FOOTNOTE:
[1] Monsignor Jarlin, the coadjutor of Monsignor Favier.
V
RETURN TO NING-HIA
Six weeks later. A cold and gloomy morning. After having been at Tien-Tsin, Pekin, and other places, where so many strange and gloomy things have come to our notice, here we are back again at Ning-Hia, which we have had time to forget; our boat has gone back to its old moorings, and we return to the French fort.
It is cold and dull; autumn, which is so severe in these parts, has brought with it sudden frosts; the birches and willows have lost all their leaves, and the sky is cold and lowering.
The Zouaves who are living in the fort, and who came so light-heartedly only a month ago to take the place of our sailors, have already buried some of their number, who died of typhus or were shot. This very morning we have paid the last honors to two of them, killed by Russian balls in a particularly tragic manner, all the result of a mistake.
The sandy roads strewn with yellow leaves are solitary. The Cossacks have evacuated their camps and disappeared to the other side of the Great Wall, in the direction of Manchuria. The agitation of the earlier days is over, as well as the confusion and the joyous crowds; all have gone into winter quarters in the places assigned to them, and as the peasants of the vicinity have not returned, their villages are abandoned and empty.
The fort, though still ornamented with Chinese emblems, now bears a French name; it is called "Fort Admiral-Pottier." As we entered trumpets resounded for the admiral, and the Zouaves, ranged under the guns, looked with respectful sorrow at their chief, who had just honored with his presence the funeral services of two soldiers.
As soon as we cross the threshold we feel quite unexpectedly as though we were on French soil; it would be hard to say by what spell these Zouaves have made of this place and its surroundings in one short month, something which is like a bit of home.
There have been no great changes; they have been content with removing Chinese filth, with putting the war supplies in order, with whitewashing their quarters, and with organizing a bakery where the bread has a good smell, and a hospital where the many wounded, alas, and the sick, sleep on very clean little camp beds. All this at once and quite inexplicably creates a feeling that one is in France again.
In the court of honor in the centre of the fort, in front of the door leading to the room where the mandarin is enthroned, two gun-carriages stand, unharnessed. Their wheels are decorated with leaves and they are covered over with white sheets, upon which are scattered poor little bouquets fastened on with pins. They are the last flowers from the neighboring Chinese gardens,—poor chrysanthemums and stunted roses touched by the frost, all arranged with touching care and kindly soldierly awkwardness, for the dead comrades who lie there on these carriages in coffins covered with the French flag.
It is a surprise to find this vast mandarin's room transformed by the Zouaves into a chapel. A strange chapel truly! On the whitewashed walls the vests of Chinese soldiers are fastened up and arranged like trophies with sabres and poniards, while the candlesticks that stand on the white altar-cloth are made of shell and bayonets,—thus naïvely and charmingly does the soldier know how to manage when he is in exile.
A military mass begins with trumpet blasts that make the Zouaves fall upon their knees; mass is said by the chaplain of the squadron, in mourning dress,—a mass for the dead, for the two who are asleep on the wagons near the door decorated with late flowers. From the court Bach's Prelude, played on muffled brass, rises like a prayer, the dominant note in this mingling of home and foreign land, of funeral service and gray morning.
Then they depart for a near-by enclosure which we have turned into a cemetery. Mules are harnessed to the heavy gun-carriages, the admiral himself leading the procession along the sandy paths where the Zouaves form a double row, presenting arms.
The sun does not pierce the autumn clouds that lower this morning over the burial of these children of France. It is cold and gloomy, and the birches and willows of the desolate country continue to drop their leaves upon us.
This improvised cemetery, surrounded by so much that is exotic, has also taken on a French air,—no doubt because of the brave home names inscribed on wooden crosses that mark the new-made graves; because of pots of chrysanthemums brought by comrades to these sad mounds of earth. And yet just beyond the wall which protects our dead, that other wall which rises and is indefinitely prolonged into the gray November country, is the Great Wall of China; and we are in exile far, frightfully far from home.
Now the coffins have been lowered, each one to its hole, adding to the already long row of new-made graves; all the Zouaves approach in serried rank while their commandant recalls in a few words how these two fell.
"It was not far from here. The company was marching without suspicion in the direction of a fort from which the Russian flag had just been hoisted, when suddenly balls began to rain like hail. The Russians behind their ramparts were new-comers who had not seen the Zouaves, and who mistook their red hats for the caps of the Boxers. Before they recognized their mistake several of our men lay on the ground; seven, one of them a captain, were wounded, and these two were dead. One of them was the sergeant who waved our flag in an effort to stop the firing."
Then the admiral addresses the Zouaves, whose eyes, all in a row, are filled with tears; and as he steps forward upon the pile of loose earth so that he may reach the graves with his sword, and says to those who lie there, "I salute you as soldiers for the last time," a real sob is audible, heartfelt, and unrestrained, from the breast of a big hearty fellow who looks to be not the least brave among those in the ranks.
Beside all this, how pitifully, how ironically empty are many of the pompous ceremonies at official burials with their fine discourses!
In these times of weakness and mediocrity, when nothing is sacred and the future is full of fear, happy are they who are cut down where they stand; happy are they who, young and pure, fall for the sake of adorable dreams of country and of honor, who are borne away wrapped in the modest flag of their country and greeted as soldiers with simple words that bring tears to the eyes.