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.