Lorraine Part 46

Thiers, putting his senile fingers in the porridge, stirred a ferment that had not even germinated since the guillotine towered in the Place de la Concorde and the tumbrils rattled through the streets. He did not know what he was stirring. The same impulse that possessed Gladstone to devastate trees animated Thiers. He stirred the dangerous mess because he liked to stir, nothing more. But from that h.e.l.l's broth the crimson spectre of the Commune was to rise, when the smoke of Sedan had drifted clear of a mutilated nation.

Through the heavy clouds of death which were already girdling Paris, that flabby Cyclops, Gambetta, was to mouth his monstrous plat.i.tudes, and brood over the battle-smoke, a nightmare of pomposity and fanfaronade--in a balloon. All France was bowed down in shame at the sight of the grotesque convoy, who were proclaiming her destiny among nations, and their destiny to lead her to victory and "la gloire." A scorched, blood-soaked land, a pall of smoke through which brave men bared their b.r.e.a.s.t.s to the blast from the Rhine, and died uncomplainingly, willingly, cheerfully, for the mother-land--was it not pitiful?

The sublime martyrdom of the men who marched, who shall write it?

And who shall write of those others--Bazaine, Napoleon, Thiers, Gambetta, Favre, Ollivier?

If Bazaine died, cursed by a nation, his martyrdom, for martyrdom it was, was no greater than that of the humblest French peasant, who, dying, knew at last that he died, not for France, but because the men who sent him were worse than criminal--they were imbecile.

The men who marched were sublime; they were the incarnation of embattled France; the starving people of Metz, of Stra.s.sbourg, of Paris, were sublime. But there was nothing sublime about Monsieur Adolphe Thiers, nothing heroic about Hugo, nothing respectable about Gambetta. The marshal with the fat neck and Spanish affiliations, the poor confused, inert, over-fed marshal caged in Metz by the Red Prince, hara.s.sed, bewildered, stunned by the clashing of politics and military strategy, which his meagre brain was unable to reconcile or separate--this unfortunate incapable was deserving of pity, perhaps of contempt. His cup was to be bitterer than that--it was to be drained, too, with the shouts of "Traitor" stunning his fleshy ears.

He was no traitor. Cannot France understand that this single word "traitor" has brought her to contempt in the eyes of the world?

There are two words that mar every glorious, sublime page of the terrible history of 1870-71, and these two words are "treason"

and "revenge." Let the nation face the truth, let the people write "incapacity" for "treason," and "honour" for "revenge," and then the abused term "la gloire" will be justified in the eyes of men.

As for Thiers, let men judge him from his three revolutions, let the unknown dead in the ditches beyond the enceinte judge him, let the spectres of the murdered from Pere Lachaise to the bullet-pitted terrace of the Luxembourg judge this meddler, this potterer in epoch-making cataclysms. Bismarck, gray, imbittered, without honour in an unenlightened court, can still smile when he remembers Jules Favre and his prayer for the National Guard.

And these were the men who formed the convoy around the chariot of France militant, France in arms!--a cortege at once hideous, shameful, ridiculous, grotesque.

What was left of the Empire? Metz still held out; Stra.s.sbourg trembled under the shock of Prussian mortars; Paris strained its eyes for the first silhouette of the Uhlan on the heights of Versailles; and through the chill of the dying year the sombre Emperor, hunted, driven, threatened, tumbled into the snare of Sedan as a sick buzzard flutters exhausted to earth under a shower of clubs and stones.

The end was to be brutal: a charge or two of devoted men, a crush at the narrow gates, a white flag, a brusque gesture from Bismarck, nothing more except a "guard of honour," an imperial special train, and Belgian newsboys shrieking along the station platform, "Extra! Fall of the Empire! Paris proclaims the Republic! Flight of the Empress! Extra!"

Jack, sitting with the paper in his hands, read between the lines, and knew that the prophecy of evil days would be fulfilled. But as yet the writing on the wall of Alsatian hills had not spelled "Sedan," nor did he know of the shambles of Mars-la-Tour, the b.l.o.o.d.y work at Buzancy, the retreat from Chalons, and the evacuation of Vitry.

Buzancy marked the beginning of the end. It was nothing but a skirmish; the 3d Saxon Cavalry, a squadron or two of the 18th Uhlans, and Zwinker's Battery fought a half-dozen squadrons of cha.s.seurs. But the red-letter mark on the result was unmistakable.

Bazaine's correspondence was captured. On the same day the second sortie occurred from Stra.s.sbourg. It was time, for the trenches and parallels had been pushed within six hundred paces of the glacis. And so it was everywhere, the whole country was in a ferment of disorganized but desperate resistance of astonishment, indignation, dismay.

The nation could not realize that it was too late, that it was not conquest but invasion which the armies of France must prepare for. Blow after blow fell, disaster after disaster stunned the country, while the government studied new and effective forms of lying and evasion, and the hunted Emperor drifted on to his doom in the pitfall of Sedan.

All Alsace except Belfort, Stra.s.sbourg, Schlettstadt, and Neuf Brisac was in German hands, under German power, governed by German law. The Uhlans scoured the country as clean as possible, but the franc-tireurs roamed from forest to forest, sometimes gallantly facing martyrdom, sometimes looting, burning, pillaging, and murdering. If Germans maintain that the only good franc-tireur is a dead franc-tireur, they are not always justified. Let them sit first in judgment on Andreas Hofer.

England had Hereward; America, Harry Lee; and, when the South is ready to acknowledge Mosby and Quantrell of the same feather, it will be time for France to blush for her franc-tireurs. n.o.ble and ign.o.ble, patriots and cowards, the justified and the misguided wore the straight kepi and the sheepskin jacket. All figs in Spain are not poisoned.

With the fall of the Chateau Morteyn, the war in Lorraine would degenerate into a combat between picquets of Uhlans and roving franc-tireurs. There would be executions of spies, vengeance on peasants, examples made of franc-tireurs, and all the horrors of irregular warfare. Jack knew this; he understood it perfectly when the muddy French infantry tramped out of the Chateau Morteyn and vanished among the dark hills in the rain.

For himself, had he been alone, there would have been nothing to keep him in the devastated province. Indeed, considering his peculiarly strained relations with the Uhlans of Rickerl's regiment, it behooved him to get across the Belgian frontier very promptly.

Now he not only had Lorraine, he had the woman who loved him and who was ready to sacrifice herself and him too for the honour of France. She lived for one thing--the box, with its pitiful contents, its secrets of aerial navigation and destruction, must be placed at the service of France. The government was France now, and the Empress was the government. Lorraine knew nothing of the reasons her father had had for his hatred of the Emperor and the Empire. Personal grievances, even when those grievances were her father's, even though they might be justified, would never deter her from placing the secrets that might aid, might save, France with the man who, at that moment, in her eyes, represented the safety, security, the very existence of the land she loved.

Jack knew this. Whether she was right or not did not occur to him to ask. But the irony of it, the grim necessity of such a fate, staggered him--a daughter seeking her father at the verge of his ruin--a child, long lost, forgotten, unrecognized, unclaimed, finding the blind path to a father who, when she had been torn from him, dared not seek for her, dared not whisper of her existence except to Morny in the cloaked shadows of secret places.

For good or ill Jack made up his mind; he had decided for himself and for her. Her loveless, lonely childhood had been enough of sorrow for one young life; she should have no further storm, no more heartaches, nothing but peace and love and the strong arm of a man to shield her. Let her remember the only father she had ever known--let her remember him with faithful love and sorrow as she would. For the wrong he had done, let him account to another tribunal; her, the echo of that crime and hate and pa.s.sion must never reach.

Why should he, the man who loved her, bring to her this heritage of ruin? Why should he tear the veil from her trusting eyes and show her a land bought with blood and broken oaths, sold in blood and infamy? Why should he show her this, and say, "This is the work of your imperial family! There is your father!--some call him the a.s.sa.s.sin of December! There is your mother!--read the pages of an Eastern diary! There, too, is your brother, a sick child of fifteen, baptized at Saarbruck, endowed at Sedan?"

It was enough that France lay prostrate, that the wounded screamed from the blood-wet fields, that the quiet dead lay under the pall of smoke from the nation's funeral pyre. It was enough that the parents suffer, that the son drag out an existence among indifferent or hostile people in an alien land. The daughter should never know, never weep when they wept, never pray when they prayed. This was retribution--not his, he only watched in silence the working of divine justice.

He tore the paper into fragments and ground them under his heel deep into the soft forest mould.

Lorraine slept.

He stood a long while in silence looking down at her. She was breathing quietly, regularly; her long, curling lashes rested on curved cheeks, delicate as an infant's.

Half fearfully he stooped to arouse her. A footfall sounded on the dead leaves behind him, and a franc-tireur touched him on the shoulder.

XXVII

cA IRA!

"What do you want?" asked Jack, in a voice that vibrated unpleasantly. There was a dangerous light in his eyes; his lips grew thinner and whiter. One by one a dozen franc-tireurs stepped from behind the trees on every side, rifles shimmering in the subdued afternoon haze--wiry, gloomy-eyed men, their sleeveless sheepskin jackets belted in with leather, their sombre caps and trousers thinly banded with orange braid. They looked at him without speaking, almost without curiosity, fingering their gunlocks, bayoneted rifles unslung.

"Your name?" said the man who had touched him on the shoulder.

He did not reply at once. One of the men began to laugh.

"He's the vicomte's nephew," said another; and, pointing at Lorraine, who, now aroused, sat up on the moss beside Jack, he continued: "And that is the little chatelaine of the Chateau de Nesville." He took off his straight-visored cap.

The circle of gaunt, sallow faces grew friendly, and, as Lorraine stood up, looking questioningly from one to the other, caps were doffed, rifle-b.u.t.ts fell to the ground.

"Why, it's Monsieur Trica.s.se of the Saint-Lys Pompiers!" she said. "Oh, and there is le Pere Pa.s.serat, and little emile Brun!

emile, my son, why are you not with your regiment?" The dark faces lighted up; somebody snickered; Brun, the conscript of the cla.s.s of '71 who had been hauled by the heels from under his mother's bed, looked confused and twiddled his thumbs.

One by one the franc-tireurs came shambling up to pay their awkward respects to Lorraine and to Jack, while Trica.s.se pulled his bristling mustache and clattered his sabre in its sheath approvingly. When his men had acquitted themselves with all the awkward sincerity of Lorraine peasants, he advanced with a superb bow and flourish, lifting his cap from his gray head:

"In my quality of ex-pompier and commandant of the 'Terrors of Morteyn'--my battalion"--here he made a sweeping gesture as though briefly reviewing an army corps instead of a dozen wolfish-eyed peasants--"I extend to our honoured and beloved Chatelaine de Nesville, and to our honoured guest, Monsieur Marche, the protection and safe-conduct of the 'Terrors of Morteyn.'"

As he spoke his expression became exalted. He, Trica.s.se, ex-pompier and exempt, was posing as the saviour of his province, and he felt that, though German armies stretched in endless ranks from the Loire to the Meuse, he, Trica.s.se, was the man of destiny, the man of the place and the hour when beauty was in distress.

Lorraine, her eyes dim with gentle tears, held out both slender hands; Trica.s.se bent low and touched them with his grizzled mustache. Then he straightened up, frowned at his men, and said "Attention!" in a very fierce voice.

The half-starved fellows shuffled into a single rank; their faces were wreathed in sheepish smiles. Jack noticed that a Bavarian helmet and side-arm hung from the knapsack of one, a mere freckled lad, downy and dimpled. Trica.s.se drew his sabre, turned, marched solemnly along the front, wheeled again, and saluted.

Jack lifted his cap; Lorraine, her arm in his, bowed and smiled tearfully.

"The dear, brave fellows!" she cried, impulsively, whereat every man reddened, and Trica.s.se grew giddy with emotion. He tried to speak; his emotion was great.

"In my capacity of ex-pompier," he gasped, then went to pieces, and hid his eyes in his hands. The "Terrors of Morteyn" wept with him to a man.

Presently, with a gesture to Trica.s.se, Jack led Lorraine down the slope, past the spring, and on through the forest, three "Terrors" leading, rifles poised, Trica.s.se and the others following, alert and balancing their c.o.c.ked rifles.

"How far is your camp?" asked Jack. "We need food and the warmth of a fire. Tell me, Monsieur Trica.s.se, what is left of the two chateaux?"

Lorraine bent nearer as the old man said: "The Chateau de Nesville is a ma.s.s of cinders; Morteyn, a stone skeleton. Pierre is dead.

There are many dead there--many, many dead. The Prussians burned Saint-Lys yesterday; they shot Bosquet, the letter-carrier; they hung his boy to the railroad trestle, then shot him to pieces. The Cure is a prisoner; the Mayor of Saint-Lys and the Notary have been sent to the camp at Stra.s.sbourg. We, my 'Terrors of Morteyn'

and I, are still facing the vandals; except for us, the Province of Lorraine is empty of Frenchmen in armed resistance."