Our Part in the Great War

Dearer my little hill of Liré than Mount Palatinus,
And than sea-airs the sweet air of Anjou.

Till yesterday that voice still spoke for the unchanging life of France. The peasant remained where his forefathers had broken the fields and loaded the wains. Why should he be seeking strange lands, like the troubled races? He found his place of peace long ago. To what country can he travel where the sun is pleasanter on happy fields? What people can he visit who have the dignity and simplicity of his neighbors?

Then the hordes from the north came down, eager to win this sunny quietness, curious to surprise the secret of this Latin race, with its sense of form and style, its charm, its sweet reasonableness. Why are these Southerners loved? Why do their accomplishments conquer the world so gently, so irresistibly? Surely this hidden beauty will yield to violence. So it came, that dark flood from the north, pouring over the fertile provinces, breaking the peace of these peasants. Something was destroyed where the human spirit had made its home for a longer time than the individual life: a channel for the generations. Their fields are still red with the poppy, but their young men who reaped are busy on redder fields. Their village street is crumbled stone, through which the thistle thrusts. The altar of their church is sour with rain water, and the goodness of life is a legend that was slain in a moment of time. A modern city can be rebuilt. An ancient village can never be rebuilt. That soft rhythm of its days was caught from old buildings and a slowly ripening tradition. Something distinguished has passed out of life. What perished at Rheims in the matchless unreturning light of its windows was only a larger loss. A quiet radiance was on these villages, too.

Still the peasants return to the place they know. Even their dead are more living than the faces of strangers in cities. The rocks in the gutter once held their home. There is sadness in a place where people have lived and been happy, and now count their dead. It is desolate in a way wild nature never is, for the raw wilderness groups itself into beauty and order. It would have been better to let the forest thicken through centuries, than to inherit the home where one day the roof-tree is razed by the invader. These peasants are not hysterical. They are only broken-hearted. They tell their story in a quiet key, in simple words, with a kind of grayness of recital. There are certain experiences so appalling to the consciousness that it can never reveal the elements of its distress, because what was done killed what could tell. But the light of the day is never seen again with the same eyes after the moment that witnessed a child tortured, or one's dearest shot down like a clay pigeon. The girl, who was made for happiness, when she is wife and mother, will pass on a consciousness of pain which had never been in her line before. The thing that happened in a moment will echo in the troubled voices of her children, and a familiar music is broken.

III

"MON GAMIN"

One day when I was in Lorraine, a woman came to me carrying in her hands a boy's cap, and a piece of rope. She was a peasant woman about forty years of age, named Madame Plaid. She said:

"You see, Monsieur, I found him in the fields. He was not in the house when the Germans came here. I thought that my little scamp (mon gamin) was in danger, so I looked everywhere for him. He was fourteen years old, only that, at least he would have been in September, but he seemed to be all of nineteen with his height and his size.

"I asked the Prussians if they had not seen my little scamp. They were leading me off and I feared that they would take me away with them. The Prussians said that somebody had fired on them from my house.

"Your son had a rifle with him and he fired on us, just like the others," they said.

"I answered: 'My little scamp did not do anything, I am sure.'

"'What shirt did he have on?' they asked.

"'A little white shirt with red stripes,' I replied.

"They insisted that he was the one that had fired.

"When the cannonading stopped, the people who had been with me told me that they had seen a young man lying stretched out in the field, but they could not tell who it was. I wanted to see who it was that was lying there dead, and yet I drew back.

"'No,' I said to myself, 'I am too much afraid.'

"But I crossed the field. I saw his cap which had fallen in front of him. I came closer. It was he. He had his hands tied behind his back.

"See. Here is the cord with which he had been killed. For he had not been shot. He had been hanged.

(She held out to us the cord – a coil of small but strong rope.)

"And here is the cap.

(She was holding the gray cap in her two hands.)

"When I saw him, I said to the Prussians:

"'Do the same thing to me now. Without my little scamp I cannot go on. So do the same to me.'

"Three weeks later, I went again to search for my little scamp. I did not find him any more. The French soldiers had buried him with their dead."

IV

THE MAYOR ON THE HILLTOP

We were searching for the Mayor of Clermont, not the official Mayor, but the real Mayor. This war has been a selector of persons. When the Germans came down on the villages, timid officials sometimes ran and left their people to be murdered. Then some quiet curé, or village storekeeper, or nun, took over the leadership. Wherever one of these strong souls has lived in the region of death, in that village he has saved life. When the weak and aged were wild with terror, and hunted to their death, he has spoken bravely and acted resolutely. The sudden rise to power of obscure persons throughout Northern France reminds an American of the life history of Ulysses Grant. So at Clermont, the Mayor took to his heels, but Edouard Jacquemet, then sixty-eight years old, and his wife, stayed through the bonfire of their village and their home. And ever since, they have stayed and administered affairs.

Clermont was a village of one thousand inhabitants. Thirty-eight persons remained – old people, religious sisters and the Jacquemets. The Germans burned 195 houses. The credit falls equally to a corps of Uhlans with the Prince of Wittgenstein at their head, and to the XIII corps from Württemberg, commanded by General von Urach. The particular regiments were the 121st and 122d Infantry.

We inquired of soldiers where we could find the Mayor.

"He is up above," they said. We were glad to leave the hot little village, with its swarms of flies, its white dust that lay on top of the roadbed in thick, puffy heaps, and its huddles of ruined houses. Each whirring camion, minute by minute, grinding its heavy wheels into the crumbling road, lifted white mists of dust, which slowly drifted upon the leaves of trees, the grass of the meadows, and the faces of soldiers. Eyebrows were dusted, hair went white, mustaches grew fanciful. Nature and man had lost all variety, all individuality. They were powdered as if for a Colonial ball. The human eye and the eyes of cattle and horses were the only things that burned with their native color through that veil of white that lay on Clermont.

We went up a steep, shaded hill, where the clay still held the summer rains. The wheels of our car buzzed on the slush – "All out," and we did the last few hundred yards on foot. We were bringing the Mayor good news. The Rosette of the Legion of Honor had just been granted him.

We found him in a little vine-covered old stone house on the hilltop, where he took refuge after his village was burned. He wept when my friend told him that the emblem of the highest honor in France was on its way.

"It means I have done something for my country," he said.

He is a cripple with one leg short. He goes on crutches, but he goes actively. He has fulfilled his life. His sons are fighting for France, and he, too, has served, and his service has been found acceptable in her sight. He is bright and cheery, very patient and sweet, with that gentleness which only goes with high courage. But underneath that kindliness and utter acceptance of fate, I felt that "deep lake of sadness," which comes to one whose experience has been over-full.

So we came through the dust of the plain and the clay of the climb to a good green place. It is a tiny community set on a hill. That hill was covered with stately trees – a lane of them ran down the center of the plateau, as richly green and fragrant as the choicest pine grove of New England. The head of the lane lost itself in a smother of low-lying bushes and grasses, lush-green and wild. But just before it broke into lawlessness, one stout tree, standing alone, shot up; and tacked to its stalwart trunk, this notice fronts the armies of France:

"Cantonnement de Clermont

"Il est formellement interdit aux visiteurs ou autres d'attacher des chevaux aux arbres. Toute dégradation aux arbres sera sevèrement reprimée.

    "Ordre du Commandant de Cantonnement.

"It is absolutely forbidden to visitors or anybody else to tie their horses to the trees. Any damage to the trees will be severely punished.

    "By order of the Commander."

Little strips of bark from the protected tree framed the notice.

There was the voice of France, mindful of the eternal compulsions of beauty, even under the guns. No military necessity must destroy a grove. In the wreckage of almost every precious value in that Argonne village, the one perfect thing remaining must be cherished.

Nowhere else have I ever seen that combination of wildness and stateliness, caught together in one little area, except on some hill crest of New Hampshire. For the first time in two years I felt utterly at home. This was the thing I knew from childhood. Nothing that happened here could seem strange. Nothing spoken in that grove of firs would fall in an alien tongue. The lane was doubly flanked by great growths, planted in 1848 – the inner line of cypresses, the outer windshield of fir trees. One lordly fir had been blown down by a shell, and cut up for kindling. Other shell-holes pitted the grove. We were standing on an historic spot. In the XIV century, Yolande of Flanders built her castle here, high above danger. She was the Countess of Bar-le-Duc, the Catherine de Medici of her district. When a little village to the North protested at her heavy taxes, she burned the village. The Bishop sent two vicars to expostulate. She drowned the two vicars, then built three churches in expiation, one more for good measure than the number of vicars, and died in the odor of sanctity. One of her chapels is on the plateau where we were standing. On the outer wall is a sun dial in colors, with a Latin inscription around the rim.

"As many darts as there are hours. Fear only one dart, the last one."

So the old illuminator had written on this Chapel of Saint Anne.

"Only one shell will get you – your own shell. No need to worry till that comes, and then you won't worry," how often the soldiers of France have said that to me, as they go forward in their blithe fatalism.

Little did the hand that groined that chapel aisle and fashioned that inscription in soft blue and gold know in what sad sincerity his words would fall true. When he lettered in his message for the hidden years, he never thought it would speak centuries away to the intimate experience of fighting men on the very spot, and that his hilltop would be gashed with shell-pits where the great 220's had come searching, till the one fated shell should find its mark.

The Mayor led me down the grove, his crutches sinking into the conifer bed of the lane. From the rim of the plateau, we looked out on one of the great panoramas of France. The famous roads from Varenne and Verdun come into Clermont and pass out to Chalons and Paris. Clermont is the channel through the heart of France. From here the way lies straight through Verdun to Metz and Mayence. We could see rolling fields, and mounting hills, ridge on ridge, for distances of from twelve to twenty-five miles. To the South-East, the East, and the North and the West, the sweep of land lay under us and in front of us: an immense brown and green bountiful farm country. There we were, lifted over the dust and strife. In a practice field, grenades clattered beneath us. From over the horizon line, the guns that nest from Verdun to the Somme grumbled like summer thunder.

"I have four sons in the war," said the Mayor. "One is a doctor. He is now a prisoner with the Germans. The other three are Hussar, Infantry and Artillery."

We turned back toward the house. His wife was walking a little ahead of us, talking vivaciously with a couple of officers.