It's late at night again--no, early to-morrow morning, just about the
hour when to-morrow's war-bread is being baked by to-night's war-bakers.
But it's good to burn the midnight electricity, because my body and
brain are feeling electric.
We have had the most astonishing day!
Of course, I expected that, because we were going to Noyon, and I
evacuated all unneeded thoughts and impressions (for instance, those
concerning the O'Farrells) to make room for a crowd of new ones, as we
did at the Hôpital des Épidémies with convalescents, for an incoming
batch of patients. But I didn't count on private, personal
emotions--unless we blundered into an air raid somewhere!
You remember those authors we met once, who write together--the
Sandersons--and how they said if they ever dared put a real incident in
a book, people picked out that one as impossible? Well, this evening
just past reminded me of the Sandersons. We spent it at the War
Correspondents' Château, not far out of Compiègne: that is, we spent it
there if it was _real_, and not a dream.
* * * * *
I am the only one in Mother Beckett's confidence--I mean, about her
health. Even her husband doesn't know how this trip strains her
endurance, physical and mental. Indeed, he's the very one who _mustn't_
know. It's agreed between us that, if she feels hopelessly unfit for
any excursion, _I_ shall put on invalid airs and she will stop at home
to keep me company. Thus will be avoided all danger of Father Beckett
suspecting the weakness she hides. But you can imagine, Padre, knowing
me as you do, how frightened I was to-day--our morning for Noyon--lest
she should give the signal. I felt I simply couldn't _bear_ to miss
Noyon. No use telling myself I shall feel exactly the same about
Soissons to-morrow, and Roye and Ham and Chauny and various others the
day after. My reason couldn't detach itself at that instant from Noyon.
Our daily programme as now arranged is: Me to knock at Mother Beckett's
door half an hour before starting-time. If she's fearing a collapse, she
is to exclaim: "My child, how pale you are!" or some other criticism of
my complexion. Then I'm to play up, replying: "I do feel under the
weather." Whereupon it's easy for her to say: "You must stop in the
hotel and rest. I'll stay with you."
To my joy, the greeting this morning was: "My dear, you look fresh as a
rose!"
I didn't feel it; for you know I wrote late to you. And at last in bed,
I disobeyed your advice about never worrying: I worried quite a lot over
Brian and Dierdre O'Farrell; my having led him into a trap, when above
all things I wanted his happiness and health. I could well have passed
as pale: but I was so pleased with the secret signal that I braced up
and bloomed again.
We had to start early, because there was a good deal to do in the day;
and we were supposed to return early, too, for a rest, as there's the
great adventure of Soissons before us to-morrow. The Correspondents'
Château wasn't on our list: that was an accident, though now it seems as
if the whole trip would have been worth while if only to lead up to that
"accident!"
There were several ways we could have taken to Noyon, but we took the
way by Dives and Lassigny. We shall have chances for other roads,
because, to see various places we mean to visit, we shall go through
Noyon again.
Once upon a time, before the Germans came, Dives had a lovely château,
part of it very old, with a round turret under a tall pointed hat; the
other part comparatively young--as young as the Renaissance--and all
built of that pale, rose-pink colour which most châteaux of this
forestland, and this Île-de-France used to wear in happy days before
they put on smoke-stained mourning.
Now, instead of its proud château, Dives has a ruin even more lovely,
though infinitely sad.
As for Lassigny, it was battered to death: yet I think it was glad to
die, because the Germans had turned it into a fortress, and they had to
be shelled out by the French. Poor little Lassigny! It must have had
what the French call "_une beauté coquette_," and the Germans, it
seemed, were loth to leave. When they found that they must go, and in
haste, they boiled with rage. Not only did they blow up all that was
left in the village, but they blew up the trees of the surrounding
orchards. They had not the excuse for this that they needed the trees to
bar the way of the pursuing French army. Such trees as they felled
across the road were the big trees of the forest. Their destruction of
the young fruit trees was just a slaughter of innocents; and I've never
hated war, Padre, as I hated it to-day--above all, German methods of
making war. Even the countless graves on the battlefields do not look so
sad as those acres of murdered trees: blown-up trees, chopped-down
trees, trees gashed to death with axes, trees that strove with all the
strength of Nature to live, putting forth leaves and blossoms as their
life blood emptied from their veins.
The graves of dead soldiers do not, somehow, look utterly sad. Their
little flags stir triumphantly in the breeze, as if waved by unseen
hands. The caps that mark the mounds seem to be on the heads of men
invisible, under the earth, standing at the salute, saying to those who
pass: "There is no death! Keep up your hearts, and follow the example we
have set." The souls of those who left their bodies on these
battlefields march on, bearing torches that have lit the courage of the
world, with a light that can never fail. But the poor trees, so dear to
France, giving life as a mother gives milk to her child!--they died to
serve no end save cruelty.
The sight of them made me furious, and I glared like a basilisk at any
German prisoners we saw working along the good, newly made white road.
On their green trousers were large letters, "P. G." for "Prisonnier de
Guerre"; and I snapped out as we passed a group, "It needs only an I
between the P and the G to make it _perfect!_"
One man must have heard, and understood English, for he glanced up with
a start. I was sorry then, for it was like hitting a fallen enemy. As he
had what would have seemed a good face if he'd been British or French,
perhaps he was one of those who wrote home that the killing of trees in
France "will be a shame to Germany till the end of time."
Only a few days ago Brian learned by heart a poem I read aloud, a poem
called "Les Arbres Coupés," by Edmond Rostand. Teaching Brian, I found I
had learned it myself.
Chacun de nos soldats eut son cri de souffrance
Devant ces arbres morts qui jonchaient les terrains:
"Les pêchers!" criaient ceux de l'Île-de-France;
"Et les mirabelliers!" crièrent les Lorrains.
Soldats bleus demeures paysans sous vos casques,
Quels poings noueux et noirs vers le nord vous tendiez!
"Les cerisiers!" criaient avec fureur les Basques;
Et ceux du Rousillon criaient: "Les amandiers!"
Devant les arbres morts de l'Aisne ou de la Somme,
Chacun se retrouva Breton ou Limousin.
"Les pommiers!" criaient ceux du pays de la pomme;
"Les vignes!" criaient ceux du pays raisin.
Ainsi vous disiez tous le climat dont vous êtes,
Devant ces arbres morts que vous consideriez,
--Et moi, voyant tomber tant de jeunes poètes,
Hélas, combien de fois j'ai crié: "Les lauriers!"
I love it. Yet I don't quite agree with the beautiful turning at the
end, because the laurels of the soldier-poets aren't really dead, nor
can they ever die. Even some of the trees which the Boches meant to kill
would not be conquered by Germans or death. Many of them, cut almost
level with the ground, continued to live, spouting leaves close to
earth as a fountain spouts water when its jet has been turned low. All
the victims that could be saved have been saved by the French,
carefully, scientifically bandaged like wounded soldiers: and the
Becketts talked eagerly of giving money--much money--to American
societies that, with the British, are aiding France to make her fair
land bloom again. Mother Beckett became quite inventive and excited,
planning to start "instruction farms," with a fund in honour of Jim.
Seeds and slips and tools and teachers should all be imported from
California. Oh, it would be wonderful! And how thankful she and Father
were that they had Brian and Molly to help make the plan come true! I
shouldn't have liked to catch Julian O'Farrell's eye just then.
All the way was haunted by the tragedy of trees, not only the tragedy of
orchards, and of the roadside giants that once had shaded the straight
avenues, but the martyrdom of trees in the great dark forests--oaks and
elms and beeches. At first glance these woods, France's shield against
her enemies--rose still and beautiful, like mystic abodes of peace,
against the pale horizon. But a searching gaze showed how they had
suffered. For every trio of living trees there seemed to be one corpse,
shattered by bombs, or blasted by evil gas. The sight of them struck at
the heart: yet they were heroes, as well as martyrs, I said to myself.
They had truly died for France, to save France. And as I thought this, I
knew that if I were a poet, beautiful words would come at my call, to
clothe my fancy about the forests.
I wanted the right words so much that it was pain when they wouldn't
answer my wish, for I seemed to hear only a faint, far-off echo of some
fine strain of music, whose real notes I failed to catch.
Always forests have fascinated me; sweet, fairy-peopled groves of my
native island, and emerald-lit beech woods of England. But I never felt
the grand meaning of forests as I felt them to-day, in this ravaged and
tortured land. I could have cried out to them: "Oh, you forests of
France, what a part you've played in the history of wars! How wise and
brave of you to stand in unbroken line, a rampart protecting your
country's frontiers, through the ages. Forests, you are bands of
soldiers, in armour of wood, and you, too, like your human brothers,
have hearts that beat and veins that bleed for France! You are soldiers,
and you are fortresses--Nature's fortresses stronger than all modern
inventions. You are fortresses to fight in; you are shelters from
air-pirates, you hide cannon; you give shelter to your fighting
countrymen from rain and heat. You delay the enemy; you mislead him, you
drive him back. When you die, deserted by the birds and all your hidden
furred and feathered children, you give yourselves--give, give to the
last! Your wood strengthens the trenches, or burns to warm the freezing
_poilus_. Brave forests, pathetic forests! I hear you defy the enemy in
your hour of death: Strike us, kill us. Still you shall never pass!"
We had felt that we knew something of the war-zone after Lorraine; but
there the great battles had all been fought in 1914, when the world was
young. Here, it seemed as if the earth must still be hot from the feet
of retreating Germans.
The whole landscape was pitted with shell-holes, and spider-webbed with
barbed wire. The three lines of French trenches we passed might, from
their look, have been manned yesterday. Piled along the neat new road
were bombs for aviators to drop; queer, fish-shaped things, and still
queerer cages they had been in. There were long, low sheds for fodder.
At each turn was the warning word, "_Convois_." The poor houses of such
villages as continued to exist were numbered, for the first time in
their humble lives, because they were needed for military lodgings.
Notices in the German language were hardly effaced from walls of
half-ruined buildings. They had been partly rubbed out, one could see,
but the ugly German words survived, strong and black as a stain on one's
past. Huge rounds of barbed wire which had been brought, and never used,
were stacked by the roadside, and there were long lines of
trench-furniture the enemy had had to abandon in flight, or leave in
dug-outs: rough tables, chairs, rusty cooking-stoves, pots, pans, petrol
tins, and broken dishes: even lamps, torn books, and a few particularly
ugly blue vases for flowers. _They_ must have been made in Germany, I
knew!
Wattled screens against enemy fire still protected the road, and here
and there was a "camouflage" canopy for a big gun. The roofs of
beautiful old farmhouses were crushed in, as if tons of rock had fallen
on them: and the moss which once had decked their ancient tiles with
velvet had withered, turning a curious rust colour, like dried blood.
Young trees with their throats cut were bandaged up with torn linen and
bagging on which German printed words were dimly legible. It would have
been a scene of unmitigated grimness, save for last summer's
enterprising grass and flowers, which autumn, kinder than war, had not
killed.
Late roses and early chrysanthemums grew in the gardens of broken,
deserted cottages, as if the flowers yearned to comfort the wounded
walls with soft caresses, innocent as the touch of children. On the
burned façades of houses, trellised fruit-trees clung, some dead--mere
black pencillings sketched on brick or plaster--but now and then one was
living still, like a beautiful young Mazeppa, bound to a dead steed.
So we arrived at Noyon, less than two hours by car from Compiègne. The
nearness of it to the heart of France struck me suddenly. I could hear
the echo of sad voices curbing the optimists: "The Germans are still at
Noyon!"
Well--they are not at Noyon now. They've been gone for many moons. Yet
there's a look on the faces of the people in the town--a look when they
come to the windows or doors of their houses, or when they hear a sudden
noise in the street--which makes those moons seem never to have waned.
Washington has adopted Noyon, so the Becketts could not offer any great
public charity, but they could sprinkle about a few private good deeds,
in remembrance of Jim, who loved the place, as he loved all the
Île-de-France. One of Mother Beckett's most valued letters from
"Jim-on-his-travels" (as she always says) is from Noyon, and she was so
bent on reading it aloud to us, as we drove slowly--almost
reverently--into the town, that she wouldn't look (I believe she even
grudged our looking!) at the façade of the far-famed Hôtel de Ville,
until she'd come to the end of the last page. She seemed to think that
to look up prematurely would be like wanting to see the stage before the
curtain rose on the play!
I loved her for it--we all loved her--and obeyed as far as possible. But
one couldn't shut one's eyes to the Stars and Stripes that flapped on
the marvellously ornate front of the old building--flapped like the
wings of the American Eagle that has flown across the Atlantic to help
save France.
Jim--a son of the Eagle--who gave his life for this land and for
liberty, would have felt proud of that flag, I think, if he could have
seen it to-day: for because she is the adopted child of Washington,
Noyon "stars" the emblem of her American mother. She hangs out no other
flag--not even that of France--on the Hôtel de Ville. Maybe she'll give
her own colours a place there later, but at this moment the Star
Spangled Banner floats alone in its glory.
No nice, normal-minded person could remember, or morbidly want to
remember, the name unkindly given by Julius Cæsar to Noyon, when he had
besieged it. I can imagine even Charlemagne waving that cumbrous label
impatiently aside, though Noyon mixed with Laon was his first capital.
"Noviodunum Belgarum it may have been" (I dare say he said). "But _I'm_
going to call it Noyon!"
He was crowned king of Austria in Noyon cathedral--an even older one
than the cathedral of to-day, which the Germans have generously omitted
to destroy, merely stealing all its treasures! But I feel sure he
doesn't feel Austrian in these days, if he is looking down over the
"Blessed Damosel's" shoulder, to see what's going on here below. He
belonged really to the whole world. Why, didn't that fairy-story king,
Haroun al Raschid, send him from Bagdad the "keys of the tomb of
Christ," as Chief of the Christian World? They say his ghost haunts
Noyon, and was always there whenever a king was crowned, or elected--as
Hugh Capet was. Perhaps it may have been Charlemagne in the spirit who
persuaded the Germans to their great retreat from the Noyon front this
last spring of 1917!
Coming into the _Place_, and stopping in front of the Hôtel de Ville,
gave me the oddest sense of unreality, because, when we were in Paris
the other day, I saw the scene in a moving picture: the first joyful
entry of the French soldiers into the town, when the Germans had cleared
out. I could hardly believe that I wasn't just a figure flickering
across a screen, and that the film wouldn't hurry me along somewhere
else, whether I wanted to go or not.
There were the venerable houses with the steep slate roofs, and
singularly intelligent-looking windows, whose bright panes seemed to
twinkle with knowledge of what they had seen during these dreadful
eighteen months of German occupation. There were the odd, unfinished
towers of the cruciform cathedral--quaint towers, topped with wood and
pointed spirelets--soaring into the sky above the gray colony of
clustered roofs. There was the cobbled pavement, glittering like masses
of broken glass, after a shower of rain just past; and even more
interesting than any of these was the fantastically carved façade of the
Hôtel de Ville, which has lured thousands of tourists to Noyon in days
of peace. Who knows but they have been coming ever since 1532, when it
was finished?
At first sight, we should never have guessed what Noyon had suffered
from the Germans. It was only after wandering through the splendid old
cathedral of Notre-Dame, stripped of everything worth stealing, and
going from street to street (we paused a long time in the one where
Calvin was born, a disagreeable, but I suppose useful, man!) that we
began to realize the slow torture inflicted by the Germans. Of course,
"lessons" had to be taught. Rebellious persons had to be "punished."
Nothing but justice had been done upon the unjust by their just
conquerors. And oh, how thorough and painstaking they were in its
execution!
As they'd destroyed all surrounding cities and villages, they had to put
the "evacuated" inhabitants somewhere (those they couldn't use as slaves
to work in Germany), so they herded the people by the thousand into
Noyon. That place had to be spared for the Germans themselves to live
in, being bigger and more comfortable than others in the neighbourhood;
so it was well to have as many of the conquered as possible interned
under their own sharp eyes. Noyon was "home" to six thousand souls
before the war. After the Germans marched in, it had to hold ten
thousand. But a little more room in the houses was thriftily obtained by
annexing all the furniture, even beds. Tables and chairs they took, too,
and stoves, and cooking utensils, which left the houses conveniently
empty, to be shared by families from Roye, and Nesle, and Ham, and
Chauny--oh, so many other towns and hamlets, that one loses count in
trying to remember!
How the people lived, they hardly know now, in looking back, some of
them told us, as we walked about with a French officer who was our
guide. Eighteen months of it! Summer wasn't quite so bad. One can always
bear hardships when weather, at least, is kind. But the winters! It is
those winters that scarcely bear thinking of, even now.
No lights were allowed after dark. All doors must be left open, for the
German military police to walk in at any hour of the night, to see what
mischief was brewing in the happy families caged together. There was no
heating, and often no fire for cooking, consequently such food as there
was had to be eaten cold. No nose must be shown out of doors unless with
a special permit, so to speak, displayed on the end of it. Not that
there was much incentive to go out, as all business was stopped, and all
shops closed. Without "_le Comité Américain_," thousands would have
starved, so it was lucky for Noyon that the United States was neutral
then!
We spent hours seeing things, and talking to people--old people, and
children, and soldiers--each one with a new side of the great story to
tell, as if each had been weaving a few inches of some wonderful,
historic piece of tapestry, small in itself, but essential to the
pattern. Then we started for home--I mean Compiègne--by a different way;
the way of Carlepont, named after Charlemagne, because it is supposed
that he was born there.
The forest was even more lovable than before, a younger forest:
fairy-like in beauty as a rainbow, in its splashed gold and red, and
green and violet and orange of autumn. The violet was "atmosphere," but
it was as much a part of the forest as the leaves, or the delicate
trunks dim as ghosts in shadow, bright as organ-pipes where sun touched
them. Out from the depths came sweet, mysterious breaths, and whispers
like prophecies of peace. But to this region of romance there were sharp
contrasts. Not even dreams have sharper ones! German trenches, chopped
into blackened wastes that once were farmlands, and barbed wire
wriggling like snake-skeletons across dreary fields.
We got out of our cars, and went into the trenches, thinking thoughts
unspeakable. Long ago as the Germans had vanished, and every corner had
been searched, our officer warned us not to pick up "souvenirs." Some
infernal machine might have been missed in the search and nothing was to
be trusted--no, not even a bit of innocent-looking lead pencil.
They were trenches made to live in, these! They had been walled with
stones from ruined farmhouses. The "dug-outs" were super-dug-outs. We
saw concealed cupolas for machine-guns, and "_les officiers boches_" had
had a neat system of douches.
There was no need to worry that Brian might stumble or fall in the
slippery labyrinths we travelled, for he had Dierdre O'Farrell as guide.
I'm afraid I knew what it was to be jealous: and this new gnawing pain
is perhaps meant to be one of my punishments. Of course it's no more
than I deserve. But that Brian should be chosen as the instrument, all
unknowingly, and happily--that _hurts_!
It was just as we were close to Compiègne, not twenty minutes (in motor
talk) outside the town, that the "accident" happened.