Chapter II: Part 2

On the round center-table was a book, _Deo Ignoto_, and _L’Echo de Paris_. A little harmonium with manuscript-music on its rack was near the bed; on the walls were shiny lithographs of three popes, and an illuminated Lord’s Prayer in German. As the upper rooms of the house were “unhealthy,” on account of the raids and bombardments, the curé lived and breathed and had his being downstairs in this one room, with a rather boisterous yellow dog that kept sniffing at my gaiters. He was a large man, with a naturally masterful eye, who would have been at home in many places, occupied with many things, but he had lived, and would die, Curé of Gewenheim. And he at least owed the Germans a temporary widening of his activities, for Gewenheim is but three kilometers from the firing-line.

Then we crossed the muddy street to the schoolhouse to confer with the nuns concerning little girls, and were greeted by a dark-eyed, sparkling-faced Sister, very gifted by nature, who would have graced any drawing-room. There was something of elegance even in the way she had the washing of the stairs cease to allow us to pass up, and in the way she removed piles of coarse linen from the chairs in the room to which she conducted us. Then another Sister, not so bright, though she evidently ranked the gifted one, came in, and together they pondered the names of possible little girls. I had a feeling of being behind the scenes, and recognized how orderly and reasonable is the working of a so-often fortuitously appearing Fate, as they decided who should, or should not, take the journey to Paris. I thought, too, that it would have been well-nigh intolerable to me, had I been a little girl in Gewenheim, not to be among those chosen to go. But there was no longing on either of _their_ faces. Especially the charming one radiated happiness and content. And how true that nothing can enter the heart that is not already there! I wondered if I, to whom so much of life is known—its glories and its miseries—possessed what that graceful woman had found in the dullest routine of duty imaginable. _She_ knew whither she was bound, also whence she had come. In comparison, shaking, shifting, uneasy, appeared the compass of my life....

A bottle of quite sour white wine was produced and they watched Lavallée and myself drink; no escape possible.

They are of the Sisters of the Divine Providence with their mother-house at Ribeauville, who have taught in the schools of Alsace for generations.

After leaving them, we visited the inn, entering into the _Gastzimmer_ through a tiny antechamber of a shop, where thread and candles and oil for lamps, socks, and a few other strict essentials were sold. The black-toothed, thin-haired landlady, Tritter by name, might have been of any age, but a handsome boy of fifteen or thereabouts, with a bad cough, calling her “Mother,” gave a possible limit. A good-looking, high-complexioned girl appeared breathless from a bethumbed back door, arranging two little curls under her ears. After the greetings, Lieutenant Lavallée said:

“Have you had any news of your daughter Odile?”

“Not since last winter from Colmar,” both mother and sister answer; “the parcels we sent her, they cost each fifteen francs, have not been received. She was hungry when she wrote.”

Then was poured out a confused story concerning the capture of a squad of Germans with their gun, in the autumn of 1914. A few days after the event the sisters had been standing in the street in front of their door, when a German officer came up and said to Odile, the younger:

“You are wanted for a moment.” She followed him to another officer on horseback, waiting in a field. They had not seen her since. Then it appeared that it was the baker’s wife who through jealousy had denounced the pretty Odile (the rôle of the baker himself was not indicated), but such an expression of hatred for the baker’s wife, rather than for the Germans, came over the mother’s visage that I was reminded of faces in pre-Raphaelite pictures—I mean those on the goat side in Judgment Day scenes. It was evidently one of those obscure yet ruthless village tragedies set in the frame of equally ruthless war.

When we came out we copied an old inscription over the house door of a man, Louis Vogler by name, who, returning from a campaign, had been decorated with the Legion of Honor in 1816, and had recorded the fact for all time over his door, his decoration even being carved in with the rest.

Evidently a man who, having done a deed, was not content that it should be writ only in water (or blood), but had it put squarely and clearly over the door of the house to which he returned; and was he not justified? For here it is being recorded some hundred years after, instead of having been carried away on the great river of Napoleonic deeds.

Then, through several wet villages, groups of girls with their felt slippers stuck into their clacking wooden sabots (very comfortable footgear, it appears) pass groups of blue-clad soldiers, and words are exchanged. I couldn’t hear, but by the looks accompanying them and the giggles I judged them to be the eternal words exchanged in all ages between soldiers and future mothers of the race. And there is a verse, old as the army, which runs:

_Le négligent troupier_
_Qui laisse passer l’heure_
_Et trop longtemps demeure_
_Sera puni par son sous-officier._[6]

Everywhere along the road, through the mist, detachments of blue-clad men would appear and disappear. I thought with a touch of sadness, an esthetic sadness, to be sure, that this extreme beauty of dissolving distances would be lost when the world of blue-clad men would have disappeared, replaced by men in shabby, nondescript, civilian clothes, or by _des types à melon ou à tube_—those wearing derby hats or cylinders.

Near Rodern, between some lines of poplars, a helmeted cavalryman, with his detachment, rode by on a great black horse. He was bending slightly forward, his lance in his hand, his eyes looking straight ahead, his ample, light-blue tunic almost concealing his saddle. He was a pure French type, pale of face, with black hair, black mustache, slanting nose, and I knew him for the archetypal Gallic warrior as he has appeared through the ages, making epics for France.

At Bourbach-le-Haut, Lieutenant Lavallée was to invite a last mayor to partake of the trip to Paris, and hunt up some remaining veterans. Whatever gentle thirst I had had for mayors and veterans being now quite slaked, I went to the little church, instead of to the _Mairie_. Through the half-open door came light and chanting sounds. I went in to find a dim interior, with an ancient arch framing the altar space, in front of which was a narrow, black coffin. Only some very old bit of mortality, waxy and shrunken, could lie within. Women, children, and what may have been veterans were saying the rosary in German—the Sorrowful Mysteries—and I thought on my dead, and on that dear and holy brother born into the world on this day long years ago. In Alsace he had desired and received, dreaming and adolescent, the baptismal waters.

Sadness invaded me, even as the dreary night was invading the day, and I would have groaned aloud, but I saw Lieutenant Lavallée standing by me. Haunted by the mournful chanting, with its mysterious indications, “_Jetz und in der Stunde unseres Absterbens, Amen_,” I passed out into falling night and rain; dark masses of mountain loomed up, lighter spaces were the stretching valleys. Soon we found ourselves on the deep road to Masevaux, I lonelier than the loneliest of the dark and hurrying clouds.

IV

THANN AND OLD THANN

_Sunday morning, November 3d._—Awakened at six by heavy firing. After wondering what could be happening, I remember that life, as far as I am concerned, is for the moment largely joy, or rather joyous riding, with a series of agreeable French officers (they certainly are of an amiability!), in a series of large, powerful military motors, through a series of beautiful autumnal hills, over a series of the newest and most wonderful of war roads.

Enough church-going, however, as will have been noticed, to keep me mindful that man, and woman, too, is grass, and though it, or rather she, springs up in the morning, she may be cut down by night, and that this bending of the hills is by the journeys of her eternity.

Well, to get to the point, or rather to Thann. We started out early, at nine, for I was to find a Mass in the cathedral, after which we were to proceed to Vieux Thann, where war has not spared the church nor left worshipers.

Again we took the screened road overhanging the valley. Again we stopped on an eminence and climbed into a field, and again I was shown the blue valley, over the tops of some red cherry trees. Nothing detached itself from gradations of velvety mists and beaming distances, but I knew that on the grape-planted slopes of an unseen river that other wine of defeat was being drunk from cups held stiffly to unwilling lips.

As we dipped down into the valley of the Thur, the belfry of the church of Thann appeared, so mistily, lacily soft that its form and substance seemed but as something breathed into the air, at any moment to be dissolved, against hills that were like brocaded stuffs, whose gold would be very thick if one turned them wrong side out. My heart was stirred because of the fairness of the Sabbath world.

We drew up in front of the gorgeous portal of the cathedral, once a deep pink, but with time grown paler and softer at all its edges, and whose boardings and sandbags now partly hide the carved story of the life of Christ and His Mother. We grope our way in through several swinging doors, and find the high, Gothic space filled with a misty yellow light coming in through narrow windows, covered with oiled paper, the precious stained-glass having been long since removed.

Little by little the forms of kneeling women and children, and many soldiers standing, detach themselves from the lovely gloom. The green vestment of the priest at the altar, on which are six tall, crystal, wide-branched candelabra, misty like the rest, is the only spot of color, for the splashes of horizon-blue become nearly white after a strange fashion of this color in dim light, whether of church or falling night. In the ancient wrought-iron pulpit the curé was just finishing a sermon in French, immediately beginning one in German. It appears that as the _communiqués_ improve, the French sermon gets longer, and the German shorter, and mercifully neither is long.

We passed out quickly after the “_Ite, missa est_.” I had been feeling that Captain B—— might be in a hurry, but when I looked about to see if he were fidgeting, I found him doing what any _miles gloriosus_ should be doing from time to time, saying his prayers.

And this is the story of the building of the church of Thann, and of its arms, which bear a single pine tree.

Death found the holy Bishop Théobald in the Umbrian Valley, and, knowing that his hour had come, he said to his servitor Maternus, who knelt weeping by his side:

“Thou knowest I leave no worldly goods, for the poor have needed what I had. But this sapphire ring, dear memory of her once loved, take it, thou, that worms may not dwell within it.” And then he entered into contemplation, saying nothing further of the things of earth.

When Maternus had made ready to hide his master’s body from the light, he tried to take the ring from its finger. But with the ring came the finger, and both were inclosed as in a shining rim.

Maternus, greatly wondering, hid the precious relic in a hollow place in his staff and started back to Alsace, begging his bread along the way. After many delays, having been set upon by wicked men and molested by prowling animals, he finally arrived in the valley of the Thur.

Exhausted, he laid himself down to rest, placing against a pine tree the precious staff. The next morning he was awakened by the ringing of the Angelus, and when he started to grasp his staff he found that it was as if grafted on to the great pine, while to left and right were burning two tall, pale, sapphire flames.

At this moment the lord of the Engelburg came by, the ruins of whose great castle are those one sees rising above the town of Thann. He had perceived the two blue flames from afar and, hastening to find out what they signified, he recognized Maternus, faithful servitor of his friend Théobald.

Maternus then related the death of the saint in the Umbrian plain, showing him the finger and the ring; whereupon the lord of the Engelburg, weeping and sighing, cried:

“Oh! my precious friend Théobald; oh! my dearly loved sister Adelaide, this is thy betrothal ring, and these two sapphire flames announce thy union in dear heaven!” (In those days they were quick to see divine meanings.)

Now, the so well-loved Adelaide, in her green youth, had been struck by a bolt from heaven, after which Théobald, for whom the whole round earth held nothing more of value, had consecrated himself to God.

The lord of the Engelburg, his gaze fixed upon the luminous finger and the familiar blue ring, knew soon the too often hidden will of God, and cried out again:

“Here I will build a church, and its reliquary shall contain this precious ring and finger.”

And so was built the church and monastery of Thann, and about them grew the town, and during long centuries on the vigil of the feast of Saint-Théobald, a freshly cut pine tree was placed in front of the cathedral, flanked by two great wax candles. Nor can any one, even of the very positive-minded, who look no farther than stones and mortar for all meanings, give a better reason for the arms of Thann.

Then we motored on toward Vieux Thann, half destroyed, and evacuated since 1914, but were obliged to leave the too visible motor on the outskirts of the village, creeping close along a very high screen of wire and broom branches that we might not be seen by the enemy. For we were in the plain of Cernay, now known as the Ochsenfeld, once called the “Field of Lies,” where the three sons of Louis le Débonnaire routed their father’s army. Lothair, Louis, and Pépin were their names. But of all this another time.

Vieux Thann is a half-demolished, echoing, empty town, with a background of neglected vineyards on very close-pressing hills.

Everywhere were signs of German war occupation. The schoolhouse had been their evacuation hospital, and one of the old inns bore the sign, “Verband-Station.” The only living things in Vieux Thann were the fountains, quite lovely in the pink-stoned, gracious Alsatian way, with their gentle, unhurried streams of crystal water. It all reminded me vaguely of Pompeii, even in the misty light of a northern Indian summer sun.

Above, in the perfect blue, the usual firing on German airplanes was going on. Long after the black specks had disappeared to the east the little, round, soft, compact balls of shrapnel were still slowly unfolding themselves.

About fifteen hundred feet from us were the battle-lines, where the French and Germans have faced each other in the “Field of Lies” since 1914.

One of the battered inns, “Zum Goldenen Lamm,” has its once lovely old sign still hanging out, but the golden lamb is gone, and only his golden feet and the green wreath of laurel that once entwined him remain.

And to what winds had the dwellers of the great village been scattered? Where had they been received, unwillingly, by strangers, those hosts of refugees, fleeing from their homes, red with excitement, bright-eyed, voluble? I’ve seen them, too, after months of treading up another’s stairs and eating of the salt bread of charity—pale, silent, dispirited, returning to villages like Vieux Thann, to see their all among disorderly piles of fallen stones and crumbling mortar....

Back to the living city, to an increasing sound of cannon, but the Sabbath stillness was so deep nothing seemed really to disturb it.

The cathedral with its single, finely pointed tower was like a needle everywhere threading up long streets. I had a desire to see it empty, and as I entered, its perfect proportions gave me a sweet and satisfying welcome. The red lamp of the sanctuary was now the only spot of color in the thick yellow gloom, out of which line and proportion gradually detached themselves. The celebrated choir-stalls had been removed to Sewen, but above the altar of the Virgin is a Gothic triptych, and the beautiful pulpit is of fifteenth-century wrought-iron. We groped our way into a low, vaulted chapel which existed even before the church was built, passing a tombstone bearing the arms of the house of Ferrette, a family once all-powerful in these valleys. Over the altar of the chapel is an ancient statue of Saint-Théobald. He has a long, thin, shaven, upper-class face, his eyes are bent, and he is looking perhaps as he did shortly before death found him in the Umbrian Valley. It is the visage of a man having done with personal things, and a great pity is woven into the downward curves of the benignant face.

We drove back to Masevaux, over one of the splendid new war roads, rising and dipping through forest-covered hills. The brilliant sun shone athwart each leaf, still dewy and sparkling, and a strong, rich, autumnal smell exuded from the earth. It reminded Captain Bernard of hunting before the war, that carefree _chasse d’avant-guerre_, and I thought of Hungarian castles, and long days in forests, walking through rustling leaves, or sitting silently in glades with men in green-brown hunting garb, awaiting the game. In the evening, shining dinner-tables, and talk about the day’s bag by men in pink hunting-coats and women wearing their best gowns and all their jewels.... And much that is no more.

We descended at the _popote_ as the hand of the church clock pointed to 12.15. Blue-clad officers were standing by the windows reading the Belfort morning paper just arrived, and the Paris newspapers of the day before, as I went in.

The enemy is beating his retreat through the Argonne Forest, to the sound of the hour of destiny, and there are armistice and abdication rumors, and indications that they want to _sauver les meubles_, or, as they would say, seeing they’ve got into a bad business, _retten was zu retten ist_—_i.e._, German unity, which, saved, means all is saved. But there are strange dissolvents infiltrating everywhere, scarcely any substance can resist, and the blood of peoples boiling over, and much good broth spilling, and too many cooks everywhere. For what man but wants to try his ’prentice hand at seasoning of the mess? And it was all talked about to the consuming of Mère Labonne’s especially excellent Sunday dinner, an example of _la vraie, la délicieuse cuisine française bourgeoise_. There were _pieds de veau_ that melted in the mouth, and creamed potatoes, after which a very delicious _hachis_, with some sort of horseradish sauce, and when I remark that it has also a touch of garlic, Sérin cries out, “But not at all—it’s only horseradish.” On my being supported by everybody at the table, he finally says, with an innocent but somewhat discomfited smile, “It’s true that there must be a lot for _me_ to notice it.” Then he tells with gusto of a repast in his dear Toulouse where there was a whole cold pheasant for each guest, and each pheasant was blanketed with such a thick cream of garlic that the bird itself could scarcely be seen. “It was exquisite,” he added. “I dare say; one can even smell it here,” some one cruelly finished.

Then they spoke of how the French had supported captivity better than the English, and why.

“We always talk while eating,” said Bernard, “no matter how scanty or ignoble the repast. It’s our hour for relaxation.” (Any one lunching or dining at French officers’ messes will have noticed this.) “But with the English it is different. They eat silently, and in captivity they easily get the spleen and fall into melancholy, because the food isn’t served as they would like, or because they can’t wash or shave or exercise.”

And I told the story of the brother of a French friend whom I had recently seen, just back from nearly four years’ captivity, who returned in such a stout, rosy condition that his sister was ashamed to show him, and when asked about her _pauvre frère_ would blush.

We sat long, talking now of books, now of personages, now of local happenings, Sérin telling of passing that morning through one of the smaller villages where even the young girls had saluted him with a military salute as he rode by—and one of the officers said, with a flash, “_Très délivrées celles-là!_”(“Very delivered, those!”) Then some one told the story of the man who came down to Masevaux to make a book on Alsace and, seeing the line of the trenches marked that day in blue on the commandant’s map, remarked, in a _dégagé_ way, “_Le Rhin, n’est-ce pas?_” (“The Rhine, I suppose?”)

“Not yet,” was the quiet answer.

He then rushed them all off their feet for ten hours, after which, having got what _he_ wanted, he went back to Paris and wrote his book. And from what I hear it wasn’t a bad book, either. Though one of the officers said he knew he could do the same about Prague or Peking, that he’d never seen, with some books, a good pair of scissors and as much paste as he wanted.

All is handled lightly, as only a group of Frenchmen could handle it, _glissant, n’appuyant jamais_, each bringing his little gift of wit and culture, enjoying the impersonal with the same pleasure as the personal, in the French way. Of course, the _communiqués_ are as honey after four years of bitter herbs, very bitter, even though distilled in extinguishable hope.

And I must say that to me lively and untrammeled conversation is the salt of daily life; and if, as it sometimes happens, one’s own thoughts are expanded, brightened, and returned to one, it is indeed delectable above all things, the true salt to be used in quantities (if you can get it). For, alas! the majority of people have no ideas, when you come down to it, or, having a few, they are pig-headed and look but into the converging point of the angle, knowing nothing of the splendor of diverging lines where self is swallowed up in unself. And there are the close-headed, whose minds work slowly in a cramped way, or not at all, and they are forever complaining that they only think of things to say when they get home and the lights are out. They might just as well not think of them (one sometimes doubts if they really do) for all the good they are to their neighbors. And there are those very thin-skinned ones who immediately get contentious, and think the arrow is meant for them instead of the universe at large, and one could go on indefinitely through the list of impenetrable heads, to whom the blow of an ax is as the brush of a feather, or cushiony heads that once dented, however, never regain their contours, and many, many others. These all need material sauces, good, rich sauces to their food, or they would find it tasteless, not having even a pinch of this other salt to season it with. And they are mostly those who do not work, but whose fathers worked—sometimes even their mothers—and _oh, là là_, the subject is endless, for everybody talks—even those who have nothing to say.

V

THE BALLON D’ALSACE

_Sunday afternoon._—At two o’clock I started out with Captain Bernard and Captain Antoni for the great mountain known as the Ballon[7] d’Alsace, sometimes called, too, “the knot of Europe,” in an especially high-powered motor (I never know the mark of any of them, distinguishing a Ford from a Rolls-Royce only by the generally pampered feeling pervading me when in the latter).

The Ballon rises like a wall at the very end of the valley of the Doller, and we passed through many villages, shining pinkly in the prismatic November afternoon, where there was much going into church for vespers, of blue- or black-clad figures. The thirteenth century-towered church of Sewen is on a slight eminence in the heart of the village, and the cemetery around it was crowded with the faithful, regretting their dead, or some, perhaps, for one reason or another (What know I?), feeling, “’Tis better they lie there.” “Live long, but not too long for others,” is an excellent device.

The charming lake of Sewen, though far from the village, seen from a certain angle, reflects the tower of the church and is, they told me, of Moorish origin. These valleys and hills seem everywhere like open books concerning the dim, dim youth of the earth; I had a sense of my transitories, with those lessons written everywhere. And it is autumn, too.

We got out at the immense reservoir of Alfelt which dams up dangerous springtime floods with its giant wall of masonry, for from the “knot of Europe” loosened waters flow to the North Sea and to the Mediterranean. Climbing to the top of the rocky elevation, we read on the monument the date of the inauguration of the reservoir, 1884, and the name, Prince Hohenlohe Schillingfurst, Statthalter.

And, looking down, the shining villages through which we had just passed, Sewen, Oberbruck, Niederbruck, Masevaux, are like beads on the thread of the lovely valley, lying between the breasts of the hills.

The mountain-ringed lake of the reservoir reflects the rich coloring of the hills in which it is set; white-stemmed, yellow-leaved birches, blood-red cherry trees; rust-colored beeches, larch trees shining like torches borne by wanderers, on black pine slopes; all is seen twice—once on the hills and once in the mirror of the lake.

Then we mount up, up, up, twisting and turning over the magnificent military road, made like so many others since the war, to become some day the joy of tourists, when, thousands upon ten thousands, nay, millions upon millions, they shall come from over ocean and mountain to see what it all looks like and get the belated thrill.

Violet hills become black, outlined against a copper-colored band of western horizon. Captain Bernard points out some English airplanes just over our heads, tiny, tiny specks hanging in a high waste of heaven, and I wonder if in one of them sits my friend, the chartered accountant of the Belfort train, fulfilling his destiny in the air.

We leave the motor at the highest point of the road, where trees no longer grow, and start to climb the grassy crest, patterned with great brown patches of barbed-wire defenses. Captain Bernard’s sharp eyes soon discerned the _chicanes_, intricate, almost indistinguishable pathways through the wire, and if one knew them one could get through without leaving one’s clothes. Breathless, we arrived at the _table d’orientation_ and find ourselves looking out over what seemed the edge of the universe. In front of us lay the gorgeous panorama of the Alps and behind it the wide band of copper-colored sky, with here and there a burnishing of glaciers by the dipping sun. To our left stretched the immense and splendid valley of the Rhine, behind it the Black Forest, clearly yet softly outlined against a paler horizon. One could have rolled the whole earth like a ball from the feet. I felt as if suddenly freed from any heaviness of the flesh, and Goethe’s soaring words brushed against my mind, and beckoned me on—those words he cried after he had reached the Brocken and was looking down on a cloud-covered Germany.

_Dem Geier gleich_
_Der auf schweren Morgenwolken_
_Mit sanftem Fittig ruhend,_
_Nach Beute schaut,_
_Schwebe mein Lied._[8]

I knew those vast expanses for material out of which a new earth, if not a new heaven, must be formed, on some eighth day of creation. And the new earth was to be made out of old and conflicting desires, worn, yet persistent passions, small, yet greedy thoughts, the whole about as facile as the weighing of the winds, making one almost feel that He who worked with new materials those first seven days had the easier part.

I was filled, too, with a great longing for an improbable wisdom and strength to be breathed into the men who are to reharness the plunging, escaping destinies of the nations. Each man that has his hands on the reins seems like some one clinging to a runaway horse, trying to dominate a relentless, unreasoning, reckless course.

Reverberating through the eternal hills was the sound of heavy cannon; and before my mind came a vision of the great forges wherein they were formed, men working day and night in hot, dim, noisy spaces—Creusot and Krupp and Skoda, and all the rest....

Some near summit hid the dread Hartmannswillerkopf, the “Verdun” of Alsace, and one of the officers spoke of that winter of 1916, when its snow was always pink with blood and black with death—“tens of thousands sleep there.” I thought of the souls breathed out into that pure, high ether, like to this, but cold, cold, almost as tenuous as the immortal stuff commingling with it.

Then we started to the other edge of the summit, whence we might look into _l’élégante et douloureuse Lorraine_, for one side of the Ballon slopes toward Alsace and the other toward Lorraine.

As we threaded our way carefully through more _chicanes_ of barbed-wire defenses “that you had to have your nose in before they could be distinguished,” I discerned on the crag three familiar silhouettes, outlined against the heavens toward the Lorraine slope. And as things are rarely in their proper setting nowadays, there on the Ballon d’Alsace were three dusty Y.M.C.A. men who had come from their _cantine_ at Belfort. We spoke to them and gave our names, and the brightest one, Tallant was his name, asked if I were the wife of my husband—and said he’d been on the Mexican border.

Then we told them where the _table d’orientation_ was, but forgot to point out the _chicanes_, and we saw them from a distance entangled in barbed wire. Their souls were safe, I hope, but heaven help those khaki clothes!

And looking down into Lorraine from my splendid height was as if looking into another world, for its distances were bronze and silver and pale green.

Great black spots of shadow cast by wasteful masses of white clouds were lying heavily over those new and ancient battle-fields. Forever obliged to protect themselves from some invader, the villages hide rather than display themselves, and are barely detached from the silvery brown of the plain, crossed here and there by the bosky lines of the Meuse, or those of the great canal joining the French river to the Rhine. And each tiny hill has been an altar or a fortress, often both at once. Over the majestic, melancholy stretch Romans have passed, the hosts of Attila, Normans, Germans, Burgundians, Swedes, English, and many others. Now its white roads sound to the tramp of American armies, are encumbered by giant quantities of war material brought from over the seas. And of all who have passed over it, of the most ancient even, much remains. Close against one another are Roman encampments, feudal castles, the two-sided, two-faced bastion defenses of Vauban, the great, mined earthworks of modern times, and now in leafy darknesses are the cement emplacements of the big guns of the twentieth century.

But alas! as I turned to go, pulling my gaze from the wide horizon (a pale, pale pink where it covered the western way to the city that is the heart of France), I saw on that slope, directly under me, a cruel statue of Jeanne d’Arc. A stiff yet boneless Pucelle sat astride an equally stiff yet boneless steed; both seemed about to drop into space, the mountain falling away from them, and both were of a dreadful superfluity! However, one isn’t so plagued with horrid modern statues in Alsace as in other places I have been, for they run rather to fountains and living waters. At St.-Amarin, for instance, I don’t remember anything later or more personal than the fiery Gallic cock, “_der spuckende Welschhahn_,” surmounting a sphere, borne in turn by the column of the 1830 fountain; and the fountain in the Place du Chapitre at Masevaux, bearing the date 1768, has a single, lovely column, too, on whose top burns a stone flame in an urn. And the shaft of the fountain of the wine-growers at Thann is a mass of rich yet noble carving, surmounted by a helmeted figure bearing a shield on his back. Furthermore, crystal water flows into its six-sided emblazoned basin.

I think of the statue of Thiers, _Libérateur du Territoire_, in that dusty, begonia-planted, iron-railed plot in front of the station at Nancy, and I could weep.

But hereabout I haven’t found a single nineteenth-century statesman in frock-coat and top-hat, done in granite, nor any bronze female pointing him the way to a dubious heaven, with a long finger and a heavy palm-branch—and so may it remain.

Certainly the _très chic chef_ of the Military Mission will be well punished for _his_ good works in Alsace if they ever raise a statue to him. For they will make him, too, out of either bronze or marble with a _plaque de commissaire_ on his frock-coated breast, and heaven knows what kind of a hat they’ll put on him, or how the fancy will seize them to do his hair! And the statue won’t be of lapis lazuli, as it should be, nor of pale sapphire, nor of dull turquoise, nor of any of the lovely blue stones of the earth, alone fit to perpetuate the beauty of the blue-clad men who have written France’s greatest epic. Blue-clad men splashed about fountains at twilight, blue-clad men taking form and substance as they emerge out of gray mountain mists, blue-clad men weaving their cerulean patterns through the woof of long-trunked pine forests, blue-clad men like bits of turquoise embedded in the matrix of white roads, and what know I besides?

As I gave a sigh for Art and a prayer for the serried ranks of her erring devotees, I found myself looking into another splendid valley, toward Giromagny, near where is a height known as La Planche des Belles Filles, after a story of the Thirty Years’ War, when men with blue eyes and very light hair and skin were for a while masters of the domains of Belfort and Ferrette. After the best manner of invading armies, ’tis recorded that these Swedes committed many excesses, and dark-eyed girls lay concealed in the forest, and when they feared their hiding-place had been discovered they fled to the mountains, but even there they were pursued by the hosts of fair-haired, fair-skinned, blue-eyed men, bent on the most elemental of errands. And again they fled precipitately, scarcely knowing their direction. When they got to the top they found themselves on a great ledge of rock and in their distress they tumbled from the height onto other rocks below, and the blue-eyed, fair-skinned, fair-haired men from the North knew them not. Hence the “Ledge of the Beautiful Girls.”

And then we took a last look at the vast heaping of the Alps; to the left, the Jungfrau and the Mönsch, to the right, Mont Blanc, the whole great mass outlined against that persistent dark-red band. The glacier of the Jungfrau was as if in conflagration; Mont Blanc was soft and roseate, yet its beauty left me cold.

Captain Bernard said he had climbed the Ballon many times and only twice before had he seen the great panorama; but as, alack! to him who does not want shall be given, except for their gorgeousness, I would have turned from them indifferently, had not my beloved mother been dwelling almost in the shadow of Mont Blanc.

But one[9] has written, as men of genius write of things in times of peace, of this Ballon d’Alsace. He who brought out from his Gallo-British mind new things and old has said in one of the most charming of books: “Then on the left you have all the Germanies, a great sea of confused and dreaming people, lost in philosophies and creating music, frozen for the moment under a foreign rigidity, but some day to thaw again and to give a word to us others. They cannot remain long apart from visions.” I thought they have, indeed, given a “word.” But when again the “visions”?

I turned and followed my two blue-clad officers down the Alsatian slope, over the gray grass, threading neatly through the _chicanes_ of the brown, barbed-wire defenses, and got into the motor waiting on the roadway once known as that of the Dukes of Lorraine.

We were silent as we started down the great mountain. I was again wrapped in thoughts of the New Day to be created out of old and rotting stuffs, and of the death of heroes. The hills were velvet-palled against the deepening crimson band of light.

Later, a _panne_, and we waited in a violet-valleyed world, illumined only by white candelabraed torches of strangely luminous larch and birch, while the prudent yet daring chauffeur changed the tire.

A great khaki-colored motor passed us, marked with two stars, filled with khaki-clad men of my race, going up, up, whence we had come.

Then we stopped at the little restaurant of Alfeld. The lake of many colors was dark and mysterious. Its high tints had been dipped in something deep in the hours since last I saw it, though strange blues and purples and rust colors were still reflected in it, and the light of a single, very yellow birch had not yet been snuffed. At the restaurant four glasses of white liqueur were poured for us (one, of course, for the chauffeur), distilled from raspberries, the odor of the berry very strong, and long afterward the taste, the _arrière-goût_, remains in the mouth, as if one had just eaten the fruit. But one of the officers said, “All the same, it doesn’t equal a good _quetsch_ or _kirsch_ or, above all, a good _mirabelle_.”

And then we dipped into the darkening valley of the Doller and through dim villages found the way to Masevaux and the house on the Place du Chapitre, where the Demoiselles Braun had tea awaiting us, and there were stories told that made us laugh. And one was of the renowned 15th Dragoons, so long quartered there, which, briefly—and humanly—is this:

At intervals after their departure little dragoons saw the light of a war-world, and, to be exact, fifty in all saw it. The curé was broken-hearted at the ravages among his sheep, but he was also a practical, long-sighted curé, so he wrote, presenting his idea of the matter before the colonel of the regiment, with the result that from the savings-box of that same regiment a sum was subtracted to provide ten years later for the first communion and confirmation clothes of the fifty! (Would you have thought of it?) Then, casting about in his mind how he could further improve the general situation, this time not so much from the temporal point of view as from that of eternity, he decided upon a pilgrimage—a pilgrimage of reparation to Huppach, where is the shrine known as that of the Virgin of Klein Einsiedeln, near Sewen, through which we had just passed. He announced the pilgrimage from the pulpit, then took the further precaution of rounding up his strayed sheep in person, and in person conducting them to Huppach to offer up prayers and tears to the Virgin of Klein Einsiedeln. There were so many of them, however, and they were mostly so young, that history does not record the pilgrimage as being entirely without smiles—and God have mercy on us all!

But the curé was not yet (so to speak) out of the woods, for fate replaced the Dragoons by another regiment, having, as it happened, a colonel possessed of a boundless love for his men and who couldn’t do enough for them (or rather have the inhabitants of Masevaux do enough for them).

“The inhabitants of Masevaux are very nice, very nice indeed,” quoth he, “but the happiness of my men above everything. We left three thousand on the battlefield last week, and the others need distraction—of a pleasant sort. My men above everything.”

So the colonel who loved his men with a boundless love and, furthermore, was not one to waste time in vain endeavors to portray the eternal feminine as undesirable, nor to render the chase unpopular, caused dances to be organized on this very Place du Chapitre, under these very linden trees, then heavy-scented, and every evening. The curé, foreseeing trouble, with the aid of Heaven and his own undiscourageable will, had them suppressed after eight days (eight days is a long time) of wrestling with leagued powers both civil and military. And again God have mercy on us all!

Now the virtuous, I mean the truly virtuous (that is, the untried, untempted virtuous), mustn’t throw stones at Masevaux nor at this book, but rather remember that anything could have happened to anybody had everything been different. And even so, hasn’t a lot happened to many of you? You know a good deal better than I do just how much.

To the _popote_ at seven-thirty, and before I’m an hour older I’m going to tell you about the _popote_. And you’ll wish you had been there instead of hearing about it—as runs the classic expression, “_Regarder manger des glaces_,” and I give the translation, “Watch others eat ice-cream,” partly because I want you all to know just what I mean, and partly because some one in the United States wrote to my publishers that _My Lorraine Journal_ was a nice book, but couldn’t they suggest to me that I write my books either in French or English.

MRS. O’S.: “But, my dear Mr. Graham” (his name is Graham, and this may be his chance of immortality), “I couldn’t write one entirely in French to save my soul, and to save my soul I’d find it impossible when everything I’m writing about takes place in France not to slip into _la belle langue_ occasionally.”

MR. GRAHAM (from a distance): “Occasionally! There you’re at it again. Occasionally!” (It does get on his nerves.)

MRS. O’S.: “And there is another saying to the effect that ‘_On ne peut pas contenter tout le monde et son père_.’ That is to say, dear Mr. Graham, that you can’t please everybody and your father as well, and this, of course, mostly applies to young men (are you a son or are you a father?) trying to win smiles outside family circles—and father ultimately paying the bills. But as it occurs to me here, there must be some connection.”

MR. GRAHAM: “I don’t see it. And while I’m about it, I’d like to tell you a thing or two concerning those Mexican books of yours. The Spanish was awful—even _The Yale Review_ and _The Nation_ noticed it.”

MRS. O’S. (getting a bit nasty): “It’s about all either of them did notice, especially _The Yale Review_; and nobody loves me on _The Nation_, but it was entirely the printer’s fault. He received them immaculate. I turned my face to the wall for three days after a glance at _A Diplomat’s Wife_. But then you probably don’t remember how perfectly sweet about these very books _The North American Review_ was (a man with the most perceptive of souls and a neat flair for the imponderabilities, named Lawrence Gilman, does _their_ book reviews), also _The New Republic_, which possesses a man named Alvin Johnson, inexorably sure about the humanities, separating with a single, infallible gesture the goats of letters from the sheep (but he still thinks, alas! that all men are born free and equal). And _The New York Sun_ was kind, kind, and _The New York Evening Post_, too, and they do say this latter rarely says anything nice about people till they’re dead and can’t enjoy it, and _The New York Tribune_, which has the reputation of being very particular about itself, and _The New York Times_, which never jokes and is known as a searcher after truth.”

Mr. Graham, dreadfully bored with me, mumbles something like “this is what you get when you try to do somebody a good turn.” I couldn’t catch it all, as he’d doubtless continued farther on his journey through the great Northwest. He wrote from one of a chain of “Grand Trunk Pacific Hotels,” and all I can think of to call after him is _Bon voyage_, though he won’t like it.

And now back to Masevaux in the valley of the Doller—Masevaux smelling a bit like nice leather things in expensive shops, with a hint of falling leaves.

VI

LA POPOTE

And how shall he who has not dined be strong? And how shall he who is not girded fight? And how shall he who has not wept laugh? And how shall he who hath not made a free offering of his life find it? And many other things occur to me, but enough for the wise of heart.

And now for _la popote_, which is in what was once the house of the Oberforster, in a street doubtless always muddy, looking out on the church, and it is square, of gray stucco, and red brick with a hall running through the center, like many and many a house.

The woodwork is everywhere painted brown and the wall-paper, too, is brown, a lighter, depressing brown. Above the dining-table is a ponderous, imitation-bronze chandelier, but its cruel light now shines on blue-clad men who have fought the good fight, agreeable, cultivated men of the world, and it touches strongly scar and galloon and decoration of these, selected _ex millibus et ex millibus_, by hidden powers, to return from battlefield and trench....

It’s the Oberforster’s glass that we use; it’s his imitation-bronze fruit-dish that is now filled with dark, rich grapes of victory. It’s his imitation-tin and real-glass punch-bowl that is on the table by the window. On the porcelain stove that heats well, too well (I sit with my back close to it), is a _dégagé_ marble bibelot, the heads of a man and a woman in _basso-rilievo_ cut in an obtrusively chance bit of marble, and it bears the motto, “_Amor condusse noi_.” Perhaps on their honeymoon, the Oberforster and his bride had made the classic _Italienische Reise_, and had pressed closely, so closely against each other in the railway carriage, that the apprehensive fellow-voyagers shut their eyes or sought another compartment. The Teutonic “will to live” is irresistible, and when it’s at work there’s nothing to be done except get out of the way.

Theirs were the lithographs representing beings of the Biedermayer epoch, theirs the many-tiered machine-turned, walnut sideboard. Theirs was (I know not how it got into that company of _ersatz_ and imitation) a beautiful old glass carafe, a shepherd and a sacrificial lamb engraved upon it (perhaps once a church vessel), but in it was a stopper, half cork and half tin, with an imitation turquoise in the middle.

Theirs was a smoking-set of imitation tin whose massive ash-receiver in the most horrid _art nouveau_ continually mocked the delicate spirals of smoke. Said the commandant one evening, flicking his cigar-ash into the dreadful thing:

“That invasion was almost as bad as this. You could have bought an ash-receiver like it in every big shop in Paris.”

“And in every little one,” finished Laferrière. “Thank God the frontier _is_ closed, even at the price.”

In the corner between the windows was an upright piano piled with the best of music, and there was a large and completely uninteresting turned-wood clock, stopped at 12.25 on August 7th, four years ago.

And the man that earned and owned it all is dead in a soldier’s grave, and the woman, Anna by name, weeps somewhere her lost love and the equally lost gods of her household. _Et c’est la guerre._

As for Madame Labonne’s cooking, she knows her business, and if it weren’t the obvious duty of those sitting about the table to take the gifts the gods and Madame Labonne provide, I should feel I were living much too well.

She gives us a _gâteau à la crème_ that disappears smoothly, leaving but an exquisite memory. She has another _gâteau à l’oignon_ (don’t turn away; it’s perfectly delicious and takes a day to make the onion part), her _filets_ melt in the mouth, and her _purées_ are the insubstantial fabric of a dream. When she serves the classic Alsatian dish of sauerkraut decorated with boiled potatoes and shining pieces of melting pork, you don’t really need to eat for twenty-four hours, and wouldn’t go to the _popote_ except for the conversation and the company. Sometimes the officers, the unwedded ones, think of marrying Madame Labonne—she’s fat and about sixty and doesn’t try to look young (by her works alone they shall know her), and the married ones think of trying to introduce her into their happy homes in some rôle or other.

And when they move into the rich, shining Alsatian plain, that they have looked down upon these four long years, she is to take part in the triumphal procession.

And this is how we generally find ourselves placed at table. I sit on the right of Commandant Poulet, who, somewhat as a prince of story, for these four years has administered with much calm, with great good sense, with wide understanding, and, above all, with immense tact and kindness, the not always simple affairs of the delivered ones of the reconquered triangle.

Only he can know the difficulties of the French Military Mission, though all may see the results. It is a land flowing with honey if not with milk (the busy bee in and out of war-time doth its work, though, it would seem, not so the cow).

In full maturity it has been given to Commandant Poulet to see results, and sometimes I have looked almost in and at a man whose strange lot during the war years has been constructive work. His first public appearance was when, as _tout jeune lieutenant remplissant des bouts de table_, he accompanied President Loubet to St. Petersburg on his 1902 visit. Since then many honors have been his, and here in Alsace he has been both Paul and Apollo, for he has reaped where he has planted and God _has_ given the increase. _Très chic_, in his horizon-blue, with his high decorations on his breast, _et très homme du monde_. This is what I see and it seems very fair. Of his personal life what can I know?—except that it must be as the life of all that walk the earth, disillusion succeeding illusion, grief tripping up joy; for there is no getting away from the old verses:

_Ainsi du mal au bien,_
_De la joie à la peine_
_Passe la vie humaine._

Somewhere in Lorraine the commandant has a destroyed château. But he can always dwell in the dwelling of his labors in Alsace.

Vis-à-vis is his first aide, Captain Tirman, whom I saw on my arrival, always with deep rings under his eyes, too much in rooms and bending over desks—_il boit le travail_. Entirely devoted to his chief. He is musical, too, and sometimes while waiting in the dining-room for the mess to assemble we find him playing Beethoven or Bach, or more recent and more compromising Germans, from the piles of the Oberforster’s music on the Oberforster’s piano. _La musique n’a pas de patrie_—for musical men who have fought. (But let a zealous _civil_ far from the front hear a strain of Schumann or Brahms issuing from some window and he runs straightway to the police.) Captain Tirman wears the Legion of Honor and the _Croix de Guerre_, and is so pale, I am told, because of the hard campaigns he has passed through, and wounds and illness. He is always in charge in the absence of the commandant, but though _être Tirmannisé_ is one of the gentle jokes of the _popote_, no signs of tyranny were apparent to me.

Captain Bernard, second aide, is, like the commandant, from Lorraine, and had prepared himself for the Paris bar. He conducted himself admirably during the war, Laferrière tells me. Wounded three times, he bears a great scar—_sa belle cicatrice_, as his comrades proudly call it—on his forehead (Verdun, August, 1916) and over his heart _la Légion d’Honneur_ and the _Croix de Guerre_. Always very carefully dressed—_tiré à quatre épingles_ (pulled out by four pins), as they nearly all are.