Alsace in rust and gold

[Illustration]

Books By Edith O’Shaughnessy

Alsace In Rust And Gold My Lorraine Journal Diplomatic Days

Harper & Brothers, New York [Established 1817]

[Illustration: THE RIVER DOLLER AT MASEVAUX]

Alsace In Rust And Gold

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

Illustrated

[Illustration]

Harper & Brothers Publishers New York And London

Alsace In Rust And Gold

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

Contents

Chap. Page

PREFACE ix

I. The Journey There 1

II. All Saints’ Day, November, 1918 13

III. FêTe Des Morts, November, 1918 23

IV. Thann And Old Thann 34

V. The Ballon D’Alsace 43

VI. La Popote 55

VII. The Houses Of The Chanoinesses 65

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

IX. The “Field Of Lies” And Laimbach 100

X. The Valley Of The Thur 110

XI. The Re-Gallicizing Of Alsace 120

XII. The Hartmannswillerkopf 131

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

XIV. Return To Masevaux 156

XV. The Vigil Of The Armistice 159

XVI. Dies Gloriæ 175

Illustrations

THE RIVER DOLLER AT MASEVAUX _Frontispiece_

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

Place Du Marché, Masevaux, July 14, 1918 ” 14

Thann And Its Vineyards ” 34

Commandant Poulet ” 56

Thann. The Cathedral Portal ” 82

Thann. La Vieille Tour ” 114

American Troops At Masevaux Celebrating The Fourth Of July ” 132

French Troops At Masevaux Celebrating The Fall Of The Bastile, July 14Th ” 132

America And Alsace ” 172

Preface

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

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

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

Edith O’Shaughnessy.

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

Alsace In Rust And Gold

I

The Journey There

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“It’s a fine coat you are wearing.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Oh, in an hour or two or three.”

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

Chorus: “You mean this morning?”

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

“What have you been doing in between times?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In the dark I wondered, too.

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

II

All Saints’ Day, November, 1918

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[Illustration: THE FOURTH OF JULY, 1918, IN ALSACE]

[Illustration: PLACE DU MARCHÉ, MASEVAUX, JULY 14, 1918]

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

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

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

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

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

[Illustration]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Yes.”

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

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

“What about the ocean?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

III

FêTe Des Morts, November, 1918

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

[Illustration: THANN AND ITS VINEYARDS]

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._

[Illustration: COMMANDANT POULET]

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.

At his right sits Captain Sérin from Toulouse, the only Meridional at the table. He is very straightforward and uncomplicated, I should judge, as regards his psychology, with the rather objective eye of the man from the south. (They don’t dream the way we farther north do.) He sees a joke at any distance and is the sort, they tell me, who would obey as simply as he would breathe, without a thought of hesitation, an order unto death. The sort that when told to bring up reinforcements at a moment when it seems impossible, quite simply does it, and it only _happens_ to happen that he is living. He is not tall, but wide of shoulder, holding himself very straight, and on his breast there are ribbons, too. He is chief of the Gendarme Service, the first and last provost of Alsace reconquered.

On the other side of Captain Bernard sits Captain Toussaint, chief of the Forestry Service of the Masevaux district, clad in bottle-green, with silver bugles on his collar and the Legion of Honor and other decorations on his breast, _d’une grande bonté_, his comrades tell me. He is from the north, from Douai (his brother was killed at the front), tall, slim, pale-faced, lantern-jawed, everything is in his eyes—in the _regard_, as some one said of him—and much of his life is passed alone in forests. So different from Captains Bernard and Lavallée, living in Paris, between whom he generally sits; and he nearly always comes in late from his forests for luncheon and dinner.

“For Toussaint, Creation is represented by the first day when the heavens were formed, and everything that came afterward had something to do with forests,” some one said last night, as he was talking rather hotly about the war-time cutting down of the trees of France, and the influence the loss of forests had on the life of nations. _Très catholique_, also; but then these men of the Mission, with all of whom I have entered tabernacles, are of an extreme reverence. What they “believe” I know not.

Lieutenant Laferrière sits sometimes by me, sometimes at the end of the table. He has early gray hair, a fresh complexion, gray-blue eyes with a certain inwardness of expression, a smiling movement of the lips when speaking, and, with all his wit, an extreme kindness in human judgments. Indeed, I am struck by something of softness and patience in the eyes of each one of these men to whom nothing of war is foreign, who have looked on all combinations of mortal anguish, and whose eyes at times, too, have had the red look, the hard, bright look of men who have just killed.

Laferrière is very cultivated after the way of us dwellers in cities. He was Doctor of Law at the University of Lille. On the 2d of August, 1914, he closed his books, after which, as under-officer, he had lived for months that closely packed life of the trenches, “where one was never physically a moment alone” (hardest of all hardships, I have heard fastidious men say), then he had been called as jurist to the Mission. Emotional, but through circumstances or will, how can I know? giving the effect of having dominated the personal—to what point also I know not.

Lieutenant Lavallée, but recently come from Paris, sits at another end. His personality is less striking than some of the others at the table, though he has _une tête un peu mauresque_, like pictures of the _Conquistadores_, and is inclined to solemnity of mien. He has a charming voice, fresh, with warm notes in it, and sometimes of an evening sings Breton _chansons populaires_. We especially like the one concerning _la douce Annette_, who spun a fatal love-story with a certain Pierre who wouldn’t let go her hand.

There is one, Stroll by name, now absent, but his comrades evidently love him, for I often hear, “What a pity Stroll isn’t here”; or, “That is Stroll’s story.”

Also for a few days _en visite_ like myself is Captain Antoni, born at Strasbourg, but very French in appearance, a tall, _svelte_, thin-faced man with a rising and falling inflexion in his voice, who has been through the whole campaign and wears many decorations. He said last night that the fighting at Verdun, especially that at Hill 304, was the worst he had seen.

At this moment the Verdun sector, which knows the blood of men of many climes, is moist with that of _my_ countrymen.

Now this is part of what I see as I sit at table with these men. The common patriotic effort tends to screen the personal life of each, of which I know nothing. But I do know that destiny is largely formed by character and endowments, and, barring the fact that time and chance happeneth to all, I would be tempted to wager that when such or such a thing came to such or such a one, _thus_ he received it—gift or blow—thus he used it, once his own. So unescapable and visible are the sequences of character.

Sometimes we play bridge in the evening, pleasant, easy bridge, anybody taking a card back when once played, and changing his mind about declarations. As they so truly say, “_Nous jouons pour nous amuser_.”

And yesterday there appeared on the table the famous _cafetière_ and Sérin, his face shining with a great light, performed the rites. It was one of those large, high glass bulbs with a nickel coffee-pot below. Dry coffee is put into the glass bulb, water into the pot, an alcohol-lamp beneath, and the whole is hermetically sealed. After which, according to the mysterious and wonderful laws of nature, the water rises and wets the coffee; it must rise thrice, giving forth at the same time volcanic sounds. During the ceremony nothing else is thought of. The officiating high priest is harried with liturgical suggestions, or unkind remarks are made about his natural endowments. As that corked spout of the pot, horrid with potentialities, is turned now toward one, now toward the other, men who would have given their lives without a thought in the trenches, get nervous and call to Sérin, “_Dis-donc, tu vas me crever un œil!_” “Not toward Madame. It would be too terrible,” etc., etc., and in the end the spout, with all its possibilities, is turned toward the Oberforster’s made-in-Germany clock. After which one has a delicious cup of coffee and conversation becomes normal.[10]

Last night I found they were talking about giving a certificate of good conduct to one of them who is married, to take home with him to reassure his wife. A comrade, after a little badinage in the Latin manner, but very discreet I must say, objects: “But now there won’t be any _permissions_,” and, doubtfully, “We would have to give him the certificate for three whole months.”

Then, like the antiphon of some song, a voice said, “_Trois mois, c’est long_.”

Another said, “_Trois mois, c’est très long_.”

Another, with a sigh, “_C’est trop long_....” And I to smile—within myself.

Then a stumbling home on an invisible but strong horizon-blue arm, through the inky streets, ankle-deep in mud. Sometimes I haven’t known which one of the various kind arms it was, the electric pocket-lamp only occasionally making the darkness more manifest. No one to bump into, as circulation in the streets is forbidden after nine o’clock, on account of possible espionage.

And you will say these are pleasant days!

_Later._—Hunting in the bookcase, I found a small diamond-printed copy of _Hermann und Dorothea_. As, to the sound of near night-firing, I turned its smooth old pages, I realized it for one of the most completely objective works of genius ever born into the world. No thread of its maker’s identity is woven with it, no color of his personal experience. I felt but a sense of his complete and serene equilibrium, though the stream of words, bearing those golden thoughts, was so softly flowing, so crystal-clear, that it made me remember a line from another of Goethe’s poems, as subjective as this is objective:

_Der Geist ist Bräutigam._ _Wort sei die Braut._

In the little preface I found that the poet, in his old age, was wont to say of _Hermann und Dorothea_ that of his long poems it was almost the only one that gave him pleasure. I seemed to understand what he meant. By reason of its complete objectivity, he could have had no consciousness of that inadequacy familiar to mortals contemplating anything formed from themselves. No suffering had attended its birth; rather it would seem to have formed itself spontaneously on the heights out of some plastic stuff, light and bright as summer air, imperishable as granite. It did not recall to Goethe (nor does it to one who reads) that night of personal anguish, that day of emptiness, that hour of longing, nor even some glimpsing, vistaed moment wherein personal fulfilment held out its shining, shadowy hand.

In spite of the sound of cannon and the smarting of my eyes from the strain of the tiny Gothic print, for a moment within myself an almost equal feeling of harmony arose, taking a form of Peace, like an antique statue, free yet restrained, noble yet persuasive; bearing no one’s mark, nor any signs of workmanship, except that stamped by its own beauty. Then it vanished, leaving the little book to throb between my hands to the beat of my own times. Though generations had passed on and other wars were being fought, and the word “freedom” was again on every lip, as always, the women, the children, the old, were paying the heaviest tithes of invasion. Had I not seen like streams of fugitive populations flooding into Paris that hideous spring of 1918, heard the cries of anguish from those fleeing before an enemy army? Then also death and birth waited not on circumstance, and love and hate, fear and hope, hurry and exhaustion, were at work in strange commingling. I had seen deeds of succor, too, like unto those of the lovers, proffered in boundless devotion, by nameless, uncounted men and women, coming from the world’s ends to minister to its woe.

A vision of _toux ceux qui ont bu à la coupe amère de cette époque_ passed before me. Deeply sighing, I at last put out my light, thinking “war is war,” needing no adjectives, and of the changelessness of the human heart, however the formulas may be multiplied and renewed; and forever _Væ victis_!

VII

The Houses Of The Chanoinesses

The Commandant Traces The Reconquered Triangle On My Map. The Military Mission

_Monday, November 4th._—Dreamed of old griefs and awakened with the heavy taste their memory can even now distil. Raining. The yellow-and-brown carpet under the lindens of the Place du Chapitre is wet and dull and the few leaves still on the trees are soft and heavy, the houses damp and shabby. “The old wounds burn,” even here, where all is new and bright, and fancy flings itself delicately, amorously, consolingly about the pleasant happenings of each day.... Fortunately my breakfast is brought early by a smiling maid, who enters, bringing with her the aroma of fresh tea and the delicately scented, dark-green, liquid honey of these pine forests. There is that blessed volatilization of night-grief, and I arise to another pleasant day, knowing once again, however, that everywhere the old ghosts find one....

The rainy light coming in seems but to darken the oak-paneled room. What there is of wall-paper is a darkish blue with a narrow frieze of red. The curtains are stripes of red-and-blue cloth. Even the daytime cover of the very comfortable eider-downed bed is of the same red-and-blue-striped stuff. It was because they were the colors of the French uniform that the young man once living herein, under German rule, chose them.

But he himself is gone, gone the hope of his house. One of his sisters was saying to me last night as I tarried for a few minutes in the little sitting-room, where I had first found them all rehanging the portraits of their ancestors:

“The price for peace is so high and terrifying that one can’t yet rejoice in it. Rather one says to oneself in desolation, ‘and all that was so precious is gone, that in the end one may sit around deserted fireplaces, or try to find shelter under bombarded roofs, and be at grips with the terrible _après-guerre_!’” And of her brother:

“At least he fell for the cause that is so dear to us;” she added after a moment’s silence, “it might so easily have been otherwise.”

I have noticed everywhere a great pride tempering grief over fallen beloved dead. Even in mothers’ hearts this pride is strong enough to console. They know why their sons were born, and to many a death of glory has been as a second birth; he whom they lost is, in some way, laid a second time, bright, beautiful, complete, in their arms, and _safe_ from life. And they are blessed who so mourn.

Sometimes there are further griefs. I knew a mother of twin sons; one had fallen far away, a gentle, young, musician son, in a fierce, unequal conflict, whose details she was not spared; the other had been brought back to her on his twenty-first birthday a sightless stump. I cannot forget her as she stood, tall, black-veiled, by a pillared door, like an antique statue of grief, her eyes as dry as marble eyes. And though she, too, said:

“At least I know why I bore them, and it was for something more than myself,” the obsession of a further grief was in her eyes as she added, “_I must not die first_—and he is so young!”

Here on the borderland I find there is often an additional reason for pride, where Fate, which could so easily have willed it otherwise, sometimes has allowed the beloved to die for the beloved cause, as did the brother whose room is now mine. And this is his story, or rather the end of it. Those first four days of August, 1914, he had gone about the mountain heights and passes with his field-glass continually at his eyes to see if help were not coming from the hills in the guise of the _pantalons rouges_. But on the fourth day he was obliged to accompany his regiment into Germany, where he stayed three months. On hearing of the battle of the Marne through a French prisoner, he cried, “_Nous avons eu là une belle victoire!_” (“We have had a great victory!”) and he was put under arrest. His one idea being to desert, he asked to go into the lines again, knowing there would be no opportunity, if he remained in prison, training recruits. His chance came when he was fighting against the English in the north. His chiefs being killed or wounded, he, as under-officer, found himself in command of a company of a hundred and fifty men. With him deserted ninety-seven others. Later, he fell fighting in the French lines near Tahure. And this (it is perhaps much) is all I know of him or ever shall; if he were beloved of a woman or had loved many, I know not. He, the last of his race, took his name with him to the grave.

All that surrounds me as I write was his. His the full bookshelves, with an elaborate set of a _Geschichte der Literatur_, and a _Welt-Geschichte_ in many volumes, his the books of early boyhood, of travel, the many old, little books of prayer in tooled and beveled bindings of a generation or two ago, and the piles of the _Revue des Deux Mondes_. Two eighteenth-century maps hang on the walls, one of “Alsatia,” with queer German names for familiar places, and another of “Gallia,” and there is an incomparable, white, porcelain stove which heats quickly and gives out its pleasant heat during long hours.

On a little corner shelf is an old engraving of the last _chanoinesse_ of the Chapter of Masevaux, Xavière de Ferrette. She is dressed in full canonicals, with a large ruched coif and ermine-trimmed mantle; some high order in a Maltese-cross design is suspended from the broad ribbon worn across her breast, and in her hands is a richly embossed prayer-book.

The long face with its immensely high forehead has a full-lipped, very human mouth, and in the right, upper corner is her sixteen-quartered coat of arms.

The story of the Chapter would make good, though long, reading, for, like many other things in this part of the world, it begins with Charlemagne and ends with the French Revolution. Of both France seems equally proud, and certainly _il y en a pour tous les goûts_.

Women always seem to have had great influence on the life of their times in Alsace. Not even those with the vote and all the rights, together with all the privileges of our times, can pretend to half the influence of certain holy women of the so-called dark ages. They built on hilltops and in valleys those many citadels of peace whose traces still are to be seen, where life was free from violence, and, like sweet odors uncorked, their good deeds have perfumed the ages. Saint-Odile, _Vierge Candide et Forte_, daughter of Duke Atalric, is patroness of Alsace, and in her many have sought the feminine ideal of the Alsatian soul; and there are Saint-Richarde, tried by fire for a guiltless love, wife of Louis the Fat, and Herrade, Abbess of Hohenburg, author of the famous _Hortus Deliciarum_, preserved through seven centuries and destroyed in the siege of Strasbourg in 1870. These are but a few, and the histories of the secular dwellers in the Rhine Valley, spectacular though they were, seem often quite colorless contrasted with those of these saints of the Holy Roman Empire.

The first monks and pilgrims to come to Alsace were from Ireland (the last of these before the very end of the world will doubtless also come from Erin). It would appear that even in those days it could not be said of the Irish that they were neither hot nor cold, which is probably one of the reasons “why God loves them.” In the lovely rivered plains and great forests of the Rhine Valley it was they who built the first chapels and traced the first paths. It was an Irish monk whom Atalric, hoping for a son, consulted before the birth of his daughter; but of Saint-Odile another time.

The house next the one wherein I dwell was that of the abbess, and now belongs to Madame Auguste Lauth.

It, too, has a beautiful stairway, with a time-polished oaken balustrade, and it contains the great room of noble proportions and lovely panelings (still heated by the celebrated porcelain stove, fit only for a museum), where the ladies of the Chapter assembled in their rich toilets and great coifs to go to the church, reached by a two-storied gallery, which old prints show as having a most distinguished air, with its sloping roof pierced with oval windows and its pleasant proportions. But the upper story and the roof were done away with in the nineteenth century, which has demolished so much (not always in heat of battle), and it is now but a long, formless building used for some sort of storehouse connected with the Koechlin manufactories. And the way the six houses came to be constructed was this:

The Abbess Xavière de Ferrette, a woman of resolution and energy, as one can easily see by the high forehead and long jaw, becoming alarmed at the increasing expenses of the Chapter and the equally decreasing revenues, decided on some radical remedies. Through the Middle Ages, down to her time, the _chanoinesses_ had lived under one roof, and, according to the holy rule, ate together. But with them fared so many outsiders, their friends and their friends’ friends, with their domestics, that they found themselves being literally eaten out of house and home. The abbess called a solemn meeting wherein they arranged for the building of separate houses, whose construction was given into the hands of Kléber, then architect and inspector of the royal buildings at Belfort. Pictures of Kléber, known rather impersonally to Americans by the Parisian avenue that bears his name, abound in Alsace, and show a sensitive, artistic face, with a pleasure-loving mouth above a short chin, and a halo of light, curly hair. He met an early death in Napoleon’s Egyptian campaign. “_Il avait six pieds en tout_,” his contemporaries were wont admiringly to say of him.

In these separate houses, with garden attached, each _chanoinesse_ was to live alone with her _demoiselle_, who at her death would step into her very comfortable shoes, and the abbess only was to receive guests in the name of the Chapter.

The house I lodged in was that of the Chanoinesse von Reutner. These dames had to make their titles very clear to their earthly mansions, each having to possess sixteen quarterings evenly balanced, eight on her father’s side and eight on her mother’s side. Gentlemen were chosen to give their word on this somewhat elusive subject, and methought ’twas well they didn’t have to put their hand in the fire at the same time, for what can be sworn to with certainty of those things which have their origin on the mysterious borderland of the emotions? However....

The _chanoinesses_ belonged mostly to the great families of Alsace, the Masevaux, the Ferrettes, though the records show many German names like Furstenburg and Seckingen, or French like Beauffrémont and Fontenoy.

Sometimes the Abbey and Chapter were under French domination, sometimes under Austrian, sometimes they would be ceded to noble families like those of the Counts of Bollwiller and of Fugger, and in many ways their history had been checkered since their foundation in the eighth century.

And as for the Thirty Years’ War, they could have told tales of the Swedish invasion scarcely to be beaten by certain tales of our days. Indeed, so complicated is the history of those times, every shade and branch of combatant having fought against every other shade and branch, in kaleidoscopic changes, that when Turenne, allied with the Spaniards, revolted against the king, Louis XIV, it was a Swede, Rosen by name, who helped the Maréchal du Plessis Praslin to conquer him at Réthel. Rosen, who with his brothers had come originally from Livonia with the armies of Gustavus Adolphus, then promptly put on his standard a tower falling on a rose-bush in full bloom, with the device, _Malgré la Tour les Roses fleuriront_.[11]

In turning over pages concerning the involved chronicles of this borderland, I feel once again that history is, of all things, the most difficult to write, because of having to do with facts, and what more elusive than facts, eternally subjective? Even this simplest record of historic days is as different from one that another might have written about the same things as if it dealt, instead, let us say, with the genial suggestion of letting the Hottentots and the Zulus have their own government. It is that fantasy-awakening thing called temperament that is forever at work with facts, one thing always suggestive of another, rather than explanatory of itself, and I frankly rejoice that the “primrose by the river’s brim” _is_ to me something more than a primrose.

I am now such a long way from the history of the Chapter that there is scarcely time to get back, and so I will finish quickly by saying that in the epoch preceding the Revolution it found itself entangled in various temporal affairs, especially lawsuits with the inhabitants concerning their convenient but disappearing feudal rights. Otherwise life was probably not too strenuous for the _chanoinesses_. As nothing escapes the influence of its hour and age, why should one think the Chapter entirely escaped those of that light, pervading, charming, inconsequent, rich thing known as the eighteenth century, where everything seems to have finished by a song, or a witty quatrain, or by delicious angels holding up holy-water founts in the shape of lovely shells.

_To the popote at 12.15._—Its windows look out on the unmistakably plain timepiece in the church tower, and everybody knows when anybody is late, and just how late, and there’s a nice little green box on the table designed for fines, but only intermittently insisted on.

Commandant Poulet greets me with the words, “At three o’clock to-day Austria ceases hostilities.” Something cruel and red seemed suddenly rolled away.

In a flash I saw that Viennese pre-war world I had known so well, partaking tranquilly of the pleasant things of life, public events making little noise, intellectual passion absent—or discouraged, and things easy, easy—except for those dying of hunger. But that world has been burned to ashes, and the winds of destiny are about to scatter even them.

Then, as usual, some one read the American _communiqué_.

And to the deeds of the First Army must be added those of the National Guard, for the words Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas, Missouri, Colorado, New Mexico, New York, New Jersey, are stamped in fadeless red upon the villages and banks of the Meuse.

We talked long, and at two o’clock, as we arose from table, I knew that those others to the east had already arisen from the bitter meal of defeat, and after the manner of human hearts were adjusting themselves to the things that _are_. And perhaps there in Vienna they may not find it so difficult. They’ve been defeated before and they’re far enough east to have a touch of fatalism.

_Later._—Through mist and low-hanging clouds and rain with Captain Bernard to Sewen, where we visited first the school. Neat rows of sabots were in the hallway, all alike to _me_, but it appears some spirit in the feet leads each unmistakably to his or her own pair. A dozen children only were in the schoolroom, the others ill with grippe.

The school-teacher, a tall, horizon-blue-clad Frenchman, with kind eyes and a decoration on his breast, had just finished the dictation. Its subject was _de la viande_ (concerning meat). Looking at the copy-book of the nearest little boy, very blue-eyed, I read _de la fiande_, and his dictation was further embellished by sounds reminiscent of German rule. “_Chez le bourgé, le tinton, le charcoutier, le boutin, le zocisse_,” but as I said, that’s their German ear—and little by little it will be done away with and “French as she is spoke” will take its place. One small boy who wrote a beautiful, copper-plate hand was stone-deaf, but he had dear, questioning eyes and something patient in his being. I asked, when we came out, if nothing could be done for him. But the master said, with a terrible finality, “His father is an alcoholic.”

It is evidently not without result that they distil their _quetsch_ and their _kirsch_, their rose haws and their gentian, and everything else that has the merest embryo of a fruit or a berry or leaf in these pleasant valleys; as to which the bright-eyed, Italian-looking curé initiated us further, as you will see.

Leaving the school, we went to the church, beautifully familiar to me against the sky, but completely and, from our point of view, hopelessly modernized within; though I couldn’t help feeling that for those who come from dingy farms and dung-heaps the crude splendor of that house of God must be greatly comforting.

The old ossuary chapel nearby, with its fifteenth-century vaulting, was crowded with beautiful things from the church at Thann. The carvings on the choir stalls, of the most delicate workmanship, were amusing to boot, nothing human being foreign to the artists that made them. One figure forming an arm-rest had a swollen cheek bound up in a cloth, and, furthermore, he evidently had an ache in the center of his being, for he was doubled up, his hands pressed close to his person in the classic position of one so suffering. Another showed a man leaning over, with delicately modeled back, his head in his hands, but _his_ ache was very manifestly spiritual. Another had a goiter, and monkeys and parrots abounded, the native fancy of the fifteenth century evidently being out on a loose snaffle. A celebrated row of musical angels were so delicately carved, with cymbal and harp and bugle and lyre and flute, that they would be well placed in some vitrine rather than high on a choir stall in a dim Gothic church. The celebrated statue in stone of Saint-Théobald from the column of his fountain at Thann had been brought here for safety, too, and I fingered it as well as many another thing generally beyond reach.

As we came out, the clock in the tower of the church struck three. The great and disastrous Austrian war-act was finished.

It was a moment beyond words, and as we walked silently over to the curé’s house I thought of the cruel, interminable lists of dead and wounded and missing in the Vienna newspapers that winter of 1915, when the Russians were flooding Galicia and spilling over the ridges of the Carpathians. The curé, however, young, with fine, Italian face-bones, and frayed and spotted cassock, somewhat changed our thoughts by bringing out various of the thirty-four specimens of distilled liqueurs which are the pride and playthings of these valleys, explaining to us with snapping eyes special variations of his distillings. Holding a bottle and a glass up against the light in his long, thin _primitif_ hands, he poured me slowly something wrested from the mountain-ash (I had thought I might as well have a completely new sensation), and I went about the rest of the afternoon feeling as if a hot stone were lodged in my breast.

Arrived at Masevaux, we drove to a house on the Place du Chapitre, where I found another interior of the kind I am now familiar with—that of the high and comfortable Alsatian bourgeoisie.

Madame Chagué, large, white-haired, energetic, intelligent, agreeable, received us flanked by an amiable married daughter and a thin, upstanding veteran, his ribbon of honor in his buttonhole. But, to be perfectly frank, the veterans get on my nerves. It’s the picture of what the gorgeous young heroes of our great war will be one day, _sans_ eyes, _sans_ teeth, _sans_ hair, _sans_ everything, and _toutes les fins sont tristes_.

“Now,” said Madame Chagué when once started and tea had been poured (accompanied by cakes you don’t get a chance to serve unless you are _délivré_, and you have to be well delivered, or else never in bondage, to get the chance to eat them), “the government must proceed with a good deal of caution as well as consideration. The Alsatians aren’t like anybody but themselves. They mustn’t lay hands on our little ideas and ways, ‘_ces Messieurs de l’Administration ont compris cela_’ [with an appreciative look at Bernard]. We held on all these years, awaiting the day of deliverance. _Enfin_, for two generations we have looked on the reconquest of Alsace as the coming of heaven upon earth, as if that once come to pass, there would be nothing more to desire.”

She said all these things with an appraising light in her eye; being a clever old lady, in the four years since she had been “delivered,” she had doubtless found that life is life—even though there is a great choice as to whom one wants to live it out with, and how.

About this time the veteran was encouraged to tell a few of his 1870 experiences, and I felt as my grandchildren, if I ever have any, will feel when the veterans of 1918 will tell what they did “single-handed in the trenches,” or how, “as the only man left of their regiment,” they had held back the invaders, or how they hid in a barn and let them go by and then gave the alarm, “and a whole battalion had to surrender,” or what know I? Politely, but without eagerness, I listened, the 1870 veterans almost “spoiling the war” for me, with their eternal illustration of the flatness of not dying on the battlefield. I tried to bring the conversation back to 1918—leaving a rather long and not very clear account of how he kept his ancient, beloved, red _képi_ under glass, or next his heart, or pressed in an album, I rather forget which. I wanted to hear the story of the famous entry of the _Pantalons Rouges_ into Masevaux on August 7, 1914, where they have been ever since, though now changed into this celestial blue, which decorates the earth (as I have frequently said, and doubtless will again) as never before has it been decorated by any men of any age or any war. Pictures of “_La Guerre en Dentelles_,” or gallooned and be-caped and be-frogged officers with lances or drawn swords on horseback, charging the enemy in the typical poses of Lasalle, or “_La Vieille Garde_,” or Wellington or Blücher at Waterloo, or anything else that ever was, are dull beside the strange, appealing beauty of the blue battalions of the twentieth century.

I listened to Madame Chagué telling of the glad reception of those who entered Masevaux on that 7th of August, houses and hearts flung wide open, how everywhere the upper windows were crowded with women and children leaning out to see them come over the dark mountains and along the bright roads. Many left that same night, as they did from Thann and Bitschwiller and Moosch and all the towns about, marching on to Mulhouse, which they took only to be driven out, and since then many red-trousered ghosts walk the otherwise unmystical, industrial streets of Mulhouse. Three weeks later Mulhouse was again entered, and again, with many losses, other red pantaloons were driven out, since which the chimneys of Mulhouse have smoked a German smoke to a German heaven.

Madame Chagué is very Catholic, too, and bristles at the bare idea of any government, even the “Tiger’s,” taking liberties with the ancient faith. They want a bishop of their own, an Alsatian shepherd—“_faut pas nous bousculer dans nos petites habitudes_”—she kept repeating. I wondered what the Tiger and all the imitation tigers would say when they come to learn just how they feel here. There’s the most Gordian of knots awaiting them, for it appears that the Germans gave three thousand marks a year to each curé, and the French government, less enamoured of the ministers of God, doesn’t give any. However, that is only one of a series of knots on a very long string, and patient and very deft fingers will be needed for the untying.

In each of these comfortable houses authentic ancestors look from the walls, ancestors who knew the Thirty Years’ War, or the Napoleonic campaigns, or 1870, or ancestors-to-be who have seen the World War. And all the dwellers of these large-roomed, high-roofed, deep-windowed houses, having been delivered, in turn deliver themselves of their sensations, thoughts, emotions, acts, on being delivered. One might, I dimly foresaw, do to one’s breast what the wedding guest did to his when he heard the loud bassoon. That I may not seem unkind, I want to say another last word about the veterans, the so often toothless, bent, sightless, forgetful veterans. They would be all right in themselves, if they weren’t so horribly illustrative. They seem to be saying all the time, “If Mortality doesn’t get you one way, it does another,” till you think that short agony on the battlefield, and long glory, are greatly preferable to decay and no glory. And no veteran will keep this my little book on the table by his bed. He would know, too well, that I am right.

Later, as I slipped across the cobbly square to my house, and mounted the broad oaken stairway to my room, a feeling of nostalgia possessed me at the thought of leaving Alsace, to which but a few short days before I had seemed so unrelated. This bit of French history in the making, molded by the men of the grave, kind eyes, whose comradery with one another is so unfailing and whose courtesy to me is so exquisite, had become dear to me, and, too, I was looking on something that would never be again. The web was shifting, other figures were to be woven in it. Fate was to pull new things as well as old out from its storehouse and proceed with its endless combinations. Masevaux, capital of Alsace Reconquered, would be overshadowed by Strasbourg, by Metz, by Colmar, by Mulhouse. But it will have had again a little day, which is all an individual or a town can reasonably ask, standing under the changeless stars.

As I went to the _popote_, low over the houses stretched the Great Bear, so vast, so splendid, that it seemed almost alone in a heaven growing misty toward its edges, though Alcor, the Starry Horseman, was twinkling strangely bright close to Mizar. But the autumnal stars hanging over the rich-colored hills of Alsace have not the brilliancy of those that I saw above the gray-white Châlons plain, that late, red October of 1917.

After dinner Commandant Poulet drew on my map the boundaries of _Alsace Reconquise_, as it is now, this fourth day of November. But as he drew I knew he was feeling that it was a fleeting, vanishing thing he was recording, for he stopped a moment, as a man might stop following a wind or tracing a line in water.

Then as we sat, some half-dozen of us, about the dining-table, under the hard light of the Oberforster’s chandelier, the commandant, flicking his cigar ash into the Oberforster’s dreadful ash-receiver, told me something of the history of the Mission, which is briefly this.

Though French troops entered the valleys of the Doller, the Thur, and the Largue on the 7th of August, 1914, the French administration of that little triangle of Alsace Reconquered, as I found it, was organized only in November of the same year. Its first form was purely military, the authorities responsible for the civil population being also in command of the military operations, the final word in all that concerned Alsace coming from the general in command of the Seventh Army, in whose sector it was. These were successively Generals de Maud’huy, Villaret, Debeney, and de Boissaudy. The little triangle was first divided into two territories only, that of the valley of the Largue, with Dannemarie as its capital, that of the valley of the Thur with Thann as capital. Masevaux at that time did not form a distinct territory, but was an annex, as it were, of Thann, as also was St.-Amarin.

The officers administering the territories were chosen mostly from the reserve—men whose former avocations had prepared them for the various rôles they were to fill in Alsace. They were members of the _Conseil d’Etat_, of the _Cour des Comptes_, magistrates, _Gardes des Forêts et des Eaux_, together with many others belonging to technical professions. The first _Capitaine Administrateur_ was Captain Heurtel, in civil life _Maître des Requêtes au Conseil d’Etat_. Though seriously wounded at the very beginning of the war, in December of 1914, he asked to be again sent to the front. He met his death at Verdun in 1916. His successor was Commandant Poulet, _Conseiller d’Etat_, who took up office on Christmas Day, 1914.

In July, 1917, the Mission was detached from the General Headquarters and placed under the Ministry of War. Its new name, expressive of enlarged activities, was changed to _Mission Militaire Administrative en Alsace_ (Military Administrative Mission in Alsace), the central office being transferred to Masevaux, which Fate had placed half-way between St.-Amarin at one end of the reconquered triangle and Dannemarie at the other.

Ever since, in and out of the building of the German _Kommandantur_, once the nave of the old Abbey, men clad in horizon-blue have been coming and going, busied about affairs after the French way, the ancient town of Masevaux entering into the unexpected enjoyment of what might be called an Indian summer. Nothing else has happened to it, so far as I can see, since the Revolution, when the Chapter was suppressed and the Goddess Reason briefly installed in the Abbey. And Masevaux loves and cherishes its brief glory as only lovely and transient things are loved and cherished.[12]

VIII

Luncheon At Bitschwiller. The Mission In Residence At St.-Amarin. Saint-Odile

_November 5th._—Awakened early, early by the sound of heavy firing. Later, looking out of the square, I see the market in full swing. Against the inn of Les Lions d’Or, with its comfortable courtyard and two red wings, stands a wagon-load of hay with a pale-green cover thrown over it. Carts of cabbages and carrots, drawn by white oxen, are pulled up under the yellowing trees. The black of the clothes of the women making their purchases cuts in very hard. Blue-clad men come and go; several motors are standing before the door of the Administration. The shining, diffused light of the mist-hidden sun rounds every corner and fills up every space with a pleasant softness.

At eleven I start out with the commandant, Captain Sérin, and Lieutenant Laferrière to motor to Thann through a world of rust and green and gold-colored hills, under the whitest of heavens. So soft and shining is the beauty of the lovely earth, and so soon to pass into the winter, that I say to the commandant how like the transient beauty of a woman of forty-five are these delicate, hazy hills with their cashmere shawls still twisted about their shoulders, drawn up over their heads, dropping down to their green-valleyed feet. I mean the woman of forty-five who is still loved.

Again we stopped on the crest between the valleys of Masevaux and of Thann, and again we stopped and peered through the wire-and-pine screen, out toward Mulhouse and the Rhine and the Black Forest. The valley was blue and shining. Even the windows of the great, white building of the _Idioten-Anstalt_, where the Germans are bivouacked, were visible. Beyond were the high towers of their potassium-works. As those three men stood looking out over the rich plain I thought, “Always will I remember the officers of the Mission like that, standing on the heights, shading their eyes with their hands as they looked down into the land of Egypt, wherein the Lord was to lead them....”

New shell-holes were all about us, and there was a sharp, continual reverberation of cannon among the cashmere-shawled hills.

At Thann we stopped for a moment by the fountain near the church (in peace-times, the old statue of St.-Théobald that I saw at Sewen surmounts the charming column), the commandant having been saluted by a young American officer, leading by the hand a little girl of seven or eight, in Alsatian costume—huge black bow, black velvet bodice, full white skirts. He was quite simply a young man whose parents had gone to America, he himself had fought on the Mexican border, got his commission, and was proudly—oh, so proudly and so smilingly—walking his native streets of Thann with his little niece.

We are _en route_ to lunch with M. and Madame Galland, at Bitschwiller, who receive us as agreeable people of the world receive their guests in all quarters of the globe. They were of those who could have gone, yet remained, during the many bombardments of the town—_noblesse oblige_, and have been a blessing to the valley.

[Illustration: THANN. THE CATHEDRAL PORTAL]

Madame Galland, with powdered hair, slender, delicate of feature and of form, dressing older than she is, might have looked out of a Latour pastel. M. Galland, too, is fine-featured, well groomed, agreeable, and there was a handsome daughter with a quietly sorrowful expression on her young face. It is a house from every one of whose many wide windows one saw gold leaves hanging on black branches, behind them warm, rust-colored hills, traced with pale-yellow larches and stamped with black patterns of pine. Within, the rooms were beautiful with blue-clad men. There was an agreeable and suave odor of kindness and unstintingness about the house, mingling with that of the ease of people of the world, and the surety of those in authority, altogether a _good_ house. Eight or ten officers besides ourselves sat down to the usual delicious and abundant Alsatian luncheon, the conversation intimate enough to have color, general enough not to exclude the stranger within the gates. And it ran after this way, beginning with accounts of that last day of July, 1914, when _Kriegsgefahrzustand_ had been proclaimed in the valley and they were completely cut off from the outer world, witnessing only the sinister passing and repassing of regiments of dragoons and detachments of artillery. M. Galland had procured all the flour and dried vegetables possible at Mulhouse to ration the population of Bitschwiller in case of need, and collected what money he could. The days passed in suspense, till the 6th of August, when they remarked much coming and going of troops; on the 7th the German cavalry was seen beating a hasty retreat.

A _Brigadier de Chasseurs_, mounted on a great black horse, is the first Frenchman they see, advancing alone, looking slowly about him, his revolver in his hands, fearing some snare. Then the _Pantalons Rouges_ pour into the valley, flowers at every bayonet and in every tunic, and the Gallands receive the first French general to enter Alsace since 1870, General Superbie, commanding the 41st Brigade. At two o’clock, after refreshments had been offered from every house, the regiment took the road to Mulhouse, where that same night many of them had their “rendezvous with death.”

The talk then fell on that mysterious thing called luck, and how the soldier must have it, be _chançard_, if he were to come through, and of generals who, like General Liautey, wouldn’t have under them any save notoriously lucky officers. And there was much heedless joking (with the Fates perhaps listening). I, who never say even within myself, “I _will_ do thus and so,” without adding “if God will,” remarked at last, propitiatingly, that “’twas somewhat difficult to tell _beforehand_ who was going to be lucky.”

“But for military purposes,” dryly remarked an officer who had not yet spoken, “one needs to be lucky only as long as the war lasts,” which being hideously true, we turned to the less elusive subject of the rich and easy living of the peasants in this part of the world since the war, and how they, even like unto those other tens of thousands of “war-workers,” will “miss” it. They had become accustomed to the troops, and there was the thrice blessed _popote_ in which they more or less shared. And when the Americans came things we