FOOTNOTE:
[8] The town described in this sketch is described not as it is, but as it was some months ago, and nothing is to be inferred from the title as to its present significance.
XII
MORT POUR LA PATRIE
Two days later a French staff-officer greeted me in the vestibule of the Hôtel de Crillon at Paris. It was the Comte de G——; he had been deputed by the Ministry of War to act as my escort on my tour of the French lines. He proved to be a charming companion. He was a magnificent figure of a man six feet three inches in height at least, an officer of dragoons, and he wore the red and white brassard, embroidered in gold with a design of forked lightning, which is the prerogative of the staff. A military car with a driver and an orderly in shaggy furs awaited us outside on the Place de la Concorde. It was a sumptuous car, upholstered in green corded silk, with nickel fittings, and displaying on its panels the motto Quand même, and the monogram of a famous actress. It had been requisitioned. The air was cold—there had been frost overnight—but the sun was brilliant. As we threaded our way through Paris and its suburbs, a Paris chastened and resolute, I caught a glimpse of the barges upon the Seine with the women standing on the convex hatches hanging out clothes to dry—and I thought of Daudet and La Belle Nivernaise. As more and yet more men are called up to the colours women take their place, until the houses of business are like nunneries—with a few aged Fathers Superior. Having had business the day before at the Société Générale, I had had occasion to reflect on these things as I stood in the counting-house watching some fifty girl typists at work, the room resounding with the tap-tap of their machines, as though fifty thrushes were breaking snails upon a stone. A wizened little clerk, verging upon superannuation, had beguiled my time of waiting with talk of the war: how his wife from Picardy had lost fifteen of her parents, while of four painters and paper-hangers who had started doing up his flat on the 2nd of July only one—disabled—had returned to finish the job; the rest were dead. Musing on these things as we drove through the Bois de Vincennes I understood the resolution of our Allies and the significance of the things my companion pointed out to me as we drove: here a row of trees felled to provide a field of fire, there a gun emplacement, and reserve trenches all the way from Paris to Soissons. They are leaving nothing to chance.
Our journey was uneventful until we reached Coulommiers, where we had certain inquiries to make which have nothing to do with this narrative. We interviewed the maire in his parlour at the Hôtel de Ville, a little man, and spirited, who had hung on at his post during the German occupation, and done his best to protect his fellow-townsmen against the lust and rapine of the Huns. Under such circumstances the office of municipal magistrate is no sinecure. It is, in fact, a position of deadly peril, for by the doctrine of vicarious punishment, peculiar to the German Staff, an innocent man is held liable with his life for the faults of his fellow-townsmen, and, it may be, for those of the enemy also. Doubtless it appeals to their sinister sense of humour, when two of their own men get drunk and shoot at one another, to execute a French citizen by way of punishment. It happened that during the German occupation of Coulommiers the gas supply gave out. The maire was informed by a choleric commandant that unless gas were forthcoming in twenty-four hours he would be shot. The little man replied quietly: "M'éteindre, ce n'est pas allumer le gaz." This illuminating remark appears to have penetrated the dark places of the commandant's mind, and although the gas-jets continued contumacious (the gas-workers were all called up to the colours) the maire was not molested. It was here that we heard a shameful story (for the truth of which I will not vouch) of a certain straggler from our army, a Highlander, who tarried in amorous dalliance and was betrayed by his enchantress to the Huns, who, having deprived him of everything but his kilt, led him mounted upon a horse in Bacchanalian procession round the town. As to what became of him afterwards nothing was known, but the worst was suspected. The Huns have a short way and bloody with British stragglers and despatch-riders and patrols, and I fear that the poor lad expiated his weakness with a cruel death.
At Coulommiers we turned northwards on the road to La Ferté-sous-Jouarre, a pleasant little town on the banks of the Marne, approached by an avenue of plane trees whose dappled trunks are visible for many miles. Here we had lunch at the inn—a dish of perch caught that morning in the waters of the Marne, a delicious cream-cheese, for which La Ferté is justly famous, and a light wine of amber hue and excellent vintage. The landlord's wife waited on us with her own hands, and as she waited talked briskly of the German occupation of the town. The Huns, it appeared, had been too hustled by the Allies to do much frightfulness beyond the usual looting, but they had inflicted enormous losses on the pigs of La Ferté. It reminded me of the satirical headline in a Paris newspaper, over a paragraph announcing a great slaughter of pigs in Germany owing to the shortage of maize—"Les Bosches s'entregorgent!" Madame told us with much spirit how she had saved her own pig, an endearing infant, by the intimation that a far more succulent pig was to be found higher up the street, and while the Bosches went looking for their victim she had hidden her own in the cellar. Her pig is now a local celebrity. People come from afar to see the pig which escaped the Bosches. For the pigs whom the Bosches love are apt to die young. But what had impressed her most was the treatment meted out by a German officer, a certain von Bülow, who was quartered at the inn, to one of his men. The soldier had been ordered to stick up a lantern outside the officer's quarters, and had been either slow or forgetful. Von Bülow knocked him down, and then, as he lay prostrate, jumped upon him, kicked him, and beat him about the head and face with sabre and riding-whip. The soldier lay still and uttered not a cry. Madame shuddered at the recollection, "Épouvantable!"
We crossed the place and called on a prominent burgess. He received us hospitably. In the hall of his house was a Uhlan's lance with drooping pennon which excited our curiosity. How had it come here? He was only too pleased to explain. He had taken it from a marauding Uhlan with whom he had engaged in single combat, strangling him with his own hands—so!
I took by the throat the circumcised dog
And smote him, thus!
He held out a pair of large fat hands of the consistency of clay; he was of a full habit and there were pouches under his eyes. In England he would have been a small tradesman, with strong views on total abstinence, accustomed to a diet of high tea, and honoured as the life-long superintendent of a Sunday school. I was more astonished than sceptical, but perhaps, as the Comte suggested in a whisper, the Uhlan was drunk. Here, too, we heard tales of loot, especially among ladies' wardrobes. It is a curious fact that there is nothing the Hun loves so much as women's underclothing. As to what happens when he gets hold of the lingerie many scandalous stories are told, and none more scandalous than the one which appeared in the whimsical pages of La Vie Parisienne. But that is, most emphatically, quite another story.
From La Ferté we drove on to Lizy, where the gendarme, wiping his mouth as he came hurriedly from the inn, told us a harrowing tale, and then to Barcy, where the maire, though busy with a pitch-fork upon a manure heap, received us with municipal gravity. We were now nearing the battlefield of the Marne, and here and there along the roadside the trunks of the poplars, green with mistletoe, were shivered as though by lightning. Yet nothing could have been more peaceful than the pastoral beauty of the countryside. We passed waggons full of roots, drawn by a team of white oxen under the yoke, and by the roadside a threshing machine was being fed by a knot of old men and young women from an oat-rick. The only hints of the cloud on the horizon were the occasional passage of a convoy and the notable absence of young men. As we raced along, the furrows, running at right angles to the road, seemed to be eddying away from us in pleats and curves, and this illusion of a stationary car in a whirling landscape was fortified by the contours of the countryside, which were those of a great plain, great as any sea, stretching away to a horizon of low chalk hills. Suddenly the car slowed down at a signal from my companion and stopped. We got out. Not a sound was to be heard except the mournful hum of the distant threshing machine, but a peculiar clicking, like the halliard of a flagstaff in a breeze, suddenly caught my ear. The wind was rising, and as I looked around me I saw innumerable little tricolour flags fluttering against small wooden staves. It was the battlefield of the Marne, the scene of that immortal order of Joffre's in which he exhorted the sons of France to conquer or die where they stood. As he had commanded, so had they done. With an emotion too deep for words we each contemplated these plaintive memorials of the heroes who lay where they fell. Our orderly wept and made no effort to hide his tears. I thought of Jeanne's wistful petition, but my heart sank, for these graves were to be numbered not by hundreds but by thousands. "C'est absolument impossible!" said the Comte, to whom I had communicated my quest. A sudden cry from the orderly, who was moving from grave to grave in a close scrutiny of the inscriptions, arrested us. He was standing by a wooden cross, half draped by a tattered blue coat and covered with wreaths of withered myrtle. A képi pierced with holes lay upon the grave. And sure enough, by some miracle of coincidence, he had found it. On a wooden slab we read these words:
Paul Duval,
151e Rég. d'Inf.
6 sept. 1914
MORT POUR LA PATRIE.
The sun was fast declining over the chalk hills and it grew bitter cold. I unfolded my camera, stepped back eight paces, and pressed the trigger. We clambered back into the car and resumed the road to Meaux. As I looked over my shoulder the last things I saw in the enfolding twilight were those little flags still fluttering wistfully in the wind.
XIII
MEAUX AND SOME BRIGANDS
We lay the night at Meaux. It was a town which breathed the enchantments of the Middle Ages and had for me the intimacy of a personal reminiscence. Sixteen years earlier, when reading for a prize essay at Oxford, I had studied the troubled times of Étienne Marcel in the treasures of the Bibliothèque de l'École des Chartes, and I knew every kilometre of this country as though I had trodden it. Meaux, Compiègne, Senlis—they called to my mind dreamy hours in the dim religious light of muniment-rooms and days of ecstasy among the pages of Froissart. Little did I think when I read those belligerent chronicles in the sequestered alcoves of the Bodleian and the Bibliothèque Nationale, tracing out the warlike dispositions of Charles the Bad and the Dauphin and the Provost of the Merchants, that the day would come when I would be traversing these very fields engaged in detective enterprises upon the footprints of contemporary armies. To compare the variae lectiones of two manuscripts concerning a fourteenth-century skirmish is good, it has all the excitement of the chase; but to be collating the field note-book of a living Hun with the dossier of a contemporary Justice de Paix, this is better. It has all the contact of reality and the breathless joy of the hue and cry. And, after all, were things so very different? Generations come and go, dynasties rise and fall, but the earth endureth for ever, and these very plains and hills and valleys that have witnessed the devastation of the Hun have also seen the ravages of the mercenaries and free companies of the Middle Age. As I lay in my bed that night at the inn I turned over the pages of my pocket volume of M. Zeller's Histoire de France racontée par les contemporains, and hit on the "Souvenirs du brigand Aimerigot Marchès," ravisher of women, spoiler of men, devourer of widows' houses. And as I read, it seemed as though I were back in the department du Contentieux of the Ministry of War in Paris deciphering the pages of a German officer's field note-book. For thus speaks Aimerigot Marchès in the delectable pages of Froissart distilled by M. Zeller into modern French:
There is no time, diversion, nor glory in this world like that of the profession of arms and making war in the way we have. How blithe were we when we rode forth at hazard and hit on a rich abbé, an opulent prior or merchant, or a string of mules from Montpelier, Narbonne, Limoux, Toulouse, or Carcassonne laden with the fabrics of Brussels or furs from the fair of Lendit, or spices from Bruges, or the silks of Damascus and Alexandria! All was ours or was to ransom at our sweet will. Every day we had more money. The peasants of Auvergne and Limousin provisioned us and brought to our camp corn and meal, and baked bread, hay for the horses and straw for their litter, good wines, oxen, and fine fat sheep, chicken, and poultry. We carried ourselves like kings and were caparisoned as they, and when we rode forth the whole country trembled before us. Par ma foi, cette vie était bonne et belle.
Is not that your very Hun? He is a true reversion to type. Only, whereas among the French he is a thing of the savage past, among the Germans he is a product of the kultured present. And to turn from the field note-book of the German soldier with its swaggering tale of loot, lust, and maudlin cups, its memoranda of stolen toys for Felix and of ravished lingerie for Bertha, all viewed in the rosy light of the writer's egotism as a laudable enterprise, to the plain depositions of the Justice de Paix, and see the reverse side of the picture with its tale of ruined homes and untilled fields, was just such an experience as it had been to turn from the glittering pages of Froissart to the sombre story of Jean de Venette,[9] a monk of Compiègne, Little Brother of the Poor and chronicler of his times, as he pondered on these things in the scriptorium:
In this year 1358, the vines, source of that beneficent liquor which gladdens the heart of man, were no longer cultivated; the fields were neither tilled nor sown; the oxen and the sheep went no longer to the pasture. The churches and houses, falling into decay, presented everywhere traces of devouring flames or sombre ruins and smouldering. The eye was no longer gladdened as before with the sight of green meadows and yellowing harvests, but rather afflicted by the aspect of briers and thistles, which clustered everywhere. The church bells no longer rang joyously to call the faithful to the divine offices, but only to give the alarm to the peasants at the approach of the enemy and the signal for flight.
As it was in the days of Jean de Venette, so it is now. I thought of that mournful passage as I wandered next day among the ruins of Choisy-au-Bac, a village not twenty miles from the place where Jean de Venette was born, and saw old women cowering among the ruins of their burnt-out homes.
If the good Carmelite of the fourteenth century returned to Meaux to-day he would have little difficulty in finding his way about the city, for though she must have aged perceptibly she can have changed but little. The timbered mills on wooden piles still stand moored in the middle of the river like so many ships, just as they stood in the twelfth century, and the cathedral with its Gothic portals and great rose-window—though it has grown in stature and added here and there a touch of the flamboyant in its tracery, even as a man will break out into insurgent adventures when he feels the first chill of age—is stamped with the characters of the fourteenth century. And I think Jean de Venette would find a congenial spirit in my friend the bishop, Monsignor Marbot, for like Jean he is a lover of the poor. It was Monsignor Marbot who went in procession to the battlefield of the Marne with crucifix and banner and white-robed acolytes, and in an allocution of singular beauty consecrated those stricken fields with the last rites of the Church. And it was Monsignor Marbot who remained at his post all through the German occupation to protect his flock while the Hun roamed over his diocese like a beast of prey. Though the Hun thinks nothing of shooting a maire, and has been known to murder many an obscure village priest, he fights shy of killing a bishop; there might be trouble at the Holy See. Many a moving tale did the good bishop tell me as we sat in his little house—surely the most meagre and ascetic of episcopal palaces, in which there was nothing more sumptuous than his cherry and scarlet soutane and his biretta.
We lay the night at an inn that must have been at one time a seigneurial mansion, for it had a noble courtyard. I was shown to a room, and, having unpacked my valise, I turned on the taps, but no water issued; I applied a match to the gas-jet, but no flame appeared; I tried to open the window, but the sash stuck. I rang the bell; that at least responded. A maid appeared; I pointed to the taps and made demonstrations with the gas-jet. To all of which she replied quite simply, "Ah! monsieur, c'est la guerre!" I had heard that answer before. With such a plea of confession and avoidance had the boots at the Hôtel de la Poste at Rouen excused a gross omission to call me in the morning, and thus also had the aged waiter at the Métropole disposed of a flagrant error in my bill. But this time it was convincing enough; gas-workers and waterworks men and carpenters were all at the war, and in the town of Meaux water was carried in pitchers and light was purchased at the chandler's. In France you get used to these things and imitate with a good grace the calm stoicism of your Allies. For, after all, the enemy was pretty near, and as I retired to my couch I could hear the thunder of their guns.