Part 6
Here on the borderland I find there is often an additional reason for pride, where Fate, which could so easily have willed it otherwise, sometimes has allowed the beloved to die for the beloved cause, as did the brother whose room is now mine. And this is his story, or rather the end of it. Those first four days of August, 1914, he had gone about the mountain heights and passes with his field-glass continually at his eyes to see if help were not coming from the hills in the guise of the _pantalons rouges_. But on the fourth day he was obliged to accompany his regiment into Germany, where he stayed three months. On hearing of the battle of the Marne through a French prisoner, he cried, “_Nous avons eu là une belle victoire!_” (“We have had a great victory!”) and he was put under arrest. His one idea being to desert, he asked to go into the lines again, knowing there would be no opportunity, if he remained in prison, training recruits. His chance came when he was fighting against the English in the north. His chiefs being killed or wounded, he, as under-officer, found himself in command of a company of a hundred and fifty men. With him deserted ninety-seven others. Later, he fell fighting in the French lines near Tahure. And this (it is perhaps much) is all I know of him or ever shall; if he were beloved of a woman or had loved many, I know not. He, the last of his race, took his name with him to the grave.
All that surrounds me as I write was his. His the full bookshelves, with an elaborate set of a _Geschichte der Literatur_, and a _Welt-Geschichte_ in many volumes, his the books of early boyhood, of travel, the many old, little books of prayer in tooled and beveled bindings of a generation or two ago, and the piles of the _Revue des Deux Mondes_. Two eighteenth-century maps hang on the walls, one of “Alsatia,” with queer German names for familiar places, and another of “Gallia,” and there is an incomparable, white, porcelain stove which heats quickly and gives out its pleasant heat during long hours.
On a little corner shelf is an old engraving of the last _chanoinesse_ of the Chapter of Masevaux, Xavière de Ferrette. She is dressed in full canonicals, with a large ruched coif and ermine-trimmed mantle; some high order in a Maltese-cross design is suspended from the broad ribbon worn across her breast, and in her hands is a richly embossed prayer-book.
The long face with its immensely high forehead has a full-lipped, very human mouth, and in the right, upper corner is her sixteen-quartered coat of arms.
The story of the Chapter would make good, though long, reading, for, like many other things in this part of the world, it begins with Charlemagne and ends with the French Revolution. Of both France seems equally proud, and certainly _il y en a pour tous les goûts_.
Women always seem to have had great influence on the life of their times in Alsace. Not even those with the vote and all the rights, together with all the privileges of our times, can pretend to half the influence of certain holy women of the so-called dark ages. They built on hilltops and in valleys those many citadels of peace whose traces still are to be seen, where life was free from violence, and, like sweet odors uncorked, their good deeds have perfumed the ages. Saint-Odile, _Vierge Candide et Forte_, daughter of Duke Atalric, is patroness of Alsace, and in her many have sought the feminine ideal of the Alsatian soul; and there are Saint-Richarde, tried by fire for a guiltless love, wife of Louis the Fat, and Herrade, Abbess of Hohenburg, author of the famous _Hortus Deliciarum_, preserved through seven centuries and destroyed in the siege of Strasbourg in 1870. These are but a few, and the histories of the secular dwellers in the Rhine Valley, spectacular though they were, seem often quite colorless contrasted with those of these saints of the Holy Roman Empire.
The first monks and pilgrims to come to Alsace were from Ireland (the last of these before the very end of the world will doubtless also come from Erin). It would appear that even in those days it could not be said of the Irish that they were neither hot nor cold, which is probably one of the reasons “why God loves them.” In the lovely rivered plains and great forests of the Rhine Valley it was they who built the first chapels and traced the first paths. It was an Irish monk whom Atalric, hoping for a son, consulted before the birth of his daughter; but of Saint-Odile another time.
The house next the one wherein I dwell was that of the abbess, and now belongs to Madame Auguste Lauth.
It, too, has a beautiful stairway, with a time-polished oaken balustrade, and it contains the great room of noble proportions and lovely panelings (still heated by the celebrated porcelain stove, fit only for a museum), where the ladies of the Chapter assembled in their rich toilets and great coifs to go to the church, reached by a two-storied gallery, which old prints show as having a most distinguished air, with its sloping roof pierced with oval windows and its pleasant proportions. But the upper story and the roof were done away with in the nineteenth century, which has demolished so much (not always in heat of battle), and it is now but a long, formless building used for some sort of storehouse connected with the Koechlin manufactories. And the way the six houses came to be constructed was this:
The Abbess Xavière de Ferrette, a woman of resolution and energy, as one can easily see by the high forehead and long jaw, becoming alarmed at the increasing expenses of the Chapter and the equally decreasing revenues, decided on some radical remedies. Through the Middle Ages, down to her time, the _chanoinesses_ had lived under one roof, and, according to the holy rule, ate together. But with them fared so many outsiders, their friends and their friends’ friends, with their domestics, that they found themselves being literally eaten out of house and home. The abbess called a solemn meeting wherein they arranged for the building of separate houses, whose construction was given into the hands of Kléber, then architect and inspector of the royal buildings at Belfort. Pictures of Kléber, known rather impersonally to Americans by the Parisian avenue that bears his name, abound in Alsace, and show a sensitive, artistic face, with a pleasure-loving mouth above a short chin, and a halo of light, curly hair. He met an early death in Napoleon’s Egyptian campaign. “_Il avait six pieds en tout_,” his contemporaries were wont admiringly to say of him.
In these separate houses, with garden attached, each _chanoinesse_ was to live alone with her _demoiselle_, who at her death would step into her very comfortable shoes, and the abbess only was to receive guests in the name of the Chapter.
The house I lodged in was that of the Chanoinesse von Reutner. These dames had to make their titles very clear to their earthly mansions, each having to possess sixteen quarterings evenly balanced, eight on her father’s side and eight on her mother’s side. Gentlemen were chosen to give their word on this somewhat elusive subject, and methought ’twas well they didn’t have to put their hand in the fire at the same time, for what can be sworn to with certainty of those things which have their origin on the mysterious borderland of the emotions? However....
The _chanoinesses_ belonged mostly to the great families of Alsace, the Masevaux, the Ferrettes, though the records show many German names like Furstenburg and Seckingen, or French like Beauffrémont and Fontenoy.
Sometimes the Abbey and Chapter were under French domination, sometimes under Austrian, sometimes they would be ceded to noble families like those of the Counts of Bollwiller and of Fugger, and in many ways their history had been checkered since their foundation in the eighth century.
And as for the Thirty Years’ War, they could have told tales of the Swedish invasion scarcely to be beaten by certain tales of our days. Indeed, so complicated is the history of those times, every shade and branch of combatant having fought against every other shade and branch, in kaleidoscopic changes, that when Turenne, allied with the Spaniards, revolted against the king, Louis XIV, it was a Swede, Rosen by name, who helped the Maréchal du Plessis Praslin to conquer him at Réthel. Rosen, who with his brothers had come originally from Livonia with the armies of Gustavus Adolphus, then promptly put on his standard a tower falling on a rose-bush in full bloom, with the device, _Malgré la Tour les Roses fleuriront_.[11]
In turning over pages concerning the involved chronicles of this borderland, I feel once again that history is, of all things, the most difficult to write, because of having to do with facts, and what more elusive than facts, eternally subjective? Even this simplest record of historic days is as different from one that another might have written about the same things as if it dealt, instead, let us say, with the genial suggestion of letting the Hottentots and the Zulus have their own government. It is that fantasy-awakening thing called temperament that is forever at work with facts, one thing always suggestive of another, rather than explanatory of itself, and I frankly rejoice that the “primrose by the river’s brim” _is_ to me something more than a primrose.
I am now such a long way from the history of the Chapter that there is scarcely time to get back, and so I will finish quickly by saying that in the epoch preceding the Revolution it found itself entangled in various temporal affairs, especially lawsuits with the inhabitants concerning their convenient but disappearing feudal rights. Otherwise life was probably not too strenuous for the _chanoinesses_. As nothing escapes the influence of its hour and age, why should one think the Chapter entirely escaped those of that light, pervading, charming, inconsequent, rich thing known as the eighteenth century, where everything seems to have finished by a song, or a witty quatrain, or by delicious angels holding up holy-water founts in the shape of lovely shells.
_To the popote at 12.15._—Its windows look out on the unmistakably plain timepiece in the church tower, and everybody knows when anybody is late, and just how late, and there’s a nice little green box on the table designed for fines, but only intermittently insisted on.
Commandant Poulet greets me with the words, “At three o’clock to-day Austria ceases hostilities.” Something cruel and red seemed suddenly rolled away.
In a flash I saw that Viennese pre-war world I had known so well, partaking tranquilly of the pleasant things of life, public events making little noise, intellectual passion absent—or discouraged, and things easy, easy—except for those dying of hunger. But that world has been burned to ashes, and the winds of destiny are about to scatter even them.
Then, as usual, some one read the American _communiqué_.
And to the deeds of the First Army must be added those of the National Guard, for the words Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas, Missouri, Colorado, New Mexico, New York, New Jersey, are stamped in fadeless red upon the villages and banks of the Meuse.
We talked long, and at two o’clock, as we arose from table, I knew that those others to the east had already arisen from the bitter meal of defeat, and after the manner of human hearts were adjusting themselves to the things that _are_. And perhaps there in Vienna they may not find it so difficult. They’ve been defeated before and they’re far enough east to have a touch of fatalism.
_Later._—Through mist and low-hanging clouds and rain with Captain Bernard to Sewen, where we visited first the school. Neat rows of sabots were in the hallway, all alike to _me_, but it appears some spirit in the feet leads each unmistakably to his or her own pair. A dozen children only were in the schoolroom, the others ill with grippe.
The school-teacher, a tall, horizon-blue-clad Frenchman, with kind eyes and a decoration on his breast, had just finished the dictation. Its subject was _de la viande_ (concerning meat). Looking at the copy-book of the nearest little boy, very blue-eyed, I read _de la fiande_, and his dictation was further embellished by sounds reminiscent of German rule. “_Chez le bourgé, le tinton, le charcoutier, le boutin, le zocisse_,” but as I said, that’s their German ear—and little by little it will be done away with and “French as she is spoke” will take its place. One small boy who wrote a beautiful, copper-plate hand was stone-deaf, but he had dear, questioning eyes and something patient in his being. I asked, when we came out, if nothing could be done for him. But the master said, with a terrible finality, “His father is an alcoholic.”
It is evidently not without result that they distil their _quetsch_ and their _kirsch_, their rose haws and their gentian, and everything else that has the merest embryo of a fruit or a berry or leaf in these pleasant valleys; as to which the bright-eyed, Italian-looking curé initiated us further, as you will see.
Leaving the school, we went to the church, beautifully familiar to me against the sky, but completely and, from our point of view, hopelessly modernized within; though I couldn’t help feeling that for those who come from dingy farms and dung-heaps the crude splendor of that house of God must be greatly comforting.
The old ossuary chapel nearby, with its fifteenth-century vaulting, was crowded with beautiful things from the church at Thann. The carvings on the choir stalls, of the most delicate workmanship, were amusing to boot, nothing human being foreign to the artists that made them. One figure forming an arm-rest had a swollen cheek bound up in a cloth, and, furthermore, he evidently had an ache in the center of his being, for he was doubled up, his hands pressed close to his person in the classic position of one so suffering. Another showed a man leaning over, with delicately modeled back, his head in his hands, but _his_ ache was very manifestly spiritual. Another had a goiter, and monkeys and parrots abounded, the native fancy of the fifteenth century evidently being out on a loose snaffle. A celebrated row of musical angels were so delicately carved, with cymbal and harp and bugle and lyre and flute, that they would be well placed in some vitrine rather than high on a choir stall in a dim Gothic church. The celebrated statue in stone of Saint-Théobald from the column of his fountain at Thann had been brought here for safety, too, and I fingered it as well as many another thing generally beyond reach.
As we came out, the clock in the tower of the church struck three. The great and disastrous Austrian war-act was finished.
It was a moment beyond words, and as we walked silently over to the curé’s house I thought of the cruel, interminable lists of dead and wounded and missing in the Vienna newspapers that winter of 1915, when the Russians were flooding Galicia and spilling over the ridges of the Carpathians. The curé, however, young, with fine, Italian face-bones, and frayed and spotted cassock, somewhat changed our thoughts by bringing out various of the thirty-four specimens of distilled liqueurs which are the pride and playthings of these valleys, explaining to us with snapping eyes special variations of his distillings. Holding a bottle and a glass up against the light in his long, thin _primitif_ hands, he poured me slowly something wrested from the mountain-ash (I had thought I might as well have a completely new sensation), and I went about the rest of the afternoon feeling as if a hot stone were lodged in my breast.
Arrived at Masevaux, we drove to a house on the Place du Chapitre, where I found another interior of the kind I am now familiar with—that of the high and comfortable Alsatian bourgeoisie.
Madame Chagué, large, white-haired, energetic, intelligent, agreeable, received us flanked by an amiable married daughter and a thin, upstanding veteran, his ribbon of honor in his buttonhole. But, to be perfectly frank, the veterans get on my nerves. It’s the picture of what the gorgeous young heroes of our great war will be one day, _sans_ eyes, _sans_ teeth, _sans_ hair, _sans_ everything, and _toutes les fins sont tristes_.
“Now,” said Madame Chagué when once started and tea had been poured (accompanied by cakes you don’t get a chance to serve unless you are _délivré_, and you have to be well delivered, or else never in bondage, to get the chance to eat them), “the government must proceed with a good deal of caution as well as consideration. The Alsatians aren’t like anybody but themselves. They mustn’t lay hands on our little ideas and ways, ‘_ces Messieurs de l’Administration ont compris cela_’ [with an appreciative look at Bernard]. We held on all these years, awaiting the day of deliverance. _Enfin_, for two generations we have looked on the reconquest of Alsace as the coming of heaven upon earth, as if that once come to pass, there would be nothing more to desire.”
She said all these things with an appraising light in her eye; being a clever old lady, in the four years since she had been “delivered,” she had doubtless found that life is life—even though there is a great choice as to whom one wants to live it out with, and how.
About this time the veteran was encouraged to tell a few of his 1870 experiences, and I felt as my grandchildren, if I ever have any, will feel when the veterans of 1918 will tell what they did “single-handed in the trenches,” or how, “as the only man left of their regiment,” they had held back the invaders, or how they hid in a barn and let them go by and then gave the alarm, “and a whole battalion had to surrender,” or what know I? Politely, but without eagerness, I listened, the 1870 veterans almost “spoiling the war” for me, with their eternal illustration of the flatness of not dying on the battlefield. I tried to bring the conversation back to 1918—leaving a rather long and not very clear account of how he kept his ancient, beloved, red _képi_ under glass, or next his heart, or pressed in an album, I rather forget which. I wanted to hear the story of the famous entry of the _Pantalons Rouges_ into Masevaux on August 7, 1914, where they have been ever since, though now changed into this celestial blue, which decorates the earth (as I have frequently said, and doubtless will again) as never before has it been decorated by any men of any age or any war. Pictures of “_La Guerre en Dentelles_,” or gallooned and be-caped and be-frogged officers with lances or drawn swords on horseback, charging the enemy in the typical poses of Lasalle, or “_La Vieille Garde_,” or Wellington or Blücher at Waterloo, or anything else that ever was, are dull beside the strange, appealing beauty of the blue battalions of the twentieth century.
I listened to Madame Chagué telling of the glad reception of those who entered Masevaux on that 7th of August, houses and hearts flung wide open, how everywhere the upper windows were crowded with women and children leaning out to see them come over the dark mountains and along the bright roads. Many left that same night, as they did from Thann and Bitschwiller and Moosch and all the towns about, marching on to Mulhouse, which they took only to be driven out, and since then many red-trousered ghosts walk the otherwise unmystical, industrial streets of Mulhouse. Three weeks later Mulhouse was again entered, and again, with many losses, other red pantaloons were driven out, since which the chimneys of Mulhouse have smoked a German smoke to a German heaven.
Madame Chagué is very Catholic, too, and bristles at the bare idea of any government, even the “Tiger’s,” taking liberties with the ancient faith. They want a bishop of their own, an Alsatian shepherd—“_faut pas nous bousculer dans nos petites habitudes_”—she kept repeating. I wondered what the Tiger and all the imitation tigers would say when they come to learn just how they feel here. There’s the most Gordian of knots awaiting them, for it appears that the Germans gave three thousand marks a year to each curé, and the French government, less enamoured of the ministers of God, doesn’t give any. However, that is only one of a series of knots on a very long string, and patient and very deft fingers will be needed for the untying.
In each of these comfortable houses authentic ancestors look from the walls, ancestors who knew the Thirty Years’ War, or the Napoleonic campaigns, or 1870, or ancestors-to-be who have seen the World War. And all the dwellers of these large-roomed, high-roofed, deep-windowed houses, having been delivered, in turn deliver themselves of their sensations, thoughts, emotions, acts, on being delivered. One might, I dimly foresaw, do to one’s breast what the wedding guest did to his when he heard the loud bassoon. That I may not seem unkind, I want to say another last word about the veterans, the so often toothless, bent, sightless, forgetful veterans. They would be all right in themselves, if they weren’t so horribly illustrative. They seem to be saying all the time, “If Mortality doesn’t get you one way, it does another,” till you think that short agony on the battlefield, and long glory, are greatly preferable to decay and no glory. And no veteran will keep this my little book on the table by his bed. He would know, too well, that I am right.
Later, as I slipped across the cobbly square to my house, and mounted the broad oaken stairway to my room, a feeling of nostalgia possessed me at the thought of leaving Alsace, to which but a few short days before I had seemed so unrelated. This bit of French history in the making, molded by the men of the grave, kind eyes, whose comradery with one another is so unfailing and whose courtesy to me is so exquisite, had become dear to me, and, too, I was looking on something that would never be again. The web was shifting, other figures were to be woven in it. Fate was to pull new things as well as old out from its storehouse and proceed with its endless combinations. Masevaux, capital of Alsace Reconquered, would be overshadowed by Strasbourg, by Metz, by Colmar, by Mulhouse. But it will have had again a little day, which is all an individual or a town can reasonably ask, standing under the changeless stars.
As I went to the _popote_, low over the houses stretched the Great Bear, so vast, so splendid, that it seemed almost alone in a heaven growing misty toward its edges, though Alcor, the Starry Horseman, was twinkling strangely bright close to Mizar. But the autumnal stars hanging over the rich-colored hills of Alsace have not the brilliancy of those that I saw above the gray-white Châlons plain, that late, red October of 1917.
After dinner Commandant Poulet drew on my map the boundaries of _Alsace Reconquise_, as it is now, this fourth day of November. But as he drew I knew he was feeling that it was a fleeting, vanishing thing he was recording, for he stopped a moment, as a man might stop following a wind or tracing a line in water.
Then as we sat, some half-dozen of us, about the dining-table, under the hard light of the Oberforster’s chandelier, the commandant, flicking his cigar ash into the Oberforster’s dreadful ash-receiver, told me something of the history of the Mission, which is briefly this.