After our visit to the American troops we went down to Domremy, the birth place of Joan of Arc.  It was good to view her from the aspect of her Old Home Town.  There is a church, restored, where she worshipped, and the home where she was born and lived.  It was a better house than one is led to suppose she lived in, and indicates that her people were rather of more consequence than common.  We visited the home, went into the church, and walked in the garden where she met the angel; but we met postcard vendors instead.  Yet it is a fair garden, back from the road, half hidden by a wall, and in it is a lovely drooping tree.  A fair place it was indeed for an angel to choose.  Some way Joan leaves me without much enthusiasm.  Perhaps it is because she has had two good friends who have done her bad turns.  The Pope, who made her a saint, and Mark Twain, who made her human.  It is difficult to say, off-hand, which did her the worse service.  Some way, it seems to me, she could live in our hearts more beautifully in the remote and noble company of myths like the lesser gods, made by men to express their deepest yearnings for the beautiful in life.  The pleasant land in which she lived, the gentle hills whereon she watched her flocks, and the tender sky of France, all made me happy, and if Joan did not get to me, perhaps it was because one can take away from a place only what he brings there.

When we left Domremy, the hills—­soft green hills, high but never rugged, stretched away in the misty purple distance and we dropped into those vales where Joan watched her sheep and heard the voices.  It did not seem impossible, nor even difficult to hear voices amid such beauty.  So we fell to discussing the voices that reach this world.  And Henry said:  “Always there are voices in this earth—­always they come in youth, calling us forward and upward.  And if we follow them, though they lead to long marches and hard bivouacs, and to humiliation and sorrow, yet are we happy and triumphant.”

“But Germany?” insisted someone.  “Where were her voices?”

“Her voices came when Heine sang, and Beethoven made music, and Goethe and Schiller wrote and Schopenhauer thought!  If ever a land had the philosophy and the poetry of democracy Germany had it.  Democracy tried to bloom in the revolutionary days of the forties, but Germany strangled her voices.  And now—­”

“And now there are no voices in the world!” sighed one of our party; but even as he spoke from out of the purple distance came the thin faint sound of a bugle trembling among the hills.  It was an American bugle.  And Henry caught its significance, and cried:  “There is the new voice—­the voice that the world must follow if we find the old peace again on earth.”

CHAPTER V

In which we discern things “By the DAWN’S early light”