Part 13
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:
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.
A blue group of _poilus_ was standing on the crest of the street, looking at a newspaper. One cried out in a loud voice, “_Guillaume a ——_,” only one can’t write the word. And going up we saw the news of the Kaiser’s abdication in letters quite American in size.
Then in a very understandable zeal that I should miss nothing, the doctor _à deux galons_, espying a khaki figure, said, “There comes an American,” and I saw approaching a blond, round-faced young man with spectacles. Something leaped within me as I turned to him. But he answered me in the stiffest German accent possible, “Ja, pig news”; and when I said, “Yes, we’ve won the war!” he answered, “Well, I do t’ink we god ’um shust now.” Unreasonably, the thing that had leaped within me lay down. I said, “Good-by.” He said, “So long.” And so much for American meeting American on the hill of the village of Faverois.
Laferrière had marched all through this country, _sac-au-dos_, and in one place he buried a comrade, and in another he knew hunger and thirst, and in another he had watched the day break after a night battle. There is a history to Faverois, too, but I don’t know it, and it’s just as well, for I would be sure to tell it in this long vigil, and I _must_ finish with the war.
Back to Dannemarie, the chauffeur driving like the wind, and Lieutenant Ditandy finds out where the American officers have their headquarters. There is a battalion[24] attached to the Seventh French Army. I am conducted over a muddy street, past two classic dung-heaps, the kind so evidently handed down from father to son, and go up some dark backstairs, and there Colonel Wing and Major Griffiths are rung up by an orderly. I give my name, and they all know of me. In a moment appear, young and slim and untried and eager, the colonel and the major, glad to see an American woman in Dannemarie. And then they took me to their more than simple quarters out through another door and another court, where there was the usual mud, but only the scent of a vanished dung-heap. How many good American dollars they had “planked down” for this priceless compound I know not. After a while we walked back to the motor waiting in the square, and I presented them to the French officers. One of them said he had been at Plattsburg with my husband that first historic summer, and spoke of General Wood, whose aide he had then been, saying, with a flush, “He is the greatest man in the United States, as well as the greatest general,” and there in the square of Dannemarie I thought, “_Magna est veritas_,” and then, “Too late, too late.”
On our way home, not far out of the town, we come across a group of Americans and French colonials standing by the road. Lying on the embankment was a young man with a fractured skull, his face deathly pale, except for the contusions, already swollen and blue. His hair was matted with blood and his red _checchia_ lay in the ditch. The stern young officer of the many decorations (there were three rows of them) that I had seen descending at the inn at Morzwiller, was there, on his beautiful mare, and he held the halter of another very good beast, the one that had just unhorsed his rider. We got out and the young man was placed carefully in our motor to be taken to the hospital at Dannemarie, after which we started to walk back to Masevaux—about thirty kilometers. In war-time you don’t wonder “can you do it,” you just start out; sometimes you get there alive, sometimes you don’t. This turned out all right, for shortly after our motor, which had met an ambulance, came back for us.
And then we found ourselves passing through a sunset-world, cut by a bar of level light, so strangely thick where it touched the golden earth that it was almost like a ledge or a wall over which we looked into wind-still, purple forests, and above us, like the tarnished gilt ceiling of a temple, was the pale, amber sky. We talked somewhat of hope, somewhat of life, from which the red thing had so suddenly gone, as they alone can talk who have laid their heads close against the cruel, beautiful, full breast of war.
As we drove into the Place du Chapitre a delicate white moon, seen through the nearly bare lindens, was hanging in a deepening sky, close above the soft, dark roofs of the houses of the _chanoinesses_. There was no breath of wind. No cannon sounded. One’s heart, too, I found, was very still. Millions of men waited face to face in dark lines, and that same moon touched their bayonets, their helmets, and their drinking-cups. The sun had set upon the last day of the World War....
The maid who brings my breakfast as I lie half dead, but not asleep, after the burning, consuming night, opens my blinds.
French and American flags are flying from many windows. Something wets my eyes. Then—if in my flesh or out of it I know not—I see a strange brightness filling the Place du Chapitre, and a further glory bathes my being in such sweet and cooling waters that I again am strong to pass, with the Sons of Victory, into the New Day.
In the old house are sounds of feet running to and fro. From our windows also blue and white and red flags are being hung. In the street are heard, “_Ça y est_,” and “_L’armistice est signé_.”
XVI
DIES GLORIÆ
“_O Eastern Star! Peace, peace!_”
And I arose and went to the church where there was a great ceremony, for it was the feast of St.-Martin, patron of Masevaux, as well as the end of the war....
Afterward I stood outside on the wide rose-gray steps, under a sky of matchless silver-blue, among groups of villagers, soldiers, and officers. A blue infantry band, grouped under that blue vault against the pink church, played the “Marseillaise” and “_Sambre et Meuse_,” with a great blare of trumpets, quickening the heart-beats, then “The Star-Spangled Banner,” and many eyes were wet with tears of hope and loneliness.
Amid the throng I noticed some new silhouettes, always in groups. They were those of husky young men in civilian holiday garb; flat, black hats, short, black jackets coming only to the waist, long, tight, black trousers, pink vests, and high, white collars. These young men, who looked no one straight in the eye, were strange-souled ones who had burned with no fever of combat; the lamp of no cause had shone before their faces; they had known no country for whom ’twas sweet and fitting to die. Free not to serve in the French army, out of reach of the German authorities, they had passed from adolescence to manhood during the World War unsplashed by blood. And they will be a generation apart. Even as they appeared on the day of victory in groups, apart. Later, in tribulation of maturity, in weakness of old age and fear of death, they may sigh that they were not among those who “dying are not dead,” and would exchange the worn drapery of their couches for the “blue-black cloud.” And those who have not known a hot youth will know a cold old age.
A motor was standing under the lindens of the Place du Chapitre and by it a black-bearded, giant chauffeur who might have been among the hosts of Louis le Débonnaire on the Field of Lies. I got in with Laferrière and he took me up on a hillside, and from the height showed me a last time the kingdoms and principalities into which his race had come. The plain shone in a blue and exceeding beauty; we ourselves were caught in a glistening web of air shot with color by the low-arching November sun. Marking the course of the great river was a line of mist shimmering in the same warm-tinted sun of Indian summer. “_L’été de St.-Martin_” indeed. Here and there villages shone brighter than day, and the hills were deep-colored, yet soft and unsubstantial. Victory, like a shining, soft-rolled ball whose tangles were hidden, was in our hands—or like to a crystal sphere as yet undarkened by events.
The grass of our hillside was dew-wet in the sun, white and frosty in the shade. Each fallen, rust-colored beech leaf, each scarlet cherry leaf, was set with something glittering. All, all was a-shine. Even the heart, too, after the dark years.
I cried within myself, though I might have said it aloud, “O beauty of life, why art thou so often hidden?” And I had in mind the eternal years, though the newborn hour of victory was so passing sweet upon the hillside.
And looking at the splendid river whose course was marked by the shining band of mist, I thought how deep the Lorelei was hidden in its timeless waters, though ’tis said she betrays but once those listening to her song. And long since, for the noise of battle, the hypnotic chanting of the Rhine-maidens lulling their nation to dreams of boundless might had not been heard. I thought, too, how the blood of the world’s armies had put out the circle of fire about Brünnhilde, though whence it was first kindled it may be again rekindled; and for all our dead—and theirs—in the middle of Europe there are, I know not how many, tens of millions to whom the fire-music is their light and heat, the river the symbol of their strength; and what to do with it all? Walhalla has been destroyed in the greatest roar of sound mortal ears have ever heard, but that which wrought its pillars and its walls is still there, and in other wide-doored mansions Wotan’s warriors may drink again deep cups of hydromel.
Siegfried lies dead upon his bier, but Brünnhilde’s candle throws a light upon his face, and though Loge seems no longer at his post, it is believed he waits somewhere unseen, protecting, as best he may, the Walkyries’ unquiet sleep, until they wake and ride again, crying, “_Je ho, je te ho!_” inciting to battle and to sacrifice.
And as nations always have the governments their mystical qualities create, in spite of the great defeat in the West and the solvent forces in the East, I thought, “Is anything really changed in Germany of that which makes each nation like only unto itself?” Old things may take new names, but, the blood-madness past, they will walk again the banks of their great river—listen once again to the Rhine-maidens, and Lorelei, combing her hair, will sing once more for them, while the wonder-working music that has so scorched us will draw again its circle. And the German people may be more portentous in defeat than when their armies were spilling over Europe—only, one who says this too soon will be stoned and one who thinks it not at all be deceived.
Then from some distant church tower softly sounded the first noontide of peace, and, turning, I left the Germanies to their predestined fate. “He beheld and melted the nations,” and truly of them may be said “_Glück und Unglück wird Gesang_.”
For to each one his own, and the power of rhythmic sound over the world’s will can no more be separated from that nation’s destinies than can certain inborn qualities of the French be separated from theirs. That pervading sense of style, that illuminating, stimulating art, their conversation, that incomparable arrangement of words, their prose; or, in the mystical realm, that bright and singular thing they denominate “_la Gloire_,” which one of my countrywomen[25] has written of in golden words, and that other peculiar and essential translation into habit and custom of the word “_honneur_,” and many more deathless qualities that make France what she is and not something else....
Then I found myself following Laferrière over another diamond-set path of rustling autumn leaves, and we got into the motor and went down the hill into the beflagged and crowded town, drawn so brightly, yet so transiently, out of its antique obscurity.
At the _popote_ many guests were assembled, among them three men of the Anglo-Saxon race, come to eat in Masevaux the first-fruits of victory, and later, not so very much later, perhaps that very night, they were to tell of it to the world, each seeming to have, as it were, the end of a telegraph wire cuddled in his pocket by his stylographic pen.
Many, I knew not who they were, came in after lunch to salute the commandant, whose house and heart were wide open that day. Black-robed, tremulous women, youngish officers with very lined faces on which, over night-loss and night-grief, was written something at once soft and shining and eager; but, with all the coming and going, a strange new quiet pervaded everything. Noise had, for a time, gone from the border-world.
Afterward we were taken up to see the room once lived in by Anna, the wife, or rather widow, of the Oberforster. In it was the most extraordinary piece of furniture, designed to occupy two sides of a corner, that I have ever seen. It was a divan, a narrow, hard divan, at right angles with itself and upholstered in mauve rep. Above the narrow seat and reaching nearly to the ceiling was a series of mirrors set in woodwork like many panes of glass, the mirror parts too high to see oneself in. On the floor near it was a hard, tasseled cushion of old-gold satin on which I am sure no foot had ever rested, for it seemed rather to belong to the dread family of bric-à-brac. On the divan was a small, woolen-lace cushion bearing the words “_nur ein Viertelstündchen_” in shaded silks.