Part 3

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.