Part 15

And now comes in this, which is perhaps the final year of the great war, a strange story from a small town in the Loire region near Cholet, of another illiterate peasant girl named Clotilde Perchaud, seemingly the reincarnation of Jeanne, who likewise sees visions and hears voices. Brought up on one of the small farms on the edge of the hamlet of Puy-Saint-Bonnet, this girl, now about twenty years old, since the age of fourteen has been of a strange personality. Instead of following the fairs and dancing at the village festivals like the other young girls of the neighborhood, Clotilde has always kept aloof, avoiding the young men who would offer her attentions, and devoting herself to devotions at church, and prayers in her squalid room in the farmhouse granary, where she had constructed an altar. So strange were her actions at the village school that the good priest advised her parents to keep her at home, as she would not study her lessons, but preferred to sit with clasped hands, and her eyes fixed in a wrapt gaze at the ceiling, to the demoralization of the scholars, who at length came to believe her half witted, and ceased to consider her. Not so, however, the elders. Soon it became known that this strange girl was a clairvoyant, and the more credulous consulted her as to future events, but these became dissatisfied because all of the girl's prophecies had to do with events beyond the ken of the simple folk of the neighborhood; with kings and heavenly hosts, with saints in armor waving banners and leading armies on to victory. Thus passed the life of this young peasant girl during the peaceful years between fourteen and twenty, until the great war broke out and armed hosts led by princes indeed invaded her unhappy land.

So in the field below the red tiled roofs of her village of Puy-St.-Bonnet, Clotilde Perchaud erected to the Virgin a rude altar of field stones, which she trimmed with green boughs, and here she passed all her spare time, praying and seeing visions in the sky, while upon the horizon mighty guns boomed, and at night the flashes could plainly be seen.

Soon this altar became a rendezvous for the neighbors, and even for those of the more remote villages from which the young men had gone forth to fight for France, and to this young girl were brought pictures of the absent soldiers at the front in the trenches and written prayers for their safety. That she possessed some strange power was admitted by even the most skeptical, for her responses to those who had loved ones missing led to their being found in distant camps as prisoners, or wounded in hospitals in distant parts of the country. In some instances, it is reported, this strange girl was able to give the names in full of those long missing, and information so detailed and circumstantial as to be marvelous. These matters were brought to the attention of the priests, and were in turn reported by them to the heads of the church, finally reaching the ears of the Bishop of Angers, who had her brought to his palace. Here she confronted unabashed a conclave of priests. The Bishop is said to have dressed himself in the ordinary black cassock of a priest, in order to test the young girl's power of divination; an ordinary priest wearing the Bishop's robes, and being seated on the throne; but to the amazement of all in the room, the girl turned from him, and kneeling before the real Bishop, asked his blessing upon her and her mission.

To him she announced, then, that a white robed angel had appeared to her above her altar in the fields, and to the strains of heavenly music charged that she had, as a pure and blameless maid, been selected to deliver their beloved France from the hands of the invader.

She presented to the Bishop the book in which she had written the words spoken to her on many occasions by the "shining angel in white." This book, says the account from which this is taken, "is partly illegible and almost entirely illiterate; rudely illustrated in a sort of futurist style." Its contents are said to be most perplexing and wonderful.

"Savants and students of religion who have examined the book assert that it shows a knowledge of the primal principles of theology, which indicates that the author has the clearest insight into the fundamentals of Roman Catholicism, but is apparently not gifted with the power to translate those ideas into fluent French. Throughout the work are passages in Latin, Greek and Hebrew, yet she apparently had less than the usual schooling of a French child."

The Bishop of Angers was so impressed with her attitude and her evident earnestness that he sent her under escort by nuns, to the Archbishop-Cardinal Amette at Paris. To him she demanded that she be at once taken to the heights of Montmartre, so that she might see the sun rise there over Paris. In this she was humored, and standing with the nuns and priests before the Basilica of the Sacred Heart on Montmartre, at sunrise, as the first beam shone upon the great gilded cross on the tower, she recited in a loud voice the vow which she had taken to deliver France from the invader.

Since this, it is said no one has been allowed to talk to Clotilde, and she is said to be at the convent in the Avenue Victor Hugo. Here she is under observation of the nuns, who each send reports of her prayers and prophecies to the Cardinal. A correspondent who was permitted to see her from a distance in the convent garden, where she walked, followed at a distance of several paces by the nuns, describes her as a rather tall girl, clad in somber baggy black robes, very light of step and walking with her head thrown back and her eyes directed heavenward. Her carriage reminded him of "Genee, Pavlowa, or some other dancer," and he speaks of her as having "a wealth of filmy hair, which because of its fineness, seemed to float about her like a cloud, and only partly covered by a religious headgear," and he could see, too, "her hands, which are lily white and tiny, and tender, as those of the most pampered lady, despite the fact that the girl has done chores which in peace times would belong to men even on the French farms where the women are accustomed to labor long and hard."

A strange story; but then these are strange times, and who shall say that this is unworthy of credence?

CONCLUSION

|AESCITIS quâ horâ fur veniet" (Ye know not in what hour the despoiler cometh) were the words of an inscription carved on the capstone of a church porch in the fifteenth century by a monkish stonecutter, overlooking a smiling valley in Picardy. That valley is now a waste place; its once populous and peaceful villages are in ruins; its fruitful orchards are gone; its murmuring streams have overflown their banks, choked with the debris of war. No church towers are visible, nor are there any forests left in the blasted expanse of shell-torn earth. The joy felt by the people of this ravaged land over the retreat of the invader, is turned to bitterness by the sight of so much wanton destruction, for they realize that this once peaceful smiling land, the richest region of France, is now a great desert waste strewn with ruins of the priceless records of her glorious achievements in the world of art. And this loss of these irreplaceable monuments is especially bitter to a people so attuned to beauty. With a contemptuous disregard for the accumulated animosity of the whole world, the Imperial high command seems bent upon leaving its hall mark upon the evacuated country. Acknowledging its inability to hold Rheims any longer, it retires its great guns to a locality from which it sends hundreds of shells crashing into that hapless town, and these are mainly aimed at the ruins of the great Cathedral. "The ruin even of ruins," cries a correspondent of the _Tribune_; adding, "In so many of the military transactions of the Hun you may perceive the hatred of humanity that actuates him, his longing to glut upon some personal victim the passion for destruction that is in his soul."

Philip Gibbs, perhaps the fairest and most moderate of war correspondents, in describing the retreat of March, 1917, deals with the aspect of the country beyond the tract of shell craters, the smashed barns and country houses and churches, the tattered tree trunks, and great belts of barbed wire: "Behind the trenches are two towns and villages in which they had their 'rest billets,' and it is in these places that one sees the spirit and temper of the men whom the British are fighting.

"All through this war I have tried to be fair and just to the Germans, to give them credit for their courage and to pity them because the terror of war has branded them as it has branded the British.

"But during these last days I have been sickened and saddened by the things I have seen, because they reveal cruelty which is beyond the inevitable villainy of war. They have spared nothing on the way of their retreat. They have destroyed every village in their abandonment with systematic and detailed destruction. Not only in (the towns of) Bapaume and Péronne have they blown up or burned all the houses which were untouched by shell-fire, but in scores of villages they laid waste the cottages of poor peasants, and all their little farms, and all their orchards. At Bethonvillers, to name only one village out of many, I saw how each house was marked with a white cross before it was gutted with fire. The Cross of Christ was used to mark the work of the devil, for truly this has been the devil's work.

"Even if we grant that the destruction of houses in the wake of retreat is the recognized cruelty of war, there are other things which I have seen which are not pardonable, even of that damnable code of morality. In Baupaume and Péronne, in Roye and Neslé and Lian-court, and all these places over a wide area the German soldiers not only blew out the fronts of houses, but with picks and axes smashed mirrors and furniture and even picture frames.... There is nothing left in these towns. Family portraits have been kicked into the débris of the gutters. The black bonnets of old women who lived in these houses lie in the rubbish heaps, and by some strange pitiful freak these are almost the only signs left of the inhabitants who lived here before the soldiers wrecked their houses.

"The ruins of houses are pitiful to see when done deliberately even when shell-fire spared them in the war-zone, but worse than that is the ruin of women and children and living flesh.

"I saw that ruin to-day in Roye and Neslé. At first I was rejoiced to see how the inhabitants were liberated after being so long in hostile lines.... The women's faces were dead faces, shallow and mask-like and branded with the memories of great agonies. The children were white and thin, so thin that the cheek bones protruded, and many of them seemed to be idiot children. Hunger and fear had been with them too long."

This is the reverse of the pictures I found, during those calm and beautiful summer days of 1910, in that sunny and prosperous land. Pictures framed with quaint customs; the simple pleasures of fête days enjoyed by a happy and prosperous peasantry, all unmindful of the terrible days so soon to come upon them. "Nescitis qua horâ fur veniet." How prophetic the warning words of that old monk inscribed upon the capstone of that little church overlooking the green plains of Picardy!

And now what is left in place of the gray old churches, the quiet monasteries, the fruitful farms and flocks and the dense forests? Where now shall we look for the gleaming white walls of the turreted châteaux, the precious mossy towers of mediaeval ruined castles; the somnolent quaint towns with wandering streets filled with timbered, carved and strangely gabled houses of half forgotten periods; the sleepy deserted market places over which towered architectural treasures of town halls famed throughout the world.

Where shall the artist seek the matchless châteaux gardens, which took centuries in the making? Where seek the still reaches of silent canals crossed here and there by arched stone bridges, all shaded by great trees casting cool shadows in midday, or the vast dim interiors of cathedrals marked with the skill of many ages,--filled with the aroma of incense, and the inspiration of centuries of prayer?

"The old order changeth, giving place to new."

But at least one may be thankful now to have been privileged to know and to have seen these wonderful and beautiful remains of that "old order." And this feeling of gratitude tempers somewhat one's fury at the result of this invasion and destruction. But one would not have these sacred remains disturbed; there must be no attempt at restoration of these matchless monuments, at the hands of well-meaning municipalities. Rheims, Arras, Soissons, Lâon, must be left mainly as they now lie prostrate, lasting memorials for future ages.

Leave to Dame Nature the task of draping them with green clinging vines, and embossings of velvet moss. So let them remain in their solemn majesty, monuments to the failure of an imperial order unhampered by the love of mankind or the fear of God.

THE END