Leaves from a Field Note-Book Part 9

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 etienne Marcel in the treasures of the Bibliotheque de l'ecole des Chartes, and I knew every kilometre of this country as though I had trodden it. Meaux, Compiegne, 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 Bibliotheque 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 ma.n.u.scripts 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 racontee par les contemporains_, and hit on the "Souvenirs du brigand Aimerigot Marches,"

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 Marches 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 abbe, an opulent prior or merchant, or a string of mules from Montpelier, Narbonne, Limoux, Toulouse, or Carca.s.sonne 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 etait 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, l.u.s.t, 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 Compiegne, 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 cl.u.s.tered 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 pa.s.sage 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.

If the good Carmelite of the fourteenth century returned to Meaux to-day he would have little difficulty in finding his way about the city, for though she must have aged perceptibly she can have changed but little.

The timbered mills on wooden piles still stand moored in the middle of the river like so many s.h.i.+ps, just as they stood in the twelfth century, and the cathedral with its Gothic portals and great rose-window--though it has grown in stature and added here and there a touch of the flamboyant in its tracery, even as a man will break out into insurgent adventures when he feels the first chill of age--is stamped with the characters of the fourteenth century. And I think Jean de Venette would find a congenial spirit in my friend the bishop, Monsignor Marbot, for like Jean he is a lover of the poor. It was Monsignor Marbot who went in procession to the battlefield of the Marne with crucifix and banner and white-robed acolytes, and in an allocution of singular beauty consecrated those stricken fields with the last rites of the Church. And it was Monsignor Marbot who remained at his post all through the German occupation to protect his flock while the Hun roamed over his diocese like a beast of prey. Though the Hun thinks nothing of shooting a _maire_, and has been known to murder many an obscure village priest, he fights shy of killing a bishop; there might be trouble at the Holy See.

Many a moving tale did the good bishop tell me as we sat in his little house--surely the most meagre and ascetic of episcopal palaces, in which there was nothing more sumptuous than his cherry and scarlet soutane and his biretta.

We lay the night at an inn that must have been at one time a seigneurial mansion, for it had a n.o.ble courtyard. I was shown to a room, and, having unpacked my valise, I turned on the taps, but no water issued; I applied a match to the gas-jet, but no flame appeared; I tried to open the window, but the sash stuck. I rang the bell; that at least responded. A maid appeared; I pointed to the taps and made demonstrations with the gas-jet. To all of which she replied quite simply, "Ah! monsieur, c'est la guerre!" I had heard that answer before.

With such a plea of confession and avoidance had the boots at the Hotel de la Poste at Rouen excused a gross omission to call me in the morning, and thus also had the aged waiter at the Metropole disposed of a flagrant error in my bill. But this time it was convincing enough; gas-workers and waterworks men and carpenters were all at the war, and in the town of Meaux water was carried in pitchers and light was purchased at the chandler's. In France you get used to these things and imitate with a good grace the calm stoicism of your Allies. For, after all, the enemy was pretty near, and as I retired to my couch I could hear the thunder of their guns.

FOOTNOTE:

[9] Reputed author of the sequel to the chronicles of Guillaume de Nangis. See M. Lacabane in the _Bibliotheque de l'ecole des Chartes_ (1e serie), t. iii.

XIV

THE CONCIERGE AT SENLIS

We rose early the next day, and, having paid our reckoning, were away betimes, for we were to visit the French lines and wished also to pay a flying visit to Senlis. As we left Crepy-en-Valois we entered the Forest of Compiegne, a forest of n.o.ble beeches which rose tall and straight and grey like the piers of Beauvais Cathedral, their arms meeting overhead in an intricate vaulting through which we saw the winter sun in a sapphire sky. We met two Cha.s.seurs d'Afrique, mounted on superb Arabs and wearing red fez-like caps and yellow collar-bands. They were like figures out of a canvas of Meissonier, recalling the s.p.a.cious days when men went into action with all the pomp and circ.u.mstance of war, drums beating, colours flying, plumes nodding, and the air vibrant with the silvery notes of the bugle. All that is past; to-day no bugle sounds the charge, and even the company commander's whistle has given way to certain soft words for which the German mocking-bird will seek in vain in our Infantry Manual. As for cuira.s.s and helmet, the range of modern guns and rifles has made them a little too ingenuous. And, sure enough, as we drove into Compiegne we found a squadron of dragoons as sombre as our own, in their mouse-coloured _couvre-casques_ and cavalry cloaks, though their lances glinted in the sun. Here all was animation. Informal conventicles of Staff officers, with whom we exchanged greetings, stood about the square in front of the exquisite Hotel de Ville, with its high-pitched roof pierced with dormer-windows and crowned with many pinnacles. North and east of Compiegne lie the zones of the respective armies, all linked up by telephone, and here we had to exchange our pa.s.ses, for even a Staff officer may not enter one zone with a pa.s.s appropriate to another. But our first objective was Senlis, which lay to the south of us between Compiegne and Paris.

The sun was high in the heavens as we turned south-west, and, keeping to the left bank of the river, skirted the forest. Faint premonitions of spring already appeared; catkins drooped upon the hazels, primroses made patches of sulphur in the woods, and one almost expected to see the blackthorn in blossom. Silver birches gleamed against the purple haze of the more distant woodlands. The road ran straight as an arrow. As we neared Senlis I was struck by the complete absence of all traffic upon the roads; no market carts came and went, neither did any wayfarer appear. Not a wisp of smoke arose from the chimneys above the screen of trees. We pa.s.sed up a double avenue of elms--just such an avenue as that along which M. Bergeret discussed metaphysics and theology with the Abbe Lantaigne--yet not a soul was to be seen upon the _trottoir_. A brooding silence hung over the little town, a silence so deep as to be almost menacing. As we entered the main street I encountered a spectacle which froze my heart. Far as the eye could see along the diminis.h.i.+ng perspective of the road were burnt-out homes, houses which once were gay with clematis and wisteria, gardens which had blossomed with the rose.

And now all that remained were trampled flower-beds, tangled creepers, blackened walls, calcined rafters, twisted ironwork, and fallen masonry.

And this was Senlis! Senlis which had been to the department of the Oise as the apple of its eye, a little town of quality, beautiful as porcelain, fragrant as a rose, and as a rose as sweet. As I looked upon these desecrated homes it seemed to me that the very stones cried out.

In all this desolation we looked in vain for any signs of life. It was not until we sought out the house of a captain of dragoons, a friend of my companion the Comte, that we found a human being in these solitudes.

The house was, indeed, a melancholy ruin, but by the gate was a lodge, and in the lodge a concierge. He was a small man and middle-aged, and as he spoke he trembled with a continual agitation of body as though he were afflicted with ague. He led us into his little house, the walls of which were blackened as with fire and pierced in many places with the impact of bullets. And this was his tale.

One afternoon early in September--it was the second day of the month, he remembered it because there had been an untimely frost over night--he heard the crackle of musketry on the outskirts of the town, and a column of grey-coated men suddenly appeared in the street. An officer blew a whistle, and, as some of them broke through the gates of the mansion, the concierge fled across the lawn with bullets buzzing about his ears and shouts of laughter pursuing him as he ran. In and out among the elms he doubled like a frightened hare, the bullets zip-zipping against the tree-trunks, till he crawled into a disused culvert and lay there panting and exhausted. From his hiding-place he heard the crash of furniture, more shots, and the loud, ribald laughter of the soldiers.

And then a crackle of flame and a thick smell of smoke. And after that silence. At dusk he crawled forth from his culvert, trembling, his hands and face all mottled with stinging-nettles and scratched with thistles; he found his master's house a smouldering ruin, and a thick pall of smoke lay over the town of Senlis like a fog. Somewhere a woman shrieked and then was still. About the hour of nine in the evening the concierge heard voices in disputation outside the lodge-gates, and as he hid himself among the shrubberies more men entered, and, being dissatisfied with their work, threw hand-grenades into the mansion and applied a lighted torch to the concierge's humble dwelling. They were very merry and sang l.u.s.tily--the concierge thought they had been drinking; they sang thus, "_comme ca!_" and the concierge mournfully hummed a tune, a tune he had never heard before, but which he would remember all his life. I recognised it. It was Luther's hymn:

Ein' feste Burg ist unser Gott.

Thus had pa.s.sed the day. Meanwhile the _maire_, M. Odent, a good man and greatly beloved, had been arrested at the Hotel de Ville. His secretary proposed to call his deputies. "No, no," replied the _maire_ tranquilly, "one victim is enough." He was dragged along the streets to the suburb of Chammont, the headquarters of von Kluck, and his guards buffeted him and spat upon him as he went. Arrived there, he was condemned to death.

He took his companions in captivity by the hand, embraced them--"tres dignement," the concierge had been told--handed them his papers, and bade them adieu. Two minutes later he was shot, and his body thrown into a shallow trench with a sprinkling of earth. The concierge had seen it the next day; the feet were protruding.

All this the concierge told us in a dull, apathetic voice, and always as he told his body twitched and the muscles of his face worked. And he spoke like a man in a soliloquy as though we were not there. He seemed to be looking at something which we could not see. As we bade him adieu he stared at us as though he saw us not, neither did he return our salutation. We clambered back into our car and turned her head round towards Compiegne. I shall never see Senlis again.

III

UNOFFICIAL INTERLUDES

XV

A "CONSEIL DE LA GUERRE"

Il y a une convenance et un pacte secret entre la jeunesse et la guerre. Manier des armes, revetir l'uniforme, monter a cheval ou marcher au commandement, _etre redoutable sans cesser d'etre aimable_, depa.s.ser le voisin en audace, en vitesse, et en grace s'il se peut, defier l'ennemi, connaitre l'aventure, jouer ce qui a peu dure, ce qui est encore illusion, reve, ambition, ce qui est encore une beaute, o jeunesse, voila ce que vous aimez! Vous n'etes pas liee, vous n'etes pas fanee, vous pouvez courir le monde.--RENe BAZIN, _Recits du temps de la guerre_.

Our little town was like the pool of Bethesda--never had I seen such a mult.i.tude of impotent folk. The lame, the halt, and the blind congregated here as if awaiting some miracle. I met them everywhere--Zouaves, Turcos, French infantry of the line, in every stage of infirmity. Our town was indeed but one vast hospital--orderly, subdued, and tenebrous. Every hotel but our own was closed to visitors and flew the Red Cross flag, displaying on its portals the register of wounded like a roll-call. The streets at night, with their lights extinguished, were subterranean in their darkness, and the single cafe, faintly illuminated, looked like some mysterious grotto within which the rows of bottles of cognac and Mattoni gleamed like veins of quartz and felspar. We were, indeed, a race of troglodytes, and we were all either very young or very old. Our adolescence was all called up to the colours. There was never any news beyond a laconic bulletin issued from the _Mairie_ at dusk, the typescript duplicates of which, posted up at street-corners, we read in groups by the light of a guttering candle, held up against the wall, and husbanded from the wind, by a little old woman of incredible age with puckered cheeks like a withered apple and hands like old oak. We were not very near the zone of war, yet not so far as to escape its stratagems. Only a day or two before an armoured motor-car, with German officers disguised in French uniforms, paid us a stealthy visit, and, after shooting three gendarmes in reply to their insistent challenge, ended its temerarious career one dark night by rus.h.i.+ng headlong over the broken arch of a bridge into the chasm beneath. After that the rigour of our existence was, if anything, accentuated; much was "defendu," and many things which were still lawful were not expedient. Every one talked in subdued tones--it was only the wounded who were gay, gay with an amazing insouciance. True, there were the picture postcards in the shops--I had forgotten them--nothing more characteristically _macabre_ have I ever seen. One such I bought one morning--a lively sketch of a German soldier dragging a child's wooden horse behind him, and saluting his officer with, "Captain, here is the horse--I have slain the horseman" ("Mon Gabidaine, ch'ai due le cavalier, foila le cheval"). It was labelled "Un Heros."

It was at this little town, on a memorable afternoon early in the war, that I was first admitted to the freedom of the soldiers of France. The ward was flooded with the soft lambent light of September suns.h.i.+ne, and it sheltered, I should say, some twenty-three men. Four were playing cards at the bedside of a cheerful youth, who a few weeks earlier had answered on tripping feet to the cry of "Garcon!" in a big Paris hotel, and was now a _sous-officier_ in 321st Regiment, recovering from wounds received in the thick of the fighting round Mulhausen. He was enjoying his convalescence. For a waiter to find himself waited upon was, he confided to me as the orderly brought in the soup, a peculiarly satisfying experience. Charles Lamb would have agreed with him. Has he not written that the ideal holiday is to watch another man doing your own job--particularly if he does it badly? The _sous-officier_ nearly wept with joy when, a moment later, the orderly upset the soup. With him was a plumber who was dealing the cards in that leisurely manner which appears to be one of the princ.i.p.al charms of the plumber's vocation. A paperhanger studied the wall-paper with a professional eye while he appropriated his cards. An Alsatian completed the party. In a distant corner a Turco, wearing his red fez upon his head, sat with his chin on his knees amid an improvised bivouac of bed-clothes and looked on uncomprehendingly. The rest smoked cigarettes and toyed with the voluptuous pages of _La Vie Parisienne_.

The _sous-officier_, being an artiste in his way, had been giving me a histrionic exhibition of sh.e.l.l-fire. With a long intake and a discharge of the breath he imitated the sibilant flight of the projectiles and followed it up with a duck of his head over the counterpane. He extended his arms in a wide sweep to show the crater they make and indicated the height of the leaping earth.

"_Quinze metres--comme ca, monsieur! Les Allemands? Ah! cochons!_ And they shoot execrably. We shoot from the shoulder (_sur l'epaule_)--so!

They shoot under the arm (_sous le bras_)--so! And they like to join hands like children--they are afraid to go alone. They came out of the wood crouching like dogs--one behind the other. They are a bad lot--_canaille_. They hide guns in ambulance-waggons and mount them on church-towers. There was one of our sappers--_diable!_ they tied him to a telegraph-pole and lit a fire under him."

"But you make them pay for that?"

He smiled grimly. "_Mais oui!_ When they see us they throw everything away and run. If we catch them, they put up their hands and say, '_Pas de mal, Alsatien_.' But we're used to that trick. We just go through them like b.u.t.ter and say, '_Pour vous!_' A little _etrenne_, you know, monsieur, what you call 'Christmas-box'!" He laughed at some grim recollection.