Antwerp to Gallipoli Part 6

To be sure, he was inclined to slur over the importance of white wine, while champagne and its perfidious makers didn't interest him in the least; but of the red wine of Bordeaux, its lightness, bouquet, and general beneficence, and the delicate and affectionate care with which it was handled, one could have heard him talk all day. Now and then younger houses discovered things that were going to revolutionize the wine trade.

"Of course," he said, "we examine such things. We look in our books, where records of all our experiments are kept, and there we find that we tried that new thing in 1856--or 1756, perhaps."

Far underground we came on some of the huge majorums, big as nine ordinary bottles. "The King of Spain ran over to Bordeaux one day, and came to us and said: 'I've got two hours; what can you show me?' We said: 'We can show you our cellars.' 'Very well,' said he; 'go ahead.'

When he came to the majorums he said: 'What on earth do you do with those ?' 'They are used when there is a christening or a wedding or some great event, and when a king visits us we give him two.'"

So they sent the majorums to the young King, and the King sent back a polite note, just as if he were anybody else, and that is all of that story.

Most of the newspapers which followed the government to Bordeaux have returned to the capital, but that intransigeant government-baiter, the venerable Georges Clemenceau, still continues his bombardment from close range. His paper was formerly L'Homme Libre--The Free Man--but on being suppressed this fall by the censor its octogenarian editor gayly changed its name to The Chained Man--L'Homme Enchaine--and continued fire.

The mayor of a Paris commune in '71, prime minister from 1906-9, the editor of various papers, and senator now, Clemenceau is properly feared; and he was offered, it is said, a place in the present government, but would accept no post but the highest. He preferred his role of political realist and critical privateer, a sort of Mr. Shaw of French politics, hitting a head wherever he sees one.

The imperfections of the French army sanitary service, the censorship, and the demoralization of the postal service since the war have been favorite targets recently. There has been much complaint of the difficulty of getting news from men at the front. M. Viviani, the premier, in an address at Reims, ventured to say that it was his duty to "organize, administer, and intensify the national defense." On this innocent phrase the eye of M. Clemenceau fell the other day, and he now flings off a characteristic three-and-a-half-column front-page salvo so adroitly combining the premier's remark with the actual, pitiful facts that the reader almost feels that "intensifying" the suffering of parents and friends of men fighting for their country is something in which the present government takes delight.

I wish there was s.p.a.ce to quote the editorial. I may, at any rate, quote from one or two of the letters written to M. Clemenceau, to suggest a stay-at-home aspect of the war of which we do not hear much.

This is from the mayor of Pont-en-Royans:

"Officially," he writes, "on September 29 I was asked to notify the family of the soldier Regnier of his death. In the midst of their cries and tears, the family showed me the last letter, received that very morning, and dated the 27th September, two days before. Now, the notice of his death was dated September 7, and I said to the father:

"'I would not give you too much hope; your son probably died the 27th, suddenly, perhaps, and the secretary charged with writing the letter I have received forgot a figure--instead of 27 he put 7. Meanwhile, as a doubt exists, I will do what I can to clear the matter up.'

"The Administrative Counsel replied to me: 'There has been no error. The notice of decease is dated September 27. If, then, the soldier wrote the 27th, he is not dead. We shall inform the ministry, and you, on your side, should write to the hospital where he is being treated.'

"I wrote to the chief doctor at Besancon. No response. I sent him a telegram with the reply prepaid. No response. I wrote him a third letter, this time a trifle sarcastic. I received finally a despatch: 'Regnier is not known at this hospital.'

"I still had the telegram in my hand when to my house came the sister of the dead soldier, in mourning, and beaming, and gave me a letter. 'It is my brother who has written us.' So there was no mistake. The dead man wrote on the 2d October.

"'Very well,' said I to the family. 'Are you sufficiently rea.s.sured now?'

"Some days after I received from the Red Cross hospital at Besancon a letter giving me news of Regnier and explaining that there were several hospitals in the town, that they had only just received my letter, etc., etc.

"I did not think more of the matter until October 23, when I received a circular from the prefecture of Isere, asking me to advise the Regnier family that the soldier Regnier, wounded, was being treated at the hospital of Besancon.

"At last I thought the affair was closed, when, to-day, October 30, I received the enclosed despatch, sent by I know not whom, informing me that the soldier Regnier is unknown in the hospital of Besancon!

"Oh, my head, my head!"

You can imagine what this slashing old privateer would do with a letter like this. The censor will not permit him to make any comment. Very well--he wishes to make none. "You see, Mr. Viviani, it isn't one of those execrable parliamentarians who makes these complaints. It is a mayor, a humble mayor, officially designated by you to transmit to his people the striking results of your 'organization,' of your 'administration,' of your 'intensification' in the cruelly delicate matter of giving news to families. He supplies the picture, and you see in plain daylight your 'intensification' at work. What do you think of it? What can you say about it? Do you believe that because you have given to your censor the right--pardon me, the power--to make white s.p.a.ces in the columns of newspapers that that is going to suppress the fact? Do you believe," etc., etc.

In the same editorial was a letter from a father whose two sons, on the firing-line, had received none of the family letters since the beginning of the war and wrote pathetically asking if their parents and little sister were ill, or how they had offended. A wife enclosed a letter from her husband, telling how he was suffering from the cold because of insufficient clothing; a doctor wrote protesting because there was not a single bottle of ant.i.tetanic serum in his field-hospital.

We found M. Clemenceau in his lodgings late one afternoon--a leonine old gentleman bundled up in cap and overcoat before a little grate fire, while a secretary ran through the big heap of letters piled on the bed.

In the corner of the room was a roll-top desk--the sanctum, evidently, of The Chained Man.

As M. Clemenceau was insistent that he should not be interviewed, I may not repeat the exceedingly lively talk on all sorts of people and things with which he regaled us once--and it didn't take long--he "got going."

One purely personal little bit of information may be pa.s.sed on, however, in the hope that it may be as interesting to other pract.i.tioners of a laborious trade as it was to me.

We were talking of the facility with which he reeled off, day after day, columns of lively, finished prose, and I asked whether he wrote in longhand, dictated, or used a typewriter.

This question seemed to amuse and interest the old war-horse greatly. He went to his desk and brought back a sheet of paper, half of which was covered with a small, firm handwriting. It was his next day's broadside, not yet finished.

"There is nothing mysterious about it," he said. "I get up at half past three every morning. I am at that desk most of the day; I go to bed at nine o'clock. If I had to write a ba.n.a.l note, it might take time, but there are certain ideas which I have worked with all my life. I worked a good many years without expressing them; they are all in my head, and when I want them I've only got to take them out. I am eighty-three years old, and if I couldn't express myself by this time"--the old gentleman lifted his eyebrows, smiled whimsically, and, with a quick movement of shoulders and hands, concluded--"it would be a public calamity--a malheur public!"

I thought of the padded lives of some of our literary charlatans and editorial gold bricks at home, of the clever young artists ruined as painters by becoming popular ill.u.s.trators, the young writers content to subst.i.tute overpaid ba.n.a.lity and bathos for honest work, and I must confess that the sight of this indomitable old fighter, who had known great men and held high place in his day, and now at eighty-three got up before daylight to pound out in longhand his columns of vivid prose, stirred every drop of what you might call one's intellectual sporting blood. Of his opinions I know little, of the justice of his attacks less, and, to be quite frank, I suspect he is something of a trouble-maker. But as he stood there, bundled up in his overcoat and cap, in that chilly lodging-house room, witty, unsubdued, full of fight and of charm, he seemed to stand for that wonderful French spirit--for its ardor and penetration, its fusion of sense and sensibility, its tireless intelligence and unquenchable fire.

Monday.

The consul of Cognac! It sounded like a musical comedy when we met on the steamer last August; not quite so odd when we b.u.mped into each other in Bordeaux; and now it turns out to mean, in addition to being a young University of Virginia man, thoroughly acquainted with the people he has to deal with, living in a town where the towers of Francis I's castle still stand, rowing on a charming old river in the summer, and in these days hearing a charming old French gentleman, vice-consul, tell how he fought against the Prussians in '70. Cognac is a real place, it appears--an old town of twenty thousand people or so, and it is really where cognac comes from, all other brandies being, of course, as one will learn here, mere upstart eaux-de-vie. We went through some of the cellars to-day, as venerable and vast as the claret cellars in Bordeaux, although not quite as interesting, perhaps, because not so "alive." For wine is a living thing, as the man said in Bordeaux, and it must be ign.o.bly boiled and destroyed before turning into a distilled spirit. To some this pale spiritual essence may possess a finer poetry--the cellars are more fragrant, at any rate.

All the young men had gone to the front--their wages continued as usual --and the work was carried on by women and old servitors, scarcely one of the latter under seventy. They were pointed out as examples of the beneficent effect of the true cognac--these old boys who had inhaled the slightly pungent fragrance of the cellars and bottling-rooms all their lives. You get this perfume all over Cognac. It comes wandering down old alleyways, out from under dark arches, people live literally in a fine mist of it. The very stones are turned black by the faint fumes.

There must be scores of towns south of Paris which look more or less like this--the young men gone or drilling in the neighborhood, the schools turned into hospitals, the little old provincial hotels sheltering families fled from Paris. There are several such at our hotel, nice, comfortable people--you might think you were in some semi-summer-resort hotel at home--Ridgefield, Conn., for instance, in winter time.

The making of cognac occupies nearly every one, one way or another, and it has made the place next to the richest town of its size in France.

They make the cognac, and they make the bottles for it in a gla.s.s factory on a hill overlooking the town--about as airy and pleasant a place for a factory as one could imagine. The molten gla.s.s is poured into moulds, the moulds closed--psst! a stream of compressed air turned in, the bottles blown, and there you are--a score or so of them turned out every minute. As we came out of the furnace-room into the chilly afternoon a regiment of reservists tramped in from a practise march in the country. Some were young fellows, wearing uniforms for the first time, apparently; some looked like convalescents drafted back into the army. They took one road and we another, and half an hour later swung down the main street of Cognac behind a chorus of shrilling bugles. All over France, south of Paris, they must be marching like this these frosty afternoons.

Coming up from Bordeaux the other night we missed the regular connection and had to spend the night at Saintes. The tall, quizzical, rather grim old landlady of the neat little Hotel de la Gare--characteristic of that rugged France which tourists who only see a few streets in Paris know little about--was plainly puzzled. There we were, two able-bodied men, and P------, saying nothing about being consul, merely remarked that he lived in Cognac. "In Cognac!" the old woman repeated, looking from one to the other, and then added, as one putting an unanswerable question: "But you are not soldiers?"

We went out for a walk in the frosty air before turning in. There was scarce a soul in the streets, but at the other end of the town a handful of young fellows pa.s.sed on the other side singing. They were boys of the 1915 cla.s.s who had been called out and in a few days would be getting ready for war. In Paris you will see young fellows just like them, decorated with flags and feathers, driving round town in rattle-trap wagons like picnic parties returning on a summer night at home. Arm in arm and keeping step, these boys of Saintes were singing as they marched:

"Il est rouge et noir et blanc, Et fendu au derriere--d."

"He's red, white, and black, And split up the back!"

They saw themselves, doubtless, marching down the streets of Berlin as now they were marching down the streets of Saintes--and they kept flinging back through the frosty dark:

"Il est rouge--et noir--et blanc--Et fendu--au derriere--d..."

Chapter VI

"The Great Days"

They were playing "The Categorical Imperative" that evening at the Little Theatre in Unter den Linden. It is an old-fashioned comedy laid in the Vienna of 1815--two love-stories, lightly and quaintly told, across which, through the chatter of a little Viennese salon, we dimly see Napoleon return from Elba and hear the thunder of Waterloo. A young cub of a Saxon schoolmaster, full of simple-hearted enthusiasm and philosophy, comes down to the Austrian capital, and, taken up by a kindly, coquettish young countess, becomes the tutor of her cousin, a girl as simple as he. The older woman with her knowing charm, the younger with her freshness, present a dualism more bewildering than any he has ever read about in his philosophy books, and part of the fun consists in seeing him fall in love with the younger in terms of pure reason, and finally, when the motherly young countess has quietly got him a professorship at Konigsberg, present to his delighted Elise his "categorical imperative."

You can imagine that thoroughly German mixture of sentiment and philosophy, the quaint references to a Prussia not yet, in its present sense, begun to exist; how to that audience--nearly every one of whom had a son or husband or brother at the front--the century suddenly seemed to close up and the Napoleonic days became part of their own "grosse Zeit." You can imagine the young schoolmaster and the frivolous older man going off to war, and the two women consoling each other, and with what strange eloquence the words of that girl of 1815, watching them from the window, come down across the years:

"Why is it that from time to time men must go and kill each other?

There it stands in the paper--two thousand more men--it writes itself so easily! But that every one of them has a wife or mother or sister or a-- ... And when they cry their eyes out that means that it is a victory, and when some brave young fellow has fallen, he is only one of the 'forces'--so and so many men--and n.o.body even knows his name..."

You must imagine them coming back from the war, and pale, benign, leaning on their canes as returning heroes do in plays, talk across the footlights to real young soldiers you have just seen limping in with real wounds--pink-cheeked boys with heads and feet bandaged and Iron Crosses on black-and-white ribbons tucked into their coats, home from East Prussia or the Aisne. Then between the acts you must imagine them pouring out to the refreshment-room for a look at each other and something to eat--will they never stop eating?--fathers and mothers and daughters with their b.u.t.terbrod and Sc.h.i.n.ken and big gla.s.ses of beer in the genial German fashion, beaming on the young heroes limping by or, with heads bandaged like schoolboys with mumps, grinning in spite of their scars.

And when they drift out into the street at last, softened and brought together by the play--the street with its lights and flags, officers in long, blue-gray overcoats and soldiers everywhere, and a military automobile shooting by, perhaps, with its gay "Ta-tee! Ta-td!"--the extras are out with another Russian army smashed and two more ships sunk in the Channel. The old newspaper woman at the Friedrichsstra.s.se corner is chanting it hoa.r.s.ely, "Zwei englische Dampfer gesunken!"--and they read that "the sands have run, the prologue is spoken, the curtain risen on the tragedy of England's destiny."