Part 11

And who would not sometimes dwell on these inner stages of the life-journey? With joy on the first period, which is that of innocence, passing with a sigh to the second, which is that of deviation; with a moistening of the dry heart to the third, that of reconciliation. Finally in humility to the fourth and last, which is that of pilgrimage, where the soul, accepting the two great natural abhorrences, old age and dissolution, hopeth for redemption and renewal....

And then I found the clock was striking twelve and I left the inner world (alas! rarely is my stay in it long, even if no clock strikes) and hurried to the _popote_.

XII

THE HARTMANNSWILLERKOPF

“_Now thou art come upon a feast of death_”

Very pleasant luncheon, after the accounting of the flesh, though not dallied over, as Captain Perdrizet, a man (Heaven reward him; I never can) of much _élan_ and quite a little perception of values, suggested changing my afternoon program, which was that of calling on various members of the high and comfortable bourgeoisie, whose “fleeting mansions” are known to me in many lands. When I found that, instead of basking in the comforts of this same bourgeoisie, eating their sweet and pleasant cakes, sitting in their deep armchairs, looking at the portraits of their ancestors, fingering their bric-à-brac and looking out at their view, I might, if the special commander of the special sector so willed it, make a pilgrimage to the sacramental Hartmannswillerkopf, where fifty thousand sleep—and where others even then as we spoke were laying themselves down, my heart was greatly quickened and my soul, after its manner, began to burn.

The sun was coming out between heavy showers as Captain Perdrizet and I departed hastily for Wesserling, where the permission was to be got. Now Wesserling rather deserves a page of its own, for many reasons, though, having a single thought—that of the pilgrimage—I gave but a glance at the very interesting little war-museum, stamped hastily on memory the quite delicious emplacement of the old château, now divided into various large and comfortable dwellings of the people on whom I was to call, and commanding the lovely valley to the west. Captain Perdrizet, who proved at every step to be a man of sequence as well as enthusiasm, took me straight to Commandant de Saint-Denis. After some conversation, which I politely didn’t catch, but which terminated by: “_Oui, si c’est comme ça_” (I looked perhaps more reasonable than I felt with that heat about my heart), “but I must telephone to the commandant of the sector at Camp Wagram, and from there you must proceed with an armed escort.” Gratefully, but with exceeding celerity, we shook the dust of the _Kommandantur_ from our feet, and returned through the valley as far as Willer, when we began to rise in a world of mist and breaking light, from time to time deluged by a diamond-like shower. Up, up through hills that one can no longer call changeless, for they are hills with their heads nicked off, neither branch nor leaf left on the stumps that outline their notched and shabby crests. Past batteries and gun-emplacements, embedded in wet foliage, many of them made by American troops last summer. Deep through a world of rusty beeches, with pine forests splashed like ink on near hills, here and there the torch of a larch—_mélèze_, it is called—and it is the only one of its family that grows yellow in autumn and sheds its foliage, and doubtless kind heaven made it so, that it might be a lamp in dark forests. There was the sound of rushing waters; and everywhere that beauty of moving, blue, helmeted figures afoot, on horseback, or on muleback was woven into highway and forest path, and to mind came immortal verses, of which I changed two words:

Know’st thou the mountain-bridge that hangs on cloud? _Blue men_ in mist grope o’er the torrent loud. In caves lie coiled the dragon’s ancient brood.

For do not everywhere “in caves” great guns “lie coiled” whose “ancient brood” are these munition-heaps spawned upon the mountain-side?

[Illustration: AMERICAN TROOPS AT MASEVAUX CELEBRATING THE FOURTH OF JULY]

[Illustration: FRENCH TROOPS AT MASEVAUX CELEBRATING THE FALL OF THE BASTILE, JULY 14TH]

Up, still up, past a long convoy of munitions and food mounting slowly and heavily to the sacrificial Hartmannswillerkopf, which seems like a great altar under whose stone lie many saints—and the number of its cemeteries is one hundred and thirteen, while God alone knows the unnamed, unnumbered graves, and those yet to be dug. I find that rarely do the bones of soldiers travel far, and so it should be, for what spot, even of a father’s inheritance, is so truly his as that where he has fallen? No litigation of man can despoil him of it, and even when he and his deeds are forgotten it is still his. So let him lie.

Everywhere from the forest came strong, damp odors of things fugitive and deciduous. The violently released sap of shell-splintered and broken trees mingled its odors with that other natural smell of falling leaf. Lush mosses exuding still deeper, earthier odors were folded about the broken shafts in soft, green velvet swathings. And some of these forest wounds were new, some old and almost healed, like the human griefs of the war.

At a sharp turn in the road we leave the motor, passing on foot many camouflaged dugouts, and, somewhat breathless, reach the collection of low wooden huts known as “Camp Wagram.” Each little building has layers of fresh pine branches on its roof, and its sides are painted in piebald or zebra-like patterns.

We were shown into the dugout of the commandant, commanding the 363d Infantry, whom we found writing at a little pine table. He received us smiling, and not surprised, our visit having been announced by telephone. A smallish man with very attentive eyes, whose quiet exterior and strong Burgundy accent cover, I am told, a heart of gold, together with quick judgment and complete fearlessness.

He gives me a military cape to replace my heavy fur coat, and we start out to Camp Meudon, farther up, where we are presented to another commandant who is frankly, though politely, surprised to see a woman where no woman has been.

A few harmless jokes about being at Meudon, yet, alas! so far from Paris, are exchanged, after which, followed by the armed escort, we mount through the wet, shabby forest to the very top of the Molkenrain. There crouching in some bushes we peer out through them to the Hartmannswillerkopf, that culminating, coveted point of the great plateau, where men have wrestled unto death these four years past. Brown, withered, not a tree on it left, its form is traversed only by a long black line—the German trenches.

Behind and on each side of “Le Hartmann,” as it is called “for short,” is a great, misty, German plain; toward the left, in the extreme background, is the three-crested hill of the “Hohkoenigsberg”; great flamelike patches of cloud lay upon it, transmuting its stones and mortar into something gorgeous and unsubstantial. To our right and beyond stretched another great German plain, in front of which curtains of sun-shot cloud were falling and rising. One moment villages and fields and white ribbons of road shone, the next they would be blotted out by pillars of mist, and others came into view.

“If they see us, they will fire,” warned the commandant as I made an involuntary movement to rise, when another quick diamond-like shower beat about us.

“But isn’t it too dark?” I asked; that world of the Hartmann sector seemed so indistinct in shifting light and rain.

“They’ve seen us when it was darker than this,” he answered, rather grimly, with the expression of one remembering lost men.

Passing to another vantage-ground of the Molkenrain, whence we could see the Sudel, now entirely in French hands, we met a group of blue men, emerging beautifully out of the colored mist under the silver heaven. They were carrying hot soup to other blue men in the brown trenches of the Hartmann.

Standing for no uncompleted emotions as far as the Hartmann is concerned, Captain Perdrizet stopped a glowing-eyed, red-cheeked, black-haired Meridional stripling and told him to let me have a taste from the can he was carrying. I drank, thinking “there are many ways of winning the war,” from a dipper for which a trusty, much-camouflaged hand had first to hunt in its steaming depths. As I thanked him I wondered within myself should I wish him a quick young death or a long life and a toothless old age? As will be seen I’m obsessed by the veterans.

About this time Commandant Moreteaux said: “But Madame will only have seen the Hartmann in mist and rain. Why not come a second time and lunch with me to-morrow?”

I looked at Captain Perdrizet, he at me, and both being, as I have said, mortals of “first movement,” and knowing holy enthusiasm, we accept—though I bethink me somewhat late of our chief, the commandant of the Military Mission, who marks the shining course of my Alsatian hours, and who might have other plans. It was “to see.”

As we came down in the gathering gloom, over the shell-ravaged sides of the mountain, I was conscious of a deep, in some way sweet, feeling that I might be going to see, to _feel_, it all again. And, too, as is the way of the heart, it seemed then somewhat to belong to me.

I was not as one who never more will pass.

Everywhere in the brown, wet forest pale-blue forms stood aside to make way for us. As we reached Camp Wagram, where I re-exchanged the long, blue military cape for my coat, great shots began to echo through the hills, and the flare of guns illuminated the thin, dark, scraggly crests. It was still war. Near, so near, men were breathing out their souls, to be “scattered by winds and high, tempestuous gusts.”

As we stood making our adieux, a radio was brought to Commandant Moreteaux, and we heard then and there that Foch had received the German Parlementaries, and given them seventy-two hours, from eleven o’clock of that day, Friday, to say “Yes” or to say “No.” Nobody spoke when he ceased reading. It seemed suddenly like the world’s end.

And it’s a good, quick place to get one’s world-news, there in the Hartmannswillerkopf sector!

Then we said another and quite hasty _au revoir_, fearing night would descend upon the valley before we could, for the motor had to go without lights, and there was many a turn and twist at which to take a skidding chance at fate.

The forest got blacker and blacker, there was the sound of rushing waters, the rattle of munition-wagons, the stamp of hoofs, and voices of dimly outlined men whose tunics were quite white in the twilight. The odors, too, deepened with the coming darkness. I was chilled in body and soul, for were not they also there, those other tens of thousands, whose beds were dug in these damp hills, mingling in some way with the living? How close the two worlds are I never knew until this war, where death is ever near, and sometimes sweet, and often, often young. The hoary Reaper with his scythe has been replaced by a figure, lithe and strong, a bugle in his hand.

As we reached the dark valley the cannon cracked again, again the night sky was illumined. The unnatural shapes of trees fallen one against the other at sharp angles were black in the twilight fog; the road was a loose, wet ribbon; more waters rushed. And who would see the Hartmannswillerkopf in sunshine? This damp, gray, afternoon robe of consecration, clasped with its clasp of emerald, carnelian, topaz, amethyst, like to the clasp of a high-priest, is its true garb. And the wide mantle of the November night was folding close over all its beauty and its grief.

At Bitschwiller we call on Madame Jules Scheuer. She knows irremediable grief and bears it with a noble courage. One of her sons fell far from her in Champagne; the other, mortally wounded on the Hartmann, was brought down one winter night to die in her arms, and lies forever in the sweet, broad valley of the Thur, claiming so little of his vast inheritance....

To the _popote_ at eight. Six Protestant pastors had been announced to dine with us, two of mine in the act of being convoyed through Alsace by four of theirs. The Americans were “looking over the ground,” they delicately informed me. I didn’t ask “what ground”; with my name it might have sounded argumentative, which I never, never am.

Now during these days of my Alsatian visit I had thought, at intervals, that it might very possibly be a nuisance to have a woman always tagging at some polite heel or other, but when I saw that six pastors could happen to them all at once, I then and there ceased forever feeling apologetic. I even fell to thinking that they hadn’t done so badly when they got me.

I can’t say that, at dinner, all went as merry as a marriage feast, because the Americans didn’t speak French, nor the officers English, except de Maroussem, who could but didn’t, even seeming but remotely interested in watching them consume the plenteous repast. And as for myself, I was too dull with fatigue and too spent with the emotions of the Hartmann to be able to do any “paying in person.” For a time, too, those men of my race were the strangers to me, not the blue-clad men of the Mission.

Suddenly, as we were unsuspectingly taking our coffee, one of the shepherds began saying prayers over us with a drop in his voice after each sentence, thanking God for their being there, for our being there, for Alsace being there, and I don’t remember what else, save that it was fairly comprehensive. After which everybody signed everybody’s menu, and then as they were on the run through the garden of Alsace, lingering nowhere, though scattering possibly seedless blessings everywhere, they said good-by and went out forever into the rain. And they ought to have thanked God for the dinner, which was a triumph, with vintage wines served by two orderlies, under Monsieur de Maroussem’s chic though somewhat detached eye.

As the door closed we fell to talking as people would when six clergymen who came all at once leave all at once, though unexpectedly one came back for his umbrella—producing a momentary hush.

One of mine had generously given me several boxes of cigarettes, produced from deep, sagging pockets, and we stopped to have an “evangelical puff” as some one called it, while I tried to explain what “nervous prostration” is to those Frenchmen—and to explain why the largest of the American clergymen, very nice, and looking like a lion-tamer, as some one remarked, could have had it, and been in bed with it, for a year. “_Chacun a sa petite misère_,” one of them said, “_mais c’est étrange, tout de même._”

One of the officers of the St.-Amarin _popote_, Debrix, is the image of the famous Coligny, and so called by his comrades, but he is, it appears, an excellent Papist, while Perdrizet, who, if he had on a suit of mail, might have borne the banner of the Virgin, following Godefroy de Bouillon into Jerusalem, is an equally excellent Protestant, his family having fled to Montbéliard after the revocation of the Edict of Nantes, and these two are continually being joked about their natural—or unnatural—camouflage. But in these days nobody really cares, alack! alack! what anybody believes, scarcely, alack! what anybody does, especially if they are quiet about it and it doesn’t interfere with the other person’s plans. And that’s why the war will be forgotten just as soon as the newspapers stop talking about it and business looks up and the women get new clothes, which they need. However, as the dead soldiers will mostly be in heaven, their smiles won’t be too unkind, though their language!—if it’s anything like what I’ve discovered they use on earth!

I was finally convoyed home by a largish contingent of the sons of Mars. As soon as we stepped from the door we were in ankle-deep mud; the sky, black and flat and close, had a vaultlike heaviness, and the fog was so clinging that I was as if wrapped in some soft, wet stuff. Monsieur and Madame Helmer were kindly waiting up for me, but mercifully let our good-night be short. And here I am with no more thought of sleep than a meadow-lark at dawn, though that’s my only resemblance to the meadow-lark, for I am tired, dead-tired, and my hair is still wet with the mists of the Hartmann.

And how shall one sleep who has so lately touched the fringe of the mountain-couch where many soldiers lie?

XIII

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

_November 9th._—This morning at eight-thirty we started out, Captain Perdrizet, Lieutenant Debrix, and I, for the famous trip along the crest of the mountains that, on one side, hang over the valley of the Thur, and on the other fall toward the Germanies. Having beheld with my eyes the first and second line defenses of these crests and of the “Hartmann,” I have come to some slight realization of how men have lived (and died) four winters through on these weather- and shell-swept heights.

We had to go to the very end of the shining valley before beginning the ascent to the crests, passing Wesserling, situated so charmingly on its eminence in the ancient moraine, commanding the valley from both ways. Once upon a time the Château of Wesserling belonged to Prince Löwenstein, Abbot of Murbach, the history of the great Abbey of Murbach being closely bound up with that of these valleys, for Charlemagne gave to the first abbot, St.-Pyrmin, the whole country of the Thur, with St.-Amarin and Thann and all the lesser towns. In the eighteenth century the Abbey was converted into a noble Chapter with residence, and a big new church, at Guebwiller, now in German hands. But the Chapter had a short life there, and probably not a gay one, and during the Revolution it was suppressed.

The vineyards round about have been renowned since time immemorial, and on Guebwiller’s southern slopes there is a wine celebrated even among the most celebrated of Alsace, which enlivens without making noisy, and inspires without depressing (evidently what the juice of the grape was meant to do when the vine grew on the first hillsides of the world). It is called “_Kitterle brisemollets_” (“Kitterle break your calves”), those whom it delights evidently not journeying far, except in fancy.

A great book could be written about the wines of Alsace, the soft, gleaming, light-colored wines of this land of sunny slopes, which may become even as a Mecca for pilgrims arriving “dry” from over the seas. In fact, quite a delightful perspective opens itself out.

From Wolxheim comes a wine, once the favorite of Napoleon, which was always found on the imperial table. There are the wines of Rouffach, “home town” of the husband of Madame Sans-Gêne; of Kaisersberg, known fashionably and pertinently as “Montlibre” for a short space during the Revolution, and by the “Rang” of Thann; Alsatians once swore, “_Que le Rang te heurte!_” (“May the Rang strike you!”) There is, too, an exceptional, ancient, red vintage called “_Sang des Turcs_,” whose name recalls the twilight days of Turkish invasions and Soliman the Great.

But the Alsatian wines are mostly made from compact bunches of little, white, sweet grapes, with irislike colors shading them richly. The inhabitants, holding their _pinard_ in great veneration, feel it a sacred duty to see that it is _good_. It is called colloquially “_thé d’Octobre_” (“October tea”) one of the officers told me, after the manner of the famous “_purée septembrale_” (“September purée”) of Rabelais, who, it appears, greatly appreciated the wines of these hillsides. But they are pitiless concerning poor wines, which they call “fiddlers’ wines,” or “_Sans-le-Sou_,” or “_gratte-gosier_” (“throat-scratcher”), and “_grimpe-muraille_” (“wall-climber”), as he who drinks them is apt to try that and other useless feats, instead of sitting and dreaming or joking and being happy. These bad wines are also known collectively and disdainfully as _vins des trois hommes_ (wines of three men) because it appears it takes three men to accomplish the feat of drinking a single glass—the man who supports the drinker, the man who forces the treacherous liquid down his throat, and the third the unhappy victim. Now the once rich soil of the ancient mellow vineyards has got thin and stony; for the men who have grown them have been occupied with killing these past four years, and neglect for even a season can spoil the best and oldest vines.

In times of peace there are many textile manufactories in these valleys, too. After the Napoleonic wars _la main d’œuvre_ (labor) was scarce, just as it will be after our war, workmen being brought even from India, and to this day in the midst of modern machinery here, in the valley, there are places where they still keep to the ancient block system of stamping cloth, with the ritual hammer-stroke, this process giving more fadeless and beautiful colors than any machine-stamped, aniline-dyed stuffs that ever were. Such cloths are still called “_Indiennes_.”

And all around here the Swedes did as tidy a bit of work as was ever done by invading armies, the seventeenth century being for the valley a century of ravage and desolation. In one of the books[18] Mr. Helmer gave me last night I read that the cantons were so reduced during the Thirty Years’ War that places like Bitschwiller could register but four adults and eleven children, Moosch eleven adults and twenty-three children, St.-Amarin thirteen adults and forty-four children, and so on, the chief of their diet being acorns and roots and mice and other classic nutriment of epochs of destruction. There were moments when the Imperials, the Swedes, the French, and the Lorrains disputed the territory, and various troops camped on the Hartmannswiller and descended to the valley—and the _Roi Très Catholique_ was the ally of the Swedes, and the Abbey and its territories were under the Holy German Empire. But whoever was momentarily in possession, it was always disastrous for the inhabitants of the valley—and of what the children suffered these fatal figures I have quoted evoke some dull perception.

As we pass the pleasant villages of Fellering and Odern and Krüt, all shining in the radiance of a strong though intermittent sun, with here and there scarfs of rainbow-like mists draped about them, we foolishly mocked the weather wisdom of Mr. Helmer, who, on being asked as we started out, if the weather would hold, had regretfully said, “No.”

At Krüt we start to ascend the Wildenstein. Gorgeous matutinal effects continued their prismatic play everywhere on soft and fathomless black hills, the yellow lights on the _mélèze_ almost outshining the sun. On one mountain-side they made a line as would some procession of pilgrims bearing torches, and one almost thought one saw cowled heads and heard the chanting of a “_Pilgerchor_.”

The air we were breathing was strong yet tenuous, and I felt a great refreshment and exhilaration.