Part 7

Another man was hit--close to Tim. He squealed like a girl; and a fellow near turned a dirty white, stumbled, with a clatter fell in a fainting fit. Tardily the men advanced, and any acute observer would have seen they had little heart in the business. Some hung behind almost unconsciously, and had to be hurried up by the sergeants. The bullets became more thick. A man started to blubber behind. "Gawd 'ave mercy! I ... I can't stand it! I won't go on!" he whined. It turned out to be a sergeant, who had broken down too. He'd had little rest, poor chap, through shepherding his company ... and now he had knocked under. The company swayed and hesitated. Some of them faced round. It was touch and go. "Steady there! Steady! Come on, men;" said Stansfield, the little company lieutenant, as the men wavered on the grey edge of collapse. "Steady that company; what in hell's the matter with 'em. Keep your men up and going, Sir!" shouted a captain rushing over. But the company had gone all to pieces. The fire of battle had departed from them, and it flung itself on the ground. And soon the whole battalion was taking cover in the same way. A captain called on Tim's company to advance. Two men obeyed and one of them was Tim. But the enemy's fire redoubled and the other man was shot, and so Tim at once took cover again. The saying of his sergeant-instructor in England came to his mind, that a man must lie down and hide if he wished to live, and he felt quite justified in hugging the earth. Tim ached in every inch of his body. Surely something was snapping in his brain, for those dusty khaki figures on the ground, the sky, the earth all seemed to be dancing madly about him. It was not yet light and Tim strained his eyes to pierce the darkness. Then he made a discovery. A dark mass, like some prehistoric monster, was gradually approaching. Tim spoke to a man next to him who was softly swearing and bandaging a shattered hand. He peered through the light and half-light of dawn, and then started to laugh in a nervous way. "Hell, mate;" he said, "the whole German race are advancing against us; it's all up with us. Look, they are coming on like a solid wall ... springing out of the earth just solid ... no end to 'em."

It was just about that time that Tim observed a light mist rising in front of him. It seemed to scintillate and sparkle as it rose, and curled in a sort of pillar or spiral. "Great Heaven!" he whispered to himself, "the thing is taking shape."

And true enough, in a very few moments he saw standing erect in front of him a tall man--and he was dressed in shining armour; that was the strange thing about him. A strange-looking fellow this! He was more like a Spaniard than an Englishman, with black eyes and olive complexion. His expression was lofty and noble, and his tall lithe figure was in strict accordance with British traditions. So were the bold features, which were rather marred by a white scar which stretched from his left nostril to the angle of his jaw. But the jet-black hair and the eyes--the deep, dark, challenging eyes--were those of Seville. A straight sword by his side and a painted long-bow at his shoulder proclaimed him a bowman. A white surcoat with the red lion of St. George upon it covered his broad chest, while a sprig of new-plucked furze at the side of his steel cap gave a touch of gaiety to his grim war-worn clothes.

No sooner had Tim looked up than a deep rich voice exclaimed:

"_Corpus Domini!_ do you need a leader?"

Tim was not a man to be easily startled, and with the bullets whining and ping-thudding all around him, it was no manner of a time to be easily startled. But the voice, on account of its unearthly sound, fairly made him jump. He picked up his rifle, and stood upright. "Come along! Come along!" the voice went on. "Why dost stand there, De Gamelyn?"

"Oh, my God! I ... I can't stand it! The loss of blood and the marching has done for me!"

"So! coming into the fight like a lion, you go out like a lamb. By Saint Paul! this is not in accordance with the De Gamelyn traditions. Take up thy arms! Come along!" said the stranger tapping him on the shoulder with a barbed shaft trimmed with grey goose feather.

"Oh! please ... please.... I'm so tired!" said Tim, like a child speaking to its nurse.

The bowman saw that the boy's lips and tongue were black with thirst, and his eyes were blood-shot. And when Tim staggered over to him all his body heaved and trembled like an overdriven horse. Sick and dizzy with pain, he cast himself to earth again, and waited for death. "Why don't they hit me?... I've tried,--oh, so hard!" he sobbed.

"Steady there! Steady, De Gamelyn! Take this," said the bowman, and drew something from his side and handed it to him. It was a sword, if swords be made of fire, of lightning, of dazzling lights; and the moment Tim grasped it all his pain and dizziness fell from him.

"What is this?" he asked.

"The Sword of Life and Death," said the bowman.

"Who the blazes are you?" Tim asked sceptically.

It was with a touch of the Irish brogue that a cheery voice answered. "A friend to a friend," said the bowman, "and the devil to a foe."

"Irish?" Tim questioned.

"Citizen of the world in time past ... now a citizen of heaven."

Tim gazed at the strange man in earnest scrutiny. He appeared quite at his ease with bullets whining around him and he unslung a jack of wine and drank.

"May a parched man claim a drink of your wine?" Tim cried.

"Give what you have, ask what you need. That is the De Gamelyn code of law," said the man, and handed Tim the flagon.

"You are cheerful, sir," said Tim, his blood somewhat warmed by the wine. "In the name of the devil, who are you, and of what country?"

"My name is Nigel De Gamelyn. My Mother, dear soul, was French. My father was wise enough to be an Irishman. So much for my blood, which unites happily the practical and the dreamer fluids. I am of no country but I know all places from the King's tombs at Rome to the old inns that stand about the upper Arun. I have marched with armies over this territory aforetime. There is no shadow, I believe, on my soul, has such strength in him as I, and I rest content to be nothing to myself and all things to every man. That being bliss."

As the bowman spoke, a bullet kicked up a cloud of dust at his feet.

"Hola, by my hilt! it is time that we were stirring," he said. "Leave these fellows to grovel and remove yourself. Follow: who follows Nigel de Gamelyn?" He hitched up his belt and strode forward with his great bow, and Tim saw him send a shaft with a twanging noise five hundred and thirty paces. One of the German officers, towering above the other men, stood out distinctly, and then he dropped.

"I'd like to take a look at that knave," the bowman remarked, drawing a fresh arrow from his sheaf. "By the twang of string! I'll swear I drilled him clean between his eyes."

The enemy were getting closer now, and from the men lying around them broke a violent fusillade. It was quite useless, but it relieved their nerves. Some were discharging their shots into the turf a few yards in front of them. Others were shooting at aeroplanes.

Then suddenly there came upon Tim a great anger. A bullet striking him brought him to his senses, and he saw the men sprawling belly-flat about him. This was not war, this ignominious crawling, this grovelling in the soil, this halting! The spirit of his fathers spoke to him. He remembered one of his father's favourite sayings: "The duty of a man of the line is to fight, and if needs be, die, not to avoid dying." His anger grew--"damn them for a pack of cringing, footling cowards: he, Tim Gamelyn, descendant of the De Gamelyns who fought in a hundred battles, would teach them how men of his father's house went into battle."

A senior officer called on those nearest to Tim to advance. And men rose up.

"D. Company, fix bayonets! Close in!" came the order. Tim gripped his sword and strode over to the Bowman. Then the advancing Germans poured a blasting volley on them.

"The Old Battalion--_charge!_" came the stentorian voice of a senior. The men scrambled to their feet, and Tim following the Bowman sprang ahead of the Battalion. The men leapt across the blood-smeared grass after them with the speed of a winged fury, but they struck the Germans a dozen yards ahead of the battalion. The bowman had hurled aside his long bow and was using a short battle mace with terrific effect. As for Tim: all he wanted to do was to slash; stab and slash again with that wonderful sword. There followed a nightmare of drawn, grinning faces, of fierce yells and groans. The mud-stained grey figures struck at him wildly, futilely. On and on Tim went, his glittering blade now at a white face, now at a throat, now at a chest, still stabbing and thrusting to pass through the wall of men which barred his way.

The man with the bow ranged up alongside him: "On, man, on, in the name of God, march forward.... By St. George and Our Lady! we are breaking up their front;" he muttered.

"Strike me crimson!" bellowed a man near to Tim, "but you're a blooming marvel! Those German beggars are going down for twenty yards around your (decorated) sword without being hit at all. Look! Look! there goes another Hun down. Let me come over near you, mate!"

But Tim knew that De Gamelyn the Bowman had summoned to their help the armies of the unconquered dead. They came, the De Gamelyns of all generations from Crecy to Waterloo: they fought by his side, and the machine gun bullets, which fell upon the dusty earth like tropical rain, hurt them not.

Again and again the Bowman's mace smashed and lashed out before him, and Tim thrust, and thrust yet again with his sword. He heard the deep-throated roar of the bowman's singing "The Song of the Bow."

What of the shaft? The shaft was cut in England: A long shaft, a strong shaft, Barbed and trim and true; So we'll drink all together To the grey goose feather And the land where the grey goose flew.

Suddenly a yell, horrible and fierce, uprose from the soldiers, and he heard the bowman's voice no more.

"They're on the run, by Gawd, they've got it right in the neck this journey," bellowed a soldier as the German infantry broke and tailed away. Then something took Tim in the chest, something wet and red, that went through him.

The man next to Tim saw the long bayonet stand out beyond his back, saw Tim sway, laughing, and snap the steel short as he fell upon it.

A body of kilted men suddenly swept from the right of the hard-pressed battalion, swept by in silence, and in silence swept the remaining Boches up one side of the ridge and down the other into eternity.

Two days later Colonel Arbuthnot inquired after the welfare of Private Tim Gamelyn at the field hospital.

"He was admitted suffering from sunstroke, and a terrible bayonet wound. He died early in the morning," said the doctor.

"Is it true that he saved the battalion by urging our fellows on at the critical moment?"

"Yes," said Colonel Arbuthnot, "but do you happen to know if he had an officer's sword with him by chance when he was carried in here? All my men speak of a 'sword of flame' with which he drove the Huns before him. Even hardened soldiers who have been through many campaigns have been babbling all sorts of nonsense of ghostly regiments of bowmen who helped to turn the German attack!"

The doctor walked over to a shelf, and, taking down a rusty old sword, placed it on the table.

"Perhaps that is what you refer to, Colonel," he said. "Where the fellow picked it up is a mystery to me. It must be some hundreds of years old."

Colonel Arbuthnot took it in his hands and read this inscription on the blade:

NIGEL DE GAMELYN ... ADSUM ...

III

THE MILLS OF GOD

They were putting little Boudru to bed--the R.H.A. and the Corps of Royal Engineers and Stansfield, the big fat Infantry Sergeant. His little sister, already tucked up in bed, was nearly asleep. Boudru had been allowed to stay up till Sergeant Stansfield had come in from duty. The special privilege had been accorded to the little French boy on this, the last night that the British troops were to spend in the village. Boudru's home was in a portion of our line in which the defence trenches were of the semi-detached type--they did not join up with the other part of the line, and at times the place was distinctly unhealthy. Sometimes it was in the hands of the Huns, sometimes the British rushed it, and held on for a few weeks; there had been times when it had been occupied by both, at other times it was written on the squared official maps as no man's land. It was a spot in which there was always a feeling of something dreadful being close at hand; there was an air of expectancy about it and one felt there was a marked atmosphere of nerves about. You might be sniped from the house opposite, or blown out of the windows by a seventeen-inch shell. You never know. The man who sold you tobacco the day before might be lying stiff in the gutter next day, or more probably still, he might be dining with the German Staff a mile and a half away. All this uncertainty, coupled with the fact that the place was full of spies, and that valuable information had been finding its way through to the German lines, made the General decide to withdraw his troops and take up some trenches behind it.

Boudru sat on the big armchair and swung his white bare legs defiantly. Perhaps it had better be explained that my lord Boudru was five years old. "Boudru going to shut eye?" said the fat infantry sergeant suggestively.

"The cots are down and the beds unrolled," said the R.H.A. man falling into the diction of the barrack-room.

"No," said Boudru. "You must tell me for the last time the story about the wicked German baby killer who was turned into a pig. The man of the guns must tell it, and the fat man of the infantry shall hide beneath the bed and make pig shrieks--many pig shrieks--at the time when he is killed."

"But we shall disturb little sister Elise," said the fat sergeant with visions of a dismal ten minutes wedged beneath the small cot and the floor.

"Elise is not bye-o yet," piped a thin voice from where two eyes were sparkling elfishly from a tangle of golden locks.

"Go on, my English man--There was once a big fat baby killer who lived in Potsdam ..."

Then the R.H.A. man (a journalist by profession, a duke by inclination, and now by destiny a very clever gunner) began the famous story. Never before had the telling of that tale been given with such splendour of effect. The fat sergeant had made pig-noises with multitudinous yells in at least fifteen different keys, and the little cross-eyed driver of the Engineers had dressed up in a real Hun helmet and grey coat. The grand finale in which the Engineer had turned into a pig on all fours and had been mercilessly put to death with the fat sergeant's bayonet, had filled Boudru's soul with joy. He reflected and gloated on the scene far into the night. Then he fell fast asleep and met with most dazzling adventures with a German soldier who had been hiding in the Jacobean oak chest with the fleur-de-lis carved on the side, which stands beneath the bulgy leaded window.

As a grey and wretched dawn came in with a cold and dispiriting rain there came to the ears of little Boudru the steady champing of marching feet in the street below. Slush, slush, slush went all those feet, beating the muddy road, and then the noise of metal on metal woke the silent village streets as the guns went by.

"The soldiers! The soldiers!" exclaimed Boudru as he bounded over and jumped on to the Jacobean chest to watch them pass. It was fated that they were the last English soldiers that Boudru would ever see.

Some weeks later Boudru's mother was busy with odd jobs in the kitchen garden and the children were playing in the front room, there was a ring at the door and the sound of a butt-end of a rifle, as it "grounded" on the cobble stones. When Boudru on tiptoe lifted the latch, the door swung open, and a big man in a greenish uniform stood before him. There was no sign of cap-badge or title on his shoulder straps, and he was horribly dirty. He carried two English ration bags, besides his own rucksack, and they were all filled to bursting with loot. Evil beamed from his narrow, leering eyes; and when he smiled at Boudru it twirled his demon-like mouth into a grotesque shape. He looked both depraved and suspicious, a disreputable scoundrel with a gun, and that, you will find in the fullness of time, was just what he was.

"Let us shut the door," said Elise. "This is not a pretty man." But the man from Stettin pushed past.

"Brat;" said he, "drink."

Boudru's mother had hurried up to the door as fast as her bulk and her stout legs would permit.

Every day she had expected a visit from the Huns. It was useless to argue with such a man, so she took the German in.

"Brandy," said the man.

"There is only a little left ... it is over there, on the sideboard."

The soldier walked over, finished half a bottle, and announced that it was like water.

"More," he ordered, "Shoot you if no find."

The woman at last managed to unearth a bottle of good Burgundy and another bottle of brandy.

He drank both the bottles, and when he had finished, he asked for more like every other Boche will do. Then he chose the front bedroom and threw himself down on the bed in a drunken sleep.

When the next morning broke the French woman went to awaken the thief and while the latter was making his toilet little Boudru entered. He regarded the Hun with gravity for at least five minutes and then delivered himself of his opinion.

"I don't like you," he said slowly, regarding the Hun, with his elfish eyes. "I don't like you. I think you may be like the man in the English soldiers' story, who turned into a pig--a baby killer perhaps. It is because of your red hair that I think you may turn ..."

The man from Stettin who had been trying to drag a comb through his horrible beard and hair, turned, and he looked like a big red devil, the sun being on his head, and red beard and all.

"What's that?" he said, as he lurched ominously across the room. He had swallowed the contents of a flask of Benedictine which he had taken from his rucksack, and the repeated drinks were taking effect.

"I'll sweep the house, so there isn't a bug in a blanket left--you damned brat!" He was bellowing like a bull, chewing his red beard and muttering to himself. As he passed a table, he knocked the empty flask on the floor. It did not break, and he viciously stamped his feet on it, smashing it to pieces. He began to go mad from that moment. As he kicked the wreckage about the room, his glance fell upon his rifle with the fixed bayonet. And then the swine-dog ran amok. Boudru stood with his back to the door: the blood froze in his veins, and his little body stiffened into absolute rigidity.

"Turn into a pig!" shrieked the Hun. "What did you say? Turn into ..."

The bayonet flashed, and little Boudru--but what followed shall not be printed. It would be passing the decent bounds of descriptive writing to put it in black and white. It is sufficient to say that some minutes later the Hun prised the floor-boards up with his bayonet, and Boudru, from that moment, without warning, or leaving any trace, disappeared from the world. He returned in the fullness of time. And this was the way of it.

For the hundredth time that day, the Hun had gone into the bedroom to look out of the bulgy bedroom window. Fear began to come over him without any warning, and he was thinking of little Boudru down there in the dark. The thing within him that served him for a heart was beating queer rhythms ... the beating sounded like a regiment of British Infantry on the march.

"Look," said he to the housewife, "look out on the road. Do you see soldiers?"

The good woman, distraught between suspense and hope for her little one, who had been missing for six long hours, blinked away a tear on her lashes and peered through the diamond panes.

No one was to be seen. But between three and four in the morning the first faint champing of marching feet could be heard and the Hun came down from the bedroom looking as pale as death. He opened the door and stood there listening. The insolent crunch, crunch, crunch of heavy nail-studded service boots came nearer, and a khaki column appeared on the winding road. The housewife, whose aching eyes had searched the road for Boudru all day, saw them too.

"Look," she cried, "look! The English soldiers are coming. Do you see?"

_They were coming!_

The man from Stettin rushed up to the bedroom, and jumped into the oak chest.

"Not tell the English! Not tell!"

Fifteen or twenty soldiers were to be heard grounding rifles and throwing off their equipment in front of the house.

Entered here Sergeant Stansfield, and shouted gaily to the housewife, but the moment he looked into her pale and worn face he understood that some sorrow had befallen her. Before he could hold her she had slid silently down on the floor, at his feet, and covered her face. "Ah,--ah,--ah! O God, help and pity me! They have taken my little son," she cried.

At this moment a soldier rushed in at the door. "I think there is a man who looks like a Boche trying to get out of the bedroom window!" he said. "Will you come, Sergeant? Quick!"

The sergeant went quickly, and returned with some men with fixed bayonets and led them up to the bedroom: He told them to break in. The man was on his knees, with his horrible hands lifted up in supplication. The soldiers kicked the man up and made him go downstairs into the front room.