Everyman's Land Part 20

Once upon a time, before the Germans came, Dives had a lovely chateau, part of it very old, with a round turret under a tall pointed hat; the other part comparatively young--as young as the Renaissance--and all built of that pale, rose-pink colour which most chateaux of this forestland, and this ile-de-France used to wear in happy days before they put on smoke-stained mourning.

Now, instead of its proud chateau, Dives has a ruin even more lovely, though infinitely sad.

As for La.s.signy, it was battered to death: yet I think it was glad to die, because the Germans had turned it into a fortress, and they had to be sh.e.l.led out by the French. Poor little La.s.signy! It must have had what the French call "_une beaute coquette_," and the Germans, it seemed, were loth to leave. When they found that they must go, and in haste, they boiled with rage. Not only did they blow up all that was left in the village, but they blew up the trees of the surrounding orchards. They had not the excuse for this that they needed the trees to bar the way of the pursuing French army. Such trees as they felled across the road were the big trees of the forest. Their destruction of the young fruit trees was just a slaughter of innocents; and I've never hated war, Padre, as I hated it to-day--above all, German methods of making war. Even the countless graves on the battlefields do not look so sad as those acres of murdered trees: blown-up trees, chopped-down trees, trees gashed to death with axes, trees that strove with all the strength of Nature to live, putting forth leaves and blossoms as their life blood emptied from their veins.

The graves of dead soldiers do not, somehow, look utterly sad. Their little flags stir triumphantly in the breeze, as if waved by unseen hands. The caps that mark the mounds seem to be on the heads of men invisible, under the earth, standing at the salute, saying to those who pa.s.s: "There is no death! Keep up your hearts, and follow the example we have set." The souls of those who left their bodies on these battlefields march on, bearing torches that have lit the courage of the world, with a light that can never fail. But the poor trees, so dear to France, giving life as a mother gives milk to her child!--they died to serve no end save cruelty.

The sight of them made me furious, and I glared like a basilisk at any German prisoners we saw working along the good, newly made white road.

On their green trousers were large letters, "P. G." for "Prisonnier de Guerre"; and I snapped out as we pa.s.sed a group, "It needs only an I between the P and the G to make it _perfect!_"

One man must have heard, and understood English, for he glanced up with a start. I was sorry then, for it was like hitting a fallen enemy. As he had what would have seemed a good face if he'd been British or French, perhaps he was one of those who wrote home that the killing of trees in France "will be a shame to Germany till the end of time."

Only a few days ago Brian learned by heart a poem I read aloud, a poem called "Les Arbres Coupes," by Edmond Rostand. Teaching Brian, I found I had learned it myself.

Chacun de nos soldats eut son cri de souffrance Devant ces arbres morts qui jonchaient les terrains: "Les pechers!" criaient ceux de l'ile-de-France; "Et les mirabelliers!" crierent les Lorrains.

Soldats bleus demeures paysans sous vos casques, Quels poings noueux et noirs vers le nord vous tendiez!

"Les cerisiers!" criaient avec fureur les Basques; Et ceux du Rousillon criaient: "Les amandiers!"

Devant les arbres morts de l'Aisne ou de la Somme, Chacun se retrouva Breton ou Limousin.

"Les pommiers!" criaient ceux du pays de la pomme; "Les vignes!" criaient ceux du pays raisin.

Ainsi vous disiez tous le climat dont vous etes, Devant ces arbres morts que vous consideriez, --Et moi, voyant tomber tant de jeunes poetes, Helas, combien de fois j'ai crie: "Les lauriers!"

I love it. Yet I don't quite agree with the beautiful turning at the end, because the laurels of the soldier-poets aren't really dead, nor can they ever die. Even some of the trees which the Boches meant to kill would not be conquered by Germans or death. Many of them, cut almost level with the ground, continued to live, spouting leaves close to earth as a fountain spouts water when its jet has been turned low. All the victims that could be saved have been saved by the French, carefully, scientifically bandaged like wounded soldiers: and the Becketts talked eagerly of giving money--much money--to American societies that, with the British, are aiding France to make her fair land bloom again. Mother Beckett became quite inventive and excited, planning to start "instruction farms," with a fund in honour of Jim.

Seeds and slips and tools and teachers should all be imported from California. Oh, it would be wonderful! And how thankful she and Father were that they had Brian and Molly to help make the plan come true! I shouldn't have liked to catch Julian O'Farrell's eye just then.

All the way was haunted by the tragedy of trees, not only the tragedy of orchards, and of the roadside giants that once had shaded the straight avenues, but the martyrdom of trees in the great dark forests--oaks and elms and beeches. At first glance these woods, France's shield against her enemies--rose still and beautiful, like mystic abodes of peace, against the pale horizon. But a searching gaze showed how they had suffered. For every trio of living trees there seemed to be one corpse, shattered by bombs, or blasted by evil gas. The sight of them struck at the heart: yet they were heroes, as well as martyrs, I said to myself.

They had truly died for France, to save France. And as I thought this, I knew that if I were a poet, beautiful words would come at my call, to clothe my fancy about the forests.

I wanted the right words so much that it was pain when they wouldn't answer my wish, for I seemed to hear only a faint, far-off echo of some fine strain of music, whose real notes I failed to catch.

Always forests have fascinated me; sweet, fairy-peopled groves of my native island, and emerald-lit beech woods of England. But I never felt the grand meaning of forests as I felt them to-day, in this ravaged and tortured land. I could have cried out to them: "Oh, you forests of France, what a part you've played in the history of wars! How wise and brave of you to stand in unbroken line, a rampart protecting your country's frontiers, through the ages. Forests, you are bands of soldiers, in armour of wood, and you, too, like your human brothers, have hearts that beat and veins that bleed for France! You are soldiers, and you are fortresses--Nature's fortresses stronger than all modern inventions. You are fortresses to fight in; you are shelters from air-pirates, you hide cannon; you give shelter to your fighting countrymen from rain and heat. You delay the enemy; you mislead him, you drive him back. When you die, deserted by the birds and all your hidden furred and feathered children, you give yourselves--give, give to the last! Your wood strengthens the trenches, or burns to warm the freezing _poilus_. Brave forests, pathetic forests! I hear you defy the enemy in your hour of death: Strike us, kill us. Still you shall never pa.s.s!"

We had felt that we knew something of the war-zone after Lorraine; but there the great battles had all been fought in 1914, when the world was young. Here, it seemed as if the earth must still be hot from the feet of retreating Germans.

The whole landscape was pitted with sh.e.l.l-holes, and spider-webbed with barbed wire. The three lines of French trenches we pa.s.sed might, from their look, have been manned yesterday. Piled along the neat new road were bombs for aviators to drop; queer, fish-shaped things, and still queerer cages they had been in. There were long, low sheds for fodder.

At each turn was the warning word, "_Convois_." The poor houses of such villages as continued to exist were numbered, for the first time in their humble lives, because they were needed for military lodgings.

Notices in the German language were hardly effaced from walls of half-ruined buildings. They had been partly rubbed out, one could see, but the ugly German words survived, strong and black as a stain on one's past. Huge rounds of barbed wire which had been brought, and never used, were stacked by the roadside, and there were long lines of trench-furniture the enemy had had to abandon in flight, or leave in dug-outs: rough tables, chairs, rusty cooking-stoves, pots, pans, petrol tins, and broken dishes: even lamps, torn books, and a few particularly ugly blue vases for flowers. _They_ must have been made in Germany, I knew!

Wattled screens against enemy fire still protected the road, and here and there was a "camouflage" canopy for a big gun. The roofs of beautiful old farmhouses were crushed in, as if tons of rock had fallen on them: and the moss which once had decked their ancient tiles with velvet had withered, turning a curious rust colour, like dried blood.

Young trees with their throats cut were bandaged up with torn linen and bagging on which German printed words were dimly legible. It would have been a scene of unmitigated grimness, save for last summer's enterprising gra.s.s and flowers, which autumn, kinder than war, had not killed.

Late roses and early chrysanthemums grew in the gardens of broken, deserted cottages, as if the flowers yearned to comfort the wounded walls with soft caresses, innocent as the touch of children. On the burned facades of houses, trellised fruit-trees clung, some dead--mere black pencillings sketched on brick or plaster--but now and then one was living still, like a beautiful young Mazeppa, bound to a dead steed.

So we arrived at Noyon, less than two hours by car from Compiegne. The nearness of it to the heart of France struck me suddenly. I could hear the echo of sad voices curbing the optimists: "The Germans are still at Noyon!"

Well--they are not at Noyon now. They've been gone for many moons. Yet there's a look on the faces of the people in the town--a look when they come to the windows or doors of their houses, or when they hear a sudden noise in the street--which makes those moons seem never to have waned.

Washington has adopted Noyon, so the Becketts could not offer any great public charity, but they could sprinkle about a few private good deeds, in remembrance of Jim, who loved the place, as he loved all the ile-de-France. One of Mother Beckett's most valued letters from "Jim-on-his-travels" (as she always says) is from Noyon, and she was so bent on reading it aloud to us, as we drove slowly--almost reverently--into the town, that she wouldn't look (I believe she even grudged our looking!) at the facade of the far-famed Hotel de Ville, until she'd come to the end of the last page. She seemed to think that to look up prematurely would be like wanting to see the stage before the curtain rose on the play!

I loved her for it--we all loved her--and obeyed as far as possible. But one couldn't shut one's eyes to the Stars and Stripes that flapped on the marvellously ornate front of the old building--flapped like the wings of the American Eagle that has flown across the Atlantic to help save France.

Jim--a son of the Eagle--who gave his life for this land and for liberty, would have felt proud of that flag, I think, if he could have seen it to-day: for because she is the adopted child of Washington, Noyon "stars" the emblem of her American mother. She hangs out no other flag--not even that of France--on the Hotel de Ville. Maybe she'll give her own colours a place there later, but at this moment the Star Spangled Banner floats alone in its glory.

No nice, normal-minded person could remember, or morbidly want to remember, the name unkindly given by Julius Caesar to Noyon, when he had besieged it. I can imagine even Charlemagne waving that c.u.mbrous label impatiently aside, though Noyon mixed with Laon was his first capital.

"Noviodunum Belgarum it may have been" (I dare say he said). "But _I'm_ going to call it Noyon!"

He was crowned king of Austria in Noyon cathedral--an even older one than the cathedral of to-day, which the Germans have generously omitted to destroy, merely stealing all its treasures! But I feel sure he doesn't feel Austrian in these days, if he is looking down over the "Blessed Damosel's" shoulder, to see what's going on here below. He belonged really to the whole world. Why, didn't that fairy-story king, Haroun al Raschid, send him from Bagdad the "keys of the tomb of Christ," as Chief of the Christian World? They say his ghost haunts Noyon, and was always there whenever a king was crowned, or elected--as Hugh Capet was. Perhaps it may have been Charlemagne in the spirit who persuaded the Germans to their great retreat from the Noyon front this last spring of 1917!

Coming into the _Place_, and stopping in front of the Hotel de Ville, gave me the oddest sense of unreality, because, when we were in Paris the other day, I saw the scene in a moving picture: the first joyful entry of the French soldiers into the town, when the Germans had cleared out. I could hardly believe that I wasn't just a figure flickering across a screen, and that the film wouldn't hurry me along somewhere else, whether I wanted to go or not.

There were the venerable houses with the steep slate roofs, and singularly intelligent-looking windows, whose bright panes seemed to twinkle with knowledge of what they had seen during these dreadful eighteen months of German occupation. There were the odd, unfinished towers of the cruciform cathedral--quaint towers, topped with wood and pointed spirelets--soaring into the sky above the gray colony of cl.u.s.tered roofs. There was the cobbled pavement, glittering like ma.s.ses of broken gla.s.s, after a shower of rain just past; and even more interesting than any of these was the fantastically carved facade of the Hotel de Ville, which has lured thousands of tourists to Noyon in days of peace. Who knows but they have been coming ever since 1532, when it was finished?

At first sight, we should never have guessed what Noyon had suffered from the Germans. It was only after wandering through the splendid old cathedral of Notre-Dame, stripped of everything worth stealing, and going from street to street (we paused a long time in the one where Calvin was born, a disagreeable, but I suppose useful, man!) that we began to realize the slow torture inflicted by the Germans. Of course, "lessons" had to be taught. Rebellious persons had to be "punished."

Nothing but justice had been done upon the unjust by their just conquerors. And oh, how thorough and painstaking they were in its execution!

As they'd destroyed all surrounding cities and villages, they had to put the "evacuated" inhabitants somewhere (those they couldn't use as slaves to work in Germany), so they herded the people by the thousand into Noyon. That place had to be spared for the Germans themselves to live in, being bigger and more comfortable than others in the neighbourhood; so it was well to have as many of the conquered as possible interned under their own sharp eyes. Noyon was "home" to six thousand souls before the war. After the Germans marched in, it had to hold ten thousand. But a little more room in the houses was thriftily obtained by annexing all the furniture, even beds. Tables and chairs they took, too, and stoves, and cooking utensils, which left the houses conveniently empty, to be shared by families from Roye, and Nesle, and Ham, and Chauny--oh, so many other towns and hamlets, that one loses count in trying to remember!

How the people lived, they hardly know now, in looking back, some of them told us, as we walked about with a French officer who was our guide. Eighteen months of it! Summer wasn't quite so bad. One can always bear hardships when weather, at least, is kind. But the winters! It is those winters that scarcely bear thinking of, even now.

No lights were allowed after dark. All doors must be left open, for the German military police to walk in at any hour of the night, to see what mischief was brewing in the happy families caged together. There was no heating, and often no fire for cooking, consequently such food as there was had to be eaten cold. No nose must be shown out of doors unless with a special permit, so to speak, displayed on the end of it. Not that there was much incentive to go out, as all business was stopped, and all shops closed. Without "_le Comite Americain_," thousands would have starved, so it was lucky for Noyon that the United States was neutral then!

We spent hours seeing things, and talking to people--old people, and children, and soldiers--each one with a new side of the great story to tell, as if each had been weaving a few inches of some wonderful, historic piece of tapestry, small in itself, but essential to the pattern. Then we started for home--I mean Compiegne--by a different way; the way of Carlepont, named after Charlemagne, because it is supposed that he was born there.

The forest was even more lovable than before, a younger forest: fairy-like in beauty as a rainbow, in its splashed gold and red, and green and violet and orange of autumn. The violet was "atmosphere," but it was as much a part of the forest as the leaves, or the delicate trunks dim as ghosts in shadow, bright as organ-pipes where sun touched them. Out from the depths came sweet, mysterious breaths, and whispers like prophecies of peace. But to this region of romance there were sharp contrasts. Not even dreams have sharper ones! German trenches, chopped into blackened wastes that once were farmlands, and barbed wire wriggling like snake-skeletons across dreary fields.

We got out of our cars, and went into the trenches, thinking thoughts unspeakable. Long ago as the Germans had vanished, and every corner had been searched, our officer warned us not to pick up "souvenirs." Some infernal machine might have been missed in the search and nothing was to be trusted--no, not even a bit of innocent-looking lead pencil.

They were trenches made to live in, these! They had been walled with stones from ruined farmhouses. The "dug-outs" were super-dug-outs. We saw concealed cupolas for machine-guns, and "_les officiers boches_" had had a neat system of douches.

There was no need to worry that Brian might stumble or fall in the slippery labyrinths we travelled, for he had Dierdre O'Farrell as guide.

I'm afraid I knew what it was to be jealous: and this new gnawing pain is perhaps meant to be one of my punishments. Of course it's no more than I deserve. But that Brian should be chosen as the instrument, all unknowingly, and happily--that _hurts_!

It was just as we were close to Compiegne, not twenty minutes (in motor talk) outside the town, that the "accident" happened.

CHAPTER XXII

At first it seemed an ordinary, commonplace accident. A loud report like a pistol shot: a flat tire down on our car: that was all.

We stopped, and the little taxi-cab, tagging on behind like a small dog after a big one, halted in sympathy. Julian O'Farrell jumped out to help Morel, our one-legged chauffeur, as he always does if anything happens, just to remind the Becketts how kind and indispensable he is. We knew that we should be hung up for a good twenty minutes, so the whole party, with the exception of Mother Beckett and me, deserted the cars. Brian was with Dierdre. He had no need of his sister; so I was free to stop with the little old lady, who whispered in my ear that she was tired.

Father Beckett and Julian watched Morel, giving him a word or a hand now and then. Dierdre and Brian sauntered away, deep in argument over Irish politics (it's come to that between them: and Dierdre actually _listens_ to Brian!). Mother Beckett drifted into talk of Jim, as she loves to do with me, and I wandered, hand in hand with her, back into his childhood.

Blue dusk was falling like a rain of dead violets--just that peculiar, faded blue; and as I was absorbed in the tale of a nursery fire (Jim, at six, playing the hero) I had no eyes for scenery. I was but vaguely aware that not far off loomed a gateway, adorned with a figure of the Virgin. A curving avenue led to shadowy, neglected lawns, dimly suggesting some faded romance of history.