FIGHTING FRANCE
FROM DUNKERQUE TO BELPORT
BY EDITH WHARTON
NEW YORK: MCMXV
CONTENTS
THE LOOK OF PARIS
IN ARGONNE
IN LORRAINE AND THE VOSGES
IN THE NORTH
IN ALSACE
THE TONE OF FRANCE
THE LOOK OF PARIS
(AUGUST, 1914—FEBUARY, 1915)
I
AUGUST
On the 30th of July, 1914, motoring north from Poitiers, we hadlunched somewhere by the roadside under apple-trees on the edge of afield. Other fields stretched away on our right and left to a borderof woodland and a village steeple. All around was noonday quiet, andthe sober disciplined landscape which the traveller's memory is aptto evoke as distinctively French. Sometimes, even to accustomedeyes, these ruled-off fields and compact grey villages seem merelyflat and tame; at other moments the sensitive imagination sees inevery thrifty sod and even furrow the ceaseless vigilant attachmentof generations faithful to the soil. The particular bit of landscapebefore us spoke in all its lines of that attachment. The air seemedfull of the long murmur of human effort, the rhythm of oft-repeatedtasks, the serenity of the scene smiled away the war rumours whichhad hung on us since morning.
All day the sky had been banked with thunder-clouds, but by the timewe reached Chartres, toward four o'clock, they had rolled away underthe horizon, and the town was so saturated with sunlight that topass into the cathedral was like entering the dense obscurity of achurch in Spain. At first all detail was imperceptible; we were in ahollow night. Then, as the shadows gradually thinned and gatheredthemselves up into pier and vault and ribbing, there burst out ofthem great sheets and showers of colour. Framed by such depths ofdarkness, and steeped in a blaze of mid-summer sun, the familiarwindows seemed singularly remote and yet overpoweringly vivid. Nowthey widened into dark-shored pools splashed with sunset, nowglittered and menaced like the shields of fighting angels. Some werecataracts of sapphires, others roses dropped from a saint's tunic,others great carven platters strewn with heavenly regalia, othersthe sails of galleons bound for the Purple Islands; and in thewestern wall the scattered fires of the rose-window hung like aconstellation in an African night. When one dropped one's eyes formthese ethereal harmonies, the dark masses of masonry below them, allveiled and muffled in a mist pricked by a few altar lights, seemedto symbolize the life on earth, with its shadows, its heavydistances and its little islands of illusion. All that a greatcathedral can be, all the meanings it can express, all thetranquilizing power it can breathe upon the soul, all the richnessof detail it can fuse into a large utterance of strength and beauty,the cathedral of Chartres gave us in that perfect hour.
It was sunset when we reached the gates of Paris. Under the heightsof St. Cloud and Suresnes the reaches of the Seine trembled with theblue-pink lustre