Chapter III: Part 3

At his right sits Captain Sérin from Toulouse, the only Meridional at the table. He is very straightforward and uncomplicated, I should judge, as regards his psychology, with the rather objective eye of the man from the south. (They don’t dream the way we farther north do.) He sees a joke at any distance and is the sort, they tell me, who would obey as simply as he would breathe, without a thought of hesitation, an order unto death. The sort that when told to bring up reinforcements at a moment when it seems impossible, quite simply does it, and it only _happens_ to happen that he is living. He is not tall, but wide of shoulder, holding himself very straight, and on his breast there are ribbons, too. He is chief of the Gendarme Service, the first and last provost of Alsace reconquered.

On the other side of Captain Bernard sits Captain Toussaint, chief of the Forestry Service of the Masevaux district, clad in bottle-green, with silver bugles on his collar and the Legion of Honor and other decorations on his breast, _d’une grande bonté_, his comrades tell me. He is from the north, from Douai (his brother was killed at the front), tall, slim, pale-faced, lantern-jawed, everything is in his eyes—in the _regard_, as some one said of him—and much of his life is passed alone in forests. So different from Captains Bernard and Lavallée, living in Paris, between whom he generally sits; and he nearly always comes in late from his forests for luncheon and dinner.

“For Toussaint, Creation is represented by the first day when the heavens were formed, and everything that came afterward had something to do with forests,” some one said last night, as he was talking rather hotly about the war-time cutting down of the trees of France, and the influence the loss of forests had on the life of nations. _Très catholique_, also; but then these men of the Mission, with all of whom I have entered tabernacles, are of an extreme reverence. What they “believe” I know not.

Lieutenant Laferrière sits sometimes by me, sometimes at the end of the table. He has early gray hair, a fresh complexion, gray-blue eyes with a certain inwardness of expression, a smiling movement of the lips when speaking, and, with all his wit, an extreme kindness in human judgments. Indeed, I am struck by something of softness and patience in the eyes of each one of these men to whom nothing of war is foreign, who have looked on all combinations of mortal anguish, and whose eyes at times, too, have had the red look, the hard, bright look of men who have just killed.

Laferrière is very cultivated after the way of us dwellers in cities. He was Doctor of Law at the University of Lille. On the 2d of August, 1914, he closed his books, after which, as under-officer, he had lived for months that closely packed life of the trenches, “where one was never physically a moment alone” (hardest of all hardships, I have heard fastidious men say), then he had been called as jurist to the Mission. Emotional, but through circumstances or will, how can I know? giving the effect of having dominated the personal—to what point also I know not.

Lieutenant Lavallée, but recently come from Paris, sits at another end. His personality is less striking than some of the others at the table, though he has _une tête un peu mauresque_, like pictures of the _Conquistadores_, and is inclined to solemnity of mien. He has a charming voice, fresh, with warm notes in it, and sometimes of an evening sings Breton _chansons populaires_. We especially like the one concerning _la douce Annette_, who spun a fatal love-story with a certain Pierre who wouldn’t let go her hand.

There is one, Stroll by name, now absent, but his comrades evidently love him, for I often hear, “What a pity Stroll isn’t here”; or, “That is Stroll’s story.”

Also for a few days _en visite_ like myself is Captain Antoni, born at Strasbourg, but very French in appearance, a tall, _svelte_, thin-faced man with a rising and falling inflexion in his voice, who has been through the whole campaign and wears many decorations. He said last night that the fighting at Verdun, especially that at Hill 304, was the worst he had seen.

At this moment the Verdun sector, which knows the blood of men of many climes, is moist with that of _my_ countrymen.

Now this is part of what I see as I sit at table with these men. The common patriotic effort tends to screen the personal life of each, of which I know nothing. But I do know that destiny is largely formed by character and endowments, and, barring the fact that time and chance happeneth to all, I would be tempted to wager that when such or such a thing came to such or such a one, _thus_ he received it—gift or blow—thus he used it, once his own. So unescapable and visible are the sequences of character.

Sometimes we play bridge in the evening, pleasant, easy bridge, anybody taking a card back when once played, and changing his mind about declarations. As they so truly say, “_Nous jouons pour nous amuser_.”

And yesterday there appeared on the table the famous _cafetière_ and Sérin, his face shining with a great light, performed the rites. It was one of those large, high glass bulbs with a nickel coffee-pot below. Dry coffee is put into the glass bulb, water into the pot, an alcohol-lamp beneath, and the whole is hermetically sealed. After which, according to the mysterious and wonderful laws of nature, the water rises and wets the coffee; it must rise thrice, giving forth at the same time volcanic sounds. During the ceremony nothing else is thought of. The officiating high priest is harried with liturgical suggestions, or unkind remarks are made about his natural endowments. As that corked spout of the pot, horrid with potentialities, is turned now toward one, now toward the other, men who would have given their lives without a thought in the trenches, get nervous and call to Sérin, “_Dis-donc, tu vas me crever un œil!_” “Not toward Madame. It would be too terrible,” etc., etc., and in the end the spout, with all its possibilities, is turned toward the Oberforster’s made-in-Germany clock. After which one has a delicious cup of coffee and conversation becomes normal.[10]

Last night I found they were talking about giving a certificate of good conduct to one of them who is married, to take home with him to reassure his wife. A comrade, after a little badinage in the Latin manner, but very discreet I must say, objects: “But now there won’t be any _permissions_,” and, doubtfully, “We would have to give him the certificate for three whole months.”

Then, like the antiphon of some song, a voice said, “_Trois mois, c’est long_.”

Another said, “_Trois mois, c’est très long_.”

Another, with a sigh, “_C’est trop long_....” And I to smile—within myself.

Then a stumbling home on an invisible but strong horizon-blue arm, through the inky streets, ankle-deep in mud. Sometimes I haven’t known which one of the various kind arms it was, the electric pocket-lamp only occasionally making the darkness more manifest. No one to bump into, as circulation in the streets is forbidden after nine o’clock, on account of possible espionage.

And you will say these are pleasant days!

_Later._—Hunting in the bookcase, I found a small diamond-printed copy of _Hermann und Dorothea_. As, to the sound of near night-firing, I turned its smooth old pages, I realized it for one of the most completely objective works of genius ever born into the world. No thread of its maker’s identity is woven with it, no color of his personal experience. I felt but a sense of his complete and serene equilibrium, though the stream of words, bearing those golden thoughts, was so softly flowing, so crystal-clear, that it made me remember a line from another of Goethe’s poems, as subjective as this is objective:

_Der Geist ist Bräutigam._
_Wort sei die Braut._

In the little preface I found that the poet, in his old age, was wont to say of _Hermann und Dorothea_ that of his long poems it was almost the only one that gave him pleasure. I seemed to understand what he meant. By reason of its complete objectivity, he could have had no consciousness of that inadequacy familiar to mortals contemplating anything formed from themselves. No suffering had attended its birth; rather it would seem to have formed itself spontaneously on the heights out of some plastic stuff, light and bright as summer air, imperishable as granite. It did not recall to Goethe (nor does it to one who reads) that night of personal anguish, that day of emptiness, that hour of longing, nor even some glimpsing, vistaed moment wherein personal fulfilment held out its shining, shadowy hand.

In spite of the sound of cannon and the smarting of my eyes from the strain of the tiny Gothic print, for a moment within myself an almost equal feeling of harmony arose, taking a form of Peace, like an antique statue, free yet restrained, noble yet persuasive; bearing no one’s mark, nor any signs of workmanship, except that stamped by its own beauty. Then it vanished, leaving the little book to throb between my hands to the beat of my own times. Though generations had passed on and other wars were being fought, and the word “freedom” was again on every lip, as always, the women, the children, the old, were paying the heaviest tithes of invasion. Had I not seen like streams of fugitive populations flooding into Paris that hideous spring of 1918, heard the cries of anguish from those fleeing before an enemy army? Then also death and birth waited not on circumstance, and love and hate, fear and hope, hurry and exhaustion, were at work in strange commingling. I had seen deeds of succor, too, like unto those of the lovers, proffered in boundless devotion, by nameless, uncounted men and women, coming from the world’s ends to minister to its woe.

A vision of _toux ceux qui ont bu à la coupe amère de cette époque_ passed before me. Deeply sighing, I at last put out my light, thinking “war is war,” needing no adjectives, and of the changelessness of the human heart, however the formulas may be multiplied and renewed; and forever _Væ victis_!

VII

THE HOUSES OF THE CHANOINESSES

THE COMMANDANT TRACES THE RECONQUERED TRIANGLE ON MY MAP. THE MILITARY MISSION

_Monday, November 4th._—Dreamed of old griefs and awakened with the heavy taste their memory can even now distil. Raining. The yellow-and-brown carpet under the lindens of the Place du Chapitre is wet and dull and the few leaves still on the trees are soft and heavy, the houses damp and shabby. “The old wounds burn,” even here, where all is new and bright, and fancy flings itself delicately, amorously, consolingly about the pleasant happenings of each day.... Fortunately my breakfast is brought early by a smiling maid, who enters, bringing with her the aroma of fresh tea and the delicately scented, dark-green, liquid honey of these pine forests. There is that blessed volatilization of night-grief, and I arise to another pleasant day, knowing once again, however, that everywhere the old ghosts find one....

The rainy light coming in seems but to darken the oak-paneled room. What there is of wall-paper is a darkish blue with a narrow frieze of red. The curtains are stripes of red-and-blue cloth. Even the daytime cover of the very comfortable eider-downed bed is of the same red-and-blue-striped stuff. It was because they were the colors of the French uniform that the young man once living herein, under German rule, chose them.

But he himself is gone, gone the hope of his house. One of his sisters was saying to me last night as I tarried for a few minutes in the little sitting-room, where I had first found them all rehanging the portraits of their ancestors:

“The price for peace is so high and terrifying that one can’t yet rejoice in it. Rather one says to oneself in desolation, ‘and all that was so precious is gone, that in the end one may sit around deserted fireplaces, or try to find shelter under bombarded roofs, and be at grips with the terrible _après-guerre_!’” And of her brother:

“At least he fell for the cause that is so dear to us;” she added after a moment’s silence, “it might so easily have been otherwise.”

I have noticed everywhere a great pride tempering grief over fallen beloved dead. Even in mothers’ hearts this pride is strong enough to console. They know why their sons were born, and to many a death of glory has been as a second birth; he whom they lost is, in some way, laid a second time, bright, beautiful, complete, in their arms, and _safe_ from life. And they are blessed who so mourn.

Sometimes there are further griefs. I knew a mother of twin sons; one had fallen far away, a gentle, young, musician son, in a fierce, unequal conflict, whose details she was not spared; the other had been brought back to her on his twenty-first birthday a sightless stump. I cannot forget her as she stood, tall, black-veiled, by a pillared door, like an antique statue of grief, her eyes as dry as marble eyes. And though she, too, said:

“At least I know why I bore them, and it was for something more than myself,” the obsession of a further grief was in her eyes as she added, “_I must not die first_—and he is so young!”

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.

Though French troops entered the valleys of the Doller, the Thur, and the Largue on the 7th of August, 1914, the French administration of that little triangle of Alsace Reconquered, as I found it, was organized only in November of the same year. Its first form was purely military, the authorities responsible for the civil population being also in command of the military operations, the final word in all that concerned Alsace coming from the general in command of the Seventh Army, in whose sector it was. These were successively Generals de Maud’huy, Villaret, Debeney, and de Boissaudy. The little triangle was first divided into two territories only, that of the valley of the Largue, with Dannemarie as its capital, that of the valley of the Thur with Thann as capital. Masevaux at that time did not form a distinct territory, but was an annex, as it were, of Thann, as also was St.-Amarin.

The officers administering the territories were chosen mostly from the reserve—men whose former avocations had prepared them for the various rôles they were to fill in Alsace. They were members of the _Conseil d’Etat_, of the _Cour des Comptes_, magistrates, _Gardes des Forêts et des Eaux_, together with many others belonging to technical professions. The first _Capitaine Administrateur_ was Captain Heurtel, in civil life _Maître des Requêtes au Conseil d’Etat_. Though seriously wounded at the very beginning of the war, in December of 1914, he asked to be again sent to the front. He met his death at Verdun in 1916. His successor was Commandant Poulet, _Conseiller d’Etat_, who took up office on Christmas Day, 1914.

In July, 1917, the Mission was detached from the General Headquarters and placed under the Ministry of War. Its new name, expressive of enlarged activities, was changed to _Mission Militaire Administrative en Alsace_ (Military Administrative Mission in Alsace), the central office being transferred to Masevaux, which Fate had placed half-way between St.-Amarin at one end of the reconquered triangle and Dannemarie at the other.

Ever since, in and out of the building of the German _Kommandantur_, once the nave of the old Abbey, men clad in horizon-blue have been coming and going, busied about affairs after the French way, the ancient town of Masevaux entering into the unexpected enjoyment of what might be called an Indian summer. Nothing else has happened to it, so far as I can see, since the Revolution, when the Chapter was suppressed and the Goddess Reason briefly installed in the Abbey. And Masevaux loves and cherishes its brief glory as only lovely and transient things are loved and cherished.[12]

VIII

LUNCHEON AT BITSCHWILLER. THE MISSION IN RESIDENCE AT ST.-AMARIN. SAINT-ODILE

_November 5th._—Awakened early, early by the sound of heavy firing. Later, looking out of the square, I see the market in full swing. Against the inn of Les Lions d’Or, with its comfortable courtyard and two red wings, stands a wagon-load of hay with a pale-green cover thrown over it. Carts of cabbages and carrots, drawn by white oxen, are pulled up under the yellowing trees. The black of the clothes of the women making their purchases cuts in very hard. Blue-clad men come and go; several motors are standing before the door of the Administration. The shining, diffused light of the mist-hidden sun rounds every corner and fills up every space with a pleasant softness.

At eleven I start out with the commandant, Captain Sérin, and Lieutenant Laferrière to motor to Thann through a world of rust and green and gold-colored hills, under the whitest of heavens. So soft and shining is the beauty of the lovely earth, and so soon to pass into the winter, that I say to the commandant how like the transient beauty of a woman of forty-five are these delicate, hazy hills with their cashmere shawls still twisted about their shoulders, drawn up over their heads, dropping down to their green-valleyed feet. I mean the woman of forty-five who is still loved.

Again we stopped on the crest between the valleys of Masevaux and of Thann, and again we stopped and peered through the wire-and-pine screen, out toward Mulhouse and the Rhine and the Black Forest. The valley was blue and shining. Even the windows of the great, white building of the _Idioten-Anstalt_, where the Germans are bivouacked, were visible. Beyond were the high towers of their potassium-works. As those three men stood looking out over the rich plain I thought, “Always will I remember the officers of the Mission like that, standing on the heights, shading their eyes with their hands as they looked down into the land of Egypt, wherein the Lord was to lead them....”

New shell-holes were all about us, and there was a sharp, continual reverberation of cannon among the cashmere-shawled hills.

At Thann we stopped for a moment by the fountain near the church (in peace-times, the old statue of St.-Théobald that I saw at Sewen surmounts the charming column), the commandant having been saluted by a young American officer, leading by the hand a little girl of seven or eight, in Alsatian costume—huge black bow, black velvet bodice, full white skirts. He was quite simply a young man whose parents had gone to America, he himself had fought on the Mexican border, got his commission, and was proudly—oh, so proudly and so smilingly—walking his native streets of Thann with his little niece.

We are _en route_ to lunch with M. and Madame Galland, at Bitschwiller, who receive us as agreeable people of the world receive their guests in all quarters of the globe. They were of those who could have gone, yet remained, during the many bombardments of the town—_noblesse oblige_, and have been a blessing to the valley.

Madame Galland, with powdered hair, slender, delicate of feature and of form, dressing older than she is, might have looked out of a Latour pastel. M. Galland, too, is fine-featured, well groomed, agreeable, and there was a handsome daughter with a quietly sorrowful expression on her young face. It is a house from every one of whose many wide windows one saw gold leaves hanging on black branches, behind them warm, rust-colored hills, traced with pale-yellow larches and stamped with black patterns of pine. Within, the rooms were beautiful with blue-clad men. There was an agreeable and suave odor of kindness and unstintingness about the house, mingling with that of the ease of people of the world, and the surety of those in authority, altogether a _good_ house. Eight or ten officers besides ourselves sat down to the usual delicious and abundant Alsatian luncheon, the conversation intimate enough to have color, general enough not to exclude the stranger within the gates. And it ran after this way, beginning with accounts of that last day of July, 1914, when _Kriegsgefahrzustand_ had been proclaimed in the valley and they were completely cut off from the outer world, witnessing only the sinister passing and repassing of regiments of dragoons and detachments of artillery. M. Galland had procured all the flour and dried vegetables possible at Mulhouse to ration the population of Bitschwiller in case of need, and collected what money he could. The days passed in suspense, till the 6th of August, when they remarked much coming and going of troops; on the 7th the German cavalry was seen beating a hasty retreat.

A _Brigadier de Chasseurs_, mounted on a great black horse, is the first Frenchman they see, advancing alone, looking slowly about him, his revolver in his hands, fearing some snare. Then the _Pantalons Rouges_ pour into the valley, flowers at every bayonet and in every tunic, and the Gallands receive the first French general to enter Alsace since 1870, General Superbie, commanding the 41st Brigade. At two o’clock, after refreshments had been offered from every house, the regiment took the road to Mulhouse, where that same night many of them had their “rendezvous with death.”

The talk then fell on that mysterious thing called luck, and how the soldier must have it, be _chançard_, if he were to come through, and of generals who, like General Liautey, wouldn’t have under them any save notoriously lucky officers. And there was much heedless joking (with the Fates perhaps listening). I, who never say even within myself, “I _will_ do thus and so,” without adding “if God will,” remarked at last, propitiatingly, that “’twas somewhat difficult to tell _beforehand_ who was going to be lucky.”

“But for military purposes,” dryly remarked an officer who had not yet spoken, “one needs to be lucky only as long as the war lasts,” which being hideously true, we turned to the less elusive subject of the rich and easy living of the peasants in this part of the world since the war, and how they, even like unto those other tens of thousands of “war-workers,” will “miss” it. They had become accustomed to the troops, and there was the thrice blessed _popote_ in which they more or less shared. And when the Americans came things were still better in a still better world. For they were very free with their money (though no one could understand a word that they said), and then they went, and the French troops came again, and there was something very pleasant about their return. Though they didn’t have the money of the Americans, they could be conversed with and they would lend a hand in the garden, and were always joking with the children, and helped with the crops, and the virtues of the Americans, if not their money, were somewhat forgotten. They were, in places, even remembered as a nuisance, wanting everything cleared up, stupid bores about the dung-heap, “and will you believe it, Monsieur,” one of them said to Laferrière, “they even washed their dishes with _soap_, and you couldn’t give the dishwater to the pigs!”

After which I related Colonel Burnside’s “best short story,” also concerning the peasant point of view. When he was in Lorraine with his men, at the well-named watery (not watering) place called Demanges-aux-Eaux, a delegation of villagers waited on him, with the complaint that the Americans made so much noise at night that the _sheep_ couldn’t sleep!

And we finished luncheon gaily, to the rather distant sound of German guns, with the story of the wife of a (or probably the) French soap manufacturer in Tonquin who came to the Gallands’ for convalescence after “war-strain.” How she charmed them with her singing, especially of children’s songs, delighted them with the reserve and modesty of her conduct, and after two months turned out to have been once a well-known, café-chantant singer with the proverbial “past and many brilliant presents,” enjoying a glimpse of home-life in Alsace.

Coffee was poured by the handsome daughter, who with her firm yet delicate profile, and rich, dark hair drawn heavily back, looked like some model for a head on a bank-note or medallion. Her mother, saying to me, “_Vous êtes femme de cœur_” took me apart and told me her history.

And perhaps because so much had been buried in the great war of youthful love and hope, I may record a little of this story; its grief is typical in simplicity and purity of many countless thousands in this land of France.

For months she had been beloved by a handsome young _chasseur_ stationed with his regiment at Bitschwiller, one of many officers to frequent the hospitable house of the Gallands. His photograph on a table shows him tall, broad-shouldered, straight-eyed, kind-mouthed. On account of the uncertainties of his life he did not declare himself while there, but immediately afterward, doubtless because of some presentiment, he wrote to the mother telling of his love. This was found to be returned and they became fiancés.

A few weeks after he was killed in Flanders, in one of the Mont Kemmel combats, a ball striking him in the forehead as he leaped from a trench to lead a counter-attack.

He was one of ten sons. Six of his brothers had fallen, too. Awed, I asked concerning her who had borne them, but she had gone to her grave long before the World War; though I knew her not, thinking of the mother of the Maccabees, and many like her, I thanked God that those seven wounds had been spared a mother’s heart. Then we returned to the young girl’s story.

“But never to have looked into each other’s eyes and exchanged the glance of love,” I said, “it’s a shadowy and heavy grief for her youth to bear. Would it not have been better for them to have been united?”

The mother answered, after a pause, “There was no time.”

“But this can’t be the end for her; she’s only beginning life!” I said, and thought of the great, sorrowing hosts of these young widows of the heart alone, and of the vexed question in their families, as to whether it was better to become a widow or remain a maid.

“She said to me only the other day, ‘I have all that I need for my whole life.’”

“She will find that the heart is not like that,” I cried; “it doesn’t seem able to content itself even with the sweetest and holiest things of memory. It’s forever reaching out.”

For a moment we stood with clasped hands, looking out to the hills whence despair had so often come, and Madame Galland added, quite simply, “Fifty thousand sleep around about us.”

For one of the many-colored hills, pressing close to the broad windows of the salons, separated us from the Molkenrain and the sacramental Hartmannswillerkopf.

In the nearest, that rises without any perspective immediately from the house, is an old quarry, and it is there that since four years the workers in M. Galland’s factory are sheltered during the frequent bombardments of the town, for in what once was used for constructing spinning-machines eleven million shells have been turned out, all of which is quite well known to the enemy.

The pleasant odor of the house followed us to the motor and even as we rolled swiftly down the valley of the Thur, past Moosch, against whose hill, still like a picture tilted back, lies the military cemetery, cut out of the rust and gold-colored hill, with its black splashes of pines. Again peace to those who lie there.

Everywhere negro troops, sitting, standing, leaning, lying (a good deal of leaning and lying). An occasional forlorn-looking white officer. It is the same Fifteenth New York Infantry.

“I am told they were all, before they were drafted, lift-boys and newsboys and bootblacks and railway-car porters,” said one of the officers.

“You mustn’t class these last with the others. You don’t know the majesty and authority of the Pullman-car porter. He’s as final as the Germans think the Fourteen Points are,” I answered.

I had felt myself somewhat exotic when I arrived in Masevaux; but I’m blotted into the landscape, one with Alsace, compared to these sons of Ham, clad in khaki, who fill the blue-and-gold valley of the Thur.

Then we roll into the long street of the village of St.-Amarin, named after the saint to whom a saint friend said, upon seeing him about to make himself scarce at the approach of assassins, “_If you miss this opportunity for martyrdom, you may never get another!_” (It all depends on what you want and what your friends can do for you, and it isn’t a bit like politics.) But I’ll tell the story of St.-Amarin another time.