MONT FRENET.—LA CHAMPAGNE POUILLEUSE.—THE RETURN
CHÂLONS, _10 p.m._
We dashed into the train at Revigny during the hail-storm, an infernal
kind that didn’t cool the air, and arrived at Châlons at six o’clock.
No cabs, at least none for us, so we begged two Quaker women with the
red-and-white star in the little black triangle on their sleeves, who
were getting into the only visible conveyance, to take our luggage and
deposit it for us at the Hôtel de la Haute Mère Dieu, whose name so
appealed to me. We paid our share of the cab, and all and everything
departed, we on foot. Châlons seems quite without character as one passes
through the streets, though I caught sight of several old churches and,
alone, would have lingered on the busy bridge that spans the Marne.
We got to the Hôtel de la Haute Mère Dieu and interviewed the female
keeper of that special paradise, who said she had nothing for us, had
received no telephone message from the _préfet_ at Bar-le-Duc or any
other _préfet_ from any other place. Then Mrs. C. P.—the Verdun day
and the Bar-le-Duc nights having somewhat stretched our nerves—began
to get annoyed; the desk-lady finally asked us, did we belong to the
Westinghouse Commission, which we didn’t. We then betook ourselves
to the streets. Nothing at the Hôtel d’Angleterre, nothing at the
Hôtel-Restaurant du Renard. We finally asked a large, beady-eyed,
determined-looking female, standing at a door, if she had accommodations
or knew of any one who had. She proved to be the _sage-femme_ of the
quarter and eyed us askance.
Just then appeared a very _comme il faut_, pretty young woman with an
expression at once so charming and so modest that we did not hesitate to
accost her and tell her of our plight—that it looked as if we should be
passing the night _à la belle étoile_ if some one didn’t do something for
us. She hesitated, looked at us, hesitated again. Smashed down on her
head at a smart angle was the identical hat that Mrs. C. P. was wearing,
blue with a twisting of gray, from Reboux. I think that hat crystallized
things, for she ended by saying, sweetly:
“I have a room that I sometimes offer to friends; only,” she added,
“there is a horrible stairway leading to it.”
We turned our backs on the _sage-femme_, doubtless naturally good,
but soured by the constant witnessing of the arrival on the scene of
apparently superfluous human beings (I say “apparently,” for who shall
decide which souls are precious?), and followed those neatly clad, small
feet and slim ankles up a winding stairway that might have been of any
epoch—except the nineteenth or twentieth century, and found ourselves
in a charming little interior, spotlessly clean. “_C’est à votre
disposition_,” she said, and then a servant appeared, a refugee from
Tahure, as we afterward learned, a garrulous refugee. I beat my breast
later on when I heard the loud bassoon, telling Mrs. C. P. that I even
hated refugees and that that one would have, if possible, to contain her
tale till I had had a night’s sleep. At the moment I hated her with all
the unreasoning hatred of the beneficiary for the benefactor.
Well, to make a long story short, closets were opened, the freshest
of embroidered linen sheets, the largest of towels, were got out, and
were left to us in the handsomest of ways _with_ the refugee, the owner
departing to her country house. The refugee managed to get in part of the
story of her life and she brought hot water; she was from Tahure and left
on the run with an aged husband, just before the entry of the enemy.
Then we looked about the pleasant room. The first object I espied
was a pair of manly brown kid gloves, the next a blue gas-mask bag,
and a cigarette-case, with a crest, lying near a volume of Alfred de
Vigny. (Can’t you see them reading it together?) And there was such a
comfortable _chaise-longue_ for him to rest on, and an expensive, very
“comfy” rug and many cushions. As the refugee from Tahure proceeded to
make up the bed and sofa she interspersed the story of _her_ life with
remarks concerning her mistress, like: “_Allez, elles ne sont pas toutes
comme cela, elle a un cœur d’or_”; “_Moi, qui vous le dis, elle n’a pas
une mauvaise pensée_.”
At this juncture we delicately asked, But where does she _live_?
“Oh, he has given her a little château in the environs.” This was a
convenient town apartment with the one big room giving on the Place de
la République; at the back a dining-room and little kitchen. Having
removed the dust of travel, hot water being produced in a jiffy from the
gas-stove on the kitchen range, we descended to take dinner at one of the
restaurants near by. We were so tired about this time that the decalogue
wasn’t much to us, neither the Law nor the Prophets, but be it remembered
of us, we _did_ love our neighbor as ourselves.
When we came back after supper the sofa was spread with large, crisp,
spotless linen sheets, the bed the same, the refugee gone, and here
we are in this clean, low-ceilinged room with eighteenth-century
wood-panelings and charming door-handles of the same period. There is a
crayon of the present tenant reflecting her sweet and candid expression
over the mantelpiece, on which are two Dresden-china figures and a small
white-marble “Young Bacchus”; furthermore an etching by Hellu of the
Duchess of Marlborough, which made one feel quite poised. In fact, there
is nothing _demi_ about it.
The Place de la République is full of soldiers coming and going, and
there are several ambulances of the Scottish Ambulance Corps drawn up
by a big fountain representing three women (typifying the Marne, the
Moselle, and the Agne). Over the soft, warm night is borne the low boom
of cannon. The guard has just called out: “_Faites attention! Lumière au
troisième étage_”—so I must stop.
_Tuesday, 9.30 a.m._
Sitting in the Place de la République on chairs borrowed from a little
lace-shop, and waiting for the cab to come to take us to General Goïgoux,
to whom Madame Fould had given us a letter of introduction. Just
opposite is the inhospitable Hôtel de la Haute Mère Dieu, and I have
been telling Mrs. C. P., who has gone to buy some fruit, of the story of
Voltaire and Madame du Châtelet passing through Châlons _en route_ from
Versailles to Lunéville. At Châlons Madame du Châtelet thought she’d like
to have a bouillon at the Hôtel de la Cloche d’Or, where they stopped
to change horses. (It still exists and is the only one we didn’t try
last night.) It was brought them to their carriage by the _aubergiste_
herself, who had learned from the indiscreet postilion the identity of
the illustrious travelers. When Longchamp, the valet of Voltaire, asks
to pay, she firmly demands a louis d’or for the bouillon. “La divine
Emilie” protests, the woman insists that at her hotel the “price of an
egg, a bouillon, or a dinner is a louis”; then Voltaire gets out and
tries by amiable processes to explain that in no country in the world
did a bouillon ever cost a louis; more cries and reproaches; a crowd
gathers; Voltaire, strong in his right, doesn’t want to give way. Madame
du Châtelet points out the gathering crowd, now quite noisy. Finally
they pay, Voltaire commending to all the devils the hospitable town of
Châlons-sur-Marne; they depart to the accompaniment of the gibes of the
amiable inhabitants. It may be _autre temps_, but not _autres mœurs_;
it’s just like the woman at the desk at the Hôtel de la Haute Mère Dieu,
who wouldn’t take us in, in any sense, last night.
The most awful-looking cab has just drawn up in front of “our” house, and
a smart American ambulance officer is trying to get in.
IN THE TRAIN EN ROUTE FOR PARIS.
The first quiet breath I have drawn, and very comfortable it is to sink
into the broad seats, out of the glare of the setting sun, and feel there
is nothing to inspect save the flying aspect of nature for the next three
hours.
The handsome officer this morning proved to be Mr. B., and he didn’t get
that cab, which, however, we promised to send back to him once we were
deposited at the general’s headquarters.
General Goïgoux is most agreeable. When he asked us where we were lodged,
we threw a stone at the Hôtel de la Haute Mère Dieu and told him of our
Good Samaritan. He gave a grin, if generals are supposed to grin, when
we said that we had not disturbed her to any great extent, as she had,
in addition, a country place where she really lived. We then told him of
our meeting with Miss N. and Miss M., who had asked us to investigate
the canteen prospects on our way back to Paris. The installing of one
has long been the idea of General Goïgoux, who loves his _poilus_, and
he immediately rang the bell on his table—among his books was a German
Baedeker of eastern France—and in a moment a captain with a sad face and
a black band on his arm appeared, and we departed in a huge military auto
to the station to investigate the great railway shed that the general has
requisitioned for canteen purposes.
Going through the streets, we were held up for a moment by a detachment
of prisoners in various uniforms and from various regiments, but all with
P.G. (_prisonnier de guerre_) marked in large letters on their backs.
A tall, upstanding set with ringing tread, not at all unhappy-looking,
despite a something set about their expression, seemingly in very good
physical condition.
Statues of the top-hatted, frock-coated political men of
nineteenth-century France have banalized the public places of every town
in the _doux pays_. They simply can’t compete with the saints and kings
and warriors of the artistic periods—it’s too bad they have tried.
At 12.30 we got back to our pleasant quarters, to find our hostess there,
in a very smart dark-blue serge dress from Jeanne Hallé. In addition to
the château, the shop down-stairs, called “Aux Alliés,” where all sorts
of edible delicacies are sold, belongs to her together with a tall and
beautiful red-haired Frenchwoman. This is her up-stairs resting-place
during the day. We sank on bed and sofa, exhausted by the heat, the visit
to the station to inspect the canteen facilities, which seemed most
promising, visits to two churches, and luncheon in the crowded Restaurant
du Renard. In the church of St.-Alpin white-bloused experts were busy
removing the beautiful sixteenth-century stained-glass windows. “If
’twere done, ’twere well ’twere done quickly.” That continued booming of
guns made one realize at once their fragility and their beauty.
Shortly after, a handsome young officer came in, a gentleman, and
speaking beautiful English. It wasn’t “he,” however, but a friend of
his, and we did a little “society” talk—the weather, the necessity of
learning the languages young, the theater, that Réjane was getting old,
and “_L’Elévation_” was bad for the morals, and fashions, if the skirts
_could_ get shorter—but nothing of the war.
At two o’clock another military auto was announced, which the general
had sent with a doctor to take us to Mont Frenet, four kilometers from
Suippes and six from the German lines. The young officer departed; we
veiled and gloved ourselves and descended, and got into the motor, where
we found a large, dark, military man inclining to _embonpoint_, who
thought he was good-looking, and started out. The first thing we met as
we got out of town on the dusty, blazing highroad was a little funeral
cortége, preceded by a priest. The body of the soldier was draped in
the tricolor, and following to his last rest, close behind, was his
_camarade_, with head bared. He had doubtless expired in the big hospital
near by, one of those lonely hospital deaths that hundreds of thousands
have suffered before transfiguration.
We were in the great plain of the Champagne Pouilleuse that leads to
Suippes, Sainte-Ménehould, and stretches out to Reims—a plain with great,
white, chalky scars of quarries, interspersed with fields and dark
patches of pine woods. I asked the doctor about the site of the ancient
camp of Attila and the battle of the Catalonian fields, but his knowledge
of the matter was vague and his interest perfunctory. I thought afterward
he might have had a more personal afternoon planned than that of taking
two objective-minded ladies to Mont Frenet. There was once a great Roman
road from Bar-le-Duc to Reims, and all about are little churches of the
twelfth and thirteenth centuries, mostly touched up in the eighteenth.
After three-quarters of an hour we found ourselves nearing what might
have been a modern mining settlement. It is the great front hospital of
Mont Frenet. A model establishment organized and conducted by a man of
heart and brain, Doctor Poutrain. Young, _élancé_, alert, he took us the
rounds of his little world, from the door where the ambulances deposit
their wounded, their dying, and oft their dead, where they are sorted
out, through the numberless wards, even to the model wash-houses and
the places where the garments of those brought in are scientifically
separated from their inevitable and deadly live stock.
As we passed through one of the wards, I saw the doctor’s eye change,
and, following it, I perceived, as he quickly went to the bedside, a face
with the death look already on it; and in a moment, with a slight sigh,
a soul had breathed itself out—_en route_ to the heaven of those who die
_pro patria_.
And I thought in great awe, “All I know or ever will know of that human
being is his supreme hour.” And so fortuitous, so sudden was it all that
I had not even time to breathe a word of prayer, nor even to reach out
for his hand. And I, come from so far, so unrelated to him, was thus the
destined witness of his passing. I can’t get it out of my mind.
Doctor Poutrain loves his broken men, and he said, “I want no man who
has been severely wounded or mutilated to leave my hospital without
his decoration.” He had tears in his eyes as he stood by a bed where a
bright-eyed, thin-faced boy was lying with a hip fracture. “He brought a
comrade in, under fire, who was shot off his back as he was carrying him
in.”
In one of the beds an aviator was lying, brought in three days before;
the eyes, the mouth, the whole face had still the peculiar look of
strain. Indeed, three faces stand out in one’s mind—the captivity face,
the hard, shining face and eyes of unwounded men just from the combat,
and the faces of wounded aviators. About this time I noticed the gloomy
look deepening on the face of our accompanying Esculapius, and it
suddenly occurred to me “he is one of those who support with difficulty
the praises of another.” For we _had_ been very explicit in praise of
Doctor Poutrain’s wonderful installation.
It was a slack day, and according to the record in the antechamber there
had only been 517 brought in that day.
We have tea with the _directrice_ of the _gardes-malades_ (ten or twelve
women only), a friend of Madame Fould’s. As we sat there talking I
discovered that the eager _médecin-chef_ had had, before the war, as
hobby, archeology and ethnology, especially of the prehistoric races of
Mexico; that he also possessed one of the few Aztec codices existing—all
of which we discussed to the sound of the German guns and the whirring of
their airplanes.
We finally made our adieux, came home over the hot, unspeakably dusty
road of the Champagne Pouilleuse, unreasonably disappointed that nobody
would give us permission to make a little détour by Suippes, then under
fire. We got back to our headquarters, packed our belongings, and
diffidently brought up the subject of remuneration, which the _belle
châtelaine_ firmly refused. I was traveling light, without a single thing
approaching the superfluous, but Mrs. P. had a breakfast-cap and her
tortoise-shell toilet things and trees for her shoes, and she also found
among her belongings a lovely amber box, which she presented in token
of our gratitude. We _could_ make the garrulous refugee from Tahure not
only happy, but speechless, which was more to the point; and here we are,
looking out on a darkening world, and there are soldiers bathing in the
river, near stacked guns, and everywhere little detachments are marching
down dim roads, and there are the eternal troop- and equipment-trains
going to the front—and I feel an immense regret at leaving it all....
PARIS.
As we were sitting in the dining-car, idly wondering how on earth we were
going to get from the station to our respective abodes once the train had
deposited us at the Gare de l’Est, or planning to spend the night there,
the Marquis de M. passed through the car. His motor was to meet him, and
he gallantly offered transit, that can be above rubies and pearls _par le
temps qui court_.
When we got to Paris at 10.30 we saw in the dim light, as we stepped into
the big motor, _voyagers_ departing with luggage on their backs, or,
preparing to await the dawn, sitting on it. We got into the motor with
Comte de ——, the Marquis himself sitting outside, “for the air,” as he
said, and also because there was no more room inside.
As we rolled along through the dimly lighted streets, the air dense and
hot, a terrific hail- and thunder-storm suddenly deluged the town, and
especially the generous Marquis outside, well punished (as usual) for his
kind act. When, slipping and skidding, we finally pulled up at my hotel,
a very wet gentleman, but remembering his manners, said, “_Au plaisir de
vous revoir, madame_.” (He must really have wished me to all the devils,
where he would never meet me a second time, hoping it was a last as
well as a first meeting.) I had to laugh, also he, the pleasure was so
evidently doubtful. It ended by his betaking his soaking person into the
auto, and I came up-stairs to find my lamps trimmed and burning and my
beloved mother awaiting me to hear “all about it.”
So may one go to the front and return....
PART II
CHAPTER I
BY THE MARNE
GARE DE L’EST, _Wednesday, July 25th_.
No, it isn’t possible, even for one whose business is not that of
stopping bullets, to go toward the combat a second time without a thrill.
Few soldiers in the station; they are mostly at the front, at Craonne and
Le Chemin des Dames and other sacrificial places, and in a week or two
the empty beds in the hospitals will be full again. Some officers are
hastening back from their _permissions_ with pasteboard boxes and other
unwar-like accoutrements. One is sitting by me, a straight-featured young
man with dark-ringed eyes, his _Croix de Guerre_ and _fourragère_,[7]
reading _Brin de Lilas_. In forty-eight hours he may be dead. Another
officer is reading _Cœur d’Orpheline_, and _Le Pays_.
Miss N., with something of serene yet brooding in her being, plus a sense
of humor, arrives with a telegraphic pass from army headquarters at
Châlons, which may or may not “pass” the train conductor.
_Later._
Chelles, where the arts of peace in the form of a vermicelli-factory
testify to the arts of war by having every pane of glass broken; and once
there was a celebrated abbey at Chelles which was destroyed, with a tidy
amount of other things beautiful, at the time of the French Revolution.
Farther along much thinning out of the woods, the beautiful
warmth-giving, shade-giving forests of France. In one place there is a
planting of young, slender trees, and I thought on those other children
of France who must grow to manhood, remake her soul, transmit her
immortality. The first harvest is stacked and yellow, and nature is
densely, deeply green where it had been pale and expectant. Even the
Marne, which we caught up here, has a deeper color than in June, as it
reflects the lush green.
Meaux, with its cathedral rising from the center of the town, untouched
except by time. Meaux has now come to be a sort of joke (“_de deux
maux choisir le moindre_”) which few can resist—I’ve even heard it at
the Théâtre Français—and it’s supposed to be the heart’s desire of the
_embusqué_, far enough from the front not to get hurt, and far enough
from Paris to be out of sight.
Château Thierry, with its first vintage of white grapes, and I bethought
me how the whole of France is one vast wine-press—“He is trampling out
the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored.”
Epernay, with its peculiar church tower. The great building of the
champagne Mercier firm near the station has every window-pane broken,
and part of it is serving as a Red Cross station. The wave of invasion
pressed hard through Epernay that August of 1914.
In the dining-car we sat at a table with two officers—an airman, tall,
deep-eyed, some sort of _tic nerveux_ disturbing his face, with the
_Grand’ Croix de la Légion d’Honneur_ among other decorations; and a
captain of infantry, who had been months at Arras, and at Verdun the
terrible March of 1916.
About the time that the cross-eyed waiter (it was easy, poor soul, to see
why he wasn’t wanted in the trenches) threw the last set of plates with a
deafening crash down the line of diners (the captain of infantry said it
was just like the first-line trenches), the airman, whose nerves couldn’t
stand it, pursued, rather irritably:
“You don’t even read the _communiqués_ any more, I wager. _Oh, les
civils!_”
“I can’t truthfully say I do, always,” I answered, feeling called on to
defend the _sacrés civils_. “After three years of it we are fatigued and
bewildered by the spectacularness of it, the great, dazzling, hideous
mass of it, and you who perish on the battle-field but perform an act
that all must some day perform, only different in that it is far better
done—_dulce et decorum_—but, after all, the same act that we must perform
against our will, at the mercy of some accidental combination. It’s the
same outcome, ‘and one’s a long time dead.’”
After a pause and a deep look, perhaps it is the look men have when alone
in the secular spaces, he answered:
“_Choisir et aimer sa mort, c’est un peu comme choisir sa bien-aimée_,”
and suddenly a flash illuminated my soul, showing me something of the
_dulce_ as well as the _decorum_ of dying for country.
And then we looked out of the window, and there came into my mind a
completely commonplace event that caught my attention in the first
wonderment and horror of the world war. Accompanied by her daughter,
an elderly woman, one August evening of 1914, took the Fifth Avenue
motor-bus to get some fresh air, and they placed themselves on top. At
that epoch, instead of going straight up the Avenue, which was being
repaved around about Thirty-fifth Street, the omnibus took a turn into
Madison Avenue and reappeared again at the north side of Altman’s. Now
the roof of the _porte-cochère_ of Altman’s has a _motif_ of bronzework.
The omnibus lurched just at this point; the head and hair of the old
lady were caught in it; she was lifted up from the top of the omnibus,
remained suspended in air for an instant of time, then dropped to the
pavement, where she breathed out her soul. Doubtless there are those who
will understand why this completely unimportant matter has remained in my
mind—even why I thought of it at that moment.
CHÂLONS-SUR-MARNE, 36 RUE DU PORT DE MARNE.
An 1860 house requisitioned by the military authorities for the _Dames de
la Cantine_.
_6.30 p.m._
Sitting in a little glass-inclosed veranda even with the ground. The
side against the house, in between the doors and windows, is painted
in a crisscross pattern of dark green against light green, and the
woodwork is that favorite but uninspiring shallow brown; a large, empty,
double-decker cage for birds is in a corner. The veranda leads into two
low-ceilinged rooms with parquet flooring and little squares of Brussels
carpet. In the first is a writing-table, some arm-chairs, and a horsehair
sofa is across a corner; brown wallpaper ornamented with the inevitable
oil-paintings of “near” Corots, and “farther” Guido Renis—everything
distinctly early Victorian, and something soothing in its atmosphere
after three lustrums of _art nouveau_. After all we’ve been through in
art lately, early Victorian isn’t as bad as we once thought.
I looked for a moment into the walnut bookcase and found bound volumes of
_La Semaine des Familles_, 1850-60; _Le Musée des Familles_ of the same
dates: _Le Magasin d’Education_, of the eighties; and the curious part
is that here beside the Marne it doesn’t seem of any special country, but
of a special period.
The kitchen leads out of the dining-room (which latter is the spiritual
twin of the _salon_), and has an old, unused fireplace with a high
masonried shelf above it and a beautiful ancient fireback with coat
of arms. Near the high window is a little range and the inevitable
gas-stove. I put my valise in the sitting-room and went out into the old
garden, untouched since the winter’s sleep and the spring’s awakening.
It looks out on the road; beyond is a raised walk along the river, and
across the stream, just opposite, is the station and the evacuation
hospital.
But I was feeling uneasy as I looked about, for I was separated from
my _carnet rouge_,[8] which has been unnecessarily reft from me by a
too-zealous station individual. Miss Mitchell had met us, smiling and
waving, which ought to have been a patent of respectability, from the
other side of a bayonet, the side we wanted to be on; but the man had a
dullish eye and didn’t see that we were birds of a feather, and, anyway,
had just been put in authority and was enjoying his full powers, after
the usual manner of the unaccustomed.
So I departed, and got sopping wet in my only suit (am traveling lighter
even than the first time), and my garments were furthermore ravaged by
falling pollen from a linden-tree under which I had confidingly stood
during the downpour. I was a sight, but I _had_ to get that _carnet
rouge_. Any one who has been in _la zone des armées_ and has been
separated from it will understand the orphaned and anxious feeling that
possessed me.
_Later._
A pale brightening of the western sky after the heavy rain. Two _avions
de chasse_ passing swiftly to the northeast. I wandered out of the
garden, past some modern houses (this part of Châlons, for some reason,
is called Madagascar), taking the little raised earth-walk by the Marne.
The river, always slow-flowing, has an almost imperceptible movement in
front of our house, and there are many grasses and reeds; the banks are
weedy and little green boats are made fast to them, and nature is a bit
motley and untidy. A soldier is fishing on the opposite side near the
station. An officer and a black-robed woman pass. Farther down, the banks
are thickly wooded and the trees glisten after the rain; even the great
railway station is a-shine, where tens of thousands of men pass daily,
together with millions of francs of war material, and it all looks like
some not very sharp wood-cut of the sixties—the kind you wouldn’t buy
if you were looking over a lot; but, somehow, lived in, it is charming.
Then I found myself on a path by the river, with a lush border of
trees, poplar, willow, white birch, ash, hawthorn, and clematis-twined,
wild-grape-vined bushes. On the other side were ripe wheat-fields. Near a
sycamore a man and a woman were locked in an embrace, whether of greeting
or farewell I know not. Neither was very young—this much I saw before
I turned my eyes and went on; but when I passed there again they were
as before, their eyes still closed; and I suddenly knew them for true
lovers, who count not moments, but were lost in some infinity; and for
all I know they may be there yet, and if not they, then others, for the
spaces of love are never empty. To some it may be nonsense that I am
talking, but there are those who will know. All the while there was a
dull boom of cannon, and other men who could love women were giving up
their lives; and I seemed to understand little or nothing, but did not
need to understand, for I had a full heart, which is better than a full
brain. And I cried, as I walked back, “_Domine Deus, Rex Celestis, Pater
omnipotens_,” and left it all—the soft love and the hard death—where it
belongs. And I was glad to have walked for a few moments alone by the
green Marne.
When I got back I found Joseph of the 71st _Chasseurs à pied_ sitting
with Miss N. Joseph thinks we are friends; he _knows_ we are friends,
so different from “world’s” people, who are suspicious and think nobody
loves them, or fatuous and think everybody does.
We sat in the 1860 dining-room. There is a pressed-bronze clock on the
mantelpiece, representing a mild and smiling Turk with a drawn sword—and
there is a sideboard you could find in Barnesville, Maryland, or Squedunk
(I forget _where_ Squedunk is), and the extremely “distant” Guido Renis
decorate the brown walls, without, however, enlivening them.
And this is Joseph’s story—Joseph of the grateful heart, Joseph with two
years and a half of service, Joseph who won’t be twenty till December,
Joseph with his young, round face and flat nose, dark under his pleasant
eyes, and a bit hollow under his cheek-bones, and with decorations on his
chest:
“I never knew my parents; the Fathers brought me up. I have had only good
from them, and when they were _chassés_ I was taken with them to Pisa. I
was going to continue my studies, _mais la guerre, que voulez-vous_? They
call me ‘_le gosse_,’ I was the youngest in the regiment. Now I am alone
in the world since my brothers were killed, one at Verdun three weeks
ago, the other last year on the Somme. I miss the letters,” he added,
simply.
“But, Joseph, tell us how you got your _Croix de Guerre_.”
“Oh, I only happened to save the life of my captain at Verdun. We were
making a reconnaissance, and he fell with a ball in the hip. I started to
bring him in, with a comrade who was hit by a piece of shrapnel in the
head and killed instantly. I caught ‘mine’ in the arm, but I was still
able to drag my captain in by his feet. It was quite simple, and since
then he is very good to me.”
Joseph is _en perm_, his regiment is at Reims, but he spits blood and his
voice is hoarse—he was gassed a few weeks ago.
“It smelt of violets,” he said, “and we didn’t know that anything was the
matter till an officer rushed toward us. Eight of us never got up. I’ll
never speak clearer than this.”
Joseph stayed to supper with us—a supper of _soupe à l’oseille_,
scrambled eggs, and salad, but the brown, dull, little room gradually
seemed to fill with a sifted glory, and we left our meal and went out
to find the whole world dipped in transparent pink, and the great Light
of Day about to disappear, a reddish ball, in a mass of color of an
intenser hue. The delicate willows were like silver candelabra reflected
in the Marne, which now was a satiny pink. The wheat-fields were seas of
burnished gold.
Over all a terrific boom of cannon was borne on the damp evening air. It
seemed impossible to do other than walk magnetically on and on toward
the dreadful sound, out of that world of surpassing beauty toward those
supreme agonies, toward Mourmelon and Reims, where men were laying down
their lives, even as we three women walked the fields at the sunset
hour. I remembered suddenly a picture known and loved years ago—a woman
kneeling by such a river-bank, her hair falling, her face buried in her
hands, called “_Hymnus an die Schönheit_,” but over the pink-and-silver
beauty of _my_ sunset world I heard the deep and dreadful tones of
_their_ cannon, and the answer of the 75’s, which Joseph likened to the
_miaulement d’un chat_—and all the world seemed askew, and I looked
through tears at a golden half-moon that was rising in the pink to add an
unbearable beauty to it all.
IN MY ROOM, _10.30 p.m._
The cannon still booming.
My room also has a dark-brown paper with great white flowers on it—some
cross between peonies and dahlias, if such union is possible—and heavy
mahogany furniture; a few books which I immediately investigated, on a
gimp and tasseled trimmed shelf, for a clue to the one-time dwellers.
Among them were two by Victor Tissot, _Le Pays des Milliards_ and _Les
Prussiens en Allemagne_; the dates were 1873 and 1875, and they told of
that other war; and I looked at Germany through the eyes of forty years
ago as I turned the pages of _Le Pays des Milliards_, listening to the
1917 guns. History was not only repeating itself, but tripping itself up!
Joseph is sleeping in the garden in the steamer-chair. I hear his
gas-cough, a cross between a croupy cough and a whooping-cough. We
wanted him to sleep inside, but he said “_J’étouffe_,” and took the
steamer-chair out under the spreading chestnut-tree, and sleeps the sleep
of youth, even though weary and gassed.
_Thursday, 26th July, 1.30 p.m._
Sitting in the garden, after lunch, where we have had coffee under the
spreading chestnut, ready to go to Bar-le-Duc. _Avions_ are whirring in
the perfect blue, and we plainly hear the cannon. We are to take night
shift at the little _Foyer des Alliés_. When I say that we carry nothing
with us, not more than if we were going to take a stroll about town, one
sees that the journey will be fairly elemental.
Many white butterflies with an unerring instinct for beauty are flying
in and out of the little white ash-tree. And in spite of the boom of
cannon there straightway came to me a dear and fugitive realization that
beauty is the first thing sought by instinct, its earliest and its last
love, its imperishable means and its end. And how every other seeking of
instinct comes after perpetuation, conservation, survival of the strong,
and how it accompanies and pushes the soul toward its transfiguration.
Suddenly, under the rustling chestnut, all about me the murmur of the
gently stirring garden, I found I was mad for beauty, and some liquid,
long, unrepeated lines came to me, I know not why:
_E il pino_
_ha un suono, e il mirto_
_Altro suono, e il ginepro_
_Altro ancora, stromenti_
_diversi_
_Sotto innumerevoli dita._
...
_Che l’anima schiude_
_novella,_
_Su la favola bella_
_Che ieri_
_M’illuse, che oggi t’illude,_
_O Ermione._[9]
When you’re not carrying anything with you except your money and your
safe-conduct, you _can_ dream till it’s time to take the train.
CHAPTER II
THE CANTEEN AT BAR-LE-DUC
_Epitaphe_
_Bénis ceux qui sont morts simplement: en victimes,_
_Et n’ayant de la guerre éprouvé que l’horreur._
_Bénis ceux qui sont morts sans nourrir en leur cœur_
_La haine et tous ses maux, la gloire et tous ses crimes._
_Bénis ceux qui sont morts comme ils avaient vécu:_
_Assidus noblement à de modestes tâches._
_Bénis ceux qui, n’étant ni très braves, ni lâches,_
_N’ont su que résigner leur corps pauvre et vaincu._
_Bénis ceux qui sont morts pour servir et défendre_
_Des honneurs et des biens dont ils n’ont point leur part._
_Bénis ceux qui se sont donnés sans rien attendre_
_De leur postérité, de l’histoire ou de l’art._
_Bénis ceux qui, luttant seulement pour la vie,_
_Ont ignoré les lois qui reposent sur eux,_
_Mais compris en mourant qu’ils sont les malheureux_
_En qui depuis toujours Jésus se sacrifie._
_Bénis, ils le sont tous, et saints entre les morts,_
_Ceux qu’on ne pleure guère et que nul ne renomme:_
_Car, devant les héros, ils ne sont rien que l’Homme;_
_Car, parmi tant de gloire, ils fondent le remords;_
_Car leur don si naïf, ce don de tout leur être,_
_Mêle aux vertus du sol les grâces d’un sang pur,_
_Pour composer, avec tout l’or du blé futur,_
_Les moissons d’un esprit dont l’Amour sera maître._
GEORGES PIOCH.
CHÂLONS, _27th July_.
Half past four. Half an hour ago, _alerte, sirènes_. We hastily arose
from resting, and have just come up from a really charming cellar, with
nice vaulting, evidently much older than the house itself.
Returned from Bar-le-Duc this morning rather sketchy in my mind, blurred
with fatigue, in a compartment with five silent, dead-tired officers.
It’s a great human document, night shift in a canteen. From ten o’clock
till six I watched the _poilus_ fill the _Foyer des Alliés_, in and out,
in and out. From time to time the voice of the station-master called out
some fateful destination. I was thankful for any momentary slackening of
the rush, so that when one gives coffee, chocolate, or bouillon one can
also give a word, the precious word, where all is so anonymous. Between
three and four there was a lessening, and a short, haggard, deep-eyed,
scraggy-mustached man of forty-six, leaning on the counter, said to
me, “I am father of five,” and, showing his blue trousers tucked in
his boots, added, “I am of the attacking troops.” He then shifted his
accoutrement and dug out from his person the photographs of the five
children and his _épouse_, and I think more and more, “it is for the
young to fight.” I can’t bear the look on the faces of the middle-aged
going up to battle.
The _poilu_ trying to find his purse or the photographs of his family,
among everything else in the world that he carries on his person, pressed
tightly against other men carrying the same, feels doubtless the way a
sardine trying to turn over would feel!
The next with whom I spoke was a _gaillard_ with a glancing blue eye,
reddish mustache and high color, from Barcelona, of French parents, and
he insisted on speaking Spanish with me. His brother is professor at
Saint-Nazaire.
“Every time he writes me it is about Mr. Lloyd George instead of about
the family.”
This is a delicate tribute to my supposed English nationality.
“Do you think we are going to win, señorita?”
“Of course,” I answer, “with the help of God. _Dios y victoria_,” I add,
piously.
But as he tosses off his coffee he says, with a gleam, “_Victoria y
Dios_,” and then gives way to a comrade who was at Craonne in April.
He was a man with a softish eye and full-lipped mouth and was probably
naturally flesh-loving, and wanted his coffee very hot, and looked
approvingly at me as I said:
“_Mon ami_, I know all about it, if coffee isn’t _too_ hot, it isn’t hot
enough.”
He ended a conversation about an engagement he had been in by saying:
“The most awful sensation is to see the dust raised by the mitrailleuses
and to know that you have got to walk into it and to see the men ahead of
you stepping with strange steps—and some falling.”
As I said, he was naturally ease-loving and pain-fearing, yet that is the
way _his_ dust may be called on to return to dust.
There are many jokes about shrapnel and shells, but nobody ever jokes
about a bullet. It’s a thing with a single purpose—and you may be it.
Our headquarters are at ——, not far away, and it was at Bar-le-Duc that
I first saw our own men among the French for the same strange purpose.
Something stirred deeply in my heart, with an accompanying searing,
scorching consciousness of what an elemental thing they have come across
the seas to do—quite simply kill or be killed. It’s all to come, for “He
hath loosed the fateful lightning of His terrible swift sword,” and it
is for the young to fight.
At 3.30 they come into the canteen and ask for eighteen fried eggs; they
are oozing with money, and _they_ aren’t feeling sentimental. One of the
four young spread-eagles (he proved to be from Texas, and was changing a
big plug of tobacco from one side of his mouth to the other) said, with
an appraising look at the counter, that he could “buy us out,” and a
second added, “And more, too.”
“How about those coming in later?” I suggest, and then I ask how long
they’ve been here.
“Been here? Just five hundred years,” a small one answers, promptly,
“and the next time the ‘Call’ comes they won’t get me. They can take the
house and the back fence, too, but they won’t get little Joe. This loving
another country’s one on me!”
“Don’t listen to him, lady; he’s homesick. We’re out to can the Kaiser,
and he’ll take some canning yet, but I say next July he will be about as
welcome as a skunk at a lawn-party.”
And then even the homesick one cheered up. The simile made me think of
summer evenings in New England, but I only asked when they were to go
back to ——.
“We ought to have been there at 10.15.”
I gave a stern glance at the big canteen clock. The hands pointed to
3.30. They were then five and a quarter hours late.
“You don’t know ‘_Gun_court.’ It’s a fierce place,” said one, in answer
to the look.
“Aren’t you busy?”
“Holy smoke! She says _are we busy_! Why, we dig ourselves in all day,
and we dig ourselves out all night, and somebody after you all the time.
I don’t call this war. We’re out for real trouble.”
“Well, you’ll get it when you see your officer,” I remarked, unfeelingly.
Just then a _poilu_ whom they seemed to know approached with his ten
centimes. One of the Sammies knocks it out of his hand onto the counter,
points to his own chest, says, “On me, a square meal,” and opens his
bursting purse for me to take whatever is necessary.
The _poilu_, hearing the chink of coin and rustle of paper, says to me,
with eyes the size of saucers, “_Sont-ils tous millionaires?_” ...
Apart from his “private resources,” which seem unlimited, the American
receives just twenty times a day what the Frenchman does.
But how my heart goes out to them, so young, so untried, so generous—and
a sea of blood awaiting them!
Toward morning, when a chill was in the air, a thin-faced, dark-eyed man
with glasses shiveringly drinks his hot chocolate. “It’s too long, the
war,” he says, “two years—even three—_mais cela traîne trop, nos bonnes
qualités s’usent et se perdent_.”
“What were you before the war?”
“My father has a book-shop at Chartres, _j’adorais les livres et une
bonne lampe_,” he added, so simply.
And then a trench-stained comrade came up to him and they talked after
this fashion—one couldn’t have done better oneself—while I mopped up the
counter and refilled my jugs:
“This country pleases me. I will come back and take a turn about after
the war.”
“_Mon vieux_, one should never return to a place where one has been
happy; one is apt to find only regrets and disillusions. You are thinking
of the young _boulangère_ here, but she herself will leave the town after
the hostilities! And then what? _Un seul être vous manque et tout est
dépeuplé!_ But nothing, however, counsels one to return to a place where
one has suffered.”
From this point of view one must say that the life of the _poilu_ is
ideal, for when he will have tried all the fronts, including those of the
Orient, the war will perhaps be over.
And then they slung everything except the kitchen stove on their persons,
and, thanking me, went out to be killed, or, in the very best event, to
get _la bonne blessure_.
One in a thousand, one in ten thousand gets it, _la bonne blessure_,
indeed, not disfiguring, not incapacitating, and afterward, sometimes,
decorations, honors. On the other side they say, “_Glück muss der Soldat
haben_.”
A strange, intense blue, like some outer curtain to the windows,
announced the coming of dawn, and out of it appeared nine men shivering.
“Why are you so cold?” I ask.
“_Il fait du brouillard_,” said one, with a beard in a point and wearing
a _béret_, such a man as would have gone into an inn of Rabelais’s
time, _en route_ for some seat of war; and as he drank his big bowl of
chocolate he added, “_Cela console_; toward dawn one’s courage is low.”
Then a young, stone-deaf man with blue eyes and delicate, pink-skinned
face came in with something vague and searching in his look. I didn’t
realize in the first moment what was the matter, as I asked, did he
want coffee or chocolate, but a comrade pointed to his ears and said,
“Verdun.” He himself smiled, a dear young smile, but sudden tears came to
my eyes and I slopped the coffee.
A little before six we closed the canteen, which is always swept and
garnished between six and seven, and went back to the house where
Miss Worthington, who so admirably runs it in conjunction with Miss
Alexander, lives.
I lay me on a sofa with my shoes unlaced—my feet by that time were
feeling like something boneless and bruised, mashed into something too
small.
Seven-thirty a great knocking at the door.
“_L’alerte! A la cave, madame!_”
I was then in a state where a bomb couldn’t hurry me, but, the knocks
continuing, I finally got up and went down-stairs to find the lower floor
full of people, too _blasé_ to go into the vaulted cellar below.
“_Quelle comédie!_” said one woman. “_Moi, je m’en vais._”
“_Quelle tragédie, si c’est pour vous cette fois_,” answered another,
pressing her baby to her breast.
“The bits of shrapnel from the anti-aircraft guns firing at the
aeroplanes make more victims than the bombs,” said another.
Miss Worthington appeared at that moment, but decided, however, to go
back to bed. I went out into the hot streets; the early sun was shining
in a faultless sky. The _Foyer des Alliés_ had been hastily evacuated at
the _alerte_, according to orders, so I asked for the nearest church,
where I could sit down in peace, or comparative peace, out of the glare
and the heat, not to mention the enemy airplanes. I was directed up the
principal street, told to turn down by the river, and was proceeding
under the dusty poplars to the church of St.-Jean, when suddenly some
beauty of the morning touched my face and a feeling almost of joy
succeeded the fatigue of the night. I was turned from thoughts of men
going to their doom, and destruction coming from the lovely sky, and I
could receive only the morning light, and the glory of the shining river
and the rolling hills was for the moment mine; and I saw how “dying, they
are not dead.” ...
Mass was over when I got to church, but I sat down, crossed myself, and
commended, with a suddenly quiet heart, the world of battle to its God,
and then, instead of _un_lacing my shoes in the sanctuary, I proceeded
to lace them _up_, having walked from my abode with the laces tied about
my ankles; it wasn’t as sloppy as it sounds, considering what was going
on overhead. But I found myself thinking of praying-carpets, and rows of
sandals outside of dim mosques, and things and ways far from Bar-le-Duc.
After twenty minutes of a somewhat hazy contemplation of other than war
mysteries, I went back to the canteen.
Betwixt the time I had left it and my return a bomb had fallen between it
and the station; a large piece of roof had been removed from the station,
and a very neat nick had been made in the corner of the canteen where we
kept our hats and coats and hung up our aprons. The street in between
looked like an earthquake street. I stood quite still for a second of
time—not thinking—you don’t think on such occasions. The Barrisiens, or,
in plain English, the Bar-le-Dukites, were engaged in business as usual.
I then began the cutting up and buttering of endless large slices
of bread, with a Scotchwoman, who has unmodifiable opinions about
Americans—any and all Americans. Even when she only remarks, “I saw two
new people in town yesterday, _very_ American-looking, _very_,” you feel
there’s something the matter with the States, and if you had time you’d
get argumentative, even perhaps annoyed.
Soldiers were coming in again. To one tired, deep-eyed man, sitting
listlessly, with the heavy load slipping, I said:
“_Vous avez le cafard,[10] mon ami?_”
And he answered, suddenly, as if the words had been ejected by a great
force from his soul:
“_Je monte demain_—and I can’t bear the sound the bayonet makes going in.”
I answered, “A hot cup of coffee and you will feel all right again.” But
to myself I said, “There’ll be trouble for him; he _can’t_ any more.”
And then a huge Senegalese, all spinal column and hip, waving a generous
five-franc note in his hands, came along and wanted to know if there was
anybody _bas mariée_ among the ministrants, as he had a day off. The
service is quite variegated, as will be seen from these random specimens.
Last night we walked up the hill of the ancient town. A yellow half-moon,
hanging behind the fourteenth-century tower, further decorated the scene.
We sat on immemorial steps, in a little V-shaped place that framed
the valley and the town, and talked of war and wars. I thought how the
legendary Gaul had wandered over these hills and these wooded stretches,
with his battle-ax and skin about him, and long-haired women had waited
his return, and children had played in front of caves. As the clock on
the tower struck nine a woman appeared, waving her arms and calling
out, “_Une incendie!_” and we went higher up the steps and saw masses
of smoke and flames on one of the hills. It was the huge barracks for
refugees that was burning, and the flames were blowing toward the near-by
encampment for German prisoners. Then we went down the ancient roadway
through the dim, warm, summer streets to the canteen overflowing with
blue-clad men, singing, drinking, disputing. A blue mist of smoke and
breath hung about them, with a smell of hot wool and worn leather—and it
was the war. As I put on my apron I found myself repeating the words:
_Bénis ceux qui sont morts simplement: en victimes,_
_Et n’ayant de la guerre éprouvé que l’horreur._
_Bénis ceux qui sont morts sans nourrir en leur cœur_
_La haine et tous ses maux, la gloire et tous ses crimes._
CHAPTER III
THEATRICALS AND CAMOUFLAGE
_27th July, evening._
This afternoon Lieutenant Robin fetched us to the theatrical
representation the _Division Marocaine_ was to give.
Generals thick as leaves in Vallombrosa were there in a hemicycle about
the stage, pressed close by the flood of _poilus_. Terrible heat in the
great, glass-roofed auditorium, a slanting afternoon sun pouring itself
in like hot gold. Some thousands of spectators; thick odor of _poilu_;
blind being led in; groups of one-legged men naturally gravitating to one
another; groups of one-armed the same. A few _gardes-malades_ from the
hospitals, and ourselves the only women in the audience.
We were presented at the door with some copies of a charming, really
literary newspaper, _L’Horizon, Journal des poilus_, and there was a
little paragraph, “_Hiérarchie française qu’on trouve au Théâtre des
Armées_,” which also described the protocol of seating, “In the first row
near the stage wounded men are lying, immediately behind them wounded men
are sitting, then come ladies, if there are any—and then come officers!”
General Goïgoux and General Abbevillers sat near us.
While waiting we looked at _L’Horizon_ and laughed with General Goïgoux
over a paragraph showing the philosophy of a son of Mars under certain
circumstances, and it was the following:
Nature is kind. She places the remedy near the ill and often
cures, as one has seen, evil by evil.
A woman, too much loved, sent me a letter so cruel that I
didn’t even have the strength to tear it up, but carried it
around in my pocket for weeks.
One night, being quartered in a stable, I took my coat off and
hung it up.
The next day, no letter. A cow had eaten it. Nature is kind.
When General Gouraud, first in command, entered, the “Marseillaise”
sounded, a thrill went through the vast assemblage, and we all arose. _Le
Lion d’Orient_ is tall, intensely straight, his whole thin, khaki-clad
body on parallel lines with his perpendicular armless right sleeve.
Long, straight, brown hair _en brosse_, bronzed skin. His entry was a
thing not to be forgotten. I wondered “Is it the East that stamps great
chiefs with such majesty, that can give them such calm?” and I thought of
Gallipoli—blue seas, battles, wounds, hospital ships. Then the curtain
rose on one of the most delightful theatrical representations I have ever
seen, screamingly funny, and quite chaste.
But all that _entrain_, all that life, to be snuffed out to-morrow or
the next day, or the next? At Craonne or Reims or Verdun or wherever it
may be? And how natural that they should sing of love and women, and say
witty things concerning food and raiment and the government, till the end!
After the performance, during which nobody had ever been so hot before,
the sun moving across the hall and grilling each row in turn, we passed
out in a great jam of _poilus_. One huge man, with the thickest of
meridional accents and red cheeks, and eyes like two black lanterns, and
a coal-black beard, was gesticulating at a small, hook-nosed, blond man.
“_Le Midi, le Midi—qu’est-ce que tu en sais, toi, bêta? Les Anglais
t’ont déjà pris ton trou de Calais, aussi je te demande, sale type_, what
army corps took the _plateau de Craonne_” and he burst into a great laugh
of triumph. Then, borne on the blue waves, we found ourselves in the open
air and realized what we had been breathing.
General Goïgoux presented us to General Gouraud standing by his motor
with several other generals, while a squad of German prisoners, looking
out of the corners of their eyes, were being marched by. His mien was
dignity itself, and out under the sky one was even more conscious of that
harmony of browns and straight lines, that something remote yet majestic
in his being. As we turned to go I saw him speaking to a blind zouave,
and he pressed his hand lingeringly on the man’s shoulder. _Oh, enfants
de la patrie!_
_Saturday, July 28th, 10.30 a.m._
All last night the strange, recurring, sinister sound of the _sirènes_
over the plain of Châlons, and it seemed to me like cries of men of the
Stone Age.
These two days I have been haunted by ghosts of beings of the twilight
ages; elusive emanations, dim suggestions of their psychologies have at
moments possessed me in this city of the Catalaunian Plains.
Rested in my pink-silk wrapper, dead tired—too tired to care whether
“they” got here or not—and stayed in bed during the _alertes_, but I
thought of airmen, attackers and defenders, in the soft summer sky, a
golden half-moon lighting a dim heaven.
Dreamed, but only in snatches, of peace and the ways of peace.
At 4.30 I heard Joseph’s gas-bark and knew he was again with us,
stretched out on the _chaise-longue_ under the chestnut-tree.
As I stood at the window my thoughts went twisting about the stars of
the gorgeous night that was so soon to give way to another summer day,
and I suddenly saw human beings, only as tiny specks, everywhere going
forth at some word of command to their doom. There was a flinging back of
my thoughts upon me, and I turned from my window, as suddenly the chill
of early dawn and the boom of cannon came in, and I could see nothing
for tears and I knew the beauteous earth for what it is—the abode of mad
horrors.
_Later._
Paid my respects to General Goïgoux for an instant of time (I can always
get out quickly) in the old gray house of the Rue Grande Étape, and found
him as always, _distingué_, human, untired, cordial. Officers passing in
and out of his room, and the walls tapestried with maps. Later Colonel
Rolland of the 1st Zouaves, very jaunty in his red fez, adoring his men
and adored by them, and flicking his leg with a short cane having a
deadly knife on a spring in the top, took us to the railroad station, to
inspect the great, dreary sheds that with time, labor, and much energy
are to become _La Cantine Américaine_. Blue-clad men were lying around
like logs in inert bundles on the earthen floor. One had to step over
legs and motley equipment to get anywhere. A dreadful sound of hammering
was echoing through the vast spaces, without, however, seeming to disturb
the slumbers of those men, and I dare say was as a lullaby in comparison
to the first-line trenches.
We stepped into the kitchen. A smiling, twinkling-eyed _cuistot_[11] who
probably had something awful the matter with him—flat-foot or hernia or
something of the kind, or he wouldn’t have been there—with pride asked
us to partake of some of his coffee. He proceeded to dip it from a
great, steaming caldron, pouring it into worn tin cups carefully wiped
first on his much-used apron. My soul responding to echoes of fraternity
enabled me to drink with a smile, which, though it started out rather
sickly, behaved all right as I returned the cup with compliments. The
_cuistot_ said he hoped the _cantine_ would soon be in order, and as he
looked through the small opening through which he shoved the cups to
the _poilus_, rendered still smaller by piles of bread and festoons of
sausage, he added, “_Les têtes de ces dames seront plus consolantes que
la mienne_.” He was a nice, human _cuistot_, though no lover of water
except for making coffee, and then, as we fell into conversation, he
added, “_Si la guerre pouvait finir; mais il y a un fossé de dignité et
personne des deux côtés n’ose le sauter_.” These _poilus_ are astounding!
We then visited Lieutenant Tonzin, who is going to decorate the _cantine_
as never _cantine_ was decorated. He was at the camouflage grounds. As
one knows, camouflage is _de l’art de la guerre le dernier cri_, but the
grounds were discreetly veiled from public gaze, and we were directed
into a little garden, green-treed and sun-flecked. In it was a trestle
with a large, very clever, plaster cast of a _camion_ taking _poilus_
somewhere; they were hanging from every possible place except the wheels,
just such a sight as one constantly sees on the roads near the front.
The gayest sounds of whistling and singing issued from the rather
coquet sun-flooded house behind the garden. Several other young artists
appeared on hearing women’s voices, loving life, adoring art with a new
adoration, and who with something of wonder and much of thankfulness
found themselves for a sweet, brief space in charge of the camouflage
work, with brush and chisel again in hand instead of bayonets.
We looked at the designs for the _cantine_ decorations, quite
charming—but we delicately suggested suppressing the figure of a too
fascinating “mees” that was to embellish the entrance and point to the
_poilus_ the way to those delights. We feared some confusion of thought.
Afterward went to church at Notre Dame, and, sitting there, drew my first
quiet breath in Châlons, out of the hot streets. Beautiful music rolling
through the gray, antique vaulting. A white bier near the altar; some
beloved child was being laid away from sight and hearing and touch and
earthly hope. As I looked about the lovely gray spaces I remembered how
in _La Cathédrale_ Huysmans says the length symbolizes the patience of
the Church during trials and persecutions; the width, that love which
dilates the heart; and the height, our aspirations and our hopes—and
some speechless gratitude overflowed my soul because of being one of the
enduring community to whom, through the gorgeous, terrible ages, nothing
human is foreign. I had a strange, complete sensation of brotherhood and
I saw us all of the great laughing, weeping caravan, winding through the
desert, and the Church compassionate the spot of living waters. And how
“men must endure their going hence, even as their coming hither. Ripeness
is all.” ...
On the same site had once been a pagan temple, and on its altar was the
figure of a Virgin, and at her feet were graven the words, “_Virgini
Parituri_” (“to the Virgin who shall bring forth”). And it had come to
pass.
The most precious of the old windows have lately been put out of harm’s
way, but the ogival tops remain with their jewels of medieval reds and
blues; and on each side, as one looks through the lovely gray vaulting,
are delicate windows of a later epoch, with designs in fawn and green and
yellow.
As I came out behind the mourners following the little white bier, I
noticed again with a sinking of the heart the revolutionary defacement
of the splendid portals. Men in all ages have had seasons of madness,
wherein they destroyed whatever mute and unresisting beauty was within
their reach.
Again through the hot streets—an epic in themselves of war, dust, sun,
blue-clad men, blue-gray automobiles, gallooned officers, and I realized
among other things that without uniforms war would be impossible.
Bought _Le Champ de Bataille de l’Epopée_, also _Le Mannequin d’Osier_,
out of a huge stock of Anatole France’s books, who is evidently a
favorite here. I passed through the old courtyard of the museum,
hermetically sealed _depuis la campagne_, as the porter told me when
I sought his lodge, from which the most savory of noonday smells was
issuing. Uninteresting and entirely beside the point, Buddhist sculptures
fill one side of the court, and then, passing through the portal of a
seventeenth-century church, transported there when the church itself
was being done away with, one finds oneself in a narrow passage on the
walls of which are hung quaint old fire-backs, _plaques de foyer_. The
first is of the eighteenth century, “_l’amour désarmé_” (love was nearly
always disarmed in those days), and this one represented Cupid supporting
a languorous lady. “_Le retour du marché_” of Louis XVI depicted a
housewife returning with a full basket on her arm, and evoked the odor of
the porter’s _pot-au-feu_. A French soldier wounded in the Crimea, 1855,
with his colonel bending over him, might have been any one of a hundred
thousand scenes of to-day. On one were the arms of the King of Spain, and
the date 1608, and on another those of Maria Theresa and her consort,
Francis III, Duke of Lorraine. Their origins were as diverse as the
history of Lorraine itself, and I glimpsed family groups sitting about
hearths, looking at them through the flames.
_Later._
Met to-day two Englishwomen coming out of the hospital. One, nearing
sixty, had something ardent in her charming blue eyes and under austerely
brushed whitening hair; there was a suggestion of banked fires—banked
under ashes of circumstance, probably, as well as time. The other,
somewhat younger, in the full grip of _l’âge dangereux_, had something
inexorable in her regard. When we passed on I asked who they were, and
found they were daily doers of acts of mercy and devotion, and then I
found myself looking for eternal reasons in transient things, under
the impression made by those two women—met only in passing, but whose
emanations I suddenly caught. And I thought: Among the innumerable
phenomena of the war are these women of various ages (though the
phenomenon is most apparent between thirty-five and sixty), brought
for the first time into personal contact with man, other than father
or brother, ministering to his wants, witness of his agonies, awed
spectator of his continual apotheosis, and all the daily transmutations
of the definite and ordinary into the infinite and divine. The world
war gives the one chance for the twisting of conventional fives, lived
along the straightest of fines, into completely unexpected shapes. They
come from abodes of hitherto unescapable virginities, these elemental
women of indescribable innocence, with that warm, wondering look, or
sometimes that determined and inexorable look, upon their faces, these
unchosen and unmated, to become part of the strange lining of the war,
part of the vast patchwork. Not the least strange are these pale, thin
bits, sewn into something riotous, reckless, multicolored, heroic. It’s
a far cry from Shepherd’s Bush or Clapham Junction or Stepney Green
to battle-fields, hospitals, vanishings, potent reminders of forces
withdrawn forever from the world-sum, or, still more, of convalescences
and evocations of returning forces, but _not_ re-established order.
Everywhere the subtle but deathless emanation of the male—his heroisms,
his agonies, his needs, his weakness, and his strength.
Can one wonder at the mighty tide obeying nameless natural laws, like
other tides, that flood the areas where the manhood of the world is
concentrated?
Very hot. Out there in the _Champagne Pouilleuse_ men are marching in
the white dust, resting in the white dust, giving up their lives in the
white dust. Am sitting under the chestnut-tree. A soldier, in civil life
a gardener, has been sent to tidy up our garden, and its _belle patine_
will soon give way to spick-and-spanness. I sensed such a passion of
tenderness in the way he handled his rake that I went over to speak to
him, and this is his history. He is from Cette—_une ville si jolie_—and
he speaks with the heavy accent of his part of the world. He is a
territorial and forms part of the _État-Civil des Champs de Bataille_
(civilian workers on the battle-fields). This doesn’t sound bad, but it
really means that since he was called, eighteen months ago, he, who all
his life has planted flowers, has been digging up dead bodies, hunting in
a literal “body of death” to find the plaques, and then identifying by
means of a map the place where they are found.
“_Madame, je rien pouvais plus._ It was too terrible. I am forty-seven
years old, but I asked to be put among the attacking troops. They
refused, but sent me here. Now in this garden I have found heaven
again.” And his eyes, his soft, suffering eyes, filled with tears.
I asked him about his family—one son is fighting in the Vosges.
“He is six feet four and he so resembles Albert I that they call him _le
roi des Belges_. I lost my daughter a few months ago—a beautiful girl
with curling blond hair. After her fiancé fell at Verdun, she went into
a decline. My other son is young, seventeen, but his turn is near. I
had a beautiful family.” The gardener himself is straight-featured and
straight-browed, caught up how terribly in the wine-press of the war.
“All my life I have been gardener in great houses,” he added, with a
shudder. “The work they gave me _là-bas_ is the most terrible of all.
_On n’y résiste pas à la longue. O les pauvres restes qu’on trouve! O,
Madame!_”
I asked him to bring me the photographs of his family, and his face
brightened for a moment as he stood with his head uncovered. One speaks
to any chance person, and immediately one gets a story that is fit only
to be handled by some master of that incomparable thing, French prose.
_Later._
A while ago investigated the house. Up-stairs is a little room toward the
north, papered in a yellow-and-white pin-stripe design of forty or fifty
years ago. In it is a yellow baroque niche with a shell design at the
top, having a temple or altar-like suggestion, in spite of the too-large,
ugly, marble-topped mahogany wash-stand that fills it. Above the mahogany
bed is a carved wooden holy water font, a little shelf in the corner
for books, and another for a lamp, and there is a window looking out on
small gardens cut up into bits for flowers and vegetables. As I entered
it I seemed to know that some spirit rare and strong enough to project
emanations, sensible even to a stranger long after, had lived, perhaps
died, in it. I settled down immediately in a really not comfortable,
too-small, brown, upholstered arm-chair, sloping forward, and felt
somehow as if I were in choice company, and began to turn the pages of
Bordeaux’s _Dernier jour du Fort de Vaux_, which I had in my hand as I
entered. But something unseen held my attention, not the book. The room
was gently, softly haunted, and the world of spirits was sensibly about
me.... Anyway, the plain of Châlons gives me the creeps.
Joseph, reappearing this afternoon, brought the news that there had been
another air raid on Bar-le-Duc at noon, and they had dropped pounds of
leaflets telling of the Russian defeat, Rumanians retreating, in danger
of being enveloped. The leaflets wound up by saying the Germans were sick
of the war—they supposed the French were—and why not have peace?
CHAPTER IV
THE BURIAL OF PÈRE CAFARD
CHÂLONS, _Sunday, 29th_.
Telegram that M. de Sinçay may be passing through. I would like to see
his _grand seigneur_ contour decorate our 1860 establishment. Go to the
_Bureau de la Place_, and nothing less than a general (Abbevillers)
grasps the receiver and telephones for me to Bar-le-Duc—but without
result. They are all in “our” _secteur_ “of a courtesy”!
Twelve-o’clock mass at Notre Dame. Again rolling music, and the green
vestment of the priest especially beautiful at the end of that high gray
Gothic vista. Many, many military. I thought of an English officer who
said to me not long ago:
“See how the soldier is exalted in the New Testament. It is certainly not
the man of law, the money-changer, the man of politics, nor governors.
When Christ has an especial lesson to show, how often He shows it through
the soldier, even unto the servant of the centurion.”
On returning, found Mrs. S. and Miss E. arrived from the village of
the fifteenth-century towers,[12] and the khaki-clad sons of Mars from
over the seas, their hearts filled with patriotism and their tank with
American _essence_. Coffee under the chestnut-tree, lovely sun filtering
through, and the little white butterflies flying about the little white
ash-tree; and we told stories, being all of us souls that laugh, which we
did, till we couldn’t breathe, at the story of the woman’s-preparedness
meeting in a certain transcendental town where the head of the assembly
in solemn accents besought as many as felt drawn to such work to become
automobilists—“and the moment the Germans set foot in New York rush the
virgins to the West, preferably Kansas City.” In the town of brotherly
love, where a like assemblage was held, an immediate position was
available, March, 1917, with a commission of major-general, to look after
dead soldiers’ widows for another blinking female. _Oh! là, là!_—and when
one thinks we’ve _got_ to win the war!
_Later._
Have just laid down _Le Mannequin d’Osier_, completely dazzled by that
first chapter, so monstrously clever, so diabolically lucid, so icily
logical, so magnetically cynical, and I said to myself, after all, “one
can only write of war in between wars.” I long for a friend to read with
me the pages where M. Roux, on short leave during his years’ military
service, says to M. Bergeret, “_Il y a quatre mois que je n’ai pas
entendu une parole intelligente_,” to the paragraph where M. Bergeret
says, “_Mais nous sommes un peuple de héros et nous croyons toujours que
nous sommes trahis_.” It stimulated a desire for the discussion of things
as they are, over against what one idiotically hopes they may be, with a
bit of imagination concerning the future thrown in.
_July 29th, evening._
In the afternoon we all went to another theatrical representation in
the big hall, given by the _1er Régiment de Marche des Zouaves_. Again
immense concourse. Again the “Marseillaise,” and again the _Lion
d’Orient_ made his majestic entry, and dozens of generals and high
officials followed him, and again all sat forming their glittering
hemicycle in front of the stage. Again a few nurses, some wives of
officers, and the thousands of _poilus_.
A great poster read: “_Vous êtes priés d’assister au convoi, service, et
enterrement du Père Cafard, assassiné par le Communiqué._
“_Le deuil sera conduit par le Pinard, le Jus, la Gniole, le Tabac, et
tous les membres du Chacal hurlant._”
It appears that those of the 1st Zouaves still in hospital had had a rise
in temperature at the thought that their representation might not equal
that of the Moroccan Division of Friday. The _Compère_ was made to look
as much as possible like Colonel Rolland—adored by his men. “_On R’met
Ca!_” has been given in the trenches all over the front, and was just as
funny and amusing as the other, but there was a strange intermezzo about
three o’clock, when the dreadful sun, shining through the glass panes of
the sides (on the roof great squares of canvas had been spread), began
to get fainter. It was like being in the hot-room of a Turkish bath.
Suddenly a darkness fell, accompanied by a deafening and terrifying
noise of a heavy rattling on the roof and a beating in at the sides; the
voices and music were completely drowned and the performance had to be
suspended. Even the officers were beginning to look about—when the lights
suddenly went out and we found ourselves in Stygian blackness at 4.30 of
a summer afternoon, the terrific noise continuing, with the under-note of
the stirring of the thousands assembled. A nameless fear, or something
akin to it, went through the vast assemblage. Finally we realized that
it was heaven, not the enemy, bombarding us, as hailstones, even by
the time they had gone through many hot hands, as big as turkey eggs,
were passed about. There was the sound of breaking glass, water began to
rush in, the heavy canvas, spread on the roof as protection against the
sun, and also to prevent the light from being seen from the air, alone
prevented the roof from breaking in. Finally the lights reappeared and
the performance proceeded to the diminishing sound of heavy rain—but it
was a strange experience. Even those generals of Olympic calm had begun
to “think thoughts” at one moment. It would have been a big “bag,” had
anything been doing, and we all knew it.
Mrs. S. and Miss E. have been persuaded to stay at the house by the
Marne, rather than at La Haute Mère Dieu, and we have arranged to double
up.
I am to motor back to Paris with them to-morrow.
CHAPTER V
A PROVIDENTIAL FORD
PARIS, _July 31st_.
Yesterday, at 8.30 in the damp morning, Lieutenant Robin appeared with
my military pass to return by auto instead of by train, and I said a
special farewell to the gardener, carrying our bags out to the motor
in a passionate tenderness of courtesy. Miss Nott and Miss Mitchell
bade us Godspeed, and we passed over the Marne and out of town. At the
_consigne_ examination of our papers, our charming chauffeuse excited
much attention. An officer standing there with pasteboard box and leather
bag asked if we would give him a lift. The road was unusually empty and
he had been awaiting an act of Providence for two hours. We were it.
He would be in ordinary times a Frenchman of the stereotyped banal sort,
and he was entirely without charm, though I dare say he is known as a
_beau garçon_ in Lyons, where before the war he was _marchand de bois_.
But the war transmutes everything it touches, and he, too, had undergone
the subtle change. He said, quite simply for a man naturally fatuous,
“_Je ne retrouverai jamais ma vie d’autre fois_.” I seemed to see what
that life had been. Small but good business transactions; some success
with women, as I said he would be considered as handsome; the theater;
reading newspapers in a café; talking of the happenings of his quarter
of the town—and the lamp of his soul burning only dimly. But even he has
been caught up in the “chariot that rides the ridges” and must partake of
_la haine et tous ses maux, la gloire et tous ses crimes_. We drop him
at a crossroad and he takes a muddy side-path to the village where his
regiment is billeted.
At another crossway just out of the village of Vertus another officer
was waiting. We called out, “Is this the road to Epernay?” And then, “Do
you want a lift?” This time it was a dark-eyed young man with a kindling
glance and something responsive and mercurial in his being, giving a
sensation of personality, awake, running, a-thrill. He had twenty-four
hours’ permission to go to Paris to see his mother, and had arrived to
see the train pulling out of the little station. He also was waiting
Fate at the crossroads, and crossroads in war-time are a favorite abode
of Fate. He had been wounded near Suippes, lay twenty-four hours in a
shell-hole, and was finally brought in by some man he didn’t know, whose
head was blown off as he was pulling him into the trench. Something deep
rustled in my heart at the vision of the splendor of that anonymity. Six
months in hospital, six months of convalescing, and then a hunger for the
front—_quorum pars fuit_.
We were passing through a beautiful country of vineyards, Vertus, Mesnil,
Avize, in the loveliness of graded greens, malachite, beryl, emerald,
jasper, and stretches of aquamarine where the grapes had been powdered
with the _mélange de Bordeaux_. Everywhere were little sharp, steep
hills, their plantings taking all kinds of lights as they turned to east
or west or south.
At Epernay we wound about the streets till we came to the Hôtel de
l’Europe, marked with a star in the guide; but you see no stars when you
get into its encumbered, dull little courtyard—as slightly modern as
possible—ask for luncheon, any kind of luncheon, and find one can’t have
it or anything till twelve, the only fixed thing, except the _consigne_,
I have discovered in the war zone. We went across the square to the Café
de la Place, where we had _œufs sur le plat_, a yard and a half of thin,
crusty bread, a thick pat of yellow butter, and a bottle of Chablis,
that poured out pinky into our glasses. After which, reinforced and
most cheerful, we went to the Place du Marché, where were many signs of
the campaign of August and September, 1914. Among débris of bombarded
buildings the fruit-market was being held. Plums, peaches, and apricots
were of the most delicious, and we got pounds of them, which later were
to be smashed and mashed and to ruin our dressing-bags and our clothes
and the motor seats as we bumped along. It all came from Paris except the
tiny, sweet, white grapes.
Epernay seems banal, driving through it, but if one thinks a bit, all
sorts of things flash into the mind. It has a Merovingian past, and has
been pillaged innumerable times by innumerable hosts. It belonged to
the Counts of Champagne, to Louise of Savoy; Henry IV besieged it in
person, and Maréchal de Biron fell by his side. Now thinking of its great
champagne industry, into mind come memories of dinner-tables around which
sat white-vested, decorated statesmen, even unto the kind that did not
prevent war, and lovely women, and the toss of repartee, and flash of
jewel and white throat, and all the once-accustomed things no longer ours.
As we got out of Epernay a terrible temptation assailed us. Three
law-abiding women, by reason of original sin, I suppose, were drawn to
take the forbidden road to Reims—Reims, the scarred, the pitiful—Reims,
whose cannon sounded even now in our ears—rather than the straight path
of duty and _sauf-conduits_ to Paris.
“After all, we’re not here to go joy-riding in the war zone,” said
one, virtuously; and then prudence, most dismal of virtues, triumphed,
bolstered up by a look at a well-guarded bridge, and I told the inspiring
story of the principal of the school my mother went to, whose last words
to every graduate class were, “What is duty, young ladies?” And the young
ladies were expected to respond, “A well-spring in the soul.” It isn’t
(and never has been), and our eyes kept sweeping the hill between the
Epernay road and that great plain of Champagne in the midst of which is
set the broken jewel of France. A military auto passed as we stood there,
and an officer waved us onward. We let that hand pointing us to Paris
decide. It was the triumph of prudence—plus a lively sense of favors to
come. Some one muttered, “Had we been going to take the boat on Saturday,
oh, then mayhap, mayhap....”
Dormans. Several kilometers before we got into Dormans little crosses
began to show themselves along the roadside. All through here was heavy
fighting during the battle of the Marne. The first grave we stopped by
bore on its little cross the words, “_Trois Allemands_,” and it was
neatly fenced up with black sticks and wire. We started to climb the
hill, and among the malachite, the beryl, the emerald, the jasper, and
the aquamarine vines were many other graves. Sometimes it would be “_20
Français_,” the red-and-white-and-blue _cocarde_ decorating the cross.
Once it was “_30 Allemands_.” On another was the name “_Lastaud, le 3
septembre, 1914, souvenir d’un ami_.” I thought how friendship has been
glorified in this war.
But mostly it was the continuous gorgeous anonymity of the defenders of
the land that clutched the heart and with them the invaders, pressing
their bayonets and their wills into a land not theirs. I was once
more again before the awful tangle of the world as I looked at these
resting-places. Over beyond the crest of the hill and the forest was
Montmirail. Just a hundred years before, Napoleon had put these names
upon the scrolls of history, and again and then again they had resounded
to marching feet, the terrors of invasion, the heroisms of defense. One
of a group of soldiers passing called out as we stood by one of the
German graves:
“I came through here in 1914.”
“But you still walk the earth,” I answered.
“I got a ball in the hip, all the same, on the top of that hill,” and he
pointed across the road. “_Mais j’ai eu de la chance._” And a look of a
strange and pitiful wonder that he was above the earth, not under it,
flashed for a moment over his young face; then he touched his cap and
went singing down the road with his companions, and I caught the refrain,
“_Ces mots sacrés, ces mots sacrés, gloire et patrie, gloire et patrie_.”
And somehow, after Dormans, we were all quiet. I only remember long,
gray villages, mostly eighteenth century, and many blue soldiers walking
about their broad, central streets, and signs of billetings, “_30 hommes,
2 officiers_,” “_5 hommes, 2 chevaux_,” black-robed women coming out
of little Gothic churches, and children playing, and in between the
villages great avenues of poplar and plane trees. Then we lost the Marne
and picked up the Seine, and passed La Ferté, and Meaux, seen from the
inside, preserved its flavor of “_autres temps, autres mœurs_,” in spite
of the 1917 soldiers billeted there, walking hand in hand with girls who
don’t have a ghost of a chance, in military towns, to get through the war
as they began it.
Entered Paris in a fine drizzle of rain at 6.30. Our charming chauffeuse
dead tired after the long day, but steering us so prudently and yet so
quickly through the wet, crowded streets. Give me a good woman chauffeur
_any day_!—not simply when coming from the front! She takes no chances,
but she makes good time and she gets you there. But somehow one leaves
one’s heart at the front, and I thought to myself as I got to the hotel
door, “It’s not so good, after all, to feel _just safe_ and to be
comfortable.”
PART III
LORRAINE IN AUTUMN
“_L’élégante et mélancolique Lorraine_”
CHAPTER I
NANCY AND MOLITOR
_1.30 p.m., Tuesday, October 9th._
Passing Meaux. Square gray tower of its cathedral against a gray sky, the
gray hemicycle of its lovely apse cutting in against reddish-gray roofs;
gray houses with old towers built into them; yellowing acacia and plane
and willow trees; level corn-fields stripped of their harvest, pheasants
and magpies pecking in them; golden pumpkins; and _betteraves_ showing
red and vermilion roots bursting out of the ground; everything wet—wet.
LIGNY-EN-BARROIS.
Two American soldiers walking up a muddy village street in the dusk; rain
falling; a cinnamon-colored stream slipping by; and a quantity of shabby,
wet foliage and wetter meadows.
GONDRECOURT, _5.40_.
In the extreme point of the angle where the Nancy train seems to turn
back to Paris and where many American soldiers are billeted. Cheerless,
dimly lighted station. Groups of our men standing about, high piles
of United States boxes, marked “Wizard Oats.” Some persuasion of
black-frock-coated “sky pilot” walking up and down and humming, “Pull
for the shore, sailor, pull for the shore” (there _was_ a lot of water
about!), and then in the darkness the train slipped out. There and in
all the dim, wet Lorraine villages about are damp, puzzled, homesick,
forlorn, brave, determined, eager young Americans.
HÔTEL EXCELSIOR ET D’ANGLETERRE, NANCY, _Tuesday evening_.
Cabs at station, hot water, writing-paper, meat, warmth, all sorts of
things you don’t always get on Tuesday in Paris. Everything, in fact,
except light. Dining-room full of officers. _Chic atmosphère de guerre_
began to envelope me, not yet experienced that day. Started from Paris
tired and not particularly receptive, but was conscious of a slow
quickening of sensibility as the hours passed, drawing me within the zone
of armies.
This “chic war atmosphere” is like nothing else. Impersonal and larger
lungs are needed to breathe it. We no longer, so many of us, read of
their battles, but they still fight them, these blue-clad men out here.
In the coal-black evening, stumbling from the station, one realizes it
all once more—and there is some lighting of the soul.
_October 10th._
Nancy in rain and storm, and all night the sound of cannon and gun and
mitrailleuse turned against sweet flesh and blood, the sons of women
dying in agony hard as their mother’s pain, and no way out. Never were
the imaginations of men less elastic; little groups everywhere are hourly
setting this cold grind in motion with a word or a gesture, around green
tables or bending over maps—in a few small spaces deciding the agonies of
millions.
An _avion_ almost tapped at my window once toward morning and reminded me
of a young aviator with whom we talked in the train last night, his face
a-twitch, strange eyes, gloomy, set mouth, once _jeunesse dorée_. A hard
look as he answered:
“_Avion de chasse, il n’y a que cela._” He had been “resting” in the
cavalry, where there was little movement, and he couldn’t stand it. As
for the trenches—
“_O les tranchées! Être avec des gens que je ne connais pas, sous des
conditions indescriptibles; non, je n’en peux plus._”
“Better to fall from the heavens?” I asked him.
And then I realized the disarray of nerves, the complete unfitting of the
being to an earthly habitat, in the knowledge that life is measured by
an almost countable number of hours or days, scarcely weeks, and rarely,
rarely months, and the calling on help from the flower of sleep to fit
one for acts impossible to normal being.
I must say this very evidently “made-in-Germany” hotel is most
comfortable. _Jugend-Stil_ designed bed, exquisitely clean; great white
eiderdown; a munificence of brass electric-light fixtures representing
leaves, with frosted shades running from pale pink to pale green, and
giving plenty of light; the iron shutters tightly pulled down, of
course. Large wash-stand with a huge faucet for hot water, bearing
the name “Jacob”; the heating apparatus by Rückstuhl; the telephone,
“Berliner-system”; electric light and lift the familiar “Schindler.”
Wardrobe and mirror over wash-stand have, like the bed, a design,
not of conventionalized flowers, but of flowers devoid of life. The
inexpressibly sloppy _mollesse_ of _art nouveau_ is in such contrast to
the beautiful precision of touch of the eighteenth century.
At 9.30 E. M. came into my room and said, “We’d better doll up and be
off.” I leave it to the gentlest of readers to surmise what we did before
being off, and I would like to say here that one doesn’t always “doll up”
for others; the process gives to one’s own being a sense of completeness
most sustaining. It comes after that of having one’s clothes put on
properly.
_En route_ to the Prefect’s we met the tall, good-looking blond young son
of Jean de Reszke, “_très chic, cherchant le danger_”; “_en voilà un qui
n’a pas froid aux yeux_,” the only and adored child of his parents. It’s
not a very promising situation for them. But again I thought, “Nothing
but good can befall the soldier, so he play his part well,” and started
to ponder on the incalculable growth of filial piety, and of the love
of mothers, and their griefs, when, suddenly walking along the gray
streets of Nancy, the scene shifted, and it was the Metropolitan Opera
House that I saw—the lights, the red glow, the boxes, the jewels; the
warmth, the stir of the orchestra, the quiet of the listening house, were
about me. It seemed to be the second act of “Tristan and Isolde” after
the duo, when King Mark makes his noble entry and in those unforgetable
accents begins his broken-hearted apostrophe to Tristan, “_Tatest du’s in
Wirklichkeit, wähnst du das?_” And all that unsurpassed and unsurpassable
art of the great Polish brothers was again evoked; one now gathered to
his rest in stress of war, the other knowing a greater fear than for
himself.
Then I found myself in the Place Stanislas under gray morning skies,
instead of the gleaming twilight web. I felt suddenly and acutely the
turning of the seasons and the inexorable advent of winter through which
unsheltered flesh and blood must pass. That ravishing of the spirit I
knew in the warm June sunset was mine no more.
_Later._
Waiting for the motor to drive to Lunéville.
Went with Madame Mirman, the wife of the _Préfet de la Meurthe et
Moselle_, to visit Molitor. It is a huge collection of barrack-buildings
which for three years has contained that terrible precipitation of
old men, women, and children from the devastated districts around
about. They are received in every conceivable condition of hunger,
dirt, disease, and distress of soul. They had been living in the woods
and fields that first summer, and the children running the streets of
half-ruined towns, before being brought to Molitor.
[Illustration: SISTER JULIE]
[Illustration: BAS-RELIEF OF THE REFUGEES
As they passed at Evian—but typical of any group anywhere.]
We went first to the school-building, and into the kindergarten room
where rows of children were making straight lines with beans on little
tables. Very hot and stuffy in the hermetically sealed room, every child
sniffling and sneezing and coughing. There are always faces that stand
out, and in this room, as the children rose and sang a song with patting
of the hands, there was one child of five with gestures so lovely and
movements of the body so rhythmic that one realized afresh the eternal
differences in the seasoning of the human _pâte_. She was between two
clumsy, wooden-faced children, one with a peaked forehead, the other with
a heavy jaw.
We then went up-stairs to a class-room of older boys, and after we had
spoken to the schoolmaster I noticed a handsome boy with shining eyes and
a firm mouth. The master, who was new and wished to become acquainted
with his pupils, had written the following questions on the blackboard:
“Whence do you come? What was the occupation of your parents? Are you
happy at Molitor?” etc. Well, that little boy of eleven, when asked what
he had written, turned out to be a sort of cross between Demosthenes and
Gambetta, and read from his slate an impassioned apostrophe about “_le
flot envahisseur des barbares, quand délivrera-t-on la France martyrisée
de la main destructrice de l’ennemi?_” and to the question, “Are you
happy at Molitor?” the answer was, “_Oui, on est bien à Molitor, mais
rien ne remplace le foyer; quand on a perdu cela, on a tout perdu_.”
The face of the master showed some embarrassment at any restrictions
on happiness at Molitor, but the boy, whose eyes had begun to flame,
continued: “_O quand viendra le jour de la Revanche, le jour sacré de la
délivrance?_” and wound up with something about his blood and the blood
of his children. His father, who was dead, had been employed in the
customs at Avricourt, and his mother now cooked in one of the Molitor
buildings. Then we passed through a room where some fifty women were
sorting and stemming hops; the strong, warm odor enveloped us and the
eyes of the women followed us.
Then out across the immense courtyard to one of the dormitory buildings.
Rows of beds, and above them, around the walls, a line of shelves on
which is every kind of small article that could be carried in flight,
from trimmings for Christmas trees to shrines and little strong-boxes.
As we entered the first room, Madame Mirman said to an old woman with
deep, soft eyes:
“_Comment ça va-t-il aujourd’hui?_”
And with such grace she answered:
“_Oh, Madame, c’est la vieillesse, et on n’en guérit pas._”
Another woman, nursing a rheumatic knee, when asked about her son, who
had been at Molitor on a three days’ permission, put her cracked old hand
over her heart and said, “_Voir un peu sa personne fait oublier tout_.”
In all the big rooms near the long windows women sit bent over embroidery
and passementerie frames. One of them, with thin hair and horny hands,
was working with extreme rapidity on a bright _pailleté_ strip for an
evening gown, a design of silver lilies on white tulle, in such contrast
to her worn face and bent figure.
Many were working at lovely and intricate tea-cloths, with designs of
the Lorraine cross, and thistle, oak and acorn designs, that had been
handed down through generations. Some of the work Madame Mirman is able
to dispose of directly, while some is contracted for with big shops.
When we came down-stairs there was a great sound of young feet and voices
and various noises of well-cared-for children, just dismissed from the
seats of learning, coming up the stone stairway to their dinner.
It’s the threading up of all these destinies, this web of the France to
be, that is the great problem. And oh, how terrible is this uptearing
of human beings, this ghastly showing of the roots! I have seen it
wholesale, east and west. I remember especially the first two evacuations
of Czernowitz and the adjacent towns and villages during the Russian
advance through Galicia. They would flood the streets of Vienna by the
tens of thousands, in pitiful groups, always the same—old men, women, and
children; and it’s all alike, it’s war, the ruthless, the indescribable,
and everywhere the children paying most heavily. Could the war-book of
_children_ be written no eyes could read it for tears....[13]
We went back to luncheon at the Prefecture, where I met M. Mirman, one
of the most striking figures of the war. Since the 12th of August, 1914,
when he took up his duties as _Préfet de la Meurthe et Moselle_, his
handsome, straight-featured face has figured at every gathering of sorrow
or relief. As he sat at his table, surrounded by his six children, he
talked of those first days when Nancy was in danger and it was not known
if _le Grand Couronné_ on which Castelnau had flung his _paraphe could_
protect them, and then he told of many urgent present needs.
After lunch we drove with Madame Mirman to her favorite good work,
_l’école ménagère_.
When we got there the elementary class, girls of thirteen to fourteen,
were chopping herbs and onions to make seasoning for soups in winter, and
putting it up in stone pots. Another class was kneading and rolling out
dough. Then we went into the great sewing-room and turned over the books
of miniature sample pieces of underclothing. When the girls become expert
they are given material and make their own trousseaux.
With a sigh Madame Mirman said: “But I am sad for these girls. The men
who might have been their husbands lie dead on the field of honor, and
there will be no homes for them.”
Something chill and inexorable laid its hand on me as I thought: only
graves, and they leveled out of memory by time; except in the hearts of
mothers, to whom _voir un pen sa personne_ is the supreme joy, and the
knowledge that it can be no more the supreme sorrow.
HÔTEL DES VOSGES, LUNÉVILLE, _11.30 p.m._
A long day. Many pages of the book of life and death turned. Just before
leaving Nancy, made a little tour of the battered station. Scarcely
a pane of glass left anywhere, but in and out of it is the ceaseless
movement of blue-clad men. A few flecks of a strange, dull amber in a
pale-pink sky, the true sunset sky of Nancy. A bishop with a military
cap and a chaplain in khaki pass, lines of _camions_ and Red Cross
ambulances. Suddenly, beyond the station, a dark-winged thing against the
sky is seen to drop, right itself for a moment, then a column of smoke
goes up from it, then a flame, then there is a falling of something
black just behind the twin Gothic towers of St.-Léon. The streets filled
instantly, “_C’est un des nôtres_,” said a man with field-glasses, and
then, death in the sky not being unusual here, they went about their
business, and the long, delicate towers of St.-Léon got black as ink
against the flaming sky. But a man’s soul was being breathed out in some
distant beet-root field or in the forest of Haye. Peace to him!
The next thing I saw, that has become a familiar sight in the last
months, was an American soldier on some sort of permission, and hanging
from his arm, neatly bound, was a pretty little “dictionary”—from whom,
however, came sounds of broken English. The British Expeditionary Force
saved the classics from destruction at one time; now “salvage” seems to
be rather the turn of the American forces. One can only philosophize on
the indestructibility of matter.
The Place Stanislas was a bit out of our way, but when I saw the lovely
Louis XV knots of pink that the orb of day was tying in the sky before he
quite departed I begged for three minutes in its pale loveliness. Against
the delicate ribbons of the sky were urns and figures, urns with stone
flames arising from them, softly glowing, or stone flower-twisted torches
held by winged beings, children and youths or angels I knew not—but I did
know in a flash just how and why the Place Stanislas came into being.
In the gray streets were blue-clad, heavily laden men, and the chill
autumn twilight was falling about them. Oh, Nancy! dream of the past and
yet with so much of the hope of the present within your gates!
As we sped out of town, through the vast manufacturing suburbs, I turned
and saw a bank of orange glory in the west, cut into browns and reds,
with little threadings of gray and green and blue, for all the world
like an ancient Cashmere shawl with light thrown on it.
Night was falling as we passed through St.-Nicolas du Port. The two
immense towers of the church, which dominate the landscape, were cutting
black and cypress-like into the sky. The streets were full of dim
figures—soldiers, overalled men, and many trousered women coming from
munition-factories, with baskets and clinging children, hurrying home to
get the evening meal.
We two American women found ourselves threading our way through it all in
a Ford which E. M. was driving herself, the Ford which in the afternoon
had allowed itself caprices only permissible to lovelier objects, and
there, close behind the French lines, we talked of love and marriage, and
the Church. And these things had been and are for one, and for the other
all to come.
Among its various imperfections, the Ford was one-eyed, and our little
light did not cast its beams very far. We got tangled up into a long
line of _camions_, with blinding headlights, quite extinguishing us as
we hugged the right side of the road. Finally we reached the outpost of
Lunéville, where the guard stopped us, dark and disreputable-looking as
we were, flashed his lantern, saw the lettering on the auto. We cried,
“Vitrimont,” and then passed on. The chill night had completely fallen,
but in the dark fields rose darker crosses that only one’s soul could
see. Peace to them that lie beneath!
Into town safe; drew up at the door of the house that was once an old
Capuchin monastery, groped our way through a dark garden to find a warm
welcome from Mademoiselle Guérin, a shining tea-table, an open fire, many
books, things seemed _too_ well with us.
CHAPTER II
EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY EMANATIONS
_October 11th, 7.30._
Awakened at five o’clock to the sound of cavalry passing under my
windows. I have three, and got the full benefit of the hoofs. I looked
out into a bluish, late-night sky; endless shadowy lines of men that
I knew were blue-clad were defiling, and there was a faint booming of
cannon. Everything that the pitchy blackness of the streets of Lunéville
prevents the inhabitants from doing between 5 and 8 P.M. they do between
5 and 8 A.M. The hour was set back on the 7th, which is why we have
suddenly so much morning and these chopped-off afternoons. It makes the
streets of the old town “hum” in the early hours. No Taubes; the sky too
threatening. Again _chic atmosphère de guerre_.
My big room is charming. The doors have panelings of the great epoch
of Lunéville, but on the walls is a fresh papering of a pinkish _toile
de Jouy_ design, in such good taste, an abyss between it and the
_Jugend-Stil_ of the “Hôtel Excelsior et d’Angleterre”; over each door is
a lunette containing a faded old painting.
The pink-curtained windows have deep embrasures; a fresh, thick,
pale-gray carpet quite covers the floor; on the mantelpiece is a bronze
clock, a large Europa sitting on a small bull. I suspect _it_ is 1830.
In one corner a commodious Louis XV _armoire_. On one of its doors
is carved a peasant’s house and a hunter aiming at a deer half-hidden
in some trees. On the other is a fishing scene and a bridge, and in
the distance a château. The panels are inclosed in charming Pompadour
scrolls, and there is an elaborate wrought-iron lock of the same period.
It seemed to epitomize the life of Lorraine, as well as “the reign of
the arts and talents.” Discovered last night that the electric light is
in the right place, so that a lady can dress for dinner or read in bed
with equal facility. There is all the hot water one could wish, an open
fireplace, but it was with a sigh that I said, as I heard the cannon,
“_Rien ne manque_.” The maid, who had been in England, put our things out
last night with a dainty touch, the ribbons on top; my pink satin négligé
was placed with art across the chair by my bed. In E. M.’s room, equally
comfortable, her pale-blue one was also tastefully displayed. Somehow,
all the physical comfort is so insistently in contrast with what is
being gone through with a few kilometers away, and though my soul can be
supremely content without any of it, I looked for the moment with a new
appreciation on this flicker of comfort behind that dreadful front.
Again we groped through the Place Léopold after dinner at Mlle. Guérin’s,
feeling our way slowly under completely remote stars, Jupiter so
gorgeous that for a moment my heart was afraid. Then I became sensible
of ghostly and lovely companions, the amiable secrets of whose amiable
lives have been revealed to me in many a tome since I crossed that square
in those linden-scented nights of June. Did linden scent, on which a
long chapter could be written, have anything to do with their morals, I
wonder? However that may be, I thought of Duke Léopold going from the
château through the park to the house in the rue de Lorraine to see
the Princesse de Craon, who bore twenty children here in Lunéville,
preserving her beauty and her husband’s love, and that of Duke Léopold as
well, evidently having the secret of squaring the circle without breaking
it (unknown in the twentieth century, when everything “goes bang” if it
is but breathed upon). Then of the wild and witty Chevalier de Boufflers,
painting and making verses, loving and forgetting, whose mother, beloved
of “_Stanislas, Roi de Pologne et Duc de Lorraine et de Bar_,” was the
bright particular star of Stanislas’s Court, as his grandmother had
been of Léopold’s. And how often _La divine Emilie_ and Voltaire passed
through the Place Léopold in their coach to be put up at the Palace
and contribute to the gaiety of nations. They and many others filled
the square, and I was thinking of discreet sedan-chairs coming from
rendezvous rather than of the uncompromised and uncompromising lamp-post
that finally got me, minus the light.
Now I quite dislike getting up from this literally downy couch, with
its dainty pink-lined, lace-trimmed, white-muslin covered eiderdown and
its heaps of soft pillows, to investigate further their _amours_, and
in general the _arts et talents_ of the eighteenth century, but so I
willed it, and so it must be done. For some reason nervous energy is at a
low ebb. There are moments when I throw my life out of the window, when
nothing seems impossible and most things quite easy, but to-day the gray
world outside, _l’élégante et mélancolique Lorraine_, I would consider
well lost for converse with a beloved friend by my fireside.
_October 12th._