Part 13
After dinner some one hazarded the word “bridge,” but there must have been that in my eye making for solitude rather than companionship, for the next thing I heard from some Frenchman, perceptive as to woman’s looks, was:
“_Madame est sans doute bien fatiguée et nous jouerons demain._”
And soon I was stumbling home on one or two or three blue-sleeved arms, in the inky darkness of a starless and moonless Masevaux.
I had found St.-Amarin charming, and I left with deep regret, but at Masevaux I was experiencing the sensation, very agreeable, I must say, of one who, having wandered, returns to his or her first love; and any one who has done it will know exactly how I felt, and I don’t have to tell them. As for those who have never returned, they wouldn’t understand if I did explain.
XV
THE VIGIL OF THE ARMISTICE
“_The Star is fall’n and Time is at his period_”
_November 11th, 1 A.M._—At ten-thirty Captain Tirman came back to the _popote_ where we were playing bridge—Sérin, Laferrière, Toussaint, and I. He was very pale, but there was something shining about his face.
“_Ça y est, l’armistice._”
Dead silence; we don’t even drop our cards. In his excitement a very naughty soldier’s word escapes him. He turns away in consternation, and the others, somewhat appalled, too, at last drop their cards. I try not to smile. General recovery; they hope I didn’t catch it. It was sufficient, however, to break that strange feeling of _absence_ of feeling that each one of us was experiencing.
“_Alors c’est fini, la guerre_,” some one finally said in a dazed way, and with the words the cruel thing seemed to drop heavily from us, as would some hideous, exhausting burden.
Toussaint, with his far look of one who loves forests, very strongly marked, said, “To think that it has found us like this playing bridge at the _popote_!”
Sérin: “I’ll not go to bed to-night.”
I: “Oh, my friends!” and then nothing more—my knees suddenly as if broken.
Laferrière (very quietly, after a pause): “I cannot but think of those who are not here.” And his words evoked great shining bands of the dear young, pressed closely, one against the other, out of their flesh, crowding the heavens.
Then Sérin, again with his _bon sourire d’enfant_, “_Il faut boire_.”
A bottle of _Asti spumante_ is produced by Laferrière, who in a dreamy way remembers that he is _chef de popote_. The stock of champagne is exhausted. Nearly every day, and sometimes twice a day for the past week, have not the radios, plucked out of the air by the commandant, plus the beauteous _communiqués_, necessitated the opening of bottles even unto the last?
Sérin, as we drink, all of us paralyzed by the sudden cessation of the world-horror, tells how one of his gendarmes would keep referring to the armistice as “_la Mistie_,” in two words, and we drink to _la Mistie_. But in spite of the too, too simple joke, how still, yet stern was each one’s heart!
About this time Toussaint seizes from the stove the marble “hunk” (it’s the only word for it), “_Amor condusse noi_,” and makes as if to throw it at the dead and gone Oberforster’s clock, stopped, as I said, some four years ago at 12.25.
Sérin again, with his most childlike expression: “_La Paix a éclaté!_ Peace has broken out, and I will break out worse than peace if I don’t do something!”
As I have said, Masevaux at that hour—it had got to be eleven o’clock—was as lustrous as an ink-pot, and all being still the prey of a strange paralysis of feeling, nobody suggested anything.
Peace, lovely, precious peace, dreamed of, desired through years of anguish, so _redly_ bought in money of the heart’s blood, was ours! Those crowding hosts gone out into the “dateless night” seemed suddenly to return, the only moving things on a stunned earth. They had not renounced in vain the dear clothing of the flesh.
But how could we understand in one moment the immensity of what had happened? Never have I felt myself so small, so almost non-existent—an insect that had fortuitously _not_ been crushed. But the soul’s great converging point _was_ reached. The war was done and won. Men need no longer kill each other by the tens of thousands, nor need women by the millions, because of it, weep.
We touched glasses again, but quietly, oh so quietly!
Some one sighs and no one speaks. After a while Toussaint, standing by the stove, again fingers “_Amor noi condusse_,” but it is taken out of his hands by one of the officers. Then Sérin suggests waking up the curé, getting the keys of the church, and ringing the bells. Tirman, in authority in the absence of the commandant, still at St.-Amarin, is gripped by that conservatism known to each and every one in command at great moments, and becomes cautious, even suspicious.
“_Mais non, c’est peut-être tout de même une blague. Attendons jusqu’à demain._” (He has quite recovered from his naughty word.)
Some one insists, “But Headquarters wouldn’t joke about a thing like that.”
Tirman, however, sits down at the piano, breaks out into the “Beautiful Blue Danube” and refuses to have the bells rung.
Sérin: “But what can one do here at Masevaux, black as the ace of spades and everybody snoring! _A Paris, il y aurait moyen de fêter même si c’est une blague!_”
I: “You are ready for anything.”
He: “_Et comment!_” With a light in his straightforward _good_ soldier’s eye, and somewhat as a child longing for the impossible, “Just think of them in Paris, the restaurants full, _et des femmes sentant bon_!”[22]
Then four dazed officers accompanied by a dazed lady proceeded to awaken the postmaster from his slumbers. That heroic expression of rejoicing accomplished, we groped our way to the Place du Chapitre. In one of the _chanoinesse_ houses Captain Bernard also dwells. Sometimes he has headaches on account of his wound, and to-night he had left us early to go home. On his not answering, some one hazarded the remark, “Perhaps he isn’t there” (Heaven knows there’s nowhere else to be but where one belongs, at Masevaux!), and it proved, indeed, to be pure defamation, for after a while he appeared at his window, or rather one heard him saying: “What’s the matter? I was sleeping the sleep of the just.”
“_Ça y est, l’armistice_,” some one cried out.
Then that man, who had been through every campaign and would forever wear “Verdun” stamped on his brow, made no answer.
And the night was dark, dark, the lovely moon too young to wait up, even for peace. We stumbled across the roughly paved square to my dwelling, and there we clasped hands with a strange, new clasp, and I, the woman and the American, wanted to say something, anything, but I had only begun, “_Mes chers amis_,” when I felt my voice break. I turned quickly and went in. What need to speak? Hearts lay open that night.
_2 A.M._—Have been reading to quiet the heavily throbbing nerves. Picked out of the bookcase an hour ago _L’Histoire des Elèves de St.-Clément, Metz_, 1871. The names Gravelotte, St.-Privat, Malmaison, Sedan, confuse themselves in my mind with Ypres, Verdun, with Belleau Woods, with St.-Mihiel, Suippes, Eparges. I remember being told that in a terraced cemetery at St.-Mihiel three thousand Germans sleep. Though friend or foe, this night I see them all arisen, standing each one by his grave, clad in horizon-blue, khaki—or field-gray, all those who at some word of command had left the “pleasant habit of living, the sweet fable of existence,” and I whispered in great need of consolation, “I know that my Redeemer liveth and at the last day we shall rise.”
_3 A.M._—And how shall sleep come, lovely sleep, desired like the morning? I slept not that night of the 3d of August which held the whole war in its darkness, and now with the youth of the world lying in “the grave’s quiet consummation,” shall I sleep?
Then slowly I became conscious of emanations from a giant, near people in defeat, not knowing what new thing to will, casting off the old fidelities, which once had given them the horn of human plenty. Thrones were shaking; “when _peoples_ rage, _kings_ must weep”; a world was to be remade out of empty places and blood.... I remembered how a poet[23] had cried out, as a prophet, after that other war:
_Ton peuple vivra,_ _Mais ton empire penche, Allemagne!..._
And then I fell to thinking on love, I know not why, unless it was for the millions of lovers taken so suddenly from the world, or because of those yet left. How shall I say? But I knew that there were three things, not two—the lover, the beloved, and love. And of this last and separate thing one can have, in extremely sensitive states, impersonal cognizance, when for some reason (again what know I?) fancy has been set free, imagination stirred, and they go flinging themselves, not so much about the personal as about the common destiny. For a moment, so brief that it was gone even as it came, my soul caught the light that hangs over dear, persistent, far, illusory hills of fancy and inclination, and felt the mysterious break of feeling on the dim, shadowy lake of the heart. Vague, beaming forms passed along its shores, dissolving, lambent outlines, awakening desire for all the beauty of the wide earth, for things not in my personal destiny, and which, if they were to be, would be no better than that which is, not even so good. It was the greed of the human heart....
And I cried out from my many-times-turned pillow, “O Life, O Love, O Death, O too, too fragile illusion of existence!”
_4 A.M._—A soft, rich-toned bell is striking. A cold breath comes in at the window, a cock crows. There is the first sound of the click of sabots across the square; the Day of Peace is about to break over the world. But here in the bed of the young deserter from the German ranks, dead in Champagne, the war still has me in its arms and presses me close to its cold, oozing breast. The familiar odor of drying blood comes to me. Old groans strike on my ear. Those who, dying, are not dead crowd about me, and the “blue-black cloud” envelops me. I am weary unto dissolution. And Sleep, darling Sleep—not even a brush of your wings against me!
In this early morning, in the “little hour before dawn,” the grief of the world sits tight about my heart—the icy hurt for things dead and gone, and the heaviness of those who awaken to a world empty of what was once the heart’s concern and desire.
Old distastes, too, press on me, old distastes, I say, not hates. How hate any one like unto myself, hurrying along the night-path to the grave, mutual, frightened possessors of a shadowy, urgent immortality?
For these last few years I have entered, as it were, into some knowledge of charity, not that I like everybody, but I have come to realize that the distaste is often in myself and not due to some fault or lesser excellence in others. Truly in this whole journey I have encountered but two whom in an idle, hazy way I did not like; one was of an amorphic species and the other had judgments too violent, and at the same time too conventional and platitudinous, to permit interest. But even of these I shall ultimately think with indulgence.
_5 A.M._—Closed the book recording the deeds of those young, long, long fallen of St.-Clément’s school, and I pass to thinking how the word now on the lips of the world is freedom.
But is not the deepest wish of the human heart for love which is never free, but always in bond to that which is its hope and its desire? And I cried out concerning freedom what once in the world’s greatest hour was cried out concerning truth, “What is it?” and begged that it might show its true form and aspect, above all to one who, invested with incredible power by a great people, would seem to hold even the lightnings in his hand.
More sabots click across the square, and a pale light sifts in at the top of the curtains. It’s the eighth day of Creation. Innumerable men have stood (and so near me) their last night through in the trenches....
Yesterday with its happenings seems a thousand years ago. I had motored with Laferrière to lunch at Dannemarie across a rich plain, through Morzwiller, where Alan Seeger spent a week with the Foreign Legion, and spun who knows which of his young and gorgeous fancies?
Now, as then, the long street of Morzwiller was crowded with a highly colored, exotic regiment, and we were stopped a moment by a detachment passing. In front of the red-roofed, cream-colored inn, with its yellowing grapevine clinging close and flat, a young officer in the strong, mustard-tinted khaki and red _checchia_ of the Moroccans was getting off his horse, a blooded, white, long-tailed beast of Araby; on his breast was a blaze of decorations and there was something implacable in his young glance as he looked about, and something very straight in his mien—a man who had been at his enemy’s very throat, or drawn the sucking bayonet out all red. Two or three men of his regiment, wearing also their crimson _checchias_, were sitting at a table drinking a light-yellow wine. A woman came out, emptied a pail, called to a cat. A very young girl behind her made a slight sign to one of the men sitting at the table. In another minute we had passed on.
Everywhere in the rich fields were great brown stretches of barbed-wire entanglements, repeating the rusty tones of the beech forests which fringe them. I asked Laferrière what would become of those thousands upon thousands of kilometers of barbed wire. He answered indifferently, as one does of things past, “Little by little the peasants will use the poles for their kitchen fires and the wire for their hedges.”
And we continue through that flat yellow and green and brown world to Dannemarie, one of the “territories” of the reconquered triangle, drawing up before some sort of government building, known to German and to French administrators, in and out of which American soldiers are now passing. I ask one of them where their officers are quartered, thinking to pay my respects after lunch. There is a vagueness as he asks of a passing comrade, “Say, ’ain’t we got a major somewhere here?” The flooding Americanism of my soul is for a moment stemmed; then we go over to the _popote_, where we are to lunch with Lieutenant Ditandy, in charge at Dannemarie. Laferrière, always ready to praise his comrades, tells me that he is possessed of much energy, good sense, and decision (rather in our American way, I found later) and the “territory” has flourished under him.
Pleasant lunch, enlivened by some last German salvos, which shook the windows and caused the glasses on the table to ring. Much and easy conversation—as we ate the classic Alsatian dish of sauerkraut, boiled potatoes, and pork, and the equally classic pancakes—mostly about the irrealizable and irreconcilable dreams of small and penniless nations, springing up like poor and unthrifty relations at the day of inheritance. And how amusing, even, the adjustments might become, once the blood-letting had ceased, though everybody felt more or less of a pricking in the thumbs at the thought of _l’après-guerre_. One could not then foresee that the movement of the Peace Conference would be about as rapid as that of the notoriously timeless glacier. Nor was it given to prophets to foretell the exceeding glitter of its generalities, nor how those same small nations, without a cent in their pockets, some even without pockets, like the Zulus and Hottentots, would multiply a hundredfold in its dewy shade. The metaphors are mixed, though not more so than the theme, and unfortunately it _won’t_ “be all the same in a hundred years,” everything having been taken into account except the future.
After lunch we start out in the motor driven by the swift yet careful chauffeur, accompanied by a doctor _à deux galons_, who speaks English very well, but doesn’t understand a word I say—and my English is generally intelligible, though perhaps one wouldn’t know right away if I came from England or the United States.
We passed the high, broken, pink viaduct of the railway, looking, against the near Swiss hills, like a bit of aqueduct in the Roman Campagna, though without any beauty of light. It had been destroyed the first days of the war, rebuilt, again destroyed, and then abandoned.
We were running straight toward the trenches, through that green and gold and brown autumn world, the road screened by wire netting interwoven with pine branches and broom, and there were kilometers of cloth screening, too, torn and flapping. The lines are but a few yards distant, and everywhere between us and them are the brown lakes of barbed wire.
At St.-Léger an infantry band is playing the terrible, the gentle, the dolorous, the gorgeous, the human, the superhuman “_Sambre et Meuse_,” which will forever evoke those seventeen hundred thousand sons of France who to its beat marched to their death. We stop to listen. A veteran of 1870 (no village seems to be complete without one or more) comes out, his green-and-yellow ribbon in his rusty buttonhole, and gives Lieutenant Ditandy a toothless, palsied salute. Black-clad women are grouped about the blue-clad band, under a great yellow chestnut tree. The mustard-tinted khaki and red _checchias_ of a passing Moroccan regiment give a last deep accent to the color of the scene. And for a long way our road runs like this:
[Illustration]
We continue swiftly through villages shot to bits and deserted save for the troops, _Quatrième Zouaves mixtes_, they mostly are, quartered within their crumbling walls. There are tattered cloth screens for camouflage hung across the streets, as electioneering signs would be hung, or the banners of festivities and welcome. Open-mouthed, the soldiers see the auto pass where for two years no wheeled thing has rolled. If men went there they slipped silently behind the screens and under cover of night, with food and munitions or carrying wounded men.
As for me, I begin to feel like a cross between Joan of Arc and Madame Poincaré.
Lieutenant Ditandy points out “_le Bec de Canard_,” the duck’s bill, a long tongue of Swiss territory that juts in comfortingly between the French and German lines, and is greatly beloved by everybody.
On the outskirts of the battered village of Seppois we pause; a few more turns of the wheel and we would be in full sight of the German lines. I make good my woman’s reputation for lack of sense of responsibility and beg to proceed. Lieutenant Ditandy, however, caps daring by a somewhat belated prudence (there is something bold and hard in his eye when it’s turned toward the enemy), saying:
“We ought not to be here; as it is, our safe return depends on whether a German officer sees us and, seeing us, thinks he might as well turn the mitrailleuses on. The first man to be killed in the war was killed near here—it would be too stupid to be the last.”
Laferrière: “Not to speak of the incident it would create, and if the colonel sees us—well, the prison at Seppois isn’t inviting.” So we turned toward the Swiss frontier instead, and I thought deeply, sweetly on her so dear, so near, as I looked toward these hills enfolding her, the best loved of my heart.
Then we turned another way, passing again through Seppois. Arab troops are quartered there, and we were held up by the sentinel, who wanted to see our papers. He was dark of color, delicate of hand, straight of nose, and wore his military coat buttoned by one of its top buttons in such a way that it fell with an effect of burnous. He couldn’t read French characters, so he called to another thin, small-handed, straight, coffee-colored man, who might have been his twin, who couldn’t read them, either, and finally they both threw up their slender hands, resembling those of some antique bronze of an adolescent, after which we passed on. And I told Sérin’s story of the Arab guard who held him up one dark night, in the trenches, but generously gave him the countersign, saying to him, “_Si tu ne dis pas tire-lire, tu ne passes pas!_” (“You can’t pass unless you say tire-lire!”)
They’re cold, these Arabs, they’re gray with cold, and they don’t know why they fight, nor whom, but they follow their officer to the death, and, if he falls, lose heart under these gray skies with which Allah seems only remotely connected.
And then we turned back and went through young woods where countless thousands, no, millions of shells were piled on shelflike receptacles, as one would pile bottles of wine on cellar shelves. Everywhere were the words “_Route interdite_,” “_Défense de passer_,” and we passed, until we came to Faverois, with its old, old church on the top of a tiny hill, over which the town spilled. The broad, low steps of the church were made of ancient tomb slabs, and, stooping, I saw, on one of them, half obliterated, “_in pace_,” and “16—.”
There was much that was unspoiled, or more likely forgotten, in the interior. A suave-expressioned St.-Sebastian, with dimpled limbs, so evidently unfit for the arrows that transfixed them, and something yearning and earthly about his eyes, was above the Louis XV altar; quite unmistakably he was of the gay century. In another niche was an unknown saint, dressed like a personage of opera; three plumes were on his head and he wore a golden shirt of mail and high, fringed boots. At the side-altars were charming, very pure models of angels, and bow-knots and shells (I mean, for once, _sea_-shells). As we came out we noticed that the roof of the church was painted a silver-white and that of the old house nearby, with the round tower, was painted the same way, and other houses, too, and when we asked why they told us it shone like crystal at night and was to warn airplanes of their nearness to the Swiss frontier.
A blue group of _poilus_ was standing on the crest of the street, looking at a newspaper. One cried out in a loud voice, “_Guillaume a ——_,” only one can’t write the word. And going up we saw the news of the Kaiser’s abdication in letters quite American in size.
Then in a very understandable zeal that I should miss nothing, the doctor _à deux galons_, espying a khaki figure, said, “There comes an American,” and I saw approaching a blond, round-faced young man with spectacles. Something leaped within me as I turned to him. But he answered me in the stiffest German accent possible, “Ja, pig news”; and when I said, “Yes, we’ve won the war!” he answered, “Well, I do t’ink we god ’um shust now.” Unreasonably, the thing that had leaped within me lay down. I said, “Good-by.” He said, “So long.” And so much for American meeting American on the hill of the village of Faverois.