Antwerp to Gallipoli Part 5

Seventh, eighth, and ninth cases. Thefts by German prisoners of war.

The accused are Antoine Michels, twenty-five years, native of Treves, Twenty-seventh German Cha.s.seurs, made prisoner at Lens. Henriede Falk, twenty-seven years, native of Landenheissen (Grand Duchy of Hesse), Fourth Regiment Dragoons, made prisoner at Lille. Max Benninghoven, twenty-two years, Seventh German Cha.s.seurs, made prisoner at Bailleul.

"The three had in their possession at the moment of their capture: Michels, two pairs of earrings, a steel watch, two medals representing the town of Arras, and a cigar-holder; Falk, a woman's watch and chain in addition to his own; Benninghoven, a pocketbook, a pack of cards, and money that did not belong to him.

"All were subjected to a severe examination and condemned: Michels, to five years in prison and a fine of five hundred francs; Falk, to twenty years at forced labor..."

And these few words of newspaper type, which n.o.body else seemed to be noticing, somehow--as if one had stubbed one's toe--disturbed the picture. They did not fit in with the rakish gray motor-car, labelled "Australia," I saw after dinner, nor the young infantryman I ran across on a street corner who had been in the fighting ever since Mons and was but down "for a rest" before jumping in again, nor the busy streets and buzzing cafes. But across them, for some reason, all evening, one couldn't help seeing Henriede Falk, twenty-seven years old, of Landenheissen, starting down toward Paris last August, singing "Deutschland uber Alles!" and wondering what he might be thinking about the great game of war fifteen years from now.

While I was taking coffee this morning my mariner-host walked up and down the cafe, delivering himself on the subject of mines in the North Sea. The Germans began it, now the English must take it up; but as for him, speaking as one who had followed the sea, it was poor business. Why couldn't people knock each other out in a stand-up fight like men in a ring, instead of strewing the open road with explosives?

Walking about town after breakfast, I ran into a young man whom I had last seen in a white linen uniform, waiting patiently on the orderlies'

bench of the American Ambulance at Neuilly. The ambulance is as hard to get into as an exclusive club, for the woods are full these days of volunteers who, leading rather decorative lives in times of peace, have been shaken awake by the war into helping out overtaxed emba.s.sies, making beds in hospitals, doing whatever comes along with a childlike delight in the novelty of work. This young man wore a Red Cross b.u.t.ton now and paused long enough to impart the following--characteristic of the things we non-combatants hear daily, and which, authentic or not, help to "make life interesting":

1. An English general just down from the front had told him that four thousand soldiers had been sent out as a burial party after the fighting along the Yser, and had buried, by actual count, thirty-nine thousand Germans.

2. In a temporary hospital near the front some fifty German and Indian wounded were put in the same ward. In the night the Indians got up and cut the Germans' throats.

I climbed up through narrow, cobblestoned streets to the higher part of the town. It was pleasant up here in the frosty morning--old houses, archways, and courts, and the bells tolling people to church.

Up the long hill, as I went down, came three hea.r.s.es in black and silver, after the French fas.h.i.+on, with drivers in black coats and black-and-silver c.o.c.ked hats. People stopped as they pa.s.sed, a woman crossed herself, men took off their hats--farther up the hill a French sentry suddenly straightened and presented arms.

The three caskets were draped in flags--not the tricolor, but the Union Jack. No mourners followed them, and as the ancient vehicles climbed over the brow of the hill the people kept looking, feeling, perhaps, that something was lacking, wondering who the strangers might be who had given their lives to France.

Monday.

Paris again--a gray Paris, with bare tree-trunks, dead leaves on the sidewalk, and in the air the chill of approaching winter.

Across the gray distances one fancies now and then to have seen the first stray flakes of snow, and in some old street, between tall, gray houses leaning backward, sidewise, each after its fas.h.i.+on--as some girl, pale, with shawl wrapped about her shoulders, hurries past with a quick upcasting of dark eyes, one thinks of Mimi and the third act of "La Boheme."

Old sentiments, old songs and verses return in this strange, gray stillness--that spirit so gracious, delicate, penetrating, and personal, which has drawn so many through the years, becomes more moving and real.

There is more animation in the streets now: shops are opening, cabs tooting down the Avenue de l'Opera the greater part of the night; but most of the house-fronts are still shuttered and still. Tourists, pleasure-seekers, and the ba.n.a.lities they bring are gone--every thought and energy is with the men fighting on that long line across the north.

It is a Paris of the French--of a France united as never before, perhaps, purified by fire, ardent, resolute, defending her life and her precious inheritance.

The Temporary Capital

Tuesday.

A journalist actually protests in print against the big loaves of coa.r.s.e bread, long as half a stick of cord-wood and almost as hard--remember the almost carnivorous joy with which a Frenchman devours bread!--to which the military government, at the beginning of the war, condemned Paris.

The explanation was that rolls and fancy bread took too much time and there were not enough bakers left to do the work--and inspectors see that the law is obeyed, whether amiable bakers think they have time or not. And people want light bread, curly rolls, "pain de fantaisie." All very well for General Gallieni! says the journalist; he likes hard bread; but why must several million people go on cracking their teeth because of that idiosyncrasy?

The government is obdurate. If fancy bread were made, only the big bakers would have time to make it, little ones would be without clients, and that this highly centralized, paternal government cannot allow.

Hard bread it is, then, for another while at least--"C'est la guerre!"

Thursday.

We have a dining-car on our Bordeaux express to-day, the first since war was declared. To-morrow night sleeping-cars go back again--more significant than one might think who had not seen the France of a few months ago, when everything was turned over to the army and people sat up all night in day coaches to cover the usual three hours from Dieppe to Paris.

Down through the heart of France--Tours, Poitiers, Angouleme--past trim little French rivers, narrow, winding, still, and deep, with rows of poplars close to the water's edge, and still a certain air of coquetry, in spite of bare branches and fallen leaves--past brown fields across which teams of oxen, one sedate old farm horse in the lead, are drawing the furrow for next spring's wheat. It's the old men who are ploughing --except for those in uniform, there is scarce a young man in sight. And everywhere soldiers--wounded ones bound for southern France, reserves not yet sent up.

Vines begin to appear, low brown lines across stony fields; then, just after dark, across the Garonne and into Bordeaux, where the civil government obligingly fled when the enemy was rolling down on Paris in the first week of September.

Bordeaux, Monday.

Bordeaux is a day's railroad ride from Paris--twelve hours away from the German cannon, which even now are only fifty miles north of the boulevards, twelve hours nearer Spain and Africa. And you feel both these things.

All about you is the wine country--the names of towns and villages round about read like a wine-card--and, as you are lunching in some little side-street restaurant, a table is moved away, a trap-door opens, and monsieur the proprietor looks on while the big casks of claret are rolled in from the street and lowered to the cellar and the old casks hauled up again. You are close to the wine country and close to the sea--to oysters and crabs and s.h.i.+ps--and to the hot sun and more exuberant spirits of the Midi. The pretty, black-eyed Bordelaise--there are pretty girls in Bordeaux--often seems closer to Madrid than to Paris; even the Bordelais accent has a touch of the Mediterranean, and the crisp words of Paris are broken up and even an extra vowel added now and then, until they ripple like Spanish or Italian. "Pe-t.i.te-a ma- dame-a !" rattles some little newsboy, ingratiating himself with an indifferent lady of uncertain age; and the porter will bring your boots in no time-in "une-a pe-t.i.te-a mi-nute-a."

The war is in everybody's mind, of course--no one in France thinks of anything else--but there is none of that silence and tenseness, that emotional tremor, one feels in Paris. The Germans will never come here, one feels, no matter what happens, and as you read the communiques in La Pet.i.te Gironde and La Liberte du Sud-Ouest the war seems farther away, I feel pretty sure, than it does in front of the newspaper bill-boards in New York.

In fact, one of the first and abiding impressions of Bordeaux is that it is a great place for things to eat--oysters from Marennes, lobsters and langoustes, pears big as cantaloupes, pomegranates, mushrooms--the little ones and the big cepes of Bordeaux--yellow dates just up from Tunis. The fruiterers' shops not only make you hungry, but into some of them you may enter and find a quiet little room up-stairs, where the proprietor and his wife and daughter, in the genial French fas.h.i.+on, will serve you with a cosey little dinner with wine for three francs, in front of the family grate fire, and the privilege of ordering up anything you want from the shop-window below.

There are attractive little chocolate and pastry shops and cheerful semi-pension restaurants where whole families, including, in these days, minor politicians with axes to grind and occasional young women from the boulevards, all dine together in a warm bustle of talk, smoke, the gurgle of claret, and tear off chunks of hard French bread, while madame the proprietress, a handsome, dark-eyed, rather Spanish-looking Bordelaise, sails round, subduing the impatient, smiling at those who wish to be smiled at, and ordering her faithful waiters about like a drill-sergeant.

And then there is the Chapon fin. When you speak to some elderly gentleman with fastidious gastronomical tastes and an acquaintance with southern France of your intention of going to Bordeaux, he murmurs reminiscently: "Ah, yes! There is a restaurant there..." He means the Chapon fin. It was famous in '70 when the government came here before, and to-day when the young King of Spain motors over from Biarritz he dines there. Coming down on the train, I read in the Revue des Deux Mondes the recollections of a gentleman who was here in '70-'71 and is here again now. He was inclined to be sarcastic about the present Chapon fin. In his day one had good food and did not pay exorbitantly; now "one needs a quasi-official introduction to penetrate, and the stylish servants, guarding the door like impa.s.sable dragons, ask with a discreet air if monsieur has taken care to warn the management of his intention of taking lunch."

We penetrated without apparent difficulty--possibly owing to the exalted position of the two amiable young attaches who entertained me--and the food was very good. There were diplomats of all sorts to be seen, a meridional head waiter, and an interesting restaurant cat. One end of the room is an artificial grotto, and into and out of the canvas rocks this enormous cat kept creeping, thrusting his round face and blazing eyes out of unexpected holes in the manner of the true carnivora, as if he had been trained by the management as an entertainer. The head waiter would have lured an anchorite into temporary abandon. Toward the end of the evening we discussed the probable character of a certain dessert, suggesting some doubt of taking it. You might as well have doubted his honor. "Mais, monsieur!" He waved his arms. "C'est delicieux! ... C'est merveilleux! ... C'est quelque chose"--slowly, with thumb and first finger pressed together--"de r-r-raf-fi-we!"...

It is to this genial provincial city that the President and his ministers have come. They distributed themselves about town in various public and private buildings; the Senate chose one theatre for its future meeting-place and the Chamber of Deputies another. And from these places, sometimes the most incongruous--one hears, for instance, of M. Delca.s.se maintaining his dignity in a bedroom now used as the office for the minister of foreign affairs--the red tape is unwound which eventually sends the life-blood of the remotest province flowing up to its appointed place at the front.

There must be plenty of real work, for an army like that of France, stretching clear across the country from Switzerland to the Channel, could not live unless it had a smoothly running civil machine in the quiet country behind. Neither of the chambers is in session, and except that the main streets are busy--one is told that one hundred thousand extra people are in town--you might almost never know that anything out of the ordinary had occurred. Things must be very different, of course, from '71, when, beaten to her knees and threatened with revolution, France had to decide between surrendering Alsace and Lorraine and going on with the war.

The theatres are closed, but there are moving-picture shows, an occasional concert, and twice a week, under the auspices of one of the newspapers, a conference. I went to one of these, given by a French professor of English literature in the University of Bordeaux, on the timely subject: "Kipling and Greater England."

You can imagine the piquant interest of the scene--the polite matinee audience, the row of erudite Frenchmen sitting behind the speaker, the table, the shaded lamp, and the professor himself, a slender, dark gentleman with a fine, grave face, pointed black beard, and penetrating eyes--suggesting vaguely a prestidigitateur--trying, by sheer intelligence and delicate, critical skill, to bridge the gaps of race and instinctive thought and feeling and make his audience understand Kipling.

Said the reporter of one of the Bordeaux papers next day: "Through the Kipling evoked by M. Cestre we admired the English and those who fight, in the great winds of the North Sea, that combat rude and brave. We admired the faithful indigenes, gathering from all her dominions, to put their muscular arms at the service of the empire..."

It would, indeed, have been difficult to pay a more graceful compliment to the entente cordiale than to try to run the author of "Soldiers Three" and the "Barrack Room Ballads," and with him the nation behind him, into the smooth mould of a conference--that mixture, so curiously French, of clear thinking and graceful expression, of sensitive definition and personal charm, all blended into a whole so intellectually neat and modulated that an audience like this may take it with the same sense of being cheered, yet not inebriated, with which their allies across the Channel take their afternoon tea.

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 amba.s.sador, 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 rea.s.sured 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 s.h.i.+pping-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.