IV
THE MAYOR ON THE HILLTOP
We were searching for the Mayor of Clermont, not the official Mayor, but the real Mayor. This war has been a selector of persons. When the Germans came down on the villages, timid officials sometimes ran and left their people to be murdered. Then some quiet curé, or village storekeeper, or nun, took over the leadership. Wherever one of these strong souls has lived in the region of death, in that village he has saved life. When the weak and aged were wild with terror, and hunted to their death, he has spoken bravely and acted resolutely. The sudden rise to power of obscure persons throughout Northern France reminds an American of the life history of Ulysses Grant. So at Clermont, the Mayor took to his heels, but Edouard Jacquemet, then sixty-eight years old, and his wife, stayed through the bonfire of their village and their home. And ever since, they have stayed and administered affairs.
One of the new little red-brick houses of reconstructed France.
The Mayor of Clermont and his wife, who did not run away when the invaders came.
Clermont was a village of one thousand inhabitants. Thirty-eight persons remained—old people, religious sisters and the Jacquemets. The Germans burned 195 houses. The credit falls equally to a corps of Uhlans with the Prince of Wittgenstein at their head, and to the XIII corps from Württemberg, commanded by General von Urach. The particular regiments were the 121st and 122d Infantry.
We inquired of soldiers where we could find the Mayor.
"He is up above," they said. We were glad to leave the hot little village, with its swarms of flies, its white dust that lay on top of the roadbed in thick, puffy heaps, and its huddles of ruined houses. Each whirring camion, minute by minute, grinding its heavy wheels into the crumbling road, lifted white mists of dust, which slowly drifted upon the leaves of trees, the grass of the meadows, and the faces of soldiers. Eyebrows were dusted, hair went white, mustaches grew fanciful. Nature and man had lost all variety, all individuality. They were powdered as if for a Colonial ball. The human eye and the eyes of cattle and horses were the only things that burned with their native color through that veil of white that lay on Clermont.
We went up a steep, shaded hill, where the clay still held the summer rains. The wheels of our car buzzed on the slush—"All out," and we did the last few hundred yards on foot. We were bringing the Mayor good news. The Rosette of the Legion of Honor had just been granted him.
We found him in a little vine-covered old stone house on the hilltop, where he took refuge after his village was burned. He wept when my friend told him that the emblem of the highest honor in France was on its way.
"It means I have done something for my country," he said.
He is a cripple with one leg short. He goes on crutches, but he goes actively. He has fulfilled his life. His sons are fighting for France, and he, too, has served, and his service has been found acceptable in her sight. He is bright and cheery, very patient and sweet, with that gentleness which only goes with high courage. But underneath that kindliness and utter acceptance of fate, I felt that "deep lake of sadness," which comes to one whose experience has been over-full.
So we came through the dust of the plain and the clay of the climb to a good green place. It is a tiny community set on a hill. That hill was covered with stately trees—a lane of them ran down the center of the plateau, as richly green and fragrant as the choicest pine grove of New England. The head of the lane lost itself in a smother of low-lying bushes and grasses, lush-green and wild. But just before it broke into lawlessness, one stout tree, standing alone, shot up; and tacked to its stalwart trunk, this notice fronts the armies of France:
"Cantonnement de Clermont.
"Il est formellement interdit aux visiteurs ou autres d'attacher des chevaux aux arbres. Toute dégradation aux arbres sera sevèrement reprimée.
"Ordre du Commandant de Cantonnement.
"It is absolutely forbidden to visitors or anybody else to tie their horses to the trees. Any damage to the trees will be severely punished.
"By order of the Commander."
Little strips of bark from the protected tree framed the notice.
There was the voice of France, mindful of the eternal compulsions of beauty, even under the guns. No military necessity must destroy a grove. In the wreckage of almost every precious value in that Argonne village, the one perfect thing remaining must be cherished.
Nowhere else have I ever seen that combination of wildness and stateliness, caught together in one little area, except on some hill crest of New Hampshire. For the first time in two years I felt utterly at home. This was the thing I knew from childhood. Nothing that happened here could seem strange. Nothing spoken in that grove of firs would fall in an alien tongue. The lane was doubly flanked by great growths, planted in 1848—the inner line of cypresses, the outer windshield of fir trees. One lordly fir had been blown down by a shell, and cut up for kindling. Other shell-holes pitted the grove. We were standing on an historic spot. In the XIV century, Yolande of Flanders built her castle here, high above danger. She was the Countess of Bar-le-Duc, the Catherine de Medici of her district. When a little village to the North protested at her heavy taxes, she burned the village. The Bishop sent two vicars to expostulate. She drowned the two vicars, then built three churches in expiation, one more for good measure than the number of vicars, and died in the odor of sanctity. One of her chapels is on the plateau where we were standing. On the outer wall is a sun dial in colors, with a Latin inscription around the rim.
"As many darts as there are hours. Fear only one dart, the last one."
So the old illuminator had written on this Chapel of Saint Anne.
"Only one shell will get you—your own shell. No need to worry till that comes, and then you won't worry," how often the soldiers of France have said that to me, as they go forward in their blithe fatalism.
Little did the hand that groined that chapel aisle and fashioned that inscription in soft blue and gold know in what sad sincerity his words would fall true. When he lettered in his message for the hidden years, he never thought it would speak centuries away to the intimate experience of fighting men on the very spot, and that his hilltop would be gashed with shell-pits where the great 220's had come searching, till the one fated shell should find its mark.
The Mayor led me down the grove, his crutches sinking into the conifer bed of the lane. From the rim of the plateau, we looked out on one of the great panoramas of France. The famous roads from Varenne and Verdun come into Clermont and pass out to Chalons and Paris. Clermont is the channel through the heart of France. From here the way lies straight through Verdun to Metz and Mayence. We could see rolling fields, and mounting hills, ridge on ridge, for distances of from twelve to twenty-five miles. To the South-East, the East, and the North and the West, the sweep of land lay under us and in front of us: an immense brown and green bountiful farm country. There we were, lifted over the dust and strife. In a practice field, grenades clattered beneath us. From over the horizon line, the guns that nest from Verdun to the Somme grumbled like summer thunder.
"I have four sons in the war," said the Mayor. "One is a doctor. He is now a prisoner with the Germans. The other three are Hussar, Infantry and Artillery."
We turned back toward the house. His wife was walking a little ahead of us, talking vivaciously with a couple of officers.
"My wife," he went on, "has the blood of four races in her, English, Greek, Spanish and French. She is a very energetic woman, and brave. She is a soul. She is a somebody. (Elle est une âme. Elle est quelqu'un.)"
We talked with her. She is brown-eyed and of an olive skin, with gayety and ever-changing expression in the face. But she is near the breaking-point with the grief of her loss, and the constant effort to choke down the hurt. Her laughter goes a little wild. I felt that tears lay close to the lightest thing she said. Her maiden name was Marie-Amélie-Anne Barker.
"When the Germans began to bombard our village," she told me, "my husband and I went down into the cellar. He stayed there a few minutes.
"'Too damp,' he said. He climbed upstairs and sat in the drawing-room through the rest of the bombardment. Every little while I went up to see him, and then came back into the cellar.
"After their bombardment they came in person. In the twilight of early morning they marched in, a very splendid sight, with their great coats thrown over the shoulder. I heard them smash the doors of my neighbors. The people had fled in fright. The soldiers piled the household stuff out in the street. I saw them load a camion with furniture taken from the home of M. Desforges and with material taken from Nordmann, our merchant of novelties.
"A doctor, with the rank of Major, seized the surgical dressings of our hospital, although it was under the Red Cross flag.
"I stood in my door, watching the men go by.
"You are not afraid?" asked one.
"I am not afraid of you," I replied.
"I believed my house would not be burned. It was the house where the German Emperor William the First spent four days in 1870. It was the house where he and Bismarck and Von Moltke mapped out the plan of Sedan. You see it was the finest house in this part of France. Each year since 1871, three or four German officers have come to visit it, taking photographs of it, because of the part it played in their history. I was sure it would not be burned by them.
"I left all my things in it—the silverware, the little trinkets and souvenirs, handed down in my family, and gathered through my lifetime. I said to myself, if I take them out, they will treat it as a deserted house. I will show them we are living there, with everything in sight. I was working through the day at the hospital, caring for the German wounded.
"The soldiers began their burning with the house of a watchmaker. They burned my house. I saw it destroyed bit by bit (morceau par morceau). I saw my husband's study go, and then the drawing-room, and the dining-room. The ivories, the pictures, the bibelots, everything that was dear to me, everything that time had brought me, was burned.
"I said to the German doctor that it was very hard.
"He replied: 'If I had known it was Madame's house, I should have ordered it to be spared.'"
We were silent for a moment. Then Madame Jacquemet said:
"Come and see what we have now."
She led us upstairs to a room which the two beds nearly filled.
"All that I own I keep under the beds," she explained. "See, there are two chairs, two beds. Nothing more. And we had such a beautiful room."
"Why did you burn our homes?" I asked a German officer, after the village was in ruins.
"We didn't burn the place," he answered. "It was French shells that destroyed it."
"I was here," I answered. "There were no French shells."
"The village people fired on our troops," he said.
"I was here," I told him. "The village people did not fire on your troops. The village people ran away."
"An empty town is a town to be pillaged," he explained.
The Mayor took up the story.
"A German officer took me into his room, one day," he said. "He closed the door, and began:
"I am French at heart. I believe that your village was burned as a spectacle for the Crown Prince who has his headquarters over yonder at a village a few kilometers away."
The picture he summoned was so vivid that I said, "Nero—Nero, for whom the destruction of a city and its people was a spectacle. Only this is a little Nero. Out of date and comic, not grandiose and convincing."
Monsieur Jacquemet went on:
"They burned our houses with pastilles, the little round ones with a hole in the middle that jump as they burn. In the Maison Maucolin we found three liters of them. The Thirty-first French Regiment picked them up when they came through, so that no further damage should come of them. The Germans left a sackful in the park belonging to M. Desforges. The sack contained 500 little bags, and each bag had 100 pastilles. Monsieur Grasset threw the sack into water, as a measure of safety."
The Mayor had saved a few pastilles as evidence, and passed one of them around. He has an exact turn of mind. He made out a map of his hilltop, marking with spots and dates the shells that seek his home.
Under one of the oldest of the linden trees—the historian of our party, Lieutenant Madelin, wondered how old: "four, five centuries, perhaps"—we ate an open-air luncheon. Our hosts were the Mayor and his wife. Our fellow-guests were the Captain and the Major—the Major a compact, ruddy, sailor type of man, with the far-seeing look in his blue eyes of one whose gaze comes to focus at the horizon line.
It seemed to me like the simple farm-meals I had so often eaten on the New England hills, in just that rapid sunlight playing through the leaves of great trees, in just that remote clean lift above the dust and hurt of things. I thought to myself, I shall always see the beauty of this little hill rising clear of the ruin of its village.
Then we said good-by, and I saw on the doorstep, sitting motionless and dumb, the mother of a soldier. Her white hair was almost vivid against the decent somber black of her hood, and dress. There was a great patience in her figure, as she sat resting her chin on her hand and looking off into the trees, as if time was nothing any more. For many days the carpenters had not been able to work fast enough to make coffins for the dead of Clermont. She was waiting on the Mayor's doorstep for the coffin of her son.