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....