IX THE “FIELD OF LIES” AND LAIMBACH

November 6th.—And to-morrow I am to pass into the sweet, broad valley of the Thur and there dwell. I ask neither how nor why, knowing it will be vastly pleasant, though a somewhat startled feeling overtakes me at the thought of leaving Masevaux, tout ce qui finit est si court. For a fleeting, nostalgic moment I think, too, “What am I about, binding sheaves in this rich corner of the earth that is not mine?”

As we gather for lunch, some one reads the sweeping clauses of the conditions of the armistice with Austria-Hungary. Nothing is left save hunger and disorder. I wonder if those to whom one of the “first aims of the war is the dismemberment of the Dual Monarchy” see, in their passion, what it will mean to surround the centripetal force of Germany with floating, unsteady bits, that inevitably will be drawn to it. Some one hazarded the remark, evidently not so trite as we once thought it, that “if Austria didn’t exist, she would have to be invented.” Passion seems more than ever to be its own blind end, and, looking at those men, I thought, have we not fought and died the good death for other and further ends?

Then Laferrière began reading the American communiqué. We are but five miles from the Sedan-Metz line, one of the principal lines of communication of the Germans!

As in a dream I listen to the deeds of my soldiers, recited in the most beautiful of French, as many deeds of many men have been recited to many women through the ages.

“Ce matin la Ière Armée a repris son attaque. En dépit d’une résistance désespérée nos troupes [américaines] ont forcé le passage de la Meuse à Brieulles et à Cléry-le-Petit.” ...

“Beaumont, nœud de routes important, est tombé devant nos troupes victorieuses qui se sont avancées jusqu’au Bois de l’Hospice à deux milles au nord de Beaumont. Au cours de leur avance elles se sont emparées de Létanne. A Beaumont, nous avons délivré 500 citoyens français qui ont salué nos soldats comme leurs libérateurs....

“L’avance des deux derniers jours a amené en certains points notre ligne à cinq milles de la voie ferrée Sedan-Metz, une des principales lignes de communication des armées allemandes.”[14]

As we sit down the commandant tells me they had been picking all sorts of strange things out of the air that morning, the ether stamped with unaccustomed names. He had just got a message, not meant for French ears, bearing a new signature, Ebert; the day before he had got one bearing that of Scheidemann. It is like a further dream of a dream, these things that are borne “upon the sightless couriers of the air.”

At two o’clock I started out with Bernard and Laferrière, the latter on the errand of rounding up an actor in one of those obscure yet deadly village dramas.

“Generally I have little to do; they know they are well off,” he said, and we agreed that it was indeed a pity to be pursued by original sin even unto these pleasant valleys.

We descend at Rammersmatt, a quite unsinful-looking place, and while he is gone Bernard and I visit the old church, beautifully held in the cleft of the hill, lying against another hill, looking down on the plain of Cernay, toward the German lines. It is this same plain of Cernay, which I mentioned before, that was known in the old days as the “Champ de Mensonges.” There Ariovistus was defeated by Caæsar. There, too, Louis le Débonnaire was attacked by his three sons and betrayed by his army, and ever since it has been justly known as the “Field of Lies.” Centuries later the Swedes vanquished the imperial armies there under a Duke of Lorraine. To-day it is that thing known as “No Man’s Land,” brown with barbed-wire entanglements and rough with shell-holes—and other things besides.

Back of it are the zigzagging German lines. It is, too, the place of the century-old legend of the Niedecker’s young Thierry who, wandering there one night, saw strange sights. He had not drained a single glass of the Rang de Thann, nor of the red wine of Turckheim, called “Sang des Turcs,” but was dreaming, as an adolescent does, of everything and nothing, when suddenly the very stones of the valley began to move, and great fissures showed in the earth. From them issued thousands upon thousands of warriors of bygone times, striking against their shields and crying out in strange, hoarse voices, “Hodeīdah! Hodeīdah!”

Finally a man taller than all the others, Louis le Débonnaire, son of Charlemagne it was, his long, silvery hair surmounted by a gold and jeweled crown, jumped on a white horse and called by name, one after the other, the chiefs of his cohorts, who answered, “Here.”

Then the king, groaning with great groans, spoke beseechingly the names of the sons he had begotten, Lothaire, Louis, and Pépin.

But Lothaire, Louis, and Pépin mocked him and to further wound him caused to be brought on the battlefield his nephew, Bernard, he who had taken arms against him and whose eyes the king had caused to be put out (and for this the king knew little sleep).

Then as the battle begins the sightless Bernard jumps up behind the king’s saddle, paralyzing his every movement. But at the very height of the combat, above its clash and shoutings, the third hour of morning sounds from a church tower, and suddenly the earth receives again the ancient host and all is as before. Only Thierry from the Niedeckers lay as if dead.

And the Field of Lies, le Champ de Mensonges, is said to be the spot where the children of earth will be assembled at the Day of Judgment, for what crime can equal that of the sons of Louis, who conquered, imprisoned, and caused to die of grief a father whose only fault was that he loved them too well? It is even said that it is the troops of Louis who will sound the brazen trumps to awaken the dead for their last accounting.

Now I see it as “No Man’s Land,” rusty and brown with patches of barbed wire, rough with great shell-holes, but they say that even in intervals of peace it is never so luxuriantly fertile as are the fields that lie about it....

A white, very white afternoon heaven stretches above us. Very violent cannonading.

“C’est nous—c’est le Boche,” Bernard repeats from time to time. Then his sharp eye distinguishes a group of German airplanes, and, looking where he points, I see five spots black, black in the white sky.

They, too, are immediately fired on. I hear over my head the great swish made by the shells from the guns placed on a hill behind us—or so sounding. My ear is not quick to distinguish directions in these echoing hills.

Little balls of snow-white shrapnel, like beautifully wound balls of fleecy wool, gently unloosen themselves about the black spots of the five airplanes, which, after a while, disappear to the east.

Though not so overcome as the Niedecker’s Thierry, I feel that my eyes, too, have looked on a strange spectacle.

Then Laferrière rejoins us. By the pleased look on his face we guess that he hasn’t made the wages of sin too high, and we continue on our way under the late, and still very white, afternoon sky. Suddenly the heavily plated, thickly enameled rust and gold and black of the hillsides seem to disappear and the earth is green again, young and tenderly green, like spring, but how and why? It lasted but a few minutes, for on the slopes toward Thann there was again the autumnal gleam of gold and rust, and spots of fathomless black.

Entering Laimbach, we stopped to get the mayor, who was to conduct us to the old Jesuit church, half-way between his village and the village of Otzwiller, or rather its site, for Otzwiller disappeared completely during the Thirty Years’ War, wherein each lovely Alsatian valley had been sacked and burned and destroyed, and friends of yesterday were enemies of to-day, and vice versa.

The mayor was a voluble, amiable mayor, who had conserved, during those many German years, a vast amount of creaking, noisy, unpleasant French.

His village was ancient, high-roofed, many-fountained, and had been much shelled. The streets were full of children playing, blue soldiers were walking about, girls were leaning out of the windows to give and get a greeting, or being pinched as they giggled about the streets, clicking their sabots in the mud. As we passed out the white sky darkened suddenly and a hard red began to burn in the west. We found ourselves nearing a half-demolished fifteenth-century church, placed strangely between the battered, living village and the ghostly village of the Thirty Years’ War. It was of grès rose and had been built on the foundations of an even earlier one, and near it was a shell-shot, ancient, high, red-roofed presbytery. For generations the church had been a shrine of St.-Blaise, and on every 3d of February the mayor told us (but sadly, as one speaking of a pleasant past) there had been a great pilgrimage made by those suffering from throat maladies.

Now over all was hanging a penetrating atmosphere of bootless desolation, and I was suddenly seized with an anxious feeling that I should be about the secret lonely business of my soul. Life seemed unbearably sad and short, and “where was the place of eternal happiness, the place where the Barbarian need be feared no more?” ...[15]

In front of the church had been placed, somewhat indiscreetly, the officers thought, a big battery. And the mayor said, too, apologetically, “Evitément z’édait mal joizi par écard à l’éclise,” for the battery had soon been sighted. After the church had received many shells right in her pink and lovely bosom, it had been moved some forty meters away, but even so it had again been repérée, and the church had suffered the usual fate of churches near batteries. Some fine old columns were left in the apse, of the delicious grès rose. For a moment Laferrière and I stood scaling off bits of the disfiguring gray plaster and wondering why it had ever been put on, it and all the other gray stucco that a certain austere century had plastered over gorgeous building-stone everywhere in Europe.

The church, like the village of the Thirty Years’ War, will soon be but a name, for its walls are cracked and sagging, and with another winter’s frost they will crumble and fall. Through the roofless nave we walked over a mass of torn-up old mosaic flooring, and heaps of gaudy modern stained glass fallen from the lovely, ancient, pointed windows.

It was getting dark as we passed out into the disorderly cemetery, between the church and the battery (and even for a cemetery very uninviting, torn up as it was by recent shells). Ends of coffins were sticking out, shabby, twisted, bead wreaths and muddy, discolored tricolor badges lay about, while in the middle of a once tidy family plot, by name Hilz, was a huge new shell-hole of only the day before.

The mayor gave a shudder as he looked at his own familiar graveyard, where his parents and his friends had been laid—though not to rest. He was out for the first time after grippe and he said, with a determined look and in his most creaking French, “If I have to die, all right, but I’ve forbidden my daughter to bury me here.” Many, many had also fallen in the fields, and everywhere thin earth lay over damp, shallow graves marked by shabby, crooked crosses. Meadow mists were beginning to rise and the copper-colored edge had hardened in the sky. I felt again an inexpressible discouragement. I tried to think of Peace, so near, so hotly desired, so redly pursued, but I could only perceive the damp meadow, the demolished church, the gun-emplacements, the disorderly, shelled cemetery, and the humid odor of death and mold and rotting leaves. As yet nothing seemed to have risen incorruptible.

We turned and went again along the dark, damp valley road till we reached the village with its consoling hum of life. Through the dusky street washed the lovely soft blue of soldiers; a group stood with some girls around the beautiful fountain, deeply pink in the half-light, built in the fifteenth century by the Jesuits, though the mayor insisted on placing the Sons of Loyola in the fourteenth. In fact, the Jesuits and the fourteenth century were one in his mind. Then, as far as he was concerned, came the war of 1914. He wanted us to come into his house to partake of some brand of white liqueur—as I have said the people of these valleys distil all and every bright-colored fruit of their earth. It would seem that the whole flora of Alsace can be used to this end, and no matter which of God’s colors go into their alembics, passing through, it comes out pure white, to befuddle the heads and harden the stomachs of the populace—and little boys are born with the burden of deafness. Though twilight enveloped us, I knew the look that must be on the mayor’s face, and something a bit phosphorescent came into his eyes as he spoke of a petite mirabelle. Fortunately, it was too late to accept.

A few minutes later we found ourselves on the screened road to Masevaux, moving slowly, without lights, the road overlooking the Field of Lies, where the Germans watched.

Above the hills in front of us was a very thin, very long, very red, crescent moon. No one spoke.

Doubtless the officers, like myself, were wondering upon what, when it was full and white, its light would shine. Now it was turned to blood.

The roads were crowded with rattling artillery wagons, transporting guns and supplies under cover of the deep, blue night. Once or twice on some hillside, turned away from the German valley, was the leaping of a flame, from the fire of a group of artilleurs, who were to wait the morning on wooded slopes.

Thoughts of the ghostly village of Otzwiller, now but a name, pursued me, and of the Swedish invasion. And the miseries of the Thirty Years’ War seemed to confound themselves with these of the war I know so well, while the night deepened, under the long, thin, red moon, hanging behind black-palled hills, in a heaven that still had an edge of copper.

A church bell sounded and something flying swiftly touched me at that hour of the evening sacrifice, and I knew then that those who tread the olives are rarely anointed with the oil, and I cried out within myself suddenly and in despair, a long-unremembered line of the great Italian:

“Faro come colui che piange.”