experience, sought out a docile monk and commanded him to impress upon
Odile the wisdom of obedience, by which she might placate him and even
win his heart. But all was in vain. Then he conceived the black idea of
delivering his daughter by force into the arms of the Austrasian lord,
thinking, once she had been embraced by the lover, she would consent to
marriage. He sent two armed men to seize her in a grotto where she was
accustomed to pray. Hardened by the fierce design that filled his heart,
he cried out when she was brought before him, “The Lord of Austrasia
awaits thee for betrothal; willingly or unwillingly thou shalt be his.”
Odile, knowing the supreme moment had come, answered: “Thou hast already
killed thy son. Wouldst thou also cause the death of thy daughter? If
thou bindest me to the arms of this man I will not survive my shame, but
I will kill myself. Thus thou wilt be the cause not only of the death of
my body, but of my soul as well, and thou wilt thyself be destined to
eternal damnation.”
“Little care I for the other world. In this I am and will remain the
master.”
“That in truth thou art,” she answered, gently, “but listen to me and
recognize the goodness of my God. Allow me instead to build a sanctuary
upon the heights of Altitona; thou wilt thus be delivered from me for all
time. There I, and those gathered with me, will pray for thee. I feel a
strange power within me.”
Atalric made a violent gesture, but she continued without flinching,
“Menace me, trample me under-foot, but tremble before this image,” and
she took from her bosom the ivory Christ hanging from the ebon cross.
In that moment, as father and daughter faced each other, the powers of
heaven and hell, of spiritual promise and unregenerate will, were arrayed
in combat. But Atalric did not at first give way. Suddenly, however, the
countenance of Odile became more terrible than that of a warrior, and her
whole mien was wrapped in an angelic majesty. In her dilated eyes Atalric
thought for an instant that he saw the bleeding image of his murdered
son. An intolerable pain filled his heart, and he cried out under the
irresistible pressure of the heavenly will: “Thou hast conquered. Do as
thou wilt, but never let me look upon thy face.”
“Thou wilt see me in the other life,” answered his child.
The legend adds that Atalric, regretting his moment of weakness, did not
immediately renounce his evil designs. Odile was obliged to flee before
his increasing wrath and was pursued by him and the Austrasian lord,
accompanied by many armed men, even beyond the Rhine.
But at the moment when they were about to seize her, at the foot of
a mountain where there seemed no issue, the rock parted suddenly and
received her. A few minutes later it again opened and Odile appeared
enveloped in a supernatural light, declaring to her awestruck pursuers
that she belonged forever to Christ alone. Then Atalric and the
Austrasian lord turned silently and left the spot. The dove had conquered
the lion.
The legend has transformed her father’s momentary conversion to her will
into the physical image of the suddenly sundered rock. But in the end it
is all the same, for Odile, _Vierge Candide et Forte_, represents forever
the victory of the transfigured soul over brute force, the incalculable
power of faith sealed by sacrifice, the saving breath of the invisible
world breathed into the visible.
During centuries the great Benedictine Convent of Mount Saint-Odile
(Odilienberg) performed its works of faith and mansuetude in that
barbarian and ruthless world; the voices of Taran, the God of War, and
of Rosmertha, the Goddess of Life and Love, according to the pagan ways,
were replaced by another, promising eternal felicities to those born
again in Christ.
From a wall of _grès rose_, this same _grès rose_ that I have found as
building-stone for temple and home and fountain all over Alsace, Odile,
needing one day to give instant refreshment to an old man spent with
fatigue, caused the spring of crystal water to gush forth from which
pilgrims still drink. And in the Chapel, called that of Tears, is a
deeply indented stone, worn, it is said, by the knees of the saint as
she knelt there praying for the release of the soul of her father (long
dead and unpenitent) from the pains of purgatory. The legend has it that
only toward the end of her life was she able to accomplish this, when at
last the chalice of blood the angel once gave her was transmuted into an
elixir of eternal life.
The redemption of the soul of Atalric signifies, too, the conversion of
the Merovingian world to Christianity, and to a new will to give up life
that it might be found again—and many other things that it is difficult
to tell of in words, but the soul can perceive them.
And on the Odilienberg has beat for centuries the very heart, as it were,
of Alsace; above its throb being laid, passionately, now a hand from the
West, now one from the East....
To this day, they who at evening ascend its heights and wander under the
lindens of the terrace built above the old pagan wall, looking out upon
the splendid panorama of the Vosges, breathe the mystical fragrance of
the lily and the rose that perfumed the last sigh of Saint-Odile.
These things I am not able to know of myself, for the Odilienberg is
still in German hands.
IX
THE “FIELD OF LIES” AND LAIMBACH
_Faro come colui che piange._—DANTE
_November 6th._—And to-morrow I am to pass into the sweet, broad valley
of the Thur and there dwell. I ask neither how nor why, knowing it will
be vastly pleasant, though a somewhat startled feeling overtakes me at
the thought of leaving Masevaux, _tout ce qui finit est si court_. For
a fleeting, nostalgic moment I think, too, “What am I about, binding
sheaves in this rich corner of the earth that is not mine?”
As we gather for lunch, some one reads the sweeping clauses of the
conditions of the armistice with Austria-Hungary. Nothing is left save
hunger and disorder. I wonder if those to whom one of the “first aims of
the war is the dismemberment of the Dual Monarchy” see, in their passion,
what it will mean to surround the centripetal force of Germany with
floating, unsteady bits, that inevitably will be drawn to it. Some one
hazarded the remark, evidently not so trite as we once thought it, that
“if Austria didn’t exist, she would have to be invented.” Passion seems
more than ever to be its own blind end, and, looking at those men, I
thought, have we not fought and died the good death for other and further
ends?
Then Laferrière began reading the American _communiqué_. We are but
five miles from the Sedan-Metz line, one of the principal lines of
communication of the Germans!
As in a dream I listen to the deeds of _my_ soldiers, recited in the most
beautiful of French, as many deeds of many men have been recited to many
women through the ages.
“_Ce matin la Ière Armée a repris son attaque. En dépit d’une
résistance désespérée nos troupes [américaines] ont forcé le
passage de la Meuse à Brieulles et à Cléry-le-Petit._” ...
“_Beaumont, nœud de routes important, est tombé devant nos
troupes victorieuses qui se sont avancées jusqu’au Bois de
l’Hospice à deux milles au nord de Beaumont. Au cours de leur
avance elles se sont emparées de Létanne. A Beaumont, nous
avons délivré 500 citoyens français qui ont salué nos soldats
comme leurs libérateurs...._
“_L’avance des deux derniers jours a amené en certains points
notre ligne à cinq milles de la voie ferrée Sedan-Metz, une des
principales lignes de communication des armées allemandes._”[14]
As we sit down the commandant tells me they had been picking all sorts
of strange things out of the air that morning, the ether stamped with
unaccustomed names. He had just got a message, not meant for French ears,
bearing a new signature, Ebert; the day before he had got one bearing
that of Scheidemann. It is like a further dream of a dream, these things
that are borne “upon the sightless couriers of the air.”
At two o’clock I started out with Bernard and Laferrière, the latter on
the errand of rounding up an actor in one of those obscure yet deadly
village dramas.
“Generally I have little to do; they know they are well off,” he said,
and we agreed that it was indeed a pity to be pursued by original sin
even unto these pleasant valleys.
We descend at Rammersmatt, a quite unsinful-looking place, and while he
is gone Bernard and I visit the old church, beautifully held in the cleft
of the hill, lying against another hill, looking down on the plain of
Cernay, toward the German lines. It is this same plain of Cernay, which
I mentioned before, that was known in the old days as the “_Champ de
Mensonges_.” There Ariovistus was defeated by Caæsar. There, too, Louis
le Débonnaire was attacked by his three sons and betrayed by his army,
and ever since it has been justly known as the “Field of Lies.” Centuries
later the Swedes vanquished the imperial armies there under a Duke of
Lorraine. To-day it is that thing known as “No Man’s Land,” brown with
barbed-wire entanglements and rough with shell-holes—and other things
besides.
Back of it are the zigzagging German lines. It is, too, the place of
the century-old legend of the Niedecker’s young Thierry who, wandering
there one night, saw strange sights. He had not drained a single glass
of the _Rang de Thann_, nor of the red wine of Turckheim, called “_Sang
des Turcs_,” but was dreaming, as an adolescent does, of everything and
nothing, when suddenly the very stones of the valley began to move, and
great fissures showed in the earth. From them issued thousands upon
thousands of warriors of bygone times, striking against their shields and
crying out in strange, hoarse voices, “_Hodeīdah! Hodeīdah!_”
Finally a man taller than all the others, Louis le Débonnaire, son of
Charlemagne it was, his long, silvery hair surmounted by a gold and
jeweled crown, jumped on a white horse and called by name, one after the
other, the chiefs of his cohorts, who answered, “Here.”
Then the king, groaning with great groans, spoke beseechingly the names
of the sons he had begotten, Lothaire, Louis, and Pépin.
But Lothaire, Louis, and Pépin mocked him and to further wound him caused
to be brought on the battlefield his nephew, Bernard, he who had taken
arms against him and whose eyes the king had caused to be put out (and
for this the king knew little sleep).
Then as the battle begins the sightless Bernard jumps up behind the
king’s saddle, paralyzing his every movement. But at the very height of
the combat, above its clash and shoutings, the third hour of morning
sounds from a church tower, and suddenly the earth receives again the
ancient host and all is as before. Only Thierry from the Niedeckers lay
as if dead.
And the Field of Lies, _le Champ de Mensonges_, is said to be the spot
where the children of earth will be assembled at the Day of Judgment,
for what crime can equal that of the sons of Louis, who conquered,
imprisoned, and caused to die of grief a father whose only fault was
that he loved them too well? It is even said that it is the troops of
Louis who will sound the brazen trumps to awaken the dead for their last
accounting.
Now I see it as “No Man’s Land,” rusty and brown with patches of barbed
wire, rough with great shell-holes, but they say that even in intervals
of peace it is never so luxuriantly fertile as are the fields that lie
about it....
A white, very white afternoon heaven stretches above us. Very violent
cannonading.
“_C’est nous—c’est le Boche_,” Bernard repeats from time to time. Then
his sharp eye distinguishes a group of German airplanes, and, looking
where he points, I see five spots black, black in the white sky.
They, too, are immediately fired on. I hear over my head the great
swish made by the shells from the guns placed on a hill behind us—or so
sounding. My ear is not quick to distinguish directions in these echoing
hills.
Little balls of snow-white shrapnel, like beautifully wound balls of
fleecy wool, gently unloosen themselves about the black spots of the five
airplanes, which, after a while, disappear to the east.
Though not so overcome as the Niedecker’s Thierry, I feel that my eyes,
too, have looked on a strange spectacle.
Then Laferrière rejoins us. By the pleased look on his face we guess that
he hasn’t made the wages of sin too high, and we continue on our way
under the late, and still very white, afternoon sky. Suddenly the heavily
plated, thickly enameled rust and gold and black of the hillsides seem to
disappear and the earth is green again, young and tenderly green, like
spring, but how and why? It lasted but a few minutes, for on the slopes
toward Thann there was again the autumnal gleam of gold and rust, and
spots of fathomless black.
Entering Laimbach, we stopped to get the mayor, who was to conduct us
to the old Jesuit church, half-way between his village and the village
of Otzwiller, or rather its site, for Otzwiller disappeared completely
during the Thirty Years’ War, wherein each lovely Alsatian valley had
been sacked and burned and destroyed, and friends of yesterday were
enemies of to-day, and _vice versa_.
The mayor was a voluble, amiable mayor, who had conserved, during those
many German years, a vast amount of creaking, noisy, unpleasant French.
His village was ancient, high-roofed, many-fountained, and had been much
shelled. The streets were full of children playing, blue soldiers were
walking about, girls were leaning out of the windows to give and get a
greeting, or being pinched as they giggled about the streets, clicking
their sabots in the mud. As we passed out the white sky darkened suddenly
and a hard red began to burn in the west. We found ourselves nearing a
half-demolished fifteenth-century church, placed strangely between the
battered, living village and the ghostly village of the Thirty Years’
War. It was of _grès rose_ and had been built on the foundations of an
even earlier one, and near it was a shell-shot, ancient, high, red-roofed
presbytery. For generations the church had been a shrine of St.-Blaise,
and on every 3d of February the mayor told us (but sadly, as one speaking
of a pleasant past) there had been a great pilgrimage made by those
suffering from throat maladies.
Now over all was hanging a penetrating atmosphere of bootless desolation,
and I was suddenly seized with an anxious feeling that I should be about
the secret lonely business of my soul. Life seemed unbearably sad and
short, and “where was the place of eternal happiness, the place where the
Barbarian need be feared no more?” ...[15]
In front of the church had been placed, somewhat indiscreetly, the
officers thought, a big battery. And the mayor said, too, apologetically,
“_Evitément z’édait mal joizi par écard à l’éclise_,” for the battery had
soon been sighted. After the church had received many shells right in her
pink and lovely bosom, it had been moved some forty meters away, but even
so it had again been _repérée_, and the church had suffered the usual
fate of churches near batteries. Some fine old columns were left in the
apse, of the delicious _grès rose_. For a moment Laferrière and I stood
scaling off bits of the disfiguring gray plaster and wondering why it had
ever been put on, it and all the other gray stucco that a certain austere
century had plastered over gorgeous building-stone everywhere in Europe.
The church, like the village of the Thirty Years’ War, will soon be but
a name, for its walls are cracked and sagging, and with another winter’s
frost they will crumble and fall. Through the roofless nave we walked
over a mass of torn-up old mosaic flooring, and heaps of gaudy modern
stained glass fallen from the lovely, ancient, pointed windows.
It was getting dark as we passed out into the disorderly cemetery,
between the church and the battery (and even for a cemetery very
uninviting, torn up as it was by recent shells). Ends of coffins were
sticking out, shabby, twisted, bead wreaths and muddy, discolored
tricolor badges lay about, while in the middle of a once tidy family
plot, by name Hilz, was a huge new shell-hole of only the day before.
The mayor gave a shudder as he looked at his own familiar graveyard,
where his parents and his friends had been laid—though not to rest. He
was out for the first time after grippe and he said, with a determined
look and in his most creaking French, “If I have to die, all right, but
I’ve forbidden my daughter to bury me here.” Many, many had also fallen
in the fields, and everywhere thin earth lay over damp, shallow graves
marked by shabby, crooked crosses. Meadow mists were beginning to rise
and the copper-colored edge had hardened in the sky. I felt again an
inexpressible discouragement. I tried to think of Peace, so near, so
hotly desired, so redly pursued, but I could only perceive the damp
meadow, the demolished church, the gun-emplacements, the disorderly,
shelled cemetery, and the humid odor of death and mold and rotting
leaves. As yet nothing seemed to have risen incorruptible.
We turned and went again along the dark, damp valley road till we reached
the village with its consoling hum of life. Through the dusky street
washed the lovely soft blue of soldiers; a group stood with some girls
around the beautiful fountain, deeply pink in the half-light, built
in the fifteenth century by the Jesuits, though the mayor insisted on
placing the Sons of Loyola in the fourteenth. In fact, the Jesuits and
the fourteenth century were one in his mind. Then, as far as he was
concerned, came the war of 1914. He wanted us to come into his house to
partake of some brand of white liqueur—as I have said the people of these
valleys distil all and every bright-colored fruit of their earth. It
would seem that the whole flora of Alsace can be used to this end, and no
matter which of God’s colors go into their alembics, passing through, it
comes out pure white, to befuddle the heads and harden the stomachs of
the populace—and little boys are born with the burden of deafness. Though
twilight enveloped us, I knew the look that must be on the mayor’s face,
and something a bit phosphorescent came into his eyes as he spoke of a
_petite mirabelle_. Fortunately, it was too late to accept.
A few minutes later we found ourselves on the screened road to Masevaux,
moving slowly, without lights, the road overlooking the Field of Lies,
where the Germans watched.
Above the hills in front of us was a very thin, very long, very red,
crescent moon. No one spoke.
Doubtless the officers, like myself, were wondering upon what, when it
was full and white, its light would shine. Now it was turned to blood.
The roads were crowded with rattling artillery wagons, transporting guns
and supplies under cover of the deep, blue night. Once or twice on some
hillside, turned away from the German valley, was the leaping of a flame,
from the fire of a group of _artilleurs_, who were to wait the morning on
wooded slopes.
Thoughts of the ghostly village of Otzwiller, now but a name, pursued
me, and of the Swedish invasion. And the miseries of the Thirty Years’
War seemed to confound themselves with these of the war I know so well,
while the night deepened, under the long, thin, red moon, hanging behind
black-palled hills, in a heaven that still had an edge of copper.
A church bell sounded and something flying swiftly touched me at that
hour of the evening sacrifice, and I knew then that those who tread the
olives are rarely anointed with the oil, and I cried out within myself
suddenly and in despair, a long-unremembered line of the great Italian:
“_Faro come colui che piange._”
X
THE VALLEY OF THE THUR
_November 7th, St.-Amarin._—This morning farewell, perhaps a long
farewell, to Masevaux, and I now dwell in the broad, sweet valley of
the Thur. I had felt many pains of parting while putting my things into
the Japanese straw basket and the little leather valise. This was quite
a simple act, for I flatter myself that those receptacles contain only
essentials, though I had long since begun to wish that I had brought
another dress for evening, feeling a bit dull always buttoned up in my
uniform, and only a white shirt changed from a blue one to mark the
difference between morning and evening. One of those 1918 dresses, that
can be carried in the pocket without making it bulge, would not have
added perceptibly to the weight of my accoutrement, and would have
brightened up the _popotes_. The light from the Oberforster’s chandelier
at Masevaux was as pitiless as that which beats about thrones—and
presidential chairs (which much resemble them)—and ladies _en mission_
should come prepared.
Before leaving I went to say good-by to Mère Labonne, who showed me the
good things in preparation for luncheon and begged me to stay—scrambled
eggs with truffles, two _poulets_ ready for roasting, a tart _au mocha_
that she was frosting on a marble table. But the look of one who goes was
in my eyes, and she ceased to insist.
Return to the Place du Chapitre; many officers and motors under the
yellowing trees in front of the _Kommandantur_, a general arriving, some
sort of delegation departing. I say a thousand thanks to the amiable,
cultivated, agreeable Demoiselles Braun, three of whom wear decorations
for their war-work in hospitals, for contagious diseases, and one,
Stéphanie, “_qui n’a pas dit son dernier mot_,” is charming after the way
of the perceptive, witty women of the seventeenth or eighteenth century.
Then I find myself getting into the motor of the commandant, who, in
the meantime, has greeted and sped the general on his way. His face has
something shining about it as he gives the great news, written on the no
longer insubstantial air, of the German demand for an armistice. Then
he reads the _communiqué_ from the Belfort newspaper as we drive out of
Masevaux, telling us more about the Germans in full retreat, and the
Americans close behind them at _Sedan_! What a rustling of the pages of
history! The mind leaps to new things, life normal again, and all forces
bent to reconstruction.
As we pass over the screened road to Thann, where we are to lunch
with the military mayor, Captain Saint-Girons, the net of broom and
pine camouflage, screening the valley where the Germans are, suddenly
seemed some monument of ancient history; and, unlike the noisy hours of
yesterday, there was no sound of cannon.
Arrived at Thann, it is we who give the great, the unbelievable, the
unrealizable news of the demand for an armistice to Captain Saint-Girons,
who, with several uniformed schoolmasters, is waiting in front of the
Mairie to receive us. And our “feet are beautiful as the feet of them
that bring the Gospel of Peace and glad tidings of good things.”
I think for a moment how strange for _me_ to carry it to them, to these
men, who have fought for it, who have waited for it, watched for it, bled
for it—but everything is strange in this strangest of all strange worlds.
Going into the house, we find other schoolmasters, with some bright-eyed
little boys ranging in years from seven to twelve.
Then to lunch. I sit on the commandant’s right, Captain Gasquet,
_adjoint_ of the mayor, on my other side, the mayor himself opposite, the
schoolmasters placed prudently and watchfully near that selected flock,
who enliven the ends of the table. Now these little Alsatian hopefuls are
very bright of eye, rosy of cheek, and on their good behavior, which, in
spite of lurking potentialities, persisted during the lunch, even when a
glow, doubtless not unaccustomed, tinged their cheeks, as they drank the
wine of their own hillsides.
At dessert I asked Commandant Poulet to drink to Sedan, the _new_ Sedan.
I thought within myself, “Is it not even now as a temple being cleansed
and glorified in the chalice of the blood of _my_ people, the blood of
the khaki-clad youths from over the seas, whom Fate, since all time, had
decreed to unseal it?” Tears came to my eyes, there was a deep beat in my
breast.
And it had been forty-eight years and two months and seven days since it
was torn from a vanquished France.
I scarcely remember what was said of the day’s events; feeling, rather
than thought, was flooding about the table, and it was in gratitude,
in wonderment, and rather silently, for a group of Frenchmen, that the
luncheon proceeded. Each was thinking perhaps of his part of loss and
grief making up the victory.