CHAPTER V
MONSIEUR KELLER
LUNÉVILLE, _Saturday, 16th June, 8 a.m._
As I put out my light and opened wide my window last night a rush of warm, linden-scented air came in, also the thick, soft, meridional voice of some soldier singing “_En passant par la Lorraine_.” I, too, was passing through Lorraine, and I got the sleep I didn’t get the night before.
This morning more whirring of aeroplanes, but peaceful. The Taube got off yesterday; all the events of Friday were accompanied by that constant low-flying of aeroplanes, making one feel one was being looked after.
Dinner at Monsieur Guérin’s. Monsieur Keller, the celebrated mayor of Lunéville, whose tact, courage, and good sense saved Lunéville many tragedies at the time of the German entry, took me out. He has a lively, perceptive eye, and, all in all, life seems not to have been unkind to him, though he has been invaded, and his parents before him. He received the Germans and said adieu to them all in that month of August. His fine old dwelling, where the treaty of peace was signed in 1801 between France and Austria, is next to E. M.’s, and housed at one time one hundred German soldiers, and the general and his staff were quartered in it. He was, of course, the bright particular hostage during the occupation, and was followed about by two officers and four soldiers wherever he went.
“I kept them moving,” he added, with a snap of his perceptive eye.
At Lunéville one hundred and thirty houses were destroyed and there was much loss of life among civilians. The mayor has, or rather had, a property near Vitrimont, called Léomont, on a hill where there was formerly a Roman temple to the moon, and from this Lunéville is supposed to take its name. The great farm and its ancient buildings were destroyed during the bombardments of Lunéville and Vitrimont.
“It’s only a war monument now,” he added, philosophically.
It’s the atmosphere of Lunéville that’s so charming to me—this drop into full eighteenth century, with the boom of twentieth-century cannon in the distance. In spite of the sound of guns, there is some peace they can’t destroy. I knew nothing about the French provinces till I got to Lunéville, and I suppose it’s their immemorial and quite special atmosphere that I have received. Here the war seems to be a thing of the past; they think of their _secteur_ only, and of themselves as _libérés_, and talk of the war in the past tense, and it might be 1814 just as well as 1914.
A heavenly evening. We walked in the dim old garden smelling of linden. No lights anywhere, of course, and, though the stars were beautiful, they didn’t seem to light up anything terrestrial; the only things blacker than the night were the giant cedars. At dinner was a youngish, much-decorated general, coming back for a night from the front; though born in Lunéville it was the first time he had been here since the war—always fighting in other parts of France. Besides the general there were Madame Saint-R. T., E. M., and Miss P., who appeared in some sort of dull-red tunic that she ought always to wear; the mayor and his wife (she is Gasconne, and very animated, though she said twenty years of Lunéville had somewhat calmed her); two or three women with husbands at the front bringing daughters; several young officers; and M. Guérin and his daughter—the usual war-time composition of dinner-parties in the provinces, I imagine. Excellent and very lavish repast, _maigre_, of course, but everything else except meat in profusion. I didn’t get to bed till after eleven. M. Guérin walked back to the hotel with us, and, while he and Mrs. C. P. talked, again I was accosted by ghosts of dead rulers and lovely ladies and philosophers as we crossed the vast, dim Place Léopold. They, too, had crossed it and been amorous and witty, pleased or having _vapeurs_, enveloped by linden scent, and the changeless stars had controlled their destinies.
_Later._
This morning we visited the military hospital in one of the most charming edifices I have ever seen, an eighteenth-century convent-building. The first entry on the tableau in the hallway giving the names of the benefactors was 1761; the last, 1913. It is a two-storied, cloistered, rambling edifice, with several wide courtyards planted with trees and flowers, a fountain in the middle of one; in another a statue of the Virgin; beyond it a sun-baked vegetable garden; and still farther, behind a hedge, the inevitable little cemetery.
[Illustration: AUTHOR AT VITRIMONT]
[Illustration: CEMETERY, VITRIMONT]
[Illustration: THE BRIDGE AT LUNÉVILLE]
We went through the wards of the hospital, high-ceilinged, spotless, airy, with the _médecin-chef_, talking with the wounded and distributing cigarettes.
One of the doctors, also mayor of Gerbéviller, said to us, when we told him we were going there in the afternoon, “But don’t you want to see the young German aviator?”
Thinking it quite “in the note,” we went up-stairs again. He unlocked the door of a large corner room. At a table by a window looking out on another little tree-planted court was the young eaglet with fractured “wing”—arm and shoulder—in plaster. He got up with the military salute as we came in. I begged permission to address him in German, and when I asked him where he was _zu Hause_, he answered, “Posen,” and that it was far. He said he was very comfortable, but, with a longing glance at the patch of sky, added that he was dreadfully bored. I suppose he was, after being a bird in the blue ether and breaking into secular silences. He had been there a month, but was still very thin under the cheek-bones and dark about the eyes, and very young. He turned to the doctor with an entirely different expression—a sort of shutting down of iron shutters over the youthful look—on being asked in German if he had all he needed.
“Why have I had no answer to the post-cards I have written my mother?” he asked, adding, “we also have mothers.”
The _médecin-chef_ said: “You know you can only write once a month; but write another, all the same, and I will see it is sent off.”
He had a worn French grammar on the table and had been diligently studying verbs when we entered. The doctor was _so_ nice with him.
There is no bitterness at the front; the more one sees of it the more one realizes that bitterness is the special prerogative of non-combatants far from the field. I heard an American woman say to an officer just back from the front, so newly back that “the look” was still in his eyes:
“I’d like to see you at Cologne, destroying the cathedral. It would serve the Boches right.”
He looked at her and made answer: “_Ce n’est pas comme ça, madame_. Enough has been destroyed in the world. Think rather of reconstruction.”
Ah! _les civils!_
Coming out, we met Mlle. des Garets and went with her to her evacuation hospital near the station, which was a triumph of turning heterogeneous spaces into a single purpose. Two old railway sheds had been converted into receiving-rooms, douche-rooms, refectories, and several eighteenth-century cellars had been so arranged that in case of bombardment they could stow away fifteen hundred wounded. This seems a simple enough statement, but just think what stowing away, _suddenly_, fifteen hundred wounded means! Mlle, des Garets, a daughter of General des Garets, has been marvelous in her devotion and practicality since the beginning of the war.
I hear the motor-horn....