Part 4

The cathedral with its single, finely pointed tower was like a needle everywhere threading up long streets. I had a desire to see it empty, and as I entered, its perfect proportions gave me a sweet and satisfying welcome. The red lamp of the sanctuary was now the only spot of color in the thick yellow gloom, out of which line and proportion gradually detached themselves. The celebrated choir-stalls had been removed to Sewen, but above the altar of the Virgin is a Gothic triptych, and the beautiful pulpit is of fifteenth-century wrought-iron. We groped our way into a low, vaulted chapel which existed even before the church was built, passing a tombstone bearing the arms of the house of Ferrette, a family once all-powerful in these valleys. Over the altar of the chapel is an ancient statue of Saint-Théobald. He has a long, thin, shaven, upper-class face, his eyes are bent, and he is looking perhaps as he did shortly before death found him in the Umbrian Valley. It is the visage of a man having done with personal things, and a great pity is woven into the downward curves of the benignant face.

We drove back to Masevaux, over one of the splendid new war roads, rising and dipping through forest-covered hills. The brilliant sun shone athwart each leaf, still dewy and sparkling, and a strong, rich, autumnal smell exuded from the earth. It reminded Captain Bernard of hunting before the war, that carefree _chasse d’avant-guerre_, and I thought of Hungarian castles, and long days in forests, walking through rustling leaves, or sitting silently in glades with men in green-brown hunting garb, awaiting the game. In the evening, shining dinner-tables, and talk about the day’s bag by men in pink hunting-coats and women wearing their best gowns and all their jewels.... And much that is no more.

We descended at the _popote_ as the hand of the church clock pointed to 12.15. Blue-clad officers were standing by the windows reading the Belfort morning paper just arrived, and the Paris newspapers of the day before, as I went in.

The enemy is beating his retreat through the Argonne Forest, to the sound of the hour of destiny, and there are armistice and abdication rumors, and indications that they want to _sauver les meubles_, or, as they would say, seeing they’ve got into a bad business, _retten was zu retten ist_—_i.e._, German unity, which, saved, means all is saved. But there are strange dissolvents infiltrating everywhere, scarcely any substance can resist, and the blood of peoples boiling over, and much good broth spilling, and too many cooks everywhere. For what man but wants to try his ’prentice hand at seasoning of the mess? And it was all talked about to the consuming of Mère Labonne’s especially excellent Sunday dinner, an example of _la vraie, la délicieuse cuisine française bourgeoise_. There were _pieds de veau_ that melted in the mouth, and creamed potatoes, after which a very delicious _hachis_, with some sort of horseradish sauce, and when I remark that it has also a touch of garlic, Sérin cries out, “But not at all—it’s only horseradish.” On my being supported by everybody at the table, he finally says, with an innocent but somewhat discomfited smile, “It’s true that there must be a lot for _me_ to notice it.” Then he tells with gusto of a repast in his dear Toulouse where there was a whole cold pheasant for each guest, and each pheasant was blanketed with such a thick cream of garlic that the bird itself could scarcely be seen. “It was exquisite,” he added. “I dare say; one can even smell it here,” some one cruelly finished.

Then they spoke of how the French had supported captivity better than the English, and why.

“We always talk while eating,” said Bernard, “no matter how scanty or ignoble the repast. It’s our hour for relaxation.” (Any one lunching or dining at French officers’ messes will have noticed this.) “But with the English it is different. They eat silently, and in captivity they easily get the spleen and fall into melancholy, because the food isn’t served as they would like, or because they can’t wash or shave or exercise.”

And I told the story of the brother of a French friend whom I had recently seen, just back from nearly four years’ captivity, who returned in such a stout, rosy condition that his sister was ashamed to show him, and when asked about her _pauvre frère_ would blush.

We sat long, talking now of books, now of personages, now of local happenings, Sérin telling of passing that morning through one of the smaller villages where even the young girls had saluted him with a military salute as he rode by—and one of the officers said, with a flash, “_Très délivrées celles-là!_”(“Very delivered, those!”) Then some one told the story of the man who came down to Masevaux to make a book on Alsace and, seeing the line of the trenches marked that day in blue on the commandant’s map, remarked, in a _dégagé_ way, “_Le Rhin, n’est-ce pas?_” (“The Rhine, I suppose?”)

“Not yet,” was the quiet answer.

He then rushed them all off their feet for ten hours, after which, having got what _he_ wanted, he went back to Paris and wrote his book. And from what I hear it wasn’t a bad book, either. Though one of the officers said he knew he could do the same about Prague or Peking, that he’d never seen, with some books, a good pair of scissors and as much paste as he wanted.

All is handled lightly, as only a group of Frenchmen could handle it, _glissant, n’appuyant jamais_, each bringing his little gift of wit and culture, enjoying the impersonal with the same pleasure as the personal, in the French way. Of course, the _communiqués_ are as honey after four years of bitter herbs, very bitter, even though distilled in extinguishable hope.

And I must say that to me lively and untrammeled conversation is the salt of daily life; and if, as it sometimes happens, one’s own thoughts are expanded, brightened, and returned to one, it is indeed delectable above all things, the true salt to be used in quantities (if you can get it). For, alas! the majority of people have no ideas, when you come down to it, or, having a few, they are pig-headed and look but into the converging point of the angle, knowing nothing of the splendor of diverging lines where self is swallowed up in unself. And there are the close-headed, whose minds work slowly in a cramped way, or not at all, and they are forever complaining that they only think of things to say when they get home and the lights are out. They might just as well not think of them (one sometimes doubts if they really do) for all the good they are to their neighbors. And there are those very thin-skinned ones who immediately get contentious, and think the arrow is meant for them instead of the universe at large, and one could go on indefinitely through the list of impenetrable heads, to whom the blow of an ax is as the brush of a feather, or cushiony heads that once dented, however, never regain their contours, and many, many others. These all need material sauces, good, rich sauces to their food, or they would find it tasteless, not having even a pinch of this other salt to season it with. And they are mostly those who do not work, but whose fathers worked—sometimes even their mothers—and _oh, là là_, the subject is endless, for everybody talks—even those who have nothing to say.

V

THE BALLON D’ALSACE

_Sunday afternoon._—At two o’clock I started out with Captain Bernard and Captain Antoni for the great mountain known as the Ballon[7] d’Alsace, sometimes called, too, “the knot of Europe,” in an especially high-powered motor (I never know the mark of any of them, distinguishing a Ford from a Rolls-Royce only by the generally pampered feeling pervading me when in the latter).

The Ballon rises like a wall at the very end of the valley of the Doller, and we passed through many villages, shining pinkly in the prismatic November afternoon, where there was much going into church for vespers, of blue- or black-clad figures. The thirteenth century-towered church of Sewen is on a slight eminence in the heart of the village, and the cemetery around it was crowded with the faithful, regretting their dead, or some, perhaps, for one reason or another (What know I?), feeling, “’Tis better they lie there.” “Live long, but not too long for others,” is an excellent device.

The charming lake of Sewen, though far from the village, seen from a certain angle, reflects the tower of the church and is, they told me, of Moorish origin. These valleys and hills seem everywhere like open books concerning the dim, dim youth of the earth; I had a sense of my transitories, with those lessons written everywhere. And it is autumn, too.

We got out at the immense reservoir of Alfelt which dams up dangerous springtime floods with its giant wall of masonry, for from the “knot of Europe” loosened waters flow to the North Sea and to the Mediterranean. Climbing to the top of the rocky elevation, we read on the monument the date of the inauguration of the reservoir, 1884, and the name, Prince Hohenlohe Schillingfurst, Statthalter.

And, looking down, the shining villages through which we had just passed, Sewen, Oberbruck, Niederbruck, Masevaux, are like beads on the thread of the lovely valley, lying between the breasts of the hills.

The mountain-ringed lake of the reservoir reflects the rich coloring of the hills in which it is set; white-stemmed, yellow-leaved birches, blood-red cherry trees; rust-colored beeches, larch trees shining like torches borne by wanderers, on black pine slopes; all is seen twice—once on the hills and once in the mirror of the lake.

Then we mount up, up, up, twisting and turning over the magnificent military road, made like so many others since the war, to become some day the joy of tourists, when, thousands upon ten thousands, nay, millions upon millions, they shall come from over ocean and mountain to see what it all looks like and get the belated thrill.

Violet hills become black, outlined against a copper-colored band of western horizon. Captain Bernard points out some English airplanes just over our heads, tiny, tiny specks hanging in a high waste of heaven, and I wonder if in one of them sits my friend, the chartered accountant of the Belfort train, fulfilling his destiny in the air.

We leave the motor at the highest point of the road, where trees no longer grow, and start to climb the grassy crest, patterned with great brown patches of barbed-wire defenses. Captain Bernard’s sharp eyes soon discerned the _chicanes_, intricate, almost indistinguishable pathways through the wire, and if one knew them one could get through without leaving one’s clothes. Breathless, we arrived at the _table d’orientation_ and find ourselves looking out over what seemed the edge of the universe. In front of us lay the gorgeous panorama of the Alps and behind it the wide band of copper-colored sky, with here and there a burnishing of glaciers by the dipping sun. To our left stretched the immense and splendid valley of the Rhine, behind it the Black Forest, clearly yet softly outlined against a paler horizon. One could have rolled the whole earth like a ball from the feet. I felt as if suddenly freed from any heaviness of the flesh, and Goethe’s soaring words brushed against my mind, and beckoned me on—those words he cried after he had reached the Brocken and was looking down on a cloud-covered Germany.

_Dem Geier gleich_ _Der auf schweren Morgenwolken_ _Mit sanftem Fittig ruhend,_ _Nach Beute schaut,_ _Schwebe mein Lied._[8]

I knew those vast expanses for material out of which a new earth, if not a new heaven, must be formed, on some eighth day of creation. And the new earth was to be made out of old and conflicting desires, worn, yet persistent passions, small, yet greedy thoughts, the whole about as facile as the weighing of the winds, making one almost feel that He who worked with new materials those first seven days had the easier part.

I was filled, too, with a great longing for an improbable wisdom and strength to be breathed into the men who are to reharness the plunging, escaping destinies of the nations. Each man that has his hands on the reins seems like some one clinging to a runaway horse, trying to dominate a relentless, unreasoning, reckless course.

Reverberating through the eternal hills was the sound of heavy cannon; and before my mind came a vision of the great forges wherein they were formed, men working day and night in hot, dim, noisy spaces—Creusot and Krupp and Skoda, and all the rest....

Some near summit hid the dread Hartmannswillerkopf, the “Verdun” of Alsace, and one of the officers spoke of that winter of 1916, when its snow was always pink with blood and black with death—“tens of thousands sleep there.” I thought of the souls breathed out into that pure, high ether, like to this, but cold, cold, almost as tenuous as the immortal stuff commingling with it.

Then we started to the other edge of the summit, whence we might look into _l’élégante et douloureuse Lorraine_, for one side of the Ballon slopes toward Alsace and the other toward Lorraine.

As we threaded our way carefully through more _chicanes_ of barbed-wire defenses “that you had to have your nose in before they could be distinguished,” I discerned on the crag three familiar silhouettes, outlined against the heavens toward the Lorraine slope. And as things are rarely in their proper setting nowadays, there on the Ballon d’Alsace were three dusty Y.M.C.A. men who had come from their _cantine_ at Belfort. We spoke to them and gave our names, and the brightest one, Tallant was his name, asked if I were the wife of my husband—and said he’d been on the Mexican border.

Then we told them where the _table d’orientation_ was, but forgot to point out the _chicanes_, and we saw them from a distance entangled in barbed wire. Their souls were safe, I hope, but heaven help those khaki clothes!

And looking down into Lorraine from my splendid height was as if looking into another world, for its distances were bronze and silver and pale green.

Great black spots of shadow cast by wasteful masses of white clouds were lying heavily over those new and ancient battle-fields. Forever obliged to protect themselves from some invader, the villages hide rather than display themselves, and are barely detached from the silvery brown of the plain, crossed here and there by the bosky lines of the Meuse, or those of the great canal joining the French river to the Rhine. And each tiny hill has been an altar or a fortress, often both at once. Over the majestic, melancholy stretch Romans have passed, the hosts of Attila, Normans, Germans, Burgundians, Swedes, English, and many others. Now its white roads sound to the tramp of American armies, are encumbered by giant quantities of war material brought from over the seas. And of all who have passed over it, of the most ancient even, much remains. Close against one another are Roman encampments, feudal castles, the two-sided, two-faced bastion defenses of Vauban, the great, mined earthworks of modern times, and now in leafy darknesses are the cement emplacements of the big guns of the twentieth century.

But alas! as I turned to go, pulling my gaze from the wide horizon (a pale, pale pink where it covered the western way to the city that is the heart of France), I saw on that slope, directly under me, a cruel statue of Jeanne d’Arc. A stiff yet boneless Pucelle sat astride an equally stiff yet boneless steed; both seemed about to drop into space, the mountain falling away from them, and both were of a dreadful superfluity! However, one isn’t so plagued with horrid modern statues in Alsace as in other places I have been, for they run rather to fountains and living waters. At St.-Amarin, for instance, I don’t remember anything later or more personal than the fiery Gallic cock, “_der spuckende Welschhahn_,” surmounting a sphere, borne in turn by the column of the 1830 fountain; and the fountain in the Place du Chapitre at Masevaux, bearing the date 1768, has a single, lovely column, too, on whose top burns a stone flame in an urn. And the shaft of the fountain of the wine-growers at Thann is a mass of rich yet noble carving, surmounted by a helmeted figure bearing a shield on his back. Furthermore, crystal water flows into its six-sided emblazoned basin.

I think of the statue of Thiers, _Libérateur du Territoire_, in that dusty, begonia-planted, iron-railed plot in front of the station at Nancy, and I could weep.

But hereabout I haven’t found a single nineteenth-century statesman in frock-coat and top-hat, done in granite, nor any bronze female pointing him the way to a dubious heaven, with a long finger and a heavy palm-branch—and so may it remain.

Certainly the _très chic chef_ of the Military Mission will be well punished for _his_ good works in Alsace if they ever raise a statue to him. For they will make him, too, out of either bronze or marble with a _plaque de commissaire_ on his frock-coated breast, and heaven knows what kind of a hat they’ll put on him, or how the fancy will seize them to do his hair! And the statue won’t be of lapis lazuli, as it should be, nor of pale sapphire, nor of dull turquoise, nor of any of the lovely blue stones of the earth, alone fit to perpetuate the beauty of the blue-clad men who have written France’s greatest epic. Blue-clad men splashed about fountains at twilight, blue-clad men taking form and substance as they emerge out of gray mountain mists, blue-clad men weaving their cerulean patterns through the woof of long-trunked pine forests, blue-clad men like bits of turquoise embedded in the matrix of white roads, and what know I besides?

As I gave a sigh for Art and a prayer for the serried ranks of her erring devotees, I found myself looking into another splendid valley, toward Giromagny, near where is a height known as La Planche des Belles Filles, after a story of the Thirty Years’ War, when men with blue eyes and very light hair and skin were for a while masters of the domains of Belfort and Ferrette. After the best manner of invading armies, ’tis recorded that these Swedes committed many excesses, and dark-eyed girls lay concealed in the forest, and when they feared their hiding-place had been discovered they fled to the mountains, but even there they were pursued by the hosts of fair-haired, fair-skinned, blue-eyed men, bent on the most elemental of errands. And again they fled precipitately, scarcely knowing their direction. When they got to the top they found themselves on a great ledge of rock and in their distress they tumbled from the height onto other rocks below, and the blue-eyed, fair-skinned, fair-haired men from the North knew them not. Hence the “Ledge of the Beautiful Girls.”

And then we took a last look at the vast heaping of the Alps; to the left, the Jungfrau and the Mönsch, to the right, Mont Blanc, the whole great mass outlined against that persistent dark-red band. The glacier of the Jungfrau was as if in conflagration; Mont Blanc was soft and roseate, yet its beauty left me cold.

Captain Bernard said he had climbed the Ballon many times and only twice before had he seen the great panorama; but as, alack! to him who does not want shall be given, except for their gorgeousness, I would have turned from them indifferently, had not my beloved mother been dwelling almost in the shadow of Mont Blanc.

But one[9] has written, as men of genius write of things in times of peace, of this Ballon d’Alsace. He who brought out from his Gallo-British mind new things and old has said in one of the most charming of books: “Then on the left you have all the Germanies, a great sea of confused and dreaming people, lost in philosophies and creating music, frozen for the moment under a foreign rigidity, but some day to thaw again and to give a word to us others. They cannot remain long apart from visions.” I thought they have, indeed, given a “word.” But when again the “visions”?

I turned and followed my two blue-clad officers down the Alsatian slope, over the gray grass, threading neatly through the _chicanes_ of the brown, barbed-wire defenses, and got into the motor waiting on the roadway once known as that of the Dukes of Lorraine.

We were silent as we started down the great mountain. I was again wrapped in thoughts of the New Day to be created out of old and rotting stuffs, and of the death of heroes. The hills were velvet-palled against the deepening crimson band of light.

Later, a _panne_, and we waited in a violet-valleyed world, illumined only by white candelabraed torches of strangely luminous larch and birch, while the prudent yet daring chauffeur changed the tire.

A great khaki-colored motor passed us, marked with two stars, filled with khaki-clad men of my race, going up, up, whence we had come.

Then we stopped at the little restaurant of Alfeld. The lake of many colors was dark and mysterious. Its high tints had been dipped in something deep in the hours since last I saw it, though strange blues and purples and rust colors were still reflected in it, and the light of a single, very yellow birch had not yet been snuffed. At the restaurant four glasses of white liqueur were poured for us (one, of course, for the chauffeur), distilled from raspberries, the odor of the berry very strong, and long afterward the taste, the _arrière-goût_, remains in the mouth, as if one had just eaten the fruit. But one of the officers said, “All the same, it doesn’t equal a good _quetsch_ or _kirsch_ or, above all, a good _mirabelle_.”

And then we dipped into the darkening valley of the Doller and through dim villages found the way to Masevaux and the house on the Place du Chapitre, where the Demoiselles Braun had tea awaiting us, and there were stories told that made us laugh. And one was of the renowned 15th Dragoons, so long quartered there, which, briefly—and humanly—is this: