V THE BALLON D’ALSACE

Sunday afternoon.—At two o’clock I started out with Captain Bernard and Captain Antoni for the great mountain known as the Ballon[7] d’Alsace, sometimes called, too, “the knot of Europe,” in an especially high-powered motor (I never know the mark of any of them, distinguishing a Ford from a Rolls-Royce only by the generally pampered feeling pervading me when in the latter).

The Ballon rises like a wall at the very end of the valley of the Doller, and we passed through many villages, shining pinkly in the prismatic November afternoon, where there was much going into church for vespers, of blue- or black-clad figures. The thirteenth century-towered church of Sewen is on a slight eminence in the heart of the village, and the cemetery around it was crowded with the faithful, regretting their dead, or some, perhaps, for one reason or another (What know I?), feeling, “’Tis better they lie there.” “Live long, but not too long for others,” is an excellent device.

The charming lake of Sewen, though far from the village, seen from a certain angle, reflects the tower of the church and is, they told me, of Moorish origin. These valleys and hills seem everywhere like open books concerning the dim, dim youth of the earth; I had a sense of my transitories, with those lessons written everywhere. And it is autumn, too.

We got out at the immense reservoir of Alfelt which dams up dangerous springtime floods with its giant wall of masonry, for from the “knot of Europe” loosened waters flow to the North Sea and to the Mediterranean. Climbing to the top of the rocky elevation, we read on the monument the date of the inauguration of the reservoir, 1884, and the name, Prince Hohenlohe Schillingfurst, Statthalter.

And, looking down, the shining villages through which we had just passed, Sewen, Oberbruck, Niederbruck, Masevaux, are like beads on the thread of the lovely valley, lying between the breasts of the hills.

The mountain-ringed lake of the reservoir reflects the rich coloring of the hills in which it is set; white-stemmed, yellow-leaved birches, blood-red cherry trees; rust-colored beeches, larch trees shining like torches borne by wanderers, on black pine slopes; all is seen twice—once on the hills and once in the mirror of the lake.

Then we mount up, up, up, twisting and turning over the magnificent military road, made like so many others since the war, to become some day the joy of tourists, when, thousands upon ten thousands, nay, millions upon millions, they shall come from over ocean and mountain to see what it all looks like and get the belated thrill.

Violet hills become black, outlined against a copper-colored band of western horizon. Captain Bernard points out some English airplanes just over our heads, tiny, tiny specks hanging in a high waste of heaven, and I wonder if in one of them sits my friend, the chartered accountant of the Belfort train, fulfilling his destiny in the air.

We leave the motor at the highest point of the road, where trees no longer grow, and start to climb the grassy crest, patterned with great brown patches of barbed-wire defenses. Captain Bernard’s sharp eyes soon discerned the chicanes, intricate, almost indistinguishable pathways through the wire, and if one knew them one could get through without leaving one’s clothes. Breathless, we arrived at the table d’orientation and find ourselves looking out over what seemed the edge of the universe. In front of us lay the gorgeous panorama of the Alps and behind it the wide band of copper-colored sky, with here and there a burnishing of glaciers by the dipping sun. To our left stretched the immense and splendid valley of the Rhine, behind it the Black Forest, clearly yet softly outlined against a paler horizon. One could have rolled the whole earth like a ball from the feet. I felt as if suddenly freed from any heaviness of the flesh, and Goethe’s soaring words brushed against my mind, and beckoned me on—those words he cried after he had reached the Brocken and was looking down on a cloud-covered Germany.

I knew those vast expanses for material out of which a new earth, if not a new heaven, must be formed, on some eighth day of creation. And the new earth was to be made out of old and conflicting desires, worn, yet persistent passions, small, yet greedy thoughts, the whole about as facile as the weighing of the winds, making one almost feel that He who worked with new materials those first seven days had the easier part.

I was filled, too, with a great longing for an improbable wisdom and strength to be breathed into the men who are to reharness the plunging, escaping destinies of the nations. Each man that has his hands on the reins seems like some one clinging to a runaway horse, trying to dominate a relentless, unreasoning, reckless course.

Reverberating through the eternal hills was the sound of heavy cannon; and before my mind came a vision of the great forges wherein they were formed, men working day and night in hot, dim, noisy spaces—Creusot and Krupp and Skoda, and all the rest....

Some near summit hid the dread Hartmannswillerkopf, the “Verdun” of Alsace, and one of the officers spoke of that winter of 1916, when its snow was always pink with blood and black with death—“tens of thousands sleep there.” I thought of the souls breathed out into that pure, high ether, like to this, but cold, cold, almost as tenuous as the immortal stuff commingling with it.

Then we started to the other edge of the summit, whence we might look into l’élégante et douloureuse Lorraine, for one side of the Ballon slopes toward Alsace and the other toward Lorraine.

As we threaded our way carefully through more chicanes of barbed-wire defenses “that you had to have your nose in before they could be distinguished,” I discerned on the crag three familiar silhouettes, outlined against the heavens toward the Lorraine slope. And as things are rarely in their proper setting nowadays, there on the Ballon d’Alsace were three dusty Y.M.C.A. men who had come from their cantine at Belfort. We spoke to them and gave our names, and the brightest one, Tallant was his name, asked if I were the wife of my husband—and said he’d been on the Mexican border.

Then we told them where the table d’orientation was, but forgot to point out the chicanes, and we saw them from a distance entangled in barbed wire. Their souls were safe, I hope, but heaven help those khaki clothes!

And looking down into Lorraine from my splendid height was as if looking into another world, for its distances were bronze and silver and pale green.

Great black spots of shadow cast by wasteful masses of white clouds were lying heavily over those new and ancient battle-fields. Forever obliged to protect themselves from some invader, the villages hide rather than display themselves, and are barely detached from the silvery brown of the plain, crossed here and there by the bosky lines of the Meuse, or those of the great canal joining the French river to the Rhine. And each tiny hill has been an altar or a fortress, often both at once. Over the majestic, melancholy stretch Romans have passed, the hosts of Attila, Normans, Germans, Burgundians, Swedes, English, and many others. Now its white roads sound to the tramp of American armies, are encumbered by giant quantities of war material brought from over the seas. And of all who have passed over it, of the most ancient even, much remains. Close against one another are Roman encampments, feudal castles, the two-sided, two-faced bastion defenses of Vauban, the great, mined earthworks of modern times, and now in leafy darknesses are the cement emplacements of the big guns of the twentieth century.

But alas! as I turned to go, pulling my gaze from the wide horizon (a pale, pale pink where it covered the western way to the city that is the heart of France), I saw on that slope, directly under me, a cruel statue of Jeanne d’Arc. A stiff yet boneless Pucelle sat astride an equally stiff yet boneless steed; both seemed about to drop into space, the mountain falling away from them, and both were of a dreadful superfluity! However, one isn’t so plagued with horrid modern statues in Alsace as in other places I have been, for they run rather to fountains and living waters. At St.-Amarin, for instance, I don’t remember anything later or more personal than the fiery Gallic cock, “der spuckende Welschhahn,” surmounting a sphere, borne in turn by the column of the 1830 fountain; and the fountain in the Place du Chapitre at Masevaux, bearing the date 1768, has a single, lovely column, too, on whose top burns a stone flame in an urn. And the shaft of the fountain of the wine-growers at Thann is a mass of rich yet noble carving, surmounted by a helmeted figure bearing a shield on his back. Furthermore, crystal water flows into its six-sided emblazoned basin.

I think of the statue of Thiers, Libérateur du Territoire, in that dusty, begonia-planted, iron-railed plot in front of the station at Nancy, and I could weep.

But hereabout I haven’t found a single nineteenth-century statesman in frock-coat and top-hat, done in granite, nor any bronze female pointing him the way to a dubious heaven, with a long finger and a heavy palm-branch—and so may it remain.

Certainly the très chic chef of the Military Mission will be well punished for his good works in Alsace if they ever raise a statue to him. For they will make him, too, out of either bronze or marble with a plaque de commissaire on his frock-coated breast, and heaven knows what kind of a hat they’ll put on him, or how the fancy will seize them to do his hair! And the statue won’t be of lapis lazuli, as it should be, nor of pale sapphire, nor of dull turquoise, nor of any of the lovely blue stones of the earth, alone fit to perpetuate the beauty of the blue-clad men who have written France’s greatest epic. Blue-clad men splashed about fountains at twilight, blue-clad men taking form and substance as they emerge out of gray mountain mists, blue-clad men weaving their cerulean patterns through the woof of long-trunked pine forests, blue-clad men like bits of turquoise embedded in the matrix of white roads, and what know I besides?

As I gave a sigh for Art and a prayer for the serried ranks of her erring devotees, I found myself looking into another splendid valley, toward Giromagny, near where is a height known as La Planche des Belles Filles, after a story of the Thirty Years’ War, when men with blue eyes and very light hair and skin were for a while masters of the domains of Belfort and Ferrette. After the best manner of invading armies, ’tis recorded that these Swedes committed many excesses, and dark-eyed girls lay concealed in the forest, and when they feared their hiding-place had been discovered they fled to the mountains, but even there they were pursued by the hosts of fair-haired, fair-skinned, blue-eyed men, bent on the most elemental of errands. And again they fled precipitately, scarcely knowing their direction. When they got to the top they found themselves on a great ledge of rock and in their distress they tumbled from the height onto other rocks below, and the blue-eyed, fair-skinned, fair-haired men from the North knew them not. Hence the “Ledge of the Beautiful Girls.”

And then we took a last look at the vast heaping of the Alps; to the left, the Jungfrau and the Mönsch, to the right, Mont Blanc, the whole great mass outlined against that persistent dark-red band. The glacier of the Jungfrau was as if in conflagration; Mont Blanc was soft and roseate, yet its beauty left me cold.

Captain Bernard said he had climbed the Ballon many times and only twice before had he seen the great panorama; but as, alack! to him who does not want shall be given, except for their gorgeousness, I would have turned from them indifferently, had not my beloved mother been dwelling almost in the shadow of Mont Blanc.

But one[9] has written, as men of genius write of things in times of peace, of this Ballon d’Alsace. He who brought out from his Gallo-British mind new things and old has said in one of the most charming of books: “Then on the left you have all the Germanies, a great sea of confused and dreaming people, lost in philosophies and creating music, frozen for the moment under a foreign rigidity, but some day to thaw again and to give a word to us others. They cannot remain long apart from visions.” I thought they have, indeed, given a “word.” But when again the “visions”?

I turned and followed my two blue-clad officers down the Alsatian slope, over the gray grass, threading neatly through the chicanes of the brown, barbed-wire defenses, and got into the motor waiting on the roadway once known as that of the Dukes of Lorraine.

We were silent as we started down the great mountain. I was again wrapped in thoughts of the New Day to be created out of old and rotting stuffs, and of the death of heroes. The hills were velvet-palled against the deepening crimson band of light.

Later, a panne, and we waited in a violet-valleyed world, illumined only by white candelabraed torches of strangely luminous larch and birch, while the prudent yet daring chauffeur changed the tire.

A great khaki-colored motor passed us, marked with two stars, filled with khaki-clad men of my race, going up, up, whence we had come.

Then we stopped at the little restaurant of Alfeld. The lake of many colors was dark and mysterious. Its high tints had been dipped in something deep in the hours since last I saw it, though strange blues and purples and rust colors were still reflected in it, and the light of a single, very yellow birch had not yet been snuffed. At the restaurant four glasses of white liqueur were poured for us (one, of course, for the chauffeur), distilled from raspberries, the odor of the berry very strong, and long afterward the taste, the arrière-goût, remains in the mouth, as if one had just eaten the fruit. But one of the officers said, “All the same, it doesn’t equal a good quetsch or kirsch or, above all, a good mirabelle.”

And then we dipped into the darkening valley of the Doller and through dim villages found the way to Masevaux and the house on the Place du Chapitre, where the Demoiselles Braun had tea awaiting us, and there were stories told that made us laugh. And one was of the renowned 15th Dragoons, so long quartered there, which, briefly—and humanly—is this:

At intervals after their departure little dragoons saw the light of a war-world, and, to be exact, fifty in all saw it. The curé was broken-hearted at the ravages among his sheep, but he was also a practical, long-sighted curé, so he wrote, presenting his idea of the matter before the colonel of the regiment, with the result that from the savings-box of that same regiment a sum was subtracted to provide ten years later for the first communion and confirmation clothes of the fifty! (Would you have thought of it?) Then, casting about in his mind how he could further improve the general situation, this time not so much from the temporal point of view as from that of eternity, he decided upon a pilgrimage—a pilgrimage of reparation to Huppach, where is the shrine known as that of the Virgin of Klein Einsiedeln, near Sewen, through which we had just passed. He announced the pilgrimage from the pulpit, then took the further precaution of rounding up his strayed sheep in person, and in person conducting them to Huppach to offer up prayers and tears to the Virgin of Klein Einsiedeln. There were so many of them, however, and they were mostly so young, that history does not record the pilgrimage as being entirely without smiles—and God have mercy on us all!

But the curé was not yet (so to speak) out of the woods, for fate replaced the Dragoons by another regiment, having, as it happened, a colonel possessed of a boundless love for his men and who couldn’t do enough for them (or rather have the inhabitants of Masevaux do enough for them).

“The inhabitants of Masevaux are very nice, very nice indeed,” quoth he, “but the happiness of my men above everything. We left three thousand on the battlefield last week, and the others need distraction—of a pleasant sort. My men above everything.”

So the colonel who loved his men with a boundless love and, furthermore, was not one to waste time in vain endeavors to portray the eternal feminine as undesirable, nor to render the chase unpopular, caused dances to be organized on this very Place du Chapitre, under these very linden trees, then heavy-scented, and every evening. The curé, foreseeing trouble, with the aid of Heaven and his own undiscourageable will, had them suppressed after eight days (eight days is a long time) of wrestling with leagued powers both civil and military. And again God have mercy on us all!

Now the virtuous, I mean the truly virtuous (that is, the untried, untempted virtuous), mustn’t throw stones at Masevaux nor at this book, but rather remember that anything could have happened to anybody had everything been different. And even so, hasn’t a lot happened to many of you? You know a good deal better than I do just how much.

To the popote at seven-thirty, and before I’m an hour older I’m going to tell you about the popote. And you’ll wish you had been there instead of hearing about it—as runs the classic expression, “Regarder manger des glaces,” and I give the translation, “Watch others eat ice-cream,” partly because I want you all to know just what I mean, and partly because some one in the United States wrote to my publishers that My Lorraine Journal was a nice book, but couldn’t they suggest to me that I write my books either in French or English.

Mrs. O’S.: “But, my dear Mr. Graham” (his name is Graham, and this may be his chance of immortality), “I couldn’t write one entirely in French to save my soul, and to save my soul I’d find it impossible when everything I’m writing about takes place in France not to slip into la belle langue occasionally.”

Mr. Graham (from a distance): “Occasionally! There you’re at it again. Occasionally!” (It does get on his nerves.)

Mrs. O’S.: “And there is another saying to the effect that ‘On ne peut pas contenter tout le monde et son père.’ That is to say, dear Mr. Graham, that you can’t please everybody and your father as well, and this, of course, mostly applies to young men (are you a son or are you a father?) trying to win smiles outside family circles—and father ultimately paying the bills. But as it occurs to me here, there must be some connection.”

Mr. Graham: “I don’t see it. And while I’m about it, I’d like to tell you a thing or two concerning those Mexican books of yours. The Spanish was awful—even The Yale Review and The Nation noticed it.”

Mrs. O’S. (getting a bit nasty): “It’s about all either of them did notice, especially The Yale Review; and nobody loves me on The Nation, but it was entirely the printer’s fault. He received them immaculate. I turned my face to the wall for three days after a glance at A Diplomat’s Wife. But then you probably don’t remember how perfectly sweet about these very books The North American Review was (a man with the most perceptive of souls and a neat flair for the imponderabilities, named Lawrence Gilman, does their book reviews), also The New Republic, which possesses a man named Alvin Johnson, inexorably sure about the humanities, separating with a single, infallible gesture the goats of letters from the sheep (but he still thinks, alas! that all men are born free and equal). And The New York Sun was kind, kind, and The New York Evening Post, too, and they do say this latter rarely says anything nice about people till they’re dead and can’t enjoy it, and The New York Tribune, which has the reputation of being very particular about itself, and The New York Times, which never jokes and is known as a searcher after truth.”

Mr. Graham, dreadfully bored with me, mumbles something like “this is what you get when you try to do somebody a good turn.” I couldn’t catch it all, as he’d doubtless continued farther on his journey through the great Northwest. He wrote from one of a chain of “Grand Trunk Pacific Hotels,” and all I can think of to call after him is Bon voyage, though he won’t like it.

And now back to Masevaux in the valley of the Doller—Masevaux smelling a bit like nice leather things in expensive shops, with a hint of falling leaves.