French Leave
I
MEN and women were shouting and laughing and crying in the city outside the barracks. All the bells of Tours were ringing and the siren of the munitions factory near us was sounding at regular intervals a long-drawn note of sombre triumph. Officers and men gathered together in groups, the joy and relief on their faces blended curiously with a certain blankness of expression, as of numbed and incredible surprise. We had expected it, and yet, when it came, something we had been living on for months vanished in an instant. The fierce draught that had blown all our energies and dreams and ambitions into incandescence ceased as suddenly as it had begun. The war was over.
The messenger boy from the Mail Control came in, his wallet filled with papers, and deposited a great sheaf in my incoming basket. An orderly from the colonel gave me a memorandum asking that the Information Section furnish the chief ordnance officer with certain facts by noon the next day. Mechanically I routed the memorandum to one of the officers, and then looked at the incoming basket. A day’s work was there, a day of war, and the war was over. Yesterday the papers in the incoming basket had been symbols of life and death, our slender line of communication in the front. Now they seemed dry and empty of significance, mere dead bones from whence the spirit of action had departed.
I glanced at Bart. He was staring at the battle-line map he had so carefully tended for five months.
‘Nothing more to move, is there?’ he said.
‘No,’ I said, ‘nothing more to move. Better get a map of Germany.’
The men in the room walked about restlessly, their laughter and quickflung sentences flashing through the composure of long discipline like rays of sun through a fog. Their desks, piled high with the dusty detritus of war, remained untouched.
‘Bart,’ I said, ‘this is no time to work. Let’s go down town to lunch.’
We walked slowly down the wide street that we had known so intimately for eight vicissitudinous months. It was filled with an eager restless crowd of French and Americans, a crowd that rippled and broke into laughter and quick shouts and sundry scurryings and pushings off the pavement. There were tears in the eyes of some of the women, but they were laughing merrily, and in front, of us a group of girls stretched out their arms and refused to let us pass. One could almost feel a touch of spring in the November air.
We turned into the Officers’ Club and surveyed the big square diningroom, with its sea of little tables about which the brown khaki undulated like rather stiff seaweed. The fine, gray, invisible dust of the army hung thick about the room, as it had hung thick about my papers that morning. As we sat down, I thought again of those papers accumulating steadily by virtue of the dumb, diligent, impersonal hands of the messenger. I knew they would never stop — the wheels of war would swing in the empty void for weeks.
‘Gilk,’ said Bart, ‘let’s celebrate tonight, and then go on leave to-morrow. We’ve not had leave since we’ve been here.’
‘Old man,’ I said, ‘I’m on.’
‘Where shall we go?’ said Bart. ‘South of France?’ I thought for a moment, and then Bart broke in, ‘We’d better go wherever it takes the longest to get to, because you know we have seven days after we reach our leave area. Let’s go to Carcassonne. It takes days and days to reach Carcassonne. I never heard of anybody’s actually getting there.’
‘All right,’ I said, ‘let’s go to Carcassonne.’
‘ Besides,’ said Bart, ‘ if we go down there, we escape all M.P.’s, and checking in and out of stations, and high ranking officers, and all that stuff.’ He looked reflectively at the grave-faced officers who flanked our table. ‘My right arm’s paralyzed with saluting, anyway,’ he added.
When we reached the office after lunch, Bart buried himself immediately in the Guide Joanne, emerging shortly with the information that a journey to Carcassonne could by a stretch of civilian conscience consume three days. This seemed as much as one could expect of any town in France, so we prepared a memorandum for leave to Carcassonne, and handed it to our colonel. Bart had discovered that, if we intended to derive the contemplated benefits of our trip, we should go to Carcassonne by way of Bordeaux; so we took the noon train to Bordeaux, intending to reach Dax in the South of France late that night. As we settled ourselves opposite the best-looking girl we could find, in order to improve our French, the old thirst for travel and new faces came upon us more strongly than ever. And as our train sped on through the soft gray light of the November afternoon, we chatted comfortably with the girl and read the Guide Joanne.
Dax proved to be an empty little place, filled with mud-baths and steam. There is no lure in mud-baths to those who have become well acquainted with dirt, and steam issuing from the ground is not impressive. Also there were American soldiers about. It did not take us long to discover that the lure of Dax was a fiction of the Guide Joanne, and at noon we left for Pau.
When we reached Pau we found American soldiers on the station platform, and sleek, solid, empty hotels standing monumentally on the terrace above our heads. We persisted to the terrace and forgot the soldiers and the hotels. There, spread before us, were the Pyrenees, coldly enticing, like sirens arising out of very chilly water. We gazed upon them as men will gaze upon the face of sirens, and across the great silence between us they beckoned, and we were seized with a desire to know them better.
At this juncture the colonel approached and spoke to us. He was a straight, full-faced, honest-eyed colonel of artillery, firm of voice and a little gray, but with a certain touch of boyishness about him. His first words were a lament on the lost water-power that was escaping down the mountainsides in delighted rapture. He then told us he should be in Nice, but that he did not intend going because he was bored with acting upon orders. This was such a bond between us, that in fifteen minutes we had arranged to travel together; and as he was tired of surveying in panorama such quantities of wasted water, and we longed to get into the mountains, we decided to leave for Lourdes that night.
The little train nosing out into the darkness was taking us to a land where the echoes of war had sounded but faintly in the great silence of the mountains. About us was the noise of falling water, and fresh, snow-touched air, and snug home-keeping lights that gleamed high up on the dark mountainside, and in the carriage were friendly people who looked at us with frank curiosity and asked if we were British.
II
The symbol of Lourdes flashed upon us a moment before we reached the town itself. It was a huge cross, apparently suspended in mid-air and blazing with an electric refulgence that was strangely disappointing in its very novelty. We had thought of Lourdes as an ancient shrine, a holy place worn by the feet of centuries of pilgrims, so skillfully had the church, the ancient mother of miracles, wrapped it in the twilight of catholic tradition. And yet, here, shining before our eyes, was a manifestation worthy of Atlantic City. But the colonel, gazing tranquilly from the window, was in a mood of philosophical satisfaction; his logical brain had reached the conclusion that the cross was placed on a mountain and derived its glory from a proper use of water-power. Quite cheerfully he descended and walked with us to the hotel, commenting largely on ancient and modern miracles.
Once in the hotel, we placed him in a room where the sound of falling water would not disturb his sleep, and then led him out to explore the town. The streets were deserted and the houses closed. About us there was only the loom of the mountains crouching in the distance and the white flash of water dashing away into the darkness, and the great cross up on the hill, with its myriad unwinking lights, poised above the city like some strangely mechanical symbol of eternal watchfulness. But the hills and the water drew us to them as Mother Nature draws her children to her even unto the last; and the cross and the miracles and the holy shrine passed into forgetfulness under the potent magic of the mountains. We had only one desire — to leave Lourdes and go out to them.
We returned and examined the profile map at the hotel. It indicated Gavernie, some twenty miles away, as a desirable objective, so we decided to leave for Gavernie in the morning.
By eight o’clock we were on board a little electric train bound for Pierre Lafitte. The colonel, discovering an old friend in the motor, established himself beside him, turning to us now and then and gesticulating unintelligibly as we passed the water-power that was going to waste in laughing beauty down the mountainside. At Pierre Lafitte the railway ended, and we were left to a trolley which ran to Luz. We had now passed beyond the ken of M.P.’s, and not even a Y.M.C.A. man on the still hunt for a leave area was stirring.
The town of Luz met us as we left the car. We were, in the twinkling of an eye, transformed into municipal curiosities, which was beyond our wildest dreams of escape. A slant-eyed little man besought us to go to his hotel, — a gay thing, with gray marble slabs painted on the outside walls, — but we were not drawn to it. We sat on our baggage and looked at the hills and the little village, and the populace stood about and looked at us. An old cocher approached and asked us to ride, for forty francs. We awoke and inquired where. He pointed to the mountains and murmured something about Gavernie and the Spanish frontier. We looked at each other, and then the colonel said, ‘ By God, I am going to put one foot in Spain if I’m interned for it!' So we piled cur baggage in the voiture and told the old man to take us to Gavernie.
As we went farther and farther into the valley we became aware, almost imperceptibly, that everything about us was touched by the harsh sombreness of northern Spain. The houses were gray like the mountains on which they were built; the inflections of the natives’ speech rose and fell on a stronger tide than the mellow French of Touraine; and their faces were dark with generations of mountain shadow. They were quiet too, with the far-off ancient stillness of the peaks that surround them.
There is a strange elusive charm that envelops the Pyrenees, and we felt it that afternoon. It is not the ancient mystery of high hills, but a charm, a strangeness that is essentially human. One thinks less of the mountains than of the people who have wandered over them; they are one of the great boundary-lines of the world, separating, with a silent gesture, race from race, and civilization from civilization. Upon this side lies France, gay, laughing, clear-sighted France, and just beyond lie the sombre plains of Spain, the land of fierce, melancholy dreamers. And here the two have met, have blended, in satirical mouth-lines, in the droop of an eye, in the harsh beat that sounds abruptly under the swiftly running words, and in the long sibilant sounds that hiss through their speech.
I don’t think we worried much about that, however, as we jogged along the road to Gavernie. Beside us leaped a swift mountain-stream, its brown waters shot with the soft blue lights of the distant snows whence it had come. The houses, brown against the mountainside, became more squat and sturdy; their gables were broken into irregular lines and the low sloping roofs came close to the ground. They were like the people we met, silent and strong and gnarledlooking, but quite pleasant.
As we drove on, our cocher murmured inarticulate words from the box and pointed with his whip at such objects of nature as especially pleased his eye. Then we turned a corner and caught sight of soldiers — not Americans this time, but French soldiers, bearing in their arms enormous rifles, articles of destruction evidently discarded by Napoleon in his advance through the mountains. They challenged us with the utmost politeness, and asked for our papers. Our papers directed us to proceed from Tours to Carcassonne, then some three hundred miles away. We surrendered them and added by way of good measure a travel-order from Tours to Paris, beautifully stamped. They examined these with great seriousness, and then bowed and begged our pardon for having detained us. After an excessive amount of saluting on both sides, we proceeded on our way.
Something about the soldiers, or their rifles, or our facile passage through the barrier they symbolized, touched the colonel’s imagination, and he began to talk with more and more insistence about putting his foot into Spain. He was driven, he said, by the necessity of writing to his wife that he had been in Spain, and he seemed to feel also that he would derive a certain personal satisfaction from the act of entrance.
In the midst of a discussion on internment and its results, we came quite unexpectedly upon a little inn, and a church and a handful of gray houses. It was the village of Gedres, and we decided to make it our advanced P.C.
I will not describe our lunch, for there is a futility in describing lunches when one seeks the pen of John Galsworthy and finds only the appetite of Dr. Johnson. We finished it quite completely, and began a firm, but tactful handling of the cocher, who had a touch of siesta.
Finally we started, and the colonel fell to talking water-power, while the sun came closer and closer to the snowclad peaks and the long shadows of afternoon slipped stealthily into the wooded valleys. Far up, tiny puffs of smoke from the squat houses floated like some pale fabric caught between the blue of the sky and the dark outline of the mountains, and below from the brown meadows came the sound of sheep-bells. Caught in the golden afternoon we dreamed silently, while the shadows lengthened and the cold blue lights of the stream turned slowly to the gleam of polished steel, and the brown rocks moved closer and the sheep across the valley marched in endless procession toward the blue smoke. And then, at a turn in the road, we saw before us the white wall of the Cirque de Gavernie. ‘There,’ said our cocher, ‘is the Spanish frontier.’
At Gavernie we were met by the village, which consisted principally of strong, decided-looking women of a certain age. They desired us to ride horses which they said they would prepare for us, and weakly we consented. They were vigorous, aggressive females, and then, we thought we would like to ride anyway. In a few minutes they produced five horses; and as Bart solemnly announced that he had never ridden a horse in his life and did not propose to begin at that time, we needed only two. Then the silence of the mountains was broken and we were deluged with swift words that fell like rain, and the astonished horses were pulled about and pushed forward until they began to show signs of life. Finally the colonel, with an attitude of command, leaped upon a horse and charged the women, and I followed, and together we clattered over the cobbled streets, two of the women jumping after us and the others hurling disparaging cries at our backs. The colonel said, ‘Frontier, frontier!’ with an expansive wave of his hand, and the women nodded and urged the horses on, with numerous ejaculations oddly compounded of French and Spanish horse-language.
As we advanced over the trail that led from the town, we forgot the frontier. About us rose the Cirque de Gavernie — a great circle of gray snowclad rock, steep and impregnable, standing like a giant gateway across the valley. The road, the stream, the gray houses, all that we had been following, ended with absolute finality at this point, and beyond were only rocks and snow and cold sunlight.
As we approached, far to the right, across the valley that had broadened like a river at the foot of the Cirque, a mountain detached itself from the encircling mass, and at its top was a great cleft cut as by a giant’s sword into the living rock. ‘ There,’ said our guide, ’is the Pass of Roland; on the other side lies Spain.’
‘Damn it all, captain,’ said the colonel, kicking himself off his horse, ‘you tell the women I’m going over there. I ’ve seen enough of the Cirque and I’m tired of being followed by women. Let them take the horses back if they want to.’
Then he looked around to see how I took it. I told the women I thought, we would go to Spain that afternoon. They began persuasively to tell us that it took hours to reach the pass; and as we insisted, they clutched the horses fiercely and refused to go farther, demanding to be paid. They were convinced, I believe, that we were spies.
The colonel stood with his back to it all, looking yearningly out into the distance. Then, without a word, he started down the valley, walking faster at each step, and I was left with the horses and the women. I can’t say that the women interested me much at that moment, but the horses did. I had envisaged an ascent to the pass on horseback, and gently I led the subject of conversation and the horses down the valley and up to the trail, which disappeared over the shoulder of the mountain with the carven crest. But there I halted, or rather the women halted me. They refused to allow me to ride any farther. So in disgust I paid them, and started up the trail on foot.
Never have I followed a trail that was more alluring. It rose gently, almost imperceptibly, over the side of the mountain, its stones and bare earth almost hidden in the brown grass on either side. Then, without warning, it shot straight at the rocky summit and lost itself in the flood of evening sunlight that streamed through the pass. I plodded along, my eyes fixed on the pass. The light was changing at every moment, and above, the dark rocks seemed touched with the flame of some invisible fire that lay beyond them; and as they burned, the shadows of the valley deepened from gray to blue and from blue to violet. Behind me the summit of the Cirque de Gavernie shone incandescent in the pale crimson flames that shot across the valley from the pass, and below, on the rocks gray and ghost-like in the deepening shadow, the snow gleamed dully like some strange phosphorescent lichen. As I climbed up the trail the pass above seemed ever desirable, as if through it one passed from a land of silence and strange shapes and dying color into a flood of light, and the wide reaches of the setting sun. In the sound of the wind through the stunted pines that stuck their gnarled roots into the trail, I could hear the rustle of garments and the swift beat of Arab hoofs, and in the cold laughter of the stream there echoed the sibilant menacing words of an ancient and forgotten tongue. And above, through the jagged cleft of the rock, the sun shot a last ray of light like a crimson sword.
Was it a thousand years ago that Roland had died there, carving the casque of the mountain into that mighty cleft, in his death-struggle with the Saracens? Was it a thousand years ago that the blast of his mighty horn had echoed over the mountains and valleys, carrying its summons to the Emperor Charlemagne? Ah, but Charlemagne was dead long, long ago; his tower, that tower at Tours that turns pale rose on summer nights, was old a thousand years ago! And Roland was a name and nothing more, with only a great cleft in living rock to bear him memory. And yet, as I stood dreaming, came the vision of all that we had seen in France, and all that the world had seen through four long, bitter years, and I thought, ‘The spirit of Roland still walks his ancient land.’
When I got back, it was quite dark, and the colonel and Bart were waiting for me. The colonel had not reached Spain, and he was a little gloomy. Bart had borne the burden of the return of the women, and he was a little gloomy. The cocher was in a furious temper because it was dark, and we had an hour’s ride to Gevre. So rather silently we started back in the starlight over the road we had followed in the afternoon.
III
In the morning we went back to Luz, and there the colonel left us. He had reacted from his wild flight toward Spain, and decided that he ought to go to Nice. He did not really want to go, but, as he had chosen it as a place in which to re-create his exhausted forces, he felt obliged to report there. Bart and I felt no such obligation in regard to Carcassonne. Bart, being an architect, knew all about Carcassonne, and he stated that it existed only in legend and in restoration. It was in fact a restored legend. Walls there were, of every century, but where Viollet-leDuc began, and the Saracens ended, was quite obvious. It was a detached artistic piece of work, standing off by itself with an air of ‘Observe me; I am correctly restored and represent to the discerning eye all the periods of art from the year 400.’ Thus spoke Bart, and I listened.
We decided finally to go to Arles instead of Carcassonne. Bart said the women there were the most beautiful in the world, and the Guide Joanne said coldly and practically that there was a Roman arena at Arles. So we took the noon train and journeyed beside the Pyrenees, through the province of Languedoc and beyond, into Provence and the Valley of the Rhone.
We reached Arles on the afternoon of the second day, and late that night I sat in my room at the little hotel and tried to write what I had seen. It seemed absurd, impossible. The beauty of the city floated like an illusive mist above the hard white paper. It seems so foolish to put things down in black and white when they never are black and white. And beauty is such a wistful thing, a swift brush of the wing, ‘naught but the scent of ambrosial hair that one might know a goddess had passed,’as old Virgil said.
But the Arena of Arles that night, filled with deep gray shadows that lay like pools of water beneath its ancient arches, had the beauty of something deathless, eternal, something that had become old with many civilizations. Greek, Roman, and Saracen have swept over it, and it has emerged from each a little softer in outline, a little more mellow, and yet with its strength untouched, calm, serene, as if silently absorbing into its shadows the life about it, and storing it away for the dreams of future generations. The great stones lie so silently one upon the other, like folded hands, and the dim arches overhead roofed with still, starlit spaces, seem faintly articulate, as if they were whispering to the enveloping night the mysteries of two thousand years. And above, a homing airplane flies black against the blue of early night. With a far-off whir of wings it cuts its path across the Arena, and for a moment looks down like a curious bird on the stones worn smooth by the sandaled feet of Grecian slaves and Roman senators. It passes, a black spot, beyond the Saracenic tower that looms impenetrable over the walls of the Arena.
About the walls of the Arena are the yellow roofs of Arles, and beyond lies the Rhone and the merry land of Provence, a land where the blitheness of the Greek is stained with the rich color of romance. Everywhere is the spirit of Aucassin and Nicolette growing like some brilliant flower from the ancient stones of Greece.
But it is from the Arena at twilight that Arles rises before one, clothed in the many garments that the centuries have laid upon her. The Arena seems a part of the city, its parent, and the gray light from the vast stones so skillfully laid by the hands of Greek slaves, blends with the rays of the sun upon the yellow roofs, and touches with pale blue shadows the darkness of the narrow, winding streets. In the distance lies the sunlight, and the warmth of southern France, the France of Mistral, and of wine and song and quick blood. And below, like a dark current, flows the turbid spirit of the Middle Ages, shot, with strange, rich colors and frozen into distorted, enchanting imagery. Yet each is touched in some abiding way by a clear, in-dwelling light that comes as from some great sun that has set forever behind the horizon.
In the morning we awoke a little dazed by what we had seen the day before. The beauty of Arles had taken us out into a world beyond the war, and we had only the desire to stay in that land of forgetfulness. No one knew where we were, so no one could send for us, and that gave us a feeling of repose and security.
After breakfast we stood in the plaza in front of the hotel, and smoked and watched the people. The idle watching of people, that effortless preoccupation with faces, where the mind is caught for an instant by some extraordinary feature, some unconscious revelation, and as suddenly cast into the midst of speculation, only to be caught again, is possibly the greatest gift that wandering brings to one. And we accepted it gratefully. The bare branches of the trees that lined the square stood in gray silhouette against the little houses which had emerged quite bravely from their panic of the night before. And at the curb, drawn up in single file, were three carriages lined with spotless linen, and presided over by three cochers of varying sizes, but of equally ruddy complexions. They had apparently no interest in prospective fares, as they were engaged in a violent discussion, which in no way concerned us.
At each corner of the square we had glimpses of narrow cobbled streets, and jutting houses, their flattened roofs and upper porches giving them an exotic appearance, as if some old memory of the East had stirred in the minds of their builders.
We walked out of the square and down one of the streets. It was still comparatively early, but the street was filled with men and women, slow-walking, expectant, talkative, and yet apparently busy in a leisurely preoccupied fashion. They lounged in doorways, gathered in little groups, and then dispersed suddenly, always with that air of leisurely preoccupation, as if there lay something unfulfilled before them. Evidently for them life was not a mere purple patch upon completed work. And yet how gladly had they sacrificed it! — the streets, as all the streets of France, were vacant of young men.
But there were women, the Arlésiennes, the women of Phœnicia, Greece, Rome, the Troubadours, and Mistral. They are so much a part of their ancient city, that it is as if the shadows of the Arena came to life and spoke. I can see them passing now, serene, white-filleted figures, the pure contour of their faces touched with dusky color, the brow and nose swept into one exquisite line, as if by some subtle hand in a moment of divine carelessness. They were shy. We talked to only one girl, and she had charge of the Museum — the Museum where the Venus of Arles stands, a silent witness to the lost beauty of antiquity.
IV
We walked away from the river retracing our steps to the square in front of the hotel. It was our intention to get a drink, a large, solid, satisfying drink. Our country was already resting under the shadow of impending prohibition, and we knew our days of grace were numbered.
As we dropped into two of the iron chairs the waiters had been scrubbing a few hours ago, we noticed a French officer seated near us, a colonel by his insignia. He was tall and thin, with a long straight nose, high at the bridge and close at the nostrils, and a nervous, compressed mouth and solid jaw which from time to time set in motion slight muscular tremors just below his high cheek-bones. His eyes were deep-set and grey under rather scanty eyebrows, and the hair under his képi was touched with gray. His complexion was tanned and leathery, and cut by two deep lines that ran from the base of his nose to the short moustache that partially covered his mouth. His right arm was resting on the table, the forearm raised and the fingers slightly closed. He was gazing off into the distance, and except for an occasional twitching of one patentleather boot which reposed on a chair in front of him, he was perfectly still. In his attitude of nervous repose he gave one the impression of an elegant and domesticated hawk. Also there was something unusual, something incongruous about that boot on the chair, something indicative of an unexpected idiosyncrasy of character.
As the waiter came toward us, he followed him absently with his eye, until we came within the line of his vision. He looked at us for a moment, withdrew his boot leisurely from the chair, and came over to our table.
‘You are on permission?’ he said, with a bow.
We assented and then he asked us where we were stationed. We told him quickly, to get it over with, that we were at Tours, adding 'État major,' by way of palliation. Our supply services masquerade in French as ‘general staff,’ and I have even heard them called chic by unknowing French females. The gentleman before us was by no means unknowing, but he was polite; and the subject dropped with the hollow thud to which we had long since become accustomed.
Then we all sat down, and he asked us to have a ‘fine champagne.’ I think it was the first time either of us had ever heard a Frenchman offer to buy a drink, — in their houses the cellar is yours, — and, rather startled, we said yes. The waiter shook his head in solemn deprecation, ‘I cannot serve “fine champagne” to officers, mon colonel.’
‘What!’ said the colonel, a cold blue ray of light from his eye transfixing the waiter. ‘Allez vite! ’
The waiter stood his ground a moment, — he had been a soldier himself, — but the ray of light grew colder and more steely, and with a dignified gesture of assent he turned into the café.
The colonel sat gazing into space, motionless, except for a slight tremor under his cheek-bones. Then he turned quickly and said, ‘We have too many regulations in France.’ Not knowing exactly what to say, we said nothing, and my thoughts wandered to the suspended boot.
Then the colonel asked us how we liked Arles. We told him, and he listened intently, evidently a trifle curious of the impression that the city would make upon Americans. As we grew enthusiastic, his face softened, and the touch of strain that we had noticed about his eyes relaxed. ‘Yes, it is a beautiful city,’ he said; and did we know its history?
We answered that we did, having just read it in the Guide Joanne.
And did we know of Mistral? He had known Mistral well — a great poet and a great lover of Provence. ‘A great lover of Provence,’he said again, slowly, his eyes resting upon the statue of Mistral that stood in the square before us. “‘Cante uno chato de Provence,”’ he repeated; and turning quickly, he said, ’Do you by any chance know Provençal? That is the first, line from Mireille — it is engraved on the pedestal of that statue.’ Then he began to talk, at first slowly and without the gestures of the South, then more rapidly and with greater and greater freedom of movement. And as he talked, his gray eyes became more distant, the lines of his mouth relaxed, and he leaned a little forward, his hands on the table before him. Like the slow resolving of a picture on the screen, the poet of the South stood revealed in place of the soldier.
Then he turned from his vision and saw us before him, and the distant gray eyes contracted, and the points of steel deep in the eyeballs became sharp again at the accustomed touch of faces, and the muscles of his mouth hardened automatically. He sat back, and crossing one leg deliberately over the other, touched his high collar lightly with his left hand, pushed up his chin, settled his shoulders, and asked us some questions in a matter-of-fact tone of voice.
But we led him away from questions, and started him again over his own country. We saw the Crau at evening from the hills of Baux stretching an endless waste of arid land filled with the beauty of the setting sun. And at its rim, where the mists of the sea rise like a summer haze above the scarceseen water, we saw Saintes-Maries, the refuge of the voyaging saints after the death of Christ.
From there he told us they had approached the wicked city of Arles, good old Saint Trophime at their head, and had surprised the folk in their disturbing and quiet modern worship of the Arlésienne Venus. Thoughts of the Winter Garden and Anatole France blended strangely in my head as the colonel described the first onslaught of Christianity upon Pagan France. They had stopped the dancing and broken the idols, he said. But the Winter Garden still danced; and Anatole France — had he broken any idols after all? ‘When the half-gods go, the gods appear’; and I thought of his face, like that of a world-worn seer, when he told Bart, long ago, at Tours, to remember that after the Age of Bronze came the Age of Gold, and not to decry the instincts of his own country.
A drop of rain struck the colonel on the end of his most excellent nose, and he ceased talking for a moment. The square was nearly deserted. The soft morning sunshine had disappeared, and the bare branches of the trees were flung in pale outline against a thickly clouded sky. The yellow roofs of the houses had turned to dull orange, and the houses themselves stood out detached. Then the rain fell heavily, soaking into the yellow gravel of the square, splashing in great drops upon the pavement at our feet. We moved under cover and sat watching.
The colonel broke the silence. His boot was on the chair in front of him, and he had resumed his attitude of reserved and somewhat ferocious elegance. ‘Did you ever see General Foch?’ he said, half turning his head toward us.
We said no, and Bart ventured that he had seen General Mangin once.
The colonel made no answer to the remark other than a slight ‘Ah!’ and an inclination of the head — his gaze was still fixed on the square. The lines had come back into his face, his mouth was tight, but the twitching muscles under his cheek-bones lay relaxed and scarcely visible. The look of strain between his eyes had returned, and there was a touch as of the faint hue of steel beneath his cheeks.
After a moment he withdrew his boot from the chair, touched his collar, and gave an almost imperceptible jerk of his shoulders. ‘I am on the general’s staff,’ he said, quite impersonally.
We murmured polite words about the honor such a position entailed; but he continued his impersonal gaze without apparently hearing. ‘We were at Doullens near Amiens on just such a day as this,’ he said, looking out into the rain again. ‘It was the month of March — you remember?’ His eyes went through and far beyond us, yet caught us an instant in the fellowship of deep truths mutually understood.
We told him we remembered the month of March — we had expected to go to the front then.
‘General Pétain came first,’ he continued, ‘and then General Haig. They came into the general’s office together. It was a bare room, with a bare table and a map and some chairs. The general never liked papers. It was raining hard, and I can remember the soles of General Haig’s boots stuck to the floor like soft red mortar. The general rose and shook hands, and the three men sat down, the general in the chair behind the table. He looked across at them, his big head and slender body very erect. There was a look of inquiry, of receptivity in his coldly luminous eyes, and his protruding jaw was sunk slightly into his collar as if held in leash.
‘General Haig moved forward a little and I could hear the squash of his wet boots. His elbow, placed on the table for an instant, left a dark semi-circle on the unpolished surface. He urged the general to give up Amiens, saying that General Pétain and himself believed it impossible to hold it any longer. The general listened, his eyes fixed on Haig’s face as if absorbing and digesting his thoughts as fast as they were uttered. Without a word, he turned to General Pétain and heard his reasons. Then he rose and looked out through the glass doors into the garden. The rain had stopped, but the sky was still gray and the poplar trees that lined the walk were dripping desolately. The general walked to the hook where his hat and coat were hanging. I helped him on with his coat, and he put his képi, with its golden oak-leaves, firmly on his head. “ I will let you know my decision in twenty minutes,” he said. I stepped forward to open the doors, but he pushed me away as if I were an inanimate object, and walked out into the garden.
‘For some reason we did not watch him. Some obscure instinct deep in the nature of a soldier, I suppose; and then the personality of the man seemed to forbid it. The two generals talked together in low tones, and I walked up and down the room, catching now and then an involuntary sight of the erect blue figure pacing to and fro in the garden. Then he came in. His face was as calm as it had been when he listened to General Haig’s arguments. He walked to the table and announced his decision. Then he gave his reasons, speaking with an air of powerful finality, as if he had experienced certain definite physical facts, the existence of which was unknown to his listeners. He spoke without gesture, but with the cold animation of a great reasoner, expounding his theories. His voice was deep and a little monotonous, and his words swung out in long sentences, gathering in his thoughts completely. In ten minutes he had finished, and the interview was over.’
The colonel ceased talking. He was silent for a moment, then brought his boot down sharply on the pavement and rose. ‘I have talked a great deal,’ he said, extending his hand, ‘ but I thought you would be interested. It gives me pleasure always to meet Americans.’ And he bowed slightly.
We collected our thoughts and our French sufficiently to tell him how interested we had been in what he had told us. He bowed again, handed us his card, and said he should be glad to see us again. We thanked him, and with a salute and a quick smile he was gone.
Bart looked at me with gravely spectacled eyes. ‘Damned interesting story, was n’t it? Do you suppose it was true?’ I nodded. ‘Yes, I suppose it was,’ he said, ‘as true as most things. Come on to lunch.’
We never saw the colonel again, and probably never will. In the pale aftermath of war, as in the fullness of its terrible glory, men pass each other like shadows and are lost from sight; but we thought about him often, and he will always remain the one memorable personality of our journey.
The next day we started for Paris. Our leave was up, and the work of the Information Section lay before us.