August 14th.
A stone and brick chateau in a flat park with a stream running
through it. Pampas-grass, geraniums, rustic bridges, winding paths:
how _bourgeois_ and sleepy it would all seem but for the sentinel
challenging our motor at the gate!
Before the door a collie dozing in the sun, and a group of
staff-officers waiting for luncheon. Indoors, a room with handsome
tapestries, some good furniture and a table spread with the usual
military maps and aeroplane-photographs. At luncheon, the General,
the chiefs of the staff--a dozen in all--an officer from the General
Head-quarters. The usual atmosphere of _camaraderie_, confidence,
good-humour, and a kind of cheerful seriousness that I have come to
regard as characteristic of the men immersed in the actual facts of
the war. I set down this impression as typical of many such luncheon
hours along the front...
August 15th.
This morning we set out for reconquered Alsace. For reasons
unexplained to the civilian this corner of old-new France has
hitherto been inaccessible, even to highly placed French officials;
and there was a special sense of excitement in taking the road that
led to it.
We slipped through a valley or two, passed some placid villages with
vine-covered gables, and noticed that most of the signs over the
shops were German. We had crossed the old frontier unawares, and
were presently in the charming town of Massevaux. It was the Feast
of the Assumption, and mass was just over when we reached the square
before the church. The streets were full of holiday people,
well-dressed, smiling, seemingly unconscious of the war. Down the
church-steps, guided by fond mammas, came little girls in white
dresses, with white wreaths in their hair, and carrying, in baskets
slung over their shoulders, woolly lambs or blue and white Virgins.
Groups of cavalry officers stood chatting with civilians in their
Sunday best, and through the windows of the Golden Eagle we saw
active preparations for a crowded mid-day dinner. It was all as
happy and parochial as a "Hansi" picture, and the fine old gabled
houses and clean cobblestone streets made the traditional setting
for an Alsacian holiday.
At the Golden Eagle we laid in a store of provisions, and started
out across the mountains in the direction of Thann. The Vosges, at
this season, are in their short midsummer beauty, rustling with
streams, dripping with showers, balmy with the smell of firs and
braken, and of purple thyme on hot banks. We reached the top of a
ridge, and, hiding the motor behind a skirt of trees, went out into
the open to lunch on a sunny slope. Facing us across the valley was
a tall conical hill clothed with forest. That hill was
Hartmannswillerkopf, the centre of a long contest in which the
French have lately been victorious; and all about us stood other
crests and ridges from which German guns still look down on the
valley of Thann.
Thann itself is at the valley-head, in a neck between hills; a
handsome old town, with the air of prosperous stability so oddly
characteristic of this tormented region. As we drove through the
main street the pall of war-sadness fell on us again, darkening the
light and chilling the summer air. Thann is raked by the German
lines, and its windows are mostly shuttered and its streets
deserted. One or two houses in the Cathedral square have been
gutted, but the somewhat over-pinnacled and statued cathedral which
is the pride of Thann is almost untouched, and when we entered it
vespers were being sung, and a few people--mostly in black--knelt in
the nave.
No greater contrast could be imagined to the happy feast-day scene
we had left, a few miles off, at Massevaux; but Thann, in spite of
its empty streets, is not a deserted city. A vigorous life beats in
it, ready to break forth as soon as the German guns are silenced.
The French administration, working on the best of terms with the
population, are keeping up the civil activities of the town as the
Canons of the Cathedral are continuing the rites of the Church. Many
inhabitants still remain behind their closed shutters and dive down
into their cellars when the shells begin to crash; and the schools,
transferred to a neighbouring village, number over two thousand
pupils. We walked through the town, visited a vast catacomb of a
wine-cellar fitted up partly as an ambulance and partly as a shelter
for the cellarless, and saw the lamentable remains of the industrial
quarter along the river, which has been the special target of the
German guns. Thann has been industrially ruined, all its mills are
wrecked; but unlike the towns of the north it has had the good
fortune to preserve its outline, its civic personality, a face that
its children, when they come back, can recognize and take comfort
in.
After our visit to the ruins, a diversion was suggested by the
amiable administrators of Thann who had guided our sight-seeing.
They were just off for a military tournament which the --th dragoons
were giving that afternoon in a neighboring valley, and we were
invited to go with them.
The scene of the entertainment was a meadow enclosed in an
amphitheatre of rocks, with grassy ledges projecting from the cliff
like tiers of opera-boxes. These points of vantage were partly
occupied by interested spectators and partly by ruminating cattle;
on the lowest slope, the rank and fashion of the neighbourhood was
ranged on a semi-circle of chairs, and below, in the meadow, a
lively steeple-chase was going on. The riding was extremely pretty,
as French military riding always is. Few of the mounts were
thoroughbreds--the greater number, in fact, being local cart-horses
barely broken to the saddle--but their agility and dash did the
greater credit to their riders. The lancers, in particular, executed
an effective "musical ride" about a central pennon, to the immense
satisfaction of the fashionable public in the foreground and of the
gallery on the rocks.
The audience was even more interesting than the artists. Chatting
with the ladies in the front row were the General of division and
his staff, groups of officers invited from the adjoining
Head-quarters, and most of the civil and military administrators of
the restored "Departement du Haut Rhin." All classes had turned out
in honour of the fete, and every one was in a holiday mood.
The people among whom we sat were mostly Alsatian property-owners,
many of them industrials of Thann. Some had been driven from their
homes, others had seen their mills destroyed, all had been living
for a year on the perilous edge of war, under the menace of
reprisals too hideous to picture; yet the humour prevailing was that
of any group of merry-makers in a peaceful garrison town. I have
seen nothing, in my wanderings along the front, more indicative of
the good-breeding of the French than the spirit of the ladies and
gentlemen who sat chatting with the officers on that grassy slope of
Alsace.
The display of _haute ecole_ was to be followed by an exhibition of
"transportation throughout the ages," headed by a Gaulish chariot
driven by a trooper with a long horsehair moustache and mistletoe
wreath, and ending in a motor of which the engine had been taken out
and replaced by a large placid white horse. Unluckily a heavy rain
began while this instructive "number" awaited its turn, and we had
to leave before Vercingetorix had led his warriors into the ring...
