Part 12
In these wide days of bending the hills, of folding the valleys, there has been, as it were, some unpacking of my mind, some shaking out of my soul, things long hidden have come to light, and the patched lining of memory has been freshened. Almost every event has appeared, accompanied by its secret meanings, in its relationship to secondary, generally unapparent, significances. I have had, too, a quickened sensitiveness to the beauty of the natural world. And can a journey do more for one than this?
It was a stiff mount to Huss in a sort of distilled pine fragrance, with a continual looking back, where the billowing lightsome pink and yellow scarfs, woven of sun and mist, were flinging themselves more and more wastefully about the shining valleys. Near the top our motor’s _bougies_ got clogged with oil, and a thin, white fog, now opaque, now sun-shot, began to close in on us. We arranged the _bougies_, but there was nothing for human hands to do about that white fog, and we found ourselves suddenly, at a turn in the road, tightly inclosed by it, and were seemingly alone on the heights, where the only thing that appeared to grow and thrive were the stretches of wire entanglements, like great patches of dried heather. Everywhere were groupings of black crosses, with their tricolor badges, above wind-swept, fog-enveloped, sun-bathed graves, dug on these treeless heights.
But there, in that thin, high air, I suddenly became conscious of the volatilization of the spirit, and knew those graves indeed for empty....
One last time, as we passed Camp Boussat, named after the colonel who fell here, and looking like a mining-camp, the mist shifted, showing the jeweled, gossamer-clad valley, and then we were again fog-locked, and I saw its beauty no more—only brown seas of wire entanglements losing themselves in those shrouds of cottony white, which lifted here and there to show some detail of the strange life on the bleak crests. There were dugouts everywhere, and very low buildings camouflaged in wood-colors and crisscross designs. In them were men washing, men cooking, men smoking, all in astonishment, which sometimes gave place to grins, and doubtless pleasantries in the best Gallic manner, at the appearance of the weaker sex on their grim, bare mountain-tops.
We passed endless gun-emplacements, and cemented munition-depots, barely visible through thick layers of pine branches, and near them heads would be sticking out of what seemed mere holes in the earth.
About this time Captain Perdrizet, whose ardent spirit had been considerably dampened by the closing in of that thick, cold fog, began also to fear we should be late for _déjeuner_ at Camp Wagram, from which, it appeared, we were separated by several valleys and a few hills of the eternal sort. The motor’s _bougies_ got clogged again (what part of its being they are I know not); the chauffeur got moody, Captain Perdrizet more visibly vexed, Debrix quieter and more philosophic (he is a _littérateur_ when there’s no war, and has written a beautiful poem about Thann); as for myself, knowing strange and enkindling things were behind me, others doubtless before me, and that whatever happened would be interesting, I felt myself sweetly detached from time and circumstances, which for one of deadly punctuality is saying much.
A peculiarity of the motor’s ailment was that it couldn’t go down as fast as it could go up, so, a-limp, a-crawl, a-hump, we descended into a valley packed extravagantly with that thick, unspun cotton-like atmosphere, leaving the dead and living alike to their bare heights. At a certain village whose name I forget (I can hear the reader saying, “Thank God she has forgotten it, and we can perhaps get on to Camp Wagram for lunch”)—at a certain village, however, I repeat, two ravens went across our path, going to the left of the motor. Said Perdrizet, on taking in the dire occurrence, his color like to the white fog and his hair and mustache like to the raven’s, “We’ll never get there!”
Now I am superstitious, too, and glory in it, for, though it gives me a good deal of otherwise avoidable worry, it colors life. From time to time friends and circumstances load me with a new one, and I go staggering on. Two ravens crossing the road to the left _was_ a novelty, and I see anxious days to come when motoring for engagements where one must be in time—or one thinks one must. And superstition has nothing to do with the processes of the brain, rather lodges itself elusively anywhere and everywhere in one’s being.
The two officers consulted their timepieces again, finding a trifling and consoling difference of twenty minutes (looked at from one way). The chauffeur’s watch didn’t go, and I never carry one. As the motor stopped again, Perdrizet began to fidget extremely much, and to say that if it weren’t for me he’d kill the chauffeur, and decided that we couldn’t take in the village of Goldbach, almost entirely destroyed in this war, where Madame Sans-Gêne first saw the light of day, and later the duke.
However, in spite of the two ravens and the _Erdwible_,[19] or other spirits of those forest-hills, we at last found ourselves twisting up the road to Camp Wagram, an hour late, and we began to sound noisily the horn of arrival. The commandant and his young captain had been long awaiting us on their hillside. With many apologies on our part because of the delay, and on theirs because of the fog, we went into the little, low mess-room built of rough boards, with its heavy camouflage of fresh pine branches on its low roof, its windows of oiled paper, and its sides painted like a green-and-yellow tiger.
The commandant did something to his watch as we sat down, and then gallantly yet unblushingly remarked that it was just 12.30, but that even _had_ we been late it would have only meant a longer anticipation of something pleasant. My companions both gave smiles of satisfaction for that, on the Hartmann, where men are almost entirely concerned with killing or being killed, the commandant was living up to the French reputation in more ways than one. I thought, too, that it was a very happy beginning, looking well, so to speak, among the _hors d’œuvre_. Captain Perdrizet had told me the day before that if the commandant had to requisition every man and mule in the sector there would be an excellent lunch. Now the very good food was accompanied by a delicious, warm Burgundy from the commandant’s own part of the world, and at dessert a bottle of Pommery & Greno, very cold, a souvenir of his service in Champagne, was poured. All drank sparingly of both, after the manner of Latins. Some asked delicately, even humbly, as one really wanting information, concerning the rumor that the United States were “going dry,” and wondered why it was to be. I rather wondered myself, up there on the Hartmann, forgetful for a moment of the unpleasant things I know about distilled liquors in the Home of the Free and the Land of the Brave.
Said the commandant, puzzled, looking at his not large glass of ruby liquid, “_Un peu de vin en mangeant, tout de même?_ ...” (“But a little wine at one’s meals?...”)
Said another officer, with a quickly restrained gesture of distaste: “_Est-ce vrai qu’il faut boire seul et debout et entre les repas en Amérique?_” (“Is it true that one must drink alone and standing up and between meals in America?”)
I was saved an answer to this question, which was a fairly near picture of some of the national customs, by the shaking, deafening sound of an exploding shell. Those paper windows didn’t seem to mind it, though everything on the table rattled. The commandant looked at the captain, who disappeared, returning almost immediately to say that an artilleryman with his horses had been killed—and the doctor, who had started to the door, sat down again.
A few minutes later, as we were beginning the _tournedos grillés, maître d’hôtel_, the telephone rang, and a radio was brought in hot and given to me for a souvenir. It was one sent by the German parlementaries saying that as they were unable to get back to Germany by road on account of broken bridges, they would be obliged to proceed by air, and that their ’plane would be marked by two white flames—_zwei weisse Flammen_.
“It sounds safe, but all the same I don’t envy the officer detailed to accompany them,” said somebody; and they all smiled and seemed glad they weren’t in the airplane. I’ve noticed in the past two or three days that military men are beginning to prize life again.
I was sitting opposite the commandant, on my right was Doctor Lantieri with four stripes on his sleeve, and on my left was young Captain de Santis, who had met us. Curiously enough, both were of Corsican descent, and showed it so distinctly that when some one mentioned the great Italian bag of Austrian prisoners after the cessation of hostilities, and how the “Tiger” had said you simply couldn’t hold them back, I got a bit worried, though nobody else seemed to mind.
The young captain took from his pocket a couple of proclamations dropped by German aviators on the Hartmann yesterday—and furthermore presented me with a large panoramic view of the Champagne sector, where he had fought. I thought it was something rightly belonging to his family, but there was that in his proud, Corsican gesture which forbade refusal.
=The German People Offers Peace.=
The new German democratic government has this programme:
=“The will of the people is the highest law.”=
The German people wants quickly to end the slaughter.
The new German popular government therefore has offered an
=Armistice=
and has declared itself ready for
=Peace=
on the basis of justice and reconciliation of nations.
It is the will of the German people that it should live in peace with all peoples, honestly and loyally.
What has the new German popular government done so far to put into practice the will of the people and to prove its good and upright intentions?
a) The new German government has appealed to President Wilson to bring about peace.
=It has recognized and accepted all the principles which President Wilson proclaimed as a basis for a general lasting peace of justice among the nations.=
b) The new German government has solemnly declared its readiness to evacuate =Belgium= and to restore it.
c) The new German government is ready to come to an honest understanding with France about
=Alsace-Lorraine.=
d) The new German government has restricted the =U-boat War=.
=No passengers steamers not carrying troops or war material will be attacked in future.=
e) The new German government has declared that it will withdraw all German troops back over the German frontier.
f)—The new German government has asked the Allied Governments to name commissioners to agree upon the practical measures of the evacuation of Belgium and France.
These are the deeds of the new German popular government. Can these be called mere words, or bluff, or propaganda?
Who is to blame, if an armistice is not called now?
Who is to blame if daily thousands of brave soldiers needlessly have to shed their blood and die?
Who is to blame, if the hitherto undestroyed towns and villages of France and Belgium sink in ashes?
Who is to blame, if hundreds of thousands of unhappy women and children are driven from their homes to hunger and freeze?
=The German people offers its hand for peace.=
After which, being the only woman who had ever lunched in the H.W.K. sector, I was photographed by the doctor with the four stripes. Then in a fog thickly enfolding us, as well as the mountains, we started out with gas-masks, compasses and pistols, plus an armed escort, toward the German lines, for they wanted to show me the ruins of the Castle of Freundstein, now an observation post, directly overhanging the great plain I had seen yesterday. Much banter between the commandant and Captain Perdrizet, their eyes very alert, as to the right road, the one that wouldn’t lead us into the enemies’ hands. Suddenly a firing of French guns began right over our befogged heads, with a near swish and crack, and answering duller German guns. In the thick fog, even those men accustomed to sensations seemed quite keyed up, and the commandant had become like some woodsman, looking closely at the trunks of battered trees, some with old scars, some with new, and other indications, invisible to me, along the path. Finally, at a certain crossroad, he stopped, saying: “_That_ would lead us straight to them. Even now a pointed casque might appear, though, with the probable armistice in sight, they will be less venturesome.”
I: “What would they do?”
He: “Throw hand-grenades first and then”—he looked at the others—“there’d be a scuffle.”
It didn’t sound attractive, I must say, the potentialities of the fog seeming even quite horrid, and I was entirely ready to hunt in the opposite direction for the path to the Freundstein, which, according to the compass, lay pleasantly due west. Dreadful, unexploded things, too, were lying about, in new and ancient shell-holes, and there was much careful stepping among broken tree-trunks and half-demolished barbed wire, and I got a horrid rip in the last of my American boots.
Here and there was a black cross, and the possibility of being underneath one, instead of above one, if we _did_ meet a German patrol, came before me. With all one’s poetizing or philosophizing, there _is_ a difference, and one’s a long time dead—as I know Lieutenant Lavallée would agree.
Suddenly the path began to rise, the commandant giving an exclamation of relief as he saw a steep ladder almost in front of us, apparently leaning against a wall of fog. Captain Perdrizet’s eyes began to shine again; he’d been quite subdued, not to say cast down.
“It’s like a scene of opera, isn’t it?” he exclaimed. And then he proceeded up the ladder, tipped, it seemed, at an angle of forty-five degrees the wrong way, I wondering how on earth I was to get down, unless I fell. Then we descend from a ledge over heaps of century-old, moss-grown mortar deep into the tower, and, passing through a long, subterranean passage, find ourselves in a tiny, closet-like room of ageless masonry. Stationed at an opening are two men with telephones over their ears, binoculars, compass, and charts lying on the sill of the opening in the masonry, which is shaped like this ⌓ and looks to the northeast, toward the Hartmann and the Sudel, and other consecrated heights, as well as the great, covered German plain—whose contours were more impenetrably veiled than its future. I had had a feeling, crouching in the wet bushes the day before, gazing out on its wide splendors in shifting sun and shower, that I would look no more upon it, nor upon the little, worn, brown crest of the Hartmann, cut by the black line of the German trenches, running through the naked wilderness of branchless trees—though I had not known why.
When we had blithely retraced our steps to the highroad, cracking many uncomplicated jokes, pleasing largely because we felt that kindness toward the universe so distinctive of the front, when no actual killing is going on, we suddenly encountered, almost bumping into them, two swearing, sweating, heavily laden _poilus_, who had got lost in the fog looking for their detachment. On seeing us they threw down their accoutrement on a wet bank and expressions strong and classic began to cut the air. A sergeant, risen up from somewhere at the unmistakable sounds, ran toward them, calling and gesticulating wildly. But, wiping their brows, they continued. They had taken the last step they were going to on that so-and-so and so-and-so mountain, and if they found their detachment or not they _enfiché’d_ themselves, only they didn’t use this elegant word to express their sentiments. The sergeant got more excited, and cried, “_Espèces de types_” and.... At this the commandant, foreseeing that the artillery exchange might get too loud for feminine ears, said to the biggest one (both were enormous), seeing his number: “You are looking for Camp Meudon, _mon ami_. It’s farther up; in an hour you are there. Follow the path up and always to the right.”
On which, like lambs, they who had sworn not to move from that spot till the hill crumbled shouldered their accoutrement, thanked Perdrizet in the best French manner for the cigarettes he gave them, and disappeared quickly, the strains of “Madelon” being loudly borne back to us on the fog.
“_Ce sont des enfants_” (“They are children”), said the commandant, with his kind smile, “and _good_ children.”
And that was the last word I heard concerning the war and “_les enfants de la Patrie_” on the Hartmann, for the hour of farewells had come.
And how deep was the mutual well-wishing enfolding that moment those who have seen peace breaking over the graves of the Hartmann, as I and they saw it, alone can know.
As we parted, they taking a higher path, disappearing almost immediately in the fog, and we the lower road back to the motor, I suddenly understood, too, the new look one sees in all men’s faces. Everywhere it is the same. It is that of men who have been ready to die, to “separate from the pleasant habit of existence, the sweet fable of living,” but who suddenly know they need not die, at least not now—nor _that_ way.
Coming down the heavily shrouded mountain-slope as quickly as possible, to be in time for my adieux to St.-Amarin before hastening over to Masevaux that same evening, Captain Perdrizet told me the legend of the “Phantoms of Freundstein.” I was then at a point of fatigue where present emotions were no longer possible, and time works such wonders that the most tragic tale of Freundstein, the Rock of Friends, was even as a poultice. And I could still be interested in hearing that to this very day there is a proverb, “_Er isch vom Freundstein_” (“He is from Freundstein”), which, said of a man, means so hospitable is he that his house belongs to his friends. And the legend runs after this fashion:
The last of the lords of Freundstein, Count Jerome, had a beautiful daughter, Christine by name, whom he adored, and whom he took with him everywhere, even to the chase, for which purpose a gorgeous litter had been made wherein she might rest. The Lord of Geroldseck, passing by one day, saw her as she lay asleep. Struck by her loveliness, he swore then and there that he would make her his.
Soon after he proceeded to Freundstein to ask her hand in marriage, but she answered that it was useless, as her heart already belonged to a certain very noble cavalier of Thann. Her father gave the same answer. One night a great noise was heard before the gates of Freundstein; it was the Lord of Geroldseck come with his vassals to take the castle and its lovely young châtelaine by assault. Freundstein resisted for three days. Then, seeing it was in vain, Christine and her father took final refuge in the high tower whose ruins rise above the chamber where we found the men with the telephones strapped to their ears. There had once been a sloping stairway in the tower, so broad that a horseman might ascend it. Up this road the Lord of Geroldseck pursued them. Arrived at the top, he was about to seize the girl, but her father, taking her in his arms, leaped with her into space. The gesture that Geroldseck made to retain her whom he loved caused him to lose his own balance, and he, too, fell and was killed. And their ghosts forever haunt the spot, and the echo, no matter what words are cried to the hills, always gives back the last, despairing call of Geroldseck:
“_Je t’aurai, je t’aurai, je t’aurai._”[20]
XIV
RETURN TO MASEVAUX
_November 9th._—I was received so warmly by the amiable Demoiselles Braun, who had my room ready for me; so kindly by Captain Bernard, who came a moment afterward to tell me he would call for me at seven-fifteen; so dearly by Laferrière, who also called for me, that I felt I had indeed got “home.” As we were walking along to the _popote_ Captain Tirman joined us in the darkness and told us that Bavaria had proclaimed itself a republic, and that there was news (military news by radio) of the abdication of the Kaiser. Somebody cried, “_Demain, de quoi demain sera-t-il fait?_” as we entered the house where the little cat, the forgetful, unabashed little cat, who but three short days before had done such well-nigh disastrous things to my fur coat, also awaited me.
Again a charming dinner, conversation about that first August of the war, the retreat from Mons, of Charleroi, and many, many other places; of forced marches and aching feet; of fatigue and hunger and thirst, now packed away gloriously in memory, though sometimes the strange look appeared on their faces as they talked. Stories were told of those who had gone to “_faire un bridge à Limoges_”[21] and remained there, and of others, like Mangin, who had come back, Mangin, the booty of whose glorious Tenth Army now overflows the Place de la Concorde. And of Foch who had _nearly_ gone there. And of the immense glory hanging over each and every battlefield, for, though black crosses were evoked, each was entwined with colors too bright for human eyes. And then we turned our thoughts from _tempus lachrymarum_ to the New Day, in whose sun, though not like to the brightness of those fallen, we all shine. The _long_ destiny is heavy and dark beside the light, bright way of heroes, and never did one realize till now how truly the gods love those whom they snatch young. We, after all, as one of the officers remarked, will die in our beds or by accident—and is it so desirable?
Then Sérin told his oft-repeated, but now dearly loved, story of “_Bravo, Capitano_,” of the _Capitano_ who thanked the Madonna for the thirteen trenches and the sea of barbed wire between himself and the enemy, but which I won’t tell. And Captain Antoni told the story of the wounded Boche who was given the _Croix de Guerre_, and how the French general said, as he entered the hospital ward:
“Are these the brave men who so valiantly held their position on the twenty-fourth? With inexpressible pleasure I give each one his well-merited _Croix de Guerre_,” and then proceeded down the line of beds. On Number 33 was lying a man with closely bandaged head, only one gleaming eye visible, and the _Croix de Guerre_ was pinned also on his valiant breast, and if it was removed by the Angel of Death or by orders of the colonel I forget. Neither is it recorded if the German smiled.
And I told of the swift passing of the autos, mine and the commandant’s, on the dark hills of the Route Joffre, when I was coming back from St.-Amarin and he going there. How sadly I had seen its kind lights rise along the heights and disappear, and there had been no friendly handclasp on the hills, nor words of thanks from me in the dim light of the blurred Pleiades and the young, half-veiled, white moon.