Chapter I: Part 1

ALSACE IN RUST AND GOLD

BOOKS BY EDITH O’SHAUGHNESSY

ALSACE IN RUST AND GOLD
MY LORRAINE JOURNAL
DIPLOMATIC DAYS

HARPER & BROTHERS, NEW YORK
[ESTABLISHED 1817]

ALSACE
IN RUST AND GOLD

_by_
EDITH O’SHAUGHNESSY
[MRS. NELSON O’SHAUGHNESSY]
AUTHOR OF
_“A Diplomat’s Wife in Mexico”
“My Lorraine Journal” Etc._

ILLUSTRATED

HARPER & BROTHERS PUBLISHERS
NEW YORK AND LONDON

ALSACE IN RUST AND GOLD

Copyright 1920, by Harper & Brothers
Printed in the United States of America
Published March, 1920
B U

CONTENTS

CHAP. PAGE

PREFACE ix

I. THE JOURNEY THERE 1

II. ALL SAINTS’ DAY, NOVEMBER, 1918 13

III. FÊTE DES MORTS, NOVEMBER, 1918 23

IV. THANN AND OLD THANN 34

V. THE BALLON D’ALSACE 43

VI. LA POPOTE 55

VII. THE HOUSES OF THE CHANOINESSES 65

VIII. LUNCHEON AT BITSCHWILLER. THE MISSION IN RESIDENCE AT
ST.-AMARIN. SAINT-ODILE 81

IX. THE “FIELD OF LIES” AND LAIMBACH 100

X. THE VALLEY OF THE THUR 110

XI. THE RE-GALLICIZING OF ALSACE 120

XII. THE HARTMANNSWILLERKOPF 131

XIII. “LES CRÊTES.” “DÉJEUNER” AT CAMP WAGRAM. THE FREUNDSTEIN
AND ITS PHANTOMS 140

XIV. RETURN TO MASEVAUX 156

XV. THE VIGIL OF THE ARMISTICE 159

XVI. DIES GLORIÆ 175

ILLUSTRATIONS

THE RIVER DOLLER AT MASEVAUX _Frontispiece_

THE FOURTH OF JULY, 1918, IN ALSACE _Facing page_ 14

PLACE DU MARCHÉ, MASEVAUX, JULY 14, 1918 ” 14

THANN AND ITS VINEYARDS ” 34

COMMANDANT POULET ” 56

THANN. THE CATHEDRAL PORTAL ” 82

THANN. LA VIEILLE TOUR ” 114

AMERICAN TROOPS AT MASEVAUX CELEBRATING THE FOURTH OF JULY ” 132

FRENCH TROOPS AT MASEVAUX CELEBRATING THE FALL OF THE
BASTILE, JULY 14TH ” 132

AMERICA AND ALSACE ” 172

PREFACE

Strangely caught up out of the rut and routine of Paris war-work, not even choosing my direction (the Fates did that), contributing, however, the eternal readiness of my soul, which the poet says is all, I was conveyed, as on a magic carpet, to the blue valleys and the rust and gold and jasper hills of Alsace, where the color is laid on thick, thick. There I was one, during many historic days, of the delightful group of blue-clad, scarred, decorated officers forming the French Military Mission, which since the autumn of 1914 had administered the little reconquered triangle of Alsace and planted in it the seed for the re-Gallicizing of Alsace-Lorraine. It was a bit of French history in the making, which detached itself quite peculiarly free from the mass of war happenings, somewhat as a medallion from that against which it is placed.

My little book shows how humanly and simply the men of the French Military Mission, accustomed to supreme events, together with a woman from over the seas, lived through those thirteen historic days preceding the armistice. It will perhaps be worth the reader’s while—I mean the nice, bright, perceptive reader’s while—for mostly the throbbing, high-colored beauty of Alsace is veiled by dusty, argumentative, statistical pamphlets, so many of which are printed, so few of which are read. I once saw a great building full of such, and dozens of them were presented me for my sins, though I had never thought to read another book on Alsace, much less to write one. I see once again how foolish is the man or woman who says to the fountain, “I will never more drink of thy water.”

In this record there are no polemics and no statistics. I have added nothing to each day’s happenings, which run along as life is apt to run along, even in supreme moments, and, Heaven help me, I have concealed nothing. It is because of all this that perhaps those who, like myself, have wept much and laughed much in their lives, will not ungladly accompany me to a corner on the sorrowful and glorious chart of the autumn of 1918.

EDITH O’SHAUGHNESSY.

PARIS, 33 RUE DE L’UNIVERSITÉ, _February, 1919_.

ALSACE IN RUST AND GOLD

I

THE JOURNEY THERE

And this is what a woman was thinking, as she walked the platform of the Gare de l’Est at seven o’clock on a foggy October morning of 1918, waiting to take the train to the front.

“Why, when trials and tribulations await us in every land, when every dearest affection is accompanied by its related grief and every achievement by the phantom of its early hope—why this illimitable ardor of the soul, pressing us forward into new combinations?” ...

A few days before I had learned that Masevaux, the capital of that small triangle of Alsace, reconquered since the August of 1914, would be my journey’s term. Looking in the guide-book, I found Masevaux at the very end—on page four hundred and ninety, to be precise, and the book has but four hundred and ninety-nine pages in all—and it had seemed far, far, and the world an immensity, with few corners for the heart. I have realized since that it was only the chill of the unknown into which I was to venture, drawn inevitably as steel to the magnet or the needle to the north, by that very ardor of the soul....

I had not slept at all the night before—I never do when I am to take an early train to pass out into new ways—and the somewhat dispiriting influences of “that little hour before dawn” were still with me as I stepped into my compartment and took my seat, while a captain of dragoons lifted my small leather valise and my not large Japanese straw basket to the rack. Settling myself, a bit chilly, into the depths of my fur coat, slipped on over my uniform, I looked out upon the throng of officers and soldiers, as many Americans as French, perhaps even more.

Standing near my window was a blue-clad colonel, with many decorations and a black band on his arm. He was carrying a small bouquet of what seemed like wild-flowers, and he embraced in farewell a woman in deepest black who would bear no more children....

Then a very young, crape-clad mother, carrying several pasteboard boxes, with three small children clinging to her skirts, hurried down the platform to get into a third-class compartment.

But with it all I was conscious that the blue and khaki war was receding, its strange deeds, which had seemed cut in such high relief, were even then blurred against the red background, the background itself fading. “Eyes look your last, arms take your last embrace” of the world horror, the world beauty, where sorrow has so often been above sorrow and where many “chariots have been burned to smoke.” ...

In the compartment are five French officers with dark rings under their eyes. I don’t know whether it is wounds or the effects of the _perm_.[1] Anyway, they almost immediately take attitudes inviting slumber. A young woman all in purple, whether third or fourth mourning I know not (it’s well done, though it couldn’t pass unnoticed), sits by one of the windows and waggles a short-vamped, very-high-heeled, bronze-shoed foot and rattles a gold vanity-box. From the neighboring compartment came classic expressions: “Can you beat it?” and “Search me.” My heart salutes the Stars and Stripes. The whistle blows, and the train starts for the very end of the guide-book.

_8.30._—Read the masterly editorial of Jacques Bainville in _L’Action Française_, “Où est le piège?” (“Where is the snare?”) while going through the ugliest suburbs in the world, inclosing the most beautiful city in the world. And more beautiful than ever is Paris in uniform. Her delicate gray streets are mosaicked in horizon-blue, burnished with khaki, aglitter with decorations. (Oh, those men of the alert, expectant step, or those other broken ones dragging themselves along on canes and crutches!) Who has not seen Paris in uniform knows not her beauty, bright and terrible as an army in array; enchantment for the eye, bitter-sweet wine for the soul. And again, who has not seen her violet-nighted, black-girdled by the river, wearing for gems a rare emerald or ruby or sapphire light, and silent in her dark, enfolding beauty, knows her not. So lovers will remember her, and those whose sons are gone.

_9.30._—Looking out of the window on fields and forests and groves. White-stemmed, yellow-leaved birches burn like torches in a pale, thin mist. The plowed fields are black with crows; it would seem to be a good year for them. We are due at Belfort at 3.35, but a large-paunched, very loquacious man blocking the corridor—his voice has not ceased since we started—tells a fellow-passenger that, with the delays caused by the shifting of troops and material, we’ll be lucky if we get there by seven.

_10.30._—Rampillon with its beautiful old church, having two rows of Gothic windows and several medieval towers, seen from a foreground of smooth tilled fields. Over the green and yellow and brown world stretches a silver heaven, tarnished with yellowish-gray clouds.

_Longueville._—Interminable trains of French and American troops cross one another. The French train has various barometrical indications of war-weather in chalk. _Guillaume, O là là, là là_; and the favorite and unrepeatable word —— mingles with _Le plaisir d’aller à Paris_, _O les belles filles_, _Adieu à jamais, Boches_.

The cars containing American troops are inarticulate. They haven’t been at it long enough to express themselves.

The handsome young officer next me opens conversation by asking me for my _L’Action Française_. Having previously torn out the article of Jacques Bainville, and wiped the windows with the rest, I pass it over to him with a smile. It wasn’t tempting.

A group of Americans are standing in the corridor. I hear, “I’d like to burn the Rhine.” And the answer: “I don’t care what you burn, but I don’t ever want to see the Statue of Liberty from _this_ side again. Me for home. There’s more in it in one week in the clinic in little old Chicago than here in a month, in spite of the hunks of material. Leaving some to die or bandaging men in a hurry that you’ll never see again, and dead tired all the time. No, siree! No war thrills for me.” And then, all being devotees of Esculapius, they fall to talking about diseases, civil as well as military.

The loquacious party (he hasn’t stopped even to take breath) says to his companion that he’s going to surprise his wife, who thinks he’s in Paris. Whatever else she’s enjoying, she must be enjoying the silence, and I do hope he’ll make a lot of noise when he opens the door.

The young French officer next me with the _Légion d’Honneur_, _Croix de Guerre_, four palms and two stars, tells me he is with the Americans at Langres, which is _camouflé_ these war-days as A.P.O. 714, the ancient hill-town of the Haute-Marne being the setting for the celebrated “University” of the A.E.F.

_11 o’clock, Romilly._—Near here, in the old Abbey of Scellières, was buried Voltaire, _l’enfant gâté du monde qu’il gâta_ (“spoiled child of the world that he spoiled”), having been refused ecclesiastical burial in Paris. And from here he journeyed in his dust to the Panthéon.

At St.-Mesmin the sun came out, and the dull, plowed fields were suddenly spread with great covers, as of old-gold velvet, tucked in about the slender feet of pine forests.

Now all this pleasant soil of France has many histories, and St.-Mesmin is where the priest Maximin (you see whence the name) was sent by the Bishop of Troyes to implore the mercy of Attila in favor of the great city. For answer the terrible king of the Huns put him to death. Against the sky is the tower of a twelfth-century church. A collection of objects in a field that I thought were plows turned out to be cannon.

_Troyes._—Not a glimpse of the cathedral. Immeasurably long troop-train fills the station on one side of us. On the other a gorgeous (it’s the only word for it) American Red Cross train. Pressed against the windows, lying or sitting, were pale men of my race. I waved and smiled, and languid hands went up in answer. The box cars on the other side were filled with blue-clad men. Over the doors were green boughs, on the sides chalked portraits of the Kaiser, _Dur à croquer_, _Mort à Guillaume_, etc. And everywhere the once so familiar _On les aura_ is converted into _Nous les avons_.[2] Through the slits in the top of the cars were faces of _poilus_ looking out, just as one sees cattle looking out; then a long line of other box cars with American, khaki-capped heads also looking out of the slits in the top, while the side doors too were crowded with sitting, standing, leaning doughboys. Again I waved from my window, and every cap was lifted.

There was a young man standing at the door of some sort of a refrigerator car, and he wore a wonderful goat-skin coat. Being so near my window I spoke to him, and said:

“It’s a fine coat you are wearing.”

“I’ll tell you in the spring,” was the prompt answer. “They’ve just given them out to us. You try living next to the cold storage.” He then proceeded to blow into some mottled fingers, after which he pulled a long tuft of hair from his coat. “I’m molting,” he added, as he held it up, “and winter’s coming.”

And he didn’t know whence he had come nor whither he was going. Then either his train moved or mine did—I couldn’t tell which—and I saw him no more.

_Vandœuvres-sur-Barse._—Wood, wood, piled high on every kind of wheeled thing. Forests from which it had been cut showing sharp and thin, fringing the gold-brown fields under the luminous noonday heaven. And here for a moment the green was so delicate and the yellow so tender, that I had a fleeting illusion of spring as I looked out.

Then I fell to talking with some young officers of the 131st Artillery from Texas, but nothing that I remember. They had made no impression on France, neither did France seem to have made any impression on them.

_Bar-sur-Aube._—Old houses, old walls, blue hills, a white road leading over one of them. Strange church tower, with a round, many-windowed top, and in each window hangs an old bell. A great trainload of American infantry “going up,” the station, too, flooded with khaki, and another train passed crowded with _poilus_ evidently _en permission_, making rather fundamental toilets.

And around about Bar, as we slipped out, was a silver-vaulted world of terra-cotta and purple hills, green and brown fields, silver hayricks, silver sheep grazing near, and warm, brindled cattle, many green-painted bee-hives, and fruit trees trained against pink walls. Gentle slopes, later to become the Alps, appeared, and beech forests, like very worn India shawls, clung to them, and a row of nearby poplars had each its nimbus of yellow light.

About this time, having had a hasty cup of tea at six, I began to be so hungry that the luster went from the landscape and my eyes received nothing more. I didn’t care whether the talkative man gave his wife a surprise or not, and the two Americans of the Texan Artillery section had long since also ceased to interest me, when I heard a “nosy” voice saying:

“Gosh! I tell you, boys, there’s big money to be made over here after the war. All you have to do is to hang out the sign, ‘American Dentist,’ and your waiting-room’ll burst.” I sat down and nearly slept by the side of the six-foot dozing handsome officer, with the beautiful blue uniform, and yellow pipings on his trousers and cap, and five service and three wound stripes, and the number 414 on his collar, besides a lot of decorations on his breast.

_1.30, Chaumont._—Sitting in the dining-car, finishing an excellent lunch. Of course, in common with the rest of the world, I’ve heard a good deal about Chaumont, but I can say that on the word of honor of an honest woman the only thing I saw in khaki in that famous station of the A.E.F. Headquarters was an emaciated Y.M.C.A. man about five feet four inches high, with an umbrella and a straw basket.

Of course, I’m familiar with the phrases, “Chaumont has put its foot down,” “Chaumont won’t have it,” “Everything will be decided at Chaumont”; and once, entering a Paris restaurant, I heard the words, “It’s all Chaumont’s fault.”

Then the fog closed in, a thick, impenetrable fog, and that’s all I know or ever will know of Chaumont, as I’m going back to Paris _via_ Nancy. So be it.

On a nearby new railroad embankment, the figure of a _poilu_—the classic figure—the coat pinned back from his knees, bayoneted rifle over his shoulder, loomed up immeasurably large in the fog, while he watched the labors of a lusty, husky set of German prisoners, the familiar “P.G.”[3] stamped on their backs. A little farther along was another laughing, rosy-faced group of four of the same, watched over by one of their own under-officers. I could only see his field-gray back stamped with his P.G., but as his men were so unrestrainedly hilarious, there is no reason to suppose that _he_ was frowning.

_4 o’clock, Culmont-Chalindrey._—Already three hours late. Fog-enveloped train of box cars filled with slightly wounded doughboys peering through the narrow slit at the top, bandaged eyes, noses, the same kind of groups looking out of the door. Suddenly everything seems dreary. I am tired, and wonder why, oh! why I came, and if the war is going to last forever and forever, and it is the hour of the day when those who have not slept the night before know profound discouragement and the noonday devil has ceased to walk, flicking his whip.

_Vitrey._—Station full of Americans and wood—wood—wood, as if every tree in France had been cut. “Wood by the pound is how you buy it over here, all the same,” disdainfully remarked the Minnesotan artilleryman serving in the Texan regiment, as we stood looking out of the window.

And if the journey down seems long, remember that life, too, is made up of wearisome and long things—that it is indeed but a pilgrimage, and mostly through a land more desert than this of Burgundy.

And in the end this book may justify itself, though of that I know as little as you.

At Vitrey there is a detachment of mustard-tinted, khaki-clad, red-_checchiaed_ Moroccan _tirailleurs_, exceedingly exotic-appearing, sitting on their accoutrement or leaning against the bare scaffolding of a new addition to the station. There came into my mind what an unwed friend told me of a conversation with a dying _tirailleur_, to whom she was giving a _tisane_ in a long, dim, hospital room at two o’clock in the morning. He looked at her and said suddenly in his strange French: “Woman, I know thy look; thou and many like thee have not been embraced in love. In my village thou wouldst be a grandmother” (I had never thought of her as old, but the _tirailleur_ knew that, as the men of his race rated women, she was old—old, and no one would have followed her to the well.) He continued: “If no man is to enfold thee, why not be as those of the great white coifs, who have given themselves to Allah? They have not thy look.” Then he went into delirium and cried out in his own tongue and picked at his sheet, and when she came that way again he was dead.

_6 P.M., Vesoul Station._—Writing by the light that comes in from the gas-jet. Dim American forms silhouetted in the great station. Partake of the loneliness that possesses the soul of American youth in France on a foggy autumn night. One of them said to me to-day, with a curious, dulled look in his eye, a brooding, neurasthenic eye, “I’m the kind that gets killed the last day of the war.”

Then a presence apparent only by the light of his cigarette, a being with an accent not immediately placeable, half cockney, half Middle-West, calls out, “Say, does anybody know when we pull into Belfort?”

It had, all the same, something of confidence-inspiring, so I briskly chirped up:

“Oh, in an hour or two or three.”

“Well, I took the eight-o’clock train from Paris last night.”

Chorus: “You mean this morning?”

“I mean last night, and going ever since.”

“What have you been doing in between times?”

“Going, going,” he answered, casually, “and as you see, going still!”

“How did you manage to get on this train?”

“I don’t know. There I was and here I am, and God knows where my kit is. I’m a flier, and I’ve got to have my things,” he ended, rather irritably, and then there was another conversation about “burning the Rhine.”

After interminable hours—two of them—we came to Lure, and everybody seemed to be getting out, even the woman in purple, and there was a fumbling with pocket-lamps and the voice of my country crying, “Where’s that d—— door, anyway?”

The young man who started last night came into my compartment as the train jerked out of the station, and he was a Canadian aviator _en route_ for the big camp of the Royal Independent Air Corps at Chatenoir. Before the war he had been a chartered accountant. “But,” he said, “once in the air, never again can I sit at a desk, crushed in by four walls.” And he told stories of hair-breadth escapes of himself and his comrades, and of combats in the air—once he had had his knee broken—and then he suddenly cried out in a sharp voice: “God! I’m tired! Somebody let me know if we ever get there,” and flung himself in a corner, and went to sleep, I hope.

A young American officer standing smoking in the corridor, with whom I had sat at lunch, turned on his pocket-lamp for an instant during the ensuing silence, and said, “Do you mind if I come in?” Then, in the pitch darkness, lighting one cigarette from the other, and very lonely, I think, he almost immediately began to talk about himself, and his story might be called the story of the young man who was and wasn’t married.

Stripped of non-essentials, it was this: He had become engaged at a “co-ed.” school, as he called it, some years before, and when he was drafted, in the possible event of his being ordered abroad, the twain decided to get married instead of waiting a few more years. One Sunday morning in November they hunted up a clergyman and the knot was tied. They then had lunch at the station and she took her train and he went back to his camp. She was an army nurse and he was in the Engineers.

Now, as inclination alone could have caused them to unite (there wasn’t the ghost of another reason apparent; they hadn’t even mentioned the matter to their families), the sequel of the story becomes somewhat interesting; in fact, quite incomprehensible, let us say, to the Latin; even I myself was a bit muddled as to the whereforeness of it all.

Well, to continue. The next time they meet is when Fate, not quite unmindful of them, sends him as instructor to a camp in the Middle West on the outskirts of the very town where her people live, and she goes to spend a three days’ leave with them.

The not-too-eager and certainly not-over-inventive bridegroom (whatever combinations may have been in his mind, neither he nor history records) gets a few hours’ leave and goes to spend Sunday at the home of his bride.

I begin to breathe. But not at all. Her people, innocent as the new moon of the marriage, ask a few neighbors in for lunch—to make it pleasant for them. The bride was to return that very same afternoon to her hospital. They did walk to the station (under the same umbrella, I hope) and there they said good-by.

“It was what you might call a quiet wedding,” I hazarded at this stage, and it was too dark to see if he caught the point. Please bear in mind that this was a marriage of inclination; no other explanation, I repeat, being possible. And the luncheon took place the end of January.

The next time the situation seems about to clear up is in the golden month of August, she having been transferred to the military hospital near the camp to which he, in the meantime, had been transferred as instructor. It seemed providential and again I breathe, thinking, “Love will find a way.” Not at all. The bride rings him up the Sabbath morning after his arrival (Sunday is evidently a bad day for that young man) and tells him her orders take her to Camp Sill that night. The next day he gets orders to report for overseas duty, and here we sit in the dark, on the outskirts of Belfort! He breaks the silence later, with a certain eagerness in his voice (not, however, for his distant bride, who, I also gather, still bears her maiden name): “I do hope if we beat them I get a chance to go into Germany with the troops. I’ve wandered all my life [he’s between twenty-five and thirty] and sometimes I wonder how I’ll take to living in one place and bringing up a family.”

In the dark I wondered, too.

_Later, much later._—To-morrow, All Saints’ Day, there will be some crowding of the heavens, and the day after, the Feast of the Dead, all France will be a-hurrying to her graves.

II

ALL SAINTS’ DAY, NOVEMBER, 1918

_Evening._—Masevaux, a town of old fountains and old inns with charming old signs hanging out, the pebbly Doller running through it under ancient, balconied houses, and over all hanging faint odors of its century-old tanneries. A long day, but not too long.

Punctually at eight-thirty I had descended the flashy stairway of the “Tonneau d’Or” at Belfort to find the officer sent to meet me finishing his coffee and reading the morning papers, always comforting these days.

In a thin fog, we start out of town, passing under the antique high wall of the castle against the rock of which “The Lion” has been carved. Now all has been done that it is humanly possible to do with granite and a lion, but of that more another time—perhaps. I can’t stop now except to say that the hand that fashioned it fashioned also the Statue of Liberty in New York harbor.

We meet, just out of Belfort, a funeral procession—three coffins, two draped with the Tricolor, one with the Stars and Stripes. Making the sign of the cross, I commended three souls to Heaven. I always remember, accompanying a beloved one of my blood to his narrow dwelling, how sweet, how very sweet, it was to see the gesture of that sign, and the lifted hats of those we met, saluting him on his last journey. Though I do not care inordinately how or when or where I lose my flesh, that much I would like done to me—in passing.

Nestled in the corner of a broad, sloping field was a cemetery, a new cemetery, with French and American flags flying from its crowded graves, and many men were busy digging, and we heard the crunch of shovels in cold, gravelly earth as we passed, and yet I thought how well, how very well, the soldier sleeps!...

We were on the flat road that leads to Cernay, where the Germans have lain intrenched since the beginning of the war.

Shifting masses of horizon-blue, velvety in the thin mist, appear, disappear down white roads, between fields of barbed wire and against horizons of rusty beeches. In the villages black-robed women and children and old men are coming out of rose-colored churches or standing by elaborate, very decorative rose-colored fountains. There is the distant sound of cannon. It is again the front.

At Masevaux, I find myself drawing up under some yellowing lindens in front of the building of the Military Mission—once the German _Kommandantur_, in turn once the nave of the old church of the Abbey of Masevaux. I walk over a rich carpet of rustling leaves to the door, and am shown up the broad, stone stairway of an immaculately kept building.

Commandant Poulet having been called that morning to St.-Amarin, I am taken into a charming corner room hung with a wall-paper that might have been designed by Hansi, where a young, light-haired man with dark rings under his eyes, who knows both battles and desks, was sitting at a big table.

We looked at each other, I must confess, with some curiosity, though of the politest. I, to see what the Military Mission might be going to offer, but prepared to be very easily and very much pleased, he, doubtless, to see what had been “wished on” them for the next week. It _might_ so easily have been awful, instead of a niceish lady who has both wept and laughed, and known many lands and many men. He asks me what I would like to do that morning. Not having the ghost of an idea what there is to do, I answer, “Everything is interesting,” and give a somewhat free Gallicization of “beauty lieth in the eye of the beholder.” This was received approvingly, even hopefully, and he tells me that in the afternoon I am to attend a ceremony in the military cemetery at Moosch, in another valley.

About this time I begin to remember that it is “La Toussaint,” and I say that if possible I should like to go to church. This, too, is encouragingly easy and I am turned over to an officer whose wife and two children have been in Brussels for four years, he himself a deserter from the German army.

When we reached the church, built of _grès rose_, evidently and happily, from its abundance, the building stone of this colorful corner of the world, and which can take on the loveliest of _patines_ in even a generation or two, I find it overflowing with the faithful, many blue men standing on its pink steps. The curé, followed, I hope, by his flock, was off on a longish sermon, and for a good half-hour I was washed and blown about on a sea of mixed metaphor, though it did not seem too long, for mind and imagination were flinging themselves about reconquered lands and border peoples, and I only really “came to,” so to speak, when a great and splendid organ sounded and a deep, harmonious choir of men’s voices joined it. Then I knew I was indeed on the frontier, where music lingers, and amorously it would seem, near the last of the mad, Romantic peoples.

When we passed out there was the noise of guns and everybody was looking up at little white balls of shrapnel unrolling themselves about some black specks in the blue, blue sky. It was the familiar firing on German airplanes.

Then I was led to this charming old house, which is one of six placed at right angles, on two sides of the Place du Chapitre. It proved to be part of the old convent, done over by Kléber when he cultivated the arts of peace rather than those of war. It belongs to four agreeable sisters, the Demoiselles Braun, whose brother, also a deserter from the German ranks, was killed in Champagne. They were rehanging the portraits of their ancestors.[4] Whereby hangs the tale of two American nurses who, quartered there some weeks before, had left the water running in the tub one night, after which the drawing-room ceiling fell in and the paper peeled in hall and vestibule. Hence the rehanging of the ancestors, at their own, I mean the sisters’, expense.

They take me up a beautiful, but very worn, stairway, with a time-polished oaken balustrade, and I find myself in a paneled room, looking out on the square shaped like this:

Many motors are drawn up in front of the Mission under the yellowing lindens. The old red inn of “Les Lions d’Or” is directly opposite, and on the left of the square at right angles with me are the four other houses once dwelt in by the _chanoinesses_ when it was decided that each should have her own establishment. The square is roughly, anciently paved, with grass growing in between the cobblestones, and Mademoiselle Braun, who showed me to my room, told me the steps of the old stairway were so uneven because after the Revolution (during which the Chapter had been dispersed) the house was long used as a school and they had been worn by generations of young feet running up and down.

_At 12.15_—I am conveyed to _la popote_[5] for luncheon. More officers inspect me—I them also—and then we proceed to the consuming of an excellent meal, to the very exhilarating accompaniment of the news of the capitulation of Turkey, and a light, easy touching on other prospective and pleasant changes.

Now as, owing to circumstances too long to enter into, I hadn’t eaten since noon the day before, passing by Chaumont, I did full justice to a rabbit white as snow, garnished with noodles of the same hue, flooded by a delicious golden sauce. I only fleetingly remembered that I ordinarily avoid the little beast as food; for dessert we had a great cake filled with chocolate and whipped cream, such a one as I had not seen for many a month and year. A bottle of champagne was opened in joy at the Turkish news. And we drank to everything and to everybody—even to the health of the “Sick Man of Europe,” not, however, sicker than several others at that moment, as some one cheerfully added. It was all very pleasant, and I felt that everything was for the best in the best of war worlds.

At 2.30 I start out with Captain Tirman over a smooth road, _camouflé_, kilometer after kilometer, with screens of wire netting interwoven with broom and pine branches, for the road runs along the side of hills which slope down to the valley where the Germans lie intrenched. Everywhere are shell-holes, new and old. We stopped on a high place and, getting out, peered through a hole in the screen. Spread out before my eyes was the rich plain of Alsace, one of the world’s gardens. Something crystal and shimmering half veiled its loveliness, but its beauty and richness I knew for the beauty and the richness of a thousand years of blood, and many men had found it fair and panted for its beauty and died for it.

In the distance, very white and shining, were the chimneys of Mulhouse, and a pale-blue line against the horizon was the Black Forest. All the time there was the sound of cannon, ours and theirs, reverberating through the hills. I was greatly moved, and started to go higher up in the field, but Captain Tirman stopped me, saying: “It will be better for you to get away with your souvenirs than to take them unrecorded with you to the grave. The Boches shell anything they see; and we haven’t got our masks, either, in case they send a gas-bomb.”

The roadsides were planted with cherry trees, scarlet-leaved, the _kirschbaum_ of Alsace. The hills had great patches of velvety, rust-colored beeches; dark pines traced black patterns through them, yellow larches shone here and there like torches; a soft sun was dispersing the last of the delicate, noonday mists.

Then we slipped into the valley of the Thur, where lies the ancient town of Thann. From afar I saw the lacy, gray belfry of its cathedral, pressed against other heights of velvet rust and burnished gold. Nearby, the hill of the Engelburg, with its broken, overturned tower like a great ring, a souvenir of Turenne’s campaign during the Thirty Years’ War, was soft and lovely, too. The long street was sun-bathed, and filled with the black-bowed peasants of story-books, and the blue soldiery of the great war. I wanted to stop by a pink fountain, near the richly carved portal of the cathedral, but we feared to be late for the ceremony at Moosch and hurried on.

At a place called Bitschwiller, however, we were obliged to wait while an almost endless procession of black-clad old men, women, and children, and blue-clad soldiers wound across the road, from its pink church to the distant green and yellow cemetery.

Furthermore, the Fifteenth New York Infantry—black, black, black—is quartered at Bitschwiller, and the most exotic sight I have ever seen were those khaki-clad negroes in that valley, already very high-colored.

Suddenly against the steep hill, like a picture slightly tilted back, we came in sight of the square cemetery of Moosch.

Above and below it was framed by a line of helmeted men in khaki, and as we neared I saw they were _our_ black troops; the horizon-blue of a French infantry regiment made the frame at the two sides. High, high up were a group of white- and black-gowned priests, and red- and white-gowned acolytes swinging their censers. At the top of the steep stairway, running down the middle of the black-crossed cemetery, was a sacerdotal figure, with outstretched arms, exhorting, and around about the whole were groups of women and children. We left the motor and walked over to the cemetery, where I found myself standing near the resting-place of Norman Hall, the first American to die in Alsace. From the tall, black cross floats the Stars and Stripes, and some one had planted chrysanthemums thick on his grave. Peace to him. He lies not far from General Serret, who fell, too, on the nearby sacrificial Hartmannswillerkopf, where commingled lie fifty thousand who at the word of command had put out each other’s light.

After the sermon the negro band of the Fifteenth played some grave and measured music, the French infantry band then something a little too gay. As one of the officers said afterward, “_Cela a presque frisé la polka_.”

Then the “Marseillaise” sounded and “The Star-spangled Banner.” I felt my veil wet against my eyes and my lips atremble as I thought, a second time that day, how well, how very well, the soldier sleeps.

Above the cemetery in a higher contour of eternal hill was a great patch of yellow and black and rust-colored forest against a clear blue-white sky, in which tiny black specks were moving eastward.

We waited to watch the negro troops defile. They appeared very smartly dressed till the eye got to their feet, and such a collection of ripped, torn, cut, down-at-the-heel footgear was never seen! They seem to be a flat-footed race, too. I spoke to a couple of darkies very much _en repos_, who were leaning against a fence, near the motor, as I got in.

One answered, with a broad grin, “You an American from America?”

“Yes.”

“Well, have you heard dis here war’s about over?” The coalest-black one then contributes this to the conversation:

“When peace is signed dis here nigger starts to walk home.”

“What about the ocean?”

“I’ll take a swim, lady; the water can’t be no colder and no damper dan dis here ‘Alice’ land.”

The mulatto by his side said, “I subscribes,” and became a pale gray at the bare idea of getting colder or damper.

Then we see Commandant Poulet, tall, blue-clad, with high decorations a-shine, coming toward us, and he and many officers are presented to me, after which I change into his motor, and we start out over a magnificent military road built since the war. It was begun and completed almost miraculously, it would seem, in little more than a year, and over it, safely hidden from German guns, come and go the great military supplies of the Alsatian front—troops, artillery, munitions, food, ambulances.

As we mount, mysterious, dissolving twilight views present themselves near red cherry trees, burn against distant blue hills, yellow larches illuminate other “hilltops hearsed with pines,” and the beech woods are a deep, deep purple. Then we plunge into the dimness of the great cedar forests of the Route Joffre, talking, but not too much, in the large, enfolding twilight, of the war, and of Alsace of to-day. Commandant Poulet has been in charge of the Military Mission since Christmas Day of 1914, and I thought, rolling over the broad road, contemporaneous with his administration, how out of thousands, nay millions of men, his part during these war years had been to construct and not destroy. He told me that almost his first official act was to be present at the burial of Norman Hall on December 26, 1915.

As we issue from the dark forest we find ourselves on a crest overlooking many other twilit hills. There is a pale, pale yellow still burning in the west, and the most timid of evening stars shines above it. Then we dip into the deep blue valley where Masevaux lies.

Peasants are hurrying to their villages, and there is a continuous, but dull, sound of cannon. In the chill of the fallen night we arrive at the Place du Chapitre, the town dark, dark as we enter it, and no light in any house. Having seen my pleasant room only in daytime, I proceeded in hunting for the light to try to turn on a barometer, then by another door feeling my way along, I fumbled about an arrangement of mandolin and pipe, then, as a last resort, I sought light from a stuffed owl. After which I went into the corridor and, re-entering the room, found the electric button just where it ought to be—by the door.

A saving hour of solitude before I am fetched for dinner, which was very pleasant, but I can’t tell about it now, for sleep, dear sleep, is touching me, and it is two days and a night since it has been near.

III

FÊTE DES MORTS, NOVEMBER, 1918

Church again, seemingly in company with the entire population, civil and military, after which I _flanéd_ in the old streets of Masevaux, word having been brought that no motor was available for our projected trip to Dannemarie. Indeed, I had early noticed from my window much mounting in hot haste, accompanied by the lively sound of two kinds of firing. Some _coup de main_, I suppose.

I strolled about under an uncertain sun, occasionally sensible of that delicate, not unpleasant smell of bark and leather hanging on a windless air. About me was that world of blue-clad soldiers, black-robed women, and many children were playing in the pink and gray streets; a group of little girls were skipping rope to the words _ein_, _zwei_, _drei_, _quatre_, _cinq_, _six_!

The post-office of modern Teutonic origin still wears, high up and indifferently, the Double Eagle, though the more accessible _Kaiserliches Post-Amt_ has been removed. A little farther down the street is the old inn of the “Golden Eagle” whose historic sign dates from Napoleonic days, and which, as was pointed out to me, turns its golden back disdainfully to the black, double face of the once proud eagle of the post-office.

And this inn of the “Golden Eagle” hangs its charming sign out on a corner of the square called “La Halle aux Blés” (the Grain Market), surrounded by sloping-roofed, roomy houses. In the center is a rose-colored fountain, with three diminishing rose-shaped basins around a carved central column.

And the cobblestoned square with its good fountain and its comfortable houses—there’s even a stable and a garage on one side—has something cozy about it, its atmosphere that of a place long used by human beings for the homelike customs of “the simple life,” which last bears no resemblance to that occasionally practised at great expense and inconvenience by those who “need a change” and can afford one.

American troops passed through the Halle aux Blés on the 30th of May of this year, again on the 4th of July, and on the 14th, too, always drawing themselves up at last in the Place du Marché, one end of which is my Place du Chapitre. There, under the lindens, General Hahn and General Boissoudy watched them deploy, while gaily attired Alsatian girls grouped about the fountain acclaimed them, and from every window hung the Stars and Stripes.

Then I found myself wandering out on the road to Belfort, past the high, grassy eminence known as the “Ringelstein,” once crowned by the proud castle of Duke Mason, founder of Masevaux. Traces of ancient walls embowered in ivy are still to be seen, and at its base are many old outbuildings of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, once dependencies of the Abbey and the Chapter, and when you are not expecting it you find old inscriptions and bits of carving plastered into them. On one high-roofed outhouse was a large crown and three fleurs-de-lis. Blasted through one end of the great rock of the Ringelstein rims the railway. And there is a near view of the red and green and yellow roofs of the houses of the _chanoinesses_ confounding themselves with the autumn foliage of the trees which embower them.

I begin to know a little of the early history of Masevaux, enveloped in legends and many contrary tales—Masevaux, ruled now by abbots, now by feudal lords, belonging sometimes to the House of Austria, sometimes to the House of France.

And the first legend is that of its foundation. How the lord of the country, by name Mason, a nephew of Saint-Odile, was feasting in his castle of this same Ringelstein, and the wines of Burgundy and Alsace and of the Rhine were flowing, and a troubadour was reciting a tale of war and love, when suddenly Duke Mason cries out:

“Soul of my soul, misfortune is happening to my son! Night is falling. Where is he?” And he goes to the window and looks out. Some one answers:

“Fear not, illustrious father of so dear a child. He has doubtless tarried with the holy fathers of Moutiers.” But the night gets blacker, the lords and ladies drop their golden hanaps and the troubadour is still.

Then Mason, in the grip of deeper presentiment, cries out, “Who loves me to the succor of my son!” And they seek with torches for the child. Alas! the white body of Mason’s son, born of a dead, beloved wife, is found floating upon the little stream, and Mason, pressing what was once his child to his heart, cries out: “Nothing can ever give me joy again. I will build a monastery wherein to pass my days until God calls me from this heavy world.” And that is the origin of Masevaux—Masmunster. The legend has it, too, that on moonless nights the child returns, weeping, because he did not live long enough to read all the beautiful stories inscribed by the gods, the prophets and the wise, concerning the sons of men. And as I looked up at the great grass- and vine-covered rock whereon the castle of Mason once rose, the Doller flowing at its base, the cannon of the great war sounded. Down the white road was disappearing a battalion of blue-clad men, going toward the black and rust and yellow of the hills—a red cherry tree between me and them. Then I turned back into the town and hied me to the _popote_, where some half-dozen extremely agreeable men were awaiting me, as well as a sustaining repast.

The American _communiqué_ was immediately and very appreciatively read out. Our victorious advance was continuing along the Meuse (known as the “Muse” by the doughboy), the First American Army attacking on the west bank in liaison with the Fourth French Army on the left. Then we looked over the Turkish armistice terms, quite satisfyingly comprehensive from the opening of the Dardanelles to promises on the part of the Turks not to speak to any of their former friends.

And we talked of how from the terrace of Versailles, where the German Empire was proclaimed, the statesmen of the world will watch the twilight descending upon Walhalla and its gods; and here in Alsace the crash of falling temples can be heard.

After lunch I went with Lieutenant Lavallée to see a bit of Alsace from within, for he was to invite various mayors of villages to go to Paris for the “Fêtes Alsaciennes,” to be held the middle of November, and also to select a discreet number of veterans of 1870 and school-children of 1918 to accompany them.

We went first to Gewenheim, a somewhat war-battered village and, as we entered it, Lavallée pointed out the iron plate on the sign-post, indicating the name of the village and the department. Like many others of the Haut Rhin (Upper Rhine), after 1870 it had been quite simply turned and marked in German. This proved most convenient and economical, for all the French Military Mission had to do when they came to Alsace in 1914 was to turn them back as they had been before 1870!

The mayor’s house, one of the usual dwellings with a small door for humans and a big door for harvests, had been much damaged. Passing in through a sagging entrance, we found the mayor, the classic, horny-fisted, wrinkle-faced mayor of a village, with cobwebs and straw and other substances adhering to his coat, but possessed of a certain air of dignity and authority notwithstanding. There was a moment’s silence after the lieutenant gave him the invitation, pride visibly wrestling with parsimony, accompanied by the working up and down of a very prominent Adam’s apple. He accepted finally with a sort of “I am a man” expression, but there was a quite apparent melting of his being when he found that it was the State that would defray expenses. Then the wife of his bosom, who had helped him make and save his money, came in and showed us some of their “best” shell-holes, and a statue of the Virgin of Lourdes under a large glass bell which had not a scratch, even, though everything around had been shattered.

There was also a lithograph of Henner’s red-headed “Alsatian Girl,” who hangs in every home and every railway station, and is used for loans and appeals and calendars and advertisements of complexion washes and hair-dyes; and she was once a charming creature, before familiarity bred contempt.

The worthy couple then fell to a discussion in Alsatian German as to which of the veterans would be possible candidates for the trip to Paris. There seemed to be something the matter with every one mentioned. Rudler, Franzi, was nice and it was a pity that his rheumatism prevented his getting about, as he had lost his dung-heap, though not his house, in a recent bombardment and needed distraction. It wasn’t quite clear to me _how_ you _could_ lose a possession of that kind, but I wasn’t at the front to ask questions, so I let it pass.

Handrupp, Hansi’s, eyes were giving him trouble. If he went, a boy would have to go to lead him about, and, even so, would he be welcome in Paris if it were known that his daughter, old enough to know better, had run away with a German?

First names, it will be noticed, came last, and last names first, a relic of German order. Another incautious but evidently esteemed veteran, by name Bauer, Seppi, had fallen from a hayrick last summer and would never walk again. It was like looking at the back of the web of Fate, and I found myself wondering with somewhat of exasperation, “for this had a hero’s death at Gravelotte or Villersexel or Saint-Privat been denied him, where angels would have awaited his strong, young body to take it to the heaven of those who die for country?” Suddenly the _dulce et decora_ of so dying was quite clear to me, and Bauer, Seppi, who fell from the hayrick last summer, and all his still extant contemporaries, had the tragic part—as would these men of the great war some forty or fifty years hence, who were now going about with an astonished yet proud consciousness that, _ex millibus_, _they_ had been chosen and been spared.

But as Lavallée very justly remarked, “What would happen to the world if everybody died young?” I suppose he is right, and I bethought myself that there are those who must await threescore and ten before the reasons for their having been born are apparent; the “Tiger,” for instance, and Moses, and many others.

We then visited the curé, living at the very end of the village toward the lines. He was called from the church where he was hearing confessions, and Lavallée proceeded to ask him which of the schoolboys he recommended; wideawake ones, without, of course, being obstreperous, were wanted. Something, disappearing almost as swiftly as it came, passed over the curé’s face. It was a look of sudden, nearly overwhelming desire to go himself, and the immediate realization of the impossibility of that or anything else that meant change.