With the wars of religion this peace and prosperity came to an end and for two hundred years all the duchy was devastated by all the armies of Europe, from those of Francis I to the obscene hordes of the French Republic. It had never revolted against the Catholic religion nor against its varied rulers, and its reward was a slow and savage extermination. Cities were burned and their names forgotten; great abbeys and churches like those of Orval and Clairefontaine were utterly extinguished; tall castles that crowned every height of land were blown up with gunpowder; fields and farms became waste land; and through starvation, massacre, and exile the population was reduced to a tithe of its former numbers, and at last, by the republic that came to bring liberty, taxed into an all-engulfing penury.

The era of enlightenment had not been wholly happy in its action on Luxembourg, but it was free at last, and, in 1867, independent, as it remained until that memorable day in August, 1914, the day of broken treaties, when the little Grand Duchess backed her motor-car across the bridge, closing it with a pathetic barrier in the vain protest of honour against a force that did not recognise the meaning of the word or the existence of the thing it signified.

Luxembourg to-day is not a place where one may go to revel in the artistic memorials of a great past; the great past is there, and its memory is still green, but even more than Brabant or Champagne has it borne the grievous harrowing of endless wars and recrudescent barbarisms, not the least destructive of these visitations being the nineteenth century in its satisfying completeness, which saw many an abbey and old haunted castle dismantled, reduced to road-metal, and carted away for the value inherent in its raw material, or turned to inconceivably base uses from all of which some pecuniary profit might be obtained. Once it was as rich in enormous castles as any country in the world that happily has a mediæval past. Bourscheid on its great hill, lordly and dominating still and a wilderness of vast crags of masonry, in spite of all that man could do; Brandenbourg, rigid and riven in its ring of mountains; Esch, split into towering and sundered fragments on the raw cliffs overhanging the Sûre; Hollenfel, Clervaux, spared by war to fall victim to the contemptuous neglect of owners who preferred pseudo-Gothic villas with all modern conveniences; Beaufort, with its noble proportions and its beauty of a later and more gracious mediævalism; Vianden, most fascinating of all with its dizzy gables, and its chapel still intact in spite of the wide ruin of its surroundings. And every castle ruin is haunted to heart’s desire, crowded with attested ghosts whose consistent habits and dependable visitations are a peculiar joy in a world that until a twelvemonth ago could not believe in the impossible and promptly discounted the improbable. Any peasant in Luxembourg knew better, and not only the ruins but the whole duchy is honeycombed by the midnight prowlings of an entire population of delectable phantoms, while the stories and legends of their commerce in the past with lords and ladies and knights and monks and bishops form a literature in themselves.

In spite of its losses, the land was one of infinite and unfamiliar charm; a land of wide and high plateaus cut by many winding river courses, each a possible journey of varying delights. Our and Sûre and Black Erenz; Alzette and Clerf and White Erenz, with many others of minor flow, cut the duchy in every direction, all at last finding the goal of their waters in the magical Moselle, as it flows past old Roman Trèves on its devious way to the Rhine. And it was a kind of little earthly paradise as well, for the fifty years of its well-earned peace. A land of farms and gardens and pastures, of contented little villages and river-bordered hamlets, and a kindly and devoted people. Coal and iron have left little mark, though the efficient Baedeker (to whom shall we go for guidance on our journeys in the long days to come?), in one of his concise and unpremeditately dramatic paragraphs does say: “18½ M. Weilerbach, for the iron-foundry of Weilerbach and the former summer-house of the Abbots of Echternach, magnificently situated amidst wood”—an antithesis of startling illumination. Protestantism passed it by, except for purposes of plunder, and it has always been unanimously and enthusiastically Catholic, with a record for public and private morality that puts any and every other part of Europe to sudden shame.

What is to be its future when the great storm that is cleaning the soiled world of its dust and ashes of false ideals and burnt-out superstitions sweeps away into the hollows of a night that is only in its darkness the promise of a new day? Who shall say? but any one can weave his vision, and to some it already appears that, with the meting out of inadequate earthly reward for irreparable bodily suffering, will come the lands to the east as far as the Kyll, with to the south Saarbourg, and the far side of the Moselle to the Hochwald, including ancient Trèves, no longer a forgotten relic of an old imperialism but a greater and better and more potent Hague, a central city of Europe and of peace, where, under the united guarantees of all the states, is permanently sitting a great council of ambassadors for the devising of measures of common interest, the adjustment of international differences, the preservation of a righteous peace between nations, and with authority to suppress any violation of treaties or any wilful aggression of one state against another, by calling into the field against the offender all the military and naval forces of all the other powers signatory to an European Treaty of Permanent Peace and represented in the council of ambassadors.

Or perhaps Trèves, with surrounding territory within a five-mile radius, might be erected into an international city of council, surrounded by Luxembourg, Belgium, which may be extended to the Moselle and eastward half-way to the Rhine, France, the new frontiers of which would be the old eastern borders of Alsace and Lorraine, and a restored Palatinate limited to the north and east by the Rhine and the Moselle. Central in this circle of guarding states, with all Europe for added defence against any possible recrudescence of local egoism in any place, Trèves might again become a great city of refuge and of Christian righteousness, with noble buildings on its circle of surrounding hills, a centre of religion and education and mercy, guardian of the peace of Europe, a living and glorious symbol of the world enlightenment that came through the clean purging of a war greater than all former wars because the need was greater.

XVI
EX TENEBRIS LUX

I HAVE tried to give some idea of the contributions of the lands and the peoples in the western theatre of the war in certain of the fields of art; to note the development of culture, the direction of human happenings, the bearing of great men and women who were leaders in Europe, through an abbreviation of historical records, to justify the giving to the region between the Seine and the Rhine, the Alps and the sea, the name of “Heart of Europe.” Such a survey of such a territory must, of necessity, be superficial and incomplete, for too many and wonderful things happened there to be recorded in a volume of limited extent. Chiefly, I have spoken of what could be, and is being, destroyed, but there is much else that is not subject to annihilation at the hands of furious men, the contributions to music, to letters, to the slow-growing spiritual deposit in society through philosophy, theology, and religion.

In music alone the Heart of Europe has done more, and at different times, than any similar area. While the troubadours of the twelfth century came into existence in the sunny lands of Languedoc, it was in Aquitaine, Champagne, and Flanders that the trouvères developed the norm of the troubadours “into something rich and strange,” and under the Countess Marie of Champagne created that beautiful and potent fiction of “courteous love,” which had issue in so many exquisite phases of human character and made possible a great school of romantic poets. They, under the leadership of Chretien de Troyes, made for the Countess Marie, out of the rude elements that had come from England and Wales through Brittany, the great poems and romances of King Arthur and his knights. The greatest of the trouvères was Adam de la Hâle and he was born in Arras in the year 1240. Long before him, however, Gottfried of Strasbourg, a contemporary of Chretien de Troyes, had made of the tale of Lancelot and Guinevere one of the deathless poems of the world, as Wolfram von Essenbach of Bavaria was to create its great counterpart from the story of Parsifal.

Very slowly in the meantime music had been working out its wonderful growth from the classical models of SS. Ambrose and Gregory intermingled with the instinctive folk-music of the south, and in the fourteenth century the leadership fell full into the hands of Flanders, where monks and laymen set themselves to the congenial task of building up a new and richer music on polyphonic lines. Brother Hairouet, who was at work about 1420; Binchois, born near Mons and died in 1460; Dufay, born in Hainault and trained in the cathedral at Cambrai, were all, together with the English Dunstable, potent leaders in the great work, laying well the foundations on which a few centuries later was to be erected the vast and magnificent superstructure of Bach and his successors. In the second period, that of the close of the fifteenth century, Antwerp became the centre, Jean de Okeghem, of Termonde, the leader in the intellectualising of music and the establishing it on methodical lines, while in the third period, of the end of the fifteenth and the beginning of the following century, Josquin des Pres led the course back toward a purer beauty, though through modes that were increasingly clever in their elaborate virtuosity. After this the lead passed across the Rhine, with memorable results a century later, when the great cycle, from Bach to Brahms, rounded itself into a perfect ring.