THE INVASION
The deluge came. The spreading front of the magnificent wave of
destroying Germans swept into France from Belgium, engulfing towns,
foundering villages, flooding the wide country with its encompassing
waters. Bah--the symbol is hopeless. _Not water_, the life-giving and
fructifying essence of the skies, which fills the earth with gladness,
not the moisture of the meandering rivulets that enamel the ground
with flowers and grass, not the blessed warm rains that search the
little brown rootlets of the glorious trees, and feed them nutriment
and gather to them the atoms of mineral from the ground, that through
the great trunks and all of the enlacing branches, build aloft to the
bending skies the temple for the birds, and the home of protecting
shadows, the wide canopy of beauty that holds the mists of the morning,
and holds back the fury of the storms. None of these things that start
in our minds familiar images of flowers and fruitage, when the pleasant
word _waters_ fills our ears--none of these came with the Germans.
It was a wave, but a wave of FIRE, consuming, scorifying, killing,
_fire_; it was a flood, but a flood of ravenous _flames_, ravishing,
withering, scorching, cremating _flames_--and there were indeed
_waters_. What?--the endlessly running fountain of tears. _Tears_ of
fathers, and mothers, wives and children, tears over vanished homes,
vanished faces, vanished tongues; tears before the black unpitying
future of penury and want, of loneliness and beggary; tears over
maimed lives, lost bodies, voiceless orphans, crushed shrines, deluded
hopes--Nay differently, tears that were never shed, dried up in the
fierce heat of bitterness and hate and terror, of shuddering despair,
of dumb abnegation; fountains of grief indeed that were sucked dry by
the tempest of impiety, that gathered them up into a storm-cloud before
the Throne of the Most High and from whose depths rolled the awful
summons--"_Why, Why, Why, is This?_"
I had given my lecture in St. Choiseul, and the little church house was
finely packed. The people came from the villages about, trudging over
the roads, riding horses and mules, driving in wagons and chariots,
with country gentlemen amongst them, and lovely ladies, and bunches of
the older children. The choir of the seminary at Bienne helped us, and
sang touching songs, and gay ones too, and songs of courage and songs
of prayer. It was inspiring. I looked at the patch-work assemblage, the
earnest young and the pale and trembling old--many helped by their
children to walk into the big room--the maidens wearing the tricolor
in profusion, the boys waving flags, and Monsieur Raoul la Fayette de
Birot, the owner of the superb chateau over towards La Ferté where
each year were held the grand _chasse-cours_, seated in the front row
with madame, splendidly arrayed, while at his side sat the humble
_chasse-mulet_ from Briois shrinking at first and fumbling his way to
some less conspicuous place, and held back by M. de Birot who spoke up
quite loudly:
"_Restez. Je vous prie. À present nous sommes tous français, tous amis,
Comment! fait-il une difference, quand la patrie est en peril?_"
There were shouts of encouragement and approval, and then the crowded
hall rose _en masse_, and sang the Marseillaise. It shook the rafters
and went far away through the open windows, and woke the sleeping birds.
Père Antoine introduced me very prettily, very sweetly, and when
he took my hand and led me forward to the edge of the stage the
cheering was tremendous. I saw Gabrielle, and father and mother, the
_Capitaine_, Privat Deschat, and Père Grandin, all together near the
front, and dear sister held her face in her kerchief, because she could
not hold back the tears.
I was a little frightened at the beginning, but I found my tongue, and
described the scenes in Paris, and what the government was doing and
how the troops were being mobilized, and the news of the successful
landing of the English reinforcements, and the confidence everywhere,
and then I read a part of M. Viviani's speech at the Chamber of
Deputies, and closed with a recitation from Bambetta's great oration.
Ah! that was magnificent; I had skill in such things--as what Frenchman
has not--and thrilled with emotion, my heart afire with pride and hope
and love, I declaimed the blazing lines as though my lips were touched
by the same divine flame that had lit those of the great tribune.
The tribute was immense; the building seemed to rock in the vibrations
caused by the thunders of applause. All were standing, hats and caps
filled the air, a sea of handkerchiefs sprang up, and the flags were
torn from the walls and the standards, and mingled their brave colors
in the ocean of snow. I saw Gabrielle between the _Capitaine_ and
Privat Deschat pale and rigid as if transfixed with pain.
Père Antoine spoke then, and invited M. de Birot to become chairman of
the supplementary meeting, designed to form committees, and outline
plans for practical work. We were most successful; the principal
committee, that of Hospital Supplies, made me its chairman, and I
instantly began my work. It was this work that carried me over the
department, and kept me long weeks from home. Gabrielle wished to go
to Paris and serve under the Red Cross, but I opposed that vigorously
and kept her at St. Choiseul where she did nobly, gathering hospital
supplies and furnishings for the soldiers, and where was inaugurated
that mystical and supernatural VISITATION that led--as the world now
knows--to the suppression of the raging conflict, as it threatened to
level all of Europe in smouldering ruin; when--was it not so?--the
HAND of GOD rested upon the earth, and the Armies shrank back from the
Vision and DISSOLVED.
On August twenty-second the mailed hand of the Germans sprang over
the borders of France, and from Mons to Luxembourg, its outstretched
fingers were crushing the land and strangling its people. Against
those groping fingers the twined hands of the French and English
were now eagerly--albeit with some trepidation--also grappling. On
the twenty-fourth there was reported terrific fighting on the Sambre
and the Meuse. On the twenty-fifth, the French and English allies
retreated, forced back by the hammering strength and anvil blows of the
Germans, who dealt their _coups de tonnerre_ while banked against each
other around their massed guns, the whole monster moved onward like
some titanic physical eruption.
Again on the twenty-sixth the allies reluctantly yield--yielding
everywhere with fierce retributive blows on their part, and
consolidating as they retreat, every energy of resistance behind them,
while they prepare new lines of defense, and gather together every
available scrap of support, material and human. On the twenty-seventh
the news is received that the battle line reaches from Maubeuge to the
mountains of the Vosges, and that the Germans number one million men.
Against this mountainous avalanche of soldiery and guns the grimmest
determination alone can hold its ground. But the walls are unbroken and
the raging flood breaks through nowhere yet.
On the twenty-ninth I was far north with the armies, in the Red-Cross
ambulances. The Germans fought their way to La Fère--north-west of
Laon, and about 140 kilometres from Paris (about 90 miles), but the
watch word _Tiens ferme_--Hold tight--was passed from mouth to mouth,
and the tense strain of dogged endurance held the fronts together, each
inch fought for with savage fury.
Someone blundered; there seems to be no doubt of that. We were not
receiving reinforcements as we should; the troops had been urged into
Alsace, tempted by a barren victory, and the large support which these
battalions could have provided failed. _C'était miserable!_
On the thirtieth our left yielded. A gigantic battle was fought out
in the department of the Aisnes near La Fère, at Guise and Laon, on
the road to Paris. The English allies proved to be adamant, immovable.
Under Sir John French at Mons and at Cambrai, they saved the day.
The cannonading was deafening, and the red tongues of fire quivered
in dense volumes along the struggling lines of men, shot forward
here, stumbling backward there, crowded in disarranged groups that
swayed this way and that. Ever and anon terrific rushes forced, from
either side, into the open midst the raging storm of the vomiting
guns, impotent sallies, whose human units fell beneath the withering,
blasting discharges of the cannon, torn into fragments by the bursting
shells, or suddenly trampled into disfigured masses by maddened
charges of cavalry, these last again stricken into death or helpless
mutilation by the converging fire of the batteries, victim and victor,
man and horse, heaped up in a throbbing or motionless blackened mass,
filtered through with the oozing streams of blood, where indeed to
the disembodied ear, that might have bent above them, rose the cries
of suffering, or the last murmurs of the anguished dying, or the
indistinguishable agonized prayers of those who yet lived and prayed
for deliverance.
Above the armies on either side the air was loaded with the brown and
bluescent clouds of smoke, in which the lurid splashes of carmine from
bursting shells broke momentary gaps. The dropping shells sent to every
side scurrying figures, pressed against each other in panic, when
with sullen roar, lost almost amidst the universal din and clash and
swelter of noise, its imprisoned powers were released in straight lines
of fire, carrying along their blinding thread of light the shattering
steel missiles of death, the blistering resin and sulphur, while at the
inner edges of that crushed resurgence of living men lay the victims of
its rage, limbless soldiers, bodies stricken into shapelessness, the
fainting suitors of Death gasping for breath.
But often the harsh steel missile, with its cracked sides, emitting
the fell arsenal of its sputtering and lightning driven contents,
failed to meet its desired mark, the soft flesh and the brittle bones
of living men. It sank, defeated, upon the impassive earth, vengefully
burrowing its hot way into the yielding ground, becoming in its burial
a mimic volcano, ripping aside its earthen tomb, as its detonation,
deadened to a hideous grumble, sent ball and canister through the soil,
spattering far and wide with dirt and mud and grass, the curtains of
the ambulances, the wheels of the wagons, the guards of the ammunition
motors, the backs and shins and breasts of men. Back of the lines the
gouged earth showed everywhere the frightful plunges of the foiled
demons, while with inconstant frequency noticeable to the trained eye,
not unobserved by those who thereby just escaped destruction, lay the
black bolides, extinguished and harmless.
Behind that wavering and uneasy or else just stiffened frontier of
combat, where the murderous duel was played its sharpest, where men
with blood-shot eyes, blackened bodies, and rent clothing were lashed
into a maniacal heroism, where officers at intervals feeling the
necessity, or inspired by the traditional splendor of service, dashed
into the open and in the withering rain of shot and shell, upright,
and with sentinel precision, directed the fire or exhorted their men
to steadfastness--behind that marvellous line of human endurance,
the fluctuating panorama of supply and reparation and reinforcement
spread. Here were the gathered platoons ready for entering the thinning
lines, the marshalled helpers of the ambulance corps, the doctors
and orderlies, the racing caissons constantly feeding the rapacious
and smoothly running cannon, the more distant assemblages of the
commissariat, and behind them--a long long way off--that perpetual
train of fleeing victims, the procession of the evicted, hidden, as to
their resemblances to human proportions, under loads of domestic goods,
the paraphernalia of the household, so that they indistinguishably took
on the appearance of a vast titanic, coarsely corrugated and dirtily
colored reptile, worming its way endlessly into the distance.
And when the eye, freed momentarily from its awful imprisonment in
that hideous wrestle of death and life, turned outward to the wide
horizons, the image of the desolating ravages of war were multiplied.
The confused flames and smoke-clouds of burning villages or deserted
shelters rose tardily into the dimmed skies, while, caught nearer at
hand perchance, and beyond the invading surges of the Germans, if seen
at all through the screen of vapors, the broken angular edges of wall
and parapet, tower and steeple, cut the horizon with cruel indentations.
I had reached the neighborhood of a little village near Noyon, and
intended to enter the lines, having a special pass which would permit
me to come quite close to the firing ranges. The reason for this
urgency on my part was the knowledge that Sebastien was with the
Third Fusiliers, in a division of the Fifth Army Corps, and a letter
sent by him to Dora Destin which had been communicated to the captain
by an _attaché_ of Gallieni who was commandant of Paris, told his
sweetheart that he was not well, and expressed a wish to hear from her.
Dora had come to me with the letter, stained with tears, and begged
me to make an effort to get to Quintado, and to take him not only her
message--written in the neatest hand-writing--but a package of woven
odds and ends which would help his comfort in the camps. Poor girl, she
was inconsolable.
It was about two in the afternoon of a dull day, with the skies heavily
laden with gray flat clouds, and there was a light drizzle falling,
with occasional sharper gusts of wind that smote the rain into keen
lines slanting eastward. I had pushed on--helped by my commission--and
found access almost to the immediate front unhindered. The Third
Fusiliers, I was told, held a part of the most exposed part of the
field, and that the battle was raging at that instant. That fact was
too evident. I heard the continuous roar of the guns; I saw the shells
exploding above and around me, while past me through the open ways of
access and retreat the stretchers passed in undeviating succession,
in their rapid methodical transference of the wounded to the field
hospitals further out, and in the direction of Compiègne. The incessant
strain of anxious incisive movement, the troubled crowding of exertion
among the waiters, the sharp punctuated orders, the bristling worry of
preparation, the racing ambulances--these indications behind the lines
formed the declarative prelude, were one approaching the battle from
behind it, of its terrible reality. As reality lay just beyond that
thicket of trees, that hastily constructed redoubt, that furrowed field
where shallow trenches cut it lengthwise, that crumbling hut, smoking
with concealed flames and spitting gun-shots.
I knew that the battle raged, but I insisted on making my way
forward, and the favoring chance of a sudden disturbance, some
intense propulsion of the enemy driving our soldiers rearward in a
dishevellement--quickly overcome--brought me right within the focus of
the fight. I was seized up in the refluent movement that reestablished
our line. The oscillation sent me eastward, and I was thrown down,
rolled over and almost trampled on, in a furious despairing rush
forward of artillery. I fell within sight of a hillock, whose little
yet unscathed crown of grass was sprinkled with daisies--the pathetic
irony of flowers in that waste of slaughter! I crawled to this trivial
protection, and, with a prayer on my lips, dug myself into the yielding
mould, and watched. The battle line was still somewhat beyond me and to
my amazement and satisfaction I soon discovered that I was actually in
the companies of the Third Fusiliers. Was Sebastien in the front?
As I recall that instant now, it seems almost an illusion that it
occurred at all. It was the concentrated immensity of it; its vast
superabundant detail, crushed into a measure of time out of all
proportion insignificant, that put it among the categories of dreams.
Before me was a very slight declension of the ground, forming a sort
of broad hollow, traversed at its centre by a stream-bed, now almost
dry, but retaining a penurious thread of water, somewhat replenished
now by the rain, which, assisted by frequent depressions had gathered
into stagnant pools. Beyond the hollow to the right and to the left,
were two sparse clumps of trees, crowning the opposite crest of the
subsidence. Sheltered in these puny groves were cannon which had
apparently just reached that forward position, as the gunners were
seen desperately forcing them into position. Between the cannon-groups
came the tightly compacted formation of the Germans--wedge-like--half
crouchingly as they advanced, the close combination of figures making a
chain of stern set faces above the pressed guns and bristling bayonets.
Our men had been driven off the opposite ridge, where the crippled
trees showed the bitterness of the contest, and where lay motionless
bodies in heaps while down the very gradual decline--less
frequently--could be detected the fallen figures, some yet moving, and
still nearer to my point of view strewn from end to end of the hollow
were the dead and dying, while--gruesome spectacle--the darkened waters
of the pools betrayed the slow infiltration of blood. From the hollow
the French had retreated to the southern edge, and were now entrenching
themselves for a new stand, at the moment when the Germans, recovering
their confidence after a partial repulse, renewed the attack, and were
coming again to close quarters with our soldiers. Our positions were
being shelled. The _mitrailleuse_ rapidly seizing position would soon
add their panic-breeding terrors, belching forth their destroying
torrents of ball and canister. The soft hiss of an ascending bomb
reached my ears, and later the roar or ripping whine of its explosion.
Our artillery, entangled in the previous _debacle_, was not yet
reorganized for response, and the moment looked perilously uncertain
for our defense.
Quickly the commanding officers realized that the stabilizing help of a
vigorous charge would bring to the derailment time to straighten out,
and, before the full power of the enemy's batteries could be developed,
inflict a salutary repulse. There was a breathing space left. A
moment's halt had brought with it reawakened energies, and when the
order was given the ground thickened with men, and the disarray, as by
the flourish of a wand of dissipation, vanished, and with shouts the
braced bodies poured forward into that shallow trough, sprang across
it, and rose on its opposite edge.
I too had risen out of my half buried position, and, transported by the
surpassing glory of the effort became oblivious of danger. The cheering
lines shot on, men dropping from the ranks and rolling backward,
becoming limp and silent, to be seized the next minute by the quickly
following support, and carried out of danger to the ambulances.
My eye was fastened upon the racing lines. The Germans, unable to
bring at once the full power of their batteries to bear upon the
French, awaited the attack with their massed infantry; indeed under the
vociferous orders of their officers, leaped against it. The shock was
blood-curdling. On either side the officers led, and amid the frightful
collisions swords, bayonets, the heavily wielded butts of guns swayed,
and rose and fell, among the frantic combatants. All loud sounds seemed
suddenly stilled, and only the muffled groans and hissing suspirations
of the heaving intermingled and vitalized mound of humans were heard
and above them the metallic clash of arms.
The gunners dared not fire. It was, as if arrested by the suspense of
a mortal conflict, each side was held at bay, except where between the
armies this intimate carnage raged. More companies were hurled into
the hollow--and from both sides--and the insignificant crease in the
landscape became a boiling caldron of death. The German resistance had
at first proved successful, and our men were being forced down into
the battered and now unrecognizable rivulet, so that the hand to hand
engagement filled the hollow with its lethal turbulence.
To and fro the mixed tumult bent and receded, when from our right,
somewhere in the rear, a bomb soared. Its hiss, sweetened to a murmur
only, sang in my ears as the harbinger of rescue. It fell a little
within the German lines, and then came the detonation, and the mangled
masses fell backward. The pressure relieved, and the appalling sense
of some successor to the avenging missile, breaking down the courage
of the enemy, our reinforced battalion was suddenly afforded room,
from the enemy's recoil. Our antagonists were ballotted backward,
as if struck with doom, and so, swinging their guns into horizontal
phalanx, with naked bayonets the French renewed their charge, and
drove the ravaged ranks before them, up, over the ridge, and back. The
next moment was scarcely passed, before the hollow was again refilled
with troops ordered to take and turn the enemy's batteries, somewhat
screened in the desolated groves of trees.
In the twinkling of an eye the work was accomplished, and the Germans
fled. Down the line for more than a kilometre I suddenly saw on either
side of me a frontier of bayonets--from fresh arrivals--fixed and
advancing and flashing. The slowly falling rain had relented, and the
sun gleamed for an instant on the bared needle points, as if in augury
of our success. Then the serried profile of bayonets paused, perhaps
for mechanical alignments, tilted upward and moved; moved as with the
release of a gigantic spring.
The line swept on. I watched them, fascinated, enthralled by its awful
menace. The deserted hollow--no longer a battle field--was almost
empty, save of those criss-crossed piles of fallen bodies where the
transfixed agony of individual conflict yet remained unchanged, in
the attitudes of foes knit together in the horrid embrace of their
death-fight. Where the severed corpses, fouled in smoke and grime and
dirt, lay shapeless, or distended on back or face, or sometimes with
arms twisted in knots among each other, or just alone, hither and
thither, solitary bodies unsoiled by any mutilation and bent together,
as if bivouacked for sleep. And here too were the wounded, sometimes
moaning audibly, sometimes still writhing with the urgent wounds, fresh
in leg or arm or breast. And everywhere was the ploughed and tormented
earth, trampled and dug into by the straining feet of the combatants,
meshed with holes of water and now, under the recovered sun,
glistening, wet, and muddy. I hurried along with the Red-Cross men into
the hollow with my mission quite driven out of my head; only anxious
to assist the wounded to some places of safety and relief. The battle
seemed for the moment displaced, though around us the orders sounded,
caissons rumbled, regiments poured past us and the intermittent aerial
swish of shells was heard, and not so far to the right and to the left
the German front was murderously insistent, pinching us where we stood
in a dangerous salient.
After lifting a number of the limp bodies of men, in whose faces shone
at times the benediction of gratitude, and at others rested just the
pallid smile of recognition, or else were filmed with the bleaching
shades of death, I went to the top of the ridge beyond which our
forward flung companies had routed the Germans. The fearful clash, body
against body, was resumed in a ploughed field but the horrors were
augmented--though too it had a splendor in it--by the added carnage
of the plunging cavalry that now thickened the fight into a crucial
contest. The captured batteries were useless here, but they were being
dragged into the French lines behind us. I was leaning against one of
the willows of the groves, thrashed into a ruin of fallen branches,
yielding to sickness of heart that might have thrown me into a faint
when I felt my feet tugged at. I started and looked down. In the heavy
grass, trampled and rutted, I saw the outstretched body of a soldier,
dragging itself upward by my legs, and he had so far freed himself from
the herbage that our eyes met. It was Sebastien Quintado.
Perhaps I shouted. I hardly think so. If I had Sebastien never heard
me, for he had fallen back again, and lay motionless. For an instant
I thought his life had fled. I seized his shoulders, and pulled him
within the trees. He was bleeding from a cutlass wound across his
chest, and from a gash in his thigh. We carried him back into the camp
and he slowly revived. The half extinguished spark was relit. Of course
he knew me. He said he knew me as I stood above him on the battlefield,
but thought, half deliriously, that it was a dream only.
I had secured excellent quarters for Quintado, and his wounds while
grave were surely healing. Had I not met him in time--the very nick of
time--he might have bled to death. At the earliest practicable moment
I intended to bring him to St. Choiseul. I knew that when I could tell
him that, he would be better. _L'espoir est à le fond de la santé._
We were in a relay hospital, back some kilometres from the front, and
on the road to Paris, where most of the charges were transferred. It
was an encampment of tents, and in one of these--indeed it was near
Compiègne--the day after I had brought him from the field, and when too
at any moment we might find it necessary to hastily retreat, as the
Germans pressed on in spite of the grim resistance that like a wall
delayed them. I say it was in one of these tents, towards sunset, as
the level rays, unchecked by a cloud poured over the camp a light that
seemed to wash out the stains of dirt and use, and make it brilliant,
that, as I sat near Quintado's cot, I caught his eyes resting upon me
with an indescribable affection.
"Sebastien," I said, "you will live, and very soon, O! very soon, I
will take you to St. Choiseul, and you shall stay with us. Is it well?"
He murmured; "Ah, Alfred. How surely you know it is well."
"Sebastien, you must not talk any more. You see what I hope to do. At
the most two or three days and you will be with Dora." His eyes were
bright with joy, and then almost as quickly they darkened with tears.
"No! No!" I remonstrated, "No! Sebastien--you need have no fears. The
doctor says you will be quite the same, a strong, well man. Eh! Do you
hear me? And see, this is what Dora has sent to you. All made by her
own hands. Are you not content?"
I unfolded the roll of stockings, and handkerchiefs, and mittens, and
waist bands, and as I handed them to feel he touched them with his
lips, as though they were holy--indeed to him they were most holy--and
then his lips moved too in prayer and a look unutterably tender flushed
his face. His great liquid eyes closed, and his heart was consecrated
anew to the pretty orphan girl.
Ah! those were terrible days. The shocking Teuton never faltered. He
came on with big weltering blows that beat the French and English back,
though we kept in good order, and, as the bulletin gave it, "The dam
still holds, and breaches are being repaired." The government thought
it best to leave Paris, and re-establish itself in Bordeaux, and the
people thronged east and south from Paris to Tours, Orleans, Le Mons,
Biarritz, Brest, Rennes, Nantes, Bordeaux, going in all ways, and
blocking the roads so that nothing could move, and the men and women
slept in the carriages, and wagons, and motor-cars, and in the roadside
houses, and in the fields.
And the peasants north of Paris, in the farms and gardens, left in
terror, and about fifteen hundred of them entered Paris--trudged the
whole way--with boxes, and bags, bundles, strings of poultry, and
sometimes driving their cows and pulling their pigs, with provisions
tied up in shawls, and utterly dumb with grief and consternation.
Then the flying men appeared over Paris and dropped bombs just to
scare the populace, letting fall papers and threats with lying news of
the Germans almost at the gates of the city, and enclosing scoffing
invitations to surrender. The bombs were dropped in the Rue de Hanovre,
the Rue du Mart, the Rue Colbert, the Rue de Londres, the Rue de la
Condamine. But later our aviators paroled the skies, and garrisoned
the air, and the frightful _taubes_ came no more. But it was I think
on September third (thirty-two days after the beginning of the war),
that a daring show-man let out orchestra stalls at the "_butte_" of
Montmartre on an arranged tribune, whence the big German dragons could
be seen hideously humming above the city.
_Il était un peu drôle, mais la plaisanterie est dans le fond de la
nature française; n'est ce pas?_ But Père Grandin frowned, and called
it _une grande folie_, and then repeated the lines from La Fontaine:
_Le trépas vient tout guérir;
Mais ne bougeons d'ou nous sommes:
Plutôt souffrir que mourir,
C'est la devise des hommes._
Well I got Sebastien away from Compiègne--and it was only about six
days later that the Germans swarmed over this region--and after delays
in the trains, crowded with the wounded, brought him to Paris. The city
was in a suppressed excitement with a seething exodus of citizens going
on, who stood in lines at the stations ten abreast and almost half a
mile long waiting their turns to get away to the south. I stayed some
days in Paris, putting Sebastien in one of the well equipped hospital
_échoppes_ in the Champ de Mars. He was yet weak and nervous, and his
breast caused him much pain. I saw him every night, and we went over
the orders and the news of each day together.
The government left Paris for Bordeaux, on September second, and it
was thought that there might soon be a pitched battle around the Paris
forts before a week was over. The enemy was pushing its outposts nearer
and nearer, with the main advance directed against the left flank of
the French centre. On September eighth the allied armies were more than
holding their own from Ourcq to Verdun. Preparations went on furiously
all over Paris, and the Bois de Boulogne was turned into a cattle
ranch, and the ratio of available provisions to the population--then
over two million--carefully calculated. The use of gas for cooking was
prohibited, and its use confined to lighting. East of Paris were lines
of refugees, filling the roads from Verdun, almost seventy kilometres
(about 43 miles) long; the Chateau de Bizy was transformed into a
hospital, and also the Chateau des Penitents at Vernonnet.
It was evident that St. Choiseul for the present was comparatively safe
from invasion, the current of investment moving to the south-east,
although a letter I received from Gabrielle said that German military
motors had been seen near Briois and that their occupants had rifled
the wine cellars of M. Villiers. Sebastien was impatient to get away,
and I feeling too excited to remain with him, concluded to send him at
once to St. Choiseul, writing to Gabrielle that we would come together.
My intention to return to St. Choiseul was further quickened by some
indefinite statements by my sister that father and mother had partly
lost their memories. I instinctively divined that the relentless pall
of paralysis was closing about them, and the miserable sombreness of
this thought with all of the present darkness about me, plunged me into
a dull speechless misery.
The autumn lights shone upon the fair lands about St. Choiseul and
shone upon the gardens, thicketed with early chrysanthemums of the
sweet village itself, with a lovelier tenderness. It was altogether
charming, and as we rode from Briois gently--very gently--Sebastien
caught my shoulders and head in his arms, and hid his face on my
breast, sobbing softly. The poor boy's heart was full of memories and
full too doubtless of presaging fears. The happiness snatched from his
life by the nation's peril, the yet unfaded impressions of the dreadful
conflict painted to his eyes with the darkest, deadliest colors of
suffering, the returning familiar beauty of his old home, and the
rising flood of anticipation before the realization of his welcome,
mingled together in a torrent of emotion too strong for his composure.
I clasped him warmly, and the sympathy of my own bereaved soul covered
him as with a benediction. Slowly we moved on amid the splendid
fruitage of the fall, where, on either side, the richly laden fields
bore their golden crops, and where too--another note of the country's
extremity--the hardy old men and the children, and the silent devoted
women, toiled almost alone at the deeply needed task of the generous
harvest.
_Mais, voila, qui arrive!_ We have reached the little bridge, from
whose moss encrusted arches rises the low hill of the dear village,
and just over there, half way up, stands the old chestnut tree. And,
coming down to meet us, is the whole _entourage_ of old men and women
and children, a mimic army bearing flags, the banners of the church,
and singing, while an improvised little group of musicians at their
head, sent far over the wayside the throb of the drums and the shrill
whistles of the fifes.
It was indeed Quintado's welcome home. Our horse recoiled, snorted and
reared at the unusual spectacle, and the stirring accompaniment, and
the next moment the throng was all about us, and there were cheers and
salutations, and waving caps, and a happy bubbling merriment, that made
poor Sebastien half wild, and so bewildered him with pride and joy
that the poor fellow was speechless, and almost in tears. I spoke a
little for him, and the good people then ranged themselves around the
carriage, and the horse, led by the head, to prevent his sudden bolting
away from the noise and clamor, brought us into St. Choiseul.
Quintado had whispered to me with a blush on his cheeks and with a
faltering voice, "But Dora is not here?"
"Ah, Sebastien," I cried, "the best comes last. Wait. You shall see.
I think I know that Dora was afraid. Yes really afraid. It would
be too much joy. Remember she has heard that you were wounded, and
perhaps--surely you understand--"
I did not finish my assurance. His good arm was about my neck, and just
to see him so overcome, without knowing the reason, pleased the good
friends, marching happily in his company, and the smiling children, so
that these, his pupils, broke out in a loud chorus that he had taught
them at school; a gay barcarolle from Moliere, that reflected the
buoyant unimpeded liveliness of young and loving spirits, though indeed
I felt some scruples as to its propriety just now, when we bowed to the
dark menace of a punishing destiny:
_Sortez, sortez de ces lieux,
Soucis, chagrins, et tristesse;
Venez, venez, ris et jeux,
Plaisirs, amours et tendresse.
Ne songeons qu'à nous réjouir,
La grande affaire est le plaisir._
It was pleasant to hear; the voices, sharp trebles, stabbing the quiet
air with their keen accents, like vocal poignards, and running on
with us under the first short group of walnuts--just opposite Privat
Deschat's--whose lower branches were draped in the bronzed leaves of
escaped vines. We moved along altogether in, to me, a curious sad
emblematic way of the past happinesses and peace. The song breathed the
pensive reminder of a remote dalliance and serenity, lost now behind
the rolling clouds of belching cannon and smoking bombs.
The swinging melody put to flight immediate fears, yet like an
incantation and, like dreamers, we surrendered to the transient
forgetfulness:
_Aimons jusques au trépas;
La raison nous y convie.
Helas! si l'on n'aimait pas,
Que serait--ce de la vie!
Ah! perdons plutôt le jour
Que de perdre notre amour._
Well! that was fitting enough, and as I glanced at Quintado his
ingenuous bliss under this vocal stimulation of his natural feelings
was boundlessly agreeable. How very handsome he was; excitement had
thrown into his flat cheeks a becoming color, and the lingering pallor,
elsewhere, bestowed upon him an enticing interest, quite pleasing.
His deep eyes glowed with pleasure, and the black hair escaping from
beneath his pompon lay like ebony fingers on his white temples. Really
for example, he was angelic, though of the darker hue and deeper
temperament of angels, and there glinted from his eyes a stubborn
tender maliciousness of animal joy. _He knew that Dora waited for him._
And so we came decorously, with manifold lingerings, where the brisk
people pressed against the carriage wheels, and almost stood under the
horse's feet, up to our house, the one--you remember--next to that
of Privat Deschat's and there, _Mon Dieu_, how I see it now! There
was a beautiful arcade of branches of yews, and amongst them red,
red roses, like ruby stars, and over the path beneath the arch were
strewn vine-leaves. We alighted very slowly, for Quintado had again
become weak, and the people were most respectful, and considerate,
and, because it might have jarred him, withheld their cheers, and just
hailed him with uncovered heads. Ah! it was most pathetic I think.
And up the path we went to that porch, where later, much later,
Gabrielle and I sat, overwrought and stricken with wonder and dread,
and on it stood father and mother, trembling, but gracious, and
tenderly sympathetic, and then--
Then Deschat and I took him up the stairs, on the chair made of our
crossed hands--the chair children make for each other--with Quintado's
good arm about my neck, and brought him to the bed-chamber, so dainty
and white, and sweet-smelling, and clean, and on the great broad bed
we laid him _so_ gently down and, from where he lay, his eyes could
see the sky, blue like a pea-blossom, with the trellised vapors spun
across it, and the window framed in Virginia creeper, with, at that
very moment, a wren whisking through its tendrils. And then Gabrielle
brought Dora to the door, and softly we went away, and the two lovers
were left there, and--_Helas!_ I was just envious perhaps, with some
illy stirred remembrance, some indefinable despair--I looked back, and
the two faces clung together and the whispering voices mingled, in the
inarticulate ecstacy of that meeting.
I stepped again to the porch; the people were drifting away, still
softly singing, but I did not see them. I saw only the field of
battle, sodden with the dead; I heard only the menacing whisper of
the ascending shell; I thought only of one Divine Figure--He of the
Cross--weeping before His Father in Heaven for the sins of the world.
And so the night came on, and I still sat there, until a hand rested on
my shoulder. I noticed its trembling pressure.
I raised my eyes. There stood near me the captain, Père Grandin and
Père Antoine. It was the last who spoke:
"_My son, Sebastien Quintado is no more!_"