Part 1

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.