When I came to the edge of this haunted forest it ceased as suddenly
as it had begun. I left behind me such a rank of trees aligned as I
had entered thousands of feet below, and I saw before me, stretching
shapely up to the sky, the round dome-like summit of the mountain - a
great field of grass. It was already evening; and, as though the tall
trees had withdrawn their virtue from me, my fatigue suddenly came
upon me. My feet would hardly bear me as I clambered up the last
hundred feet and looked down under the rolling clouds, lit from
beneath by the level light of evening, to the three countries that met
at my feet.
For the Ballon d'Alsace is the knot of Europe, and from that gathering
up and ending of the Vosges you look down upon three divisions of men.
To the right of you are the Gauls. I do not mean that mixed breed of
Lorraine, silent, among the best of people, but I mean the tree Gauls,
who are hot, ready, and born in the plains and in the vineyards. They
stand in their old entrenchments on either side of the Saone and are
vivacious in battle; from time to time a spirit urges them, and they
go out conquering eastward in the Germanics, or in Asia, or down the
peninsulas of the Mediterranean, and then they suck back like a tide
homewards, having accomplished nothing but an epic.
Then on the left you have all the Germanics, a great sea of confused
and dreaming people, lost in philosophies and creating music, frozen
for the moment under a foreign rigidity, but some day to thaw again
and to give a word to us others. They cannot long remain apart from
visions.
Then in front of you southward and eastward, if you are marching to
Rome, come the Highlanders. I had never been among them, and I was to
see them in a day; the people of the high hills, the race whom we all
feel to be enemies, and who run straight across the world from the
Atlantic to the Pacific, understanding each other, not understood by
us. I saw their first rampart, the mountains called the Jura, on the
horizon, and above my great field of view the clouds still tumbled,
lit from beneath with evening.
I tired of these immensities, and, feeling now my feet more broken
than ever, I very slowly and in sharp shoots of pain dragged down the
slope towards the main road: I saw just below me the frontier stones
of the Prussians, and immediately within them a hut. To this I
addressed myself.
It was an inn. The door opened of itself, and I found there a pleasant
woman of middle age, but frowning. She had three daughters, all of
great strength, and she was upbraiding them loudly in the German of
Alsace and making them scour and scrub. On the wall above her head was
a great placard which I read very tactfully, and in a distant manner,
until she had restored the discipline of her family. This great
placard was framed in the three colours which once brought a little
hope to the oppressed, and at the head of it in broad black letters
were the three words, 'Freedom, Brotherhood, and an Equal Law'.
Underneath these was the emblematic figure of a cock, which I took to
be the Gallic bird, and underneath him again was printed in enormous
italics -
Quand ce coq chantera
Ici credit l'on fera.
Which means -
When you hear him crowing
Then's the time for owing.
Till that day - Pay.
While I was still wondering at this epitome of the French people, and
was attempting to combine the French military tradition with the
French temper in the affairs of economics; while I was also delighting
in the memory of the solid coin that I carried in a little leathern
bag in my pocket, the hard-working, God-fearing, and honest woman that
governs the little house and the three great daughters, within a yard
of the frontier, and on the top of this huge hill, had brought back
all her troops into line and had the time to attend to me. This she
did with the utmost politeness, though cold by race, and through her
politeness ran a sense of what Teutons called Duty, which would once
have repelled me; but I have wandered over a great part of the world,
and I know it now to be a distorted kind of virtue.
She was of a very different sort from that good tribe of the Moselle
valley beyond the hill; yet she also was Catholic - (she had a little
tree set up before her door for the Corpus Christi: see what religion
is, that makes people of utterly different races understand each
other; for when I saw that tree I knew precisely where I stood. So
once all we Europeans understood each other, but now we are divided by
the worst malignancies of nations and classes, and a man does not so
much love his own nation as hate his neighbours, and even the twilight
of chivalry is mixed up with a detestable patronage of the poor. But
as I was saying - ) she also was a Catholic, and I knew myself to be
with friends. She was moreover not exactly of - what shall I say? the
words Celtic and Latin mean nothing - not of those who delight in a
delicate manner; and her good heart prompted her to say, very loudly -
'What do you want?'
'I want a bed,' I said, and I pulled out a silver coin.
