Part 5
At intervals after their departure little dragoons saw the light of a war-world, and, to be exact, fifty in all saw it. The curé was broken-hearted at the ravages among his sheep, but he was also a practical, long-sighted curé, so he wrote, presenting his idea of the matter before the colonel of the regiment, with the result that from the savings-box of that same regiment a sum was subtracted to provide ten years later for the first communion and confirmation clothes of the fifty! (Would you have thought of it?) Then, casting about in his mind how he could further improve the general situation, this time not so much from the temporal point of view as from that of eternity, he decided upon a pilgrimage—a pilgrimage of reparation to Huppach, where is the shrine known as that of the Virgin of Klein Einsiedeln, near Sewen, through which we had just passed. He announced the pilgrimage from the pulpit, then took the further precaution of rounding up his strayed sheep in person, and in person conducting them to Huppach to offer up prayers and tears to the Virgin of Klein Einsiedeln. There were so many of them, however, and they were mostly so young, that history does not record the pilgrimage as being entirely without smiles—and God have mercy on us all!
But the curé was not yet (so to speak) out of the woods, for fate replaced the Dragoons by another regiment, having, as it happened, a colonel possessed of a boundless love for his men and who couldn’t do enough for them (or rather have the inhabitants of Masevaux do enough for them).
“The inhabitants of Masevaux are very nice, very nice indeed,” quoth he, “but the happiness of my men above everything. We left three thousand on the battlefield last week, and the others need distraction—of a pleasant sort. My men above everything.”
So the colonel who loved his men with a boundless love and, furthermore, was not one to waste time in vain endeavors to portray the eternal feminine as undesirable, nor to render the chase unpopular, caused dances to be organized on this very Place du Chapitre, under these very linden trees, then heavy-scented, and every evening. The curé, foreseeing trouble, with the aid of Heaven and his own undiscourageable will, had them suppressed after eight days (eight days is a long time) of wrestling with leagued powers both civil and military. And again God have mercy on us all!
Now the virtuous, I mean the truly virtuous (that is, the untried, untempted virtuous), mustn’t throw stones at Masevaux nor at this book, but rather remember that anything could have happened to anybody had everything been different. And even so, hasn’t a lot happened to many of you? You know a good deal better than I do just how much.
To the _popote_ at seven-thirty, and before I’m an hour older I’m going to tell you about the _popote_. And you’ll wish you had been there instead of hearing about it—as runs the classic expression, “_Regarder manger des glaces_,” and I give the translation, “Watch others eat ice-cream,” partly because I want you all to know just what I mean, and partly because some one in the United States wrote to my publishers that _My Lorraine Journal_ was a nice book, but couldn’t they suggest to me that I write my books either in French or English.
MRS. O’S.: “But, my dear Mr. Graham” (his name is Graham, and this may be his chance of immortality), “I couldn’t write one entirely in French to save my soul, and to save my soul I’d find it impossible when everything I’m writing about takes place in France not to slip into _la belle langue_ occasionally.”
MR. GRAHAM (from a distance): “Occasionally! There you’re at it again. Occasionally!” (It does get on his nerves.)
MRS. O’S.: “And there is another saying to the effect that ‘_On ne peut pas contenter tout le monde et son père_.’ That is to say, dear Mr. Graham, that you can’t please everybody and your father as well, and this, of course, mostly applies to young men (are you a son or are you a father?) trying to win smiles outside family circles—and father ultimately paying the bills. But as it occurs to me here, there must be some connection.”
MR. GRAHAM: “I don’t see it. And while I’m about it, I’d like to tell you a thing or two concerning those Mexican books of yours. The Spanish was awful—even _The Yale Review_ and _The Nation_ noticed it.”
MRS. O’S. (getting a bit nasty): “It’s about all either of them did notice, especially _The Yale Review_; and nobody loves me on _The Nation_, but it was entirely the printer’s fault. He received them immaculate. I turned my face to the wall for three days after a glance at _A Diplomat’s Wife_. But then you probably don’t remember how perfectly sweet about these very books _The North American Review_ was (a man with the most perceptive of souls and a neat flair for the imponderabilities, named Lawrence Gilman, does _their_ book reviews), also _The New Republic_, which possesses a man named Alvin Johnson, inexorably sure about the humanities, separating with a single, infallible gesture the goats of letters from the sheep (but he still thinks, alas! that all men are born free and equal). And _The New York Sun_ was kind, kind, and _The New York Evening Post_, too, and they do say this latter rarely says anything nice about people till they’re dead and can’t enjoy it, and _The New York Tribune_, which has the reputation of being very particular about itself, and _The New York Times_, which never jokes and is known as a searcher after truth.”
Mr. Graham, dreadfully bored with me, mumbles something like “this is what you get when you try to do somebody a good turn.” I couldn’t catch it all, as he’d doubtless continued farther on his journey through the great Northwest. He wrote from one of a chain of “Grand Trunk Pacific Hotels,” and all I can think of to call after him is _Bon voyage_, though he won’t like it.
And now back to Masevaux in the valley of the Doller—Masevaux smelling a bit like nice leather things in expensive shops, with a hint of falling leaves.
VI
LA POPOTE
And how shall he who has not dined be strong? And how shall he who is not girded fight? And how shall he who has not wept laugh? And how shall he who hath not made a free offering of his life find it? And many other things occur to me, but enough for the wise of heart.
And now for _la popote_, which is in what was once the house of the Oberforster, in a street doubtless always muddy, looking out on the church, and it is square, of gray stucco, and red brick with a hall running through the center, like many and many a house.
The woodwork is everywhere painted brown and the wall-paper, too, is brown, a lighter, depressing brown. Above the dining-table is a ponderous, imitation-bronze chandelier, but its cruel light now shines on blue-clad men who have fought the good fight, agreeable, cultivated men of the world, and it touches strongly scar and galloon and decoration of these, selected _ex millibus et ex millibus_, by hidden powers, to return from battlefield and trench....
It’s the Oberforster’s glass that we use; it’s his imitation-bronze fruit-dish that is now filled with dark, rich grapes of victory. It’s his imitation-tin and real-glass punch-bowl that is on the table by the window. On the porcelain stove that heats well, too well (I sit with my back close to it), is a _dégagé_ marble bibelot, the heads of a man and a woman in _basso-rilievo_ cut in an obtrusively chance bit of marble, and it bears the motto, “_Amor condusse noi_.” Perhaps on their honeymoon, the Oberforster and his bride had made the classic _Italienische Reise_, and had pressed closely, so closely against each other in the railway carriage, that the apprehensive fellow-voyagers shut their eyes or sought another compartment. The Teutonic “will to live” is irresistible, and when it’s at work there’s nothing to be done except get out of the way.
Theirs were the lithographs representing beings of the Biedermayer epoch, theirs the many-tiered machine-turned, walnut sideboard. Theirs was (I know not how it got into that company of _ersatz_ and imitation) a beautiful old glass carafe, a shepherd and a sacrificial lamb engraved upon it (perhaps once a church vessel), but in it was a stopper, half cork and half tin, with an imitation turquoise in the middle.
Theirs was a smoking-set of imitation tin whose massive ash-receiver in the most horrid _art nouveau_ continually mocked the delicate spirals of smoke. Said the commandant one evening, flicking his cigar-ash into the dreadful thing:
“That invasion was almost as bad as this. You could have bought an ash-receiver like it in every big shop in Paris.”
“And in every little one,” finished Laferrière. “Thank God the frontier _is_ closed, even at the price.”
In the corner between the windows was an upright piano piled with the best of music, and there was a large and completely uninteresting turned-wood clock, stopped at 12.25 on August 7th, four years ago.
And the man that earned and owned it all is dead in a soldier’s grave, and the woman, Anna by name, weeps somewhere her lost love and the equally lost gods of her household. _Et c’est la guerre._
[Illustration: COMMANDANT POULET]
As for Madame Labonne’s cooking, she knows her business, and if it weren’t the obvious duty of those sitting about the table to take the gifts the gods and Madame Labonne provide, I should feel I were living much too well.
She gives us a _gâteau à la crème_ that disappears smoothly, leaving but an exquisite memory. She has another _gâteau à l’oignon_ (don’t turn away; it’s perfectly delicious and takes a day to make the onion part), her _filets_ melt in the mouth, and her _purées_ are the insubstantial fabric of a dream. When she serves the classic Alsatian dish of sauerkraut decorated with boiled potatoes and shining pieces of melting pork, you don’t really need to eat for twenty-four hours, and wouldn’t go to the _popote_ except for the conversation and the company. Sometimes the officers, the unwedded ones, think of marrying Madame Labonne—she’s fat and about sixty and doesn’t try to look young (by her works alone they shall know her), and the married ones think of trying to introduce her into their happy homes in some rôle or other.
And when they move into the rich, shining Alsatian plain, that they have looked down upon these four long years, she is to take part in the triumphal procession.
And this is how we generally find ourselves placed at table. I sit on the right of Commandant Poulet, who, somewhat as a prince of story, for these four years has administered with much calm, with great good sense, with wide understanding, and, above all, with immense tact and kindness, the not always simple affairs of the delivered ones of the reconquered triangle.
Only he can know the difficulties of the French Military Mission, though all may see the results. It is a land flowing with honey if not with milk (the busy bee in and out of war-time doth its work, though, it would seem, not so the cow).
In full maturity it has been given to Commandant Poulet to see results, and sometimes I have looked almost in and at a man whose strange lot during the war years has been constructive work. His first public appearance was when, as _tout jeune lieutenant remplissant des bouts de table_, he accompanied President Loubet to St. Petersburg on his 1902 visit. Since then many honors have been his, and here in Alsace he has been both Paul and Apollo, for he has reaped where he has planted and God _has_ given the increase. _Très chic_, in his horizon-blue, with his high decorations on his breast, _et très homme du monde_. This is what I see and it seems very fair. Of his personal life what can I know?—except that it must be as the life of all that walk the earth, disillusion succeeding illusion, grief tripping up joy; for there is no getting away from the old verses:
_Ainsi du mal au bien,_ _De la joie à la peine_ _Passe la vie humaine._
Somewhere in Lorraine the commandant has a destroyed château. But he can always dwell in the dwelling of his labors in Alsace.
Vis-à-vis is his first aide, Captain Tirman, whom I saw on my arrival, always with deep rings under his eyes, too much in rooms and bending over desks—_il boit le travail_. Entirely devoted to his chief. He is musical, too, and sometimes while waiting in the dining-room for the mess to assemble we find him playing Beethoven or Bach, or more recent and more compromising Germans, from the piles of the Oberforster’s music on the Oberforster’s piano. _La musique n’a pas de patrie_—for musical men who have fought. (But let a zealous _civil_ far from the front hear a strain of Schumann or Brahms issuing from some window and he runs straightway to the police.) Captain Tirman wears the Legion of Honor and the _Croix de Guerre_, and is so pale, I am told, because of the hard campaigns he has passed through, and wounds and illness. He is always in charge in the absence of the commandant, but though _être Tirmannisé_ is one of the gentle jokes of the _popote_, no signs of tyranny were apparent to me.
Captain Bernard, second aide, is, like the commandant, from Lorraine, and had prepared himself for the Paris bar. He conducted himself admirably during the war, Laferrière tells me. Wounded three times, he bears a great scar—_sa belle cicatrice_, as his comrades proudly call it—on his forehead (Verdun, August, 1916) and over his heart _la Légion d’Honneur_ and the _Croix de Guerre_. Always very carefully dressed—_tiré à quatre épingles_ (pulled out by four pins), as they nearly all are.
At his right sits Captain Sérin from Toulouse, the only Meridional at the table. He is very straightforward and uncomplicated, I should judge, as regards his psychology, with the rather objective eye of the man from the south. (They don’t dream the way we farther north do.) He sees a joke at any distance and is the sort, they tell me, who would obey as simply as he would breathe, without a thought of hesitation, an order unto death. The sort that when told to bring up reinforcements at a moment when it seems impossible, quite simply does it, and it only _happens_ to happen that he is living. He is not tall, but wide of shoulder, holding himself very straight, and on his breast there are ribbons, too. He is chief of the Gendarme Service, the first and last provost of Alsace reconquered.
On the other side of Captain Bernard sits Captain Toussaint, chief of the Forestry Service of the Masevaux district, clad in bottle-green, with silver bugles on his collar and the Legion of Honor and other decorations on his breast, _d’une grande bonté_, his comrades tell me. He is from the north, from Douai (his brother was killed at the front), tall, slim, pale-faced, lantern-jawed, everything is in his eyes—in the _regard_, as some one said of him—and much of his life is passed alone in forests. So different from Captains Bernard and Lavallée, living in Paris, between whom he generally sits; and he nearly always comes in late from his forests for luncheon and dinner.
“For Toussaint, Creation is represented by the first day when the heavens were formed, and everything that came afterward had something to do with forests,” some one said last night, as he was talking rather hotly about the war-time cutting down of the trees of France, and the influence the loss of forests had on the life of nations. _Très catholique_, also; but then these men of the Mission, with all of whom I have entered tabernacles, are of an extreme reverence. What they “believe” I know not.
Lieutenant Laferrière sits sometimes by me, sometimes at the end of the table. He has early gray hair, a fresh complexion, gray-blue eyes with a certain inwardness of expression, a smiling movement of the lips when speaking, and, with all his wit, an extreme kindness in human judgments. Indeed, I am struck by something of softness and patience in the eyes of each one of these men to whom nothing of war is foreign, who have looked on all combinations of mortal anguish, and whose eyes at times, too, have had the red look, the hard, bright look of men who have just killed.
Laferrière is very cultivated after the way of us dwellers in cities. He was Doctor of Law at the University of Lille. On the 2d of August, 1914, he closed his books, after which, as under-officer, he had lived for months that closely packed life of the trenches, “where one was never physically a moment alone” (hardest of all hardships, I have heard fastidious men say), then he had been called as jurist to the Mission. Emotional, but through circumstances or will, how can I know? giving the effect of having dominated the personal—to what point also I know not.
Lieutenant Lavallée, but recently come from Paris, sits at another end. His personality is less striking than some of the others at the table, though he has _une tête un peu mauresque_, like pictures of the _Conquistadores_, and is inclined to solemnity of mien. He has a charming voice, fresh, with warm notes in it, and sometimes of an evening sings Breton _chansons populaires_. We especially like the one concerning _la douce Annette_, who spun a fatal love-story with a certain Pierre who wouldn’t let go her hand.
There is one, Stroll by name, now absent, but his comrades evidently love him, for I often hear, “What a pity Stroll isn’t here”; or, “That is Stroll’s story.”
Also for a few days _en visite_ like myself is Captain Antoni, born at Strasbourg, but very French in appearance, a tall, _svelte_, thin-faced man with a rising and falling inflexion in his voice, who has been through the whole campaign and wears many decorations. He said last night that the fighting at Verdun, especially that at Hill 304, was the worst he had seen.
At this moment the Verdun sector, which knows the blood of men of many climes, is moist with that of _my_ countrymen.
Now this is part of what I see as I sit at table with these men. The common patriotic effort tends to screen the personal life of each, of which I know nothing. But I do know that destiny is largely formed by character and endowments, and, barring the fact that time and chance happeneth to all, I would be tempted to wager that when such or such a thing came to such or such a one, _thus_ he received it—gift or blow—thus he used it, once his own. So unescapable and visible are the sequences of character.
Sometimes we play bridge in the evening, pleasant, easy bridge, anybody taking a card back when once played, and changing his mind about declarations. As they so truly say, “_Nous jouons pour nous amuser_.”
And yesterday there appeared on the table the famous _cafetière_ and Sérin, his face shining with a great light, performed the rites. It was one of those large, high glass bulbs with a nickel coffee-pot below. Dry coffee is put into the glass bulb, water into the pot, an alcohol-lamp beneath, and the whole is hermetically sealed. After which, according to the mysterious and wonderful laws of nature, the water rises and wets the coffee; it must rise thrice, giving forth at the same time volcanic sounds. During the ceremony nothing else is thought of. The officiating high priest is harried with liturgical suggestions, or unkind remarks are made about his natural endowments. As that corked spout of the pot, horrid with potentialities, is turned now toward one, now toward the other, men who would have given their lives without a thought in the trenches, get nervous and call to Sérin, “_Dis-donc, tu vas me crever un œil!_” “Not toward Madame. It would be too terrible,” etc., etc., and in the end the spout, with all its possibilities, is turned toward the Oberforster’s made-in-Germany clock. After which one has a delicious cup of coffee and conversation becomes normal.[10]
Last night I found they were talking about giving a certificate of good conduct to one of them who is married, to take home with him to reassure his wife. A comrade, after a little badinage in the Latin manner, but very discreet I must say, objects: “But now there won’t be any _permissions_,” and, doubtfully, “We would have to give him the certificate for three whole months.”
Then, like the antiphon of some song, a voice said, “_Trois mois, c’est long_.”
Another said, “_Trois mois, c’est très long_.”
Another, with a sigh, “_C’est trop long_....” And I to smile—within myself.
Then a stumbling home on an invisible but strong horizon-blue arm, through the inky streets, ankle-deep in mud. Sometimes I haven’t known which one of the various kind arms it was, the electric pocket-lamp only occasionally making the darkness more manifest. No one to bump into, as circulation in the streets is forbidden after nine o’clock, on account of possible espionage.
And you will say these are pleasant days!
_Later._—Hunting in the bookcase, I found a small diamond-printed copy of _Hermann und Dorothea_. As, to the sound of near night-firing, I turned its smooth old pages, I realized it for one of the most completely objective works of genius ever born into the world. No thread of its maker’s identity is woven with it, no color of his personal experience. I felt but a sense of his complete and serene equilibrium, though the stream of words, bearing those golden thoughts, was so softly flowing, so crystal-clear, that it made me remember a line from another of Goethe’s poems, as subjective as this is objective:
_Der Geist ist Bräutigam._ _Wort sei die Braut._
In the little preface I found that the poet, in his old age, was wont to say of _Hermann und Dorothea_ that of his long poems it was almost the only one that gave him pleasure. I seemed to understand what he meant. By reason of its complete objectivity, he could have had no consciousness of that inadequacy familiar to mortals contemplating anything formed from themselves. No suffering had attended its birth; rather it would seem to have formed itself spontaneously on the heights out of some plastic stuff, light and bright as summer air, imperishable as granite. It did not recall to Goethe (nor does it to one who reads) that night of personal anguish, that day of emptiness, that hour of longing, nor even some glimpsing, vistaed moment wherein personal fulfilment held out its shining, shadowy hand.