Antwerp to Gallipoli - Arthur Ruhl
A Frenchman of a generation ago would scarcely have recognized the
England pictured by the amiable Bordeaux professor, and I am not sure
that in this entirely altruistic big brother of little nations the
English would have recognized themselves. But, at any rate, polite
flutters of applause punctuated the talk, and at the end M. Cestre
asked his audience to rise as he paid his final tribute to the people
now fighting the common battle with France. They all stood up and,
smiling up at the left-hand proscenium-box, saluted the British
ambassador, Sir Francis Bertie, with long and enthusiastic applause. A
man in the gallery even ventured a "Heep! heep!" and every one drifted
out very content, indeed.
In the foyer I saw one lady carefully spelling out with her lorgnette
one of the words on the list posted there of the subjects for
conferences.
"Ah!" she said, considerably reassured apparently, "Keepling!" But then
she may have come in late.
Thursday.
The war has been hard on the main business of the neighborhood, of
course--Germany was the heaviest buyer of Bordeaux wine, Russia next,
and not as much as usual is going to England. The vintage this year,
like that of 70, is said to be good, however, and, though the young men
have gone, and the wine-making was not as gay as usual, there were
enough old men and women left to do the work. I visited one of the
older wine houses--nearly two centuries old--and tramped through cellars
which burrow on two levels under a whole city block. There were some
two million bottles down there in the dark and dust.
There is something patriarchal and princely about such a house, almost
unknown in our businesses at home--from the portraits of the founders,
from the caskmakers, at lunch-time, broiling their own fish over a huge
fireplace and drawing wine from the common cask as they have done for
generations; the stencils in the shipping-room--"Baltimore," "Bogota,"
"Buenos Aires," "Chicago," "Calcutta," "Christiania," "Caracas"--from
things like these to the personality and point of view of the men who
have the business in charge.
"Now, wine," began the charming gentleman who showed us round, "is a
living thing." And though you could see that he had showed many people
about in his day--and was not unaware of what might interest them--that
he was, in short, an advertiser of the most accomplished kind, yet one
could also see that he liked his work and believed in it, and grew wine
as an amateur grows fancy tulips and not as a mere salesman.
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 space 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 reassured
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
spaces 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 antitetanic 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 passed on, however,
in the hope that it may be as interesting to other practitioners 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 banal 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 illustrators, the young writers content to
substitute overpaid banality 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 bumped 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
ignobly 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 glass
factory on a hill overlooking the town--about as airy and pleasant a
place for a factory as one could imagine. The molten glass 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 passed on the other side singing. They were boys of
the 1915 class 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 nobody 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 Butterbrod and Schinken and big glasses 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 Friedrichsstrasse corner
is chanting it hoarsely, "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."
Great days, indeed! Days of achievement, of utter sacrifice, and
flinging all into the common cause. Round the corner from Unter den
Linden, under the dark windows of the Information Bureau, you may see
part of the price. It is still and deserted there, except for a lone
woman with a shawl over her head, trying to read, by the light of the
street-lamp, the casualty lists. You must imagine a building like the
Post Office in New York, for instance, or the Auditorium Hotel in
Chicago, with a band of white paper, like newspapers, spread out and
pasted end to end, running along one side, round the corner, and down
the other. Not inches, but yards, rods, two city blocks almost, of
microscopic type; columns of names, arranged in the systematic German
way--lightly wounded, badly wounded--schwer verwundet--gefallen. Some
have died of wounds--tot--some dead in the enemy's country--in
Feindesland gefallen. Rank on rank, blurring off into nothingness,
endless files of type, pale as if the souls of the dead were crowding
here.
One tried to think of the "Categorical Imperative" in a New York
playhouse--of the desperate endeavor to make the young schoolmaster
really look simple and boyish, and yet as if he might have heard of
Kant, and of convincing the two ladies that they lost their sweet
comfortableness by dressing like professional manikins; how the piece
might succeed with luck, or if it could somehow be made fashionable; and
how here, with all the unaffected and affectionate intelligence with
which it was played--and watched--it was but part of the week's work.
And, in spite of the desperation of the time, you might have seen a
dozen such audiences in Berlin, that night--and yet tourists generally
speak of Berlin, compared with some of the German provincial cities, as
a rather graceless, new sort of place, full of bad sculpture and
Prussian arrogance. You might have seen them at the opera or symphony
concerts, at Shakespeare, Strindberg, or the German classics we used to
read in college, or standing in line at six o'clock, sandwiches in hand,
so that they might sit through a performance of "Peer Gynt," with the
Grieg music, beginning at seven and lasting till after eleven. A
wonderful night, with poetry and music and splendid scenes and acting,
and a man's very soul developing before you all the time--sandwiches and
beer and more music and poetry, until that tragedy of the egoist is no
longer a play but a part of you, so many years of living, almost, added
to one's life. Yes, it is all here, along with the forty-two-centimetre
shells--good music and good beer and good love of both; simplicity,
homely kindness, and Gemutlichkeit.
Mere talk about plays would not be much encouraged in Germany nowadays.
In one of the Cologne papers the other day there were two imaginary
letters--one signed "One Who Means Well," asking that there be a little
relief from war poems, war articles, and the like; and the other signed
"One Who Means Better," demanding if it were possible for any German to
waste time in artistic hair-splitting when the Germanic peoples, in
greater danger than in their entire history, stood with their back to
the wall, facing and holding back the world. A Berlin dramatic critic,
going through the motions of reviewing a new performance of "Hedda
Gabler" the other morning, finally dismissed the matter as "Women's
troubles--if anybody can be interested in that nowadays!" Yet a woman,
asking at the same time that the "finer and sweeter voices of peaceful
society" be not forgotten, concluded her letter with "East and west the
cannon thunder, but in men's souls sound many bells, and it is not
necessary that they should always and forever be drowned out."
I mention the theatre only as an easy illustration of that many-sided
vitality one feels at once on entering Germany, that development of all
a people's capabilities, material and spiritual, which is summed up, I
suppose, in that hapless word Kultur.
You may not like German learning or German art, and consider the one
pedantic and the other heavy and uninspired. A Frenchman wrote very
feelingly the other day, in the Revue des Deux Mondes, about a return to
the old French culture, an escape from what he described as the German
habit of accumulating mere facts to something that, in addition to
feeding the brain, nourished the taste as well--carried with it, so to
speak, a certain spiritual fragrance.
You may be of this persuasion. The thing one cannot escape, however, in
Germany, whether one likes its manifestations or not, is the vitality,
the moral and intellectual force, everywhere apparent, whether it be
applied to smashing forts or staging a play. When a people can hold
back England and France with one hand and the Russian avalanche with the
other, and, cut off from oversea trade and living on rations almost,
yet, to take but one of the first examples, maintain the art of the
theatre at a level which makes that of New York or London in the most
spacious time of peace seem crude and infantile, one is confronted with
a fact which a reporter in his travels must record--a force which, as
the saying goes, "must be reckoned with."