a fantastic smear of crimson and gold, and the more brilliant stars crept forth from a dome of lapis lazuli. Presently the moon, at the full, rose in almost artificial splendor. Back home they were speaking of it as the “harvest moon.” Here the only harvest was that of death, desolation, and despair.
Seen beneath its amber light the picture changed from a landscape in brilliant oils to an etching in monstrous blacks and whites. It was as if we were crossing the ghostly contour of some dead planet. The battle line, stilled by the armistice, was well beyond—the returning tide of scattered inhabitants far to the rear. We were alone in a land at once empty and silent.
Here and there an object caught my eye, and I guided my mount aside to identify it. Once it was the sparkle of moonshine from the staring eyes of a doll. Again, it was a crucifix, the wooden figure hacked and defiled. A broken iron pot lay beside a fifteenth-century missal, painfully transcribed and illuminated by some forgotten monk during slow creeping years. A torn placard affixed to a wall announced a boche beer-drinking contest. Beside it was the impaled body of a kitten—a mere scrap of moldering fur.
Oftener there was nothing identifiable: houses had been wrecked and leveled, and then seemingly brayed in giant mortars, that there might remain nothing save dust, to be blown away by the wind and worked up into mud, by the rain—to disappear utterly from the face of the earth and the very memories of men.
We rode in silence for the most part, Lieutenant Paradis and I, depressed by the bleak and artificial desert created by man in one of the garden spots of Europe.
It was then a weird and startling sight which suddenly materialized before our eyes from the fog-wraiths which clung to a winding river—nothing less than a perfectly preserved little town in the midst of all the woeful wreckage.
Not absolutely untouched, of course; looking sharp, one observed where a corner of the church belfry had gone, and here and there a gaping hole where a home had stood, but practically intact, even the stained-glass in the church and most of the humble panes of its shops unbroken.
Here it stood, as if left for a solitary specimen of the vanished villages of Champagne.
If any such purpose had spared it one could have wished that some other town might have been chosen in its place—for Breaux was unknown to the tourist, it possessed no famous edifice, no supreme example of medieval craftsmanship.
Still, marvelously sweet, it looked sleeping amid its filmy draperies of vapor, beneath the full moon, with its one principal street widening to a civic center where stood the church, the two inns, the town hall, and on whose cobbled pave had for centuries raged no battle fiercer than that of its bare-headed, wooden-shod market women over the prices of fat geese and luscious grapes.
It was silent and deserted as our tired horses clumped through it; I noted especially a little wine-shop, with its sign still in its place over the door, its square bottles still in orderly array upon the shelf behind the copper counter.
That the boches should have spared the church and the tavern answered all queries as to the condition of the other buildings. Breaux had been spared. But why?
We passed abruptly from it to open country, as one does in France, with no tailing off, such as our suburbs reveal. The town ended as if cut off with a giant’s knife. A little way beyond I turned in my saddle for a parting glance.
Breaux stood between us and the moon now; and, its nearly horizontal beams striking through the windows and portals, it was as if the entire village was ablaze for some silent and ghostly festival, some voiceless triumph.
Lieutenant Paradis answered the question in my eyes, speaking for the first time in hours.
“It is the town which was saved by miracle,” he said. “By the Colonel Eugen Etienne Ste. Marie de Voulx, late of Napoleon’s Young Guard, who rose from the dead to preserve the home of his ancestors.”
“A miracle?” I responded vaguely. “Ah—yes, like the Angel of Mons and the Christ seen at night upon the battle-fields easing the souls of dying men!”
For some moments Paradis did not speak; and when he did it was not to refer at once and directly to the miracle of Breaux.
“Concerning these things who knows? Not I! I neither believe nor disbelieve. But always, in world crises, these reports are current. It was so when Greeks fought Trojans. And do you recall that when the Turks took Constantinople the wretched people sought refuge in their cathedral, and as the enemy burst in upon them there and began slaughtering young and old, women and children, the priest, who was in the midst of celebrating mass, bore the sacred elements out through a little door in the apse; and the Turks sealed it up, and so it has remained unto this day in the mosque of Ste. Sophia.
“And it is said that on the day when it shall be reconsecrated as a Christian church the little door shall open and the celebrant come forth and resume the canon of the mass, at the point where it was so bloodily interrupted centuries ago.”
We crossed the brook by a ford since its bridge had been blown up, and as we clambered up the bank Paradis continued:
“So, in our own war men say that on a certain night when a gap was torn in our lines, a ragged hole open to Calais, and there were no more troops to throw in, there rose silently from the mists strange men in great bearskin shakos, wearing obsolete bandoliers, and carrying clumsy muskets.
‘“At their head, upon a gray horse, rode a gray figure, bowed forward in thought, one hand thrust into his breast, a cocked hat upon his head. It was, to be sure, the Little Corporal, risen from the dead to hurl his grizzled Old Guard upon the desecrators of French soil.
“At any rate, the gap was stopped, nobody knows how or by whom. A division rushed up by lorries found no one, friend or foe, when they arrived at dawn—only the waves of dead men as the tide had ebbed and flowed. Myself? I believe that when mankind is in travail, an anguish too great to be borne alone, it flies to Deity as a child to its mother’s skirt, or as chicks to the maternal wing.
“It is inconceivable, intolerable, that God should look down a mere spectator upon their agony as from a celestial grandstand. And so there are portents in the sky, and gods fighting with men, and legends passing from one to another the children of hope and fear.”
“Merely legends?” I asked.
Lieutenant Paradis shrugged.
“Who can say? Let me repeat what a great philosopher has written: That with so many hundreds of thousands of lusty young souls cut off instantly and in the full sway of the most violent passions, it is inconceivable that they should at once go to their abiding place; rather must the earth be girdled by a stratum of spiritual unrest, reacting upon our minds in many singular and mysterious ways.”
Under the waning stars, and to the solemn accompaniment of the slow-coming dawn, Paradis related to me the miracle whereby De Voulx, though long asleep in his coffin, returned to save the village of his forebears from the slime of the green-gray German horde.
* * * *
Three men sat about a little table in the sacristy of the old parish church of St. Leu in Breaux. It was early fall, the third year of the great war; and save for these three there remained no living inhabitant in the town. All had departed, bearing with them such valuables as could be gathered up before the German onrush.
For days the unfortunates from scores of similar villages to the eastward had streamed through Breaux, pausing long enough to rest for an hour and to whisper of the
