the most horrid _art nouveau_ continually mocked the delicate spirals of
smoke. Said the commandant one evening, flicking his cigar-ash into the
dreadful thing:
“That invasion was almost as bad as this. You could have bought an
ash-receiver like it in every big shop in Paris.”
“And in every little one,” finished Laferrière. “Thank God the frontier
_is_ closed, even at the price.”
In the corner between the windows was an upright piano piled with the
best of music, and there was a large and completely uninteresting
turned-wood clock, stopped at 12.25 on August 7th, four years ago.
And the man that earned and owned it all is dead in a soldier’s grave,
and the woman, Anna by name, weeps somewhere her lost love and the
equally lost gods of her household. _Et c’est la guerre._
[Illustration: COMMANDANT POULET]
As for Madame Labonne’s cooking, she knows her business, and if it
weren’t the obvious duty of those sitting about the table to take the
gifts the gods and Madame Labonne provide, I should feel I were living
much too well.
She gives us a _gâteau à la crème_ that disappears smoothly, leaving but
an exquisite memory. She has another _gâteau à l’oignon_ (don’t turn
away; it’s perfectly delicious and takes a day to make the onion part),
her _filets_ melt in the mouth, and her _purées_ are the insubstantial
fabric of a dream. When she serves the classic Alsatian dish of
sauerkraut decorated with boiled potatoes and shining pieces of melting
pork, you don’t really need to eat for twenty-four hours, and wouldn’t go
to the _popote_ except for the conversation and the company. Sometimes
the officers, the unwedded ones, think of marrying Madame Labonne—she’s
fat and about sixty and doesn’t try to look young (by her works alone
they shall know her), and the married ones think of trying to introduce
her into their happy homes in some rôle or other.
And when they move into the rich, shining Alsatian plain, that they
have looked down upon these four long years, she is to take part in the
triumphal procession.
And this is how we generally find ourselves placed at table. I sit on
the right of Commandant Poulet, who, somewhat as a prince of story, for
these four years has administered with much calm, with great good sense,
with wide understanding, and, above all, with immense tact and kindness,
the not always simple affairs of the delivered ones of the reconquered
triangle.
Only he can know the difficulties of the French Military Mission, though
all may see the results. It is a land flowing with honey if not with milk
(the busy bee in and out of war-time doth its work, though, it would
seem, not so the cow).
In full maturity it has been given to Commandant Poulet to see results,
and sometimes I have looked almost in and at a man whose strange lot
during the war years has been constructive work. His first public
appearance was when, as _tout jeune lieutenant remplissant des bouts de
table_, he accompanied President Loubet to St. Petersburg on his 1902
visit. Since then many honors have been his, and here in Alsace he has
been both Paul and Apollo, for he has reaped where he has planted and God
_has_ given the increase. _Très chic_, in his horizon-blue, with his high
decorations on his breast, _et très homme du monde_. This is what I see
and it seems very fair. Of his personal life what can I know?—except that
it must be as the life of all that walk the earth, disillusion succeeding
illusion, grief tripping up joy; for there is no getting away from the
old verses:
_Ainsi du mal au bien,_
_De la joie à la peine_
_Passe la vie humaine._
Somewhere in Lorraine the commandant has a destroyed château. But he can
always dwell in the dwelling of his labors in Alsace.
Vis-à-vis is his first aide, Captain Tirman, whom I saw on my arrival,
always with deep rings under his eyes, too much in rooms and bending over
desks—_il boit le travail_. Entirely devoted to his chief. He is musical,
too, and sometimes while waiting in the dining-room for the mess to
assemble we find him playing Beethoven or Bach, or more recent and more
compromising Germans, from the piles of the Oberforster’s music on the
Oberforster’s piano. _La musique n’a pas de patrie_—for musical men who
have fought. (But let a zealous _civil_ far from the front hear a strain
of Schumann or Brahms issuing from some window and he runs straightway
to the police.) Captain Tirman wears the Legion of Honor and the _Croix
de Guerre_, and is so pale, I am told, because of the hard campaigns he
has passed through, and wounds and illness. He is always in charge in the
absence of the commandant, but though _être Tirmannisé_ is one of the
gentle jokes of the _popote_, no signs of tyranny were apparent to me.
Captain Bernard, second aide, is, like the commandant, from Lorraine, and
had prepared himself for the Paris bar. He conducted himself admirably
during the war, Laferrière tells me. Wounded three times, he bears a
great scar—_sa belle cicatrice_, as his comrades proudly call it—on his
forehead (Verdun, August, 1916) and over his heart _la Légion d’Honneur_
and the _Croix de Guerre_. Always very carefully dressed—_tiré à quatre
épingles_ (pulled out by four pins), as they nearly all are.
At his right sits Captain Sérin from Toulouse, the only Meridional at the
table. He is very straightforward and uncomplicated, I should judge, as
regards his psychology, with the rather objective eye of the man from the
south. (They don’t dream the way we farther north do.) He sees a joke at
any distance and is the sort, they tell me, who would obey as simply as
he would breathe, without a thought of hesitation, an order unto death.
The sort that when told to bring up reinforcements at a moment when it
seems impossible, quite simply does it, and it only _happens_ to happen
that he is living. He is not tall, but wide of shoulder, holding himself
very straight, and on his breast there are ribbons, too. He is chief of
the Gendarme Service, the first and last provost of Alsace reconquered.
On the other side of Captain Bernard sits Captain Toussaint, chief of the
Forestry Service of the Masevaux district, clad in bottle-green, with
silver bugles on his collar and the Legion of Honor and other decorations
on his breast, _d’une grande bonté_, his comrades tell me. He is from
the north, from Douai (his brother was killed at the front), tall, slim,
pale-faced, lantern-jawed, everything is in his eyes—in the _regard_, as
some one said of him—and much of his life is passed alone in forests. So
different from Captains Bernard and Lavallée, living in Paris, between
whom he generally sits; and he nearly always comes in late from his
forests for luncheon and dinner.
“For Toussaint, Creation is represented by the first day when the heavens
were formed, and everything that came afterward had something to do with
forests,” some one said last night, as he was talking rather hotly about
the war-time cutting down of the trees of France, and the influence the
loss of forests had on the life of nations. _Très catholique_, also;
but then these men of the Mission, with all of whom I have entered
tabernacles, are of an extreme reverence. What they “believe” I know not.
Lieutenant Laferrière sits sometimes by me, sometimes at the end of the
table. He has early gray hair, a fresh complexion, gray-blue eyes with
a certain inwardness of expression, a smiling movement of the lips when
speaking, and, with all his wit, an extreme kindness in human judgments.
Indeed, I am struck by something of softness and patience in the eyes of
each one of these men to whom nothing of war is foreign, who have looked
on all combinations of mortal anguish, and whose eyes at times, too, have
had the red look, the hard, bright look of men who have just killed.
Laferrière is very cultivated after the way of us dwellers in cities.
He was Doctor of Law at the University of Lille. On the 2d of August,
1914, he closed his books, after which, as under-officer, he had lived
for months that closely packed life of the trenches, “where one was
never physically a moment alone” (hardest of all hardships, I have heard
fastidious men say), then he had been called as jurist to the Mission.
Emotional, but through circumstances or will, how can I know? giving the
effect of having dominated the personal—to what point also I know not.
Lieutenant Lavallée, but recently come from Paris, sits at another
end. His personality is less striking than some of the others at the
table, though he has _une tête un peu mauresque_, like pictures of the
_Conquistadores_, and is inclined to solemnity of mien. He has a charming
voice, fresh, with warm notes in it, and sometimes of an evening sings
Breton _chansons populaires_. We especially like the one concerning _la
douce Annette_, who spun a fatal love-story with a certain Pierre who
wouldn’t let go her hand.
There is one, Stroll by name, now absent, but his comrades evidently love
him, for I often hear, “What a pity Stroll isn’t here”; or, “That is
Stroll’s story.”
Also for a few days _en visite_ like myself is Captain Antoni, born at
Strasbourg, but very French in appearance, a tall, _svelte_, thin-faced
man with a rising and falling inflexion in his voice, who has been
through the whole campaign and wears many decorations. He said last night
that the fighting at Verdun, especially that at Hill 304, was the worst
he had seen.
At this moment the Verdun sector, which knows the blood of men of many
climes, is moist with that of _my_ countrymen.
Now this is part of what I see as I sit at table with these men. The
common patriotic effort tends to screen the personal life of each, of
which I know nothing. But I do know that destiny is largely formed by
character and endowments, and, barring the fact that time and chance
happeneth to all, I would be tempted to wager that when such or such a
thing came to such or such a one, _thus_ he received it—gift or blow—thus
he used it, once his own. So unescapable and visible are the sequences of
character.
Sometimes we play bridge in the evening, pleasant, easy bridge, anybody
taking a card back when once played, and changing his mind about
declarations. As they so truly say, “_Nous jouons pour nous amuser_.”
And yesterday there appeared on the table the famous _cafetière_ and
Sérin, his face shining with a great light, performed the rites. It was
one of those large, high glass bulbs with a nickel coffee-pot below. Dry
coffee is put into the glass bulb, water into the pot, an alcohol-lamp
beneath, and the whole is hermetically sealed. After which, according to
the mysterious and wonderful laws of nature, the water rises and wets
the coffee; it must rise thrice, giving forth at the same time volcanic
sounds. During the ceremony nothing else is thought of. The officiating
high priest is harried with liturgical suggestions, or unkind remarks
are made about his natural endowments. As that corked spout of the pot,
horrid with potentialities, is turned now toward one, now toward the
other, men who would have given their lives without a thought in the
trenches, get nervous and call to Sérin, “_Dis-donc, tu vas me crever un
œil!_” “Not toward Madame. It would be too terrible,” etc., etc., and
in the end the spout, with all its possibilities, is turned toward the
Oberforster’s made-in-Germany clock. After which one has a delicious cup
of coffee and conversation becomes normal.[10]
Last night I found they were talking about giving a certificate of
good conduct to one of them who is married, to take home with him to
reassure his wife. A comrade, after a little badinage in the Latin
manner, but very discreet I must say, objects: “But now there won’t be
any _permissions_,” and, doubtfully, “We would have to give him the
certificate for three whole months.”
Then, like the antiphon of some song, a voice said, “_Trois mois, c’est
long_.”
Another said, “_Trois mois, c’est très long_.”
Another, with a sigh, “_C’est trop long_....” And I to smile—within
myself.
Then a stumbling home on an invisible but strong horizon-blue arm,
through the inky streets, ankle-deep in mud. Sometimes I haven’t known
which one of the various kind arms it was, the electric pocket-lamp only
occasionally making the darkness more manifest. No one to bump into, as
circulation in the streets is forbidden after nine o’clock, on account of
possible espionage.
And you will say these are pleasant days!
_Later._—Hunting in the bookcase, I found a small diamond-printed copy
of _Hermann und Dorothea_. As, to the sound of near night-firing, I
turned its smooth old pages, I realized it for one of the most completely
objective works of genius ever born into the world. No thread of its
maker’s identity is woven with it, no color of his personal experience.
I felt but a sense of his complete and serene equilibrium, though the
stream of words, bearing those golden thoughts, was so softly flowing, so
crystal-clear, that it made me remember a line from another of Goethe’s
poems, as subjective as this is objective:
_Der Geist ist Bräutigam._
_Wort sei die Braut._
In the little preface I found that the poet, in his old age, was wont to
say of _Hermann und Dorothea_ that of his long poems it was almost the
only one that gave him pleasure. I seemed to understand what he meant. By
reason of its complete objectivity, he could have had no consciousness
of that inadequacy familiar to mortals contemplating anything formed
from themselves. No suffering had attended its birth; rather it would
seem to have formed itself spontaneously on the heights out of some
plastic stuff, light and bright as summer air, imperishable as granite.
It did not recall to Goethe (nor does it to one who reads) that night of
personal anguish, that day of emptiness, that hour of longing, nor even
some glimpsing, vistaed moment wherein personal fulfilment held out its
shining, shadowy hand.
In spite of the sound of cannon and the smarting of my eyes from the
strain of the tiny Gothic print, for a moment within myself an almost
equal feeling of harmony arose, taking a form of Peace, like an antique
statue, free yet restrained, noble yet persuasive; bearing no one’s mark,
nor any signs of workmanship, except that stamped by its own beauty. Then
it vanished, leaving the little book to throb between my hands to the
beat of my own times. Though generations had passed on and other wars
were being fought, and the word “freedom” was again on every lip, as
always, the women, the children, the old, were paying the heaviest tithes
of invasion. Had I not seen like streams of fugitive populations flooding
into Paris that hideous spring of 1918, heard the cries of anguish from
those fleeing before an enemy army? Then also death and birth waited not
on circumstance, and love and hate, fear and hope, hurry and exhaustion,
were at work in strange commingling. I had seen deeds of succor, too,
like unto those of the lovers, proffered in boundless devotion, by
nameless, uncounted men and women, coming from the world’s ends to
minister to its woe.
A vision of _toux ceux qui ont bu à la coupe amère de cette époque_
passed before me. Deeply sighing, I at last put out my light, thinking
“war is war,” needing no adjectives, and of the changelessness of the
human heart, however the formulas may be multiplied and renewed; and
forever _Væ victis_!
VII
THE HOUSES OF THE CHANOINESSES
THE COMMANDANT TRACES THE RECONQUERED TRIANGLE ON MY MAP. THE MILITARY
MISSION
_Monday, November 4th._—Dreamed of old griefs and awakened with the heavy
taste their memory can even now distil. Raining. The yellow-and-brown
carpet under the lindens of the Place du Chapitre is wet and dull and the
few leaves still on the trees are soft and heavy, the houses damp and
shabby. “The old wounds burn,” even here, where all is new and bright,
and fancy flings itself delicately, amorously, consolingly about the
pleasant happenings of each day.... Fortunately my breakfast is brought
early by a smiling maid, who enters, bringing with her the aroma of fresh
tea and the delicately scented, dark-green, liquid honey of these pine
forests. There is that blessed volatilization of night-grief, and I arise
to another pleasant day, knowing once again, however, that everywhere the
old ghosts find one....
The rainy light coming in seems but to darken the oak-paneled room. What
there is of wall-paper is a darkish blue with a narrow frieze of red. The
curtains are stripes of red-and-blue cloth. Even the daytime cover of the
very comfortable eider-downed bed is of the same red-and-blue-striped
stuff. It was because they were the colors of the French uniform that the
young man once living herein, under German rule, chose them.
But he himself is gone, gone the hope of his house. One of his sisters
was saying to me last night as I tarried for a few minutes in the little
sitting-room, where I had first found them all rehanging the portraits of
their ancestors:
“The price for peace is so high and terrifying that one can’t yet rejoice
in it. Rather one says to oneself in desolation, ‘and all that was so
precious is gone, that in the end one may sit around deserted fireplaces,
or try to find shelter under bombarded roofs, and be at grips with the
terrible _après-guerre_!’” And of her brother:
“At least he fell for the cause that is so dear to us;” she added after a
moment’s silence, “it might so easily have been otherwise.”
I have noticed everywhere a great pride tempering grief over fallen
beloved dead. Even in mothers’ hearts this pride is strong enough to
console. They know why their sons were born, and to many a death of glory
has been as a second birth; he whom they lost is, in some way, laid a
second time, bright, beautiful, complete, in their arms, and _safe_ from
life. And they are blessed who so mourn.
Sometimes there are further griefs. I knew a mother of twin sons; one
had fallen far away, a gentle, young, musician son, in a fierce, unequal
conflict, whose details she was not spared; the other had been brought
back to her on his twenty-first birthday a sightless stump. I cannot
forget her as she stood, tall, black-veiled, by a pillared door, like an
antique statue of grief, her eyes as dry as marble eyes. And though she,
too, said:
“At least I know why I bore them, and it was for something more than
myself,” the obsession of a further grief was in her eyes as she added,
“_I must not die first_—and he is so young!”
Here on the borderland I find there is often an additional reason for
pride, where Fate, which could so easily have willed it otherwise,
sometimes has allowed the beloved to die for the beloved cause, as did
the brother whose room is now mine. And this is his story, or rather
the end of it. Those first four days of August, 1914, he had gone about
the mountain heights and passes with his field-glass continually at his
eyes to see if help were not coming from the hills in the guise of the
_pantalons rouges_. But on the fourth day he was obliged to accompany his
regiment into Germany, where he stayed three months. On hearing of the
battle of the Marne through a French prisoner, he cried, “_Nous avons
eu là une belle victoire!_” (“We have had a great victory!”) and he was
put under arrest. His one idea being to desert, he asked to go into the
lines again, knowing there would be no opportunity, if he remained in
prison, training recruits. His chance came when he was fighting against
the English in the north. His chiefs being killed or wounded, he, as
under-officer, found himself in command of a company of a hundred and
fifty men. With him deserted ninety-seven others. Later, he fell fighting
in the French lines near Tahure. And this (it is perhaps much) is all I
know of him or ever shall; if he were beloved of a woman or had loved
many, I know not. He, the last of his race, took his name with him to the
grave.
All that surrounds me as I write was his. His the full bookshelves, with
an elaborate set of a _Geschichte der Literatur_, and a _Welt-Geschichte_
in many volumes, his the books of early boyhood, of travel, the many
old, little books of prayer in tooled and beveled bindings of a
generation or two ago, and the piles of the _Revue des Deux Mondes_. Two
eighteenth-century maps hang on the walls, one of “Alsatia,” with queer
German names for familiar places, and another of “Gallia,” and there is
an incomparable, white, porcelain stove which heats quickly and gives out
its pleasant heat during long hours.
On a little corner shelf is an old engraving of the last _chanoinesse_
of the Chapter of Masevaux, Xavière de Ferrette. She is dressed in full
canonicals, with a large ruched coif and ermine-trimmed mantle; some high
order in a Maltese-cross design is suspended from the broad ribbon worn
across her breast, and in her hands is a richly embossed prayer-book.
The long face with its immensely high forehead has a full-lipped, very
human mouth, and in the right, upper corner is her sixteen-quartered coat
of arms.
The story of the Chapter would make good, though long, reading, for, like
many other things in this part of the world, it begins with Charlemagne
and ends with the French Revolution. Of both France seems equally proud,
and certainly _il y en a pour tous les goûts_.
Women always seem to have had great influence on the life of their times
in Alsace. Not even those with the vote and all the rights, together
with all the privileges of our times, can pretend to half the influence
of certain holy women of the so-called dark ages. They built on hilltops
and in valleys those many citadels of peace whose traces still are to be
seen, where life was free from violence, and, like sweet odors uncorked,
their good deeds have perfumed the ages. Saint-Odile, _Vierge Candide
et Forte_, daughter of Duke Atalric, is patroness of Alsace, and in her
many have sought the feminine ideal of the Alsatian soul; and there are
Saint-Richarde, tried by fire for a guiltless love, wife of Louis the
Fat, and Herrade, Abbess of Hohenburg, author of the famous _Hortus
Deliciarum_, preserved through seven centuries and destroyed in the siege
of Strasbourg in 1870. These are but a few, and the histories of the
secular dwellers in the Rhine Valley, spectacular though they were, seem
often quite colorless contrasted with those of these saints of the Holy
Roman Empire.
The first monks and pilgrims to come to Alsace were from Ireland (the
last of these before the very end of the world will doubtless also come
from Erin). It would appear that even in those days it could not be said
of the Irish that they were neither hot nor cold, which is probably one
of the reasons “why God loves them.” In the lovely rivered plains and
great forests of the Rhine Valley it was they who built the first chapels
and traced the first paths. It was an Irish monk whom Atalric, hoping for
a son, consulted before the birth of his daughter; but of Saint-Odile
another time.
The house next the one wherein I dwell was that of the abbess, and now
belongs to Madame Auguste Lauth.
It, too, has a beautiful stairway, with a time-polished oaken balustrade,
and it contains the great room of noble proportions and lovely panelings
(still heated by the celebrated porcelain stove, fit only for a museum),
where the ladies of the Chapter assembled in their rich toilets and great
coifs to go to the church, reached by a two-storied gallery, which old
prints show as having a most distinguished air, with its sloping roof
pierced with oval windows and its pleasant proportions. But the upper
story and the roof were done away with in the nineteenth century, which
has demolished so much (not always in heat of battle), and it is now but
a long, formless building used for some sort of storehouse connected
with the Koechlin manufactories. And the way the six houses came to be
constructed was this: