Then just as this suspense almost throttled my breathing, the whole line rested, and there above me—I could see their strong figures, their gray coats, even the gleam of theirpickelhaubes—the babel of conversation broke out in incoherent gurglings of German. Another instant and the order might be given to break ranks, to camp, and my screen might serve, practically enough, to light a fire, or even the hole be selected as a preeminently good substitute for a hearth. Smoked and roasted out then it would be!
No, the line moved again, with the unintermittent trudge of the hundreds of booted feet, now and then the clangor of a sword, now and then the whish of grazing coats, and always acertain observed but indescribable hum of rapidly passing bodies. Then came silence—no more?—could it be possible? In my hole the light had grown dimmer and dimmer, and while it was no prudent criterion of the time of day above me, still I felt sure—for I had counted the seconds elapsing as the battalion swept over me—that the night drew near, and then—deliverance.
At first I scarcely dared to stir, fearing the betrayal of my retreat by the animated bush which I would raise above me. But after a long wait, while the light sensibly failed, I cautiously crowded what I could of it,the bush, beside me, and surmounting it, at length was able to peer out of the hole, and note the opportunities for my escape. It was very dark, the night threatened to be stormy, and the rising wind prevented my distinctly hearing sounds about me, if anyone was in the vicinity. Slowly with the finest sense of carefulness and stealth, I crawled to the lip of the shallow pit, and rose above it, and stood up, achingly relieving my sharply disabled limb.
"Sind gefangen;" the voice was at my side, and a shadow accompanied it. But I was quicker than its groping arms or hands, quicker than the gun or sword, or whatever else it seized for my despatch. I jumped at the black body with my revolver trigger snapped back, andpressed the muzzle upon the now rampant body, that grappled with me, and discharged it. The report was almost inaudible, and the sound of the falling German, as he dropped lifeless into the pit, that had sheltered me, was hardly more than a dull thud. What was about me? was the enemies' circuit here on every side? I hesitated for a moment. There came no sound of rescue. The topography of the country I knew well. Far—about a half a mile—to the right as you looked westward, was a road leading directly to a village that was in the rear of the second line of our defense. That road I would reach if I could. It was the simplest—to me the only—issue of salvation. I turned quickly aside and fell to the ground. My leg pained me, and seemed almost incapable of movement. Lying there I swung my head about to discover what objects surrounded me. In the night-light, almost absent, I could discern nothing, and taking the risk as there was no other alternative I abandoned the idea of walking to the road, over the rough field, and began slowly to crawl in its direction. The sense of direction was infallible with me, and I had not the slightest doubt of my position. Of course the Germans might by this time have swarmed over the whole area, but that they had not yet attacked the second line of our defense seemed certain as I had heard no firing.Both sides awaited the morning. The Germans were there, no doubt, but farther to the east.
I canvassed these conditions while I crawled over the stinging grass-stubble, and at intervals waded through water holes and muddy banks. Now the ground was rising. I had attained the further side of the broad field, and was surmounting a hillslope beyond which ran the little road that would conduct me to safety. Well, I shall not rehearse the mingling feelings of dread and relief, of quick suspense and then exulting certainty, that I experienced, on that dismal trip on my hands and knees all the way to the village. For only at intervals was it possible for me to use my injured leg that increased in helplessness as I went on. I reached the village, and the first man I encountered on its outskirts was the man who had been next to me in the line of battle.
We were dislodged from our position, and the weary retreat towards Paris continued. I still stayed with the army, and I was in one other fight, when my leg had somewhat regained its usefulness. It was then that I was wounded, then that my soul most revolted against the barbarity of War.
We were in a village near the Marne, when the Germans attacked the place. We had thrown up strong barricades at the end of the main street, from which every vestige of life haddeparted except—I recall the whimsical observation—that a black cat still crouched upon the narrow window sill of an upper window of one of the little houses. The Germans with their usual intrepidity and singular tenacity of habit were expected to move down upon us in solid formation, and our guns would receive them—we thought—with the almost certain decision of their repulse. I was next to a gunner whose impatience to start the fearful havoc was unrestrained. He kept muttering between his teeth.
"Sacre Bleu! Pas encore! Pas encore! Les scelerats; Pourquoi ne venaient-ils pas?"
He did not have long to wait. At the head of the street, with shouts and the loud beating of near-by drums, the Boches came on, almost as if maneuvering upon a field of drill-practice. I was compelled to admire their stolid impervious confidence and fearlessness. Down the deserted alley of houses they rushed, and from behind them swung upward with stunning reports exploding shells, intended for our discomfiture. But the range was imperfect, and they fell beyond our position. I trembled with expectation—the advance of the enemy, so determinedly forceful, with the ranks close pressed in dense crowds, promised an awful disillusion. Our captain warned against any premature discharge. He would give the word.On the bristling lines swung, massively compacted, like some human battering ram, and when I could almost see the buttons on their gray coats the order came.
It was awhisper, and the next instant the machine guns spouted, and each soldier braced himself for the charge that might follow the foe's disorder, with fixed bayonet. That was a hideous moment. The bodies of the slain Germans piled high before the oncoming ranks, and from side to side of the street—now become a veritable slaughter-pen—the heaving mass still unrelentingly pressed over their dismembered and fallen comrades. It was the veriest depth of hell. I awaited the next word to charge, and it seemed to me incredible that I could urge myself to do the deed, running the cold steel of the bayonet into quivering flesh. Later like a flash this detachment passed, and the frenzy of the moment blinded me to everything, but the fierce desire to destroy our invaders. I waited. The machine guns unceasingly hissed, and they shook with the uninterrupted intensity of their working. I watched in a delirium of satisfaction their ravages. Arms and hands, even heads, severed as if cut with a knife, flew into the air, and yet the flood of humans, with not-to-be-denied insistency, rose to our barricade, and in another breath would overwhelm us.
Then came the order "Charge" and over thebarricade with set bayonets—I as best I might—our companies leaped and dashed into the baying pack before us, with the shrivelling terror of the cold steel. The Germans did not like the treatment. The machine guns were withdrawn under the protection of this assault, and while we stemmed the tide, for an instant, it was for an instant only. No effective pressure we could then summon, would withstand the leviathan movement of those belted Prussians. The shells too were finding us out, and we yielded. A German officer cut down with his sword the brave gunner who had so intemperately desired their approach. He was severed almost from shoulder to waist. But he was avenged. I rushed upon the miscreant—so he seemed to me—and pierced his neck with the bayonet in my hands. There were no misgivings then, no secondary thoughts, not even the transient survival of my sickening sense of faintness at the sight of blood. I was acquiring the war-hardening that accompanies incessant Murder.
We fell back from the position in fairly good shape, and soon were reinforced by new regiments, and then by artillery, and mortars, and, as the battle widened, with more and more success on our side, we checked the invasion, and soon were overmastering the invaders. At length they fled, and the whole line swept onward, while fresh men strode into the footsteps of their predecessors and Joffre won the Battle of the Marne.
It was then that I was shot in the breast and shoulder, and fell heavily on my head against a roadside pile of stone. I lay directly in the way of the Red-Cross men—those blessed gleaners of the wounded—and so was quickly carried to safety.
CHAPTER VIII
GABRIELLE'S VISITATION
Itwas the day after the battle of the Marne that as I lay in a Red-Cross ambulance, one of an endless line making a slow progress to Paris, past packed masses of soldiery, parks of artillery, ammunition vans, hay wagons, meat carts buried in straw, commissariat busses—many of them English, still pasted with placards of coffee-houses, groceries and smoking tobacco, that a letter was brought to me by the orderly attached to our company of wagons. How well I recall his grimed face and the blood-stains on his white surtout! The letter was marked "urgente" and also "par permission de le chef-major de corps d'hôpital." The young orderly was gay with the pleasure of bringing me a note from home—"Que vous serez heureux; le mot de la femme et les petites!" The innocent salutation stabbed deeper than had the sabre of the Teuton giant. My eyes started, and the pang passed. The cheerful greeting was as some taunting whisper hissed in my ears, but—alas—how well meant!—bien entendu.
I recognized Gabrielle's hand-writing. I held the letter unopened, and my flaccid nervesscarcely measured its meaning. Ah! it seemed to me now almost a light matter what happened. The horrors and depths of pitiless sufferings I had been through had stunned my susceptibilities, and any added blow fell on a sensorium become rigid, or simply pulseless with shock. At length my hand, mechanically almost, opened the letter, and if it was unsteady it was the tremor of weakness only. My blurred eyes read it as they might have uncertainly read a sign on the street. And yet there was intelligence still remaining in them. My heart beat faster, my eyes closed a moment, while a puny pain like a shooting neuralgic ache, somewhere about my heart too, pierced me, and then my lips moved in a whisper—Dieu defende.
But indeed it was with me as with an eye fatigued with flashes, that sees no longer, or sees everything fantastically. I read the letter and laughed. The mild manner of a death—even the death of a father and mother—in their own bed, by its luminous contrast with this manifold Dance of Death in which I had shared, where Death nakedly came out of the air, and shot you, or impaled you, or stifled you, where things worse—Ah! miserable—than death happened, seemed almost benignant. It won an enviable distinction. And, for the meaning of it all, the disclosure of Death seemed itself now an admirable escape. Conception with mehad become so darkened by excitation, that in the black background of consciousness, the loss of a father or of a mother, created no discernible image.
And yet—a few minutes later, as I read again the letter—crushed into a ball in my hand—a natural recreation of sensibility terrified me by its acute punishments. I cried out in a kind of fury, and then I wept. My nerves went to pieces. I was delirious. That raging tempest of madness lasted three days. I was taken to Paris. There in a well appointed hospital in the Faubourg Saint Antoine, I was treated with the most happy kindness, and there my sister came to see me and to nurse me, and by that incommunicable power of sweetness and sympathy—wherein too lurked the kindred genius of our common parentage—she restored me to sanity, and the broken strained mind was healed and fitted—as it were—together again, and the extinguished candle of reason relit. Those were days of infinite bliss. It was something wonderful indeed to be present and observant of one's own regeneration. Yet so it seemed. A consciousness, feeble and complacent, but always delighted, noted the return of another master-consciousness to the control of its despoiled and scattered properties, and in noting it, was willing to fade itself away, or re-enter its mysterious hidden realm of feeling.
And then I grew to so love Gabrielle. It was a sense of recreation, of absolute reference of a second birth to her power. She assumed a spiritual maternity before my eyes, and enrolled like some nucleal miniature of divinity within my soul. She walked before my seeing eyes an Angel of Grace. My bed lay in a separate room, quite apart from the general dormitory, wherein the crowded cots held the anguished sufferers from the battle fields, now forwarding their daily harvest of wounded, in thicker and thicker bunches. It was an unsolicited privilege but one granted through the benevolent insistence of the superintending surgeon. Its window looked out of the back of the hospital over a broken prospect of high chimneys, peaked walls, and balustraded roofs. Points of color flamed here and there, where jardinieres still bloomed on the window-sills, or where a tricolor, in wreaths of bunting, festooned the near and far piazzas. Dull surfaces of drab rose to parapeted balconies, and in a side-long glimpse I could see the tree-lined boulevard of ——. Above the mingled edges and angles an autumn sky laughed and wept, now flushed with delicate primrose, when the sunset closed the day, and now, for days too, drearily gray with inexpressive and moisture dropping clouds. The room was prettily set with some plain furniture—a bureau and a table covered with green baize,a cuvette and a few chairs. The shining floor, in the light, mirrored the furniture, and in it too were reflected the three pictures that decorated the walls. Gabrielle had put these pictures where they were, and they were all religious. One a Madonna, one a Christ, and the third the new Pope. The walls were faintlyrougeatreand from the middle of the ceiling hung an electrolier. That made the place at night gay with light. It seemed to me a little corner of Heaven. Was it not so, after all I had seen and been through? But I felt the sting of self-reproach, when my thoughts traveled back to the desolate comrades on the shell splintered, shrapnel haunted, bullet riddled field, there far away at the front—and not indeed so far away either.
Here Gabrielle nursed me, her pale face and sunken eyes were ominous symptoms of her own failing strength—and here she told me of my parents' deaths. It had a mysterious fore-ordained simplicity, and, as it were, a naturalness. It seemed just a going out, as one would leave a room, or pass through a door, and enter upon the world beyond. Father and mother were stricken with the hand of that hovering paralysis that had followed them for some time, and the achieving blow fell upon them both as they lay in the morning, in their bed, conversing. Even their thoughts had dwelt at thatvery instant upon the inevitable end, and the light flame of life was snuffed out even as their hands crossed, and the smile of a mutual resignation bathed their faces in hope and confidence.
This news brought to me no added misery—no, no, rather a strange placidity of contentment. For in that region of experience wherein I wandered along the borders of the great darkling ocean of Eternity, I felt the intervening space of life, between this existence and the next, to be of a transient and incomputable narrowness. The luxury of a gentle inanition overcame me, and so unevenly did the spark of life at times flutter in its cage, that I was unaware exactly whether I lived, or had begun to float otherwhere on an uncharted sea.
Slowly everything rectified itself, and then Grief came, and realization, and reproach, and memory started its accusative course, and I bewailed the impotence and forgetfulness of my pallid rectitude. My filial uses had not been energetic enough, nor altogether wakeful. That I knew.
Thus between the relapses of my sorrow, and the soothing influence of Gabrielle, I leaned more and more upon my sister, and, by a subjection of will and emotion, caught her frame of mind, her tincture of spiritualized enthusiasm. I now come to the very nucleus and meaning, the very heart and life of this story—the longedfor confession and explanation which two worlds have waited for, the marvellous tale of a young woman's intervention with the unnumbered dead, and their disembodied re-entrance in the world to stay the earth's destroying plague of War. To tell finally how in the agony of her sublime assumption, to bring this to pass, my sister's soul left her body, and withdrew in the wake of that vast ascension of spirits, to the Eternal Sphere of the Immortals.
I had reached successfully the last stage of convalescence. My recovery had been stubbornly contested by the militant eager sprites of disease which somewhere lurked within me. I had only "come round," as the English say, slowly, with veerings and retreats, that kept Gabrielle miserably anxious. When I was at last able to leave my bed and sit up—sitting up in a Morris chair, most capacious and comfortable—Gabrielle came to me one afternoon, when the white radiance of the glorious day might cancel the unearthly shock and the ghostly melancholy of her story, and almost kneeling at my side repeated her incredible and wondrous confession.
"Alfred, I have something very strange to tell you. Something that has been happening for some time, and seems to grow more frequent as this awful war—cette guerre desesperant—goes on.For it has to do with it—with the war. You want to hear it, surely?"
"Yes," I replied, "Gabrielle, I do indeed. Is it some of the visits again from the other world which we agreed should be discontinued?"
"Yes, Alfred, it is," Gabrielle looked up at me with a scrutiny of wistful, almost beseeching ardor, and as I remained silent she continued, "Alfred, the DEAD come back to me! They speak to me. Oh, more than that, they throng my room, and in my ears sounds the endless wailing of their prayers."
"Prayers?" I repeated, aroused now into a sudden repulsion of these renewed surrenders to the old-time madness.
"Yes, Alfred,Prayers. I do not hear them now in Paris, but at St. Choiseul the night long they have assailed my ears with piteous prayers. I have endured it without confiding it to anyone, the dreadful matter, but I have so wanted to tell you."
"But Gabrielle, why do you surrender to this delusion? It will wear you to death. Ah sister, be very careful. We are alone in this great world now, and you are everything to me. These nightmares will turn your reason, unhinge your strength. Put them all to flight as you did before."
"Ah, Alfred it is different now—much different. Really the old visions were soft and gentleand pleasant, and I accepted them as pictures almost of lovely beings, happy and serene and sympathetic. But these are so dreadful. At first I screamed with terror at them or just shrank into myself and shuddered. I did put them to flight, Alfred. I begged Julie to sleep in the room with me, and then they never came. But just to see what it all meant I tried several times to sleep alone and the things came thicker and faster as the war went on. I resisted my fear, but the misery of these wounded and broken spirits—as it was shown to me—was killing me. I once more drove them all away by getting Julie to come to my room. One night Julie awoke me and said there was someone or something in the room. We started up in the bed, and looked about the room, and then that light you once saw came again, but no figure, just a wonderful shimmering of threads of mellow light, traced through the air of the room, and flowing out of the open window like skeins of smoke caught in a draught. Julie clutched me and cried, and her voice broke the spell—if spell it was—the light vanished and nothing more happened that night."
"How long has this been going on?" I asked in suspense, in half incredulity.
"It began after the first days of the war. But at first the voices were indistinct, and the visions vague and shadowy. I did not mindthat. I thought it would wear off, and the spirits go away. They did for a while, but after the battle of Mons suddenly at night I saw an awful picture, not the battle field, but the ascending shades drifting upward from it like innumerable specks of vapor. Ah Alfred, how shall I describe it? I seemed to be carried there. It was a dream, and yet it was full of reality to me, and the ground, the wrecked villages, the streets strewn with the dead and dying, were all half hidden; sometimes in the dream altogether erased, by the multitudes of the shades going on, and on, and on, up and up, and up, in smoky masses, with faces and limbs spectral and ghostly, like some vast current of fog shaped into human forms."
"Well," I groaned, "what next?"
"I awoke, and there was nothing—nothing—but an hour later the voices were resumed and they murmured and murmured, and words now and then were understood, like 'Have Mercy'—'Oh God my wife'—'My home,' and then furious words like blasphemies. Ah Alfred, it was terrible," and the woman hid her face in my lap and shook convulsively.
"Gabrielle, my sister, how have you gone through with all this misery? Our father and mother dead, and these horrible visitations! I must get well quickly and together we willgo to St. Choiseul, and then I can see for myself if such things can be."
"Can be, Alfred? You do not doubt me, do you? I am indeed telling you the very truth, and you will wound me to the heart if you think that I have been deluded, or am deceiving you."
Her loving, tender eyes were filled with the tears of remonstrance. I seized her arms, and brought her to my breast, and embraced and kissed her, whispering with all the devotion of my soul, "No Gabrielle, I know that these things have, in their way, happened, and that your tired senses and strained nerves may have actually created them, worn out as we all are with this grievous trial. And thePrayers, darling. What were they when they were intelligible? Could you make them out—tell me."
"At first I could only recognize them as supplications by the imploring voices, and then later they often became distinguishable as short cries for help and mercy, and deliverance, and then short staccato calls, as if from madness, insanity, brutality, unrighteousness. Lately and here in Paris I have not heard them, and I control myself better—" the last words were spoken by my sister hesitatingly, or at least slowly, as if she felt unwilling to utter them. I noticed the indecision at once.
"What is it, Gabrielle—your control? Have you yielded to the old temptation—the feeling that you wished to summon the DEAD?"
"Alfred," the voice was very low, and Gabrielle cast her eyes down, as if depressed by some unwonted shame of contrition; "Alfred, although I say that I exert no power to open the communications with the spirit world, yet I believe that in some unconscious way I actually summon these to me. Watching myself in the voluntary movements of my mind, I detect at times that without my volition, my mind assumes the mediumistic poise, as the books say. I am ashamed of it, and I think it is wicked. That makes me dread these visions for, perhaps, they are simply satanic. Oh what shall I do?"
Poor girl, worn out with service, beaten to the earth with sorrow, and now devitalized, unwillingly surrendering herself to the—to me—abhorrent power she seemed endowed with, to materialize the dead, and converse with the other side of the veil of life! The refuge of my partnership with her of these secrets was an immense relief. I gathered together my strength, and forced the laugh to my lips, and the merry words to my lips also, for her sake. Thus, with a deepening mutual absorption in each other, brother and sister grew inseparable in feeling and in thought and in affections.
It was almost three weeks later that I waspermitted to leave the hospital, and return with my sister to St. Choiseul. It was a return strangely mingling the accents of sorrow, with the notes of a sudden joy. The autumn lights were beautiful, and the darkening vineyards, and the striped hop poles, the yet radiant gladiolus and the glancing lustres of the streams, the long peaceful perspectives, unsullied by war, the romantic cluster of the ivy coated ruins of the chateau towards Briois, the winding road, the straight sentinel line of poplars, and the unchanged village—empty and silent perhaps—crowning the slow ascent, bathed in the soft atmosphere of dewy sweetness—Mon Dieu, it almost made me swoon away with ecstacy!
And here at our doorway, was the little circle, Père Antoine, Père Grandin, theCapitaine, and Privat Deschat, Hortense, and Julie, and the pale faded loveliness of the orphan girl, Dora, but no father or mother was there. The tears rose to my eyes; it was impossible to check their almost unnoticed flow.
I fell into their arms. I kissed them all. I was half swooning with the pain of my affection.
"My son, how good it is to see you again, the vampire has not swallowed you up—Dieu soit benit;" that was Père Antoine.
"Ah Alfred, you see the plague has not touched us yet—the desecrating fiends were near. Yes, they were seen east of Briois—foraging, And you? Well? You look grave. Ah! it is not a time for smiles;" that was Père Grandin.
"Alfred, where are the Boches now? Where?Ma foiit is not this time as it was in '70. You shall tell us all. It isun histoire magnifique. The flag is supreme;" that was theCapitaine.
"MaîtreAlfred, you must not leave us again.Souvenez vous—I will make thegalette aux amandes chaque jour? Eh? You will not go away again?" that was Hortense.
They all laughed a little. But Hortense wiped her eyes with her broad apron.
"Ah Gabrielle, we have been unhappy without you—all of us. Never,never, shall you go away again—OR—you take me with you, and theCapitaine;" that was Dora, and her pallid face, with the serious eyes, haunted now always with sorrow, the expressive index of her life's tragedy, flushed ever so slightly, and her arms were flung about my sister's neck, and she was caught again by Gabrielle, in her own blessed arms of reassurance and protection.
"Well Alfred, we are all traveling the same road together now. Death walks at everyone's side. But they who have died on the battlefield, they have sown in their own ashes the seeds of Redemption." And the speaker's voice rose, so that we felt startled at its suddenness."They will yet fight as avenging spirits. They are about us now. When Heaven is too full of them they will descend, and destroy the enemy.La Patrieis Eternal;"thatwas Privat Deschat.
This last apostrophe awkwardly dampened the moment's happiness, and we went into the house slowly and silently, as if to the summons of an obsequy. When Deschat mentioned the descending spirits I saw Gabrielle quail and draw Dora to her side in a trembling spasm of alarm.
Slowly we entered the house. I shuddered in a momentary realization that its master and mistress were no longer sanctioning its hospitality. But how peaceful and comforting it all was! I felt embraced by the manifold tendernesses of form and picture and color and furnishment. Around the table of the dining room that evening in the cheerful splendor of the old oil lamp, with the shadows, grotesquely friendly, moving over the walls, we sat together, while Hortense and Julie outdid themselves in overloading the table withles pièces precieuses de la cuisine. I hardly dared to taste these delicacies. It seemed a profanation. Those suffering patient men at the front, so often almost starving! It was an impiety against patriotism to feast so lavishly.
I touched almost nothing, buried in sombrememories. The regalement was darkened by my abrupt disillusionment, and I could not easily rehearse my experience. I begged them to excuse me—another time I would go through it all, but just then—Ah surely they understood. There were so many reasons for hesitation, for suspense, for silence. They were most sympathetic, and I, who was to have been theraconteur, sat now almost moodily amongst them, and listened to the news of the neighborhood, as one and the other kept up the trivial narration.
How the Uhlans had been seen by little Mimette Collot prancing along a highway toward Cabrelet, how the thunders from the constant attrition eastward, between the armies, had kept them all awake at night; how the English soldiers had visited them and they had turned their pantries inside out to welcome and refresh them; how ataubehad wheeled and droned above them, like some colossal bumble bee, and how it dropped one bomb in a pasturage, and had killed a young mother cow and her calf; how good Mother Webbe—she at the crossroads where you go east toward Landrecies and Mons—had given a young English soldier on a motorcycle a full glass ofvin de prunes, and he had fallen from his cycle along the roadside "dead-drunk"—un ivrogne jusque mort—; the dear soul had thought it was onlyvin ordinaire;how the men had deserted the country-side to enlist, and the old men and the women, the boys and girls, had taken their places; how the Diligence had a woman driver now, and how she dressed in man's clothes, and how bitter she was with the horses, just to seem more mannish—comme un homme.
They told how the troops had filled the roads moving eastward, and with them the long files of ambulances, of ammunition vans, of cannon carriages; how when the news came of our victory the church bells were rung, bonfires were made in the streets, and processions of boys and girls went up and down the roads singing the Marseillaise.
But somehow the spirit of our reunion dragged and drooped, and I suppose it was all my fault. The oppression of despair had seized me. I could not escape a sense of doom, not exactly my own, or the country's, but some vague awfulness of desolation, approaching with black pestilence—breathing power, to desecrate and ravage the earth. It kept me dumb. And all of this uneasy and ungracious apathy or morose grief, had developed since I entered the house—where at first the happiness of refuge seemed so inexpressible.
When I bade them "Good night," I said some stumbling words about my disappointment with myself, and promised to make amends. Ineeded rest. My body and soul, my mind were ill at ease. And so they left me, that clear star-lit night as the rising wind, threatening frosts or snow, rocketed upward with gusty roars from the house-tops, and rushed away with a wail that almost sounded to me as the incorporeal echo of those ravenous moans and cries, those palpitating shrieks, that I had heard sweep across the battlefield, and that, as the hours waned died away in death.
I recovered my strength but slowly, and there were recurrent lapses into periods of frightful depression, nervousness, and I fear irritability, that tried the devoted soul of Gabrielle, who remained unchanged in her devotion, and unceasing in her soothing ministrations. We often talked about the strange apparitions, and the voices, and the weaving and winnowed lights, but there was no return to Gabrielle of these visitations. She had gained in strength, her old time loveliness of face bloomed again, and, delighted with my companionship, she withheld—if indeed they assaulted her at all, or essayed to—the disembodied souls. Gabrielle was utterly transparent and confessed everything. I know that for at least seven months, there literally was no return of the manifestations. Because they seemed to have vanished entirely we permitted ourselves to talk them over freely,and it amused me. The terrifying thought though often arose, in the minds of both of us, that the discharged multitudes of spirits, shot almost into eternity, clung to the earth. Their gathering increasing shades haunted the loved earth, and their affections, somehow still retained for the living, nursed in them a rising anger at the continuance of the slaughters.
For the war went on; west and east the perpetual deluge of shells and shrapnel and bullets, the surges of poisonous gases, the savagery of assassination, and the cruelty of the bayonet, were emptying homes, thinning the ranks, and draining the country of its best, its strongest, men. And now came the trench lines; the insinuating deep gutters in the earth, worming themselves this way and that, here in unutterable perplexity of entrance and exit, there more simple, running on with occasional dug-outs and bomb-proof dungeons, cellar-like dismal caverns of darkness, humidity, and sickness. Stuck in them at various intervals were the platoons of shooting men, the hunters after other men's lives, quick, almost instinctive in their scent of opportunity, almost wolfish in their ample placidity of intention to take those other men's lives, if they could reach them. The long lines of subterranean fortification, stretching, with irregular intervals of defenselessness, like broad gaps in a strong fence, sweptover fields, and up hills, and over rivers, and through villages, junketed ever and anon with ruins, shattered homes, or burrowing like the entrails of a corrupting cancer under churches, and massing hither and thither, in coils of black and muddy gashes, like the redoubled and tangled intestines of an animal.
Here went on the daily work of murder, helped by the batteries, and at propitious moments intensified into the uttermost diabolism by the whine, scream, and tear of shells, the detonations of shrapnel, and the thudding din of cannon, the whipping, ping-pong hiss of bullets. And following that splenetic outburst the sudden bolt forward of regiments of men might follow; headlong charges, frenzied rushes, dashes through a hail of shot, men tumbling this way and that, wounded, dying, dead, and then the ferocity of bodily collision with stabs from bayonets, and slashes from swords and all in a tense silence, save for the oppressed suspiration, the swish of brushing bodies pinned to each other, a momentary cry of pain, smothered objurgations.
Over the wavering line of lethal burrows, high in the air, swung or raced the bird-like combatants of the French and the Germans, their shadows sometimes thrown upon a cloud, sometimes drifting over the ground in a grotesque patch—a mere spot perhaps—of gray. Thusthe mortal combat sullied the pure air with its disorder. Up to those armed fliers rose the stark stenches of the earth—the smell of unburied corpses—and their eagle eyes looked down upon long stretches of torn mud flats, ploughed by missiles, dreary plains of desolation, beaten into a black and brown hideousness of confused holes and gaping rents, gouged out hillsides, heaped mounds of fantastic earth, stippled everywhere with the half hidden bodies of the dead.
From Ostend to Arras, from Arras to Maubeuge, from Maubeuge to Vouzier, the indented, buried, smoking furrows of human explosives stretched its weary length, concealing armies; hiding, in its ambuscades and pits and mines, volcanoes of ammunition, a vast aneurism draining two nations of their life and substance. What was a half stifled combat here in the east in Galicia and in Poland was a fiercer conflict, and from there as from here—in the west—each hour sent to some home the stab of bereavement.
I could not return to my work. Recurrent chills and nervous breakdowns, constantly augmented by the horrible agony of this insufferable crime, kept my mind weakened, my body helpless.
It was a little more than seven months after the repulse of the invaders at the Battle of theMarne, that the strange symptoms of the spirit visitation that had troubled Gabrielle returned with appalling violence. The spring about St. Choiseul had filled the hills and the valleys with a wonderful beauty, more entrancing because the season had prevailed with rain, and this had imbued the skies with a fascinating vaporousness, which, suffused with sunlight, made the picture about us in the lowlands so lovely in its grace and clinging softness of light and shades. This sweet peacefulness made the horrid nightmare of the war, only a few miles away, more unbearable and hateful. How often that spring Gabrielle and I sat out on the porch late into the night, amid the renewed fragrance of the flowers, the rising chorus of the insect and tree life, murmuring in field and stream and wood and along the grassy edges of the highway, talking over the miseries of our dear land! Gabrielle had worn herself to skin and bone—as the English say—with her work in the hospital at Paris, and now together, both melancholy and disabled, we lingered long in thoughtful communion on what the meaning and upshot of this unwearied struggle might be.
Perhaps it was about the middle of April, 1915, that late at night—it might have been after midnight—as I read in my room some late reports and personal letters from the front, my door—the one leading from my room intoGabrielle's, opened, and my sister appeared at the entrance, in her night dress. In her face was a wild, startled look, as of one who had been surprised in her sleep by some awful dream, and yet trembled under the malign shock.
"Gabrielle," I cried, myself moved to the outcry by her famished, stricken, hunted look, "What is it? Are you ill?"
She did not answer at once, but stole towards me with a wavering stealthiness, as of one escaping from a pursuer. When she was at my side—I had leaped to my feet in consternation and alarm—she flung her arms around my neck, and in a choking whisper, that half audible mixture of breathing and utterance which betokens physical and nervous exhaustion, said:
"Alfred, the spirits are here again, and they crowd my room; they are filling this room now. Don't you feel them? Have you seen, felt, heard nothing? They are the ghosts of the slain—I know it, for they tell me so, and their faces are so imploring—They ask me to stop the war. They tell me—" her voice grew stronger, and in the rush of her emotion and excitement the words followed faster and faster, but still her voice was a whisper only—"They tell me I can help. And O! Alfred their cry for Mercy is piteous. They feel the pain of those who have lost them—whom they have lost too. A voice came to my ears, clear and calm:'Help us! Help us! Our sadness is yours. We wished to live. Death for us is wrong—too soon—too soon—too soon;' and then it died away, like a fading bell-note, far, far away. And Alfred the voice sounded to me like Sebastien's. O! Alfred there are others too—and some—" she shuddered in my arms, and clasped me convulsively, as if the pain of the recollection were too great to bear.
"Gabrielle," I answered, now aroused and almost terrified, "stay here. Are you quite well? The morning must soon break. Rest on my bed. We will watch it out. And—and—perhaps Gabrielle it will be best for us to leave this strange, bewitched place." My voice was loud. Its very loudness seemed to reassure her.
She released my arms, and controlling herself sank into the armchair I had risen from. She pressed her hands to her brows and her eyes closed. A moment later she opened them, looked steadfastly at me, then turned, without rising, and looked about the room in a dazed scrutiny, as if searching for something. Her wandering eyes returned to my face. I bent suddenly in surprise towards her. She was smiling. The staggering fancy crossed my mind that Gabrielle might have lost her reason. Anguish and despair and sympathy had spread madness and dementia throughout France already, that I knew.
"Alfred they have gone; how wonderful! Your loud words cleared the room of the crowding host. Alfred itwasa host. I felt their presence before I woke. But they come like air; they vanish as darkness vanishes at the touch of day."
"Gabrielle, no more of it now. No. Rest. Sleep. I will sit up and read. I have letters to write to men at the front, in the trenches whom I know, who know me, who expect to hear from me. I have packed a wagon-load of things for these brave boys, and it goes to the front tomorrow. I wish I could go with it. But—"
"No Alfred—O! No!—not now! Do not leave me. Some strange powers are working, and in the voices I have heard I feel the approach of a vast spiritual finale."
"Why, Gabrielle, what do you mean? Stay. No more of it tonight. My brusqueness has chased them away. If a little noise scares these mockers, I can always furnish that."
I laughed and chided my sister for her seriousness. But Gabrielle rebuked me. I rebuked myself. A strange oppressive and yet merciful theory was shaping itself in my mind. I apprehended that a mysterious supernatural power might be summoned to end the war. And—Yes, so I thought—Gabrielle might be its protagonist and avatar.
I helped my sister to my bed, and when sheagain had regained her cheerfulness, and welcome sleep—that chrism of the Almighty to vexed hearts and minds—closed her eyes, I resumed my work. The silence was the very enclosure of the grave. But then it was like the grave in nothing else. The spring air, dewy, warm, perfumed, entered the room, and once or twice when I looked out of the window the shimmering stars shone in a velvet night over a world buried in slumber. All of the gentle twitterings and murmurs of the night seemed stilled. I think I fell asleep myself, for I awoke with a strange, a most benumbing sense of confinement, of restraint that I could not define, but perhaps was most easily compared to an immersion in some high pressure atmosphere. I felt suffocated. I sprang to my feet. The lamp was flickering as if about to go out, but its light fell on my watch, which recorded the hour as 2:30 past midnight. Someone stood at my side. I felt the presence, as we instinctively do—a cognition like a telepathy. It was Gabrielle again. Her face was pale and her eyes gazed, as if in a spell, upon the space above my head; her hands gropingly rested now on my arm. I waited for her to speak, and almost immediately the flickering flame of the lamp expired. We were in darkness.
But we were notalone. Some kinesthetic sense made me aware of beings, entities, existencies, about me. I yielded to the impression that a peculiar nervous excitation, a thrilled expectancy, as though the next instant some miracle of strangeness would befall me, was due to this influence of an invisible flood of spirits, or souls, or what you will, that had invaded the room. It was Gabrielle's voice that spoke in my ears, it was her arms again that encircled my neck.
"Alfred, again! They are all about us; and Alfred," the voice sank to a whisper, "the spirit of Sebastien Quintado is here too."
I could not restrain the impetuous cry that broke from my lips. Perhaps, were it rightly interpreted, it was fear, the sudden effort to restore some balance of sanity in the madness of a nightmare, that forced this outburst. I only knew that I almost shouted:
"Gabrielle, Gabrielle! You have gone mad." I sprang to the lamp and relit it. The pale lights of morning were streaking the sky, and the vocal welcome of Nature was breaking out from myriad throats in the wide jubilation of the spring's resurrection.
Gabrielle was on her knees before me with her face bowed within her embracing hands. I raised her up, and we walked together to the window in silence. Upon us both fell the overwhelming consciousness that our home had become arendez-vous for the spirits of the slain.It was haunted. But to what end?
CHAPTER IX
GOD'S HAND
NeitherGabrielle nor I spoke of these marvellous matters to anyone. It was of course connected with my sister's peculiar power of mediumistic control. The appearances were oddly varied, and we began to associate the return of the spirits with certain atmospheric conditions. Then there was a notable increase—if it could be so called—of these mysterious visitants after heavy engagements, when we might assume that the hosts of the disembodied had been greatly augmented. For weeks the conditions of the house were normal, and there would be no manifestations—manifestations which I myself began to appreciate and detect. The times most favorable for the discarnate effects were the still nights, and more generally after cold days than after hot ones. Dark nights were not necessarily preferred, as on a wonderfully splendid moonlight night, my sister saw the myriad shapes and lines of these, shall I call them GHOSTS? I remember feeling myself the thrill of some electric-like sensation penetrating my nerves, and half caught before my eyes the scintillations of tiny specks of light.
At first we were both not a little frightened. The tremendous impact of this mass of disembodied creatures broke down our mental equilibrium. We felt suddenly half immersed in the other world, and felt too the oncomingdenouementwhich, apprehended but unforeseen, awaited this spectral deluge. How often we sat at nights, deep into the night, at the front door under the leaf-embowered porch, fearful of entrance into the house, which had become a sort ofadytum, which we might not penetrate, evicted as we were, by the unbidden tenants, that swarmed from grave, and trench, and field, hilltop and valley, from the crevices of walls, and the streets of villages, the cellars of churches, and the torn up holes of tree-roots. We might indeed have instituted—as at times I suggested—a sort of analysis of the psychical constants of these disembodied beings whose actuality neither of us doubted for an instant. We might have noted the exact moments of their larger recurrence, the intervals of their absence, the occasions when they became vocal, the peculiarities of their incidence upon ourselves in our physical sensations, or mental susceptibilities, or emotional response, if such observations were possible—that is if we could discover that the presence of these souls (?) affected us in those three elements of our existence at all.
Nothing of a systematic record was kept, butcertain very sharp and certain hopelessly hazy impressions are quite, by me, easily recalled. The sharp impressions were in the nature of shocks allied with what might be less flatteringly calledfrights, and the hazy ones were indubitably aural influences such as have been determined as electrical, or epileptic, or hysteric. Naturally the latter possess the greater interest and have more to do with the extra-natural mystical agencies of spirits. Perhaps it would not be amiss to describe these—not too tediously—before I rehearse the last convincing stages of the spiritualistic manifestations as they ushered in the final descent of the "Other World" for the shame of human strife, and the obliterating arrest of this infernal, this demoralizing, this vast national embroilment of bitterness and hatred, that has unloosed the satanic energies of HELL to the confusion ofFaithandHopeandCharity.
An experience of the first sort, followed immediately by the aural influence, took place about the beginning of June in 1916. It was a beautiful day, the light gloriously brilliant, and the summer fragrance of St. Choiseul filling our little world with its inexhaustible presence of roses, when, as I stood at my open window, leaning outward to regale my senses with the precious offerings of the earth and sky, I felt a wind, perhaps without any precise quality ofheat or coolness, blow over me, although not a breath of the moving atmosphere outside stirred leaf or blade or flower, and then supervened a loss of consciousness, a relaxation of my body in sleep, and I, overcome with this unnatural drowsiness against which I forlornly struggled, sank into a chair, and did not recover consciousness before the evening. Now on that day was fought the battle of the —— which killed 5000 men here in the west, while almost simultaneously the conflict in Poland added another 5000 to the number of the slain. There could be no doubt that my unconsciousness partook of the immediate character of syncope, or, to be even more scientific, that it was lethal, and might have terminated my life. That is my firm conviction. From a later experience I have become convinced that the ingestion so to speak into the air of the disembodied, actually devitalizes the atmosphere, and produces in those subjected to their multitudinous contact, asphyxiation. I awoke from my sleep wearied and apathetic.
The second occasion happened at night, and was not attributable to any sudden influx of the dead from contemporaneous battles. I have no theory to explain it. I was asleep in my bed. It was in the following August. I awoke with a start, almost as if I had been struck, and realized the most curious tingling inside myhead, as if a thousand or more needles were therein busily engaged in employing their myriad points upon my sensitive tissues. It was an excruciating agony, not exactly acutely painful, but maddeningly intolerable and nerve racking and confusing. It was unendurable. Instinctively I clapped the bedclothes to my head and instantly there was complete relief. Exposing my head again to this outside atmospheric bombardment the agony recurred. I maintained my self-possession and actually tried the experiment over and over again of alternately putting my head outside of the bedclothes and then covering it with them. The effects were constant, and the inference unimpeachable that the air contained some agencies that exasperated my brain and pierced its envelope of skull, while the interposition of the loose textures of the bed-coverings stopped it. I can add authoritatively, that, as might have been expected, the thicker the covering of my head the more complete the relief, while upon no other part of my exposed body was any effect noticeable. The irritatable surfaces were confined to my head only. Not the spinal column nor the ganglionic centres along the thigh responded to this inexplicable force. There was no cessation of this attack throughout the night, but it slowly quieted down and disappeared as the day broke. The aural effects upon me weredual in character. They were physiological to the extent of producing a severe intermittent headache, and they were psychic or mental inasmuch as they provoked an irrepressible activity of thought, and, quite humiliatingly, with it, an extreme emotional irritability. So cross did I become that I left the house, and exhausted myself walking about the country to rid myself of this abominable disagreeableness.
Another experience distinctly connected with the frightful cost of the assaults upon the German trenches in September, 1915, took place in that month, a few days after the engagements—the suggestion might be hazarded that it requires some time for the "ghosts" to assemble themselves and repair to any agreed uponrendez-vous—when entering the house at evening, both my sister and myself became stifled with the strange suffocating effect of the air. It was irrespirable. I muttered "Again the spirits." The conclusion was ludicrous enough. We fell to our knees and crawled out of the room. In fact the circumstances resembled exactly the entrance of irrespirable gases into a room of pure air, and the consequent escape of the victims by creeping along the floor.
I must now state that these material effects were much more noticeable with me than with my sister. My sister, as the foregoing pages have reiterated was familiar with the spiritualworld, and her powers of mediumistic control had been successfully evoked. She had indeed been visited apparently by numbers of the dead, and no unpleasant bodily sensations had been felt. The voicesalonehad become to her unendurable, but for many months now these voices had been stilled, as it were; in fact ever since that moment when she saw the wraith of Sebastien Quintado above us in my room their intelligible articulations had not been heard—hearing meaning a kind ofinaudible utterancewithin the veil of the mind or soul. I do not think that I ever attained the sensitivity necessary to distinguish the voices, though, whether it was imagination or reality, my ears have possibly at moments rung with an indescribable confused murmur. And never, until the lastmaterialization, did I discern faces. I except the special incarnation of Blanchette. These incidents, I have recalled, have only the slenderest value to establish any facts associated with the nature and functions of the disembodied, and they need not be further extended. Let me at once come to the ultimate act of this inexpressible drama.
My readers all know how, upon the approach of the spring of 1917, the Allies and their Teutonic adversaries prepared for the last desperate struggle, how it had become almost mutually understood that the fierce death-grapple should be undertaken outside of the trenches, and that the arbitrament of war, under skies darkened by all the most hideous emissions of shell, canister, powder, and infernal machines of poison, should be attempted in a colossal conflict, that strains the mind to conceive, and that might have approached in its horribleness of means and results, the very uttermost image of theEnd of All Things. The huge forces on both sides were assembled within the ten thousand miles of trenches, that had converted the northeastern edges of our country into a subterranean battlefield. From these trenches, almost so arranged by some supervising destiny, they were to arise, like implacable fiends or bloodless furies, and plunge their regiments, their brigades, their squadrons, their divisions, their armies against each other, in an unutterable tremendousness of slaughter, that might have rent the vault of Heaven, if any feeling, any sympathy, any recognition, any compassion, any power resided there! All of the resources were accumulated, and the last promised carnage proclaimed the extinction of civilized man in Europe.
Well that was the situation. On the eastern front the war had subsided. Russia was practically fought to a standstill, and though, with the customary Muscovite happiness of pretension, the Bear addressed his allies with pompousdeclarations, no one seriously thought of him. The Balkan turmoil had also simmered down to expectation simply. The invasion of Egypt and the upheaval of the Indian mutineers had not so very considerably materialized. Indeed everything now hung and was made to hang, upon this final, incalculable, terrible decision. Would either side survive its furious exterminating madness? Rumania was destroyed.
See what it meant. Two gigantic armies confronted each other over a line of two hundred and fifty miles, and the last resources of all the armaments of the magnified and reinforced invention of the great nations of Europe had been marshalled together to bring to some lasting decision the desecrating ravages of this racial duel. From the plain of Antwerp and the winding valleys of the Meuse, to the hilltops of the Marne, from Chalons to the slopes of the Vosges, the steel-bristling squadrons, carrying in their flanks volcanic fires, watched each other nervously, and yet, with a stolidity, born of custom and the grim confidence of an irreparable doom; with a detachment also from earthly ties, that made them seem like, almost like, discarnate beings. But to these men, brought there from the ends of Europe, to meet DEATH, as they might meet the morning or the evening of the common day, each country, throughout its fields and shires, its wards andtowns, its bourgesses and departments and communes, its duchies, and electorates, would soon become an empty cenotaph.
Ah, but that was not all. There was a miracle in it. Yes, a miracle. God had moved the minds of the leaders towards this vastdenouement. The huge military programme, replete with bristling glories of arms and men, the caparisoned squadrons of cavalry, the wide-mouthed, serried cannon, the lumpy groups of the squandering "Busy Berthas," and "Jack Johnsons," that wasted the ransom of kings in a few hours, the crowding millions of men covering square miles of desolated countrysides, the pitched tents, where the electric service, installed with thousands of wires, kept the tendrilous nets of communication quivering with orders, despatches, and rumors, the littered commissariats, filling screened refuges with barrels, wagons, soup-kitchens, and interminable bales of food, the long ranges of the hospital equipments, the stretchers, the Red-Cross orderlies, the waiting doctors in barracks and in tents, the auto-ambulances, the piled ramparts of bandages, and near at hand in loosely framed operating chambers the sweet sickly odors of ether and iodiform, and then back of all, along interminable alleys, the loaded ammunition vans, carrying the shells and canisters, the cartridges and gas engines and back again of these thegrouped multitudes of spectators—all of this vast spectacle, repeated on the opposite line of the enemy—vis-a-vis—was thus concentrated, by a common impulse in both camps, for the irrevocable decision,because GOD willed it.
In such a grandiose style should the last act of HIS interposition be culminated, and the races of the earth should learn from the cavernous receptacles of spirit, from the shrined multitudes of the DEAD, enwrapped in the boundless fields of sky and star and cloud, issuing perchance from the wide-swung gates of Paradise, or Heaven, or of Hell itself—of the overwhelming pressure of the OTHER WORLD, learn thus too of the maintenance of sympathy between the affairs this side, and the affairs that side, of the narrow gap of DEATH! So it was.
But wonderful things had happened in the summer of 1916 and in its early autumn. There had been awful carnage at Verdun where the Teuton attempted to drive through to Paris and where the Gallic defiance rang out,Ils ne passeron pas. To and fro had the lines wavered, each interval strewn with innumerable corpses; the curtains of fire had swept to and fro and in their murderous folds life had expired as the flames destroy the swarming moths at harvest. Super-human deeds of valor had amazed the world that watched the strugglewith terror-stricken eyes, and at last the Germans were pushed backward and the valleys of the Meuse, its hills and fields, its villages lay scorched, blackened, upheaved, overthrown, scarred from end to end, with most damnable desolation.
And northward the English had, along the Somme, struck at the Teuton with savage fury. The skies had been eclipsed with thunderous avalanches of fire, and for days the satanic deluge of shot and shell had stricken the German into helpless panic. Beyond Albert, with headlong rushes animated by God only knows what courage, the Briton had reached Thiepval Ginchy, Guillemont Clery and then shot forward with staggering, awful vehemence towards Bapaume and Peronne, and the defenses of the enemy, assailed on all sides, were melting away, and the invasion promised the greatest results. Except on the east the German forces seemed exhausted and the debacle had begun. The Allies were ready for the supreme effort.
Yes—there had been talk of PEACE—and, for one short moment, the world reeled almost in its dazed wonder-stricken joy. But the war-clouds closed again, and the steel-toothed, fire-shrouded fight stormed out again.
And then there had been another change. Their long line of armament had again been pushed further west by the Germans, who hadforced our lines back, and again threatened the safety of Paris, had indeed so far trespassed over France, that their trenches and up-flung fortifications, their mounded parapets and encircling redoubts, broke in the line from Maubeuge, Rocroi, Dinant, Mézières, and Montmedy, eastward to Laon, again to Soissons, Compiègne, to Rheims, and now indeed, from the high ruined tower of the Chateau at La Ferté the trench line of the Teutons could be distinctly seen. The matter is important forthereGabrielle summoned—summoned I say—the disembodied to the great intervention.Ne riez pas; c'est vrai, le dernier mot de verité intime. Attendez! Vous savez bien la grande chose qui finit la guerre!
All of this happened in the winter of 1917. And about the first of April of that spring—let me see—that was on a Sunday morning, Gabrielle came into my room—before our breakfast—and sat down at the window, that one looking west. She had been to early mass, her face was drawn and inspired, her eyes were large and frightened, and she was trembling with excitement.
I had been reading and scarcely noticed her entrance. The instant my eyes met hers I started with alarm.
"Gabrielle qu'avez vous?What is it? The GHOSTS?"
She rose softly and came towards me. Then she knelt at my side, and looking rather down at her moving fingers than at me, told me this wonderful thing: One word—the spirits had not visited us for months, and we had, partly at least, forgotten them, in the busy work of the relief, and the frequent visits hither and thither, on errands of the Red-Cross mission. Gabrielle spoke rapidly in parts of her narrative, and then she hesitated, and seemed absent-minded, worn, and bewildered, but as she went on her words flowed abundantly and fastly,—so you remember it was before—and as she ended she had risen, and her expression assumed a peculiar vividness of—of—Ah how shall I say?—of seraphic beauty!
Yes, yes, it was just so.Vraiment!
"Alfred last night about two o'clock towards morning, I seemed to be awake, and Isaw—Alfred I was not awake, it was a vision in my dreams—the figure of Sebastien Quintado like a blade of light standing at my bed-side, his eyes fixed into mine so that I was spell-bound—" Gabrielle here stopped, and her face blushed, I thought, with a kind of modest shame I could not comprehend—"Finally he spoke, and his voice sounded like an echo; I seemed just to hear it. Sometimes it grew louder, and then it faded and died away and I thought I leanedtowards him to catch his words—so it seemed Alfred. He said this:
"'Gabrielle! Gabrielle! the spirits need you. The great war ends. The millions who have died, who now, as I do, repine in spirit-land, have gathered together, thousands upon thousands, upon thousands, and GOD sends them to stop the slaughter. God has dispensed council—the council of willfulness—to the nations and their generals, and in a little while they will assemble the vast armies on the west, and try out the conflictin one great battle. So it will be determined; So God wills it.
"'And then GabrielleWE—the millions of the dead, those torn away from wives and children, from youth and love and joy, from friends and country, from all of the ambitions which animate our kind on earth; we will flock like clouds, when the north wind blows over St. Choiseul, and descend, visible, luminous, vocal, from the glowing skies, and from us, Gabrielle, will proceed a terrible Paralysis—Ay more—an undeniable dread and weakness.
"'It will, like a contagion, spread throughout the armies from rank to rank, from private to general, and back again; it will freeze the blood, it will dwindle the heart, it will thrill the brain. Before it bravery becomes a shrinking, ambition a regret, the thought of conflict a remorse. It will do more. It will slowly become a strange, unendurable, gnawing, piercing, scorching, internal pain, a pain so bitter and keen, that flesh will refuse its infliction, and so there will enter in that innumerable host just one thought—FLIGHT!
"'It will not be, though, the FLIGHT of cowards, but of Conscience-stricken men. And then a greater thing will come. There will beno Flight; the pain will manacle their feet, will stifle their voices, will wither their wills—one monstrous Stupor will overcome them, and for three days and a night, like the men overcome with sleep that watched the Apostle St. Peter in the prison, the armies of the Nations will sleep—Ay—and sleep in PAIN!
"'We shall abide above them. Our millions, by night and day, will perpetually afflict them. By day we will be unseen, by night we shall be seen. And from every particle of our incorporeal beings will flow the influence of our terror and our punishment. There will be no mitigation. GOD so wills it!
"'And when the three days are finished, then those men will awake—General and Prince and King and Private and Officer—and their strength will be as nothing, their vigor as a reed shaken by the wind, their wills as shaking vials of water, their threats like sheets whipped by the wind. So shall it be. Like men dazed in a flame, or smoke, or men caught half dead fromthe waters, will it be to them. It will be to them as the prophet Isaiah said:
"'"And they shall be brought down and shall speak out of the ground, and their speech shall be low out of the dust, and their voice shall be, as of one that hath a familiar spirit, out of the ground, and their speech shall whisper out of the dust."
"'But'—it was at this point that Gabrielle rose, and stood like some Sybil or Prophetess, replenished with a divine ardor—'Gabrielle, you have been chosen as the instrument of our incarnation. I chose you. See! It is God's way! Great issues HE brings about through the lowly and the humble, the contrite and the simple. God chooses you. There must be the human, living, breathing, earth-born medium. Go to the Chateau of La Ferté on —— and use your power. It will be added to. Let it be at night, the night before the great combat and the whole world will be advertised of it. That is the intention of God. So does He sway the feeble minds of men, turning their pride into humiliation, their certainties into failures, their promises into dreams. GO!
"'And Gabrielle, perchance it shall happen that then you also will be numbered with US—those of the Over-World.'"
Here Gabrielle stopped, a sudden flush mounted to her temples, and after came a deathlypallor, and then she fell upon my neck in an embrace utterly tearless, when I felt her body sway upon mine with deep pulsations, while her lips sought my own, and almost inaudibly she whispered in my ear—"Alfred, Sebastien kissed me as he vanished, and his lips were like fire, and the power he brought to me rested with me from his lips. I am ready to go. But you, Alfred, will go with me. It may be afterwards we shall be no more together."
Truly upon us unutterable things had fallen. We sat there together, almost unnoticing the passage of the day, immersed in a wonder that deepened into sadness as the anticipation of some wild unearthly ending of the great war steadily became more and more fixed in our minds, and with it—Ah there was the desperate cruelty and anguish of it—the possible separation of our lives. We hardly spoke, and only as the noon hour flooded the room with light and heat, did we arise, and, hand in hand, almost as if then we approached the tragic sacrifice of our happiness, went out, and down the stairway to our duties.
Perhaps dear old Emile Chouteau thinking of our propitiation would have said:
Sic, sic juvat ire sub umbras.
Sic, sic juvat ire sub umbras.
During the long weeks before that awfullyauspicious moment came, Gabrielle and I kept working at our tasks; she at the villages about us, in the homes of sick returning soldiers, and also at Paris on errands of every sort, and I in work of distribution, supervision and occasionally administration. But it was mostly at the hospital of Saint Jean that I experienced the full measure of an unusual depression—the customary, and now grown habitual, grievous seriousness of a national crisis, deepened into a pathos, almost unassuaged with any hope of joy. Here I saw our soldiers in that delicately conceived and apportioned religious retreat, itself a poetic dream of gentle loveliness, with its walls of time-stained stone, its avenues of trees, the ranged gardens of its sunny domains, with the petunias, the geraniums, the sages, and the high-browed and over shadowing chestnuts, the outspread firm outlines of tower and hall, its innumerable vistas, at evenings breathing a strange and subtle melancholy—malheur à qui n'a pas senti ces mélancolies(Renan)—and the devoted community of priests and nurses. Here I saw the sons of my country dying, praying, chanting, smiling in their ferocious sufferings, slipping away into eternity with prayers forLa patrie, or rising from the very border of the grave with mutilated bodies, and yet yearning for the last chance of fighting still again. Here I saw the deathless love of home, lingering inthe sick bodies, whose lips moved in a delirium of dreams, that they were soon to revisit the old orchards, the vineyards, the chimney places, and their people—Ah c'était miserable—and I have seen the chapel filled with the mourners and the broken-limbed companions of the dead, lifting the coffin so gently, as if the lifeless figure in it might feel their friendliness and thank them for it. Yes more too—a spectacle that might have touched the heart of Heaven—the wounded in the wards singing, in murmurs, between their gasps of pain, or just slowly gesturing, as it were, with body and fingers and with their speaking eyes in unison,La Marseillaise. You know how M. —— has described it.Ecoutez.
"Nos blessés chantaient ainsi par la bouche de leur blessures et nous en écoutant les strophes sublimes, il nous semblait les comprendre pour la première fois!"
"Nos blessés chantaient ainsi par la bouche de leur blessures et nous en écoutant les strophes sublimes, il nous semblait les comprendre pour la première fois!"