Chapter VI: Part 6

=It has recognized and accepted all the principles which
President Wilson proclaimed as a basis for a general
lasting peace of justice among the nations.=

b) The new German government has solemnly declared its
readiness to evacuate =Belgium= and to restore it.

c) The new German government is ready to come to an honest
understanding with France about

=Alsace-Lorraine.=

d) The new German government has restricted the =U-boat War=.

=No passengers steamers not carrying troops
or war material will be attacked in future.=

e) The new German government has declared that it will
withdraw all German troops back over the German frontier.

f)—The new German government has asked the Allied
Governments to name commissioners to agree upon the
practical measures of the evacuation of Belgium and France.

These are the deeds of the new German popular government. Can
these be called mere words, or bluff, or propaganda?

Who is to blame, if an armistice is not called now?

Who is to blame if daily thousands of brave soldiers needlessly
have to shed their blood and die?

Who is to blame, if the hitherto undestroyed towns and villages
of France and Belgium sink in ashes?

Who is to blame, if hundreds of thousands of unhappy women and
children are driven from their homes to hunger and freeze?

=The German people offers its hand for peace.=

After which, being the only woman who had ever lunched in the H.W.K. sector, I was photographed by the doctor with the four stripes. Then in a fog thickly enfolding us, as well as the mountains, we started out with gas-masks, compasses and pistols, plus an armed escort, toward the German lines, for they wanted to show me the ruins of the Castle of Freundstein, now an observation post, directly overhanging the great plain I had seen yesterday. Much banter between the commandant and Captain Perdrizet, their eyes very alert, as to the right road, the one that wouldn’t lead us into the enemies’ hands. Suddenly a firing of French guns began right over our befogged heads, with a near swish and crack, and answering duller German guns. In the thick fog, even those men accustomed to sensations seemed quite keyed up, and the commandant had become like some woodsman, looking closely at the trunks of battered trees, some with old scars, some with new, and other indications, invisible to me, along the path. Finally, at a certain crossroad, he stopped, saying: “_That_ would lead us straight to them. Even now a pointed casque might appear, though, with the probable armistice in sight, they will be less venturesome.”

I: “What would they do?”

He: “Throw hand-grenades first and then”—he looked at the others—“there’d be a scuffle.”

It didn’t sound attractive, I must say, the potentialities of the fog seeming even quite horrid, and I was entirely ready to hunt in the opposite direction for the path to the Freundstein, which, according to the compass, lay pleasantly due west. Dreadful, unexploded things, too, were lying about, in new and ancient shell-holes, and there was much careful stepping among broken tree-trunks and half-demolished barbed wire, and I got a horrid rip in the last of my American boots.

Here and there was a black cross, and the possibility of being underneath one, instead of above one, if we _did_ meet a German patrol, came before me. With all one’s poetizing or philosophizing, there _is_ a difference, and one’s a long time dead—as I know Lieutenant Lavallée would agree.

Suddenly the path began to rise, the commandant giving an exclamation of relief as he saw a steep ladder almost in front of us, apparently leaning against a wall of fog. Captain Perdrizet’s eyes began to shine again; he’d been quite subdued, not to say cast down.

“It’s like a scene of opera, isn’t it?” he exclaimed. And then he proceeded up the ladder, tipped, it seemed, at an angle of forty-five degrees the wrong way, I wondering how on earth I was to get down, unless I fell. Then we descend from a ledge over heaps of century-old, moss-grown mortar deep into the tower, and, passing through a long, subterranean passage, find ourselves in a tiny, closet-like room of ageless masonry. Stationed at an opening are two men with telephones over their ears, binoculars, compass, and charts lying on the sill of the opening in the masonry, which is shaped like this ⌓ and looks to the northeast, toward the Hartmann and the Sudel, and other consecrated heights, as well as the great, covered German plain—whose contours were more impenetrably veiled than its future. I had had a feeling, crouching in the wet bushes the day before, gazing out on its wide splendors in shifting sun and shower, that I would look no more upon it, nor upon the little, worn, brown crest of the Hartmann, cut by the black line of the German trenches, running through the naked wilderness of branchless trees—though I had not known why.

When we had blithely retraced our steps to the highroad, cracking many uncomplicated jokes, pleasing largely because we felt that kindness toward the universe so distinctive of the front, when no actual killing is going on, we suddenly encountered, almost bumping into them, two swearing, sweating, heavily laden _poilus_, who had got lost in the fog looking for their detachment. On seeing us they threw down their accoutrement on a wet bank and expressions strong and classic began to cut the air. A sergeant, risen up from somewhere at the unmistakable sounds, ran toward them, calling and gesticulating wildly. But, wiping their brows, they continued. They had taken the last step they were going to on that so-and-so and so-and-so mountain, and if they found their detachment or not they _enfiché’d_ themselves, only they didn’t use this elegant word to express their sentiments. The sergeant got more excited, and cried, “_Espèces de types_” and.... At this the commandant, foreseeing that the artillery exchange might get too loud for feminine ears, said to the biggest one (both were enormous), seeing his number: “You are looking for Camp Meudon, _mon ami_. It’s farther up; in an hour you are there. Follow the path up and always to the right.”

On which, like lambs, they who had sworn not to move from that spot till the hill crumbled shouldered their accoutrement, thanked Perdrizet in the best French manner for the cigarettes he gave them, and disappeared quickly, the strains of “Madelon” being loudly borne back to us on the fog.

“_Ce sont des enfants_” (“They are children”), said the commandant, with his kind smile, “and _good_ children.”

And that was the last word I heard concerning the war and “_les enfants de la Patrie_” on the Hartmann, for the hour of farewells had come.

And how deep was the mutual well-wishing enfolding that moment those who have seen peace breaking over the graves of the Hartmann, as I and they saw it, alone can know.

As we parted, they taking a higher path, disappearing almost immediately in the fog, and we the lower road back to the motor, I suddenly understood, too, the new look one sees in all men’s faces. Everywhere it is the same. It is that of men who have been ready to die, to “separate from the pleasant habit of existence, the sweet fable of living,” but who suddenly know they need not die, at least not now—nor _that_ way.

Coming down the heavily shrouded mountain-slope as quickly as possible, to be in time for my adieux to St.-Amarin before hastening over to Masevaux that same evening, Captain Perdrizet told me the legend of the “Phantoms of Freundstein.” I was then at a point of fatigue where present emotions were no longer possible, and time works such wonders that the most tragic tale of Freundstein, the Rock of Friends, was even as a poultice. And I could still be interested in hearing that to this very day there is a proverb, “_Er isch vom Freundstein_” (“He is from Freundstein”), which, said of a man, means so hospitable is he that his house belongs to his friends. And the legend runs after this fashion:

The last of the lords of Freundstein, Count Jerome, had a beautiful daughter, Christine by name, whom he adored, and whom he took with him everywhere, even to the chase, for which purpose a gorgeous litter had been made wherein she might rest. The Lord of Geroldseck, passing by one day, saw her as she lay asleep. Struck by her loveliness, he swore then and there that he would make her his.

Soon after he proceeded to Freundstein to ask her hand in marriage, but she answered that it was useless, as her heart already belonged to a certain very noble cavalier of Thann. Her father gave the same answer. One night a great noise was heard before the gates of Freundstein; it was the Lord of Geroldseck come with his vassals to take the castle and its lovely young châtelaine by assault. Freundstein resisted for three days. Then, seeing it was in vain, Christine and her father took final refuge in the high tower whose ruins rise above the chamber where we found the men with the telephones strapped to their ears. There had once been a sloping stairway in the tower, so broad that a horseman might ascend it. Up this road the Lord of Geroldseck pursued them. Arrived at the top, he was about to seize the girl, but her father, taking her in his arms, leaped with her into space. The gesture that Geroldseck made to retain her whom he loved caused him to lose his own balance, and he, too, fell and was killed. And their ghosts forever haunt the spot, and the echo, no matter what words are cried to the hills, always gives back the last, despairing call of Geroldseck:

“_Je t’aurai, je t’aurai, je t’aurai._”[20]

XIV

RETURN TO MASEVAUX

_November 9th._—I was received so warmly by the amiable Demoiselles Braun, who had my room ready for me; so kindly by Captain Bernard, who came a moment afterward to tell me he would call for me at seven-fifteen; so dearly by Laferrière, who also called for me, that I felt I had indeed got “home.” As we were walking along to the _popote_ Captain Tirman joined us in the darkness and told us that Bavaria had proclaimed itself a republic, and that there was news (military news by radio) of the abdication of the Kaiser. Somebody cried, “_Demain, de quoi demain sera-t-il fait?_” as we entered the house where the little cat, the forgetful, unabashed little cat, who but three short days before had done such well-nigh disastrous things to my fur coat, also awaited me.

Again a charming dinner, conversation about that first August of the war, the retreat from Mons, of Charleroi, and many, many other places; of forced marches and aching feet; of fatigue and hunger and thirst, now packed away gloriously in memory, though sometimes the strange look appeared on their faces as they talked. Stories were told of those who had gone to “_faire un bridge à Limoges_”[21] and remained there, and of others, like Mangin, who had come back, Mangin, the booty of whose glorious Tenth Army now overflows the Place de la Concorde. And of Foch who had _nearly_ gone there. And of the immense glory hanging over each and every battlefield, for, though black crosses were evoked, each was entwined with colors too bright for human eyes. And then we turned our thoughts from _tempus lachrymarum_ to the New Day, in whose sun, though not like to the brightness of those fallen, we all shine. The _long_ destiny is heavy and dark beside the light, bright way of heroes, and never did one realize till now how truly the gods love those whom they snatch young. We, after all, as one of the officers remarked, will die in our beds or by accident—and is it so desirable?

Then Sérin told his oft-repeated, but now dearly loved, story of “_Bravo, Capitano_,” of the _Capitano_ who thanked the Madonna for the thirteen trenches and the sea of barbed wire between himself and the enemy, but which I won’t tell. And Captain Antoni told the story of the wounded Boche who was given the _Croix de Guerre_, and how the French general said, as he entered the hospital ward:

“Are these the brave men who so valiantly held their position on the twenty-fourth? With inexpressible pleasure I give each one his well-merited _Croix de Guerre_,” and then proceeded down the line of beds. On Number 33 was lying a man with closely bandaged head, only one gleaming eye visible, and the _Croix de Guerre_ was pinned also on his valiant breast, and if it was removed by the Angel of Death or by orders of the colonel I forget. Neither is it recorded if the German smiled.

And I told of the swift passing of the autos, mine and the commandant’s, on the dark hills of the Route Joffre, when I was coming back from St.-Amarin and he going there. How sadly I had seen its kind lights rise along the heights and disappear, and there had been no friendly handclasp on the hills, nor words of thanks from me in the dim light of the blurred Pleiades and the young, half-veiled, white moon.

After dinner some one hazarded the word “bridge,” but there must have been that in my eye making for solitude rather than companionship, for the next thing I heard from some Frenchman, perceptive as to woman’s looks, was:

“_Madame est sans doute bien fatiguée et nous jouerons demain._”

And soon I was stumbling home on one or two or three blue-sleeved arms, in the inky darkness of a starless and moonless Masevaux.

I had found St.-Amarin charming, and I left with deep regret, but at Masevaux I was experiencing the sensation, very agreeable, I must say, of one who, having wandered, returns to his or her first love; and any one who has done it will know exactly how I felt, and I don’t have to tell them. As for those who have never returned, they wouldn’t understand if I did explain.

XV

THE VIGIL OF THE ARMISTICE

“_The Star is fall’n and Time is at his period_”

_November 11th, 1 A.M._—At ten-thirty Captain Tirman came back to the _popote_ where we were playing bridge—Sérin, Laferrière, Toussaint, and I. He was very pale, but there was something shining about his face.

“_Ça y est, l’armistice._”

Dead silence; we don’t even drop our cards. In his excitement a very naughty soldier’s word escapes him. He turns away in consternation, and the others, somewhat appalled, too, at last drop their cards. I try not to smile. General recovery; they hope I didn’t catch it. It was sufficient, however, to break that strange feeling of _absence_ of feeling that each one of us was experiencing.

“_Alors c’est fini, la guerre_,” some one finally said in a dazed way, and with the words the cruel thing seemed to drop heavily from us, as would some hideous, exhausting burden.

Toussaint, with his far look of one who loves forests, very strongly marked, said, “To think that it has found us like this playing bridge at the _popote_!”

Sérin: “I’ll not go to bed to-night.”

I: “Oh, my friends!” and then nothing more—my knees suddenly as if broken.

Laferrière (very quietly, after a pause): “I cannot but think of those who are not here.” And his words evoked great shining bands of the dear young, pressed closely, one against the other, out of their flesh, crowding the heavens.

Then Sérin, again with his _bon sourire d’enfant_, “_Il faut boire_.”

A bottle of _Asti spumante_ is produced by Laferrière, who in a dreamy way remembers that he is _chef de popote_. The stock of champagne is exhausted. Nearly every day, and sometimes twice a day for the past week, have not the radios, plucked out of the air by the commandant, plus the beauteous _communiqués_, necessitated the opening of bottles even unto the last?

Sérin, as we drink, all of us paralyzed by the sudden cessation of the world-horror, tells how one of his gendarmes would keep referring to the armistice as “_la Mistie_,” in two words, and we drink to _la Mistie_. But in spite of the too, too simple joke, how still, yet stern was each one’s heart!

About this time Toussaint seizes from the stove the marble “hunk” (it’s the only word for it), “_Amor condusse noi_,” and makes as if to throw it at the dead and gone Oberforster’s clock, stopped, as I said, some four years ago at 12.25.

Sérin again, with his most childlike expression: “_La Paix a éclaté!_ Peace has broken out, and I will break out worse than peace if I don’t do something!”

As I have said, Masevaux at that hour—it had got to be eleven o’clock—was as lustrous as an ink-pot, and all being still the prey of a strange paralysis of feeling, nobody suggested anything.

Peace, lovely, precious peace, dreamed of, desired through years of anguish, so _redly_ bought in money of the heart’s blood, was ours! Those crowding hosts gone out into the “dateless night” seemed suddenly to return, the only moving things on a stunned earth. They had not renounced in vain the dear clothing of the flesh.

But how could we understand in one moment the immensity of what had happened? Never have I felt myself so small, so almost non-existent—an insect that had fortuitously _not_ been crushed. But the soul’s great converging point _was_ reached. The war was done and won. Men need no longer kill each other by the tens of thousands, nor need women by the millions, because of it, weep.

We touched glasses again, but quietly, oh so quietly!

Some one sighs and no one speaks. After a while Toussaint, standing by the stove, again fingers “_Amor noi condusse_,” but it is taken out of his hands by one of the officers. Then Sérin suggests waking up the curé, getting the keys of the church, and ringing the bells. Tirman, in authority in the absence of the commandant, still at St.-Amarin, is gripped by that conservatism known to each and every one in command at great moments, and becomes cautious, even suspicious.

“_Mais non, c’est peut-être tout de même une blague. Attendons jusqu’à demain._” (He has quite recovered from his naughty word.)

Some one insists, “But Headquarters wouldn’t joke about a thing like that.”

Tirman, however, sits down at the piano, breaks out into the “Beautiful Blue Danube” and refuses to have the bells rung.

Sérin: “But what can one do here at Masevaux, black as the ace of spades and everybody snoring! _A Paris, il y aurait moyen de fêter même si c’est une blague!_”

I: “You are ready for anything.”

He: “_Et comment!_” With a light in his straightforward _good_ soldier’s eye, and somewhat as a child longing for the impossible, “Just think of them in Paris, the restaurants full, _et des femmes sentant bon_!”[22]

Then four dazed officers accompanied by a dazed lady proceeded to awaken the postmaster from his slumbers. That heroic expression of rejoicing accomplished, we groped our way to the Place du Chapitre. In one of the _chanoinesse_ houses Captain Bernard also dwells. Sometimes he has headaches on account of his wound, and to-night he had left us early to go home. On his not answering, some one hazarded the remark, “Perhaps he isn’t there” (Heaven knows there’s nowhere else to be but where one belongs, at Masevaux!), and it proved, indeed, to be pure defamation, for after a while he appeared at his window, or rather one heard him saying: “What’s the matter? I was sleeping the sleep of the just.”

“_Ça y est, l’armistice_,” some one cried out.

Then that man, who had been through every campaign and would forever wear “Verdun” stamped on his brow, made no answer.

And the night was dark, dark, the lovely moon too young to wait up, even for peace. We stumbled across the roughly paved square to my dwelling, and there we clasped hands with a strange, new clasp, and I, the woman and the American, wanted to say something, anything, but I had only begun, “_Mes chers amis_,” when I felt my voice break. I turned quickly and went in. What need to speak? Hearts lay open that night.

_2 A.M._—Have been reading to quiet the heavily throbbing nerves. Picked out of the bookcase an hour ago _L’Histoire des Elèves de St.-Clément, Metz_, 1871. The names Gravelotte, St.-Privat, Malmaison, Sedan, confuse themselves in my mind with Ypres, Verdun, with Belleau Woods, with St.-Mihiel, Suippes, Eparges. I remember being told that in a terraced cemetery at St.-Mihiel three thousand Germans sleep. Though friend or foe, this night I see them all arisen, standing each one by his grave, clad in horizon-blue, khaki—or field-gray, all those who at some word of command had left the “pleasant habit of living, the sweet fable of existence,” and I whispered in great need of consolation, “I know that my Redeemer liveth and at the last day we shall rise.”

_3 A.M._—And how shall sleep come, lovely sleep, desired like the morning? I slept not that night of the 3d of August which held the whole war in its darkness, and now with the youth of the world lying in “the grave’s quiet consummation,” shall I sleep?

Then slowly I became conscious of emanations from a giant, near people in defeat, not knowing what new thing to will, casting off the old fidelities, which once had given them the horn of human plenty. Thrones were shaking; “when _peoples_ rage, _kings_ must weep”; a world was to be remade out of empty places and blood.... I remembered how a poet[23] had cried out, as a prophet, after that other war:

_Ton peuple vivra,_
_Mais ton empire penche, Allemagne!..._

And then I fell to thinking on love, I know not why, unless it was for the millions of lovers taken so suddenly from the world, or because of those yet left. How shall I say? But I knew that there were three things, not two—the lover, the beloved, and love. And of this last and separate thing one can have, in extremely sensitive states, impersonal cognizance, when for some reason (again what know I?) fancy has been set free, imagination stirred, and they go flinging themselves, not so much about the personal as about the common destiny. For a moment, so brief that it was gone even as it came, my soul caught the light that hangs over dear, persistent, far, illusory hills of fancy and inclination, and felt the mysterious break of feeling on the dim, shadowy lake of the heart. Vague, beaming forms passed along its shores, dissolving, lambent outlines, awakening desire for all the beauty of the wide earth, for things not in my personal destiny, and which, if they were to be, would be no better than that which is, not even so good. It was the greed of the human heart....

And I cried out from my many-times-turned pillow, “O Life, O Love, O Death, O too, too fragile illusion of existence!”

_4 A.M._—A soft, rich-toned bell is striking. A cold breath comes in at the window, a cock crows. There is the first sound of the click of sabots across the square; the Day of Peace is about to break over the world. But here in the bed of the young deserter from the German ranks, dead in Champagne, the war still has me in its arms and presses me close to its cold, oozing breast. The familiar odor of drying blood comes to me. Old groans strike on my ear. Those who, dying, are not dead crowd about me, and the “blue-black cloud” envelops me. I am weary unto dissolution. And Sleep, darling Sleep—not even a brush of your wings against me!

In this early morning, in the “little hour before dawn,” the grief of the world sits tight about my heart—the icy hurt for things dead and gone, and the heaviness of those who awaken to a world empty of what was once the heart’s concern and desire.

Old distastes, too, press on me, old distastes, I say, not hates. How hate any one like unto myself, hurrying along the night-path to the grave, mutual, frightened possessors of a shadowy, urgent immortality?

For these last few years I have entered, as it were, into some knowledge of charity, not that I like everybody, but I have come to realize that the distaste is often in myself and not due to some fault or lesser excellence in others. Truly in this whole journey I have encountered but two whom in an idle, hazy way I did not like; one was of an amorphic species and the other had judgments too violent, and at the same time too conventional and platitudinous, to permit interest. But even of these I shall ultimately think with indulgence.

_5 A.M._—Closed the book recording the deeds of those young, long, long fallen of St.-Clément’s school, and I pass to thinking how the word now on the lips of the world is freedom.

But is not the deepest wish of the human heart for love which is never free, but always in bond to that which is its hope and its desire? And I cried out concerning freedom what once in the world’s greatest hour was cried out concerning truth, “What is it?” and begged that it might show its true form and aspect, above all to one who, invested with incredible power by a great people, would seem to hold even the lightnings in his hand.

More sabots click across the square, and a pale light sifts in at the top of the curtains. It’s the eighth day of Creation. Innumerable men have stood (and so near me) their last night through in the trenches....

Yesterday with its happenings seems a thousand years ago. I had motored with Laferrière to lunch at Dannemarie across a rich plain, through Morzwiller, where Alan Seeger spent a week with the Foreign Legion, and spun who knows which of his young and gorgeous fancies?

Now, as then, the long street of Morzwiller was crowded with a highly colored, exotic regiment, and we were stopped a moment by a detachment passing. In front of the red-roofed, cream-colored inn, with its yellowing grapevine clinging close and flat, a young officer in the strong, mustard-tinted khaki and red _checchia_ of the Moroccans was getting off his horse, a blooded, white, long-tailed beast of Araby; on his breast was a blaze of decorations and there was something implacable in his young glance as he looked about, and something very straight in his mien—a man who had been at his enemy’s very throat, or drawn the sucking bayonet out all red. Two or three men of his regiment, wearing also their crimson _checchias_, were sitting at a table drinking a light-yellow wine. A woman came out, emptied a pail, called to a cat. A very young girl behind her made a slight sign to one of the men sitting at the table. In another minute we had passed on.

Everywhere in the rich fields were great brown stretches of barbed-wire entanglements, repeating the rusty tones of the beech forests which fringe them. I asked Laferrière what would become of those thousands upon thousands of kilometers of barbed wire. He answered indifferently, as one does of things past, “Little by little the peasants will use the poles for their kitchen fires and the wire for their hedges.”

And we continue through that flat yellow and green and brown world to Dannemarie, one of the “territories” of the reconquered triangle, drawing up before some sort of government building, known to German and to French administrators, in and out of which American soldiers are now passing. I ask one of them where their officers are quartered, thinking to pay my respects after lunch. There is a vagueness as he asks of a passing comrade, “Say, ’ain’t we got a major somewhere here?” The flooding Americanism of my soul is for a moment stemmed; then we go over to the _popote_, where we are to lunch with Lieutenant Ditandy, in charge at Dannemarie. Laferrière, always ready to praise his comrades, tells me that he is possessed of much energy, good sense, and decision (rather in our American way, I found later) and the “territory” has flourished under him.

Pleasant lunch, enlivened by some last German salvos, which shook the windows and caused the glasses on the table to ring. Much and easy conversation—as we ate the classic Alsatian dish of sauerkraut, boiled potatoes, and pork, and the equally classic pancakes—mostly about the irrealizable and irreconcilable dreams of small and penniless nations, springing up like poor and unthrifty relations at the day of inheritance. And how amusing, even, the adjustments might become, once the blood-letting had ceased, though everybody felt more or less of a pricking in the thumbs at the thought of _l’après-guerre_. One could not then foresee that the movement of the Peace Conference would be about as rapid as that of the notoriously timeless glacier. Nor was it given to prophets to foretell the exceeding glitter of its generalities, nor how those same small nations, without a cent in their pockets, some even without pockets, like the Zulus and Hottentots, would multiply a hundredfold in its dewy shade. The metaphors are mixed, though not more so than the theme, and unfortunately it _won’t_ “be all the same in a hundred years,” everything having been taken into account except the future.

After lunch we start out in the motor driven by the swift yet careful chauffeur, accompanied by a doctor _à deux galons_, who speaks English very well, but doesn’t understand a word I say—and my English is generally intelligible, though perhaps one wouldn’t know right away if I came from England or the United States.

We passed the high, broken, pink viaduct of the railway, looking, against the near Swiss hills, like a bit of aqueduct in the Roman Campagna, though without any beauty of light. It had been destroyed the first days of the war, rebuilt, again destroyed, and then abandoned.

We were running straight toward the trenches, through that green and gold and brown autumn world, the road screened by wire netting interwoven with pine branches and broom, and there were kilometers of cloth screening, too, torn and flapping. The lines are but a few yards distant, and everywhere between us and them are the brown lakes of barbed wire.

At St.-Léger an infantry band is playing the terrible, the gentle, the dolorous, the gorgeous, the human, the superhuman “_Sambre et Meuse_,” which will forever evoke those seventeen hundred thousand sons of France who to its beat marched to their death. We stop to listen. A veteran of 1870 (no village seems to be complete without one or more) comes out, his green-and-yellow ribbon in his rusty buttonhole, and gives Lieutenant Ditandy a toothless, palsied salute. Black-clad women are grouped about the blue-clad band, under a great yellow chestnut tree. The mustard-tinted khaki and red _checchias_ of a passing Moroccan regiment give a last deep accent to the color of the scene. And for a long way our road runs like this:

We continue swiftly through villages shot to bits and deserted save for the troops, _Quatrième Zouaves mixtes_, they mostly are, quartered within their crumbling walls. There are tattered cloth screens for camouflage hung across the streets, as electioneering signs would be hung, or the banners of festivities and welcome. Open-mouthed, the soldiers see the auto pass where for two years no wheeled thing has rolled. If men went there they slipped silently behind the screens and under cover of night, with food and munitions or carrying wounded men.

As for me, I begin to feel like a cross between Joan of Arc and Madame Poincaré.

Lieutenant Ditandy points out “_le Bec de Canard_,” the duck’s bill, a long tongue of Swiss territory that juts in comfortingly between the French and German lines, and is greatly beloved by everybody.

On the outskirts of the battered village of Seppois we pause; a few more turns of the wheel and we would be in full sight of the German lines. I make good my woman’s reputation for lack of sense of responsibility and beg to proceed. Lieutenant Ditandy, however, caps daring by a somewhat belated prudence (there is something bold and hard in his eye when it’s turned toward the enemy), saying:

“We ought not to be here; as it is, our safe return depends on whether a German officer sees us and, seeing us, thinks he might as well turn the mitrailleuses on. The first man to be killed in the war was killed near here—it would be too stupid to be the last.”

Laferrière: “Not to speak of the incident it would create, and if the colonel sees us—well, the prison at Seppois isn’t inviting.” So we turned toward the Swiss frontier instead, and I thought deeply, sweetly on her so dear, so near, as I looked toward these hills enfolding her, the best loved of my heart.

Then we turned another way, passing again through Seppois. Arab troops are quartered there, and we were held up by the sentinel, who wanted to see our papers. He was dark of color, delicate of hand, straight of nose, and wore his military coat buttoned by one of its top buttons in such a way that it fell with an effect of burnous. He couldn’t read French characters, so he called to another thin, small-handed, straight, coffee-colored man, who might have been his twin, who couldn’t read them, either, and finally they both threw up their slender hands, resembling those of some antique bronze of an adolescent, after which we passed on. And I told Sérin’s story of the Arab guard who held him up one dark night, in the trenches, but generously gave him the countersign, saying to him, “_Si tu ne dis pas tire-lire, tu ne passes pas!_” (“You can’t pass unless you say tire-lire!”)

They’re cold, these Arabs, they’re gray with cold, and they don’t know why they fight, nor whom, but they follow their officer to the death, and, if he falls, lose heart under these gray skies with which Allah seems only remotely connected.

And then we turned back and went through young woods where countless thousands, no, millions of shells were piled on shelflike receptacles, as one would pile bottles of wine on cellar shelves. Everywhere were the words “_Route interdite_,” “_Défense de passer_,” and we passed, until we came to Faverois, with its old, old church on the top of a tiny hill, over which the town spilled. The broad, low steps of the church were made of ancient tomb slabs, and, stooping, I saw, on one of them, half obliterated, “_in pace_,” and “16—.”

There was much that was unspoiled, or more likely forgotten, in the interior. A suave-expressioned St.-Sebastian, with dimpled limbs, so evidently unfit for the arrows that transfixed them, and something yearning and earthly about his eyes, was above the Louis XV altar; quite unmistakably he was of the gay century. In another niche was an unknown saint, dressed like a personage of opera; three plumes were on his head and he wore a golden shirt of mail and high, fringed boots. At the side-altars were charming, very pure models of angels, and bow-knots and shells (I mean, for once, _sea_-shells). As we came out we noticed that the roof of the church was painted a silver-white and that of the old house nearby, with the round tower, was painted the same way, and other houses, too, and when we asked why they told us it shone like crystal at night and was to warn airplanes of their nearness to the Swiss frontier.

A blue group of _poilus_ was standing on the crest of the street, looking at a newspaper. One cried out in a loud voice, “_Guillaume a ——_,” only one can’t write the word. And going up we saw the news of the Kaiser’s abdication in letters quite American in size.

Then in a very understandable zeal that I should miss nothing, the doctor _à deux galons_, espying a khaki figure, said, “There comes an American,” and I saw approaching a blond, round-faced young man with spectacles. Something leaped within me as I turned to him. But he answered me in the stiffest German accent possible, “Ja, pig news”; and when I said, “Yes, we’ve won the war!” he answered, “Well, I do t’ink we god ’um shust now.” Unreasonably, the thing that had leaped within me lay down. I said, “Good-by.” He said, “So long.” And so much for American meeting American on the hill of the village of Faverois.

Laferrière had marched all through this country, _sac-au-dos_, and in one place he buried a comrade, and in another he knew hunger and thirst, and in another he had watched the day break after a night battle. There is a history to Faverois, too, but I don’t know it, and it’s just as well, for I would be sure to tell it in this long vigil, and I _must_ finish with the war.

Back to Dannemarie, the chauffeur driving like the wind, and Lieutenant Ditandy finds out where the American officers have their headquarters. There is a battalion[24] attached to the Seventh French Army. I am conducted over a muddy street, past two classic dung-heaps, the kind so evidently handed down from father to son, and go up some dark backstairs, and there Colonel Wing and Major Griffiths are rung up by an orderly. I give my name, and they all know of me. In a moment appear, young and slim and untried and eager, the colonel and the major, glad to see an American woman in Dannemarie. And then they took me to their more than simple quarters out through another door and another court, where there was the usual mud, but only the scent of a vanished dung-heap. How many good American dollars they had “planked down” for this priceless compound I know not. After a while we walked back to the motor waiting in the square, and I presented them to the French officers. One of them said he had been at Plattsburg with my husband that first historic summer, and spoke of General Wood, whose aide he had then been, saying, with a flush, “He is the greatest man in the United States, as well as the greatest general,” and there in the square of Dannemarie I thought, “_Magna est veritas_,” and then, “Too late, too late.”

On our way home, not far out of the town, we come across a group of Americans and French colonials standing by the road. Lying on the embankment was a young man with a fractured skull, his face deathly pale, except for the contusions, already swollen and blue. His hair was matted with blood and his red _checchia_ lay in the ditch. The stern young officer of the many decorations (there were three rows of them) that I had seen descending at the inn at Morzwiller, was there, on his beautiful mare, and he held the halter of another very good beast, the one that had just unhorsed his rider. We got out and the young man was placed carefully in our motor to be taken to the hospital at Dannemarie, after which we started to walk back to Masevaux—about thirty kilometers. In war-time you don’t wonder “can you do it,” you just start out; sometimes you get there alive, sometimes you don’t. This turned out all right, for shortly after our motor, which had met an ambulance, came back for us.

And then we found ourselves passing through a sunset-world, cut by a bar of level light, so strangely thick where it touched the golden earth that it was almost like a ledge or a wall over which we looked into wind-still, purple forests, and above us, like the tarnished gilt ceiling of a temple, was the pale, amber sky. We talked somewhat of hope, somewhat of life, from which the red thing had so suddenly gone, as they alone can talk who have laid their heads close against the cruel, beautiful, full breast of war.

As we drove into the Place du Chapitre a delicate white moon, seen through the nearly bare lindens, was hanging in a deepening sky, close above the soft, dark roofs of the houses of the _chanoinesses_. There was no breath of wind. No cannon sounded. One’s heart, too, I found, was very still. Millions of men waited face to face in dark lines, and that same moon touched their bayonets, their helmets, and their drinking-cups. The sun had set upon the last day of the World War....

The maid who brings my breakfast as I lie half dead, but not asleep, after the burning, consuming night, opens my blinds.

French and American flags are flying from many windows. Something wets my eyes. Then—if in my flesh or out of it I know not—I see a strange brightness filling the Place du Chapitre, and a further glory bathes my being in such sweet and cooling waters that I again am strong to pass, with the Sons of Victory, into the New Day.

In the old house are sounds of feet running to and fro. From our windows also blue and white and red flags are being hung. In the street are heard, “_Ça y est_,” and “_L’armistice est signé_.”

XVI

DIES GLORIÆ

“_O Eastern Star! Peace, peace!_”

And I arose and went to the church where there was a great ceremony, for it was the feast of St.-Martin, patron of Masevaux, as well as the end of the war....

Afterward I stood outside on the wide rose-gray steps, under a sky of matchless silver-blue, among groups of villagers, soldiers, and officers. A blue infantry band, grouped under that blue vault against the pink church, played the “Marseillaise” and “_Sambre et Meuse_,” with a great blare of trumpets, quickening the heart-beats, then “The Star-Spangled Banner,” and many eyes were wet with tears of hope and loneliness.

Amid the throng I noticed some new silhouettes, always in groups. They were those of husky young men in civilian holiday garb; flat, black hats, short, black jackets coming only to the waist, long, tight, black trousers, pink vests, and high, white collars. These young men, who looked no one straight in the eye, were strange-souled ones who had burned with no fever of combat; the lamp of no cause had shone before their faces; they had known no country for whom ’twas sweet and fitting to die. Free not to serve in the French army, out of reach of the German authorities, they had passed from adolescence to manhood during the World War unsplashed by blood. And they will be a generation apart. Even as they appeared on the day of victory in groups, apart. Later, in tribulation of maturity, in weakness of old age and fear of death, they may sigh that they were not among those who “dying are not dead,” and would exchange the worn drapery of their couches for the “blue-black cloud.” And those who have not known a hot youth will know a cold old age.

A motor was standing under the lindens of the Place du Chapitre and by it a black-bearded, giant chauffeur who might have been among the hosts of Louis le Débonnaire on the Field of Lies. I got in with Laferrière and he took me up on a hillside, and from the height showed me a last time the kingdoms and principalities into which his race had come. The plain shone in a blue and exceeding beauty; we ourselves were caught in a glistening web of air shot with color by the low-arching November sun. Marking the course of the great river was a line of mist shimmering in the same warm-tinted sun of Indian summer. “_L’été de St.-Martin_” indeed. Here and there villages shone brighter than day, and the hills were deep-colored, yet soft and unsubstantial. Victory, like a shining, soft-rolled ball whose tangles were hidden, was in our hands—or like to a crystal sphere as yet undarkened by events.

The grass of our hillside was dew-wet in the sun, white and frosty in the shade. Each fallen, rust-colored beech leaf, each scarlet cherry leaf, was set with something glittering. All, all was a-shine. Even the heart, too, after the dark years.

I cried within myself, though I might have said it aloud, “O beauty of life, why art thou so often hidden?” And I had in mind the eternal years, though the newborn hour of victory was so passing sweet upon the hillside.

And looking at the splendid river whose course was marked by the shining band of mist, I thought how deep the Lorelei was hidden in its timeless waters, though ’tis said she betrays but once those listening to her song. And long since, for the noise of battle, the hypnotic chanting of the Rhine-maidens lulling their nation to dreams of boundless might had not been heard. I thought, too, how the blood of the world’s armies had put out the circle of fire about Brünnhilde, though whence it was first kindled it may be again rekindled; and for all our dead—and theirs—in the middle of Europe there are, I know not how many, tens of millions to whom the fire-music is their light and heat, the river the symbol of their strength; and what to do with it all? Walhalla has been destroyed in the greatest roar of sound mortal ears have ever heard, but that which wrought its pillars and its walls is still there, and in other wide-doored mansions Wotan’s warriors may drink again deep cups of hydromel.

Siegfried lies dead upon his bier, but Brünnhilde’s candle throws a light upon his face, and though Loge seems no longer at his post, it is believed he waits somewhere unseen, protecting, as best he may, the Walkyries’ unquiet sleep, until they wake and ride again, crying, “_Je ho, je te ho!_” inciting to battle and to sacrifice.

And as nations always have the governments their mystical qualities create, in spite of the great defeat in the West and the solvent forces in the East, I thought, “Is anything really changed in Germany of that which makes each nation like only unto itself?” Old things may take new names, but, the blood-madness past, they will walk again the banks of their great river—listen once again to the Rhine-maidens, and Lorelei, combing her hair, will sing once more for them, while the wonder-working music that has so scorched us will draw again its circle. And the German people may be more portentous in defeat than when their armies were spilling over Europe—only, one who says this too soon will be stoned and one who thinks it not at all be deceived.

Then from some distant church tower softly sounded the first noontide of peace, and, turning, I left the Germanies to their predestined fate. “He beheld and melted the nations,” and truly of them may be said “_Glück und Unglück wird Gesang_.”

For to each one his own, and the power of rhythmic sound over the world’s will can no more be separated from that nation’s destinies than can certain inborn qualities of the French be separated from theirs. That pervading sense of style, that illuminating, stimulating art, their conversation, that incomparable arrangement of words, their prose; or, in the mystical realm, that bright and singular thing they denominate “_la Gloire_,” which one of my countrywomen[25] has written of in golden words, and that other peculiar and essential translation into habit and custom of the word “_honneur_,” and many more deathless qualities that make France what she is and not something else....

Then I found myself following Laferrière over another diamond-set path of rustling autumn leaves, and we got into the motor and went down the hill into the beflagged and crowded town, drawn so brightly, yet so transiently, out of its antique obscurity.

At the _popote_ many guests were assembled, among them three men of the Anglo-Saxon race, come to eat in Masevaux the first-fruits of victory, and later, not so very much later, perhaps that very night, they were to tell of it to the world, each seeming to have, as it were, the end of a telegraph wire cuddled in his pocket by his stylographic pen.

Many, I knew not who they were, came in after lunch to salute the commandant, whose house and heart were wide open that day. Black-robed, tremulous women, youngish officers with very lined faces on which, over night-loss and night-grief, was written something at once soft and shining and eager; but, with all the coming and going, a strange new quiet pervaded everything. Noise had, for a time, gone from the border-world.

Afterward we were taken up to see the room once lived in by Anna, the wife, or rather widow, of the Oberforster. In it was the most extraordinary piece of furniture, designed to occupy two sides of a corner, that I have ever seen. It was a divan, a narrow, hard divan, at right angles with itself and upholstered in mauve rep. Above the narrow seat and reaching nearly to the ceiling was a series of mirrors set in woodwork like many panes of glass, the mirror parts too high to see oneself in. On the floor near it was a hard, tasseled cushion of old-gold satin on which I am sure no foot had ever rested, for it seemed rather to belong to the dread family of bric-à-brac. On the divan was a small, woolen-lace cushion bearing the words “_nur ein Viertelstündchen_” in shaded silks.

Voluptuous the divan was not, neither was it respectable, nor comfortable, nor practical, nor anything natural to a divan, but it doubtless represented some dim longing of the soul of her who bought and installed it, some formless inclination toward beauty, out of the daily round of the good housewife; perhaps even a “soul storm,” after the Ibsen manner, had so externalized itself. Who knows, or ever will know, or cares?

The wide bed was of the newest and horridest of _art nouveau_, and over it was a spread of many pieces of coffee-colored machine-made lace put together with colored wools. There was a writing-table near the window at which you couldn’t write, for all the writing space was taken up with little drawers or tiny jutting-out shelves, and an imitation bronze vase, holding some faded artificial roses, was built into it, where the hand would naturally slip along when writing. Over it, between the windows, hung an illuminated verse, “_Allein soll ich denn reisen? die Heimat ist so schön._” From the Oberforster’s album some one took and presented to me a photograph of Anna, which I couldn’t connect with that room, a rather sharp-nosed, mild-eyed woman whose head was leaning against her husband’s head. And the husband is one among millions of husbands who lie in their graves, for whom the pleasant habit of existence is no more.

Downstairs on their upright piano, in the corner of the dining-room, are those high piles of music of the masters, and much of it is arranged for four hands.

In the afternoon a great weariness came upon me, and the light of victory seemed to pale, but I knew that it was only within myself, because of the long vigil in which I had burned both oil and wick. I stood listening for a while to the military bands in the Halle aux Blés and the Place du Marché, but the gorgeous fanfare of the trumpets reached me only dully, as from a great distance.

Then many little boys, after the eternal manner of little boys, began to set off firecrackers, and the sudden noises hurt my ears.

I went to my room, but was too wearied to compose myself to rest, and soon came out, chilly and wandering. The sun had set upon the square and something cold had began to come up from the earth; I seemed to have finished both joy and mourning. I thought that perhaps forever I would be alone, unable to partake of the world’s gladness.

I could not remember, in that afternoon ebb of vitality, that with the evening hours would come rushing in the tide of nervous strength, bringing again warmth to my heart, light to my spirit, and that buoyantly I would be treading the _Via Triumphalis_ of this borderland.

A little later in a blue twilight, bluer close to the earth where those many Sons of Victory pressed, I walked out with Laferrière past the ancient, evocative Ringelstein, along the Doller, and we called on a very charming woman who had also seen the war of 1870—Madame Caillaux. She gave us a perfect cup of tea and was flanked by no veteran, and she, the portion of whose youth and age had been war, was calm with the pleasant calm of those who harmoniously have sewed together the ends of life.

When we came out a pale white moon had arisen over some black cedars planted near the door, and as we walked slowly back, saluted by blue-clad men, or standing aside to let munition-wagons rattle by, Laferrière told me of some of the glorious deeds of his comrades of the _popote_, though no word of himself.