Part 9 (1/2)

The sun was fast declining over the chalk hills and it grew bitter cold.

I unfolded my camera, stepped back eight paces, and pressed the trigger.

We clambered back into the car and resumed the road to Meaux. As I looked over my shoulder the last things I saw in the enfolding twilight were those little flags still fluttering wistfully in the wind.

XIII

MEAUX AND SOME BRIGANDS

We lay the night at Meaux. It was a town which breathed the enchantments of the Middle Ages and had for me the intimacy of a personal reminiscence. Sixteen years earlier, when reading for a prize essay at Oxford, I had studied the troubled times of etienne Marcel in the treasures of the Bibliotheque de l'ecole des Chartes, and I knew every kilometre of this country as though I had trodden it. Meaux, Compiegne, Senlis--they called to my mind dreamy hours in the dim religious light of muniment-rooms and days of ecstasy among the pages of Froissart.

Little did I think when I read those belligerent chronicles in the sequestered alcoves of the Bodleian and the Bibliotheque Nationale, tracing out the warlike dispositions of Charles the Bad and the Dauphin and the Provost of the Merchants, that the day would come when I would be traversing these very fields engaged in detective enterprises upon the footprints of contemporary armies. To compare the _variae lectiones_ of two ma.n.u.scripts concerning a fourteenth-century skirmish is good, it has all the excitement of the chase; but to be collating the field note-book of a living Hun with the _dossier_ of a contemporary Justice de Paix, this is better. It has all the contact of reality and the breathless joy of the hue and cry. And, after all, were things so very different? Generations come and go, dynasties rise and fall, but the earth endureth for ever, and these very plains and hills and valleys that have witnessed the devastation of the Hun have also seen the ravages of the mercenaries and free companies of the Middle Age. As I lay in my bed that night at the inn I turned over the pages of my pocket volume of M. Zeller's _Histoire de France racontee par les contemporains_, and hit on the ”Souvenirs du brigand Aimerigot Marches,”

ravisher of women, spoiler of men, devourer of widows' houses. And as I read, it seemed as though I were back in the department _du Contentieux_ of the Ministry of War in Paris deciphering the pages of a German officer's field note-book. For thus speaks Aimerigot Marches in the delectable pages of Froissart distilled by M. Zeller into modern French:

There is no time, diversion, nor glory in this world like that of the profession of arms and making war in the way we have. How blithe were we when we rode forth at hazard and hit on a rich abbe, an opulent prior or merchant, or a string of mules from Montpelier, Narbonne, Limoux, Toulouse, or Carca.s.sonne laden with the fabrics of Brussels or furs from the fair of Lendit, or spices from Bruges, or the silks of Damascus and Alexandria! All was ours or was to ransom at our sweet will. Every day we had more money.

The peasants of Auvergne and Limousin provisioned us and brought to our camp corn and meal, and baked bread, hay for the horses and straw for their litter, good wines, oxen, and fine fat sheep, chicken, and poultry. We carried ourselves like kings and were caparisoned as they, and when we rode forth the whole country trembled before us. Par ma foi, cette vie etait bonne et belle.

Is not that your very Hun? He is a true reversion to type. Only, whereas among the French he is a thing of the savage past, among the Germans he is a product of the kultured present. And to turn from the field note-book of the German soldier with its swaggering tale of loot, l.u.s.t, and maudlin cups, its memoranda of stolen toys for Felix and of ravished lingerie for Bertha, all viewed in the rosy light of the writer's egotism as a laudable enterprise, to the plain depositions of the Justice de Paix, and see the reverse side of the picture with its tale of ruined homes and untilled fields, was just such an experience as it had been to turn from the glittering pages of Froissart to the sombre story of Jean de Venette,[9] a monk of Compiegne, Little Brother of the Poor and chronicler of his times, as he pondered on these things in the scriptorium:

In this year 1358, the vines, source of that beneficent liquor which gladdens the heart of man, were no longer cultivated; the fields were neither tilled nor sown; the oxen and the sheep went no longer to the pasture. The churches and houses, falling into decay, presented everywhere traces of devouring flames or sombre ruins and smouldering. The eye was no longer gladdened as before with the sight of green meadows and yellowing harvests, but rather afflicted by the aspect of briers and thistles, which cl.u.s.tered everywhere.

The church bells no longer rang joyously to call the faithful to the divine offices, but only to give the alarm to the peasants at the approach of the enemy and the signal for flight.

As it was in the days of Jean de Venette, so it is now. I thought of that mournful pa.s.sage as I wandered next day among the ruins of Choisy-au-Bac, a village not twenty miles from the place where Jean de Venette was born, and saw old women cowering among the ruins of their burnt-out homes.

If the good Carmelite of the fourteenth century returned to Meaux to-day he would have little difficulty in finding his way about the city, for though she must have aged perceptibly she can have changed but little.

The timbered mills on wooden piles still stand moored in the middle of the river like so many s.h.i.+ps, just as they stood in the twelfth century, and the cathedral with its Gothic portals and great rose-window--though it has grown in stature and added here and there a touch of the flamboyant in its tracery, even as a man will break out into insurgent adventures when he feels the first chill of age--is stamped with the characters of the fourteenth century. And I think Jean de Venette would find a congenial spirit in my friend the bishop, Monsignor Marbot, for like Jean he is a lover of the poor. It was Monsignor Marbot who went in procession to the battlefield of the Marne with crucifix and banner and white-robed acolytes, and in an allocution of singular beauty consecrated those stricken fields with the last rites of the Church. And it was Monsignor Marbot who remained at his post all through the German occupation to protect his flock while the Hun roamed over his diocese like a beast of prey. Though the Hun thinks nothing of shooting a _maire_, and has been known to murder many an obscure village priest, he fights shy of killing a bishop; there might be trouble at the Holy See.

Many a moving tale did the good bishop tell me as we sat in his little house--surely the most meagre and ascetic of episcopal palaces, in which there was nothing more sumptuous than his cherry and scarlet soutane and his biretta.

We lay the night at an inn that must have been at one time a seigneurial mansion, for it had a n.o.ble courtyard. I was shown to a room, and, having unpacked my valise, I turned on the taps, but no water issued; I applied a match to the gas-jet, but no flame appeared; I tried to open the window, but the sash stuck. I rang the bell; that at least responded. A maid appeared; I pointed to the taps and made demonstrations with the gas-jet. To all of which she replied quite simply, ”Ah! monsieur, c'est la guerre!” I had heard that answer before.

With such a plea of confession and avoidance had the boots at the Hotel de la Poste at Rouen excused a gross omission to call me in the morning, and thus also had the aged waiter at the Metropole disposed of a flagrant error in my bill. But this time it was convincing enough; gas-workers and waterworks men and carpenters were all at the war, and in the town of Meaux water was carried in pitchers and light was purchased at the chandler's. In France you get used to these things and imitate with a good grace the calm stoicism of your Allies. For, after all, the enemy was pretty near, and as I retired to my couch I could hear the thunder of their guns.

FOOTNOTE:

[9] Reputed author of the sequel to the chronicles of Guillaume de Nangis. See M. Lacabane in the _Bibliotheque de l'ecole des Chartes_ (1e serie), t. iii.

XIV

THE CONCIERGE AT SENLIS

We rose early the next day, and, having paid our reckoning, were away betimes, for we were to visit the French lines and wished also to pay a flying visit to Senlis. As we left Crepy-en-Valois we entered the Forest of Compiegne, a forest of n.o.ble beeches which rose tall and straight and grey like the piers of Beauvais Cathedral, their arms meeting overhead in an intricate vaulting through which we saw the winter sun in a sapphire sky. We met two Cha.s.seurs d'Afrique, mounted on superb Arabs and wearing red fez-like caps and yellow collar-bands. They were like figures out of a canvas of Meissonier, recalling the s.p.a.cious days when men went into action with all the pomp and circ.u.mstance of war, drums beating, colours flying, plumes nodding, and the air vibrant with the silvery notes of the bugle. All that is past; to-day no bugle sounds the charge, and even the company commander's whistle has given way to certain soft words for which the German mocking-bird will seek in vain in our Infantry Manual. As for cuira.s.s and helmet, the range of modern guns and rifles has made them a little too ingenuous. And, sure enough, as we drove into Compiegne we found a squadron of dragoons as sombre as our own, in their mouse-coloured _couvre-casques_ and cavalry cloaks, though their lances glinted in the sun. Here all was animation. Informal conventicles of Staff officers, with whom we exchanged greetings, stood about the square in front of the exquisite Hotel de Ville, with its high-pitched roof pierced with dormer-windows and crowned with many pinnacles. North and east of Compiegne lie the zones of the respective armies, all linked up by telephone, and here we had to exchange our pa.s.ses, for even a Staff officer may not enter one zone with a pa.s.s appropriate to another. But our first objective was Senlis, which lay to the south of us between Compiegne and Paris.