found out what
these weird engines were, no doubt, but I preferred to remember them as
mysterious monsters.
At a great, strange church of St. Nicolas, in the old town of St.
Nicolas-du-Port, we stopped, because the Préfet's daughters had told us
of a magic stone in the pavement which gives good fortune to those who
set foot on it. Only when several of us were huddled together, with a
foot each on the sacred spot, were we told that it meant marriage before
the new year. If the spell works, Dierdre O'Farrell, Brian, and I will
all be married in less than four months. But St. Nicolas is a false
prophet where we are concerned. Brian and I will never marry. Even if
poor Brian should fall head over ears in love, he wouldn't ask a girl to
share his broken life: he has told me this. As for me, I can never love
any man after Jim Beckett. The least penance I owe is to be faithful
forever to his memory and my own falsehood!
St. Nicolas is the patron saint of the neighbourhood, so it's right that
from his little town and his big church all the country round should
open out to the eye, as if to do him homage.
From the hill of Léomont we could see to the south the far-off, famous
Forest of Parroy; away to the north, the blue heights of La Grande
Couronne, where the fate of Nancy was decided in 1914; to the west, a
purple haze like a mourning wreath of violets hung over the valley of
the Meurthe, and the tragic little tributary river Mortagne; beyond, we
could picture with our mind's eyes the Moselle and the Meuse.
But Léomont was not a place where one could stand coldly thinking of
horizons. It drew all thoughts to itself, and to the drama played out
upon its miniature mountain. There was fought one of the fiercest and
most heroic single battles of the war.
We had to desert the cars, and walk up a rough track to the ruined
farmhouse which crowned the hill; a noble, fortified farmhouse that must
have had the dignity of a château before the great fight which shattered
its ancient walls. Now it has the dignity of a mausoleum. Long ago, in
Roman days when Diana, Goddess of the Moon, was patron of Lunéville and
the country round, a temple of stone and marble in her honour and a
soaring fountain crowned the high summit of Léomont, for all the world
to see. Her influence is said to reign over the whole of Lorraine, from
that day to this, St. Nicholas being her sole rival: and a prophecy has
come down through the centuries that no evil may befall Diana's
citadels, save in the "dark o' the moon," when the protectress is
absent. Lunéville was overrun in the "dark o' the moon"; and it was then
also that the battle of Léomont was fought, ending in the vast cellars,
where no man was left alive.
In these days of ours, it's a wonderful and romantic mountain, sacred as
a monument forever, to the glory of the French soldiers who did not die
in vain. The scarred face of the ruined house--its stones pitted by
shrapnel as if by smallpox--gazes over Lorraine as the Sphinx gazes over
the desert: calm, majestic, sad, yet triumphant. And under the shattered
walls, among fallen buttresses and blackened stumps of oaks, are the
graves of Léomont's heroes; graves everywhere, over the hillside; graves
in the open; graves in sheltered corners where wild flowers have begun
to grow; their tricolour cockades and wooden crosses mirrored in the
blue of water-filled shell-holes; graves in the historic cellars,
covered with a pall of darkness; graves along the slope of the hill,
where old trenches have left ruts in the rank grass.
An unseen choir of bird-voices was singing the sweetest requiem ever
sung for the dead; yet Léomont in its majestic loneliness saddened us,
even the irrepressible Puck. We were sad and rather silent all the way
to Vitrimont; and Vitrimont, at first glance, was a sight to make us
sadder than any we had seen. There had been a Vitrimont, a happy little
place, built of gray and rose-red stones; now, of those stones hardly
one lies upon another, except in rubble heaps. And yet, Vitrimont isn't
sad as others of the ruined towns are sad. It even cheered us, after
Léomont, because a star of hope shines over the field of desolation--a
star that has come out of the west. Some wonderful women of San
Francisco decided to "adopt" Vitrimont, as one of the little places of
France which had suffered most in the war. Two of them, Miss Polk and
Miss Crocker--girls rather than women--gave themselves as well as their
money to the work. In what remains of Vitrimont--what they are making of
Vitrimont--they live like two fresh roses that have taken root in a pile
of ashes. With a few books, a few bowls of flowers, pictures, and bits
of bright chintz they have given charm to their poor rooms in the
half-ruined house of a peasant. This has been their home for many
months, from the time when they were the only creatures who shared
Vitrimont with its ghosts: but now other homes are growing under their
eyes and through their charity; thanks to them, the people of the
destroyed village are trooping back, happy and hopeful. The church has
been repaired (that was done first, "because it is God's house") with
warm-coloured pink walls and neat decoration; and plans for the
restoring of the whole village are being carried out, while the waiting
inhabitants camp in a village of toy-like bungalows given by the French
Government. I never saw such looks of worshipping love cast upon human
beings as those of the people of Vitrimont for these two American girls.
I'm sure they believe that Miss Crocker and Miss Polk are saints
incarnated for their sakes by "_la Sainte Vierge_." One old man said as
much!
He was so old that it seemed as if he could never have been young, yet
he was whistling a toothless but patriotic whistle, over some bit of
amateur-carpenter work, in front of a one-room bungalow. Inside, visible
through the open door, was the paralyzed wife he had lately wheeled
"home" to Vitrimont, in some kind of a cart. "Oh, yes, we are happy!" he
stopped whistling to say. "We are fortunate, too. We think we have found
the place where our _street_ used to be, and these Angels--we do not
call them Demoiselles, but Angels--from America are going to build us a
new home in it. We have seen the plan. It is more beautiful than the
old!"
Wherever we passed a house on the road to Lunéville, and in town itself,
as we came in, we saw notices--printed and written--to remind us that we
were in the war-zone, if we forgot for an instant. "_Logement
militaire_," or "_Cave voûtée, 200 places--400 places_." Those
hospitable cellars advertising their existence in air raids and
bombardments must be a comforting sight for passers-by, now and then;
but no siren wailed us a warning. We drove on in peace; and
I--disappointed at Vitrimont--quietly kept watch for a tall, thin figure
of a man with a slight limp. At any moment, I thought, I might see him,
for at Lunéville he lives--if he lives anywhere!
I was so eager and excited that I could hardly turn my mind to other
things; but Brian, not knowing why I should be absent-minded, constantly
asked questions about what we passed. Julian O'Farrell had exchanged his
sister for Mr. and Mrs. Beckett, whom he had persuaded to take the short
trip in his ramshackle taxi. His excuse was that Mother Beckett would
deal out more wisely than Dierdre his Red Cross supplies to the returned
refugees; so we had the girl with us; and I caught reproachful glances
if I was slow in answering my blind brother. She herself suspects him as
a _poseur_, yet she judges me careless of his needs--which I should find
funny, if it didn't make me furious! Just to see what Dierdre would do,
and perhaps to provoke her, sometimes I didn't answer at all, but left
her to explain our surroundings to Brian. I hardly thought she would
respond to the silent challenge, but almost ostentatiously she did.
She cried, "There's a castle!" when we came to the fine and rather staid
château which Duke Stanislas loved, and where he died. She even tried to
describe it for Brian, with faltering self-consciousness, and the old
streets which once had been "brilliant as Versailles, full of Queen
Marie's beautiful ladies." Now, they are gray and sad, even those
streets which show no scars from the three weeks' martyrdom of German
rule. Soldiers pass, on foot and in motors, yet it's hard to realize
that before the war Lunéville was one of the gayest, grandest garrison
towns of France, rich and industrious, under Diana's special protection.
Just because she was away in her moon-chariot, one dark and dreadful
night, all has changed since then. But she'll come back, and bless her
ancient place of Lunæ Villa, in good time!
It was here, Brian reminded me, that they drew up the treaty which gave
the Rhine frontier to France, after Napoleon won the Battle of Marengo.
I wonder if the Germans remembered this in 1914 when they came?
We lunched at an hotel, in a restaurant crowded with French officers;
and not a civilian there except ourselves. I was hoping that Paul Herter
might come in, for the tragic Rue Princesse Marie is not far away--and
even a Wandering Jew must eat! He did not come; but I almost forgot my
new disappointment in hearing the French officers talk about Lorraine.
They were in the midst of a discussion when we came in, and when they
had all bowed politely to us, they took up its thread where it had
broken off. A colonel--a Lorrainer--was saying that out of the wealth of
Lorraine (stolen wealth, he called it!) Germany had built up her fortune
as a united nation, in a few years far exceeding the indemnity received
in 1871. Germany had known that there were vast stores of iron; but the
amazing riches in phosphorus ores had come to her as a surprise. If she
had guessed, never would she have agreed to leave more than half the
deposit on the French side of the frontier! Well enough for Prussian
boasters to say that Germany's success was due to her own industry and
supervirtue, or that her tariff schemes had worked wonders. But take
away the provinces she tore from France, and she will be a Samson shorn!
Take away Lorraine and the world will be rid once and for all of the
German menace!
When we left Lunéville there was still hope from Gerbéviller. Herter is
often there, it seems. Besides, Gerbéviller was the principal end and
aim of our day's excursion. Once no more than a pleasant town of quiet
beauty on a pretty river, now it is a _monument historique_, the Pompeii
of Lorraine.
As we arrived the sun clouded over suddenly, and the effect was almost
theatrical. From gold the light had dimmed to silver. In the midst of
the afternoon, we saw Gerbéviller as if by moonlight in the still
silence of night. On the outskirts we forsook our three cars, and
walked slowly through the dead town, awestruck and deeply thoughtful as
if in a church where the body of some great man lay in state.
There was not a sound except, as at Léomont, the unseen choir of
bird-voices; but their song emphasized the silence. In the pale light
the shells of wrecked houses glimmered white, like things seen deep down
under clear water. They were mysterious as daytime ghosts; and already a
heartbreaking picturesqueness had taken possession of the streets, as an
artist-decorator comes into an ugly room and mellows all its crudeness
with his loving touch.
Gerbéviller's tragic little river Mortagne gleamed silver-bright beneath
a torn lace of delicate white flowers that was like a veil flung off by
a fugitive bride. It ran sparkling under the motionless wheel of a
burned mill, and twinkled on--the one living thing the Germans left--to
flow through the park of a ruined château.
When it was alive, that small château must have been gay and delightful
as a castle in a fairy tale, pink and friendly among its pleasant trees;
but even in its prime, rich with tapestries and splendid old paintings,
which were its treasures, never could the place have been so beautiful
as in death!
At a first glance--seen straight in front--the face of the house seems
to live still, rosy with colour, gazing with immense blue eyes through a
light green veil. But a second glance brings a shock to the heart. The
face is a mask held up to hide a skull; the blue of the eyes is the open
sky framed by glassless windows; the rosy colour is stained with dark
streaks of smoke and flame; the château among its trees, and the chapel
with its stopped clock and broken saints are skeletons.
Not even O'Farrell could talk. We were a silent procession in the midst
of silence until we came at last to the one quarter of the town whose
few houses had been spared to the courage of Gerbéviller's heroine,
Soeur Julie.
Her street (but for her it would not exist) has perhaps a dozen houses
intact, looking strangely _bourgeois_, almost out of place, so smugly
whole where all else has perished. Yet it was a comfort to see them, and
wonderful to see Soeur Julie.
We knocked at the door of the hospice, the cottage hospital which is
famous because of her, its head and heart; and she herself let us in,
for at that instant she had been in the act of starting out. I
recognized her at once from the photographs which were in every
illustrated paper at the time when, for her magnificent bravery and
presence of mind, she was named Chevalière of the Legion of Honour.
But with her first smile I saw that the pictures had done her crude
injustice. They made of Soeur Julie an elderly woman in the dress of a
nun; somewhat stout, rather large of feature. But the figure which met
us in the narrow corridor had dignity and a noble strength. The smile of
greeting lit deep eyes whose colour was that of brown topaz, and showed
the kindly, humorous curves of a generous mouth. The flaring white
headdress of the Order of Saint-Charles of Nancy framed a face so strong
that I ceased to wonder how this woman had cowed a German horde; and it
thrilled me to think that in this very doorway she had stood at bay,
offering her black-robed body as a shield for the wounded soldiers and
poor people she meant to save.
Even if we had not come from the Préfet, and with some of his family who
were her admiring friends, I'm sure Soeur Julie would have welcomed
the strangers. As it was she beamed with pleasure at the visit, and
called a young nun to help place chairs for us all in the clean, bare
reception room. By this time she must know that she is the heroine of
Lorraine--her own Lorraine!--and that those who came to Gerbéviller come
to see her; but she talked to us with the unself-consciousness of a
child. It was only when she was begged to tell the tale of August 23,
1914, that she showed a faint sign of embarrassment. The blood flushed
her brown face, and she hesitated how to begin, as if she would rather
not begin at all, but once launched on the tide, she forgot everything
except her story: she lived that time over again, and we lived it with
her.
"What a day it was!" she sighed. "We knew what must happen, unless God
willed to spare Gerbéviller by some miracle. Our town was in the
German's way. Yet we prayed--we hoped. We hoped even after our army's
defeat at Morhange. Then Lunéville was taken. Our turn was near. We
heard how terrible were the Bavarians under their general, Clauss. Our
soldiers--poor, brave boys!--fought every step of the way to hold them
back. They fought like lions. But they were so few! The Germans came in
a gray wave of men. Our wounded were brought here to the hospice, as
many as we could take--and more! Often there were three hundred. But
when there was no hope to save the town, quick, with haste at night,
they got the wounded away--ambulance after ambulance, cart after cart:
all but a few; nineteen _grands blessés_, who could not be moved. They
were here in this room where we sit. But ah, if you had seen us--we
sisters--helping the commandant as best we could! We made ourselves
carpenters. We took wooden shutters and doors from their hinges for
stretchers. We split the wood with axes. We did not remember to be
tired. We tore up our linen, and linen which others brought us. We tied
the wounded boys on to the shutters. They never groaned. Sometimes they
smiled. Ah, it was we who wept, to see them jolting off in rough country
wagons, going we knew not where, or to what fate! All night we worked,
and at dawn there were none left--except those nineteen I told you of.
And that was the morning of the 23rd of August, hot and heavy--a weight
upon our hearts and heads.
"Not only the wounded, but our defenders had gone. The army was in
retreat. We had fifty-seven chasseurs left, ordered to keep the enemy
back for five hours. They did it for _eleven_! From dawn till twilight
they held the bridge outside the town, and fought behind barriers they
had flung up in haste. Boys they were, but of a courage! They knew they
were to die to save their comrades. They asked no better than to die
hard. And they fought so well, the Germans believed there were
thousands. Not till our boys had nearly all fallen did the enemy break
through and swarm into the town. That was down at the other end from us,
below the hill, but soon we heard fearful sounds--screams and shoutings,
shots and loud explosions. They were burning the place street by street
with that method of theirs! They fired the houses with pastilles their
chemists have invented, and with petrol. The air was thick with smoke.
We shut our windows to save the wounded from coughing. Soon we might all
die together, but we would keep our boys from new sufferings while we
could!
"Then at last the hour struck for us. One of our sisters, who had run to
look at the red sky to see how near the fire came, cried out that
Germans were pouring up the hill--four officers on horseback heading a
troop of soldiers. I knew what that meant. I went quickly to the door to
meet them. My knees felt as if they had broken under my weight. My heart
was a great, cold, dead thing within me. My mouth was dry as if I had
lost myself for days in the desert. I am not a small woman, yet it
seemed that I was no bigger than a mouse under the stare of those big
men who leaped off their horses, and made as if to pass me at the door.
But I did not let them pass. I knew I could stop them long enough at
least to kill me and then the sisters, one by one, before they reached
our wounded! We backed slowly before them into the hall, the sisters and
I, to stand guard before this room.
"'You are hiding Frenchmen here--French soldiers!' a giant of a captain
bawled at me. Beside him was a lieutenant even more tall. They had
swords in their hands, and they both pointed their weapons at me.
"'We have nineteen soldiers desperately wounded,' I said. 'There are no
other men here.'
"'You are lying!' shouted the captain. He thought he could frighten me
with his roar like a lion: but he did not seem to me so noble a beast.
"'You may come in and see for yourselves that I speak the truth,' I
said. And think what it was for me, a woman of Lorraine, to bid a
_German_ enter her house! I did not let those two pass by me into this
room. I came in first. While the lieutenant stood threatening our boys
in their beds that he would shoot if they moved, the captain went round,
tearing off the sheets, looking for firearms. In his hand was a strange
knife, like a dagger which he had worn in his belt. One of our soldiers,
too weak to open his lips, looked at the German, with a pair of great
dark eyes that spoke scorn; and that look maddened the man with a sudden
fury.
"'Coward, of a country of cowards! You and cattle like you have cut off
the ears and torn out the eyes of our glorious Bavarians. I'll slit your
throat to pay for that!'
"Ah, but this was too much--more than I could bear! I said 'No!' and I
put my two hands--so--between the throat of that boy and the German
knife."
When Soeur Julie came to this part of the tale, she made a beautiful,
unconscious gesture, re-enacting the part she had played. I knew then
how she had looked when she faced the Bavarian officer, and why he had
not hacked those two work-worn but nobly shaped hands of hers, to get at
the French chasseur's throat. She seemed the incarnate spirit of the
mother-woman, whose selfless courage no brute who had known a mother
could resist. And her "No!" rang out deep and clear as a warning tocsin.
I felt that the wounded boy must have been as safe behind those hands
and that "No!" as if a thick though transparent wall of glass had
magically risen to protect him.
"All this time," Soeur Julie went on, gathering herself together after
a moment. "All this time Germans led by non-commissioned officers were
searching the hospice. But they found no hiding soldiers, because there
were none such to find. And somehow that captain and his lieutenant did
not touch our wounded ones. They had a look of shame and sullenness on
their faces, as if they were angry with themselves for yielding their
wicked will to an old woman. Yet they _did_ yield, thank God! And then I
got the captain's promise to spare the hospice--got it by saying we
would care for his wounded as faithfully as we tended our own. I said,
'If you leave this house standing to take in your men, you must leave
the whole street. If the buildings round us burn, we shall burn,
too--and with us your German wounded. Will you give me your word that
this whole quarter shall be safe?'
"The man did not answer. But he looked down at his boots. And I have
always noticed that, when men of any nation look at their boots, it is
that they are undecided. It was so with him. A few more arguments from
me, and he said: 'It shall be as you ask.'
"Soon he must have been glad of his promise, for there were many German
wounded, and we took them all in. Ah, this room, which you see so clean
and white now, ran blood. We had to sweep blood into the hall, and so
out at the front door, where at least it washed away the German
footprints from our floor! For days we worked and did our best, even
when we knew of the murders committed: innocent women with their little
children. And the fifteen old men they shot for hostages. Oh, we did our
best, though it was like acid eating our hearts. But our reward came the
day the Germans had to gather up their wounded in wild haste, as the
French commandant had gathered ours before the retreat. They fled, and
our Frenchmen marched back--too late to save the town, but not too late
to redeem its honour. And that is all my story."
As she finished with a smile half sad, half sweet, Soeur Julie looked
over our heads at some one who had just come in--some one who had stood
listening in silence, unheard and unseen by us. I turned mechanically,
and my eyes met the eyes of Paul Herter, the "Wandering Jew."