Alsace in rust and gold

And this is what a woman was thinking, as she walked the platform of the Gare de l’Est at seven o’clock on a foggy October morning of 1918, waiting to take the train to the front.

“Why, when trials and tribulations await us in every land, when every dearest affection is accompanied by its related grief and every achievement by the phantom of its early hope—why this illimitable ardor of the soul, pressing us forward into new combinations?” ...

A few days before I had learned that Masevaux, the capital of that small triangle of Alsace, reconquered since the August of 1914, would be my journey’s term. Looking in the guide-book, I found Masevaux at the very end—on page four hundred and ninety, to be precise, and the book has but four hundred and ninety-nine pages in all—and it had seemed far, far, and the world an immensity, with few corners for the heart. I have realized since that it was only the chill of the unknown into which I was to venture, drawn inevitably as steel to the magnet or the needle to the north, by that very ardor of the soul....

I had not slept at all the night before—I never do when I am to take an early train to pass out into new ways—and the somewhat dispiriting influences of “that little hour before dawn” were still with me as I stepped into my compartment and took my seat, while a captain of dragoons lifted my small leather valise and my not large Japanese straw basket to the rack. Settling myself, a bit chilly, into the depths of my fur coat, slipped on over my uniform, I looked out upon the throng of officers and soldiers, as many Americans as French, perhaps even more.

Standing near my window was a blue-clad colonel, with many decorations and a black band on his arm. He was carrying a small bouquet of what seemed like wild-flowers, and he embraced in farewell a woman in deepest black who would bear no more children....

Then a very young, crape-clad mother, carrying several pasteboard boxes, with three small children clinging to her skirts, hurried down the platform to get into a third-class compartment.

But with it all I was conscious that the blue and khaki war was receding, its strange deeds, which had seemed cut in such high relief, were even then blurred against the red background, the background itself fading. “Eyes look your last, arms take your last embrace” of the world horror, the world beauty, where sorrow has so often been above sorrow and where many “chariots have been burned to smoke.” ...

In the compartment are five French officers with dark rings under their eyes. I don’t know whether it is wounds or the effects of the perm.[1] Anyway, they almost immediately take attitudes inviting slumber. A young woman all in purple, whether third or fourth mourning I know not (it’s well done, though it couldn’t pass unnoticed), sits by one of the windows and waggles a short-vamped, very-high-heeled, bronze-shoed foot and rattles a gold vanity-box. From the neighboring compartment came classic expressions: “Can you beat it?” and “Search me.” My heart salutes the Stars and Stripes. The whistle blows, and the train starts for the very end of the guide-book.

_8.30._—Read the masterly editorial of Jacques Bainville in L’Action Française, “Où est le piège?” (“Where is the snare?”) while going through the ugliest suburbs in the world, inclosing the most beautiful city in the world. And more beautiful than ever is Paris in uniform. Her delicate gray streets are mosaicked in horizon-blue, burnished with khaki, aglitter with decorations. (Oh, those men of the alert, expectant step, or those other broken ones dragging themselves along on canes and crutches!) Who has not seen Paris in uniform knows not her beauty, bright and terrible as an army in array; enchantment for the eye, bitter-sweet wine for the soul. And again, who has not seen her violet-nighted, black-girdled by the river, wearing for gems a rare emerald or ruby or sapphire light, and silent in her dark, enfolding beauty, knows her not. So lovers will remember her, and those whose sons are gone.

_9.30._—Looking out of the window on fields and forests and groves. White-stemmed, yellow-leaved birches burn like torches in a pale, thin mist. The plowed fields are black with crows; it would seem to be a good year for them. We are due at Belfort at 3.35, but a large-paunched, very loquacious man blocking the corridor—his voice has not ceased since we started—tells a fellow-passenger that, with the delays caused by the shifting of troops and material, we’ll be lucky if we get there by seven.

_10.30._—Rampillon with its beautiful old church, having two rows of Gothic windows and several medieval towers, seen from a foreground of smooth tilled fields. Over the green and yellow and brown world stretches a silver heaven, tarnished with yellowish-gray clouds.

_Longueville._—Interminable trains of French and American troops cross one another. The French train has various barometrical indications of war-weather in chalk. Guillaume, O là là, là là; and the favorite and unrepeatable word —— mingles with Le plaisir d’aller à Paris, O les belles filles, Adieu à jamais, Boches.

The cars containing American troops are inarticulate. They haven’t been at it long enough to express themselves.

The handsome young officer next me opens conversation by asking me for my L’Action Française. Having previously torn out the article of Jacques Bainville, and wiped the windows with the rest, I pass it over to him with a smile. It wasn’t tempting.

A group of Americans are standing in the corridor. I hear, “I’d like to burn the Rhine.” And the answer: “I don’t care what you burn, but I don’t ever want to see the Statue of Liberty from this side again. Me for home. There’s more in it in one week in the clinic in little old Chicago than here in a month, in spite of the hunks of material. Leaving some to die or bandaging men in a hurry that you’ll never see again, and dead tired all the time. No, siree! No war thrills for me.” And then, all being devotees of Esculapius, they fall to talking about diseases, civil as well as military.

The loquacious party (he hasn’t stopped even to take breath) says to his companion that he’s going to surprise his wife, who thinks he’s in Paris. Whatever else she’s enjoying, she must be enjoying the silence, and I do hope he’ll make a lot of noise when he opens the door.

The young French officer next me with the Légion d’Honneur, Croix de Guerre, four palms and two stars, tells me he is with the Americans at Langres, which is camouflé these war-days as A.P.O. 714, the ancient hill-town of the Haute-Marne being the setting for the celebrated “University” of the A.E.F.

_11 o’clock, Romilly._—Near here, in the old Abbey of Scellières, was buried Voltaire, l’enfant gâté du monde qu’il gâta (“spoiled child of the world that he spoiled”), having been refused ecclesiastical burial in Paris. And from here he journeyed in his dust to the Panthéon.

At St.-Mesmin the sun came out, and the dull, plowed fields were suddenly spread with great covers, as of old-gold velvet, tucked in about the slender feet of pine forests.

Now all this pleasant soil of France has many histories, and St.-Mesmin is where the priest Maximin (you see whence the name) was sent by the Bishop of Troyes to implore the mercy of Attila in favor of the great city. For answer the terrible king of the Huns put him to death. Against the sky is the tower of a twelfth-century church. A collection of objects in a field that I thought were plows turned out to be cannon.

_Troyes._—Not a glimpse of the cathedral. Immeasurably long troop-train fills the station on one side of us. On the other a gorgeous (it’s the only word for it) American Red Cross train. Pressed against the windows, lying or sitting, were pale men of my race. I waved and smiled, and languid hands went up in answer. The box cars on the other side were filled with blue-clad men. Over the doors were green boughs, on the sides chalked portraits of the Kaiser, Dur à croquer, Mort à Guillaume, etc. And everywhere the once so familiar On les aura is converted into Nous les avons.[2] Through the slits in the top of the cars were faces of poilus looking out, just as one sees cattle looking out; then a long line of other box cars with American, khaki-capped heads also looking out of the slits in the top, while the side doors too were crowded with sitting, standing, leaning doughboys. Again I waved from my window, and every cap was lifted.

There was a young man standing at the door of some sort of a refrigerator car, and he wore a wonderful goat-skin coat. Being so near my window I spoke to him, and said:

“It’s a fine coat you are wearing.”

“I’ll tell you in the spring,” was the prompt answer. “They’ve just given them out to us. You try living next to the cold storage.” He then proceeded to blow into some mottled fingers, after which he pulled a long tuft of hair from his coat. “I’m molting,” he added, as he held it up, “and winter’s coming.”

And he didn’t know whence he had come nor whither he was going. Then either his train moved or mine did—I couldn’t tell which—and I saw him no more.

_Vandœuvres-sur-Barse._—Wood, wood, piled high on every kind of wheeled thing. Forests from which it had been cut showing sharp and thin, fringing the gold-brown fields under the luminous noonday heaven. And here for a moment the green was so delicate and the yellow so tender, that I had a fleeting illusion of spring as I looked out.

Then I fell to talking with some young officers of the 131st Artillery from Texas, but nothing that I remember. They had made no impression on France, neither did France seem to have made any impression on them.

_Bar-sur-Aube._—Old houses, old walls, blue hills, a white road leading over one of them. Strange church tower, with a round, many-windowed top, and in each window hangs an old bell. A great trainload of American infantry “going up,” the station, too, flooded with khaki, and another train passed crowded with poilus evidently en permission, making rather fundamental toilets.

And around about Bar, as we slipped out, was a silver-vaulted world of terra-cotta and purple hills, green and brown fields, silver hayricks, silver sheep grazing near, and warm, brindled cattle, many green-painted bee-hives, and fruit trees trained against pink walls. Gentle slopes, later to become the Alps, appeared, and beech forests, like very worn India shawls, clung to them, and a row of nearby poplars had each its nimbus of yellow light.

About this time, having had a hasty cup of tea at six, I began to be so hungry that the luster went from the landscape and my eyes received nothing more. I didn’t care whether the talkative man gave his wife a surprise or not, and the two Americans of the Texan Artillery section had long since also ceased to interest me, when I heard a “nosy” voice saying:

“Gosh! I tell you, boys, there’s big money to be made over here after the war. All you have to do is to hang out the sign, ‘American Dentist,’ and your waiting-room’ll burst.” I sat down and nearly slept by the side of the six-foot dozing handsome officer, with the beautiful blue uniform, and yellow pipings on his trousers and cap, and five service and three wound stripes, and the number 414 on his collar, besides a lot of decorations on his breast.