certain inquiries to make which have nothing to do with this narrative.
We interviewed the _maire_ in his parlour at the Hôtel de Ville, a
little man, and spirited, who had hung on at his post during the German
occupation, and done his best to protect his fellow-townsmen against the
lust and rapine of the Huns. Under such circumstances the office of
municipal magistrate is no sinecure. It is, in fact, a position of
deadly peril, for by the doctrine of vicarious punishment, peculiar to
the German Staff, an innocent man is held liable with his life for the
faults of his fellow-townsmen, and, it may be, for those of the enemy
also. Doubtless it appeals to their sinister sense of humour, when two
of their own men get drunk and shoot at one another, to execute a French
citizen by way of punishment. It happened that during the German
occupation of Coulommiers the gas supply gave out. The _maire_ was
informed by a choleric commandant that unless gas were forthcoming in
twenty-four hours he would be shot. The little man replied quietly:
"M'éteindre, ce n'est pas allumer le gaz." This illuminating remark
appears to have penetrated the dark places of the commandant's mind, and
although the gas-jets continued contumacious (the gas-workers were all
called up to the colours) the _maire_ was not molested. It was here
that we heard a shameful story (for the truth of which I will not vouch)
of a certain straggler from our army, a Highlander, who tarried in
amorous dalliance and was betrayed by his enchantress to the Huns, who,
having deprived him of everything but his kilt, led him mounted upon a
horse in Bacchanalian procession round the town. As to what became of
him afterwards nothing was known, but the worst was suspected. The Huns
have a short way and bloody with British stragglers and despatch-riders
and patrols, and I fear that the poor lad expiated his weakness with a
cruel death.
At Coulommiers we turned northwards on the road to La
Ferté-sous-Jouarre, a pleasant little town on the banks of the Marne,
approached by an avenue of plane trees whose dappled trunks are visible
for many miles. Here we had lunch at the inn--a dish of perch caught
that morning in the waters of the Marne, a delicious cream-cheese, for
which La Ferté is justly famous, and a light wine of amber hue and
excellent vintage. The landlord's wife waited on us with her own hands,
and as she waited talked briskly of the German occupation of the town.
The Huns, it appeared, had been too hustled by the Allies to do much
frightfulness beyond the usual looting, but they had inflicted enormous
losses on the pigs of La Ferté. It reminded me of the satirical
headline in a Paris newspaper, over a paragraph announcing a great
slaughter of pigs in Germany owing to the shortage of maize--"Les
Bosches s'entregorgent!" Madame told us with much spirit how she had
saved her own pig, an endearing infant, by the intimation that a far
more succulent pig was to be found higher up the street, and while the
Bosches went looking for their victim she had hidden her own in the
cellar. Her pig is now a local celebrity. People come from afar to see
the pig which escaped the Bosches. For the pigs whom the Bosches love
are apt to die young. But what had impressed her most was the treatment
meted out by a German officer, a certain von Bülow, who was quartered at
the inn, to one of his men. The soldier had been ordered to stick up a
lantern outside the officer's quarters, and had been either slow or
forgetful. Von Bülow knocked him down, and then, as he lay prostrate,
jumped upon him, kicked him, and beat him about the head and face with
sabre and riding-whip. The soldier lay still and uttered not a cry.
Madame shuddered at the recollection, "Épouvantable!"
We crossed the _place_ and called on a prominent burgess. He received us
hospitably. In the hall of his house was a Uhlan's lance with drooping
pennon which excited our curiosity. How had it come here? He was only
too pleased to explain. He had taken it from a marauding Uhlan with whom
he had engaged in single combat, strangling him with his own hands--so!
I took by the throat the circumcised dog
And smote him, thus!
He held out a pair of large fat hands of the consistency of clay; he was
of a full habit and there were pouches under his eyes. In England he
would have been a small tradesman, with strong views on total
abstinence, accustomed to a diet of high tea, and honoured as the
life-long superintendent of a Sunday school. I was more astonished than
sceptical, but perhaps, as the Comte suggested in a whisper, the Uhlan
was drunk. Here, too, we heard tales of loot, especially among ladies'
wardrobes. It is a curious fact that there is nothing the Hun loves so
much as women's underclothing. As to what happens when he gets hold of
the _lingerie_ many scandalous stories are told, and none more
scandalous than the one which appeared in the whimsical pages of _La Vie
Parisienne_. But that is, most emphatically, quite another story.
From La Ferté we drove on to Lizy, where the gendarme, wiping his mouth
as he came hurriedly from the inn, told us a harrowing tale, and then to
Barcy, where the _maire_, though busy with a pitch-fork upon a manure
heap, received us with municipal gravity. We were now nearing the
battlefield of the Marne, and here and there along the roadside the
trunks of the poplars, green with mistletoe, were shivered as though by
lightning. Yet nothing could have been more peaceful than the pastoral
beauty of the countryside. We passed waggons full of roots, drawn by a
team of white oxen under the yoke, and by the roadside a threshing
machine was being fed by a knot of old men and young women from an
oat-rick. The only hints of the cloud on the horizon were the occasional
passage of a convoy and the notable absence of young men. As we raced
along, the furrows, running at right angles to the road, seemed to be
eddying away from us in pleats and curves, and this illusion of a
stationary car in a whirling landscape was fortified by the contours of
the countryside, which were those of a great plain, great as any sea,
stretching away to a horizon of low chalk hills. Suddenly the car slowed
down at a signal from my companion and stopped. We got out. Not a sound
was to be heard except the mournful hum of the distant threshing
machine, but a peculiar clicking, like the halliard of a flagstaff in a
breeze, suddenly caught my ear. The wind was rising, and as I looked
around me I saw innumerable little tricolour flags fluttering against
small wooden staves. It was the battlefield of the Marne, the scene of
that immortal order of Joffre's in which he exhorted the sons of France
to conquer or die where they stood. As he had commanded, so had they
done. With an emotion too deep for words we each contemplated these
plaintive memorials of the heroes who lay where they fell. Our orderly
wept and made no effort to hide his tears. I thought of Jeanne's wistful
petition, but my heart sank, for these graves were to be numbered not by
hundreds but by thousands. "C'est absolument impossible!" said the
Comte, to whom I had communicated my quest. A sudden cry from the
orderly, who was moving from grave to grave in a close scrutiny of the
inscriptions, arrested us. He was standing by a wooden cross, half
draped by a tattered blue coat and covered with wreaths of withered
myrtle. A képi pierced with holes lay upon the grave. And sure enough,
by some miracle of coincidence, he had found it. On a wooden slab we
read these words:
PAUL DUVAL,
151e Rég. d'Inf.
6 sept. 1914
MORT POUR LA PATRIE.
The sun was fast declining over the chalk hills and it grew bitter cold.
I unfolded my camera, stepped back eight paces, and pressed the trigger.
We clambered back into the car and resumed the road to Meaux. As I
looked over my shoulder the last things I saw in the enfolding twilight
were those little flags still fluttering wistfully in the wind.
XIII
MEAUX AND SOME BRIGANDS
We lay the night at Meaux. It was a town which breathed the enchantments
of the Middle Ages and had for me the intimacy of a personal
reminiscence. Sixteen years earlier, when reading for a prize essay at
Oxford, I had studied the troubled times of Étienne Marcel in the
treasures of the Bibliothèque de l'École des Chartes, and I knew every
kilometre of this country as though I had trodden it. Meaux, Compiègne,
Senlis--they called to my mind dreamy hours in the dim religious light
of muniment-rooms and days of ecstasy among the pages of Froissart.
Little did I think when I read those belligerent chronicles in the
sequestered alcoves of the Bodleian and the Bibliothèque Nationale,
tracing out the warlike dispositions of Charles the Bad and the Dauphin
and the Provost of the Merchants, that the day would come when I would
be traversing these very fields engaged in detective enterprises upon
the footprints of contemporary armies. To compare the _variae
lectiones_ of two manuscripts concerning a fourteenth-century skirmish
is good, it has all the excitement of the chase; but to be collating the
field note-book of a living Hun with the _dossier_ of a contemporary
Justice de Paix, this is better. It has all the contact of reality and
the breathless joy of the hue and cry. And, after all, were things so
very different? Generations come and go, dynasties rise and fall, but
the earth endureth for ever, and these very plains and hills and valleys
that have witnessed the devastation of the Hun have also seen the
ravages of the mercenaries and free companies of the Middle Age. As I
lay in my bed that night at the inn I turned over the pages of my pocket
volume of M. Zeller's _Histoire de France racontée par les
contemporains_, and hit on the "Souvenirs du brigand Aimerigot Marchès,"
ravisher of women, spoiler of men, devourer of widows' houses. And as I
read, it seemed as though I were back in the department _du Contentieux_
of the Ministry of War in Paris deciphering the pages of a German
officer's field note-book. For thus speaks Aimerigot Marchès in the
delectable pages of Froissart distilled by M. Zeller into modern French:
There is no time, diversion, nor glory in this world like that of
the profession of arms and making war in the way we have. How
blithe were we when we rode forth at hazard and hit on a rich
abbé, an opulent prior or merchant, or a string of mules from
Montpelier, Narbonne, Limoux, Toulouse, or Carcassonne laden with
the fabrics of Brussels or furs from the fair of Lendit, or spices
from Bruges, or the silks of Damascus and Alexandria! All was ours
or was to ransom at our sweet will. Every day we had more money.
The peasants of Auvergne and Limousin provisioned us and brought to
our camp corn and meal, and baked bread, hay for the horses and
straw for their litter, good wines, oxen, and fine fat sheep,
chicken, and poultry. We carried ourselves like kings and were
caparisoned as they, and when we rode forth the whole country
trembled before us. Par ma foi, cette vie était bonne et belle.
Is not that your very Hun? He is a true reversion to type. Only, whereas
among the French he is a thing of the savage past, among the Germans he
is a product of the kultured present. And to turn from the field
note-book of the German soldier with its swaggering tale of loot, lust,
and maudlin cups, its memoranda of stolen toys for Felix and of ravished
lingerie for Bertha, all viewed in the rosy light of the writer's
egotism as a laudable enterprise, to the plain depositions of the
Justice de Paix, and see the reverse side of the picture with its tale
of ruined homes and untilled fields, was just such an experience as it
had been to turn from the glittering pages of Froissart to the sombre
story of Jean de Venette,[9] a monk of Compiègne, Little Brother of the
Poor and chronicler of his times, as he pondered on these things in the
scriptorium:
In this year 1358, the vines, source of that beneficent liquor
which gladdens the heart of man, were no longer cultivated; the
fields were neither tilled nor sown; the oxen and the sheep went no
longer to the pasture. The churches and houses, falling into decay,
presented everywhere traces of devouring flames or sombre ruins and
smouldering. The eye was no longer gladdened as before with the
sight of green meadows and yellowing harvests, but rather afflicted
by the aspect of briers and thistles, which clustered everywhere.
The church bells no longer rang joyously to call the faithful to
the divine offices, but only to give the alarm to the peasants at
the approach of the enemy and the signal for flight.
As it was in the days of Jean de Venette, so it is now. I thought of
that mournful passage as I wandered next day among the ruins of
Choisy-au-Bac, a village not twenty miles from the place where Jean de
Venette was born, and saw old women cowering among the ruins of their
burnt-out homes.
If the good Carmelite of the fourteenth century returned to Meaux to-day
he would have little difficulty in finding his way about the city, for
though she must have aged perceptibly she can have changed but little.
The timbered mills on wooden piles still stand moored in the middle of
the river like so many ships, just as they stood in the twelfth century,
and the cathedral with its Gothic portals and great rose-window--though
it has grown in stature and added here and there a touch of the
flamboyant in its tracery, even as a man will break out into insurgent
adventures when he feels the first chill of age--is stamped with the
characters of the fourteenth century. And I think Jean de Venette would
find a congenial spirit in my friend the bishop, Monsignor Marbot, for
like Jean he is a lover of the poor. It was Monsignor Marbot who went in
procession to the battlefield of the Marne with crucifix and banner and
white-robed acolytes, and in an allocution of singular beauty
consecrated those stricken fields with the last rites of the Church. And
it was Monsignor Marbot who remained at his post all through the German
occupation to protect his flock while the Hun roamed over his diocese
like a beast of prey. Though the Hun thinks nothing of shooting a
_maire_, and has been known to murder many an obscure village priest, he
fights shy of killing a bishop; there might be trouble at the Holy See.
Many a moving tale did the good bishop tell me as we sat in his little
house--surely the most meagre and ascetic of episcopal palaces, in which
there was nothing more sumptuous than his cherry and scarlet soutane and
his biretta.
We lay the night at an inn that must have been at one time a seigneurial
mansion, for it had a noble courtyard. I was shown to a room, and,
having unpacked my valise, I turned on the taps, but no water issued; I
applied a match to the gas-jet, but no flame appeared; I tried to open
the window, but the sash stuck. I rang the bell; that at least
responded. A maid appeared; I pointed to the taps and made
demonstrations with the gas-jet. To all of which she replied quite
simply, "Ah! monsieur, c'est la guerre!" I had heard that answer before.
With such a plea of confession and avoidance had the boots at the Hôtel
de la Poste at Rouen excused a gross omission to call me in the morning,
and thus also had the aged waiter at the Métropole disposed of a
flagrant error in my bill. But this time it was convincing enough;
gas-workers and waterworks men and carpenters were all at the war, and
in the town of Meaux water was carried in pitchers and light was
purchased at the chandler's. In France you get used to these things and
imitate with a good grace the calm stoicism of your Allies. For, after
all, the enemy was pretty near, and as I retired to my couch I could
hear the thunder of their guns.
FOOTNOTE:
[9] Reputed author of the sequel to the chronicles of Guillaume de
Nangis. See M. Lacabane in the _Bibliothèque de l'École des Chartes_ (1e
série), t. iii.
XIV
THE CONCIERGE AT SENLIS
We rose early the next day, and, having paid our reckoning, were away
betimes, for we were to visit the French lines and wished also to pay a
flying visit to Senlis. As we left Crépy-en-Valois we entered the Forest
of Compiègne, a forest of noble beeches which rose tall and straight and
grey like the piers of Beauvais Cathedral, their arms meeting overhead
in an intricate vaulting through which we saw the winter sun in a
sapphire sky. We met two Chasseurs d'Afrique, mounted on superb Arabs
and wearing red fez-like caps and yellow collar-bands. They were like
figures out of a canvas of Meissonier, recalling the spacious days when
men went into action with all the pomp and circumstance of war, drums
beating, colours flying, plumes nodding, and the air vibrant with the
silvery notes of the bugle. All that is past; to-day no bugle sounds the
charge, and even the company commander's whistle has given way to
certain soft words for which the German mocking-bird will seek in vain
in our Infantry Manual. As for cuirass and helmet, the range of modern
guns and rifles has made them a little too ingenuous. And, sure enough,
as we drove into Compiègne we found a squadron of dragoons as sombre as
our own, in their mouse-coloured _couvre-casques_ and cavalry cloaks,
though their lances glinted in the sun. Here all was animation. Informal
conventicles of Staff officers, with whom we exchanged greetings, stood
about the square in front of the exquisite Hôtel de Ville, with its
high-pitched roof pierced with dormer-windows and crowned with many
pinnacles. North and east of Compiègne lie the zones of the respective
armies, all linked up by telephone, and here we had to exchange our
passes, for even a Staff officer may not enter one zone with a pass
appropriate to another. But our first objective was Senlis, which lay to
the south of us between Compiègne and Paris.
The sun was high in the heavens as we turned south-west, and, keeping to
the left bank of the river, skirted the forest. Faint premonitions of
spring already appeared; catkins drooped upon the hazels, primroses made
patches of sulphur in the woods, and one almost expected to see the
blackthorn in blossom. Silver birches gleamed against the purple haze of
the more distant woodlands. The road ran straight as an arrow. As we
neared Senlis I was struck by the complete absence of all traffic upon
the roads; no market carts came and went, neither did any wayfarer
appear. Not a wisp of smoke arose from the chimneys above the screen of
trees. We passed up a double avenue of elms--just such an avenue as that
along which M. Bergeret discussed metaphysics and theology with the Abbé
Lantaigne--yet not a soul was to be seen upon the _trottoir_. A brooding
silence hung over the little town, a silence so deep as to be almost
menacing. As we entered the main street I encountered a spectacle which
froze my heart. Far as the eye could see along the diminishing
perspective of the road were burnt-out homes, houses which once were gay
with clematis and wisteria, gardens which had blossomed with the rose.
And now all that remained were trampled flower-beds, tangled creepers,
blackened walls, calcined rafters, twisted ironwork, and fallen masonry.
And this was Senlis! Senlis which had been to the department of the Oise
as the apple of its eye, a little town of quality, beautiful as
porcelain, fragrant as a rose, and as a rose as sweet. As I looked upon
these desecrated homes it seemed to me that the very stones cried out.
In all this desolation we looked in vain for any signs of life. It was
not until we sought out the house of a captain of dragoons, a friend of
my companion the Comte, that we found a human being in these solitudes.
The house was, indeed, a melancholy ruin, but by the gate was a lodge,
and in the lodge a concierge. He was a small man and middle-aged, and as
he spoke he trembled with a continual agitation of body as though he
were afflicted with ague. He led us into his little house, the walls of
which were blackened as with fire and pierced in many places with the
impact of bullets. And this was his tale.
One afternoon early in September--it was the second day of the month, he
remembered it because there had been an untimely frost over night--he
heard the crackle of musketry on the outskirts of the town, and a column
of grey-coated men suddenly appeared in the street. An officer blew a
whistle, and, as some of them broke through the gates of the mansion,
the concierge fled across the lawn with bullets buzzing about his ears
and shouts of laughter pursuing him as he ran. In and out among the elms
he doubled like a frightened hare, the bullets zip-zipping against the
tree-trunks, till he crawled into a disused culvert and lay there
panting and exhausted. From his hiding-place he heard the crash of
furniture, more shots, and the loud, ribald laughter of the soldiers.
And then a crackle of flame and a thick smell of smoke. And after that
silence. At dusk he crawled forth from his culvert, trembling, his hands
and face all mottled with stinging-nettles and scratched with thistles;
he found his master's house a smouldering ruin, and a thick pall of
smoke lay over the town of Senlis like a fog. Somewhere a woman shrieked
and then was still. About the hour of nine in the evening the concierge
heard voices in disputation outside the lodge-gates, and as he hid
himself among the shrubberies more men entered, and, being dissatisfied
with their work, threw hand-grenades into the mansion and applied a
lighted torch to the concierge's humble dwelling. They were very merry
and sang lustily--the concierge thought they had been drinking; they
sang thus, "_comme ça!_" and the concierge mournfully hummed a tune, a
tune he had never heard before, but which he would remember all his
life. I recognised it. It was Luther's hymn:
Ein' feste Burg ist unser Gott.
Thus had passed the day. Meanwhile the _maire_, M. Odent, a good man and
greatly beloved, had been arrested at the Hôtel de Ville. His secretary
proposed to call his deputies. "No, no," replied the _maire_ tranquilly,
"one victim is enough." He was dragged along the streets to the suburb
of Chammont, the headquarters of von Kluck, and his guards buffeted him
and spat upon him as he went. Arrived there, he was condemned to death.
He took his companions in captivity by the hand, embraced them--"très
dignement," the concierge had been told--handed them his papers, and
bade them adieu. Two minutes later he was shot, and his body thrown into
a shallow trench with a sprinkling of earth. The concierge had seen it
the next day; the feet were protruding.
All this the concierge told us in a dull, apathetic voice, and always as
he told his body twitched and the muscles of his face worked. And he
spoke like a man in a soliloquy as though we were not there. He seemed
to be looking at something which we could not see. As we bade him adieu
he stared at us as though he saw us not, neither did he return our
salutation. We clambered back into our car and turned her head round
towards Compiègne. I shall never see Senlis again.
III
UNOFFICIAL INTERLUDES
XV
A "CONSEIL DE LA GUERRE"
Il y a une convenance et un pacte secret entre la jeunesse et la
guerre. Manier des armes, revêtir l'uniforme, monter à cheval ou
marcher au commandement, _être redoutable sans cesser d'être
aimable_, dépasser le voisin en audace, en vitesse, et en grâce
s'il se peut, défier l'ennemi, connaître l'aventure, jouer ce qui a
peu duré, ce qui est encore illusion, rêve, ambition, ce qui est
encore une beauté, ô jeunesse, voilà ce que vous aimez! Vous n'êtes
pas liée, vous n'êtes pas fanée, vous pouvez courir le
monde.--RENÉ BAZIN, _Récits du temps de la guerre_.