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diff --git a/75744-0.txt b/75744-0.txt new file mode 100644 index 0000000..e7bc476 --- /dev/null +++ b/75744-0.txt @@ -0,0 +1,5963 @@ + +*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 75744 *** + + + + + +MY LORRAINE JOURNAL + +[Illustration] + + +BOOKS BY EDITH O’SHAUGHNESSY + + A DIPLOMAT’S WIFE IN MEXICO. Illustrated. + DIPLOMATIC DAYS. Illustrated. + + HARPER & BROTHERS, NEW YORK + [ESTABLISHED 1817] + + + + +[Illustration: DUCAL PALACE, NANCY] + + + + + MY LORRAINE + JOURNAL + + _by_ + EDITH O’SHAUGHNESSY + [MRS. NELSON O’SHAUGHNESSY] + AUTHOR OF + _“A Diplomat’s Wife in Mexico” + and “Diplomatic Days”_ + + ILLUSTRATED + + [Illustration] + + HARPER & BROTHERS PUBLISHERS + NEW YORK AND LONDON + + MY LORRAINE JOURNAL + + Copyright, 1918, by Harper & Brothers + Printed in the United States of America + Published September, 1918 + + + + + _To + Mrs. William H. Crocker_ + + _In memory of a lost battle + and in appreciation of + her work in Lorraine_ + + + + +ILLUSTRATIONS + + + DUCAL PALACE, NANCY _Frontispiece_ + + VERDUN AND VICINITY _Facing p._ 4 + + PLACE STANISLAS, NANCY ” 12 + + AUTHOR AT VITRIMONT ” 30 + + CEMETERY, VITRIMONT ” 30 + + THE BRIDGE AT LUNÉVILLE ” 30 + + FOUNTAIN OF AMPHITRITE BY JEAN LAMOUR, PLACE STANISLAS, + NANCY ” 38 + + SOUVENIR MENU OF LUNCHEON AT VERDUN, JUNE 17, 1917 ” 46 + + OUR PARTY ON THE BATTLE-FIELD AT VERDUN, JUNE 17, 1917 ” 50 + + IN THE BOYAUX, VERDUN, JUNE 17, 1917 ” 50 + + SISTER JULIE ” 124 + + BAS-RELIEF OF THE REFUGEES ” 124 + + MISS POLK’S WEDDING ” 162 + + + + +CONTENTS + + + PAGE + + FOREWORD xi + + PART I + + CHAP. + + I. HOW ONE MAY HAPPEN TO GO TO THE FRONT 3 + + II. NANCY 12 + + III. LUNÉVILLE 18 + + IV. VITRIMONT 22 + + V. LUNÉVILLE AGAIN 28 + + VI. GERBÉVILLER AND LA SŒUR JULIE 33 + + VII. BAR-LE-DUC 37 + + VIII. VERDUN 42 + + IX. CHÂLONS.—CHÂTEAU DE JEAN D’HEURS.—REVIGNY, THE “LINING” OF + THE FRONT 60 + + X. MONT FRENET.—LA CHAMPAGNE POUILLEUSE.—THE RETURN 64 + + PART II + + I. BY THE MARNE 77 + + II. THE CANTEEN AT BAR-LE-DUC 87 + + III. THEATRICALS AND CAMOUFLAGE 97 + + IV. THE BURIAL OF PÈRE CAFARD 108 + + V. A PROVIDENTIAL FORD 112 + + PART III + + LORRAINE IN AUTUMN + + “_L’élégante et mélancolique Lorraine_” + + I. NANCY AND MOLITOR 121 + + II. EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY EMANATIONS 131 + + III. TOUL 144 + + IV. A STROLL IN NANCY 153 + + V. VITRIMONT IN AUTUMN 161 + + VI. AT THE GUÉRINS’ 167 + + VII. ACROSS LORRAINE 174 + + VIII. THE CHÂLONS CANTEEN 182 + + + + +FOREWORD + + +It will be seen, by the first chapter, how fortuitous though inevitable +was the writing of this little book, begun before the American troops +came to France; yet it happens to concern that part of the war zone +wherein our men are preparing themselves for battle, and which will be +quickened with their blood. + +The time has scarcely come to write of the world war; indeed, it is only +between wars that one can write of them, when wisdom, with accompanying +imagination, looks down the great perspectives; now men’s utmost energies +are concentrated upon deeds of passion performed in hope or in despair. + +Oliver’s _Ordeal by Battle_ of 1915 remains the most scholarly and +philosophic of the war books; Masefield’s _Gallipoli_ the most artistic. +But even these, and the many, many others, give not so much a sense of +inadequacy as of impossibility. + +Letters from strong souls undergoing supreme emotions have emanated +from the trenches or the air. We have mourned young perished singers: +Rupert Brooke, Alan Seeger. But for the most part, and so it must be, +war books are limited to the relation of personal deeds and sufferings, +and descriptions of localities where they have taken place, colored +more or less by the temperament of each—even as I, “_en passant par la +Lorraine_,” wrote these pages. + + EDITH COUES O’SHAUGHNESSY. + +33 RUE DE L’UNIVERSITÉ, PARIS, _January 19, 1918_. + + + + +PART I + + + + +CHAPTER I + +HOW ONE MAY HAPPEN TO GO TO THE FRONT + + + PARIS, _Thursday, June 7, 1917_. + +Even personal events have their outriders, and this is how an unexpectant +lady, still fiancée to Mexico, received from Destiny various indications +that she was to go there where men, ten thousand upon ten thousand, lay +down their lives _pro patria_. Like everything, it was simple when it had +happened. + +At the Foire Saint-Sulpice, where I was serving at the tea-stall, I met +E. M. C., whom I thought in California. After greetings (we had not seen +each other since the fatal month of October, 1916) she said to me: + +“You must come down to Lunéville where I have a house, and visit the +village of Vitrimont, that mother is rebuilding.” + +I answered: “My dear, I’m still tied to Mexico, and I can see my +publishers frowning all the way across the ocean if the second +much-promised, long-delayed book doesn’t arrive. I oughtn’t even to peep +at anything else for the moment.” + +Then, tea victims beginning to crowd in, “business as usual” engaged us +and we parted. + +When I got home I found that Joseph Reinach, met but once—Polybe of +the delightful _Commentaires_—had sent me his brochure, _Le Village +Reconstitué_. I still didn’t hear the outriders galloping down the street. + +In the evening I dined _chez Laurent_ with Mr. C., known in Mexico. When +I got there I found that his sister, Madame Saint-R. T., Présidente de +La Renaissance des Foyers, was going into Lorraine, to Lunéville itself, +the next day; conversation was almost entirely of the practical work to +be done in the devastated districts, and the deeply engaging _philosophie +de la guerre_, of how one had not only to rebuild villages, but to remake +souls and lives. + +_A quoi bon donner des chemises?_ Give tools and implements, or a brace +of rabbits, that nature may take its course and the peasant can say, +“Soon I will have a dozen rabbits, and twenty-five francs that I have +earned.” + +Some one observed that it really would be the rabbits, however—it is any +living, productive thing that is of account, beyond all else, in the dead +and silent places of devastation, and gifts of twelve chickens and one +cock are demanded rather even than shoes. + +As we were pleasantly dining in the garden, and philosophizing sometimes +with tears, sometimes smiles, a terrific thunder-storm broke over Paris, +and we all crowded into the big central room, with piles of hastily +torn-off, muddy table-linen. We sat talking, however, till they turned +both ourselves and the lights out. As we parted, Madame Saint-R. T.’s +last words were, “But try to come down to Lunéville.” + +I thought to myself that night, “Things are getting hot.” I believe in +signs from heaven, and signs from heaven are not to be neglected. + +[Illustration: VERDUN AND VICINITY] + +On Saturday, when E. M. stopped by for me to go again to the Foire, I +said: + +“I believe I _will_ go to Lunéville. What does one do about papers?” + +We straightway went to the Rue François Premier, not being in the +_mañana_ class, either of us, and found there a charming specimen of +_jeunesse dorée_, intellectual, “sicklied o’er with the pale cast of +thought,” but doing his bit. Shears for the cutting of red tape were +liberally applied, and my papers were promised in an unprecedented three +days. + +As we “swept” out I said to E. M., “You don’t think we were _too_ +strenuous?” + +She said, “Oh, they are used to us now, though it was a thrilling moment +when you ripped your photograph (such a photograph!) from the duplicate +of your passport!” + +The aforementioned charming specimen, M. de P., had said a photograph was +essential; it was Saturday afternoon, the next day was Sunday, and for +some unexplained reason photographers don’t seem to work in France on +Mondays, at least not in war-time. + +It was about this time that E. M. said, in a _dégagé_ way: “I am going +down to Verdun with a friend. It’s awfully difficult, and the women who +have been there can be counted on one’s fingers. I wish _you_ could go, +too.” + +I said, “That’s out of the question.” But I thought to myself, “We will +see what Fate decides.” It’s a great thing to keep astride of her, anyway. + +On account of Sunday coming in between, my papers could not be ready in +time for me to leave with her on Tuesday (they have to be sent to the +_Quartier-Général_ to be stamped), but they were promised for Wednesday +that I might start for Lunéville on Thursday. I went to see E. M. at +her aunt’s, the Princess P.’s, on Monday night for a few last words and +injunctions. I found her after passing through some lovely dove-gray +rooms with priceless old portraits of Polish great, hanging on silvery +walls, and rare bibelots and porcelains discreetly scattered on charming +tables rising from gray carpetings. She greeted me by saying, “It’s all +arranged for you to go to Verdun, too.” + +“Verdun!” I cried. “Glory and sorrow of France!” + +I didn’t ask how, but thought of the harmonious working of chance that +brings as many gifts as blows in its train. + + _Thursday, June 14th, 10.30 a.m._ + +We slipped out of the station, flooded with waves of blue-clad men, at +eight o’clock, and since then there has been a constant stopping of the +train in green, glade-like places to let troop-trains pass. A while ago +I found myself looking out on a river, and a shiver went over me. It was +the jade-colored, slow-flowing Marne. + +White morning-glories are thick on every hedge, and wild roses such +as grow in New England lanes, and there are many thistles, soft and +magenta-colored; lindens, acacias, and poplars abound and hang delicately +over the banks of the river. + +Lying open on my lap is the _Revue de Paris_ of June 1st, but I can’t +read even the beautiful “_Lettres d’un Officier Italien_”—(Giosué +Borsi[1]), breathing a deep spirit of conformity to the will of God and +showing the evolution that many an _intellectuel catholique_ of his +generation has gone through in Italy. In his dugout were Dante, Homer, +Ariosto, the Gospels, St. Augustine, Pascal, and _Le Manuel du Parfait +Caporal et les Secours d’Urgence_. And he loved his mother and let her +know it. + +All along the route are villages and peaceful country houses, near the +train, bowered in acacia and linden; elder-bushes are in full bloom, +too, and we pass many green kitchen gardens. Women are shaking blankets +out of windows, and looking at the train going to the front, thinking, +who shall say what thoughts? + + _Later._ + +Big movement of troops is delaying us, and it has been a morning spent +among emerald-green hills, pale, like Guatemalan or Bolivian emeralds, +not like the deep-colored gems of the Rue de la Paix. Everywhere are +patches of blue-clad men, marching down white roads between green fields +melting into the blue sky at the point of the eyes’ vision. Still others +are bathing in the pale, warm Marne or resting on its banks. Trains go +past loaded with battered autos, _camions_ and guns coming from the +front, or others with neatly covered, newly repaired machines of death, +going out. + +All were silent in the train at first. “_Méfiez-vous, les oreilles +ennemies vous écoutent_” is the device placarded everywhere. In my coupé +some one feeling slightly, very slightly, facetious, had rubbed out the +first two letters of _oreilles_, changed the first “_e_” into an “_f_,” +so that it read, “_Méfiez-vous, les filles ennemies vous écoutent_.” The +ruling passion strong in death! + +We pass Epernay, whose little vine-planted hills had run red, before +the treading out of its 1914 wine, with the blood of English and French +heroes. + +At last we began to talk, a dark-eyed colonel of infantry with the +_Grand’ Croix de la Légion d’Honneur_ having reached down my bag for me. + +It is a historic date for France and for ourselves. + +The night before, General Pershing arrived in Paris, with his guerdon +of help, mayhap salvation. All the newspapers had pictures of him and +his staff, their reception at the station, the crowd before the Hôtel +Crillon. One officer told the story of the woman in the crowd who was +so little that there wasn’t the slightest chance of her seeing anything +or anybody. When asked why she was there she answered, “_Mais j’aurai +assisté_,” and that, it seems to me, is the epitome and epitaph of the +generation whose fate it is to see with their eyes the world war. + + IN THE STATION, CHÂLONS-SUR-MARNE, _2.30 p.m._ + +Extreme heat. Train four hours late on account of the movement of troops. +Wave after wave of horizon blue undulates through the station. They are +lying about, standing about, sitting about—the _poilus_. Half hidden by +their equipment, their countless bundles tied around their waists, slung +on their shoulders, under their arms, they seem indescribably weary and +dusty, turned toward the blazing front where the best they can hope is +_la bonne blessure_—theirs not to reason why. Sometimes 30,000 pass +through Châlons in a day. + +Now it comes to me that our men—our fresh, eager, beautiful young men, +such as I saw disembark at Vera Cruz—will pass through this same station +to that same blazing front.... + +By my window, on the siding, is passing an endless train of box-cars, +with four horses in the ends of each car. Between the horses’ forefeet, +pale-blue groups of men are crowded; no room to lie, scarcely to +sit—cramped, hot, with their eternal accoutrement. One bent group was +playing cards, the horses’ heads above them. But mostly they are looking +out at people who are not called upon to die. + + _Later._ + +Pangs of hunger began to assail me as the train pulled out. I went into +the dining-car and had a modest, belated repast of _œufs sur le plat_, +cheese and fruit. At the tables were groups of uniformed men talking in +low voices of what had been and what might have been. As I looked out of +the window, while waiting, my eyes fell upon the first band of prisoners +I had seen—tall, stalwart men, wearing the round white cap with its band +of red—at work on the roads, those veins and arteries of France. + +An officer, once the most civilian of civilians, looking like the +pictures of Alexandre Dumas _fils_ on the covers of cheap editions of _La +Dame aux Camélias_, with bushy hair parted on one side, mustache, and +stubby Napoleon, broad face and twinkling eyes, pointed out Sermaize, the +first of the devastated villages we passed, which has been rebuilt by +the English Society of Friends. “Conscientious objectors” don’t intend +to let the sons of Mars do everything, but they can’t keep pace with +the destruction. In _Le Village Reconstitué_ M. Reinach speaks of the +ugliness of the models proposed to the victims, which pass understanding, +and says that even the vocabulary of Huysmans would not suffice to give +the least idea of them. What the peasant wants is “_mon village_,” which +doesn’t at all resemble what the _commis voyageur en laideur_ proposes. + + REVIGNY, _4.30 p.m._ + +I have seen the first black crosses in a green field bounded by clumps +of poplar against the clear sky. Revigny is a mass of ruins, roofless +houses, heaps of mortar, and endless quantities of blue-clad, heavily +laden men coming and going in the station—the eternal waiting, waiting +for transit. Revigny is on the road to Verdun, Alexandre Dumas _fils_ +told me. He gets out at Bar-le-Duc, which is now the point of departure +to the fateful fortress. Groups of yellow Annamites are working at the +roads. They are imported for that purpose, being of little use when the +cannon sounds. + +Awhile ago two young Breton under-officers, colonials, came into the +compartment. They had been at school together and had not met for ten +years until just now on the train. They watched together the shifting +scenery; one was coming from a young wife, the other from a fiancée. + + GONDRECOURT. + +Two symmetrical fifteenth-century towers pierce a pale-blue sky. One of +the young Bretons tells me that for some time the train has been making +a great détour, as the straight line to Nancy would take it through +Commercy, daily bombarded by the enemy. + + PAGNY, _5.30 o’clock p.m._ + +Here we pick up the Meuse—and there still follows us the pink-and-gray +ribbon of willow-fringed canal that links the Marne to the Rhine, +and which all day long has looked like the marble the Italians call +_cipollino_. But I remember that its greenness has been but lately +colored with a crimson dye. + + TOUL (_where we thread up the Moselle_), _5.50_. + +We have just passed Toul. Great barracks are near the station, and +on the opposite hill is the fortress, high against the sky, bound to +Verdun by an uninterrupted series of forts. It is a _place de guerre de +première classe_. The Romans had an encampment here, and Vauban made the +fortifications of his time. + +And because the mind is not always held to the thing in view, even though +it be of great moment, I thought how Toul was the town where Hilaire +Belloc did his military service, “was in arms for his sins”; from here it +was that he set out upon the “path to Rome” in fulfilment of his vow. +Other things laid long away in memory came to mind, and I was only jerked +back as my eye was caught by a group of German prisoners being marched +past the station, one soldier, with a pointed bayonet, in front of them +and another behind. + +And at Nancy we are to knit up the river Meurthe. + + + + +CHAPTER II + +NANCY + + +Nancy, a dream of the eighteenth century, with the réveillé of +twentieth-century guns. + +We arrived at Nancy five hours late, at seven o’clock. + +No sign of E. M., no sign of anything familiar. Fortunately I was flanked +by Brittany, and a stout heart did the rest. When we found that the next +train for Lunéville would leave at nine o’clock, I asked them to dine +with me and take a little walk about the town. Our luggage—we were all +traveling light, I with a hand-bag and flat straw valise, they with two +iron helmets—was given to the _consigne_ and, after my _sauf-conduit_ had +been stamped in three separate places, we departed. + +The square before the station was surging with the usual pale-blue +waves, and as we crossed it the odor of leather and tired feet and hot +men was a good deal stronger than the linden scent. We passed a very +banal statue of Thiers, _Libérateur du Territoire_, and some horrors of +_art nouveau_. A construction with colored-glass windows and unnatural +cupolas and gilding and mushy outlines protruded from a corner, and its +name, for its sins, was Hôtel Excelsior. But we were searching for the +celebrated Place Stanislas. After asking a passer-by, we were directed +to a street whose name I have forgotten, and we started down its rather +distinguished length of gray, well-built houses of another century, +many of them having the double Lorraine cross in red to indicate cellar +accommodations, with the number they could shelter. + +[Illustration: PLACE STANISLAS, NANCY] + +When, suddenly, we stepped into the Place Stanislas, I almost swooned +with joy. I was in full eighteenth century, in the midst of one of its +most perfect creations, with the low boom of the twentieth-century guns +in the distance. + +Quickly my spirit was ravished from the world of combat into the still, +calm, beautiful world of art, within the enchantments of the _grilles_ of +Jean Lamour. A sensation sweet, satisfying, unfelt since the beginning +of the war, invaded me. I gazed entranced upon that delicate tracery of +wrought iron, like some rich guipure, at the four corners of the square +of buildings, its lovely gilding reflecting a soft light; and, outlined +against a heaven colored especially for them—pale blue, with threads +of palest pink, and a hint of gray and yellow—were urns and torches +and figures, half human, half divine, supporting them. The beautiful +fountains in the corners were banked with sand-bags, but their contours +were in harmony with the other _grilles_, and one was surmounted by an +Amphitrite, the other by a Neptune. It was all a symbol of a state of +mind, a flowering of feeling, to which had been vouchsafed a perfection +of expression. + +There is an Arc de Triomphe, put up by Stanislas at one end, in honor +of his kingly son-in-law, in front of the Hôtel de Ville, and a statue +of Stanislas himself in the middle, bearing the name “Stanislas,” the +date of 1831, and “_La Lorraine Reconnaissante_.” In looking about, my +eye fell on the Restaurant Stanislas, _dans la note_, certainly, and I +decided to dine there. We found that we had time to investigate a little +further, and turned down by the café into a most lovely linden-scented +square called Place de la Carrière. Through the double lines of trees +between the fountains at the farther end was visible an old palace, and +the square was flanked by houses that courtiers only could have lived +in. It all cried out, “Stay with me awhile.” An old park was at one +side, with trees planted _en quinconce_[2]—chestnuts, ash, trembling +poplars—and everywhere was the penetrating fragrance of the lindens. It +was so sweet and loosening under the shade, after the long hot day in the +train, that the young officers began to talk, one of his fiancée waiting +in _Les Landes_, the other of his wife of a year, seen only twice seven +days. And then again we were silent, and under the flowering trees I was +seized with a great longing for the beautiful and calm, for the arts and +ways of Peace. It seemed to me I could not longer think of this, that, +or the other “offensive,” but that I must see before my eyes, hear with +my ears, feel with my touch, the lovely, the melodic, the benign. _O +bon Jésus!_ Not of the battle-fields, not of _réformés_, of limbless, +sightless men, not of starving, frightened children, not of black-robed +women, not of lonely deaths, not of munition-factories. What is this +world we are in? + +I don’t know how long we were silent, but at last one of the young men +said, “We must think of the hour.” Then came a glancing at wrist watches, +rattling of identity disks, and we went back to the café and got a table +by the window, where we could look out on the lovely, calm _ensemble_ and +the fading sky. The menu was brought; it was a meatless day, but with a +snap of the eye the waiter recommended _œufs à la gelée_. We understood +later, when we found, concealed in the bottom of each little dish under +the egg, a thick, round piece of ham. Fried perch, new potatoes, salad, +strawberries and cream, with the celebrated macarons of Nancy—_des Sœurs +Macarons_, as the little piece of paper underneath each says—made a +delicious menu. A certain _petit vin gris du pays_ had been recommended +us with another snap of the eye. + +As we sat waiting, one of the officers exclaimed at a giant, lonely, +priestly figure passing through the Place: + +“_Le voilà, l’aumônier du 52ème._” + +I said, “Do run after him and ask him for dinner, too.” + +He came back with the young man and we had a most enjoyable repast. The +chaplain knew all the things about Nancy that we didn’t. He was a huge, +bearded man, who might have been with the hosts of Charlemagne, and was +a native of Commercy, where Stanislas used to go with his court. The two +Bretons were very Catholic and very royalist; when I remarked upon it, +they said, simply, “Oh, we are all that way, _par là_,” and they spoke +names of great men born in Brittany, and the _aumônier_ told tales of +near yesterdays surpassing those of the heroic age. The gayest of the +Bretons, he who had not just left his young wife and his child unborn, +began to sing, “_Voici un sône tout nouveau_,” and suddenly it was a +quarter before nine and we had time only for a dash to the station _d’une +bonne allure militaire_, which left me breathless. The nine-o’clock +train didn’t, however, leave till ten, as it was waiting for the Paris +train, which didn’t arrive at all. Finally, in a strange heat, vagaries +of lightning without thunder or rain—the thunder we _did_ hear wasn’t +the old-time, pleasant, celestial sort, but something with an easily +traceable, regular, decisive sound—we pulled out of the station, I not +knowing where I was going—no address in the town of Lunéville. + +A thick, heavy, soft, enveloping night was about us. + +Groups of soldiers were lying, sitting, standing in the little stations. +We stopped every few minutes, and I could distinguish them by the light +of cigarette or lantern on their guns and equipment, waiting for motors +to take them to the trenches. At one place I had to descend to show my +_sauf-conduit_; it was inspected and stamped by the flickering light of +a blue-veiled lantern, and I climbed in again. I was beginning to feel a +bit tired, and the end was _not_ in sight. + +We descended at Lunéville in complete darkness, a motley crowd of +military and civilians. My companions were due at different points at +dawn—Baccarat and the Forest of Parroy. As I write, they are in the +trenches. They put me into the hands of a _commissaire_ who said he lived +opposite E. M.’s. I waited, standing by the door, while he locked up +the station, looking out on the silhouette of a gutted, roofless house, +showing dimly against the soft night sky. At last there was a sound of +rattling of keys and the _commissaire_ picked me and my luggage up. We +started forth, the only human beings visible, in what seemed a deserted +town—no lights in streets or houses. + +As we passed a wide open space the scent of flowering lindens enveloped +me, and with me walked the ghosts of lovely and too-amiable ladies, of +witty rulers loving the arts as well as women—Duke Léopold and Madame de +Craon, King Stanislas and Madame de Boufflers, and Voltaire and Madame du +Châtelet. + +We walked seemingly through the entire town toward a freshness of parks, +and in darkness we arrived before a garden gate; silence, and the bell +nowhere to be found. After looking for it in the light of various +matches—vainly, of course—the _commissaire_ had the brilliant idea of +going to the house next door, _la maison de M. le Maire_, the celebrated +M. Keller. A woman came out and showed the bell where nobody would ever +have thought of looking for it, and, furthermore, masked by vines. The +door was finally opened by a tall, slender, white-robed figure with two +black braids showing over her shoulders and a floating scarf. I thought +it a vision of Isolde, but it proved to be Miss P., who cried: + +“We had given you up! We waited at Nancy till the train came in, and then +had to motor back as quickly as possible on account of the lights.” + +I went in, to find E. M. in a most becoming, slinky, pale-blue satin +_négligé_, also with braids on her shoulders. I’d rather have found +them both in _paniers_, shaking the powder out of their hair. However, +I can’t complain; it was all pretty good as regards the stage-setting. +We embraced. I explained that various zealous guardians of the gates of +Nancy had stamped my _sauf-conduit_, and, as I was certainly the only +one of my species arriving by that train, they should have given news +of me when asked concerning _une Américaine_. Then, as the only healthy +rooms in Lunéville in 1917 are on the ground floor, I departed to one +that had been retained for me at the Hôtel des Vosges. Again through the +soft-scented night, guided by my _commissaire_, to a room of extreme +cleanliness and a most comfortable bed. + +It is 2 A.M. I am too tired to sleep. My mind is jacked up by all the +twists and turns of the day. I have been reading the _Cour de Lunéville_, +by Gaston Maugras, found in my room, belonging to E. M. + +Three o’clock. Soft, very soft booming of cannon, and a deep-toned bell. +But no “poppy throws around _my_ bed its lulling charities.” + + + + +CHAPTER III + +LUNÉVILLE + + +Lunéville, a dream of fair women of old and new times, linden scents, and +circling Taubes and little white puffs of shrapnel against blue skies. + + HÔTEL DES VOSGES, _June 15th, 8 a.m._ + +Have just breakfasted to the gentle accompaniment of firing on a Taube. + +Dear old village life began at an early hour, but of course the Taube put +the cocks and the carts and the geese and all the other usual auroral +sounds quite in the background. + +My breakfast service is decorated with the same double cross of Lorraine +that I saw on various houses in Nancy indicating comfortable cellar +accommodation. The cross with the _chardon lorrain_ (Lorraine thistle) is +everywhere. + +Popping and cannonading going on at a lively rate, and whir of aero +wheels; a beautiful day. Some little white puffs of shrapnel visible from +my window; I must get dressed and investigate. + +Cannonading just stopped. I don’t know whether he got off or was got. + +The hotel is discreet and clean, _avec un petit air_. + +It has been a good house of the good epoch, and over each window are +diverse and charming eighteenth-century _motifs_ in gray stone. + + _6.30 p.m._ + +Just home from Vitrimont in a blinding blaze of sun, in a motor driven by +E. M., and bearing in large letters the words “Commission Californienne +pour la Reconstruction des Villages Dévastés,” a sort of “open sesame,” +and everywhere bayonets were lowered to let us pass. Nerves a-quiver with +another day’s impressions. Tried lying down, but it didn’t go, so I am in +an arm-chair looking out of my Lorraine window in full eighteenth century +as regards setting, but with a very definite tide of twentieth-century +warfare sweeping through it all. Meant to go to church, where there +are special prayers to be offered up, at Benediction, for the needs of +Lorraine, but, though the spirit was willing, the rest of me was like +lead after the hot, full day and two hours in one spot too tempting. + +This morning, before I was dressed, E. M. and Mrs. C. P., also staying +in the hotel, appeared, so I hastily harnessed up for the day and +sallied forth with them. We went first to the charming old house of +Mlle. Guérin, and, going in through a wide hallway, stepped out into a +large garden, where, under some trees, several ladies were sitting, one +of them Madame Saint-R. T. We embraced cordially, in the very evident +fulfilment of destiny. Madame Saint-R. T. was reading Pierre Boyé’s _Cour +de Lunéville_, which I matched with Gaston Maugras’s, and then I looked +about me. + +The house, gray and long and low, was, until a hundred years ago, a +Capuchin monastery, when it came into the hands of Mlle. Guérin’s family. +There are old linden-trees in the garden, and some tall cedars and roses +not doing very well; and masses of canterbury-bells and geraniums. At one +end of the garden, against the wall, is an ancient statue of the Virgin, +dark, moss-grown, against still darker walls; we placed the flowers we +had gathered on her breast and in the hands of the Child. _Avions_ were +humming above in the perfect sky, and against the faultless blue was a +very white crescent moon just discernible. + +After accepting an invitation for dinner that night, we walked out +through the town toward the Château, once the haunt of witty rulers, +philosophers, and of the fair and evidently too-amiable ladies beloved by +them. However, when we got into the great square of the palace I forgot +about them, for, looking up at the statue of Lasalle, born in Metz, +1775, and fallen at the battle of Wagram, 1807, were two Senegalese whom +_we_ looked at as the Lunéville populace might once have looked at the +camels the young Duke Léopold brought back with him from his wars with +the Turks. The juxtaposition was as strange. One of the Senegalese had +on a blue cap, the other a red. We gave each one a franc for cigarettes, +received large-mouthed, white-toothed smiles, and proceeded to look at +the remains of a German _avion_ which had fallen beside the statue the +day before, the most complete wreck possible. The aviator had been killed +and his broken wings were being removed to the Museum. It made me quite +still—there was something so complete about it all, the great Château in +the background, the statue of Lasalle, the two Senegalese, the shattered +Taube! + +We walked on rather quietly over the bridge of the Vesouze to the Place +des Carmes—the Place Brûlée, as it is now called. The big Carmelite +convent which formed the square had been used as a barracks for a +generation or so, and one side had been burned with incendiary bombs +when the Germans left, while the other side was untouched. In the +middle was the statue of L’Abbé Grégoire (who made the mistake of being +ahead of his time), and on the pedestal are the words, “_J’ai vécu sans +lâcheté, je veux mourir sans remords_.” We stopped only a moment at the +church—eighteenth century, of course; fine old choir, delicate baroque +designs on the great wooden doors, and dominating towers in a lovely +reddish stone, with charming _motifs_ of urn and scroll, and flying +angels against the sky, or rather _in_ it. + +We began to have that “gone” feeling about this time, and turned back +through the town to E.M.’s house, where we were to lunch. It was cool +and charming as we stepped in out of the sun-flooded garden, stripped +of the mystery of the night before, but quite lovely. In old Lunéville +china vases were masses of pink and purple canterbury-bells. It had been +hastily but charmingly got ready for occupancy with old furniture that +nice people in the provinces can put at the disposition of their friends, +and I saw again Miss P., the Isolde of the dim, scented garden of the +night before. After lunch we sat in an arbor jutting into a corner of the +ancient park, drinking our coffee, and eating some Mirror candies just +out from New York—all to the continued hum of _avions_ and the rather +soft crack of guns. Then the motor was announced, or, to be faithful to +reality, somebody said, “We’d better be off.” We put on our veils, got +into the motor, which E.M. cranked herself, and started off to Vitrimont +without any male assistance of any kind. + + + + +CHAPTER IV + +VITRIMONT + + +A merciless blaze of sun as we passed out through the town, badly +battered at the end, through the Place Brûlée, leading to the road to +Vitrimont, some three kilometers distant, running through green fields +with their little groups of black crosses. All is softly green and gently +rolling. Vitrimont, and around about it, was the scene of some of the +fiercest fighting of that first August of the war, and Vitrimont itself +was taken and lost at the point of the bayonet seven times in one day +as gray German floods kept rolling in over the green eastern hills. The +village is charmingly placed on a little eminence; sloping down from +it are very fertile meadows, then other thickly wooded hills slope up +against the sky. + +We passed through encumbered streets of devastated, roofless houses, +going first to Miss P.’s little dwelling, that she has lived in during +all these months of the superintending of the reconstruction work. It +consists mostly of one perfectly charming room done up in yellow chintz +with a square pattern of pink roses, and some good bits of old furniture, +books, and flowers. She took down from the wall a violin made by a +convalescing soldier out of a cigar-box and drew from it a few soft and +lovely tones. The rest of the house, where she has installed herself +with a woman servant, is typical of the Lorraine peasant houses: a very +wide door to let the harvest-wagons in, a narrow one for human beings, a +narrow hall leading into a kitchen, then the bigger living-room giving +into it, now so charming in its yellow chintz. From the kitchen some +steep stairs lead up into an attic which Miss P. has converted into a +medical dispensary. + +Outside, across the street, is a little pergola effect made of boarding, +where one can sit and look out across the softly rolling, wooded hills. +In it are a table and a few chairs and some pots of flowers. We deposited +our tea-things there, and were starting out to make the tour of the +village, when the mayor, in shirt sleeves, loose suspenders, and slipping +trousers (his wife was killed in the 1915 bombardment of Lunéville and +his son fell in the 1914 fighting in Vitrimont), came to welcome us and +do the inevitable stamping of our safe-conducts. + +We then proceeded to the old church, one of the first things to be +restored, so that its delicious fifteenth-century vaultings and +window-tracings would be beyond further damage from exposure to the +weather. One of the things _not_ hurt was the dado running around +the interior in the form of painted cloth folds by a misguided +nineteenth-century _curé_. War, with its usual discriminating touch, had +left _that_. In the vestibule are some small, perfect Louis XV holy-water +fonts in the form of shells upheld on angels’ heads. A celebrated +baptismal font was removed to Paris. + +We then went to the _maison forte_, as the peasants call what had been +a sort of château, the dwelling of the “first family” of the place. +Its medieval tower was battered beyond repair, and the house itself +pretty well damaged, while some of the rooms still had charming bits of +paneling, and the locks and latches of the doors were perfect examples +of eighteenth-century wrought-iron work. In one of the large rooms, whose +ceiling was broken in by a shell, was a lovely old fireback under a +marble mantel with the arms of the Counts of Vitrimont. By a north window +was sitting a woman working at an embroidery screen with a brilliant +green and silver design; an old man with palsied head was near. + +The school also has been rebuilt. A rosy-faced young schoolmistress +received us, and two little boys kept to do their _pensums_ told us the +name of the President of the United States, and showed us Washington +_and_ San Francisco on the map hanging in the room. This having been +satisfactorily gone through with, the punished little boys, with the +usual luck of the wicked, were given chocolates by E. M. and dismissed; +then we walked out into the little cemetery, approached by a narrow +pathway of arching sycamores. It looks out toward the ancient forest of +Vitrimont; in between are more green, undulating fields ripening with +the 1917 harvest. The walls of the cemetery are battered and broken and +monuments and gravestones are overturned. There was furious hand-to-hand +fighting there, and in those first August days the long dead again +mingled with the living. I passed down by broken, sun-baked walls, +reading the names on the crosses as I went, and these are some of them: + + _Lieut. Jeannot, 26ème Infanterie, aspirant—Un soldat inconnu—_ + + _Haye, Louis, Sergent—28 soldats—_ + + _A notre fils, Charles Diebolt, mort pour la Patrie 1895-1914, + 26ème Infanterie—_ + + _Charles Carron, Musicien; Souvenir d’un camarade, mort au + Champ d’Honneur 31 août 1914—_ + +A rude wooden cross bears the words: + +“_Ci-gît Edouard Durand, fusillé le 25 août 1914 par des lâches._” + +As one goes out is the tomb of a young girl; “_Hélène Midon, 18 ans, +victime du 1er septembre 1915—une prière—la plus jolie fille du +village_.” A white and virginal rose has been planted where she lies. In +this cemetery lie, too, the wife and son of the mayor. + +The first upspringing of early flowers is everywhere—asters, goldenrod, +wild roses—and the hot sun extracted from each its soft, peculiar +perfume. I picked a seemingly perfect rose from the grave of _un soldat +inconnu_. Its petals immediately fell to the ground. Everything grows +with an almost ironical luxuriousness on the shallow, hastily dug graves. +All over Lorraine is this same flowering; it has been and will be, but +there was no time to ponder on the fate of frontier lands, for we were +next to call on the officer commanding the detachment quartered at +Vitrimont, who was housed in a reconstructed building and who had been +waked from slumber to receive us. When I gave him my boxes of cigarettes +for his men he said that he had received some before for the soldiers who +had the Croix de Guerre. I promptly told him mine were for the soldiers +who had _not_ got it. Mrs. C. P. brought bundles of illustrated papers +and postal cards. + +Soldiers are everywhere helping to get in the hay; sweet odors +of freshly cut grass float about on the warm air to the sound of +distant cannonading. However, in spite of everything, it is already +_l’après-guerre_ here, and the delivered population is breathing again, +but it all gives the sensation of something prostrate that needs the +help of strong, fresh hands before it can arise. Mrs. Crocker’s work is +on such a generous, imaginative, sliding scale, and Miss P., untiring +and executive, is of immense tact in dealing with the Lorraine peasant, +a peculiar type demanding peculiar handling. There are numberless +psychological situations needing adjustment in the human as well as +material affairs of devastated villages. Miss P. meets all difficulties +with understanding plus determination. Some are content, some not, with +what is done for them. One woman whose house was completed, and who was +evidently dazzled by the result, said, “It isn’t a house to live in, but +to rent.” + +Another, however, when we went into the grange behind her house, pointing +to the posts sustaining the hay-lofts, said: “Will they hold? The old +ones were twice the size.” + +Sanitary improvements have been worked out as far as possible, but when +you try to tamper with a peasant’s pile of _fumier_, it’s like tampering +with his purse—and _that’s_ impossible. Quite a good deal of live stock +has been put into Vitrimont. + +A soldier stationed with the Vitrimont detachment cranked the motor for +us. His home was near by, and he told us with shining eyes that he had +just bought for ninety francs two pigs. Somebody observed it was the +_premier pig qui coûte_. However that may be, the purchase marked the +remaking of his home. + +One is appalled at the time and energy and money necessary for the +rebuilding of this single village—a million francs is the cost +estimated—and materials and workmen are increasingly difficult to get. +One thinks of the hundreds that _aren’t_ being rebuilt. Vitrimont has +certainly been smiled on by heaven _and_ Mrs. C. + +As we drove home, fleecy, delicately tinted clouds were pinned together +with mother-of-pearl cross-shaped brooches. It is in the air alone that +there is any “war beauty.” + +Soldiers are passing under my window, some in the blue trench-helmets, +with their equipment; some in their fatigue caps, swinging their arms, +free of their eternal burdens; and there are officers afoot or on +horseback, and colonials—marines, we call them—in many kinds of uniforms. + +The poster on the old garden wall opposite says: _Alice Raveau viendra +jouer “Werther,” dimanche, le 17 juin, 1917, en matinée_. + +Charlotte might have lived in the house behind the wall on which it is +pasted, a gray, smooth-façaded house with a good eighteenth-century door, +and a chestnut and a linden in full bloom. At the café on the corner +soldiers are sitting, laughing and talking, humming, drinking their +_bocks_, reading their papers, or throwing words to women who pass by, +and I thought of the men who pass through these villages, leaving to +women an inexorable burden and an untransmittable joy. Many swallows are +flying about, and above it all, in the colorful afternoon air, _avions_ +are humming. On the wings of the French airplanes are stamped a great +circle of color like an eye with red pupil, white retina, and a blue +outer rim. After the hot day, something lovely and cool begins to come in +at the window, and I know soldiers all over Lorraine are resting after +the heat and burden of the day, though in the distance the dull, muffled +sound of cannon continues. Now I must “dress”—that is, put on my other +dress—for the eight-o’clock dinner at Mlle. Guérin’s. + + + + +CHAPTER V + +MONSIEUR KELLER + + + LUNÉVILLE, _Saturday, 16th June, 8 a.m._ + +As I put out my light and opened wide my window last night a rush of +warm, linden-scented air came in, also the thick, soft, meridional voice +of some soldier singing “_En passant par la Lorraine_.” I, too, was +passing through Lorraine, and I got the sleep I didn’t get the night +before. + +This morning more whirring of aeroplanes, but peaceful. The Taube got off +yesterday; all the events of Friday were accompanied by that constant +low-flying of aeroplanes, making one feel one was being looked after. + +Dinner at Monsieur Guérin’s. Monsieur Keller, the celebrated mayor of +Lunéville, whose tact, courage, and good sense saved Lunéville many +tragedies at the time of the German entry, took me out. He has a lively, +perceptive eye, and, all in all, life seems not to have been unkind to +him, though he has been invaded, and his parents before him. He received +the Germans and said adieu to them all in that month of August. His fine +old dwelling, where the treaty of peace was signed in 1801 between France +and Austria, is next to E. M.’s, and housed at one time one hundred +German soldiers, and the general and his staff were quartered in it. He +was, of course, the bright particular hostage during the occupation, and +was followed about by two officers and four soldiers wherever he went. + +“I kept them moving,” he added, with a snap of his perceptive eye. + +At Lunéville one hundred and thirty houses were destroyed and there +was much loss of life among civilians. The mayor has, or rather had, +a property near Vitrimont, called Léomont, on a hill where there was +formerly a Roman temple to the moon, and from this Lunéville is supposed +to take its name. The great farm and its ancient buildings were destroyed +during the bombardments of Lunéville and Vitrimont. + +“It’s only a war monument now,” he added, philosophically. + +It’s the atmosphere of Lunéville that’s so charming to me—this drop into +full eighteenth century, with the boom of twentieth-century cannon in +the distance. In spite of the sound of guns, there is some peace they +can’t destroy. I knew nothing about the French provinces till I got +to Lunéville, and I suppose it’s their immemorial and quite special +atmosphere that I have received. Here the war seems to be a thing of the +past; they think of their _secteur_ only, and of themselves as _libérés_, +and talk of the war in the past tense, and it might be 1814 just as well +as 1914. + +A heavenly evening. We walked in the dim old garden smelling of linden. +No lights anywhere, of course, and, though the stars were beautiful, +they didn’t seem to light up anything terrestrial; the only things +blacker than the night were the giant cedars. At dinner was a youngish, +much-decorated general, coming back for a night from the front; though +born in Lunéville it was the first time he had been here since the +war—always fighting in other parts of France. Besides the general there +were Madame Saint-R. T., E. M., and Miss P., who appeared in some sort +of dull-red tunic that she ought always to wear; the mayor and his wife +(she is Gasconne, and very animated, though she said twenty years of +Lunéville had somewhat calmed her); two or three women with husbands at +the front bringing daughters; several young officers; and M. Guérin and +his daughter—the usual war-time composition of dinner-parties in the +provinces, I imagine. Excellent and very lavish repast, _maigre_, of +course, but everything else except meat in profusion. I didn’t get to bed +till after eleven. M. Guérin walked back to the hotel with us, and, while +he and Mrs. C. P. talked, again I was accosted by ghosts of dead rulers +and lovely ladies and philosophers as we crossed the vast, dim Place +Léopold. They, too, had crossed it and been amorous and witty, pleased or +having _vapeurs_, enveloped by linden scent, and the changeless stars had +controlled their destinies. + + _Later._ + +This morning we visited the military hospital in one of the most charming +edifices I have ever seen, an eighteenth-century convent-building. +The first entry on the tableau in the hallway giving the names of the +benefactors was 1761; the last, 1913. It is a two-storied, cloistered, +rambling edifice, with several wide courtyards planted with trees and +flowers, a fountain in the middle of one; in another a statue of the +Virgin; beyond it a sun-baked vegetable garden; and still farther, behind +a hedge, the inevitable little cemetery. + +[Illustration: AUTHOR AT VITRIMONT] + +[Illustration: CEMETERY, VITRIMONT] + +[Illustration: THE BRIDGE AT LUNÉVILLE] + +We went through the wards of the hospital, high-ceilinged, spotless, +airy, with the _médecin-chef_, talking with the wounded and distributing +cigarettes. + +One of the doctors, also mayor of Gerbéviller, said to us, when we told +him we were going there in the afternoon, “But don’t you want to see the +young German aviator?” + +Thinking it quite “in the note,” we went up-stairs again. He unlocked +the door of a large corner room. At a table by a window looking out on +another little tree-planted court was the young eaglet with fractured +“wing”—arm and shoulder—in plaster. He got up with the military salute +as we came in. I begged permission to address him in German, and when +I asked him where he was _zu Hause_, he answered, “Posen,” and that it +was far. He said he was very comfortable, but, with a longing glance at +the patch of sky, added that he was dreadfully bored. I suppose he was, +after being a bird in the blue ether and breaking into secular silences. +He had been there a month, but was still very thin under the cheek-bones +and dark about the eyes, and very young. He turned to the doctor with an +entirely different expression—a sort of shutting down of iron shutters +over the youthful look—on being asked in German if he had all he needed. + +“Why have I had no answer to the post-cards I have written my mother?” he +asked, adding, “we also have mothers.” + +The _médecin-chef_ said: “You know you can only write once a month; but +write another, all the same, and I will see it is sent off.” + +He had a worn French grammar on the table and had been diligently +studying verbs when we entered. The doctor was _so_ nice with him. + +There is no bitterness at the front; the more one sees of it the more one +realizes that bitterness is the special prerogative of non-combatants far +from the field. I heard an American woman say to an officer just back +from the front, so newly back that “the look” was still in his eyes: + +“I’d like to see you at Cologne, destroying the cathedral. It would serve +the Boches right.” + +He looked at her and made answer: “_Ce n’est pas comme ça, madame_. +Enough has been destroyed in the world. Think rather of reconstruction.” + +Ah! _les civils!_ + +Coming out, we met Mlle. des Garets and went with her to her +evacuation hospital near the station, which was a triumph of turning +heterogeneous spaces into a single purpose. Two old railway sheds had +been converted into receiving-rooms, douche-rooms, refectories, and +several eighteenth-century cellars had been so arranged that in case of +bombardment they could stow away fifteen hundred wounded. This seems a +simple enough statement, but just think what stowing away, _suddenly_, +fifteen hundred wounded means! Mlle, des Garets, a daughter of General +des Garets, has been marvelous in her devotion and practicality since the +beginning of the war. + +I hear the motor-horn.... + + + + +CHAPTER VI + +GERBÉVILLER AND LA SŒUR JULIE + + +We started out for Gerbéviller in a blinding sun, over a road leading +through pleasant green meadows. That is one of the strange things of +Lorraine—everywhere destroyed villages and everywhere well-planted +fields, almost as if planted by the ghostly throngs of heroes who lie +within. For in nearly every field there are the little clusters of black +crosses, hung with flowers or the tricolor badge, or quite bare—with the +number of men who lie within, or a date, scarcely ever a name. + +We went into the village, very ancient, that owes its name, Ville des +Gerbes, to a miracle performed there by St.-Mansuy, past the completely +destroyed château of the Lambertye family, and, going up a winding +street, reached the house of Sister Julie, the heroine of August, 1914. +On every side were gutted houses and piles of mortar and stones; one +enterprising individual of the fair sex had installed against a resisting +wall Le Café des Ruines, and some soldiers and civilians were sitting on +bits of stone and masonry, drinking their _bocks_ and reading newspapers. +The convent-building is in the principal street, and it was unharmed +save for a little peppering of rifle-fire and a bit of cornice knocked +off—_par la grâce de Dieu_, as Sister Julie afterward told us. Up three +steps, and one finds oneself in a narrow, ancient stone hallway. Turning +to the right, one enters a cool, peaceful room of the convent-parlor +type—a large crucifix, lithographs of the last three popes, horsehair +furniture, white crocheted doilies, everything spotless. In a moment +Sister Julie came in. Her flashing eyes, her determined jaw, show her +always to have been a woman of parts, and yet her whole life is really +crowded into those few eventful days of the latter part of August, +when “they” entered the town. For the rest, the quiet, useful routine +of the nursing and teaching order of St. Charles de Nancy, which had +been _chassé_ at the time of the French Revolution; a few nuns managed +to remain hidden, and the order has been preserved. She is evidently a +responsive soul, for she immediately began to enact the story of the +arrival of the Germans, with a certain art in the presentment of the +tragedy of the little town, gained, no doubt, by many recitals. + +The Germans came into the town on the 27th of August, after the heroic +defense of the bridge over the Mortagne by a detachment of fifty-four men +of the 2d Chasseurs from sunrise to sunset, who held up during hours the +brigade of the Bavarian General Clauss. Finally, at five o’clock the gray +hosts got through and passed in with a great sound of tramping feet and +ringing hoof, and, after the manner of invaders, _mettant le feu et le +sang dans le village_. Sister Julie thought her hour also had come. In +the room where we were sitting she had placed her thirteen wounded men, +brought in at intervals during the day. “_Mes petits_,” she called them, +and her eyes shone softly at the memory. She sent the other sisters up to +the attic, and remained alone to face the enemy and to beg that the house +be spared. She went out on the little step, not knowing what fate awaited +her, and found four immense officers on horseback, with their horses’ +heads facing her. + +“They thought they were Charlemagnes, immense men, with light hair and +light-blue eyes and arched noses and gallooned uniforms. I was like a +dwarf in comparison, and I am not small.” To tell the truth, she is +indeed a “muscular Christian.” + +Then began the interrogatory, the ranking officer demanding of her: + +“_Sie sprechen Deutsch?_” + +She said to us, with a smile: + +“I did speak it in my youth, but it wasn’t the moment to recall my +studies, and I didn’t answer, and we remained for a few seconds looking +at each other _comme des chiens de faïence_.[3] I so little on the +house-step, and they so tall on their big horses, and with poignards +drawn from their breast pockets, _pas le beau geste de tirer l’épée du +côté_,” she finished, disdainfully. + +Finally, the silence was broken by the ranking officer, whose next words +were in French: “_Nous ne sommes pas des barbares_; you have soldiers and +weapons concealed in your house. Lead the way.” + +Then the four officers dismounted and, with pistols in one hand and +poignards in the other, followed Sister Julie into the little room where +the thirteen wounded men were lying. Their helmets touched the ceiling as +they looked about them. Standing by the first bed nearest the door, an +officer pulled down the covers. + +“You have arms concealed.” + +“We have nothing. You will find only men lying in their blood.” + +By this time Sister Julie was not only talking, but acting the scene, +indicating where the beds were, where she had stood, where the four +_chefs_ had entered, and how the eyes of the wounded men followed her. +The officers made the rounds of the beds, pulling down each stained +cover, Sister Julie following to re-cover the men, who were expecting, as +was she, the order to burn the house. + +She continued: “They were Bavarians, and when I said: ‘You see, we +have nothing. Leave me my wounded, in the name of Mary most Holy,’ the +commanding officer began to look at the point of his shoe as men do when +they are embarrassed. I have seen surgeons do just that when they are in +doubt about an operation,” she added. “Then he suddenly turned without a +word and went out, followed by the other three, pistols and poignards in +hand. They passed up the street with their detachment, ‘_mettant le feu +et le sang au village; et moi, restée avec mes petits, à remercier le bon +Dieu—et de leur donner à boire_.’” + +We gave our little offerings into her generous hands, and sniffed +the scent of freshly baked bread that permeated the corridor. E. M. +photographed her standing on her historic steps, and we went out into the +hot, cobble-stoned street, to the completely ruined Lambertye château, +standing in the midst of a park whose gardens were designed by Louis de +Nesle. Two large and very beautiful porphyry basins near the house were +untouched—not a nick or a scratch. On the great marble fireplace of what +had been the big central hall, now uncovered to the day, we could still +read the words: + + Charles de Montmorency + Duc de . . . . mbourg, + Maréchal de France. + +Afterward E. M. took some more photographs, and we sped homeward to pack +our belongings and dash into Nancy to get the eight-o’clock train from +there for Bar-le-Duc, to be ready for the high adventure of Verdun early +the next morning. + + + + +CHAPTER VII + +BAR-LE-DUC + + + BAR-LE-DUC, _Sunday, June 17th, 2 a.m._ + +Scribbling in an indescribable brown-upholstered room, where one lies +on the outside of a dark and menacing bed covered by one’s own coat, a +strong odor of stable coming in at the window and a horrid black cat +wandering about. It’s no night to sleep. Two o’clock has just softly +sounded from some old bell. I didn’t hear one o’clock, I am thankful to +say. I was in a sort of trance of fatigue when we got here at eleven. + +Miss P. motored us into Nancy, straight into the setting sun. My +eyes were so tired that I didn’t try to pierce the hot glaze, but +there’s a memory of running through green fields, with black crosses, +saline installations (Rosières aux Salines), manufacturing towns +(Dombasle-sur-Meurthe), and Gothic towers (St. Nicholas du Port), and +a dash through the new factory suburbs of Nancy into the delicate and +perfect loveliness of the Place Stanislas. Neither E. M. nor I had a +permit to go to Bar-le-Duc, the point of departure for Verdun, but Mrs. +P. had, so she was deputed to order dinner at the Café Stanislas, while +we went to the Hôtel de Ville to try to find the _Secrétaire Général_, +Mr. Martin, a special friend of E. M.’s, and do what I call “cutting +barbed wire.” It seemed at one time as if the high adventure of Verdun +might have to be abandoned, as the _Secrétaire Général_, who alone could +give us the necessary permission, had been called to Pont-à-Mousson to +investigate the results of a raid of German _avions_ there and at Pompey +that morning. However, when fate has made up its mind that things shall +happen, any deadlock is cleared up by the puppets themselves, literally +on a string this time, for as we were standing there in the room with the +impotent substitute of the _Secrétaire Général_, the telephone rang, and +who was it but the so desired gentleman calling up about something on +the long-distance wire. E. M. literally grabbed the receiver, explained +the situation, and he gave the necessary authority to his substitute, +and we in turn gave the oft-repeated story of our lives from the cradle +to the present moment, and finally could depart with papers in order for +dinner at the Café Stanislas. Again as we walked across the lovely Place +my soul was stirred with memories of peace, love, and the arts of peace. +I seemed to understand anew those words, “The arts of peace,” and in a +half-dream I looked up at the heavens. Again pale, charming faded tints +of blues and grays and pinks were the background for the urns and figures +of the sky-line of the pure and lovely buildings that surround it, and a +crescent moon with something untouched and virginal flung a last charm +about it all. + +[Illustration: FOUNTAIN OF AMPHITRITE BY JEAN LAMOUR, PLACE STANISLAS, +NANCY] + +We found Mrs. C. P. waiting at the same table at which I had sat two +nights before with the sons of Mars and the man of God. We were just +beginning our dinner when, looking out of the window, we saw something +strange and for a moment unclassifiable, in an almost impossible +juxtaposition of ideas. No one’s mind would be sufficiently mobile to +grasp what it was without blinking a bit. The great, portentous black +cross on its wings was what started the mind working properly. It was +the Taube brought down at Pont-à-Mousson that morning, being drawn on +a _camion_ through the delicious, delicate tracery of Jean Lamour’s +wrought-iron gate! + +1755-1917! + +We dashed out; a crowd was already gathering. A young French aviator with +a curious look in his eyes was watching it being set up. Having espied +the wings on his uniform, we asked “what and where and how” and are +“they” dead or prisoners? Some one said, “_C’est lui_,” indicating the +young man, who did not answer our questions, but continued to stand quite +still in some sort of dream or _détente_ of nerves. But a man in the +crowd said: + +“He brought it down at Pont-à-Mousson, and _they_ are prisoners.” We were +standing by the statue of _Stanislas le Bienfaisant, Stanislas le Bon_, +his reign _le règne des talents, des arts et des vertus_ (these last not +as we know them in 1917), and he _was_ looking on strange things! We went +back to the café, consumed in haste and distraction the very nice little +dinner, topped off by strawberries and cream and the celebrated _macarons +des Sœurs Macarons_, and again I found myself dashing to the station, +which one thinks is near and isn’t, accompanied by my two fair friends, +all going at the same _allure militaire_ that I had taken forty-eight +hours before with the two Breton officers and the Chaplain of the 52d. + +Wild dash at the station for our hand-luggage; and stampings of +safe-conduct, then a hunt for the porter, who, with an excess of zeal +(and hope), had reserved a coupé for us and put up the fateful words +_dames seules_. Now there is no such thing as _dames seules_ at the +front. Many officers were standing in the corridor, one on crutches, +so we tore the forbidding words from the windows, and the compartment +automatically, though courteously, filled. + +Among them two immense, dark-bearded men from the Midi, with accents to +defeat the enemy, and a pale officer from near the Swiss frontier, as we +afterward discovered. He smiled when I said to the dark one sitting by +me, after the greetings and thanks: + +“You come from Marseilles?” (He came from a little place five miles from +there.) + +The officer on crutches stretched his leg with a contraction of the face +and a sigh of relief. They were all _en route_ for home, from the same +regiment, the seven precious days of _permission_ counting from the hour +they reach their homes till the hour they leave them, after months in the +field. They had fought in Belgium, on the dunes, these men of the south, +those first eighteen months, up to their waists in water, often for weeks +at a time. They found the Lorraine landscape that so soothed my soul only +fairly pretty, and spoke soft praises of _le Midi_. + +They all had the strange, bold, hard, shining look about the eyes, with a +deeper suggestion of sadness, that men just returning from action have. +It is the warrior look—one kills or one is killed, one conquers or is +conquered; there is no _via media_. + +The pale officer from Savoy said: “There should never be any war; _c’est +trop terrible_; but, once given the fact that war exists, all means to +victory are justifiable.” And the bright, hard look deepening on his face +made me suddenly think of Charles Martel and Charlemagne, and I knew +it was the way French warriors have looked through the ages, but, oh! +France. “_Oh doux pays!_” + +At Bar-le-Duc, dating from the Merovingians, at least, we descended (our +bags passed out of the windows by the officers), and went through a dark, +silent, linden-scented town, obliged to drag our own belongings through +an interminable street, over a bridge across tree-bordered black water, +till we got to this abode, known to men by the name of Hôtel de Metz et +du Commerce. What the devils call it I don’t know; I have just chased the +black cat out, and if I don’t get some sleep I shall not get to Verdun. +There’s no linden scent coming in at my window here. + + BAR-LE-DUC, _eight o’clock a.m._ + +Waiting in the sandy-floored dining-room of the hotel. All three of us +very cross. At dawn not only the light, but the sounds of chopping of +wood, emptying of pails, and invectives of various sorts came in at the +dreadful windows. At seven the maid mounted to know if we wanted the +water in the tea or the tea in the water. That tea “threw” them. Not a +sign of the famous Bar-le-Duc jellies that one has eaten all one’s life, +even _outre-mer_. We compared notes of furry, rumpled sheets, dented +pillows, dark coverlets, dreadful scents, and unmistakable sounds. We are +now somewhat restored by hot and very good _café au lait_, and Mrs. C. +P. is looking out of the door for signs of Mr. de Sinçay, who has just +stepped out of his motor. + + + + +CHAPTER VIII + +VERDUN + + +_Verdun! The sound is like a clarion call. Verdun! It is shorty but +gravely harmonious. It is satisfying to the ear, it is quickening to the +soul. Verdun! It is for France the word of words; in it lies the whole +beauty of her language and of her martial glory as well._ + +_Who shall say it is but a fortuitous collection of letters, this word +Verdun, beautiful as a chalice, that holds the dearest blood of France? +It would not have been the same mystically, perhaps not actually, had it +been Toul or Epinal or even that other melodic sound, Belfort. Verdun! +It is the call through red days and nights, and everywhere the sons of +France rallying to it with great hurryings lest mayhap one be there +before the other, to dye with deeper color the crimson of high deeds. +Verdun, ear and tongue relinquish you regretfully._ + +_Verdun, glory and sorrow of France, I salute you, Verdun! Verdun!_ + +Night, silence, and memory turning over the events of the day. + +I stopped writing this morning as a gentleman of supreme personal +distinction entered the little sandy-floored café, a gentleman who +should always be arriving in a dark-red, sixty-horse-power Panhard, or +receiving on a terrace with a castle behind him, or sitting in a library +of first editions only, in soft but gorgeous bindings. It was M. de S., +and we shortly all got into the big auto, we three women on the broad +back seat, M. de S. in front with the military chauffeur. Even the bend +of his long back was _l’élégance suprême_. He said the motor had seen +three years of war-service, but certainly there was something unfatigued +about it as it started out through the ancient streets of Bar-le-Duc, on +the white road to the fateful fortress. The arrow on the first Verdun +sign-post gave a feeling of having shot itself into one’s heart, as well +as pointing the way. + +Almost immediately we met a long convoy bringing men back from the front, +ourselves and everything else enveloped in a white plaster-of-Paris-like +cloud of dust. It seemed an endless line, with their camouflaged canvas +tops and sides, painted in great splashes of green and brown. In some +of them the men were singing the _chansons de route_ that soldiers so +love, and many of them had green branches stuck in the sides as a slight +protection against the sun and the shifting white dust. The grass and +flowers of the wayside were as if dipped in whitewash, but the road, like +all the roads of France—those veins of her body of death _and_ life—was +in excellent condition. Next we met a great line of Red Cross convoys, +and all the time we were swinging through ruined villages. + +At the entrance to X. the guard stopped us with his bayonet. Our papers +being in _archi_ condition, we passed through the little village of the +_Quartier-Général_ without further hindrance. In front of the Mairie +there is a quaint old fountain with its statue of three women holding up +a _motif_ of flowers in a basket; near by there is an old hostelry, _Le +Raisin Blanc_, in front of which soldiers were sitting, drinking their +_bocks_ and reading newspapers. Turning out again on the white road, we +pass settlements of Red Cross barracks and munition parks, looking for +all the world like mining camps in Western towns at home. + +We arrived at Dugny at ten o’clock and descended to look about for a +suitable place for the installing of a canteen, which was partly our +reason for being where we were. There is an old country house in the +middle of the little town, with a coat of arms above the door and lions +crouching on its gates; behind is a lovely ancient park with linden and +elder trees in full blossom, and under them quiet, shady walks. It is +used as an ambulance station, and convalescing men were sitting or lying +about on the ground. We met the _médecin-chef_, who, however, like all +doctors, didn’t care twopence for well soldiers, and was but platonically +interested in the canteen matter—just as the military count out the sick +and wounded soldiers. It’s all in the point of view. + +As we stood talking a German aeroplane flew high above Dugny outlined in +a perfect sky. Little white clouds of shrapnel from the vertical guns +began to burst about it in the clear blue, and there was a louder sound +of cannonading as the _avion_ disappeared in some far and upper ether. E. +M.’s brother had been once stationed here for months, and she told the +story of his meeting unexpectedly his cousin Casimir. They were going +different ways with different detachments, and they “held up the war” +while they embraced! Smart officers, ahorse and afoot, convoys going to +the trenches with rations, great carts full of bread, and ambulating +soup-kitchens filled the little street. Verdun was but seven kilometers +distant, and the road lay straight before us as we left Dugny. On the +horizon the outline of the citadel and the towers of the cathedral +showed against the sky. Another endless convoy of ambulances and +_camions_ enveloped us in a choking white dust. This is the lining of the +front, and it is quite easy to see where the war billions go. + +We passed into Verdun under the Porte de France, and then went +immediately up to the citadel through the old drawbridge, all dating from +the days of Louis XIV and Vauban, and it was at Verdun that the sons of +Louis the Debonair met to divide the empire of Charlemagne.[4] + +We got out by the demolished barracks, and M. de S. went to pay his +respects to the colonel, who was expecting him. As I descended I saw at +my feet a beautiful tiny bird’s nest, which I picked up with a clutching +at the heart. The birds went away that first terrible spring of 1916, the +colonel afterward told me, but they had come back in great numbers in +1917, and were everywhere building their nests, in spite of the continual +bombardments. The citadel was a desolate mass of mortar, stones, rusty +barbed-wire entanglements, blackened and broken tree stumps, but +everywhere, too, were quantities of undiscourageable new green. + +We met a young doctor coming across the Place, and fell into conversation +with him. He had been at the front since the beginning, and he was +sad-eyed in spite of his youth. When I spoke of the near-by tenth-century +tower toppling and half-demolished, all that was left of the ancient +church, and the celebrated abbey of Saint-Vannes, and said what a pity +it was that the beautiful things of the old days had to go, he answered, +with a gesture of complete indifference: + +“_Qu’est-ce que celà fait? A nous qui restons de faire de nouvelles +choses, et mieux, que n’en out fait nos aïeux._ All the comrades I loved +in the beginning are gone—and what remains, or perishes, of brick and +mortar is of little account beside the sum of living things that is lost.” + +Just at this moment M. de S. appeared with the colonel, and the young +philosopher touched his cap. We were then introduced to Colonel Dehaye, +a brilliant officer and delightful _homme du monde_, loving the arts of +peace, as I afterward discovered, as well as practising those of war. +In his hands now lie the destinies of Verdun. He presented us each then +and there with the famous medal of Verdun and an accompanying paper with +his signature, and furthermore gave us an invitation to lunch, which we +accepted with delight after delicate references to sandwiches and wine in +the motor. We spent half an hour walking about the citadel, and he showed +us the most recent damage—of yesterday—when a very especially precise aim +of the Germans had destroyed nearly everything that had been left. + +Then we descended really into the bowels of the earth, cemented, +white-tiled, electric-lighted, artificially aired bowels, to the very +depths of the great fortress. To get to the mess-room of the colonel and +his staff we had to pass through a long room where perhaps a hundred +officers were sitting at dinner. There was something deeply impressive +about the dim, long, low length of it, and those groups of men prepared +for battle. Thoughts of Knights Templar and Crusaders came to me, and +there seemed something of consecration about it all. Behind the tables on +the walls were hung helmets and arms. + +[Illustration] + +[Illustration] + +A young officer said to me once, “We don’t tell _all_ our stories there +and we don’t often laugh very loud.” From it we got into the small, +well-lighted mess-room, where kings and presidents and premiers and +generalissime, too, have dined in the past few months. + +The staff and Paul Renouard, the painter, were waiting, and we sat down +immediately to an excellent dinner, though the colonel said it was +entirely _à l’improviste_. There were flowers on the table, too, but +these I did suspect were specially for us. The colonel remarked, with the +_hors-d’œuvre_, that he would take us to the battle-field after dinner, +to the famous Fort de Souville, and the repast, instead of a meal, became +the prelude to a supreme climax. The arrival of General Pershing was the +first subject of conversation, accompanied by the most courteous and +appreciative remarks; one of the officers told of the first day when the +Stars and Stripes had appeared in the field with the other flags, and +of the cheers that went up. And they drank to the United States, and we +drank to France; they praised the work of women, and spoke of the immense +moral and practical aid of the entry into the war of the United States. +Whether it would shorten the conflict was another question. To the +captain sitting opposite I said: + +“If the soul of the war has a special dwelling-place it is Verdun,” +and told him how the thought of America turned about it those days of +February and March of 1916. “But,” I added, “there was a time when I +thought they might get through.” + +The commandant answered quickly from the other end of the table: “Ah, +madame, there was a time when we thought they might get through, _mais +‘ils n’ont pas passé—ils ne passeront pas.’_” + +And then I quoted the beautiful phrase of the _Commentaires de Polybe_:[5] + +“_Et Verdun y en ruines, avec ses soldats, debouts, toujours dans la +tempête, comme il n’y en a jamais eu de plus beaux ... avec Nivelle, +et avec Pétain, avec l’image de Raynal qui vient roder la nuit dans +les décombres de Vaux et avec le paraphe de Castelnau sur cet autre +Couronné...._” + +We ended a most pleasant repast, with its great under throb, by coffee +and tilleul and a little glass of cassis (black-currant cordial), the +native liqueur. + +Then, on into a room where we pulled up our coat-collars so no white +would show, slung the bags containing the gas-masks across our chests, +left our flowers, parasols, and other impedimenta, and went out through +the long, dim now empty hall to get into the autos. We waited half an +hour for ours, which had performed the seemingly impossible feat of +getting lost in Verdun. The officers began to get impatient, and M. de S. +to make bitter remarks about his chauffeur; the colonel to walk up and +down. The commandant said, “_Du calme_,” and the colonel answered that +only sous-lieutenants _savent avoir du calme_. “_Ils sont étonnants_,” +said another officer with four stripes on his arm. + +Finally our man appeared, with a story no one listened to, Colonel Dehaye +getting in with us, the other officers leading the way in his auto. + +It was two o’clock, and a white, burning sun was shining on a white, +burning earth as we drove through the crumbling streets, through houses +in every stage of ruin, to the great plain of La Woèvre, toward the +dreadful, scarred battle-field, where the chariot of God rides the ridges. + +Verdun is built to reinforce the natural rampart of the Côtes de Meuse, +to bar the passage of the river’s valley, and cover the Argonne. + +As we passed out of the town on one side was a cemetery where sleep +four thousand, on another side sleep twenty thousand—and these are but +a handful to the numbers that lie everywhere in the white, scarred +earth around Verdun. The colonel named various battered places as we +passed—Fleury, Tavannes, etc., and finally we climbed a steep hillside +near the celebrated Fort de Souville, where we left the motors. The +abomination of desolation over which we passed once had been a green, +smiling, wooded, gently rolling hillside. The village of Tavannes was +but a spot of white horror, even with the ground. The hills of Douaumont +and Thiaumont had on their blanched sides only a few blackened stumps of +trees that will not leaf again. To the left as we looked about were the +fateful summits of Le Mort Homme and Hill 304 with a white ribbon of road +running between. We walked along, stumbling over heaps of water-bottles, +haversacks, helmets, cartridge-belts, belonging alike to the invader +and the invaded—bones, skulls, rusty rolls of barbed wire, remains of +_obus_, and mixed with what lies in the earth of fair and brave and dear +are myriads of unexploded shells. The country round Verdun, despite the +rich blood that could render it so fertile, can’t be cultivated for years +on account of the vast quantities of shells buried in it. A man pulls a +piece of wire, and he loses his hand, another tries to clear away bits of +something round, and his head is blown off. One of the officers told us +of societies for the demineralization of battle-fields, but the work is +slow and costly. + +Yet a winter’s snows had lain upon it all and spring had breathed over +it since the first awful combats of February, 1916. I knew suddenly some +complete “heartbreak over fallen things” as I stumbled, and, looking +down, saw at my feet a helmet, and by it a skull with insects crawling in +and out the eyes, and a broken gun-stock. + +Great and gorgeous patches of scarlet poppies in a profusion never seen +before splash themselves like something else red against the white earth, +or fill great shell hollows and spill and slop over the fields.... + +The Germans had been shelling a near-by 75 battery that very morning, and +fresh bits of _warm_ shrapnel were lying all about as we twisted in and +out of the _boyaux_. I brought away but a small bit with me, having early +discovered that a small piece is as good a reminder as a big bit, and +much easier to carry. We passed the grave of a soldier buried where he +had fallen, a few hours before. His shallow grave, with its little cross, +was running _red_, but he was mayhap already in his Father’s house of +many mansions. + +In many places under the feet scarcely buried bodies gave an elastic +sensation.... + +We first visited the emplacement of a great gun worked by the most +complicated electric machinery, something that seemed built as strongly +as the Pyramids, revolving on its great axis, at a touch fulfilling that +which it was cast into being to perform. When we came out, we climbed +some last white scarred heights that the colonel called “_Les Pyrénées_,” +and there, stretched out, was the whole great and fateful panorama of +Verdun—“_par où ils n’ont pas passé_.” I thought of the men I had known +who had been engaged in those dreadful attacks, whose mothers and wives +had looked upon them again, and of others still whose wives and mothers +would behold them no more. And I had again a breaking of the heart over +the vast tangle, and cried within myself, “Shall all the world be a +valley of dry bones?” + +[Illustration: OUR PARTY ON THE BATTLE-FIELD AT VERDUN, JUNE 17, 1917] + +[Illustration: IN THE BOYAUX, VERDUN, JUNE 17, 1917] + +Then we hid ourselves in some _boyaux_ well out of sight, for we were +nearing a camouflaged battery, two of whose guns had been silenced +that very morning. In dark woods over beyond Tavannes the Germans were +intrenched, and their shells were also falling thickly over Douaumont and +Thiaumont. It was the front indeed. It was at Tavannes that in a dreadful +moment, in a moment such as can happen anywhere, artillery fire had +been trained on thousands of men who were rushing to the top in a great +charge. And yet I kept thinking of the words of a dead hero, “Nothing but +good can befall the soldier, so he plays his part well.”[6] + +At that moment the enemy began to send an unwonted number of shells, +which were exploding just behind Thiaumont, so the colonel told the +captain of artillery—who had joined our party at the gun emplacement—to +answer, and he climbed down a steep decline to his masked battery. In a +few minutes, as we lay hidden in the _boyau_, twenty discharges sounded; +but shells that go up, come down, and on the other side of the hill we +were watching, who shall say what agony? I am so constituted that I +cannot think of the passage of any soul into the next life other than +with awe. + +We then descended into the Fort of Souville, down 850 feet, where men +live and breathe and have their being in dimly lighted, damp, narrow +spaces. But it seemed temporarily like heaven to be out of the glare and +the heat. Preceded by lanterns, an officer in front of each one of us, we +crept or felt our way up and down, stumbling through vault-like passages, +where we would come upon men lying asleep in damp, dim places, or writing +by the light of lanterns, or preparing meals in their kitchen, or waiting +at the little dispensary, and then we stumbled up again into the heat, +reverberating from the white hills. + +On the way back we passed a little chapel installed in an old cemented +dugout. On the altar were many flowers. I bent and peered into the +dimness, and, as I knelt, it seemed to me that never had I so understood +the words _Introibo ad Altare Dei_. I thought of the Lamb of God, and +martyrs new and old, and the catacombs and the primitive Church.... Again +men in stress were worshiping in the bowels of the earth. + +We were photographed against a particularly sinister group of blackened +trees, and we picked up some helmets and bits of _obus_. As I write, the +_couronne_ of one, quite evenly exploded, lies on the little table by my +side. + +Just before getting into town the colonel ordered the motor to stop, and +we got out, and, walking through a field of deep, waving grass, found +ourselves in the largest of the cemeteries with its long, even lines of +broad graves where lie, in a last co-mingling, the brothers of France, +and I repeated to myself in a quiver of feeling, “_Scio quod Redemptor +meus vivit et in novissime die resurrecturus sum et in carne mea videbo +Deum Salvatorum meum_.” + +All was in beautiful order. The crosses bore sometimes a name, but +oftener a number only: _140 soldats_, or _85 soldats_. The round tricolor +badge hung from every cross. There were a few graves of officers who +could be identified, their bodies having been brought in by friends or +faithful orderlies. How anything could live on those fire-swept hills is +the wonder, not that any one died. Suddenly, again, a great sadness fell +upon me, and as the colonel pointed out the grave of an especially dear +comrade—Colonel Dubois, I think his name was—dead in some heroic manner, +I could look no more. + +We finally got back into the green freshness of Verdun, whose normal +state, I see, is to be vine-bowered, tree-shaded, grass-carpeted. After +the scarred and blazing battle-field, and in spite of the ruined streets, +the roofless houses, I had a feeling of refreshment, coming from those +heights where “all the round world is indeed a sepulcher” ... and near +the station is the monument to the heroes fallen at Verdun, in 1870. + +Of the Cercle Militaire on the right bank of the Meuse little is left +except the walls, but it is no loss architecturally, and _messieurs les +officiers_ are otherwise engaged. The banks of the Meuse are a pitiful +sight. The old houses that reach over the water are roofless, bits of +mattress hang from broken windows, and heaps of mortar are falling +into the river. The great Porte Chaussée of the fifteenth century, +with its two huge gray towers, is unharmed. We stopped at the theater +for a moment. A big shell last month had made a sort of pudding of it. +We crept in through a large aperture, to find the orchestra stalls +precipitated onto the stage, and the loges sagging, ready to fall. We +then went up into the old, high part of the town, and Colonel Dehaye, +a true lover of the arts, in sadness showed us the cathedral and the +charming old buildings that surround it. The huge church constructed +according to Germanic traditions has two equal transepts, with high and +beautiful vaulting, which is now so damaged that the roof at any time may +fall. Inside were masses of débris, and nothing was left of the famous +stained-glass windows except powdery bits of color on the floor. The +colonel had rescued some old Spanish Stations of the Cross, and had put +in safety a few other portable things of value. We passed out through +the sacristy, which was a scene of disorder, bits of vestment, torn +altar-cloths, and books lying about on the floor. + +“But,” I said, “the Germans didn’t get here?” + +“Oh,” answered one of the officers, with a smile, “_ce sont nos bons +français_.” + +Then we descended into the crypt, the remains of the church that Pope +Eugene III built in the twelfth century. Leading down to it is an old +winding stair, with a delicious eighteenth-century wrought-iron railing. +An artist in a white blouse, sent to restore some frescoes dating +from the twelfth century, was rescuing from too complete destruction +a beautiful figure of Christ with something stern and immutable in +His look, reminding me of the Christ in the church of San Cosmo and +San Damiano in the Roman Forum. We then went into the cloisters, with +lovely and diverse _motifs_ on their vaultings, very much damaged in +parts, a big shell having landed in the courtyard which they inclose. M. +Renouard had stationed himself there with his easel, before a beautiful +arrangement of trees and grass and enchanting old statues on mossy +pedestals. In front of him was a great heap of fallen masonry, and a +beautiful bit of toppling vaulting that the colonel had had propped up by +beams, though he said: “_Demain ou après-demain cela ne sera plus_—it’s +all at the mercy of a shot.” A sculptured Holy Family, somewhat the worse +for _war_, is plastered into one side, dating from the fourteenth century. + +From there we passed into what had been a seminary until 1914, and one +of the rooms with rows of _lavabos_ (not of the eighteenth century, as +the colonel observed) looked out on the great plain of La Woèvre, and +again the fateful panorama was unrolled before us. In what had been a +council-room there was an old choir high up over the door, with a little +balcony giving a Spanish effect. + +Coming out, at the north side of the church, an ancient Romanesque statue +of Adam and Eve on the outer hemicycle of the apse and some little +windows, also of pure Romanesque, were pointed out to us. In the ground +underneath the statue of Adam and Eve a great shell had opened up a Roman +foundation and walls, formed of immense square blocks of stone, hidden +during ages. + +Near the church is the great Cour d’Honneur, once the house of the +bishop, a very perfect example of Louis XIV, making me think of +Versailles; but it, too, has received many a blow in its lovely heart. +One longed so to bandage up all those wounds of war, preserve in being +those lovelinesses of another age. + +We then visited the house of Pope Julius II (I forget what he was doing +at Verdun), which, fortunately, has not suffered much up to now, though +it, too, is at the mercy of a shot—to-night, to-morrow, or the next day. +It would make a perfect museum, with its beautiful old door, bearing +inscription and date, through which one passes into a tiny V-shaped court +with a flowering linden-tree, and there are two romantic winding stone +stairways, with something Boccaccioesque about them, leading to the upper +stories. + +Though it wasn’t an occasion in which to think how one felt, the flesh +_was_ weary by this time, and we went gladly back to the colonel’s +mess-room, where we had tea, or rather, to be exact, some ice-cold +champagne _coupé d’eau_, and some sort of madeleine, a specialty of +Verdun, which gave us the little flip-up that we needed. Another +specialty of Verdun is the _dragées_ (hard, sugared almonds), but the +factory, so one of the officers said, had been destroyed the year before +in one of the bombardments. Generations of tourists having broken their +teeth on them, however, we wasted no regrets. + +The colonel begged us to stay for dinner, and the cinematograph +representation after, but we were obliged to regretfully decline, as +we had to pay our respects to the general at Y——, to whose courtesy M. +de S. owed the safe-conducts to Verdun. As we passed by we looked into +the long, narrow hall where the representations are given, the sight of +which the colonel offered as further inducement. It would have ennobled +for me forever that most boresome of modern things, had I assisted at one +underneath the citadel of Verdun. The hall was hung with flags of the +Allies. With sudden tears I saluted, ours waving among them. + +We thanked a thousand times the colonel and his group of officers +standing by the auto at the entrance to the subterranean passage, and +though I had a consciousness of the uncertainty of their lives, I thought +again “Nothing but good can befall the soldier, so he plays his part +well.” + +Now comes to mind a conversation I had before I ever dreamed of going +to Verdun, when I talked for three hours of battles and scars with a +young hero wounded on Hill 304, June 9, 1916. He is a flashing-eyed, +straight-featured, tall, slim-waisted young hero who knows what it is to +have made, and with astounding ease, the sacrifice of the life that he +loves so, and drinks in full bumpers. And this is part of what we said, +one of a thousand, of ten thousand, of a hundred thousand happenings, of +which Verdun is the golden frame: + + De G.—“There was something hanging about Verdun; ‘_Ils ne + passeront pas, et ils ne sont pas passés_.’ If the enemy could + have but known how thinly, poorly, in so many places it was + defended! It was seemingly the will of Heaven rather than the + strength of mortals that they were not to pass, not man, not + artillery, but the high destiny of nations. + + “When I lay during those hours at the _poste d’observation_ + on Hill 304, in front of the French army, signaling ‘shell + square 17,’ or 16, or whatever it might be, I could see clearly + the havoc in the German ranks as the shells would fall. Great + groups of men would be blown to atoms and new formations would + press in to take their place. The whole horror was there before + me, mapped out in numbered squares. + + “I dismissed all my men except my orderly of the fourth + Zouaves, who wouldn’t have gone, anyway. It was a work I + could do alone, lying with a sand-bag against my head, my + field-glasses in my hand, and before me my field map held down + by four sticks. We lay there just under the crest of the hill + from two o’clock in the morning until the next afternoon, + watching seven attacks. Toward three o’clock I was wounded, and + I knew it was only a question of time and chance when I would + lie like the dead man at my side, that Dueso had been pressing + his feet against, and whose place I had been sent to take. + Almost at the same moment I caught sight of Dueso spinning + around, holding his elbows to his side, and crying out: ‘_Nom + de Dieu! Nom de Dieu!_ I’ve got it in the arm!’—but trying with + the other hand to undo his _cravate_. + + “Two jets of blood were now spurting like two faucets from + my leg, the big artery was cut. _Ça y est._ In five minutes + I’ll be dead, I thought, and there came a fainting away and a + thinking not on God, but on still untasted joys of the flesh + and life—not even on my mother’s grief; and waking up after + years, it seemed, and calling for water, and Dueso bending + over me, after a frantic twisting at his _cravate_, and a + frantic pulling and tightening of it about my leg, with one + hand and his teeth, and then a pleasant, happy fainting away. A + delicious sensation of ease invaded me, and I said to myself, + ‘_Ce n’est que ça, mourir?_’ (‘Is death only this?’) I have + seen so many men die, and whatever their agonies, if long or + short, minutes or hours or days, as it may happen, just before + dying something gentle and simple takes place.” + + E. O’S.—“The inevitable dust to dust, the natural law + fulfilling itself?” + + De G.—“It may be. This _rictus de la mort_, I haven’t seen it, + though I have heard men screaming and cursing and praying in + the trenches as they got their blow, and watched their agonies, + but before death something else, softer, always happens. Unless + it comes too suddenly. I remember once being on the dunes in + Belgium, and against the yellow sand men were sitting in red + trousers and _chechias_, and one was telling a tale of laughter + when a shell burst. In a moment the blood of his brains was + flowing red upon the yellow sand, and then it got blue, and + then it sank and was no more, like the laughing man himself + from whom it flowed, and his tale of laughter.... About nine + o’clock we were brought in. Dueso had been lying with his head + under my armpit, and his feet still on the dead man, and we + would both come out of a faint from time to time and ask for + water. + + “Dueso! ah, Dueso! for a human being _il est plus chic que + moi_. He had been in jail for various reasons not very _chic_, + and I was warned against him when I took him for my orderly, + but to him I owe my life. Now he is in Salonique, _cité à + l’armée_, knows how to live in those regions, hard as nails, + originally from Tunis; a dark man, with dark mustache and very + big white teeth.” + + E. O’S.—“One thinks so often how little the common soldier, + defending honors and riches that he doesn’t share, has to gain. + There is nothing for him, in fact, except to step out into + anonymous death; at a given moment to make the sacrifice of his + life, or his eyes or his limbs, knowing nothing of war except + its horror, rarely any glory, sometimes a mention or a medal, + oftener not. But,” I continued, after we had sat silent for a + while, “who will carry it all on? Few like yourself are left, + and it is not enough. France is bleeding white—France, whose + sons are heroes, not fathers!” + + De G.—“What does it matter if we do go? There are the little + ones coming on. It will be like something out of which a whole + piece has been cut and the ends must be sewed together. The + very old, and the very young, the children, are these ends. We + shall have done what we were born to do. This is the immortal + history of France that we have made, her _chant du cygne_, too, + the most beautiful of her epics and it is enough to have lived + for that. To others the carrying on of the generations....” + +A pale rose light begins to come in at the window, but sleep cometh not. +Fortunately, if need be, I can do without it, but I must close my eyes +now. He, too, watching over Israel, slumbers not nor sleeps.... + + + + +CHAPTER IX + +CHÂLONS.—CHÂTEAU DE JEAN D’HEURS.—REVIGNY, THE “LINING” OF THE FRONT + + +Each, on comparing notes, was found to have spent the night on the +outside of the bed. One of the party, who naturally wishes to remain +anonymous, found a _cafard_, the classic cockroach, in her ear toward +dawn, and Aurora was welcomed by no hymn of praise from her. + +Now we are sitting drinking lemonade on the pavement in front of the +abode of iniquity. We have been twice through the hot town, which +consists of a modern town around the station, and a picturesque old one +on a hill at the back, to find the proper authorities for the stamping +of our papers with the military _permis_ to go to the château of Jean +d’Heurs, belonging to Madame Achille Fould, for luncheon. We caught the +major by a hair’s breadth; he was disappearing around the corner by the +military _commandature_ on his bicycle. Then to the _préfecture_ for +permission to telephone to Châlons for rooms that night; on returning, +found Miss M. and Miss N. awaiting us. They have been working at the +“Foyer des Alliés” near the station. They want now to get a much-needed +canteen in shape at Châlons, and are asking us to help. The word from the +colonel of Verdun is an “open sesame,” and we will investigate _en route_ +to Paris. + + CHÂLONS-SUR-MARNE, _10 o’clock p.m._ + +It’s been as long as to Tipperary since the scrawl at Bar-le-Duc. + +At 11.30 we got into the comfortable motor Madame Fould sent to bring +us to Jean d’Heurs’ for lunch. It’s a beautiful old château of the +eighteenth century, given by Napoleon to the Maréchal Oudinot, and in +the Fould family since those days, though not lived in until the war +by the present generation. It made us feel quite like “folks” as a +side-whiskered, highly respectable, rather aged majordomo received us and +led us up a broad stairway and showed us into a big library where Madame +Fould, her seven _infirmières_, and a young officer were waiting. After +that, a perfect lunch in the way of each thing being of the freshest and +most delicate and tasting of itself. The young officer was recovering +from a wound received at Verdun last September, followed by a trepanning, +evidently highly successful, as, in addition to all his senses, he had a +thick mat of hair. + +The library, to which we returned for coffee, was lined with the most +precious books in the most precious bindings, one whole side containing +first editions only from Voltaire and J.-J. Rousseau to Châteaubriand and +Taine. And I ran my fingers with such a friendly feeling over some soft +and lustrous bindings. + +The vast spaces of the château are now made into wards, and relays of +several hundred men are cared for in them. White hospital beds are pushed +against elaborately frescoed walls and Empire gildings. Everything in +spotless order. Afterward we went out into the beautiful old park, where +convalescent men were sitting or lying about under the great trees. The +park is now closed to visitors, the fair sex from neighboring villages +having been too generous in their offerings on the altar of Priapus. It’s +a lovely spot, and Madame Fould has had her hospital going since the +beginning of the war. + +At two o’clock we motored into Revigny, accompanied by the handsome +young trepanned officer, who deposited us at the military headquarters +for the stamping of our safe-conducts. Mrs. C. P., who can put her head +through a stone wall, without injuring it, as neatly as any one I ever +saw, proceeded to perform the feat, with the result that the major in +command gave us all permission for the next _étape_, Châlons. Then Mrs. +C. P.’s young son, serving with the American Ambulance, met us, motoring +over from Z——; a friend came with him, originally from Swarthmore, +Pennsylvania, rather discouraged at the quiet of the _secteur_ in which +he was stationed. But all he has to do is to wait. Everybody at the front +eventually gets what’s “coming to him.” Mrs. C. P.’s boy had on his +_Croix de Guerre_, got for fearless ambulance work at Verdun during one +of the big attacks. + +Revigny seen from the inside is a hole of holes—but through it defile +continually the blue-clad men of France. Twelve thousand had already +passed through that day. In the _carrefour_ of the road by the station +is a ceaseless line of convoys coming from or going to Verdun. This once +banal little village has come to have something symbolic about it, though +looking, as one passes by, like dozens of other destroyed villages. But +inside it is the lining of the war—that thing of dust, fatigue, thirst, +hunger, sadness, fear, despondence, hopelessness, running up and down the +gamut of spiritual and physical miseries. “Theirs not to reason why.” ... + +The English canteen is the only bright spot in the whole place. Those +sad-eyed men, like us, love and regret, and are beloved and regretted; +women have let them go in fear and dread; and all over Europe it is the +same, east, west, north, and south—all they love they lay down at the +word of command. I watched for an hour the blue stream of heavily laden +men as they passed in, coming up to the counter with their battered +quart cups, drinking their coffee standing, in haste, that the comrade +following might be sure to get his drink, the sweat dripping from their +faces. Fifteen minutes later a great thunder-storm broke, and thousands +of sad-eyed men were huddled together, shelterless, like sheep, suddenly +soaked; the hateful dust became the still more hateful mud. I left it all +in complete desolation of spirit, and wondering, Is God in His heaven? + +Revigny was worse to my spiritual sense almost than the +battle-field—there all was consummated. Here the men are still passing up +to sacrifice. + + + + +CHAPTER X + +MONT FRENET.—LA CHAMPAGNE POUILLEUSE.—THE RETURN + + + CHÂLONS, _10 p.m._ + +We dashed into the train at Revigny during the hail-storm, an infernal +kind that didn’t cool the air, and arrived at Châlons at six o’clock. +No cabs, at least none for us, so we begged two Quaker women with the +red-and-white star in the little black triangle on their sleeves, who +were getting into the only visible conveyance, to take our luggage and +deposit it for us at the Hôtel de la Haute Mère Dieu, whose name so +appealed to me. We paid our share of the cab, and all and everything +departed, we on foot. Châlons seems quite without character as one passes +through the streets, though I caught sight of several old churches and, +alone, would have lingered on the busy bridge that spans the Marne. +We got to the Hôtel de la Haute Mère Dieu and interviewed the female +keeper of that special paradise, who said she had nothing for us, had +received no telephone message from the _préfet_ at Bar-le-Duc or any +other _préfet_ from any other place. Then Mrs. C. P.—the Verdun day +and the Bar-le-Duc nights having somewhat stretched our nerves—began +to get annoyed; the desk-lady finally asked us, did we belong to the +Westinghouse Commission, which we didn’t. We then betook ourselves +to the streets. Nothing at the Hôtel d’Angleterre, nothing at the +Hôtel-Restaurant du Renard. We finally asked a large, beady-eyed, +determined-looking female, standing at a door, if she had accommodations +or knew of any one who had. She proved to be the _sage-femme_ of the +quarter and eyed us askance. + +Just then appeared a very _comme il faut_, pretty young woman with an +expression at once so charming and so modest that we did not hesitate to +accost her and tell her of our plight—that it looked as if we should be +passing the night _à la belle étoile_ if some one didn’t do something for +us. She hesitated, looked at us, hesitated again. Smashed down on her +head at a smart angle was the identical hat that Mrs. C. P. was wearing, +blue with a twisting of gray, from Reboux. I think that hat crystallized +things, for she ended by saying, sweetly: + +“I have a room that I sometimes offer to friends; only,” she added, +“there is a horrible stairway leading to it.” + +We turned our backs on the _sage-femme_, doubtless naturally good, +but soured by the constant witnessing of the arrival on the scene of +apparently superfluous human beings (I say “apparently,” for who shall +decide which souls are precious?), and followed those neatly clad, small +feet and slim ankles up a winding stairway that might have been of any +epoch—except the nineteenth or twentieth century, and found ourselves +in a charming little interior, spotlessly clean. “_C’est à votre +disposition_,” she said, and then a servant appeared, a refugee from +Tahure, as we afterward learned, a garrulous refugee. I beat my breast +later on when I heard the loud bassoon, telling Mrs. C. P. that I even +hated refugees and that that one would have, if possible, to contain her +tale till I had had a night’s sleep. At the moment I hated her with all +the unreasoning hatred of the beneficiary for the benefactor. + +Well, to make a long story short, closets were opened, the freshest +of embroidered linen sheets, the largest of towels, were got out, and +were left to us in the handsomest of ways _with_ the refugee, the owner +departing to her country house. The refugee managed to get in part of the +story of her life and she brought hot water; she was from Tahure and left +on the run with an aged husband, just before the entry of the enemy. + +Then we looked about the pleasant room. The first object I espied +was a pair of manly brown kid gloves, the next a blue gas-mask bag, +and a cigarette-case, with a crest, lying near a volume of Alfred de +Vigny. (Can’t you see them reading it together?) And there was such a +comfortable _chaise-longue_ for him to rest on, and an expensive, very +“comfy” rug and many cushions. As the refugee from Tahure proceeded to +make up the bed and sofa she interspersed the story of _her_ life with +remarks concerning her mistress, like: “_Allez, elles ne sont pas toutes +comme cela, elle a un cœur d’or_”; “_Moi, qui vous le dis, elle n’a pas +une mauvaise pensée_.” + +At this juncture we delicately asked, But where does she _live_? +“Oh, he has given her a little château in the environs.” This was a +convenient town apartment with the one big room giving on the Place de +la République; at the back a dining-room and little kitchen. Having +removed the dust of travel, hot water being produced in a jiffy from the +gas-stove on the kitchen range, we descended to take dinner at one of the +restaurants near by. We were so tired about this time that the decalogue +wasn’t much to us, neither the Law nor the Prophets, but be it remembered +of us, we _did_ love our neighbor as ourselves. + +When we came back after supper the sofa was spread with large, crisp, +spotless linen sheets, the bed the same, the refugee gone, and here +we are in this clean, low-ceilinged room with eighteenth-century +wood-panelings and charming door-handles of the same period. There is a +crayon of the present tenant reflecting her sweet and candid expression +over the mantelpiece, on which are two Dresden-china figures and a small +white-marble “Young Bacchus”; furthermore an etching by Hellu of the +Duchess of Marlborough, which made one feel quite poised. In fact, there +is nothing _demi_ about it. + +The Place de la République is full of soldiers coming and going, and +there are several ambulances of the Scottish Ambulance Corps drawn up +by a big fountain representing three women (typifying the Marne, the +Moselle, and the Agne). Over the soft, warm night is borne the low boom +of cannon. The guard has just called out: “_Faites attention! Lumière au +troisième étage_”—so I must stop. + + _Tuesday, 9.30 a.m._ + +Sitting in the Place de la République on chairs borrowed from a little +lace-shop, and waiting for the cab to come to take us to General Goïgoux, +to whom Madame Fould had given us a letter of introduction. Just +opposite is the inhospitable Hôtel de la Haute Mère Dieu, and I have +been telling Mrs. C. P., who has gone to buy some fruit, of the story of +Voltaire and Madame du Châtelet passing through Châlons _en route_ from +Versailles to Lunéville. At Châlons Madame du Châtelet thought she’d like +to have a bouillon at the Hôtel de la Cloche d’Or, where they stopped +to change horses. (It still exists and is the only one we didn’t try +last night.) It was brought them to their carriage by the _aubergiste_ +herself, who had learned from the indiscreet postilion the identity of +the illustrious travelers. When Longchamp, the valet of Voltaire, asks +to pay, she firmly demands a louis d’or for the bouillon. “La divine +Emilie” protests, the woman insists that at her hotel the “price of an +egg, a bouillon, or a dinner is a louis”; then Voltaire gets out and +tries by amiable processes to explain that in no country in the world +did a bouillon ever cost a louis; more cries and reproaches; a crowd +gathers; Voltaire, strong in his right, doesn’t want to give way. Madame +du Châtelet points out the gathering crowd, now quite noisy. Finally +they pay, Voltaire commending to all the devils the hospitable town of +Châlons-sur-Marne; they depart to the accompaniment of the gibes of the +amiable inhabitants. It may be _autre temps_, but not _autres mœurs_; +it’s just like the woman at the desk at the Hôtel de la Haute Mère Dieu, +who wouldn’t take us in, in any sense, last night. + +The most awful-looking cab has just drawn up in front of “our” house, and +a smart American ambulance officer is trying to get in. + + IN THE TRAIN EN ROUTE FOR PARIS. + +The first quiet breath I have drawn, and very comfortable it is to sink +into the broad seats, out of the glare of the setting sun, and feel there +is nothing to inspect save the flying aspect of nature for the next three +hours. + +The handsome officer this morning proved to be Mr. B., and he didn’t get +that cab, which, however, we promised to send back to him once we were +deposited at the general’s headquarters. + +General Goïgoux is most agreeable. When he asked us where we were lodged, +we threw a stone at the Hôtel de la Haute Mère Dieu and told him of our +Good Samaritan. He gave a grin, if generals are supposed to grin, when +we said that we had not disturbed her to any great extent, as she had, +in addition, a country place where she really lived. We then told him of +our meeting with Miss N. and Miss M., who had asked us to investigate +the canteen prospects on our way back to Paris. The installing of one +has long been the idea of General Goïgoux, who loves his _poilus_, and +he immediately rang the bell on his table—among his books was a German +Baedeker of eastern France—and in a moment a captain with a sad face and +a black band on his arm appeared, and we departed in a huge military auto +to the station to investigate the great railway shed that the general has +requisitioned for canteen purposes. + +Going through the streets, we were held up for a moment by a detachment +of prisoners in various uniforms and from various regiments, but all with +P.G. (_prisonnier de guerre_) marked in large letters on their backs. +A tall, upstanding set with ringing tread, not at all unhappy-looking, +despite a something set about their expression, seemingly in very good +physical condition. + +Statues of the top-hatted, frock-coated political men of +nineteenth-century France have banalized the public places of every town +in the _doux pays_. They simply can’t compete with the saints and kings +and warriors of the artistic periods—it’s too bad they have tried. + +At 12.30 we got back to our pleasant quarters, to find our hostess there, +in a very smart dark-blue serge dress from Jeanne Hallé. In addition to +the château, the shop down-stairs, called “Aux Alliés,” where all sorts +of edible delicacies are sold, belongs to her together with a tall and +beautiful red-haired Frenchwoman. This is her up-stairs resting-place +during the day. We sank on bed and sofa, exhausted by the heat, the visit +to the station to inspect the canteen facilities, which seemed most +promising, visits to two churches, and luncheon in the crowded Restaurant +du Renard. In the church of St.-Alpin white-bloused experts were busy +removing the beautiful sixteenth-century stained-glass windows. “If +’twere done, ’twere well ’twere done quickly.” That continued booming of +guns made one realize at once their fragility and their beauty. + +Shortly after, a handsome young officer came in, a gentleman, and +speaking beautiful English. It wasn’t “he,” however, but a friend of +his, and we did a little “society” talk—the weather, the necessity of +learning the languages young, the theater, that Réjane was getting old, +and “_L’Elévation_” was bad for the morals, and fashions, if the skirts +_could_ get shorter—but nothing of the war. + +At two o’clock another military auto was announced, which the general +had sent with a doctor to take us to Mont Frenet, four kilometers from +Suippes and six from the German lines. The young officer departed; we +veiled and gloved ourselves and descended, and got into the motor, where +we found a large, dark, military man inclining to _embonpoint_, who +thought he was good-looking, and started out. The first thing we met as +we got out of town on the dusty, blazing highroad was a little funeral +cortége, preceded by a priest. The body of the soldier was draped in +the tricolor, and following to his last rest, close behind, was his +_camarade_, with head bared. He had doubtless expired in the big hospital +near by, one of those lonely hospital deaths that hundreds of thousands +have suffered before transfiguration. + +We were in the great plain of the Champagne Pouilleuse that leads to +Suippes, Sainte-Ménehould, and stretches out to Reims—a plain with great, +white, chalky scars of quarries, interspersed with fields and dark +patches of pine woods. I asked the doctor about the site of the ancient +camp of Attila and the battle of the Catalonian fields, but his knowledge +of the matter was vague and his interest perfunctory. I thought afterward +he might have had a more personal afternoon planned than that of taking +two objective-minded ladies to Mont Frenet. There was once a great Roman +road from Bar-le-Duc to Reims, and all about are little churches of the +twelfth and thirteenth centuries, mostly touched up in the eighteenth. + +After three-quarters of an hour we found ourselves nearing what might +have been a modern mining settlement. It is the great front hospital of +Mont Frenet. A model establishment organized and conducted by a man of +heart and brain, Doctor Poutrain. Young, _élancé_, alert, he took us the +rounds of his little world, from the door where the ambulances deposit +their wounded, their dying, and oft their dead, where they are sorted +out, through the numberless wards, even to the model wash-houses and +the places where the garments of those brought in are scientifically +separated from their inevitable and deadly live stock. + +As we passed through one of the wards, I saw the doctor’s eye change, +and, following it, I perceived, as he quickly went to the bedside, a face +with the death look already on it; and in a moment, with a slight sigh, +a soul had breathed itself out—_en route_ to the heaven of those who die +_pro patria_. + +And I thought in great awe, “All I know or ever will know of that human +being is his supreme hour.” And so fortuitous, so sudden was it all that +I had not even time to breathe a word of prayer, nor even to reach out +for his hand. And I, come from so far, so unrelated to him, was thus the +destined witness of his passing. I can’t get it out of my mind. + +Doctor Poutrain loves his broken men, and he said, “I want no man who +has been severely wounded or mutilated to leave my hospital without +his decoration.” He had tears in his eyes as he stood by a bed where a +bright-eyed, thin-faced boy was lying with a hip fracture. “He brought a +comrade in, under fire, who was shot off his back as he was carrying him +in.” + +In one of the beds an aviator was lying, brought in three days before; +the eyes, the mouth, the whole face had still the peculiar look of +strain. Indeed, three faces stand out in one’s mind—the captivity face, +the hard, shining face and eyes of unwounded men just from the combat, +and the faces of wounded aviators. About this time I noticed the gloomy +look deepening on the face of our accompanying Esculapius, and it +suddenly occurred to me “he is one of those who support with difficulty +the praises of another.” For we _had_ been very explicit in praise of +Doctor Poutrain’s wonderful installation. + +It was a slack day, and according to the record in the antechamber there +had only been 517 brought in that day. + +We have tea with the _directrice_ of the _gardes-malades_ (ten or twelve +women only), a friend of Madame Fould’s. As we sat there talking I +discovered that the eager _médecin-chef_ had had, before the war, as +hobby, archeology and ethnology, especially of the prehistoric races of +Mexico; that he also possessed one of the few Aztec codices existing—all +of which we discussed to the sound of the German guns and the whirring of +their airplanes. + +We finally made our adieux, came home over the hot, unspeakably dusty +road of the Champagne Pouilleuse, unreasonably disappointed that nobody +would give us permission to make a little détour by Suippes, then under +fire. We got back to our headquarters, packed our belongings, and +diffidently brought up the subject of remuneration, which the _belle +châtelaine_ firmly refused. I was traveling light, without a single thing +approaching the superfluous, but Mrs. P. had a breakfast-cap and her +tortoise-shell toilet things and trees for her shoes, and she also found +among her belongings a lovely amber box, which she presented in token +of our gratitude. We _could_ make the garrulous refugee from Tahure not +only happy, but speechless, which was more to the point; and here we are, +looking out on a darkening world, and there are soldiers bathing in the +river, near stacked guns, and everywhere little detachments are marching +down dim roads, and there are the eternal troop- and equipment-trains +going to the front—and I feel an immense regret at leaving it all.... + + PARIS. + +As we were sitting in the dining-car, idly wondering how on earth we were +going to get from the station to our respective abodes once the train had +deposited us at the Gare de l’Est, or planning to spend the night there, +the Marquis de M. passed through the car. His motor was to meet him, and +he gallantly offered transit, that can be above rubies and pearls _par le +temps qui court_. + +When we got to Paris at 10.30 we saw in the dim light, as we stepped into +the big motor, _voyagers_ departing with luggage on their backs, or, +preparing to await the dawn, sitting on it. We got into the motor with +Comte de ——, the Marquis himself sitting outside, “for the air,” as he +said, and also because there was no more room inside. + +As we rolled along through the dimly lighted streets, the air dense and +hot, a terrific hail- and thunder-storm suddenly deluged the town, and +especially the generous Marquis outside, well punished (as usual) for his +kind act. When, slipping and skidding, we finally pulled up at my hotel, +a very wet gentleman, but remembering his manners, said, “_Au plaisir de +vous revoir, madame_.” (He must really have wished me to all the devils, +where he would never meet me a second time, hoping it was a last as +well as a first meeting.) I had to laugh, also he, the pleasure was so +evidently doubtful. It ended by his betaking his soaking person into the +auto, and I came up-stairs to find my lamps trimmed and burning and my +beloved mother awaiting me to hear “all about it.” + +So may one go to the front and return.... + + + + +PART II + + + + +CHAPTER I + +BY THE MARNE + + + GARE DE L’EST, _Wednesday, July 25th_. + +No, it isn’t possible, even for one whose business is not that of +stopping bullets, to go toward the combat a second time without a thrill. + +Few soldiers in the station; they are mostly at the front, at Craonne and +Le Chemin des Dames and other sacrificial places, and in a week or two +the empty beds in the hospitals will be full again. Some officers are +hastening back from their _permissions_ with pasteboard boxes and other +unwar-like accoutrements. One is sitting by me, a straight-featured young +man with dark-ringed eyes, his _Croix de Guerre_ and _fourragère_,[7] +reading _Brin de Lilas_. In forty-eight hours he may be dead. Another +officer is reading _Cœur d’Orpheline_, and _Le Pays_. + +Miss N., with something of serene yet brooding in her being, plus a sense +of humor, arrives with a telegraphic pass from army headquarters at +Châlons, which may or may not “pass” the train conductor. + + _Later._ + +Chelles, where the arts of peace in the form of a vermicelli-factory +testify to the arts of war by having every pane of glass broken; and once +there was a celebrated abbey at Chelles which was destroyed, with a tidy +amount of other things beautiful, at the time of the French Revolution. + +Farther along much thinning out of the woods, the beautiful +warmth-giving, shade-giving forests of France. In one place there is a +planting of young, slender trees, and I thought on those other children +of France who must grow to manhood, remake her soul, transmit her +immortality. The first harvest is stacked and yellow, and nature is +densely, deeply green where it had been pale and expectant. Even the +Marne, which we caught up here, has a deeper color than in June, as it +reflects the lush green. + +Meaux, with its cathedral rising from the center of the town, untouched +except by time. Meaux has now come to be a sort of joke (“_de deux +maux choisir le moindre_”) which few can resist—I’ve even heard it at +the Théâtre Français—and it’s supposed to be the heart’s desire of the +_embusqué_, far enough from the front not to get hurt, and far enough +from Paris to be out of sight. + +Château Thierry, with its first vintage of white grapes, and I bethought +me how the whole of France is one vast wine-press—“He is trampling out +the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored.” + +Epernay, with its peculiar church tower. The great building of the +champagne Mercier firm near the station has every window-pane broken, +and part of it is serving as a Red Cross station. The wave of invasion +pressed hard through Epernay that August of 1914. + +In the dining-car we sat at a table with two officers—an airman, tall, +deep-eyed, some sort of _tic nerveux_ disturbing his face, with the +_Grand’ Croix de la Légion d’Honneur_ among other decorations; and a +captain of infantry, who had been months at Arras, and at Verdun the +terrible March of 1916. + +About the time that the cross-eyed waiter (it was easy, poor soul, to see +why he wasn’t wanted in the trenches) threw the last set of plates with a +deafening crash down the line of diners (the captain of infantry said it +was just like the first-line trenches), the airman, whose nerves couldn’t +stand it, pursued, rather irritably: + +“You don’t even read the _communiqués_ any more, I wager. _Oh, les +civils!_” + +“I can’t truthfully say I do, always,” I answered, feeling called on to +defend the _sacrés civils_. “After three years of it we are fatigued and +bewildered by the spectacularness of it, the great, dazzling, hideous +mass of it, and you who perish on the battle-field but perform an act +that all must some day perform, only different in that it is far better +done—_dulce et decorum_—but, after all, the same act that we must perform +against our will, at the mercy of some accidental combination. It’s the +same outcome, ‘and one’s a long time dead.’” + +After a pause and a deep look, perhaps it is the look men have when alone +in the secular spaces, he answered: + +“_Choisir et aimer sa mort, c’est un peu comme choisir sa bien-aimée_,” +and suddenly a flash illuminated my soul, showing me something of the +_dulce_ as well as the _decorum_ of dying for country. + +And then we looked out of the window, and there came into my mind a +completely commonplace event that caught my attention in the first +wonderment and horror of the world war. Accompanied by her daughter, +an elderly woman, one August evening of 1914, took the Fifth Avenue +motor-bus to get some fresh air, and they placed themselves on top. At +that epoch, instead of going straight up the Avenue, which was being +repaved around about Thirty-fifth Street, the omnibus took a turn into +Madison Avenue and reappeared again at the north side of Altman’s. Now +the roof of the _porte-cochère_ of Altman’s has a _motif_ of bronzework. +The omnibus lurched just at this point; the head and hair of the old +lady were caught in it; she was lifted up from the top of the omnibus, +remained suspended in air for an instant of time, then dropped to the +pavement, where she breathed out her soul. Doubtless there are those who +will understand why this completely unimportant matter has remained in my +mind—even why I thought of it at that moment. + + CHÂLONS-SUR-MARNE, 36 RUE DU PORT DE MARNE. + +An 1860 house requisitioned by the military authorities for the _Dames de +la Cantine_. + + _6.30 p.m._ + +Sitting in a little glass-inclosed veranda even with the ground. The +side against the house, in between the doors and windows, is painted +in a crisscross pattern of dark green against light green, and the +woodwork is that favorite but uninspiring shallow brown; a large, empty, +double-decker cage for birds is in a corner. The veranda leads into two +low-ceilinged rooms with parquet flooring and little squares of Brussels +carpet. In the first is a writing-table, some arm-chairs, and a horsehair +sofa is across a corner; brown wallpaper ornamented with the inevitable +oil-paintings of “near” Corots, and “farther” Guido Renis—everything +distinctly early Victorian, and something soothing in its atmosphere +after three lustrums of _art nouveau_. After all we’ve been through in +art lately, early Victorian isn’t as bad as we once thought. + +I looked for a moment into the walnut bookcase and found bound volumes of +_La Semaine des Familles_, 1850-60; _Le Musée des Familles_ of the same +dates: _Le Magasin d’Education_, of the eighties; and the curious part +is that here beside the Marne it doesn’t seem of any special country, but +of a special period. + +The kitchen leads out of the dining-room (which latter is the spiritual +twin of the _salon_), and has an old, unused fireplace with a high +masonried shelf above it and a beautiful ancient fireback with coat +of arms. Near the high window is a little range and the inevitable +gas-stove. I put my valise in the sitting-room and went out into the old +garden, untouched since the winter’s sleep and the spring’s awakening. +It looks out on the road; beyond is a raised walk along the river, and +across the stream, just opposite, is the station and the evacuation +hospital. + +But I was feeling uneasy as I looked about, for I was separated from +my _carnet rouge_,[8] which has been unnecessarily reft from me by a +too-zealous station individual. Miss Mitchell had met us, smiling and +waving, which ought to have been a patent of respectability, from the +other side of a bayonet, the side we wanted to be on; but the man had a +dullish eye and didn’t see that we were birds of a feather, and, anyway, +had just been put in authority and was enjoying his full powers, after +the usual manner of the unaccustomed. + +So I departed, and got sopping wet in my only suit (am traveling lighter +even than the first time), and my garments were furthermore ravaged by +falling pollen from a linden-tree under which I had confidingly stood +during the downpour. I was a sight, but I _had_ to get that _carnet +rouge_. Any one who has been in _la zone des armées_ and has been +separated from it will understand the orphaned and anxious feeling that +possessed me. + + _Later._ + +A pale brightening of the western sky after the heavy rain. Two _avions +de chasse_ passing swiftly to the northeast. I wandered out of the +garden, past some modern houses (this part of Châlons, for some reason, +is called Madagascar), taking the little raised earth-walk by the Marne. +The river, always slow-flowing, has an almost imperceptible movement in +front of our house, and there are many grasses and reeds; the banks are +weedy and little green boats are made fast to them, and nature is a bit +motley and untidy. A soldier is fishing on the opposite side near the +station. An officer and a black-robed woman pass. Farther down, the banks +are thickly wooded and the trees glisten after the rain; even the great +railway station is a-shine, where tens of thousands of men pass daily, +together with millions of francs of war material, and it all looks like +some not very sharp wood-cut of the sixties—the kind you wouldn’t buy +if you were looking over a lot; but, somehow, lived in, it is charming. +Then I found myself on a path by the river, with a lush border of +trees, poplar, willow, white birch, ash, hawthorn, and clematis-twined, +wild-grape-vined bushes. On the other side were ripe wheat-fields. Near a +sycamore a man and a woman were locked in an embrace, whether of greeting +or farewell I know not. Neither was very young—this much I saw before +I turned my eyes and went on; but when I passed there again they were +as before, their eyes still closed; and I suddenly knew them for true +lovers, who count not moments, but were lost in some infinity; and for +all I know they may be there yet, and if not they, then others, for the +spaces of love are never empty. To some it may be nonsense that I am +talking, but there are those who will know. All the while there was a +dull boom of cannon, and other men who could love women were giving up +their lives; and I seemed to understand little or nothing, but did not +need to understand, for I had a full heart, which is better than a full +brain. And I cried, as I walked back, “_Domine Deus, Rex Celestis, Pater +omnipotens_,” and left it all—the soft love and the hard death—where it +belongs. And I was glad to have walked for a few moments alone by the +green Marne. + +When I got back I found Joseph of the 71st _Chasseurs à pied_ sitting +with Miss N. Joseph thinks we are friends; he _knows_ we are friends, +so different from “world’s” people, who are suspicious and think nobody +loves them, or fatuous and think everybody does. + +We sat in the 1860 dining-room. There is a pressed-bronze clock on the +mantelpiece, representing a mild and smiling Turk with a drawn sword—and +there is a sideboard you could find in Barnesville, Maryland, or Squedunk +(I forget _where_ Squedunk is), and the extremely “distant” Guido Renis +decorate the brown walls, without, however, enlivening them. + +And this is Joseph’s story—Joseph of the grateful heart, Joseph with two +years and a half of service, Joseph who won’t be twenty till December, +Joseph with his young, round face and flat nose, dark under his pleasant +eyes, and a bit hollow under his cheek-bones, and with decorations on his +chest: + +“I never knew my parents; the Fathers brought me up. I have had only good +from them, and when they were _chassés_ I was taken with them to Pisa. I +was going to continue my studies, _mais la guerre, que voulez-vous_? They +call me ‘_le gosse_,’ I was the youngest in the regiment. Now I am alone +in the world since my brothers were killed, one at Verdun three weeks +ago, the other last year on the Somme. I miss the letters,” he added, +simply. + +“But, Joseph, tell us how you got your _Croix de Guerre_.” + +“Oh, I only happened to save the life of my captain at Verdun. We were +making a reconnaissance, and he fell with a ball in the hip. I started to +bring him in, with a comrade who was hit by a piece of shrapnel in the +head and killed instantly. I caught ‘mine’ in the arm, but I was still +able to drag my captain in by his feet. It was quite simple, and since +then he is very good to me.” + +Joseph is _en perm_, his regiment is at Reims, but he spits blood and his +voice is hoarse—he was gassed a few weeks ago. + +“It smelt of violets,” he said, “and we didn’t know that anything was the +matter till an officer rushed toward us. Eight of us never got up. I’ll +never speak clearer than this.” + +Joseph stayed to supper with us—a supper of _soupe à l’oseille_, +scrambled eggs, and salad, but the brown, dull, little room gradually +seemed to fill with a sifted glory, and we left our meal and went out +to find the whole world dipped in transparent pink, and the great Light +of Day about to disappear, a reddish ball, in a mass of color of an +intenser hue. The delicate willows were like silver candelabra reflected +in the Marne, which now was a satiny pink. The wheat-fields were seas of +burnished gold. + +Over all a terrific boom of cannon was borne on the damp evening air. It +seemed impossible to do other than walk magnetically on and on toward +the dreadful sound, out of that world of surpassing beauty toward those +supreme agonies, toward Mourmelon and Reims, where men were laying down +their lives, even as we three women walked the fields at the sunset +hour. I remembered suddenly a picture known and loved years ago—a woman +kneeling by such a river-bank, her hair falling, her face buried in her +hands, called “_Hymnus an die Schönheit_,” but over the pink-and-silver +beauty of _my_ sunset world I heard the deep and dreadful tones of +_their_ cannon, and the answer of the 75’s, which Joseph likened to the +_miaulement d’un chat_—and all the world seemed askew, and I looked +through tears at a golden half-moon that was rising in the pink to add an +unbearable beauty to it all. + + IN MY ROOM, _10.30 p.m._ + + The cannon still booming. + +My room also has a dark-brown paper with great white flowers on it—some +cross between peonies and dahlias, if such union is possible—and heavy +mahogany furniture; a few books which I immediately investigated, on a +gimp and tasseled trimmed shelf, for a clue to the one-time dwellers. +Among them were two by Victor Tissot, _Le Pays des Milliards_ and _Les +Prussiens en Allemagne_; the dates were 1873 and 1875, and they told of +that other war; and I looked at Germany through the eyes of forty years +ago as I turned the pages of _Le Pays des Milliards_, listening to the +1917 guns. History was not only repeating itself, but tripping itself up! + +Joseph is sleeping in the garden in the steamer-chair. I hear his +gas-cough, a cross between a croupy cough and a whooping-cough. We +wanted him to sleep inside, but he said “_J’étouffe_,” and took the +steamer-chair out under the spreading chestnut-tree, and sleeps the sleep +of youth, even though weary and gassed. + + _Thursday, 26th July, 1.30 p.m._ + +Sitting in the garden, after lunch, where we have had coffee under the +spreading chestnut, ready to go to Bar-le-Duc. _Avions_ are whirring in +the perfect blue, and we plainly hear the cannon. We are to take night +shift at the little _Foyer des Alliés_. When I say that we carry nothing +with us, not more than if we were going to take a stroll about town, one +sees that the journey will be fairly elemental. + +Many white butterflies with an unerring instinct for beauty are flying +in and out of the little white ash-tree. And in spite of the boom of +cannon there straightway came to me a dear and fugitive realization that +beauty is the first thing sought by instinct, its earliest and its last +love, its imperishable means and its end. And how every other seeking of +instinct comes after perpetuation, conservation, survival of the strong, +and how it accompanies and pushes the soul toward its transfiguration. + +Suddenly, under the rustling chestnut, all about me the murmur of the +gently stirring garden, I found I was mad for beauty, and some liquid, +long, unrepeated lines came to me, I know not why: + + _E il pino_ + _ha un suono, e il mirto_ + _Altro suono, e il ginepro_ + _Altro ancora, stromenti_ + _diversi_ + _Sotto innumerevoli dita._ + + ... + + _Che l’anima schiude_ + _novella,_ + _Su la favola bella_ + _Che ieri_ + _M’illuse, che oggi t’illude,_ + _O Ermione._[9] + +When you’re not carrying anything with you except your money and your +safe-conduct, you _can_ dream till it’s time to take the train. + + + + +CHAPTER II + +THE CANTEEN AT BAR-LE-DUC + + +_Epitaphe_ + + _Bénis ceux qui sont morts simplement: en victimes,_ + _Et n’ayant de la guerre éprouvé que l’horreur._ + _Bénis ceux qui sont morts sans nourrir en leur cœur_ + _La haine et tous ses maux, la gloire et tous ses crimes._ + + _Bénis ceux qui sont morts comme ils avaient vécu:_ + _Assidus noblement à de modestes tâches._ + _Bénis ceux qui, n’étant ni très braves, ni lâches,_ + _N’ont su que résigner leur corps pauvre et vaincu._ + + _Bénis ceux qui sont morts pour servir et défendre_ + _Des honneurs et des biens dont ils n’ont point leur part._ + _Bénis ceux qui se sont donnés sans rien attendre_ + _De leur postérité, de l’histoire ou de l’art._ + + _Bénis ceux qui, luttant seulement pour la vie,_ + _Ont ignoré les lois qui reposent sur eux,_ + _Mais compris en mourant qu’ils sont les malheureux_ + _En qui depuis toujours Jésus se sacrifie._ + + _Bénis, ils le sont tous, et saints entre les morts,_ + _Ceux qu’on ne pleure guère et que nul ne renomme:_ + _Car, devant les héros, ils ne sont rien que l’Homme;_ + _Car, parmi tant de gloire, ils fondent le remords;_ + + _Car leur don si naïf, ce don de tout leur être,_ + _Mêle aux vertus du sol les grâces d’un sang pur,_ + _Pour composer, avec tout l’or du blé futur,_ + _Les moissons d’un esprit dont l’Amour sera maître._ + + GEORGES PIOCH. + + CHÂLONS, _27th July_. + +Half past four. Half an hour ago, _alerte, sirènes_. We hastily arose +from resting, and have just come up from a really charming cellar, with +nice vaulting, evidently much older than the house itself. + +Returned from Bar-le-Duc this morning rather sketchy in my mind, blurred +with fatigue, in a compartment with five silent, dead-tired officers. +It’s a great human document, night shift in a canteen. From ten o’clock +till six I watched the _poilus_ fill the _Foyer des Alliés_, in and out, +in and out. From time to time the voice of the station-master called out +some fateful destination. I was thankful for any momentary slackening of +the rush, so that when one gives coffee, chocolate, or bouillon one can +also give a word, the precious word, where all is so anonymous. Between +three and four there was a lessening, and a short, haggard, deep-eyed, +scraggy-mustached man of forty-six, leaning on the counter, said to +me, “I am father of five,” and, showing his blue trousers tucked in +his boots, added, “I am of the attacking troops.” He then shifted his +accoutrement and dug out from his person the photographs of the five +children and his _épouse_, and I think more and more, “it is for the +young to fight.” I can’t bear the look on the faces of the middle-aged +going up to battle. + +The _poilu_ trying to find his purse or the photographs of his family, +among everything else in the world that he carries on his person, pressed +tightly against other men carrying the same, feels doubtless the way a +sardine trying to turn over would feel! + +The next with whom I spoke was a _gaillard_ with a glancing blue eye, +reddish mustache and high color, from Barcelona, of French parents, and +he insisted on speaking Spanish with me. His brother is professor at +Saint-Nazaire. + +“Every time he writes me it is about Mr. Lloyd George instead of about +the family.” + +This is a delicate tribute to my supposed English nationality. + +“Do you think we are going to win, señorita?” + +“Of course,” I answer, “with the help of God. _Dios y victoria_,” I add, +piously. + +But as he tosses off his coffee he says, with a gleam, “_Victoria y +Dios_,” and then gives way to a comrade who was at Craonne in April. + +He was a man with a softish eye and full-lipped mouth and was probably +naturally flesh-loving, and wanted his coffee very hot, and looked +approvingly at me as I said: + +“_Mon ami_, I know all about it, if coffee isn’t _too_ hot, it isn’t hot +enough.” + +He ended a conversation about an engagement he had been in by saying: +“The most awful sensation is to see the dust raised by the mitrailleuses +and to know that you have got to walk into it and to see the men ahead of +you stepping with strange steps—and some falling.” + +As I said, he was naturally ease-loving and pain-fearing, yet that is the +way _his_ dust may be called on to return to dust. + +There are many jokes about shrapnel and shells, but nobody ever jokes +about a bullet. It’s a thing with a single purpose—and you may be it. + +Our headquarters are at ——, not far away, and it was at Bar-le-Duc that +I first saw our own men among the French for the same strange purpose. +Something stirred deeply in my heart, with an accompanying searing, +scorching consciousness of what an elemental thing they have come across +the seas to do—quite simply kill or be killed. It’s all to come, for “He +hath loosed the fateful lightning of His terrible swift sword,” and it +is for the young to fight. + +At 3.30 they come into the canteen and ask for eighteen fried eggs; they +are oozing with money, and _they_ aren’t feeling sentimental. One of the +four young spread-eagles (he proved to be from Texas, and was changing a +big plug of tobacco from one side of his mouth to the other) said, with +an appraising look at the counter, that he could “buy us out,” and a +second added, “And more, too.” + +“How about those coming in later?” I suggest, and then I ask how long +they’ve been here. + +“Been here? Just five hundred years,” a small one answers, promptly, +“and the next time the ‘Call’ comes they won’t get me. They can take the +house and the back fence, too, but they won’t get little Joe. This loving +another country’s one on me!” + +“Don’t listen to him, lady; he’s homesick. We’re out to can the Kaiser, +and he’ll take some canning yet, but I say next July he will be about as +welcome as a skunk at a lawn-party.” + +And then even the homesick one cheered up. The simile made me think of +summer evenings in New England, but I only asked when they were to go +back to ——. + +“We ought to have been there at 10.15.” + +I gave a stern glance at the big canteen clock. The hands pointed to +3.30. They were then five and a quarter hours late. + +“You don’t know ‘_Gun_court.’ It’s a fierce place,” said one, in answer +to the look. + +“Aren’t you busy?” + +“Holy smoke! She says _are we busy_! Why, we dig ourselves in all day, +and we dig ourselves out all night, and somebody after you all the time. +I don’t call this war. We’re out for real trouble.” + +“Well, you’ll get it when you see your officer,” I remarked, unfeelingly. + +Just then a _poilu_ whom they seemed to know approached with his ten +centimes. One of the Sammies knocks it out of his hand onto the counter, +points to his own chest, says, “On me, a square meal,” and opens his +bursting purse for me to take whatever is necessary. + +The _poilu_, hearing the chink of coin and rustle of paper, says to me, +with eyes the size of saucers, “_Sont-ils tous millionaires?_” ... + +Apart from his “private resources,” which seem unlimited, the American +receives just twenty times a day what the Frenchman does. + +But how my heart goes out to them, so young, so untried, so generous—and +a sea of blood awaiting them! + +Toward morning, when a chill was in the air, a thin-faced, dark-eyed man +with glasses shiveringly drinks his hot chocolate. “It’s too long, the +war,” he says, “two years—even three—_mais cela traîne trop, nos bonnes +qualités s’usent et se perdent_.” + +“What were you before the war?” + +“My father has a book-shop at Chartres, _j’adorais les livres et une +bonne lampe_,” he added, so simply. + +And then a trench-stained comrade came up to him and they talked after +this fashion—one couldn’t have done better oneself—while I mopped up the +counter and refilled my jugs: + +“This country pleases me. I will come back and take a turn about after +the war.” + +“_Mon vieux_, one should never return to a place where one has been +happy; one is apt to find only regrets and disillusions. You are thinking +of the young _boulangère_ here, but she herself will leave the town after +the hostilities! And then what? _Un seul être vous manque et tout est +dépeuplé!_ But nothing, however, counsels one to return to a place where +one has suffered.” + +From this point of view one must say that the life of the _poilu_ is +ideal, for when he will have tried all the fronts, including those of the +Orient, the war will perhaps be over. + +And then they slung everything except the kitchen stove on their persons, +and, thanking me, went out to be killed, or, in the very best event, to +get _la bonne blessure_. + +One in a thousand, one in ten thousand gets it, _la bonne blessure_, +indeed, not disfiguring, not incapacitating, and afterward, sometimes, +decorations, honors. On the other side they say, “_Glück muss der Soldat +haben_.” + +A strange, intense blue, like some outer curtain to the windows, +announced the coming of dawn, and out of it appeared nine men shivering. + +“Why are you so cold?” I ask. + +“_Il fait du brouillard_,” said one, with a beard in a point and wearing +a _béret_, such a man as would have gone into an inn of Rabelais’s +time, _en route_ for some seat of war; and as he drank his big bowl of +chocolate he added, “_Cela console_; toward dawn one’s courage is low.” + +Then a young, stone-deaf man with blue eyes and delicate, pink-skinned +face came in with something vague and searching in his look. I didn’t +realize in the first moment what was the matter, as I asked, did he +want coffee or chocolate, but a comrade pointed to his ears and said, +“Verdun.” He himself smiled, a dear young smile, but sudden tears came to +my eyes and I slopped the coffee. + +A little before six we closed the canteen, which is always swept and +garnished between six and seven, and went back to the house where +Miss Worthington, who so admirably runs it in conjunction with Miss +Alexander, lives. + +I lay me on a sofa with my shoes unlaced—my feet by that time were +feeling like something boneless and bruised, mashed into something too +small. + +Seven-thirty a great knocking at the door. + +“_L’alerte! A la cave, madame!_” + +I was then in a state where a bomb couldn’t hurry me, but, the knocks +continuing, I finally got up and went down-stairs to find the lower floor +full of people, too _blasé_ to go into the vaulted cellar below. + +“_Quelle comédie!_” said one woman. “_Moi, je m’en vais._” + +“_Quelle tragédie, si c’est pour vous cette fois_,” answered another, +pressing her baby to her breast. + +“The bits of shrapnel from the anti-aircraft guns firing at the +aeroplanes make more victims than the bombs,” said another. + +Miss Worthington appeared at that moment, but decided, however, to go +back to bed. I went out into the hot streets; the early sun was shining +in a faultless sky. The _Foyer des Alliés_ had been hastily evacuated at +the _alerte_, according to orders, so I asked for the nearest church, +where I could sit down in peace, or comparative peace, out of the glare +and the heat, not to mention the enemy airplanes. I was directed up the +principal street, told to turn down by the river, and was proceeding +under the dusty poplars to the church of St.-Jean, when suddenly some +beauty of the morning touched my face and a feeling almost of joy +succeeded the fatigue of the night. I was turned from thoughts of men +going to their doom, and destruction coming from the lovely sky, and I +could receive only the morning light, and the glory of the shining river +and the rolling hills was for the moment mine; and I saw how “dying, they +are not dead.” ... + +Mass was over when I got to church, but I sat down, crossed myself, and +commended, with a suddenly quiet heart, the world of battle to its God, +and then, instead of _un_lacing my shoes in the sanctuary, I proceeded +to lace them _up_, having walked from my abode with the laces tied about +my ankles; it wasn’t as sloppy as it sounds, considering what was going +on overhead. But I found myself thinking of praying-carpets, and rows of +sandals outside of dim mosques, and things and ways far from Bar-le-Duc. + +After twenty minutes of a somewhat hazy contemplation of other than war +mysteries, I went back to the canteen. + +Betwixt the time I had left it and my return a bomb had fallen between it +and the station; a large piece of roof had been removed from the station, +and a very neat nick had been made in the corner of the canteen where we +kept our hats and coats and hung up our aprons. The street in between +looked like an earthquake street. I stood quite still for a second of +time—not thinking—you don’t think on such occasions. The Barrisiens, or, +in plain English, the Bar-le-Dukites, were engaged in business as usual. + +I then began the cutting up and buttering of endless large slices +of bread, with a Scotchwoman, who has unmodifiable opinions about +Americans—any and all Americans. Even when she only remarks, “I saw two +new people in town yesterday, _very_ American-looking, _very_,” you feel +there’s something the matter with the States, and if you had time you’d +get argumentative, even perhaps annoyed. + +Soldiers were coming in again. To one tired, deep-eyed man, sitting +listlessly, with the heavy load slipping, I said: + +“_Vous avez le cafard,[10] mon ami?_” + +And he answered, suddenly, as if the words had been ejected by a great +force from his soul: + +“_Je monte demain_—and I can’t bear the sound the bayonet makes going in.” + +I answered, “A hot cup of coffee and you will feel all right again.” But +to myself I said, “There’ll be trouble for him; he _can’t_ any more.” + +And then a huge Senegalese, all spinal column and hip, waving a generous +five-franc note in his hands, came along and wanted to know if there was +anybody _bas mariée_ among the ministrants, as he had a day off. The +service is quite variegated, as will be seen from these random specimens. + +Last night we walked up the hill of the ancient town. A yellow half-moon, +hanging behind the fourteenth-century tower, further decorated the scene. +We sat on immemorial steps, in a little V-shaped place that framed +the valley and the town, and talked of war and wars. I thought how the +legendary Gaul had wandered over these hills and these wooded stretches, +with his battle-ax and skin about him, and long-haired women had waited +his return, and children had played in front of caves. As the clock on +the tower struck nine a woman appeared, waving her arms and calling +out, “_Une incendie!_” and we went higher up the steps and saw masses +of smoke and flames on one of the hills. It was the huge barracks for +refugees that was burning, and the flames were blowing toward the near-by +encampment for German prisoners. Then we went down the ancient roadway +through the dim, warm, summer streets to the canteen overflowing with +blue-clad men, singing, drinking, disputing. A blue mist of smoke and +breath hung about them, with a smell of hot wool and worn leather—and it +was the war. As I put on my apron I found myself repeating the words: + + _Bénis ceux qui sont morts simplement: en victimes,_ + _Et n’ayant de la guerre éprouvé que l’horreur._ + _Bénis ceux qui sont morts sans nourrir en leur cœur_ + _La haine et tous ses maux, la gloire et tous ses crimes._ + + + + +CHAPTER III + +THEATRICALS AND CAMOUFLAGE + + + _27th July, evening._ + +This afternoon Lieutenant Robin fetched us to the theatrical +representation the _Division Marocaine_ was to give. + +Generals thick as leaves in Vallombrosa were there in a hemicycle about +the stage, pressed close by the flood of _poilus_. Terrible heat in the +great, glass-roofed auditorium, a slanting afternoon sun pouring itself +in like hot gold. Some thousands of spectators; thick odor of _poilu_; +blind being led in; groups of one-legged men naturally gravitating to one +another; groups of one-armed the same. A few _gardes-malades_ from the +hospitals, and ourselves the only women in the audience. + +We were presented at the door with some copies of a charming, really +literary newspaper, _L’Horizon, Journal des poilus_, and there was a +little paragraph, “_Hiérarchie française qu’on trouve au Théâtre des +Armées_,” which also described the protocol of seating, “In the first row +near the stage wounded men are lying, immediately behind them wounded men +are sitting, then come ladies, if there are any—and then come officers!” +General Goïgoux and General Abbevillers sat near us. + +While waiting we looked at _L’Horizon_ and laughed with General Goïgoux +over a paragraph showing the philosophy of a son of Mars under certain +circumstances, and it was the following: + + Nature is kind. She places the remedy near the ill and often + cures, as one has seen, evil by evil. + + A woman, too much loved, sent me a letter so cruel that I + didn’t even have the strength to tear it up, but carried it + around in my pocket for weeks. + + One night, being quartered in a stable, I took my coat off and + hung it up. + + The next day, no letter. A cow had eaten it. Nature is kind. + +When General Gouraud, first in command, entered, the “Marseillaise” +sounded, a thrill went through the vast assemblage, and we all arose. _Le +Lion d’Orient_ is tall, intensely straight, his whole thin, khaki-clad +body on parallel lines with his perpendicular armless right sleeve. +Long, straight, brown hair _en brosse_, bronzed skin. His entry was a +thing not to be forgotten. I wondered “Is it the East that stamps great +chiefs with such majesty, that can give them such calm?” and I thought of +Gallipoli—blue seas, battles, wounds, hospital ships. Then the curtain +rose on one of the most delightful theatrical representations I have ever +seen, screamingly funny, and quite chaste. + +But all that _entrain_, all that life, to be snuffed out to-morrow or +the next day, or the next? At Craonne or Reims or Verdun or wherever it +may be? And how natural that they should sing of love and women, and say +witty things concerning food and raiment and the government, till the end! + +After the performance, during which nobody had ever been so hot before, +the sun moving across the hall and grilling each row in turn, we passed +out in a great jam of _poilus_. One huge man, with the thickest of +meridional accents and red cheeks, and eyes like two black lanterns, and +a coal-black beard, was gesticulating at a small, hook-nosed, blond man. + +“_Le Midi, le Midi—qu’est-ce que tu en sais, toi, bêta? Les Anglais +t’ont déjà pris ton trou de Calais, aussi je te demande, sale type_, what +army corps took the _plateau de Craonne_” and he burst into a great laugh +of triumph. Then, borne on the blue waves, we found ourselves in the open +air and realized what we had been breathing. + +General Goïgoux presented us to General Gouraud standing by his motor +with several other generals, while a squad of German prisoners, looking +out of the corners of their eyes, were being marched by. His mien was +dignity itself, and out under the sky one was even more conscious of that +harmony of browns and straight lines, that something remote yet majestic +in his being. As we turned to go I saw him speaking to a blind zouave, +and he pressed his hand lingeringly on the man’s shoulder. _Oh, enfants +de la patrie!_ + + _Saturday, July 28th, 10.30 a.m._ + +All last night the strange, recurring, sinister sound of the _sirènes_ +over the plain of Châlons, and it seemed to me like cries of men of the +Stone Age. + +These two days I have been haunted by ghosts of beings of the twilight +ages; elusive emanations, dim suggestions of their psychologies have at +moments possessed me in this city of the Catalaunian Plains. + +Rested in my pink-silk wrapper, dead tired—too tired to care whether +“they” got here or not—and stayed in bed during the _alertes_, but I +thought of airmen, attackers and defenders, in the soft summer sky, a +golden half-moon lighting a dim heaven. + +Dreamed, but only in snatches, of peace and the ways of peace. + +At 4.30 I heard Joseph’s gas-bark and knew he was again with us, +stretched out on the _chaise-longue_ under the chestnut-tree. + +As I stood at the window my thoughts went twisting about the stars of +the gorgeous night that was so soon to give way to another summer day, +and I suddenly saw human beings, only as tiny specks, everywhere going +forth at some word of command to their doom. There was a flinging back of +my thoughts upon me, and I turned from my window, as suddenly the chill +of early dawn and the boom of cannon came in, and I could see nothing +for tears and I knew the beauteous earth for what it is—the abode of mad +horrors. + + _Later._ + +Paid my respects to General Goïgoux for an instant of time (I can always +get out quickly) in the old gray house of the Rue Grande Étape, and found +him as always, _distingué_, human, untired, cordial. Officers passing in +and out of his room, and the walls tapestried with maps. Later Colonel +Rolland of the 1st Zouaves, very jaunty in his red fez, adoring his men +and adored by them, and flicking his leg with a short cane having a +deadly knife on a spring in the top, took us to the railroad station, to +inspect the great, dreary sheds that with time, labor, and much energy +are to become _La Cantine Américaine_. Blue-clad men were lying around +like logs in inert bundles on the earthen floor. One had to step over +legs and motley equipment to get anywhere. A dreadful sound of hammering +was echoing through the vast spaces, without, however, seeming to disturb +the slumbers of those men, and I dare say was as a lullaby in comparison +to the first-line trenches. + +We stepped into the kitchen. A smiling, twinkling-eyed _cuistot_[11] who +probably had something awful the matter with him—flat-foot or hernia or +something of the kind, or he wouldn’t have been there—with pride asked +us to partake of some of his coffee. He proceeded to dip it from a +great, steaming caldron, pouring it into worn tin cups carefully wiped +first on his much-used apron. My soul responding to echoes of fraternity +enabled me to drink with a smile, which, though it started out rather +sickly, behaved all right as I returned the cup with compliments. The +_cuistot_ said he hoped the _cantine_ would soon be in order, and as he +looked through the small opening through which he shoved the cups to +the _poilus_, rendered still smaller by piles of bread and festoons of +sausage, he added, “_Les têtes de ces dames seront plus consolantes que +la mienne_.” He was a nice, human _cuistot_, though no lover of water +except for making coffee, and then, as we fell into conversation, he +added, “_Si la guerre pouvait finir; mais il y a un fossé de dignité et +personne des deux côtés n’ose le sauter_.” These _poilus_ are astounding! + +We then visited Lieutenant Tonzin, who is going to decorate the _cantine_ +as never _cantine_ was decorated. He was at the camouflage grounds. As +one knows, camouflage is _de l’art de la guerre le dernier cri_, but the +grounds were discreetly veiled from public gaze, and we were directed +into a little garden, green-treed and sun-flecked. In it was a trestle +with a large, very clever, plaster cast of a _camion_ taking _poilus_ +somewhere; they were hanging from every possible place except the wheels, +just such a sight as one constantly sees on the roads near the front. + +The gayest sounds of whistling and singing issued from the rather +coquet sun-flooded house behind the garden. Several other young artists +appeared on hearing women’s voices, loving life, adoring art with a new +adoration, and who with something of wonder and much of thankfulness +found themselves for a sweet, brief space in charge of the camouflage +work, with brush and chisel again in hand instead of bayonets. + +We looked at the designs for the _cantine_ decorations, quite +charming—but we delicately suggested suppressing the figure of a too +fascinating “mees” that was to embellish the entrance and point to the +_poilus_ the way to those delights. We feared some confusion of thought. + +Afterward went to church at Notre Dame, and, sitting there, drew my first +quiet breath in Châlons, out of the hot streets. Beautiful music rolling +through the gray, antique vaulting. A white bier near the altar; some +beloved child was being laid away from sight and hearing and touch and +earthly hope. As I looked about the lovely gray spaces I remembered how +in _La Cathédrale_ Huysmans says the length symbolizes the patience of +the Church during trials and persecutions; the width, that love which +dilates the heart; and the height, our aspirations and our hopes—and +some speechless gratitude overflowed my soul because of being one of the +enduring community to whom, through the gorgeous, terrible ages, nothing +human is foreign. I had a strange, complete sensation of brotherhood and +I saw us all of the great laughing, weeping caravan, winding through the +desert, and the Church compassionate the spot of living waters. And how +“men must endure their going hence, even as their coming hither. Ripeness +is all.” ... + +On the same site had once been a pagan temple, and on its altar was the +figure of a Virgin, and at her feet were graven the words, “_Virgini +Parituri_” (“to the Virgin who shall bring forth”). And it had come to +pass. + +The most precious of the old windows have lately been put out of harm’s +way, but the ogival tops remain with their jewels of medieval reds and +blues; and on each side, as one looks through the lovely gray vaulting, +are delicate windows of a later epoch, with designs in fawn and green and +yellow. + +As I came out behind the mourners following the little white bier, I +noticed again with a sinking of the heart the revolutionary defacement +of the splendid portals. Men in all ages have had seasons of madness, +wherein they destroyed whatever mute and unresisting beauty was within +their reach. + +Again through the hot streets—an epic in themselves of war, dust, sun, +blue-clad men, blue-gray automobiles, gallooned officers, and I realized +among other things that without uniforms war would be impossible. + +Bought _Le Champ de Bataille de l’Epopée_, also _Le Mannequin d’Osier_, +out of a huge stock of Anatole France’s books, who is evidently a +favorite here. I passed through the old courtyard of the museum, +hermetically sealed _depuis la campagne_, as the porter told me when +I sought his lodge, from which the most savory of noonday smells was +issuing. Uninteresting and entirely beside the point, Buddhist sculptures +fill one side of the court, and then, passing through the portal of a +seventeenth-century church, transported there when the church itself +was being done away with, one finds oneself in a narrow passage on the +walls of which are hung quaint old fire-backs, _plaques de foyer_. The +first is of the eighteenth century, “_l’amour désarmé_” (love was nearly +always disarmed in those days), and this one represented Cupid supporting +a languorous lady. “_Le retour du marché_” of Louis XVI depicted a +housewife returning with a full basket on her arm, and evoked the odor of +the porter’s _pot-au-feu_. A French soldier wounded in the Crimea, 1855, +with his colonel bending over him, might have been any one of a hundred +thousand scenes of to-day. On one were the arms of the King of Spain, and +the date 1608, and on another those of Maria Theresa and her consort, +Francis III, Duke of Lorraine. Their origins were as diverse as the +history of Lorraine itself, and I glimpsed family groups sitting about +hearths, looking at them through the flames. + + _Later._ + +Met to-day two Englishwomen coming out of the hospital. One, nearing +sixty, had something ardent in her charming blue eyes and under austerely +brushed whitening hair; there was a suggestion of banked fires—banked +under ashes of circumstance, probably, as well as time. The other, +somewhat younger, in the full grip of _l’âge dangereux_, had something +inexorable in her regard. When we passed on I asked who they were, and +found they were daily doers of acts of mercy and devotion, and then I +found myself looking for eternal reasons in transient things, under +the impression made by those two women—met only in passing, but whose +emanations I suddenly caught. And I thought: Among the innumerable +phenomena of the war are these women of various ages (though the +phenomenon is most apparent between thirty-five and sixty), brought +for the first time into personal contact with man, other than father +or brother, ministering to his wants, witness of his agonies, awed +spectator of his continual apotheosis, and all the daily transmutations +of the definite and ordinary into the infinite and divine. The world +war gives the one chance for the twisting of conventional fives, lived +along the straightest of fines, into completely unexpected shapes. They +come from abodes of hitherto unescapable virginities, these elemental +women of indescribable innocence, with that warm, wondering look, or +sometimes that determined and inexorable look, upon their faces, these +unchosen and unmated, to become part of the strange lining of the war, +part of the vast patchwork. Not the least strange are these pale, thin +bits, sewn into something riotous, reckless, multicolored, heroic. It’s +a far cry from Shepherd’s Bush or Clapham Junction or Stepney Green +to battle-fields, hospitals, vanishings, potent reminders of forces +withdrawn forever from the world-sum, or, still more, of convalescences +and evocations of returning forces, but _not_ re-established order. + +Everywhere the subtle but deathless emanation of the male—his heroisms, +his agonies, his needs, his weakness, and his strength. + +Can one wonder at the mighty tide obeying nameless natural laws, like +other tides, that flood the areas where the manhood of the world is +concentrated? + +Very hot. Out there in the _Champagne Pouilleuse_ men are marching in +the white dust, resting in the white dust, giving up their lives in the +white dust. Am sitting under the chestnut-tree. A soldier, in civil life +a gardener, has been sent to tidy up our garden, and its _belle patine_ +will soon give way to spick-and-spanness. I sensed such a passion of +tenderness in the way he handled his rake that I went over to speak to +him, and this is his history. He is from Cette—_une ville si jolie_—and +he speaks with the heavy accent of his part of the world. He is a +territorial and forms part of the _État-Civil des Champs de Bataille_ +(civilian workers on the battle-fields). This doesn’t sound bad, but it +really means that since he was called, eighteen months ago, he, who all +his life has planted flowers, has been digging up dead bodies, hunting in +a literal “body of death” to find the plaques, and then identifying by +means of a map the place where they are found. + +“_Madame, je rien pouvais plus._ It was too terrible. I am forty-seven +years old, but I asked to be put among the attacking troops. They +refused, but sent me here. Now in this garden I have found heaven +again.” And his eyes, his soft, suffering eyes, filled with tears. + +I asked him about his family—one son is fighting in the Vosges. + +“He is six feet four and he so resembles Albert I that they call him _le +roi des Belges_. I lost my daughter a few months ago—a beautiful girl +with curling blond hair. After her fiancé fell at Verdun, she went into +a decline. My other son is young, seventeen, but his turn is near. I +had a beautiful family.” The gardener himself is straight-featured and +straight-browed, caught up how terribly in the wine-press of the war. +“All my life I have been gardener in great houses,” he added, with a +shudder. “The work they gave me _là-bas_ is the most terrible of all. +_On n’y résiste pas à la longue. O les pauvres restes qu’on trouve! O, +Madame!_” + +I asked him to bring me the photographs of his family, and his face +brightened for a moment as he stood with his head uncovered. One speaks +to any chance person, and immediately one gets a story that is fit only +to be handled by some master of that incomparable thing, French prose. + + _Later._ + +A while ago investigated the house. Up-stairs is a little room toward the +north, papered in a yellow-and-white pin-stripe design of forty or fifty +years ago. In it is a yellow baroque niche with a shell design at the +top, having a temple or altar-like suggestion, in spite of the too-large, +ugly, marble-topped mahogany wash-stand that fills it. Above the mahogany +bed is a carved wooden holy water font, a little shelf in the corner +for books, and another for a lamp, and there is a window looking out on +small gardens cut up into bits for flowers and vegetables. As I entered +it I seemed to know that some spirit rare and strong enough to project +emanations, sensible even to a stranger long after, had lived, perhaps +died, in it. I settled down immediately in a really not comfortable, +too-small, brown, upholstered arm-chair, sloping forward, and felt +somehow as if I were in choice company, and began to turn the pages of +Bordeaux’s _Dernier jour du Fort de Vaux_, which I had in my hand as I +entered. But something unseen held my attention, not the book. The room +was gently, softly haunted, and the world of spirits was sensibly about +me.... Anyway, the plain of Châlons gives me the creeps. + +Joseph, reappearing this afternoon, brought the news that there had been +another air raid on Bar-le-Duc at noon, and they had dropped pounds of +leaflets telling of the Russian defeat, Rumanians retreating, in danger +of being enveloped. The leaflets wound up by saying the Germans were sick +of the war—they supposed the French were—and why not have peace? + + + + +CHAPTER IV + +THE BURIAL OF PÈRE CAFARD + + + CHÂLONS, _Sunday, 29th_. + +Telegram that M. de Sinçay may be passing through. I would like to see +his _grand seigneur_ contour decorate our 1860 establishment. Go to the +_Bureau de la Place_, and nothing less than a general (Abbevillers) +grasps the receiver and telephones for me to Bar-le-Duc—but without +result. They are all in “our” _secteur_ “of a courtesy”! + +Twelve-o’clock mass at Notre Dame. Again rolling music, and the green +vestment of the priest especially beautiful at the end of that high gray +Gothic vista. Many, many military. I thought of an English officer who +said to me not long ago: + +“See how the soldier is exalted in the New Testament. It is certainly not +the man of law, the money-changer, the man of politics, nor governors. +When Christ has an especial lesson to show, how often He shows it through +the soldier, even unto the servant of the centurion.” + +On returning, found Mrs. S. and Miss E. arrived from the village of +the fifteenth-century towers,[12] and the khaki-clad sons of Mars from +over the seas, their hearts filled with patriotism and their tank with +American _essence_. Coffee under the chestnut-tree, lovely sun filtering +through, and the little white butterflies flying about the little white +ash-tree; and we told stories, being all of us souls that laugh, which we +did, till we couldn’t breathe, at the story of the woman’s-preparedness +meeting in a certain transcendental town where the head of the assembly +in solemn accents besought as many as felt drawn to such work to become +automobilists—“and the moment the Germans set foot in New York rush the +virgins to the West, preferably Kansas City.” In the town of brotherly +love, where a like assemblage was held, an immediate position was +available, March, 1917, with a commission of major-general, to look after +dead soldiers’ widows for another blinking female. _Oh! là, là!_—and when +one thinks we’ve _got_ to win the war! + + _Later._ + +Have just laid down _Le Mannequin d’Osier_, completely dazzled by that +first chapter, so monstrously clever, so diabolically lucid, so icily +logical, so magnetically cynical, and I said to myself, after all, “one +can only write of war in between wars.” I long for a friend to read with +me the pages where M. Roux, on short leave during his years’ military +service, says to M. Bergeret, “_Il y a quatre mois que je n’ai pas +entendu une parole intelligente_,” to the paragraph where M. Bergeret +says, “_Mais nous sommes un peuple de héros et nous croyons toujours que +nous sommes trahis_.” It stimulated a desire for the discussion of things +as they are, over against what one idiotically hopes they may be, with a +bit of imagination concerning the future thrown in. + + _July 29th, evening._ + +In the afternoon we all went to another theatrical representation in +the big hall, given by the _1er Régiment de Marche des Zouaves_. Again +immense concourse. Again the “Marseillaise,” and again the _Lion +d’Orient_ made his majestic entry, and dozens of generals and high +officials followed him, and again all sat forming their glittering +hemicycle in front of the stage. Again a few nurses, some wives of +officers, and the thousands of _poilus_. + +A great poster read: “_Vous êtes priés d’assister au convoi, service, et +enterrement du Père Cafard, assassiné par le Communiqué._ + +“_Le deuil sera conduit par le Pinard, le Jus, la Gniole, le Tabac, et +tous les membres du Chacal hurlant._” + +It appears that those of the 1st Zouaves still in hospital had had a rise +in temperature at the thought that their representation might not equal +that of the Moroccan Division of Friday. The _Compère_ was made to look +as much as possible like Colonel Rolland—adored by his men. “_On R’met +Ca!_” has been given in the trenches all over the front, and was just as +funny and amusing as the other, but there was a strange intermezzo about +three o’clock, when the dreadful sun, shining through the glass panes of +the sides (on the roof great squares of canvas had been spread), began +to get fainter. It was like being in the hot-room of a Turkish bath. +Suddenly a darkness fell, accompanied by a deafening and terrifying +noise of a heavy rattling on the roof and a beating in at the sides; the +voices and music were completely drowned and the performance had to be +suspended. Even the officers were beginning to look about—when the lights +suddenly went out and we found ourselves in Stygian blackness at 4.30 of +a summer afternoon, the terrific noise continuing, with the under-note of +the stirring of the thousands assembled. A nameless fear, or something +akin to it, went through the vast assemblage. Finally we realized that +it was heaven, not the enemy, bombarding us, as hailstones, even by +the time they had gone through many hot hands, as big as turkey eggs, +were passed about. There was the sound of breaking glass, water began to +rush in, the heavy canvas, spread on the roof as protection against the +sun, and also to prevent the light from being seen from the air, alone +prevented the roof from breaking in. Finally the lights reappeared and +the performance proceeded to the diminishing sound of heavy rain—but it +was a strange experience. Even those generals of Olympic calm had begun +to “think thoughts” at one moment. It would have been a big “bag,” had +anything been doing, and we all knew it. + +Mrs. S. and Miss E. have been persuaded to stay at the house by the +Marne, rather than at La Haute Mère Dieu, and we have arranged to double +up. + +I am to motor back to Paris with them to-morrow. + + + + +CHAPTER V + +A PROVIDENTIAL FORD + + + PARIS, _July 31st_. + +Yesterday, at 8.30 in the damp morning, Lieutenant Robin appeared with +my military pass to return by auto instead of by train, and I said a +special farewell to the gardener, carrying our bags out to the motor +in a passionate tenderness of courtesy. Miss Nott and Miss Mitchell +bade us Godspeed, and we passed over the Marne and out of town. At the +_consigne_ examination of our papers, our charming chauffeuse excited +much attention. An officer standing there with pasteboard box and leather +bag asked if we would give him a lift. The road was unusually empty and +he had been awaiting an act of Providence for two hours. We were it. + +He would be in ordinary times a Frenchman of the stereotyped banal sort, +and he was entirely without charm, though I dare say he is known as a +_beau garçon_ in Lyons, where before the war he was _marchand de bois_. +But the war transmutes everything it touches, and he, too, had undergone +the subtle change. He said, quite simply for a man naturally fatuous, +“_Je ne retrouverai jamais ma vie d’autre fois_.” I seemed to see what +that life had been. Small but good business transactions; some success +with women, as I said he would be considered as handsome; the theater; +reading newspapers in a café; talking of the happenings of his quarter +of the town—and the lamp of his soul burning only dimly. But even he has +been caught up in the “chariot that rides the ridges” and must partake of +_la haine et tous ses maux, la gloire et tous ses crimes_. We drop him +at a crossroad and he takes a muddy side-path to the village where his +regiment is billeted. + +At another crossway just out of the village of Vertus another officer +was waiting. We called out, “Is this the road to Epernay?” And then, “Do +you want a lift?” This time it was a dark-eyed young man with a kindling +glance and something responsive and mercurial in his being, giving a +sensation of personality, awake, running, a-thrill. He had twenty-four +hours’ permission to go to Paris to see his mother, and had arrived to +see the train pulling out of the little station. He also was waiting +Fate at the crossroads, and crossroads in war-time are a favorite abode +of Fate. He had been wounded near Suippes, lay twenty-four hours in a +shell-hole, and was finally brought in by some man he didn’t know, whose +head was blown off as he was pulling him into the trench. Something deep +rustled in my heart at the vision of the splendor of that anonymity. Six +months in hospital, six months of convalescing, and then a hunger for the +front—_quorum pars fuit_. + +We were passing through a beautiful country of vineyards, Vertus, Mesnil, +Avize, in the loveliness of graded greens, malachite, beryl, emerald, +jasper, and stretches of aquamarine where the grapes had been powdered +with the _mélange de Bordeaux_. Everywhere were little sharp, steep +hills, their plantings taking all kinds of lights as they turned to east +or west or south. + +At Epernay we wound about the streets till we came to the Hôtel de +l’Europe, marked with a star in the guide; but you see no stars when you +get into its encumbered, dull little courtyard—as slightly modern as +possible—ask for luncheon, any kind of luncheon, and find one can’t have +it or anything till twelve, the only fixed thing, except the _consigne_, +I have discovered in the war zone. We went across the square to the Café +de la Place, where we had _œufs sur le plat_, a yard and a half of thin, +crusty bread, a thick pat of yellow butter, and a bottle of Chablis, +that poured out pinky into our glasses. After which, reinforced and +most cheerful, we went to the Place du Marché, where were many signs of +the campaign of August and September, 1914. Among débris of bombarded +buildings the fruit-market was being held. Plums, peaches, and apricots +were of the most delicious, and we got pounds of them, which later were +to be smashed and mashed and to ruin our dressing-bags and our clothes +and the motor seats as we bumped along. It all came from Paris except the +tiny, sweet, white grapes. + +Epernay seems banal, driving through it, but if one thinks a bit, all +sorts of things flash into the mind. It has a Merovingian past, and has +been pillaged innumerable times by innumerable hosts. It belonged to +the Counts of Champagne, to Louise of Savoy; Henry IV besieged it in +person, and Maréchal de Biron fell by his side. Now thinking of its great +champagne industry, into mind come memories of dinner-tables around which +sat white-vested, decorated statesmen, even unto the kind that did not +prevent war, and lovely women, and the toss of repartee, and flash of +jewel and white throat, and all the once-accustomed things no longer ours. + +As we got out of Epernay a terrible temptation assailed us. Three +law-abiding women, by reason of original sin, I suppose, were drawn to +take the forbidden road to Reims—Reims, the scarred, the pitiful—Reims, +whose cannon sounded even now in our ears—rather than the straight path +of duty and _sauf-conduits_ to Paris. + +“After all, we’re not here to go joy-riding in the war zone,” said +one, virtuously; and then prudence, most dismal of virtues, triumphed, +bolstered up by a look at a well-guarded bridge, and I told the inspiring +story of the principal of the school my mother went to, whose last words +to every graduate class were, “What is duty, young ladies?” And the young +ladies were expected to respond, “A well-spring in the soul.” It isn’t +(and never has been), and our eyes kept sweeping the hill between the +Epernay road and that great plain of Champagne in the midst of which is +set the broken jewel of France. A military auto passed as we stood there, +and an officer waved us onward. We let that hand pointing us to Paris +decide. It was the triumph of prudence—plus a lively sense of favors to +come. Some one muttered, “Had we been going to take the boat on Saturday, +oh, then mayhap, mayhap....” + +Dormans. Several kilometers before we got into Dormans little crosses +began to show themselves along the roadside. All through here was heavy +fighting during the battle of the Marne. The first grave we stopped by +bore on its little cross the words, “_Trois Allemands_,” and it was +neatly fenced up with black sticks and wire. We started to climb the +hill, and among the malachite, the beryl, the emerald, the jasper, and +the aquamarine vines were many other graves. Sometimes it would be “_20 +Français_,” the red-and-white-and-blue _cocarde_ decorating the cross. +Once it was “_30 Allemands_.” On another was the name “_Lastaud, le 3 +septembre, 1914, souvenir d’un ami_.” I thought how friendship has been +glorified in this war. + +But mostly it was the continuous gorgeous anonymity of the defenders of +the land that clutched the heart and with them the invaders, pressing +their bayonets and their wills into a land not theirs. I was once +more again before the awful tangle of the world as I looked at these +resting-places. Over beyond the crest of the hill and the forest was +Montmirail. Just a hundred years before, Napoleon had put these names +upon the scrolls of history, and again and then again they had resounded +to marching feet, the terrors of invasion, the heroisms of defense. One +of a group of soldiers passing called out as we stood by one of the +German graves: + +“I came through here in 1914.” + +“But you still walk the earth,” I answered. + +“I got a ball in the hip, all the same, on the top of that hill,” and he +pointed across the road. “_Mais j’ai eu de la chance._” And a look of a +strange and pitiful wonder that he was above the earth, not under it, +flashed for a moment over his young face; then he touched his cap and +went singing down the road with his companions, and I caught the refrain, +“_Ces mots sacrés, ces mots sacrés, gloire et patrie, gloire et patrie_.” + +And somehow, after Dormans, we were all quiet. I only remember long, +gray villages, mostly eighteenth century, and many blue soldiers walking +about their broad, central streets, and signs of billetings, “_30 hommes, +2 officiers_,” “_5 hommes, 2 chevaux_,” black-robed women coming out +of little Gothic churches, and children playing, and in between the +villages great avenues of poplar and plane trees. Then we lost the Marne +and picked up the Seine, and passed La Ferté, and Meaux, seen from the +inside, preserved its flavor of “_autres temps, autres mœurs_,” in spite +of the 1917 soldiers billeted there, walking hand in hand with girls who +don’t have a ghost of a chance, in military towns, to get through the war +as they began it. + +Entered Paris in a fine drizzle of rain at 6.30. Our charming chauffeuse +dead tired after the long day, but steering us so prudently and yet so +quickly through the wet, crowded streets. Give me a good woman chauffeur +_any day_!—not simply when coming from the front! She takes no chances, +but she makes good time and she gets you there. But somehow one leaves +one’s heart at the front, and I thought to myself as I got to the hotel +door, “It’s not so good, after all, to feel _just safe_ and to be +comfortable.” + + + + +PART III + +LORRAINE IN AUTUMN + +“_L’élégante et mélancolique Lorraine_” + + + + +CHAPTER I + +NANCY AND MOLITOR + + + _1.30 p.m., Tuesday, October 9th._ + +Passing Meaux. Square gray tower of its cathedral against a gray sky, the +gray hemicycle of its lovely apse cutting in against reddish-gray roofs; +gray houses with old towers built into them; yellowing acacia and plane +and willow trees; level corn-fields stripped of their harvest, pheasants +and magpies pecking in them; golden pumpkins; and _betteraves_ showing +red and vermilion roots bursting out of the ground; everything wet—wet. + + LIGNY-EN-BARROIS. + +Two American soldiers walking up a muddy village street in the dusk; rain +falling; a cinnamon-colored stream slipping by; and a quantity of shabby, +wet foliage and wetter meadows. + + GONDRECOURT, _5.40_. + +In the extreme point of the angle where the Nancy train seems to turn +back to Paris and where many American soldiers are billeted. Cheerless, +dimly lighted station. Groups of our men standing about, high piles +of United States boxes, marked “Wizard Oats.” Some persuasion of +black-frock-coated “sky pilot” walking up and down and humming, “Pull +for the shore, sailor, pull for the shore” (there _was_ a lot of water +about!), and then in the darkness the train slipped out. There and in +all the dim, wet Lorraine villages about are damp, puzzled, homesick, +forlorn, brave, determined, eager young Americans. + + HÔTEL EXCELSIOR ET D’ANGLETERRE, NANCY, _Tuesday evening_. + +Cabs at station, hot water, writing-paper, meat, warmth, all sorts of +things you don’t always get on Tuesday in Paris. Everything, in fact, +except light. Dining-room full of officers. _Chic atmosphère de guerre_ +began to envelope me, not yet experienced that day. Started from Paris +tired and not particularly receptive, but was conscious of a slow +quickening of sensibility as the hours passed, drawing me within the zone +of armies. + +This “chic war atmosphere” is like nothing else. Impersonal and larger +lungs are needed to breathe it. We no longer, so many of us, read of +their battles, but they still fight them, these blue-clad men out here. +In the coal-black evening, stumbling from the station, one realizes it +all once more—and there is some lighting of the soul. + + _October 10th._ + +Nancy in rain and storm, and all night the sound of cannon and gun and +mitrailleuse turned against sweet flesh and blood, the sons of women +dying in agony hard as their mother’s pain, and no way out. Never were +the imaginations of men less elastic; little groups everywhere are hourly +setting this cold grind in motion with a word or a gesture, around green +tables or bending over maps—in a few small spaces deciding the agonies of +millions. + +An _avion_ almost tapped at my window once toward morning and reminded me +of a young aviator with whom we talked in the train last night, his face +a-twitch, strange eyes, gloomy, set mouth, once _jeunesse dorée_. A hard +look as he answered: + +“_Avion de chasse, il n’y a que cela._” He had been “resting” in the +cavalry, where there was little movement, and he couldn’t stand it. As +for the trenches— + +“_O les tranchées! Être avec des gens que je ne connais pas, sous des +conditions indescriptibles; non, je n’en peux plus._” + +“Better to fall from the heavens?” I asked him. + +And then I realized the disarray of nerves, the complete unfitting of the +being to an earthly habitat, in the knowledge that life is measured by +an almost countable number of hours or days, scarcely weeks, and rarely, +rarely months, and the calling on help from the flower of sleep to fit +one for acts impossible to normal being. + +I must say this very evidently “made-in-Germany” hotel is most +comfortable. _Jugend-Stil_ designed bed, exquisitely clean; great white +eiderdown; a munificence of brass electric-light fixtures representing +leaves, with frosted shades running from pale pink to pale green, and +giving plenty of light; the iron shutters tightly pulled down, of +course. Large wash-stand with a huge faucet for hot water, bearing +the name “Jacob”; the heating apparatus by Rückstuhl; the telephone, +“Berliner-system”; electric light and lift the familiar “Schindler.” +Wardrobe and mirror over wash-stand have, like the bed, a design, +not of conventionalized flowers, but of flowers devoid of life. The +inexpressibly sloppy _mollesse_ of _art nouveau_ is in such contrast to +the beautiful precision of touch of the eighteenth century. + +At 9.30 E. M. came into my room and said, “We’d better doll up and be +off.” I leave it to the gentlest of readers to surmise what we did before +being off, and I would like to say here that one doesn’t always “doll up” +for others; the process gives to one’s own being a sense of completeness +most sustaining. It comes after that of having one’s clothes put on +properly. + +_En route_ to the Prefect’s we met the tall, good-looking blond young son +of Jean de Reszke, “_très chic, cherchant le danger_”; “_en voilà un qui +n’a pas froid aux yeux_,” the only and adored child of his parents. It’s +not a very promising situation for them. But again I thought, “Nothing +but good can befall the soldier, so he play his part well,” and started +to ponder on the incalculable growth of filial piety, and of the love +of mothers, and their griefs, when, suddenly walking along the gray +streets of Nancy, the scene shifted, and it was the Metropolitan Opera +House that I saw—the lights, the red glow, the boxes, the jewels; the +warmth, the stir of the orchestra, the quiet of the listening house, were +about me. It seemed to be the second act of “Tristan and Isolde” after +the duo, when King Mark makes his noble entry and in those unforgetable +accents begins his broken-hearted apostrophe to Tristan, “_Tatest du’s in +Wirklichkeit, wähnst du das?_” And all that unsurpassed and unsurpassable +art of the great Polish brothers was again evoked; one now gathered to +his rest in stress of war, the other knowing a greater fear than for +himself. + +Then I found myself in the Place Stanislas under gray morning skies, +instead of the gleaming twilight web. I felt suddenly and acutely the +turning of the seasons and the inexorable advent of winter through which +unsheltered flesh and blood must pass. That ravishing of the spirit I +knew in the warm June sunset was mine no more. + + _Later._ + + Waiting for the motor to drive to Lunéville. + +Went with Madame Mirman, the wife of the _Préfet de la Meurthe et +Moselle_, to visit Molitor. It is a huge collection of barrack-buildings +which for three years has contained that terrible precipitation of +old men, women, and children from the devastated districts around +about. They are received in every conceivable condition of hunger, +dirt, disease, and distress of soul. They had been living in the woods +and fields that first summer, and the children running the streets of +half-ruined towns, before being brought to Molitor. + +[Illustration: SISTER JULIE] + +[Illustration: BAS-RELIEF OF THE REFUGEES + +As they passed at Evian—but typical of any group anywhere.] + +We went first to the school-building, and into the kindergarten room +where rows of children were making straight lines with beans on little +tables. Very hot and stuffy in the hermetically sealed room, every child +sniffling and sneezing and coughing. There are always faces that stand +out, and in this room, as the children rose and sang a song with patting +of the hands, there was one child of five with gestures so lovely and +movements of the body so rhythmic that one realized afresh the eternal +differences in the seasoning of the human _pâte_. She was between two +clumsy, wooden-faced children, one with a peaked forehead, the other with +a heavy jaw. + +We then went up-stairs to a class-room of older boys, and after we had +spoken to the schoolmaster I noticed a handsome boy with shining eyes and +a firm mouth. The master, who was new and wished to become acquainted +with his pupils, had written the following questions on the blackboard: +“Whence do you come? What was the occupation of your parents? Are you +happy at Molitor?” etc. Well, that little boy of eleven, when asked what +he had written, turned out to be a sort of cross between Demosthenes and +Gambetta, and read from his slate an impassioned apostrophe about “_le +flot envahisseur des barbares, quand délivrera-t-on la France martyrisée +de la main destructrice de l’ennemi?_” and to the question, “Are you +happy at Molitor?” the answer was, “_Oui, on est bien à Molitor, mais +rien ne remplace le foyer; quand on a perdu cela, on a tout perdu_.” + +The face of the master showed some embarrassment at any restrictions +on happiness at Molitor, but the boy, whose eyes had begun to flame, +continued: “_O quand viendra le jour de la Revanche, le jour sacré de la +délivrance?_” and wound up with something about his blood and the blood +of his children. His father, who was dead, had been employed in the +customs at Avricourt, and his mother now cooked in one of the Molitor +buildings. Then we passed through a room where some fifty women were +sorting and stemming hops; the strong, warm odor enveloped us and the +eyes of the women followed us. + +Then out across the immense courtyard to one of the dormitory buildings. +Rows of beds, and above them, around the walls, a line of shelves on +which is every kind of small article that could be carried in flight, +from trimmings for Christmas trees to shrines and little strong-boxes. + +As we entered the first room, Madame Mirman said to an old woman with +deep, soft eyes: + +“_Comment ça va-t-il aujourd’hui?_” + +And with such grace she answered: + +“_Oh, Madame, c’est la vieillesse, et on n’en guérit pas._” + +Another woman, nursing a rheumatic knee, when asked about her son, who +had been at Molitor on a three days’ permission, put her cracked old hand +over her heart and said, “_Voir un peu sa personne fait oublier tout_.” + +In all the big rooms near the long windows women sit bent over embroidery +and passementerie frames. One of them, with thin hair and horny hands, +was working with extreme rapidity on a bright _pailleté_ strip for an +evening gown, a design of silver lilies on white tulle, in such contrast +to her worn face and bent figure. + +Many were working at lovely and intricate tea-cloths, with designs of +the Lorraine cross, and thistle, oak and acorn designs, that had been +handed down through generations. Some of the work Madame Mirman is able +to dispose of directly, while some is contracted for with big shops. + +When we came down-stairs there was a great sound of young feet and voices +and various noises of well-cared-for children, just dismissed from the +seats of learning, coming up the stone stairway to their dinner. + +It’s the threading up of all these destinies, this web of the France to +be, that is the great problem. And oh, how terrible is this uptearing +of human beings, this ghastly showing of the roots! I have seen it +wholesale, east and west. I remember especially the first two evacuations +of Czernowitz and the adjacent towns and villages during the Russian +advance through Galicia. They would flood the streets of Vienna by the +tens of thousands, in pitiful groups, always the same—old men, women, and +children; and it’s all alike, it’s war, the ruthless, the indescribable, +and everywhere the children paying most heavily. Could the war-book of +_children_ be written no eyes could read it for tears....[13] + +We went back to luncheon at the Prefecture, where I met M. Mirman, one +of the most striking figures of the war. Since the 12th of August, 1914, +when he took up his duties as _Préfet de la Meurthe et Moselle_, his +handsome, straight-featured face has figured at every gathering of sorrow +or relief. As he sat at his table, surrounded by his six children, he +talked of those first days when Nancy was in danger and it was not known +if _le Grand Couronné_ on which Castelnau had flung his _paraphe could_ +protect them, and then he told of many urgent present needs. + +After lunch we drove with Madame Mirman to her favorite good work, +_l’école ménagère_. + +When we got there the elementary class, girls of thirteen to fourteen, +were chopping herbs and onions to make seasoning for soups in winter, and +putting it up in stone pots. Another class was kneading and rolling out +dough. Then we went into the great sewing-room and turned over the books +of miniature sample pieces of underclothing. When the girls become expert +they are given material and make their own trousseaux. + +With a sigh Madame Mirman said: “But I am sad for these girls. The men +who might have been their husbands lie dead on the field of honor, and +there will be no homes for them.” + +Something chill and inexorable laid its hand on me as I thought: only +graves, and they leveled out of memory by time; except in the hearts of +mothers, to whom _voir un pen sa personne_ is the supreme joy, and the +knowledge that it can be no more the supreme sorrow. + + HÔTEL DES VOSGES, LUNÉVILLE, _11.30 p.m._ + +A long day. Many pages of the book of life and death turned. Just before +leaving Nancy, made a little tour of the battered station. Scarcely +a pane of glass left anywhere, but in and out of it is the ceaseless +movement of blue-clad men. A few flecks of a strange, dull amber in a +pale-pink sky, the true sunset sky of Nancy. A bishop with a military +cap and a chaplain in khaki pass, lines of _camions_ and Red Cross +ambulances. Suddenly, beyond the station, a dark-winged thing against the +sky is seen to drop, right itself for a moment, then a column of smoke +goes up from it, then a flame, then there is a falling of something +black just behind the twin Gothic towers of St.-Léon. The streets filled +instantly, “_C’est un des nôtres_,” said a man with field-glasses, and +then, death in the sky not being unusual here, they went about their +business, and the long, delicate towers of St.-Léon got black as ink +against the flaming sky. But a man’s soul was being breathed out in some +distant beet-root field or in the forest of Haye. Peace to him! + +The next thing I saw, that has become a familiar sight in the last +months, was an American soldier on some sort of permission, and hanging +from his arm, neatly bound, was a pretty little “dictionary”—from whom, +however, came sounds of broken English. The British Expeditionary Force +saved the classics from destruction at one time; now “salvage” seems to +be rather the turn of the American forces. One can only philosophize on +the indestructibility of matter. + +The Place Stanislas was a bit out of our way, but when I saw the lovely +Louis XV knots of pink that the orb of day was tying in the sky before he +quite departed I begged for three minutes in its pale loveliness. Against +the delicate ribbons of the sky were urns and figures, urns with stone +flames arising from them, softly glowing, or stone flower-twisted torches +held by winged beings, children and youths or angels I knew not—but I did +know in a flash just how and why the Place Stanislas came into being. + +In the gray streets were blue-clad, heavily laden men, and the chill +autumn twilight was falling about them. Oh, Nancy! dream of the past and +yet with so much of the hope of the present within your gates! + +As we sped out of town, through the vast manufacturing suburbs, I turned +and saw a bank of orange glory in the west, cut into browns and reds, +with little threadings of gray and green and blue, for all the world +like an ancient Cashmere shawl with light thrown on it. + +Night was falling as we passed through St.-Nicolas du Port. The two +immense towers of the church, which dominate the landscape, were cutting +black and cypress-like into the sky. The streets were full of dim +figures—soldiers, overalled men, and many trousered women coming from +munition-factories, with baskets and clinging children, hurrying home to +get the evening meal. + +We two American women found ourselves threading our way through it all in +a Ford which E. M. was driving herself, the Ford which in the afternoon +had allowed itself caprices only permissible to lovelier objects, and +there, close behind the French lines, we talked of love and marriage, and +the Church. And these things had been and are for one, and for the other +all to come. + +Among its various imperfections, the Ford was one-eyed, and our little +light did not cast its beams very far. We got tangled up into a long +line of _camions_, with blinding headlights, quite extinguishing us as +we hugged the right side of the road. Finally we reached the outpost of +Lunéville, where the guard stopped us, dark and disreputable-looking as +we were, flashed his lantern, saw the lettering on the auto. We cried, +“Vitrimont,” and then passed on. The chill night had completely fallen, +but in the dark fields rose darker crosses that only one’s soul could +see. Peace to them that lie beneath! + +Into town safe; drew up at the door of the house that was once an old +Capuchin monastery, groped our way through a dark garden to find a warm +welcome from Mademoiselle Guérin, a shining tea-table, an open fire, many +books, things seemed _too_ well with us. + + + + +CHAPTER II + +EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY EMANATIONS + + + _October 11th, 7.30._ + +Awakened at five o’clock to the sound of cavalry passing under my +windows. I have three, and got the full benefit of the hoofs. I looked +out into a bluish, late-night sky; endless shadowy lines of men that +I knew were blue-clad were defiling, and there was a faint booming of +cannon. Everything that the pitchy blackness of the streets of Lunéville +prevents the inhabitants from doing between 5 and 8 P.M. they do between +5 and 8 A.M. The hour was set back on the 7th, which is why we have +suddenly so much morning and these chopped-off afternoons. It makes the +streets of the old town “hum” in the early hours. No Taubes; the sky too +threatening. Again _chic atmosphère de guerre_. + +My big room is charming. The doors have panelings of the great epoch +of Lunéville, but on the walls is a fresh papering of a pinkish _toile +de Jouy_ design, in such good taste, an abyss between it and the +_Jugend-Stil_ of the “Hôtel Excelsior et d’Angleterre”; over each door is +a lunette containing a faded old painting. + +The pink-curtained windows have deep embrasures; a fresh, thick, +pale-gray carpet quite covers the floor; on the mantelpiece is a bronze +clock, a large Europa sitting on a small bull. I suspect _it_ is 1830. +In one corner a commodious Louis XV _armoire_. On one of its doors +is carved a peasant’s house and a hunter aiming at a deer half-hidden +in some trees. On the other is a fishing scene and a bridge, and in +the distance a château. The panels are inclosed in charming Pompadour +scrolls, and there is an elaborate wrought-iron lock of the same period. +It seemed to epitomize the life of Lorraine, as well as “the reign of +the arts and talents.” Discovered last night that the electric light is +in the right place, so that a lady can dress for dinner or read in bed +with equal facility. There is all the hot water one could wish, an open +fireplace, but it was with a sigh that I said, as I heard the cannon, +“_Rien ne manque_.” The maid, who had been in England, put our things out +last night with a dainty touch, the ribbons on top; my pink satin négligé +was placed with art across the chair by my bed. In E. M.’s room, equally +comfortable, her pale-blue one was also tastefully displayed. Somehow, +all the physical comfort is so insistently in contrast with what is +being gone through with a few kilometers away, and though my soul can be +supremely content without any of it, I looked for the moment with a new +appreciation on this flicker of comfort behind that dreadful front. + +Again we groped through the Place Léopold after dinner at Mlle. Guérin’s, +feeling our way slowly under completely remote stars, Jupiter so +gorgeous that for a moment my heart was afraid. Then I became sensible +of ghostly and lovely companions, the amiable secrets of whose amiable +lives have been revealed to me in many a tome since I crossed that square +in those linden-scented nights of June. Did linden scent, on which a +long chapter could be written, have anything to do with their morals, I +wonder? However that may be, I thought of Duke Léopold going from the +château through the park to the house in the rue de Lorraine to see +the Princesse de Craon, who bore twenty children here in Lunéville, +preserving her beauty and her husband’s love, and that of Duke Léopold as +well, evidently having the secret of squaring the circle without breaking +it (unknown in the twentieth century, when everything “goes bang” if it +is but breathed upon). Then of the wild and witty Chevalier de Boufflers, +painting and making verses, loving and forgetting, whose mother, beloved +of “_Stanislas, Roi de Pologne et Duc de Lorraine et de Bar_,” was the +bright particular star of Stanislas’s Court, as his grandmother had +been of Léopold’s. And how often _La divine Emilie_ and Voltaire passed +through the Place Léopold in their coach to be put up at the Palace +and contribute to the gaiety of nations. They and many others filled +the square, and I was thinking of discreet sedan-chairs coming from +rendezvous rather than of the uncompromised and uncompromising lamp-post +that finally got me, minus the light. + +Now I quite dislike getting up from this literally downy couch, with +its dainty pink-lined, lace-trimmed, white-muslin covered eiderdown and +its heaps of soft pillows, to investigate further their _amours_, and +in general the _arts et talents_ of the eighteenth century, but so I +willed it, and so it must be done. For some reason nervous energy is at a +low ebb. There are moments when I throw my life out of the window, when +nothing seems impossible and most things quite easy, but to-day the gray +world outside, _l’élégante et mélancolique Lorraine_, I would consider +well lost for converse with a beloved friend by my fireside. + + _October 12th._ + +Nothing to be found in Lunéville on an October night except your soul, +and if you don’t keep it fairly bright, you won’t find even that. Oh, woe +is me! about six o’clock mine was suddenly too dark and sad for words, +so I betook me to the downy couch of the morning, with a batch of letters +and various books given me by M. Guérin at lunch, some old, some new, +concerning _l’élégante et mélancolique Lorraine_. The Hôtel des Vosges +is ahead of any Ritz that was ever built, and, what’s more, in it your +soul’s your own, even if it is a poor and dark and trembling thing. + +My “_Symphonie Pastorale_” letter to —— returned to me. Have just reread +it and pinned it into the Journal. It’s all part of the same. + + AIX-LES-BAINS, _vendredi, 27 août, 1917_. + +... The orchestra, pale, emasculated, having the minimum of strings—the +musicians of France are dead or in the trenches—seemed without accent +during the first part of the program. “_La Chasse du Jeune Henri_” of +Méhul, “_Les Eolides_” of César Franck, something of Grétry, Dukas, +Saint-Saëns, _enfin_, one of the usual war-time programs. But then +followed the “_Symphonie Pastorale_” and the master’s voice suddenly +swelled the thin sounds, triumphant in the beauty of his order and +splendor. + +A.—(_Sensations agréables en arrivant à la Campagne. Allégro ma non +troppo._) I felt myself invaded by a familiar but long-untasted delight +as my ear received the gorgeous consonances, and the lovely theme of +the violins drew me to an interior place. My fancy was set a-wandering +in a world of green glades, and broad meadows covered with asphodel and +belladonna and fringed by dark plantings of pines, such as the master had +wandered in, and “upon my eyes there lay a tear the dream had loosened +from my brain.” In deep serenity I found myself thinking on appearances +of “things wise and fair,” feeling myself in some way included in a +company of paradisaical beings. + +Suddenly an almost unbearable spiritual exasperation succeeded +the delight, and I saw a scarred and dreadful scene, like to the +lunar landscape of the battle-field of Verdun, and I knew that my +dwelling-place was a world of blood-madness. I tried to beat off the +invading horror. Hot tears of protest came to my eyes, a feeling of +suffocation clutched my throat, and a something burning wrapped my soul. +Delight was dead. + +B.—(_Au bord du Ruisseau. Andante molto moto._) The master spoke again, +in a voice of purling water over smooth stones and through soft grasses; +the music of the lower strings, monotonous, hypnotic, possessed my +fancy. Again the joy with which he was looking on the beauty of the +exterior world tried to communicate itself to me. But my eyes fell on a +white-haired man seated near me, a black band about his arm, dozing or +dreaming, I knew not which. He awakened with a start and groan, and was +doubtless thinking on combat and empty places and “heroes struggling with +heroes and above them the wrathful gods.” + +And I thought of Veiled Destinies and high and nameless sacrifices and +children at evening and silent firesides, and broken loves and other +visible and invisible things. + +C.—(_Joyeuse réunion de Paysans. Allégro._) Expressing the master’s +deep belief in the goodness of humanity, its deathless adorations, its +inextinguishable hopes. + +But the houses of the peasants are empty, even here in Savoy, and +husbands and fathers and sons will cross their thresholds no more. “The +ancients have ceased from the gates, the young men from the choir of the +singers.” + +I sat by the stream among the peasants and remembered suddenly two +combatants, an Austrian and a Serb, visited in a hospital in Vienna that +first winter of the war. One had lain by a frozen brook across a fallen +log for two days, his hands and feet alone touching the ground, and +when he was brought in they were black and swollen, and as I saw him he +was but a trunk of a man with dull eyes. And the other, the Serb, with +something wild and burning in his look, and restless hands, had fallen +with his feet in a stream, and he, too, would walk no more; and so one +thinks of brooks and sweet, moving waters these days. + +(_Orage—Tempête. Allégro._) The sudden D flat, the world in noise and +horror and protesting hate, and hard, bright-eyed men meeting from East +and West, the sons of the world falling for the sins of the world; and +there is no way out, for all words save that of peace may be spoken. And +I thought on the loneliness of the mind, and knew it for as great or +greater than that of the heart, for mostly humanity lives by its personal +throbs, its desires and its hopes and fears, and these are of such +abundance that there are always contacts. But the loneliness of the mind +is a world where there is scarcely any sound of footsteps, few voices +call, and sometimes it is deathly cold, and that is why I write to _you_ +to-night. + +I listened again. (_Joie et sentiments de reconnaissance après l’orage. +Allegretto._) And I suddenly realized how unsubstantial, for all their +thickness, are the towers wherein each dwells isolated from some near +happiness, shut off from some close beatitude, that for a dissolving +touch might be his own. And I found that the completed harmonies of the +lovely finale, “_Herr, wir danken Dir_,” were seeking my mortal ear, +and my soul was being regained to tranquillity. My mind was turned from +untimely vanishings, or the despair of men of middle life who go up +to battle, and from all the company of those who “have wrapped about +themselves the blue-black cloud of death,” and I saw again visions, +felicities, progressions, accomplishments. Then, not bearing less +beneficent harmonies, I went out, and Hope, with lovely, veiled, outcast, +undesired Peace, accompanied me through the warm Savoyan night. But +they left me at the door of my dwelling, as the one-armed _concierge_ +saluted me, and the one-legged lift-man (symbols of my real world) took +me up-stairs. Now I am alone with thoughts of him who gave to melody its +eternal fashion and to music itself its furthest soul, and would that you +had listened with me!... You who will not, Peace!... + +M. Guérin’s book-loving, artistic, perceptive son, _en permission_, with +a dreadful cold, was at lunch, Colonel ——, and several other men. Mr. G., +whose family have been part owners of the Lunéville porcelain-factories +for one hundred and fifty years, is charming, erudite, and afterward, +over our coffee by his library fire, we talked politics and literature +and music. I had just been reading Madame de Staël’s _De l’Allemagne_, +not at all in favor just now, which I had picked up on her centenary. + +“_Une exaltée_,” said one of the officers. + +“That is not enough to say of one who always had the courage of her +convictions,” I answered, and recalled the conversation between her and +Benjamin Constant when under the Consulate he threw himself into the +opposition. + +“_Voilà_,” he said, “_votre salon rempli de personnes qui vous plaisent; +si je parle demain, il sera désert; pensez-y_.”[14] + +And she answered, “_Il faut suivre sa conviction_.” + +“She certainly followed out her convictions; but what did Madame de +Staël know of the Germans?” pursued the colonel. “She saw them in the +quite factitious setting of the Weimar Court, and was intoxicated by +the play of mind. Those _beaux esprits_ presented the character and the +future of their race, through rose-colored clouds of Romanticism, to one +of the most charming and gifted women another race had ever produced, _et +puis elle rentre et elle écrit de l’Allemagne! Cela serait comique si ce +n’était pas si triste._” + +“Don’t you think both sides played up,” I asked, “at those Weimar +suppers? She was under the charm of philosophers and musicians, and they +under the charm of her wit and appreciation. I keep thinking how they all +enjoyed it—and how those black eyes flashed under the heavy red-and-gold +turban.” + +“Without doubt it was more than agreeable. I only complain that she was +in a position to mislead succeeding generations, and did so. She seems to +have had no _flair_, and because she got the personal enthusiasm, the hot +striking of mind against mind, that was at once her gift and her delight, +she glorifies a nation that later makes furious attempts to destroy hers.” + +I then remarked, but a bit warily: “Talking of centenaries, I have just +had in my hands the discourse of Wagner on the centenary of Beethoven. It +has fire.” + +“We won’t talk of Wagner, the mere memory of a phrase scorches one’s +ear. Beethoven, yes, for all time, but we French can’t listen to Wagner +now. He’s like a hot iron on seared flesh—or a rake in a wound. We want +nothing more to do with the Lohengrins and the Tannhäusers and the +Siegfrieds. I only wish they had been annihilated with their Walhalla.” + +“These beings, however, were potential in the German race. Madame de +Staël got their projections, together with the metaphysics of Goethe and +his contemporaries, and carried away with her the memory of a blue-eyed +people lost in metaphysical dreams, passionately loving poetry and music.” + +“Yes, and presented them to us as an example of all the social virtues. +Look at history,” said another officer, with a gesture toward the east. + +One _can_ talk of other things besides the booming of cannon, even in +Lunéville—but not with complete pleasure. + +Then E. M. and I departed to take a _tournée_ about the country. But the +Ford reposing in the Guérins’ garage was completely unresponsive; it +might have been dead. It appears it hates cold weather. A dozen officers +are billeted in the Guérins’ house; two of their orderlies and the butler +tried to crank it. The only signs of life were in the handle, which from +time to time flew round with extraordinary rapidity. We called out to one +not-over-cautious soldier, “Be careful; you will break your arm.” + +He only answered: + +“If that happens I shall have two or three months of tranquillity.” And +that’s how _he_ felt anent the breaking of his arm! + +At last we found ourselves on the road bounded by the meadows of the +silent crosses, skirting the hill of Léomont, with its great scars of +1914 shell-holes, beneath which is a little village with the strange name +of Anthelupt. The Romans were all about here and it was once “Antelucus” +(before the sacred grove), and afterward was a dependence of the priory +of Léomont built on the site of the ancient temple to the moon. Then +we found ourselves on the broad ridge of road leading to Crévic. Great +stretches of Lorraine, _l’élégante et mélancolique Lorraine_, were flung +out before us under rain-clouds and sunbursts—lovely stretches, with +fields of mustard greedy for the light, blowing patches of red-stemmed +osier, and everywhere fields of beet-root in which women and old men and +little children were working, piling high red-white mounds or separating +the wilted leaves into greenish-yellow piles. + +Crévic is shot to bits. Of the château of General Lyautey[15] but a few +crumbling walls remain. Though the piles of stones and mortar are covered +with the green of three summers’ growth, still the cannon are booming to +the east and north. The perfectly banal church is intact. People were +walking about the streets and improvised roofs cover some sort of homes, +and there seemed many very little children. We passed out over an old +bridge in a dazzling sunburst, while a great curtain of rain hung to the +west near Dombasle, the smoke-columns of whose hundred chimneys caught +and held and reflected the gorgeous afternoon light, and there were other +great stretches of unspeakable beauty, soft, rolling, and radiant—crying +out about the generations that have bent over them. + +The great village of Haraucourt has a lovely destroyed church of pure +Gothic that workmen are at last roofing over; but three winters have +already passed over its beauty, unsheltered and unguarded. We go out +through the village in the direction of Dombasle, and suddenly against +some gorgeous masses of clouds we see an _avion de chasse_, “type +Nieuport,” as E. M., who has ample reason to be expert in things aerial, +tells me. There is a moment when it is a great silver brooch pinning two +gray velvety curtains together, where a ray of blinding light falls. Then +it makes a series of marvelous _vrilles_, and I say to her, “How can men +who do that love finite woman?” A great observation balloon, _saucisse_, +hung in the sky, and another broad shaft of light lay on the far hills +behind which lie intrenched gray-clad men with pointed helmets. + +At this moment a _panne_. The only thing in sight is a long line of +war-supply wagons drawn by tired horses, and women and old men and +children bending over their eternal piles of beet-root. But E. M. said, +“Sooner than change that tire, I’ll bury the Ford by the road.” So we +bumped and crawled along till we met a line of _camions_. The first +was driven by a handsome, tall, very small-handed, extremely polite +Frenchman, who knew Fords, having been four months with Piatt Andrew +at the Field Service Ambulance in the rue Raynouard, and who agreed to +change it for us. + +A hail-storm, like a pelting of diamonds, as sudden bursts of light +caught it, came up in the middle of the operation, which was finally +completed with expressions of mutual satisfaction. The shining storm +was withdrawn like a curtain, showing the sun on the great stretches, +and Dombasle with the smoke of its hundred chimneys was a thing +of inexpressible beauty, while behind it were the great towers of +St.-Nicolas du Port, for which we decided to make a dash. We got into +it, through Dombasle, as a perfect rainbow rose from the Meurthe and +disappeared into the horizon, where the gray-clad men with the pointed +helmets are intrenched. + +“For luck,” said E. M. + +But I asked, “Whose luck?” the rainbow evidently being neutral. + +We had some difficulty in finding anything but the towers of the church. +There is no square in front; tiny streets encircle it on all sides. But +we at last got into the narrow street in front of the cathedral, which is +called “_Des Trois Pucelles_,” in memory of the three young girls to whom +St.-Nicolas gave a _dot_. I was not alone in remembering that he is the +patron saint of those contemplating matrimony. + +The church is of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, and among the +largest of the Gothic churches of Lorraine. Swelling-breasted pigeons +with gorgeous pink and red and green and purple upon their throats were +nestled against the beautiful carvings of the gray portals, and much +soft cooing was going on. Above the central door, in the _trumeau_, is +a statue of the saint said to have been done by the brother of Ligier +Richier, and I thought of the lovely Gothic fireplace by Ligier Richier +himself taken from St.-Mihiel, and now at Ochre Court in Newport. + +Noble interior, though the pillars have had the beautiful sharpness +of their chiseling blunted by much painting and whitewashing. There +are remains of early frescoes on some of the croisillons, and near a +door I found a tiny, ancient painting representing scenes in the life +of St.-Nicolas, inclosed in glass in a modern varnished wooden frame. +Somewhere in the pavement of the church is a certain potent slab, and +she who steps upon it is married within the year. Its exact position is +not known, but I told E. M. to take an exhaustive walk about and commend +herself to heaven and the saint. + +When we came out into the ancient streets the western sky was aflame and +there were translucent pale greens ahead of us. We turned again toward +the open road and Dombasle, named after a monk of the fifth century. +Hermits brought the first civilization to these forests, followed by the +great bishops and the builder-monks, who constructed the immense abbeys +and the churches of Lorraine. Dombasle from some mysterious wilderness +had become what I saw it that afternoon. From the chimneys of its +munition-factories, against the amber sky, there poured and twisted a +wonder of gray and white and deep brown and violet smoke. The darkening, +soot-blackened streets were overflowing with human energies spilling +themselves into the greedy war-machine. There are vast monotonous +workingmen’s quarters, and everywhere children, little children, being +trampled in the wine-press.... + +It was dark when we drew up in front of the house of the _maire_, Mr. +Keller, the celebrated house where the Prince de Beauvau was born, where +the beautiful Princesse de Craon had most of the twenty children, where +the Treaty of Lunéville was signed in 1801, and where, in 1914, the +_maire_ lodged the generals of the German army. Madame was still at her +hospital, so we left our cards and came back to the hotel. + +Now I must leave the almost Capuan delights of this pleasant room to +motor a hundred kilometers. Nancy, Toul, the antique Tullum, and back, is +the program. It’s raining, it’s hailing, it’s blowing, but I bethink me +of St.-Mansuy and St.-Epvre, the great Bishop of Toul, and those other +saints, St.-Eucarius and St.-Loup, starting out in all kinds of weather, +and of the _œuvre_ that we are to visit, founded last summer for children +gathered in 1917 from villages where there had been bad gas attacks. The +history of Lorraine piles high about me—the cannon boom. What a day to +lie with your life’s blood flowing from you in wet beet-root fields.... +The motor horn sounds. + + + + +CHAPTER III + +TOUL + + + _October 13th._ + +We lunched at the Café Stanislas yesterday after the wildest of drives +into Nancy, the Ford seeming like an autumn leaf in the high wind. We +did ourselves well, even I, who care not a farthing what I eat except to +“stoke the engine.” The proprietor, who left Alsace as a boy after 1870, +stood and talked to us, as we ate our _œufs au beurre noir_, as French +people alone can talk. He said “they” came only with fire and sword; +the great Napoleon, who came with the same, had also his “Code” in his +pocket. Then he spoke of the marvelous administration of Germany, the +order and the use made of each one’s capacities, which was why they could +_tenir_. + +“We only ask for a leader here in France, to be _bien menés_. All other +things we have in abundance. But if a department is to be organized or +reconstructed, it seems always to be given into the hands of some one +knowing nothing about it.” + +In between I kept looking out where against gray skies beings half child, +half angel hold up stone flames, and _panaches_ leaning one against the +other. The gilding of the _grilles_ has a dull gleam through the wet. +The statue of Stanislas _le Bienfaisant_ was black and big. Everybody +was talking about the unexpected visit of the German _avion_ in the bad +weather the night before. + +The station was further devastated, a train moving out was wrecked and +many _permissionnaires_ killed, a house near the Hôtel Excelsior et +d’Angleterre was totally demolished, the _avion_ flying very low, not +more than twenty-five meters above the town at one time. After lunch we +went over to the prefect’s house, from where we were to motor with him +to Toul. He could not go with us, as he was out investigating the damage +of the night before, but one of his daughters was waiting for us in the +Prefecture motor. + +_Le Grand Couronné_ was but a ridge of mist and clouds as we passed +out of town, but it was there that the Germans were held up and Nancy +was saved that first September of the war, there that was written the +_paraphe de Castelnau_, and from there the German Emperor had looked into +France. + +I never should have known Lorraine if I had not seen it gray and wet +under its autumn skies, bands of lemon and amber at sunset finishing +the garb of its gray days. As we sped along I could just distinguish +the landscape—villages lost in the immense stretch of the plains, and +great forests of beech and oak in which are strange, mysterious ponds +(_étangs_), and before my mind passed for an instant images of those +solitaries of the twilight centuries, slipping through them with staff +and scrip, after the Romans, and bringing to the land the things Rome +tried to destroy. + +A beautifully kept straight road leads to Toul. From time to time one +sees rusty barbed-wire entanglements and camouflaged trenches, for, on +this road, had the Germans taken Nancy, they would have come to Toul, as +they did in 1870. Outside the town are double ramparts, where the guard +stopped us, but the military chauffeur cried the magic words, “_Monsieur +le Préfet_,” and we passed in through the Porte de Metz, dating from +the time of Vauban, then skirted the town, to get to the barracks of +Luxembourg, where hundreds of little children, first gathered together +by Madame Mirman, are now being taken care of by the American Red Cross. +It is conducted by Doctor Sedgwick, unfortunately in Paris. It seemed a +dreary spot that afternoon, and it has since been confided to me that the +weather is always dreadful there. The barracks are after the new model of +groups of one-storied houses, which, it appears, have also disadvantages, +as well as the large buildings they superseded.[16] + +It was raining and hailing and blowing as we made blind dashes from one +to the other with the French directors. A consolation to find oneself in +the dormitories where many blessed tiny babies lay asleep (or howling!) +in little cots or perambulators, out of the horrid cold. + +They are not always orphans, but their mothers work in the fields of +Lorraine or in the munitions-factories. Doctor Peel, second in charge, +came at last from a distant building, and met us in the school-room, out +of which a hundred noisy, warm, well-fed children were scuffling. Tea was +offered us, but we came away; time was short and I was a-hungered, after +the cold, windy, wet desolation of the Luxembourg barracks, for a sight +of the beautiful cathedral. + +Some one said, “Why ‘sight-seeing’?” but I said, “It’s soul-seeing.” And +there was some lifting of the being as we stepped into the loveliness +of the pale-gray vaulting of the church of St.-Étienne. At the end of +the apse was an immense, high, narrow, blue window, and it reminded me +of Huysmans’s phrase about the cathedral of Chartres, “_Une blonde aux +yeux bleus._” We stepped over worn _pierres tombales_, and as I stood on +one of them, whose date, scarcely decipherable, was fifteen hundred and +something, I looked up and saw in the wall a new marble plaque, and it +was to the memory of “_Jean Bourhis, aviateur-pilote, chevalier de la +Légion d’Honneur, Croix de Guerre, né 1888.... Mort glorieusement pour +la Patrie, le 22 mars, 1916._” And so one’s thoughts are jerked from the +past into the dreadful, sacramental present. + +Close by the cathedral is the Hôtel de Ville, once the Episcopal Palace, +a gem of the eighteenth century. We stepped from the little square in +front of the church into the wet, wind-swept garden. At one end is a +flat, round fountain, and behind it is a moss-grown statue of a woman +in contemplation, and one side of the garden is hedged in by the flying +buttresses and gargoyles of the cathedral. Broad, low steps lead down to +its gravel walks from the terrace of the Palace, onto which open long +windows, forming a great hemicycle. I did not need to see it under warm, +sunset skies, with the linden-trees of the garden in full blossom, to be +possessed of its charm. + +An American soldier was coming out of the cathedral as we issued from the +garden in a gust of wind which blew my umbrella wrong side out, and when +I and it were righted he was gone. But it’s all a part of history. + +We went for a moment to St.-Gengoult, the old Gothic church in the rue +Carnot. (Like every town in Lorraine and in the whole of France there is +a rue Carnot, and it’s horribly monotonous when your soul is aflame.) + +As we entered, a thick rich light came through the ancient windows. + +A black-robed woman was sobbing before a grave and pitying statue of +St.-Anne—sixteenth or seventeenth century, I didn’t know which—and a +pale, tiny child with a frightened look was standing by her. Again I +thought on the oceans of fear children have passed through in this war, +and again I besought God to take care of His world. + +As I passed up the central aisle I saw two American soldiers kneeling +before the high altar. That spot of khaki and its young, unmistakable +silhouette under the gray vaulting of that old church suddenly seemed +momentous beyond anything I had ever seen. It was the country of my birth +and my love pursuing its gigantic destiny down an endless vista, crowded +with uncountable khaki-clad forms, men with souls. The two anonymous +soldiers became typical of each and every Miles Gloriosus since the world +began, and as they knelt there on the altar steps I knew that they had +been laid on that other dreadful altar of the world’s sin.... + +An open door showed us the way to a lovely Gothic cloister of the +sixteenth century, surrounding a tree- and flower-planted court. It had +a few fresh chippings on its _belle patine_, the results of a bomb which +fell in it a few months ago. + +Long lines of soldiers’ socks were hung on strings across one corner of +it, and soldiers were sitting in a little room-like corridor, leading +I know not where, reading newspapers, whistling and writing. Then, +out through a delightful sixteenth-century door into the streets, the +loveliness of Toul imagined rather than really perceived, for the rain +was falling again. Khaki-clad men of the _Division marocaine_, together +with blue-clad companions, were threading their way through the narrow +streets, and there were few women and children. I thought how I had seen +the two towers of the church shining from afar as I passed by in the +train that June evening with the two Bretons whose fate I shall never +know.... Did the one from Nantes return to hold his first-born in his +arms? Or the fiancé return to consummate his nuptials? + +Then I caught sight of my own two soldiers standing at the door of a +little tobacco-shop. I suppose it was the nearest resemblance to anything +familiar in Toul, and they were rather cuddling up to it. They smiled +broadly when they heard themselves addressed in what they termed the +“blessed lingo,” and called it “some luck.” + +“I was just thinking, ‘me for the coop,’” genially continued the biggest, +raw-boned, lantern-jawed one who had a bad bronchial cold and wore a +muffler about his throat. He turned out to be from Omaha; the smaller +one was from Hackensack, N.J. (with an emphasis on the N.J.). We talked +about simple and unglorious matters, what they had for breakfast, among +other things, and it was, in parenthesis, what any Frenchman would call +a dinner—ham and eggs and oatmeal and white bread (which none save +American soldiers get in France these days) and jam and coffee. They were +from Pagny-sur-Meuse near by—pronounced “Pag-ni” by the Omaha man. The +Hackensack man avoided it. He quite simply wanted “the war to begin,” so +that he might “show the Germans how.” + +“We’re sure to lick ’em in the spring,” the one with the cold said, “but +it’s a long time waiting for the fun to begin, and I haven’t been warm +since I got here.” + +I asked them how they came into France. + +“All I know is that after we got off the boat we were three days in some +sort of a milk-train; there wasn’t room to sit, let alone lie. We drew +lots and I got the baggage-rack; but what saved us was that we could +get out at every station, and, believe me, the fellows that got drunk +were the only ones that pulled in all right—the others were sent up to +hospital soon as they arrived.” + +In the best and most persuasive of Y.M.C.A. manners I said to this +special Miles Gloriosus: + +“It isn’t a remedy, however, that you could really count on.” + +“But I say,” answered the Omaha man, “you’ll own up that it’s worth +trying.” + +It was getting late and, the Omaha man having the best of it, we parted +with smiles of mutual appreciation. It’s all so simple—and so momentous. + +Then back to Nancy, running swiftly over a white road, the gray sky very +low, and on either side green and yellow and brown fields, and the oak +and beech forest of Haye. The _Grand Couronné_ for a moment was divested +of its mists, and some brightening of the western sky touched its ridge +with a subdued splendor; and then we got into Nancy and were deposited +at the Prefecture, where we made our adieux. We proceeded to the garage +of a stoutish, blond man of pronounced Teuton type and accent, with an +uncertain smile—and a coreless heart, I think—who cranked _la Ford_ (by +the way, Fords change their sex in France), and we started out through +the town that night was enveloping, with but one dull eye to light us to +Lunéville. We thought the trip might prove fairly uncertain, but didn’t +know how much so till there was an impact, in the crowded suburb, and +a horse’s form with legs in air, looking as big as a monster of the +Pliocene age, showed for an instant on our radiator, then fell to the +ground. A crowd immediately gathered, while the driver of the cart +proceeded to tell us what he thought of us in particular and women +drivers in general. But, though unfortunate, we felt blameless, as the +horse had been tied _behind_ the wagon standing at the curb and there +was no light, except something very dim coming from a green-grocer’s. +We departed to the _commissaire de police_ with the man and a couple of +gendarmes, explained that we were willing to do anything and everything +if he would only let us proceed to Lunéville, gave the magic name +“Commission Californienne,” and equally potent reference to the _Préfet +de la Meurthe et Moselle_ whose house we had just left. Then with +beating hearts and a chastened outlook on life—I use the word “outlook” +rather wildly; we couldn’t see anything—we passed out through the great +manufacturing district. Every now and then our feeble ray was swallowed +up by the great lamps of a military auto or the large round headlight +of a _camion_. As we passed through St.-Nicolas du Port and Dombasle +the blue of the soldiers’ tunics took on a strange ghoul-like color, a +white incandescent sort of gray, and the moving forms seemed twice their +natural size. We couldn’t see the streets at all, and the only thing we +wanted to do in all the world was to get to Lunéville and run _la Ford_ +into the garage of M. Guérin. + +When that was accomplished we decided to say good-by to the proud world, +sent regrets to Mlle. Guérin, and had a much more modest repast served in +my room by the deft maid, whose husband got typhoid fever in the trenches +and died at Epinal last year. Later the mistress of the house came up to +know if we were comfortable, and told us her husband, too, had died of it +in hospital at Toul. And then I read _Les Vieux Châteaux de la Vesouze_, +a modern _Etude lorraine_, and _Promenades autour de Lunéville_, printed +in 1838, to the accompaniment of rattling windows and the heavy boom of +distant cannon. All else was quiet. Near my room is a device plastered +on the wall, _Qui tient à sa tranquillité sait respecter celle des +autres_. Isn’t it nice? It makes one steal in at night, get into slippers +immediately, and ring gently in the morning. + +It is still raining, hailing, blowing—dreadfully discouraging weather to +investigate the amours of the eighteenth century, and I have a couple of +twentieth-century idyls right under my eyes, too. I had planned a stroll +in the park to trace the steps of Léopold and Stanislas to the doors of +the fairest of ladies, and Panpan and St.-Lambert and the Chevalier de +Boufflers, and all the other _charmeurs_. I’ll either have to leave them +out of the Journal or do them in some half-dream when I’m back in Paris +and warm! What _they_ did in this sort of weather I don’t know, except +that when they knocked at a door or tapped at a window they were sure of +tender welcomes, they and the easy verses that accompanied them. + + + + +CHAPTER IV + +A STROLL IN NANCY + + + _October 15th._ + +I spent yesterday a-wandering in the old streets of Nancy, between gusts +of wind and rain and great bursts of sun. After much coaxing, _la Ford_ +was cajoled into taking the road at 9.30, but as we got to Nancy and into +the Place Stanislas suddenly her front wheels spread apart. E. M. gave +one glance, but not at all the glance of despair she would have given had +it happened on the road, and then flew to seek her waiting bridegroom +at the Hôtel Excelsior et d’Angleterre, while I, less enthusiastically, +sought the blond chauffeur of the coreless heart. He seemed quite human, +as, unscrewing the bar in front, which crumbled softly like a piece of +bread, he held up a piece and said, “_C’était fait pour vous casser le +cou_.” + +Seeing the American flag flying from the ground-floor window of one of +the beautiful old buildings of the Place Stanislas, I went in to find +Mrs. Dawson installed in charge of the Nancy branch of the “American Fund +for French Wounded.” It was another novelty for Stanislas to look upon +out of his _right_ eye! He’s been kept busy, these past three years, +looking about him. The large room was filled with furniture M. Mirman is +collecting for refugees—wardrobes, tables, chairs, in and on which were +piles of shirts, vests, sweaters, _cachenez_, handkerchiefs, all from +over the ocean. And really, when one investigates the comfort-bags filled +by too-generous American hands, one has a cupidous feeling. There is a +lavishness in the matter of Colgate’s tooth-paste, for instance, which +one can rarely get for love, and not at all for money, in Paris! + +I came away in a gray, slanting rain that made the Place Stanislas look +as if Raffaello had done it over and framed it beautifully in gray. Great +scratchings of rainfall, and soldiers and women hurrying through it. +But _le geste_ is not like the days when Raffaello painted—there are no +skirts to lift up, or, rather, none that need lifting. + +Then I crossed over to the Place de la Carrière, where _souvent en ces +aimables lieux des héros et des demi-dieux_ had held their tournaments, +and then into the church of St.-Epvre to get a Mass. The stained-glass +windows, modern and very expensive-looking, were crisscrossed with broad +stripes of paper on the side toward the railway, where the shocks from +the frequent bombing of the station are especially felt. Everywhere in +Nancy the windows are broken, or crisscrossed with paper, or both. The +church was blue with military. + +Afterward I walked through the Grande Rue. The ducal palace of the +early sixteenth century, begun by René II, has its door scaffolded and +sandbagged. It is the celebrated _Musée Lorrain_, whose treasures are now +removed further from the frontier. It is here that the body of Charles +III lay in such magnificence that there arose the saying in the sixteenth +century that the three most gorgeous ceremonies in the world were the +consecration of a king of France at Reims, the crowning of an emperor of +Germany at Frankfort, and the obsequies of a duke of Lorraine at Nancy. + +I continued down the Grande Rue between groups of _poilus_, officers, and +the usual Sunday population coming from Mass, or getting in last dinner +provisions, to the Porte de Graffe of the fourteenth century, beyond +which is the Porte de la Citadelle, and then the garrison. As one walks +along, the snatches of talk one overhears are “_Bombardé deux fois_,” +“_Pas un vitre qui reste_,” “_Volant très-bas_,” etc. + +I came back through the park. In it is a modern iron bandstand, +fortunately copied after the delicious designs of Jean Lamour—only _he_ +would have done something to relieve the heavy iron roof. And he quite +certainly caught his inspiration musing about the park one autumn day, +for everywhere I saw charming repetitions of his _grilles_ in that +delicate tracery of yellow leaf against gray trunk and branch. + +Old houses give on the park, where one might dream dreams, and find the +world—perhaps well lost. Many windows broken, and more crisscrossing with +bands of paper. + +It was getting to be 12.30 when, having been as much of an angel as the +three dimensions permit, I emerged on to the Place Stanislas to see E. M. +approaching with a young blue-clad aviator, with something distinguished +yet modest in his bearing, of whom I instantly thought he is one of those +_qui cherche sa récompense plutôt dans les yeux de ses hommes que dans +les notes de ses chefs_—and so it proved to be. He didn’t even wear the +_brisquets_ of his years of service on his arm. + +“_Tout le monde sait que je n’ai pas été trois ans sans rien faire_,” he +said, later, during lunch, which we took in the Café Stanislas, crowded +with gallooned and decorated officers. Several red-and-white marked autos +of the General Staff were waiting before the door, where Stanislas +also could see them, and those beings, half human, half divine, of the +sky-line, framed it all. Afterward I again removed my three dimensions, +hunting for M. Pierre Boyé, the great authority on all things of +Lorraine, M. Guérin having given me a letter to him. On arriving at the +house, through quiet gray streets, there was no answer to my numerous +ringings of the bell, so I came back, drawn irresistibly to the Place +Stanislas. By this time it was aglow in the afternoon light; great masses +of clouds even at 3.30 were tinted with yellow and orange, and every inch +of gilding caught the light. I hailed an antique cab and drove out where +I could look over rolling stretches of country, along the road to Toul. +The brown and yellow fields were aglow, the bronzing forests, too; above +were piled the high and splendid clouds of autumnal Lorraine, and I saw +where Claude le Lorrain had got _his_ masses. The _cocher_ then proceeded +to bring me back to town by a perfectly hideous road, called Quai Claude +le Lorrain—on one side the blackened railway, on the other modern +claptrappy houses with their windows shattered and their roofs damaged. + +I then told him to take me to the church of the Cordeliers, where I +stepped suddenly, not only into its late afternoon dimness, but into the +dimness of past ages. A shaft of light from a high window showed me a +dull, rich bit of color on an ancient pillar, in a sort of chapel; and +then my eye fell on what I had come to see, the tomb of the Duchesse +Philippe de Gueldre, widow of René II, bearing the incomparable stamp of +the genius of Ligier Richier. + +I tiptoed toward the stone slab where that great lady of another age +is lying asleep, clad in the dark robe of the Poor Clares. Her hands, +folded downward, are clasped at her waist. Under the cowl the pale head +is turned gently, as if in sleep.[17] She is an enduring image of +resignation, not alone for herself, but for all of us who live and die, +we don’t quite know how or why, and who must “endure our going hence even +as our coming hither.” + +The church was constructed by her husband, René II, Duke of Lorraine, +to commemorate the deliverance of Nancy and the defeat of Charles the +Bold, Duke of Burgundy, in 1477. Duke René himself had a glorious reign; +for him the arts and letters were the ornament of victory. I discovered +a commemorative monument of my friend Duke Léopold, flanked rather +flamboyantly by unquiet, yet charming, statues of Faith and Hope! Also an +elaborate statue of Katerina Opalinska, the consort of Stanislas, who, +though he had been somewhat forgetful of her in life, had done really +all that a wife could wish in the matter of the tomb. But some virtue +more mystic than the decorative Faith and Hope of the eighteenth century +exhaled from the quiet figure of Philippe de Gueldre. + +Near the high altar is the Chapelle Ronde begun by Charles III, the +grandson of René, in 1607, intended as a sepulcher for the princes of +Lorraine, and in a beautiful _grille_ are entwined the arms of Lorraine +and Austria. Then the sacristan came in to light the candles of the +high altar, the church got suddenly quite dark, from the organ came +the strains of “_O quam suavis est, Domine_,” and people began to come +in to Benediction. The blue and vermilion and gold of the mausoleum of +René II faded and one saw only vague outlines of saints and angels, and +a figure of the Eternal Father. It cried out of that other deliverance +of Nancy; but when the world war is over will his widow, Philippe de +Gueldre, _conjunx Piissimi_, still be sleeping quietly, her brown cowl +over her head and her crown at her feet? Her soul “conducted to Paradise +by angels, where martyrs received her and led her into the Holy City +Jerusalem.” The church got quite full, the organist continued to play +early Italian music, and the “Pietà, Signor” of Pergolese rose as I knelt +by Philippe de Gueldre. The great cope of the priest shone, the smell of +incense pervaded the dim spaces, the “_Tantum Ergo_” sounded, and I bowed +my head.... + +Then out into a world of fading light, found the _cocher_ in the exact +attitude I had left him, and begged him to drive quickly (which was +impossible) to the Hôtel Excelsior et d’Angleterre, bethinking me of the +5.30 train to Lunéville. As we went through the dim, charming streets I +remembered an old verse I had found in one of M. Guérin’s books, by an +unreservedly admiring individual, who said that if he had one foot in +Paradise and the other in Nancy, he would withdraw the one in Paradise, +that both might be in Nancy! + +I found waiting at the door of the hotel E. M., the _distingué_ young +aviator, and Don Kelley, _en permission_ for twenty-four hours from +Gondrecourt, strong and eager, since a week at Gondrecourt, since a month +in France for the first time in his life. + +The young men took us to the station and deposited us in the train and +made their adieux. For very special reasons at that moment I said to E. +M.: + +“If you are going back to Lunéville on _my_ account, don’t!” + +The guard had closed the door of the compartment, had sounded his +whistle, but I caught the look in her eye and out we jumped, returning +to the hotel, where we gave what we hoped was a pleasant surprise +party. _Dîner à quatre_ at seven o’clock. About a dozen Americans _en +permission_ were dining among many Frenchmen, and we amused ourselves +investigating the multicolored intricacies of the various uniforms, +aviators, cavalry, infantry, artillery, and the many “grades.” Then again +a dash for the station—Count de L. had to get to Paris, and Don Kelley to +Gondrecourt. The latter said, as we stood in the dark, battered station: + +“I am where I would most want to be in the world, and, though I am an +only son, I am where my parents would most wish me to be. When I get back +to Gondrecourt and get into that long, dark shed and see the men rolled +up, and if it is raining, the water dripping in, I shall know it is the +real thing, and those of my generation who have known it and those who +have not will be forever divided.” + +Permissions not being among things safely trifled with, we then saw them +into their train, which was leaving first, and crossed the rails to where +ours, dark, filled with returning officers, was waiting; and so out into +the night with all curtains carefully drawn, the stars shining. It was +a _nuit à boches_, one of the officers said, continuing, “It’s often +an obsession with them—for a long time they won’t come near Nancy or +Lunéville, and then every night when it is at all clear they appear.” The +inhabitants can choose (in their minds) between good weather and _avions_ +or bad weather and safety. + +Trains from Nancy to Lunéville seem to have a way of hunting up stations, +threading them up, and what one does easily in three-quarters of an hour +in a motor takes an hour and a half to three, according to the stops. At +Blainville we descended to show our _sauf-conduits_, the guard standing +just behind a convenient puddle that every one splashed into and then +stepped out of. Finally, Lunéville, night-enveloped, lighted only with +flashes from electric pocket-lamps, like great fireflies. And coming +through the night from Nancy, I kept thinking how France had done enough, +more than enough, the impossible, and what a cold and dreadful grind the +war had become, and of untried young Americans sleeping in dim villages +so near. And many other things that it is bootless to record. _Nous +sommes dedans._ + + + + +CHAPTER V + +VITRIMONT IN AUTUMN + + +Out of Lunéville over the muddy Vesouze, through the Place Brûlée, and +onto a pasty road, E. M. driving, and, on the back seat, newly wedded +love. As we left the town a dwarf made a face at us and then turned his +back on us with a not over-elegant gesture, for all the world like the +tales of the famous dwarf Bébé, during years the delight of the Court of +Stanislas. + +Mustard and osier plantings became the intensest yellow or red, as the +sun fell on them through rifts in dark clouds, and many women, old men, +and children were working in wet beet-root fields, among little groupings +of black crosses.... + +We got into Vitrimont through streets deep in mud. Such a change! Before +reaching it, instead of the skeleton outline of homes one now sees +orderly rows of red roofs. The work that had seemed almost stationary, +pursued with so much difficulty by Comtesse de B. (Miss Polk), had got +suddenly to a point where it began to show, though the finished houses +will be too damp for habitation this winter, and, like a lot of other +things, must await the spring. + +Everywhere in the streets the busy work of reconstruction is proceeding. +Soldiers billeted in Vitrimont are coming and going, helping with +masonry, bringing in great wagons of beet-root, as if they had always +lived there; not _en passant par la Lorraine_. It’s a very human +document, this billeting of soldiers; though, as far as they are +concerned, when they leave a village they only change their residence. +For the women the thing is much more serious. _They_ get a change of +regiment. However, I have no time to muse on this detail of the war. +Things in Vitrimont were simply taking their inevitable course. Nothing +is held back for long, with the generations pressing thick and fast. +Black-aproned children with books on their backs, to whom E. M. gave +little slabs of chocolate, were coming from the new school-house. Old men +were hobbling about, and women bending over embroidery frames, in houses +often half destroyed and hastily roofed over. In the old days Lorraine +furnished beautiful damasks and gold galloons and laces to Paris and +Versailles. + +We stopped by a window where a thin-faced woman was just taking from its +frame a beautiful beaded bag such as one would buy very, very dear in the +Rue de la Paix. Near her sat an old woman, her mother, the light falling +on her pale, withered face, wearing a great black-bowed head-dress, a +yellow cat in her lap. It was an _intérieur_ that would have done honor +to any great museum. + +We visited Mlle. Antoine, living in a reconstructed street named after +a Polish prince. She escaped to Lunéville with her servant on the day +of the entry of the Germans into the village, August 23, 1914, fleeing +through the ancient forest, but returned to her Lares and Penates a few +days afterward with German passes. She represents culture in the village, +and is clear-eyed, sweet-voiced, but with two red spots on her cheeks—she +is fighting off consumption by living out of doors with her chickens and +live stock, in sabots and apron and shawl. A beautiful old desk was in +her living-room, and there was a discussion as to whether it was Louis +XVI or Directoire, but under any name one would have loved to possess it. +The windows looked out onto the inevitable dung-heap, but beyond were +bronzing forests, and, in between, fields the color of semi-precious +stones. + +[Illustration: MISS POLK’S WEDDING + +The Comtesse de Buyer (Miss Polk) on the arm of Monsieur Mirman, Prefect +of the Meurthe et Moselle, after her wedding at Vitrimont, September, +1917.] + +Hearing the sound of music as we passed the church, we went in and found +some young girls were practising a “_Credo_,” clustered about the little +organ, and wearing brooches with a device of thistle and double Lorraine +cross that Madame de Buyer had given them on her wedding-day. I looked +again upon the lovely old fifteenth-century vaulting, fully restored, +shifting my eye hurriedly from the hideous but seemingly imperishable +dado with its design of painted folds of cloth. At the door the little +holy water fonts, formed of shells held upon two heads of seraphim, gave +me a thrill of joy—and sadness, too, that beauty is so perishable. + +Then I turned to the cemetery. The little pathways were muddy beneath the +leafless trees. Bead crosses and wreaths and a few stunted chrysanthemums +decorated the wet graves. All seasons are the same to the dead. I stood +by a breach in the wall near the grave of “_Charles Carron, musicien, +souvenir d’un camarade, 31 août, 1914_,” looking out toward the forest of +Vitrimont. Its autumn garb was soft, discreet, and lovely; more jasper +and amethyst and Chrysoprase and cornelian fields rolled gently in +between it and me. There was the band of yellow like a Greek border to a +garment in the western sky—only that and nothing more, yet some beauty +and sadness chained me to the spot. Quail and woodcock, gray pheasant +and larks, were flying about, and some strongly marked black-and-white +magpies were pecking at something in the nearest field. I asked myself +again, “What is it that stamps Lorraine with such beauty?” General de +Buyer told me that when Pierre Loti came to Vitrimont he said, “_C’est +trop vert_,” and perhaps, after Stamboul and Egypt and the Grecian Isles, +it would seem too green. But I saw, returning there in autumn, that the +soul of Lorraine, _l’élégante et douleureuse_, is like unto tarnished +silver, with its grays, yellows, browns, and purples; that soul that has +suffered, hoped through the generations, whose abiding-places have been +devastated and rebuilt through the centuries. And I knew that one must +see it in autumn, beneath the wasteful splendors of gray clouds, with +their hints of color, red, brown, yellow, and purple, or with sky and +rain melting into one, curtaining the brown, mysterious earth—and, in +between, the beat of the human heart. + +It all seemed to show itself through some dissolving light of ages. +Those secular beeches, that I had first seen in their tenderest green, +had become a brilliant yellow, and were turned to the south. The great +bronze oaks looked to the north, obeying laws as inviolable as those +of the human beings passing beneath them. In all these forests round +about Vitrimont, Parroy, and Mondon the legendary lords of the country +hunted; the roads of Gaul disappeared under the great Roman highways +which traversed Lorraine from Langres to Trèves, from Toul to Metz, and +again from Langres to Strasburg. The name Lunéville emerges out of the +night of the tenth century in the person of Étienne, Bishop of Toul, +successor of St.-Gérard, and Folmar I, Count of Lunéville, was married to +Sparhilde, descended from Charlemagne. (To this day I notice that almost +any one who respects himself in these parts talks quite casually of being +descended from Charlemagne, or Charles the Bald, or René the Victorious, +as a Boston man might of the Pilgrim Fathers.) Folmar’s hunting-lodge +was by the muddy Vesouze, over which one passes to get from Lunéville to +Vitrimont. In time it was transformed into a château, and around it grew +a village, which in turn became a fortified town, then the capital of +Léopold and Stanislas. + +I stood for a long time by that 1914 breach in the wall, and the grave +of _Charles Carron, musicien_, looking out over the rolling fields in +the late October afternoon, migrating birds passing against the amber +sky, red vines floating from the yellowing branches of oaks and beeches; +near me was a tangle of wild-plum bushes, stiffened blackberry-vines, and +dried ramie. All except the deeds of men seemed sweet. Everything was +in sinuous lines, inclosing the jasper, amethyst, chrysoprase, russet, +jewels of the fields, through which flow the slow rivers, slipping +between bushes of osier and plum, and somewhere there is a slower, +nigrescent canal scarcely a-move between willows and poplars. And those +men who are out there where that dull thunder is!... + +I thought how often in her history the men that hunted in her forests +or tilled her fields had reddened them with their blood, or, buried in +them, had increased the harvests, fighting now against one invader, +now another, being continually thrown back from power to power like a +ball, with nothing changeless save the changelessness of their changing +destiny—and its unescapableness. + +And how, under Godefroy de Bouillon, a Lorraine prince, the Crusades +began, and under a duke of Lorraine, Charles V, they ended. And of the +holy glory of Jeanne d’Arc. And now, after the lapse of centuries, of the +covenant of our own men. + +I realized that the beauty of Lorraine is not entirely of the natural +world. + +As we drove back there was a sudden flaming up of that band of lemon. The +western sky became a vast ocean of pink with great white clouds afloat +in it. The red roofs of Lunéville were transfigured, a crimson glow +was flung about the Pompadour towers of the church, outlined against +a blue-white eastern sky. But only for a few minutes. The streets of +Lunéville were already dim as we passed in through the battered suburbs. + +We stopped for tea at the house of Madame —— on the outskirts of the +town. It had been occupied by the Germans that first August, and in +one of the _salons_ was a large hole in the wall, stopped up, but not +replastered or papered. “They” had rolled up her rugs and given them to +her, and she and her four young daughters had lived in the upper stories +during the occupation, and seen war very close from their windows. The +only really valuable picture, a Claude Lorrain, I think, was missing. In +the cellars and in the garden, whose walls are still breached and broken, +dead and wounded, living and fighting, Germans and French, had lain. + +The usual conjunction of elderly officers and young aviators were there +for tea. Then E. M. and I, closely linked, threaded the black streets to +the Hôtel des Vosges. And there is great sadness in Lorraine in autumn. + + + + +CHAPTER VI + +AT THE GUÉRINS’ + + + _October 16th._ + +In the park of the château, sitting on an old stone bench under yellowing +chest nut-trees. + +Soldiers are coming and going. The château has been for many years a +barracks. One guardian of the park, of the now so-despised race of +gendarmes, has walked by three times, for I have my little note-book in +my lap and my pencil in my hand and I am plainly not of Lunéville. He is +just passing me again, and I say + +“_C’est beau, le parc._” + +He answers, “Perhaps in summer,” evidently not stirred by autumnal +Lorraine, and then, “_Madame est en visite?_” + +I answer, “Yes, with Miss Crocker.” + +That name being magic in these parts, he salutes and passes on. + +Of the lovely old bosquets where Stanislas combined his _jets d’eau_, +his _grottes_, his Chinese pavilions, and his _parterres_, the long +avenue and the great flat basin of the fountain, in which black swans are +floating, are all that remain. From the end of this avenue can be seen +the aviation field with its great hangars. The low terraces have borders +of autumn flowers, dahlias, chrysanthemums, red vines, dead leaves, +and moss-grown and charming statues of ancient love-making gods, who +came into their own again in those amorous days. There is a statue to +M. Guérin’s poet son born and dead between two invasions, but a lovely +eighteenth-century statue of a veiled woman renders _mou_ and without +accent the flat, white-marble shaft that commemorates his earthly span +(1874-1908). The statue of Erckmann is also in the nineteenth-century +manner. Is the human race as uncharming as modern sculptors would make +it? One feels apologetic toward the ages to come, and one wants to cry +out that we weren’t so bad, after all, and that seemingly soulless +individual in a frock-coat and baggy trousers and top-hat, looking +so unattractive in white marble, was really a delightful person, an +imaginative lover, a perceptive intellectual, and witty to boot. He would +have been the first to protest against his memorial; and how he would +have hated the geraniums and begonias planted at his base, and the wire +fencing! + +Beyond the park, where the trees have been cleared away, is the brown, +reedy Vesouze, a little border of old houses on its banks. Beyond is the +rolling stretch of forest-covered hills and russet and jasper and topaz +fields, and above it all the sunless and gray, but strangely luminous, +noonday heaven of autumnal Lorraine. + + _Later._ + +Wandered about the town. Everywhere charming bits of _autrefois_ arrest +the eye. Over one doorway, between two angels’ heads of pure Louis +XV, was written, “_Fais bien, laisses dire_.” A little farther along, +under a figureless niche, “_Si le cœur t’en dit un ave pour son âme_.” +In the window of a pharmacy near by, occupying a good old house with +flat, gray façade, is a big Lunéville porcelain jar bearing the words +“_Theriaca celestis_,” interwoven among flowered scrolls, and I thought +of eighteenth-century servants going in for herbs and various cures for +masters and mistresses having “vapors.” + +The portal of the church reminds me, with its rich, wine-colored tones, +of the _tezontle_ of the Mexican houses of the viceregal period. The +words over the door are “_Au Dieu de Paix_,” the God that this torn +borderland seldom receives, and still rarely keeps, and above is a figure +of Chronos, or the Almighty, I don’t know which. + +A large black marble slab without name or date is near the door as one +passes in; underneath lie the remains of Voltaire’s _divine Emilie_.[18] +Having loved much, let us hope much was forgiven her. The choir, pulpit, +and confessionals are very pure Louis XV. Over the organ-loft are the +words “_Laudate Deum in chordis et organo_,” painted in among Pompadour +knots which have been democratically colored red, white, and blue, near +blue and gold fleurs-de-lys of another epoch. + +Against the wall of the façade is a marble urn that once contained the +heart of Stanislas, who was very devout, and left no stone unturned, +though he continued to love not alone the arts, to placate the final +judge. He was very fond of music while dining, but on Friday never +permitted any except that of the harp, considered less earthly than +violin and clavecin. He never missed Mass; he was merciful to the poor +and appreciative of the things of the mind. Not a bad showing; one hopes +he’s happy somewhere. + +In one of the side altars is a Pietà and three long lists of those just +dead for France, whose + + graves are all too young as yet + To have outgrown the sorrow which consigned + Its charge to each; + +and then, as I sat quietly thinking upon the passing of heroes, Shelley’s +immortal words kept sounding in my ears: + + And if the seal is set, + Here, on one fountain of a mourning mind, + Break it not thou!... + From the world’s bitter wind + Seek shelter in the shadow of the tomb. + What Adonaïs is, why fear we to become? + +Lunched at the Guérins’. _La Ford_ being the only means of locomotion +in Lunéville, not even an old horse remaining to pull a cab, we had to +give up the trip to Baccarat, and indeed any trip anywhere. Delighted to +be able to _flâner_ in the old streets without my umbrella being turned +wrong side out. + +Overhead the _avions_ were thick; we counted twelve at one time, some +of them flying so low that we could hear words. Observation airplanes, +bombarding airplanes, the swift _avions de chasse_, going in the +direction of the forest of Parroy, where the Germans are intrenched since +the retreat from Lunéville, September, 1914. Parroy and all that part of +the country was completely laid waste in 1636 by Richelieu, who sent the +cheerful report to Louis XIV that “Lorraine was reduced to nothing, and +the inhabitants dead for the most part.” + +That conquest of the unsubstantial air seems the greatest of all man’s +achievements. And as I walked along there was an almost perceptible +flinging of my soul into the heavenly spaces and I thought not on battles +and wrecks nor even of hungry children, but rather of the discoverers of +nature’s secrets, the disciples of philosophers, the undiscourageable +lovers of the arts, who everywhere are in the minority, and everywhere +reach the heights, and everywhere in the end control the hosts, even of +battle. And at the sudden dropping of the sun over the lovely Lorraine +fields, become blue with scarcely a hint of the green and brown and +amethyst of a moment ago, the band of yellow fringing the horizon—though +with me walked the ghosts of men who at the word of command invaded or +defended—I was not sad. A lean, brown, unexpectant urchin entered the +town with me. I gave him a two-franc piece and a blessing, _Pax tibi_, +which last, from the look in his eyes, some part of him understood. Then +I turned into the beautiful old house of the mayor where _goûter_ and +bridge had been arranged for us. I rapped with a large and very bright +wrought-iron knocker bearing the date 1781, and, entering, found myself +in a great hallway; to the left is the _escalier d’honneur_, with its +beautiful wrought-iron balustrade. I mounted it, and passed through many +rooms of noble yet thoroughly livable dimensions. They were filled with +officers, some women came from their hospital service in nursing garb, +groups of bright-eyed “_filles à marier_,” and a few young aviators. +The large _salon_ has beautiful panelings, with heavy gilt _motifs_ of +tambour, torch, helmet and shield in the corners. In it was signed the +celebrated Traité de Lunéville, 1801, and it is all very seigneurial. + +I found myself seated at a table with the mayor, General —— and Mme. +de C., in nursing garb. I investigated, during a couple of hours, +the surprises of the erratic yet brilliant bridge of the _maire de +Lunéville_, whose delight was to mystify his partner as well as the +adversary, and who, without in the least deserving it, won every rubber. +I had a few bad “distractions,” but who would not, under that roof so +rich in memories? + +During the occupation in 1914 the German generals and high officers +entering the town were lodged on the second floor of the old house. The +same thing had happened in 1870. + +We came away in pitch darkness at 7.30, but I can now skip and bound +about the dark streets, with the best of them, no more feeling around for +curbs, which seem again to be placed where they are to be expected. + +Afterward, dinner at M. Guérin’s. General and Mme. de Buyer, General ——, +M. Guérin’s two sons, one a mitrailleuse officer for the moment near by +at Blainville la Grande, the other the student and lover of the arts +of whom I spoke, and whose every instinct is remote from killing. I +sometimes wonder at the stillness of men like that—except that there is +nothing to be done about it. General de Buyer told us of _lances-flamme_, +of _flamme-snappes_, of the _obus asphyxiants_, which burst without odor +or smoke, but are deadly, all the same. Then the conversation turned on +_le conflit historique entre la race germanique et la nation gauloise_ +which had begun before the Roman conquest. M. Guérin told us of places +where still may be seen colossal walls and thick, crumbling towers, +mysterious witness of those legendary conflicts, just as the Place des +Carmes, or Place Brûlée, is witness of those of 1917. + +The younger Guérin son was preparing to go into diplomacy when the war +broke out. I said, “Perhaps we will sometime be _en poste_ together,” +and a strange look that the pleasant dinner scene did not allow me to +interpret immediately came over his face. + +“_Peut-être_,” he answered, slowly. + +I knew a moment afterward that that young man who loves his life was +thinking, “if I am alive.” He has seen so many fall. And suddenly came +into my mind the lines of his poet brother, born and dead between two +invasions: + + _Nous sommes, ô mon Dieu, plusieurs dans la cité,_ + _A porter haut le lys de la mysticité, ..._ + +And for an infinitesimal moment, in spite of the pleasant evening meal, +my thoughts, too, turned to invisibilities—his and my last end, and our +veiled destinies. + + + + +CHAPTER VII + +ACROSS LORRAINE + + + LUNÉVILLE, _Tuesday, October 16th_. + +One last look at the church, whose warm and lovely towers with their +_motifs_ of urn and scroll and angel were shining pinkly in the morning +light. Then through the door of the Hôtel de Ville, built on the site of +the ancient abbey of St.-Rémy, founded in the last years of the tenth +century by Folmar de Lunéville for the repose of his soul and of his +wife’s, and completely done over in the eighteenth century. As I turned +in at the passageway leading through to the other street, old houses on +one side, and on the other plantings of holly against the church walls, +I thought of the saying of the Middle Ages, “_Il fait bon vivre sous la +crosse_” (“It is good to live under the bishops”), and how the peasants +would come in from their hamlets, through the fields and forests, with +their tithes. The monks generally springing from the people showed +themselves more understanding of their wants and their miseries, and were +less apt to overtax them, having fewer needs, than the lords with their +wars, their ambitions, and their grandeurs. + +Then one finds oneself in the garden of the Hôtel de Ville, where one +doesn’t think of the Middle Ages, for in it is a figure of a weeping +woman, and on the statue’s base are inscribed the names of young men +fallen in 1870. Life becomes suddenly without reason. + +At the station. _L’abri de bombardement pour permissionnaires_ is in an +old convent having a deep cellar, across the railway. We carry our own +luggage, resembling almost any _poilu_, and with grateful hearts think of +what we left behind. + +Mont-sur-Meurthe. Flooding sun, many soldiers, no room in the train. The +famous and now classic refrain, “_Faut pas s’en paire_,”[19] floats about +and makes one think how those who wait also serve, and in waiting learn +patience, this new virtue of the Gaul. In regard to virtues, the French +seem to have all those we thought they had, in addition to others we +never suspected them of having. + +A man completely bent with grief follows two men carrying a coffin. He +himself carries a huge bead wreath, and his head is bared. Whatever his +sorrow, it is gone out into the eternal, the immeasurable Wisdom, which I +thought, in sudden fear, completely conceals that which it receives. + +Dombasle, with its busy station and its great munitions-factories. +Columns of smoke, from purest white to darkest brown, were rising to the +shining heavens, and women in trousers, mothers and mothers-to-be, were +going to work in the factories. + +At Rosières immense camouflage works, and then the railway skirts the +great canal. A thin, heavy-haired, very young girl is drawing a huge +canal-boat. Her arms are crossed over her breast; above them is the broad +band by which she tows that behemoth, a thousand times her size. In +accord with some law of matter it is just possible. One thinks of the +building of the Pyramids, and of the unborn. + + NANCY, _1.15_. + +Lunching at the Café Stanislas and eating my fifth macaroon, “for +remembrance.” The gold guipure of the wrought-iron work makes the square +seem to me like some lovely handkerchief thrown down as a challenge to +memory. And I will _not_ forget. + + _Later._ + +At the station, waiting for the train to pull out. An old man attended to +our luggage; he liked his tip and became talkative as he straightened our +impedimenta in the racks. Three sons killed in the war. Two at Verdun, +the last and youngest at the Chemin des Dames this summer. His toothless +old mouth trembled, and I thought to myself in sudden horror, “God, is +_this_ France?” + + LIVERDUN, _3 o’clock_. + +A vision of transfigured beauty in the afternoon light. Its high +promontory aglow, every window a-dazzle. Its ancient walls, its old +château, its church, all seemingly made of something pink, unsubstantial, +shining. At the foot of the town flows the Moselle and there is a second +shining moiré ribbon—the great canal leading from the Marne to the Rhine. + +Toul. The gorgeous towers of the cathedral are a-shine, too, above the +outline of the great barrack buildings. The vast station is a sea of +blue-clad washing in and out of trains. + +At Pagny we pick up the Meuse, _la Meuse aux lignes nonchalantes_. + +At Sorcy, wide, shallow expanses of inundation, and reeds and trees grow +out of shining spaces, and meadow-bounded flat horizons stretch away, +and suddenly it seems Oriental, Japanese, in the pink light—what you +will—anything but a historic river of the European war, flowing through +the elegant and sorrowful Lorraine. + +And then we find ourselves at Gondrecourt in the tip of the acute angle, +for still, to go the straight road between Nancy and Châlons, we would +have to pass Commercy, daily bombarded by big German guns. + +At Gondrecourt, about a dozen American soldiers standing on the platform, +several seeming to have just left their mothers’ knees. We wanted to +speak to the nearest one, but feared we might represent _l’autre danger_. +Great packing-boxes piled everywhere with “U.S. Army” stamped on them—and +how fateful a destination is this little Lorraine town! + +At Demanges-aux-Eaux more Americans. An old church, quite mauve, rises up +seemingly from bronze waters, the houses of the surrounding village, blue +and gray. Americans are billeted in these wide-doored Lorraine peasant +houses, or in big stables whose entrances are high enough for great +hay-wagons to pass through. + +A talkative military person in the compartment with us. I thought at +first he was a secret agent, he seemed to know so little about the +country; then I realized that he was only rather stupid. And he had an +uncontrollable provincial curiosity about small things, and was quite +_intrigué_ about his traveling companions, who seemed to know all the +things he didn’t know. He was _en permission_, coming from the forest of +Parroy, the other side of Lunéville, where the French and Germans sit +within a few yards of each other. He was quite uninteresting about it +all, but it wasn’t his fault, merely the way he was made. He showed me +his map and the zigzagging German and French lines in the forest, and +then I got suddenly bored and stood in the corridor, and watched the +Meuse get pink and then purple and then a strange glinting black. Down +the streets of little villages would come blue-clad men, smoking and +talking, or getting water and stores for evening meals. And then the sun +disappeared behind the yellow poplars, and a cold, clear night began to +fall. Bridges were guarded by sentries with bayoneted rifles, and old +men and women and children came in from dim beet-root fields, and more +khaki-clad Americans were standing about village streets, or cycling in +the dusk, behind reeds in water, and there were deepening forests, and +black ridges against the last pale lemon glow, and then another little +town, Laneuville, and two American patrols marching up and down with +rifle on shoulder. + +And the talkative officer, who had bought newspapers at Gondrecourt, +tells of the pretty spy dancer, Mata Hari, shot that morning in the +prison of Vincennes with warning pomp and circumstance, and of Bolo Pasha +and _l’affaire Turmel_, but as soon as he touches a subject it loses all +vestige of human interest. + +“_Ce que nous avons vu d’Anglais parterre à Combes_,” or, “_Qu’il faisait +froid la nuit où nous cédions la ligne aux Anglais_,” or, “_Je suis +toujours là où on cède la ligne_, they say now the Americans will take +the line at Parroy.” + +He has been through the whole war without a scratch—Verdun, the Somme, +the Aisne—and now he spends cold, dark nights listening for Germans in +the forest of Parroy, and it hasn’t helped a bit; and he is one that +will get through, when so much of wise and fair will have been gathered +to the Lord. In an unwonted pause I asked him what he was in civil life, +and he answered, “_Fabricant de brosses à dent_.” I know it’s all right, +and there must be tooth-brushes, but we had just come from gallooned +generals, prefects, mayors, smart young aviators, and men living in the +world of books. + +Blue mists came up from the meadows and slipped between the hills, and +everywhere black trees grew out of gold water. + + LIGNY-EN-BARROIS. + +The end of our line at the north, and there is a Gothic church of the +thirteenth century called Notre Dame des Vertus, and in it is the tomb of +the Maréchale de Luxembourg, dead in 1695. + + NANÇOIS-TRONVILLE. + +More blue meadow mists along gold waters, and soft dark fringes of +willows. + + LONGEVILLE. + +The evening star and spirals of smoke from little houses, and +blue-clad men melting into the twilight, and the canal a golden band, +with stampings of deepest purple where tree shadows cut across it. +Two American soldiers standing at a road-crossing looking up at the +sign-post. Everywhere the Lorraine twilight is shot with khaki-colored +threads from over the seas—and the three gray sisters spin the inexorable +web. + +Bar-le-Duc, looking sick and sorry for itself. Station full of broken +glass, dirt, and piles of demolished masonry. The evening star hangs +above the older town on the hill. No time to get out to see how the +canteen work is going on; but two obliging station employees gave me +news. A whole quarter of the town by the river, near the Hôtel du +Commerce et de Metz, of unsanctified memory, was destroyed ten days ago, +by an air raid. + +I asked if anything had happened to the church of St.-Peter, for I +thought of the _chef-d’œuvre_ of Ligier Richier, René de Châlons,[20] +standing in its dim space, holding his heart aloft in his left hand, +eternal offering to his first wife, Louise of Lorraine. How his widow, +Philippe de Gueldre, felt about this before she was laid out in the garb +of the Poor Clares I don’t know. + +No longer any night work in the canteen, no lights being permitted. +Our train unlighted, too. New and larger signs indicating cellars and +shelters everywhere. Black moving shapes of _camions_ along the road, and +the evening star following us along the top of the hill of Bar. A squad +of Annamites quitting their work on the road. + + _En ces armées singulières_ + _Où l’Annam casse des pierres_ + _Sur la route de Verdun._ + + REVIGNY. + +Portentous dark shapes of roofless houses and detachments of blue-clad +men going down a winding road, one with the blue twilight. The station +dim, the town completely dark, and the vine-planted hills only soft +masses; the evening star still following us, though she is so close to +the ridge that in a few minutes she will drop behind it. Oh, this passing +of the evening star in a war—autumn behind French hills! + + VITRY-LE-FRANÇOIS, _5.45_. + +Founded by François Premier near the old town which was burned with its +church full of worshipers, in a fit of anger by Louis VII during his +war with the Count of Champagne. To expiate this crime he undertook +the Second Crusade. Much black ribbon of canal knotted about, one +end of which leads from the heart of France to the Rhine. An endless +train of troops going to the front, men pressed together, sardine- and +herring-like, in each compartment—it made my soul sick—just human masses +weighed down by accoutrement and literally wedged in. A lively dispute +between a thick-set _poilu_ and one of the station employees on behalf +of a slight, blond, very young soldier. + +“_Quoi, vous osez engueuler un poilu de quinze ans?_” + +And the following crescendo mounts to the broken panes of the station +roof, “_Embusqué, cochon, salaud, vache!_”[21] + +There was no answer of protest from the official. And Vitry-le-François +is where Napoleon almost took prisoner the Emperor of Russia, the King of +Prussia, and the Austrian General Schwarzenberg in 1814, and in 1914 it +was bombarded by the Germans, and now American troops pour through it. + + + + +CHAPTER VIII + +THE CHÂLONS CANTEEN + + + HÔTEL DE LA HAUTE MÈRE DIEU, CHÂLONS, _October 17th, 1.30 a.m._ + +Lodged at last with the “High Mother of God.” On arriving, dined in a +low-ceilinged, dingy, dowdy room, but the acetylene lights, the uniforms +and decorations of the officers, made something brilliant, which half +veiled the knowledge of the dark night outside, the approaching winter, +the continuing war. + +Afterward, I slipped out with my little electric lamp, through the Place +de la République, almost empty; low and splendid stars hung over the +town. In the rue des Lombards, St.-Alpin was a dark mass, and from its +tower the hour was striking a quarter to nine o’clock. + +I turned into the long, perfectly black rue de Marne. Not a single light, +nor any passer-by. I flashed my little lamp to find the curb. There came +a click of wooden-soled shoes from a side street, and a thick voice said, +“_Ah, la dame, pourquoi si vite?_” I passed on like the wind, trembling, +down the deserted street, but when I flashed the lamp to find another +curb, something heavy and stumbling got nearer. And then I didn’t dare to +turn the light on, and I took the wrong turning, and found myself in what +seemed a wilderness of mud and trees, with the click of those following +wooden-soled feet behind, and any woman who has been terrified, she +scarcely knows why, will understand. Finally I stopped behind a dark +mass of trees, with something sucking about in the mud, and mumbling +half-suspected words, and finally retreating. + +At that moment a soldier appeared, a gigantic shadow of himself as he +struck a match to light his cigarette, and I asked: + +“Is this the rue du Port de Marne?” + +He answers, “You have missed your way; you are by the canal,” and he puts +me onto the road again, and then I turn and grope my way to the little +house by the Marne. + +Neither Miss Nott nor Miss Mitchell is there, so I depart again, going +over the great Marne bridge to the station. Though I can see nothing, I +hear the regular practised tread of a marching squad, and when I flash my +lamp to find the curb, a little detachment looms up unmeasurably big and +distorted, and the horizon blue becomes that ghostly gray. + +In the canteen a thousand men at least. Am quite dazzled by the splendor +of the installation. Warm welcome from Miss Nott and Miss Mitchell, with +the light of a very understandable pride in their eyes. Go behind the +long counter, then through the kitchen to the little dressing-room; take +off my hat, put on a long apron, twist my pale-blue chiffon scarf about +my head and am ready. As I look out over the big room I feel that in +the whole world it is the only place to be. Around me surged those blue +waves; the light caught helmets and drinking-cups; there was the mist of +breath and smoke; the familiar sound of laughing, disputing, humming. +That strange atmosphere of fatality hung over each and every one, yet +with a merciless confusing of destinies in the extreme anonymity of it +all. + +Came away at 11.30 enveloped in a strange sidereal light, the stars +still more splendid as the night deepened. Even the memory of tropical +constellations vaulting high altitudes was dimmed. The Great Bear lay +over the left of the Marne bridge, and on the other horizon, over the +Promenade du Jard, where I suddenly remembered that St.-Bernard had +preached the crusade in presence of Pope Eugene and Charles VII, was +Orion, so bright that he alone could have lighted the town of the +Catalaunian fields, and Jupiter seemed like a distant sun, under the soft +blur of the Pleiades. The river was mysterious, yet personal with its new +mantle of history wrapping it sadly, yet tenderly, and with much glory. + +Then I was again in the still, dark, long street; no passers-by, no +lights from any window, the clock of St.-Alpin striking midnight, and +Orion concealed to his belt by the houses of the Place de la République. +There was some deep stirring of my heart as I turned in at the door of La +Haute Mère Dieu, leaving the gorgeous heavens to stretch over the wide +plain of Châlons, where the hosts of Attila were defeated, where the +great, misty, tragic, glorious history of Champagne and Lorraine rolls +itself out. Now above it all is the whir of _aeros de chasse_, and a +faint, very faint booming of cannon. The Châlons plain continues to give +me the “creeps.” It is haunting and suggestive in the same way that the +Roman Campagna is haunting and suggestive, though the great bare stretch, +with its bald, chalky scarrings, its dull spots of pine woods, its dust +or mud, has none of the material beauty of the Campagna. Doubtless I’m +within the folds of the mantle of the concentrated, continuous human +passions that cover it. + +I trod as lightly as I could through a resounding corridor, having a +profound regard for all sleeping things, past many leather leggings and +spurred boots outside of silent doors. + +When I left the canteen, the guard, in answer to my cry, “Sentinelle!” +said, as he opened the gate, “_Ce n’est pas comme à Verdun, où l’on ne +passe pas_”; and then, “_Bonsoir, Mees._” It was so easily and gracefully +said in the inimitable French way. + + _October 17th, 7.30 a.m._ + +Tea, a lukewarm pale-gray beverage, with some still crisp leaves afloat +on the top. I would have been ungrateful if I had not thought of the +Hôtel des Vosges. Mrs. Church, fresh and strong as the morning, though +just back from night shift, boiled some water for me and I blessed +her. The bleakness of this room is indescribable. Two lithographs of +the “_Angelus_” and “_Les Glaneurs_” but add to the desolation. A +red-and-yellow striped paper on the walls; on the floor a worn square +of Brussels carpet; brown woolen curtains; shutters with slats askew; a +large mahogany chest of drawers; a grayish dimity cover to the feather +bed, with machine-stitched _motifs_ showing its ugly yellow case +underneath; linen sheets, large, thick, and clean—and you have almost +any room of La Haute Mère Dieu. Except Mrs. C.’s with its extraordinary +bed, painted cream-color, having large “Empirish” corners formed by +pale green and gilt Egyptian unduly voluptuous Sphinx-like figures, and +a brownish-red plush baldaquin from which depend some yellowish-brown +curtains; the brown carpet with purplish flowers is a protest between the +two, and the rest of the room a riot of gilt mirrors. It’s a room one +couldn’t forget, and why provincial hotels cling so to brown upholstery +I don’t know. They give the effect of being old and dirty even when they +are—_perhaps_—new. + +The corridor has been a sounding-board since dawn, and all during the +night _camions_ were being driven over the cobblestones, and motor horns +rent the darkness. My room looks out over an old garden. A tall, dead +tree-trunk has immemorial ivy clinging to it, and there is an old round +well, half covered, and beyond the gate, with ivy and moss-grown urns, is +a street that would have been quiet except for the _camions_; and I can +see a row of distinguished-looking, plain-façaded gray houses of another +century, opposite. + +The German General Staff was lodged here before the battle of the Marne, +the chambermaid told me, with a reminiscential gleam in her eyes. + +But you see how any one’s personal history, his little wants, his little +habits, are ground out into something quite different by the war-machine. +The only thing any one asks is strength to get through what he has +to do. He doesn’t demand to get through in any special way—just get +through—where so many don’t. Not to be so cold that you can’t use your +hands or your mind, not to be so tired that you can’t stand, not to be so +hungry that you are faint and useless, not to go without sleep till you +don’t care what happens to anybody, especially yourself. Life is fairly +simple, and somehow very satisfactory, on such a basis. + + _11.30 p.m._ + +A long day, with the exception of luncheon at the house on the Marne +and a talk in the garden, where Mrs. Corbin and I sat for a while under +the yellow chestnut-tree, looking out on the brimming, jade-colored, +slow-flowing Marne, talking of destinies, and the illusion of free will, +by which, however, all these high deeds which we witness are done. And +it seems to me the thing called Destiny resides somewhere. It isn’t a +purely subjective affair, created out of the combination of qualities +and opportunities of each, rather something definite and operative +and immutable; but that may only be the way I feel about it now. I am +overcome all the time by the relativity of everything, even of truth. + +The little white birch-tree has no leaves, the butterflies are gone, and +winter is close upon the war-world. The gardener has been returned to his +home. What of his sons, I wonder? He has a tender heart. + +Miss Stanton lives in the little yellow room with the niche and the +emanations. Now she looks out on yellowing trees; yellow pumpkins lie in +the little wet garden; there is a border of yellow and red nasturtiums +and dahlias. It’s all like some stage-setting. When I said to her, “I +hear you have the little room with the emanations,” she answered, “There +must be something about it; for in spite of the fact that I am not +comfortable, I don’t dislike it.” + +I wondered again what soul had inhabited within those four walls and if +the niche had been an altar, and to what god, as I walked along in a +sudden cold mist that began to envelope Châlons. + + _Since 10 o’clock._ + +I have been swept about by varying tides of blue-clad men. Some thought +the _cantine épatante_, others thought sadly and remarked loudly that so +much money being spent on an installation meant that the war was going to +last indefinitely. “_C’est trop long_” one thin, blond man, with deep-set +eyes and bright spots on his cheeks, kept repeating, till one of his +friends in unrepeatable _poilu_ terms told him to “leave the camp.” + +Concert in the afternoon, the usual number of extremely good _diseurs_. +In the Salle de Récréation, where it was held, are reclining-chairs and +writing-tables. When I told one not very young _poilu_ that there _was_ +such a heaven, he, too, answered, “_Alors la guerre va durer longtemps, +si l’on fait tout cela pour ceux qui restent_.” + +Lieutenant Tonzin has converted those old railway sheds into something +most artistic. The walls are painted cream with strips of pale blue; +conventionalized fruit-filled baskets and designs of flowery wreaths +decorate them at intervals. The great roof has drapings of white muslin, +and square, engarlanded shades make the light shine softly on the +blue-clad men coming and going, coming and going. + +On the counter are small green bushes. One homesick-eyed gardener _poilu_ +from Marseilles, having felt them, wondered what they would do if +watered. “_Les pauvres! Chez nous sont grands comme ça_,” and he raised +his hand toward the roof. + +“_Toi, grand serin_,” remarked his comrade; “_tu vois tout toujours dix +fois grandeur naturelle_.” + +Whereupon they began the inevitable dispute. I heard the words +“_gueuleton_,” “_qu’est-ce que t’as au bec_,” and the Marseillais finally +calling out, as they retreated, that he thanked God _he_ hadn’t been born +at Caen. + +All is so orderly and the jokes mostly relatable. Only when they are +somewhat _allumés_ do they get on the subject of the eternal feminine, +and then the dots are put on the i’s, regarding her rôle on the natural +plane. But even then there is generally some _copain_ to say, “_Ferme +ta gueule_,” or “_Que veux-tu que les mees sachent de tout cela?_” The +legend being that the canteens are served almost exclusively by vestals. + +When holding out their “quarts,” they often ask, longingly, “_Pas de +cogneau; pas de gniole?_”[22] When I answered once, “_Pas de pinard[23] +ici_,” the _poilu_ cried back, “_Mais le ‘whisk’! Vous en avez toujours +chez vous!_” Another delicate Anglo-Saxon reference. + +Late, in between one of the train rushes, two men came in, violently +disputing as they stood at the counter: + +“_C’est une guerre diplomatique, je te dis, cochon, va._” + +“_Qu’est-ce que tu dis là, moi, je te dis, sale type, que c’est une +guerre qui ne mène à rien!_” + +“_C’est la même chose, nom de—— —nom de—— —t’es bête, espèce +d’acrobate_,” etc., etc. + +Another comes in saying, loudly: + +“_Cette sacrée guerre, cette sacrée guerre! Qu’est-ce que cela me fait +que je sois boche ou Français? Suis de Roubaix, moi, il me faut manger du +pain sec le reste de mes jours—moi et ma femme et mes cinq enfants._” + +When I gave him his cup of steaming _jus_ (coffee), he poured into it, +from his _bidon_, a few drops of _gniole_, and by the time he got to the +door he was singing the well-known refrain: + + _Je fus vacciné,_ + _Inoculé,_ + _Quatr’ fois piqué ..._ + +Then a train arrived, the great room was flooded again, and no time for +anything except to ask, “_Avez-vous votre quart?_” (the tin cup) our +bowls having given out during the rush; or, “_Prenez votre billet à la +caisse_,” or, in order to relieve the congestion at _la caisse_, one +takes their ten centimes and pours and pours and pours, or indicates the +end of the counter, where the _repas complet_, consisting of soup, meat, +vegetable, and salad, is served. _Boudin_ with potatoes (a hundred yards +of this dark “blood-sausage,” curled up in boxes before being cooked, is +an awful sight), or hash with potatoes, they love, but one and all hate +macaroni with a deep hatred. Sometimes it is served when the potatoes +give out, and they don’t conceal their distaste. They get too much cold +macaroni in the trenches. + +It’s always the ones who speak English who have the worst manners. One +rather nice-looking individual came up to the _repas complet_ counter, +saying: “I’m in a ’urry. Got no waiters? Step live.’” No _un_corrupted +Frenchman, even half-seas over, would dream of such a form of address! + +Lots of tiny, yellow Annamites in to-day, sounding just the way +they look and looking just the way they sound. One brought back his +salad-plate (accidents will happen in the best canteens) with a little +worm a-move upon its edge, and he made some unintelligible sounds. When +I thoughtlessly asked a _poilu_ what he was saying, the _poilu_, quite +unembarrassed, proceeded to tell me, but _I_ can’t tell _you_! It must go +no further. + +Lunched at the house by the Marne, where we talk American politics for a +change, then back. One goes, one returns, and still they flood the vast +room, and one continues the book of the _cantine_, bound in its horizon +blue, with its blood-stained, tear-sealed pages. + +A quite peculiar warming of the heart when one’s own khaki-clad men +come in. Early in the afternoon an American appeared at the counter, +accompanied by a French corporal. He had completely forgotten the name +of his town, was driving a _camion_, and said, with a distressed air, +“If I could only find a certain spot in town, I _could_ get back”; and +then added, with a grin, “I suppose you think I’m like the doctor that +could cure fits; but I’ve got to get the fits before I can do anything +else, and I’m late already,” he finished, anxiously. After giving various +descriptions of various localities I hit on the Place de la République, +“with a fountain with three women?” and as I explained to the +under-officer, he said, “You’ve saved little Willie’s life,” and hurried +out. + +The names seem the difficult part. One of them, when I asked where he was +billeted, said: + +“That’s one on me; it’s got three names; but”—and he beckoned to a +_poilu_ standing near—“this is a pal of mine. When I give him three +knocks on the shoulder he gives the name.” + +The _poilu_ didn’t wait for even the first knock before he said, +“Demanges-aux-Eaux,” and then the American treated him to chocolate +and offered him a “Lucky Strike” cigarette and began some exotic +pronunciation of Demanges-aux-Eaux. + +There’s always one special thing in every situation in life that comes +hard. Now I must confess that whenever I have to take a damp, dark-brown +cloth in my hand and mop up puddles of spilled chocolate and coffee +from the tiled counter, I feel an invincible repugnance. To-day four +Americans came in together. A nice, tall, evidently perceptive one said, +unexpectedly: + +“Just give me that rag.” + +As I gratefully surrendered the clammy thing he continued: + +“I will be here all the afternoon and you’ll find me mopping any time you +like.” He subsequently ordered four fried eggs apiece for himself and a +_poilu_, and then took a whole box of the little sweet round biscuits +that we were selling rather gingerly by twos and threes, came back from +time to time for bowls of chocolate, when he would cheerfully mop the +counter for me. Finally I said: + +“What is your name?” + +And he answered: “Smith. There’re a few of us,” he added, and then with a +twinkle, “but I’m John. Now what do you say to a swap?” + +“I’m Mrs. O’Shaughnessy.” + +“I bet I spot you. I was in Mexico last summer. Say, wasn’t your husband +mixed up with old Huerta?” + +I had to answer “yes” to this version of history. + +“I wasn’t much on dust when I was down there, but there’s too much water +here. However,” he continued, cheerfully, “we’ve got to tin the Teut or +he’ll tin us.” Then he added, in a confidential voice: “What do you think +of the war? I get mixed sometimes.” + +I had noticed a small amethyst ring in the shape of a pansy on one of his +large fingers as he was mopping, so, after disposing of his question in +the briefest and most effective way by remarking that it was “up to us +all” to do every bit we could to win the war, to which he agreed, I asked: + +“Are you engaged?” + +“To one beaut,” he answered, without an instant’s hesitation. “Met her in +San Antonio last summer, but I guess she’s the kind that waits. Gee! they +were around her like flies, but I shoo’d ’em all off.” + +And he pulled out the picture of a girl with large dark eyes half hidden +in love-locks, and showing a lot of white teeth between pleasure-ready +lips. What appeared of her person was clad in the most “peek-a-boo” of +blouses, and there was a twist of white tulle about it all. I wondered if +she was the “kind that waits.” I had a sudden affection for John Smith, +thinking, however, as he passed out of the door, that his identification +disk would be more definite than his name, and then, for an instant, I +pondered on the supremely elemental thing he’s come for. + +Damp, cold night had fallen on Châlons, but the canteen was warm and +cheery, and the men who knew little of warmth and cheer were sitting +about in a moment’s comfort, and there came to mind a canteen I know +(oh, far away!) which is presided over by a lady with a mustache like +a majordomo, and there are no night hours in her canteen. She rings an +inexorable bell at the chaste hour of 9.30, and, rainy or dry, warm or +cold, out they go, the _poilus_. Some one with a compassionate heart +remarked to one of the men on a pouring night, as the bell was ringing, +“I am sorry you must go.” He answered, with a glance at the ringer and a +twist of _his_ mustache: “It’s well to choose them that way. It quiets +us.” And he went off singing, “_Depuis le jour où je me suis donnée_.” It +was too funny.... + + _Friday, October 19th._ + +A tightening of the heart at leaving that flooding hall—going out again +to pick up the personal life, inconsequential as it now seems. One is +hypnotized by the stream of humanity, drawn into its vortex, finally +rushing along with it, who knows whence or whither. I jerked myself back +by saying, “This is not my bit,” and, “Each one to his own.” There are +many ways of helping win the war. + +I saw for a moment General Goïgoux, just back from his _permission_, so +solicitous for the welfare of his men, so pleased with the results of the +canteen, smiling as he said to me: + +“_Eh bien, Madame, cela a fait des progrès depuis votre dernière visite._” + +There is a quite wonderful entente, and appreciation, on both sides in +Châlons. + +I went back into the canteen, and found some _poilus_ in fits of laughter +over a black cat. Now what a black cat evokes in the mind of the _poilu_ +I can only suspect; I don’t quite know. Anyway, it’s something that +“makes to laugh”; and our black cat, strayed in weeks ago from who knows +where, and perched near a devoted lady of unmistakable respectability, +lately arrived to help “save France,” furthermore enveloped in a gray +sweater (it’s cold and draughty where she sits behind the small aperture +selling tickets for coffee, chocolate, and _repas complets_), and not in +her nature playful, seems somehow suggestive to the _poilu_. Even when it +perches on the counter by the coffee-jugs it’s the same. We don’t like +to get rid of it; it’s supposed to bring good luck. However, enough, or +perhaps too little, about the black cat. + +There is a _surveillant_ supposed to keep order. He is rarely needed, and +if he does say anything, he gets an “_Embusqué!_” thrown at him, between +the eyes. It’s not the day of the civilian employee. This one spends a +good deal of time eating and not paying, and nobody loves him. There is +a favorite story of the _poilu_ saluting a common or garden variety of +policeman, thinking he was a corporal; and when telling of his mistake +afterward he called it “_le plus malheureux jour de mavie_.” + +A hitch in the serving of the _complete repasts_. I looked into the +kitchen to see if things couldn’t be hurried up. The group that +met my eyes, of the cook and her assistant wrestling with yards of +blood-sausage, could have been the female pendant to the Laocoön. It was +awful. As I turned back to the counter I heard this bit of conversation +between two _poilus_ waiting for their meal: + +“_Tu sais_, when a Canadian sees wood he goes wild. He’ll chop up +anything from a roadside cross to a baby-carriage. They say it is because +of his forests. At —— last spring they took the balusters out of the +house where they were quartered, and that pretty Jeanne you’ve heard +about—_un amour, je te dis_—fell down in the dark and was killed.” + +“Each one has his _manie_,” answered his friend, in perfect tolerance. +“_Mais moi, je ne toucherais pas à une croix._” And he proceeded to +cross himself at the bare thought. + +A colonel whose name I don’t remember took me into the garden to see the +kiosks that I had so often indicated when the men asked for _pinard_ or +_tabac_. The _guignol_ that I had seen at the camouflage grounds in July +was in place; beyond was the huge bomb-proof shelter built by German +prisoners to contain 2,000 men in case of _avion_ attack. We took a few +steps into its black, moist intricacies. As I came up I found myself +close to a group of some thirty German prisoners being marched past to +work on a cement emplacement for a gun, the large P.G.[24] stamped on +their backs, and wearing their small round caps with the red stripe, and +any kind of clothes. I felt for a moment like an illustration for Cæsar’s +_Commentaries_, or some sort of a Roman watching northern prisoners being +marched by. + +The officer who showed me about was one of the twenty-seven men who +escaped from the Fort de Vaux, and had lost his only child on Hill 304. + +“I was wounded, and I’m not yet worth much, which is why I am here. +My boy was only twenty-one—_mais c’était une personne faite_—a leader +of men. All, with those qualities, go; I am not alone, alas! in my +_douleur_.” + +And that is one of the beautiful things of this sorrowful epoch. Each +thinks upon the others’ grief.... And then I left it all. + +The jade-colored Marne is flat, eddyless, brimming over with its autumn +rains, the reeds have disappeared, the trunks of the willows are hidden. +Over the gray bridge flows, unabated, that other stream of war and life. +_Camions_, ambulances, smart red-and-white-marked staff automobiles, +soldiers in every conceivable state of soul and body, “enduring their +going hence even as their coming hither.” English, Americans, Senegalese, +Annamites—a dozen races swell this Gallic flood, and the Gray Sisters +never so busy since the world began. + + PARIS, _January 7th, 1918_. + +I am waiting to know from one of the most charming of the sons of Gaul, +who has promised to be my intercessor before the powers that be, whether +I am to go to my front—our front—now or not. If, as Amiel says, “_Être +prêt, c’est partir_,” then I am already off. + + +FINIS + + + + +FOOTNOTES + + +[1] Killed 10th November, 1915, at Zagora, at the head of his battalion. + +[2] Planted so that any vista represents the Roman numeral V. + +[3] Like porcelain dogs. + +[4] Verdun, the Virdunum of the Romans. In the third century a bishopric +was founded there with Saint Saintin as first bishop; 843, the treaty +of Verdun; after the battle of Fontanet the three sons of Louis the +Debonair, Lothair, Louis of Bavaria, and Charles the Bald, divided the +empire of Charlemagne, with the result that not only was France separated +from Germania, but her natural boundaries, the Alps and the Rhine, +were lost; 1792, the Prussians besieged it in force and it was obliged +to capitulate after two days; 1870, a heroic defense lasting nearly +three months ending in capitulation; 1916, _Ils n’ont pas passé, ils ne +passeront pas_. + +[5] _Neuvième série._ + +[6] Alan Seeger, _Letters and Diary_. + +[7] Regimental decoration in the form of a cord worn over the left +shoulder, passing under the arm. + +[8] The _sauf-conduits_ for the army zones are in the form of little, +red, paper-bound books. + +[9] “_La Pioggia nel Pineto._”—D’ANNUNZIO. + +[10] In _L’Horizon_ I found these lines from Verlaine, with a few added, +concerning _le Cafard_, by “Bi Bi Bi”: + + _Quelle est cette douleur_ + _Qui pénètre mon cœur?_ + _C’est bien la pire peine_ + _De ne savoir pourquoi_ + _Sans amour et sans haine_ + _Mon cœur a tant de peine._ + _En effet, cher Verlaine,_ + _C’est bien la pire peine_ + _Que ta fameuse peine_ + _Et les poilus sans art_ + _La nomment le Cafard._ + +But _le Cafard_ differs from Verlaine’s _peine_ in that it is a very +special kind of world-pain, and very complete; for those in its grip +know _why_, as well as _not_ why, they suffer. The memory of loved and +early things, very probably not to be known again, is part of it. The +consciously unreasonable hope that all will be well in an extremely +uncertain future is another part of it—and underlying it is crushing +physical fatigue, sleeplessness, hunger, cold, heat, the whole smeared +in the blood of brothers and foes, the dull reaction after killing, or +escape from being killed—one can’t feel that there is anything vague +about _le Cafard_. + +[11] Cook. + +[12] Gondrecourt, the first American encampment in Lorraine. + +[13] During the closing days of February, 1918, the air raids on Nancy +were so continuous and so disastrous that Molitor had to be evacuated +and the inmates, the aged and the children, were redistributed in other +parts of France. These words are quite simple to write and to read. Their +significance is beyond expression. + + March, 1918, E. O’S. + +[14] She received ten refusals for the dinner she was giving the next +night; among them one from Talleyrand, which caused a permanent rupture +in their relations. + +[15] Governor-General of Morocco. + +[16] The American Red Cross Asylum at Luxembourg (Toul), now under the +very able management of Dr. Maynard Ladd, has accommodations for nearly a +thousand children, well and ill, and a maternity hospital. + +The American forces hold the line to the northwest of Toul. + +[17] Her epitaph, written by herself, is to the effect that underneath +lies a rotting worm, giving to death the tribute of nature, the earth her +only covering, and begging her sisters, the Poor Clares, to say for her a +_Requiescat in pace_. + + _Ci-gist un ver tout en pourriture,_ + _Donnant à mort le tribut de la nature._ + _Sœur Philippe de Gueldre fust Royne du passé,_ + _Terre soulat pour toute couverture._ + _Sœurs, dites-lui une requiescat in pace._ + + _MDXLVII._ + +[18] Madame du Châtelet, around whose death-bed three men met in +fraternal tolerance, Voltaire, St.-Lambert, and her husband, was buried +here September 11, 1749. In 1793 the tomb was profaned, the lead coffin +stolen, the bones scattered. In 1858 they were gathered up and put in a +modern coffin in which they now repose. She said of herself: “_J’ai reçu +de Dieu une de ces âmes tendres et immuables qui ne savent ni déguiser +ni modérer leurs passions; qui ne connaissent ni l’affaiblissement ni le +dégoût, et dont la ténacité sait résister à tout, même à la certitude de +n’être pas aimée.... Mais un cœur aussi tendre, peut-il être rempli par +un sentiment aussi paisible et aussi faible que l’amitié?_” + +[19] “_Faut pas s’en faire_” is one of the most famous phrases of the +French army, and has been described as a combination of two slang +expressions, “To keep your hair on, _de ne pas se faire des cheveux_,” +and “not to hurt your digestion by undue worry, _de ne pas se faire de la +bile_.” + +[20] René de Châlons, Prince of Orange, killed in 1544, at the siege of +St.-Dizier. The genius of Ligier Richier has represented him according to +his wish, as his body might have appeared three years _after_ death. + +[21] Slacker, pig, dirty-one, cow! + +[22] Cognac. + +[23] wine. + +[24] _Prisonnier de Guerre._ + + + +*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 75744 *** |