"This is as far as I dare go!" our lieutenant said, with a brusque gesture which bade the chauffeur stop. But before the car turned, he gave us a moment to take in the picture of grandeur and unforgivable cruelty. Yes, unforgivable! for you know, Padre, there was no military motive in the destruction. The only object was to deprive France forever of the noblest of her castles, which has helped in the making of her history since a bishop of Rheims began to build it in 920.
"Roi ne suis Ne prince, ne duc, ne comte aussy. Je suys le Sire de Coucy."
The beautiful old boast in beautiful old French sang in my head as I gazed through tears at the new ruin of ancient grandeur.
Some of those haughty Sires de Coucy may have deserved to have their stronghold destroyed, for they seem—most of them—to have been as bad as they were vain. I remember there was one, in the days of Louis XII, who punished three little boys for killing a few rabbits in his park, by ordering the children to be hanged on the spot; and St. Louis was so angry on hearing of the crime that he wished to hang the Sire de Coucy on the same tree. There were others I've read of, just as wicked and high-handed: but their castle was not to blame for its master's crimes! Besides, the last of the proud Enguerrands and Thomases and Raouls, Seigneurs of the line, was son-in-law to Edward III of England; so all their sins were expiated long ago.
"The Boches were jealous of our Coucy," said the Frenchman, with a sigh. "They have nothing to compare with it on their side of the Rhine. If they could have packed up the château and carted it across the frontier they would—if it had taken three years. As they couldn't do that, they did what Cardinal Mazarin wasn't able to do with his picked engineers; they blew it up with high explosives. But all they could steal they stole: carvings and historic furniture. You know there was a room the guardian used to show before the war—the room where César de Bourbon was born, the son of Henri Quatre of Navarre and Gabrielle d'Estrées? That room the Boches emptied when they first came in August, 1914. Not a piece of rich tapestry, not a suit of armour, not even a chair, or a table, or lamp did they leave. Everything was sent to Germany. But we believe we shall get it all again some day. And now we must go, for the Boches shell this road whenever they think of it, or have nothing better to do!"
The signal was given. We turned and tore along the road by which we'd come, our backs feeling rather sensitive and exposed to chance German bombs, until we'd got round the corner to a "safe section." Our way led through a pitiful country of crippled trees to a curious round hill. A little castle or miniature fortress must have crowned it once, for the height was entirely circled by an ancient moat. On top of this green mound Prince Eitel Fritz built for himself the imitation shooting-lodge which was our goal and viewpoint. And, Padre, there can't be another such German-looking spot in martyred France as he has made of the insulted hillock!
I don't know how many fair young birch trees he sacrificed to build a summer-house for himself and his staff to drink beer in, and gaze over the country, at St. Quentin, at Soissons and a hundred conquered towns and villages! Now he's obliged to look from St. Quentin at the summer-house—and how we pray that it may not be for long!
Over one door of the building a pair of crossed swords carved heavily in wood form a stolid German decoration; and still more maddeningly German are the seats outside the house, made of cement and shaped like toadstools. In the sitting room are rough chairs, and a big table so stained with wine and beer that I could almost see the fat figures of the prince and his friends grouped round it, with cheers for "Wein, Weib, und Gesang."
Close down below us, in sloping green meadows, a lot of war-worn horses en permission were grazing peacefully. Our guide said that some were "Americans," and I fancied them dreaming of Kentucky grasslands, or the desert herbs of the Far West, which they will never taste again. Also I yearned sorrowfully over the weary creatures that had done their "bit" without any incentive, without much praise or glory, and that would presently go back to do it all over again, until they died or were finally disabled. I remembered a cavalry-man I nursed in our Hôpital des Épidémies telling me how brave horses are. "The only trouble with them in battle," he said, "is when their riders are killed, to make them fall out of line. They will keep their places!"
Both Father Beckett and the French officer had field-glasses, but we hardly needed them for St. Quentin. Far away across a plain slowly turning from bright blue-green to dim green-blue in the twilight, we saw a dream town built of violet shadows—Marie Stuart's dowry town. Its purple roofs and the dominating towers of its great collegiate church were ethereal as a mirage, yet delicately clear, and so beautiful, rising from the river-bank, that I shuddered to think of the French guns, forced to break the heart of Faidherbe's brave city.