Chapter V: Part 5

As I sat down I saw in front of me a sign over the door leading into the pantry, a somewhat Y.M.C.A.-ish sign, “_Sois sobre et tu vivras longtemps_” (“Be sober and you will live long”), and de Maroussem’s feelings were almost hurt when I asked if perhaps behind me there was one that said, “_Mange peu et tu seras invité souvent_” (“Eat little and you will be invited often”). And when it came time for coffee and cigarettes and some especially old _quetsch_ he brought out the book, “The Friends of France,” that I had first seen at Harry Sleeper’s in Gloucester Bay, a thousand years ago, it seemed, and we turned to the death and citation of Norman Hall, Commandant Poulet recalling again that he had begun his work in Alsace on the 25th of December, 1914, and on the 26th he had stood by Norman Hall’s open grave.

Then a radio, just received, concerning the Parlementaries, is discussed; among them is slated von Hintze, leading to talk of the days when I had known him in Mexico. Count Oberndorf, too, husband of a dear and charming friend of Dutch and American birth, was on the list, and we spoke of Vienna as it had been—and was no more. _Sic transit_ ... though I thought within myself, as I looked, for a flashing moment, down the vista of history, many things return.

It was late when two officers accompanied me to my dwelling, to the sucking sound of boots in mud, and under a starless sky hanging dark and heavy over a black, black earth. At last I could draw literally the drapery of my couch about me and lie down to dreams of _my_ men in blood and glory before Sedan.

XI

THE RE-GALLICIZING OF ALSACE

_November 8th, St.-Amarin, Night._—Fancy and feeling too quickened for sleep. If there is anything I did not see or anything I did not feel, in and about St.-Amarin, I challenge some one of the Mission to produce it.

This was my day, or rather half of it. At 8.45 Lieutenant Fress, Inspector of Schools, came to fetch me, and not knowing how to be late (alack!), I am on the stairs as he rings the bell. We pass out into a white, rather flat November world toward the schoolhouses, everywhere the clean odor of freshly hewn wood and sawdust hanging on the November air.

Now the re-Gallicizing of Alsace is one of the most interesting political operations I have ever seen, and Heaven knows I’ve seen many in many lands. But this washing out and marking in of history on the clean slate of childhood is different from anything else, though easier than most things, the eye of youth glancing easily from earth to heaven and from heaven to earth—and soft and eager the slate of its mind.

The St.-Amarin schoolhouse is a large, solid building, its walls hung everywhere with huge war-posters, all of those one sees in Paris and many besides.

The classes for the smaller children, in accordance with the traditions of the valley, here also are in the hands of the Sisters of “The Divine Providence,” who, in the earliest years of the nineteenth century, opened in St.-Amarin the first school for girls. The other classes are taught by carefully selected Alsatian teachers or by mobilized French schoolmasters. Formerly French was the language of honor, for the well-to-do only, but now this article, once “of luxury,” is for all the language of their country and their heart, and pride mixes with the zeal with which the peasants pursue _la belle langue_—not always successfully. For in these border regions the tongue has an un-Gallic thickness; the voice is placed far back in the throat, with a strong accent on the tonic, nothing of the light flinging from the lips that makes the beauty of the French language and its conquest so difficult.

We begin with a class of small children, where a smiling, almost exuberantly happy nun is teaching a group of little delivered darlings to sing, “_il y avait une bergère et ron, ron, ron, petit pat à pon_”—to my surprise, in the latest manner of Jacques Dalcroze. They evidently mean to keep abreast of the times here in Alsace.

While they recited I looked about. The room was large, light, and superheated by a small, black, iron stove fiercely burning. On the wall were maps of the Old World, and, I had almost said, of the world to come, for new divisions of countries were indicated. Among the many posters and in the place of honor was a big colored text, which I afterward saw in every room, with the head-line, “_Pourquoi on ne peut pas conclure une paix fondée sur la parole de l’Allemagne_” (“Why one cannot make a peace founded on the word of Germany”).

The children were literally as good as gold. No scuffling of feet nor restless rubbing about on the seats. I remarked this as we left the room after listening to “_Le Loup et l’Agneau_” recited in those shrill, thin voices, and Lieutenant Fress said, with a smile:

“What remains of the Boche discipline makes them docile and attentive scholars; they are often several hours in class without needing to be reprimanded for chattering or lack of attention.”

Later I delicately inquired about ink-throwing or “spitballs,” but it appeared they’re unknown.

We then betook ourselves upstairs to a class of older girls, from ten to thirteen or thereabouts, to whom Lieutenant Fress, with the greatest confidence, put the most difficult questions. It was a class of French history, and he began boldly with the Druids and finished with the war of 1914. He has a gift for teaching, and was so easy with those children, whom I should have been embarrassed, not to say terrified, to approach, that the answers came pleasantly and quickly. When at a certain moment, however, there was a delay, I got anxious, thinking to myself, suppose the Sister or Lieutenant Fress were to say to the class:

“You don’t know? Then we must ask this _aimable_ lady who has come across the ocean to visit you. _She_ will tell us.” And of Charles the Fat, then engaging our attention, I only remembered vaguely that he had had a saintly wife of whom he grew tired. There were other questions, too, about Louis of Aquitaine, which awakened only the faintest echoes in memory, but which to my relief were answered to complete satisfaction by a determined, dark-eyed, round-faced girl of twelve or thereabouts.

Lieutenant Fress then asked who could recite “_La Laitière et le Pot au Lait_.” All hands shot up, and the recitation proceeded with much _brio_.

“What does this teach us?” he boldly asked at the end.

At this a heavy-jawed, but very bright, near-together-eyed girl raised her hand without a second’s hesitation, and equally without a second’s hesitation answered:

“To think only of the present.” As is elegantly expressed in the enemies’ tongue, that girl wasn’t one of whom it would be said she would be “left hanging,” except of course as regards the imponderabilities.

Lieutenant Fress: “But is it well to think only of the present? What of imagination, and things that may happen in the future?”

A small, undersized girl with a deep-blue eye somewhat nervously answered:

“In imagination one builds castles in Spain.”

This was encouraging, but what she called _châteaux d’Espagne_ seemed not, however, to find great favor, for a silence fell on that bright-eyed class.

“But isn’t that all right?” continued Lieutenant Fress, giving a fillip. “Must we think only of the things we can see and touch?”

At the mention of seeing and touching, hands again shot up. He indicated a thick-haired, heavy-browed girl.

“In thinking of the things she doesn’t see, the good housewife would forget to cook the dinner, _et cela serait tommage_,” was the answer coming from the deepest depths of her consciousness.

On which we leave the schoolroom, with its extremely practical atmosphere, the argument being unanswerable, even by Lieutenant Fress. I could but think on that long line of peasants who have wrestled with realities, begotten, brought forth, tilled the soil, baked the bread, struggling all the time with their border-destiny, nature and history, even more than their own wills, having made them what they are. It struck me as reasonable that they should be a canny set, those little girls. Something alert, perceptive of realities, was forming them, they could not be over-given to dreams, for which one is both sorry and glad, according to the way one happens to feel about human things at the moment—and not necessarily the way they are. Even Marcus Aurelius tells us that “if a thing displease us” (I suppose he only forgot to add, “or if a thing please us”) “it is not that thing, but our view of that thing.” And certainly a lot of perfectly good things are spoiled by the point of view.

In the next room they were having a lesson in American history, quite in the note everywhere these days, and I know the Sister saw the hand of God as I entered at that special moment (she was a quiet-eyed, not very young Sister, who had trod further paths than those of learning). Then and there I heard the tale of the Boston Tea-party, and its consequences, of the War of the Rebellion, and the name of Lincoln, pronounced “Lancone,” who “wanted all men to be free and equal,” sounded through the room. No one, of course, expressed a doubt, nor ever will in schoolrooms, that men aren’t free, neither are they equal. As for myself, I thank God nearly every morning that some men always will be better than others, realizing that there is more difference between man and man than between man and beast, which truth was recalled to me but shortly by an equalitarian friend of the New Republic—but it’s not for schools, like many other truths. Even Saint Paul can do nothing except cry out, “Shall not the potter have power to shape the vessel as he will, some to honor, some to dishonor?” which again recognizes the fact of inequality without explaining it. However, there’s no use going into that now.

I soon found myself in a class of boys of twelve to fifteen years of age. They were having a lesson in German, and were reading a “piece” called “_Der arme Sepp_,” the history of whose misfortunes (he was a stable-boy, and the horse ran away and the wagon was broken, and he was received by his master with blows) didn’t seem to stick; for after it had been read out no boy, in answer to Lieutenant Fress’s questions, could recount the short and simple annals of poor Sepp.

They weren’t nearly so bright as the girls. Dull-eyed, pimply-faced, squeaky-voiced, they were wrestling with something that was for the time stronger than books—the eternal _Frühlings Erwachen_, that has always occupied philosophers and scientists—though not so much parents, who are apt to avoid the issues involved.

We passed finally into a class where young women were dissecting _Les Obsèques de la Lionne_, under the guidance of a brown-bearded, one-armed teacher in uniform. It was a small room, and you could have cut the air with a knife. And for the mist I could scarcely see the placard “_Pourquoi on ne peut pas conclure une paix fondée sur la parole d’Allemagne_” and the portraits of Clémenceau and Poincaré.

About this time I began to understand that La Fontaine is the pillar of the French educational system; and there is no doubt that he _did_ clear up a lot of doubtful things, in the most liquid use of the clearest of all languages.

We listened here to dissertations on the falseness of courts and courtiers, the charms of which were not touched on. How those who frequented them learned disastrous habits of dissimulation, not to say lying, and how ’twas better to live in obscurity (which for some reason is always supposed to be cheerful and where nobody ever lies perhaps because it isn’t worth while). Courts are not in favor anywhere just now, but everybody will admit they’ve had a glorious past; and as for democracy’s future, which the Bolsheviki and the New Freedom are decidedly handicapping, they _may_ run it a close second. This class was not so interesting, however, as were the children’s—discussions of intellectual propositions by people who aren’t intellectual being an awful bore at any time.

Toward the end there was a horrid moment, Lieutenant Fress bearing up with equanimity, when the over-bold teacher, interrupting the reading, asked the meaning of the word “_apothéose_.” Dead silence.

“_Continuez_,” he finally said, though a young woman with an immense amount of corn-colored hair waved low about some spectacled blue eyes, and wearing a large silver pin with the word “_Adieu_” on it, showed signs of being about to bring forth the answer.

They finished the fable in unison in their strong border-accent, which seemed to get thicker and thicker as we got farther up the flights of learning.

_Amusez les rois par tes songes,_
_Flattez-les, payez les d’agréables mensonges._
_Quelque intignation dont leur cœur soit rembli,_
_Ils goberont l’abbât, vous serez leur ami._

But methought it isn’t anything like what the “people” will have to “swallow,” when everybody is free and nobody is equal. And I wondered again at those who think to change the destinies of nations from without, by formulas or commands, when each evolves mysteriously, mystically, inevitably from within, out of its own particular shape and substance and strength. Even one from over the seas, clad in the supremest power a great nation has ever lent a mortal, though he pull the earth to pieces in the attempt, cannot change this law of nature. “_Que direz-vous, races futures?_”

And time respects nothing that is done without it.

As we came out into the square, little boys were bringing in armfuls of wood for their schoolroom stoves, others were already noisily scampering home for dinner in the crisp, sawdusty air; straight columns of smoke from many chimneys evoked women standing about noonday fires; there was a homely, human feeling about it all....

As I went through the school it seemed to me that the types of the children were modified in two ways, inclining now toward the elongated head, with pointed chin, dark hair, dark eyes, and mantling color, now toward the round-headed, square-jawed, blond type, with full, dreamy, blue eyes. But under these modifications one felt that there was a persistent something that was their own, neither German nor French nor anything else, for all the mingling; the Alsatian root and stem, with an inalienable, peculiar life mounting in it, its very own, its race-gift.

And this essential gift, this rich, diverse inheritance, had been received from each point of the compass. From the south, through the defiles of the Alps, the great Latin traditions had infiltered. From the north and east had come Germanic thought, with its mystical reactions, its metaphysical inclinations, its marvelous legends, and its romantic chronicles of gods and half-gods. From the west, from Gaul, came grace and courtesy and the deathless wish for liberty. Was ever a people more richly endowed? Yet, how shall even such a seed grow if it never lie quiet in the warm darkness of the earth?...

Then I turned from the paths of learning, and went over to the very well-kept ambulance, in charge, since several years, of the ladies from Mulhouse, whom I had met at dinner the night before.

And I stood by the bed of a dying negro of the Fifteenth New York Infantry, his eyes already glazed, and thought how he was to leave the broad valley of the Thur for that other wider Valley of the Soul, where, it is said, we are all of one color. And I am inclined to believe it, for the further I go, even in this life, the less real difference I find in people; even the white, unfortunately, are extraordinarily alike about most things; and one can but wonder why the few high differences, rather than the low and easy likenesses, are discouraged by so many good men.

Then I sought out the church of pink stone, passing a pink fountain in the chestnut-planted square it fronts on, where blue-clad soldiers were coming and going, busy about their midday meal. And, entering the church, I thought, after commending the soul of the negro to its Maker, of St.-Amarin, who has given his name to the broad, sweet valley and its pleasant town.

The chronicles have it that he erected an oratory hereabouts with his own hands. Later when St.-Prix, the holy bishop of Auvergne, was passing by, on his way to the court of Childeric to obtain permission to build a church, he stopped at the oratory to rest and found its builder lying ill of a fever. St.-Prix making the sign of the cross upon his breast, immediately the fever falls, and Amarin finds himself bathed in a gentle sweat. He arises, gives thanks to God, and in gratitude offers to accompany St.-Prix to the king’s court.

Now, some time before, St.-Prix had run afoul of a vicious, thick-souled man named Hector, Count of Marseille. The matter being brought to court, in the final judgment the holy bishop had been acquitted, and the wicked Hector convicted and put to death.

But the family of Hector was proud and vengeful and powerful (in our days we’ve seen such), and learning that St.-Prix had set out on the journey, sent a squad of archers and other soldiery to make away with him _en route_.

These came upon him, accompanied by St.-Amarin, in a village known as Volvic. Now when Amarin saw the assassins stretching their bows, the first thought of the natural man was to get out of harm’s way. But St.-Prix, further advanced in sanctity and therefore more perceptive of the invisibilities, seizing him by the arm, said to him the words, alas! so incomprehensible to us, children of the age: “If you lose this opportunity for martyrdom, you will perhaps never find it again!”

At this Amarin stood his ground, though one has a feeling from the little one knows of him that he had a natural love for life. He was the first to be massacred, “his soul leaving his body in the company of angels.”

The assassins, thinking their work well done, were about to depart, when St.-Prix called to them, saying: “But I am he whom you seek. Do with me what you will.” Whereupon one of the evil men, Radebert by name, gave him a sword-thrust through the breast. And as he cried out the words each one of us should ever have ready on his tongue (Heaven knows they are needed often enough), “Forgive them, Lord, they know not what they do,” another thrust caused his brains to spurt from his head. Whereupon angels were seen again descending, and the murderers, appalled by a great light that filled the valley, took their flight.

Sitting quietly in the pink church of St.-Amarin (its interior is noble of breadth and length, though not high), I thought how sweet is the mystical gift, and that one but stingily endowed in other ways, without houses or lands, or even learning or beauty or grace, if he have but the inner light, draws many unto him.

So alluring are such that kings in anguish call for them; even the wasters of life, they know not why, sometimes seek them out; others have been known to forget their money-making, or stop their spending, and render themselves physically uncomfortable, trying to get at the strange and secret gift they offer.

For the permanent interest of life is the unseen, and neither visible joys nor visible griefs can compete with it, nor any of the ways of the flesh, however pleasant or however straight.

And who would not sometimes dwell on these inner stages of the life-journey? With joy on the first period, which is that of innocence, passing with a sigh to the second, which is that of deviation; with a moistening of the dry heart to the third, that of reconciliation. Finally in humility to the fourth and last, which is that of pilgrimage, where the soul, accepting the two great natural abhorrences, old age and dissolution, hopeth for redemption and renewal....

And then I found the clock was striking twelve and I left the inner world (alas! rarely is my stay in it long, even if no clock strikes) and hurried to the _popote_.

XII

THE HARTMANNSWILLERKOPF

“_Now thou art come upon a feast of death_”

Very pleasant luncheon, after the accounting of the flesh, though not dallied over, as Captain Perdrizet, a man (Heaven reward him; I never can) of much _élan_ and quite a little perception of values, suggested changing my afternoon program, which was that of calling on various members of the high and comfortable bourgeoisie, whose “fleeting mansions” are known to me in many lands. When I found that, instead of basking in the comforts of this same bourgeoisie, eating their sweet and pleasant cakes, sitting in their deep armchairs, looking at the portraits of their ancestors, fingering their bric-à-brac and looking out at their view, I might, if the special commander of the special sector so willed it, make a pilgrimage to the sacramental Hartmannswillerkopf, where fifty thousand sleep—and where others even then as we spoke were laying themselves down, my heart was greatly quickened and my soul, after its manner, began to burn.

The sun was coming out between heavy showers as Captain Perdrizet and I departed hastily for Wesserling, where the permission was to be got. Now Wesserling rather deserves a page of its own, for many reasons, though, having a single thought—that of the pilgrimage—I gave but a glance at the very interesting little war-museum, stamped hastily on memory the quite delicious emplacement of the old château, now divided into various large and comfortable dwellings of the people on whom I was to call, and commanding the lovely valley to the west. Captain Perdrizet, who proved at every step to be a man of sequence as well as enthusiasm, took me straight to Commandant de Saint-Denis. After some conversation, which I politely didn’t catch, but which terminated by: “_Oui, si c’est comme ça_” (I looked perhaps more reasonable than I felt with that heat about my heart), “but I must telephone to the commandant of the sector at Camp Wagram, and from there you must proceed with an armed escort.” Gratefully, but with exceeding celerity, we shook the dust of the _Kommandantur_ from our feet, and returned through the valley as far as Willer, when we began to rise in a world of mist and breaking light, from time to time deluged by a diamond-like shower. Up, up through hills that one can no longer call changeless, for they are hills with their heads nicked off, neither branch nor leaf left on the stumps that outline their notched and shabby crests. Past batteries and gun-emplacements, embedded in wet foliage, many of them made by American troops last summer. Deep through a world of rusty beeches, with pine forests splashed like ink on near hills, here and there the torch of a larch—_mélèze_, it is called—and it is the only one of its family that grows yellow in autumn and sheds its foliage, and doubtless kind heaven made it so, that it might be a lamp in dark forests. There was the sound of rushing waters; and everywhere that beauty of moving, blue, helmeted figures afoot, on horseback, or on muleback was woven into highway and forest path, and to mind came immortal verses, of which I changed two words:

Know’st thou the mountain-bridge that hangs on cloud?
_Blue men_ in mist grope o’er the torrent loud.
In caves lie coiled the dragon’s ancient brood.

For do not everywhere “in caves” great guns “lie coiled” whose “ancient brood” are these munition-heaps spawned upon the mountain-side?

Up, still up, past a long convoy of munitions and food mounting slowly and heavily to the sacrificial Hartmannswillerkopf, which seems like a great altar under whose stone lie many saints—and the number of its cemeteries is one hundred and thirteen, while God alone knows the unnamed, unnumbered graves, and those yet to be dug. I find that rarely do the bones of soldiers travel far, and so it should be, for what spot, even of a father’s inheritance, is so truly his as that where he has fallen? No litigation of man can despoil him of it, and even when he and his deeds are forgotten it is still his. So let him lie.

Everywhere from the forest came strong, damp odors of things fugitive and deciduous. The violently released sap of shell-splintered and broken trees mingled its odors with that other natural smell of falling leaf. Lush mosses exuding still deeper, earthier odors were folded about the broken shafts in soft, green velvet swathings. And some of these forest wounds were new, some old and almost healed, like the human griefs of the war.

At a sharp turn in the road we leave the motor, passing on foot many camouflaged dugouts, and, somewhat breathless, reach the collection of low wooden huts known as “Camp Wagram.” Each little building has layers of fresh pine branches on its roof, and its sides are painted in piebald or zebra-like patterns.

We were shown into the dugout of the commandant, commanding the 363d Infantry, whom we found writing at a little pine table. He received us smiling, and not surprised, our visit having been announced by telephone. A smallish man with very attentive eyes, whose quiet exterior and strong Burgundy accent cover, I am told, a heart of gold, together with quick judgment and complete fearlessness.

He gives me a military cape to replace my heavy fur coat, and we start out to Camp Meudon, farther up, where we are presented to another commandant who is frankly, though politely, surprised to see a woman where no woman has been.

A few harmless jokes about being at Meudon, yet, alas! so far from Paris, are exchanged, after which, followed by the armed escort, we mount through the wet, shabby forest to the very top of the Molkenrain. There crouching in some bushes we peer out through them to the Hartmannswillerkopf, that culminating, coveted point of the great plateau, where men have wrestled unto death these four years past. Brown, withered, not a tree on it left, its form is traversed only by a long black line—the German trenches.

Behind and on each side of “Le Hartmann,” as it is called “for short,” is a great, misty, German plain; toward the left, in the extreme background, is the three-crested hill of the “Hohkoenigsberg”; great flamelike patches of cloud lay upon it, transmuting its stones and mortar into something gorgeous and unsubstantial. To our right and beyond stretched another great German plain, in front of which curtains of sun-shot cloud were falling and rising. One moment villages and fields and white ribbons of road shone, the next they would be blotted out by pillars of mist, and others came into view.

“If they see us, they will fire,” warned the commandant as I made an involuntary movement to rise, when another quick diamond-like shower beat about us.

“But isn’t it too dark?” I asked; that world of the Hartmann sector seemed so indistinct in shifting light and rain.

“They’ve seen us when it was darker than this,” he answered, rather grimly, with the expression of one remembering lost men.

Passing to another vantage-ground of the Molkenrain, whence we could see the Sudel, now entirely in French hands, we met a group of blue men, emerging beautifully out of the colored mist under the silver heaven. They were carrying hot soup to other blue men in the brown trenches of the Hartmann.

Standing for no uncompleted emotions as far as the Hartmann is concerned, Captain Perdrizet stopped a glowing-eyed, red-cheeked, black-haired Meridional stripling and told him to let me have a taste from the can he was carrying. I drank, thinking “there are many ways of winning the war,” from a dipper for which a trusty, much-camouflaged hand had first to hunt in its steaming depths. As I thanked him I wondered within myself should I wish him a quick young death or a long life and a toothless old age? As will be seen I’m obsessed by the veterans.

About this time Commandant Moreteaux said: “But Madame will only have seen the Hartmann in mist and rain. Why not come a second time and lunch with me to-morrow?”

I looked at Captain Perdrizet, he at me, and both being, as I have said, mortals of “first movement,” and knowing holy enthusiasm, we accept—though I bethink me somewhat late of our chief, the commandant of the Military Mission, who marks the shining course of my Alsatian hours, and who might have other plans. It was “to see.”

As we came down in the gathering gloom, over the shell-ravaged sides of the mountain, I was conscious of a deep, in some way sweet, feeling that I might be going to see, to _feel_, it all again. And, too, as is the way of the heart, it seemed then somewhat to belong to me.

I was not as one who never more will pass.

Everywhere in the brown, wet forest pale-blue forms stood aside to make way for us. As we reached Camp Wagram, where I re-exchanged the long, blue military cape for my coat, great shots began to echo through the hills, and the flare of guns illuminated the thin, dark, scraggly crests. It was still war. Near, so near, men were breathing out their souls, to be “scattered by winds and high, tempestuous gusts.”

As we stood making our adieux, a radio was brought to Commandant Moreteaux, and we heard then and there that Foch had received the German Parlementaries, and given them seventy-two hours, from eleven o’clock of that day, Friday, to say “Yes” or to say “No.” Nobody spoke when he ceased reading. It seemed suddenly like the world’s end.

And it’s a good, quick place to get one’s world-news, there in the Hartmannswillerkopf sector!

Then we said another and quite hasty _au revoir_, fearing night would descend upon the valley before we could, for the motor had to go without lights, and there was many a turn and twist at which to take a skidding chance at fate.

The forest got blacker and blacker, there was the sound of rushing waters, the rattle of munition-wagons, the stamp of hoofs, and voices of dimly outlined men whose tunics were quite white in the twilight. The odors, too, deepened with the coming darkness. I was chilled in body and soul, for were not they also there, those other tens of thousands, whose beds were dug in these damp hills, mingling in some way with the living? How close the two worlds are I never knew until this war, where death is ever near, and sometimes sweet, and often, often young. The hoary Reaper with his scythe has been replaced by a figure, lithe and strong, a bugle in his hand.

As we reached the dark valley the cannon cracked again, again the night sky was illumined. The unnatural shapes of trees fallen one against the other at sharp angles were black in the twilight fog; the road was a loose, wet ribbon; more waters rushed. And who would see the Hartmannswillerkopf in sunshine? This damp, gray, afternoon robe of consecration, clasped with its clasp of emerald, carnelian, topaz, amethyst, like to the clasp of a high-priest, is its true garb. And the wide mantle of the November night was folding close over all its beauty and its grief.

At Bitschwiller we call on Madame Jules Scheuer. She knows irremediable grief and bears it with a noble courage. One of her sons fell far from her in Champagne; the other, mortally wounded on the Hartmann, was brought down one winter night to die in her arms, and lies forever in the sweet, broad valley of the Thur, claiming so little of his vast inheritance....

To the _popote_ at eight. Six Protestant pastors had been announced to dine with us, two of mine in the act of being convoyed through Alsace by four of theirs. The Americans were “looking over the ground,” they delicately informed me. I didn’t ask “what ground”; with my name it might have sounded argumentative, which I never, never am.

Now during these days of my Alsatian visit I had thought, at intervals, that it might very possibly be a nuisance to have a woman always tagging at some polite heel or other, but when I saw that six pastors could happen to them all at once, I then and there ceased forever feeling apologetic. I even fell to thinking that they hadn’t done so badly when they got me.

I can’t say that, at dinner, all went as merry as a marriage feast, because the Americans didn’t speak French, nor the officers English, except de Maroussem, who could but didn’t, even seeming but remotely interested in watching them consume the plenteous repast. And as for myself, I was too dull with fatigue and too spent with the emotions of the Hartmann to be able to do any “paying in person.” For a time, too, those men of my race were the strangers to me, not the blue-clad men of the Mission.

Suddenly, as we were unsuspectingly taking our coffee, one of the shepherds began saying prayers over us with a drop in his voice after each sentence, thanking God for their being there, for our being there, for Alsace being there, and I don’t remember what else, save that it was fairly comprehensive. After which everybody signed everybody’s menu, and then as they were on the run through the garden of Alsace, lingering nowhere, though scattering possibly seedless blessings everywhere, they said good-by and went out forever into the rain. And they ought to have thanked God for the dinner, which was a triumph, with vintage wines served by two orderlies, under Monsieur de Maroussem’s chic though somewhat detached eye.

As the door closed we fell to talking as people would when six clergymen who came all at once leave all at once, though unexpectedly one came back for his umbrella—producing a momentary hush.

One of mine had generously given me several boxes of cigarettes, produced from deep, sagging pockets, and we stopped to have an “evangelical puff” as some one called it, while I tried to explain what “nervous prostration” is to those Frenchmen—and to explain why the largest of the American clergymen, very nice, and looking like a lion-tamer, as some one remarked, could have had it, and been in bed with it, for a year. “_Chacun a sa petite misère_,” one of them said, “_mais c’est étrange, tout de même._”

One of the officers of the St.-Amarin _popote_, Debrix, is the image of the famous Coligny, and so called by his comrades, but he is, it appears, an excellent Papist, while Perdrizet, who, if he had on a suit of mail, might have borne the banner of the Virgin, following Godefroy de Bouillon into Jerusalem, is an equally excellent Protestant, his family having fled to Montbéliard after the revocation of the Edict of Nantes, and these two are continually being joked about their natural—or unnatural—camouflage. But in these days nobody really cares, alack! alack! what anybody believes, scarcely, alack! what anybody does, especially if they are quiet about it and it doesn’t interfere with the other person’s plans. And that’s why the war will be forgotten just as soon as the newspapers stop talking about it and business looks up and the women get new clothes, which they need. However, as the dead soldiers will mostly be in heaven, their smiles won’t be too unkind, though their language!—if it’s anything like what I’ve discovered they use on earth!

I was finally convoyed home by a largish contingent of the sons of Mars. As soon as we stepped from the door we were in ankle-deep mud; the sky, black and flat and close, had a vaultlike heaviness, and the fog was so clinging that I was as if wrapped in some soft, wet stuff. Monsieur and Madame Helmer were kindly waiting up for me, but mercifully let our good-night be short. And here I am with no more thought of sleep than a meadow-lark at dawn, though that’s my only resemblance to the meadow-lark, for I am tired, dead-tired, and my hair is still wet with the mists of the Hartmann.

And how shall one sleep who has so lately touched the fringe of the mountain-couch where many soldiers lie?

XIII

“LES CRÊTES.” “DÉJEUNER” AT CAMP WAGRAM. THE FREUNDSTEIN AND ITS PHANTOMS

_November 9th._—This morning at eight-thirty we started out, Captain Perdrizet, Lieutenant Debrix, and I, for the famous trip along the crest of the mountains that, on one side, hang over the valley of the Thur, and on the other fall toward the Germanies. Having beheld with my eyes the first and second line defenses of these crests and of the “Hartmann,” I have come to some slight realization of how men have lived (and died) four winters through on these weather- and shell-swept heights.

We had to go to the very end of the shining valley before beginning the ascent to the crests, passing Wesserling, situated so charmingly on its eminence in the ancient moraine, commanding the valley from both ways. Once upon a time the Château of Wesserling belonged to Prince Löwenstein, Abbot of Murbach, the history of the great Abbey of Murbach being closely bound up with that of these valleys, for Charlemagne gave to the first abbot, St.-Pyrmin, the whole country of the Thur, with St.-Amarin and Thann and all the lesser towns. In the eighteenth century the Abbey was converted into a noble Chapter with residence, and a big new church, at Guebwiller, now in German hands. But the Chapter had a short life there, and probably not a gay one, and during the Revolution it was suppressed.

The vineyards round about have been renowned since time immemorial, and on Guebwiller’s southern slopes there is a wine celebrated even among the most celebrated of Alsace, which enlivens without making noisy, and inspires without depressing (evidently what the juice of the grape was meant to do when the vine grew on the first hillsides of the world). It is called “_Kitterle brisemollets_” (“Kitterle break your calves”), those whom it delights evidently not journeying far, except in fancy.

A great book could be written about the wines of Alsace, the soft, gleaming, light-colored wines of this land of sunny slopes, which may become even as a Mecca for pilgrims arriving “dry” from over the seas. In fact, quite a delightful perspective opens itself out.

From Wolxheim comes a wine, once the favorite of Napoleon, which was always found on the imperial table. There are the wines of Rouffach, “home town” of the husband of Madame Sans-Gêne; of Kaisersberg, known fashionably and pertinently as “Montlibre” for a short space during the Revolution, and by the “Rang” of Thann; Alsatians once swore, “_Que le Rang te heurte!_” (“May the Rang strike you!”) There is, too, an exceptional, ancient, red vintage called “_Sang des Turcs_,” whose name recalls the twilight days of Turkish invasions and Soliman the Great.

But the Alsatian wines are mostly made from compact bunches of little, white, sweet grapes, with irislike colors shading them richly. The inhabitants, holding their _pinard_ in great veneration, feel it a sacred duty to see that it is _good_. It is called colloquially “_thé d’Octobre_” (“October tea”) one of the officers told me, after the manner of the famous “_purée septembrale_” (“September purée”) of Rabelais, who, it appears, greatly appreciated the wines of these hillsides. But they are pitiless concerning poor wines, which they call “fiddlers’ wines,” or “_Sans-le-Sou_,” or “_gratte-gosier_” (“throat-scratcher”), and “_grimpe-muraille_” (“wall-climber”), as he who drinks them is apt to try that and other useless feats, instead of sitting and dreaming or joking and being happy. These bad wines are also known collectively and disdainfully as _vins des trois hommes_ (wines of three men) because it appears it takes three men to accomplish the feat of drinking a single glass—the man who supports the drinker, the man who forces the treacherous liquid down his throat, and the third the unhappy victim. Now the once rich soil of the ancient mellow vineyards has got thin and stony; for the men who have grown them have been occupied with killing these past four years, and neglect for even a season can spoil the best and oldest vines.

In times of peace there are many textile manufactories in these valleys, too. After the Napoleonic wars _la main d’œuvre_ (labor) was scarce, just as it will be after our war, workmen being brought even from India, and to this day in the midst of modern machinery here, in the valley, there are places where they still keep to the ancient block system of stamping cloth, with the ritual hammer-stroke, this process giving more fadeless and beautiful colors than any machine-stamped, aniline-dyed stuffs that ever were. Such cloths are still called “_Indiennes_.”

And all around here the Swedes did as tidy a bit of work as was ever done by invading armies, the seventeenth century being for the valley a century of ravage and desolation. In one of the books[18] Mr. Helmer gave me last night I read that the cantons were so reduced during the Thirty Years’ War that places like Bitschwiller could register but four adults and eleven children, Moosch eleven adults and twenty-three children, St.-Amarin thirteen adults and forty-four children, and so on, the chief of their diet being acorns and roots and mice and other classic nutriment of epochs of destruction. There were moments when the Imperials, the Swedes, the French, and the Lorrains disputed the territory, and various troops camped on the Hartmannswiller and descended to the valley—and the _Roi Très Catholique_ was the ally of the Swedes, and the Abbey and its territories were under the Holy German Empire. But whoever was momentarily in possession, it was always disastrous for the inhabitants of the valley—and of what the children suffered these fatal figures I have quoted evoke some dull perception.

As we pass the pleasant villages of Fellering and Odern and Krüt, all shining in the radiance of a strong though intermittent sun, with here and there scarfs of rainbow-like mists draped about them, we foolishly mocked the weather wisdom of Mr. Helmer, who, on being asked as we started out, if the weather would hold, had regretfully said, “No.”

At Krüt we start to ascend the Wildenstein. Gorgeous matutinal effects continued their prismatic play everywhere on soft and fathomless black hills, the yellow lights on the _mélèze_ almost outshining the sun. On one mountain-side they made a line as would some procession of pilgrims bearing torches, and one almost thought one saw cowled heads and heard the chanting of a “_Pilgerchor_.”

The air we were breathing was strong yet tenuous, and I felt a great refreshment and exhilaration.

In these wide days of bending the hills, of folding the valleys, there has been, as it were, some unpacking of my mind, some shaking out of my soul, things long hidden have come to light, and the patched lining of memory has been freshened. Almost every event has appeared, accompanied by its secret meanings, in its relationship to secondary, generally unapparent, significances. I have had, too, a quickened sensitiveness to the beauty of the natural world. And can a journey do more for one than this?

It was a stiff mount to Huss in a sort of distilled pine fragrance, with a continual looking back, where the billowing lightsome pink and yellow scarfs, woven of sun and mist, were flinging themselves more and more wastefully about the shining valleys. Near the top our motor’s _bougies_ got clogged with oil, and a thin, white fog, now opaque, now sun-shot, began to close in on us. We arranged the _bougies_, but there was nothing for human hands to do about that white fog, and we found ourselves suddenly, at a turn in the road, tightly inclosed by it, and were seemingly alone on the heights, where the only thing that appeared to grow and thrive were the stretches of wire entanglements, like great patches of dried heather. Everywhere were groupings of black crosses, with their tricolor badges, above wind-swept, fog-enveloped, sun-bathed graves, dug on these treeless heights.

But there, in that thin, high air, I suddenly became conscious of the volatilization of the spirit, and knew those graves indeed for empty....

One last time, as we passed Camp Boussat, named after the colonel who fell here, and looking like a mining-camp, the mist shifted, showing the jeweled, gossamer-clad valley, and then we were again fog-locked, and I saw its beauty no more—only brown seas of wire entanglements losing themselves in those shrouds of cottony white, which lifted here and there to show some detail of the strange life on the bleak crests. There were dugouts everywhere, and very low buildings camouflaged in wood-colors and crisscross designs. In them were men washing, men cooking, men smoking, all in astonishment, which sometimes gave place to grins, and doubtless pleasantries in the best Gallic manner, at the appearance of the weaker sex on their grim, bare mountain-tops.

We passed endless gun-emplacements, and cemented munition-depots, barely visible through thick layers of pine branches, and near them heads would be sticking out of what seemed mere holes in the earth.

About this time Captain Perdrizet, whose ardent spirit had been considerably dampened by the closing in of that thick, cold fog, began also to fear we should be late for _déjeuner_ at Camp Wagram, from which, it appeared, we were separated by several valleys and a few hills of the eternal sort. The motor’s _bougies_ got clogged again (what part of its being they are I know not); the chauffeur got moody, Captain Perdrizet more visibly vexed, Debrix quieter and more philosophic (he is a _littérateur_ when there’s no war, and has written a beautiful poem about Thann); as for myself, knowing strange and enkindling things were behind me, others doubtless before me, and that whatever happened would be interesting, I felt myself sweetly detached from time and circumstances, which for one of deadly punctuality is saying much.

A peculiarity of the motor’s ailment was that it couldn’t go down as fast as it could go up, so, a-limp, a-crawl, a-hump, we descended into a valley packed extravagantly with that thick, unspun cotton-like atmosphere, leaving the dead and living alike to their bare heights. At a certain village whose name I forget (I can hear the reader saying, “Thank God she has forgotten it, and we can perhaps get on to Camp Wagram for lunch”)—at a certain village, however, I repeat, two ravens went across our path, going to the left of the motor. Said Perdrizet, on taking in the dire occurrence, his color like to the white fog and his hair and mustache like to the raven’s, “We’ll never get there!”

Now I am superstitious, too, and glory in it, for, though it gives me a good deal of otherwise avoidable worry, it colors life. From time to time friends and circumstances load me with a new one, and I go staggering on. Two ravens crossing the road to the left _was_ a novelty, and I see anxious days to come when motoring for engagements where one must be in time—or one thinks one must. And superstition has nothing to do with the processes of the brain, rather lodges itself elusively anywhere and everywhere in one’s being.

The two officers consulted their timepieces again, finding a trifling and consoling difference of twenty minutes (looked at from one way). The chauffeur’s watch didn’t go, and I never carry one. As the motor stopped again, Perdrizet began to fidget extremely much, and to say that if it weren’t for me he’d kill the chauffeur, and decided that we couldn’t take in the village of Goldbach, almost entirely destroyed in this war, where Madame Sans-Gêne first saw the light of day, and later the duke.

However, in spite of the two ravens and the _Erdwible_,[19] or other spirits of those forest-hills, we at last found ourselves twisting up the road to Camp Wagram, an hour late, and we began to sound noisily the horn of arrival. The commandant and his young captain had been long awaiting us on their hillside. With many apologies on our part because of the delay, and on theirs because of the fog, we went into the little, low mess-room built of rough boards, with its heavy camouflage of fresh pine branches on its low roof, its windows of oiled paper, and its sides painted like a green-and-yellow tiger.

The commandant did something to his watch as we sat down, and then gallantly yet unblushingly remarked that it was just 12.30, but that even _had_ we been late it would have only meant a longer anticipation of something pleasant. My companions both gave smiles of satisfaction for that, on the Hartmann, where men are almost entirely concerned with killing or being killed, the commandant was living up to the French reputation in more ways than one. I thought, too, that it was a very happy beginning, looking well, so to speak, among the _hors d’œuvre_. Captain Perdrizet had told me the day before that if the commandant had to requisition every man and mule in the sector there would be an excellent lunch. Now the very good food was accompanied by a delicious, warm Burgundy from the commandant’s own part of the world, and at dessert a bottle of Pommery & Greno, very cold, a souvenir of his service in Champagne, was poured. All drank sparingly of both, after the manner of Latins. Some asked delicately, even humbly, as one really wanting information, concerning the rumor that the United States were “going dry,” and wondered why it was to be. I rather wondered myself, up there on the Hartmann, forgetful for a moment of the unpleasant things I know about distilled liquors in the Home of the Free and the Land of the Brave.

Said the commandant, puzzled, looking at his not large glass of ruby liquid, “_Un peu de vin en mangeant, tout de même?_ ...” (“But a little wine at one’s meals?...”)

Said another officer, with a quickly restrained gesture of distaste: “_Est-ce vrai qu’il faut boire seul et debout et entre les repas en Amérique?_” (“Is it true that one must drink alone and standing up and between meals in America?”)

I was saved an answer to this question, which was a fairly near picture of some of the national customs, by the shaking, deafening sound of an exploding shell. Those paper windows didn’t seem to mind it, though everything on the table rattled. The commandant looked at the captain, who disappeared, returning almost immediately to say that an artilleryman with his horses had been killed—and the doctor, who had started to the door, sat down again.

A few minutes later, as we were beginning the _tournedos grillés, maître d’hôtel_, the telephone rang, and a radio was brought in hot and given to me for a souvenir. It was one sent by the German parlementaries saying that as they were unable to get back to Germany by road on account of broken bridges, they would be obliged to proceed by air, and that their ’plane would be marked by two white flames—_zwei weisse Flammen_.

“It sounds safe, but all the same I don’t envy the officer detailed to accompany them,” said somebody; and they all smiled and seemed glad they weren’t in the airplane. I’ve noticed in the past two or three days that military men are beginning to prize life again.

I was sitting opposite the commandant, on my right was Doctor Lantieri with four stripes on his sleeve, and on my left was young Captain de Santis, who had met us. Curiously enough, both were of Corsican descent, and showed it so distinctly that when some one mentioned the great Italian bag of Austrian prisoners after the cessation of hostilities, and how the “Tiger” had said you simply couldn’t hold them back, I got a bit worried, though nobody else seemed to mind.

The young captain took from his pocket a couple of proclamations dropped by German aviators on the Hartmann yesterday—and furthermore presented me with a large panoramic view of the Champagne sector, where he had fought. I thought it was something rightly belonging to his family, but there was that in his proud, Corsican gesture which forbade refusal.

=The German People Offers Peace.=

The new German democratic government has this programme:

=“The will of the people is the highest law.”=

The German people wants quickly to end the slaughter.

The new German popular government therefore has offered an

=Armistice=

and has declared itself ready for

=Peace=

on the basis of justice and reconciliation of nations.

It is the will of the German people that it should live in
peace with all peoples, honestly and loyally.

What has the new German popular government done so far to put
into practice the will of the people and to prove its good and
upright intentions?

a) The new German government has appealed to President
Wilson to bring about peace.