CHAPTER III

TOUL

_October 13th._

We lunched at the Café Stanislas yesterday after the wildest of drives into Nancy, the Ford seeming like an autumn leaf in the high wind. We did ourselves well, even I, who care not a farthing what I eat except to “stoke the engine.” The proprietor, who left Alsace as a boy after 1870, stood and talked to us, as we ate our _œufs au beurre noir_, as French people alone can talk. He said “they” came only with fire and sword; the great Napoleon, who came with the same, had also his “Code” in his pocket. Then he spoke of the marvelous administration of Germany, the order and the use made of each one’s capacities, which was why they could _tenir_.

“We only ask for a leader here in France, to be _bien menés_. All other things we have in abundance. But if a department is to be organized or reconstructed, it seems always to be given into the hands of some one knowing nothing about it.”

In between I kept looking out where against gray skies beings half child, half angel hold up stone flames, and _panaches_ leaning one against the other. The gilding of the _grilles_ has a dull gleam through the wet. The statue of Stanislas _le Bienfaisant_ was black and big. Everybody was talking about the unexpected visit of the German _avion_ in the bad weather the night before.

The station was further devastated, a train moving out was wrecked and many _permissionnaires_ killed, a house near the Hôtel Excelsior et d’Angleterre was totally demolished, the _avion_ flying very low, not more than twenty-five meters above the town at one time. After lunch we went over to the prefect’s house, from where we were to motor with him to Toul. He could not go with us, as he was out investigating the damage of the night before, but one of his daughters was waiting for us in the Prefecture motor.

_Le Grand Couronné_ was but a ridge of mist and clouds as we passed out of town, but it was there that the Germans were held up and Nancy was saved that first September of the war, there that was written the _paraphe de Castelnau_, and from there the German Emperor had looked into France.

I never should have known Lorraine if I had not seen it gray and wet under its autumn skies, bands of lemon and amber at sunset finishing the garb of its gray days. As we sped along I could just distinguish the landscape—villages lost in the immense stretch of the plains, and great forests of beech and oak in which are strange, mysterious ponds (_étangs_), and before my mind passed for an instant images of those solitaries of the twilight centuries, slipping through them with staff and scrip, after the Romans, and bringing to the land the things Rome tried to destroy.

A beautifully kept straight road leads to Toul. From time to time one sees rusty barbed-wire entanglements and camouflaged trenches, for, on this road, had the Germans taken Nancy, they would have come to Toul, as they did in 1870. Outside the town are double ramparts, where the guard stopped us, but the military chauffeur cried the magic words, “_Monsieur le Préfet_,” and we passed in through the Porte de Metz, dating from the time of Vauban, then skirted the town, to get to the barracks of Luxembourg, where hundreds of little children, first gathered together by Madame Mirman, are now being taken care of by the American Red Cross. It is conducted by Doctor Sedgwick, unfortunately in Paris. It seemed a dreary spot that afternoon, and it has since been confided to me that the weather is always dreadful there. The barracks are after the new model of groups of one-storied houses, which, it appears, have also disadvantages, as well as the large buildings they superseded.[16]

It was raining and hailing and blowing as we made blind dashes from one to the other with the French directors. A consolation to find oneself in the dormitories where many blessed tiny babies lay asleep (or howling!) in little cots or perambulators, out of the horrid cold.

They are not always orphans, but their mothers work in the fields of Lorraine or in the munitions-factories. Doctor Peel, second in charge, came at last from a distant building, and met us in the school-room, out of which a hundred noisy, warm, well-fed children were scuffling. Tea was offered us, but we came away; time was short and I was a-hungered, after the cold, windy, wet desolation of the Luxembourg barracks, for a sight of the beautiful cathedral.

Some one said, “Why ‘sight-seeing’?” but I said, “It’s soul-seeing.” And there was some lifting of the being as we stepped into the loveliness of the pale-gray vaulting of the church of St.-Étienne. At the end of the apse was an immense, high, narrow, blue window, and it reminded me of Huysmans’s phrase about the cathedral of Chartres, “_Une blonde aux yeux bleus._” We stepped over worn _pierres tombales_, and as I stood on one of them, whose date, scarcely decipherable, was fifteen hundred and something, I looked up and saw in the wall a new marble plaque, and it was to the memory of “_Jean Bourhis, aviateur-pilote, chevalier de la Légion d’Honneur, Croix de Guerre, né 1888.... Mort glorieusement pour la Patrie, le 22 mars, 1916._” And so one’s thoughts are jerked from the past into the dreadful, sacramental present.

Close by the cathedral is the Hôtel de Ville, once the Episcopal Palace, a gem of the eighteenth century. We stepped from the little square in front of the church into the wet, wind-swept garden. At one end is a flat, round fountain, and behind it is a moss-grown statue of a woman in contemplation, and one side of the garden is hedged in by the flying buttresses and gargoyles of the cathedral. Broad, low steps lead down to its gravel walks from the terrace of the Palace, onto which open long windows, forming a great hemicycle. I did not need to see it under warm, sunset skies, with the linden-trees of the garden in full blossom, to be possessed of its charm.

An American soldier was coming out of the cathedral as we issued from the garden in a gust of wind which blew my umbrella wrong side out, and when I and it were righted he was gone. But it’s all a part of history.

We went for a moment to St.-Gengoult, the old Gothic church in the rue Carnot. (Like every town in Lorraine and in the whole of France there is a rue Carnot, and it’s horribly monotonous when your soul is aflame.)

As we entered, a thick rich light came through the ancient windows.

A black-robed woman was sobbing before a grave and pitying statue of St.-Anne—sixteenth or seventeenth century, I didn’t know which—and a pale, tiny child with a frightened look was standing by her. Again I thought on the oceans of fear children have passed through in this war, and again I besought God to take care of His world.

As I passed up the central aisle I saw two American soldiers kneeling before the high altar. That spot of khaki and its young, unmistakable silhouette under the gray vaulting of that old church suddenly seemed momentous beyond anything I had ever seen. It was the country of my birth and my love pursuing its gigantic destiny down an endless vista, crowded with uncountable khaki-clad forms, men with souls. The two anonymous soldiers became typical of each and every Miles Gloriosus since the world began, and as they knelt there on the altar steps I knew that they had been laid on that other dreadful altar of the world’s sin....

An open door showed us the way to a lovely Gothic cloister of the sixteenth century, surrounding a tree- and flower-planted court. It had a few fresh chippings on its _belle patine_, the results of a bomb which fell in it a few months ago.

Long lines of soldiers’ socks were hung on strings across one corner of it, and soldiers were sitting in a little room-like corridor, leading I know not where, reading newspapers, whistling and writing. Then, out through a delightful sixteenth-century door into the streets, the loveliness of Toul imagined rather than really perceived, for the rain was falling again. Khaki-clad men of the _Division marocaine_, together with blue-clad companions, were threading their way through the narrow streets, and there were few women and children. I thought how I had seen the two towers of the church shining from afar as I passed by in the train that June evening with the two Bretons whose fate I shall never know.... Did the one from Nantes return to hold his first-born in his arms? Or the fiancé return to consummate his nuptials?

Then I caught sight of my own two soldiers standing at the door of a little tobacco-shop. I suppose it was the nearest resemblance to anything familiar in Toul, and they were rather cuddling up to it. They smiled broadly when they heard themselves addressed in what they termed the “blessed lingo,” and called it “some luck.”

“I was just thinking, ‘me for the coop,’” genially continued the biggest, raw-boned, lantern-jawed one who had a bad bronchial cold and wore a muffler about his throat. He turned out to be from Omaha; the smaller one was from Hackensack, N.J. (with an emphasis on the N.J.). We talked about simple and unglorious matters, what they had for breakfast, among other things, and it was, in parenthesis, what any Frenchman would call a dinner—ham and eggs and oatmeal and white bread (which none save American soldiers get in France these days) and jam and coffee. They were from Pagny-sur-Meuse near by—pronounced “Pag-ni” by the Omaha man. The Hackensack man avoided it. He quite simply wanted “the war to begin,” so that he might “show the Germans how.”

“We’re sure to lick ’em in the spring,” the one with the cold said, “but it’s a long time waiting for the fun to begin, and I haven’t been warm since I got here.”

I asked them how they came into France.

“All I know is that after we got off the boat we were three days in some sort of a milk-train; there wasn’t room to sit, let alone lie. We drew lots and I got the baggage-rack; but what saved us was that we could get out at every station, and, believe me, the fellows that got drunk were the only ones that pulled in all right—the others were sent up to hospital soon as they arrived.”

In the best and most persuasive of Y.M.C.A. manners I said to this special Miles Gloriosus:

“It isn’t a remedy, however, that you could really count on.”

“But I say,” answered the Omaha man, “you’ll own up that it’s worth trying.”

It was getting late and, the Omaha man having the best of it, we parted with smiles of mutual appreciation. It’s all so simple—and so momentous.

Then back to Nancy, running swiftly over a white road, the gray sky very low, and on either side green and yellow and brown fields, and the oak and beech forest of Haye. The _Grand Couronné_ for a moment was divested of its mists, and some brightening of the western sky touched its ridge with a subdued splendor; and then we got into Nancy and were deposited at the Prefecture, where we made our adieux. We proceeded to the garage of a stoutish, blond man of pronounced Teuton type and accent, with an uncertain smile—and a coreless heart, I think—who cranked _la Ford_ (by the way, Fords change their sex in France), and we started out through the town that night was enveloping, with but one dull eye to light us to Lunéville. We thought the trip might prove fairly uncertain, but didn’t know how much so till there was an impact, in the crowded suburb, and a horse’s form with legs in air, looking as big as a monster of the Pliocene age, showed for an instant on our radiator, then fell to the ground. A crowd immediately gathered, while the driver of the cart proceeded to tell us what he thought of us in particular and women drivers in general. But, though unfortunate, we felt blameless, as the horse had been tied _behind_ the wagon standing at the curb and there was no light, except something very dim coming from a green-grocer’s. We departed to the _commissaire de police_ with the man and a couple of gendarmes, explained that we were willing to do anything and everything if he would only let us proceed to Lunéville, gave the magic name “Commission Californienne,” and equally potent reference to the _Préfet de la Meurthe et Moselle_ whose house we had just left. Then with beating hearts and a chastened outlook on life—I use the word “outlook” rather wildly; we couldn’t see anything—we passed out through the great manufacturing district. Every now and then our feeble ray was swallowed up by the great lamps of a military auto or the large round headlight of a _camion_. As we passed through St.-Nicolas du Port and Dombasle the blue of the soldiers’ tunics took on a strange ghoul-like color, a white incandescent sort of gray, and the moving forms seemed twice their natural size. We couldn’t see the streets at all, and the only thing we wanted to do in all the world was to get to Lunéville and run _la Ford_ into the garage of M. Guérin.

When that was accomplished we decided to say good-by to the proud world, sent regrets to Mlle. Guérin, and had a much more modest repast served in my room by the deft maid, whose husband got typhoid fever in the trenches and died at Epinal last year. Later the mistress of the house came up to know if we were comfortable, and told us her husband, too, had died of it in hospital at Toul. And then I read _Les Vieux Châteaux de la Vesouze_, a modern _Etude lorraine_, and _Promenades autour de Lunéville_, printed in 1838, to the accompaniment of rattling windows and the heavy boom of distant cannon. All else was quiet. Near my room is a device plastered on the wall, _Qui tient à sa tranquillité sait respecter celle des autres_. Isn’t it nice? It makes one steal in at night, get into slippers immediately, and ring gently in the morning.

It is still raining, hailing, blowing—dreadfully discouraging weather to investigate the amours of the eighteenth century, and I have a couple of twentieth-century idyls right under my eyes, too. I had planned a stroll in the park to trace the steps of Léopold and Stanislas to the doors of the fairest of ladies, and Panpan and St.-Lambert and the Chevalier de Boufflers, and all the other _charmeurs_. I’ll either have to leave them out of the Journal or do them in some half-dream when I’m back in Paris and warm! What _they_ did in this sort of weather I don’t know, except that when they knocked at a door or tapped at a window they were sure of tender welcomes, they and the easy verses that accompanied them.