Part 7
About this time the veteran was encouraged to tell a few of his 1870 experiences, and I felt as my grandchildren, if I ever have any, will feel when the veterans of 1918 will tell what they did “single-handed in the trenches,” or how, “as the only man left of their regiment,” they had held back the invaders, or how they hid in a barn and let them go by and then gave the alarm, “and a whole battalion had to surrender,” or what know I? Politely, but without eagerness, I listened, the 1870 veterans almost “spoiling the war” for me, with their eternal illustration of the flatness of not dying on the battlefield. I tried to bring the conversation back to 1918—leaving a rather long and not very clear account of how he kept his ancient, beloved, red _képi_ under glass, or next his heart, or pressed in an album, I rather forget which. I wanted to hear the story of the famous entry of the _Pantalons Rouges_ into Masevaux on August 7, 1914, where they have been ever since, though now changed into this celestial blue, which decorates the earth (as I have frequently said, and doubtless will again) as never before has it been decorated by any men of any age or any war. Pictures of “_La Guerre en Dentelles_,” or gallooned and be-caped and be-frogged officers with lances or drawn swords on horseback, charging the enemy in the typical poses of Lasalle, or “_La Vieille Garde_,” or Wellington or Blücher at Waterloo, or anything else that ever was, are dull beside the strange, appealing beauty of the blue battalions of the twentieth century.
I listened to Madame Chagué telling of the glad reception of those who entered Masevaux on that 7th of August, houses and hearts flung wide open, how everywhere the upper windows were crowded with women and children leaning out to see them come over the dark mountains and along the bright roads. Many left that same night, as they did from Thann and Bitschwiller and Moosch and all the towns about, marching on to Mulhouse, which they took only to be driven out, and since then many red-trousered ghosts walk the otherwise unmystical, industrial streets of Mulhouse. Three weeks later Mulhouse was again entered, and again, with many losses, other red pantaloons were driven out, since which the chimneys of Mulhouse have smoked a German smoke to a German heaven.
Madame Chagué is very Catholic, too, and bristles at the bare idea of any government, even the “Tiger’s,” taking liberties with the ancient faith. They want a bishop of their own, an Alsatian shepherd—“_faut pas nous bousculer dans nos petites habitudes_”—she kept repeating. I wondered what the Tiger and all the imitation tigers would say when they come to learn just how they feel here. There’s the most Gordian of knots awaiting them, for it appears that the Germans gave three thousand marks a year to each curé, and the French government, less enamoured of the ministers of God, doesn’t give any. However, that is only one of a series of knots on a very long string, and patient and very deft fingers will be needed for the untying.
In each of these comfortable houses authentic ancestors look from the walls, ancestors who knew the Thirty Years’ War, or the Napoleonic campaigns, or 1870, or ancestors-to-be who have seen the World War. And all the dwellers of these large-roomed, high-roofed, deep-windowed houses, having been delivered, in turn deliver themselves of their sensations, thoughts, emotions, acts, on being delivered. One might, I dimly foresaw, do to one’s breast what the wedding guest did to his when he heard the loud bassoon. That I may not seem unkind, I want to say another last word about the veterans, the so often toothless, bent, sightless, forgetful veterans. They would be all right in themselves, if they weren’t so horribly illustrative. They seem to be saying all the time, “If Mortality doesn’t get you one way, it does another,” till you think that short agony on the battlefield, and long glory, are greatly preferable to decay and no glory. And no veteran will keep this my little book on the table by his bed. He would know, too well, that I am right.
Later, as I slipped across the cobbly square to my house, and mounted the broad oaken stairway to my room, a feeling of nostalgia possessed me at the thought of leaving Alsace, to which but a few short days before I had seemed so unrelated. This bit of French history in the making, molded by the men of the grave, kind eyes, whose comradery with one another is so unfailing and whose courtesy to me is so exquisite, had become dear to me, and, too, I was looking on something that would never be again. The web was shifting, other figures were to be woven in it. Fate was to pull new things as well as old out from its storehouse and proceed with its endless combinations. Masevaux, capital of Alsace Reconquered, would be overshadowed by Strasbourg, by Metz, by Colmar, by Mulhouse. But it will have had again a little day, which is all an individual or a town can reasonably ask, standing under the changeless stars.
As I went to the _popote_, low over the houses stretched the Great Bear, so vast, so splendid, that it seemed almost alone in a heaven growing misty toward its edges, though Alcor, the Starry Horseman, was twinkling strangely bright close to Mizar. But the autumnal stars hanging over the rich-colored hills of Alsace have not the brilliancy of those that I saw above the gray-white Châlons plain, that late, red October of 1917.
After dinner Commandant Poulet drew on my map the boundaries of _Alsace Reconquise_, as it is now, this fourth day of November. But as he drew I knew he was feeling that it was a fleeting, vanishing thing he was recording, for he stopped a moment, as a man might stop following a wind or tracing a line in water.
Then as we sat, some half-dozen of us, about the dining-table, under the hard light of the Oberforster’s chandelier, the commandant, flicking his cigar ash into the Oberforster’s dreadful ash-receiver, told me something of the history of the Mission, which is briefly this.
Though French troops entered the valleys of the Doller, the Thur, and the Largue on the 7th of August, 1914, the French administration of that little triangle of Alsace Reconquered, as I found it, was organized only in November of the same year. Its first form was purely military, the authorities responsible for the civil population being also in command of the military operations, the final word in all that concerned Alsace coming from the general in command of the Seventh Army, in whose sector it was. These were successively Generals de Maud’huy, Villaret, Debeney, and de Boissaudy. The little triangle was first divided into two territories only, that of the valley of the Largue, with Dannemarie as its capital, that of the valley of the Thur with Thann as capital. Masevaux at that time did not form a distinct territory, but was an annex, as it were, of Thann, as also was St.-Amarin.
The officers administering the territories were chosen mostly from the reserve—men whose former avocations had prepared them for the various rôles they were to fill in Alsace. They were members of the _Conseil d’Etat_, of the _Cour des Comptes_, magistrates, _Gardes des Forêts et des Eaux_, together with many others belonging to technical professions. The first _Capitaine Administrateur_ was Captain Heurtel, in civil life _Maître des Requêtes au Conseil d’Etat_. Though seriously wounded at the very beginning of the war, in December of 1914, he asked to be again sent to the front. He met his death at Verdun in 1916. His successor was Commandant Poulet, _Conseiller d’Etat_, who took up office on Christmas Day, 1914.
In July, 1917, the Mission was detached from the General Headquarters and placed under the Ministry of War. Its new name, expressive of enlarged activities, was changed to _Mission Militaire Administrative en Alsace_ (Military Administrative Mission in Alsace), the central office being transferred to Masevaux, which Fate had placed half-way between St.-Amarin at one end of the reconquered triangle and Dannemarie at the other.
Ever since, in and out of the building of the German _Kommandantur_, once the nave of the old Abbey, men clad in horizon-blue have been coming and going, busied about affairs after the French way, the ancient town of Masevaux entering into the unexpected enjoyment of what might be called an Indian summer. Nothing else has happened to it, so far as I can see, since the Revolution, when the Chapter was suppressed and the Goddess Reason briefly installed in the Abbey. And Masevaux loves and cherishes its brief glory as only lovely and transient things are loved and cherished.[12]
VIII
LUNCHEON AT BITSCHWILLER. THE MISSION IN RESIDENCE AT ST.-AMARIN. SAINT-ODILE
_November 5th._—Awakened early, early by the sound of heavy firing. Later, looking out of the square, I see the market in full swing. Against the inn of Les Lions d’Or, with its comfortable courtyard and two red wings, stands a wagon-load of hay with a pale-green cover thrown over it. Carts of cabbages and carrots, drawn by white oxen, are pulled up under the yellowing trees. The black of the clothes of the women making their purchases cuts in very hard. Blue-clad men come and go; several motors are standing before the door of the Administration. The shining, diffused light of the mist-hidden sun rounds every corner and fills up every space with a pleasant softness.
At eleven I start out with the commandant, Captain Sérin, and Lieutenant Laferrière to motor to Thann through a world of rust and green and gold-colored hills, under the whitest of heavens. So soft and shining is the beauty of the lovely earth, and so soon to pass into the winter, that I say to the commandant how like the transient beauty of a woman of forty-five are these delicate, hazy hills with their cashmere shawls still twisted about their shoulders, drawn up over their heads, dropping down to their green-valleyed feet. I mean the woman of forty-five who is still loved.
Again we stopped on the crest between the valleys of Masevaux and of Thann, and again we stopped and peered through the wire-and-pine screen, out toward Mulhouse and the Rhine and the Black Forest. The valley was blue and shining. Even the windows of the great, white building of the _Idioten-Anstalt_, where the Germans are bivouacked, were visible. Beyond were the high towers of their potassium-works. As those three men stood looking out over the rich plain I thought, “Always will I remember the officers of the Mission like that, standing on the heights, shading their eyes with their hands as they looked down into the land of Egypt, wherein the Lord was to lead them....”
New shell-holes were all about us, and there was a sharp, continual reverberation of cannon among the cashmere-shawled hills.
At Thann we stopped for a moment by the fountain near the church (in peace-times, the old statue of St.-Théobald that I saw at Sewen surmounts the charming column), the commandant having been saluted by a young American officer, leading by the hand a little girl of seven or eight, in Alsatian costume—huge black bow, black velvet bodice, full white skirts. He was quite simply a young man whose parents had gone to America, he himself had fought on the Mexican border, got his commission, and was proudly—oh, so proudly and so smilingly—walking his native streets of Thann with his little niece.
We are _en route_ to lunch with M. and Madame Galland, at Bitschwiller, who receive us as agreeable people of the world receive their guests in all quarters of the globe. They were of those who could have gone, yet remained, during the many bombardments of the town—_noblesse oblige_, and have been a blessing to the valley.
[Illustration: THANN. THE CATHEDRAL PORTAL]
Madame Galland, with powdered hair, slender, delicate of feature and of form, dressing older than she is, might have looked out of a Latour pastel. M. Galland, too, is fine-featured, well groomed, agreeable, and there was a handsome daughter with a quietly sorrowful expression on her young face. It is a house from every one of whose many wide windows one saw gold leaves hanging on black branches, behind them warm, rust-colored hills, traced with pale-yellow larches and stamped with black patterns of pine. Within, the rooms were beautiful with blue-clad men. There was an agreeable and suave odor of kindness and unstintingness about the house, mingling with that of the ease of people of the world, and the surety of those in authority, altogether a _good_ house. Eight or ten officers besides ourselves sat down to the usual delicious and abundant Alsatian luncheon, the conversation intimate enough to have color, general enough not to exclude the stranger within the gates. And it ran after this way, beginning with accounts of that last day of July, 1914, when _Kriegsgefahrzustand_ had been proclaimed in the valley and they were completely cut off from the outer world, witnessing only the sinister passing and repassing of regiments of dragoons and detachments of artillery. M. Galland had procured all the flour and dried vegetables possible at Mulhouse to ration the population of Bitschwiller in case of need, and collected what money he could. The days passed in suspense, till the 6th of August, when they remarked much coming and going of troops; on the 7th the German cavalry was seen beating a hasty retreat.
A _Brigadier de Chasseurs_, mounted on a great black horse, is the first Frenchman they see, advancing alone, looking slowly about him, his revolver in his hands, fearing some snare. Then the _Pantalons Rouges_ pour into the valley, flowers at every bayonet and in every tunic, and the Gallands receive the first French general to enter Alsace since 1870, General Superbie, commanding the 41st Brigade. At two o’clock, after refreshments had been offered from every house, the regiment took the road to Mulhouse, where that same night many of them had their “rendezvous with death.”
The talk then fell on that mysterious thing called luck, and how the soldier must have it, be _chançard_, if he were to come through, and of generals who, like General Liautey, wouldn’t have under them any save notoriously lucky officers. And there was much heedless joking (with the Fates perhaps listening). I, who never say even within myself, “I _will_ do thus and so,” without adding “if God will,” remarked at last, propitiatingly, that “’twas somewhat difficult to tell _beforehand_ who was going to be lucky.”
“But for military purposes,” dryly remarked an officer who had not yet spoken, “one needs to be lucky only as long as the war lasts,” which being hideously true, we turned to the less elusive subject of the rich and easy living of the peasants in this part of the world since the war, and how they, even like unto those other tens of thousands of “war-workers,” will “miss” it. They had become accustomed to the troops, and there was the thrice blessed _popote_ in which they more or less shared. And when the Americans came things were still better in a still better world. For they were very free with their money (though no one could understand a word that they said), and then they went, and the French troops came again, and there was something very pleasant about their return. Though they didn’t have the money of the Americans, they could be conversed with and they would lend a hand in the garden, and were always joking with the children, and helped with the crops, and the virtues of the Americans, if not their money, were somewhat forgotten. They were, in places, even remembered as a nuisance, wanting everything cleared up, stupid bores about the dung-heap, “and will you believe it, Monsieur,” one of them said to Laferrière, “they even washed their dishes with _soap_, and you couldn’t give the dishwater to the pigs!”
After which I related Colonel Burnside’s “best short story,” also concerning the peasant point of view. When he was in Lorraine with his men, at the well-named watery (not watering) place called Demanges-aux-Eaux, a delegation of villagers waited on him, with the complaint that the Americans made so much noise at night that the _sheep_ couldn’t sleep!
And we finished luncheon gaily, to the rather distant sound of German guns, with the story of the wife of a (or probably the) French soap manufacturer in Tonquin who came to the Gallands’ for convalescence after “war-strain.” How she charmed them with her singing, especially of children’s songs, delighted them with the reserve and modesty of her conduct, and after two months turned out to have been once a well-known, café-chantant singer with the proverbial “past and many brilliant presents,” enjoying a glimpse of home-life in Alsace.
Coffee was poured by the handsome daughter, who with her firm yet delicate profile, and rich, dark hair drawn heavily back, looked like some model for a head on a bank-note or medallion. Her mother, saying to me, “_Vous êtes femme de cœur_” took me apart and told me her history.
And perhaps because so much had been buried in the great war of youthful love and hope, I may record a little of this story; its grief is typical in simplicity and purity of many countless thousands in this land of France.
For months she had been beloved by a handsome young _chasseur_ stationed with his regiment at Bitschwiller, one of many officers to frequent the hospitable house of the Gallands. His photograph on a table shows him tall, broad-shouldered, straight-eyed, kind-mouthed. On account of the uncertainties of his life he did not declare himself while there, but immediately afterward, doubtless because of some presentiment, he wrote to the mother telling of his love. This was found to be returned and they became fiancés.
A few weeks after he was killed in Flanders, in one of the Mont Kemmel combats, a ball striking him in the forehead as he leaped from a trench to lead a counter-attack.
He was one of ten sons. Six of his brothers had fallen, too. Awed, I asked concerning her who had borne them, but she had gone to her grave long before the World War; though I knew her not, thinking of the mother of the Maccabees, and many like her, I thanked God that those seven wounds had been spared a mother’s heart. Then we returned to the young girl’s story.
“But never to have looked into each other’s eyes and exchanged the glance of love,” I said, “it’s a shadowy and heavy grief for her youth to bear. Would it not have been better for them to have been united?”
The mother answered, after a pause, “There was no time.”
“But this can’t be the end for her; she’s only beginning life!” I said, and thought of the great, sorrowing hosts of these young widows of the heart alone, and of the vexed question in their families, as to whether it was better to become a widow or remain a maid.
“She said to me only the other day, ‘I have all that I need for my whole life.’”
“She will find that the heart is not like that,” I cried; “it doesn’t seem able to content itself even with the sweetest and holiest things of memory. It’s forever reaching out.”
For a moment we stood with clasped hands, looking out to the hills whence despair had so often come, and Madame Galland added, quite simply, “Fifty thousand sleep around about us.”
For one of the many-colored hills, pressing close to the broad windows of the salons, separated us from the Molkenrain and the sacramental Hartmannswillerkopf.
In the nearest, that rises without any perspective immediately from the house, is an old quarry, and it is there that since four years the workers in M. Galland’s factory are sheltered during the frequent bombardments of the town, for in what once was used for constructing spinning-machines eleven million shells have been turned out, all of which is quite well known to the enemy.
The pleasant odor of the house followed us to the motor and even as we rolled swiftly down the valley of the Thur, past Moosch, against whose hill, still like a picture tilted back, lies the military cemetery, cut out of the rust and gold-colored hill, with its black splashes of pines. Again peace to those who lie there.
Everywhere negro troops, sitting, standing, leaning, lying (a good deal of leaning and lying). An occasional forlorn-looking white officer. It is the same Fifteenth New York Infantry.
“I am told they were all, before they were drafted, lift-boys and newsboys and bootblacks and railway-car porters,” said one of the officers.
“You mustn’t class these last with the others. You don’t know the majesty and authority of the Pullman-car porter. He’s as final as the Germans think the Fourteen Points are,” I answered.
I had felt myself somewhat exotic when I arrived in Masevaux; but I’m blotted into the landscape, one with Alsace, compared to these sons of Ham, clad in khaki, who fill the blue-and-gold valley of the Thur.
Then we roll into the long street of the village of St.-Amarin, named after the saint to whom a saint friend said, upon seeing him about to make himself scarce at the approach of assassins, “_If you miss this opportunity for martyrdom, you may never get another!_” (It all depends on what you want and what your friends can do for you, and it isn’t a bit like politics.) But I’ll tell the story of St.-Amarin another time.
The town that bears his name is long and rambling. There is a pink church tower surmounted by a slate-roofed top, shaped something like a turban with a point like those on helmets, and there is the fountain bearing the date 1830, and on its column is perched the Gallic cock, and it is the pride of the long street and vies with the church square as a meeting-place.
But this is 1918 and the commandant, who loves St.-Amarin, as I can see by the gentle, almost affectionate way he looks about, shows me first the cinematograph, in a sort of club for soldiers. It has been a Mecca of warmth and comfort since three years for those coming down from frozen mountain-sides. Pictures by George Scott (good pictures) decorate it, and fancy is unbridled where the enemy is concerned.
The Crown Prince is represented in a _loge_ with a voluptuous actress twice his size, and, furthermore, the artist, not content with mere paint and canvas, has given him real wooden legs which dangle from the painted sides of the painted _loge_. The Prince of —— said to an officer showing him about, “And even so you have flattered my cousin.”
Franz Joseph, shrunken by years, is represented huddled up in another _loge_, with another actress, but it didn’t strike me as funny, nor did it recall in any way the tales of his very unspectacular friendship with the faithful Käthe Schratt.
A little way down the street is the pleasant officers’ club, with books and papers, deep chairs and long divans. I dwell a little on the comfort of it all, thinking what it has meant to half or entirely frozen men coming down from those relentless winter heights.
Then we go to the Bureaux de l’Administration across the way, which had been the headquarters of the “Mission Militaire d’Alsace” until it was transferred to Masevaux a year ago.