and if you don’t keep it fairly bright, you won’t find even that. Oh, woe
is me! about six o’clock mine was suddenly too dark and sad for words,
so I betook me to the downy couch of the morning, with a batch of letters
and various books given me by M. Guérin at lunch, some old, some new,
concerning _l’élégante et mélancolique Lorraine_. The Hôtel des Vosges
is ahead of any Ritz that was ever built, and, what’s more, in it your
soul’s your own, even if it is a poor and dark and trembling thing.
My “_Symphonie Pastorale_” letter to —— returned to me. Have just reread
it and pinned it into the Journal. It’s all part of the same.
AIX-LES-BAINS, _vendredi, 27 août, 1917_.
... The orchestra, pale, emasculated, having the minimum of strings—the
musicians of France are dead or in the trenches—seemed without accent
during the first part of the program. “_La Chasse du Jeune Henri_” of
Méhul, “_Les Eolides_” of César Franck, something of Grétry, Dukas,
Saint-Saëns, _enfin_, one of the usual war-time programs. But then
followed the “_Symphonie Pastorale_” and the master’s voice suddenly
swelled the thin sounds, triumphant in the beauty of his order and
splendor.
A.—(_Sensations agréables en arrivant à la Campagne. Allégro ma non
troppo._) I felt myself invaded by a familiar but long-untasted delight
as my ear received the gorgeous consonances, and the lovely theme of
the violins drew me to an interior place. My fancy was set a-wandering
in a world of green glades, and broad meadows covered with asphodel and
belladonna and fringed by dark plantings of pines, such as the master had
wandered in, and “upon my eyes there lay a tear the dream had loosened
from my brain.” In deep serenity I found myself thinking on appearances
of “things wise and fair,” feeling myself in some way included in a
company of paradisaical beings.
Suddenly an almost unbearable spiritual exasperation succeeded
the delight, and I saw a scarred and dreadful scene, like to the
lunar landscape of the battle-field of Verdun, and I knew that my
dwelling-place was a world of blood-madness. I tried to beat off the
invading horror. Hot tears of protest came to my eyes, a feeling of
suffocation clutched my throat, and a something burning wrapped my soul.
Delight was dead.
B.—(_Au bord du Ruisseau. Andante molto moto._) The master spoke again,
in a voice of purling water over smooth stones and through soft grasses;
the music of the lower strings, monotonous, hypnotic, possessed my
fancy. Again the joy with which he was looking on the beauty of the
exterior world tried to communicate itself to me. But my eyes fell on a
white-haired man seated near me, a black band about his arm, dozing or
dreaming, I knew not which. He awakened with a start and groan, and was
doubtless thinking on combat and empty places and “heroes struggling with
heroes and above them the wrathful gods.”
And I thought of Veiled Destinies and high and nameless sacrifices and
children at evening and silent firesides, and broken loves and other
visible and invisible things.
C.—(_Joyeuse réunion de Paysans. Allégro._) Expressing the master’s
deep belief in the goodness of humanity, its deathless adorations, its
inextinguishable hopes.
But the houses of the peasants are empty, even here in Savoy, and
husbands and fathers and sons will cross their thresholds no more. “The
ancients have ceased from the gates, the young men from the choir of the
singers.”
I sat by the stream among the peasants and remembered suddenly two
combatants, an Austrian and a Serb, visited in a hospital in Vienna that
first winter of the war. One had lain by a frozen brook across a fallen
log for two days, his hands and feet alone touching the ground, and
when he was brought in they were black and swollen, and as I saw him he
was but a trunk of a man with dull eyes. And the other, the Serb, with
something wild and burning in his look, and restless hands, had fallen
with his feet in a stream, and he, too, would walk no more; and so one
thinks of brooks and sweet, moving waters these days.
(_Orage—Tempête. Allégro._) The sudden D flat, the world in noise and
horror and protesting hate, and hard, bright-eyed men meeting from East
and West, the sons of the world falling for the sins of the world; and
there is no way out, for all words save that of peace may be spoken. And
I thought on the loneliness of the mind, and knew it for as great or
greater than that of the heart, for mostly humanity lives by its personal
throbs, its desires and its hopes and fears, and these are of such
abundance that there are always contacts. But the loneliness of the mind
is a world where there is scarcely any sound of footsteps, few voices
call, and sometimes it is deathly cold, and that is why I write to _you_
to-night.
I listened again. (_Joie et sentiments de reconnaissance après l’orage.
Allegretto._) And I suddenly realized how unsubstantial, for all their
thickness, are the towers wherein each dwells isolated from some near
happiness, shut off from some close beatitude, that for a dissolving
touch might be his own. And I found that the completed harmonies of the
lovely finale, “_Herr, wir danken Dir_,” were seeking my mortal ear,
and my soul was being regained to tranquillity. My mind was turned from
untimely vanishings, or the despair of men of middle life who go up
to battle, and from all the company of those who “have wrapped about
themselves the blue-black cloud of death,” and I saw again visions,
felicities, progressions, accomplishments. Then, not bearing less
beneficent harmonies, I went out, and Hope, with lovely, veiled, outcast,
undesired Peace, accompanied me through the warm Savoyan night. But
they left me at the door of my dwelling, as the one-armed _concierge_
saluted me, and the one-legged lift-man (symbols of my real world) took
me up-stairs. Now I am alone with thoughts of him who gave to melody its
eternal fashion and to music itself its furthest soul, and would that you
had listened with me!... You who will not, Peace!...
M. Guérin’s book-loving, artistic, perceptive son, _en permission_, with
a dreadful cold, was at lunch, Colonel ——, and several other men. Mr. G.,
whose family have been part owners of the Lunéville porcelain-factories
for one hundred and fifty years, is charming, erudite, and afterward,
over our coffee by his library fire, we talked politics and literature
and music. I had just been reading Madame de Staël’s _De l’Allemagne_,
not at all in favor just now, which I had picked up on her centenary.
“_Une exaltée_,” said one of the officers.
“That is not enough to say of one who always had the courage of her
convictions,” I answered, and recalled the conversation between her and
Benjamin Constant when under the Consulate he threw himself into the
opposition.
“_Voilà_,” he said, “_votre salon rempli de personnes qui vous plaisent;
si je parle demain, il sera désert; pensez-y_.”[14]
And she answered, “_Il faut suivre sa conviction_.”
“She certainly followed out her convictions; but what did Madame de
Staël know of the Germans?” pursued the colonel. “She saw them in the
quite factitious setting of the Weimar Court, and was intoxicated by
the play of mind. Those _beaux esprits_ presented the character and the
future of their race, through rose-colored clouds of Romanticism, to one
of the most charming and gifted women another race had ever produced, _et
puis elle rentre et elle écrit de l’Allemagne! Cela serait comique si ce
n’était pas si triste._”
“Don’t you think both sides played up,” I asked, “at those Weimar
suppers? She was under the charm of philosophers and musicians, and they
under the charm of her wit and appreciation. I keep thinking how they all
enjoyed it—and how those black eyes flashed under the heavy red-and-gold
turban.”
“Without doubt it was more than agreeable. I only complain that she was
in a position to mislead succeeding generations, and did so. She seems to
have had no _flair_, and because she got the personal enthusiasm, the hot
striking of mind against mind, that was at once her gift and her delight,
she glorifies a nation that later makes furious attempts to destroy hers.”
I then remarked, but a bit warily: “Talking of centenaries, I have just
had in my hands the discourse of Wagner on the centenary of Beethoven. It
has fire.”
“We won’t talk of Wagner, the mere memory of a phrase scorches one’s
ear. Beethoven, yes, for all time, but we French can’t listen to Wagner
now. He’s like a hot iron on seared flesh—or a rake in a wound. We want
nothing more to do with the Lohengrins and the Tannhäusers and the
Siegfrieds. I only wish they had been annihilated with their Walhalla.”
“These beings, however, were potential in the German race. Madame de
Staël got their projections, together with the metaphysics of Goethe and
his contemporaries, and carried away with her the memory of a blue-eyed
people lost in metaphysical dreams, passionately loving poetry and music.”
“Yes, and presented them to us as an example of all the social virtues.
Look at history,” said another officer, with a gesture toward the east.
One _can_ talk of other things besides the booming of cannon, even in
Lunéville—but not with complete pleasure.
Then E. M. and I departed to take a _tournée_ about the country. But the
Ford reposing in the Guérins’ garage was completely unresponsive; it
might have been dead. It appears it hates cold weather. A dozen officers
are billeted in the Guérins’ house; two of their orderlies and the butler
tried to crank it. The only signs of life were in the handle, which from
time to time flew round with extraordinary rapidity. We called out to one
not-over-cautious soldier, “Be careful; you will break your arm.”
He only answered:
“If that happens I shall have two or three months of tranquillity.” And
that’s how _he_ felt anent the breaking of his arm!
At last we found ourselves on the road bounded by the meadows of the
silent crosses, skirting the hill of Léomont, with its great scars of
1914 shell-holes, beneath which is a little village with the strange name
of Anthelupt. The Romans were all about here and it was once “Antelucus”
(before the sacred grove), and afterward was a dependence of the priory
of Léomont built on the site of the ancient temple to the moon. Then
we found ourselves on the broad ridge of road leading to Crévic. Great
stretches of Lorraine, _l’élégante et mélancolique Lorraine_, were flung
out before us under rain-clouds and sunbursts—lovely stretches, with
fields of mustard greedy for the light, blowing patches of red-stemmed
osier, and everywhere fields of beet-root in which women and old men and
little children were working, piling high red-white mounds or separating
the wilted leaves into greenish-yellow piles.
Crévic is shot to bits. Of the château of General Lyautey[15] but a few
crumbling walls remain. Though the piles of stones and mortar are covered
with the green of three summers’ growth, still the cannon are booming to
the east and north. The perfectly banal church is intact. People were
walking about the streets and improvised roofs cover some sort of homes,
and there seemed many very little children. We passed out over an old
bridge in a dazzling sunburst, while a great curtain of rain hung to the
west near Dombasle, the smoke-columns of whose hundred chimneys caught
and held and reflected the gorgeous afternoon light, and there were other
great stretches of unspeakable beauty, soft, rolling, and radiant—crying
out about the generations that have bent over them.
The great village of Haraucourt has a lovely destroyed church of pure
Gothic that workmen are at last roofing over; but three winters have
already passed over its beauty, unsheltered and unguarded. We go out
through the village in the direction of Dombasle, and suddenly against
some gorgeous masses of clouds we see an _avion de chasse_, “type
Nieuport,” as E. M., who has ample reason to be expert in things aerial,
tells me. There is a moment when it is a great silver brooch pinning two
gray velvety curtains together, where a ray of blinding light falls. Then
it makes a series of marvelous _vrilles_, and I say to her, “How can men
who do that love finite woman?” A great observation balloon, _saucisse_,
hung in the sky, and another broad shaft of light lay on the far hills
behind which lie intrenched gray-clad men with pointed helmets.
At this moment a _panne_. The only thing in sight is a long line of
war-supply wagons drawn by tired horses, and women and old men and
children bending over their eternal piles of beet-root. But E. M. said,
“Sooner than change that tire, I’ll bury the Ford by the road.” So we
bumped and crawled along till we met a line of _camions_. The first
was driven by a handsome, tall, very small-handed, extremely polite
Frenchman, who knew Fords, having been four months with Piatt Andrew
at the Field Service Ambulance in the rue Raynouard, and who agreed to
change it for us.
A hail-storm, like a pelting of diamonds, as sudden bursts of light
caught it, came up in the middle of the operation, which was finally
completed with expressions of mutual satisfaction. The shining storm
was withdrawn like a curtain, showing the sun on the great stretches,
and Dombasle with the smoke of its hundred chimneys was a thing
of inexpressible beauty, while behind it were the great towers of
St.-Nicolas du Port, for which we decided to make a dash. We got into
it, through Dombasle, as a perfect rainbow rose from the Meurthe and
disappeared into the horizon, where the gray-clad men with the pointed
helmets are intrenched.
“For luck,” said E. M.
But I asked, “Whose luck?” the rainbow evidently being neutral.
We had some difficulty in finding anything but the towers of the church.
There is no square in front; tiny streets encircle it on all sides. But
we at last got into the narrow street in front of the cathedral, which is
called “_Des Trois Pucelles_,” in memory of the three young girls to whom
St.-Nicolas gave a _dot_. I was not alone in remembering that he is the
patron saint of those contemplating matrimony.
The church is of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, and among the
largest of the Gothic churches of Lorraine. Swelling-breasted pigeons
with gorgeous pink and red and green and purple upon their throats were
nestled against the beautiful carvings of the gray portals, and much
soft cooing was going on. Above the central door, in the _trumeau_, is
a statue of the saint said to have been done by the brother of Ligier
Richier, and I thought of the lovely Gothic fireplace by Ligier Richier
himself taken from St.-Mihiel, and now at Ochre Court in Newport.
Noble interior, though the pillars have had the beautiful sharpness
of their chiseling blunted by much painting and whitewashing. There
are remains of early frescoes on some of the croisillons, and near a
door I found a tiny, ancient painting representing scenes in the life
of St.-Nicolas, inclosed in glass in a modern varnished wooden frame.
Somewhere in the pavement of the church is a certain potent slab, and
she who steps upon it is married within the year. Its exact position is
not known, but I told E. M. to take an exhaustive walk about and commend
herself to heaven and the saint.
When we came out into the ancient streets the western sky was aflame and
there were translucent pale greens ahead of us. We turned again toward
the open road and Dombasle, named after a monk of the fifth century.
Hermits brought the first civilization to these forests, followed by the
great bishops and the builder-monks, who constructed the immense abbeys
and the churches of Lorraine. Dombasle from some mysterious wilderness
had become what I saw it that afternoon. From the chimneys of its
munition-factories, against the amber sky, there poured and twisted a
wonder of gray and white and deep brown and violet smoke. The darkening,
soot-blackened streets were overflowing with human energies spilling
themselves into the greedy war-machine. There are vast monotonous
workingmen’s quarters, and everywhere children, little children, being
trampled in the wine-press....
It was dark when we drew up in front of the house of the _maire_, Mr.
Keller, the celebrated house where the Prince de Beauvau was born, where
the beautiful Princesse de Craon had most of the twenty children, where
the Treaty of Lunéville was signed in 1801, and where, in 1914, the
_maire_ lodged the generals of the German army. Madame was still at her
hospital, so we left our cards and came back to the hotel.
Now I must leave the almost Capuan delights of this pleasant room to
motor a hundred kilometers. Nancy, Toul, the antique Tullum, and back, is
the program. It’s raining, it’s hailing, it’s blowing, but I bethink me
of St.-Mansuy and St.-Epvre, the great Bishop of Toul, and those other
saints, St.-Eucarius and St.-Loup, starting out in all kinds of weather,
and of the _œuvre_ that we are to visit, founded last summer for children
gathered in 1917 from villages where there had been bad gas attacks. The
history of Lorraine piles high about me—the cannon boom. What a day to
lie with your life’s blood flowing from you in wet beet-root fields....
The motor horn sounds.
CHAPTER III
TOUL
_October 13th._
We lunched at the Café Stanislas yesterday after the wildest of drives
into Nancy, the Ford seeming like an autumn leaf in the high wind. We
did ourselves well, even I, who care not a farthing what I eat except to
“stoke the engine.” The proprietor, who left Alsace as a boy after 1870,
stood and talked to us, as we ate our _œufs au beurre noir_, as French
people alone can talk. He said “they” came only with fire and sword;
the great Napoleon, who came with the same, had also his “Code” in his
pocket. Then he spoke of the marvelous administration of Germany, the
order and the use made of each one’s capacities, which was why they could
_tenir_.
“We only ask for a leader here in France, to be _bien menés_. All other
things we have in abundance. But if a department is to be organized or
reconstructed, it seems always to be given into the hands of some one
knowing nothing about it.”
In between I kept looking out where against gray skies beings half child,
half angel hold up stone flames, and _panaches_ leaning one against the
other. The gilding of the _grilles_ has a dull gleam through the wet.
The statue of Stanislas _le Bienfaisant_ was black and big. Everybody
was talking about the unexpected visit of the German _avion_ in the bad
weather the night before.
The station was further devastated, a train moving out was wrecked and
many _permissionnaires_ killed, a house near the Hôtel Excelsior et
d’Angleterre was totally demolished, the _avion_ flying very low, not
more than twenty-five meters above the town at one time. After lunch we
went over to the prefect’s house, from where we were to motor with him
to Toul. He could not go with us, as he was out investigating the damage
of the night before, but one of his daughters was waiting for us in the
Prefecture motor.
_Le Grand Couronné_ was but a ridge of mist and clouds as we passed
out of town, but it was there that the Germans were held up and Nancy
was saved that first September of the war, there that was written the
_paraphe de Castelnau_, and from there the German Emperor had looked into
France.
I never should have known Lorraine if I had not seen it gray and wet
under its autumn skies, bands of lemon and amber at sunset finishing
the garb of its gray days. As we sped along I could just distinguish
the landscape—villages lost in the immense stretch of the plains, and
great forests of beech and oak in which are strange, mysterious ponds
(_étangs_), and before my mind passed for an instant images of those
solitaries of the twilight centuries, slipping through them with staff
and scrip, after the Romans, and bringing to the land the things Rome
tried to destroy.
A beautifully kept straight road leads to Toul. From time to time one
sees rusty barbed-wire entanglements and camouflaged trenches, for, on
this road, had the Germans taken Nancy, they would have come to Toul, as
they did in 1870. Outside the town are double ramparts, where the guard
stopped us, but the military chauffeur cried the magic words, “_Monsieur
le Préfet_,” and we passed in through the Porte de Metz, dating from
the time of Vauban, then skirted the town, to get to the barracks of
Luxembourg, where hundreds of little children, first gathered together
by Madame Mirman, are now being taken care of by the American Red Cross.
It is conducted by Doctor Sedgwick, unfortunately in Paris. It seemed a
dreary spot that afternoon, and it has since been confided to me that the
weather is always dreadful there. The barracks are after the new model of
groups of one-storied houses, which, it appears, have also disadvantages,
as well as the large buildings they superseded.[16]
It was raining and hailing and blowing as we made blind dashes from one
to the other with the French directors. A consolation to find oneself in
the dormitories where many blessed tiny babies lay asleep (or howling!)
in little cots or perambulators, out of the horrid cold.
They are not always orphans, but their mothers work in the fields of
Lorraine or in the munitions-factories. Doctor Peel, second in charge,
came at last from a distant building, and met us in the school-room, out
of which a hundred noisy, warm, well-fed children were scuffling. Tea was
offered us, but we came away; time was short and I was a-hungered, after
the cold, windy, wet desolation of the Luxembourg barracks, for a sight
of the beautiful cathedral.
Some one said, “Why ‘sight-seeing’?” but I said, “It’s soul-seeing.” And
there was some lifting of the being as we stepped into the loveliness
of the pale-gray vaulting of the church of St.-Étienne. At the end of
the apse was an immense, high, narrow, blue window, and it reminded me
of Huysmans’s phrase about the cathedral of Chartres, “_Une blonde aux
yeux bleus._” We stepped over worn _pierres tombales_, and as I stood on
one of them, whose date, scarcely decipherable, was fifteen hundred and
something, I looked up and saw in the wall a new marble plaque, and it
was to the memory of “_Jean Bourhis, aviateur-pilote, chevalier de la
Légion d’Honneur, Croix de Guerre, né 1888.... Mort glorieusement pour
la Patrie, le 22 mars, 1916._” And so one’s thoughts are jerked from the
past into the dreadful, sacramental present.
Close by the cathedral is the Hôtel de Ville, once the Episcopal Palace,
a gem of the eighteenth century. We stepped from the little square in
front of the church into the wet, wind-swept garden. At one end is a
flat, round fountain, and behind it is a moss-grown statue of a woman
in contemplation, and one side of the garden is hedged in by the flying
buttresses and gargoyles of the cathedral. Broad, low steps lead down to
its gravel walks from the terrace of the Palace, onto which open long
windows, forming a great hemicycle. I did not need to see it under warm,
sunset skies, with the linden-trees of the garden in full blossom, to be
possessed of its charm.
An American soldier was coming out of the cathedral as we issued from the
garden in a gust of wind which blew my umbrella wrong side out, and when
I and it were righted he was gone. But it’s all a part of history.
We went for a moment to St.-Gengoult, the old Gothic church in the rue
Carnot. (Like every town in Lorraine and in the whole of France there is
a rue Carnot, and it’s horribly monotonous when your soul is aflame.)
As we entered, a thick rich light came through the ancient windows.
A black-robed woman was sobbing before a grave and pitying statue of
St.-Anne—sixteenth or seventeenth century, I didn’t know which—and a
pale, tiny child with a frightened look was standing by her. Again I
thought on the oceans of fear children have passed through in this war,
and again I besought God to take care of His world.
As I passed up the central aisle I saw two American soldiers kneeling
before the high altar. That spot of khaki and its young, unmistakable
silhouette under the gray vaulting of that old church suddenly seemed
momentous beyond anything I had ever seen. It was the country of my birth
and my love pursuing its gigantic destiny down an endless vista, crowded
with uncountable khaki-clad forms, men with souls. The two anonymous
soldiers became typical of each and every Miles Gloriosus since the world
began, and as they knelt there on the altar steps I knew that they had
been laid on that other dreadful altar of the world’s sin....
An open door showed us the way to a lovely Gothic cloister of the
sixteenth century, surrounding a tree- and flower-planted court. It had
a few fresh chippings on its _belle patine_, the results of a bomb which
fell in it a few months ago.
Long lines of soldiers’ socks were hung on strings across one corner of
it, and soldiers were sitting in a little room-like corridor, leading
I know not where, reading newspapers, whistling and writing. Then,
out through a delightful sixteenth-century door into the streets, the
loveliness of Toul imagined rather than really perceived, for the rain
was falling again. Khaki-clad men of the _Division marocaine_, together
with blue-clad companions, were threading their way through the narrow
streets, and there were few women and children. I thought how I had seen
the two towers of the church shining from afar as I passed by in the
train that June evening with the two Bretons whose fate I shall never
know.... Did the one from Nantes return to hold his first-born in his
arms? Or the fiancé return to consummate his nuptials?
Then I caught sight of my own two soldiers standing at the door of a
little tobacco-shop. I suppose it was the nearest resemblance to anything
familiar in Toul, and they were rather cuddling up to it. They smiled
broadly when they heard themselves addressed in what they termed the
“blessed lingo,” and called it “some luck.”
“I was just thinking, ‘me for the coop,’” genially continued the biggest,
raw-boned, lantern-jawed one who had a bad bronchial cold and wore a
muffler about his throat. He turned out to be from Omaha; the smaller
one was from Hackensack, N.J. (with an emphasis on the N.J.). We talked
about simple and unglorious matters, what they had for breakfast, among
other things, and it was, in parenthesis, what any Frenchman would call
a dinner—ham and eggs and oatmeal and white bread (which none save
American soldiers get in France these days) and jam and coffee. They were
from Pagny-sur-Meuse near by—pronounced “Pag-ni” by the Omaha man. The
Hackensack man avoided it. He quite simply wanted “the war to begin,” so
that he might “show the Germans how.”
“We’re sure to lick ’em in the spring,” the one with the cold said, “but
it’s a long time waiting for the fun to begin, and I haven’t been warm
since I got here.”
I asked them how they came into France.
“All I know is that after we got off the boat we were three days in some
sort of a milk-train; there wasn’t room to sit, let alone lie. We drew
lots and I got the baggage-rack; but what saved us was that we could
get out at every station, and, believe me, the fellows that got drunk
were the only ones that pulled in all right—the others were sent up to
hospital soon as they arrived.”
In the best and most persuasive of Y.M.C.A. manners I said to this
special Miles Gloriosus:
“It isn’t a remedy, however, that you could really count on.”
“But I say,” answered the Omaha man, “you’ll own up that it’s worth
trying.”
It was getting late and, the Omaha man having the best of it, we parted
with smiles of mutual appreciation. It’s all so simple—and so momentous.
Then back to Nancy, running swiftly over a white road, the gray sky very
low, and on either side green and yellow and brown fields, and the oak
and beech forest of Haye. The _Grand Couronné_ for a moment was divested
of its mists, and some brightening of the western sky touched its ridge
with a subdued splendor; and then we got into Nancy and were deposited
at the Prefecture, where we made our adieux. We proceeded to the garage
of a stoutish, blond man of pronounced Teuton type and accent, with an
uncertain smile—and a coreless heart, I think—who cranked _la Ford_ (by
the way, Fords change their sex in France), and we started out through
the town that night was enveloping, with but one dull eye to light us to
Lunéville. We thought the trip might prove fairly uncertain, but didn’t
know how much so till there was an impact, in the crowded suburb, and
a horse’s form with legs in air, looking as big as a monster of the
Pliocene age, showed for an instant on our radiator, then fell to the
ground. A crowd immediately gathered, while the driver of the cart
proceeded to tell us what he thought of us in particular and women
drivers in general. But, though unfortunate, we felt blameless, as the
horse had been tied _behind_ the wagon standing at the curb and there
was no light, except something very dim coming from a green-grocer’s.
We departed to the _commissaire de police_ with the man and a couple of
gendarmes, explained that we were willing to do anything and everything
if he would only let us proceed to Lunéville, gave the magic name
“Commission Californienne,” and equally potent reference to the _Préfet
de la Meurthe et Moselle_ whose house we had just left. Then with
beating hearts and a chastened outlook on life—I use the word “outlook”
rather wildly; we couldn’t see anything—we passed out through the great
manufacturing district. Every now and then our feeble ray was swallowed
up by the great lamps of a military auto or the large round headlight
of a _camion_. As we passed through St.-Nicolas du Port and Dombasle
the blue of the soldiers’ tunics took on a strange ghoul-like color, a
white incandescent sort of gray, and the moving forms seemed twice their
natural size. We couldn’t see the streets at all, and the only thing we
wanted to do in all the world was to get to Lunéville and run _la Ford_
into the garage of M. Guérin.
When that was accomplished we decided to say good-by to the proud world,
sent regrets to Mlle. Guérin, and had a much more modest repast served in
my room by the deft maid, whose husband got typhoid fever in the trenches
and died at Epinal last year. Later the mistress of the house came up to
know if we were comfortable, and told us her husband, too, had died of it
in hospital at Toul. And then I read _Les Vieux Châteaux de la Vesouze_,
a modern _Etude lorraine_, and _Promenades autour de Lunéville_, printed
in 1838, to the accompaniment of rattling windows and the heavy boom of
distant cannon. All else was quiet. Near my room is a device plastered
on the wall, _Qui tient à sa tranquillité sait respecter celle des
autres_. Isn’t it nice? It makes one steal in at night, get into slippers
immediately, and ring gently in the morning.
It is still raining, hailing, blowing—dreadfully discouraging weather to
investigate the amours of the eighteenth century, and I have a couple of
twentieth-century idyls right under my eyes, too. I had planned a stroll
in the park to trace the steps of Léopold and Stanislas to the doors of
the fairest of ladies, and Panpan and St.-Lambert and the Chevalier de
Boufflers, and all the other _charmeurs_. I’ll either have to leave them
out of the Journal or do them in some half-dream when I’m back in Paris
and warm! What _they_ did in this sort of weather I don’t know, except
that when they knocked at a door or tapped at a window they were sure of
tender welcomes, they and the easy verses that accompanied them.
CHAPTER IV
A STROLL IN NANCY
_October 15th._
I spent yesterday a-wandering in the old streets of Nancy, between gusts
of wind and rain and great bursts of sun. After much coaxing, _la Ford_
was cajoled into taking the road at 9.30, but as we got to Nancy and into
the Place Stanislas suddenly her front wheels spread apart. E. M. gave
one glance, but not at all the glance of despair she would have given had
it happened on the road, and then flew to seek her waiting bridegroom
at the Hôtel Excelsior et d’Angleterre, while I, less enthusiastically,
sought the blond chauffeur of the coreless heart. He seemed quite human,
as, unscrewing the bar in front, which crumbled softly like a piece of
bread, he held up a piece and said, “_C’était fait pour vous casser le
cou_.”
Seeing the American flag flying from the ground-floor window of one of
the beautiful old buildings of the Place Stanislas, I went in to find
Mrs. Dawson installed in charge of the Nancy branch of the “American Fund
for French Wounded.” It was another novelty for Stanislas to look upon
out of his _right_ eye! He’s been kept busy, these past three years,
looking about him. The large room was filled with furniture M. Mirman is
collecting for refugees—wardrobes, tables, chairs, in and on which were
piles of shirts, vests, sweaters, _cachenez_, handkerchiefs, all from
over the ocean. And really, when one investigates the comfort-bags filled
by too-generous American hands, one has a cupidous feeling. There is a
lavishness in the matter of Colgate’s tooth-paste, for instance, which
one can rarely get for love, and not at all for money, in Paris!
I came away in a gray, slanting rain that made the Place Stanislas look
as if Raffaello had done it over and framed it beautifully in gray. Great
scratchings of rainfall, and soldiers and women hurrying through it.
But _le geste_ is not like the days when Raffaello painted—there are no
skirts to lift up, or, rather, none that need lifting.
Then I crossed over to the Place de la Carrière, where _souvent en ces
aimables lieux des héros et des demi-dieux_ had held their tournaments,
and then into the church of St.-Epvre to get a Mass. The stained-glass
windows, modern and very expensive-looking, were crisscrossed with broad
stripes of paper on the side toward the railway, where the shocks from
the frequent bombing of the station are especially felt. Everywhere in
Nancy the windows are broken, or crisscrossed with paper, or both. The
church was blue with military.
Afterward I walked through the Grande Rue. The ducal palace of the
early sixteenth century, begun by René II, has its door scaffolded and
sandbagged. It is the celebrated _Musée Lorrain_, whose treasures are now
removed further from the frontier. It is here that the body of Charles
III lay in such magnificence that there arose the saying in the sixteenth
century that the three most gorgeous ceremonies in the world were the
consecration of a king of France at Reims, the crowning of an emperor of
Germany at Frankfort, and the obsequies of a duke of Lorraine at Nancy.
I continued down the Grande Rue between groups of _poilus_, officers, and
the usual Sunday population coming from Mass, or getting in last dinner
provisions, to the Porte de Graffe of the fourteenth century, beyond
which is the Porte de la Citadelle, and then the garrison. As one walks
along, the snatches of talk one overhears are “_Bombardé deux fois_,”
“_Pas un vitre qui reste_,” “_Volant très-bas_,” etc.
I came back through the park. In it is a modern iron bandstand,
fortunately copied after the delicious designs of Jean Lamour—only _he_
would have done something to relieve the heavy iron roof. And he quite
certainly caught his inspiration musing about the park one autumn day,
for everywhere I saw charming repetitions of his _grilles_ in that
delicate tracery of yellow leaf against gray trunk and branch.
Old houses give on the park, where one might dream dreams, and find the
world—perhaps well lost. Many windows broken, and more crisscrossing with
bands of paper.
It was getting to be 12.30 when, having been as much of an angel as the
three dimensions permit, I emerged on to the Place Stanislas to see E. M.
approaching with a young blue-clad aviator, with something distinguished
yet modest in his bearing, of whom I instantly thought he is one of those
_qui cherche sa récompense plutôt dans les yeux de ses hommes que dans
les notes de ses chefs_—and so it proved to be. He didn’t even wear the
_brisquets_ of his years of service on his arm.
“_Tout le monde sait que je n’ai pas été trois ans sans rien faire_,” he
said, later, during lunch, which we took in the Café Stanislas, crowded
with gallooned and decorated officers. Several red-and-white marked autos
of the General Staff were waiting before the door, where Stanislas
also could see them, and those beings, half human, half divine, of the
sky-line, framed it all. Afterward I again removed my three dimensions,
hunting for M. Pierre Boyé, the great authority on all things of
Lorraine, M. Guérin having given me a letter to him. On arriving at the
house, through quiet gray streets, there was no answer to my numerous
ringings of the bell, so I came back, drawn irresistibly to the Place
Stanislas. By this time it was aglow in the afternoon light; great masses
of clouds even at 3.30 were tinted with yellow and orange, and every inch
of gilding caught the light. I hailed an antique cab and drove out where
I could look over rolling stretches of country, along the road to Toul.
The brown and yellow fields were aglow, the bronzing forests, too; above
were piled the high and splendid clouds of autumnal Lorraine, and I saw
where Claude le Lorrain had got _his_ masses. The _cocher_ then proceeded
to bring me back to town by a perfectly hideous road, called Quai Claude
le Lorrain—on one side the blackened railway, on the other modern
claptrappy houses with their windows shattered and their roofs damaged.
I then told him to take me to the church of the Cordeliers, where I
stepped suddenly, not only into its late afternoon dimness, but into the
dimness of past ages. A shaft of light from a high window showed me a
dull, rich bit of color on an ancient pillar, in a sort of chapel; and
then my eye fell on what I had come to see, the tomb of the Duchesse
Philippe de Gueldre, widow of René II, bearing the incomparable stamp of
the genius of Ligier Richier.
I tiptoed toward the stone slab where that great lady of another age
is lying asleep, clad in the dark robe of the Poor Clares. Her hands,
folded downward, are clasped at her waist. Under the cowl the pale head
is turned gently, as if in sleep.[17] She is an enduring image of
resignation, not alone for herself, but for all of us who live and die,
we don’t quite know how or why, and who must “endure our going hence even
as our coming hither.”
The church was constructed by her husband, René II, Duke of Lorraine,
to commemorate the deliverance of Nancy and the defeat of Charles the
Bold, Duke of Burgundy, in 1477. Duke René himself had a glorious reign;
for him the arts and letters were the ornament of victory. I discovered
a commemorative monument of my friend Duke Léopold, flanked rather
flamboyantly by unquiet, yet charming, statues of Faith and Hope! Also an
elaborate statue of Katerina Opalinska, the consort of Stanislas, who,
though he had been somewhat forgetful of her in life, had done really
all that a wife could wish in the matter of the tomb. But some virtue
more mystic than the decorative Faith and Hope of the eighteenth century
exhaled from the quiet figure of Philippe de Gueldre.
Near the high altar is the Chapelle Ronde begun by Charles III, the
grandson of René, in 1607, intended as a sepulcher for the princes of
Lorraine, and in a beautiful _grille_ are entwined the arms of Lorraine
and Austria. Then the sacristan came in to light the candles of the
high altar, the church got suddenly quite dark, from the organ came
the strains of “_O quam suavis est, Domine_,” and people began to come
in to Benediction. The blue and vermilion and gold of the mausoleum of
René II faded and one saw only vague outlines of saints and angels, and
a figure of the Eternal Father. It cried out of that other deliverance
of Nancy; but when the world war is over will his widow, Philippe de
Gueldre, _conjunx Piissimi_, still be sleeping quietly, her brown cowl
over her head and her crown at her feet? Her soul “conducted to Paradise
by angels, where martyrs received her and led her into the Holy City
Jerusalem.” The church got quite full, the organist continued to play
early Italian music, and the “Pietà, Signor” of Pergolese rose as I knelt
by Philippe de Gueldre. The great cope of the priest shone, the smell of
incense pervaded the dim spaces, the “_Tantum Ergo_” sounded, and I bowed
my head....
Then out into a world of fading light, found the _cocher_ in the exact
attitude I had left him, and begged him to drive quickly (which was
impossible) to the Hôtel Excelsior et d’Angleterre, bethinking me of the
5.30 train to Lunéville. As we went through the dim, charming streets I
remembered an old verse I had found in one of M. Guérin’s books, by an
unreservedly admiring individual, who said that if he had one foot in
Paradise and the other in Nancy, he would withdraw the one in Paradise,
that both might be in Nancy!
I found waiting at the door of the hotel E. M., the _distingué_ young
aviator, and Don Kelley, _en permission_ for twenty-four hours from
Gondrecourt, strong and eager, since a week at Gondrecourt, since a month
in France for the first time in his life.
The young men took us to the station and deposited us in the train and
made their adieux. For very special reasons at that moment I said to E.
M.:
“If you are going back to Lunéville on _my_ account, don’t!”
The guard had closed the door of the compartment, had sounded his
whistle, but I caught the look in her eye and out we jumped, returning
to the hotel, where we gave what we hoped was a pleasant surprise
party. _Dîner à quatre_ at seven o’clock. About a dozen Americans _en
permission_ were dining among many Frenchmen, and we amused ourselves
investigating the multicolored intricacies of the various uniforms,
aviators, cavalry, infantry, artillery, and the many “grades.” Then again
a dash for the station—Count de L. had to get to Paris, and Don Kelley to
Gondrecourt. The latter said, as we stood in the dark, battered station:
“I am where I would most want to be in the world, and, though I am an
only son, I am where my parents would most wish me to be. When I get back
to Gondrecourt and get into that long, dark shed and see the men rolled
up, and if it is raining, the water dripping in, I shall know it is the
real thing, and those of my generation who have known it and those who
have not will be forever divided.”
Permissions not being among things safely trifled with, we then saw them
into their train, which was leaving first, and crossed the rails to where
ours, dark, filled with returning officers, was waiting; and so out into
the night with all curtains carefully drawn, the stars shining. It was
a _nuit à boches_, one of the officers said, continuing, “It’s often
an obsession with them—for a long time they won’t come near Nancy or
Lunéville, and then every night when it is at all clear they appear.” The
inhabitants can choose (in their minds) between good weather and _avions_
or bad weather and safety.
Trains from Nancy to Lunéville seem to have a way of hunting up stations,
threading them up, and what one does easily in three-quarters of an hour
in a motor takes an hour and a half to three, according to the stops. At
Blainville we descended to show our _sauf-conduits_, the guard standing
just behind a convenient puddle that every one splashed into and then
stepped out of. Finally, Lunéville, night-enveloped, lighted only with
flashes from electric pocket-lamps, like great fireflies. And coming
through the night from Nancy, I kept thinking how France had done enough,
more than enough, the impossible, and what a cold and dreadful grind the
war had become, and of untried young Americans sleeping in dim villages
so near. And many other things that it is bootless to record. _Nous
sommes dedans._
CHAPTER V
VITRIMONT IN AUTUMN
Out of Lunéville over the muddy Vesouze, through the Place Brûlée, and
onto a pasty road, E. M. driving, and, on the back seat, newly wedded
love. As we left the town a dwarf made a face at us and then turned his
back on us with a not over-elegant gesture, for all the world like the
tales of the famous dwarf Bébé, during years the delight of the Court of
Stanislas.
Mustard and osier plantings became the intensest yellow or red, as the
sun fell on them through rifts in dark clouds, and many women, old men,
and children were working in wet beet-root fields, among little groupings
of black crosses....
We got into Vitrimont through streets deep in mud. Such a change! Before
reaching it, instead of the skeleton outline of homes one now sees
orderly rows of red roofs. The work that had seemed almost stationary,
pursued with so much difficulty by Comtesse de B. (Miss Polk), had got
suddenly to a point where it began to show, though the finished houses
will be too damp for habitation this winter, and, like a lot of other
things, must await the spring.
Everywhere in the streets the busy work of reconstruction is proceeding.
Soldiers billeted in Vitrimont are coming and going, helping with
masonry, bringing in great wagons of beet-root, as if they had always
lived there; not _en passant par la Lorraine_. It’s a very human
document, this billeting of soldiers; though, as far as they are
concerned, when they leave a village they only change their residence.
For the women the thing is much more serious. _They_ get a change of
regiment. However, I have no time to muse on this detail of the war.
Things in Vitrimont were simply taking their inevitable course. Nothing
is held back for long, with the generations pressing thick and fast.
Black-aproned children with books on their backs, to whom E. M. gave
little slabs of chocolate, were coming from the new school-house. Old men
were hobbling about, and women bending over embroidery frames, in houses
often half destroyed and hastily roofed over. In the old days Lorraine
furnished beautiful damasks and gold galloons and laces to Paris and
Versailles.
We stopped by a window where a thin-faced woman was just taking from its
frame a beautiful beaded bag such as one would buy very, very dear in the
Rue de la Paix. Near her sat an old woman, her mother, the light falling
on her pale, withered face, wearing a great black-bowed head-dress, a
yellow cat in her lap. It was an _intérieur_ that would have done honor
to any great museum.
We visited Mlle. Antoine, living in a reconstructed street named after
a Polish prince. She escaped to Lunéville with her servant on the day
of the entry of the Germans into the village, August 23, 1914, fleeing
through the ancient forest, but returned to her Lares and Penates a few
days afterward with German passes. She represents culture in the village,
and is clear-eyed, sweet-voiced, but with two red spots on her cheeks—she
is fighting off consumption by living out of doors with her chickens and
live stock, in sabots and apron and shawl. A beautiful old desk was in
her living-room, and there was a discussion as to whether it was Louis
XVI or Directoire, but under any name one would have loved to possess it.
The windows looked out onto the inevitable dung-heap, but beyond were
bronzing forests, and, in between, fields the color of semi-precious
stones.
[Illustration: MISS POLK’S WEDDING
The Comtesse de Buyer (Miss Polk) on the arm of Monsieur Mirman, Prefect
of the Meurthe et Moselle, after her wedding at Vitrimont, September,
1917.]
Hearing the sound of music as we passed the church, we went in and found
some young girls were practising a “_Credo_,” clustered about the little
organ, and wearing brooches with a device of thistle and double Lorraine
cross that Madame de Buyer had given them on her wedding-day. I looked
again upon the lovely old fifteenth-century vaulting, fully restored,
shifting my eye hurriedly from the hideous but seemingly imperishable
dado with its design of painted folds of cloth. At the door the little
holy water fonts, formed of shells held upon two heads of seraphim, gave
me a thrill of joy—and sadness, too, that beauty is so perishable.
Then I turned to the cemetery. The little pathways were muddy beneath the
leafless trees. Bead crosses and wreaths and a few stunted chrysanthemums
decorated the wet graves. All seasons are the same to the dead. I stood
by a breach in the wall near the grave of “_Charles Carron, musicien,
souvenir d’un camarade, 31 août, 1914_,” looking out toward the forest of
Vitrimont. Its autumn garb was soft, discreet, and lovely; more jasper
and amethyst and Chrysoprase and cornelian fields rolled gently in
between it and me. There was the band of yellow like a Greek border to a
garment in the western sky—only that and nothing more, yet some beauty
and sadness chained me to the spot. Quail and woodcock, gray pheasant
and larks, were flying about, and some strongly marked black-and-white
magpies were pecking at something in the nearest field. I asked myself
again, “What is it that stamps Lorraine with such beauty?” General de
Buyer told me that when Pierre Loti came to Vitrimont he said, “_C’est
trop vert_,” and perhaps, after Stamboul and Egypt and the Grecian Isles,
it would seem too green. But I saw, returning there in autumn, that the
soul of Lorraine, _l’élégante et douleureuse_, is like unto tarnished
silver, with its grays, yellows, browns, and purples; that soul that has
suffered, hoped through the generations, whose abiding-places have been
devastated and rebuilt through the centuries. And I knew that one must
see it in autumn, beneath the wasteful splendors of gray clouds, with
their hints of color, red, brown, yellow, and purple, or with sky and
rain melting into one, curtaining the brown, mysterious earth—and, in
between, the beat of the human heart.
It all seemed to show itself through some dissolving light of ages.
Those secular beeches, that I had first seen in their tenderest green,
had become a brilliant yellow, and were turned to the south. The great
bronze oaks looked to the north, obeying laws as inviolable as those
of the human beings passing beneath them. In all these forests round
about Vitrimont, Parroy, and Mondon the legendary lords of the country
hunted; the roads of Gaul disappeared under the great Roman highways
which traversed Lorraine from Langres to Trèves, from Toul to Metz, and
again from Langres to Strasburg. The name Lunéville emerges out of the
night of the tenth century in the person of Étienne, Bishop of Toul,
successor of St.-Gérard, and Folmar I, Count of Lunéville, was married to
Sparhilde, descended from Charlemagne. (To this day I notice that almost
any one who respects himself in these parts talks quite casually of being
descended from Charlemagne, or Charles the Bald, or René the Victorious,
as a Boston man might of the Pilgrim Fathers.) Folmar’s hunting-lodge
was by the muddy Vesouze, over which one passes to get from Lunéville to
Vitrimont. In time it was transformed into a château, and around it grew
a village, which in turn became a fortified town, then the capital of
Léopold and Stanislas.
I stood for a long time by that 1914 breach in the wall, and the grave
of _Charles Carron, musicien_, looking out over the rolling fields in
the late October afternoon, migrating birds passing against the amber
sky, red vines floating from the yellowing branches of oaks and beeches;
near me was a tangle of wild-plum bushes, stiffened blackberry-vines, and
dried ramie. All except the deeds of men seemed sweet. Everything was
in sinuous lines, inclosing the jasper, amethyst, chrysoprase, russet,
jewels of the fields, through which flow the slow rivers, slipping
between bushes of osier and plum, and somewhere there is a slower,
nigrescent canal scarcely a-move between willows and poplars. And those
men who are out there where that dull thunder is!...
I thought how often in her history the men that hunted in her forests
or tilled her fields had reddened them with their blood, or, buried in
them, had increased the harvests, fighting now against one invader,
now another, being continually thrown back from power to power like a
ball, with nothing changeless save the changelessness of their changing
destiny—and its unescapableness.
And how, under Godefroy de Bouillon, a Lorraine prince, the Crusades
began, and under a duke of Lorraine, Charles V, they ended. And of the
holy glory of Jeanne d’Arc. And now, after the lapse of centuries, of the
covenant of our own men.
I realized that the beauty of Lorraine is not entirely of the natural
world.
As we drove back there was a sudden flaming up of that band of lemon. The
western sky became a vast ocean of pink with great white clouds afloat
in it. The red roofs of Lunéville were transfigured, a crimson glow
was flung about the Pompadour towers of the church, outlined against
a blue-white eastern sky. But only for a few minutes. The streets of
Lunéville were already dim as we passed in through the battered suburbs.
We stopped for tea at the house of Madame —— on the outskirts of the
town. It had been occupied by the Germans that first August, and in
one of the _salons_ was a large hole in the wall, stopped up, but not
replastered or papered. “They” had rolled up her rugs and given them to
her, and she and her four young daughters had lived in the upper stories
during the occupation, and seen war very close from their windows. The
only really valuable picture, a Claude Lorrain, I think, was missing. In
the cellars and in the garden, whose walls are still breached and broken,
dead and wounded, living and fighting, Germans and French, had lain.
The usual conjunction of elderly officers and young aviators were there
for tea. Then E. M. and I, closely linked, threaded the black streets to
the Hôtel des Vosges. And there is great sadness in Lorraine in autumn.
CHAPTER VI
AT THE GUÉRINS’
_October 16th._
In the park of the château, sitting on an old stone bench under yellowing
chest nut-trees.
Soldiers are coming and going. The château has been for many years a
barracks. One guardian of the park, of the now so-despised race of
gendarmes, has walked by three times, for I have my little note-book in
my lap and my pencil in my hand and I am plainly not of Lunéville. He is
just passing me again, and I say
“_C’est beau, le parc._”
He answers, “Perhaps in summer,” evidently not stirred by autumnal
Lorraine, and then, “_Madame est en visite?_”
I answer, “Yes, with Miss Crocker.”
That name being magic in these parts, he salutes and passes on.
Of the lovely old bosquets where Stanislas combined his _jets d’eau_,
his _grottes_, his Chinese pavilions, and his _parterres_, the long
avenue and the great flat basin of the fountain, in which black swans are
floating, are all that remain. From the end of this avenue can be seen
the aviation field with its great hangars. The low terraces have borders
of autumn flowers, dahlias, chrysanthemums, red vines, dead leaves,
and moss-grown and charming statues of ancient love-making gods, who
came into their own again in those amorous days. There is a statue to
M. Guérin’s poet son born and dead between two invasions, but a lovely
eighteenth-century statue of a veiled woman renders _mou_ and without
accent the flat, white-marble shaft that commemorates his earthly span
(1874-1908). The statue of Erckmann is also in the nineteenth-century
manner. Is the human race as uncharming as modern sculptors would make
it? One feels apologetic toward the ages to come, and one wants to cry
out that we weren’t so bad, after all, and that seemingly soulless
individual in a frock-coat and baggy trousers and top-hat, looking
so unattractive in white marble, was really a delightful person, an
imaginative lover, a perceptive intellectual, and witty to boot. He would
have been the first to protest against his memorial; and how he would
have hated the geraniums and begonias planted at his base, and the wire
fencing!
Beyond the park, where the trees have been cleared away, is the brown,
reedy Vesouze, a little border of old houses on its banks. Beyond is the
rolling stretch of forest-covered hills and russet and jasper and topaz
fields, and above it all the sunless and gray, but strangely luminous,
noonday heaven of autumnal Lorraine.
_Later._
Wandered about the town. Everywhere charming bits of _autrefois_ arrest
the eye. Over one doorway, between two angels’ heads of pure Louis
XV, was written, “_Fais bien, laisses dire_.” A little farther along,
under a figureless niche, “_Si le cœur t’en dit un ave pour son âme_.”
In the window of a pharmacy near by, occupying a good old house with
flat, gray façade, is a big Lunéville porcelain jar bearing the words
“_Theriaca celestis_,” interwoven among flowered scrolls, and I thought
of eighteenth-century servants going in for herbs and various cures for
masters and mistresses having “vapors.”
The portal of the church reminds me, with its rich, wine-colored tones,
of the _tezontle_ of the Mexican houses of the viceregal period. The
words over the door are “_Au Dieu de Paix_,” the God that this torn
borderland seldom receives, and still rarely keeps, and above is a figure
of Chronos, or the Almighty, I don’t know which.
A large black marble slab without name or date is near the door as one
passes in; underneath lie the remains of Voltaire’s _divine Emilie_.[18]
Having loved much, let us hope much was forgiven her. The choir, pulpit,
and confessionals are very pure Louis XV. Over the organ-loft are the
words “_Laudate Deum in chordis et organo_,” painted in among Pompadour
knots which have been democratically colored red, white, and blue, near
blue and gold fleurs-de-lys of another epoch.
Against the wall of the façade is a marble urn that once contained the
heart of Stanislas, who was very devout, and left no stone unturned,
though he continued to love not alone the arts, to placate the final
judge. He was very fond of music while dining, but on Friday never
permitted any except that of the harp, considered less earthly than
violin and clavecin. He never missed Mass; he was merciful to the poor
and appreciative of the things of the mind. Not a bad showing; one hopes
he’s happy somewhere.
In one of the side altars is a Pietà and three long lists of those just
dead for France, whose
graves are all too young as yet
To have outgrown the sorrow which consigned
Its charge to each;
and then, as I sat quietly thinking upon the passing of heroes, Shelley’s
immortal words kept sounding in my ears:
And if the seal is set,
Here, on one fountain of a mourning mind,
Break it not thou!...
From the world’s bitter wind
Seek shelter in the shadow of the tomb.
What Adonaïs is, why fear we to become?
Lunched at the Guérins’. _La Ford_ being the only means of locomotion
in Lunéville, not even an old horse remaining to pull a cab, we had to
give up the trip to Baccarat, and indeed any trip anywhere. Delighted to
be able to _flâner_ in the old streets without my umbrella being turned
wrong side out.
Overhead the _avions_ were thick; we counted twelve at one time, some
of them flying so low that we could hear words. Observation airplanes,
bombarding airplanes, the swift _avions de chasse_, going in the
direction of the forest of Parroy, where the Germans are intrenched since
the retreat from Lunéville, September, 1914. Parroy and all that part of
the country was completely laid waste in 1636 by Richelieu, who sent the
cheerful report to Louis XIV that “Lorraine was reduced to nothing, and
the inhabitants dead for the most part.”
That conquest of the unsubstantial air seems the greatest of all man’s
achievements. And as I walked along there was an almost perceptible
flinging of my soul into the heavenly spaces and I thought not on battles
and wrecks nor even of hungry children, but rather of the discoverers of
nature’s secrets, the disciples of philosophers, the undiscourageable
lovers of the arts, who everywhere are in the minority, and everywhere
reach the heights, and everywhere in the end control the hosts, even of
battle. And at the sudden dropping of the sun over the lovely Lorraine
fields, become blue with scarcely a hint of the green and brown and
amethyst of a moment ago, the band of yellow fringing the horizon—though
with me walked the ghosts of men who at the word of command invaded or
defended—I was not sad. A lean, brown, unexpectant urchin entered the
town with me. I gave him a two-franc piece and a blessing, _Pax tibi_,
which last, from the look in his eyes, some part of him understood. Then
I turned into the beautiful old house of the mayor where _goûter_ and
bridge had been arranged for us. I rapped with a large and very bright
wrought-iron knocker bearing the date 1781, and, entering, found myself
in a great hallway; to the left is the _escalier d’honneur_, with its
beautiful wrought-iron balustrade. I mounted it, and passed through many
rooms of noble yet thoroughly livable dimensions. They were filled with
officers, some women came from their hospital service in nursing garb,
groups of bright-eyed “_filles à marier_,” and a few young aviators.
The large _salon_ has beautiful panelings, with heavy gilt _motifs_ of
tambour, torch, helmet and shield in the corners. In it was signed the
celebrated Traité de Lunéville, 1801, and it is all very seigneurial.
I found myself seated at a table with the mayor, General —— and Mme.
de C., in nursing garb. I investigated, during a couple of hours,
the surprises of the erratic yet brilliant bridge of the _maire de
Lunéville_, whose delight was to mystify his partner as well as the
adversary, and who, without in the least deserving it, won every rubber.
I had a few bad “distractions,” but who would not, under that roof so
rich in memories?
During the occupation in 1914 the German generals and high officers
entering the town were lodged on the second floor of the old house. The
same thing had happened in 1870.
We came away in pitch darkness at 7.30, but I can now skip and bound
about the dark streets, with the best of them, no more feeling around for
curbs, which seem again to be placed where they are to be expected.
Afterward, dinner at M. Guérin’s. General and Mme. de Buyer, General ——,
M. Guérin’s two sons, one a mitrailleuse officer for the moment near by
at Blainville la Grande, the other the student and lover of the arts
of whom I spoke, and whose every instinct is remote from killing. I
sometimes wonder at the stillness of men like that—except that there is
nothing to be done about it. General de Buyer told us of _lances-flamme_,
of _flamme-snappes_, of the _obus asphyxiants_, which burst without odor
or smoke, but are deadly, all the same. Then the conversation turned on
_le conflit historique entre la race germanique et la nation gauloise_
which had begun before the Roman conquest. M. Guérin told us of places
where still may be seen colossal walls and thick, crumbling towers,
mysterious witness of those legendary conflicts, just as the Place des
Carmes, or Place Brûlée, is witness of those of 1917.
The younger Guérin son was preparing to go into diplomacy when the war
broke out. I said, “Perhaps we will sometime be _en poste_ together,”
and a strange look that the pleasant dinner scene did not allow me to
interpret immediately came over his face.
“_Peut-être_,” he answered, slowly.
I knew a moment afterward that that young man who loves his life was
thinking, “if I am alive.” He has seen so many fall. And suddenly came
into my mind the lines of his poet brother, born and dead between two
invasions:
_Nous sommes, ô mon Dieu, plusieurs dans la cité,_
_A porter haut le lys de la mysticité, ..._
And for an infinitesimal moment, in spite of the pleasant evening meal,
my thoughts, too, turned to invisibilities—his and my last end, and our
veiled destinies.
CHAPTER VII
ACROSS LORRAINE
LUNÉVILLE, _Tuesday, October 16th_.
One last look at the church, whose warm and lovely towers with their
_motifs_ of urn and scroll and angel were shining pinkly in the morning
light. Then through the door of the Hôtel de Ville, built on the site of
the ancient abbey of St.-Rémy, founded in the last years of the tenth
century by Folmar de Lunéville for the repose of his soul and of his
wife’s, and completely done over in the eighteenth century. As I turned
in at the passageway leading through to the other street, old houses on
one side, and on the other plantings of holly against the church walls,
I thought of the saying of the Middle Ages, “_Il fait bon vivre sous la
crosse_” (“It is good to live under the bishops”), and how the peasants
would come in from their hamlets, through the fields and forests, with
their tithes. The monks generally springing from the people showed
themselves more understanding of their wants and their miseries, and were
less apt to overtax them, having fewer needs, than the lords with their
wars, their ambitions, and their grandeurs.
Then one finds oneself in the garden of the Hôtel de Ville, where one
doesn’t think of the Middle Ages, for in it is a figure of a weeping
woman, and on the statue’s base are inscribed the names of young men
fallen in 1870. Life becomes suddenly without reason.
At the station. _L’abri de bombardement pour permissionnaires_ is in an
old convent having a deep cellar, across the railway. We carry our own
luggage, resembling almost any _poilu_, and with grateful hearts think of
what we left behind.
Mont-sur-Meurthe. Flooding sun, many soldiers, no room in the train. The
famous and now classic refrain, “_Faut pas s’en paire_,”[19] floats about
and makes one think how those who wait also serve, and in waiting learn
patience, this new virtue of the Gaul. In regard to virtues, the French
seem to have all those we thought they had, in addition to others we
never suspected them of having.
A man completely bent with grief follows two men carrying a coffin. He
himself carries a huge bead wreath, and his head is bared. Whatever his
sorrow, it is gone out into the eternal, the immeasurable Wisdom, which I
thought, in sudden fear, completely conceals that which it receives.
Dombasle, with its busy station and its great munitions-factories.
Columns of smoke, from purest white to darkest brown, were rising to the
shining heavens, and women in trousers, mothers and mothers-to-be, were
going to work in the factories.
At Rosières immense camouflage works, and then the railway skirts the
great canal. A thin, heavy-haired, very young girl is drawing a huge
canal-boat. Her arms are crossed over her breast; above them is the broad
band by which she tows that behemoth, a thousand times her size. In
accord with some law of matter it is just possible. One thinks of the
building of the Pyramids, and of the unborn.
NANCY, _1.15_.
Lunching at the Café Stanislas and eating my fifth macaroon, “for
remembrance.” The gold guipure of the wrought-iron work makes the square
seem to me like some lovely handkerchief thrown down as a challenge to
memory. And I will _not_ forget.
_Later._
At the station, waiting for the train to pull out. An old man attended to
our luggage; he liked his tip and became talkative as he straightened our
impedimenta in the racks. Three sons killed in the war. Two at Verdun,
the last and youngest at the Chemin des Dames this summer. His toothless
old mouth trembled, and I thought to myself in sudden horror, “God, is
_this_ France?”
LIVERDUN, _3 o’clock_.
A vision of transfigured beauty in the afternoon light. Its high
promontory aglow, every window a-dazzle. Its ancient walls, its old
château, its church, all seemingly made of something pink, unsubstantial,
shining. At the foot of the town flows the Moselle and there is a second
shining moiré ribbon—the great canal leading from the Marne to the Rhine.
Toul. The gorgeous towers of the cathedral are a-shine, too, above the
outline of the great barrack buildings. The vast station is a sea of
blue-clad washing in and out of trains.
At Pagny we pick up the Meuse, _la Meuse aux lignes nonchalantes_.
At Sorcy, wide, shallow expanses of inundation, and reeds and trees grow
out of shining spaces, and meadow-bounded flat horizons stretch away,
and suddenly it seems Oriental, Japanese, in the pink light—what you
will—anything but a historic river of the European war, flowing through
the elegant and sorrowful Lorraine.
And then we find ourselves at Gondrecourt in the tip of the acute angle,
for still, to go the straight road between Nancy and Châlons, we would
have to pass Commercy, daily bombarded by big German guns.
At Gondrecourt, about a dozen American soldiers standing on the platform,
several seeming to have just left their mothers’ knees. We wanted to
speak to the nearest one, but feared we might represent _l’autre danger_.
Great packing-boxes piled everywhere with “U.S. Army” stamped on them—and
how fateful a destination is this little Lorraine town!
At Demanges-aux-Eaux more Americans. An old church, quite mauve, rises up
seemingly from bronze waters, the houses of the surrounding village, blue
and gray. Americans are billeted in these wide-doored Lorraine peasant
houses, or in big stables whose entrances are high enough for great
hay-wagons to pass through.
A talkative military person in the compartment with us. I thought at
first he was a secret agent, he seemed to know so little about the
country; then I realized that he was only rather stupid. And he had an
uncontrollable provincial curiosity about small things, and was quite
_intrigué_ about his traveling companions, who seemed to know all the
things he didn’t know. He was _en permission_, coming from the forest of
Parroy, the other side of Lunéville, where the French and Germans sit
within a few yards of each other. He was quite uninteresting about it
all, but it wasn’t his fault, merely the way he was made. He showed me
his map and the zigzagging German and French lines in the forest, and
then I got suddenly bored and stood in the corridor, and watched the
Meuse get pink and then purple and then a strange glinting black. Down
the streets of little villages would come blue-clad men, smoking and
talking, or getting water and stores for evening meals. And then the sun
disappeared behind the yellow poplars, and a cold, clear night began to
fall. Bridges were guarded by sentries with bayoneted rifles, and old
men and women and children came in from dim beet-root fields, and more
khaki-clad Americans were standing about village streets, or cycling in
the dusk, behind reeds in water, and there were deepening forests, and
black ridges against the last pale lemon glow, and then another little
town, Laneuville, and two American patrols marching up and down with
rifle on shoulder.
And the talkative officer, who had bought newspapers at Gondrecourt,
tells of the pretty spy dancer, Mata Hari, shot that morning in the
prison of Vincennes with warning pomp and circumstance, and of Bolo Pasha
and _l’affaire Turmel_, but as soon as he touches a subject it loses all
vestige of human interest.
“_Ce que nous avons vu d’Anglais parterre à Combes_,” or, “_Qu’il faisait
froid la nuit où nous cédions la ligne aux Anglais_,” or, “_Je suis
toujours là où on cède la ligne_, they say now the Americans will take
the line at Parroy.”
He has been through the whole war without a scratch—Verdun, the Somme,
the Aisne—and now he spends cold, dark nights listening for Germans in
the forest of Parroy, and it hasn’t helped a bit; and he is one that
will get through, when so much of wise and fair will have been gathered
to the Lord. In an unwonted pause I asked him what he was in civil life,
and he answered, “_Fabricant de brosses à dent_.” I know it’s all right,
and there must be tooth-brushes, but we had just come from gallooned
generals, prefects, mayors, smart young aviators, and men living in the
world of books.
Blue mists came up from the meadows and slipped between the hills, and
everywhere black trees grew out of gold water.
LIGNY-EN-BARROIS.
The end of our line at the north, and there is a Gothic church of the
thirteenth century called Notre Dame des Vertus, and in it is the tomb of
the Maréchale de Luxembourg, dead in 1695.
NANÇOIS-TRONVILLE.
More blue meadow mists along gold waters, and soft dark fringes of
willows.
LONGEVILLE.
The evening star and spirals of smoke from little houses, and
blue-clad men melting into the twilight, and the canal a golden band,
with stampings of deepest purple where tree shadows cut across it.
Two American soldiers standing at a road-crossing looking up at the
sign-post. Everywhere the Lorraine twilight is shot with khaki-colored
threads from over the seas—and the three gray sisters spin the inexorable
web.
Bar-le-Duc, looking sick and sorry for itself. Station full of broken
glass, dirt, and piles of demolished masonry. The evening star hangs
above the older town on the hill. No time to get out to see how the
canteen work is going on; but two obliging station employees gave me
news. A whole quarter of the town by the river, near the Hôtel du
Commerce et de Metz, of unsanctified memory, was destroyed ten days ago,
by an air raid.
I asked if anything had happened to the church of St.-Peter, for I
thought of the _chef-d’œuvre_ of Ligier Richier, René de Châlons,[20]
standing in its dim space, holding his heart aloft in his left hand,
eternal offering to his first wife, Louise of Lorraine. How his widow,
Philippe de Gueldre, felt about this before she was laid out in the garb
of the Poor Clares I don’t know.
No longer any night work in the canteen, no lights being permitted.
Our train unlighted, too. New and larger signs indicating cellars and
shelters everywhere. Black moving shapes of _camions_ along the road, and
the evening star following us along the top of the hill of Bar. A squad
of Annamites quitting their work on the road.
_En ces armées singulières_
_Où l’Annam casse des pierres_
_Sur la route de Verdun._
REVIGNY.
Portentous dark shapes of roofless houses and detachments of blue-clad
men going down a winding road, one with the blue twilight. The station
dim, the town completely dark, and the vine-planted hills only soft
masses; the evening star still following us, though she is so close to
the ridge that in a few minutes she will drop behind it. Oh, this passing
of the evening star in a war—autumn behind French hills!
VITRY-LE-FRANÇOIS, _5.45_.
Founded by François Premier near the old town which was burned with its
church full of worshipers, in a fit of anger by Louis VII during his
war with the Count of Champagne. To expiate this crime he undertook
the Second Crusade. Much black ribbon of canal knotted about, one
end of which leads from the heart of France to the Rhine. An endless
train of troops going to the front, men pressed together, sardine- and
herring-like, in each compartment—it made my soul sick—just human masses
weighed down by accoutrement and literally wedged in. A lively dispute
between a thick-set _poilu_ and one of the station employees on behalf
of a slight, blond, very young soldier.
“_Quoi, vous osez engueuler un poilu de quinze ans?_”
And the following crescendo mounts to the broken panes of the station
roof, “_Embusqué, cochon, salaud, vache!_”[21]
There was no answer of protest from the official. And Vitry-le-François
is where Napoleon almost took prisoner the Emperor of Russia, the King of
Prussia, and the Austrian General Schwarzenberg in 1814, and in 1914 it
was bombarded by the Germans, and now American troops pour through it.
CHAPTER VIII
THE CHÂLONS CANTEEN
HÔTEL DE LA HAUTE MÈRE DIEU, CHÂLONS, _October 17th, 1.30 a.m._
Lodged at last with the “High Mother of God.” On arriving, dined in a
low-ceilinged, dingy, dowdy room, but the acetylene lights, the uniforms
and decorations of the officers, made something brilliant, which half
veiled the knowledge of the dark night outside, the approaching winter,
the continuing war.
Afterward, I slipped out with my little electric lamp, through the Place
de la République, almost empty; low and splendid stars hung over the
town. In the rue des Lombards, St.-Alpin was a dark mass, and from its
tower the hour was striking a quarter to nine o’clock.
I turned into the long, perfectly black rue de Marne. Not a single light,
nor any passer-by. I flashed my little lamp to find the curb. There came
a click of wooden-soled shoes from a side street, and a thick voice said,
“_Ah, la dame, pourquoi si vite?_” I passed on like the wind, trembling,
down the deserted street, but when I flashed the lamp to find another
curb, something heavy and stumbling got nearer. And then I didn’t dare to
turn the light on, and I took the wrong turning, and found myself in what
seemed a wilderness of mud and trees, with the click of those following
wooden-soled feet behind, and any woman who has been terrified, she
scarcely knows why, will understand. Finally I stopped behind a dark
mass of trees, with something sucking about in the mud, and mumbling
half-suspected words, and finally retreating.
At that moment a soldier appeared, a gigantic shadow of himself as he
struck a match to light his cigarette, and I asked:
“Is this the rue du Port de Marne?”
He answers, “You have missed your way; you are by the canal,” and he puts
me onto the road again, and then I turn and grope my way to the little
house by the Marne.
Neither Miss Nott nor Miss Mitchell is there, so I depart again, going
over the great Marne bridge to the station. Though I can see nothing, I
hear the regular practised tread of a marching squad, and when I flash my
lamp to find the curb, a little detachment looms up unmeasurably big and
distorted, and the horizon blue becomes that ghostly gray.
In the canteen a thousand men at least. Am quite dazzled by the splendor
of the installation. Warm welcome from Miss Nott and Miss Mitchell, with
the light of a very understandable pride in their eyes. Go behind the
long counter, then through the kitchen to the little dressing-room; take
off my hat, put on a long apron, twist my pale-blue chiffon scarf about
my head and am ready. As I look out over the big room I feel that in
the whole world it is the only place to be. Around me surged those blue
waves; the light caught helmets and drinking-cups; there was the mist of
breath and smoke; the familiar sound of laughing, disputing, humming.
That strange atmosphere of fatality hung over each and every one, yet
with a merciless confusing of destinies in the extreme anonymity of it
all.
Came away at 11.30 enveloped in a strange sidereal light, the stars
still more splendid as the night deepened. Even the memory of tropical
constellations vaulting high altitudes was dimmed. The Great Bear lay
over the left of the Marne bridge, and on the other horizon, over the
Promenade du Jard, where I suddenly remembered that St.-Bernard had
preached the crusade in presence of Pope Eugene and Charles VII, was
Orion, so bright that he alone could have lighted the town of the
Catalaunian fields, and Jupiter seemed like a distant sun, under the soft
blur of the Pleiades. The river was mysterious, yet personal with its new
mantle of history wrapping it sadly, yet tenderly, and with much glory.
Then I was again in the still, dark, long street; no passers-by, no
lights from any window, the clock of St.-Alpin striking midnight, and
Orion concealed to his belt by the houses of the Place de la République.
There was some deep stirring of my heart as I turned in at the door of La
Haute Mère Dieu, leaving the gorgeous heavens to stretch over the wide
plain of Châlons, where the hosts of Attila were defeated, where the
great, misty, tragic, glorious history of Champagne and Lorraine rolls
itself out. Now above it all is the whir of _aeros de chasse_, and a
faint, very faint booming of cannon. The Châlons plain continues to give
me the “creeps.” It is haunting and suggestive in the same way that the
Roman Campagna is haunting and suggestive, though the great bare stretch,
with its bald, chalky scarrings, its dull spots of pine woods, its dust
or mud, has none of the material beauty of the Campagna. Doubtless I’m
within the folds of the mantle of the concentrated, continuous human
passions that cover it.
I trod as lightly as I could through a resounding corridor, having a
profound regard for all sleeping things, past many leather leggings and
spurred boots outside of silent doors.
When I left the canteen, the guard, in answer to my cry, “Sentinelle!”
said, as he opened the gate, “_Ce n’est pas comme à Verdun, où l’on ne
passe pas_”; and then, “_Bonsoir, Mees._” It was so easily and gracefully
said in the inimitable French way.
_October 17th, 7.30 a.m._
Tea, a lukewarm pale-gray beverage, with some still crisp leaves afloat
on the top. I would have been ungrateful if I had not thought of the
Hôtel des Vosges. Mrs. Church, fresh and strong as the morning, though
just back from night shift, boiled some water for me and I blessed
her. The bleakness of this room is indescribable. Two lithographs of
the “_Angelus_” and “_Les Glaneurs_” but add to the desolation. A
red-and-yellow striped paper on the walls; on the floor a worn square
of Brussels carpet; brown woolen curtains; shutters with slats askew; a
large mahogany chest of drawers; a grayish dimity cover to the feather
bed, with machine-stitched _motifs_ showing its ugly yellow case
underneath; linen sheets, large, thick, and clean—and you have almost
any room of La Haute Mère Dieu. Except Mrs. C.’s with its extraordinary
bed, painted cream-color, having large “Empirish” corners formed by
pale green and gilt Egyptian unduly voluptuous Sphinx-like figures, and
a brownish-red plush baldaquin from which depend some yellowish-brown
curtains; the brown carpet with purplish flowers is a protest between the
two, and the rest of the room a riot of gilt mirrors. It’s a room one
couldn’t forget, and why provincial hotels cling so to brown upholstery
I don’t know. They give the effect of being old and dirty even when they
are—_perhaps_—new.
The corridor has been a sounding-board since dawn, and all during the
night _camions_ were being driven over the cobblestones, and motor horns
rent the darkness. My room looks out over an old garden. A tall, dead
tree-trunk has immemorial ivy clinging to it, and there is an old round
well, half covered, and beyond the gate, with ivy and moss-grown urns, is
a street that would have been quiet except for the _camions_; and I can
see a row of distinguished-looking, plain-façaded gray houses of another
century, opposite.
The German General Staff was lodged here before the battle of the Marne,
the chambermaid told me, with a reminiscential gleam in her eyes.
But you see how any one’s personal history, his little wants, his little
habits, are ground out into something quite different by the war-machine.
The only thing any one asks is strength to get through what he has
to do. He doesn’t demand to get through in any special way—just get
through—where so many don’t. Not to be so cold that you can’t use your
hands or your mind, not to be so tired that you can’t stand, not to be so
hungry that you are faint and useless, not to go without sleep till you
don’t care what happens to anybody, especially yourself. Life is fairly
simple, and somehow very satisfactory, on such a basis.
_11.30 p.m._
A long day, with the exception of luncheon at the house on the Marne
and a talk in the garden, where Mrs. Corbin and I sat for a while under
the yellow chestnut-tree, looking out on the brimming, jade-colored,
slow-flowing Marne, talking of destinies, and the illusion of free will,
by which, however, all these high deeds which we witness are done. And
it seems to me the thing called Destiny resides somewhere. It isn’t a
purely subjective affair, created out of the combination of qualities
and opportunities of each, rather something definite and operative
and immutable; but that may only be the way I feel about it now. I am
overcome all the time by the relativity of everything, even of truth.
The little white birch-tree has no leaves, the butterflies are gone, and
winter is close upon the war-world. The gardener has been returned to his
home. What of his sons, I wonder? He has a tender heart.
Miss Stanton lives in the little yellow room with the niche and the
emanations. Now she looks out on yellowing trees; yellow pumpkins lie in
the little wet garden; there is a border of yellow and red nasturtiums
and dahlias. It’s all like some stage-setting. When I said to her, “I
hear you have the little room with the emanations,” she answered, “There
must be something about it; for in spite of the fact that I am not
comfortable, I don’t dislike it.”
I wondered again what soul had inhabited within those four walls and if
the niche had been an altar, and to what god, as I walked along in a
sudden cold mist that began to envelope Châlons.
_Since 10 o’clock._
I have been swept about by varying tides of blue-clad men. Some thought
the _cantine épatante_, others thought sadly and remarked loudly that so
much money being spent on an installation meant that the war was going to
last indefinitely. “_C’est trop long_” one thin, blond man, with deep-set
eyes and bright spots on his cheeks, kept repeating, till one of his
friends in unrepeatable _poilu_ terms told him to “leave the camp.”
Concert in the afternoon, the usual number of extremely good _diseurs_.
In the Salle de Récréation, where it was held, are reclining-chairs and
writing-tables. When I told one not very young _poilu_ that there _was_
such a heaven, he, too, answered, “_Alors la guerre va durer longtemps,
si l’on fait tout cela pour ceux qui restent_.”
Lieutenant Tonzin has converted those old railway sheds into something
most artistic. The walls are painted cream with strips of pale blue;
conventionalized fruit-filled baskets and designs of flowery wreaths
decorate them at intervals. The great roof has drapings of white muslin,
and square, engarlanded shades make the light shine softly on the
blue-clad men coming and going, coming and going.
On the counter are small green bushes. One homesick-eyed gardener _poilu_
from Marseilles, having felt them, wondered what they would do if
watered. “_Les pauvres! Chez nous sont grands comme ça_,” and he raised
his hand toward the roof.
“_Toi, grand serin_,” remarked his comrade; “_tu vois tout toujours dix
fois grandeur naturelle_.”
Whereupon they began the inevitable dispute. I heard the words
“_gueuleton_,” “_qu’est-ce que t’as au bec_,” and the Marseillais finally
calling out, as they retreated, that he thanked God _he_ hadn’t been born
at Caen.
All is so orderly and the jokes mostly relatable. Only when they are
somewhat _allumés_ do they get on the subject of the eternal feminine,
and then the dots are put on the i’s, regarding her rôle on the natural
plane. But even then there is generally some _copain_ to say, “_Ferme
ta gueule_,” or “_Que veux-tu que les mees sachent de tout cela?_” The
legend being that the canteens are served almost exclusively by vestals.
When holding out their “quarts,” they often ask, longingly, “_Pas de
cogneau; pas de gniole?_”[22] When I answered once, “_Pas de pinard[23]
ici_,” the _poilu_ cried back, “_Mais le ‘whisk’! Vous en avez toujours
chez vous!_” Another delicate Anglo-Saxon reference.
Late, in between one of the train rushes, two men came in, violently
disputing as they stood at the counter:
“_C’est une guerre diplomatique, je te dis, cochon, va._”
“_Qu’est-ce que tu dis là, moi, je te dis, sale type, que c’est une
guerre qui ne mène à rien!_”
“_C’est la même chose, nom de—— —nom de—— —t’es bête, espèce
d’acrobate_,” etc., etc.
Another comes in saying, loudly:
“_Cette sacrée guerre, cette sacrée guerre! Qu’est-ce que cela me fait
que je sois boche ou Français? Suis de Roubaix, moi, il me faut manger du
pain sec le reste de mes jours—moi et ma femme et mes cinq enfants._”
When I gave him his cup of steaming _jus_ (coffee), he poured into it,
from his _bidon_, a few drops of _gniole_, and by the time he got to the
door he was singing the well-known refrain:
_Je fus vacciné,_
_Inoculé,_
_Quatr’ fois piqué ..._
Then a train arrived, the great room was flooded again, and no time for
anything except to ask, “_Avez-vous votre quart?_” (the tin cup) our
bowls having given out during the rush; or, “_Prenez votre billet à la
caisse_,” or, in order to relieve the congestion at _la caisse_, one
takes their ten centimes and pours and pours and pours, or indicates the
end of the counter, where the _repas complet_, consisting of soup, meat,
vegetable, and salad, is served. _Boudin_ with potatoes (a hundred yards
of this dark “blood-sausage,” curled up in boxes before being cooked, is
an awful sight), or hash with potatoes, they love, but one and all hate
macaroni with a deep hatred. Sometimes it is served when the potatoes
give out, and they don’t conceal their distaste. They get too much cold
macaroni in the trenches.
It’s always the ones who speak English who have the worst manners. One
rather nice-looking individual came up to the _repas complet_ counter,
saying: “I’m in a ’urry. Got no waiters? Step live.’” No _un_corrupted
Frenchman, even half-seas over, would dream of such a form of address!
Lots of tiny, yellow Annamites in to-day, sounding just the way
they look and looking just the way they sound. One brought back his
salad-plate (accidents will happen in the best canteens) with a little
worm a-move upon its edge, and he made some unintelligible sounds. When
I thoughtlessly asked a _poilu_ what he was saying, the _poilu_, quite
unembarrassed, proceeded to tell me, but _I_ can’t tell _you_! It must go
no further.
Lunched at the house by the Marne, where we talk American politics for a
change, then back. One goes, one returns, and still they flood the vast
room, and one continues the book of the _cantine_, bound in its horizon
blue, with its blood-stained, tear-sealed pages.
A quite peculiar warming of the heart when one’s own khaki-clad men
come in. Early in the afternoon an American appeared at the counter,
accompanied by a French corporal. He had completely forgotten the name
of his town, was driving a _camion_, and said, with a distressed air,
“If I could only find a certain spot in town, I _could_ get back”; and
then added, with a grin, “I suppose you think I’m like the doctor that
could cure fits; but I’ve got to get the fits before I can do anything
else, and I’m late already,” he finished, anxiously. After giving various
descriptions of various localities I hit on the Place de la République,
“with a fountain with three women?” and as I explained to the
under-officer, he said, “You’ve saved little Willie’s life,” and hurried
out.
The names seem the difficult part. One of them, when I asked where he was
billeted, said:
“That’s one on me; it’s got three names; but”—and he beckoned to a
_poilu_ standing near—“this is a pal of mine. When I give him three
knocks on the shoulder he gives the name.”
The _poilu_ didn’t wait for even the first knock before he said,
“Demanges-aux-Eaux,” and then the American treated him to chocolate
and offered him a “Lucky Strike” cigarette and began some exotic
pronunciation of Demanges-aux-Eaux.
There’s always one special thing in every situation in life that comes
hard. Now I must confess that whenever I have to take a damp, dark-brown
cloth in my hand and mop up puddles of spilled chocolate and coffee
from the tiled counter, I feel an invincible repugnance. To-day four
Americans came in together. A nice, tall, evidently perceptive one said,
unexpectedly:
“Just give me that rag.”
As I gratefully surrendered the clammy thing he continued:
“I will be here all the afternoon and you’ll find me mopping any time you
like.” He subsequently ordered four fried eggs apiece for himself and a
_poilu_, and then took a whole box of the little sweet round biscuits
that we were selling rather gingerly by twos and threes, came back from
time to time for bowls of chocolate, when he would cheerfully mop the
counter for me. Finally I said:
“What is your name?”
And he answered: “Smith. There’re a few of us,” he added, and then with a
twinkle, “but I’m John. Now what do you say to a swap?”
“I’m Mrs. O’Shaughnessy.”
“I bet I spot you. I was in Mexico last summer. Say, wasn’t your husband
mixed up with old Huerta?”
I had to answer “yes” to this version of history.
“I wasn’t much on dust when I was down there, but there’s too much water
here. However,” he continued, cheerfully, “we’ve got to tin the Teut or
he’ll tin us.” Then he added, in a confidential voice: “What do you think
of the war? I get mixed sometimes.”
I had noticed a small amethyst ring in the shape of a pansy on one of his
large fingers as he was mopping, so, after disposing of his question in
the briefest and most effective way by remarking that it was “up to us
all” to do every bit we could to win the war, to which he agreed, I asked:
“Are you engaged?”
“To one beaut,” he answered, without an instant’s hesitation. “Met her in
San Antonio last summer, but I guess she’s the kind that waits. Gee! they
were around her like flies, but I shoo’d ’em all off.”
And he pulled out the picture of a girl with large dark eyes half hidden
in love-locks, and showing a lot of white teeth between pleasure-ready
lips. What appeared of her person was clad in the most “peek-a-boo” of
blouses, and there was a twist of white tulle about it all. I wondered if
she was the “kind that waits.” I had a sudden affection for John Smith,
thinking, however, as he passed out of the door, that his identification
disk would be more definite than his name, and then, for an instant, I
pondered on the supremely elemental thing he’s come for.
Damp, cold night had fallen on Châlons, but the canteen was warm and
cheery, and the men who knew little of warmth and cheer were sitting
about in a moment’s comfort, and there came to mind a canteen I know
(oh, far away!) which is presided over by a lady with a mustache like
a majordomo, and there are no night hours in her canteen. She rings an
inexorable bell at the chaste hour of 9.30, and, rainy or dry, warm or
cold, out they go, the _poilus_. Some one with a compassionate heart
remarked to one of the men on a pouring night, as the bell was ringing,
“I am sorry you must go.” He answered, with a glance at the ringer and a
twist of _his_ mustache: “It’s well to choose them that way. It quiets
us.” And he went off singing, “_Depuis le jour où je me suis donnée_.” It
was too funny....
_Friday, October 19th._
A tightening of the heart at leaving that flooding hall—going out again
to pick up the personal life, inconsequential as it now seems. One is
hypnotized by the stream of humanity, drawn into its vortex, finally
rushing along with it, who knows whence or whither. I jerked myself back
by saying, “This is not my bit,” and, “Each one to his own.” There are
many ways of helping win the war.
I saw for a moment General Goïgoux, just back from his _permission_, so
solicitous for the welfare of his men, so pleased with the results of the
canteen, smiling as he said to me:
“_Eh bien, Madame, cela a fait des progrès depuis votre dernière visite._”
There is a quite wonderful entente, and appreciation, on both sides in
Châlons.
I went back into the canteen, and found some _poilus_ in fits of laughter
over a black cat. Now what a black cat evokes in the mind of the _poilu_
I can only suspect; I don’t quite know. Anyway, it’s something that
“makes to laugh”; and our black cat, strayed in weeks ago from who knows
where, and perched near a devoted lady of unmistakable respectability,
lately arrived to help “save France,” furthermore enveloped in a gray
sweater (it’s cold and draughty where she sits behind the small aperture
selling tickets for coffee, chocolate, and _repas complets_), and not in
her nature playful, seems somehow suggestive to the _poilu_. Even when it
perches on the counter by the coffee-jugs it’s the same. We don’t like
to get rid of it; it’s supposed to bring good luck. However, enough, or
perhaps too little, about the black cat.
There is a _surveillant_ supposed to keep order. He is rarely needed, and
if he does say anything, he gets an “_Embusqué!_” thrown at him, between
the eyes. It’s not the day of the civilian employee. This one spends a
good deal of time eating and not paying, and nobody loves him. There is
a favorite story of the _poilu_ saluting a common or garden variety of
policeman, thinking he was a corporal; and when telling of his mistake
afterward he called it “_le plus malheureux jour de mavie_.”
A hitch in the serving of the _complete repasts_. I looked into the
kitchen to see if things couldn’t be hurried up. The group that
met my eyes, of the cook and her assistant wrestling with yards of
blood-sausage, could have been the female pendant to the Laocoön. It was
awful. As I turned back to the counter I heard this bit of conversation
between two _poilus_ waiting for their meal:
“_Tu sais_, when a Canadian sees wood he goes wild. He’ll chop up
anything from a roadside cross to a baby-carriage. They say it is because
of his forests. At —— last spring they took the balusters out of the
house where they were quartered, and that pretty Jeanne you’ve heard
about—_un amour, je te dis_—fell down in the dark and was killed.”
“Each one has his _manie_,” answered his friend, in perfect tolerance.
“_Mais moi, je ne toucherais pas à une croix._” And he proceeded to
cross himself at the bare thought.
A colonel whose name I don’t remember took me into the garden to see the
kiosks that I had so often indicated when the men asked for _pinard_ or
_tabac_. The _guignol_ that I had seen at the camouflage grounds in July
was in place; beyond was the huge bomb-proof shelter built by German
prisoners to contain 2,000 men in case of _avion_ attack. We took a few
steps into its black, moist intricacies. As I came up I found myself
close to a group of some thirty German prisoners being marched past to
work on a cement emplacement for a gun, the large P.G.[24] stamped on
their backs, and wearing their small round caps with the red stripe, and
any kind of clothes. I felt for a moment like an illustration for Cæsar’s
_Commentaries_, or some sort of a Roman watching northern prisoners being
marched by.
The officer who showed me about was one of the twenty-seven men who
escaped from the Fort de Vaux, and had lost his only child on Hill 304.
“I was wounded, and I’m not yet worth much, which is why I am here.
My boy was only twenty-one—_mais c’était une personne faite_—a leader
of men. All, with those qualities, go; I am not alone, alas! in my
_douleur_.”
And that is one of the beautiful things of this sorrowful epoch. Each
thinks upon the others’ grief.... And then I left it all.
The jade-colored Marne is flat, eddyless, brimming over with its autumn
rains, the reeds have disappeared, the trunks of the willows are hidden.
Over the gray bridge flows, unabated, that other stream of war and life.
_Camions_, ambulances, smart red-and-white-marked staff automobiles,
soldiers in every conceivable state of soul and body, “enduring their
going hence even as their coming hither.” English, Americans, Senegalese,
Annamites—a dozen races swell this Gallic flood, and the Gray Sisters
never so busy since the world began.
PARIS, _January 7th, 1918_.
I am waiting to know from one of the most charming of the sons of Gaul,
who has promised to be my intercessor before the powers that be, whether
I am to go to my front—our front—now or not. If, as Amiel says, “_Être
prêt, c’est partir_,” then I am already off.
FINIS
FOOTNOTES
[1] Killed 10th November, 1915, at Zagora, at the head of his battalion.
[2] Planted so that any vista represents the Roman numeral V.
[3] Like porcelain dogs.
[4] Verdun, the Virdunum of the Romans. In the third century a bishopric
was founded there with Saint Saintin as first bishop; 843, the treaty
of Verdun; after the battle of Fontanet the three sons of Louis the
Debonair, Lothair, Louis of Bavaria, and Charles the Bald, divided the
empire of Charlemagne, with the result that not only was France separated
from Germania, but her natural boundaries, the Alps and the Rhine,
were lost; 1792, the Prussians besieged it in force and it was obliged
to capitulate after two days; 1870, a heroic defense lasting nearly
three months ending in capitulation; 1916, _Ils n’ont pas passé, ils ne
passeront pas_.
[5] _Neuvième série._
[6] Alan Seeger, _Letters and Diary_.
[7] Regimental decoration in the form of a cord worn over the left
shoulder, passing under the arm.
[8] The _sauf-conduits_ for the army zones are in the form of little,
red, paper-bound books.
[9] “_La Pioggia nel Pineto._”—D’ANNUNZIO.
[10] In _L’Horizon_ I found these lines from Verlaine, with a few added,
concerning _le Cafard_, by “Bi Bi Bi”:
_Quelle est cette douleur_
_Qui pénètre mon cœur?_
_C’est bien la pire peine_
_De ne savoir pourquoi_
_Sans amour et sans haine_
_Mon cœur a tant de peine._
_En effet, cher Verlaine,_
_C’est bien la pire peine_
_Que ta fameuse peine_
_Et les poilus sans art_
_La nomment le Cafard._
But _le Cafard_ differs from Verlaine’s _peine_ in that it is a very
special kind of world-pain, and very complete; for those in its grip
know _why_, as well as _not_ why, they suffer. The memory of loved and
early things, very probably not to be known again, is part of it. The
consciously unreasonable hope that all will be well in an extremely
uncertain future is another part of it—and underlying it is crushing
physical fatigue, sleeplessness, hunger, cold, heat, the whole smeared
in the blood of brothers and foes, the dull reaction after killing, or
escape from being killed—one can’t feel that there is anything vague
about _le Cafard_.
[11] Cook.
[12] Gondrecourt, the first American encampment in Lorraine.
[13] During the closing days of February, 1918, the air raids on Nancy
were so continuous and so disastrous that Molitor had to be evacuated
and the inmates, the aged and the children, were redistributed in other
parts of France. These words are quite simple to write and to read. Their
significance is beyond expression.
March, 1918, E. O’S.
[14] She received ten refusals for the dinner she was giving the next
night; among them one from Talleyrand, which caused a permanent rupture
in their relations.
[15] Governor-General of Morocco.
[16] The American Red Cross Asylum at Luxembourg (Toul), now under the
very able management of Dr. Maynard Ladd, has accommodations for nearly a
thousand children, well and ill, and a maternity hospital.
The American forces hold the line to the northwest of Toul.
[17] Her epitaph, written by herself, is to the effect that underneath
lies a rotting worm, giving to death the tribute of nature, the earth her
only covering, and begging her sisters, the Poor Clares, to say for her a
_Requiescat in pace_.
_Ci-gist un ver tout en pourriture,_
_Donnant à mort le tribut de la nature._
_Sœur Philippe de Gueldre fust Royne du passé,_
_Terre soulat pour toute couverture._
_Sœurs, dites-lui une requiescat in pace._
_MDXLVII._
[18] Madame du Châtelet, around whose death-bed three men met in
fraternal tolerance, Voltaire, St.-Lambert, and her husband, was buried
here September 11, 1749. In 1793 the tomb was profaned, the lead coffin
stolen, the bones scattered. In 1858 they were gathered up and put in a
modern coffin in which they now repose. She said of herself: “_J’ai reçu
de Dieu une de ces âmes tendres et immuables qui ne savent ni déguiser
ni modérer leurs passions; qui ne connaissent ni l’affaiblissement ni le
dégoût, et dont la ténacité sait résister à tout, même à la certitude de
n’être pas aimée.... Mais un cœur aussi tendre, peut-il être rempli par
un sentiment aussi paisible et aussi faible que l’amitié?_”
[19] “_Faut pas s’en faire_” is one of the most famous phrases of the
French army, and has been described as a combination of two slang
expressions, “To keep your hair on, _de ne pas se faire des cheveux_,”
and “not to hurt your digestion by undue worry, _de ne pas se faire de la
bile_.”
[20] René de Châlons, Prince of Orange, killed in 1544, at the siege of
St.-Dizier. The genius of Ligier Richier has represented him according to
his wish, as his body might have appeared three years _after_ death.
[21] Slacker, pig, dirty-one, cow!
[22] Cognac.
[23] wine.
[24] _Prisonnier de Guerre._