Allons enfants de la Patrie
Arise, children of the Fatherland
Le jour de gloire est arrivé
The day of glory has arrived
Contre nous, de la tyrannie
Against us stand tyranny
L’étendard sanglant est levé
The bloody flag is raised
Aloysius painted several enormous blue ravens over the dark fortress and over the bridges on the Rhine River. He had obtained a larger book of fine art paper with deckled edges, and the new raven scenes were magnificent. My brother once again painted with a sense of native presence, imagination, and visionary power. The military occupation billets in the royal fortress must have roused his new raven images of liberty.
Aloysius was inspired to paint as we traveled several times by steamboat down the Rhine River. His portrayals of blue ravens on the river, blue wake and shadows on the water, traces of rouge on the bridges, castles, and ancient houses were the most dramatic and abstract that he had ever painted. Yes, we had survived the war as scouts and brothers, a painter and a writer, but were unnerved by the wounds and agonies of peace. My literary scenes were more fierce and poetic, and the images my brother created were more intense and visionary. No one would wisely endorse the experiences of war and peace as the just sources of artistic inspiration, and yet we would never resist the tease of chance, turn of trickster stories, or the natural outcome of native irony.
Soldiers were allowed a furlough for one week after four months of active service. We had served for six months, and, since scouts have no actual combat duty in a military occupation, we requested a leave for two weeks in Paris. The military encouraged furloughs when the war ended so our leave was approved for ten days in early January.
Sergeant Sorek advised us not to travel to major cities because there were no hotel rooms available, especially not in Paris. Aloysius assured the good sergeant that we would stay with a friend, the ambulance driver Harry Greene.
The Paris Peace Conference convened on January 18, 1919, a few days after we had returned from furlough. The onerous peace negotiations continued for five months. The Treaty of Versailles became a tortured tongue of grievous reparations and vengeance, and was finally endorsed on June 28, 1919, by representatives of the new government of Germany.
Aloysius was prepared to present his most recent blue ravens to the owner of the Galerie Crémieux in Paris. He carried two small art books of his war paintings in a backpack, and the recent book of fine art paper under his arm. I reminisced about our first train journey ten years earlier to Minneapolis, the hotels and theaters, the gracious librarian who served cookies, the friendly streetcar conductor, the nasty curator at the art gallery, and the great artist and teacher Yamada Baske, who had encouraged my brother to paint a trace of rouge in the blue raven portrayals.
Paris meant more to us than a luminous tourist destination of culture and liberation. The city had become our vision of art and literature, and a chance of recognition as native artists. We departed before dawn by truck to the train station in Koblenz. More than a hundred soldiers were on furlough that morning, but only a few were on their way to Paris.
The Central Station was new, massive, a spectacular ornate sandstone structure. Hungry civilians were huddled in every corner and cover of the station. The carriages were crowded with soldiers and downcast civilians who were leaving the city with huge bundles. We changed trains four times. Luxembourg was the first transfer, and then at Metz, Nancy, and Vitry-le-François in France. The noisy train moved slowly through the mountains, and then into the bleak abandoned farms and shattered forest areas. The stations at Thionville and Épernay had been badly damaged in the war.
I read book six of The Odyssey as the train traveled through forests and farmland closer to Paris. Thus did he pray, and Minerva heard his prayer, but she would not show herself to him openly, for she was afraid of her uncle Neptune, who was still furious in his endeavors to prevent Ulysses from getting home.
The train lurched and wobbled from one track to another through the steely industrial areas and arrived late the following morning in the smoky cavern of the Gare de l’Est in Paris. The Orient Express had departed from that very station, but not since the start of the war.
The city was cold and gray, but we hardly noticed the weather in the noise and crush of people, horses, wagons, and the noisy rush of new motor cars. Parisian taxicabs circled the station and lined the streets in every direction. The same clunky Renault taxicabs, more than a thousand, that had delivered infantry soldiers to the First Battle of the Marne to save Paris.
Aloysius sat on the steps of a hotel across the street from the station and painted several great blue ravens perched at the entrance to the Gare de l’Est. Three scruffy boys pointed at the portrayal and praised the blue ravens, and then held out their hands for food or money. We were dressed in combat uniforms, so there was no way to evade the hungry children near the station. American soldiers were the most generous, and the most popular, visitors to Paris.
We walked directly down the busy Boulevard de Strasbourg and Boulevard de Sébastopol toward the River Seine. Boulangeries, cafés, A. Simon corsets, and hundreds of other stores with window displays of clothes, shoes, and books, lined both sides of the street. The corset displays were similar to the regular advertisements in the Tomahawk. Les Halles, the incredible central marketplace, was on the right side of the boulevard, and on the left the Jewish community of Le Marais.
The Seine River was slow and solemn that morning as we crossed the Pont au Change and walked past the Paris Hall of Justice over the Pont Saint-Michel to the Place Saint-Michel in the Latin Quarter. The monuments and statues were shrouded in the gray coat of the city. The cafés were more seductive, with bright red and blue canopies, than the gray and green metal generals mounted on fierce horses. We walked directly to a red canopy, the Café du Départ, on the corner and sat outside with a view of the River Seine and the Cathédrale Notre-Dame de Paris.
I was hungry and ordered a double omelet with herbs and a café au lait. Aloysius ordered a baguette with jambon and a café with chocolate. Then he moistened the woad and painted a blue raven with enormous wings extended over the Pont Saint-Michel, and a second blue raven with traces of rouge on the faint blue gargoyles of the Cathédrale Notre-Dame. The waiter was fascinated by the raven paintings and explained that the gargoyle waterspouts had once been painted in bright colors. How would my brother know about the color of the waterspouts? Aloysius had envisioned the gargoyles, and never knew that they had once been painted in bright
colors.
The waiter did not recognize the name Harry Greene, the novelist and ambulance driver for the American Field Service, but he gave us directions to his residence at L’Hôtel, 13 Rue des Beaux-Arts. We walked slowly along the River Seine past the bouquinistes, book dealers and artists, to the Pont des Arts. Aloysius leaned over the rail and watched the barges cruise on the dark river. Many artists have been roused and inspired to paint scenes of the River Seine. Henri Matisse, Claude Monet, Camille Pissaro, and Eugène Isabey, mostly impressionist painters, might have created their river scenes on the Pont des Arts.
Aloysius painted an uneven row of three bright blue ravens on the Quai des Grands-Augustins near the Pont Neuf. The stone quay or wharf was crowded near the bridge with mattress makers, tinkers, and other discrete trades, crafts, and veterans of the war. An older woman was working over a framed mattress. She raised her head toward the bastion on the bridge, folded her arms, smiled, and then returned to the mattress. We walked down the stairs to the quay, and my brother showed the portrait to the woman. She laughed and turned away, surprised that the blue ravens were not humans.
Mattresses were precious possessions, and ancestral, and the workers repaired and cleaned the covers and horsehair cushions on the quay near the River Seine. Most of the people who worked on the quay were friends and compatriots, and they looked after each other. When it rained everyone took cover under
the bridge.
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Two veterans sat on narrow benches near the riverbank. They wore military coats, smoked cigarettes, and fished for perch and white suckers. Three small perch, enough for dinner, writhed in a bucket. The eager expectation, we learned later, was to catch a stray salmon from the Atlantic.
The veterans wore black fedoras, and their faces were obscured in clouds of cigarette smoke. They jiggled fish lines, mumbled words with an unusual accent, amorce, presque, oui, dîner de poissons, and gestured with their elbows, hands, and fishing poles, but the veterans never once turned away from the River Seine.
Aloysius sat next to the two veterans on the riverbank and painted an enormous blue raven perched on a barge. The wings of the raven raised the barge above the waves. The veterans turned to see the portrait of abstract flight, and revealed the masks they wore to cover ghastly facial wounds.
The metal masks were painted to simulate the precious tones of distinctive skin, and the contour of cheeks and noses with no bruises or pockmarks. The masks covered monstrous shrapnel scars, the wounds of war. The painted faces were clear and precise, and yet peculiar, even grotesque with no expression. The smiles, frowns and ordinary gestures were resolved by style, the aesthetic disguises of war wounds. The masks were blank stares without motion, the meticulous contours, satiny hues, and decorative camouflage of war wounds and broken faces.
Aloysius painted two blue ravens with abstract masks, a cubist ravenesque masquerade on the River Seine. The eyes, claws, crowns, and great beaks of the ravens were slanted, curved, and distorted by fractures. The curious breaks in contour feathers were touched with heavy blue hues, and the perceived faces of the ravens were restored with faint traces of rouge.
Henri and André, the noms de guerre, or war names of the two masked veterans, had served as infantry soldiers in separate units of the Rainbow Division in the American Expeditionary Forces. They were maimed on the very same day by enemy artillery. Henri lost his nose, nasal bone, and right cheekbone, slashed and crushed by shrapnel. André lost his jaw, lower lip and teeth, and his shattered right leg was amputated above the knee.
André turned directly toward my brother, and his bright blue eyes lighted the metal mask. Henri looked away, down the river, and told us they had met on an ambulance, heavily bandaged, and were transported and treated at the American Expeditionary Forces Base Hospital at Bazoilles-sur-Meuse, a commune near Neufchâteau, southeast of Paris.
Lieutenant Lucien Brun, the dental surgeon at the hospital, was interested in facial fractures, and restored by surgery sections of bone and skin on the faces of the soldiers. They were hospitalized for several months, and were denied access to mirrors. André related that he caught sight of his broken face for the first time reflected in a water trough for horses. He shivered and cursed the war, and then smashed the surface of the water with his fist. Some time later he looked in a mirror for the second time to see a marvelous mask that covered the grisly wounds on his broken face.
Henri and André were mutilated soldiers, mutilés de guerre, and became friends in the Base Hospital at Bazoilles-sur-Meuse. The hospital had been an estate, and the countryside was beautiful, a natural sanctuary. André told me that most of the wounded soldiers had returned home, but he and Henri refused to leave France. The reasons were personal, and the politics of aversion and rehabilitation in a military hospital at home would have been unbearable.
André told me that hundreds of wounded soldiers, many with mutilated faces, were paid with other soldiers to perform as a ghostly horde, the actual mutilés de guerre in the film J’accuse directed by Abel Gance. Some of the war scenes were real, filmed on the actual battlefields of Saint-Mihiel at the end of the war. André was a scary figure in a fantastic scene of the return of dead soldiers.
Henri caught another perch, and as he slowly removed the fishhook he told stories, almost recitations, about Liberty Limbs and the thousands of wounded soldiers on a wait list for facial surgery. Military doctors were restricted to minimal restorative surgery, and the government would not provide prosthetic masks.
André raised his fishing pole, changed the lure, turned, and stared at me in silence. I was caught in his uncanny gaze. The slant and mirror of light on the metal mask was marvelous, mannered, and spooky at the same time. He cracked his right wooden leg twice with a hook remover and explained that the military had provided only cheaply manufactured Liberty Limbs. The government limb was fabricated of compressed wood fiber with a flexible knee and strapped at the waist, but the modular prosthesis was awkward and not reliable.
André refused to wear the composite military limb, and was wrongly reproached as a shirker who would not accept the new government policies of rehabilitation. He was a mutilated soldier and resisted in his own way the cultural aversions to disability.
The French and the American Red Cross provided basic peg legs, fastened with a shoulder and waist strap. He wore a peg leg for a few months and then carved an elegant resemblance of his right leg from selected charme, or hornbeam, a durable hardwood.
André handed me the fishing pole, reached down, lifted the pant leg, and presented a beautifully curved and polished prosthesis with simulated muscles and a bony ankle. The hornbeam leg was a work of art, hinged with precision at the foot and knee, and not a mere composite. The tree had been downed by enemy artillery.
Aloysius painted four abstract blue ravens on huge masks that were mounted on the bastions of the Pont Neuf. My brother wanted to paint a tiny blue raven on the metal masks, a mask with a natural image of motion, but the two wounded veterans refused and turned away. No, they would never change the masks, and revealed later that the very idea of a face mark, blue raven or beast, was a cheeky tease.
I insisted that we meet the sculptor who created the mutilés de guerre masks. Henri cleaned, filleted, and wrapped the four perch in paper for dinner. First we walked to their shabby hotel, and then continued a few blocks more to the Red Cross Studio for Portrait Masks for Mutilated Soldiers on Rue Notre-Dame-des-Champs between the Jardin du Luxembourg and Boulevard du Montparnasse. The studio was on the fourth floor, and the scent of plaster and paint was stronger with each flight of stairs.
Anna Coleman Ladd, the sculptor who had established the studio, and created the masks, was dressed in the distinct formal uniform, jacket, wide black belt, and the insignias of a Red Cross Nurse. I was enchanted by her affection and generous smile. She served chocolate and white wine.
Aloysius was interested in how the masks were made and painted with such precision. Anna presented the various stages of the meticulous creation of a distinctive mask, a plaster cast and thin galvanized copper. The prosthetic masks were painted with enamel to avoid cracks and shines, and the hues of each mask matched the skin color of the soldier, even the bluish tint to simulate a shaved beard.
Each mask was original, an artistic creation, and not a mere disguise or camouflage. Dozens of plaster casts were mounted on the back wall of the studio, the chalky and poignant resemblance of the mutilés de guerre sentinels of the war. The avant-garde masks were the new aesthetics of war and mutilated soldiers.
Anna had created distinctive masks for André and Henri and three other Americans. She created more than ninety masks for other soldiers since the studio was established a year earlier. Anna was exact, and with the concentration of a humane artist she fashioned eyebrows with real hair.
Aloysius was inspired by the distinctive portrayal of the masks, the stature and guise of an aesthetic pose, and yet he worried about the ironic resemblance of the mutilated soldier as camouflage. My brother was determined to restyle the meticulous resemblance of the lost faces on the masks with abstract blue ravens. The masks would become an abstract work of art, not an aesthetic disguise.
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GALERIE CRÉMIEUX
— — — — — — — 1919 — — — — — — —
Aloysius Hudon Beaulieu became one of those great artists inspired by t
he ancient vitality of the River Seine. My brother created a surge of blue waves on the river, and he painted a blue raven with enormous translucent wing feathers spread across the entire entrance to the Pont des Arts.
The Institut de France was on the south side of the pedestrian bridge and on the north side, the Musée du Louvre. At that moment on the Pont des Arts, in the middle of two national monuments, and the end of a savage war, we created a scene of native art, the presence of visionary ravens and the River Seine by expressionistic waves of color, poetic images, and the traces of totemic motion in words and paint. On that very first day in the city we revealed a native presence in our names, blue paint, and in my stories.
Naturally, we celebrated our notable surname and fur trade ancestors from France. The surnames and streets were ancient, and other artists and writers must have walked the same route through an alley to Rue de Seine. We turned right to L’Hôtel on Rue des Beaux-Arts. The street was messy, and the entrance to the hotel was shabby. No one was at the reception desk.
Oscar Wilde had died in L’Hôtel about nineteen years earlier. His name was posted near the entrance. We had expected at least an ordinary greeting at the hotel. The lobby stank of cigarette smoke, out-of-date newspapers were scattered on the floor, and the leather chairs were stained and cracked. We decided not to wait for anyone in that lobby. I left a note for Harry Greene that we had arrived and would be waiting in a nearby park on the corner of Rue de Seine and Rue Mazarine behind the Institut de France.
Aloysius painted several scenes of blue ravens at the Musée du Louvre and perched on statues in the park. We waited for several hours and then returned to L’Hôtel. No one was there and the note had not been read. The guest register was behind the desk, so we searched the pages and found the name of Harry Greene, and the note, une erreur dans la note, an error in the bill. His room was located on the second floor. We knocked, and then entered the cold, dark, tiny room that faced another building at the back of the hotel. There were several empty notebooks on a table near the
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