Braun, who had my room ready for me; so kindly by Captain Bernard, who
came a moment afterward to tell me he would call for me at seven-fifteen;
so dearly by Laferrière, who also called for me, that I felt I had
indeed got “home.” As we were walking along to the _popote_ Captain
Tirman joined us in the darkness and told us that Bavaria had proclaimed
itself a republic, and that there was news (military news by radio) of
the abdication of the Kaiser. Somebody cried, “_Demain, de quoi demain
sera-t-il fait?_” as we entered the house where the little cat, the
forgetful, unabashed little cat, who but three short days before had done
such well-nigh disastrous things to my fur coat, also awaited me.
Again a charming dinner, conversation about that first August of the
war, the retreat from Mons, of Charleroi, and many, many other places;
of forced marches and aching feet; of fatigue and hunger and thirst,
now packed away gloriously in memory, though sometimes the strange look
appeared on their faces as they talked. Stories were told of those who
had gone to “_faire un bridge à Limoges_”[21] and remained there, and
of others, like Mangin, who had come back, Mangin, the booty of whose
glorious Tenth Army now overflows the Place de la Concorde. And of Foch
who had _nearly_ gone there. And of the immense glory hanging over each
and every battlefield, for, though black crosses were evoked, each was
entwined with colors too bright for human eyes. And then we turned our
thoughts from _tempus lachrymarum_ to the New Day, in whose sun, though
not like to the brightness of those fallen, we all shine. The _long_
destiny is heavy and dark beside the light, bright way of heroes, and
never did one realize till now how truly the gods love those whom they
snatch young. We, after all, as one of the officers remarked, will die in
our beds or by accident—and is it so desirable?
Then Sérin told his oft-repeated, but now dearly loved, story of “_Bravo,
Capitano_,” of the _Capitano_ who thanked the Madonna for the thirteen
trenches and the sea of barbed wire between himself and the enemy, but
which I won’t tell. And Captain Antoni told the story of the wounded
Boche who was given the _Croix de Guerre_, and how the French general
said, as he entered the hospital ward:
“Are these the brave men who so valiantly held their position on
the twenty-fourth? With inexpressible pleasure I give each one his
well-merited _Croix de Guerre_,” and then proceeded down the line of
beds. On Number 33 was lying a man with closely bandaged head, only one
gleaming eye visible, and the _Croix de Guerre_ was pinned also on his
valiant breast, and if it was removed by the Angel of Death or by orders
of the colonel I forget. Neither is it recorded if the German smiled.
And I told of the swift passing of the autos, mine and the commandant’s,
on the dark hills of the Route Joffre, when I was coming back from
St.-Amarin and he going there. How sadly I had seen its kind lights
rise along the heights and disappear, and there had been no friendly
handclasp on the hills, nor words of thanks from me in the dim light of
the blurred Pleiades and the young, half-veiled, white moon.
After dinner some one hazarded the word “bridge,” but there must have
been that in my eye making for solitude rather than companionship, for
the next thing I heard from some Frenchman, perceptive as to woman’s
looks, was:
“_Madame est sans doute bien fatiguée et nous jouerons demain._”
And soon I was stumbling home on one or two or three blue-sleeved arms,
in the inky darkness of a starless and moonless Masevaux.
I had found St.-Amarin charming, and I left with deep regret, but at
Masevaux I was experiencing the sensation, very agreeable, I must say, of
one who, having wandered, returns to his or her first love; and any one
who has done it will know exactly how I felt, and I don’t have to tell
them. As for those who have never returned, they wouldn’t understand if I
did explain.
XV
THE VIGIL OF THE ARMISTICE
“_The Star is fall’n and Time is at his period_”
_November 11th, 1 A.M._—At ten-thirty Captain Tirman came back to the
_popote_ where we were playing bridge—Sérin, Laferrière, Toussaint, and
I. He was very pale, but there was something shining about his face.
“_Ça y est, l’armistice._”
Dead silence; we don’t even drop our cards. In his excitement a very
naughty soldier’s word escapes him. He turns away in consternation,
and the others, somewhat appalled, too, at last drop their cards. I
try not to smile. General recovery; they hope I didn’t catch it. It
was sufficient, however, to break that strange feeling of _absence_ of
feeling that each one of us was experiencing.
“_Alors c’est fini, la guerre_,” some one finally said in a dazed way,
and with the words the cruel thing seemed to drop heavily from us, as
would some hideous, exhausting burden.
Toussaint, with his far look of one who loves forests, very strongly
marked, said, “To think that it has found us like this playing bridge at
the _popote_!”
Sérin: “I’ll not go to bed to-night.”
I: “Oh, my friends!” and then nothing more—my knees suddenly as if broken.
Laferrière (very quietly, after a pause): “I cannot but think of those
who are not here.” And his words evoked great shining bands of the
dear young, pressed closely, one against the other, out of their flesh,
crowding the heavens.
Then Sérin, again with his _bon sourire d’enfant_, “_Il faut boire_.”
A bottle of _Asti spumante_ is produced by Laferrière, who in a dreamy
way remembers that he is _chef de popote_. The stock of champagne is
exhausted. Nearly every day, and sometimes twice a day for the past week,
have not the radios, plucked out of the air by the commandant, plus the
beauteous _communiqués_, necessitated the opening of bottles even unto
the last?
Sérin, as we drink, all of us paralyzed by the sudden cessation of the
world-horror, tells how one of his gendarmes would keep referring to the
armistice as “_la Mistie_,” in two words, and we drink to _la Mistie_.
But in spite of the too, too simple joke, how still, yet stern was each
one’s heart!
About this time Toussaint seizes from the stove the marble “hunk” (it’s
the only word for it), “_Amor condusse noi_,” and makes as if to throw it
at the dead and gone Oberforster’s clock, stopped, as I said, some four
years ago at 12.25.
Sérin again, with his most childlike expression: “_La Paix a éclaté!_
Peace has broken out, and I will break out worse than peace if I don’t do
something!”
As I have said, Masevaux at that hour—it had got to be eleven o’clock—was
as lustrous as an ink-pot, and all being still the prey of a strange
paralysis of feeling, nobody suggested anything.
Peace, lovely, precious peace, dreamed of, desired through years of
anguish, so _redly_ bought in money of the heart’s blood, was ours! Those
crowding hosts gone out into the “dateless night” seemed suddenly to
return, the only moving things on a stunned earth. They had not renounced
in vain the dear clothing of the flesh.
But how could we understand in one moment the immensity of what had
happened? Never have I felt myself so small, so almost non-existent—an
insect that had fortuitously _not_ been crushed. But the soul’s great
converging point _was_ reached. The war was done and won. Men need no
longer kill each other by the tens of thousands, nor need women by the
millions, because of it, weep.
We touched glasses again, but quietly, oh so quietly!
Some one sighs and no one speaks. After a while Toussaint, standing by
the stove, again fingers “_Amor noi condusse_,” but it is taken out of
his hands by one of the officers. Then Sérin suggests waking up the
curé, getting the keys of the church, and ringing the bells. Tirman,
in authority in the absence of the commandant, still at St.-Amarin, is
gripped by that conservatism known to each and every one in command at
great moments, and becomes cautious, even suspicious.
“_Mais non, c’est peut-être tout de même une blague. Attendons jusqu’à
demain._” (He has quite recovered from his naughty word.)
Some one insists, “But Headquarters wouldn’t joke about a thing like
that.”
Tirman, however, sits down at the piano, breaks out into the “Beautiful
Blue Danube” and refuses to have the bells rung.
Sérin: “But what can one do here at Masevaux, black as the ace of spades
and everybody snoring! _A Paris, il y aurait moyen de fêter même si c’est
une blague!_”
I: “You are ready for anything.”
He: “_Et comment!_” With a light in his straightforward _good_ soldier’s
eye, and somewhat as a child longing for the impossible, “Just think of
them in Paris, the restaurants full, _et des femmes sentant bon_!”[22]
Then four dazed officers accompanied by a dazed lady proceeded to awaken
the postmaster from his slumbers. That heroic expression of rejoicing
accomplished, we groped our way to the Place du Chapitre. In one of
the _chanoinesse_ houses Captain Bernard also dwells. Sometimes he has
headaches on account of his wound, and to-night he had left us early to
go home. On his not answering, some one hazarded the remark, “Perhaps
he isn’t there” (Heaven knows there’s nowhere else to be but where one
belongs, at Masevaux!), and it proved, indeed, to be pure defamation, for
after a while he appeared at his window, or rather one heard him saying:
“What’s the matter? I was sleeping the sleep of the just.”
“_Ça y est, l’armistice_,” some one cried out.
Then that man, who had been through every campaign and would forever wear
“Verdun” stamped on his brow, made no answer.
And the night was dark, dark, the lovely moon too young to wait up, even
for peace. We stumbled across the roughly paved square to my dwelling,
and there we clasped hands with a strange, new clasp, and I, the woman
and the American, wanted to say something, anything, but I had only
begun, “_Mes chers amis_,” when I felt my voice break. I turned quickly
and went in. What need to speak? Hearts lay open that night.
_2 A.M._—Have been reading to quiet the heavily throbbing nerves. Picked
out of the bookcase an hour ago _L’Histoire des Elèves de St.-Clément,
Metz_, 1871. The names Gravelotte, St.-Privat, Malmaison, Sedan, confuse
themselves in my mind with Ypres, Verdun, with Belleau Woods, with
St.-Mihiel, Suippes, Eparges. I remember being told that in a terraced
cemetery at St.-Mihiel three thousand Germans sleep. Though friend or
foe, this night I see them all arisen, standing each one by his grave,
clad in horizon-blue, khaki—or field-gray, all those who at some word
of command had left the “pleasant habit of living, the sweet fable of
existence,” and I whispered in great need of consolation, “I know that my
Redeemer liveth and at the last day we shall rise.”
_3 A.M._—And how shall sleep come, lovely sleep, desired like the
morning? I slept not that night of the 3d of August which held the whole
war in its darkness, and now with the youth of the world lying in “the
grave’s quiet consummation,” shall I sleep?
Then slowly I became conscious of emanations from a giant, near people
in defeat, not knowing what new thing to will, casting off the old
fidelities, which once had given them the horn of human plenty. Thrones
were shaking; “when _peoples_ rage, _kings_ must weep”; a world was to be
remade out of empty places and blood.... I remembered how a poet[23] had
cried out, as a prophet, after that other war:
_Ton peuple vivra,_
_Mais ton empire penche, Allemagne!..._
And then I fell to thinking on love, I know not why, unless it was for
the millions of lovers taken so suddenly from the world, or because of
those yet left. How shall I say? But I knew that there were three things,
not two—the lover, the beloved, and love. And of this last and separate
thing one can have, in extremely sensitive states, impersonal cognizance,
when for some reason (again what know I?) fancy has been set free,
imagination stirred, and they go flinging themselves, not so much about
the personal as about the common destiny. For a moment, so brief that it
was gone even as it came, my soul caught the light that hangs over dear,
persistent, far, illusory hills of fancy and inclination, and felt the
mysterious break of feeling on the dim, shadowy lake of the heart. Vague,
beaming forms passed along its shores, dissolving, lambent outlines,
awakening desire for all the beauty of the wide earth, for things not in
my personal destiny, and which, if they were to be, would be no better
than that which is, not even so good. It was the greed of the human
heart....
And I cried out from my many-times-turned pillow, “O Life, O Love, O
Death, O too, too fragile illusion of existence!”
_4 A.M._—A soft, rich-toned bell is striking. A cold breath comes in at
the window, a cock crows. There is the first sound of the click of sabots
across the square; the Day of Peace is about to break over the world.
But here in the bed of the young deserter from the German ranks, dead in
Champagne, the war still has me in its arms and presses me close to its
cold, oozing breast. The familiar odor of drying blood comes to me. Old
groans strike on my ear. Those who, dying, are not dead crowd about me,
and the “blue-black cloud” envelops me. I am weary unto dissolution. And
Sleep, darling Sleep—not even a brush of your wings against me!
In this early morning, in the “little hour before dawn,” the grief of the
world sits tight about my heart—the icy hurt for things dead and gone,
and the heaviness of those who awaken to a world empty of what was once
the heart’s concern and desire.
Old distastes, too, press on me, old distastes, I say, not hates. How
hate any one like unto myself, hurrying along the night-path to the
grave, mutual, frightened possessors of a shadowy, urgent immortality?
For these last few years I have entered, as it were, into some knowledge
of charity, not that I like everybody, but I have come to realize that
the distaste is often in myself and not due to some fault or lesser
excellence in others. Truly in this whole journey I have encountered but
two whom in an idle, hazy way I did not like; one was of an amorphic
species and the other had judgments too violent, and at the same time too
conventional and platitudinous, to permit interest. But even of these I
shall ultimately think with indulgence.
_5 A.M._—Closed the book recording the deeds of those young, long, long
fallen of St.-Clément’s school, and I pass to thinking how the word now
on the lips of the world is freedom.
But is not the deepest wish of the human heart for love which is never
free, but always in bond to that which is its hope and its desire? And I
cried out concerning freedom what once in the world’s greatest hour was
cried out concerning truth, “What is it?” and begged that it might show
its true form and aspect, above all to one who, invested with incredible
power by a great people, would seem to hold even the lightnings in his
hand.
More sabots click across the square, and a pale light sifts in at the top
of the curtains. It’s the eighth day of Creation. Innumerable men have
stood (and so near me) their last night through in the trenches....
Yesterday with its happenings seems a thousand years ago. I had motored
with Laferrière to lunch at Dannemarie across a rich plain, through
Morzwiller, where Alan Seeger spent a week with the Foreign Legion, and
spun who knows which of his young and gorgeous fancies?
Now, as then, the long street of Morzwiller was crowded with a highly
colored, exotic regiment, and we were stopped a moment by a detachment
passing. In front of the red-roofed, cream-colored inn, with its
yellowing grapevine clinging close and flat, a young officer in the
strong, mustard-tinted khaki and red _checchia_ of the Moroccans was
getting off his horse, a blooded, white, long-tailed beast of Araby; on
his breast was a blaze of decorations and there was something implacable
in his young glance as he looked about, and something very straight in
his mien—a man who had been at his enemy’s very throat, or drawn the
sucking bayonet out all red. Two or three men of his regiment, wearing
also their crimson _checchias_, were sitting at a table drinking a
light-yellow wine. A woman came out, emptied a pail, called to a cat. A
very young girl behind her made a slight sign to one of the men sitting
at the table. In another minute we had passed on.
Everywhere in the rich fields were great brown stretches of barbed-wire
entanglements, repeating the rusty tones of the beech forests which
fringe them. I asked Laferrière what would become of those thousands upon
thousands of kilometers of barbed wire. He answered indifferently, as one
does of things past, “Little by little the peasants will use the poles
for their kitchen fires and the wire for their hedges.”
And we continue through that flat yellow and green and brown world to
Dannemarie, one of the “territories” of the reconquered triangle, drawing
up before some sort of government building, known to German and to French
administrators, in and out of which American soldiers are now passing.
I ask one of them where their officers are quartered, thinking to pay
my respects after lunch. There is a vagueness as he asks of a passing
comrade, “Say, ’ain’t we got a major somewhere here?” The flooding
Americanism of my soul is for a moment stemmed; then we go over to the
_popote_, where we are to lunch with Lieutenant Ditandy, in charge at
Dannemarie. Laferrière, always ready to praise his comrades, tells me
that he is possessed of much energy, good sense, and decision (rather in
our American way, I found later) and the “territory” has flourished under
him.
Pleasant lunch, enlivened by some last German salvos, which shook the
windows and caused the glasses on the table to ring. Much and easy
conversation—as we ate the classic Alsatian dish of sauerkraut, boiled
potatoes, and pork, and the equally classic pancakes—mostly about
the irrealizable and irreconcilable dreams of small and penniless
nations, springing up like poor and unthrifty relations at the day of
inheritance. And how amusing, even, the adjustments might become, once
the blood-letting had ceased, though everybody felt more or less of a
pricking in the thumbs at the thought of _l’après-guerre_. One could not
then foresee that the movement of the Peace Conference would be about
as rapid as that of the notoriously timeless glacier. Nor was it given
to prophets to foretell the exceeding glitter of its generalities, nor
how those same small nations, without a cent in their pockets, some
even without pockets, like the Zulus and Hottentots, would multiply a
hundredfold in its dewy shade. The metaphors are mixed, though not more
so than the theme, and unfortunately it _won’t_ “be all the same in a
hundred years,” everything having been taken into account except the
future.
After lunch we start out in the motor driven by the swift yet careful
chauffeur, accompanied by a doctor _à deux galons_, who speaks English
very well, but doesn’t understand a word I say—and my English is
generally intelligible, though perhaps one wouldn’t know right away if I
came from England or the United States.
We passed the high, broken, pink viaduct of the railway, looking, against
the near Swiss hills, like a bit of aqueduct in the Roman Campagna,
though without any beauty of light. It had been destroyed the first days
of the war, rebuilt, again destroyed, and then abandoned.
We were running straight toward the trenches, through that green and gold
and brown autumn world, the road screened by wire netting interwoven with
pine branches and broom, and there were kilometers of cloth screening,
too, torn and flapping. The lines are but a few yards distant, and
everywhere between us and them are the brown lakes of barbed wire.
At St.-Léger an infantry band is playing the terrible, the gentle, the
dolorous, the gorgeous, the human, the superhuman “_Sambre et Meuse_,”
which will forever evoke those seventeen hundred thousand sons of France
who to its beat marched to their death. We stop to listen. A veteran
of 1870 (no village seems to be complete without one or more) comes
out, his green-and-yellow ribbon in his rusty buttonhole, and gives
Lieutenant Ditandy a toothless, palsied salute. Black-clad women are
grouped about the blue-clad band, under a great yellow chestnut tree. The
mustard-tinted khaki and red _checchias_ of a passing Moroccan regiment
give a last deep accent to the color of the scene. And for a long way our
road runs like this:
[Illustration]
We continue swiftly through villages shot to bits and deserted save for
the troops, _Quatrième Zouaves mixtes_, they mostly are, quartered within
their crumbling walls. There are tattered cloth screens for camouflage
hung across the streets, as electioneering signs would be hung, or the
banners of festivities and welcome. Open-mouthed, the soldiers see the
auto pass where for two years no wheeled thing has rolled. If men went
there they slipped silently behind the screens and under cover of night,
with food and munitions or carrying wounded men.
As for me, I begin to feel like a cross between Joan of Arc and Madame
Poincaré.
Lieutenant Ditandy points out “_le Bec de Canard_,” the duck’s bill, a
long tongue of Swiss territory that juts in comfortingly between the
French and German lines, and is greatly beloved by everybody.
On the outskirts of the battered village of Seppois we pause; a few more
turns of the wheel and we would be in full sight of the German lines. I
make good my woman’s reputation for lack of sense of responsibility and
beg to proceed. Lieutenant Ditandy, however, caps daring by a somewhat
belated prudence (there is something bold and hard in his eye when it’s
turned toward the enemy), saying:
“We ought not to be here; as it is, our safe return depends on whether a
German officer sees us and, seeing us, thinks he might as well turn the
mitrailleuses on. The first man to be killed in the war was killed near
here—it would be too stupid to be the last.”
Laferrière: “Not to speak of the incident it would create, and if the
colonel sees us—well, the prison at Seppois isn’t inviting.” So we turned
toward the Swiss frontier instead, and I thought deeply, sweetly on her
so dear, so near, as I looked toward these hills enfolding her, the best
loved of my heart.
Then we turned another way, passing again through Seppois. Arab troops
are quartered there, and we were held up by the sentinel, who wanted
to see our papers. He was dark of color, delicate of hand, straight of
nose, and wore his military coat buttoned by one of its top buttons in
such a way that it fell with an effect of burnous. He couldn’t read
French characters, so he called to another thin, small-handed, straight,
coffee-colored man, who might have been his twin, who couldn’t read them,
either, and finally they both threw up their slender hands, resembling
those of some antique bronze of an adolescent, after which we passed
on. And I told Sérin’s story of the Arab guard who held him up one dark
night, in the trenches, but generously gave him the countersign, saying
to him, “_Si tu ne dis pas tire-lire, tu ne passes pas!_” (“You can’t
pass unless you say tire-lire!”)
They’re cold, these Arabs, they’re gray with cold, and they don’t know
why they fight, nor whom, but they follow their officer to the death,
and, if he falls, lose heart under these gray skies with which Allah
seems only remotely connected.
And then we turned back and went through young woods where countless
thousands, no, millions of shells were piled on shelflike receptacles,
as one would pile bottles of wine on cellar shelves. Everywhere were the
words “_Route interdite_,” “_Défense de passer_,” and we passed, until
we came to Faverois, with its old, old church on the top of a tiny hill,
over which the town spilled. The broad, low steps of the church were
made of ancient tomb slabs, and, stooping, I saw, on one of them, half
obliterated, “_in pace_,” and “16—.”
There was much that was unspoiled, or more likely forgotten, in the
interior. A suave-expressioned St.-Sebastian, with dimpled limbs, so
evidently unfit for the arrows that transfixed them, and something
yearning and earthly about his eyes, was above the Louis XV altar; quite
unmistakably he was of the gay century. In another niche was an unknown
saint, dressed like a personage of opera; three plumes were on his head
and he wore a golden shirt of mail and high, fringed boots. At the
side-altars were charming, very pure models of angels, and bow-knots and
shells (I mean, for once, _sea_-shells). As we came out we noticed that
the roof of the church was painted a silver-white and that of the old
house nearby, with the round tower, was painted the same way, and other
houses, too, and when we asked why they told us it shone like crystal at
night and was to warn airplanes of their nearness to the Swiss frontier.