one can easily see by the high forehead and long jaw, becoming alarmed
at the increasing expenses of the Chapter and the equally decreasing
revenues, decided on some radical remedies. Through the Middle Ages, down
to her time, the _chanoinesses_ had lived under one roof, and, according
to the holy rule, ate together. But with them fared so many outsiders,
their friends and their friends’ friends, with their domestics, that
they found themselves being literally eaten out of house and home. The
abbess called a solemn meeting wherein they arranged for the building of
separate houses, whose construction was given into the hands of Kléber,
then architect and inspector of the royal buildings at Belfort. Pictures
of Kléber, known rather impersonally to Americans by the Parisian avenue
that bears his name, abound in Alsace, and show a sensitive, artistic
face, with a pleasure-loving mouth above a short chin, and a halo of
light, curly hair. He met an early death in Napoleon’s Egyptian campaign.
“_Il avait six pieds en tout_,” his contemporaries were wont admiringly
to say of him.
In these separate houses, with garden attached, each _chanoinesse_ was to
live alone with her _demoiselle_, who at her death would step into her
very comfortable shoes, and the abbess only was to receive guests in the
name of the Chapter.
The house I lodged in was that of the Chanoinesse von Reutner. These
dames had to make their titles very clear to their earthly mansions,
each having to possess sixteen quarterings evenly balanced, eight on her
father’s side and eight on her mother’s side. Gentlemen were chosen to
give their word on this somewhat elusive subject, and methought ’twas
well they didn’t have to put their hand in the fire at the same time,
for what can be sworn to with certainty of those things which have their
origin on the mysterious borderland of the emotions? However....
The _chanoinesses_ belonged mostly to the great families of Alsace, the
Masevaux, the Ferrettes, though the records show many German names like
Furstenburg and Seckingen, or French like Beauffrémont and Fontenoy.
Sometimes the Abbey and Chapter were under French domination, sometimes
under Austrian, sometimes they would be ceded to noble families like
those of the Counts of Bollwiller and of Fugger, and in many ways their
history had been checkered since their foundation in the eighth century.
And as for the Thirty Years’ War, they could have told tales of the
Swedish invasion scarcely to be beaten by certain tales of our days.
Indeed, so complicated is the history of those times, every shade and
branch of combatant having fought against every other shade and branch,
in kaleidoscopic changes, that when Turenne, allied with the Spaniards,
revolted against the king, Louis XIV, it was a Swede, Rosen by name, who
helped the Maréchal du Plessis Praslin to conquer him at Réthel. Rosen,
who with his brothers had come originally from Livonia with the armies
of Gustavus Adolphus, then promptly put on his standard a tower falling
on a rose-bush in full bloom, with the device, _Malgré la Tour les Roses
fleuriront_.[11]
In turning over pages concerning the involved chronicles of this
borderland, I feel once again that history is, of all things, the most
difficult to write, because of having to do with facts, and what more
elusive than facts, eternally subjective? Even this simplest record of
historic days is as different from one that another might have written
about the same things as if it dealt, instead, let us say, with the
genial suggestion of letting the Hottentots and the Zulus have their own
government. It is that fantasy-awakening thing called temperament that
is forever at work with facts, one thing always suggestive of another,
rather than explanatory of itself, and I frankly rejoice that the
“primrose by the river’s brim” _is_ to me something more than a primrose.
I am now such a long way from the history of the Chapter that there is
scarcely time to get back, and so I will finish quickly by saying that in
the epoch preceding the Revolution it found itself entangled in various
temporal affairs, especially lawsuits with the inhabitants concerning
their convenient but disappearing feudal rights. Otherwise life was
probably not too strenuous for the _chanoinesses_. As nothing escapes the
influence of its hour and age, why should one think the Chapter entirely
escaped those of that light, pervading, charming, inconsequent, rich
thing known as the eighteenth century, where everything seems to have
finished by a song, or a witty quatrain, or by delicious angels holding
up holy-water founts in the shape of lovely shells.
_To the popote at 12.15._—Its windows look out on the unmistakably plain
timepiece in the church tower, and everybody knows when anybody is late,
and just how late, and there’s a nice little green box on the table
designed for fines, but only intermittently insisted on.
Commandant Poulet greets me with the words, “At three o’clock to-day
Austria ceases hostilities.” Something cruel and red seemed suddenly
rolled away.
In a flash I saw that Viennese pre-war world I had known so well,
partaking tranquilly of the pleasant things of life, public events making
little noise, intellectual passion absent—or discouraged, and things
easy, easy—except for those dying of hunger. But that world has been
burned to ashes, and the winds of destiny are about to scatter even them.
Then, as usual, some one read the American _communiqué_.
And to the deeds of the First Army must be added those of the National
Guard, for the words Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas, Missouri, Colorado, New
Mexico, New York, New Jersey, are stamped in fadeless red upon the
villages and banks of the Meuse.
We talked long, and at two o’clock, as we arose from table, I knew that
those others to the east had already arisen from the bitter meal of
defeat, and after the manner of human hearts were adjusting themselves
to the things that _are_. And perhaps there in Vienna they may not find
it so difficult. They’ve been defeated before and they’re far enough east
to have a touch of fatalism.
_Later._—Through mist and low-hanging clouds and rain with Captain
Bernard to Sewen, where we visited first the school. Neat rows of sabots
were in the hallway, all alike to _me_, but it appears some spirit in the
feet leads each unmistakably to his or her own pair. A dozen children
only were in the schoolroom, the others ill with grippe.
The school-teacher, a tall, horizon-blue-clad Frenchman, with kind eyes
and a decoration on his breast, had just finished the dictation. Its
subject was _de la viande_ (concerning meat). Looking at the copy-book of
the nearest little boy, very blue-eyed, I read _de la fiande_, and his
dictation was further embellished by sounds reminiscent of German rule.
“_Chez le bourgé, le tinton, le charcoutier, le boutin, le zocisse_,” but
as I said, that’s their German ear—and little by little it will be done
away with and “French as she is spoke” will take its place. One small boy
who wrote a beautiful, copper-plate hand was stone-deaf, but he had dear,
questioning eyes and something patient in his being. I asked, when we
came out, if nothing could be done for him. But the master said, with a
terrible finality, “His father is an alcoholic.”
It is evidently not without result that they distil their _quetsch_
and their _kirsch_, their rose haws and their gentian, and everything
else that has the merest embryo of a fruit or a berry or leaf in these
pleasant valleys; as to which the bright-eyed, Italian-looking curé
initiated us further, as you will see.
Leaving the school, we went to the church, beautifully familiar to me
against the sky, but completely and, from our point of view, hopelessly
modernized within; though I couldn’t help feeling that for those who come
from dingy farms and dung-heaps the crude splendor of that house of God
must be greatly comforting.
The old ossuary chapel nearby, with its fifteenth-century vaulting, was
crowded with beautiful things from the church at Thann. The carvings
on the choir stalls, of the most delicate workmanship, were amusing to
boot, nothing human being foreign to the artists that made them. One
figure forming an arm-rest had a swollen cheek bound up in a cloth, and,
furthermore, he evidently had an ache in the center of his being, for
he was doubled up, his hands pressed close to his person in the classic
position of one so suffering. Another showed a man leaning over, with
delicately modeled back, his head in his hands, but _his_ ache was very
manifestly spiritual. Another had a goiter, and monkeys and parrots
abounded, the native fancy of the fifteenth century evidently being out
on a loose snaffle. A celebrated row of musical angels were so delicately
carved, with cymbal and harp and bugle and lyre and flute, that they
would be well placed in some vitrine rather than high on a choir stall
in a dim Gothic church. The celebrated statue in stone of Saint-Théobald
from the column of his fountain at Thann had been brought here for
safety, too, and I fingered it as well as many another thing generally
beyond reach.
As we came out, the clock in the tower of the church struck three. The
great and disastrous Austrian war-act was finished.
It was a moment beyond words, and as we walked silently over to the
curé’s house I thought of the cruel, interminable lists of dead and
wounded and missing in the Vienna newspapers that winter of 1915, when
the Russians were flooding Galicia and spilling over the ridges of the
Carpathians. The curé, however, young, with fine, Italian face-bones,
and frayed and spotted cassock, somewhat changed our thoughts by bringing
out various of the thirty-four specimens of distilled liqueurs which are
the pride and playthings of these valleys, explaining to us with snapping
eyes special variations of his distillings. Holding a bottle and a glass
up against the light in his long, thin _primitif_ hands, he poured me
slowly something wrested from the mountain-ash (I had thought I might as
well have a completely new sensation), and I went about the rest of the
afternoon feeling as if a hot stone were lodged in my breast.
Arrived at Masevaux, we drove to a house on the Place du Chapitre, where
I found another interior of the kind I am now familiar with—that of the
high and comfortable Alsatian bourgeoisie.
Madame Chagué, large, white-haired, energetic, intelligent, agreeable,
received us flanked by an amiable married daughter and a thin, upstanding
veteran, his ribbon of honor in his buttonhole. But, to be perfectly
frank, the veterans get on my nerves. It’s the picture of what the
gorgeous young heroes of our great war will be one day, _sans_ eyes,
_sans_ teeth, _sans_ hair, _sans_ everything, and _toutes les fins sont
tristes_.
“Now,” said Madame Chagué when once started and tea had been poured
(accompanied by cakes you don’t get a chance to serve unless you are
_délivré_, and you have to be well delivered, or else never in bondage,
to get the chance to eat them), “the government must proceed with a good
deal of caution as well as consideration. The Alsatians aren’t like
anybody but themselves. They mustn’t lay hands on our little ideas and
ways, ‘_ces Messieurs de l’Administration ont compris cela_’ [with an
appreciative look at Bernard]. We held on all these years, awaiting the
day of deliverance. _Enfin_, for two generations we have looked on the
reconquest of Alsace as the coming of heaven upon earth, as if that once
come to pass, there would be nothing more to desire.”
She said all these things with an appraising light in her eye; being a
clever old lady, in the four years since she had been “delivered,” she
had doubtless found that life is life—even though there is a great choice
as to whom one wants to live it out with, and how.
About this time the veteran was encouraged to tell a few of his 1870
experiences, and I felt as my grandchildren, if I ever have any, will
feel when the veterans of 1918 will tell what they did “single-handed in
the trenches,” or how, “as the only man left of their regiment,” they had
held back the invaders, or how they hid in a barn and let them go by and
then gave the alarm, “and a whole battalion had to surrender,” or what
know I? Politely, but without eagerness, I listened, the 1870 veterans
almost “spoiling the war” for me, with their eternal illustration of
the flatness of not dying on the battlefield. I tried to bring the
conversation back to 1918—leaving a rather long and not very clear
account of how he kept his ancient, beloved, red _képi_ under glass, or
next his heart, or pressed in an album, I rather forget which. I wanted
to hear the story of the famous entry of the _Pantalons Rouges_ into
Masevaux on August 7, 1914, where they have been ever since, though now
changed into this celestial blue, which decorates the earth (as I have
frequently said, and doubtless will again) as never before has it been
decorated by any men of any age or any war. Pictures of “_La Guerre en
Dentelles_,” or gallooned and be-caped and be-frogged officers with
lances or drawn swords on horseback, charging the enemy in the typical
poses of Lasalle, or “_La Vieille Garde_,” or Wellington or Blücher at
Waterloo, or anything else that ever was, are dull beside the strange,
appealing beauty of the blue battalions of the twentieth century.
I listened to Madame Chagué telling of the glad reception of those who
entered Masevaux on that 7th of August, houses and hearts flung wide
open, how everywhere the upper windows were crowded with women and
children leaning out to see them come over the dark mountains and along
the bright roads. Many left that same night, as they did from Thann and
Bitschwiller and Moosch and all the towns about, marching on to Mulhouse,
which they took only to be driven out, and since then many red-trousered
ghosts walk the otherwise unmystical, industrial streets of Mulhouse.
Three weeks later Mulhouse was again entered, and again, with many
losses, other red pantaloons were driven out, since which the chimneys of
Mulhouse have smoked a German smoke to a German heaven.
Madame Chagué is very Catholic, too, and bristles at the bare idea of any
government, even the “Tiger’s,” taking liberties with the ancient faith.
They want a bishop of their own, an Alsatian shepherd—“_faut pas nous
bousculer dans nos petites habitudes_”—she kept repeating. I wondered
what the Tiger and all the imitation tigers would say when they come to
learn just how they feel here. There’s the most Gordian of knots awaiting
them, for it appears that the Germans gave three thousand marks a year to
each curé, and the French government, less enamoured of the ministers of
God, doesn’t give any. However, that is only one of a series of knots on
a very long string, and patient and very deft fingers will be needed for
the untying.
In each of these comfortable houses authentic ancestors look from the
walls, ancestors who knew the Thirty Years’ War, or the Napoleonic
campaigns, or 1870, or ancestors-to-be who have seen the World War.
And all the dwellers of these large-roomed, high-roofed, deep-windowed
houses, having been delivered, in turn deliver themselves of their
sensations, thoughts, emotions, acts, on being delivered. One might,
I dimly foresaw, do to one’s breast what the wedding guest did to his
when he heard the loud bassoon. That I may not seem unkind, I want to
say another last word about the veterans, the so often toothless, bent,
sightless, forgetful veterans. They would be all right in themselves, if
they weren’t so horribly illustrative. They seem to be saying all the
time, “If Mortality doesn’t get you one way, it does another,” till you
think that short agony on the battlefield, and long glory, are greatly
preferable to decay and no glory. And no veteran will keep this my little
book on the table by his bed. He would know, too well, that I am right.
Later, as I slipped across the cobbly square to my house, and mounted the
broad oaken stairway to my room, a feeling of nostalgia possessed me at
the thought of leaving Alsace, to which but a few short days before I had
seemed so unrelated. This bit of French history in the making, molded by
the men of the grave, kind eyes, whose comradery with one another is so
unfailing and whose courtesy to me is so exquisite, had become dear to
me, and, too, I was looking on something that would never be again. The
web was shifting, other figures were to be woven in it. Fate was to pull
new things as well as old out from its storehouse and proceed with its
endless combinations. Masevaux, capital of Alsace Reconquered, would be
overshadowed by Strasbourg, by Metz, by Colmar, by Mulhouse. But it will
have had again a little day, which is all an individual or a town can
reasonably ask, standing under the changeless stars.
As I went to the _popote_, low over the houses stretched the Great Bear,
so vast, so splendid, that it seemed almost alone in a heaven growing
misty toward its edges, though Alcor, the Starry Horseman, was twinkling
strangely bright close to Mizar. But the autumnal stars hanging over the
rich-colored hills of Alsace have not the brilliancy of those that I saw
above the gray-white Châlons plain, that late, red October of 1917.
After dinner Commandant Poulet drew on my map the boundaries of _Alsace
Reconquise_, as it is now, this fourth day of November. But as he drew
I knew he was feeling that it was a fleeting, vanishing thing he was
recording, for he stopped a moment, as a man might stop following a wind
or tracing a line in water.
Then as we sat, some half-dozen of us, about the dining-table, under the
hard light of the Oberforster’s chandelier, the commandant, flicking his
cigar ash into the Oberforster’s dreadful ash-receiver, told me something
of the history of the Mission, which is briefly this.
Though French troops entered the valleys of the Doller, the Thur, and
the Largue on the 7th of August, 1914, the French administration of that
little triangle of Alsace Reconquered, as I found it, was organized
only in November of the same year. Its first form was purely military,
the authorities responsible for the civil population being also in
command of the military operations, the final word in all that concerned
Alsace coming from the general in command of the Seventh Army, in whose
sector it was. These were successively Generals de Maud’huy, Villaret,
Debeney, and de Boissaudy. The little triangle was first divided into
two territories only, that of the valley of the Largue, with Dannemarie
as its capital, that of the valley of the Thur with Thann as capital.
Masevaux at that time did not form a distinct territory, but was an
annex, as it were, of Thann, as also was St.-Amarin.
The officers administering the territories were chosen mostly from the
reserve—men whose former avocations had prepared them for the various
rôles they were to fill in Alsace. They were members of the _Conseil
d’Etat_, of the _Cour des Comptes_, magistrates, _Gardes des Forêts et
des Eaux_, together with many others belonging to technical professions.
The first _Capitaine Administrateur_ was Captain Heurtel, in civil life
_Maître des Requêtes au Conseil d’Etat_. Though seriously wounded at the
very beginning of the war, in December of 1914, he asked to be again
sent to the front. He met his death at Verdun in 1916. His successor was
Commandant Poulet, _Conseiller d’Etat_, who took up office on Christmas
Day, 1914.
In July, 1917, the Mission was detached from the General Headquarters
and placed under the Ministry of War. Its new name, expressive of
enlarged activities, was changed to _Mission Militaire Administrative en
Alsace_ (Military Administrative Mission in Alsace), the central office
being transferred to Masevaux, which Fate had placed half-way between
St.-Amarin at one end of the reconquered triangle and Dannemarie at the
other.
Ever since, in and out of the building of the German _Kommandantur_, once
the nave of the old Abbey, men clad in horizon-blue have been coming and
going, busied about affairs after the French way, the ancient town of
Masevaux entering into the unexpected enjoyment of what might be called
an Indian summer. Nothing else has happened to it, so far as I can see,
since the Revolution, when the Chapter was suppressed and the Goddess
Reason briefly installed in the Abbey. And Masevaux loves and cherishes
its brief glory as only lovely and transient things are loved and
cherished.[12]
VIII
LUNCHEON AT BITSCHWILLER. THE MISSION IN RESIDENCE AT ST.-AMARIN.
SAINT-ODILE
_November 5th._—Awakened early, early by the sound of heavy firing.
Later, looking out of the square, I see the market in full swing. Against
the inn of Les Lions d’Or, with its comfortable courtyard and two red
wings, stands a wagon-load of hay with a pale-green cover thrown over it.
Carts of cabbages and carrots, drawn by white oxen, are pulled up under
the yellowing trees. The black of the clothes of the women making their
purchases cuts in very hard. Blue-clad men come and go; several motors
are standing before the door of the Administration. The shining, diffused
light of the mist-hidden sun rounds every corner and fills up every space
with a pleasant softness.
At eleven I start out with the commandant, Captain Sérin, and Lieutenant
Laferrière to motor to Thann through a world of rust and green and
gold-colored hills, under the whitest of heavens. So soft and shining
is the beauty of the lovely earth, and so soon to pass into the winter,
that I say to the commandant how like the transient beauty of a woman
of forty-five are these delicate, hazy hills with their cashmere shawls
still twisted about their shoulders, drawn up over their heads, dropping
down to their green-valleyed feet. I mean the woman of forty-five who is
still loved.
Again we stopped on the crest between the valleys of Masevaux and of
Thann, and again we stopped and peered through the wire-and-pine screen,
out toward Mulhouse and the Rhine and the Black Forest. The valley was
blue and shining. Even the windows of the great, white building of the
_Idioten-Anstalt_, where the Germans are bivouacked, were visible. Beyond
were the high towers of their potassium-works. As those three men stood
looking out over the rich plain I thought, “Always will I remember the
officers of the Mission like that, standing on the heights, shading their
eyes with their hands as they looked down into the land of Egypt, wherein
the Lord was to lead them....”
New shell-holes were all about us, and there was a sharp, continual
reverberation of cannon among the cashmere-shawled hills.
At Thann we stopped for a moment by the fountain near the church (in
peace-times, the old statue of St.-Théobald that I saw at Sewen surmounts
the charming column), the commandant having been saluted by a young
American officer, leading by the hand a little girl of seven or eight, in
Alsatian costume—huge black bow, black velvet bodice, full white skirts.
He was quite simply a young man whose parents had gone to America, he
himself had fought on the Mexican border, got his commission, and was
proudly—oh, so proudly and so smilingly—walking his native streets of
Thann with his little niece.
We are _en route_ to lunch with M. and Madame Galland, at Bitschwiller,
who receive us as agreeable people of the world receive their guests in
all quarters of the globe. They were of those who could have gone, yet
remained, during the many bombardments of the town—_noblesse oblige_, and
have been a blessing to the valley.
[Illustration: THANN. THE CATHEDRAL PORTAL]