Paris Again--And Bordeaux: Journal of a Flight from a London Fogs
These notes began in a London fog and ended in the south of France. I
had hoped, on reaching Calais, to work in toward the fighting along the
Yser, but, finding it impossible, decided to turn about and travel away
from the front instead of toward it--down to see Bordeaux while it was
still the temporary capital, and to see what life might be like in the
French provincial towns in war time.
It was not, so the young woman at the hotel desk in London said, what
you would call a fog, because she could still see the porter at the
street-door--yet day after day the same rain, smoky mist, and unbroken
gloom.
One breakfasted and tramped the streets by lamplight, as if there were
no such thing as sun---recalled vaguely a world in which it used to be--
woods with the leaves turning, New York on a bright autumn morning,
enchanted tropical dawns.
Through this viscous envelope--a sort of fungi thrown off by it--
newspapers kept appearing--slaughter and more slaughter, hatred, the
hunt for spies, more hysterical and shrill. One looked for fairness
almost as for the sun, and, merely by blackguarding long enough men who
could not answer back and, after all, were flinging their lives away
bravely over there in France, one ended by giving them the very
qualities they were denied.
They faded out as one picture on a stereopticon screen fades into
another--even as one read "Huns" for the thousandth time the Huns turned
into kindly burghers smoking pipes and singing songs. In the same way
the England of tradition--Shakespeare, Dickens, Meredith, jolly old
rumbling London, rides 'cross country, rows on the river--faded into
this nightmare of hate and smoky lamplight. The psychology was very
simple, but too much, it seems, for censors and even editors. And,
unfortunately, at a time like this not the light-hearted, sportsmanlike
fighting men at the front, nor sober people left behind in homes, but
newspapers are likely to be an outsider's most constant companions.
A sort of spiritual asphyxiation overtook one at last, in which the mere
stony Briticism of the London hotel seemed to have a part. If you awoke
again into that taste of soft-coal smoke, went down to another of those
staggering lamp-lit breakfasts. But why staggering? "Can you not take
coffee and rolls in London as well as in some Paris café"? It would seem
so, yet it cannot be done. The mere sight and sound--or lack of sound--
of that warm, softly carpeted breakfast-room, moving like some gloomy,
inevitable mechanism as it has moved for countless years, attacks the
already weakened will like an opiate. At the first bewildering '"Q?"
from that steely-fronted maid the ritual overpowers you and you bow
before porridge, kippers, bacon and eggs, stewed fruit, marmalade,
toast, more toast, more marmalade, as helpless as the rabbit before the
proverbial boa--except that in this case the rabbit swallows its own
asphyxiator.
Another breakfast like this, another day of rain and fog, another '"Q?"
--it was in some such state of mind as this that I packed up one night
and took the early train for Folkestone.
Folkestone, Friday.
Sunshine at last--a delicious autumn afternoon--clean air, quiet, and
the sea. Far below the cliff walk, trawlers crawling slowly in; along
the horizon a streak of smoke from some patrolling destroyer or
battleship. And all along this cliff walk, Belgians--strolling with
their children, sitting on the benches, looking out to sea. Just beyond
that hazy white wall to the east--the cliffs of France--the fight for
Calais is being fought--they can almost hear the cannon.
In the stillness, as they drift by, you catch bits of their talk:
"It was two o'clock in the morning when we left Antwerp."
"And imagine--it was not three metres from our doorstep that the shell
burst."
"We walked forty kilometres that night and in the morning-------"
On the balcony of some one's summer-house, now turned into a hospital,
four Belgian soldiers, one with his head bandaged, are playing cards--
jolly, blond youngsters, caps rakishly tipped over one ear, slamming the
cards down as if that were the only thing in the world. In the garden
others taking the sunshine, some with their wheel-chairs pushed through
the shrubbery close to the high iron fence, to be petted by nurse-maids
and children as if they were animals in a sort of zoo.
The Belgians strolling by on the cliff walk smile at this quaint
picture, for sun and space and quiet seem to have wiped out their
terror--that passed through is as far away as that now hidden in the
east. Is it merely quiet and sun? Perhaps it is the look of a "nice
little people" who know that now they have a history. "Refugees," to be
sure, yet one can fancy them looking back some day from their tight
little villages, canals, and beet-fields, on afternoons like this, as on
the days of their great adventure--when they could sit in the sun above
the sea at Folkestone and look across the Channel to the haze under
which their sons and husbands and brothers and King were fighting for
the last corner of their country.
Calais, Saturday.
Belgian officers, parks of Belgian military automobiles; up-country a
little way the Germans going down in tens of thousands to win their
"gate to England"--yet we came across on the Channel boat last evening
as usual and had little trouble finding a room. There were tons of Red
Cross supplies on board--cotton, chloroform, peroxide; Belgian soldiers
patched up and going back to fight; and various volunteer nurses,
including two handsome young Englishwomen of the very modern aviatrix
type--coming over to drive motor-cycle ambulances--and so smartly gotten
up in boots and khaki that a little way off you might have taken them
for British officers. At the wharf were other nurses, some of whom I
had last seen that Thursday afternoon in Antwerp as they and their
wounded rolled away in London buses from the hospital in the Boulevard
Leopold.
This morning, strolling round the town, I ran into a couple of English
correspondents. There were yet several hours before they need address
themselves to the arduous task of describing fighting they had not seen,
and they talked, with a good humor one sometimes misses in their
correspondence, of German collectivism and similar things. One had
spent a good deal of time in Germany.
"They're the only people who have solved the problem of industrial
cities without slums--you must say that for them. Of course, in those
model towns of theirs, you've got to brush your teeth at six minutes
past eight and sleep on your left side if the police say so--they're
astonishing people for doing what they're told.
"One day in Dresden I walked across a bit of grass the public weren't
supposed to cross. An old gentleman fairly roared the instant he saw
me. He was ready to explode at the mere suggestion that any one could
think of disobeying a rule made for all of them.
"'Das kann man nicht thun! Es ist verboten!'"
The other quoted the answer of an English factory-owner to some of his
employees who did not want to enlist. "They've done a lot for working
men over there," the man said. "Accident-insurance, old-age pensions,
and all that--what do we want to fight the Kaiser for? We'd just about
as soon be under Billy as George." And X------said to them: "If you were
under Kaiser Billy, you'd enlist right enough, there's no doubt of
that!"
Boulogne, Saturday.
He sat in the corner of our compartment coming down from Calais this
afternoon, an old Algerian soldier, homeward bound, with a big, round
loaf of bread and a military pass. He had a blue robe, bright-red, soft
boots, a white turban wound with a sort of scarf of brown cord and baggy
corduroy underneath, concealing various mysterious pockets.
"Paris? To-night?" he grunted in his queer French. The big Frenchman
next him, who had served in Africa in his youth and understood the
dialect, shook his head. "To-morrow morning!" he said. He laid his
head on his hand to suggest a man sleeping, and held up three fingers.
"Three days--Marseilles!" The old goumier's dark eyes blazed curiously,
and he opened and shut his mouth in a dry yawn--like a tiger yawning.
Wounded? No--he pointed to his eyes, which were bloodshot, patted his
forehead to suggest that it was throbbing, rubbed his legs, and scowled.
"Rheumatism!" said the Frenchman. The Algerian pressed his palms
together six times, then held up two fingers. "He's sixty-two years
old!" said the Frenchman, and the old warrior obligingly opened his jaws
and pointed to two or three lone brown fangs to prove it. They talked
for a moment in the vernacular, and the Frenchman explained again,
"Volunteer!" and then, "Scout!"
The old Arab made the motion of sighting along a rifle, then of brushing
something over, and tapped himself on the chest.
"Deux!" he said. "Two Germans--me!" Evidently he was going back to the
desert satisfied.
Train after train passed us, northward bound, some from Boulogne, some
from the trenches north of Paris evidently, bringing artillery caked
with mud--all packed with British soldiers leaning from doors of their
cattle-cars, hats pushed back, pipes in their faces, singing and joking.
At the end of each train, in passenger-coaches, their officers--tall,
slim-legged young Olympians in leather puttees and short tan greatcoats,
with their air of elegant amateurs embarking on some rather superior
sort of sport.
The same cars filled with French soldiers equally brave, efficient,
light-hearted would be as different as Corneille and Shakespeare, as
Dickens and Dumas--and in the same ways!
An Englishman had been telling me in a London club a few nights before
of the "extraordinary detachment" of Tommy Atkins.
"Take almost any of those little French soldiers--they've got a pretty
good idea what the war is about--at any rate, they've got a sentiment
about it perfectly clear and conscious, and they'll go to their death
shouting for la patrie. Now, Tommy Atkins isn't the least like that.
He doesn't fight--and you know how he does fight--for patriotism or
glory, at least not in the same conscious way. He'd fight just as well
against another of his own regiments--if you know what I mean. He's
just--well, look at the soldiers' letters. The Germans are sentimental
--they are all martyrs. The Frenchmen are all heroes. But Tommy Atkins
--well, he's just playing football!"
The idea this Englishman was trying to express was put in another way by
a British sailor at the time of the sinking of the Aboukir, Cressy, and
Rogue.
Imagine, for a moment, that scene--the three great ships going over like
stricken whales, men slipping down their slimy flanks into the sea,
boats overturned and smashed, in the thick of it the wet nose of the
German submarine coming up for a look round, and then, out of that
hideous welter, the voice of a sailor, the unalterable Briton in the
face of all this modern science and sea magic, grabbing an anchor or
whatever it was he saw first, and bellowing:
"Smash the blighter's head!"
There are phrases like these which could only have been said by the
people who say them; they are like windows suddenly opening down cycles
of racial history and difference. At a Regent Street moving-picture
show a few evenings ago two young Frenchwomen sat behind us, girls
driven off the Paris boulevards by the same impartial force which has
driven grubbing peasant women from the Belgian beet-fields. One spoke a
little English, and as the pictures changed she translated for her
companion.
There were pictures of the silk industry in Japan--moths emerging from
cocoons, the breeding process, the hatching of the eggs, the life
history of these anonymous little specks magnified until for the moment
they almost had a sort of personality. And one murmured:
"Comme c'est drole, la nature!"
Sunday.
It was dusk when we reached Boulogne last night--frosty dusk, with the
distant moan of a fog-horn, and under the mist hilly streets busy with
soldiers and bright with lights. It made one think of a college town at
home on the eve of the great game, so keen and happy seemed all these
fit young men--officers swinging by with their walking-sticks, soldiers
spinning yarns in smoky cafes--for the great game of war.
The hotels were full of wounded or officers--to Boulogne comes the
steady procession of British transports--but an amiable porter led me to
a little side street and a place kept by a retired English
merchant-marine officer who had married a Frenchwoman. Paintings, such
as sailor-artists make, of the ships he had served in were on the walls,
a photograph of himself and his mates taken in the sunshine of some
tropical port; and with its cheerful hot stove, the place combined the
air of a French cafe with the cosiness of an English inn.
Very comfortable, indeed, I leaned over one of the tables that ran along
the wall, while two British soldiers alongside gossiped and sipped their
beer, and ran over the columns of La Boulonnaise. Here, too, war seemed
a jolly man's game, and I came to "Military Court Sitting at Boulogne,"
and beneath it the following:
Seventh, eighth, and ninth cases. Thefts by German prisoners of war.
The accused are Antoine Michels, twenty-five years, native of Treves,
Twenty-seventh German Chasseurs, made prisoner at Lens. Henriede Falk,
twenty-seven years, native of Landenheissen (Grand Duchy of Hesse),
Fourth Regiment Dragoons, made prisoner at Lille. Max Benninghoven,
twenty-two years, Seventh German Chasseurs, made prisoner at Bailleul.
"The three had in their possession at the moment of their capture:
Michels, two pairs of earrings, a steel watch, two medals representing
the town of Arras, and a cigar-holder; Falk, a woman's watch and chain
in addition to his own; Benninghoven, a pocketbook, a pack of cards, and
money that did not belong to him.
"All were subjected to a severe examination and condemned: Michels, to
five years in prison and a fine of five hundred francs; Falk, to twenty
years at forced labor..."
And these few words of newspaper type, which nobody else seemed to be
noticing, somehow--as if one had stubbed one's toe--disturbed the
picture. They did not fit in with the rakish gray motor-car, labelled
"Australia," I saw after dinner, nor the young infantryman I ran across
on a street corner who had been in the fighting ever since Mons and was
but down "for a rest" before jumping in again, nor the busy streets and
buzzing cafes. But across them, for some reason, all evening, one
couldn't help seeing Henriede Falk, twenty-seven years old, of
Landenheissen, starting down toward Paris last August, singing
"Deutschland uber Alles!" and wondering what he might be thinking about
the great game of war fifteen years from now.
While I was taking coffee this morning my mariner-host walked up and
down the cafe, delivering himself on the subject of mines in the North
Sea. The Germans began it, now the English must take it up; but as for
him, speaking as one who had followed the sea, it was poor business. Why
couldn't people knock each other out in a stand-up fight like men in a
ring, instead of strewing the open road with explosives?
Walking about town after breakfast, I ran into a young man whom I had
last seen in a white linen uniform, waiting patiently on the orderlies'
bench of the American Ambulance at Neuilly. The ambulance is as hard to
get into as an exclusive club, for the woods are full these days of
volunteers who, leading rather decorative lives in times of peace, have
been shaken awake by the war into helping out overtaxed embassies,
making beds in hospitals, doing whatever comes along with a childlike
delight in the novelty of work. This young man wore a Red Cross button
now and paused long enough to impart the following--characteristic of
the things we non-combatants hear daily, and which, authentic or not,
help to "make life interesting":
1. An English general just down from the front had told him that four
thousand soldiers had been sent out as a burial party after the fighting
along the Yser, and had buried, by actual count, thirty-nine thousand
Germans.
2. In a temporary hospital near the front some fifty German and Indian
wounded were put in the same ward. In the night the Indians got up and
cut the Germans' throats.
I climbed up through narrow, cobblestoned streets to the higher part of
the town. It was pleasant up here in the frosty morning--old houses,
archways, and courts, and the bells tolling people to church.
Up the long hill, as I went down, came three hearses in black and
silver, after the French fashion, with drivers in black coats and
black-and-silver cocked hats. People stopped as they passed, a woman
crossed herself, men took off their hats--farther up the hill a French
sentry suddenly straightened and presented arms.
The three caskets were draped in flags--not the tricolor, but the Union
Jack. No mourners followed them, and as the ancient vehicles climbed
over the brow of the hill the people kept looking, feeling, perhaps,
that something was lacking, wondering who the strangers might be who had
given their lives to France.
Monday.
Paris again--a gray Paris, with bare tree-trunks, dead leaves on the
sidewalk, and in the air the chill of approaching winter.
Across the gray distances one fancies now and then to have seen the
first stray flakes of snow, and in some old street, between tall, gray
houses leaning backward, sidewise, each after its fashion--as some girl,
pale, with shawl wrapped about her shoulders, hurries past with a quick
upcasting of dark eyes, one thinks of Mimi and the third act of "La
Boheme."
Old sentiments, old songs and verses return in this strange, gray
stillness--that spirit so gracious, delicate, penetrating, and personal,
which has drawn so many through the years, becomes more moving and real.
There is more animation in the streets now: shops are opening, cabs
tooting down the Avenue de l'Opera the greater part of the night; but
most of the house-fronts are still shuttered and still. Tourists,
pleasure-seekers, and the banalities they bring are gone--every thought
and energy is with the men fighting on that long line across the north.
It is a Paris of the French--of a France united as never before,
perhaps, purified by fire, ardent, resolute, defending her life and her
precious inheritance.
The Temporary Capital
Tuesday.
A journalist actually protests in print against the big loaves of coarse
bread, long as half a stick of cord-wood and almost as hard--remember
the almost carnivorous joy with which a Frenchman devours bread!--to
which the military government, at the beginning of the war, condemned
Paris.
The explanation was that rolls and fancy bread took too much time and
there were not enough bakers left to do the work--and inspectors see
that the law is obeyed, whether amiable bakers think they have time or
not. And people want light bread, curly rolls, "pain de fantaisie." All
very well for General Gallieni! says the journalist; he likes hard
bread; but why must several million people go on cracking their teeth
because of that idiosyncrasy?
The government is obdurate. If fancy bread were made, only the big
bakers would have time to make it, little ones would be without clients,
and that this highly centralized, paternal government cannot allow.
Hard bread it is, then, for another while at least--"C'est la guerre!"
Thursday.
We have a dining-car on our Bordeaux express to-day, the first since war
was declared. To-morrow night sleeping-cars go back again--more
significant than one might think who had not seen the France of a few
months ago, when everything was turned over to the army and people sat
up all night in day coaches to cover the usual three hours from Dieppe
to Paris.
Down through the heart of France--Tours, Poitiers, Angouleme--past trim
little French rivers, narrow, winding, still, and deep, with rows of
poplars close to the water's edge, and still a certain air of coquetry,
in spite of bare branches and fallen leaves--past brown fields across
which teams of oxen, one sedate old farm horse in the lead, are drawing
the furrow for next spring's wheat. It's the old men who are ploughing
--except for those in uniform, there is scarce a young man in sight. And
everywhere soldiers--wounded ones bound for southern France, reserves
not yet sent up.
Vines begin to appear, low brown lines across stony fields; then, just
after dark, across the Garonne and into Bordeaux, where the civil
government obligingly fled when the enemy was rolling down on Paris in
the first week of September.
Bordeaux, Monday.
Bordeaux is a day's railroad ride from Paris--twelve hours away from the
German cannon, which even now are only fifty miles north of the
boulevards, twelve hours nearer Spain and Africa. And you feel both
these things.
All about you is the wine country--the names of towns and villages round
about read like a wine-card--and, as you are lunching in some little
side-street restaurant, a table is moved away, a trap-door opens, and
monsieur the proprietor looks on while the big casks of claret are
rolled in from the street and lowered to the cellar and the old casks
hauled up again. You are close to the wine country and close to the
sea--to oysters and crabs and ships--and to the hot sun and more
exuberant spirits of the Midi. The pretty, black-eyed Bordelaise--there
are pretty girls in Bordeaux--often seems closer to Madrid than to
Paris; even the Bordelais accent has a touch of the Mediterranean, and
the crisp words of Paris are broken up and even an extra vowel added now
and then, until they ripple like Spanish or Italian. "Pe-tite-a ma-
dame-a !" rattles some little newsboy, ingratiating himself with an
indifferent lady of uncertain age; and the porter will bring your boots
in no time-in "une-a pe-tite-a mi-nute-a."
The war is in everybody's mind, of course--no one in France thinks of
anything else--but there is none of that silence and tenseness, that
emotional tremor, one feels in Paris. The Germans will never come here,
one feels, no matter what happens, and as you read the communiqués in La
Petite Gironde and La Liberté du Sud-Ouest the war seems farther away, I
feel pretty sure, than it does in front of the newspaper bill-boards in
New York.
In fact, one of the first and abiding impressions of Bordeaux is that it
is a great place for things to eat--oysters from Marennes, lobsters and
langoustes, pears big as cantaloupes, pomegranates, mushrooms--the
little ones and the big cepes of Bordeaux--yellow dates just up from
Tunis. The fruiterers' shops not only make you hungry, but into some of
them you may enter and find a quiet little room up-stairs, where the
proprietor and his wife and daughter, in the genial French fashion, will
serve you with a cosey little dinner with wine for three francs, in
front of the family grate fire, and the privilege of ordering up
anything you want from the shop-window below.
There are attractive little chocolate and pastry shops and cheerful
semi-pension restaurants where whole families, including, in these days,
minor politicians with axes to grind and occasional young women from the
boulevards, all dine together in a warm bustle of talk, smoke, the
gurgle of claret, and tear off chunks of hard French bread, while madame
the proprietress, a handsome, dark-eyed, rather Spanish-looking
Bordelaise, sails round, subduing the impatient, smiling at those who
wish to be smiled at, and ordering her faithful waiters about like a
drill-sergeant.
And then there is the Chapon fin. When you speak to some elderly
gentleman with fastidious gastronomical tastes and an acquaintance with
southern France of your intention of going to Bordeaux, he murmurs
reminiscently: "Ah, yes! There is a restaurant there..." He means the
Chapon fin. It was famous in '70 when the government came here before,
and to-day when the young King of Spain motors over from Biarritz he
dines there. Coming down on the train, I read in the Revue des Deux
Mondes the recollections of a gentleman who was here in '70-'71 and is
here again now. He was inclined to be sarcastic about the present
Chapon fin. In his day one had good food and did not pay exorbitantly;
now "one needs a quasi-official introduction to penetrate, and the
stylish servants, guarding the door like impassable dragons, ask with a
discreet air if monsieur has taken care to warn the management of his
intention of taking lunch."
We penetrated without apparent difficulty--possibly owing to the exalted
position of the two amiable young attaches who entertained me--and the
food was very good. There were diplomats of all sorts to be seen, a
meridional head waiter, and an interesting restaurant cat. One end of
the room is an artificial grotto, and into and out of the canvas rocks
this enormous cat kept creeping, thrusting his round face and blazing
eyes out of unexpected holes in the manner of the true carnivora, as if
he had been trained by the management as an entertainer. The head
waiter would have lured an anchorite into temporary abandon. Toward the
end of the evening we discussed the probable character of a certain
dessert, suggesting some doubt of taking it. You might as well have
doubted his honor. "Mais, monsieur!" He waved his arms. "C'est
delicieux! ... C'est merveilleux! ... C'est quelque chose"--slowly,
with thumb and first finger pressed together--"de r-r-raf-fi-we!"...
It is to this genial provincial city that the President and his
ministers have come. They distributed themselves about town in various
public and private buildings; the Senate chose one theatre for its
future meeting-place and the Chamber of Deputies another. And from
these places, sometimes the most incongruous--one hears, for instance,
of M. Delcasse maintaining his dignity in a bedroom now used as the
office for the minister of foreign affairs--the red tape is unwound
which eventually sends the life-blood of the remotest province flowing
up to its appointed place at the front.
There must be plenty of real work, for an army like that of France,
stretching clear across the country from Switzerland to the Channel,
could not live unless it had a smoothly running civil machine in the
quiet country behind. Neither of the chambers is in session, and except
that the main streets are busy--one is told that one hundred thousand
extra people are in town--you might almost never know that anything out
of the ordinary had occurred. Things must be very different, of course,
from '71, when, beaten to her knees and threatened with revolution,
France had to decide between surrendering Alsace and Lorraine and going
on with the war.
The theatres are closed, but there are moving-picture shows, an
occasional concert, and twice a week, under the auspices of one of the
newspapers, a conference. I went to one of these, given by a French
professor of English literature in the University of Bordeaux, on the
timely subject: "Kipling and Greater England."
You can imagine the piquant interest of the scene--the polite matinee
audience, the row of erudite Frenchmen sitting behind the speaker, the
table, the shaded lamp, and the professor himself, a slender, dark
gentleman with a fine, grave face, pointed black beard, and penetrating
eyes--suggesting vaguely a prestidigitateur--trying, by sheer
intelligence and delicate, critical skill, to bridge the gaps of race
and instinctive thought and feeling and make his audience understand
Kipling.
Said the reporter of one of the Bordeaux papers next day: "Through the
Kipling evoked by M. Cestre we admired the English and those who fight,
in the great winds of the North Sea, that combat rude and brave. We
admired the faithful indigenes, gathering from all her dominions, to put
their muscular arms at the service of the empire..."
It would, indeed, have been difficult to pay a more graceful compliment
to the entente cordiale than to try to run the author of "Soldiers
Three" and the "Barrack Room Ballads," and with him the nation behind
him, into the smooth mould of a conference--that mixture, so curiously
French, of clear thinking and graceful expression, of sensitive
definition and personal charm, all blended into a whole so
intellectually neat and modulated that an audience like this may take it
with the same sense of being cheered, yet not inebriated, with which
their allies across the Channel take their afternoon tea.
A Frenchman of a generation ago would scarcely have recognized the
England pictured by the amiable Bordeaux professor, and I am not sure
that in this entirely altruistic big brother of little nations the
English would have recognized themselves. But, at any rate, polite
flutters of applause punctuated the talk, and at the end M. Cestre
asked his audience to rise as he paid his final tribute to the people
now fighting the common battle with France. They all stood up and,
smiling up at the left-hand proscenium-box, saluted the British
ambassador, Sir Francis Bertie, with long and enthusiastic applause. A
man in the gallery even ventured a "Heep! heep!" and every one drifted
out very content, indeed.
In the foyer I saw one lady carefully spelling out with her lorgnette
one of the words on the list posted there of the subjects for
conferences.
"Ah!" she said, considerably reassured apparently, "Keepling!" But then
she may have come in late.
Thursday.
The war has been hard on the main business of the neighborhood, of
course--Germany was the heaviest buyer of Bordeaux wine, Russia next,
and not as much as usual is going to England. The vintage this year,
like that of 70, is said to be good, however, and, though the young men
have gone, and the wine-making was not as gay as usual, there were
enough old men and women left to do the work. I visited one of the
older wine houses--nearly two centuries old--and tramped through cellars
which burrow on two levels under a whole city block. There were some
two million bottles down there in the dark and dust.
There is something patriarchal and princely about such a house, almost
unknown in our businesses at home--from the portraits of the founders,
from the caskmakers, at lunch-time, broiling their own fish over a huge
fireplace and drawing wine from the common cask as they have done for
generations; the stencils in the shipping-room--"Baltimore," "Bogota,"
"Buenos Aires," "Chicago," "Calcutta," "Christiania," "Caracas"--from
things like these to the personality and point of view of the men who
have the business in charge.
"Now, wine," began the charming gentleman who showed us round, "is a
living thing." And though you could see that he had showed many people
about in his day--and was not unaware of what might interest them--that
he was, in short, an advertiser of the most accomplished kind, yet one
could also see that he liked his work and believed in it, and grew wine
as an amateur grows fancy tulips and not as a mere salesman.
To be sure, he was inclined to slur over the importance of white wine,
while champagne and its perfidious makers didn't interest him in the
least; but of the red wine of Bordeaux, its lightness, bouquet, and
general beneficence, and the delicate and affectionate care with which
it was handled, one could have heard him talk all day. Now and then
younger houses discovered things that were going to revolutionize the
wine trade.
"Of course," he said, "we examine such things. We look in our books,
where records of all our experiments are kept, and there we find that we
tried that new thing in 1856--or 1756, perhaps."
Far underground we came on some of the huge majorums, big as nine
ordinary bottles. "The King of Spain ran over to Bordeaux one day, and
came to us and said: 'I've got two hours; what can you show me?' We
said: 'We can show you our cellars.' 'Very well,' said he; 'go ahead.'
When he came to the majorums he said: 'What on earth do you do with
those ?' 'They are used when there is a christening or a wedding or some
great event, and when a king visits us we give him two.'"
So they sent the majorums to the young King, and the King sent back a
polite note, just as if he were anybody else, and that is all of that
story.
Most of the newspapers which followed the government to Bordeaux have
returned to the capital, but that intransigeant government-baiter, the
venerable Georges Clemenceau, still continues his bombardment from close
range. His paper was formerly L'Homme Libre--The Free Man--but on being
suppressed this fall by the censor its octogenarian editor gayly changed
its name to The Chained Man--L'Homme Enchainé--and continued fire.
The mayor of a Paris commune in '71, prime minister from 1906-9, the
editor of various papers, and senator now, Clemenceau is properly
feared; and he was offered, it is said, a place in the present
government, but would accept no post but the highest. He preferred his
role of political realist and critical privateer, a sort of Mr. Shaw of
French politics, hitting a head wherever he sees one.
The imperfections of the French army sanitary service, the censorship,
and the demoralization of the postal service since the war have been
favorite targets recently. There has been much complaint of the
difficulty of getting news from men at the front. M. Viviani, the
premier, in an address at Reims, ventured to say that it was his duty to
"organize, administer, and intensify the national defense." On this
innocent phrase the eye of M. Clemenceau fell the other day, and he now
flings off a characteristic three-and-a-half-column front-page salvo so
adroitly combining the premier's remark with the actual, pitiful facts
that the reader almost feels that "intensifying" the suffering of
parents and friends of men fighting for their country is something in
which the present government takes delight.
I wish there was space to quote the editorial. I may, at any rate,
quote from one or two of the letters written to M. Clemenceau, to
suggest a stay-at-home aspect of the war of which we do not hear much.
This is from the mayor of Pont-en-Royans:
"Officially," he writes, "on September 29 I was asked to notify the
family of the soldier Regnier of his death. In the midst of their cries
and tears, the family showed me the last letter, received that very
morning, and dated the 27th September, two days before. Now, the notice
of his death was dated September 7, and I said to the father:
"'I would not give you too much hope; your son probably died the 27th,
suddenly, perhaps, and the secretary charged with writing the letter I
have received forgot a figure--instead of 27 he put 7. Meanwhile, as a
doubt exists, I will do what I can to clear the matter up.'
"The Administrative Counsel replied to me: 'There has been no error. The
notice of decease is dated September 27. If, then, the soldier wrote
the 27th, he is not dead. We shall inform the ministry, and you, on
your side, should write to the hospital where he is being treated.'
"I wrote to the chief doctor at Besancon. No response. I sent him a
telegram with the reply prepaid. No response. I wrote him a third
letter, this time a trifle sarcastic. I received finally a despatch:
'Regnier is not known at this hospital.'
"I still had the telegram in my hand when to my house came the sister of
the dead soldier, in mourning, and beaming, and gave me a letter. 'It
is my brother who has written us.' So there was no mistake. The dead
man wrote on the 2d October.
"'Very well,' said I to the family. 'Are you sufficiently reassured
now?'
"Some days after I received from the Red Cross hospital at Besancon a
letter giving me news of Regnier and explaining that there were several
hospitals in the town, that they had only just received my letter, etc.,
etc.
"I did not think more of the matter until October 23, when I received a
circular from the prefecture of Isere, asking me to advise the Regnier
family that the soldier Regnier, wounded, was being treated at the
hospital of Besancon.
"At last I thought the affair was closed, when, to-day, October 30, I
received the enclosed despatch, sent by I know not whom, informing me
that the soldier Regnier is unknown in the hospital of Besancon!
"Oh, my head, my head!"
You can imagine what this slashing old privateer would do with a letter
like this. The censor will not permit him to make any comment. Very
well--he wishes to make none. "You see, Mr. Viviani, it isn't one of
those execrable parliamentarians who makes these complaints. It is a
mayor, a humble mayor, officially designated by you to transmit to his
people the striking results of your 'organization,' of your
'administration,' of your 'intensification' in the cruelly delicate
matter of giving news to families. He supplies the picture, and you see
in plain daylight your 'intensification' at work. What do you think of
it? What can you say about it? Do you believe that because you have
given to your censor the right--pardon me, the power--to make white
spaces in the columns of newspapers that that is going to suppress the
fact? Do you believe," etc., etc.
In the same editorial was a letter from a father whose two sons, on the
firing-line, had received none of the family letters since the beginning
of the war and wrote pathetically asking if their parents and little
sister were ill, or how they had offended. A wife enclosed a letter
from her husband, telling how he was suffering from the cold because of
insufficient clothing; a doctor wrote protesting because there was not a
single bottle of antitetanic serum in his field-hospital.
We found M. Clemenceau in his lodgings late one afternoon--a leonine old
gentleman bundled up in cap and overcoat before a little grate fire,
while a secretary ran through the big heap of letters piled on the bed.
In the corner of the room was a roll-top desk--the sanctum, evidently,
of The Chained Man.
As M. Clemenceau was insistent that he should not be interviewed, I may
not repeat the exceedingly lively talk on all sorts of people and things
with which he regaled us once--and it didn't take long--he "got going."
One purely personal little bit of information may be passed on, however,
in the hope that it may be as interesting to other practitioners of a
laborious trade as it was to me.
We were talking of the facility with which he reeled off, day after day,
columns of lively, finished prose, and I asked whether he wrote in
longhand, dictated, or used a typewriter.
This question seemed to amuse and interest the old war-horse greatly. He
went to his desk and brought back a sheet of paper, half of which was
covered with a small, firm handwriting. It was his next day's
broadside, not yet finished.
"There is nothing mysterious about it," he said. "I get up at half past
three every morning. I am at that desk most of the day; I go to bed at
nine o'clock. If I had to write a banal note, it might take time, but
there are certain ideas which I have worked with all my life. I worked
a good many years without expressing them; they are all in my head, and
when I want them I've only got to take them out. I am eighty-three
years old, and if I couldn't express myself by this time"--the old
gentleman lifted his eyebrows, smiled whimsically, and, with a quick
movement of shoulders and hands, concluded--"it would be a public
calamity--a malheur public!"
I thought of the padded lives of some of our literary charlatans and
editorial gold bricks at home, of the clever young artists ruined as
painters by becoming popular illustrators, the young writers content to
substitute overpaid banality and bathos for honest work, and I must
confess that the sight of this indomitable old fighter, who had known
great men and held high place in his day, and now at eighty-three got up
before daylight to pound out in longhand his columns of vivid prose,
stirred every drop of what you might call one's intellectual sporting
blood. Of his opinions I know little, of the justice of his attacks
less, and, to be quite frank, I suspect he is something of a
trouble-maker. But as he stood there, bundled up in his overcoat and
cap, in that chilly lodging-house room, witty, unsubdued, full of fight
and of charm, he seemed to stand for that wonderful French spirit--for
its ardor and penetration, its fusion of sense and sensibility, its
tireless intelligence and unquenchable fire.
Monday.
The consul of Cognac! It sounded like a musical comedy when we met on
the steamer last August; not quite so odd when we bumped into each other
in Bordeaux; and now it turns out to mean, in addition to being a young
University of Virginia man, thoroughly acquainted with the people he has
to deal with, living in a town where the towers of Francis I's castle
still stand, rowing on a charming old river in the summer, and in these
days hearing a charming old French gentleman, vice-consul, tell how he
fought against the Prussians in '70. Cognac is a real place, it
appears--an old town of twenty thousand people or so, and it is really
where cognac comes from, all other brandies being, of course, as one
will learn here, mere upstart eaux-de-vie. We went through some of the
cellars to-day, as venerable and vast as the claret cellars in Bordeaux,
although not quite as interesting, perhaps, because not so "alive." For
wine is a living thing, as the man said in Bordeaux, and it must be
ignobly boiled and destroyed before turning into a distilled spirit. To
some this pale spiritual essence may possess a finer poetry--the cellars
are more fragrant, at any rate.
All the young men had gone to the front--their wages continued as usual
--and the work was carried on by women and old servitors, scarcely one
of the latter under seventy. They were pointed out as examples of the
beneficent effect of the true cognac--these old boys who had inhaled the
slightly pungent fragrance of the cellars and bottling-rooms all their
lives. You get this perfume all over Cognac. It comes wandering down
old alleyways, out from under dark arches, people live literally in a
fine mist of it. The very stones are turned black by the faint fumes.
There must be scores of towns south of Paris which look more or less
like this--the young men gone or drilling in the neighborhood, the
schools turned into hospitals, the little old provincial hotels
sheltering families fled from Paris. There are several such at our
hotel, nice, comfortable people--you might think you were in some
semi-summer-resort hotel at home--Ridgefield, Conn., for instance,
in winter time.
The making of cognac occupies nearly every one, one way or another, and
it has made the place next to the richest town of its size in France.
They make the cognac, and they make the bottles for it in a glass
factory on a hill overlooking the town--about as airy and pleasant a
place for a factory as one could imagine. The molten glass is poured
into moulds, the moulds closed--psst! a stream of compressed air turned
in, the bottles blown, and there you are--a score or so of them turned
out every minute. As we came out of the furnace-room into the chilly
afternoon a regiment of reservists tramped in from a practise march in
the country. Some were young fellows, wearing uniforms for the first
time, apparently; some looked like convalescents drafted back into the
army. They took one road and we another, and half an hour later swung
down the main street of Cognac behind a chorus of shrilling bugles. All
over France, south of Paris, they must be marching like this these
frosty afternoons.
Coming up from Bordeaux the other night we missed the regular connection
and had to spend the night at Saintes. The tall, quizzical, rather grim
old landlady of the neat little Hotel de la Gare--characteristic of that
rugged France which tourists who only see a few streets in Paris know
little about--was plainly puzzled. There we were, two able-bodied men,
and P------, saying nothing about being consul, merely remarked that he
lived in Cognac. "In Cognac!" the old woman repeated, looking from one
to the other, and then added, as one putting an unanswerable question:
"But you are not soldiers?"
We went out for a walk in the frosty air before turning in. There was
scarce a soul in the streets, but at the other end of the town a handful
of young fellows passed on the other side singing. They were boys of
the 1915 class who had been called out and in a few days would be
getting ready for war. In Paris you will see young fellows just like
them, decorated with flags and feathers, driving round town in
rattle-trap wagons like picnic parties returning on a summer night at
home. Arm in arm and keeping step, these boys of Saintes were singing
as they marched:
"Il est rouge et noir et blanc, Et fendu au derriere--d."
"He's red, white, and black, And split up the back!"
They saw themselves, doubtless, marching down the streets of Berlin as
now they were marching down the streets of Saintes--and they kept
flinging back through the frosty dark:
"Il est rouge--et noir--et blanc--Et fendu--au derriere--d..."