Part 3 (1/2)
We entered the gate into the garden, the American soldier, the children and I together. The little girl, with that wistful confidence that all French children show for men in khaki, slipped her grubby little paw into my hand. I expect Joan was often grubby like that.
Brown winter leaves strewed the path. The gra.s.s was bleached and dead.
At our approach an old sheep-dog rattled his chain and looked out of his kennel. He was s.h.a.ggy and matted with years. His bark was so weak that it broke in the middle. He was a Rip Van Winkle of a sheep-dog--the kind of dog you would picture in a fairy-tale. One couldn't help feeling that he had accompanied the shepherd girl and had kept the flock from straying while she spoke with her visions.
All those centuries ago he had seen her ride away--ride away to save France--and she had not come back. All through the centuries he had waited; at every footstep on the path he had come hopefully out from his kennel, wagging his tail and barking ever more weakly. He would not believe that she was dead. And it was difficult to believe it in that ancient quiet. If ever France needed her, it was now.
Across my memory flashed the words of a dreamer, prophetic in the light of recent events, ”Daughter of Domremy, when the grat.i.tude of thy king shall awaken, thou wilt be sleeping the sleep of the dead.
Call her, King of France, but she will not hear thee. Cite her by the apparitors to come and receive a robe of honour, but she will not be found. When the thunders of universal France, as even yet may happen, shall proclaim the grandeur of the poor shepherd girl that gave up her all for her country, thy ear, young shepherd girl, will have been deaf five centuries.”
Quite illogically it seemed to me that January evening that this American soldier was the symbol of the power that had come in her stead.
The barking of the dog had awakened a bowed old Mother Hubbard lady.
She opened the door of her diminutive castle and peered across the threshold, jingling her keys.
Would we come in? Ah, Monsieur from America was there! He was always there when he was not training, playing with the children and rolling cigarettes. And Monsieur, the English officer, perhaps he did not know that she was descended from Joan's family. Oh, yes, there was no mistake about it; that was why she had been made custodian. She must light the lamp. There! That was better. There was not much to see, but if we would follow....
We stepped down into a flagged room like a cellar--cold, ascetic and bare. There was a big open fire-place, with a chimney hooded by ma.s.sive masonry and blackened by the fires of immemorial winters. This was where Joan's parents had lived. She had probably been born here.
The picture that formed in my mind was not of Joan, but that other woman unknown to history--her mother, who after Joan had left the village and rumours of her battles and banquets drifted back, must have sat there staring into the blazing logs, her peasant's hands folded in her lap, brooding, wondering, hoping, fearing--fearing as the mothers of soldiers have throughout the ages.
And this was Joan's brother's room--a cheerless place of hewn stone.
What kind of a man could he have been? What were his reflections as he went about his farm-work and thought of his sister at the head of armies? Was he merely a lout or something worse--the prototype of our Conscientious Objector: a coward who disguised his cowardice with moral scruples?
And this was Joan's room--a cell, with a narrow slit at the end through which one gained a glimpse of the church. Before this slit she had often knelt while the angels drifted from the belfry like doves to peer in on her. The place was sacred. How many nights had she spent here with girlish folded hands, her face ecstatic, the cold eating into her tender body? I see her blue for lack of charity, forgotten, unloved, neglected--the symbol of misunderstanding and loneliness.
They told her she was mad. She was a laughing stock in the village.
The world could find nothing better for her to do than driving sheep through the bitter woodlands; but G.o.d found time to send his angels.
Yes, she was mad--mad as Christ was in Galilee--mad enough to save others when she could not save herself. How nearly the sacrifice of this most child-like of women parallels the sacrifice of the most G.o.d-like of men! Both were born in a shepherd community; both forewent the humanity of love and parenthood; both gave up their lives that the world might be better; both were royally apparelled in mockery; both followed their visions; for each the price of following was death.
She, too, was despised and rejected; as a sheep before her shearers is dumb, so she opened not her mouth.
That is all there is to see at Domremy; three starveling, stone-paved rooms, a crumbling church, a garden full of dead leaves, an old dog growing mangy in his kennel and the wind-swept cathedral of the woodlands. The soul of France was born there in the humble body of a peasant-girl; yes, and more than the soul of France--the gallantry of all womanhood. G.o.d must be fond of His peasants; I think they will be His aristocracy in Heaven.
The old lady led us out of the house. There was one more thing she wished to show us. The sunset light was still in the tree-tops, but her eyes were dim; she thought that night had already gathered.
Holding her lamp above her head, she pointed to a statue in a niche above the doorway. It had been placed there by order of the King of France after Joan was dead. But it wasn't so much the statue that she wanted us to look at; it was the mutilations that were upon it. She was filled with a great trembling of indignation. ”Yes, gaze your fill upon it, Messieurs,” she said; ”it was _les Boches_ did that. They were here in 1870. To others she may be a saint, but to _them_--Bah!”
and she spat, ”a woman is less than a woman always.”
When we turned to go she was still cursing _les Boches_ beneath her breath, tremblingly holding up the lamp above her head that she might forget nothing of their defilement. The old dog rattled his chain as we pa.s.sed; he knew us now and did not trouble to come out. The dead leaves whispered beneath our tread.
At the gate we halted. I turned to my American soldier. ”How long before you go into the line?”
He was carrying the little French girl in his arms. As he glanced up to answer, his face caught the sunset. ”Soon now. The sooner, the better. She ...,” and I knew he meant no living woman. ”This place ...
I don't know how to express it. But everything here makes you want to fight,--makes you ashamed of standing idle. If she could do that--well, I guess that I....”
He made no attempt to fill his eloquent silences; and so I left. As the car gathered speed, plunging into the pastoral solitudes, I looked back. The last sight I had of Domremy was a grey little garden, made sacred by the centuries, and an American soldier standing with a French child in his arms, her golden hair lying thickly against his neck.
On the surface the American is unemotionally practical, but at heart he is a dreamer, first, last and always. If the Americans have merited any criticism in France, it is owing to the vastness of their plans; the tremendous dream of their preparations postpones the beginning of the reality. Their mistake, if they have made a mistake, is an error of generosity. They are building with a view to flinging millions into the line when thousands a little earlier would be of superlative advantage. They had the choice of dribbling their men over in small contingents or of waiting till they could put a fighting-force into the field so overwhelming in equipment and numbers that its weight would be decisive. They were urged to learn wisdom from England's example and not to waste their strength by putting men into the trenches in a hurry before they were properly trained. England was compelled to adopt this chivalrous folly by the crying need of France.
It looked in the Spring of 1917, before Russia had broken down or the pressure on the Italian front had become so menacing, as though the Allies could afford to ask America to conduct her war on the lines of big business. America jumped at the chance--big business being the task to which her national genius was best suited. If her Allies could hold on long enough, she would build her fleet and appear with an army of millions that would bring the war to a rapid end. Her role was to be that of the toreador in the European bull-fight.
But big business takes time and usually loses money at the start.
In the light of recent developments, we would rather have the bird-in-the-hand of 300,000 Americans actually fighting than the promise of a host a year from now. People at home in America realised this in January. They were so afraid that their Allies might feel disappointed. They were so keen to achieve tangible results in the war that they grew impatient with the long delay. They weren't interested in seeing other nations going over the top--the same nations who had been over so many times; they wanted to see their sons and brothers at once given the opportunity to share the wounds and the danger. Their att.i.tude was Spartan and splendid; they demanded a curtailment of their respite that they might find themselves afloat on the crimson tide. The cry of the civilians in America was identical with that of their men in France. ”Let them take off our khaki or else hurry us into the trenches. We want to get started. This waiting makes us tired.”