where the immemorial forest of the ardennes closes in on the moselle that winds beautifully to the rhine, there is a little land that can give us small aid in the way of art, for the hand of man and of an implacable fatality has been heavy, and little remains, but it is a place of infinite charm and of significance as well, while in the last year its ancient name has come into the light again, even as it was some centuries ago. it has borne many names, acknowledged many sovereignties; roman belgica, part of the kingdom of the ripuarian franks, austrasia, lorraine, a province of the germanic holy roman empire, burgundy, the netherlands (spanish and austrian), france again, both of the republican and imperial mode, then back in an amorphous germany, and now, crushed into a tiny but concentrated state, an independent but sovereign grand duchy of luxembourg, imprisoned for the moment in dark fastnesses of oppression where{297}from no word issues forth, but destined under god to a triumphant release and to a restoration that may mean a return to earlier and wider frontiers.
luxembourg means that portion of the heart of europe lying between the meuse and the moselle, and one line drawn from limbourg to trèves, another from verdun to metz. it is now a tithe of this, but who can say what may be in the future? all its great northern portion has for long been incorporated in the eternally honourable kingdom of belgium, and there it will remain, but there is always the old archbishopric of trèves with its moselle valley, and there are the lands along the saar and the new (and old) frontiers of france. at present, as a result of three treaties in which it played the passive part of victim, it is a fourth the size it once had under its first duke wenceslas; the first section was lost in 1659, the second at the congress of vienna in 1815, the third and largest at london in 1859, but, as a japanese guide remarked at the monastery of horiuji, “the quality is not dependent on the numerality of quantity,” and as nothing was lost but land the indomitable spirit of the people remained intact and merely concentrated{298} itself still more intensely within its shrunken borders.
luxembourg lies along that line where first the teuton blended with the primitive gaul, or celt, and where a second mingling later took place between the result of the first—the salian frank—and the same old teutonic stock. it is the mating-place of races and therefore the fighting-place as well, and always will remain so, as they and we now realise only too clearly. they were far enough apart, these celts and germans, to guarantee good progeny. the gaul was huge of stature, blonde, long-haired, fond of fine clothes and golden chains. he was pastoral and agricultural, aristocratic in his social and political systems, incontinent, good-natured, quick-tempered, superstitious, druidical. the teuton was red-haired, shaven except for a fierce top-knot, grim in his clothing, contemptuous of agriculture and of everything else except fighting; as a youth he wore an iron collar which could not be removed until he had killed his man. politically he was ultra-democratic; socially, monogamous and chaste; theologically, monotheistic. from the fusion of these two elements came the many tribes of gallia belgica, and in good time most of the{299} peoples of the heart of europe, of flanders, brabant, luxembourg, lorraine, the hither rhineland, champagne, burgundy, picardy, artois. trèves, head city of the treveri, was the natural capital and so it became under the c?sars when they had made their wilderness and called it peace.
it did not remain a wilderness long; presently came the pacific c?sars of a later day and the whole land became first the “kitchen-garden of rome” and then the newport of the empire. fine roads cut the forests in every direction, land was cleared, agriculture intensified, so that shortly the whole region was a garden dotted with private parks and estates. trèves was made a great city, with palaces, temples, baths, amphitheatres, the summer capital of europe and second in gaul only to lyons. a city of manifold pleasures and as many beauties; rich, sumptuous, sensuous, where from the shores of tiber and bosporus enervated and exhausted devotees of the joy of living came to cool themselves and restore their vitality in the fresh air and the green river valleys of this curiously picturesque retreat. all along the moselle rose gorgeous villas with their rooms of sheeted marble and mosaic and gilded cedar{300} and splendid fabrics, their terraced gardens and cool groves and wide-spreading parks. a golden day-dream focussed along the windings of a little river and destined, the sleepers dreamed, to endure for ever.
and then the greater dream of empire began to turn into nightmare. the gallic legions revolted against a weakening hand in rome, and c?sars of a day and a thousand votes fought back and forth over the land, and burned and murdered and died until peace came again, and restoration, with real emperors refreshing themselves in their imperial city of trèves and their dim forests on the hilly walls of the winding moselle. war again, and ruin, this time of a nature to last for generations and to leave the marble villas to the slow but kindly burial of trees and vines and moss. out of the terrible east the huns came like a flood with the deadly attila at their head, blind terror before them, death and silence behind. just to the west, at chalons, they were beaten back and fled eastward again (men thought for ever), and what was left became part of the new frankish kingdom. of the makers of this nation and the stock from which sprang merovings, carolings, and most of the other royal houses of europe, the reverend t. h. passmore writes engagingly thus:
the record of this people, until the close of the fifth century, is dim and discursive. up to that time they were more like a firework display than a people. they appear and disappear on the historic horizon confusingly, the only unifying condition being a general and most sacred sense of mission, the mission being the demolition of the universe. the first head upon which history steadily focusses its light is that of the great clovis. he was lord of the small salian tribe in batavia and sacked and plundered all around him to such an extent that the other frankish tribes who lived along the belgic rivers were smitten with admiration and flocked to the standard of so virtuous a prince.... the pious clovis was a born diplomatist. he was a sanguinary teuton, a cultured roman, and a christian saint according to circumstances. he was great.
after clearing gaul of the burgundians and other germans who still barred his progress, and wiping out the alemanni—those chronic foes whom rome had found invincible—clovis listened to the prayers of his christian wife, clotilde, and was baptised in rheims cathedral by st. remigius with three thousand of his devoted franks, who would probably have heard of it again had they made any trouble about the matter. he does not seem, however, to have grown any nicer or kinder on this account. st. gregory of tours, his biographer and panegyrist, who was somewhat modestly endowed with the sense of humour, tells us gravely that on one occasion, after dismissing with prayer a synod of the gallican church, he quietly proceeded to butcher all the merovingian princes. having pushed his arms into france, he fixed on paris as his royal seat; conquered the goths under alaric, his only remaining rivals; and was invested{302} with purple tunic in st. martin’s church at tours. twenty-five years after his death the emperor justinian generously bestowed on his sons the provinces of gaul, which they already possessed; and most gracefully absolved its inhabitants from their allegiance to himself, which had only existed in his own august imagination. thus the french kingdom of the merovingians, to the generation succeeding clovis, already included all gaul from western france to the rhine and their suzerainty reached to the alps and beyond them.
luxembourg had long been christian after a fashion; the first bishop of trèves had been appointed by st. peter himself, while the emperor constantine, who had lived much in the city, fostered the new religion in every way. later, at the time of the era-making pepin of heristal, st. willibrord came from england on his great mission to the heathen of friesland, and while converting them, and much of norway and denmark to boot, established here at echternach a great monastery that was his spiritual power-house, from which he drew the energy that sent him on his endless journeys and cruises, by land and sea, for the winning of souls to christ. he did his work well, none better, and wherever he went christianity went with him, and a new civilisation, a new culture, that remained for many centuries after he had been called to his high reward,{303} buried in his dear abbey at echternach and enrolled in the kalendar of saints.
it was a vast monastery and a magnificent one, but it is a monastery no longer; for centuries it continued to pour out from its inexhaustible benedictine store, missionaries, prophets, priests, leaders and protectors of the people; fostering education, agriculture, the arts; establishing order, nursing a piety that found its reward in this world through the consciousness of an ever-widening civilisation, and a greater reward in heaven. then the power and wealth grew too great for the equanimity of princes, and it was robbed by one after another, oppressed by lay abbots in commendam, its benedictine monks driven out and secular canons intruded, and finally pillaged by recreant bishops of the new dispensation of humanism and enlightenment and by that concentration and apotheosis of the same, le roi soleil, and so handed over to the emissaries of the deluge that followed him, the attractive exemplars of revolution, who swept the place clean of books and pictures and statues and all the hoarded art of a thousand years—yes, even of the poor ashes of the good saint himself—to make place a half century later for the ashes and{304} slag of blast-furnaces set up within the ancient walls, and for the housing of soldiers and their mounts.
still, the work could not wholly be undone, luxembourg was a christian state and so it remained, through fair days and foul, the fairest being perhaps those when, united to flanders and brabant under the emperor maximilian, it fell into the charge of that great lady and unofficial saint, margaret “of malines,” whose story i have tried to tell elsewhere.
with the wars of religion this peace and prosperity came to an end and for two hundred years all the duchy was devastated by all the armies of europe, from those of francis i to the obscene hordes of the french republic. it had never revolted against the catholic religion nor against its varied rulers, and its reward was a slow and savage extermination. cities were burned and their names forgotten; great abbeys and churches like those of orval and clairefontaine were utterly extinguished; tall castles that crowned every height of land were blown up with gunpowder; fields and farms became waste land; and through starvation, massacre, and exile the population was reduced to a tithe of its former numbers, and{305} at last, by the republic that came to bring liberty, taxed into an all-engulfing penury.
the era of enlightenment had not been wholly happy in its action on luxembourg, but it was free at last, and, in 1867, independent, as it remained until that memorable day in august, 1914, the day of broken treaties, when the little grand duchess backed her motor-car across the bridge, closing it with a pathetic barrier in the vain protest of honour against a force that did not recognise the meaning of the word or the existence of the thing it signified.
luxembourg to-day is not a place where one may go to revel in the artistic memorials of a great past; the great past is there, and its memory is still green, but even more than brabant or champagne has it borne the grievous harrowing of endless wars and recrudescent barbarisms, not the least destructive of these visitations being the nineteenth century in its satisfying completeness, which saw many an abbey and old haunted castle dismantled, reduced to road-metal, and carted away for the value inherent in its raw material, or turned to inconceivably base uses from all of which some pecuniary profit might be obtained. once it was as rich in enormous castles{306} as any country in the world that happily has a medi?val past. bourscheid on its great hill, lordly and dominating still and a wilderness of vast crags of masonry, in spite of all that man could do; brandenbourg, rigid and riven in its ring of mountains; esch, split into towering and sundered fragments on the raw cliffs overhanging the s?re; hollenfel, clervaux, spared by war to fall victim to the contemptuous neglect of owners who preferred pseudo-gothic villas with all modern conveniences; beaufort, with its noble proportions and its beauty of a later and more gracious medi?valism; vianden, most fascinating of all with its dizzy gables, and its chapel still intact in spite of the wide ruin of its surroundings. and every castle ruin is haunted to heart’s desire, crowded with attested ghosts whose consistent habits and dependable visitations are a peculiar joy in a world that until a twelvemonth ago could not believe in the impossible and promptly discounted the improbable. any peasant in luxembourg knew better, and not only the ruins but the whole duchy is honeycombed by the midnight prowlings of an entire population of delectable phantoms, while the stories and legends of their commerce in the past with lords and ladies and{307} knights and monks and bishops form a literature in themselves.
in spite of its losses, the land was one of infinite and unfamiliar charm; a land of wide and high plateaus cut by many winding river courses, each a possible journey of varying delights. our and s?re and black erenz; alzette and clerf and white erenz, with many others of minor flow, cut the duchy in every direction, all at last finding the goal of their waters in the magical moselle, as it flows past old roman trèves on its devious way to the rhine. and it was a kind of little earthly paradise as well, for the fifty years of its well-earned peace. a land of farms and gardens and pastures, of contented little villages and river-bordered hamlets, and a kindly and devoted people. coal and iron have left little mark, though the efficient baedeker (to whom shall we go for guidance on our journeys in the long days to come?), in one of his concise and unpremeditately dramatic paragraphs does say: “18? m. weilerbach, for the iron-foundry of weilerbach and the former summer-house of the abbots of echternach, magnificently situated amidst wood”—an antithesis of startling illumination. protestantism passed it by, except for purposes of plun{308}der, and it has always been unanimously and enthusiastically catholic, with a record for public and private morality that puts any and every other part of europe to sudden shame.
what is to be its future when the great storm that is cleaning the soiled world of its dust and ashes of false ideals and burnt-out superstitions sweeps away into the hollows of a night that is only in its darkness the promise of a new day? who shall say? but any one can weave his vision, and to some it already appears that, with the meting out of inadequate earthly reward for irreparable bodily suffering, will come the lands to the east as far as the kyll, with to the south saarbourg, and the far side of the moselle to the hochwald, including ancient trèves, no longer a forgotten relic of an old imperialism but a greater and better and more potent hague, a central city of europe and of peace, where, under the united guarantees of all the states, is permanently sitting a great council of ambassadors for the devising of measures of common interest, the adjustment of international differences, the preservation of a righteous peace between nations, and with authority to suppress any violation of treaties or any wilful aggression of one state against another,{309} by calling into the field against the offender all the military and naval forces of all the other powers signatory to an european treaty of permanent peace and represented in the council of ambassadors.
or perhaps trèves, with surrounding territory within a five-mile radius, might be erected into an international city of council, surrounded by luxembourg, belgium, which may be extended to the moselle and eastward half-way to the rhine, france, the new frontiers of which would be the old eastern borders of alsace and lorraine, and a restored palatinate limited to the north and east by the rhine and the moselle. central in this circle of guarding states, with all europe for added defence against any possible recrudescence of local egoism in any place, trèves might again become a great city of refuge and of christian righteousness, with noble buildings on its circle of surrounding hills, a centre of religion and education and mercy, guardian of the peace of europe, a living and glorious symbol of the world enlightenment that came through the clean purging of a war greater than all former wars because the need was greater.
