THE CONCLUSION
The Great War is over. There is peace in Europe. It is now five years
since the armies of the nations succumbed in terror to the incursions
of the Spirits. And there is peace in St. Choiseul. Our old home is
unchanged except that some familiar faces and some familiar voices are
not seen or heard within its walls now--not all. Privat Deschat lives
and Père Grandin and Père Antoine, and Dora is here, and our little
housekeeper Julie. But the _Capitaine_ is dead, and old Hortense,
and--Ah that you know--Gabrielle is gone.
Tonight the wide country-side is wonderful with its snow-blanket
and, with the moon lighting it up, shadows lie on the smooth white
banks like pencilled drawings, flat and black. I have regained
composure--perhaps happiness. At any rate St. Choiseul retains all of
its loveliness, and in the nursery of its beauty why should not the
heart grow calm. Visitors come often to see our house, and to see me.
Privat Deschat says I should lecture about the Visitation. That I would
make a king's ransom.
But that I could not do. It would be just pure profanation. I do not
like to have the visitors. I talk to them in general phrases. Some
understand my reticence, and some are vexed. _Mais pourquoi?_ How can
I go over and over again that miracle I have seen--the great miracle
of the war? _See_, I have written this little book, so that I may no
longer endure this intrusion, and now I have only to ask "Have you read
my book?"
Sometimes it is an Englishman who remonstrates, with:
"But my dear sir; it is the living voice I want, the voice of the man
who witnessed the Descent of the Dead. And then there are impressions
that no book fairly gives--your own exact feeling you know--that is
what I am after. Don't you see? It was a very remarkable circumstance."
Sometimes it is an American:
"Well! Well! That gets ahead of anything I ever knew. Weren't you
shaken up a bit? Strikes me that my life would have been scared out of
my body. Now let us have the whole thing."
These pertinacities and irrelevant curiosities I could not endure,
and Dora urged me to write the book, and so at last it is written,
and the world may now know the very truth of the matter--the truth as
well as I can give it, for even now I sometimes feel as if I had been
the toy of an illusion. And yet see the proofs. Is there not peace?
Did not Gabrielle leave me? Is it not well known that the very day
after the visions disappeared, the stir in the camps began? Is it not
a common attested fact that the droves of soldiers broke out from all
command--indeed that there was no command, the officers with the men
being seized with one irresistible impulse--and streamed in disordered
legions, over the country, seeking, this way and that, their homes,
and hurting no one; all reduced to a childlike weariness of limb and
spirit? And have not the lengthy histories recorded the voluntary
abandonment of the war by the soldiers and their officers, despite
what the bigger men and the so-called rulers wished? And was there not
wholesale rejoicing everywhere, and were not the churches crowded to
the doors, and did not the flocking multitudes improvise services in
the fields, and on the roadways? And then came the signed manifestoes
of the troops, that nothing in heaven, or on the earth, would drive
them back to the trenches--that it was God's will that the carnage and
the wretchedness of the whole business--_l'affaire entière_--should be
put an end to?
And how was it with the governments?
They "surrendered" as the Americans say. They put their wise heads
together and did for the first time what the people said they
should do. And--again the good American slang--"_there was no back
talk_." They did it. And how is it now? Where are the huge military
establishments--where the drill, drill, drill, of uniformed and
gun-carrying men, where the war bureaus and the generals, where that
"power of the sword" that the Teuton blindly worshipped, where the
Gospel of Power? Blotted out, and in its place the sanctification of
Peace. The vision I had on that battlefield, when Gabrielle and I
walked in the midst of the unshriven dead has been realized. _The flags
of the nations wave still, but with them waves the flag of their common
Brotherhood._
Well, I am no great writer. I must not attempt eloquence. Let the
historians and the essayists do that. What I think I saw, I _must_ have
seen, for what I see about me, everyone else sees, and this latter
thing is the child of the former thing.
Reader are you content? The wonderfulness of the repatriation of the
soldiers, as they swept from the battlefields and got back to the
natural tasks of life has been written about, in hundreds of letters
and books. I have given you the entire history of the strange event,
that brought all that about. Again I ask: "Are you content?"
In years I am yet young, but I am old in spirit. The sharp experiences
I have passed through; the transcendent Miracle I have been a part of,
have delivered me from the trivial considerations of life. But too I
have my part in life, and the darling prettiness of St. Choiseul, the
noble friendship of Père Grandin, and the holy consolations of Père
Antoine, the honest service of Julie, are not unconsidered. And--_there
is Dora_.
_Sincèrement. Je vous dit--le monde m'apparaît tres bon._