always found on the imperial table. There are the wines of Rouffach,
“home town” of the husband of Madame Sans-Gêne; of Kaisersberg, known
fashionably and pertinently as “Montlibre” for a short space during the
Revolution, and by the “Rang” of Thann; Alsatians once swore, “_Que
le Rang te heurte!_” (“May the Rang strike you!”) There is, too, an
exceptional, ancient, red vintage called “_Sang des Turcs_,” whose name
recalls the twilight days of Turkish invasions and Soliman the Great.
But the Alsatian wines are mostly made from compact bunches of little,
white, sweet grapes, with irislike colors shading them richly. The
inhabitants, holding their _pinard_ in great veneration, feel it a
sacred duty to see that it is _good_. It is called colloquially “_thé
d’Octobre_” (“October tea”) one of the officers told me, after the manner
of the famous “_purée septembrale_” (“September purée”) of Rabelais,
who, it appears, greatly appreciated the wines of these hillsides. But
they are pitiless concerning poor wines, which they call “fiddlers’
wines,” or “_Sans-le-Sou_,” or “_gratte-gosier_” (“throat-scratcher”),
and “_grimpe-muraille_” (“wall-climber”), as he who drinks them is apt
to try that and other useless feats, instead of sitting and dreaming or
joking and being happy. These bad wines are also known collectively and
disdainfully as _vins des trois hommes_ (wines of three men) because
it appears it takes three men to accomplish the feat of drinking a
single glass—the man who supports the drinker, the man who forces the
treacherous liquid down his throat, and the third the unhappy victim.
Now the once rich soil of the ancient mellow vineyards has got thin and
stony; for the men who have grown them have been occupied with killing
these past four years, and neglect for even a season can spoil the best
and oldest vines.
In times of peace there are many textile manufactories in these valleys,
too. After the Napoleonic wars _la main d’œuvre_ (labor) was scarce, just
as it will be after our war, workmen being brought even from India, and
to this day in the midst of modern machinery here, in the valley, there
are places where they still keep to the ancient block system of stamping
cloth, with the ritual hammer-stroke, this process giving more fadeless
and beautiful colors than any machine-stamped, aniline-dyed stuffs that
ever were. Such cloths are still called “_Indiennes_.”
And all around here the Swedes did as tidy a bit of work as was ever
done by invading armies, the seventeenth century being for the valley a
century of ravage and desolation. In one of the books[18] Mr. Helmer gave
me last night I read that the cantons were so reduced during the Thirty
Years’ War that places like Bitschwiller could register but four adults
and eleven children, Moosch eleven adults and twenty-three children,
St.-Amarin thirteen adults and forty-four children, and so on, the chief
of their diet being acorns and roots and mice and other classic nutriment
of epochs of destruction. There were moments when the Imperials, the
Swedes, the French, and the Lorrains disputed the territory, and various
troops camped on the Hartmannswiller and descended to the valley—and
the _Roi Très Catholique_ was the ally of the Swedes, and the Abbey
and its territories were under the Holy German Empire. But whoever was
momentarily in possession, it was always disastrous for the inhabitants
of the valley—and of what the children suffered these fatal figures I
have quoted evoke some dull perception.
As we pass the pleasant villages of Fellering and Odern and Krüt, all
shining in the radiance of a strong though intermittent sun, with here
and there scarfs of rainbow-like mists draped about them, we foolishly
mocked the weather wisdom of Mr. Helmer, who, on being asked as we
started out, if the weather would hold, had regretfully said, “No.”
At Krüt we start to ascend the Wildenstein. Gorgeous matutinal effects
continued their prismatic play everywhere on soft and fathomless black
hills, the yellow lights on the _mélèze_ almost outshining the sun. On
one mountain-side they made a line as would some procession of pilgrims
bearing torches, and one almost thought one saw cowled heads and heard
the chanting of a “_Pilgerchor_.”
The air we were breathing was strong yet tenuous, and I felt a great
refreshment and exhilaration.
In these wide days of bending the hills, of folding the valleys, there
has been, as it were, some unpacking of my mind, some shaking out of my
soul, things long hidden have come to light, and the patched lining of
memory has been freshened. Almost every event has appeared, accompanied
by its secret meanings, in its relationship to secondary, generally
unapparent, significances. I have had, too, a quickened sensitiveness to
the beauty of the natural world. And can a journey do more for one than
this?
It was a stiff mount to Huss in a sort of distilled pine fragrance,
with a continual looking back, where the billowing lightsome pink and
yellow scarfs, woven of sun and mist, were flinging themselves more and
more wastefully about the shining valleys. Near the top our motor’s
_bougies_ got clogged with oil, and a thin, white fog, now opaque, now
sun-shot, began to close in on us. We arranged the _bougies_, but there
was nothing for human hands to do about that white fog, and we found
ourselves suddenly, at a turn in the road, tightly inclosed by it, and
were seemingly alone on the heights, where the only thing that appeared
to grow and thrive were the stretches of wire entanglements, like great
patches of dried heather. Everywhere were groupings of black crosses,
with their tricolor badges, above wind-swept, fog-enveloped, sun-bathed
graves, dug on these treeless heights.
But there, in that thin, high air, I suddenly became conscious of the
volatilization of the spirit, and knew those graves indeed for empty....
One last time, as we passed Camp Boussat, named after the colonel who
fell here, and looking like a mining-camp, the mist shifted, showing the
jeweled, gossamer-clad valley, and then we were again fog-locked, and
I saw its beauty no more—only brown seas of wire entanglements losing
themselves in those shrouds of cottony white, which lifted here and there
to show some detail of the strange life on the bleak crests. There were
dugouts everywhere, and very low buildings camouflaged in wood-colors and
crisscross designs. In them were men washing, men cooking, men smoking,
all in astonishment, which sometimes gave place to grins, and doubtless
pleasantries in the best Gallic manner, at the appearance of the weaker
sex on their grim, bare mountain-tops.
We passed endless gun-emplacements, and cemented munition-depots, barely
visible through thick layers of pine branches, and near them heads would
be sticking out of what seemed mere holes in the earth.
About this time Captain Perdrizet, whose ardent spirit had been
considerably dampened by the closing in of that thick, cold fog, began
also to fear we should be late for _déjeuner_ at Camp Wagram, from which,
it appeared, we were separated by several valleys and a few hills of the
eternal sort. The motor’s _bougies_ got clogged again (what part of its
being they are I know not); the chauffeur got moody, Captain Perdrizet
more visibly vexed, Debrix quieter and more philosophic (he is a
_littérateur_ when there’s no war, and has written a beautiful poem about
Thann); as for myself, knowing strange and enkindling things were behind
me, others doubtless before me, and that whatever happened would be
interesting, I felt myself sweetly detached from time and circumstances,
which for one of deadly punctuality is saying much.
A peculiarity of the motor’s ailment was that it couldn’t go down as
fast as it could go up, so, a-limp, a-crawl, a-hump, we descended into
a valley packed extravagantly with that thick, unspun cotton-like
atmosphere, leaving the dead and living alike to their bare heights. At a
certain village whose name I forget (I can hear the reader saying, “Thank
God she has forgotten it, and we can perhaps get on to Camp Wagram for
lunch”)—at a certain village, however, I repeat, two ravens went across
our path, going to the left of the motor. Said Perdrizet, on taking in
the dire occurrence, his color like to the white fog and his hair and
mustache like to the raven’s, “We’ll never get there!”
Now I am superstitious, too, and glory in it, for, though it gives me a
good deal of otherwise avoidable worry, it colors life. From time to time
friends and circumstances load me with a new one, and I go staggering
on. Two ravens crossing the road to the left _was_ a novelty, and I see
anxious days to come when motoring for engagements where one must be in
time—or one thinks one must. And superstition has nothing to do with
the processes of the brain, rather lodges itself elusively anywhere and
everywhere in one’s being.
The two officers consulted their timepieces again, finding a trifling
and consoling difference of twenty minutes (looked at from one way). The
chauffeur’s watch didn’t go, and I never carry one. As the motor stopped
again, Perdrizet began to fidget extremely much, and to say that if it
weren’t for me he’d kill the chauffeur, and decided that we couldn’t take
in the village of Goldbach, almost entirely destroyed in this war, where
Madame Sans-Gêne first saw the light of day, and later the duke.
However, in spite of the two ravens and the _Erdwible_,[19] or other
spirits of those forest-hills, we at last found ourselves twisting up
the road to Camp Wagram, an hour late, and we began to sound noisily
the horn of arrival. The commandant and his young captain had been long
awaiting us on their hillside. With many apologies on our part because
of the delay, and on theirs because of the fog, we went into the little,
low mess-room built of rough boards, with its heavy camouflage of fresh
pine branches on its low roof, its windows of oiled paper, and its sides
painted like a green-and-yellow tiger.
The commandant did something to his watch as we sat down, and then
gallantly yet unblushingly remarked that it was just 12.30, but that
even _had_ we been late it would have only meant a longer anticipation
of something pleasant. My companions both gave smiles of satisfaction
for that, on the Hartmann, where men are almost entirely concerned with
killing or being killed, the commandant was living up to the French
reputation in more ways than one. I thought, too, that it was a very
happy beginning, looking well, so to speak, among the _hors d’œuvre_.
Captain Perdrizet had told me the day before that if the commandant
had to requisition every man and mule in the sector there would be an
excellent lunch. Now the very good food was accompanied by a delicious,
warm Burgundy from the commandant’s own part of the world, and at dessert
a bottle of Pommery & Greno, very cold, a souvenir of his service in
Champagne, was poured. All drank sparingly of both, after the manner
of Latins. Some asked delicately, even humbly, as one really wanting
information, concerning the rumor that the United States were “going
dry,” and wondered why it was to be. I rather wondered myself, up there
on the Hartmann, forgetful for a moment of the unpleasant things I know
about distilled liquors in the Home of the Free and the Land of the Brave.
Said the commandant, puzzled, looking at his not large glass of ruby
liquid, “_Un peu de vin en mangeant, tout de même?_ ...” (“But a little
wine at one’s meals?...”)
Said another officer, with a quickly restrained gesture of distaste:
“_Est-ce vrai qu’il faut boire seul et debout et entre les repas en
Amérique?_” (“Is it true that one must drink alone and standing up and
between meals in America?”)
I was saved an answer to this question, which was a fairly near picture
of some of the national customs, by the shaking, deafening sound
of an exploding shell. Those paper windows didn’t seem to mind it,
though everything on the table rattled. The commandant looked at the
captain, who disappeared, returning almost immediately to say that an
artilleryman with his horses had been killed—and the doctor, who had
started to the door, sat down again.
A few minutes later, as we were beginning the _tournedos grillés, maître
d’hôtel_, the telephone rang, and a radio was brought in hot and given to
me for a souvenir. It was one sent by the German parlementaries saying
that as they were unable to get back to Germany by road on account of
broken bridges, they would be obliged to proceed by air, and that their
’plane would be marked by two white flames—_zwei weisse Flammen_.
“It sounds safe, but all the same I don’t envy the officer detailed to
accompany them,” said somebody; and they all smiled and seemed glad they
weren’t in the airplane. I’ve noticed in the past two or three days that
military men are beginning to prize life again.
I was sitting opposite the commandant, on my right was Doctor Lantieri
with four stripes on his sleeve, and on my left was young Captain de
Santis, who had met us. Curiously enough, both were of Corsican descent,
and showed it so distinctly that when some one mentioned the great
Italian bag of Austrian prisoners after the cessation of hostilities, and
how the “Tiger” had said you simply couldn’t hold them back, I got a bit
worried, though nobody else seemed to mind.
The young captain took from his pocket a couple of proclamations dropped
by German aviators on the Hartmann yesterday—and furthermore presented me
with a large panoramic view of the Champagne sector, where he had fought.
I thought it was something rightly belonging to his family, but there was
that in his proud, Corsican gesture which forbade refusal.
=The German People Offers Peace.=
The new German democratic government has this programme:
=“The will of the people is the highest law.”=
The German people wants quickly to end the slaughter.
The new German popular government therefore has offered an
=Armistice=
and has declared itself ready for
=Peace=
on the basis of justice and reconciliation of nations.
It is the will of the German people that it should live in
peace with all peoples, honestly and loyally.
What has the new German popular government done so far to put
into practice the will of the people and to prove its good and
upright intentions?
a) The new German government has appealed to President
Wilson to bring about peace.
=It has recognized and accepted all the principles which
President Wilson proclaimed as a basis for a general
lasting peace of justice among the nations.=
b) The new German government has solemnly declared its
readiness to evacuate =Belgium= and to restore it.
c) The new German government is ready to come to an honest
understanding with France about
=Alsace-Lorraine.=
d) The new German government has restricted the =U-boat War=.
=No passengers steamers not carrying troops
or war material will be attacked in future.=
e) The new German government has declared that it will
withdraw all German troops back over the German frontier.
f)—The new German government has asked the Allied
Governments to name commissioners to agree upon the
practical measures of the evacuation of Belgium and France.
These are the deeds of the new German popular government. Can
these be called mere words, or bluff, or propaganda?
Who is to blame, if an armistice is not called now?
Who is to blame if daily thousands of brave soldiers needlessly
have to shed their blood and die?
Who is to blame, if the hitherto undestroyed towns and villages
of France and Belgium sink in ashes?
Who is to blame, if hundreds of thousands of unhappy women and
children are driven from their homes to hunger and freeze?
=The German people offers its hand for peace.=
After which, being the only woman who had ever lunched in the H.W.K.
sector, I was photographed by the doctor with the four stripes. Then in a
fog thickly enfolding us, as well as the mountains, we started out with
gas-masks, compasses and pistols, plus an armed escort, toward the German
lines, for they wanted to show me the ruins of the Castle of Freundstein,
now an observation post, directly overhanging the great plain I had seen
yesterday. Much banter between the commandant and Captain Perdrizet,
their eyes very alert, as to the right road, the one that wouldn’t lead
us into the enemies’ hands. Suddenly a firing of French guns began right
over our befogged heads, with a near swish and crack, and answering
duller German guns. In the thick fog, even those men accustomed to
sensations seemed quite keyed up, and the commandant had become like some
woodsman, looking closely at the trunks of battered trees, some with old
scars, some with new, and other indications, invisible to me, along the
path. Finally, at a certain crossroad, he stopped, saying: “_That_ would
lead us straight to them. Even now a pointed casque might appear, though,
with the probable armistice in sight, they will be less venturesome.”
I: “What would they do?”
He: “Throw hand-grenades first and then”—he looked at the others—“there’d
be a scuffle.”
It didn’t sound attractive, I must say, the potentialities of the fog
seeming even quite horrid, and I was entirely ready to hunt in the
opposite direction for the path to the Freundstein, which, according to
the compass, lay pleasantly due west. Dreadful, unexploded things, too,
were lying about, in new and ancient shell-holes, and there was much
careful stepping among broken tree-trunks and half-demolished barbed
wire, and I got a horrid rip in the last of my American boots.
Here and there was a black cross, and the possibility of being underneath
one, instead of above one, if we _did_ meet a German patrol, came before
me. With all one’s poetizing or philosophizing, there _is_ a difference,
and one’s a long time dead—as I know Lieutenant Lavallée would agree.
Suddenly the path began to rise, the commandant giving an exclamation of
relief as he saw a steep ladder almost in front of us, apparently leaning
against a wall of fog. Captain Perdrizet’s eyes began to shine again;
he’d been quite subdued, not to say cast down.
“It’s like a scene of opera, isn’t it?” he exclaimed. And then he
proceeded up the ladder, tipped, it seemed, at an angle of forty-five
degrees the wrong way, I wondering how on earth I was to get down,
unless I fell. Then we descend from a ledge over heaps of century-old,
moss-grown mortar deep into the tower, and, passing through a long,
subterranean passage, find ourselves in a tiny, closet-like room of
ageless masonry. Stationed at an opening are two men with telephones
over their ears, binoculars, compass, and charts lying on the sill of
the opening in the masonry, which is shaped like this ⌓ and looks to
the northeast, toward the Hartmann and the Sudel, and other consecrated
heights, as well as the great, covered German plain—whose contours were
more impenetrably veiled than its future. I had had a feeling, crouching
in the wet bushes the day before, gazing out on its wide splendors in
shifting sun and shower, that I would look no more upon it, nor upon the
little, worn, brown crest of the Hartmann, cut by the black line of the
German trenches, running through the naked wilderness of branchless
trees—though I had not known why.
When we had blithely retraced our steps to the highroad, cracking many
uncomplicated jokes, pleasing largely because we felt that kindness
toward the universe so distinctive of the front, when no actual killing
is going on, we suddenly encountered, almost bumping into them, two
swearing, sweating, heavily laden _poilus_, who had got lost in the
fog looking for their detachment. On seeing us they threw down their
accoutrement on a wet bank and expressions strong and classic began to
cut the air. A sergeant, risen up from somewhere at the unmistakable
sounds, ran toward them, calling and gesticulating wildly. But, wiping
their brows, they continued. They had taken the last step they were
going to on that so-and-so and so-and-so mountain, and if they found
their detachment or not they _enfiché’d_ themselves, only they didn’t
use this elegant word to express their sentiments. The sergeant got more
excited, and cried, “_Espèces de types_” and.... At this the commandant,
foreseeing that the artillery exchange might get too loud for feminine
ears, said to the biggest one (both were enormous), seeing his number:
“You are looking for Camp Meudon, _mon ami_. It’s farther up; in an hour
you are there. Follow the path up and always to the right.”
On which, like lambs, they who had sworn not to move from that spot till
the hill crumbled shouldered their accoutrement, thanked Perdrizet in
the best French manner for the cigarettes he gave them, and disappeared
quickly, the strains of “Madelon” being loudly borne back to us on the
fog.
“_Ce sont des enfants_” (“They are children”), said the commandant, with
his kind smile, “and _good_ children.”
And that was the last word I heard concerning the war and “_les enfants
de la Patrie_” on the Hartmann, for the hour of farewells had come.
And how deep was the mutual well-wishing enfolding that moment those who
have seen peace breaking over the graves of the Hartmann, as I and they
saw it, alone can know.
As we parted, they taking a higher path, disappearing almost immediately
in the fog, and we the lower road back to the motor, I suddenly
understood, too, the new look one sees in all men’s faces. Everywhere it
is the same. It is that of men who have been ready to die, to “separate
from the pleasant habit of existence, the sweet fable of living,” but who
suddenly know they need not die, at least not now—nor _that_ way.
Coming down the heavily shrouded mountain-slope as quickly as possible,
to be in time for my adieux to St.-Amarin before hastening over to
Masevaux that same evening, Captain Perdrizet told me the legend of
the “Phantoms of Freundstein.” I was then at a point of fatigue where
present emotions were no longer possible, and time works such wonders
that the most tragic tale of Freundstein, the Rock of Friends, was even
as a poultice. And I could still be interested in hearing that to this
very day there is a proverb, “_Er isch vom Freundstein_” (“He is from
Freundstein”), which, said of a man, means so hospitable is he that his
house belongs to his friends. And the legend runs after this fashion:
The last of the lords of Freundstein, Count Jerome, had a beautiful
daughter, Christine by name, whom he adored, and whom he took with him
everywhere, even to the chase, for which purpose a gorgeous litter had
been made wherein she might rest. The Lord of Geroldseck, passing by one
day, saw her as she lay asleep. Struck by her loveliness, he swore then
and there that he would make her his.
Soon after he proceeded to Freundstein to ask her hand in marriage, but
she answered that it was useless, as her heart already belonged to a
certain very noble cavalier of Thann. Her father gave the same answer.
One night a great noise was heard before the gates of Freundstein; it was
the Lord of Geroldseck come with his vassals to take the castle and its
lovely young châtelaine by assault. Freundstein resisted for three days.
Then, seeing it was in vain, Christine and her father took final refuge
in the high tower whose ruins rise above the chamber where we found the
men with the telephones strapped to their ears. There had once been a
sloping stairway in the tower, so broad that a horseman might ascend it.
Up this road the Lord of Geroldseck pursued them. Arrived at the top,
he was about to seize the girl, but her father, taking her in his arms,
leaped with her into space. The gesture that Geroldseck made to retain
her whom he loved caused him to lose his own balance, and he, too, fell
and was killed. And their ghosts forever haunt the spot, and the echo,
no matter what words are cried to the hills, always gives back the last,
despairing call of Geroldseck:
“_Je t’aurai, je t’aurai, je t’aurai._”[20]
XIV
RETURN TO MASEVAUX