Part 9

We descend at Rammersmatt, a quite unsinful-looking place, and while he is gone Bernard and I visit the old church, beautifully held in the cleft of the hill, lying against another hill, looking down on the plain of Cernay, toward the German lines. It is this same plain of Cernay, which I mentioned before, that was known in the old days as the “_Champ de Mensonges_.” There Ariovistus was defeated by Caæsar. There, too, Louis le Débonnaire was attacked by his three sons and betrayed by his army, and ever since it has been justly known as the “Field of Lies.” Centuries later the Swedes vanquished the imperial armies there under a Duke of Lorraine. To-day it is that thing known as “No Man’s Land,” brown with barbed-wire entanglements and rough with shell-holes—and other things besides.

Back of it are the zigzagging German lines. It is, too, the place of the century-old legend of the Niedecker’s young Thierry who, wandering there one night, saw strange sights. He had not drained a single glass of the _Rang de Thann_, nor of the red wine of Turckheim, called “_Sang des Turcs_,” but was dreaming, as an adolescent does, of everything and nothing, when suddenly the very stones of the valley began to move, and great fissures showed in the earth. From them issued thousands upon thousands of warriors of bygone times, striking against their shields and crying out in strange, hoarse voices, “_Hodeīdah! Hodeīdah!_”

Finally a man taller than all the others, Louis le Débonnaire, son of Charlemagne it was, his long, silvery hair surmounted by a gold and jeweled crown, jumped on a white horse and called by name, one after the other, the chiefs of his cohorts, who answered, “Here.”

Then the king, groaning with great groans, spoke beseechingly the names of the sons he had begotten, Lothaire, Louis, and Pépin.

But Lothaire, Louis, and Pépin mocked him and to further wound him caused to be brought on the battlefield his nephew, Bernard, he who had taken arms against him and whose eyes the king had caused to be put out (and for this the king knew little sleep).

Then as the battle begins the sightless Bernard jumps up behind the king’s saddle, paralyzing his every movement. But at the very height of the combat, above its clash and shoutings, the third hour of morning sounds from a church tower, and suddenly the earth receives again the ancient host and all is as before. Only Thierry from the Niedeckers lay as if dead.

And the Field of Lies, _le Champ de Mensonges_, is said to be the spot where the children of earth will be assembled at the Day of Judgment, for what crime can equal that of the sons of Louis, who conquered, imprisoned, and caused to die of grief a father whose only fault was that he loved them too well? It is even said that it is the troops of Louis who will sound the brazen trumps to awaken the dead for their last accounting.

Now I see it as “No Man’s Land,” rusty and brown with patches of barbed wire, rough with great shell-holes, but they say that even in intervals of peace it is never so luxuriantly fertile as are the fields that lie about it....

A white, very white afternoon heaven stretches above us. Very violent cannonading.

“_C’est nous—c’est le Boche_,” Bernard repeats from time to time. Then his sharp eye distinguishes a group of German airplanes, and, looking where he points, I see five spots black, black in the white sky.

They, too, are immediately fired on. I hear over my head the great swish made by the shells from the guns placed on a hill behind us—or so sounding. My ear is not quick to distinguish directions in these echoing hills.

Little balls of snow-white shrapnel, like beautifully wound balls of fleecy wool, gently unloosen themselves about the black spots of the five airplanes, which, after a while, disappear to the east.

Though not so overcome as the Niedecker’s Thierry, I feel that my eyes, too, have looked on a strange spectacle.

Then Laferrière rejoins us. By the pleased look on his face we guess that he hasn’t made the wages of sin too high, and we continue on our way under the late, and still very white, afternoon sky. Suddenly the heavily plated, thickly enameled rust and gold and black of the hillsides seem to disappear and the earth is green again, young and tenderly green, like spring, but how and why? It lasted but a few minutes, for on the slopes toward Thann there was again the autumnal gleam of gold and rust, and spots of fathomless black.

Entering Laimbach, we stopped to get the mayor, who was to conduct us to the old Jesuit church, half-way between his village and the village of Otzwiller, or rather its site, for Otzwiller disappeared completely during the Thirty Years’ War, wherein each lovely Alsatian valley had been sacked and burned and destroyed, and friends of yesterday were enemies of to-day, and _vice versa_.

The mayor was a voluble, amiable mayor, who had conserved, during those many German years, a vast amount of creaking, noisy, unpleasant French.

His village was ancient, high-roofed, many-fountained, and had been much shelled. The streets were full of children playing, blue soldiers were walking about, girls were leaning out of the windows to give and get a greeting, or being pinched as they giggled about the streets, clicking their sabots in the mud. As we passed out the white sky darkened suddenly and a hard red began to burn in the west. We found ourselves nearing a half-demolished fifteenth-century church, placed strangely between the battered, living village and the ghostly village of the Thirty Years’ War. It was of _grès rose_ and had been built on the foundations of an even earlier one, and near it was a shell-shot, ancient, high, red-roofed presbytery. For generations the church had been a shrine of St.-Blaise, and on every 3d of February the mayor told us (but sadly, as one speaking of a pleasant past) there had been a great pilgrimage made by those suffering from throat maladies.

Now over all was hanging a penetrating atmosphere of bootless desolation, and I was suddenly seized with an anxious feeling that I should be about the secret lonely business of my soul. Life seemed unbearably sad and short, and “where was the place of eternal happiness, the place where the Barbarian need be feared no more?” ...[15]

In front of the church had been placed, somewhat indiscreetly, the officers thought, a big battery. And the mayor said, too, apologetically, “_Evitément z’édait mal joizi par écard à l’éclise_,” for the battery had soon been sighted. After the church had received many shells right in her pink and lovely bosom, it had been moved some forty meters away, but even so it had again been _repérée_, and the church had suffered the usual fate of churches near batteries. Some fine old columns were left in the apse, of the delicious _grès rose_. For a moment Laferrière and I stood scaling off bits of the disfiguring gray plaster and wondering why it had ever been put on, it and all the other gray stucco that a certain austere century had plastered over gorgeous building-stone everywhere in Europe.

The church, like the village of the Thirty Years’ War, will soon be but a name, for its walls are cracked and sagging, and with another winter’s frost they will crumble and fall. Through the roofless nave we walked over a mass of torn-up old mosaic flooring, and heaps of gaudy modern stained glass fallen from the lovely, ancient, pointed windows.

It was getting dark as we passed out into the disorderly cemetery, between the church and the battery (and even for a cemetery very uninviting, torn up as it was by recent shells). Ends of coffins were sticking out, shabby, twisted, bead wreaths and muddy, discolored tricolor badges lay about, while in the middle of a once tidy family plot, by name Hilz, was a huge new shell-hole of only the day before.

The mayor gave a shudder as he looked at his own familiar graveyard, where his parents and his friends had been laid—though not to rest. He was out for the first time after grippe and he said, with a determined look and in his most creaking French, “If I have to die, all right, but I’ve forbidden my daughter to bury me here.” Many, many had also fallen in the fields, and everywhere thin earth lay over damp, shallow graves marked by shabby, crooked crosses. Meadow mists were beginning to rise and the copper-colored edge had hardened in the sky. I felt again an inexpressible discouragement. I tried to think of Peace, so near, so hotly desired, so redly pursued, but I could only perceive the damp meadow, the demolished church, the gun-emplacements, the disorderly, shelled cemetery, and the humid odor of death and mold and rotting leaves. As yet nothing seemed to have risen incorruptible.

We turned and went again along the dark, damp valley road till we reached the village with its consoling hum of life. Through the dusky street washed the lovely soft blue of soldiers; a group stood with some girls around the beautiful fountain, deeply pink in the half-light, built in the fifteenth century by the Jesuits, though the mayor insisted on placing the Sons of Loyola in the fourteenth. In fact, the Jesuits and the fourteenth century were one in his mind. Then, as far as he was concerned, came the war of 1914. He wanted us to come into his house to partake of some brand of white liqueur—as I have said the people of these valleys distil all and every bright-colored fruit of their earth. It would seem that the whole flora of Alsace can be used to this end, and no matter which of God’s colors go into their alembics, passing through, it comes out pure white, to befuddle the heads and harden the stomachs of the populace—and little boys are born with the burden of deafness. Though twilight enveloped us, I knew the look that must be on the mayor’s face, and something a bit phosphorescent came into his eyes as he spoke of a _petite mirabelle_. Fortunately, it was too late to accept.

A few minutes later we found ourselves on the screened road to Masevaux, moving slowly, without lights, the road overlooking the Field of Lies, where the Germans watched.

Above the hills in front of us was a very thin, very long, very red, crescent moon. No one spoke.

Doubtless the officers, like myself, were wondering upon what, when it was full and white, its light would shine. Now it was turned to blood.

The roads were crowded with rattling artillery wagons, transporting guns and supplies under cover of the deep, blue night. Once or twice on some hillside, turned away from the German valley, was the leaping of a flame, from the fire of a group of _artilleurs_, who were to wait the morning on wooded slopes.

Thoughts of the ghostly village of Otzwiller, now but a name, pursued me, and of the Swedish invasion. And the miseries of the Thirty Years’ War seemed to confound themselves with these of the war I know so well, while the night deepened, under the long, thin, red moon, hanging behind black-palled hills, in a heaven that still had an edge of copper.

A church bell sounded and something flying swiftly touched me at that hour of the evening sacrifice, and I knew then that those who tread the olives are rarely anointed with the oil, and I cried out within myself suddenly and in despair, a long-unremembered line of the great Italian:

“_Faro come colui che piange._”

X

THE VALLEY OF THE THUR

_November 7th, St.-Amarin._—This morning farewell, perhaps a long farewell, to Masevaux, and I now dwell in the broad, sweet valley of the Thur. I had felt many pains of parting while putting my things into the Japanese straw basket and the little leather valise. This was quite a simple act, for I flatter myself that those receptacles contain only essentials, though I had long since begun to wish that I had brought another dress for evening, feeling a bit dull always buttoned up in my uniform, and only a white shirt changed from a blue one to mark the difference between morning and evening. One of those 1918 dresses, that can be carried in the pocket without making it bulge, would not have added perceptibly to the weight of my accoutrement, and would have brightened up the _popotes_. The light from the Oberforster’s chandelier at Masevaux was as pitiless as that which beats about thrones—and presidential chairs (which much resemble them)—and ladies _en mission_ should come prepared.

Before leaving I went to say good-by to Mère Labonne, who showed me the good things in preparation for luncheon and begged me to stay—scrambled eggs with truffles, two _poulets_ ready for roasting, a tart _au mocha_ that she was frosting on a marble table. But the look of one who goes was in my eyes, and she ceased to insist.

Return to the Place du Chapitre; many officers and motors under the yellowing trees in front of the _Kommandantur_, a general arriving, some sort of delegation departing. I say a thousand thanks to the amiable, cultivated, agreeable Demoiselles Braun, three of whom wear decorations for their war-work in hospitals, for contagious diseases, and one, Stéphanie, “_qui n’a pas dit son dernier mot_,” is charming after the way of the perceptive, witty women of the seventeenth or eighteenth century. Then I find myself getting into the motor of the commandant, who, in the meantime, has greeted and sped the general on his way. His face has something shining about it as he gives the great news, written on the no longer insubstantial air, of the German demand for an armistice. Then he reads the _communiqué_ from the Belfort newspaper as we drive out of Masevaux, telling us more about the Germans in full retreat, and the Americans close behind them at _Sedan_! What a rustling of the pages of history! The mind leaps to new things, life normal again, and all forces bent to reconstruction.

As we pass over the screened road to Thann, where we are to lunch with the military mayor, Captain Saint-Girons, the net of broom and pine camouflage, screening the valley where the Germans are, suddenly seemed some monument of ancient history; and, unlike the noisy hours of yesterday, there was no sound of cannon.

Arrived at Thann, it is we who give the great, the unbelievable, the unrealizable news of the demand for an armistice to Captain Saint-Girons, who, with several uniformed schoolmasters, is waiting in front of the Mairie to receive us. And our “feet are beautiful as the feet of them that bring the Gospel of Peace and glad tidings of good things.”

I think for a moment how strange for _me_ to carry it to them, to these men, who have fought for it, who have waited for it, watched for it, bled for it—but everything is strange in this strangest of all strange worlds.

Going into the house, we find other schoolmasters, with some bright-eyed little boys ranging in years from seven to twelve.

Then to lunch. I sit on the commandant’s right, Captain Gasquet, _adjoint_ of the mayor, on my other side, the mayor himself opposite, the schoolmasters placed prudently and watchfully near that selected flock, who enliven the ends of the table. Now these little Alsatian hopefuls are very bright of eye, rosy of cheek, and on their good behavior, which, in spite of lurking potentialities, persisted during the lunch, even when a glow, doubtless not unaccustomed, tinged their cheeks, as they drank the wine of their own hillsides.

At dessert I asked Commandant Poulet to drink to Sedan, the _new_ Sedan. I thought within myself, “Is it not even now as a temple being cleansed and glorified in the chalice of the blood of _my_ people, the blood of the khaki-clad youths from over the seas, whom Fate, since all time, had decreed to unseal it?” Tears came to my eyes, there was a deep beat in my breast.

And it had been forty-eight years and two months and seven days since it was torn from a vanquished France.

I scarcely remember what was said of the day’s events; feeling, rather than thought, was flooding about the table, and it was in gratitude, in wonderment, and rather silently, for a group of Frenchmen, that the luncheon proceeded. Each was thinking perhaps of his part of loss and grief making up the victory.

Names of Americans who had visited Thann were spoken: Dr. Herbert Adams Gibbons, long the friend of Alsace, and in some wise, as I told them, the god of the machine directing my steps to them; Mr. John Weare; and others whom I don’t recall. There had been, too, a fair and fleeting vision of Mrs. Bliss one snowy winter day.

Many beautiful words were said of my country, and in that hour I think it was, to them of the reconquered triangle, “_dulce et decora_” to have even the least of the daughters of the Stars and Stripes at their board, that hers should have been among the feet bringing “the glad tidings of good things.”

When coffee and _quetsch_ and cigarettes were passed around, the schoolmasters made ready to pour some of the heady white liqueur into the glasses of even the smallest of the little boys, but the commandant said, “No,” and cigarettes only are offered to the babes. I would put my hand in the fire (knowing I could draw it out unsinged) that it was not the first time they had puffed “caporals.” The seven-year-old one held his with an astounding ease, not entirely hereditary. When he had finished he was stood on a chair, from which he recited “_Le Loup et l’Agneau_,” the lines concerning the now extremely well-demonstrated “_La raison du plus fort est toujours la meilleure_,” being given almost at a breath, one word tightly tied to another in quite an ingenious way.

An older one, whose naturally flashing eye was slightly restrained only by the solemnity of the occasion, gave us the equally classic, “_Maidre corpeau sur un arbre bergé_.” He hadn’t been caught so young, and the old Adam in the shape of his German accent was heavy upon him. Then, standing in a row, they sang “_Le Chant du Départ_,” that greatest of all the wars’ marching songs, and the childish voices cut my heart like a knife, and tears were loosened, and through their blur I seemed to see the march of the generations of Alsace adown the ages, fulfilling the shifting, cruel destinies of border peoples. Ghosts of the Thirty Years’ War, of the Napoleonic wars, of 1870, and of 1914, and of the other dateless struggles that have ravaged their rich valleys, come before me. I weep and weep, and my handkerchief is a microscopic, damp, gray ball. I have an idea that pride of sex alone restrained the blue-clad men from tears. Peace, lovely Peace, desired like the morning, was arising, but her light was to shine on rivers of blood, running through such black ruins that her glory and her sweetness, and even her hope, hurt with a great hurt, and I thought again on those who, empty-armed, must yet rejoice....

Afterward I strolled along the banks of the pebbly Thur with the commandant and Captain Saint-Girons. There is a river-path leading under balconied, red-roofed houses, or by gray walls, and there is an old round tower having a caplike roof with a point on the top, and against it are silhouetted a poplar and a sycamore. Nearly everywhere the lovely gray lace spire of the cathedral shows above roof or tree or chimney; and it is said that though Strasbourg’s cathedral is higher and Friburg’s is wider, Thann’s is the loveliest.[16]

When the Mission had its headquarters at Thann, the commandant and Captain Saint-Girons were wont to walk along this path in the afternoon, holding a sort of tribunal, receiving petitions, granting favors, righting differences that may occur even among the delivered, quite after the fashion of Saint-Louis receiving the petitions of his people under the great tree.

The river flows through the heart of the lovely old town, badly bombarded in spots. To our left as we walked rose the deep-colored hills in the full afternoon burnishing of their deep rusty reds and pale gilts. As we pass up the steep winding road we meet the Duc de Trévise, under-lieutenant, with a sketch in his hand of a shell-shot historic corner of Thann, the commandant wishing to save at least a memorial wherever he can. Furthermore, Thann was black-spotted with our negro troops. Sometimes I stopped and spoke, sometimes I waved as I passed, just to see the full, white-toothed smile against the exotic background.

[Illustration: THANN. LA VIEILLE TOUR]

The orphanage toward which we are bound is in the old Château de Marsilly, beautifully situated in the cleft of its own hill and restored not too cruelly. Close above it rises the Engelberg, the tower of whose castle was blown up when Turenne practised the arts of war in the valley. Part of it lies like a great ring, and is called the “Eye of the Witch.” To our right as we mount is a V-shaped glimpse of the valley where the Germans lie intrenched, formed by close, rich hillsides, on which lie in lovely, ruglike designs the vineyards of _l’heureuse Alsace féconde en vignobles_.

A charming, vivacious nun whose age was unguessable by twenty years, dark-eyed and satin-skinned, whose manners could not have been surpassed for ease by any woman of the great world, greets us. I think for the thousandth time how perfect the polish the conventual life gives. I have seen in peasant cottages the rooms wherein they were born, these women of restrained gesture, of dignified mien, of easy charm in conversation, of finished courtesy, and realize again that something invisible, imponderable, yet all-powerful, shapes the coarse block, polishes the rough surface, till there is no resemblance to that out of which it was hewn.

As we turn to go down we stand for a moment looking again through the V-shaped cleft at the rich, blue plain held by the enemy.

“How often,” said Captain Saint-Girons, after a silence, “it has seemed to me like the Promised Land, and how often during these four interminable years have I longed to look at these hills _from_ the plain.”

“Now all is fulfilling itself,” I answered.

The commandant said nothing, but his gaze, too, was fixed on the wide horizon.

Then we visited the military cemetery, a pleasant place, as cemeteries go, with many trees, and fallen, rustling leaves, and a few late-blooming flowers. Many sons of France were lying there since “the beginning”; others had been but lately laid away. The two officers stood for a moment with uncovered heads by the graves of four comrades of the Mission, killed by a bomb in front of the Mairie, as they were going in for lunch. Again I bowed my head and tears were loosened. Never as in this war has “death been made so proud with pure and princely beauty.” How can we so soon be engaged in “business as usual,” compete with the splendor of these dead?

Then we pass down the valley of the Thur, so greatly loved by those who dwell therein, inclosed by purple and dark-amber hills, but inclosed easily, widely, leaving room for fancy, for delight, with no sense of being shut in by heaps of earth that press too tight.