"'And Gabrielle, perchance it shall happen that then you also will be numbered with US—those of the Over-World.'"
Here Gabrielle stopped, a sudden flush mounted to her temples, and after came a deathly pallor, and then she fell upon my neck in an embrace utterly tearless, when I felt her body sway upon mine with deep pulsations, while her lips sought my own, and almost inaudibly she whispered in my ear—"Alfred, Sebastien kissed me as he vanished, and his lips were like fire, and the power he brought to me rested with me from his lips. I am ready to go. But you, Alfred, will go with me. It may be afterwards we shall be no more together."
Truly upon us unutterable things had fallen. We sat there together, almost unnoticing the passage of the day, immersed in a wonder that deepened into sadness as the anticipation of some wild unearthly ending of the great war steadily became more and more fixed in our minds, and with it—Ah there was the desperate cruelty and anguish of it—the possible separation of our lives. We hardly spoke, and only as the noon hour flooded the room with light and heat, did we arise, and, hand in hand, almost as if then we approached the tragic sacrifice of our happiness, went out, and down the stairway to our duties.
Perhaps dear old Emile Chouteau thinking of our propitiation would have said:
Sic, sic juvat ire sub umbras.
During the long weeks before that awfully auspicious moment came, Gabrielle and I kept working at our tasks; she at the villages about us, in the homes of sick returning soldiers, and also at Paris on errands of every sort, and I in work of distribution, supervision and occasionally administration. But it was mostly at the hospital of Saint Jean that I experienced the full measure of an unusual depression—the customary, and now grown habitual, grievous seriousness of a national crisis, deepened into a pathos, almost unassuaged with any hope of joy. Here I saw our soldiers in that delicately conceived and apportioned religious retreat, itself a poetic dream of gentle loveliness, with its walls of time-stained stone, its avenues of trees, the ranged gardens of its sunny domains, with the petunias, the geraniums, the sages, and the high-browed and over shadowing chestnuts, the outspread firm outlines of tower and hall, its innumerable vistas, at evenings breathing a strange and subtle melancholy—malheur à qui n'a pas senti ces mélancolies (Renan)—and the devoted community of priests and nurses. Here I saw the sons of my country dying, praying, chanting, smiling in their ferocious sufferings, slipping away into eternity with prayers for La patrie, or rising from the very border of the grave with mutilated bodies, and yet yearning for the last chance of fighting still again. Here I saw the deathless love of home, lingering in the sick bodies, whose lips moved in a delirium of dreams, that they were soon to revisit the old orchards, the vineyards, the chimney places, and their people—Ah c'était miserable—and I have seen the chapel filled with the mourners and the broken-limbed companions of the dead, lifting the coffin so gently, as if the lifeless figure in it might feel their friendliness and thank them for it. Yes more too—a spectacle that might have touched the heart of Heaven—the wounded in the wards singing, in murmurs, between their gasps of pain, or just slowly gesturing, as it were, with body and fingers and with their speaking eyes in unison, La Marseillaise. You know how M. —— has described it. Ecoutez.
"Nos blessés chantaient ainsi par la bouche de leur blessures et nous en écoutant les strophes sublimes, il nous semblait les comprendre pour la première fois!"
Our—Gabrielle's and mine—miraculous mission was never forgotten. We did not speak of it, but we watched the racing days, and as we watched the words of the VISION grew visibly true. The Great Effort was to be made; that we knew. In the face of all prudence, driven onward by the irresistible purpose of the Almighty, the generals of the armies announced the dread decision of "trying it out"—the English said—in one colossal combat. It was the edict of fate that rushed them on to this conclusion. And it was trumpeted to the whole world. And no one thought it strange. No one wondered. And yet in any finite human view what unutterable folly! Ah—it was God's way. HE had blinded the eyes of the wise. HE had perverted the judgment of the mighty. HE had turned the councils of the Great into childishness. His hand indeed again rested on the earth, and its peoples, and the vast END would be—so it became clear to my sister and to me—HIS Revelation of Himself, blasting clean into the hearts of men this truth, that HE LIVED.
So the armies of the Allies and of the Powers gathered together against each other, along the line of the eastern frontiers of France, as I have said. There the last gage of war was to be flung down, and the issue tested.