Part 19

In the days to come the historian will find fruitful scope for a work on faith, as shown in the Great War. And among the "Angels of Mons" and other celestial visitants I hope he will find a niche for the "Child of Terbeeke."

I came across the story--and the child himself, for that matter--when I was billeted with my battalion at Durdegem. Durdegem is as ugly a little Walloon village as you need look for, but, internationally speaking, it is as interesting as ugly. It stands on French soil; you could almost throw a tin of bully-beef, if you were so unpatriotically wasteful, into Belgium; what is, for all practical purposes, temporarily Germany is not more than three miles away; yet English is almost the only language you will hear in the streets. Even the children, those who are left of them, speak English; they say "Na poo" or "No bon," and sometimes, it is to be feared, a swearword, as patly as a bombardier. This is really less surprising than that there should be any children at all, with the German lines so close; but things have been comparatively quiet thereabouts for months past, and though some of the houses are still ruinous and others have had their windows blocked with sandbags so long that already the grass is beginning to grow upon them, the inhabitants have settled down to the not unprofitable task of selling comforts to the British soldiers who are always passing and repassing.

I was billeted upon Madame Tavernier, who owned the Blanchisserie du Cygne and was rapidly making her fortune out of the laundry bills she rendered to British officers, who are notoriously millionaires and well able to pay for the privilege of defending Northern France. With Madame Tavernier there was also staying--while other arrangements were being made for him--Hippolyte, otherwise famous as the Child of Terbeeke.

Hippolyte was not yet six, but already he could say "Slee-o-pums" and "Stunt-ease" and "Fum-fers" so plainly that any drill-sergeant would have wept with pride to hear him. Also he wore the full uniform of a British sergeant-major, with puttees and a walking-stick and the badge of a famous Line regiment, all specially made and presented to him for his very own. Also, although he was temporarily the paying-guest of Madame Tavernier and allowed himself to be petted by a whole serial-story of British officers, he had a service-battalion to act as his father and to fight for him any battles he might wish fought. It is to be feared that a precocious understanding of these facts had made him rather conceited, and I do not think I should have liked him very much had I remained with Madame Tavernier longer than three days. Anyhow, this was his story, as related to me by that excellent lady and vouched for by a cloud of witnesses.

Hippolyte came from Terbeeke, which is in the south of flat Flanders. Madame declared that he was the son of a professor at Louvain University, and added that the professor quarrelled with his wife soon after the birth of Hippolyte, and that the wife thereupon returned to her native village.

Hippolyte, therefore, at a very early age indeed, went to live at Terbeeke. Terbeeke, I understand--for I was never there--lies just at the southward edge of the Flemish flats. Northwards the country is as flat as a drawing-board, criss-crossed with dykes and little canals; to the east is a wide State forest, and to the south a range of low hills. Between the little town and the hills lies what in pre-war days was Terbeeke's one claim to fame--the Terbeeke mere or marsh, forming a crescent to the south and west. I do not know how broad or wide it is, but it has been famous for centuries as bottomless, and a whole cycle of legend has grown up round it, dealing with the notabilities of one kind or another who have been drowned in its brown, oozy depths. Perhaps because of this evil fame it has never been drained, and is to-day as darkly ominous as in the times of fairies and lubber-fiends.

The mother of Hippolyte lived in a small and lonely house at the other side of the marsh from the town of Terbeeke. She must have possessed some private means, for she seems to have carried on no business of any kind, but to have devoted most of her time to religion, crossing the marsh-arm several times daily to the parish church, which stood in the centre of the town. Otherwise her days were passed in solitude, for she lived quite alone with the child, their only companion being a large dog. She passed the time not taken up by religion in wandering about the marsh, for she had few friends, and the people of Terbeeke often saw the three moving about the surface of the quagmire in places where there was no known track.

II--IN PATH OF PRUSSIAN INVADERS

Time passed, and the war broke out. Terbeeke was not in the direct path of the invaders, and, sheltered behind the forest, it almost seemed to the townspeople as though they might escape the fate of the rest of Belgium. But the respite was not for long. The low muttering of distant guns grew every day louder; the stream of fugitives hurrying through the forest and past the town towards the French frontier grew always denser; at last the climax came. A British officer dashed into the town at three o'clock in the morning and hurried into the Mairie. The civilian population, it was announced, must evacuate their houses instantly.

There followed the usual scenes of frantic terror and chaotic haste that happened so often during the opening chapters of the Great War. The one road out of the town was blocked with every kind of conveyance, from bicycle to dog-carts; there were blocks at every corner; precious minutes were wasted in useless recriminations; and long before the last civilian had left, the turmoil of desperate fighting was heard coming always nearer through the dim mystery of the forest.

It was one of the incidents of the Great Retreat. A flank battalion of British infantry, by some mishap, lost direction. Cut off from the main body, and fighting desperately, it was driven always further from the path along which safety lay, until at last, flinging itself into the forest of Terbeeke, for a whole day and night it held off the furious attacks of a brigade of Prussians.

But the odds were too great. Slowly but surely the battalion was forced back through the forest to the very outskirts. Back from there, after another frantic assault, it reeled, reduced now to two sparse companies--some three hundred men in all---across the little edging of cornfields into the stricken streets of Terbeeke.

There, at last, it found some respite. The Prussians, having learnt by bitter experience the fighting value of the "contemptible" little force arrayed against them, jibbed at the open frontal attack across bare plough-land, and remained hidden within the forest, awaiting reinforcements.

Meanwhile the British remnant fought desperately to establish themselves within the village and turn every house into a citadel; while their commander, a lieutenant of something under twenty-one, racked his brain for some way of escape. At one time it might have been possible to skirt the northern edge of the marsh, but already the attacking Prussians had pushed forward, and the British were now enclosed within a triangle, formed as to its sides by the overwhelming Prussian force, and as to its base by the impassable fastnesses of the mere.

"Unless something happens pretty quick," said the C.O. to his second-in-command, a boy of nineteen, "things are pretty considerably all U-P." (He said something to that effect, I mean. Madame Tavernier's narrative did not, of course, fill in such details.)

They were standing in the porch of the old church, gazing disconsolately over the flat stretches of marshland. The Boche fire had temporarily ceased, and they devoted the respite to seeking some way by which the marsh might be crossed even at the eleventh hour. But there was none, or none which they could discern.

"Wonder what they are waiting for?" said the boy, lighting a cigarette.

"Bringing up the guns, of course. It will be dark in an hour." The young C.O. gazed hopelessly to where the sun was already dropping to the cloud-capped western horizon, straining with ominous red the reedy pools before them.

"Moon will be up, though."

"All the better for them. I should give the village another two hours. And then----"

"You aren't going to surrender, surely?" There was the quiver of horror in the young voice.

They were interrupted by the C.S.M. of B Company.

"Not more than ten rounds a man, sir," he reported. "Machine-gun out of order." He made his report with the tranquil woodenness of his kind, without a quiver of voice or muscle. (If you say that it is impossible for me to know what these men said, or how they behaved, I can only reply that I have been through the same sort of thing myself.)

"Thanks, major. Men come in that were sounding the marsh?"

"Report there is no way across, sir."

"They certainly won't find one now it's getting dark. Better get back to your posts. They will begin again soon."

Even as he spoke there came the complaining whine of a four-inch shell high overhead.

III--THE BABE ON THE BATTLEFIELD WITH HIS DOG

Possibly it was the new sound that woke Hippolyte, or perhaps Casper, the mongrel wolf-hound, took it for the challenge of some ancestral enemy. At least, some half-hour later No. 21687 Private John Smith, of C Company, had a vision. He was not naturally an imaginative man, but he hastened to report it to the C.S.M.

"Lummy, sir," he said, "if there ain't a bloomin' angel comin' across the bloomin' marsh!"

And, sure enough, across the very centre of the shivering quag came a small figure, clothed in a long white robe very like those attributed to mediæval angels, and with a golden aureole about its head, cast by the last rays of the dying sun. Actually it was no angel, but little Hippolyte, looking for his mother. She had left him, very early in the morning, to go to Mass, trusting him, as often before, to the care of Casper. Usually she was not gone for more than half an hour or so. On that day, however, she had not returned in one hour or in three. She never _would_ return, for before the third hour she was lying dead in the little square before the church-door--one of a group of six, men and women, who had been caught leaving the building when the Germans, in their first assault, enfiladed the main street with machine-gun fire. They lay side by side, very peacefully, just as they fell, for the hard-pressed defenders of the village had found no leisure to remove them.

Hippolyte waited very patiently--as was his wont. He cried a little from loneliness at first, but his mother, before she left him, had set out the little portion of milk and bread that was to be his breakfast. Growing hungry, he sought for it in its accustomed place, ate it, and fell asleep again. It was the dog at last that disturbed him, later in the afternoon, by whimpering and scratching at the door, and gave him the great idea of starting out to find the mother who was so long in returning.

Child and dog set out together along the imperceptible track of safety that crept and twisted across the marsh. Alone Hippolyte would almost certainly have strayed from it, but the dog's surer instinct guarded him until, just at the moment when hope was at an end, he came as a vision of hope to the spent company of Englishmen.

That is practically the end of the story, for you can imagine the rest, except, perhaps, that the child, when he had almost reached the hard ground, grew afraid of the sound of firing, the noise overhead, and the gaunt, stark men staring at him in wondering silence. So he turned homeward again, Casper stalking beside him, sacrificing his lust for battle to his duty as foster-father. But they went slowly, the child often turning back to stare with wondering eyes at the increasing chaos behind him and, as the more impressionable among the soldiers would have it, beckoning them to follow him towards safety.

Follow they did, but as unbeaten soldiers should, in good order and with due precautions--and so escaped. The Germans lost time before they entered the deserted village, for they feared an ambush. When they _did_ enter, it was long past sunset and the night was too dark to do anything before dawn. Even then they had no guide to show them the track across the marsh, and they were forced to skirt it, losing so much time that the British battalion--if you can call less than three hundred men a battalion--got clear away, and in due course picked up the main body, taking with them Hippolyte and Casper.

You would say, if you did not know human nature, that there was no room for a legend of celestial intervention. But you would be wrong. Even in the rescued battalion--long since brought up to strength and upholding its laurels elsewhere in the line--the story holds good that somewhere unspecified on the Belgian frontier an angel, mediæval in every detail down to aureole, wings, and celestial robes, did actually intervene and rescue it from under the very noses of the baffled Boches. And this although Hippolyte, adopted child of the regiment, sports his sergeant-major's uniform for everyone to see, and Casper, brilliantly caparisoned, stalks as a mascot should behind the drums. Elsewhere the legend has assumed new details, as I realized when a very excellent clergyman assured me that it was ... George himself, mounted upon a white horse (so transmogrified, I take it, was black Casper), who rode up and down the line before the 2nd Battalion of the West Loamshires, shaking his sword at the advancing Prussian Guard, who not unnaturally fled in disorder. Perhaps, in Terbeeke, he has by this time become Ste. Gudule, or some other patron saint of the Belgians, with a fiery dragon or whatever be her saintly attributes. I don't know, because, as I say, I was never in Terbeeke, but here at least you have what really happened, as Madame Tavernier told it to me in the front room of her Blanchisserie du Cygne, in the village of Durdegem, and in the presence of Hippolyte himself, who afterwards begged shamelessly for _sous_.

A HERO TALE OF THE RED CROSS

_Told by G. S. Petroff, War Correspondent of the "Russkoye Slovo," Moscow_

The following incident is narrated in M. Petroff's account of a battle on the eastern front. Translated for _Current History_.

I--STORY OF THE WOUNDED GERMAN

One of our soldiers brought with him a German officer, who could hardly stand on his feet. His leg had been pierced by a bayonet, his shoulder was bleeding from a bullet, and his arm had been bruised by the butt end of a rifle. He was losing consciousness from pain and loss of blood. As soon as the soldier led him to our place he dropped with his whole weight to the ground. The doctor bandaged him, exclaiming: "What luck! Three wounds, and in spite of all of them he will be well soon. The wound in the leg is only a flesh wound, his arm is badly bruised but not broken, and only his collarbone at his shoulder is broken. In a month he will be all right again. Just look! what a handsome fellow, and what expensive underwear!"

The bandaged officer came to himself, looked around the yard, and, seeing the farmhouse in the background on fire, he sharply seated himself.

"Now be quiet, calm yourself," said the doctor, speaking in German and taking the man gently by the shoulders.

"My wife, my wife!" cried the German, tearing himself forward.

"Where is the wife?"

"There, in the house, in the fire!" He made an effort to get off the stretcher from under the doctor's hands.

"Is he delirious or what?" muttered the doctor in Russian. "There is no one in the house," he added soothingly in German. "Your German wounded were there, but they were saved in time."

"But my wife? My wife!" cried the captive in terror.

"What wife? How did she come here?"

"She is a nurse. She was here with the wounded. We loved each other, we married only a year ago. She became a nurse. Our regiment happened to be near their hospital. Your offensive was unexpected. There was no time to remove the hospital. The other nurses left, but she would not leave when I was so near. Where is she? My wife!"

"Did any one see a German nurse in the house or yard?" asked the doctor, turning to the Russian soldiers and telling them briefly what the prisoner had said:

"There was no woman," came the response. "The house was empty. Look at the fire within. Even mice would have run out by now."

At this moment something metallic shrilled through the air. A heavy German shell flew over us.

"Scoundrels!" cursed the doctor. "They are firing on us--and their own wounded! We must get out of this. Two or three more shells and they will begin dropping in the yard. Carry our wounded first, then theirs. Hurry, or we shall remain here for eternity!"

II--A WOMAN'S FIGURE AT WINDOW OF BURNING HOUSE

The captive officer, apparently powerless, could not rise from the stretcher, where he was lying with one of his soldiers who had been wounded before him. He gazed devouringly at the blazing house. Suddenly he shouted savagely: "There, at the window, under the roof! Look, she is breaking the window--where the smoke is pouring out!"

We looked at the roof of the blazing house, and, in truth, there was a woman's figure in white, with a red cross on her breast. The doctor shouted: "Eh, fellows, it is true! A woman was left in the house--a nurse--his wife!"

"What can be done?" asked the stunned soldiers. "The whole house is on fire, and she is not strong enough to break through the window frame. She must be weak from fright. But why did she go up? Why not down?"

"There's no use guessing!" shouted a bearded fellow, evidently from the reserves, throwing off his overcoat.

"Where are you going?" cried the soldiers.

But he was already out of reach of their voices. He rushed into the house. All were stupefied, fearing to breathe. A minute passed, another, a third. Then at the window appeared the bearded face of the Russian soldier. There came the sound of broken glass and wood. Above our heads something was shrilling, but no one paid attention to the German shells. The soldier broke the window, dragged the woman into the open air. She was unconscious.

"Catch!" rang from above, and a big white parcel came down. The soldiers caught it successfully on the hero's outspread overcoat. Only one of them was hurt in the eye by the heel of her shoe.

"How will our chap get back to us now?" asked the soldiers of one another. "It is hell inside."

"Oh, he will get out, all right," said some one. "It is easier to get out than to get in. He knows the way. And if he burns some of his beard, no harm; he has a large one."

"Carry her to her husband!" ordered the doctor, "and get out from here immediately. The Germans are shelling us. Take away the rest, and don't forget the couple," remarked jokingly the doctor, happy over the incident. "I will wait for our hero. He may be burned."

The soldiers caught the remaining stretchers, and nearly ran out of the yard. At that moment a big German shell struck the burning house. A deafening explosion shook the air. The walls trembled, shook, and fell. The heroic soldier had not had time to get out. He remained buried under the ruins.

When the woman recovered consciousness near her wounded husband she did not understand where she was. She murmured in perplexity: "Dream, death? Otto, is that you? Are we together in heaven?"

"On earth and both alive," calmed the doctor.

"How did you get to the upper story?" asked the husband.

"I saw Russian soldiers run into the house. I feared violence, so I ran upstairs. I thought I would run down later, but then came the fire.... A soldier appeared behind me and I was terrified to death."

"But that soldier saved you!" sighed the doctor.

"How? Where is he?"

"In heaven, if there is such a place for heroes." The doctor then told them all. The German officer and his wife both cried.

"But how was it that your guns were firing at a farm which you were occupying?" asked the prisoner.

"Our guns?" exclaimed the doctor, who was already bandaging a new victim. "It was your guns that were shelling a house over which flew a German Red Cross flag. Our soldiers were saving the lives of your wounded, and your guns were firing at both ours and yours. They killed the man who saved you. That's the way the Kaiser makes war."

LIFE STORY OF "GRANDMOTHER OF THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION"

_Triumphant Return from Forty-four Years in Siberian Exile_

_Told by Catherine Breshkovskaya, the Russian Revolutionist_

This life story of the "Grandmother of the Revolution," Catherine Breshkovskaya, is the living symbol of the Russian people's long and hard struggle for freedom. Of her seventy-three years forty-four have been spent in prison and Siberian exile. But neither the wilderness of Siberia nor the severity of convict labor has broken the spirit of this little woman. Entering the struggle against Czarism while still in its infancy, she lived to see its complete overthrow, and the Russian people remembered their loving "Babushka." They made her journey from Siberia to Petrograd after the revolution a continuous triumphal procession, such as no Czar or King has ever been accorded. Mme. Breshkovskaya, upon her arrival home, began touring Russia in the interests of Kerensky's policies. Her love for the common people, her influence on the peasantry, her faith in the stability of the New Russia, made her a great power. She has told the story of her life in the Petrograd weekly, "_Niva_," which has been translated by Isaac Don Levine for the _New York Tribune_. Here she tells for the first time how she journeyed afoot over Russia to preach "freedom from ignorance and political tyranny" to the peasants; how she was sentenced to Siberia; how she escaped, was captured, reimprisoned and flogged; and how on the news of the Czar's downfall she began her journey home on a sledge over the snow and ice to join her people in the establishment of the republic.

I--"I ALWAYS PITIED THE SERFS"

I was born in 1844. I passed my childhood and youth in the province of Tchernigoff, and all my life I remained grateful to my parents for the good and wise training and schooling which they gave me. They pitied the serfs and never oppressed them. Nevertheless there was a sharp difference between our life, the life of landlords, and that of the peasants in their cabins, such a shocking difference that my childish soul suffered greatly from the contradiction between the reality and the teaching of Christ. My mother would often read to us the New Testament and biographies of the great apostles of truth and love for humanity.