CHAPTER V
A PROVIDENTIAL FORD
PARIS, _July 31st_.
Yesterday, at 8.30 in the damp morning, Lieutenant Robin appeared with my military pass to return by auto instead of by train, and I said a special farewell to the gardener, carrying our bags out to the motor in a passionate tenderness of courtesy. Miss Nott and Miss Mitchell bade us Godspeed, and we passed over the Marne and out of town. At the _consigne_ examination of our papers, our charming chauffeuse excited much attention. An officer standing there with pasteboard box and leather bag asked if we would give him a lift. The road was unusually empty and he had been awaiting an act of Providence for two hours. We were it.
He would be in ordinary times a Frenchman of the stereotyped banal sort, and he was entirely without charm, though I dare say he is known as a _beau garçon_ in Lyons, where before the war he was _marchand de bois_. But the war transmutes everything it touches, and he, too, had undergone the subtle change. He said, quite simply for a man naturally fatuous, “_Je ne retrouverai jamais ma vie d’autre fois_.” I seemed to see what that life had been. Small but good business transactions; some success with women, as I said he would be considered as handsome; the theater; reading newspapers in a café; talking of the happenings of his quarter of the town—and the lamp of his soul burning only dimly. But even he has been caught up in the “chariot that rides the ridges” and must partake of _la haine et tous ses maux, la gloire et tous ses crimes_. We drop him at a crossroad and he takes a muddy side-path to the village where his regiment is billeted.
At another crossway just out of the village of Vertus another officer was waiting. We called out, “Is this the road to Epernay?” And then, “Do you want a lift?” This time it was a dark-eyed young man with a kindling glance and something responsive and mercurial in his being, giving a sensation of personality, awake, running, a-thrill. He had twenty-four hours’ permission to go to Paris to see his mother, and had arrived to see the train pulling out of the little station. He also was waiting Fate at the crossroads, and crossroads in war-time are a favorite abode of Fate. He had been wounded near Suippes, lay twenty-four hours in a shell-hole, and was finally brought in by some man he didn’t know, whose head was blown off as he was pulling him into the trench. Something deep rustled in my heart at the vision of the splendor of that anonymity. Six months in hospital, six months of convalescing, and then a hunger for the front—_quorum pars fuit_.
We were passing through a beautiful country of vineyards, Vertus, Mesnil, Avize, in the loveliness of graded greens, malachite, beryl, emerald, jasper, and stretches of aquamarine where the grapes had been powdered with the _mélange de Bordeaux_. Everywhere were little sharp, steep hills, their plantings taking all kinds of lights as they turned to east or west or south.
At Epernay we wound about the streets till we came to the Hôtel de l’Europe, marked with a star in the guide; but you see no stars when you get into its encumbered, dull little courtyard—as slightly modern as possible—ask for luncheon, any kind of luncheon, and find one can’t have it or anything till twelve, the only fixed thing, except the _consigne_, I have discovered in the war zone. We went across the square to the Café de la Place, where we had _œufs sur le plat_, a yard and a half of thin, crusty bread, a thick pat of yellow butter, and a bottle of Chablis, that poured out pinky into our glasses. After which, reinforced and most cheerful, we went to the Place du Marché, where were many signs of the campaign of August and September, 1914. Among débris of bombarded buildings the fruit-market was being held. Plums, peaches, and apricots were of the most delicious, and we got pounds of them, which later were to be smashed and mashed and to ruin our dressing-bags and our clothes and the motor seats as we bumped along. It all came from Paris except the tiny, sweet, white grapes.
Epernay seems banal, driving through it, but if one thinks a bit, all sorts of things flash into the mind. It has a Merovingian past, and has been pillaged innumerable times by innumerable hosts. It belonged to the Counts of Champagne, to Louise of Savoy; Henry IV besieged it in person, and Maréchal de Biron fell by his side. Now thinking of its great champagne industry, into mind come memories of dinner-tables around which sat white-vested, decorated statesmen, even unto the kind that did not prevent war, and lovely women, and the toss of repartee, and flash of jewel and white throat, and all the once-accustomed things no longer ours.
As we got out of Epernay a terrible temptation assailed us. Three law-abiding women, by reason of original sin, I suppose, were drawn to take the forbidden road to Reims—Reims, the scarred, the pitiful—Reims, whose cannon sounded even now in our ears—rather than the straight path of duty and _sauf-conduits_ to Paris.
“After all, we’re not here to go joy-riding in the war zone,” said one, virtuously; and then prudence, most dismal of virtues, triumphed, bolstered up by a look at a well-guarded bridge, and I told the inspiring story of the principal of the school my mother went to, whose last words to every graduate class were, “What is duty, young ladies?” And the young ladies were expected to respond, “A well-spring in the soul.” It isn’t (and never has been), and our eyes kept sweeping the hill between the Epernay road and that great plain of Champagne in the midst of which is set the broken jewel of France. A military auto passed as we stood there, and an officer waved us onward. We let that hand pointing us to Paris decide. It was the triumph of prudence—plus a lively sense of favors to come. Some one muttered, “Had we been going to take the boat on Saturday, oh, then mayhap, mayhap....”
Dormans. Several kilometers before we got into Dormans little crosses began to show themselves along the roadside. All through here was heavy fighting during the battle of the Marne. The first grave we stopped by bore on its little cross the words, “_Trois Allemands_,” and it was neatly fenced up with black sticks and wire. We started to climb the hill, and among the malachite, the beryl, the emerald, the jasper, and the aquamarine vines were many other graves. Sometimes it would be “_20 Français_,” the red-and-white-and-blue _cocarde_ decorating the cross. Once it was “_30 Allemands_.” On another was the name “_Lastaud, le 3 septembre, 1914, souvenir d’un ami_.” I thought how friendship has been glorified in this war.
But mostly it was the continuous gorgeous anonymity of the defenders of the land that clutched the heart and with them the invaders, pressing their bayonets and their wills into a land not theirs. I was once more again before the awful tangle of the world as I looked at these resting-places. Over beyond the crest of the hill and the forest was Montmirail. Just a hundred years before, Napoleon had put these names upon the scrolls of history, and again and then again they had resounded to marching feet, the terrors of invasion, the heroisms of defense. One of a group of soldiers passing called out as we stood by one of the German graves:
“I came through here in 1914.”
“But you still walk the earth,” I answered.
“I got a ball in the hip, all the same, on the top of that hill,” and he pointed across the road. “_Mais j’ai eu de la chance._” And a look of a strange and pitiful wonder that he was above the earth, not under it, flashed for a moment over his young face; then he touched his cap and went singing down the road with his companions, and I caught the refrain, “_Ces mots sacrés, ces mots sacrés, gloire et patrie, gloire et patrie_.”
And somehow, after Dormans, we were all quiet. I only remember long, gray villages, mostly eighteenth century, and many blue soldiers walking about their broad, central streets, and signs of billetings, “_30 hommes, 2 officiers_,” “_5 hommes, 2 chevaux_,” black-robed women coming out of little Gothic churches, and children playing, and in between the villages great avenues of poplar and plane trees. Then we lost the Marne and picked up the Seine, and passed La Ferté, and Meaux, seen from the inside, preserved its flavor of “_autres temps, autres mœurs_,” in spite of the 1917 soldiers billeted there, walking hand in hand with girls who don’t have a ghost of a chance, in military towns, to get through the war as they began it.
Entered Paris in a fine drizzle of rain at 6.30. Our charming chauffeuse dead tired after the long day, but steering us so prudently and yet so quickly through the wet, crowded streets. Give me a good woman chauffeur _any day_!—not simply when coming from the front! She takes no chances, but she makes good time and she gets you there. But somehow one leaves one’s heart at the front, and I thought to myself as I got to the hotel door, “It’s not so good, after all, to feel _just safe_ and to be comfortable.”
PART III
LORRAINE IN AUTUMN
“_L’élégante et mélancolique Lorraine_”