VADENAY FARM, CAMP DE CHALONS
July 2nd, 1918
I like this spot, but it was a terrible place to get to. We got hurry-up orders to leave our pleasant villages on the Coole on June 26th. It was payday and some of the fellows had hiked it into Chalons and back to find something to spend their money on. But it was “pack your kits and trek” for everybody.
It was a beautiful soft June night. No moon, but the French highway rolled out before us dull white in the gloom, as if its dust were mingled with phosphorus. The men trudged along behind—joking and singing—it was the beginning of the march. After a couple of hours we entered Chalons, a dream city by night. Not a light was visible, but the chalk stone buildings showed dimly on either hand, and the old Cathedral, with the ravages of the French Revolution obscured by darkness, was more beautiful than in the day. But before we left that town behind, all the poetry had departed from it. It seemed to take hours and hours of hard hiking on uneven pavements before the wearying men found their feet on country roads once more. Nobody knew how far the column had to go, and every spire that marked a village was hailed with hope, and, I fear, cursed when the hope was unrealized. They had a weary night ahead before they reached their destinations. The headquarters found itself with Division Headquarters in the Ferme de Vadenay, which is not a farm at all, but some long low barracks on the Camp de Chalons. The nearest approach to a farmer I saw there was a French soldier, who carefully nursed a few cabbages to feed his rabbits. He was a Breton fisherman, who had gone to the war, and the war had touched his wits. As a younger man he had fished in the North Sea and was the only person I ever found who could confirm the existence of Captain George MacAdie’s native town of Wyck. It was a great triumph for George, for my geographical skepticism had aroused a doubt as to whether he had ever been born at all.
The Chalons plains set all of us old Border veterans going again. The first comment was “Just like Texas.” A broad expanse of flat brookless country with patches of scrimpy trees that surely must be mesquite. But I delight in it. There is a blue sky over it all, and the long reaches for the eye to travel are as fascinating and as restful as the ocean. In Texas the attraction is in the skies. Half of it is beautiful. The half you see by gazing at the horizon and letting the eye travel up and back till it meets the horizon again. But here the flat earth has beauties of its own. It is God’s flower garden. The whole ground is covered with wild flowers—marguerites and bluets by millions and big clumps of violets as gorgeous as a sanctuary of Monsignori, and poppies, poppies everywhere. Colonel McCoy gave me a copy of Alan’s Seegar’s poems with one marked Champagne, 1915. Two lines of it are running through my head all day.
The mat of many colored flowers
That decks the sunny chalk fields of Champagne.
Champagne. The word is a familiar one with other associations. We had thought that the bottles grew on trees and that the thirsty traveler had but to detach the wire that held them. And behold it is a land as dry as Nebraska. There are no such vivifying trees, nor lowly vines, nor even abundant water. A vastly over-advertised country in the opinion of the present collection of tourists.