Front matter (continued 2)

I did not answer the mute question. I could not. An unopposed, a sudden quenchless need of Blanchette, frustrated all honesty of speech, and I really caught at, snatched, the proffered chance—diablerie or no diablerie—to see again the face, the form, the flesh—Was it indeed materialization as the mediumistic parlance had it?—of Blanchette. The more I thought of it, the more I coveted the vision. Its quality should be tested. That I swore. And my connivance became more cautious. We would try nothing, until Hortense and Julie had retired. A sudden tension of almost ravenous expectancy rose within me, utterly surprising, and now, I was the exhilarator, and prompter, and accomplice, more desirous, more credulous, than Gabrielle herself. The delay for the thing to begin seemed insufferable, but there must be no interruption, and the sceptic, the half believer, the moderating protestant, at the unreasonableness and danger of the indulgence, moved now in its preparation with an unresisting acceptance of its realization, hungry for its fulfillment, every scruple banished!

"Gabrielle, go to your room. We will not begin until Hortense and Julie have gone to bed; then, when the house is all ours," my voice was strained and unnatural, and perhaps my features were themselves distorted with excitement, for Gabrielle slightly withdrew from me, "then, let us go to the library, and there we will unite our minds and hearts, and—bring Blanchette back!"

Only a violent self-control withheld my tongue from shouting the words, so monstrously grew within me the insatiable passion for the coveted design, a passion, half orgiastic, half a maddened curiosity, and within which, I know now, not a trace of spiritual feeling, or aspirations, or tenderness, or beauty, reigned, or had a part. So variously are we composed, and thus from the waters of our souls, when stirred, or clouded, darkened by the overturning prods of the rebellious body, which disturb its slimy sediments, rise the exhalations of unworthy motives. In that instant, as I waited afterwards for the hour agreed upon for our nocturnal incantations—the word suits the debased frame of my mind—just one overpowering conception ruled my heart, the possibility of clasping Blanchette to my breast as a physical presentment. Whither had flown the beautiful boundless dreams of our beatific, immaterial union, bathed in the everlasting lights of celestial choirs? Alas—whither?

It was about eleven o'clock, when Gabrielle tapped at the door between our rooms, and I opened it. Gabrielle had changed her dress somewhat. She had put on a dark serge gown that fitted quite closely, and she had opened the waist at the throat slightly, and discarded all collar. The sleeves closed about the wrists; in her hair, loosely piled up above her temples, were three silver combs, and they formed the only light touch in her apparel. We both wore slippers, as almost instinctively the association of lightness and noiselessness with the work in hand came to my mind. We said nothing, but passed out of my room, and stepped swiftly down the stairway to the library. I glanced out of the window hastily, and found the sky clear, mistily studded with the stars, and with strips of cloud strung along the western limits of the firmament.

Gabrielle asked me to light the lamp for a minute's instruction; otherwise we would proceed in complete darkness; that she averred was best. I lit the lamp, and was a little disturbed by Gabrielle's pallor which in the yellow light of the lamp appeared deathly. I asked her if she felt unwell. She smiled and said, "No, not at all," and then she motioned me to a seat near her, at the centre of the room, where she had chosen a chair, quite detached from any other article of furniture. Behind her were simply the unillumined corners of the apartment. I sat down and waited for her instructions, which however I fully understood as the manner of this seance had been in words rehearsed between us.

"Alfred, take my hands in your own, and bend your forehead forward upon my knees, and then just THINK of Blanchette, and remain so, no matter how long it seems. When the soul of Blanchette comes it will be light, but do not release my hands."

I recall the absolute precision of certainty in Gabrielle's words, in her voice, and then that she leaned back, shut her eyes, and just perceptibly drew her shoulders upward, while her lips moved as if in prayer. I put out the light. I pressed her hands in mine; they were supremely warm, and soft, and unresisting, and then I knelt and bowed my head and—endowed, as I have in this narrative many times intimated, some visualizing or occult force—brought to my eyes the very figure, color, expression, and voice of the dead girl. It was not so much a feeling of solemnity—that does not express it at all—as a feeling of mystery, of indefinite approach towards the incredible, with the mingled half delirious anticipations in myself of actually again seeing the live Blanchette, that held me rigid.

At length Gabrielle's fingers twitched slightly, and she half released them, but I held them tightly, and then Gabrielle seemed to be murmuring aloud. I still held my face downwards, forcing to my eyes the image of Blanchette, recalling her voice, and straining my mind outward as it were, in my effort to impress all of this upon Gabrielle. The voice of my sister grew slightly louder, and the words were at intervals coherent and intelligible, and then I lifted my head.

At first I could see nothing but soon I became conscious of some diffused light or glow, a kind of absorbed brightness, as if it escaped from the darkness itself, perhaps faintly bluish. It arrested my attention, and the thought of Blanchette died away as I actually saw the brightness increase around me. It was a strange indescribable light. It was not only seen by the eyes; it was felt by the mind, if I may put it that way. Looking more cautiously and intently it became evident that it lay in lines proceeding through the blackness of the room, from a point somewhere at our side, and it still grew slowly stronger, with a soft interior palpitation, as if the source of the emanations pulsed regularly, sending out the luminous streams in waves. With this increasing intensity—though intensity hardly expresses it, it was so vaguely dispersed and yet obviously confined in radial directions—with the increasing intensity, the mental influence deepened also, and it was only by a supreme effort that I retained my position.

The inclination with me was to allow myself to float, from the unmistakable sense of buoyancy that invaded all my body, and with that came to my sensorium a most peculiar incomputable sensation of diffusion. I cannot put it into words. It felt like a dissolution, as if the material substance of which I was composed were undergoing dispersion or extension, and the solvent was this strengthening light. But the sensation was also peculiarly delightful so that, while you felt yourself as it were vanishing, there was no sickness of fear with it, nor any, the slightest, physical resistance. I feel certain it was the prelude to unconsciousness. Some residual wakefulness, springing from my curiosity, saved me from the invited surrender, and I slowly rose to my feet, still holding Gabrielle's hands.

Then I looked at my sister, and, so it seemed, in that gloom there had developed around her head a half nebulous curtain or aureole of light also, which, in its turn, was emitting the peculiar light beams. It was at that moment I dropped her hands, that had become almost lifeless to my feeling. In an instant the previous sense of dematerialization left me, and with a shock, absurdly like the flying back of widely distended or separated limbs, I became keenly conscious, and concretely centered. I remember the faint thrill of amusement that this réassemblage caused to me. And now—there was not much desire on my part to be ratiocinative—the other point, the emergent initial centre of the emanations grew, not only brighter, but greatly larger, and I divined with a sudden consternation of heart, that there were forming before me the outlines of a human figure. I shrank backward for an instant, and for an instant only, and then bent forward and moved forward with the increasing light, for now the adjutant centres—that about the evolving apparition, and that around my sister—both increased, filling my eyes with the radiance, and yet administering no particular illumination to the objects in the room. These latter were perhaps more visible than they had been. That I think was incontestable, but the light might have been described as self-centered, in this sense, that it was entirely refluent on its source and confined in its illuminating effect to that.

And now—I lost sight of everything else, so concentrated was my thought upon the spectacle—the light to the side and in the depth of the room expanded rapidly, and the shape that it made was that of a naked phosphorescent figure, whose configuration, while it was discerned, was not really revealed, so bathed it seemed to be in the billowy light that encumbered it, and yet exposed it. Only the arms of the figure escaped that luminous envelope, and, stretching outward beyond it, put on the semblance of white flesh. I put my hand to my head. It was wet with the dew of perspiration, that may have been the sweat of amazement, or of excitement.

The intention so dearly formed of seizing my restored Blanchette died away before this immaculate phenomenon, for in it there dawned no reminiscence of the earthly charm I had called by that name. That loveliness whose perishable garb of color and of matter I had worshipped was not suggested here; the showery lightness that seemed tremulous with a thousand interior responses had its wonderfulness indeed, but it only left me wonder-stricken. Neither did it appall me. I became chilled into immobility, although every nerve was shaking with the impressed realization of a miracle. I was standing before the resurrected DEAD.

Whether it was this thought or the resuscitated passion of my heart, rebelling against the incandescent splendor, I do not know, but I suddenly stepped towards the scintillating object and spoke: "Blanchette! Blanchette! Blanchette!" My voice was instinct with the note of human passion, the earthly cry of love for the reality of warmth, and softness, and breath, and fragrance, the concomitants of the living body—and, as my words were repeated, and again repeated, and my arms were outstretched, while my face, bathed in the sepulchral light, perhaps might have showed my yearning, this marvellous and stupendous reality occurred:

The phosphorescent configuration with the extended arms grew paler and paler, and as its extreme blurry splendor died away, there sprang forward from within it, the real similitude of Blanchette, a pallid figure of light, and in it the dear face of the girl, tender, divinely, to my eyes, beautiful, with now a compassionate wistfulness of prettiness, O! so faintly expressed, in the dim radiance that seemed yet to stream with undulous waves through the room from the relaxed, motionless body of my sister. And—so it appeared to me—the figure advanced towards me with the same outstretched arms, with which I leaped forward to receive it.

I clasped the empty air and fell headlong in a convulsion, that rattled my very bones, while sharp strokes of pain severed my muscles, and throbs, like the intermittent knocks of a hammer, beat within my brain. It was an utterly unnatural collapse; the strained attitude of the last few hours, with the previous anticipation—unsuspectingly untying the resistance of my nerves—did not clearly explain it. There was something else. I was still quite conscious and, more than that, I was wrathful with disappointment, as if caught in a trick of deception, the hocus-pocus of a mere niaiserie. My eyes watched the faded spot of light from which the transfiguration had started. It actually flitted unevenly for some moments over my fallen body, and then it moved slowly—now contracted into a mere ball of luminosity—towards my yet unawakened sister. There it increased in brilliancy, and the former glowing outline, with the resumed extended arms, reappeared, and then came the last denouement. In an instant there was a flashing collision between the light of the vision and the light, seemingly emitted by my sister, when the entire room became vivid with light—everything seen, with absolutely nothing there but my sister and myself, and then the darkness again more profound by contrast, and swimming—the word is exactly descriptive—upward, and then sideways a ball, a mere star, of brightness, sparkled for one second in the fire-place, and vanished.

There was no sound, there had not been an audible word, and now there was the undisturbed apartment with myself spread out in pain on the floor, and my sister still in her unbroken trance. I struggled to my feet and seized Gabrielle's hands and drew her up. She awoke, dazed, and also in pain, standing at my side in a benumbed speechless way that startled me. I lit the lamp hurriedly, and led her to the couch, where she again fell into unconsciousness. I chafed her hands. I wet her temples. Finally she slowly responded to the treatment, and I was able to lead her to her room. She had by that time become normal, but reticent and oppressed, and begged me to leave. I went away.

My own distress lasted some hours, but slowly improved, the jolts of pain growing less, and at longer intervals, and succumbing to my complete restoration.

The next day found Gabrielle and myself talking in the garden at the same spot where we had conceived of the seance; we had both been almost feverishly waiting the opportunity to rehearse our experience. We met almost as if by agreement, walking down the garden, on opposite sides at the same time, as to a rendez-vous.

I related everything to Gabrielle as I had seen it, and asked her about her own experience. I said, "Gabrielle, I think that it is best not to indulge this power of yours any longer. It was a disappointment every way, and the results only unhealthy and stupid."

"Alfred," she replied, "I have often brought back the spirits of the dead, not by my own will but because they came to me willingly, and it has never hurt me. It seemed a delight rather, and the sensations were blissful. But it was all different last night. It was spoiled somehow. There was some discord, something improper in our thoughts—in yours, Alfred?"

"Gabrielle, just what happened to yourself, when you fell away in the trance?"

"I seemed to be rising upward on wings, with sunny lights shining upon me, and the endless shimmering of spirit bodies about me, and then came a darkness with a despairing feeling of loneliness and of desertion, and then a slow, consuming pain until you waked me."

"Gabrielle, have you ever actually seen the spirits? Were they, as the jargon goes, materialized before your eyes?"

"Not exactly, perhaps. They came to me in my sleep, but I have indeed—so it seems to me—awakened and found the air about me filled with shapes. They did not last, wavering away with swingings this way and that, but their faces smiled as they went off, and a low pleasant light remained; that too gently—doucement—fading away."

We walked slowly back again towards the house, quite silent. I, buried in a reverie of self-dissatisfaction, Gabrielle doubtless in one of afflicted wonder. At length I said, stopping abruptly, and turning Gabrielle towards me, as I often did, with my two hands clasping her shoulders, "Gabrielle, let us agree to banish these practices. It may cost you an effort, but I believe it is best for both of us. We shall lose our wits with these devilments." Gabrielle resented that, and her face showed her protest. "Well, not that exactly," I added quickly, "let us call them illusions. Some scientific wiseacres call them hypnagogic illusions. It is not altogether normal and reasonable and—" I hesitated a moment, and Gabrielle added, "You mean improper, unhealthy, unsafe?"

"Yes I mean all that, and then I think by some occultism we cannot define, or even recognize, they will torment us, and actually drag us into lunacy."

"Alfred, did you see Blanchette?"

"Why, yes, I saw something that brought her distinctly before me for an instant—but, Gabrielle," I was ashamed to betray my hope for some sort of bodily incarnation, "it was only a madness of the brain—only that."

"But, Alfred, you did see the light; they always come in light-clouds—les voiles de lumière."

"Oh, yes, I saw the shining figure—so it seemed—and the light, Gabrielle, that seemed to stream from your head in rays. All that I saw, but whether it was an actual light, or some infernal hallucination, or just some mesmeric phenomena, and we both were asleep, I fear to say. But it has left me queerly disgusted and upset. At any rate I will have nothing more to do with it—nothing. My work (Redaction of the Code Législatif for Court Practice) will be interfered with, and then perhaps my poor brain will leave me altogether."

We laughed, and at length Gabrielle answered, liberating herself from my hold and musingly watching the sparrows twittering and flying spasmodically in swarms from the thicketed ampelopsis on the house. Her voice was low, and its accent firm, and half persuasive too.

"Alfred, I will go half way. I will do nothing to bring back the visions, but if they come I shall not scare them away. And as for séances—well, we both have had all we want of them. Eh?"

"Truly Gabrielle, I think that if we continued these visitations, if they are that, it would be with us as it was with Argan in Le Malade Imaginaire, who was threatened by Dr. Purgan, you know, after a long line of disorders, avec la privation de la vie, ou nous aura conduit notre folie."

I never again spoke about the spirits to Gabrielle. I grew strangely fearful of them, the thought of them made me shudder—until the war brought upon us the awful visitation that I have written this book to describe, and which—Well, what it did is now the common knowledge of the world. Nor did Gabrielle allude to them until the gathering terrors of the dead broke her silence. And to describe that moment and its undreamed of marvels, its vast resurrections from the holocausts of the battle fields, the fathomless panorama of the endless dead, with the stupefying and convulsing climax of the horrid warfare, choked by their immitigable hosts, is now my dangerous and difficult task.

Father and mother returned from Briois most radiant over their success. Père Grandin was superb, a wonderful man, un homme de sagesse, de piété, et, ma Foi, un homme des affaires; enfin, un homme eloquent et fin aussi. He would come to St. Choiseul, and it was certain that Père Grandin and Père Antoine would get on well together.

The spring was all about us; each day added to the charm of the country-side and the gardens of St. Choiseul grew gayer and gayer with the snowy and carmine splendor of the tulips, the purple glories of the hyacinth, the blossoming trails of periwinkle, leading at last to the zenith loveliness of the blushing roses, when St. Choiseul sent its fragrant breath far and wide over the green meadows, and far into the thick-set and shadowed woods.

The bienséance of nature was seen too in the overflowing happiness of the country, its peace and increasing wealth, with the flow towards it of the gracious friendliness of the peoples, and the establishment among us of the pure principles of liberty. Indeed we were all gay. Privat Deschat's hideous predictions that evening so long ago—how long ago it indeed seemed, as if in another age; that was before I went to America—were all forgotten, or if recalled just laughed at—and yet there had been the Agadir affair and there had been disturbances in Alsace and cruel muttering elsewhere; the Cassagnac matter and the German correspondents. But that was nothing—une bagatelle simplement—and so the bright years rolled along, braided with delights, illustrious with hopes, serene with gifts, not altogether free from acquiescent tears, while the inevitable CALAMITY came closer and closer, and like a thunderbolt crashed suddenly from the peaceful skies, and darkened all the world with its despair and misery.

CHAPTER V

THE WAR

Père Grandin very soon became a favorite, and not the least devoted of his friends was Père Antoine, our village priest. The temper of the two men was most congenial, and the fervor of their love of goodness, their common age, a certain sweet complacency in the joyousness of life and in the complete mercy of God, wedded them to each other, and so into our intimate circle of friends Père Antoine, through the mediation of Père Grandin was joined, and both father and mother thus grew more sympathetic and permissive with Gabrielle and myself, and the days flowed smoothly, and the years followed each other joyously.

I became more and more interested in the work I had undertaken, and, under the pressure of its laborious needs, with frequent visits to Paris, found my time admirably occupied, while I was not too busy to omit the recreations of the home life with our friends. Above all caressed by my dear sister, whose companionship I now more and more delighted in, I was growing, perhaps by a premature decline of animal spirits, into a bachelor, whose inmost heart still kept unimpaired the image and hope of his first love. That indeed dwelt with me perpetually, and by the platonic resuscitation of its enjoyment administered literally to my physical contentment.

There was in my library an English book written by an American authoress in which I came upon this sentence (the book was sent to me by a Texan acquaintance after I had left America): "there were hours when she felt that any bitter personal past—that the recollection of a single despairing kiss or a blighted love would have filled her days with happiness. What she craved was the conscious dignity of a broken heart—some lofty memory that she might rest upon in her hour of weakness."

The philosophy and the psychology of the paragraph are profoundly true. That relationship which sex seems inexorably to claim is satisfied naturally by union, but its omission finds exoneration at least in the remembrance of disappointment. I grew with each succeeding year more and more sedately complacent, and a gravity of thought, deepened by a pleasant melancholy, mingled with the real consolations of religion and the inseparable charm of my sister and kept me composed and evenly—at times almost jubilantly—happy. My work was attracting some attention, and it promised for me continued and congenial employment.

We had many garden parties with Privat Deschat and Capitaine Bleu-Pistache—growing more feeble now, more silent, with often unbidden tears springing to his eyes—and Quintado and Père Grandin and Père Antoine—though he was not so often with us—and the sweet-voiced and sparkling little orphan girl the captain had adopted—Dora Destin, a vivacious creature with delicate ways and a keen appetite for tarts and pastry, and a peculiar shyness that came and went so oddly, that one instant she might be hiding, as if afraid, and the next leaping amongst us like a bird. Mother and father had become in the later years even graver, and a calmness—I dreaded to believe that it meant some interior failing—descended upon them, that made their ways a little embarrassing at times. We all noted it. It was a presage, a shadow. They were silent in company, and once or twice, I thought—this was just a year before the War—father seemed unconscious of his surroundings; his mind wandered and he kept saying "Alfred, Alfred" to me, as if dazed or grieved. The stealthy hand of Paralysis thus crept slowly forward towards its unescapable conclusion.

Of course Gabrielle was in our parties, and she had become to me the concentrated bliss of my living. Her growth into a healthier condition of mind and body had accompanied an increasing adaptability to company, and while the reserved manner remained, bestowing upon her a fine dignity, she was truly sociable and friendly. Gabrielle never quite outgrew the secretive habit of her thoughtfulness, and her deportment had been criticized and found fault with, as cold and austere. The inference would have been cruelly unjust, for never breathed a kinder and more devotedly good heart than my sister possessed. Her abstracted way often arose from the custom of religious meditation, and I suppose too was influenced by that singular supernatural—to call it so—power that she always felt, but now, so far as I knew, seldom exercised. It was that power that made of her the MEDIATRIX of the nations.

It was hardly fifteen years after my return that the Grown Prince of Austria was shot in Sarajevo in Serbia, and that was on the day of the Grand Prix de Paris. I read the news to Gabrielle, and Père Grandin was there. He had taken dinner with us. How well I remember his terror-stricken face. He pushed his spectacles up over his high white forehead, and his bright eyes glowed strangely with a growing fear. His expressive lips twitched almost as if he were in pain, and he lifted up his hands in protestation.

"God forbid. The blow has fallen then. The bolt shot. Alfred, this is the torch that starts the conflagration. The material—all inflammable, all explosive—has been heaped up between the nations, and, like a fierce feu-de-joie it will kindle into a wall of fire—un rideau de feu—between the countries. God save France!"

I was incredulous as were at the time most people. I laughed at the good man's warning, and because he felt half grieved at my carelessness, half stifled with apprehension as if almost—so he put it—his ears were filling already with the rumble of cannon, he begged our pardon for his distress. He put on his crumpled Panama hat and stood at the doorway, almost irresolute in his trepidation and sadness. He looked at me quite long.

I recall the moon riding high in white drifting vapors that came in from Calais—and in the changing light and shade he seemed almost preternaturally pale and sombre.

"Mon patrie," he sighed, "again the ravage, the desolation, the orphaned, the widowed, the crippled, the sick, the breaking hearts—Ah, Ah—" and seizing my hands as if in support in his agitation, he wept.

"But Père Grandin" I said, now thoroughly alarmed over his evident agony, "surely you are too quick, too hasty. Europe is at peace. Its people are reasonably happy. They will not permit war, and—"

I got no further. The old man was choking with emotion—it was half wrath, half despair.

"Permit it? Can they stop it? Do they govern? Is it not kings and princes and royal houses and titled ministers, the tyrants of opinion, the caprice or the pride or the selfishness of aristocrats, that control everything?

"See, they prance by us, unseeing, unthoughtful, just living for themselves, and then when the crash comes—the crash they have prepared with their silly talk of national honor, national enlargement, national continuity, racial union, destiny, putting over it all a gorgeous light of promised glory—just as the heroes in a stage play walk and stand in the glare of the electric lantern from the gallery, uttering bombast—when the crash comes, they summon the troops, they dragoon the people, they empty the banks, they crack the whip of urgency, and, pointing to the flag, drive us in hecatombs to death.

"No, no, Alfred—the war will come. I have long felt its growing tremors. We cultivate revenge in our hearts, the Germans cultivate hate, the Cossacks conquest, the Austrians dynasty, the Englishmen trade-money, their assumed preeminence, and there have been cabals and understandings, and a jolt snaps the artifice of our pretended brotherhood and, with hoof and claw, we fly at each other's throats. Bah—vous verrez."

His rage had restored his strength, and he stumbled away muttering and gesticulating. I watched him going across the roadway in the light that danced with the swinging lanterns when the night wind from the distant shores blew more strongly. The disks and outlines of shadows imparted to him a peculiar effect of unsteadiness. I half thought he staggered.

I went back to the library. There I found Gabrielle leaning over the paper I had flung down at the old man's outburst, and reading of the assassination. She looked up as I returned, and her face was white, and in her eyes too I saw an awful consternation. I was impatient with this foolishness, and expostulated loudly.

"What, Gabrielle, are you too imbecile? Père Grandin is in a panic. Why? He sees us fighting already—just because the heir to a crown is shot. It's absurd—pas vraisemblable."

"Alfred, I think we should not be too sure. It all looks bad to me, and—if it comes. What?"

Her eyes dilated with terror.

"Why, Gabrielle, have we not prepared ourselves for just this! Besides we have allies now—it is not as it was in 1870. There is England, there is Russia. Sacre nom, it will be as when Greek meets Greek—not comme les vautours et les pigeons."

"Ah, Alfred, think of the suffering. O! I have seen suffering in the hospitals, but a whole nation to be made into one huge hospital. Mon Dieu, c'est incroyable!"

"Wait, Gabrielle. Don't borrow trouble. The world cannot afford war now. La Guerre est un peu passée aujourd'hui. Eh?"

"Alfred, the devil is never sick, and never tired, and never asleep."

That night the news was confirmed. Then came Austria's demands; and then a chasing hither and thither of couriers; the wires hot with messages; lights in the embassies all night; rage, dismay; in the cities the people silent or cheering in the streets; houses closed or hidden in flags; in the ministries forebodings; feverish despatches; and almost always hopelessness. Peace was impossible; everywhere the "mailed fist"—poing armée—of the Kaiser. Then came Austria's declaration of war against Servia on July 29th. The detonation was at hand which would burst Europe asunder.

Capitaine Bleu-Pistache asked me to go to Paris at once, so did Père Grandin, so did Privat Deschat, and although father and mother seemed listless about it I, thoroughly awake now to the disaster, was impatient to visit the capital, and see how things were going. But Gabrielle did not wish me to go.

"Alfred, is it not best to hear the news here? You cannot enlist. Alfred you know that is impossible." She suddenly checked herself. I knew her thought, and my cheeks grew crimson—my weakness and physical deficiency now cut me off from service—"No, Alfred it was not that, not that," her embarrassment brought tears to her eyes. "No not that, but I am afraid of some danger. Now it is everywhere, an explosion, a chance shot, a street quarrel. Alfred let me go too."

"Gabrielle I shall be quite safe. I shall be O! so very timid."

She smiled.

"Not so timid alone Alfred, as if I were there too."

"Nonsense Gabrielle, is it not written, la femme fait le coeur intrépide. But really it would be very foolish for you to come. Watch here. I will be so careful."

She seemed inconsolable, so I promised to write daily.

Père Grandin wished all the papers sent to him, and the captain, the pictures, illustrations, prints, anything that would speak rather than tell—so he put it. And Privat Deschat whispered, "Alfred Lupin, you remember my prophecy of more than twenty years ago. I have said nothing about it—rien. But Lupin, if by a chance you can kill a Dutchman or even come by a dead one bring me his two ears."

"Privat," I almost shouted, "by all means—but Why?"

"Alfred," Deschat tossed his big head this side and that as a mastif might, coming out of the water, "I would dry them hard, tan them, and wear them as tassels on my smoking cap, mon chapeau de fumée."

Père Antoine was the last man I saw in St. Choiseul. I left for Briois in the cabriolet in the evening, and with all of my adieus at home over I had settled back in my seat, in a gloomy meditation upon the frightful turn in events, and with some compunctions too over my own indiscreet skepticism as to its possibility. My face was buried in the nosegay Gabrielle had pressed into my hands—I see her now standing in the doorway where the light from the hall flung around her the aureole of its pale illumination—and my thoughts grew each moment more sombre, when the carriage was abruptly stopped, and I heard the voice of Père Antoine speaking to the driver.

I recognized the father at once, and delightedly welcomed the interruption; my own sombreness threatened a positive malaise.

"Father, you here? Step into the carriage. I am on my way to Briois, and then by train to Paris. My friends—yours too—wanted me to go and I am impatient to watch things nearer the focus."

"Ah, my child" answered the benignant man, now seated beside me, "what new horrors does it all mean? I tremble for religion. I know the sneers that will be flung at FAITH. Where, where, they will cry, is this merciful GOD?—and as the misery rises, their cry will seem to have its justification. But surely God is in the storm as well as in the quiet dawn? If the war really breaks out then it leads to larger things—all in the scheme and providence of the Almighty."

"Father we must hope and pray that the worst cannot happen."

"Yes my son, but we must be also submissive. We must not fix in our prayers the stubbornness of expectation. What comes we must accept as the work of God. There can be no reservations in our acknowledgment of the immediate and uninterrupted immanence of the divine POWER. Let us simply trust."

I murmured disheartedly:

Ici tout meurt, la fleur, l'été, La jeunesse et la vie.

The good man pressed my hands, and as we drew near to the lights in the station I saw his pained and overflowing eyes.

I came into Paris at the Gare d'Orsay on August first. Mobilization began the next day and when I reached the Place de l'Opéra crowds of young men were marching in the streets, crying, almost shrieking, "Vive la France." Girls along the balconies and from the windows showered flowers on them. In other streets groups of young men were singing the Marseillaise, and waving the flags of France and Russia and England. It was fiercely exciting, and when at last my eagerness broke all restraint I joined some of them—my limp was no hindrance there—and almost forgot my destination, drinking in the elixir of patriotism for a few delirious moments.

It was the next day (August third) that I hurried to my publisher's—Avenue de l'Alma—and found him with his family about him, disordered in dress, and dismally grave. It was M. Albert Yvette. He welcomed me with effusion, and resolved to take me to the Chamber of Deputies where the premier M. Viviani would speak on the situation. That would be the next day, and for the moment we would go over some copy as a temporary distraction from the mind-blighting crisis which had overcome the country. M. Yvette had four sons, two of whom had already joined the colors, and three exquisite daughters, two young girls, and the third a married woman, who in this extremity had united her family with her father's, and added to his own overflowing famille three boys—joufflus et bruants—so that there was no lack of excitement; conversation and predictions too.

On August first Jaures the socialist leader had been assassinated, and yet this monstrous assault failed to arouse national dissension. Yvette said it was significant. France was as one man and an undivided nation would frustrate the enemy.

We all agreed, but the coming test promised to be a severe one. The news that came in from the advancing Germans was not welcome, and showed the organization of a powerful attack. Yvette was confident that even the "spray," as he termed it, of the Teutonic wave would not reach us. I did not think so. Paris was in danger. Madame Yvette became tremulous and the daughters were in tears. Then came the news, flashed through the streets as if by a magnetic sympathy, answering the popular suspense, that England had declared war upon Germany. This was most cheering, and the days before France seemed less threatening.

We attended the session of the Chamber of Deputies. It was inspiring. The English and Russian ambassadors sat together, and the Chamber awaited the proceedings in complete silence. A tribute to the dead socialist Jaures was delivered by M. Paul Deschanel. It was eloquent, and the resounding shout that greeted the declaration that with France "there are no more adversaries; there are only Frenchmen," thrilled everyone present by its vociferous unanimity. Then followed the speech of the Premier M. Viviani, who read his address, punctuated by repeated cries of "Vive la France," and when he concluded with the phrase, uttered in a tone of metallic defiance, "We are without reproach. We shall be without fear," the Chamber went mad, and the walls sent back the billows of sound, as the air above the heads of the deputies became white with waving handkerchiefs and papers.

Yvette was overcome with his feelings, and I led him from the room trembling with emotion.

The next day Yvette appeared greatly refreshed, and suggested almost jocosely that we should together "parcourir la ville." I gladly assented. I craved this intimacy with the dramatic incidents of the moment, and was only too anxious to record some vivid impression of the city under this terrifying menace. That was August sixth, and we walked or rode all of the day. At night Paris was silent and dark, the streets almost deserted, and the soldiery watchful.

The dressmakers and milliners on the Rue de la Paix—the irony of the name grimly diverted us—were almost all shut up, and the street was a long dull succession of iron shutters. We saw women on the street cars (tramways). Along the Boulevard des Capucines our eyes were astonished by a drove of a hundred cows being driven through that avenue; the papers were sold in immense numbers, and the lively trade in them brought boys, girls, women, and old men from the suburbs to share in the momentary activity. Everywhere we saw the momentous enthusiasm and determination of the people, and any appearance of troops entrained for the frontier started the wildest applause.

Paris has been for an instant stunned by the spell of a terrible apprehension, that quickly succumbed to a returning wave of excited, indignant, overwhelming patriotism. I felt that the actual danger as a fear vanished in the tremendous reaction of rage and resolution. Its industries are crippled, its hilarity suppressed, and the many hued veil of joy and enjoyment that enveloped it like a cloud, has been torn aside, only to reveal the underlying hardihood and substance of manhood and devotion.

It looked finely, but I could not now shake off the terror of my mind over the Germanic rush onward. I intuitively felt that their devastating passage southward from Belgium would stretch far into France, and if arrested at all must be parried or flung back by the concentrated energy of the French and English armies, before its irresistible massiveness assumed such proportions as to become immovable and impregnable. I began to fear for St. Choiseul, and was anxious to return. M. Yvette pressed me to remain a few days longer, and as I had despatched all of my commissions—papers to Privat Deschat, and pictures to the captain, and letters every day to Gabrielle and Père Antoine—I assented.

Each succeeding day manifested the overturn in the domestic and routine days of the great city. The morning breakfast rolls had gone because the bakers are with the army, and families are supplied only with boulot and demi-fendu, but the supply is irregular, and the girls go after both the bread and the milk. In a hundred ways the national emergency is felt in the family, apart from the departure of sons, and the even retinue of service has been disarranged, with amusing consequences. Lines were formed before the provision shops in the mornings.

On August eighth good news was received, and the quickly revived spirits of the city became apparent in the crowded streets, with a noticeable resumption of gayety. I went to church, leaving the Yvettes home. The church was filled to repletion, and there was a large proportion of men. The service was well rendered, and the preacher touched upon the one thing uppermost in all minds, and admonished faith, courage, and prayer. As the congregation emerged from the portals of the church, the Marseillaise was heard from a near-by street, and, like a spark conveyed to combustibles, the surging mass broke out with song. It was a convulsion of fervor that made one almost quail before its immense intensity.

I took my leave of the Yvettes, who had been charmingly pleasant to me in their great home, and where the enormous sadness was sensibly softened by their amiability and courage. That was August fifteenth. The morning was dark with heavy thunderstorms, and the rain fell continuously. In the large dining room of the Yvettes, we gathered at a late breakfast—une affaire de semi-cuisine à midi—and, as the chandeliers were lighted and candles graced the side-board, and the mantel, and the high square étagères, it took on the expression of an "occasion." M. Yvette said it was my valedictory. I hardly knew what he meant, but this I know, that that was the last time I saw Yvette, or any of his splendid family. Yvette died at Bordeaux after the official evacuation of Paris; his two boys were killed at the battle of the Marne, and then the widow and the unmarried daughters left the mansion in the Avenue de l'Alma and lived with Madame Aubray, the married daughter. I have never seen any of them since.

We all tried to be cheerful, but the incessant marching of troops in the city during the last three days occurred to some of us as ominous of the encroaching and steadily moving Teuton. The conversation was most disingenuous, touching upon almost anything but the immediate preoccupations of our minds, and the apparent social abandon masked the uneasy sense of danger. The only remark that related to the war was one by myself, to the purpose that the superbly furnished table offered no suggestions of the possibility of Paris being starved—which perhaps under the circumstances was a little maladroit—and the story that Madame Aubray repeated, that a Prussian officer speaking French perfectly, among a group of prisoners at Versailles, met some French reservists, who passed the convoy singing the Marseillaise, and he turned to his guard and quickly remarked, "What a disillusion awaits us!"

M. Yvette accompanied me to the train at the Gare du Nord, and as I bade him "Farewell," he referred to the familiar and deep impression made upon everyone of the profound unity of the people, telling me that the Catholic Abbé Marcadé whose services at Le Bourget had attracted so much praise, had dined with the officers of the regiment and with the socialist mayor of the commune. He added, "I tell you, M. Lupin, the cementation of France is extraordinary. National cohesion has made us incompressible."

"Ah," I answered as I stepped into the almost empty train, "remember, M. Yvette, there is also such a calamity as pulverization."

My spirits had undergone a complete change since my talk with Père Grandin, and a gnawing feeling of hopelessness tormented me.

But how inexpressibly sweet it all was at St. Choiseul, and in the lovely and beloved country about it, as I walked along the familiar road from Briois, with the scent of the meadows, slowly ripening and withering at the summer's close; caught the long glimpses of the white road—lit now only by the light of the stars—indistinctly heaped, under the straight poplars, with the falling leaves, and then after the little stone bridge was passed with the liquid eyes of the stars gazing up to me as if from depthless nether worlds in the deep pools, I saw the massed houses of our village with hospitable lights shining from their windows. The urgent smell of flowers breathed from its walled gardens, and I prayed aloud that the hand of the destroyer or the cruel fury of bomb and shell and shrapnel might not invade the entrancing spot. The fresh odors—roses, heliotrope, verbena—enriched with an added effluence from the wet ground, bestowed upon the place a sort of consecration of beauty, peace, and sweetness.

I passed Privat Deschat's, and there was no light in the upper story window where he often read late into the night. I instantly caught sight of our home, where the windows of the library sent out so bright a light, that as I stood before the gate I could distinguish its occupants. Lights in other rooms shone out more timidly. The old home had doubtless gathered our group of friends, and it was an auspicious moment for me to enter. I raised the knocker and let it fall with a rub-a-dub-dub that I invariably used. I heard the running footsteps within, and the door flew open and I fell into the arms of Gabrielle.

"Alfred, Alfred. How good. O! We are glad to see you. And our friends are here, and we are all wild with anxiety to know what is being done; what is happening. Come, come," and the impatient creature pulled me into the now filled doorway of the library, where one by the other stood father and mother, Père Antoine, Père Grandin, the captain, and Privat Deschat, with Dora Destin, the little circle of our intimates, all peering with wide-open eyes at me as the bearer of new tidings, new hopes perhaps.

An embrace of mother and father and of the Capitaine, a hearty hand-shake of Père Grandin and Père Antoine, of good Privat Deschat, and an unreluctant kiss from the pretty Dora brought me well into the room.

"Where," I said, "is Quintado?"

"O! Monsieur Lupin," it was the half wailing voice of Dora, "He has gone to the regiment and is on his way to the front."

I looked intently at the half weeping child, and discovered a budding romance there.

"Come, come, Alfred," said the captain. "Tell us everything. Are there troops enough? Where are the robbers? We hear they are advancing along by Maubeuge in a broad front."

"And Alfred," it was the voice of Père Antoine, "the hospitals and the aids to the injured. Are they in good hands?"

"Monsieur Lupin," now it was Père Grandin, "is the Ministry together? Are we in safe hands under Viviani and Delcassé? Is Paris well guarded, and how goes the English alliance? Belgium is wiped out. Do the Russians make headway?"

I expected to hear next the shrill insistent voice of Privat Deschat, but as I turned towards him with a smile of interrogation, I saw he had withdrawn, and was moodily studying the ceiling.

"Alfred, will our credit be maintained? It is clear that the expense of the support of the armies, the purchase of stores, of munitions, the care of the wounded, will be almost ruinous. Does anyone predict how long the war will last? What are rentes selling at?" It was my father who put this practical aspect of the case before me.

"But Alfred, what can we do? Everyone must help. Could I nurse? I would go gladly." I knew that sweet voice and I felt how the devoted heart which gave it utterance would sacrifice herself to the last atom of her body in the cause. It was Gabrielle.

"Alfred, you are hungry and tired. Hortense and Julie have put up for you a good dinner—the things you like, un ragout de viande de saucisse avec les pommes de terres et les girofles, all bien melée." Ah, that was the mother's voice, and there behind her at the library entrance shone the honest face of Hortense, brimming full of admiration, and the little curious petite visage of Julie at her side, also admiring.

"Come, let us all go together with him in the dining room and sit around and hear him," said the disconsolate Dora.

Mother objected to that proposal and so I was whisked off under apologies, and with the strictest promise that I would be back in as short a time as possible, and then we would use up the night in talk and confidences, with mother's red wine and les gateaux aux amandes to loosen our tongues.

In our old dining room under the stiff surveillance of our over-painted ancestors, with mother opposite to me, and Hortense bustling in every minute, with new contributions of les bonnes bouches, I sat enjoying to the uttermost the good dinner, while I told mother of the Yvettes, and of Paris, of the soldiers, the anticipated invasion of the Germans, and how the high and low, the rich and the poor, the learned and the ignorant, were standing shoulder to shoulder in the immense effort to preserve la patrie!

Ah! that was a famous night! How we all talked, and how I rehearsed all I had seen, all I had heard, all that I thought and, all that Yvette heard, and saw, and thought too. How defiant was the captain, how grieving the Père Antoine—who half thought that the threatened death of the Pope might stop the war!—how impatient Père Grandin, how attentive and silent was Gabrielle—waiting for them all to go to besiege me with questions and offers—and how we all became silent, stifled with a fearful dread, when the invasion of the Huns was thought of, as reaching St. Choiseul. I argued against that likelihood. The wish was indeed then the father to the thought.

"The tide of approach will be more to the north and east, and if the worst happens before our men can check the deluge, the enemy's hordes will sweep into the Paris environs directly from the east and north. Our position north-west of Paris must protect us for some time, but—of course there are possibilities."

"It can't be done," the old captain strode into the centre of the room and swung round to us as he made his point clear. "It can't be done—c'est impossible. Why? Because with each retreat our armies are rolled up into thicker lines, and the Germans must broaden their wings to save themselves from being out-flanked and to protect their lines of retreat and supply. It can't be done—c'est impossible. Je vous le dit."

Perhaps we were not persuaded—so many things might happen—but we all felt better by making up our minds that St. Choiseul was rather out of the path of danger. Then we went over plans to help, and the suggestion was made by Père Antoine that I speak at the church house, and all of St. Choiseul and Briois and the country-side around be assembled there, and a committee be formed, and work started to gather and make material for the hospitals, the Red Cross missions, and to send gifts and warm underwear to the camps.

Now it was surprising, and it gave me an almost unpleasant shock of disillusionment, that throughout the night Privat Deschat had said nothing—absolument. Glances fell upon him from the company, as if his voice in the talk would be welcomed, and yet, listening with an absorbed earnestness, he "never opened his mouth" (Americain)—jamais il ouvrait son bouche—and it produced the disagreeable effect of alienation, of indifference. It could not be believed. Ah—God be blessed—that cloud of doubt was quite dissolved. About, as the morning sent its streaks of red over the east, and a fresher scent invaded us from the windows, Privat Deschat stood up at the corner of the group, where he had been sitting in his, to us, unfathomable taciturnity, and in a low voice, his big face moving with unconcealed emotion said these words. It closed our council:

"You wonder that I have kept silent. It seems to you a treachery. It is not. I can say but little. I know nothing. My heart beats with yours, with that of France, but neither your hearts nor the noble heart of France will force conclusions in this matter. Fate," he cast a momentary amused glance at Père Antoine, "is not concerned with the wishes of nations, any more than with the wishes of men and women. But after all Fate can be COERCED," he spoke the word with a simulated cry of anguish—it made me start. "Force and Strength and Devotion can put Fate to flight. You may not believe it, because Fate, or the way things go, is to you," he paused, as weighing the possibility of his inclusion, "all—the will of God. It may be in the meanings of Fate to destroy France, but our FAITH in France—and that means Force and Strength and Devotion will put that Fate to flight."

CHAPTER VI

THE INVASION

The deluge came. The spreading front of the magnificent wave of destroying Germans swept into France from Belgium, engulfing towns, foundering villages, flooding the wide country with its encompassing waters. Bah—the symbol is hopeless. Not water, the life-giving and fructifying essence of the skies, which fills the earth with gladness, not the moisture of the meandering rivulets that enamel the ground with flowers and grass, not the blessed warm rains that search the little brown rootlets of the glorious trees, and feed them nutriment and gather to them the atoms of mineral from the ground, that through the great trunks and all of the enlacing branches, build aloft to the bending skies the temple for the birds, and the home of protecting shadows, the wide canopy of beauty that holds the mists of the morning, and holds back the fury of the storms. None of these things that start in our minds familiar images of flowers and fruitage, when the pleasant word waters fills our ears—none of these came with the Germans.

It was a wave, but a wave of FIRE, consuming, scorifying, killing, fire; it was a flood, but a flood of ravenous flames, ravishing, withering, scorching, cremating flames—and there were indeed waters. What?—the endlessly running fountain of tears. Tears of fathers, and mothers, wives and children, tears over vanished homes, vanished faces, vanished tongues; tears before the black unpitying future of penury and want, of loneliness and beggary; tears over maimed lives, lost bodies, voiceless orphans, crushed shrines, deluded hopes—Nay differently, tears that were never shed, dried up in the fierce heat of bitterness and hate and terror, of shuddering despair, of dumb abnegation; fountains of grief indeed that were sucked dry by the tempest of impiety, that gathered them up into a storm-cloud before the Throne of the Most High and from whose depths rolled the awful summons—"Why, Why, Why, is This?"

I had given my lecture in St. Choiseul, and the little church house was finely packed. The people came from the villages about, trudging over the roads, riding horses and mules, driving in wagons and chariots, with country gentlemen amongst them, and lovely ladies, and bunches of the older children. The choir of the seminary at Bienne helped us, and sang touching songs, and gay ones too, and songs of courage and songs of prayer. It was inspiring. I looked at the patch-work assemblage, the earnest young and the pale and trembling old—many helped by their children to walk into the big room—the maidens wearing the tricolor in profusion, the boys waving flags, and Monsieur Raoul la Fayette de Birot, the owner of the superb chateau over towards La Ferté where each year were held the grand chasse-cours, seated in the front row with madame, splendidly arrayed, while at his side sat the humble chasse-mulet from Briois shrinking at first and fumbling his way to some less conspicuous place, and held back by M. de Birot who spoke up quite loudly:

"Restez. Je vous prie. À present nous sommes tous français, tous amis, Comment! fait-il une difference, quand la patrie est en peril?"

There were shouts of encouragement and approval, and then the crowded hall rose en masse, and sang the Marseillaise. It shook the rafters and went far away through the open windows, and woke the sleeping birds.

Père Antoine introduced me very prettily, very sweetly, and when he took my hand and led me forward to the edge of the stage the cheering was tremendous. I saw Gabrielle, and father and mother, the Capitaine, Privat Deschat, and Père Grandin, all together near the front, and dear sister held her face in her kerchief, because she could not hold back the tears.

I was a little frightened at the beginning, but I found my tongue, and described the scenes in Paris, and what the government was doing and how the troops were being mobilized, and the news of the successful landing of the English reinforcements, and the confidence everywhere, and then I read a part of M. Viviani's speech at the Chamber of Deputies, and closed with a recitation from Bambetta's great oration.

Ah! that was magnificent; I had skill in such things—as what Frenchman has not—and thrilled with emotion, my heart afire with pride and hope and love, I declaimed the blazing lines as though my lips were touched by the same divine flame that had lit those of the great tribune.

The tribute was immense; the building seemed to rock in the vibrations caused by the thunders of applause. All were standing, hats and caps filled the air, a sea of handkerchiefs sprang up, and the flags were torn from the walls and the standards, and mingled their brave colors in the ocean of snow. I saw Gabrielle between the Capitaine and Privat Deschat pale and rigid as if transfixed with pain.

Père Antoine spoke then, and invited M. de Birot to become chairman of the supplementary meeting, designed to form committees, and outline plans for practical work. We were most successful; the principal committee, that of Hospital Supplies, made me its chairman, and I instantly began my work. It was this work that carried me over the department, and kept me long weeks from home. Gabrielle wished to go to Paris and serve under the Red Cross, but I opposed that vigorously and kept her at St. Choiseul where she did nobly, gathering hospital supplies and furnishings for the soldiers, and where was inaugurated that mystical and supernatural VISITATION that led—as the world now knows—to the suppression of the raging conflict, as it threatened to level all of Europe in smouldering ruin; when—was it not so?—the HAND of GOD rested upon the earth, and the Armies shrank back from the Vision and DISSOLVED.

On August twenty-second the mailed hand of the Germans sprang over the borders of France, and from Mons to Luxembourg, its outstretched fingers were crushing the land and strangling its people. Against those groping fingers the twined hands of the French and English were now eagerly—albeit with some trepidation—also grappling. On the twenty-fourth there was reported terrific fighting on the Sambre and the Meuse. On the twenty-fifth, the French and English allies retreated, forced back by the hammering strength and anvil blows of the Germans, who dealt their coups de tonnerre while banked against each other around their massed guns, the whole monster moved onward like some titanic physical eruption.

Again on the twenty-sixth the allies reluctantly yield—yielding everywhere with fierce retributive blows on their part, and consolidating as they retreat, every energy of resistance behind them, while they prepare new lines of defense, and gather together every available scrap of support, material and human. On the twenty-seventh the news is received that the battle line reaches from Maubeuge to the mountains of the Vosges, and that the Germans number one million men. Against this mountainous avalanche of soldiery and guns the grimmest determination alone can hold its ground. But the walls are unbroken and the raging flood breaks through nowhere yet.

On the twenty-ninth I was far north with the armies, in the Red-Cross ambulances. The Germans fought their way to La Fère—north-west of Laon, and about 140 kilometres from Paris (about 90 miles), but the watch word Tiens ferme—Hold tight—was passed from mouth to mouth, and the tense strain of dogged endurance held the fronts together, each inch fought for with savage fury.

Someone blundered; there seems to be no doubt of that. We were not receiving reinforcements as we should; the troops had been urged into Alsace, tempted by a barren victory, and the large support which these battalions could have provided failed. C'était miserable!

On the thirtieth our left yielded. A gigantic battle was fought out in the department of the Aisnes near La Fère, at Guise and Laon, on the road to Paris. The English allies proved to be adamant, immovable. Under Sir John French at Mons and at Cambrai, they saved the day.

The cannonading was deafening, and the red tongues of fire quivered in dense volumes along the struggling lines of men, shot forward here, stumbling backward there, crowded in disarranged groups that swayed this way and that. Ever and anon terrific rushes forced, from either side, into the open midst the raging storm of the vomiting guns, impotent sallies, whose human units fell beneath the withering, blasting discharges of the cannon, torn into fragments by the bursting shells, or suddenly trampled into disfigured masses by maddened charges of cavalry, these last again stricken into death or helpless mutilation by the converging fire of the batteries, victim and victor, man and horse, heaped up in a throbbing or motionless blackened mass, filtered through with the oozing streams of blood, where indeed to the disembodied ear, that might have bent above them, rose the cries of suffering, or the last murmurs of the anguished dying, or the indistinguishable agonized prayers of those who yet lived and prayed for deliverance.

Above the armies on either side the air was loaded with the brown and bluescent clouds of smoke, in which the lurid splashes of carmine from bursting shells broke momentary gaps. The dropping shells sent to every side scurrying figures, pressed against each other in panic, when with sullen roar, lost almost amidst the universal din and clash and swelter of noise, its imprisoned powers were released in straight lines of fire, carrying along their blinding thread of light the shattering steel missiles of death, the blistering resin and sulphur, while at the inner edges of that crushed resurgence of living men lay the victims of its rage, limbless soldiers, bodies stricken into shapelessness, the fainting suitors of Death gasping for breath.

But often the harsh steel missile, with its cracked sides, emitting the fell arsenal of its sputtering and lightning driven contents, failed to meet its desired mark, the soft flesh and the brittle bones of living men. It sank, defeated, upon the impassive earth, vengefully burrowing its hot way into the yielding ground, becoming in its burial a mimic volcano, ripping aside its earthen tomb, as its detonation, deadened to a hideous grumble, sent ball and canister through the soil, spattering far and wide with dirt and mud and grass, the curtains of the ambulances, the wheels of the wagons, the guards of the ammunition motors, the backs and shins and breasts of men. Back of the lines the gouged earth showed everywhere the frightful plunges of the foiled demons, while with inconstant frequency noticeable to the trained eye, not unobserved by those who thereby just escaped destruction, lay the black bolides, extinguished and harmless.

Behind that wavering and uneasy or else just stiffened frontier of combat, where the murderous duel was played its sharpest, where men with blood-shot eyes, blackened bodies, and rent clothing were lashed into a maniacal heroism, where officers at intervals feeling the necessity, or inspired by the traditional splendor of service, dashed into the open and in the withering rain of shot and shell, upright, and with sentinel precision, directed the fire or exhorted their men to steadfastness—behind that marvellous line of human endurance, the fluctuating panorama of supply and reparation and reinforcement spread. Here were the gathered platoons ready for entering the thinning lines, the marshalled helpers of the ambulance corps, the doctors and orderlies, the racing caissons constantly feeding the rapacious and smoothly running cannon, the more distant assemblages of the commissariat, and behind them—a long long way off—that perpetual train of fleeing victims, the procession of the evicted, hidden, as to their resemblances to human proportions, under loads of domestic goods, the paraphernalia of the household, so that they indistinguishably took on the appearance of a vast titanic, coarsely corrugated and dirtily colored reptile, worming its way endlessly into the distance.

And when the eye, freed momentarily from its awful imprisonment in that hideous wrestle of death and life, turned outward to the wide horizons, the image of the desolating ravages of war were multiplied. The confused flames and smoke-clouds of burning villages or deserted shelters rose tardily into the dimmed skies, while, caught nearer at hand perchance, and beyond the invading surges of the Germans, if seen at all through the screen of vapors, the broken angular edges of wall and parapet, tower and steeple, cut the horizon with cruel indentations.

I had reached the neighborhood of a little village near Noyon, and intended to enter the lines, having a special pass which would permit me to come quite close to the firing ranges. The reason for this urgency on my part was the knowledge that Sebastien was with the Third Fusiliers, in a division of the Fifth Army Corps, and a letter sent by him to Dora Destin which had been communicated to the captain by an attaché of Gallieni who was commandant of Paris, told his sweetheart that he was not well, and expressed a wish to hear from her. Dora had come to me with the letter, stained with tears, and begged me to make an effort to get to Quintado, and to take him not only her message—written in the neatest hand-writing—but a package of woven odds and ends which would help his comfort in the camps. Poor girl, she was inconsolable.

It was about two in the afternoon of a dull day, with the skies heavily laden with gray flat clouds, and there was a light drizzle falling, with occasional sharper gusts of wind that smote the rain into keen lines slanting eastward. I had pushed on—helped by my commission—and found access almost to the immediate front unhindered. The Third Fusiliers, I was told, held a part of the most exposed part of the field, and that the battle was raging at that instant. That fact was too evident. I heard the continuous roar of the guns; I saw the shells exploding above and around me, while past me through the open ways of access and retreat the stretchers passed in undeviating succession, in their rapid methodical transference of the wounded to the field hospitals further out, and in the direction of Compiègne. The incessant strain of anxious incisive movement, the troubled crowding of exertion among the waiters, the sharp punctuated orders, the bristling worry of preparation, the racing ambulances—these indications behind the lines formed the declarative prelude, were one approaching the battle from behind it, of its terrible reality. As reality lay just beyond that thicket of trees, that hastily constructed redoubt, that furrowed field where shallow trenches cut it lengthwise, that crumbling hut, smoking with concealed flames and spitting gun-shots.

I knew that the battle raged, but I insisted on making my way forward, and the favoring chance of a sudden disturbance, some intense propulsion of the enemy driving our soldiers rearward in a dishevellement—quickly overcome—brought me right within the focus of the fight. I was seized up in the refluent movement that reestablished our line. The oscillation sent me eastward, and I was thrown down, rolled over and almost trampled on, in a furious despairing rush forward of artillery. I fell within sight of a hillock, whose little yet unscathed crown of grass was sprinkled with daisies—the pathetic irony of flowers in that waste of slaughter! I crawled to this trivial protection, and, with a prayer on my lips, dug myself into the yielding mould, and watched. The battle line was still somewhat beyond me and to my amazement and satisfaction I soon discovered that I was actually in the companies of the Third Fusiliers. Was Sebastien in the front?

As I recall that instant now, it seems almost an illusion that it occurred at all. It was the concentrated immensity of it; its vast superabundant detail, crushed into a measure of time out of all proportion insignificant, that put it among the categories of dreams. Before me was a very slight declension of the ground, forming a sort of broad hollow, traversed at its centre by a stream-bed, now almost dry, but retaining a penurious thread of water, somewhat replenished now by the rain, which, assisted by frequent depressions had gathered into stagnant pools. Beyond the hollow to the right and to the left, were two sparse clumps of trees, crowning the opposite crest of the subsidence. Sheltered in these puny groves were cannon which had apparently just reached that forward position, as the gunners were seen desperately forcing them into position. Between the cannon-groups came the tightly compacted formation of the Germans—wedge-like—half crouchingly as they advanced, the close combination of figures making a chain of stern set faces above the pressed guns and bristling bayonets.

Our men had been driven off the opposite ridge, where the crippled trees showed the bitterness of the contest, and where lay motionless bodies in heaps while down the very gradual decline—less frequently—could be detected the fallen figures, some yet moving, and still nearer to my point of view strewn from end to end of the hollow were the dead and dying, while—gruesome spectacle—the darkened waters of the pools betrayed the slow infiltration of blood. From the hollow the French had retreated to the southern edge, and were now entrenching themselves for a new stand, at the moment when the Germans, recovering their confidence after a partial repulse, renewed the attack, and were coming again to close quarters with our soldiers. Our positions were being shelled. The mitrailleuse rapidly seizing position would soon add their panic-breeding terrors, belching forth their destroying torrents of ball and canister. The soft hiss of an ascending bomb reached my ears, and later the roar or ripping whine of its explosion. Our artillery, entangled in the previous debacle, was not yet reorganized for response, and the moment looked perilously uncertain for our defense.

Quickly the commanding officers realized that the stabilizing help of a vigorous charge would bring to the derailment time to straighten out, and, before the full power of the enemy's batteries could be developed, inflict a salutary repulse. There was a breathing space left. A moment's halt had brought with it reawakened energies, and when the order was given the ground thickened with men, and the disarray, as by the flourish of a wand of dissipation, vanished, and with shouts the braced bodies poured forward into that shallow trough, sprang across it, and rose on its opposite edge.

I too had risen out of my half buried position, and, transported by the surpassing glory of the effort became oblivious of danger. The cheering lines shot on, men dropping from the ranks and rolling backward, becoming limp and silent, to be seized the next minute by the quickly following support, and carried out of danger to the ambulances.

My eye was fastened upon the racing lines. The Germans, unable to bring at once the full power of their batteries to bear upon the French, awaited the attack with their massed infantry; indeed under the vociferous orders of their officers, leaped against it. The shock was blood-curdling. On either side the officers led, and amid the frightful collisions swords, bayonets, the heavily wielded butts of guns swayed, and rose and fell, among the frantic combatants. All loud sounds seemed suddenly stilled, and only the muffled groans and hissing suspirations of the heaving intermingled and vitalized mound of humans were heard and above them the metallic clash of arms.

The gunners dared not fire. It was, as if arrested by the suspense of a mortal conflict, each side was held at bay, except where between the armies this intimate carnage raged. More companies were hurled into the hollow—and from both sides—and the insignificant crease in the landscape became a boiling caldron of death. The German resistance had at first proved successful, and our men were being forced down into the battered and now unrecognizable rivulet, so that the hand to hand engagement filled the hollow with its lethal turbulence.

To and fro the mixed tumult bent and receded, when from our right, somewhere in the rear, a bomb soared. Its hiss, sweetened to a murmur only, sang in my ears as the harbinger of rescue. It fell a little within the German lines, and then came the detonation, and the mangled masses fell backward. The pressure relieved, and the appalling sense of some successor to the avenging missile, breaking down the courage of the enemy, our reinforced battalion was suddenly afforded room, from the enemy's recoil. Our antagonists were ballotted backward, as if struck with doom, and so, swinging their guns into horizontal phalanx, with naked bayonets the French renewed their charge, and drove the ravaged ranks before them, up, over the ridge, and back. The next moment was scarcely passed, before the hollow was again refilled with troops ordered to take and turn the enemy's batteries, somewhat screened in the desolated groves of trees.

In the twinkling of an eye the work was accomplished, and the Germans fled. Down the line for more than a kilometre I suddenly saw on either side of me a frontier of bayonets—from fresh arrivals—fixed and advancing and flashing. The slowly falling rain had relented, and the sun gleamed for an instant on the bared needle points, as if in augury of our success. Then the serried profile of bayonets paused, perhaps for mechanical alignments, tilted upward and moved; moved as with the release of a gigantic spring.

The line swept on. I watched them, fascinated, enthralled by its awful menace. The deserted hollow—no longer a battle field—was almost empty, save of those criss-crossed piles of fallen bodies where the transfixed agony of individual conflict yet remained unchanged, in the attitudes of foes knit together in the horrid embrace of their death-fight. Where the severed corpses, fouled in smoke and grime and dirt, lay shapeless, or distended on back or face, or sometimes with arms twisted in knots among each other, or just alone, hither and thither, solitary bodies unsoiled by any mutilation and bent together, as if bivouacked for sleep. And here too were the wounded, sometimes moaning audibly, sometimes still writhing with the urgent wounds, fresh in leg or arm or breast. And everywhere was the ploughed and tormented earth, trampled and dug into by the straining feet of the combatants, meshed with holes of water and now, under the recovered sun, glistening, wet, and muddy. I hurried along with the Red-Cross men into the hollow with my mission quite driven out of my head; only anxious to assist the wounded to some places of safety and relief. The battle seemed for the moment displaced, though around us the orders sounded, caissons rumbled, regiments poured past us and the intermittent aerial swish of shells was heard, and not so far to the right and to the left the German front was murderously insistent, pinching us where we stood in a dangerous salient.

After lifting a number of the limp bodies of men, in whose faces shone at times the benediction of gratitude, and at others rested just the pallid smile of recognition, or else were filmed with the bleaching shades of death, I went to the top of the ridge beyond which our forward flung companies had routed the Germans. The fearful clash, body against body, was resumed in a ploughed field but the horrors were augmented—though too it had a splendor in it—by the added carnage of the plunging cavalry that now thickened the fight into a crucial contest. The captured batteries were useless here, but they were being dragged into the French lines behind us. I was leaning against one of the willows of the groves, thrashed into a ruin of fallen branches, yielding to sickness of heart that might have thrown me into a faint when I felt my feet tugged at. I started and looked down. In the heavy grass, trampled and rutted, I saw the outstretched body of a soldier, dragging itself upward by my legs, and he had so far freed himself from the herbage that our eyes met. It was Sebastien Quintado.

Perhaps I shouted. I hardly think so. If I had Sebastien never heard me, for he had fallen back again, and lay motionless. For an instant I thought his life had fled. I seized his shoulders, and pulled him within the trees. He was bleeding from a cutlass wound across his chest, and from a gash in his thigh. We carried him back into the camp and he slowly revived. The half extinguished spark was relit. Of course he knew me. He said he knew me as I stood above him on the battlefield, but thought, half deliriously, that it was a dream only.

I had secured excellent quarters for Quintado, and his wounds while grave were surely healing. Had I not met him in time—the very nick of time—he might have bled to death. At the earliest practicable moment I intended to bring him to St. Choiseul. I knew that when I could tell him that, he would be better. L'espoir est à le fond de la santé.

We were in a relay hospital, back some kilometres from the front, and on the road to Paris, where most of the charges were transferred. It was an encampment of tents, and in one of these—indeed it was near Compiègne—the day after I had brought him from the field, and when too at any moment we might find it necessary to hastily retreat, as the Germans pressed on in spite of the grim resistance that like a wall delayed them. I say it was in one of these tents, towards sunset, as the level rays, unchecked by a cloud poured over the camp a light that seemed to wash out the stains of dirt and use, and make it brilliant, that, as I sat near Quintado's cot, I caught his eyes resting upon me with an indescribable affection.

"Sebastien," I said, "you will live, and very soon, O! very soon, I will take you to St. Choiseul, and you shall stay with us. Is it well?"

He murmured; "Ah, Alfred. How surely you know it is well."

"Sebastien, you must not talk any more. You see what I hope to do. At the most two or three days and you will be with Dora." His eyes were bright with joy, and then almost as quickly they darkened with tears.

"No! No!" I remonstrated, "No! Sebastien—you need have no fears. The doctor says you will be quite the same, a strong, well man. Eh! Do you hear me? And see, this is what Dora has sent to you. All made by her own hands. Are you not content?"

I unfolded the roll of stockings, and handkerchiefs, and mittens, and waist bands, and as I handed them to feel he touched them with his lips, as though they were holy—indeed to him they were most holy—and then his lips moved too in prayer and a look unutterably tender flushed his face. His great liquid eyes closed, and his heart was consecrated anew to the pretty orphan girl.

Ah! those were terrible days. The shocking Teuton never faltered. He came on with big weltering blows that beat the French and English back, though we kept in good order, and, as the bulletin gave it, "The dam still holds, and breaches are being repaired." The government thought it best to leave Paris, and re-establish itself in Bordeaux, and the people thronged east and south from Paris to Tours, Orleans, Le Mons, Biarritz, Brest, Rennes, Nantes, Bordeaux, going in all ways, and blocking the roads so that nothing could move, and the men and women slept in the carriages, and wagons, and motor-cars, and in the roadside houses, and in the fields.

And the peasants north of Paris, in the farms and gardens, left in terror, and about fifteen hundred of them entered Paris—trudged the whole way—with boxes, and bags, bundles, strings of poultry, and sometimes driving their cows and pulling their pigs, with provisions tied up in shawls, and utterly dumb with grief and consternation.

Then the flying men appeared over Paris and dropped bombs just to scare the populace, letting fall papers and threats with lying news of the Germans almost at the gates of the city, and enclosing scoffing invitations to surrender. The bombs were dropped in the Rue de Hanovre, the Rue du Mart, the Rue Colbert, the Rue de Londres, the Rue de la Condamine. But later our aviators paroled the skies, and garrisoned the air, and the frightful taubes came no more. But it was I think on September third (thirty-two days after the beginning of the war), that a daring show-man let out orchestra stalls at the "butte" of Montmartre on an arranged tribune, whence the big German dragons could be seen hideously humming above the city.

Il était un peu drôle, mais la plaisanterie est dans le fond de la nature française; n'est ce pas? But Père Grandin frowned, and called it une grande folie, and then repeated the lines from La Fontaine:

Le trépas vient tout guérir; Mais ne bougeons d'ou nous sommes: Plutôt souffrir que mourir, C'est la devise des hommes.

Well I got Sebastien away from Compiègne—and it was only about six days later that the Germans swarmed over this region—and after delays in the trains, crowded with the wounded, brought him to Paris. The city was in a suppressed excitement with a seething exodus of citizens going on, who stood in lines at the stations ten abreast and almost half a mile long waiting their turns to get away to the south. I stayed some days in Paris, putting Sebastien in one of the well equipped hospital échoppes in the Champ de Mars. He was yet weak and nervous, and his breast caused him much pain. I saw him every night, and we went over the orders and the news of each day together.

The government left Paris for Bordeaux, on September second, and it was thought that there might soon be a pitched battle around the Paris forts before a week was over. The enemy was pushing its outposts nearer and nearer, with the main advance directed against the left flank of the French centre. On September eighth the allied armies were more than holding their own from Ourcq to Verdun. Preparations went on furiously all over Paris, and the Bois de Boulogne was turned into a cattle ranch, and the ratio of available provisions to the population—then over two million—carefully calculated. The use of gas for cooking was prohibited, and its use confined to lighting. East of Paris were lines of refugees, filling the roads from Verdun, almost seventy kilometres (about 43 miles) long; the Chateau de Bizy was transformed into a hospital, and also the Chateau des Penitents at Vernonnet.

It was evident that St. Choiseul for the present was comparatively safe from invasion, the current of investment moving to the south-east, although a letter I received from Gabrielle said that German military motors had been seen near Briois and that their occupants had rifled the wine cellars of M. Villiers. Sebastien was impatient to get away, and I feeling too excited to remain with him, concluded to send him at once to St. Choiseul, writing to Gabrielle that we would come together. My intention to return to St. Choiseul was further quickened by some indefinite statements by my sister that father and mother had partly lost their memories. I instinctively divined that the relentless pall of paralysis was closing about them, and the miserable sombreness of this thought with all of the present darkness about me, plunged me into a dull speechless misery.

The autumn lights shone upon the fair lands about St. Choiseul and shone upon the gardens, thicketed with early chrysanthemums of the sweet village itself, with a lovelier tenderness. It was altogether charming, and as we rode from Briois gently—very gently—Sebastien caught my shoulders and head in his arms, and hid his face on my breast, sobbing softly. The poor boy's heart was full of memories and full too doubtless of presaging fears. The happiness snatched from his life by the nation's peril, the yet unfaded impressions of the dreadful conflict painted to his eyes with the darkest, deadliest colors of suffering, the returning familiar beauty of his old home, and the rising flood of anticipation before the realization of his welcome, mingled together in a torrent of emotion too strong for his composure. I clasped him warmly, and the sympathy of my own bereaved soul covered him as with a benediction. Slowly we moved on amid the splendid fruitage of the fall, where, on either side, the richly laden fields bore their golden crops, and where too—another note of the country's extremity—the hardy old men and the children, and the silent devoted women, toiled almost alone at the deeply needed task of the generous harvest.

Mais, voila, qui arrive! We have reached the little bridge, from whose moss encrusted arches rises the low hill of the dear village, and just over there, half way up, stands the old chestnut tree. And, coming down to meet us, is the whole entourage of old men and women and children, a mimic army bearing flags, the banners of the church, and singing, while an improvised little group of musicians at their head, sent far over the wayside the throb of the drums and the shrill whistles of the fifes.

It was indeed Quintado's welcome home. Our horse recoiled, snorted and reared at the unusual spectacle, and the stirring accompaniment, and the next moment the throng was all about us, and there were cheers and salutations, and waving caps, and a happy bubbling merriment, that made poor Sebastien half wild, and so bewildered him with pride and joy that the poor fellow was speechless, and almost in tears. I spoke a little for him, and the good people then ranged themselves around the carriage, and the horse, led by the head, to prevent his sudden bolting away from the noise and clamor, brought us into St. Choiseul.

Quintado had whispered to me with a blush on his cheeks and with a faltering voice, "But Dora is not here?"

"Ah, Sebastien," I cried, "the best comes last. Wait. You shall see. I think I know that Dora was afraid. Yes really afraid. It would be too much joy. Remember she has heard that you were wounded, and perhaps—surely you understand—"

I did not finish my assurance. His good arm was about my neck, and just to see him so overcome, without knowing the reason, pleased the good friends, marching happily in his company, and the smiling children, so that these, his pupils, broke out in a loud chorus that he had taught them at school; a gay barcarolle from Moliere, that reflected the buoyant unimpeded liveliness of young and loving spirits, though indeed I felt some scruples as to its propriety just now, when we bowed to the dark menace of a punishing destiny:

Sortez, sortez de ces lieux, Soucis, chagrins, et tristesse; Venez, venez, ris et jeux, Plaisirs, amours et tendresse. Ne songeons qu'à nous réjouir, La grande affaire est le plaisir.

It was pleasant to hear; the voices, sharp trebles, stabbing the quiet air with their keen accents, like vocal poignards, and running on with us under the first short group of walnuts—just opposite Privat Deschat's—whose lower branches were draped in the bronzed leaves of escaped vines. We moved along altogether in, to me, a curious sad emblematic way of the past happinesses and peace. The song breathed the pensive reminder of a remote dalliance and serenity, lost now behind the rolling clouds of belching cannon and smoking bombs.

The swinging melody put to flight immediate fears, yet like an incantation and, like dreamers, we surrendered to the transient forgetfulness:

Aimons jusques au trépas; La raison nous y convie. Helas! si l'on n'aimait pas, Que serait—ce de la vie! Ah! perdons plutôt le jour Que de perdre notre amour.

Well! that was fitting enough, and as I glanced at Quintado his ingenuous bliss under this vocal stimulation of his natural feelings was boundlessly agreeable. How very handsome he was; excitement had thrown into his flat cheeks a becoming color, and the lingering pallor, elsewhere, bestowed upon him an enticing interest, quite pleasing. His deep eyes glowed with pleasure, and the black hair escaping from beneath his pompon lay like ebony fingers on his white temples. Really for example, he was angelic, though of the darker hue and deeper temperament of angels, and there glinted from his eyes a stubborn tender maliciousness of animal joy. He knew that Dora waited for him.

And so we came decorously, with manifold lingerings, where the brisk people pressed against the carriage wheels, and almost stood under the horse's feet, up to our house, the one—you remember—next to that of Privat Deschat's and there, Mon Dieu, how I see it now! There was a beautiful arcade of branches of yews, and amongst them red, red roses, like ruby stars, and over the path beneath the arch were strewn vine-leaves. We alighted very slowly, for Quintado had again become weak, and the people were most respectful, and considerate, and, because it might have jarred him, withheld their cheers, and just hailed him with uncovered heads. Ah! it was most pathetic I think.

And up the path we went to that porch, where later, much later, Gabrielle and I sat, overwrought and stricken with wonder and dread, and on it stood father and mother, trembling, but gracious, and tenderly sympathetic, and then—

Then Deschat and I took him up the stairs, on the chair made of our crossed hands—the chair children make for each other—with Quintado's good arm about my neck, and brought him to the bed-chamber, so dainty and white, and sweet-smelling, and clean, and on the great broad bed we laid him so gently down and, from where he lay, his eyes could see the sky, blue like a pea-blossom, with the trellised vapors spun across it, and the window framed in Virginia creeper, with, at that very moment, a wren whisking through its tendrils. And then Gabrielle brought Dora to the door, and softly we went away, and the two lovers were left there, and—Helas! I was just envious perhaps, with some illy stirred remembrance, some indefinable despair—I looked back, and the two faces clung together and the whispering voices mingled, in the inarticulate ecstacy of that meeting.

I stepped again to the porch; the people were drifting away, still softly singing, but I did not see them. I saw only the field of battle, sodden with the dead; I heard only the menacing whisper of the ascending shell; I thought only of one Divine Figure—He of the Cross—weeping before His Father in Heaven for the sins of the world.

And so the night came on, and I still sat there, until a hand rested on my shoulder. I noticed its trembling pressure.

I raised my eyes. There stood near me the captain, Père Grandin and Père Antoine. It was the last who spoke:

"My son, Sebastien Quintado is no more!"

CHAPTER VII

THE REPULSE

As the Germans crossed the border of France and the hordes of the Kaiser, like some whirlwind of devastation, crushed our villages, trampled down our gardens, smote our sons, France trembled with rage, a rage at first not unmixed with fears. But it was for a moment only. The fierce reaction followed, and with the steadfast poise of her faith, her endurance, her heroism, she resisted. That resistance was a sublime act of confidence in herself. It meant an endless self-sacrifice. It meant a solidarity of hearts. It meant a complete disenthrallment from the illusions of ease and indolence and impregnability. We were surprised. The enemy was at our gates. And Paris, the cynosure of our pride and of our affection banished its insouciance, and suddenly became strained with gravity, and a kind of, I know not what, absorption in a new life.

The German wedge moved on, and then our armies holding stiffly together fell back, prodding the sides of the huge leviathan, that sprawled over our fair land with its fierce talons extended, with a savage not-to-be-denied hunger reaching out for that paramount morsel—Paris—and spitting out of its ravenous mouth sprays of desecrating Uhlans and automobile excursionists, who were here and there, now hiding in a wood, now racing over the roads. It was these drops and waterings of saliva from its horrid living mass that spread terror and anxiety and a sickening dread. But we had not severed our lines, and the retreating army corps tightly kept their cordon intact, though falling back with a deep reentering swerve in the centre, where the enemy fought hard to break through. And not seldom it happened that those exudations from its vast throat were stamped out summarily, so that no spot of their defilement remained. And Joffre—Pater patriae—was not worried. That we knew; the plan was working. I learned that from a colonel who had been at the crossing of the Meuse, where, so he said, "the Germans spent their thousands to gain their end, squadrons upon squadrons, slaughtered like pigeons from a trap, coming on, stuck together like an army of termites, and beaten into death by the merciless fire from our guns. But they got over," he said, "and that was what they wanted to do. Why, living men were thrown into the gaps to be rained down with shot and shell, like so much earth and stone into a pit that must be crossed."

The plan was to thrust the great beast sideways, and for that purpose Joffre kept his plunging assaults on the west, while the English lured them eastward and then came the Battle of the Marne. Charleroi, Rheims, Rethel, Soissons, St. Quentin, had been passed, the bridge over the Marne near Meaux blown up, and now came the sudden halt with our backs against the wall, as it were, and every nerve and muscle strained in the death-grip. The magnificence of our resistance was the measure of our sense of peril.