ALSACE IN RUST AND GOLD
[Illustration]
BOOKS BY EDITH O’SHAUGHNESSY
ALSACE IN RUST AND GOLD
MY LORRAINE JOURNAL
DIPLOMATIC DAYS
HARPER & BROTHERS, NEW YORK
[ESTABLISHED 1817]
[Illustration: THE RIVER DOLLER AT MASEVAUX]
ALSACE
IN RUST AND GOLD
_by_
EDITH O’SHAUGHNESSY
[MRS. NELSON O’SHAUGHNESSY]
AUTHOR OF
_“A Diplomat’s Wife in Mexico”
“My Lorraine Journal” Etc._
ILLUSTRATED
[Illustration]
HARPER & BROTHERS PUBLISHERS
NEW YORK AND LONDON
ALSACE IN RUST AND GOLD
Copyright 1920, by Harper & Brothers
Printed in the United States of America
Published March, 1920
B U
CONTENTS
CHAP. PAGE
PREFACE ix
I. THE JOURNEY THERE 1
II. ALL SAINTS’ DAY, NOVEMBER, 1918 13
III. FÊTE DES MORTS, NOVEMBER, 1918 23
IV. THANN AND OLD THANN 34
V. THE BALLON D’ALSACE 43
VI. LA POPOTE 55
VII. THE HOUSES OF THE CHANOINESSES 65
VIII. LUNCHEON AT BITSCHWILLER. THE MISSION IN RESIDENCE AT
ST.-AMARIN. SAINT-ODILE 81
IX. THE “FIELD OF LIES” AND LAIMBACH 100
X. THE VALLEY OF THE THUR 110
XI. THE RE-GALLICIZING OF ALSACE 120
XII. THE HARTMANNSWILLERKOPF 131
XIII. “LES CRÊTES.” “DÉJEUNER” AT CAMP WAGRAM. THE FREUNDSTEIN
AND ITS PHANTOMS 140
XIV. RETURN TO MASEVAUX 156
XV. THE VIGIL OF THE ARMISTICE 159
XVI. DIES GLORIÆ 175
ILLUSTRATIONS
THE RIVER DOLLER AT MASEVAUX _Frontispiece_
THE FOURTH OF JULY, 1918, IN ALSACE _Facing page_ 14
PLACE DU MARCHÉ, MASEVAUX, JULY 14, 1918 ” 14
THANN AND ITS VINEYARDS ” 34
COMMANDANT POULET ” 56
THANN. THE CATHEDRAL PORTAL ” 82
THANN. LA VIEILLE TOUR ” 114
AMERICAN TROOPS AT MASEVAUX CELEBRATING THE FOURTH OF JULY ” 132
FRENCH TROOPS AT MASEVAUX CELEBRATING THE FALL OF THE
BASTILE, JULY 14TH ” 132
AMERICA AND ALSACE ” 172
PREFACE
Strangely caught up out of the rut and routine of Paris war-work, not
even choosing my direction (the Fates did that), contributing, however,
the eternal readiness of my soul, which the poet says is all, I was
conveyed, as on a magic carpet, to the blue valleys and the rust and
gold and jasper hills of Alsace, where the color is laid on thick,
thick. There I was one, during many historic days, of the delightful
group of blue-clad, scarred, decorated officers forming the French
Military Mission, which since the autumn of 1914 had administered the
little reconquered triangle of Alsace and planted in it the seed for the
re-Gallicizing of Alsace-Lorraine. It was a bit of French history in the
making, which detached itself quite peculiarly free from the mass of war
happenings, somewhat as a medallion from that against which it is placed.
My little book shows how humanly and simply the men of the French
Military Mission, accustomed to supreme events, together with a woman
from over the seas, lived through those thirteen historic days preceding
the armistice. It will perhaps be worth the reader’s while—I mean the
nice, bright, perceptive reader’s while—for mostly the throbbing,
high-colored beauty of Alsace is veiled by dusty, argumentative,
statistical pamphlets, so many of which are printed, so few of which are
read. I once saw a great building full of such, and dozens of them were
presented me for my sins, though I had never thought to read another book
on Alsace, much less to write one. I see once again how foolish is the
man or woman who says to the fountain, “I will never more drink of thy
water.”
In this record there are no polemics and no statistics. I have added
nothing to each day’s happenings, which run along as life is apt to run
along, even in supreme moments, and, Heaven help me, I have concealed
nothing. It is because of all this that perhaps those who, like myself,
have wept much and laughed much in their lives, will not ungladly
accompany me to a corner on the sorrowful and glorious chart of the
autumn of 1918.
EDITH O’SHAUGHNESSY.
PARIS, 33 RUE DE L’UNIVERSITÉ, _February, 1919_.
ALSACE IN RUST AND GOLD
I
THE JOURNEY THERE
And this is what a woman was thinking, as she walked the platform of
the Gare de l’Est at seven o’clock on a foggy October morning of 1918,
waiting to take the train to the front.
“Why, when trials and tribulations await us in every land, when every
dearest affection is accompanied by its related grief and every
achievement by the phantom of its early hope—why this illimitable ardor
of the soul, pressing us forward into new combinations?” ...
A few days before I had learned that Masevaux, the capital of that small
triangle of Alsace, reconquered since the August of 1914, would be my
journey’s term. Looking in the guide-book, I found Masevaux at the very
end—on page four hundred and ninety, to be precise, and the book has
but four hundred and ninety-nine pages in all—and it had seemed far,
far, and the world an immensity, with few corners for the heart. I have
realized since that it was only the chill of the unknown into which I was
to venture, drawn inevitably as steel to the magnet or the needle to the
north, by that very ardor of the soul....
I had not slept at all the night before—I never do when I am to take
an early train to pass out into new ways—and the somewhat dispiriting
influences of “that little hour before dawn” were still with me as I
stepped into my compartment and took my seat, while a captain of dragoons
lifted my small leather valise and my not large Japanese straw basket to
the rack. Settling myself, a bit chilly, into the depths of my fur coat,
slipped on over my uniform, I looked out upon the throng of officers and
soldiers, as many Americans as French, perhaps even more.
Standing near my window was a blue-clad colonel, with many decorations
and a black band on his arm. He was carrying a small bouquet of what
seemed like wild-flowers, and he embraced in farewell a woman in deepest
black who would bear no more children....
Then a very young, crape-clad mother, carrying several pasteboard boxes,
with three small children clinging to her skirts, hurried down the
platform to get into a third-class compartment.
But with it all I was conscious that the blue and khaki war was receding,
its strange deeds, which had seemed cut in such high relief, were even
then blurred against the red background, the background itself fading.
“Eyes look your last, arms take your last embrace” of the world horror,
the world beauty, where sorrow has so often been above sorrow and where
many “chariots have been burned to smoke.” ...
In the compartment are five French officers with dark rings under their
eyes. I don’t know whether it is wounds or the effects of the _perm_.[1]
Anyway, they almost immediately take attitudes inviting slumber. A young
woman all in purple, whether third or fourth mourning I know not (it’s
well done, though it couldn’t pass unnoticed), sits by one of the windows
and waggles a short-vamped, very-high-heeled, bronze-shoed foot and
rattles a gold vanity-box. From the neighboring compartment came classic
expressions: “Can you beat it?” and “Search me.” My heart salutes the
Stars and Stripes. The whistle blows, and the train starts for the very
end of the guide-book.
_8.30._—Read the masterly editorial of Jacques Bainville in _L’Action
Française_, “Où est le piège?” (“Where is the snare?”) while going
through the ugliest suburbs in the world, inclosing the most beautiful
city in the world. And more beautiful than ever is Paris in uniform.
Her delicate gray streets are mosaicked in horizon-blue, burnished with
khaki, aglitter with decorations. (Oh, those men of the alert, expectant
step, or those other broken ones dragging themselves along on canes and
crutches!) Who has not seen Paris in uniform knows not her beauty, bright
and terrible as an army in array; enchantment for the eye, bitter-sweet
wine for the soul. And again, who has not seen her violet-nighted,
black-girdled by the river, wearing for gems a rare emerald or ruby or
sapphire light, and silent in her dark, enfolding beauty, knows her not.
So lovers will remember her, and those whose sons are gone.
_9.30._—Looking out of the window on fields and forests and groves.
White-stemmed, yellow-leaved birches burn like torches in a pale, thin
mist. The plowed fields are black with crows; it would seem to be a good
year for them. We are due at Belfort at 3.35, but a large-paunched, very
loquacious man blocking the corridor—his voice has not ceased since we
started—tells a fellow-passenger that, with the delays caused by the
shifting of troops and material, we’ll be lucky if we get there by seven.
_10.30._—Rampillon with its beautiful old church, having two rows of
Gothic windows and several medieval towers, seen from a foreground of
smooth tilled fields. Over the green and yellow and brown world stretches
a silver heaven, tarnished with yellowish-gray clouds.
_Longueville._—Interminable trains of French and American troops cross
one another. The French train has various barometrical indications of
war-weather in chalk. _Guillaume, O là là, là là_; and the favorite and
unrepeatable word —— mingles with _Le plaisir d’aller à Paris_, _O les
belles filles_, _Adieu à jamais, Boches_.
The cars containing American troops are inarticulate. They haven’t been
at it long enough to express themselves.
The handsome young officer next me opens conversation by asking me for my
_L’Action Française_. Having previously torn out the article of Jacques
Bainville, and wiped the windows with the rest, I pass it over to him
with a smile. It wasn’t tempting.
A group of Americans are standing in the corridor. I hear, “I’d like to
burn the Rhine.” And the answer: “I don’t care what you burn, but I don’t
ever want to see the Statue of Liberty from _this_ side again. Me for
home. There’s more in it in one week in the clinic in little old Chicago
than here in a month, in spite of the hunks of material. Leaving some to
die or bandaging men in a hurry that you’ll never see again, and dead
tired all the time. No, siree! No war thrills for me.” And then, all
being devotees of Esculapius, they fall to talking about diseases, civil
as well as military.
The loquacious party (he hasn’t stopped even to take breath) says to his
companion that he’s going to surprise his wife, who thinks he’s in Paris.
Whatever else she’s enjoying, she must be enjoying the silence, and I do
hope he’ll make a lot of noise when he opens the door.
The young French officer next me with the _Légion d’Honneur_, _Croix de
Guerre_, four palms and two stars, tells me he is with the Americans at
Langres, which is _camouflé_ these war-days as A.P.O. 714, the ancient
hill-town of the Haute-Marne being the setting for the celebrated
“University” of the A.E.F.
_11 o’clock, Romilly._—Near here, in the old Abbey of Scellières, was
buried Voltaire, _l’enfant gâté du monde qu’il gâta_ (“spoiled child of
the world that he spoiled”), having been refused ecclesiastical burial in
Paris. And from here he journeyed in his dust to the Panthéon.
At St.-Mesmin the sun came out, and the dull, plowed fields were suddenly
spread with great covers, as of old-gold velvet, tucked in about the
slender feet of pine forests.
Now all this pleasant soil of France has many histories, and St.-Mesmin
is where the priest Maximin (you see whence the name) was sent by the
Bishop of Troyes to implore the mercy of Attila in favor of the great
city. For answer the terrible king of the Huns put him to death. Against
the sky is the tower of a twelfth-century church. A collection of objects
in a field that I thought were plows turned out to be cannon.
_Troyes._—Not a glimpse of the cathedral. Immeasurably long troop-train
fills the station on one side of us. On the other a gorgeous (it’s the
only word for it) American Red Cross train. Pressed against the windows,
lying or sitting, were pale men of my race. I waved and smiled, and
languid hands went up in answer. The box cars on the other side were
filled with blue-clad men. Over the doors were green boughs, on the sides
chalked portraits of the Kaiser, _Dur à croquer_, _Mort à Guillaume_,
etc. And everywhere the once so familiar _On les aura_ is converted
into _Nous les avons_.[2] Through the slits in the top of the cars were
faces of _poilus_ looking out, just as one sees cattle looking out;
then a long line of other box cars with American, khaki-capped heads
also looking out of the slits in the top, while the side doors too were
crowded with sitting, standing, leaning doughboys. Again I waved from my
window, and every cap was lifted.
There was a young man standing at the door of some sort of a refrigerator
car, and he wore a wonderful goat-skin coat. Being so near my window I
spoke to him, and said:
“It’s a fine coat you are wearing.”
“I’ll tell you in the spring,” was the prompt answer. “They’ve just
given them out to us. You try living next to the cold storage.” He then
proceeded to blow into some mottled fingers, after which he pulled a long
tuft of hair from his coat. “I’m molting,” he added, as he held it up,
“and winter’s coming.”
And he didn’t know whence he had come nor whither he was going. Then
either his train moved or mine did—I couldn’t tell which—and I saw him no
more.
_Vandœuvres-sur-Barse._—Wood, wood, piled high on every kind of wheeled
thing. Forests from which it had been cut showing sharp and thin,
fringing the gold-brown fields under the luminous noonday heaven. And
here for a moment the green was so delicate and the yellow so tender,
that I had a fleeting illusion of spring as I looked out.
Then I fell to talking with some young officers of the 131st Artillery
from Texas, but nothing that I remember. They had made no impression on
France, neither did France seem to have made any impression on them.
_Bar-sur-Aube._—Old houses, old walls, blue hills, a white road leading
over one of them. Strange church tower, with a round, many-windowed top,
and in each window hangs an old bell. A great trainload of American
infantry “going up,” the station, too, flooded with khaki, and another
train passed crowded with _poilus_ evidently _en permission_, making
rather fundamental toilets.
And around about Bar, as we slipped out, was a silver-vaulted world of
terra-cotta and purple hills, green and brown fields, silver hayricks,
silver sheep grazing near, and warm, brindled cattle, many green-painted
bee-hives, and fruit trees trained against pink walls. Gentle slopes,
later to become the Alps, appeared, and beech forests, like very worn
India shawls, clung to them, and a row of nearby poplars had each its
nimbus of yellow light.
About this time, having had a hasty cup of tea at six, I began to be
so hungry that the luster went from the landscape and my eyes received
nothing more. I didn’t care whether the talkative man gave his wife a
surprise or not, and the two Americans of the Texan Artillery section had
long since also ceased to interest me, when I heard a “nosy” voice saying:
“Gosh! I tell you, boys, there’s big money to be made over here after
the war. All you have to do is to hang out the sign, ‘American Dentist,’
and your waiting-room’ll burst.” I sat down and nearly slept by the
side of the six-foot dozing handsome officer, with the beautiful blue
uniform, and yellow pipings on his trousers and cap, and five service and
three wound stripes, and the number 414 on his collar, besides a lot of
decorations on his breast.
_1.30, Chaumont._—Sitting in the dining-car, finishing an excellent
lunch. Of course, in common with the rest of the world, I’ve heard a good
deal about Chaumont, but I can say that on the word of honor of an honest
woman the only thing I saw in khaki in that famous station of the A.E.F.
Headquarters was an emaciated Y.M.C.A. man about five feet four inches
high, with an umbrella and a straw basket.
Of course, I’m familiar with the phrases, “Chaumont has put its
foot down,” “Chaumont won’t have it,” “Everything will be decided at
Chaumont”; and once, entering a Paris restaurant, I heard the words,
“It’s all Chaumont’s fault.”
Then the fog closed in, a thick, impenetrable fog, and that’s all I know
or ever will know of Chaumont, as I’m going back to Paris _via_ Nancy. So
be it.
On a nearby new railroad embankment, the figure of a _poilu_—the classic
figure—the coat pinned back from his knees, bayoneted rifle over his
shoulder, loomed up immeasurably large in the fog, while he watched the
labors of a lusty, husky set of German prisoners, the familiar “P.G.”[3]
stamped on their backs. A little farther along was another laughing,
rosy-faced group of four of the same, watched over by one of their own
under-officers. I could only see his field-gray back stamped with his
P.G., but as his men were so unrestrainedly hilarious, there is no reason
to suppose that _he_ was frowning.
_4 o’clock, Culmont-Chalindrey._—Already three hours late. Fog-enveloped
train of box cars filled with slightly wounded doughboys peering through
the narrow slit at the top, bandaged eyes, noses, the same kind of groups
looking out of the door. Suddenly everything seems dreary. I am tired,
and wonder why, oh! why I came, and if the war is going to last forever
and forever, and it is the hour of the day when those who have not slept
the night before know profound discouragement and the noonday devil has
ceased to walk, flicking his whip.
_Vitrey._—Station full of Americans and wood—wood—wood, as if every tree
in France had been cut. “Wood by the pound is how you buy it over here,
all the same,” disdainfully remarked the Minnesotan artilleryman serving
in the Texan regiment, as we stood looking out of the window.
And if the journey down seems long, remember that life, too, is made up
of wearisome and long things—that it is indeed but a pilgrimage, and
mostly through a land more desert than this of Burgundy.
And in the end this book may justify itself, though of that I know as
little as you.
At Vitrey there is a detachment of mustard-tinted, khaki-clad,
red-_checchiaed_ Moroccan _tirailleurs_, exceedingly exotic-appearing,
sitting on their accoutrement or leaning against the bare scaffolding
of a new addition to the station. There came into my mind what an unwed
friend told me of a conversation with a dying _tirailleur_, to whom she
was giving a _tisane_ in a long, dim, hospital room at two o’clock in
the morning. He looked at her and said suddenly in his strange French:
“Woman, I know thy look; thou and many like thee have not been embraced
in love. In my village thou wouldst be a grandmother” (I had never
thought of her as old, but the _tirailleur_ knew that, as the men of his
race rated women, she was old—old, and no one would have followed her
to the well.) He continued: “If no man is to enfold thee, why not be as
those of the great white coifs, who have given themselves to Allah? They
have not thy look.” Then he went into delirium and cried out in his own
tongue and picked at his sheet, and when she came that way again he was
dead.
_6 P.M., Vesoul Station._—Writing by the light that comes in from the
gas-jet. Dim American forms silhouetted in the great station. Partake of
the loneliness that possesses the soul of American youth in France on a
foggy autumn night. One of them said to me to-day, with a curious, dulled
look in his eye, a brooding, neurasthenic eye, “I’m the kind that gets
killed the last day of the war.”
Then a presence apparent only by the light of his cigarette, a being with
an accent not immediately placeable, half cockney, half Middle-West,
calls out, “Say, does anybody know when we pull into Belfort?”
It had, all the same, something of confidence-inspiring, so I briskly
chirped up:
“Oh, in an hour or two or three.”
“Well, I took the eight-o’clock train from Paris last night.”
Chorus: “You mean this morning?”
“I mean last night, and going ever since.”
“What have you been doing in between times?”
“Going, going,” he answered, casually, “and as you see, going still!”
“How did you manage to get on this train?”
“I don’t know. There I was and here I am, and God knows where my kit is.
I’m a flier, and I’ve got to have my things,” he ended, rather irritably,
and then there was another conversation about “burning the Rhine.”
After interminable hours—two of them—we came to Lure, and everybody
seemed to be getting out, even the woman in purple, and there was a
fumbling with pocket-lamps and the voice of my country crying, “Where’s
that d—— door, anyway?”
The young man who started last night came into my compartment as the
train jerked out of the station, and he was a Canadian aviator _en route_
for the big camp of the Royal Independent Air Corps at Chatenoir. Before
the war he had been a chartered accountant. “But,” he said, “once in the
air, never again can I sit at a desk, crushed in by four walls.” And he
told stories of hair-breadth escapes of himself and his comrades, and of
combats in the air—once he had had his knee broken—and then he suddenly
cried out in a sharp voice: “God! I’m tired! Somebody let me know if we
ever get there,” and flung himself in a corner, and went to sleep, I hope.
A young American officer standing smoking in the corridor, with whom I
had sat at lunch, turned on his pocket-lamp for an instant during the
ensuing silence, and said, “Do you mind if I come in?” Then, in the pitch
darkness, lighting one cigarette from the other, and very lonely, I
think, he almost immediately began to talk about himself, and his story
might be called the story of the young man who was and wasn’t married.
Stripped of non-essentials, it was this: He had become engaged at a
“co-ed.” school, as he called it, some years before, and when he was
drafted, in the possible event of his being ordered abroad, the twain
decided to get married instead of waiting a few more years. One Sunday
morning in November they hunted up a clergyman and the knot was tied.
They then had lunch at the station and she took her train and he went
back to his camp. She was an army nurse and he was in the Engineers.
Now, as inclination alone could have caused them to unite (there wasn’t
the ghost of another reason apparent; they hadn’t even mentioned the
matter to their families), the sequel of the story becomes somewhat
interesting; in fact, quite incomprehensible, let us say, to the Latin;
even I myself was a bit muddled as to the whereforeness of it all.
Well, to continue. The next time they meet is when Fate, not quite
unmindful of them, sends him as instructor to a camp in the Middle West
on the outskirts of the very town where her people live, and she goes to
spend a three days’ leave with them.
The not-too-eager and certainly not-over-inventive bridegroom (whatever
combinations may have been in his mind, neither he nor history records)
gets a few hours’ leave and goes to spend Sunday at the home of his bride.
I begin to breathe. But not at all. Her people, innocent as the new moon
of the marriage, ask a few neighbors in for lunch—to make it pleasant for
them. The bride was to return that very same afternoon to her hospital.
They did walk to the station (under the same umbrella, I hope) and there
they said good-by.
“It was what you might call a quiet wedding,” I hazarded at this stage,
and it was too dark to see if he caught the point. Please bear in mind
that this was a marriage of inclination; no other explanation, I repeat,
being possible. And the luncheon took place the end of January.
The next time the situation seems about to clear up is in the golden
month of August, she having been transferred to the military hospital
near the camp to which he, in the meantime, had been transferred as
instructor. It seemed providential and again I breathe, thinking, “Love
will find a way.” Not at all. The bride rings him up the Sabbath morning
after his arrival (Sunday is evidently a bad day for that young man) and
tells him her orders take her to Camp Sill that night. The next day he
gets orders to report for overseas duty, and here we sit in the dark, on
the outskirts of Belfort! He breaks the silence later, with a certain
eagerness in his voice (not, however, for his distant bride, who, I also
gather, still bears her maiden name): “I do hope if we beat them I get
a chance to go into Germany with the troops. I’ve wandered all my life
[he’s between twenty-five and thirty] and sometimes I wonder how I’ll
take to living in one place and bringing up a family.”
In the dark I wondered, too.
_Later, much later._—To-morrow, All Saints’ Day, there will be some
crowding of the heavens, and the day after, the Feast of the Dead, all
France will be a-hurrying to her graves.
II
ALL SAINTS’ DAY, NOVEMBER, 1918
_Evening._—Masevaux, a town of old fountains and old inns with charming
old signs hanging out, the pebbly Doller running through it under
ancient, balconied houses, and over all hanging faint odors of its
century-old tanneries. A long day, but not too long.
Punctually at eight-thirty I had descended the flashy stairway of the
“Tonneau d’Or” at Belfort to find the officer sent to meet me finishing
his coffee and reading the morning papers, always comforting these days.
In a thin fog, we start out of town, passing under the antique high wall
of the castle against the rock of which “The Lion” has been carved. Now
all has been done that it is humanly possible to do with granite and a
lion, but of that more another time—perhaps. I can’t stop now except to
say that the hand that fashioned it fashioned also the Statue of Liberty
in New York harbor.
We meet, just out of Belfort, a funeral procession—three coffins, two
draped with the Tricolor, one with the Stars and Stripes. Making the
sign of the cross, I commended three souls to Heaven. I always remember,
accompanying a beloved one of my blood to his narrow dwelling, how sweet,
how very sweet, it was to see the gesture of that sign, and the lifted
hats of those we met, saluting him on his last journey. Though I do not
care inordinately how or when or where I lose my flesh, that much I would
like done to me—in passing.
Nestled in the corner of a broad, sloping field was a cemetery, a new
cemetery, with French and American flags flying from its crowded graves,
and many men were busy digging, and we heard the crunch of shovels in
cold, gravelly earth as we passed, and yet I thought how well, how very
well, the soldier sleeps!...
We were on the flat road that leads to Cernay, where the Germans have
lain intrenched since the beginning of the war.
Shifting masses of horizon-blue, velvety in the thin mist, appear,
disappear down white roads, between fields of barbed wire and against
horizons of rusty beeches. In the villages black-robed women and children
and old men are coming out of rose-colored churches or standing by
elaborate, very decorative rose-colored fountains. There is the distant
sound of cannon. It is again the front.
At Masevaux, I find myself drawing up under some yellowing lindens
in front of the building of the Military Mission—once the German
_Kommandantur_, in turn once the nave of the old church of the Abbey of
Masevaux. I walk over a rich carpet of rustling leaves to the door, and
am shown up the broad, stone stairway of an immaculately kept building.
Commandant Poulet having been called that morning to St.-Amarin, I am
taken into a charming corner room hung with a wall-paper that might have
been designed by Hansi, where a young, light-haired man with dark rings
under his eyes, who knows both battles and desks, was sitting at a big
table.
We looked at each other, I must confess, with some curiosity, though
of the politest. I, to see what the Military Mission might be going
to offer, but prepared to be very easily and very much pleased, he,
doubtless, to see what had been “wished on” them for the next week. It
_might_ so easily have been awful, instead of a niceish lady who has
both wept and laughed, and known many lands and many men. He asks me
what I would like to do that morning. Not having the ghost of an idea
what there is to do, I answer, “Everything is interesting,” and give a
somewhat free Gallicization of “beauty lieth in the eye of the beholder.”
This was received approvingly, even hopefully, and he tells me that in
the afternoon I am to attend a ceremony in the military cemetery at
Moosch, in another valley.
[Illustration: THE FOURTH OF JULY, 1918, IN ALSACE]
[Illustration: PLACE DU MARCHÉ, MASEVAUX, JULY 14, 1918]
About this time I begin to remember that it is “La Toussaint,” and
I say that if possible I should like to go to church. This, too, is
encouragingly easy and I am turned over to an officer whose wife and two
children have been in Brussels for four years, he himself a deserter from
the German army.
When we reached the church, built of _grès rose_, evidently and happily,
from its abundance, the building stone of this colorful corner of the
world, and which can take on the loveliest of _patines_ in even a
generation or two, I find it overflowing with the faithful, many blue men
standing on its pink steps. The curé, followed, I hope, by his flock, was
off on a longish sermon, and for a good half-hour I was washed and blown
about on a sea of mixed metaphor, though it did not seem too long, for
mind and imagination were flinging themselves about reconquered lands and
border peoples, and I only really “came to,” so to speak, when a great
and splendid organ sounded and a deep, harmonious choir of men’s voices
joined it. Then I knew I was indeed on the frontier, where music lingers,
and amorously it would seem, near the last of the mad, Romantic peoples.
When we passed out there was the noise of guns and everybody was looking
up at little white balls of shrapnel unrolling themselves about some
black specks in the blue, blue sky. It was the familiar firing on German
airplanes.
Then I was led to this charming old house, which is one of six placed
at right angles, on two sides of the Place du Chapitre. It proved to be
part of the old convent, done over by Kléber when he cultivated the arts
of peace rather than those of war. It belongs to four agreeable sisters,
the Demoiselles Braun, whose brother, also a deserter from the German
ranks, was killed in Champagne. They were rehanging the portraits of
their ancestors.[4] Whereby hangs the tale of two American nurses who,
quartered there some weeks before, had left the water running in the tub
one night, after which the drawing-room ceiling fell in and the paper
peeled in hall and vestibule. Hence the rehanging of the ancestors, at
their own, I mean the sisters’, expense.
They take me up a beautiful, but very worn, stairway, with a
time-polished oaken balustrade, and I find myself in a paneled room,
looking out on the square shaped like this:
[Illustration]
Many motors are drawn up in front of the Mission under the yellowing
lindens. The old red inn of “Les Lions d’Or” is directly opposite, and on
the left of the square at right angles with me are the four other houses
once dwelt in by the _chanoinesses_ when it was decided that each should
have her own establishment. The square is roughly, anciently paved,
with grass growing in between the cobblestones, and Mademoiselle Braun,
who showed me to my room, told me the steps of the old stairway were so
uneven because after the Revolution (during which the Chapter had been
dispersed) the house was long used as a school and they had been worn by
generations of young feet running up and down.
_At 12.15_—I am conveyed to _la popote_[5] for luncheon. More officers
inspect me—I them also—and then we proceed to the consuming of an
excellent meal, to the very exhilarating accompaniment of the news of the
capitulation of Turkey, and a light, easy touching on other prospective
and pleasant changes.
Now as, owing to circumstances too long to enter into, I hadn’t eaten
since noon the day before, passing by Chaumont, I did full justice to a
rabbit white as snow, garnished with noodles of the same hue, flooded by
a delicious golden sauce. I only fleetingly remembered that I ordinarily
avoid the little beast as food; for dessert we had a great cake filled
with chocolate and whipped cream, such a one as I had not seen for many
a month and year. A bottle of champagne was opened in joy at the Turkish
news. And we drank to everything and to everybody—even to the health of
the “Sick Man of Europe,” not, however, sicker than several others at
that moment, as some one cheerfully added. It was all very pleasant, and
I felt that everything was for the best in the best of war worlds.
At 2.30 I start out with Captain Tirman over a smooth road, _camouflé_,
kilometer after kilometer, with screens of wire netting interwoven with
broom and pine branches, for the road runs along the side of hills which
slope down to the valley where the Germans lie intrenched. Everywhere are
shell-holes, new and old. We stopped on a high place and, getting out,
peered through a hole in the screen. Spread out before my eyes was the
rich plain of Alsace, one of the world’s gardens. Something crystal and
shimmering half veiled its loveliness, but its beauty and richness I knew
for the beauty and the richness of a thousand years of blood, and many
men had found it fair and panted for its beauty and died for it.
In the distance, very white and shining, were the chimneys of Mulhouse,
and a pale-blue line against the horizon was the Black Forest. All the
time there was the sound of cannon, ours and theirs, reverberating
through the hills. I was greatly moved, and started to go higher up in
the field, but Captain Tirman stopped me, saying: “It will be better for
you to get away with your souvenirs than to take them unrecorded with you
to the grave. The Boches shell anything they see; and we haven’t got our
masks, either, in case they send a gas-bomb.”
The roadsides were planted with cherry trees, scarlet-leaved, the
_kirschbaum_ of Alsace. The hills had great patches of velvety,
rust-colored beeches; dark pines traced black patterns through them,
yellow larches shone here and there like torches; a soft sun was
dispersing the last of the delicate, noonday mists.
Then we slipped into the valley of the Thur, where lies the ancient town
of Thann. From afar I saw the lacy, gray belfry of its cathedral, pressed
against other heights of velvet rust and burnished gold. Nearby, the hill
of the Engelburg, with its broken, overturned tower like a great ring, a
souvenir of Turenne’s campaign during the Thirty Years’ War, was soft
and lovely, too. The long street was sun-bathed, and filled with the
black-bowed peasants of story-books, and the blue soldiery of the great
war. I wanted to stop by a pink fountain, near the richly carved portal
of the cathedral, but we feared to be late for the ceremony at Moosch and
hurried on.
At a place called Bitschwiller, however, we were obliged to wait while
an almost endless procession of black-clad old men, women, and children,
and blue-clad soldiers wound across the road, from its pink church to the
distant green and yellow cemetery.
Furthermore, the Fifteenth New York Infantry—black, black, black—is
quartered at Bitschwiller, and the most exotic sight I have ever seen
were those khaki-clad negroes in that valley, already very high-colored.
Suddenly against the steep hill, like a picture slightly tilted back, we
came in sight of the square cemetery of Moosch.
Above and below it was framed by a line of helmeted men in khaki, and
as we neared I saw they were _our_ black troops; the horizon-blue of
a French infantry regiment made the frame at the two sides. High,
high up were a group of white- and black-gowned priests, and red- and
white-gowned acolytes swinging their censers. At the top of the steep
stairway, running down the middle of the black-crossed cemetery, was
a sacerdotal figure, with outstretched arms, exhorting, and around
about the whole were groups of women and children. We left the motor
and walked over to the cemetery, where I found myself standing near
the resting-place of Norman Hall, the first American to die in Alsace.
From the tall, black cross floats the Stars and Stripes, and some one
had planted chrysanthemums thick on his grave. Peace to him. He lies
not far from General Serret, who fell, too, on the nearby sacrificial
Hartmannswillerkopf, where commingled lie fifty thousand who at the word
of command had put out each other’s light.
After the sermon the negro band of the Fifteenth played some grave and
measured music, the French infantry band then something a little too gay.
As one of the officers said afterward, “_Cela a presque frisé la polka_.”
Then the “Marseillaise” sounded and “The Star-spangled Banner.” I felt my
veil wet against my eyes and my lips atremble as I thought, a second time
that day, how well, how very well, the soldier sleeps.
Above the cemetery in a higher contour of eternal hill was a great patch
of yellow and black and rust-colored forest against a clear blue-white
sky, in which tiny black specks were moving eastward.
We waited to watch the negro troops defile. They appeared very smartly
dressed till the eye got to their feet, and such a collection of ripped,
torn, cut, down-at-the-heel footgear was never seen! They seem to be
a flat-footed race, too. I spoke to a couple of darkies very much _en
repos_, who were leaning against a fence, near the motor, as I got in.
One answered, with a broad grin, “You an American from America?”
“Yes.”
“Well, have you heard dis here war’s about over?” The coalest-black one
then contributes this to the conversation:
“When peace is signed dis here nigger starts to walk home.”
“What about the ocean?”
“I’ll take a swim, lady; the water can’t be no colder and no damper dan
dis here ‘Alice’ land.”
The mulatto by his side said, “I subscribes,” and became a pale gray at
the bare idea of getting colder or damper.
Then we see Commandant Poulet, tall, blue-clad, with high decorations
a-shine, coming toward us, and he and many officers are presented to me,
after which I change into his motor, and we start out over a magnificent
military road built since the war. It was begun and completed almost
miraculously, it would seem, in little more than a year, and over it,
safely hidden from German guns, come and go the great military supplies
of the Alsatian front—troops, artillery, munitions, food, ambulances.
As we mount, mysterious, dissolving twilight views present themselves
near red cherry trees, burn against distant blue hills, yellow larches
illuminate other “hilltops hearsed with pines,” and the beech woods are
a deep, deep purple. Then we plunge into the dimness of the great cedar
forests of the Route Joffre, talking, but not too much, in the large,
enfolding twilight, of the war, and of Alsace of to-day. Commandant
Poulet has been in charge of the Military Mission since Christmas Day of
1914, and I thought, rolling over the broad road, contemporaneous with
his administration, how out of thousands, nay millions of men, his part
during these war years had been to construct and not destroy. He told me
that almost his first official act was to be present at the burial of
Norman Hall on December 26, 1915.
As we issue from the dark forest we find ourselves on a crest overlooking
many other twilit hills. There is a pale, pale yellow still burning in
the west, and the most timid of evening stars shines above it. Then we
dip into the deep blue valley where Masevaux lies.
Peasants are hurrying to their villages, and there is a continuous, but
dull, sound of cannon. In the chill of the fallen night we arrive at the
Place du Chapitre, the town dark, dark as we enter it, and no light in
any house. Having seen my pleasant room only in daytime, I proceeded in
hunting for the light to try to turn on a barometer, then by another
door feeling my way along, I fumbled about an arrangement of mandolin
and pipe, then, as a last resort, I sought light from a stuffed owl.
After which I went into the corridor and, re-entering the room, found the
electric button just where it ought to be—by the door.
A saving hour of solitude before I am fetched for dinner, which was
very pleasant, but I can’t tell about it now, for sleep, dear sleep, is
touching me, and it is two days and a night since it has been near.
III
FÊTE DES MORTS, NOVEMBER, 1918
Church again, seemingly in company with the entire population, civil and
military, after which I _flanéd_ in the old streets of Masevaux, word
having been brought that no motor was available for our projected trip to
Dannemarie. Indeed, I had early noticed from my window much mounting in
hot haste, accompanied by the lively sound of two kinds of firing. Some
_coup de main_, I suppose.
I strolled about under an uncertain sun, occasionally sensible of that
delicate, not unpleasant smell of bark and leather hanging on a windless
air. About me was that world of blue-clad soldiers, black-robed women,
and many children were playing in the pink and gray streets; a group
of little girls were skipping rope to the words _ein_, _zwei_, _drei_,
_quatre_, _cinq_, _six_!
The post-office of modern Teutonic origin still wears, high up and
indifferently, the Double Eagle, though the more accessible _Kaiserliches
Post-Amt_ has been removed. A little farther down the street is the old
inn of the “Golden Eagle” whose historic sign dates from Napoleonic days,
and which, as was pointed out to me, turns its golden back disdainfully
to the black, double face of the once proud eagle of the post-office.
And this inn of the “Golden Eagle” hangs its charming sign out on a
corner of the square called “La Halle aux Blés” (the Grain Market),
surrounded by sloping-roofed, roomy houses. In the center is a
rose-colored fountain, with three diminishing rose-shaped basins around
a carved central column.
And the cobblestoned square with its good fountain and its comfortable
houses—there’s even a stable and a garage on one side—has something
cozy about it, its atmosphere that of a place long used by human
beings for the homelike customs of “the simple life,” which last bears
no resemblance to that occasionally practised at great expense and
inconvenience by those who “need a change” and can afford one.
American troops passed through the Halle aux Blés on the 30th of May of
this year, again on the 4th of July, and on the 14th, too, always drawing
themselves up at last in the Place du Marché, one end of which is my
Place du Chapitre. There, under the lindens, General Hahn and General
Boissoudy watched them deploy, while gaily attired Alsatian girls grouped
about the fountain acclaimed them, and from every window hung the Stars
and Stripes.
Then I found myself wandering out on the road to Belfort, past the
high, grassy eminence known as the “Ringelstein,” once crowned by the
proud castle of Duke Mason, founder of Masevaux. Traces of ancient
walls embowered in ivy are still to be seen, and at its base are many
old outbuildings of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, once
dependencies of the Abbey and the Chapter, and when you are not expecting
it you find old inscriptions and bits of carving plastered into them.
On one high-roofed outhouse was a large crown and three fleurs-de-lis.
Blasted through one end of the great rock of the Ringelstein rims the
railway. And there is a near view of the red and green and yellow roofs
of the houses of the _chanoinesses_ confounding themselves with the
autumn foliage of the trees which embower them.
I begin to know a little of the early history of Masevaux, enveloped in
legends and many contrary tales—Masevaux, ruled now by abbots, now by
feudal lords, belonging sometimes to the House of Austria, sometimes to
the House of France.
And the first legend is that of its foundation. How the lord of the
country, by name Mason, a nephew of Saint-Odile, was feasting in his
castle of this same Ringelstein, and the wines of Burgundy and Alsace and
of the Rhine were flowing, and a troubadour was reciting a tale of war
and love, when suddenly Duke Mason cries out:
“Soul of my soul, misfortune is happening to my son! Night is falling.
Where is he?” And he goes to the window and looks out. Some one answers:
“Fear not, illustrious father of so dear a child. He has doubtless
tarried with the holy fathers of Moutiers.” But the night gets blacker,
the lords and ladies drop their golden hanaps and the troubadour is still.
Then Mason, in the grip of deeper presentiment, cries out, “Who loves
me to the succor of my son!” And they seek with torches for the child.
Alas! the white body of Mason’s son, born of a dead, beloved wife, is
found floating upon the little stream, and Mason, pressing what was once
his child to his heart, cries out: “Nothing can ever give me joy again.
I will build a monastery wherein to pass my days until God calls me from
this heavy world.” And that is the origin of Masevaux—Masmunster. The
legend has it, too, that on moonless nights the child returns, weeping,
because he did not live long enough to read all the beautiful stories
inscribed by the gods, the prophets and the wise, concerning the sons
of men. And as I looked up at the great grass- and vine-covered rock
whereon the castle of Mason once rose, the Doller flowing at its base,
the cannon of the great war sounded. Down the white road was disappearing
a battalion of blue-clad men, going toward the black and rust and
yellow of the hills—a red cherry tree between me and them. Then I turned
back into the town and hied me to the _popote_, where some half-dozen
extremely agreeable men were awaiting me, as well as a sustaining repast.
The American _communiqué_ was immediately and very appreciatively read
out. Our victorious advance was continuing along the Meuse (known as the
“Muse” by the doughboy), the First American Army attacking on the west
bank in liaison with the Fourth French Army on the left. Then we looked
over the Turkish armistice terms, quite satisfyingly comprehensive from
the opening of the Dardanelles to promises on the part of the Turks not
to speak to any of their former friends.
And we talked of how from the terrace of Versailles, where the German
Empire was proclaimed, the statesmen of the world will watch the twilight
descending upon Walhalla and its gods; and here in Alsace the crash of
falling temples can be heard.
After lunch I went with Lieutenant Lavallée to see a bit of Alsace from
within, for he was to invite various mayors of villages to go to Paris
for the “Fêtes Alsaciennes,” to be held the middle of November, and also
to select a discreet number of veterans of 1870 and school-children of
1918 to accompany them.
We went first to Gewenheim, a somewhat war-battered village and, as
we entered it, Lavallée pointed out the iron plate on the sign-post,
indicating the name of the village and the department. Like many others
of the Haut Rhin (Upper Rhine), after 1870 it had been quite simply
turned and marked in German. This proved most convenient and economical,
for all the French Military Mission had to do when they came to Alsace in
1914 was to turn them back as they had been before 1870!
The mayor’s house, one of the usual dwellings with a small door for
humans and a big door for harvests, had been much damaged. Passing
in through a sagging entrance, we found the mayor, the classic,
horny-fisted, wrinkle-faced mayor of a village, with cobwebs and straw
and other substances adhering to his coat, but possessed of a certain
air of dignity and authority notwithstanding. There was a moment’s
silence after the lieutenant gave him the invitation, pride visibly
wrestling with parsimony, accompanied by the working up and down of a
very prominent Adam’s apple. He accepted finally with a sort of “I am a
man” expression, but there was a quite apparent melting of his being when
he found that it was the State that would defray expenses. Then the wife
of his bosom, who had helped him make and save his money, came in and
showed us some of their “best” shell-holes, and a statue of the Virgin of
Lourdes under a large glass bell which had not a scratch, even, though
everything around had been shattered.
There was also a lithograph of Henner’s red-headed “Alsatian Girl,” who
hangs in every home and every railway station, and is used for loans
and appeals and calendars and advertisements of complexion washes and
hair-dyes; and she was once a charming creature, before familiarity bred
contempt.