Hilaire Belloc - Premium Collection: Historical Works, Writings on Economy, Essays & Fiction. Hilaire Belloc

fell from time to time through the clear morning seemed like a sister to the spray of the waterfalls; and what with all this moisture and greenery, and the surrounding silence, all the valley was inspired with content. It was a repose to descend through its leaves and grasses, and find the lovely pastures at the foot of the descent, a narrow floor between the hills. Here there were the first houses of men; and, from one, smoke was already going up thinly into the morning. The air was very pure and cold; it was made more nourishing and human by the presence and noise of the waters, by the shining wet grasses and the beaded leaves all through that umbrageous valley. The shreds of clouds which, high above the calm, ran swiftly in the upper air, fed it also with soft rains from time to time as fine as dew; and through those clear and momentary showers one could see the sunlight.

      When I had enjoyed the descent through this place for but a few miles, everything changed. The road in front ran straight and bordered--it led out and onwards over a great flat, set here and there with hillocks. The Vosges ended abruptly. Houses came more thickly, and by the ceaseless culture of the fields, by the flat slate roofs, the white-washed walls, and the voices, and the glare, I knew myself to be once more in France of the plains; and the first town I came to was Giromagny.

      Here, as I heard a bell, I thought I would go up and hear Mass; and I did so, but my attention at the holy office was distracted by the enormous number of priests that I found in the church, and I have wondered painfully ever since how so many came to be in a little place like Giromagny. There were three priests at the high altar, and nearly one for each chapel, and there was such a buzz of Masses going on, beginning and ending, that I am sure I need not have gone without my breakfast in my hurry to get one. With all this there were few people at Mass so early; nothing but these priests going in and out, and continual little bells. I am still wondering. Giromagny is no place for relics or for a pilgrimage, it cures no one, and has nothing of a holy look about it, and all these priests--

      LECTOR. Pray dwell less on your religion, and--

      AUCTOR. Pray take books as you find them, and treat travel as travel. For you, when you go to a foreign country, see nothing but what you expect to see. But I am astonished at a thousand accidents, and always find things twenty-fold as great as I supposed they would be, and far more curious; the whole covered by a strange light of adventure. And that is the peculiar value of this book. Now, if you can explain these priests---

      LECTOR. I can. It was the season of the year, and they were swarming.

      AUCTOR. So be it. Then if you will hear nothing of what interests me, I see no reason for setting down with minute care what interests you, and I may leave out all mention of the Girl who could only speak German, of the Arrest of the Criminal, and even of the House of Marshal Turenne--- this last something quite exceptionally entertaining. But do not let us continue thus, nor push things to an open quarrel. You must imagine for yourself about six miles of road, and then--then in the increasing heat, the dust rising in spite of the morning rain, and the road most wearisome, I heard again the sound of bugles and the sombre excitement of the drums.

      It is a thought-provoking thing, this passing from one great garrison to another all the way down the frontier. I had started from the busy order of Toul; I had passed through the silence and peace of all that Moselle country, the valley like a long garden, and I had come to the guns and the tramp of Épinal. I had left Épinal and counted the miles and miles of silence in the forests, I had crossed the great hills and come down into quite another plain draining to another sea, and I heard again all the clamour that goes with soldiery, and looking backward then over my four days, one felt--one almost saw--the new system of fortification, the vast entrenched camps each holding an army, the ungarnished gaps between.

      As I came nearer to Belfort, I saw the guns going at a trot down a side road, and, a little later, I saw marching on my right, a long way off, the irregular column, the dust and the invincible gaiety of the French line. The sun here and there glinted on the ends of rifle-barrels and the polished pouches. Their heavy pack made their tramp loud and thudding. They were singing a song.

      I had already passed the outer forts; I had noted a work close to the road; I had gone on a mile or so and had entered the long and ugly suburb where the tramway lines began, when, on one of the ramshackle houses of that burning, paved, and noisy endless street, I saw written up the words,

      Wine; shut or open.

      As it is a great rule to examine every new thing, and to suck honey out of every flower, I did not--as some would--think the phrase odd and pass on. I stood stock-still gazing at the house and imagining a hundred explanations. I had never in my life heard wine divided into shut and open wine. I determined to acquire yet one more great experience, and going in I found a great number of tin cans, such as the French carry up water in, without covers, tapering to the top, and standing about three feet high; on these were pasted large printed labels, '30', '40', and '50', and they were brimming with wine. I spoke to the woman, and pointing at the tin cans, said--

      'Is this what you call open wine?'

      'Why, yes,' said she. 'Cannot you see for yourself that it is open?'

      That was true enough, and it explained a great deal. But it did not explain how--seeing that if you leave a bottle of wine uncorked for ten minutes you spoil it--you can keep gallons of it in a great wide can, for all the world like so much milk, milked from the Panthers of the God. I determined to test the prodigy yet further, and choosing the middle price, at fourpence a quart, I said--

      'Pray give me a hap'orth in a mug.'

      This the woman at once did, and when I came to drink it, it was delicious. Sweet, cool, strong, lifting the heart, satisfying, and full of all those things wine-merchants talk of, bouquet, and body, and flavour. It was what I have heard called a very pretty wine.

      I did not wait, however, to discuss the marvel, but accepted it as one of those mysteries of which this pilgrimage was already giving me examples, and of which more were to come--(wait till you hear about the brigand of Radicofani). I said to myself-

      'When I get out of the Terre Majeure, and away from the strong and excellent government of the Republic, when I am lost in the Jura Hills to-morrow there will be no such wine as this.'

      So I bought a quart of it, corked it up very tight, put it in my sack, and held it in store against the wineless places on the flanks of the hill called Terrible, where there are no soldiers, and where Swiss is the current language. Then I went on into the centre of the town.

      As I passed over the old bridge into the market-place, where I proposed to lunch (the sun was terrible--it was close upon eleven), I saw them building parallel with that old bridge a new one to replace it. And the way they build a bridge in Belfort is so wonderfully simple, and yet so new, that it is well worth telling.

      In most places when a bridge has to be made, there is an infinite pother and worry about building the piers, coffer-dams, and heaven knows what else. Some swing their bridges to avoid this trouble, and some try to throw an arch of one span from side to side. There are a thousand different tricks. In Belfort they simply wait until the water has run away. Then a great brigade of workmen run down into the dry bed of the river and dig the foundations feverishly, and begin building the piers in great haste. Soon the water comes back, but the piers are already above it, and the rest of the work is done from boats. This is absolutely true. Not only did I see the men in the bed of the river, but a man whom I asked told me that it seemed to him the most natural way to build bridges, and doubted if they were ever made in any other fashion.

      There is also in Belfort a great lion carved in rock to commemorate the siege of 1870. This lion is part of the precipice under the castle, and is of enormous size--- how large I do not know, but I saw that a man looked quite small by one of his paws. The precipice was first smoothed like a stone slab or tablet, and then this lion was carved into and out of it in high relief by Bartholdi, the same man that made the statue of Liberty in New York Harbour.

      The siege of 1870 has been fixed for history in yet another way, and one that shows you how the Church works on from one stem continually. For there is a little church somewhere near or in Belfort (I do not know where, I only heard of it) which, a local mason and painter being told to decorate for so much, he amused himself