Chapter XV

.

XI

AT G.H.Q.[8]

+-----------------------------------------------------------------------+ | Billet de Logement. | | | | Mme. Bonnard, 131 rue Robert le Frisson, logera les sous-dits, | | savoir: un officier, un sous officier, deux hommes; fournira le lit, | | place au feu et à la chandelle, conformément à loi du 3 juillet, 1877.| | Délivré à la Mairie, | | le 31me Janvier, 1915. | | Le Maire ---- | +-----------------------------------------------------------------------+

The Camp Commandant, who is a keeper of lodging-houses and an Inspector of Nuisances, had given me a slip of paper on which was inscribed the address No. 131 rue Robert le Frisson and a printed injunction to the occupier to know that by these presents she was enjoined to provide me with bed, fire, and lights. Armed with this billeting-paper and accompanied by my servant, a private in the Suffolks, who was carrying my kit, I knocked at the door of No. 131, affecting an indifference to my reception which I did not feel. It seemed to me that a rate-collector, presenting a demand note, could have boasted a more graceful errand. The door opened and an old lady in a black silk gown inquired, "Qu'est-ce que vous voulez, M'sieu'?" I presented my billeting-paper with a bow. Her waist was girt with a kind of bombardier's girdle from which hung a small armoury of steel implements and leather scabbards: scissors, spectacle case, a bunch of keys, a button-hook, and other more or less intimidating things. "Jeanne," she called in a quavering voice, and as the _bonne_ appeared, tying her apron-strings, they read the billeting-paper together, the one looking over the shoulder of the other, Madame reading the words as a child reads, and as though she were speaking to herself. The paper shook in her tremulous hands, and I could see that she was very old. It was obvious that my appearance in that quiet household was as agitating as it was unexpected. "Et votre ordonnance?" she asked, with a glance at my servant. "Non, il dort dans la caserne." "Bien!" she said, and with a smile made me welcome.

It was soon evident that, my credentials being once established, I was to be regarded as a member of the household, and nothing would satisfy Madame but that I should be assured of this. Having shown me my bedroom, with its pompous bed draped with a tent of curtains, she took me on a tour of her _ménage_. I was conducted into the kitchen, bright with copper pans and the _marmite_--it was as sweet and clean as a dairy; the resources of the still-room were displayed to me, and the confitures and spices were not more remarkable than the domestic pharmacy in which the herbs of the field had been distilled by Madame's own hands to yield their peculiar virtues, rue for liver, calamint for cholera, plantain for the kidneys, fennel for indigestion, elderberry for sore throat, and dandelion for affections of the blood. Then I was shown the oak presses full of linen white as snow and laid up in lavender. This inventory being concluded, I was presented with a key of the front door to mark my admission into the freedom of the house, and invited to take a glass of Burgundy while Sykes was unpacking my kit upstairs.

Madame, it seemed, was a widow of eighty-five years of age, without issue, and if her eyes were dim and her natural force abated, her teeth, as she proudly told me, were her own. She obviously belonged to that _rentier_ class who spend the evening of their days in the quiet town which serves as G.H.Q.--a town which has a kind of faded gentility, and which, behind its inscrutable house-fronts, conceals a good deal of quiet opulence in the matter of old china, silver, and oak. In her youth Madame had kept a _pension_ and had had English demoiselles among her charges. She had never been to England but she had heard of "Hyde Park." Did I know it? She received my assurance with obvious gratification as though it established a personal intimacy between us. "Avez-vous tué des Allemands?" My negative answer left her disappointed but hopeful.

"La guerre, quand finira-t-elle?" interjected the _bonne_, who, I afterwards found, had a husband at the war. Those interrogatories were to become very familiar to me. Every evening, when I returned from my visits to Divisional and Brigade Headquarters, mistress and servant always put me through the same catechism:

"Avez-vous tué des Allemands?"

"La guerre, quand finira-t-elle?"

The immense seriousness, not to say solicitude, with which these inquiries were addressed to me eventually led me into the most enterprising mendacities. I killed a German every day, greatly to Madame's satisfaction, and my total bag when I came away was sufficiently remarkable to be worth a place in an official _communiqué_. I think it gave Madame a feeling of security, and I hoped Jeanne might consider that it appreciably accelerated the end of the war. But "Guillaume," as she always called him, was the principal object of Madame's aversion, and she never mentioned the name of the All-Highest without a lethal gesture as she drew her tremulous hand across her throat and uttered the menacing words: "Couper la gorge." She often uttered these maledictions to Sykes in the kitchen, as she watched him making the toast for my breakfast, and I have no doubt that the "Oui, Madame," with which he invariably assented, gave her great satisfaction. Doubtless it made her feel that the heart of the British Army was sound. Sykes used to study furtively a small book called _French, and how to speak it_, but he was very chary of speaking it, and seemed to prefer a deaf-and-dumb language of his own. But he was naturally a man of few words, and phlegmatic. He described the first battle of Ypres, in which he had been "wownded," in exactly twenty-four words, and I could never get any more out of him, though he became comparatively voluble on the subject of his wife at Norwich and the twins. He was an East Anglian, and made four vowels do duty for five, his e's being always pronounced as a's; he had done his seven years' "sarvice" with the colours, and was a reservist; he was an admirable servant--steady, cool, and honest. I imagine he had never acted as servant to any of his regimental officers, for on the first occasion when he brought up my breakfast I was not a little amused to observe that the top of the egg had been carefully removed, the rolls sliced and buttered, and the bread and butter cut into slender "fingers," presumably for me to dip into the ochreous interior of the egg; it reminded me of my nursery days. Perhaps he was in the habit of doing it for the twins. I gently weaned him from this tender habit. He performed all his duties, such as making my bed, or handing me a letter, with quick automatic movements as though he were presenting arms. Also his face, which was usually expressionless as though his mind were "at ease," had a way of suddenly coming to "attention" when you spoke to him. He had a curious and recondite knowledge of the folk-lore of the British Army, and entertained me at times with stories of "Kruger's Own," "The White Shirts," "The Dirty Twelfth," "The Holy Boys," "The Saucy Seventh," having names for the regiments which you will never find in the _Army List_. In short, he was a survival and in a way a tragic survival. For how many of the old Army are left? I fear very few, and many traditions may have perished with them.

In his solicitude for me Sykes had jealous rivals in Madame and Jeanne. Madame reserved to herself as her peculiar prerogative the deposit of a hot-water "bottle" in my bed every night, such a hot-water bottle as I have never seen elsewhere. It reminded me of nothing so much as the barrel of one of the newer machine-guns, being a long fluted cylinder of black steel. This was always borne by Madame every night in ritualistic procession, Jeanne following with a silver candlestick and a night-light. The ceremony concluded with a bow and "good-night," two words of which Madame was inordinately proud. She never attained "good-morning," but she more than supplied the deficiency of English speech by the grace of her French manners, always entering my room at 8 A.M. as I lay in bed, with the greeting, "Bon matin, M'sieu', avez-vous bien dormi?" Perhaps I looked, as I felt, embarrassed on the first occasion, for she quickly added in French, "I am old enough to be your mother"--as indeed she was. She had at once the resignation in repose and the agitation in action of extreme old age. I have seen her dozing in her chair in the salon, as I passed through the hall, with her gnarled hands extended on her knees in just that attitude of quiet waiting which one associates with the well-known engraving in which Death is figured as the coming of a friend. But when she was on her feet she moved about with a kind of aimless activity, opening drawers and shutting them and reopening them and speaking to herself the while, until Jeanne, catching my puzzled expression, would whisper loudly in my ear with a tolerant smile, "Elle est très VIEILLE." Jeanne had acquired a habit of raising her voice, owing to Madame's deafness, which resulted in her whispers partaking of the phonetic quality of those stage asides which, by a curious convention, while audible at the very back of the dress circle, are quite inaudible to the other characters on the stage. Whether Madame ever overheard these auricular confidences I know not. If she did, I doubt if she regarded them, for she was under the illusion, common to very old people who live in the society of a younger generation and were mature adults when their companions were merely adolescent, that Jeanne, who had entered her service as a child, had never grown up. If Madame seemed "très vieille" to Jeanne, it was indisputable that Jeanne continued "très jeune" to Madame. She was, indeed, firmly convinced that she was looking after Jeanne, whereas in truth it was Jeanne who looked after her. For Jeanne was at least thirty-five, with a husband at the war, in virtue of whom she enjoyed a separation allowance of one franc a day, and a boy for whom she received ten sous. Her husband, a _pompier_, got nothing. It never occurred to her to regard this provision as inadequate. And she was as capable as she was contented, and sang at her work.

It was often difficult to believe that this quiet backwater was within an hour or two of the trenches. G.H.Q. was indeed situated well back behind "the Front," which, however precise the maps in the newspapers may affect to make it, is, like the Equator of our school-books, a more or less "imaginary line drawn across the earth's surface." Imaginary because if a line be, as we were taught with painful reiteration, length without breadth, then "the Front" is not a line at all, much less a straight line in the sense of the shortest distance between two points. It is not straight, for it curves and sags and has its salients and re-entrant angles; and it is not a line, for it has breadth as well as length. Broadly speaking, the Front extends back to the H.Q. of the armies (to say nothing of the H.Q. of corps, divisions, and brigades), and thence to G.H.Q. itself, which may be regarded as being "the Back of the Front," to vary a classical expression of _Punch_. The Front is, indeed, to be visualised not as a straight line but as a fully opened fan, the periphery of which is the fire-trenches, the ribs the lines of communication, and the knob or knuckle is General Headquarters. When we extend our Front southwards and take over the French trenches we just expand our fan a little more. When we come to make a general advance all along the periphery, the whole fan will be thrust forward, and the knuckle with it, for the relative distances of General Headquarters, and minor Headquarters, from this periphery and from one another are a more or less constant quantity, being determined by such fixed considerations as the range of modern guns and the mobility of transport.

From G.H.Q., the brain of the Army, the volitional centre of the whole organism, radiate the sensory and motor nerves by which impressions at the Front are registered and plans for action transmitted. It is the home of the Staff, not of the Armies, and contains more "brass hats" than all the other Headquarters put together. Beyond the "details" in the barracks it contains few of the rank and file, and its big square betrays little of the crowded animation of the towns nearer the fighting line, with their great parks of armoured cars, motor lorries, and ammunition waggons, their filter-carts, and their little clusters and eddies of men resting in billets. The Military Police on point-duty have a comparatively quiet time, although despatch-riders are, of course, for ever whizzing to and fro with messages from and to the Front. It is as full of departmental offices as Whitehall itself--some 153 of them to be exact--each one indicated by a combination of initial letters, for staff officers are men of few words and cogent, and it saves time to say "O." when you mean Operations, "I." for Intelligence, "A.G." for Adjutant-General; a fashion which is faithfully followed at the other H.Q., for D.A.A.Q.M.G. saves an enormous number of polysyllables.

Hence the proximity of hostilities has left but little outward and visible sign upon the ancient town. The tradesmen have, it is true, made some concessions to our presence, and one remarks the inviting legends "Top-hole Tea" in the windows of a _pâtisserie_ and "High life" over the shop of a tailor. Four of us made a private arrangement with a buxom housewife, whereby, in return for four francs per head a day and the pooling of our rations, she undertook to provide us with lunch and dinner, thereby establishing a "Mess" of our own. Many such fraternities there were in the absence of a regular regimental mess. But these arrangements were more private than military, the only obligation on the ordinary householder being the furnishing of billets. Occasionally the cobbled streets became the scene of an unwonted animation when young French recruits celebrated their call to the colours by marching down the streets arm-in-arm singing ribald songs, or a squad of sullen German prisoners were marched up them on their way to the prison, within which they vanished amid the imprecations of the crowd. One such squad I saw arriving in a motor lorry, from the tailboard of which they jumped down to enter the gates, and one of them, a clumsy fellow of about thirteen stones, landed heavily in his ammunition boots from a height of about five feet on the foot of a British soldier on guard. The latter winced and hastily drew back his foot, but beyond that gave no sign; I wondered whether, had the positions been reversed and the scene laid across the Rhine, a German guard would have exhibited a similar tolerance. I doubt it.

The town itself seemed to be living on its past, for indubitably it had seen better days. An ancient foundation of the Jesuits now converted into the Map and Printing Department of the R.E.'s, a church whose huge nave had been secularised to the uses of motor transport, a museum which served to incarcerate the German prisoners, all testified to the vanished greatness, as did also the private mansions, which preserved a kind of mystery behind their high-walled gardens and massive double doors. There was one such which I never passed at night without thinking of the Sieur de Maletroit's door. The streets were narrow, tortuous, and secretive, with many blind alleys and dark closes, and it required no great effort of the imagination--especially at night when not a light showed--to call to mind the ambuscades and adventures with the watch which they must have witnessed some centuries before. The very names of the streets--such as the _Rue d'Arbalête_--held in them something of romance. To find one's billet at night was like a game of blind man's buff, and one felt rather than saw one's way. Not a soul was to be seen, for the whole town was under _droit de siège_, and the civilian inhabitants had to be within doors by nine o'clock, while all the entrances and exits to and from the town were guarded by double sentries night and day. Certain dark doorways also secreted a solitary sentry, and my own office boasted a corporal's guard--presumably because the Field-Cashier had his rooms on the first floor. The sanitation was truly medieval; on either side of the cobbled streets noisome gutters formed an open sewer into which housewives emptied their slop-pails every morning, while mongrel dogs nosed among the garbage. Yet the precincts were not without a certain beauty, and every side of the town was approached through an avenue of limes or poplars. But in winter the sodden landscape was desolate beyond belief, these roads presenting just that aspect of a current of slime in a muddy sea which they suggested to the lonely horseman on the eve of Waterloo in that little classic of De Vigny's known to literature as _Laurette_.

Such was the country and such the town in which we were billeted. Now upon a morning in February it happened that I was smoking a cigarette in the little garden, bordered by hedges of box, while waiting for my car, and as I waited I watched Jeanne, with her sleeves rolled up to her elbows and a clothes-peg in her mouth, busy over the wash-tub. "Vous êtes une blanchisseuse, aujourd'hui?" I remarked. She corrected me. "Non, m'sieu', une lessiveuse." "Une lessiveuse?" For answer Jeanne pointed to a linen-bag which was steeping in the tub. The linen-bag contained the ashes of the beech-tree; it is a way of washing that they have in some parts of France, and very cleansing. To specialise thus is _lessiver_. As we talked in this desultory fashion I let fall a word concerning a journey I was about to undertake to the French lines, a journey that would take me over the battlefield of the Marne. "La Marne! Hélas, quelle douleur!" said Jeanne, and wiped her eyes with the corner of her apron. "But it was a glorious victory," I expostulated. Yes, but Jeanne, it seemed, had lost a brother in the battle of the Marne. She pulled out of her bosom a frayed letter, bleached, stained, and perforated with holes about the size of a shilling, and handed it to me. I could make nothing of it. She handed me another letter. "Son camarade," she explained, and no longer attempted to hide her tears. And this was what I read:

Le 10 sept., 1914.

CHÈRE MADAME--Comme j'étais très bon camarade avec votre frère Paul Duval et que le malheur vient de lui arriver, je tient à vous le faire savoir, car peut-être vous serai dans l'inquiétude de pas recevoir de ces nouvelles et de ne pas savoir où il est. Je vous dirai que je vient de lui donner du papier à lettre et une enveloppe pour vous écrire et aussitôt la lettre finit il l'a mis dans son képi pour vous l'envoyé le plus vite possible et malheureusement un obus est arriver, et il à etait tué. Heureusement nous étions trois près de l'un l'autre et il n'y a eut de lui de touché. Je vous envoi la petite lettre qu'il venait de vous faire, et en même tant vous verrez les trous que les éclats d'obus l'on attrapper. Recevez de moi chère madame mes sincères salutations.

JULES COPPÉE.

Tambour au 151e Regiment d'Inf., 2e Cie 42e Division, Secteur postale 56.

Crude and illiterate though it was, the letter had a certain noble simplicity. "Très gentil," I remarked as I returned it to Jeanne, and thought the matter at an end. But Jeanne had not done, and, with much circumlocution and many hesitations, she at last preferred a simple request. I was going to visit the battlefield of the Marne--yes? I assented. Well, perhaps, perhaps Monsieur would visit Paul's grave, and perhaps if he found it he would take a photograph. "Why, certainly," I said, little knowing what I promised. But the request was to have a strange sequel, as you shall hear. Sykes came to say my car was at the door. As I clambered in and turned to wave a farewell, Madame and Jeanne stood on the doorstep to wish me _bon voyage_. "J'espère que vous tuerez plusieurs Allemands," cried Madame in a quavering voice. "Veuillez ne pas oublier, M'sieu'," cried Jeanne wistfully. I waved my hand, and had soon left rue Robert le Frisson far behind me.

FOOTNOTE:

[8] The town described in this sketch is described not as it is, but as it was some months ago, and nothing is to be inferred from the title as to its present significance.

XII

MORT POUR LA PATRIE

Two days later a French staff-officer greeted me in the vestibule of the Hôtel de Crillon at Paris. It was the Comte de G----; he had been deputed by the Ministry of War to act as my escort on my tour of the French lines. He proved to be a charming companion. He was a magnificent figure of a man six feet three inches in height at least, an officer of dragoons, and he wore the red and white brassard, embroidered in gold with a design of forked lightning, which is the prerogative of the staff. A military car with a driver and an orderly in shaggy furs awaited us outside on the Place de la Concorde. It was a sumptuous car, upholstered in green corded silk, with nickel fittings, and displaying on its panels the motto _Quand même_, and the monogram of a famous actress. It had been requisitioned. The air was cold--there had been frost overnight--but the sun was brilliant. As we threaded our way through Paris and its suburbs, a Paris chastened and resolute, I caught a glimpse of the barges upon the Seine with the women standing on the convex hatches hanging out clothes to dry--and I thought of Daudet and _La Belle Nivernaise_. As more and yet more men are called up to the colours women take their place, until the houses of business are like nunneries--with a few aged Fathers Superior. Having had business the day before at the Société Générale, I had had occasion to reflect on these things as I stood in the counting-house watching some fifty girl typists at work, the room resounding with the tap-tap of their machines, as though fifty thrushes were breaking snails upon a stone. A wizened little clerk, verging upon superannuation, had beguiled my time of waiting with talk of the war: how his wife from Picardy had lost fifteen of her _parents_, while of four painters and paper-hangers who had started doing up his flat on the 2nd of July only one--disabled--had returned to finish the job; the rest were dead. Musing on these things as we drove through the Bois de Vincennes I understood the resolution of our Allies and the significance of the things my companion pointed out to me as we drove: here a row of trees felled to provide a field of fire, there a gun emplacement, and reserve trenches all the way from Paris to Soissons. They are leaving nothing to chance.

Our journey was uneventful until we reached Coulommiers, where we had certain inquiries to make which have nothing to do with this narrative. We interviewed the _maire_ in his parlour at the Hôtel de Ville, a little man, and spirited, who had hung on at his post during the German occupation, and done his best to protect his fellow-townsmen against the lust and rapine of the Huns. Under such circumstances the office of municipal magistrate is no sinecure. It is, in fact, a position of deadly peril, for by the doctrine of vicarious punishment, peculiar to the German Staff, an innocent man is held liable with his life for the faults of his fellow-townsmen, and, it may be, for those of the enemy also. Doubtless it appeals to their sinister sense of humour, when two of their own men get drunk and shoot at one another, to execute a French citizen by way of punishment. It happened that during the German occupation of Coulommiers the gas supply gave out. The _maire_ was informed by a choleric commandant that unless gas were forthcoming in twenty-four hours he would be shot. The little man replied quietly: "M'éteindre, ce n'est pas allumer le gaz." This illuminating remark appears to have penetrated the dark places of the commandant's mind, and although the gas-jets continued contumacious (the gas-workers were all called up to the colours) the _maire_ was not molested. It was here that we heard a shameful story (for the truth of which I will not vouch) of a certain straggler from our army, a Highlander, who tarried in amorous dalliance and was betrayed by his enchantress to the Huns, who, having deprived him of everything but his kilt, led him mounted upon a horse in Bacchanalian procession round the town. As to what became of him afterwards nothing was known, but the worst was suspected. The Huns have a short way and bloody with British stragglers and despatch-riders and patrols, and I fear that the poor lad expiated his weakness with a cruel death.

At Coulommiers we turned northwards on the road to La Ferté-sous-Jouarre, a pleasant little town on the banks of the Marne, approached by an avenue of plane trees whose dappled trunks are visible for many miles. Here we had lunch at the inn--a dish of perch caught that morning in the waters of the Marne, a delicious cream-cheese, for which La Ferté is justly famous, and a light wine of amber hue and excellent vintage. The landlord's wife waited on us with her own hands, and as she waited talked briskly of the German occupation of the town. The Huns, it appeared, had been too hustled by the Allies to do much frightfulness beyond the usual looting, but they had inflicted enormous losses on the pigs of La Ferté. It reminded me of the satirical headline in a Paris newspaper, over a paragraph announcing a great slaughter of pigs in Germany owing to the shortage of maize--"Les Bosches s'entregorgent!" Madame told us with much spirit how she had saved her own pig, an endearing infant, by the intimation that a far more succulent pig was to be found higher up the street, and while the Bosches went looking for their victim she had hidden her own in the cellar. Her pig is now a local celebrity. People come from afar to see the pig which escaped the Bosches. For the pigs whom the Bosches love are apt to die young. But what had impressed her most was the treatment meted out by a German officer, a certain von Bülow, who was quartered at the inn, to one of his men. The soldier had been ordered to stick up a lantern outside the officer's quarters, and had been either slow or forgetful. Von Bülow knocked him down, and then, as he lay prostrate, jumped upon him, kicked him, and beat him about the head and face with sabre and riding-whip. The soldier lay still and uttered not a cry. Madame shuddered at the recollection, "Épouvantable!"

We crossed the _place_ and called on a prominent burgess. He received us hospitably. In the hall of his house was a Uhlan's lance with drooping pennon which excited our curiosity. How had it come here? He was only too pleased to explain. He had taken it from a marauding Uhlan with whom he had engaged in single combat, strangling him with his own hands--so!

I took by the throat the circumcised dog And smote him, thus!

He held out a pair of large fat hands of the consistency of clay; he was of a full habit and there were pouches under his eyes. In England he would have been a small tradesman, with strong views on total abstinence, accustomed to a diet of high tea, and honoured as the life-long superintendent of a Sunday school. I was more astonished than sceptical, but perhaps, as the Comte suggested in a whisper, the Uhlan was drunk. Here, too, we heard tales of loot, especially among ladies' wardrobes. It is a curious fact that there is nothing the Hun loves so much as women's underclothing. As to what happens when he gets hold of the _lingerie_ many scandalous stories are told, and none more scandalous than the one which appeared in the whimsical pages of _La Vie Parisienne_. But that is, most emphatically, quite another story.

From La Ferté we drove on to Lizy, where the gendarme, wiping his mouth as he came hurriedly from the inn, told us a harrowing tale, and then to Barcy, where the _maire_, though busy with a pitch-fork upon a manure heap, received us with municipal gravity. We were now nearing the battlefield of the Marne, and here and there along the roadside the trunks of the poplars, green with mistletoe, were shivered as though by lightning. Yet nothing could have been more peaceful than the pastoral beauty of the countryside. We passed waggons full of roots, drawn by a team of white oxen under the yoke, and by the roadside a threshing machine was being fed by a knot of old men and young women from an oat-rick. The only hints of the cloud on the horizon were the occasional passage of a convoy and the notable absence of young men. As we raced along, the furrows, running at right angles to the road, seemed to be eddying away from us in pleats and curves, and this illusion of a stationary car in a whirling landscape was fortified by the contours of the countryside, which were those of a great plain, great as any sea, stretching away to a horizon of low chalk hills. Suddenly the car slowed down at a signal from my companion and stopped. We got out. Not a sound was to be heard except the mournful hum of the distant threshing machine, but a peculiar clicking, like the halliard of a flagstaff in a breeze, suddenly caught my ear. The wind was rising, and as I looked around me I saw innumerable little tricolour flags fluttering against small wooden staves. It was the battlefield of the Marne, the scene of that immortal order of Joffre's in which he exhorted the sons of France to conquer or die where they stood. As he had commanded, so had they done. With an emotion too deep for words we each contemplated these plaintive memorials of the heroes who lay where they fell. Our orderly wept and made no effort to hide his tears. I thought of Jeanne's wistful petition, but my heart sank, for these graves were to be numbered not by hundreds but by thousands. "C'est absolument impossible!" said the Comte, to whom I had communicated my quest. A sudden cry from the orderly, who was moving from grave to grave in a close scrutiny of the inscriptions, arrested us. He was standing by a wooden cross, half draped by a tattered blue coat and covered with wreaths of withered myrtle. A képi pierced with holes lay upon the grave. And sure enough, by some miracle of coincidence, he had found it. On a wooden slab we read these words:

PAUL DUVAL, 151e Rég. d'Inf. 6 sept. 1914 MORT POUR LA PATRIE.

The sun was fast declining over the chalk hills and it grew bitter cold. I unfolded my camera, stepped back eight paces, and pressed the trigger. We clambered back into the car and resumed the road to Meaux. As I looked over my shoulder the last things I saw in the enfolding twilight were those little flags still fluttering wistfully in the wind.

XIII

MEAUX AND SOME BRIGANDS

We lay the night at Meaux. It was a town which breathed the enchantments of the Middle Ages and had for me the intimacy of a personal reminiscence. Sixteen years earlier, when reading for a prize essay at Oxford, I had studied the troubled times of Étienne Marcel in the treasures of the Bibliothèque de l'École des Chartes, and I knew every kilometre of this country as though I had trodden it. Meaux, Compiègne, Senlis--they called to my mind dreamy hours in the dim religious light of muniment-rooms and days of ecstasy among the pages of Froissart. Little did I think when I read those belligerent chronicles in the sequestered alcoves of the Bodleian and the Bibliothèque Nationale, tracing out the warlike dispositions of Charles the Bad and the Dauphin and the Provost of the Merchants, that the day would come when I would be traversing these very fields engaged in detective enterprises upon the footprints of contemporary armies. To compare the _variae lectiones_ of two manuscripts concerning a fourteenth-century skirmish is good, it has all the excitement of the chase; but to be collating the field note-book of a living Hun with the _dossier_ of a contemporary Justice de Paix, this is better. It has all the contact of reality and the breathless joy of the hue and cry. And, after all, were things so very different? Generations come and go, dynasties rise and fall, but the earth endureth for ever, and these very plains and hills and valleys that have witnessed the devastation of the Hun have also seen the ravages of the mercenaries and free companies of the Middle Age. As I lay in my bed that night at the inn I turned over the pages of my pocket volume of M. Zeller's _Histoire de France racontée par les contemporains_, and hit on the "Souvenirs du brigand Aimerigot Marchès," ravisher of women, spoiler of men, devourer of widows' houses. And as I read, it seemed as though I were back in the department _du Contentieux_ of the Ministry of War in Paris deciphering the pages of a German officer's field note-book. For thus speaks Aimerigot Marchès in the delectable pages of Froissart distilled by M. Zeller into modern French:

There is no time, diversion, nor glory in this world like that of the profession of arms and making war in the way we have. How blithe were we when we rode forth at hazard and hit on a rich abbé, an opulent prior or merchant, or a string of mules from Montpelier, Narbonne, Limoux, Toulouse, or Carcassonne laden with the fabrics of Brussels or furs from the fair of Lendit, or spices from Bruges, or the silks of Damascus and Alexandria! All was ours or was to ransom at our sweet will. Every day we had more money. The peasants of Auvergne and Limousin provisioned us and brought to our camp corn and meal, and baked bread, hay for the horses and straw for their litter, good wines, oxen, and fine fat sheep, chicken, and poultry. We carried ourselves like kings and were caparisoned as they, and when we rode forth the whole country trembled before us. Par ma foi, cette vie était bonne et belle.

Is not that your very Hun? He is a true reversion to type. Only, whereas among the French he is a thing of the savage past, among the Germans he is a product of the kultured present. And to turn from the field note-book of the German soldier with its swaggering tale of loot, lust, and maudlin cups, its memoranda of stolen toys for Felix and of ravished lingerie for Bertha, all viewed in the rosy light of the writer's egotism as a laudable enterprise, to the plain depositions of the Justice de Paix, and see the reverse side of the picture with its tale of ruined homes and untilled fields, was just such an experience as it had been to turn from the glittering pages of Froissart to the sombre story of Jean de Venette,[9] a monk of Compiègne, Little Brother of the Poor and chronicler of his times, as he pondered on these things in the scriptorium:

In this year 1358, the vines, source of that beneficent liquor which gladdens the heart of man, were no longer cultivated; the fields were neither tilled nor sown; the oxen and the sheep went no longer to the pasture. The churches and houses, falling into decay, presented everywhere traces of devouring flames or sombre ruins and smouldering. The eye was no longer gladdened as before with the sight of green meadows and yellowing harvests, but rather afflicted by the aspect of briers and thistles, which clustered everywhere. The church bells no longer rang joyously to call the faithful to the divine offices, but only to give the alarm to the peasants at the approach of the enemy and the signal for flight.

As it was in the days of Jean de Venette, so it is now. I thought of that mournful passage as I wandered next day among the ruins of Choisy-au-Bac, a village not twenty miles from the place where Jean de Venette was born, and saw old women cowering among the ruins of their burnt-out homes.

If the good Carmelite of the fourteenth century returned to Meaux to-day he would have little difficulty in finding his way about the city, for though she must have aged perceptibly she can have changed but little. The timbered mills on wooden piles still stand moored in the middle of the river like so many ships, just as they stood in the twelfth century, and the cathedral with its Gothic portals and great rose-window--though it has grown in stature and added here and there a touch of the flamboyant in its tracery, even as a man will break out into insurgent adventures when he feels the first chill of age--is stamped with the characters of the fourteenth century. And I think Jean de Venette would find a congenial spirit in my friend the bishop, Monsignor Marbot, for like Jean he is a lover of the poor. It was Monsignor Marbot who went in procession to the battlefield of the Marne with crucifix and banner and white-robed acolytes, and in an allocution of singular beauty consecrated those stricken fields with the last rites of the Church. And it was Monsignor Marbot who remained at his post all through the German occupation to protect his flock while the Hun roamed over his diocese like a beast of prey. Though the Hun thinks nothing of shooting a _maire_, and has been known to murder many an obscure village priest, he fights shy of killing a bishop; there might be trouble at the Holy See. Many a moving tale did the good bishop tell me as we sat in his little house--surely the most meagre and ascetic of episcopal palaces, in which there was nothing more sumptuous than his cherry and scarlet soutane and his biretta.

We lay the night at an inn that must have been at one time a seigneurial mansion, for it had a noble courtyard. I was shown to a room, and, having unpacked my valise, I turned on the taps, but no water issued; I applied a match to the gas-jet, but no flame appeared; I tried to open the window, but the sash stuck. I rang the bell; that at least responded. A maid appeared; I pointed to the taps and made demonstrations with the gas-jet. To all of which she replied quite simply, "Ah! monsieur, c'est la guerre!" I had heard that answer before. With such a plea of confession and avoidance had the boots at the Hôtel de la Poste at Rouen excused a gross omission to call me in the morning, and thus also had the aged waiter at the Métropole disposed of a flagrant error in my bill. But this time it was convincing enough; gas-workers and waterworks men and carpenters were all at the war, and in the town of Meaux water was carried in pitchers and light was purchased at the chandler's. In France you get used to these things and imitate with a good grace the calm stoicism of your Allies. For, after all, the enemy was pretty near, and as I retired to my couch I could hear the thunder of their guns.

FOOTNOTE:

[9] Reputed author of the sequel to the chronicles of Guillaume de Nangis. See M. Lacabane in the _Bibliothèque de l'École des Chartes_ (1e série), t. iii.

XIV

THE CONCIERGE AT SENLIS

We rose early the next day, and, having paid our reckoning, were away betimes, for we were to visit the French lines and wished also to pay a flying visit to Senlis. As we left Crépy-en-Valois we entered the Forest of Compiègne, a forest of noble beeches which rose tall and straight and grey like the piers of Beauvais Cathedral, their arms meeting overhead in an intricate vaulting through which we saw the winter sun in a sapphire sky. We met two Chasseurs d'Afrique, mounted on superb Arabs and wearing red fez-like caps and yellow collar-bands. They were like figures out of a canvas of Meissonier, recalling the spacious days when men went into action with all the pomp and circumstance of war, drums beating, colours flying, plumes nodding, and the air vibrant with the silvery notes of the bugle. All that is past; to-day no bugle sounds the charge, and even the company commander's whistle has given way to certain soft words for which the German mocking-bird will seek in vain in our Infantry Manual. As for cuirass and helmet, the range of modern guns and rifles has made them a little too ingenuous. And, sure enough, as we drove into Compiègne we found a squadron of dragoons as sombre as our own, in their mouse-coloured _couvre-casques_ and cavalry cloaks, though their lances glinted in the sun. Here all was animation. Informal conventicles of Staff officers, with whom we exchanged greetings, stood about the square in front of the exquisite Hôtel de Ville, with its high-pitched roof pierced with dormer-windows and crowned with many pinnacles. North and east of Compiègne lie the zones of the respective armies, all linked up by telephone, and here we had to exchange our passes, for even a Staff officer may not enter one zone with a pass appropriate to another. But our first objective was Senlis, which lay to the south of us between Compiègne and Paris.

The sun was high in the heavens as we turned south-west, and, keeping to the left bank of the river, skirted the forest. Faint premonitions of spring already appeared; catkins drooped upon the hazels, primroses made patches of sulphur in the woods, and one almost expected to see the blackthorn in blossom. Silver birches gleamed against the purple haze of the more distant woodlands. The road ran straight as an arrow. As we neared Senlis I was struck by the complete absence of all traffic upon the roads; no market carts came and went, neither did any wayfarer appear. Not a wisp of smoke arose from the chimneys above the screen of trees. We passed up a double avenue of elms--just such an avenue as that along which M. Bergeret discussed metaphysics and theology with the Abbé Lantaigne--yet not a soul was to be seen upon the _trottoir_. A brooding silence hung over the little town, a silence so deep as to be almost menacing. As we entered the main street I encountered a spectacle which froze my heart. Far as the eye could see along the diminishing perspective of the road were burnt-out homes, houses which once were gay with clematis and wisteria, gardens which had blossomed with the rose. And now all that remained were trampled flower-beds, tangled creepers, blackened walls, calcined rafters, twisted ironwork, and fallen masonry. And this was Senlis! Senlis which had been to the department of the Oise as the apple of its eye, a little town of quality, beautiful as porcelain, fragrant as a rose, and as a rose as sweet. As I looked upon these desecrated homes it seemed to me that the very stones cried out.

In all this desolation we looked in vain for any signs of life. It was not until we sought out the house of a captain of dragoons, a friend of my companion the Comte, that we found a human being in these solitudes. The house was, indeed, a melancholy ruin, but by the gate was a lodge, and in the lodge a concierge. He was a small man and middle-aged, and as he spoke he trembled with a continual agitation of body as though he were afflicted with ague. He led us into his little house, the walls of which were blackened as with fire and pierced in many places with the impact of bullets. And this was his tale.

One afternoon early in September--it was the second day of the month, he remembered it because there had been an untimely frost over night--he heard the crackle of musketry on the outskirts of the town, and a column of grey-coated men suddenly appeared in the street. An officer blew a whistle, and, as some of them broke through the gates of the mansion, the concierge fled across the lawn with bullets buzzing about his ears and shouts of laughter pursuing him as he ran. In and out among the elms he doubled like a frightened hare, the bullets zip-zipping against the tree-trunks, till he crawled into a disused culvert and lay there panting and exhausted. From his hiding-place he heard the crash of furniture, more shots, and the loud, ribald laughter of the soldiers. And then a crackle of flame and a thick smell of smoke. And after that silence. At dusk he crawled forth from his culvert, trembling, his hands and face all mottled with stinging-nettles and scratched with thistles; he found his master's house a smouldering ruin, and a thick pall of smoke lay over the town of Senlis like a fog. Somewhere a woman shrieked and then was still. About the hour of nine in the evening the concierge heard voices in disputation outside the lodge-gates, and as he hid himself among the shrubberies more men entered, and, being dissatisfied with their work, threw hand-grenades into the mansion and applied a lighted torch to the concierge's humble dwelling. They were very merry and sang lustily--the concierge thought they had been drinking; they sang thus, "_comme ça!_" and the concierge mournfully hummed a tune, a tune he had never heard before, but which he would remember all his life. I recognised it. It was Luther's hymn:

Ein' feste Burg ist unser Gott.

Thus had passed the day. Meanwhile the _maire_, M. Odent, a good man and greatly beloved, had been arrested at the Hôtel de Ville. His secretary proposed to call his deputies. "No, no," replied the _maire_ tranquilly, "one victim is enough." He was dragged along the streets to the suburb of Chammont, the headquarters of von Kluck, and his guards buffeted him and spat upon him as he went. Arrived there, he was condemned to death. He took his companions in captivity by the hand, embraced them--"très dignement," the concierge had been told--handed them his papers, and bade them adieu. Two minutes later he was shot, and his body thrown into a shallow trench with a sprinkling of earth. The concierge had seen it the next day; the feet were protruding.

All this the concierge told us in a dull, apathetic voice, and always as he told his body twitched and the muscles of his face worked. And he spoke like a man in a soliloquy as though we were not there. He seemed to be looking at something which we could not see. As we bade him adieu he stared at us as though he saw us not, neither did he return our salutation. We clambered back into our car and turned her head round towards Compiègne. I shall never see Senlis again.

III

UNOFFICIAL INTERLUDES

XV

A "CONSEIL DE LA GUERRE"

Il y a une convenance et un pacte secret entre la jeunesse et la guerre. Manier des armes, revêtir l'uniforme, monter à cheval ou marcher au commandement, _être redoutable sans cesser d'être aimable_, dépasser le voisin en audace, en vitesse, et en grâce s'il se peut, défier l'ennemi, connaître l'aventure, jouer ce qui a peu duré, ce qui est encore illusion, rêve, ambition, ce qui est encore une beauté, ô jeunesse, voilà ce que vous aimez! Vous n'êtes pas liée, vous n'êtes pas fanée, vous pouvez courir le monde.--RENÉ BAZIN, _Récits du temps de la guerre_.

Our little town was like the pool of Bethesda--never had I seen such a multitude of impotent folk. The lame, the halt, and the blind congregated here as if awaiting some miracle. I met them everywhere--Zouaves, Turcos, French infantry of the line, in every stage of infirmity. Our town was indeed but one vast hospital--orderly, subdued, and tenebrous. Every hotel but our own was closed to visitors and flew the Red Cross flag, displaying on its portals the register of wounded like a roll-call. The streets at night, with their lights extinguished, were subterranean in their darkness, and the single café, faintly illuminated, looked like some mysterious grotto within which the rows of bottles of cognac and Mattoni gleamed like veins of quartz and felspar. We were, indeed, a race of troglodytes, and we were all either very young or very old. Our adolescence was all called up to the colours. There was never any news beyond a laconic bulletin issued from the _Mairie_ at dusk, the typescript duplicates of which, posted up at street-corners, we read in groups by the light of a guttering candle, held up against the wall, and husbanded from the wind, by a little old woman of incredible age with puckered cheeks like a withered apple and hands like old oak. We were not very near the zone of war, yet not so far as to escape its stratagems. Only a day or two before an armoured motor-car, with German officers disguised in French uniforms, paid us a stealthy visit, and, after shooting three gendarmes in reply to their insistent challenge, ended its temerarious career one dark night by rushing headlong over the broken arch of a bridge into the chasm beneath. After that the rigour of our existence was, if anything, accentuated; much was "défendu," and many things which were still lawful were not expedient. Every one talked in subdued tones--it was only the wounded who were gay, gay with an amazing insouciance. True, there were the picture postcards in the shops--I had forgotten them--nothing more characteristically _macabre_ have I ever seen. One such I bought one morning--a lively sketch of a German soldier dragging a child's wooden horse behind him, and saluting his officer with, "Captain, here is the horse--I have slain the horseman" ("Mon Gabidaine, ch'ai dué le cavalier, foilà le cheval"). It was labelled "Un Héros."

It was at this little town, on a memorable afternoon early in the war, that I was first admitted to the freedom of the soldiers of France. The ward was flooded with the soft lambent light of September sunshine, and it sheltered, I should say, some twenty-three men. Four were playing cards at the bedside of a cheerful youth, who a few weeks earlier had answered on tripping feet to the cry of "Garçon!" in a big Paris hotel, and was now a _sous-officier_ in 321st Regiment, recovering from wounds received in the thick of the fighting round Mülhausen. He was enjoying his convalescence. For a waiter to find himself waited upon was, he confided to me as the orderly brought in the soup, a peculiarly satisfying experience. Charles Lamb would have agreed with him. Has he not written that the ideal holiday is to watch another man doing your own job--particularly if he does it badly? The _sous-officier_ nearly wept with joy when, a moment later, the orderly upset the soup. With him was a plumber who was dealing the cards in that leisurely manner which appears to be one of the principal charms of the plumber's vocation. A paperhanger studied the wall-paper with a professional eye while he appropriated his cards. An Alsatian completed the party. In a distant corner a Turco, wearing his red fez upon his head, sat with his chin on his knees amid an improvised bivouac of bed-clothes and looked on uncomprehendingly. The rest smoked cigarettes and toyed with the voluptuous pages of _La Vie Parisienne_.

The _sous-officier_, being an artiste in his way, had been giving me a histrionic exhibition of shell-fire. With a long intake and a discharge of the breath he imitated the sibilant flight of the projectiles and followed it up with a duck of his head over the counterpane. He extended his arms in a wide sweep to show the crater they make and indicated the height of the leaping earth.

"_Quinze mètres--comme ça, monsieur! Les Allemands? Ah! cochons!_ And they shoot execrably. We shoot from the shoulder (_sur l'épaule_)--so! They shoot under the arm (_sous le bras_)--so! And they like to join hands like children--they are afraid to go alone. They came out of the wood crouching like dogs--one behind the other. They are a bad lot--_canaille_. They hide guns in ambulance-waggons and mount them on church-towers. There was one of our sappers--_diable!_ they tied him to a telegraph-pole and lit a fire under him."

"But you make them pay for that?"

He smiled grimly. "_Mais oui!_ When they see us they throw everything away and run. If we catch them, they put up their hands and say, '_Pas de mal, Alsatien_.' But we're used to that trick. We just go through them like butter and say, '_Pour vous!_' A little _étrenne_, you know, monsieur, what you call 'Christmas-box'!" He laughed at some grim recollection.

"_Deutschen Hunde! Stink-preussen!_[10] _Ja!_" It was the Alsatian who was speaking.

"_Sie sprechen Deutsch!_"[11] I exclaimed in astonishment.

"_Ja, ich kann nicht anders--um so mehr schade!_"[12] he replied mournfully. He was an Alsatian "volunteer," he explained, having deserted for the French side at an opportune moment. It was odd to hear him declaiming against the Germans in their own language. It is a way the Alsatians have. Treitschke once lamented the fact. "But," I interpolated, "it must be very painful for those of you who cannot get away like yourself."

"Very painful, monsieur; I have two brothers even now in the German army. They watch us--and they put Prussian _sous-officiers_ over us to spy. So when we see the _sous-officier_ sneaking about, we raise our voices and say, 'Ah! those beastly French, we'll give it them.' But when we are alone--well, then we say what we think."

And this led us on to talk of German spies and their nasty habits--how they had mapped out France, its bridges, its culverts, its smithies, like an ordnance-survey, and how predatory German commanders betray the knowledge of an Income-tax Commissioner as to the income and resources of every inhabitant who has the misfortune to find himself in occupied territory. Also how the German guns get the range at once. And other such things. All of which the paperhanger listened to in thoughtful silence and then told a tale.

"An officer in the uniform of your Army, monsieur, strolled up to my company one day. He was very pleasant, and his French was so good--not too good, just the kind of French that you English messieurs"--he bowed apologetically to me--"usually speak. Oh! he was very clever. And he talked with our captain about the battle for a long time. And then our captain noticed something--two things. First, monsieur, the English officer was very troubled with his eyes--he was always applying a large white handkerchief to the pupil. And it occur to the captain that the English officers do not carry white handkerchiefs but 'khaki.' What was the matter with the officer's eye? It could not be a fly--the weather was too cold; it had been raining. It could not be the dust; the ground was too wet. And the German shells--they begin to fall right in the midst of us--they had been so wide before. So the captain was very concerned for monsieur l'officier's eyes, and he takes him aside very politely and says he had better see the doctor. A _sous-officier_ and two men shall take him to the doctor. Which they do. Only the 'doctor' was the _liaison_ officer with our brigade--an English officer. And he finds that the officer is a spy--a Bosche. He have no more trouble with his eyes," added the paperhanger laconically. It was too good a story to spoil by cross-examination, so I left it at that.

"You like the bayonet?" I asked.

"Ah, yes! we love the bayonet. It is a _bon enfant_," said the _sous-officier_. "And they can't fence (_escrimer_), the Bosches--they are too _lourds_. I remember we caught them once in a quarry. Our men fought like tiger-cats--so quick, so agile. And you know, monsieur, no one said a word. Nor a sound except the clash of steel." His eyes flashed at the recollection. "They make a funny noise when you go through them--they grunt, _comme un cochon_." Perhaps I shuddered slightly. "Ah, yes! monsieur, but they play such dirty tricks (_ruses honteuses_). Of course they cry out in French, and put up their hands after they have shot down our comrades under their white flags." He gave a snort of contempt.

"What do they cry?"

"Oh, all kinds of things. 'I have a wife and eight children.' The German pig has a big litter." He looked, and no doubt felt himself to be, a minister of justice. And after all, I reflect, the Belgians once had wives and children too. Many of them have neither wife nor child any longer. And so perish all Germans!

The plumber, who had been studying his "hand," looked up from the cards. "We have killed a great number of the Bosches," he said dispassionately. "Yes, a great number. It was in a beetroot field, and there were as many dead Germans as beetroots. Near by was a corn-field; the flames were leaping up the shocks of yellow corn and the bodies caught fire--such a stench! And the faces of the dead! Especially after they have been killed with the bayonet--they are quite black. I suppose it's the grease."

"The grease?"

"Yes, we always grease our bayonets, you know. To prevent them getting rusty."

He was a man of few words, but in three sentences he had given me a battle-picture as clearly visualised as a canvas of Verestchagin. The reminiscences of the plumber provoked the paperhanger to further recollections, more particularly the stunning effects of the French shell-fire. He had found four dead Germans--they had been surprised by a shell while playing cards in a billet. "They still had the cards in their hands, monsieur, just as you see us--and they hadn't got a scratch. They were like the statues in the Louvre."

"Yes," said the _sous-officier_, "I have seen them like that. I remember I found a big Bosche--six feet four he must have been--sitting dead in a house which we had shelled. His face was just like wax, and he sat there like a wooden doll with his long arms hanging down stiff--yes! _comme une poupée_. And I couldn't find a scratch on him--not one! And do you know what he had on--a woman's chemise! _Écoutez!_" he added suddenly, and he held up a monitory hand.

Echoing down the corridor outside there came nearer and nearer the beat of a drum and with it the liquid notes of a fife. I recognised the measure--who can ever forget it! It stirs the blood like a trumpet. The door was kicked open and two convalescent soldiers entered, one wearing a festive cap of coloured paper such as is secreted in Christmas "crackers." He was playing a fife, and the drummer was close upon his heels.

Every one rose in his bed and lifted up his voice:

Allons! enfants de la Patrie!

A strange electricity ran through us all. The card-players had thrown down their cards just as the plumber was about to trump an ace. The others had tossed aside their papers and laid down their cigarettes. The Turco--"Muley Hafid" he was called, because those were the only words of his any one could understand--who had been deploying imaginary troops, with the aid of matches, upon the counterpane, as though he were a sick child playing with leaden soldiers, recognised the tune, and in default of words began to beat time with a soup spoon. Up and down the passage way between the beds marched the fife and drum; louder beat the drum, more piercing grew the fife. What delirious joy-of-battle, what poignant cries of anguish, has not that immortal music both stirred and soothed! To what supremacy of effort has it not incited? It has succoured dying men with its _viaticum_. It has brought fire to glazing eyes. It has exalted men a little higher than the angels, it has won the angels to the side of men:

Tout est soldat pour vous combattre: S'ils tombent, nos jeunes héros, La terre en produit de nouveaux Contre vous tout prêts à se battre. Aux armes, citoyens! Formez vos bataillons: Marchons, qu'un sang impur abreuve nos sillons.

As I gently closed the door of the ward and stole out into the corridor on tip-toe, I heard again the martial chorus swelling into a tumult of joy:

Le jour de gloire est arrivé!

It was the note of the conqueror.

FOOTNOTES:

[10] German swine! Stinking Prussians!

[11] You speak German!

[12] Yes, I can no other, more's the pity!

XVI

PETER

My friend T---- and myself were smoking a pipe after dinner in his sitting-room at the Base. He was a staff-captain who had done his term as a "Political" in India, and had now taken on an Army job of a highly confidential nature. He was one of those men who, when they make up their minds to give you their friendship, give it handsomely and without reserve, and in a few weeks we had got on to the plane of friends of many years. As we talked we suddenly heard the sound of many feet on the cobbles of the street below, a street which ran up the side of the hill like a gully--between tall houses standing so close together that one might almost have shaken hands with the inmates of the houses opposite. The rhythm of that tramp, tramp, tramp, in spite of the occasional slipping of one or another man's boots upon the greasy and precipitous stones, was unmistakable.

"New drafts!" said T----. Instinctively we both moved to the window. We knew that the Army authorities were rushing troops across the Channel every night as fast as the transports could take them, and often in the silence of the sleep-time we had heard them marching up the hill from the harbour to the camps on the downs. As we opened our own window, we heard another window thrown open on the floor above us. We looked down and saw in the darkness, faintly illuminated by the light from our room, the upturned faces of the men.

"Bonjour, monseer," they shouted cheerfully, delighted to air on French soil the colloquialisms they had picked up from that _vade mecum_ (price one penny) of the British soldier: _French, and how to speak it_. It was night, not day, but that didn't matter.

"Good-night," came a piping treble voice from the floor above us.

"Good-night"--"Good-night, old chap"--"Good-night, my son"--the men shouted back as they glanced at the floor above us. Some of them gravely saluted.

"It's Peter," said T----; "he'll be frightfully bucked up."

"Let's go up and see him," I said. We ascended the dark staircase--the rest of the household were plunged in slumber--turned the handle of the bedroom door, and could just make out in the darkness a little figure in pyjamas, leaning precipitously out of the window.

"Peter, you'll catch cold," said his father as he struck a match. The light illuminated a round, chubby face which glanced over its owner's shoulder from the window.

"All right, Dad. I say," he exclaimed joyfully, "did you see? They saluted me! Did _you_ see?" he said, turning to me.

"I did, Major Peter."

"You're kidding!"

"Not a bit of it," I said, saluting gravely. "They've given you commissioned rank, and, the Army having spoken, I intend in the future to address you as a field-officer. Of course your father will have to salute you too, now."

This was quite another aspect of the matter, and commended itself to Peter. "Right oh!" he said. And from that time forward I always addressed him as Major Peter. So did his father, except when he was ordering him to bed. At such times--there was a nightly contest on the matter--the paternal authority could not afford to concede any prerogatives, and Peter was gravely cashiered from the Army, only to be reinstated without a stain on his character the next morning.

"Come up to the Flying-Ground to-morrow, will you?" said Peter. "I know lots of officers up there. I'll introduce you," he added patronisingly. Peter had been a bare fortnight at the Base, it being holiday at his preparatory school at Beckenham, and he had already become familiar and domestic with every one in authority from the Base Commandant downwards. "Thank you," I said. "I will." He clambered back into bed at a word from his father. By the side of the bed was a small library. It consisted of _The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes_, _The Cock-House at Fellsgarth_, and Newbolt's _Pages from Froissart_. Peter was rather eclectic in his tastes, but they were thoroughly sound. On the table were the contents of Peter's pockets, turned out nightly by the express orders of his father, for this is war-time, and the wear and tear of schoolboys' jackets is a prodigious item of expenditure. I made a rapid mental inventory of them:

(1) A button of the Welsh Fusiliers.

(2) Some dozen cartridge-cases from a Lewis machine-gun requisitioned by Peter from the Flying-Ground.

(3) A miniature aeroplane--the wings rather crumpled as though the aviator had been forced to make a hurried descent.

(4) A knife.

(5) Several pieces of string.

(6) A coloured "alley."

(7) Some cigarette-card portraits, highly coloured, of Lord Kitchener, Sir John French, and General Smith-Dorrien.

(8) A top.

(9) A conglomerate of chocolate, bull's-eyes, and acid drops.

For the kit of an officer of field rank in His Majesty's Army it was certainly a peculiar collection, few or none of these articles being included in the Field Service regulations. Still, not more peculiar than some of the things with which solicitous friends and relatives encumber officers at the Front.

The next morning we ascended the downs above the harbour, and Peter piloted me to the Flying-Ground. Here we came upon a huge hangar in which were docked half a dozen aeroplanes, light as a Canadian canoe and graceful as a dragon-fly. Peter calmly climbed up into one of them and proceeded to move levers and adjust controls, explaining the whole business to me with the professional confidence of a fully certificated airman.

"Hulloa, that you, Peter?" said a voice from the other side of the aeroplane. The owner wore the wings of the Flying Corps on his breast.

"It's me, Captain S----," said Peter. "Allow me to introduce my friend ----" he added, looking down over the side of the aeroplane. "He's attached to the staff at G.H.Q.," he added impressively. For the first time I realised, with great gratification, that Peter thought me rather a personage.

The Captain and I discussed the merits of the new Lewis machine-gun, while Peter went off to give the mechanics his opinion on biplanes and monoplanes.

"That kid knows a thing or two," I heard one of them say to the other in an undertone. "Jolly little chap." Peter has an undoubted gift for Mathematics, both Pure and Applied, and his form master has prophesied a Mathematical Scholarship at Cambridge. Peter, however, has other views. He has determined to join the Army at the earliest opportunity. He is now ten years of age, and the only thing that ever worries him is the prospect of the war not lasting another seven years. When I told him that the A.A.G. up at G.H.Q. had, in a saturnine moment, answered my question as to when the war would end with a gloomy "Never," he was mightily pleased. That was a bit of all right, he remarked.

Peter, it should be explained, belongs to one of those Indian dynasties which go on, from one generation to another, contributing men to the public service--the I.C.S., the Army, the Forest Service, the Indian Police. Wherever there's a bit of a scrap, whether it's Dacoits or Pathans, wherever there's a catastrophe which wants tidying up, whether it's plague, or famine, or earthquake, there you will find one of Peter's family in the midst of it. One of his uncles, who is a Major in the R.F.A., saved a battery at X---- Y----. Another is the chief of the most mysterious of our public services--a man who speaks little and listens a great deal, who never commits anything to writing, and who changes his address about once every three months. For if you have a price on your head you have to be careful to cover up your tracks. He neither drinks nor smokes, and he will never marry, for his work demands an almost sacerdotal abnegation. Peter knows very little about this uncle, except that, as he remarked to me, "Uncle Dick's got eyes like gimlets." But Peter has seen those eyes unveiled, whereas in public Uncle Dick, whom I happen to know as well as one can ever hope to know such a bird of passage, always wears rather a sleepy and slightly bored expression. Uncle Dick, although Peter does not know it, is the counsellor of Secretaries of State, and one of the trusted advisers of the G.H.Q. Staff. Of all the staff officers I have met I liked him most, although I knew him least. Some day, if and when I have the honour to know him better, I shall write a book about him, and I shall call it _The Man behind the Scenes_.

Such was Peter's family. It may help you to understand Peter, who, if he feared God, certainly regarded not man. Now the Flying Corps captain had promised Peter that he would let him see the new Lewis machine-gun. It is a type of gun specially designed for aircraft, rather big in the bore, worked by a trigger-handle, and it makes a noise like the back-firing of a motor-car of 100 horse-power. It plays no great part in this story, except that it was the cause of my obtaining a glimpse of Peter's private correspondence. For, after the Captain had discharged his gun at a hedge and made a large rabbit-burrow in it, Peter proceeded to pick up the cartridge-cases, which lay thick as catkins. This interested me, as Peter already had a pocketful.

"What do you want all those for, Major Peter?" I asked.

"Well, you see," said Peter, "the kids at school"--Peter now calls other boys of the same age as himself "kids," on the same principle that a West African negro who is rising in the world refers to his fellows as "niggers"--"keep on bothering me to send them things, and a fellow must send them something."

He pulled a crumpled letter, to which some chocolate was adhering with the tenacity of sealing-wax, out of his pocket. "That's from Jackson minor," he said. "Cheek, isn't it?"

I began reading the letter aloud.

DEAR OLD PAN--You must be having a ripping time. I see your letter is headed "The Front" ...

I looked at Peter. He was blushing uncomfortably.

... so I suppose you've seen a lot. The whole school's fritefully bucked up about you, and we're one up on Fenner's....

"What's Fenner's?" I said to Peter.

"Oh, that's another school at Beckenham. They're stinkers. Put on no end of side because some smug of theirs won a schol' at Uppingham last term. But we beat them at footer."

We met them at footer the other day, and I told that little bounder Jenkins that we had a fellow at the Front. He said, "Rot!" So I showed him the envelope of your letter with "Passed by the Censor" on it, and one of those cartridge-cases you sent me, and I said, "That's proof," and he dried up. He did look sick. I hope you'll get the V.C. or something--the Head'll be sure to give us a half-holiday. Young Smith, who pretends to read the Head's newspaper when he leaves it lying about--you know how he swanks about it--said the Precedent or General Joffre had given a French kid who was only fourteen and had enlisted and killed a lot of Huns, till they found him out and sent him back to school, a legion of honours or something. Smith said it was a medal; I said that was rot, and that it meant they'd given him a lot of other chaps to command, and I showed him what the Bible said about a legion of devils, and I got hold of a crib to Caesar and proved to him that legions were soldiers. That shut him up. So, Pan, old man, mind you get the French to let you bring us other fellows out, or if you can't bring it off, then come home with a medal or something.

"Peter," I called out. Peter had turned his back on me and was pretending to be absorbed in a distant speck in the sky.

"Major Peter," I said ingratiatingly, with a salute. Peter turned round. He was very red.

"I didn't mean you to read all that rot," he said. "I meant what he says at the end."

I read on--this time in silence:

I say, have you killed any Huns yet? Very decent of the Head to tell your governor you could have an extra week. We miss you at center forward. So hurry up, but mind you don't get torpeedod--we hope they'll just miss you. It would be rotten luck if you never saw one. We've given up German this term--beastly language; it's just like a Hun to keep the verb till the end, so that you never know what he's driving at.

Then followed a sentence heavily underlined:

_By the way I'll let you have that knife you wanted me to swop last term if you'll bring me a bayonet. Only mind it's got some blood on it, German blood I mean_.--Yours to a cinder,

ARTHUR JACKSON.

I handed this priceless missive back to Peter.

"Cheek, isn't it?" said Peter rather hurriedly. "His old knife for a bayonet!"

"But if you put 'the Front' at the top of your letters, Major Peter, you can't be surprised at his asking for one, you know."

Peter blushed.

"Well, I heard Dad say we were the back of the Front, and the fellows wouldn't think anything of me if I hadn't been _near_ the Front," he said, apologetically. "Hullo, they're going up!"

An aeroplane was skimming along the ground as a moor-hen scuppers across the water, the mechanics having assisted her initial progress by pushing the lower stays and then ducking under the planes, as she gathered way, and just missing decapitation. It's a way they have. She took a run for it, her engine humming like a top, and then rose, and gradually climbed the sky. Peter gazed at her wistfully. "And he promised to take me up some day," he said sadly.

"Yes, some day, Peter," I said encouragingly. "But it's time we were getting back. You know you've got to catch the leave-boat at four o'clock this afternoon."

* * * * *

Peter's father and I stood on the quay, having taken farewell of Peter. There was an eminent Staff Officer going home on leave--a very great man at G.H.Q., a lieutenant-general, who inspired no less fear than respect among us all. He knew Peter's father in his distant way, and had not only returned his salute, but had even condescended to ask, in his laconic style, "Who is the boy?"--whereupon Peter's father had, with some nervousness, introduced him. All the other officers going home on leave, from a Brigadier down to the subalterns, stood at a respectful distance, glancing furtively at the hawk-like profile of the great man, and lowering their voices. It was a tribute not only to rank but to power. As the ship gathered way and moved slowly out of the harbour I pulled the sleeve of Peter's father. "Look!" I said. The Lieutenant-General and Peter were engaged in an animated conversation on the deck, and the great man, usually as silent as the sphinx and not less inscrutable, was evidently contesting with some warmth and great interest, as though hard put to keep his end up, some point of debate propounded to him by Peter.

"T----, old chap," I said, "Peter'll be a great man some day."

Peter's father said nothing, but his eyes grew misty. Perhaps he was thinking of that lonely grave in the distant plains of the Deccan where Peter's mother sleeps.

XVII

THREE TRAVELLERS

(_October 1914_)

My train left Paris at 1.52 in the afternoon. It was due at Calais at eight o'clock the same evening. But it soon became apparent that something was amiss with our journey--we crawled along at a pace which barely exceeded six miles an hour. At every culvert, guarded by its solitary sentry, we seemed to pause to take breath. As we approached Amiens, barely halfway on our journey, somewhere about 9.30 P.M., we passed on the opposite line of rails a Red Cross train, stationary, and throwing deep rhomboid shadows in the candid moonlight. One glimpse of an open horse-box revealed to me in a flash the secret of our languor. It was a cold, keen night; the full moon rode high in a starless sky, and there must have been ten or twelve degrees of frost. We had left far behind us the diaphanous veils of mist hovering above river banks, out of which the poplars stood argent and fragile, as though the landscape were a Japanese print. Through the open door of the horse-box I saw a soldier stretched upon his straw, with a red gaping wound in his half-naked body. Over him stooped a nurse, improvising with delicate ministries a hasty dressing. In the next carriage the black face of a wounded Senegalese looked out, unearthly in the moonlight. Ahead of us an interminable line of trains (some seventy of them I was told) had passed, conveying fresh troops. Then I knew. The Germans, hovering like a dark cloud some twenty miles away, had been reinforced, and a fierce battle was in progress. The news of it had travelled by some mysterious telepathy to every village along the line, and at every crossing groups of pale-faced women, silent and intent, kept a restless vigil. They looked like ghosts in the moonlight; no cheer escaped them as we passed, no hand waved an exuberant greeting. In the twilight we had already seen red-trousered soldiers, vivid as poppies against the grass, digging trenches along the line, and at one point a group of sappers improvising a wire footbridge across the river. The contagion of suspense was in the air,--you seemed to catch it in the faint susurrus of the poplars.

"Shall we get to Calais?" I asked.

"Bon Dieu! I know not," was the reply of the harassed guard.

We pursued our stealthy journey, reached Abbeville somewhere about midnight, and Boulogne in the small hours. 4 A.M. Calais at last! I joyfully exclaimed. But between Calais Ville and Calais Maritime a group of officers boarded our train and, for some mysterious reason, we were headed off to Dunkirk. It grew colder and more cold, and I had had no food since noon of yesterday. But my thoughts were with our men, the men whom I had lately come to know, now lying out on the bare earth in the moonlit trenches, keeping their everlasting vigil and blowing on their fingers numbed with cold. We reached Dunkirk at 6 A.M. No explanation why the train had played truant at Calais was vouchsafed me, nor was any hope held out of a return. In those days I was travelling as a private person, and was not yet endowed with the prerogatives by which, in the name of a Secretary of State, I could requisition cars and impress men to do my bidding.

At a hopeless moment I had the good fortune to fall in with a King's Messenger, carrying despatches, who was in the next carriage. He produced his special passports, and the prestige of "Courrier du Roi," Knight of the Order of the Silver Greyhound, worked a miracle. Every one was at our service. We were escorted to the military headquarters of Dunkirk--through streets already echoing with the march of French infantry, each carrying a big baton of bread and munching as he kept step, to an office in which the courteous commandant was just completing his toilet. The Consul was summoned, the headquarters hotel of the English officers was rung up, and thither we went through an ambuscade of motor-cars in the courtyard.

A lieutenant of the Naval Flying Squadron was ready for us with his powerful Rolls-Royce, and we were soon on the high road to Calais. Everywhere were the stratagems of war: a misty haze of barbed-wire entanglements in the distant fields, deep trenches, earthworks six feet thick masking rows of guns. Time pressed, but every mile or so we were stopped by a kind of Hampton Court maze, thrown across the road, in the shape of high walls of earth and stone, compelling our lieutenant at the steering-wheel to zigzag in and out, and thereby putting us at the mercy of the sentry who stood beside his hut of straw and hurdles, and presented his bayonet at the bonnet as though preparing to receive cavalry. The corporal came up, and with him a little group of French soldiers, their cheeks impoverished, their glassy eyes sunk in deep black hollows by their eternal vigil. "Officier Anglais!" "Courrier du Roi!" we exclaimed, and were sped on our way with a weary smile and "Bonjour! messieurs." Women and old men were already toiling in the fields, stooping like the figures in Millet's "Gleaners," as we raced through an interminable avenue of poplars, past closed inns, past depopulated farms, past wooden windmills, perched high upon wooden platforms like gigantic dovecots. At each challenge a sombre word was exchanged about Antwerp--again that strange telepathy of peril. Calais at last! and a great empty boat with a solitary fellow-passenger.

* * * * *

He was a London wine-merchant of repute, who had got here at last from Rheims, whither he had gone to pay his yearly inspection of the champagne vintage, only to find the red wine-press of war. Three weeks he had lived like primitive man in the wine-cellars of Rheims, with the shells screaming overhead--screaming, he says, just like the long-drawn sobbing whistle of an express train as it leaves a tunnel. Never has he lived such days before; never, he fervently prays, will he live them again. From his narrative I got a glimpse of a subterranean existence, as tenebrous and fearful as the deepest circle of Dante's _Inferno_, with a river of tears falling always in the darkness of the vaults. A great wine-cellar--there are ten miles of them at Rheims--crowded with four thousand people, lighted only by candles, and swarming with huge rats; the blanched faces of women, the crying of children, the wail of babies at the breast. Overhead the crash of falling masonry--the men had armed themselves with big iron pikes to hew their way out in case the vaults fell in. Life in these catacombs was one long threnody of anguish. Outside, the conscious stone of the great monument of mediaeval aspiration was being battered to pieces, and the glorious company of the apostles, the goodly fellowship of the martyrs, suffered another and a less resurgent martyrdom. After days of this crepuscular existence he emerged to find the cathedral less disfigured than he had feared. One masterpiece of the mediaeval craftsmen's chisel is, however, irremediably destroyed--the figure of the devil. We hope it is a portent.

* * * * *

The King's Messenger had posted from a distant country, and his way through Dijon had been truly a Via Dolorosa. Thirty-six people standing in the corridor, and in his own crowded compartment--he had surrendered his royal prerogative of exclusion--was a woman on the verge of hysteria, finding relief not in tears but in an endless recital of her sorrow. She and her husband had a son--the only son of his mother--gone to the front, reported badly wounded, and for days, like Joseph and Mary, the anxious parents had sought him, only to find him on the threshold of death, with a bullet in his liver. Again and again she beguiled her anguish by chronicles of his miraculous childhood--his precocious intelligence at five, his prescience at six, his unfathomable wisdom at seven. The silent company of wayfarers listened in patience to the twice-told tale. No one could say her nay as she repeated her litany of pain. She was, indeed, the only passenger in that compartment whose eyes were dry. _Stabat Mater Dolorosa._

XVIII

BARBARA

It was the Duchess of X.'s Hospital at a certain _plage_ on the coast. I had motored thither through undulating country dotted with round beehive ricks and past meadows on which a flock of gulls, looking in the distance like a bed of white crocuses, were settled in platoons. As we neared the coast the scenery changed to shifting dunes of pale sand, fine as flour, and tufted with tussocks of wiry grass. Here clumps of broom and beech, with an occasional fir, maintained a desperate existence against the salt winds from the Atlantic, and the beeches held up plaintive arms like caryatids supporting the intolerable architrave of the sky. The bare needle-like branches of the broom and fir stood out blackly against the biscuit-coloured sand with the sharp outlines of an etching.

I had taken a hospitable cup of tea with the Duchess in the Matron's room. She was clothed in fine linen but without her purple; she wore the ordinary and serviceable slate-coloured dress of a nurse. It was here I had the honour of being introduced to Barbara. She was nursing a doll with great tenderness, and had been asking the Duchess why she did not wear her "cowonet."

"This is Barbara--our little Egyptian," said the matron.

Barbara repudiated the description hotly.

"She was born in Egypt," explained the matron.

"Ah," I said, "that wasn't your fault, Barbara, was it? But it was Egypt's good fortune."

Barbara ignored the compliment with the simplicity of childhood, and proceeded to explain with great seriousness: "You see, Mummy was travelling, and she comed to Egypt. She didn't know I was going to happen," she added as if to clear Mummy of any imputation of thoughtlessness.

"And your birthday, Barbara?"

Barbara and I discovered that both of us have birthdays in March--only six days apart. This put us at once on a footing of intimacy--we must have been born under the same star. Barbara proceeded to inform me that she rather liked birthdays--except the one which happened in Egypt. I had half a mind to execute a deed of conveyance on the spot, assigning to her all my own birthdays as an estate _pour autre vie_, with all _profits à prendre_ and presents arising therefrom, for I am thirty-eight and have no further use for them.

"I am afraid there are more than six years between us, Barbara," I said pensively.

Barbara regarded me closely with large round eyes.

"About ten, I fink. I'm seven, you know."

"How nice of you to say that, Barbara. Then I'm only seventeen."

Barbara regarded me still more closely.

"A little more, p'waps--ten monfs."

"Thank you, Barbara. I'll remind you of that some day." After all, ten years is no obstacle to the course of true love. "But what is the matter with the doll?" Despite a rosy flush the doll has a field-dressing round her auburn locks, and one leg is immensely stout owing to a tourniquet.

Barbara looked at me rather less favourably than before. It was evident that she now thought poorly of my intelligence, and that I had made a _faux pas_.

"I'm a nurse," Barbara explained, loftily, showing an armlet bearing the ensign of the Red Cross. I was about to remind her of 1 & 2 Geo. V. cap. 20, which threatens the penalties of a misdemeanour against all who wear the Red Cross without the authority of Army Council, but I thought better of it. Instead of anything so foolish, I exhibit a delicate solicitude about the health of the patient. I put myself right by referring to it as "he." A less intelligent observer might pronounce it to be decidedly of the female sex. Still, I reflected, women have enlisted in the Army before now. I proceeded to inspect the injured limb with professional gravity. "A compound fracture, I think, Barbara. He will require careful nursing."

Barbara liked this--no one in the matron's room had ever exhibited such a clinical interest in the case before, and she thinks "fwacture" rather imposing.

"Let me feel his pulse," I said. I held a waxen arm between my thumb and forefinger, and looked at my wrist-watch for some seconds, Barbara gazing at me intently.

"Hum! hum! I think we had better take his temperature," I said, as I held a clinical thermometer in the shape of a fountain-pen to the rosebud lips of the patient. "103, I think."

"Will you wite a pwescwiption?" asked Barbara anxiously.

"Certainly, an admirable suggestion, Barbara. Let me see, will this do, do you think?" I scribbled on my Field Note-book, tore out the page, and handed it to Barbara.

Brom. Potass. 3 grs. Hydrochl. 5 quarts. Quin. Sulph. 1 pt.

She scrutinised it closely. It puzzled her, though her bewilderment was nothing to the astonishment which that prescription would have excited in a member of the medical profession.

"Fank you," said Barbara, who was no less pleased than puzzled, and who tried to look as if she quite understood. Her little face, with its halo of golden curls, was turned up to mine, and she now regarded me with a respect for my professional attainments which was truly gratifying.

I was transcribing a temperature-chart for Barbara's patient when a tactless messenger came to say that my car was at the door. Barbara hung on my arm. "Will you come again, and take his tempewature--Pwomise?"

I promised.

XIX

AN ARMY COUNCIL

(_October 1914_)

All the morning I had travelled through the pleasant valleys of Normandy between chalk-hills crowned with russet beeches. The country had the delicacy of one of Corot's landscapes, and the skies were of that unforgettable blue which is the secret of France. The end of my journey found me at No. ---- General Hospital. The chaplain, an old C.F. attached to the Base Hospitals, who had rejoined on the outbreak of the war, and myself were the centre of a group of convalescents. They wore the regulation uniform of loose sky-blue flannels, resembling a fitter's overalls in everything except the extreme brilliance of the dye, with red ties tied in a sailor's knot. The badges on their caps alone betrayed their regiments. There were "details" from almost every regiment in the British Army, and one could hear every dialect from John o' Groat's to Land's End. Their talk was of the great retreat.

"Hell it was--fire and brimstone," said a R.F.A. man. "We limbered up, our battery did, and got the guns off in column of route, but we were more like a blooming ambulance than a battery. We had our limbers and waggons chock full o' details--fellers who'd been wounded or crocked up. And reservists wi' sore feet--out o' training, I reckon," he added magisterially.

"Never you mind about resarvists, my son," interjected a man in the Suffolks. "We resarvists carried some of the recroots on our backs for miles. We ain't no chickens."

"No, that we bain't," said a West-countryman. "I reckon we can teach them young fellers zummat. Oi zeed zome on 'em pretty clytenish[13] when they was under foire the fust time. Though they were middlin' steady, arterwards," he added indulgently as though jealous of the honour of his regiment.

"'Twere all a duddering[14] mix-up. I niver a zeed anything loike it afore. Wimmen an' childer a-runnin' in and out among us like poultry; we could'n keep sections o' fours nohow. We carried some o' the little 'uns. And girt fires a-burnin' at night loike ricks--a terrible blissey[15] on the hills. And 'twere that dusty and hot oi did get mortal drouthy in my drawt and a niver had a drop in my water-bottle; I'd gied it all to the childer."

"What about rations?" said the chaplain.

"Oh I were bit leery[16] i' my innerds at toimes, but oi had my emargency ration, and them A.S.C. chaps were pretty sprack;[17] they kep up wi' us most times. 'Twere just loike a circus procession--lorries and guns and we soldjers all a-mixed up. And some of the harses went cruel lame and had to be left behind."

"That they did," said a small man in the 19th Hussars who was obviously a Londoner. He was slightly bow-legged and moved with the deliberate gait of the cavalryman on his feet. "Me 'orse got the blooming 'ump with corns."

"Ah! and what do you think of the Uhlans?"

He sniffed. "Rotten, sir! They never gives us a chawnce. They ain't no good except for lootin'. Regular 'ooligans. We charged 'em up near Mons, our orficer goin' ahead 'bout eight yards, and when we got up to 'em 'e drops back into our line. We charges in a single line, you know, knee to knee, as close together as us can get, riding low so as to present as small a target as we can."

"And you got home with the Uhlans?" I asked.

"Once. Their lances ain't much good except for lightin' street-lamps."

"Street-lamps?" said the chaplain literally.

"Yuss. They're too long. The blighters 'ave no grip on them. We just parry and then thrust with the point; we've giv' up cutting exercises. If the thrust misses, you uses the pommel--so!" He executed an intimidating gesture with his stick.

"Well, ah've had ma bit o' fun," interjected a small H.L.I. man irrelevantly, feeling, apparently, it was his turn in the symposium, as he thrust a red head with a freckled skin and high cheek-bones into the group. "Ah ken verra weel ah got 'im. It was at a railway stashon where we surprised 'em. Ah came upon a Jerrman awficer--I thocht he were drunk--and he fired three times aht me with a ree-vol-ver. But ah got 'im. Yes, ah've had ma bit o' fun," he said complacently as he cherished an arm in a sling.

With him was a comrade belonging to the "Lilywhites," the old 82nd, now known as the first battalion of the South Lancs, with whom the H.L.I. have an ancient friendship. The South Lancs have also their antipathies--the King's Liverpools among them--but that is neither here nor there.

"It were just like a coop-tie crowd was the retreat," he drawled in the broad Lancashire dialect. "A fair mix-up, it were."

"What do you think of the Germans?"

There was a chorus of voices. "Not much"--"Blighters"--"Swine."

"Their 'coal-boxes' don't come off half the time," said the R.F.A. man professionally. "And their shrapnel hasn't got the dispersion ours has. Ours is a treat--like sugar-loaf." The German gunnery has become deadly enough since then.

"Their coal-boxes do stink though," said a Hoxton man in the Royal Fusiliers. "Reminds me of our howitzer shells in the Boer War; they used to let off a lot of stuff that turned yellow. I've seen Boers--hairy men, you know, sir--with their beards turned all yellow by them. Regular hair-restorers, they was."

"I remember up on the Aisne," continued the Hoxton man, who had an ingenuous countenance, "one of our chaps shouted 'Waiter,' and about fifty on 'em stuck their heads up above the trenches and said, 'Coming, sir.'"

There was a shout of laughter. The chaplain looked incredulous. "Don't mind him, he's pulling your leg, sir," said his neighbour. It is a pastime of which the British soldier is inordinately fond.

"They can't shoot for nuts, that's a fact," said a Rifleman. "They couldn't hit a house if they was in it. We can give them five rounds rapid while they're getting ready to fire one. Fire from the hips, they do. I never seen the likes of it." It was the professional criticism of the most perfectly trained body of marksmen in the world, and we listened with respect. "But they've got some tidy snipers," he added candidly.

"They was singing like an Eisteddfod," said a man in the South Wales Borderers, "when they advanced. Yess, they was singing splendid. Like a _cymanfa ganu_,[18] it wass. Fair play."

"And what do you boys do?" asked the chaplain. "Do you sing too?"

"Faith, I swore," said one of the Munsters, "I used every name but a saint's name." The speaker was a Catholic, and the chaplain was Church of England, or he might have been less candid.

"There was a mon in oor company," said the red-headed one, feeling it was his turn again, "that killed seven Jerrmans--he shot six and baynitted anither. And he wur fair fou[19] afterwards. He grat like a bairn."

"Aye, mon," said a ruddy man of the Yorks L.I., "ah knaw'd ah felt mysen dafflin[20] when ah saw me pal knocked over. He comed fra oor toon, and he tellt me hissen the neet afore: 'Jock,' 'e said, 'tha'll write to me wife, woan't tha?' And ah said, 'Doan't be a fule, Ben, tha'll be all right.' 'Noa, Jock,' he tellt me, 'ah knaw'd afore ah left heeam ah should be killt. Ah saw a mouldiwarp[21] dead afore oor door; me wife fair dithered[22] when she saw't.'"

The chaplain and myself looked puzzled. "It's a kind o' sign among the fouk in our parts, sir," he proceeded, enlightening our ignorance. "And 'e asked me to take his brass for the wife. But ah thowt nowt of it. And we lost oor connectin' files and were nobbut two platoons, and we got it somethin' cruel; the shells were a-skirling[23] like peewits ower our heids. And Ben were knocked over and 'e never said a ward. And then ah got fair daft."

There was silence for a moment.

"I found this," suddenly interrupted a despatch-rider. He was a fair-spoken youth, obviously of some education. He explained, in reply to our interrogatories, that he was a despatch-rider attached to a Signal Company of the R.E. He produced a cap, apparently from nowhere, by mere sleight of hand. It was greasy, weather-stained, and in no respect different from a thousand such Army caps. It bore the badge and superscription of the R.E. We looked at it indifferently as he held it out with an eleemosynary gesture.

"A collection will now be taken," said the Hoxton man with a grin.

But the despatch-rider did not laugh. "I found this cap," he said gravely, "on Monday, September 7th, in a house near La Ferté. We stopped there for four hours while the artillery were in action. We saw a broken motor bicycle outside a house to which the people pointed. We went in. We found one of our despatch-riders with an officer's sword sticking in him. Our section officer asked the people about it, and they told him that the despatch-rider arrived late one night, having lost his way and knocked at the door of the house. There were German officers billeted there. They let him in, and then they stuck him up against a wall and cut him up. He had fifteen sabre-cuts," he added quietly.

No one laughed any more. We all crowded round to look at that tragic cap. "The number looks like one--nought--seven--something," said the chaplain, adjusting his glasses, "but I can't make out the rest." "Poor lad," he added softly. No one spoke. But I saw a look in the eyes of the men around me that boded ill for the Hun when they should be reported fit for duty.

The English soldier hides his feelings as though he were ashamed of them. The sombre silence became almost oppressive in the autumnal twilight, and I sought to disperse it.

"I suppose you're pretty comfortable here?" I said, for the camp seemed to leave nothing to be desired.

But this was to open the sluices of criticism. The British soldier begins to "grouse" the moment he becomes comfortable--and not before. He will bear without repining everything but luxury.

"One and six a day we gets," cried one of them, "and what's this about this New Army getting four bob?"

"I think you're mistaken, my son," said the chaplain gently.

"Well, there's chaps in this 'ere camp, Army cooks they calls themselves, speshully 'listed for the war, and they gets six bob. And those shuvvers--they're like fighting cocks."

"Well, there seems nothing to complain of in the matter of supplies," I said. They had been having a kind of high tea on tables laid across trestles on the lawn, and one of them, using his knife as a bricklayer uses his trowel, was luxuriously spreading a layer of apple and plum jam upon a stratum of hard-boiled egg, which reposed on a bed-rock of bread and butter, the whole representing a most interesting geological formation and producing a startling chromatic effect.

"Why, sir, if you read the papers you wud 'a thocht it was a braw pic-nic." said the red-headed one. "You wud think we were growin' fat oot in the trenches. Dae ah look like it?"

My companion, the grey-headed chaplain, took the Highlander affectionately by the second button of his tunic and gave it a pull. "Not much space here, eh? I think you're pretty well fed, my son!"

A bugle-call rang out over the camp. "Bed-time," said a Guardsman, "time to go bye-bye. Parade--hype! Dis-miss! The orderly officer'll be round soon. Scoot, my sons."

They scooted.

The silvery notes of the bugle died away over the woods. Night was falling, and the sky faded slowly from mother-of-pearl to a leaden gray. We were alone. The chaplain gazed wistfully at the retreating figures, his face seemed suddenly shrunken, and I could see that he was very old. He took my arm and leaned heavily upon it. "I have been in the Army for the best part of my life," he said simply, "and I had retired on a pension. But I thank God," he added devoutly, "that it has pleased Him to extend my days long enough to enable me to rejoin the Forces. For I know the British soldier and--to know him is to love him. Do you understand?" he added, as he nodded in the direction the men had gone.

As I looked at him, there came into my mind the haunting lines of Tennyson's "Ulysses."

"Yes," I said, "I understand."

FOOTNOTES:

[13] Pale.

[14] Confusing.

[15] Blaze.

[16] Empty.

[17] Smart.

[18] Welsh for a singing meeting.

[19] Mad.

[20] Imbecile.

[21] A mole.

[22] Trembled.

[23] Screaming.

XX

THE FUGITIVES

"But pray that your flight be not in the winter."

Some four or five miles north of Bailleul, where the _douane_ posts mark the marches of the Franco-Belgian frontier, is the village of Locre. Here the clay of the plains gives way to a wooded ridge of low hills, through which the road drives a deep cutting, laying bare the age of the earth in a chronology of greensand and limestone. Beyond the ridge lies another plain, and there it was that on a clammy winter's day I came upon two lonely wayfarers. The fields and hedgerows were rheumy with moisture which dripped from every bent and twig. The hedges were full of the dead wood of the departed autumn, and on a decrepit creeper hung a few ragged wisps of Old Man's Beard. The only touch of colour in the landscape was the vinous purple of the twigs, and a few green leaves of privet from which rose spikes of berries black as crape. Not a living thing appeared, and the secret promises of spring were so remote as to seem incredible.

The man and woman were Flemish of the peasant class; the man, gnarled like an old oak, the purple clots in the veins of his wrists betraying the senility of his arteries; the woman, withered as though all the sap had gone out of her blood. She had a rope round her waist, to the other end of which a small cart was attached; under the cart, harnessed to the axle, two dogs panted painfully with their tongues out; behind the cart the man pushed. It contained a disorderly freight: a large feather-bed, a copper cauldron, a bird-cage, a mattock, a clock curiously carved, a spinning-wheel with a distaff impoverished of flax, and some kitchen utensils, which, as the woman stumbled and the cart lurched, clanked together.

As our car drew up, they stopped, the woman holding her hands to her side as though to recover breath.

"Who are you? Where do you come from?" said my companion, a French officer.

They stared uncomprehendingly.

He spoke again, this time in Flemish:

"_Van waar komt gy? Waar gaat gy heen?_"

The man pointed with his hand vaguely in the direction of the Menin ridge.

There followed a conversation of which I could make but little. But I noticed that they answered my companion in a dull, trance-like way, as though our questions concerned no one so little as themselves.

"They're fugitives," he repeated to me. "Been burnt out of their farm by the Bosches near the Menin ridge."

"Are they all alone?" I asked.

He put some further questions. "Yes, their only son was shot by the Germans when they billeted there."

"Why?"

"They don't know. The Bosches took all they had and drove the live-stock away. These few sticks are all they have left. Curious, isn't it," he added meditatively, "that you never see any Flemish fugitives without their feather-beds?" I had often noticed it. Also I had noticed the curious purposelessness of their salvage, as though in trying to save everything they succeeded in saving nothing that was of any consequence. Perhaps it is that, as some one has remarked, all things suddenly become equally dear when you have to leave them.

"But where are they going?"

The man stared at my companion as he put my question; the woman gazed vacantly at the lowering horizon, but neither uttered a word. The canary in its little prison of wire-work piped joyfully, as a gleam of sunshine lit up the watery landscape. Somewhere the guns spoke in a dull thunder. The woman was pleating a fold of her skirt between thumb and forefinger, plucking and unplucking with immense care and concentration. The man was suddenly shaken with a fit of asthma, and clutched at the cart as though seeking support.

We waited for some reply, and at length the man answered between the spasms of his malady.

"He says he doesn't know," my companion translated. "He's never been outside his parish before. But he thinks he'll go to Brussels and see the King of the Belgians. He doesn't know the Germans are in Brussels. And anyhow he's on the wrong road."

"But surely," I hazarded, "the _maire_ or the _curé_ could have told him better."

"He says the Germans shot the _curé_ and carried off the _maire_. It's a way they've got, you know."

It was now clear to us that this tragic couple were out on an uncharted sea. Their little world was in ruins. The bells that had called them to the divine offices were silent; the little church in which they had knelt at mass was in ruins; the parish registers which chronicled the great landmarks in their lives had been devoured by the flames; their hearth was cold and their habitation desolate. They had watched the heavens but they might not sow; they had turned their back on the fields which they would never reap. There was an end to all their husbandry, and they had no one left to speak with their enemies in the gate. This was the secret of their heavy lethargy.

My companion and I took counsel together. It were better, we agreed, to maintain them on the road to Bailleul. For we knew that, though Bailleul had been stripped bare by the German hussars before they evacuated it, the French, out of the warmth of their hearts, and the British, out of the fulness of their supplies, would succour this forlorn couple. Many a time had I known the British soldier pass round the hat to relieve the refugees out of the exiguous pay of himself and his fellows; not seldom has he risked a stoppage of pay or a spell of field-punishment by

## parting with an overcoat, for whose absence at kit inspection he would

supply every excuse but the true one. And, therefore, to Bailleul we directed them to go.

But as I looked back I saw those bent and dwindling figures still standing in the mud. The woman continued to pluck at her dress; the man gazed at the horizon with the same dull vacancy. They had the weary humility of the figures in Millet's "Angelus," without their inspiration, and in their eyes was a dumb despair.

XXI

A "DUG-OUT"[24]

Driver George Hawkins, of the ----th Battery (K), was engaged in drying one of the leaders of the gun team. The leader, who answered, when he felt so inclined, to the name of "Tommy," had been exercised that morning in a driving rain, and Driver Hawkins was concerned lest Tommy should develop colic with all its acute internal inconveniences. He performed his ministrations with a wisp of straw, and seemed to derive great moral support in the process from the production of a phthisical expiration of his breath, between clenched teeth, resulting in a sibilant hiss. Like most ritualistic practices this habit has a utilitarian origin: it serves to keep the dust of grooming from entering the lungs. But in process of time it has acquired a touch of mysticism, and is supposed to soothe the horse and sustain the man. Had Hawkins not been absorbed in a localised attention to Tommy's fetlocks he would have observed that his charge had suddenly laid his ears back. But being something of a chiropodist he was studying the way Tommy put his foot to the ground, for he suspected corns. The next moment Driver Hawkins found himself lying in a heap of straw on the opposite side of the stable. Tommy had suddenly lashed out, and landed him one on the left shoulder. Driver Hawkins picked himself up, more grieved than hurt. He looked at Tommy with pained surprise.

"I feeds yer," he said reproachfully, "I waters yer, I grooms yer, I stays from my dinner to dry yer, and what do I get for it? Now I ask yer?" Tommy was looking round at him with eyes of guileless innocence.

"What do I get for it?" he repeated argumentatively. "I gets a blooming kick."

"Blooming" is a euphemism. The adjective Hawkins actually used was, as a matter of fact, closely associated with the exercise of the reproductive functions, and cannot be set down here.

"Beg pardon, sir," said Hawkins, saluting, as he caught sight of the Major and myself who had entered the stable at that moment. The Major was trying hard to repress a smile. "Go on with your catechism, Hawkins," he said. It was evident that Hawkins belonged to the Moral Education League, and believed in suasion rather than punishment for the repression of vice.

"I suppose you're fond of your horses, Hawkins?" I said unguardedly. But no R.F.A. driver wears his heart on his sleeve, and Hawkins's reply was disconcerting. "I 'ates 'em, sir," he whispered to me as the Major turned his back; "I'm a maid-of-all-work to them 'orses. They gives me 'ousemaid's knee, and my back do ache something cruel."

"He doesn't, though," said the Major, who had overheard this auricular confidence. We had left the stable. "Our drivers are mighty fond of their horses--and proud of them too. It's quite an infatuation in its way. But come and see the O.T.C. We've got them down here for the weekend, by way of showing them the evolutions of a battery. They've got their instructor, an N.C.O. who's been dug out for the job, and I've lent him two of the guns to put them through their paces. He's quite priceless--a regular chip of the old Army block."

"Now, sir," the sergeant was saying, "get them into single file." They were to change from Battery Column to Column of Route.

"Battery...!" began the cadet in a piping voice.

"As y' were," interjected the sergeant in mild expostulation. "You've got to get it off your chest, sir. Let them 'ear it. So!" And he gave a stentorian shout. It was a meritorious and surprising performance, for he was fat and scant of breath. The sedentary duties of hall-porter at the ---- Club, after twenty-one years' service in the Army, had produced a fatty degeneration which no studious arrangement of an Army belt could altogether conceal.

"Battery!" began the cadet, as he threw his head back and took a deep breath. "Advance in single file from the right. The rest mark time."

"Rest!" said the sergeant reproachfully. "There ain't no rest in the British Army. Rear, say, 'Rear,' sir."

"Rear, mark time!" said the cadet uncomfortably.

"Now," said the sergeant, as he wiped his brows, "double them back, sir."

"Battery, run!" said the cadet brightly.

"As y' were! How could yer, Mr. ----?" said the sergeant grievously. "The British Army never runs, sir! They doubles." The cadet blushed at the aspersion upon the reputation of the British Army into which he had been betrayed.

"Double--march!"

They doubled.

The sergeant now turned his attention to a party at gun drill. It was a sub-section, which means a gun, a waggon, and ten men. The detachment was formed up behind the gun in two rows, odd numbers in front, even numbers behind.

"Section tell off!"

"One," from the front row. "Two," from the back. "Three," from the front. The tale was duly told in voices which ran up and down the scale, tenor alternating with baritone.

"Without drag-ropes--prepare to advance!" shouted the sergeant. The odd numbers shifted to the right of the gun, the evens to the left, but numbers "4" and "6," being apparently under the impression that it was a game of "musical chairs," found themselves on the right instead of the left.

"Too many odds," shouted the sergeant. "The British Army be used to 'eavy hodds, but not that sort. Nos. 4 and 6 get over to the near side."

"Halt! Action front!" They unlimbered, and swung the gun round to point in the direction of an imaginary enemy.

The detachment were now grouped round the gun, and I drew near to have a look at it. No neater adaptation of means to end could be devised than your eighteen-pounder. She is as docile as a child, and her "bubble" is as sensitive to a touch as mercury in a barometer.

"No. 1 add one hundred. Two-nought minutes more left!" shouted the sergeant, who, with the versatility of a variety artiste, was now playing another part from his extensive repertoire. He was forward observing officer.

One of his pupils turned the ranging gear until the range-drum registered a further hundred yards, while another traversed the gun until it pointed twenty minutes more left.

As we turned away they were performing another delicate and complicated operation which was not carried through without some plaintive expostulation from the N.C.O.

"It reminds me," remarked the Major colloquially, as we strolled away, "of Falstaff drilling his recruits. So does the texture of the khaki they serve out to the O.T.C. 'Dowlas, filthy dowlas!' But you've no idea how soon he'll lick them into shape. These 'dug-outs' are as primitive as cave-dwellers in their way but they know their job. And what is more, they like it."

As we passed the stables I heard ecstatic sounds--a whinny of equine delight and the blandishments of a human voice. Through the open door I caught a glimpse of Driver Hawkins with his back turned towards us. His left arm was round Tommy's neck and the left side of his face rested upon Tommy's head; the fingers of his right hand were delicately stroking Tommy's nose.

"I forgives yer," I heard him say with rare magnanimity, "yus, I forgives yer, old boy. But if yer does it again, yer'll give me the blooming 'ump."

I passed hurriedly on. It was not for a stranger to intrude on anything so intimate.

FOOTNOTE:

[24] On leave in England.

XXII

CHRISTMAS EVE

(_1914_)

"Halt! Stop, I mean."

The ring of choristers in khaki and blue flannel faced with cotton wool looked at their conductor, a sergeant in the Glosters, with intense and painful concentration. They were rehearsing carols in the annexe of a Base hospital on Christmas Eve, and the sergeant was as hard to please as if they were recruits doing their first squad drill. They were a scratch lot, recruited by a well-meaning chaplain to the Forces, from Base "details" and convalescents. Their voices were lusty, but their time erratic, and one ardent spirit was a bar ahead and gaining audibly with each lap despite the desperate spurts of the rest.

"Opened out his throttle--'e has," whispered an Army driver professionally to his neighbour; "'e's a fair cop for exceedin' the speed limit."

The sergeant glanced magisterially at the offender, a young Dorset, who a year ago was hedging and ditching in the Vale of Blackmore, but who has lately done enough digging for a whole parish.

"You've lost your connecting files, me lad," he exclaimed reproachfully; "you ain't out on patrol, yer know. 'Shun! Now again! 'Christians'."

Christians, awake! Salute the happy morn, Whereon ...

The familiar melody was shut behind me as I closed the door. Those West-country voices awoke in me haunting memories of my childhood, and, in a flash, I saw once again a ring of ruddy faces on a frosty night, illuminated by the candle in a shepherd's horn lantern, their breath a luminous vapour in the still air, and my mother holding me up at the window of our Wiltshire house, as I looked out from the casement of the nursery upon the up-turned faces of the choristers below and wondered mazily whether they had brought Father Christmas with them.

A low cry of pain reached my ears as I opened the door of Surgical Ward A.I. A nurse was removing a field-dressing from a soldier just brought down from the Front. The surgeon stood over him ready to spray the wound with peroxide. "Buck up, old chap," cried the patients in the neighbouring beds who looked on encouragingly at these ministries. Another moan escaped him as the discoloured bandage, with its faint odour of perchloride, was stripped from the raw and inflamed flesh.

"Next gramophone record, please!" chanted his neighbours. The patient smiled faintly at the exhortation and set his teeth.

"That's better, sonny," whispered the nurse with benign approval.

"It won't hurt you, old chap, I'm only going to drain off the septic matter," interjected the surgeon in holland overalls, with sleeves tucked up to the elbow. "Here, give me that tube." The dresser handed him a nickel reed from the sterilising basin.

With a few light quick movements the wound was sprayed, dressed, cleansed, and anointed, and the surgeon, like the good Samaritan, passed on to the next case. Only last night the patient was in the trenches, moaning with pain, as the stretcher-bearers carried him to the aid-post, and from the aid-post to the forward dressing station, whence by an uneasy journey (there were no sumptuous hospital-trains in those days) he had come hither. But what of the others who were hit outside the trenches and who lay even now, this Christmas Eve, in that dreadful No Man's Land swept by the enemy's fire, whither no stretcher-bearer can go--lying among the dead and dying, a field of creeping forms, some quivering in the barbed wire, where dead men hang as on a gibbet, hoping only for a cleanly death from a bullet before their wounds fester and poison the blood in their veins.

Whereon--the Saviour--of mankind--was--born.

The measured cadence fell on my ear as I left the ward and passed beyond the annexe. The sergeant had now got his section well in hand. I turned up the long winding road towards my quarters. It was a cold moonlight night, and every twig of broom and beech was sharply defined as in a black-and-white drawing. Overhead each star was hard and bright, as though a lapidary had been at work in the heavens, and never had the Great Bear seemed so brilliant. But none so bright and legible--or so it seemed to me--as Mars in all that starry heraldry.

"Bon soir, monsieur!" It was the voice of the sentry, and came from behind a barricade of hurdles, thatched with straw, on the crest of the road over the downs. His bayonet gleamed like a silver needle in the moonlight, and he was alone in his vigil. No shepherds watched their flocks by night, neither did angels sing peace on earth and goodwill towards men. Only the cold austerity of the stars kept him company. Perhaps the first Christmas Eve was just such a starry night as this; the same stars may have looked down upon a manger in Bethlehem. But on the brow of the hill was one of those wayside shrines which symbolise the anguish of the Cross, and these very stars may have looked down upon the hill of Calvary.

IV

THE FRONT AGAIN

XXIII

THE COMING OF THE HUN

The _maire_ sat in his parlour at the Hôtel de Ville dictating to his secretary. He was a stout little man with a firm mouth, an indomitable chin, and quizzical eyes. His face would at any time have been remarkable; for a French provincial it was notable in being clean-shaven. Most Frenchmen of the middle class wear beards of an Assyrian luxuriance, which to a casual glance suggest stage properties rather than the work of Nature. The _maire_ was leaning back in his chair, his elbows resting upon its arms and his hands extended in front of him, the thumb and finger-tips of one hand poised to meet those of the other as though he were contemplating the fifth proposition in Euclid. It was a characteristic attitude; an observer would have said it indicated a temperament at once patient and precise. He was dictating a note to the _commissaire de police_, warning the inhabitants to conduct themselves "paisiblement" in the event of a German occupation, an event which was hourly expected. Much might depend upon that proclamation; a word too little or too much and Heaven alone knew what innuendo a German Commandant might discover in it. Perhaps the _maire_ was also not indifferent to the question of style; he prided himself on his French; he had in his youth won a prize at the Lycée for composition, and he contributed occasional papers to the journal of the Société de l'Histoire de France on the antiquities of his _department_. Most Frenchmen are born purists in style, and the _maire_ lingered over his words.

"Continuez, Henri," he said with a glance at the clerk. "_Le Maire, assisté de son adjoint et de ses conseillers municipaux et de délégués de quartier, sera en permanence à l'hôtel de Ville pour assurer_--" There was a kick at the door and a tall loutish man in the uniform of a German officer entered, followed by two grey-coated soldiers. The officer neither bowed nor saluted, but merely glared with an intimidating frown. The _maire's_ clerk sat in an atrophy of fear, unable to move a muscle. The officer advanced to the desk, pulled out his revolver from its leather pouch, and laid it with a lethal gesture on the _maire's_ desk. The _maire_ examined it curiously. "Ah, yes, M. le Capitaine, thank you; I will examine it in a moment, but I have seen better ones--our new service pattern, for example. Ja! Ich verstehe ganz gut," he continued, answering the officer's reckless French in perfect German. "Consider yourself under arrest," declaimed the officer, with increasing violence. "We are in occupation of your town; you will provide us within the next twenty-four hours with ten thousand kilos of bread, thirty thousand kilos of hay, forty thousand kilos of oats, five thousand bottles of wine, one hundred boxes of cigars." ("Mon Dieu! it is an inventory," said the _maire_ to himself.) "If these are not forthcoming by twelve noon to-morrow you will be shot," added the officer in a sudden inspiration of his own.

The _maire_ was facing the officer, who towered above him. "Ah, yes, Monsieur le Capitaine, you will not take a seat? No? And your requisition--you have your commandant's written order and signature, no doubt?" The officer blustered. "No, no, Monsieur le Capitaine, I am the head of the civil government in this town; I take no orders except from the head of the military authority. You have doubtless forgotten Hague Regulation, Article 52; your Government signed it, you will recollect." The officer hesitated. The _maire_ looked out on the _place_; it was full of armed men, but he did not flinch. "You see, monsieur," he went on suavely, "there are such things as receipts, and they have to be authenticated." The officer turned his back on him, took out his field note-book, scribbled something on a page, and, having torn it out, handed it to one of his men with a curt instruction.

The _maire_ resumed his dictation to the hypnotised clerk, while the officer sat astride a chair and executed an impatient _pas seul_ with his heels upon the parquet floor. Once or twice he spat demonstratively, but the _maire_ took no notice. In a few minutes the soldier returned with a written order, which the officer threw upon the desk without a word.

The _maire_ scrutinised it carefully. "Ten thousand kilos of bread! Monsieur, we provide five thousand a day for the refugees, and this will tax us to the uttermost. The bakers of the town are nearly all _sous les drapeaux_. Very well, monsieur," he added in reply to an impatient exclamation from the officer, "we shall do our best. But many a poor soul in this town will go hungry to-night. And the receipts?" "The requisitioning officer will go with you and give receipts," retorted the officer, who had apparently forgotten that he had placed the _maire_ under arrest.

* * * * *

Subdued lights twinkled like glow-worms in the streets as the _maire_ returned across the square to the Hôtel de Ville. He threaded his way through groups of infantry, narrowly escaped a collision with three drunken soldiers, who were singing "Die Wacht am Rhein" with laborious unction, skirted the park of ammunition waggons, and reached the main entrance. He had been on his feet for hours visiting the _boulangeries_, the _pâtisseries_, the hay and corn merchants, persuading, expostulating, beseeching, until at last he had wrung from their exiguous stores the apportionment of the stupendous tribute. It was a heavy task, nor were his importunities made appreciably easier by the receipt-forms tendered, readily enough, by the requisitioning officer who accompanied him, for the inhabitants seemed to view with terror the possession of these German documents, suspecting they knew not what. But the task was done, and the _maire_ wearily mounted the stairs.

The officer greeted him curtly. The _maire_ now had leisure to study his appearance more closely. He had high cheek-bones, protruding eyes, and a large underhung mouth which, when he was pleased, looked sensual, and, when he was annoyed, merely cruel. The base of his forehead was square, but it rapidly receded with a convex conformation of head, very closely shaven as though with a currycomb, and his ears stood out almost at right angles to his skull. The ferocity that was his by nature he seemed to have assiduously cultivated by art, and the points of his moustaches, upturned in the shape of a cow's horns, accentuated the truculence of his appearance. In short, he was a typical Prussian officer. In peace he would have been merely comic. In war he was terrible, for there was nothing to restrain him.

Meanwhile the officer called for a corporal's guard to place the _maire_ under arrest. "But you will first sign the following _affiche_--by the General's orders," he exclaimed roughly.

Le Maire informe ses concitoyens que le commandant en chef des troupes allemandes a ordonné que le maire et deux notables soient pris comme otages pour la raison que des civils aient tiré sur des patrouilles allemandes. Si un coup de fusil était tiré à nouveau par des civils, les trois otages seraient fusillés et la ville serait incendiée immédiatement.

Si des troupes alliées rentraient le maire rappelle à la population que tout civil ne doit pas prendre part à la guerre et que si l'un d'eux venait à y participer le commandant des troupes allemandes ferait fusilier également les otages.

"One moment," said the _maire_ as he took up a pen, "'_les civils_'! I ordered the civil population to deposit their arms at the _mairie_ two days ago, and the _commissaire de police_ and the gendarmes have searched every house. We have no armed civilians here."

"Es macht nichts," said the officer; "we shall add '_ou peut-être des militaires en civil_.'"

The _maire_ shrugged his shoulders at the disingenuous parenthesis. It was, he knew, useless to protest. For all he knew he might be signing his own death-warrant. He studied the style a little more attentively. "Mon Dieu, what French!" he said to himself; "'était,' 'seraient,' 'venait'! What moods! What tenses! Monsieur le Capitaine," he continued aloud, "if I had used such French in my exercises at the Lycée my instituteur would have said I deserved to be shot. Pray allow me to make it a little more graceful." But the Prussian's ignorance of French syntax was only equalled by his suspicion of it. The _maire's_ irony merely irritated him and his coolness puzzled him. "I give you thirty seconds to sign," he said, as he took out his watch and the inevitable revolver. The _maire_ took up a needle-like pen, dipped it in the ink, and with a sigh wrote in fragile but firm characters "X---- Y----." The officer called a corporal's guard, and the _maire_, who had fasted since noon, was marched out of the room and thrust into a small closet upon the door of which were the letters "_Cabinet_." This, he reflected grimly, was certainly what in military language is called "close confinement." The soldiers accompanied him. There was just room for him to stretch his weary body upon the stone floor; one soldier remained standing over him with fixed bayonet, the others took up their position outside.

Meanwhile a company of Landwehr had bivouacked in the square, four machine-guns had been placed so as to command the four avenues of approach, patrols had been sent out, sentries posted, all lights extinguished, and all doors ordered to be left open by the householders. Billeting officers had gone from house to house, chalking upon the doors such legends as "_Drei Männer_," "_6 Offiziere--Eingang verboten_," and, on rare occasions "_Gute Leute hier_." The trembling inhabitants had been forced to wait on their uninvited guests as they clamoured noisily for wine and liqueurs. All the civilians of military age, and many beyond it, had been rounded up and taken under guard to the church; their wives and daughters alone remained, and were the subject of menacing pleasantries. So much the _maire_ knew before he had returned from his errand. As he lay in his dark cell he speculated painfully as to what might be happening in the homes of his fellow-townsmen. He sat up once or twice to listen, until the toe of the sentry's boot in his back reminded him of his irregularity. Now and again a woman's cry broke the silence of the night, but otherwise all was still. He composed himself to sleep on the floor, reflecting that he must husband his strength and his nerves for what might lie ahead of him. He was very tired and slept heavily in spite of his cold stone bed. At the hour of one in the morning he was awakened by a kick, and he found himself staring at an electric torch which was being held to his face by a tall figure shrouded in darkness. It was the captain. He sat up and rubbed his eyes.

"'_Fusillé_'! Bien! so I am to be shot! and wherefore, Monsieur le Capitaine?"

"Some one has fired upon us," said the officer, "one of your dirty fellows; you must pay for it."

"And the order?" asked the _maire_ sleepily; "you have the Commandant's order?"

"Never mind about the order," said the officer reassuringly, "the order will be forthcoming at eight o'clock. Oh yes, we shall shoot you most authoritatively--never fear."

The officer knew that nothing could be done until eight o'clock, for he dared not wake the Commandant, but he did not see why he should deny himself the pleasure of waking up this pig of a _maire_ to see how he would take it. The _maire_ divined his thoughts, and without a word turned over on his side and pretended to go to sleep again. From under his drooping eyelids he saw the officer gazing at him with a look in which dislike, disappointment, and pleasurable expectation seemed to be struggling for mastery. Then with a click he extinguished his torch and withdrew.

At eight o'clock the _maire_ awoke to learn with mild surprise that he was not to be shot. Beyond that his guard would tell him nothing. It was only afterwards he learnt that one of the drunken revellers had been prowling the streets, and, having given the sentries a bad fright by letting off his rifle at a lamp-post, had expiated his adventure at the hands of a firing party in the cemetery outside the town.

For two days the _maire_ was unmolested. He was allowed to see his _adjoint_,[25] who came to him with a troubled face.

"The babies are crying for milk," he said, "the troops have taken it all. I begged one of the officers to leave a little for the inhabitants, but he said the men did not like their coffee without plenty of hot milk." The _maire_ reflected for a moment, and then dictated an _avis_ to the inhabitants enjoining upon them to be as sparing in their consumption of milk as possible for the sake of the "mères de famille" and "les petits enfants."

"Tell the _commissaire de police_ to have that posted up immediately," he added. "We can do no more."

"They have taken the bread out of our mouths," resumed the _adjoint_, "and now they are despoiling us of our goods. They are like a swarm of bailiffs let loose upon our homes. Everywhere they levy a distress upon our chattels. There is an ammunition waggon outside my house; they have put all the furniture of my _salon_ upon it."

"You should make a protest to the Commandant," said the _maire_, but not very hopefully.

"It is no use," replied the _adjoint_ despondingly. "I have. He simply shrugged his shoulders and said, 'C'est la guerre.' It is always so. They have shot Jules Bonnard."

"Et pourquoi?" asked the _maire_.

"I know not," said the _adjoint_. "They found four market-gardeners returning from the fields last night and shot them too--they made them dig their own graves, and tied their hands behind their backs with their own scarves. I protested to a Staff officer; he said it was 'verboten' to dig potatoes. I said they did not know; how could they? He said they ought to know. Then he abused me, and said if I made any more complaints he would shoot me too. They have made the _civils_ dig trenches."

"Ah," said the _maire_. He knew it was a flagrant violation of the Hague Regulations, but it was not the tithe of mint and cummin of the law that troubled him. It was the reflection that the _civil_ who is forced to dig trenches is already as good as dead. He knows too much.

"And the women," continued the _adjoint_, in a tone of stupefied horror, "they are crying, many of them, and will not look one in the face. Some of them have black eyes. And the young girls!"

The _maire_ brooded in impotent horror. His meditations were interrupted by the entrance of the captain. "The Commandant wishes to see you _tout de suite_," he exclaimed. "March!" He was conducted by a corporal's guard, preceded by the captain, into the presence of the General, who had taken up his quarters in the principal mansion looking out upon the square. The General was a stout, square-headed man, with grey moustaches and steel-blue eyes, and the _maire_ divined at a glance that here was no swashbuckler, but a man who had himself under control. "I have imposed a fine of 300,000 francs upon your town; you will collect it in twenty-four hours; if it is not forthcoming to the last franc I shall be regretfully compelled to burn this town to the ground."

"And why?" exclaimed the _maire_, whom nothing could now surprise, though much might perplex.

The General seemed unprepared for the question. He paused for a moment and said, "Some one has been giving information to the enemy." "No!"--he held up his hand, not impolitely but finally, as the _maire_ began to expostulate--"I have spoken."

"But," said the _maire_ desperately, "we shall be ruined. We have not got it. And all our goods have been taken already."

"You have our receipts," said the General. "They are as good as gold. German credit is very high; the Imperial Government has just floated a loan of several milliards. And you have our stamped _Quittungen_." He became at once voluble and persuasive in his cupidity, and forgot something of his habitual caution. "You surely do not doubt the word of the German Government?" he said. The _maire_ doubted it very much, but he discreetly held his tongue. "And our requisitioning officers have not been niggardly," continued the General; "they have put a substantial price on the goods we have taken." This was true. It had not escaped the _maire_ that the receipt-forms had been lavish.

"I will do my best," said the _maire_ simply.

He was now released from arrest, and he retired to his house to think out the new problem that had presented itself. The threat to burn down the town might or might not be anything but bluff; he himself doubted whether the German Commandant would burn the roofs over his men's heads, as long as the occupation lasted. The military disadvantages were too obvious, though what the enemy might do when they left the town was another matter. They might shoot him, of course; that was more than probable.

But how to find the money was an anxious problem and urgent. The municipal _caisse_ was empty: the managers of the banks had closed their doors and carried their deposits off to Paris before the Germans had entered the town; of the wealthier bourgeoisie some had fled, many were ruined, and the rest were inadequate. The _maire_ pondered long upon these things, leaning back in his chair with knitted brows in that pensive attitude which was characteristic. Suddenly he caught sight of a blue paper with German characters lying upon a walnut table at his elbow. He took it up, scrutinised it, and studied the signature:

Empfangschein. Werth 500 fr. erhalten. Herr Hauptmann von Koepenick.

Then he smiled. He got up, put on his overcoat, took up his hat and cane, and went forth into the drizzling rain.

* * * * *

Two hours later he was at the headquarters of the Staff and asked to see the Commandant. He was shown into his presence without delay. "Well?" said the Commandant. "Monsieur le Général, I have collected the fine," said the _maire_. The General's face relaxed its habitual sternness; he grew at once pleasant and polite. "Good," he said. The _maire_ opened a fat leather wallet and placed upon the table under the General's predatory nose a large pile of blue documents, some (but not all) stamped with the violet stamp of the German A.Q.M.G. "If the _hochgeehrter_ General will count them," said the _maire_, "he will see they come to 325,000 francs. It is rather more than the fine," he explained, "but I have made allowance for the fact that they are not immediately redeemable. They are mostly stamped, and--_they are as good as gold_."

For three minutes there was absolute silence in the room. The gilt clock in its glass sepulchre on the mantelpiece ticked off the seconds as loudly as a cricket on the hearth in the stillness of the night. The _maire_ speculated with more curiosity than fear as to how many more of these seconds he had to live. Never had the intervals seemed so long nor their registration so insistent. The ashes fell with a soft susurrus in the grate. The Commandant looked at the _maire_; the _maire_ looked at the Commandant. Then the Commandant smiled. It was an inscrutable smile; a smile in which the eyes participated not at all. There was merely a muscular relaxation of the lips disclosing the teeth; to the _maire_ there seemed something almost canine in it. At last the General spoke. "Gut!" he said gutturally; "you may go."

* * * * *

"You astonish me," I said to the _maire_, as he concluded his narrative. We were sitting in his parlour, smoking a cigar together one day in February in a town not a thousand miles from the German lines. "You know, Monsieur le Maire, they have shot many a municipal magistrate for less. I wonder they didn't make up their minds to shoot you." The _maire_ smiled. "They did," he said quietly. He carefully nicked the ash off his cigar, as he laid it down upon his desk, and opened the drawer of his escritoire. He took out a piece of paper and handed it to me. It was an order in German to shoot the _maire_ on the evacuation of the town.

"You see, monsieur," he exclaimed, "your brave soldiers were a little too quick for them. You made a surprise attack in force early one morning and drove the enemy out. So surprising was it that the Staff officers billeted in my house left a box half full of cigars on my sideboard! You are smoking one of them now--a very good cigar, is it not?" It was. "And they left a good many official papers behind--what you call 'chits,' is it not?--and this one among them. Please mind your cigar-ash, monsieur! You see I rather value my own death-warrant."

Moved by an irresistible impulse I rose from my chair and held out my hand. The _maire_ took it in mild surprise. "Monsieur," I said frankly, if crudely, "you are a brave man. And you have endured much."

"Yes, monsieur," said the _maire_ gravely, as he glanced at a proclamation on the wall which he has added to his private collection of antiquities, "that is true. I have often been _très fâché_ to think that I who won the Michelet prize at the Lycée should have put my name to that thing over there."[26]

FOOTNOTES:

[25] Deputy.

[26] This narrative follows with some fidelity the course of events as related to the writer by the _maire_ of the town in question. But for the most obvious of reasons the writer has deemed it his duty to suppress names, disguise events, and give the narrative something of the investiture of fiction. It is, however, true "in substance and in fact."--J.H.M.

XXIV

THE HILL

It was one of those perfect spring days when the whole earth seems to bare her bosom to the caresses of the sun. The sky was without a cloud and in the vault overhead, blue as a piece of Delft, a lark was ascending in transports of exultant song. The hill on which we stood was covered with young birch saplings bursting into leaf, and the sky itself was not more blue than the wild hyacinths at our feet. Here and there in the undergrowth gleamed the pallid anemone. A copper wire ran from pole to pole down the slope of the hill and glittered in the sun like a thread of gold. A little to our right two circular mirrors, glancing obliquely at each other, stood on a tripod, and a graduated sequence of flashes came and went, under the hands of the signallers, with the velocity of light itself. A few yards behind us on the crest of the hill stood a windmill, its great sails motionless as though it were a brig becalmed and waiting for a wind, and astride one arm, like a sailor on a yard, a carpenter was busy, with his mouth full of nails. The tapping of his hammer and the song of the lark were the only sounds that broke the warm stillness of the April day. A great plain stretched away at our feet, and in the fields below women were stooping forward over their hoes.

The white towers of Ypres gleamed ghostlike in the distant haze. The city had the wistful fragility of some beautiful mirage, and looking at it across the pleasant landscape I thought of the Pilgrim's vision of the Golden City shining in the sun beyond the Land of Beulah. Two or three miles away on our right the ground rose gently to a range of low wooded hills, and on their bare green slopes brown furrows showed up like a cicatrice. They were the German trenches. On the crest of the ridge a white house peeped out between the trees. That house seemed an object of peculiar interest to the battery-major at my side. He was stooping behind the "Director" with his eye to the sights as though he was focussing the distant object for a photograph. He fixed the outer clamp, unscrewed the inner clamp, and having got his sights on the house, he reversed the process and swung round the sights to bear on a little copse to our left. "One hundred and five," he said meditatively as he found the angle. The N.C.O. took up the range-finder and measured the distances first to the house, then to the copse. The major took up an adjustable triangle, and with a movement of thumb and forefinger converted it into the figure of an irregular "X." As he read off the battery angle on the "Plotter" the N.C.O. communicated it and the elevation to the telephone operator, who in turn communicated it to the battery in the copse. "Battery angle seventy. Range four thousand." Gunners are a laconic people, and their language is as economical of words as a proposition in Euclid; their sentences resemble those Oriental languages in which the verb is regarded as a superfluous impertinence. Language is to them a visual and symbolical thing in which angles and distances are predicated of churches, trees, and four-storied houses. Now in the copse on our left six field-guns were cunningly concealed, and even as the telephone operator spoke the dial-sights of those six guns were being screwed round and the elevating gear adjusted till they and the range-drum recorded the results of the major's meditations upon the hill. Then the guns in the copse spoke, and the air was sibilant with their speech. A little cloud no bigger than a man's hand arose above the roof of the white house on the ridge. Our battery had found its mark.

Somewhere behind that ridge were the enemy's batteries and they were yet to find. But even as we searched the landscape with our field-glasses an aeroplane rose from behind our own position and made for the distant ridge, its diaphanous wings displaying red, white, and blue concentric circles to our glasses like the scales of some huge magpie-moth, while a long streamer of petrol smoke made faint pencillings in the sky behind it. As it hovered above the ridge seven or eight little white clouds like balls of feathers suddenly appeared from nowhere just below it. They were German shrapnel. But the aeroplane passed imperturbably on, leaving the little feathers to float in the sky until in time they faded away and disappeared. In no long time the aeroplane was retracing its flight, and certain little coloured discs were speaking luminously to the battery, telling it of what the observer had seen beyond the ridge. Between the aeroplane, the observer, the telephone, and the guns, there seemed to be some mysterious freemasonry. And this impression of secret and collusive agencies was heightened by the vibration of the air above us, in which the shells from the batteries made furrows that were audible without being visible, as though the whole firmament were populated with disembodied spirits. The passivity of the toilers in the field below us, who, absorbed in their husbandry, regarded not the air above them, and the dreaming beauty of the distant city almost persuaded us that we were the victims of a gigantic illusion. But even as we gazed the city acquired a desperate and tragic reality. Voices of thunder awoke behind the ridge, the air was rent like a garment, and first one cloud and then another and another rose above the city of Ypres, till the white towers were blotted out of sight. A black pall floated over the doomed city, and from that moment the air was never still, as a rhythm of German shells rained upon it. The storm spread until other villages were involved, and a fierce red glow appeared above the roofs of Vlamertinge.

Yet the clouds and flame that rose above the white towers had at that distance a flagrant beauty of their own, and it was hard to believe that they stood for death, desolation, and the agony of men. Beyond the voluminous smoke and darting tongues of fire, our field-glasses could show us nothing. But we knew--for we had seen but yesterday--that behind that haze there was being perpetrated a destruction as mournful and capricious as that which in the vision upon the Mount of Olives overtook Jerusalem. Where two were in the street one was even now being taken and the other left; he who was upon the housetop would not come down to take anything out of his house, neither would he who was in the field return to take away his clothes. The great cathedral was crumbling to dust, and saints, apostles, prophets, martyrs were being hurled from their niches of stone, the Virgin alone standing unscathed upon her pedestal contemplating the ruin and tribulation around her. And we knew that while we gazed the roads from the doomed city to Locre and Poperinghe were choked with a terror-stricken stream of fugitives, ancient men hobbling upon sticks, aged women clutching copper pans, and stumbling under the weight of feather-beds, while whimpering children fumbled among their mothers' skirts. What convulsive eddies each of the shells, whose trajectory we heard ever and anon in the skies overhead, were making in that living stream were to us a subject of poignant speculation.

But as I looked immediately around me I found it ever more difficult to believe that such things were being done upon the earth. The carpenter went on hammering, stopping but for a moment to shade his eyes with his hand and gaze out over the plain, the peasants in the field continued to hoe, a woman came out of a cottage with a child clinging to her skirts, and said, "La guerre, quand finira-t-elle, M'sieu'?" From far above us the song of the lark, now lost to sight in the aerial blue, floated down upon the drowsy air.

XXV

THE DAY'S WORK

It was dinner hour in the Mess. There were some dozen of us all told--the Camp Commandant, the Deputy-Assistant-Adjutant-General, the Assistant-Provost-Marshal, the Assistant-Director of Medical Services, the Sanitary Colonel (which adjective has nothing to do with his personal habits), the Judge-Advocate, two men of the Intelligence, a _padre_, and myself. Most of us were known by our initials--our official initials--for the use of them saves time and avoids pomposity. Our duties were both extensive and peculiar, as will presently appear, for we were in the habit of talking shop. There was, indeed, little else to talk about. When you are billeted in a small town in Flanders with no amusements and few amenities--neither theatres, nor sport, nor books--and with little prospect of getting a move on, you can but chronicle the small beer of your quotidian adventures. And these be engaging enough at times.

As we sat down to the stew which our orderly had compounded with the assistance of the ingenious Mr. Maconochie, the Camp Commandant sighed heavily. "I am a kind of receptacle for the waste products of everybody's mind," he exclaimed petulantly. "This morning I was rung up on the telephone and asked if I would bury a dead horse for the Canadian Division; I told them I hadn't a Prayer Book and it couldn't be done. Then two nuns called and asked me to find a discreet soldier--_un soldat discret_--to escort them to Hazebrouck; I told them to take my servant, who is a married man with five children. Then an old lady sent round to ask me to come and drown her cat's kittens; I said it was impossible, as she hadn't complied with the Notification of Births Act."

The Mess listened to this plaintive recital in unsympathetic silence. Perhaps they reflected that as the Camp Commandant is one of those to whom much, in the way of perquisites of office, is given, from him much may legitimately be expected. "Well, you may think yourself lucky you haven't my job," said the Deputy-Assistant-Adjutant-General at length. "I'm getting rather fed up with casualty lists and strength returns. I'm like the man who boasted that his chief literary recreation was reading Bradshaw, except that I don't boast of it and it isn't a recreation--it's damned hard work. I have to read the Army List for about ten hours every day, for if I get an officer's initials wrong there's the devil to pay. And I spent half an hour between the telephone and the Army List to-day trying to find out who 'Teddy' was. The 102nd Welsh sent him in with their returns of officers' casualties as having died of heart failure on the 22nd inst."

"Well, but who is 'Teddy,' anyhow?" asked the Camp Commandant.

"He is the regimental goat," replied the D.A.A.G. "I suppose they thought it amusing. When I tumbled to it I told their Brigade Headquarters on the telephone that I quite understood their making him a member of their mess, as they belonged to the same species."

"Wait until you've had to track down a case of typhoid in billets," said the R.A.M.C. man who looks after infectious diseases. "I've been on the trail of a typhoid epidemic at La Croix Farm, where a company of the Downshires are billeted, and it made me sad. They had their filters with them and they swore they hadn't touched a drop of impure water, and that they treasured our regulations like the book of Leviticus. And yet the trail of that typhoid was all over my spot chart, and the thing was spreading like one of the seven plagues of Egypt. At last I tracked it down to an Army cook; the rotter had had typhoid about five years ago and simply poisoned everything he touched. He was what we call a carrier."

"What did you do with him?" said the A.D.M.S.

"He won't do any more cooking; I've sent him home. The fellow's a perfect leper, and ought to be interned like an alien enemy."

"Well, I'd rather have your job than mine even if prevention is more honourable than cure," said he whom we know as "Smells," and who has a nose like a fox-terrier's. "I am the _avant-garde_ of the Staff, and you fellows can thank me that you are so merry and bright. If I didn't make my sanitary reconnaissances with my chloride of lime and fatigue

## parties, where would you all be?"

"We should all be home on sick-leave and very pleased to get it," said the A.P.M. ungratefully.

"The _maire_ thinks I'm mad, of course," continued 'Smells,' "and I can't make him understand that cesspools and open sewers in the street are not conducive to health."

"I expect they think we're rather too fond of spreading broad our phylacteries," said the Assistant Provost Marshal. "Now I'm a sort of licensing authority, Brewster Sessions in fact, for this commune, and the _estaminet_ proprietors think I'm a Temperance fanatic," he said, as he put forth his hand for the whisky bottle. "One of them told me the other day he preferred a German occupation to a British one, because the Huns let him sell as much spirits to their men as he liked. And yet I'm sure the little finger of a French provost-marshal is thicker than my loins any day."

"Yes," said the Camp Commandant, "it's our melancholy duty to be impertinent. I'm supposed to read all you fellows' letters before I stamp them. I'd be rather glad if they were liable to be censored again at the Base or somewhere else _en route_; it would relieve me of any compunction about the first reading, the text and preamble of the envelope would be good enough for me. You fellows write abominably."

"I'm something of a handwriting expert myself," said the A.P.M., ignoring the aspersion. "They have changed the colour of the passes again this month, and so I'm engaged in a fresh study of the A.G.'s signature; I believe he changes his style of handwriting with the colour of the pass. I wonder what is the size of the A.G.'s bank balance," he murmured dreamily; "I believe I could now forge his signature very artistically."

"I wish some one would start a school of handwriting at G.H.Q.," said the A.D.M.S. "I believe I receive more chits than any man on the staff." "Chits," it should be explained, are the billets-doux of the Army wherein officers send tender messages to one another and make assignations.

"Did you hear about that chit the Camp Commandant at the Headquarters of the ----th Corps sent to the A.Q.M.G.?" asked the A.P.M. "No? Well, the A.Q.M.G. of the other Army wrote to Ferrers asking if they had made use of any Ammonal and, if so, whether the results were satisfactory. Ferrers sent it on to the Camp Commandant for report and the Camp Commandant wrote back a chit saying plaintively, 'This is not understood. For what purpose is Ammonal used--is it a drug or an explosive?' Ferrers told him to ask the Medical Officer attached to Corps headquarters, which he did. Thereupon he wrote back another chit to Ferrers, saying that the M.O. had informed him that 'Ammonal' was a compound drug extensively used in America in cases of abnormal neurotic excitement, and that, so far as he knew, it was not a medical issue to Corps H.Q. He therefore regretted that he was unable to report results, but promised that if occasion should arise to administer it to any of the Corps H.Q. _personnel_ he would faithfully observe the effects and report the same. When the A.Q.M.G. read the reply he betrayed a quite abnormal degree of neurotic excitement; in fact, he was quite nasty about it."

"What the devil did he mean?" asked the A.D.M.S.

"Well, that points the moral of your remarks about handwriting," said the A.P.M. encouragingly. "The Camp Commandant had written what looked like an 'o' in place of an 'a.' Ammonol is a drug; ammonal is an explosive."

"Well, I wish some one would teach the Huns how to write decently." The speaker was Summersby of the Intelligence Corps. The Intelligence are a corps of detectives and have to estimate the strength, the location, and the composition of the enemy's forces. Everything is grist that comes to their mill and they will perform surprising feats of induction. They can reconstruct a German Army Corps out of a Landwehr man's bootlace, his diary, his underclothing, or his shoulder-strap--but the greatest of these is his diary. "I've been studying the diaries of prisoners until I feel a Hun myself. They remind me of the diary I used to keep at school, they are all about eating and drinking. The Hun is a glutton and a wine-bibber. But I found something to-day--'Keine Gefangene' in an officer's field note-book."

"Translate, my Hunnish friend," said the A.P.M.

"No prisoners," replied Summersby shortly.

"I hope you handed the swine over to the P.M.," said the Camp Commandant.

"Well, no," said Summersby. "You see he had a plausible explanation--by the way, what perfect English those German officers talk; I'll bet that man has eaten our bread and salt some time. He said it was a Brigade order to the men not to make the taking of prisoners a pretext for going back to the rear in large parties but to leave them to the supports when they came up. The curious thing is that that officer belongs to the 112th and we've our eye on the 112th. One of their men, a fellow named Schmidt, who surrendered on the 19th of last month, said they'd had an order to take no prisoners but kill them all. His regiment was the 112th," he added darkly.

"The filthy swine!" we cried in a chorus, and our talk grew sombre as we exchanged reminiscences.

"What pleases me about you fellows," said Ponsonby, who had been listening with a languid air, and who was formerly in the F.O. where he composed florid speeches in elegant French for Hague Plenipotentiaries, "is your habits of speech. In diplomacy we contrive to talk a lot without saying anything, whereas Army men manage to talk little and say a great deal. You've got four words in the Army which seem to be a mighty present help in trouble at H.Q. Their sustaining properties are remarkable and they seem to tide over very anxious moments. When you are in a hole you say 'Damn all,' and when you are asked for instructions you cry 'Carry on.' I suppose it's by sitting tight and using those words with discrimination that you fellows arrive at greatness and attain Brigadier rank. That seems to be the first thing a third-grade staff-officer learns."

"The first thing a third-grade staff-officer learns is to speak respectfully of his superiors," said the A.P.M., as he hurled a cushion at Ponsonby, who caught it with a bow. Ponsonby is irrepressible and, in spite of his supercilious civilian airs, much is forgiven him. He turned to the D.A.A.G. and said, "Hooper, you've forgotten to say grace. For what we have _not_ received"--he added, with a meaning glance at a Stilton cheese which the A.A.G.'s wife has sent out from home and which remained on the sideboard--"the Lord make us truly thankful." This was an allusion to the D.A.A.G.'s sacerdotal functions. For the Adjutant-General and his staff, who know the numbers of all the Field Ambulances, can lay hands--but not in the apostolic sense--upon every chaplain attached thereto; the A.G. is the Metropolitan of them all and can admonish, deprive, and suspend.

The D.A.A.G. ignored the plaintive benediction. "I think we've fixed it up with those Red Cross drivers," he said complacently. The A.G.'s department had been wrestling with the disciplinary problem presented by these birds of passage on the lines of communication. "We've decided that they are Army followers under section 176, sub-section 10, of the Army Act, and that you 'follow' the British Army from the moment you accept a pass to H.Q. My chief called some of them together yesterday, and being in a benevolent humour told them that they were now under military law and might be sentenced to anything from seven days' field-punishment to the punishment of death. This was _pour encourager les autres_. They looked quite thoughtful."

"That's a nice point," commented Ponsonby pensively. "Should an Army follower be hanged or is he entitled to be shot? I put it to you," he added, turning to the Judge-Advocate. "I want counsel's opinion."

"I never give abstract opinions," retorted the man of law. "But the safest course would be to hang him first and shoot him afterwards."

"Your counsel is as the counsel of Ahithophel," said Ponsonby. "I'll put you another problem. Is a carrier-pigeon an Army follower? Because Slingsby never has any appetite for dinner" (this was notoriously untrue), "and I have a strong suspicion that he converts--that's a legal expression for fraud, isn't it?--his carrier-pigeons into pigeon-pie. What is the penalty for fraudulent conversion of an Army follower?" Slingsby, who in virtue of his aquiline features is known as _Aquila vulgaris_, has charge of the carrier-pigeons and takes large baskets of them out to the Front every day; he is supposed to be training them by an intimate use of pigeon-English not to settle when the shells explode. Unfortunately his pigeons are usually posted as "missing," and go to some bourne from which no pigeon has ever been known to return. Ponsonby glances suspiciously at Slingsby's portly figure.

But the Judge-Advocate had stolen away to study a dossier of "proceedings," and his departure was the signal for a general dispersion. "Come and have a drink," said Ponsonby to the "I" man. "Can't, you slacker," was the reply. "I've got to go and make up an 'I' summary. 'Notes of an Air Reconnaissance. Distribution of the enemy's forces. Copy of a German Divisional Circular. Notes on the German system of signalling from their trenches.' You know the usual kind of thing. Just now we're trying to discover how many guns they've got in the batteries of their new formations. We've noticed that their 77-mm. projectiles now arrive in groups of four, and we suspect that two guns have been withdrawn. But it may be only a blind."

As we turned out into the darkened street to make our way to our respective offices a supply column rumbled over the _pavé_, each of the seventy-two motor-lorries keeping its distance like the ships of a fleet. Despatch-riders with blue and white armlets whizzed past on their motor-bicycles, and high overhead was the loud droning hum of the aeroplane going home to roost. The thunder of guns was clearly audible from the north-east. The D.A.A.G. turned to me and said, "It's Hill 60 again. My old regiment's up there. And to-morrow the casualty returns will come in. Good God! will it never end?"

XXVI

FIAT JUSTITIA

PARQUET du Tribunal de Ière Instance d'Ypres

At last I had found it. I had spent a mournful morning at Ypres seeking out the _procureur du roi_, and I had sought in vain. He was nowhere to be found. Ypres was a city of catacombs, wrapt in a winding-sheet of mortar, fine as dust, which rose in clouds as the German shells winnowed among the ruins. The German guns had been threshing the ancient city like flails, beating her out of all recognition, beating her into shapes strange, uncouth, and lamentable. The Cloth Hall was little more than a deserted cloister of ruined arches, and the cathedral presented a spectacle at once tragic and whimsical--the brass lectern still stood upright in the nave confronting a congregation of overturned chairs as with a gesture of reproof. The sight of those scrambling chairs all huddled together and fallen headlong upon one another had something oddly human about it; it suggested a panic of ghosts. Ypres is an uncanny place.

We returned to Poperinghe, our way choked by a column of French troops, pale, hollow-eyed, their blue uniforms bleached by sun and rain until all the virtue of the dye had run out of them. Before resuming our hunt for the _procureur du roi_--who, we now found, had removed from Ypres to Poperinghe--we entered a restaurant for lunch. It was crowded with French officers, with whom a full-bosomed, broad-hipped Flemish girl exchanged uncouth pleasantries, and it possessed a weird and uncomely boy, who regarded A----, the Staff officer accompanying me, with a hypnotic stare. He peered at him from under drooping eyelids, flanking a nose without a bridge, and my companion didn't like it. "He is admiring you," I remarked by way of consolation, as indeed he was. "What do you call it?" said A---- petulantly to a R.A.M.C. officer who was lunching with us. The latter looked at the boy with a clinical eye. "Necrosis--syphilitic," he said dispassionately. "And he's handing us the cakes!" A---- exclaimed with horror. "Fetch me an ounce of civet." We declined the cakes, and, having paid our _addition_, hastily departed to resume our quest of the _procureur_.

Eventually we found the legend set out above. It was a placard stuck on the door of a private house. We entered and found ourselves in a kitchen with a stone floor; japanned tin boxes, calf-bound volumes, and fat registers, all stamped with the arms of Belgium, were grouped on the shelves of the dresser. A courteous gentleman, well-groomed and debonair, with waxed moustaches, greeted us. It was the _procureur du roi_. With him was another civilian--the _juge d'instruction_. They politely requested us to take a seat and to excuse a judicial preoccupation. The _juge d'instruction_ was interrogating an inhabitant of Poperinghe. The _procureur_ explained to me that the _prévenu_ (the accused), who was not present but was within the precincts, was charged with _calomnie_[27] under Section 444 of the _Code Pénal_. "But," I exclaimed in astonishment, "are you still administering justice?" "Pourquoi non?" he asked in mild surprise. It was true, he admitted, that his office at Ypres had been destroyed by shell-fire, the _maison d'arrêt_--in plain English, the prison--was open to the four winds of heaven, and warders and gendarmes had been called up to the colours. But justice must be done and the majesty of the King of the Belgians upheld. The King's writ still ran, even though its currency might be limited to the few square miles which were all that remained of Belgian territory in Belgian hands. All this he explained to me with such gravity that I felt further questions would be futile, if not impertinent. I therefore held my tongue and determined to follow the proceedings closely, being not a little curious to observe how the judgment would be enforced.

The witness took the oath to say the truth and nothing but the truth ("rien que la vérité"), concluding with the solemn invocation, "Ainsi m'aide Dieu." The parties had elected to have the proceedings taken in French.

"Your name?" said the judge, as he studied the procès-verbal prepared by the _procureur_.

"Jules F----."

"Age?"

"Cinquante-cinq."

"Profession?"

"Cordonnier."

"Résidence?"

"Rue d'Ypres 32."

This preliminary catechism being completed, the prosecutor unfolded his tale. He had been drinking the health of His Majesty the King of the Belgians and confusion to his enemies in an _estaminet_ at the crowded hour of 7 P.M. The accused had entered, and in the presence of many of his neighbours had said to him, "Vous êtes un Bosche." "Un Bosche!" repeated the witness indignantly. "It is a gross defamation." With difficulty had he been restrained from the shedding of blood. But, being a law-abiding, peaceful man and the father of a family, he volubly explained, he had laid this information ("dénonciation") before the _procureur du roi_.

The judge looked grave. But he duly noted down the testimony, after some perfunctory cross-examination, and, it being read over to the witness, the judge added "Lecture faite," and the persisting witness signed the deposition with his own hand. The prosecutor having retired, two other witnesses, whom he had vouched to warranty, came forward and testified to the same effect. And they also signed their depositions and withdrew.

The magistrate ordered the usher to bring in the accused, who had been summoned to appear by a _mandat d'amener_. He was a stout, dark, convivial-looking soul, with a merry eye, not altogether convinced of the enormity of his delict, and inclined at first to deprecate these proceedings. But the dialectical skill of the magistrate soon tied him into knots, and reduced him to a state of extreme penitence.

"Where were you on the 3rd of April at 7 P.M.?" began the magistrate, making what gunners call a ranging shot. The accused appeared to have been everywhere in Poperinghe except at the _estaminet_. He had been to the butcher's, the baker's, and the candlestick-maker's.

"At what hour did you enter the Café à l'Harmonie?"

The accused tried to look as if he now heard of the Café "À l'Harmonie" for the first time, but under the searching eye of the magistrate he failed. He might, he conceded, have looked in there for a thirsty moment.

"Do you know Jules F----?" the magistrate persisted. The accused grudgingly admitted the existence of such a person. "Is he a German?" asked the magistrate pointedly. The accused pondered. "Would you call him a Bosche?" persisted the magistrate. "I never _meant_ to call him 'a Bosche,'" the accused said in an unguarded moment. The magistrate pounced on him. He had found the range. After that the result was a foregone conclusion. The duel ended in the accused tearfully admitting he thought he must have been drunk, and throwing himself on the mercy of the magistrate.

"It is a grave offence," said the magistrate severely, as he contemplated the lachrymose delinquent. "An _estaminet_ is a public place within the meaning of Section 444 of the Code Pénal. Vous avez méchamment imputé à une personne un fait précis qui est de nature à porter atteinte à son honneur." "And calculated to provoke a breach of the peace," he added. "It is punishable with a term of imprisonment not exceeding one year." The face of the accused grew long. "Or a fine of 200 francs," he pursued. The lips of the accused quivered. "You may have to go to a _maison de correction_," continued the magistrate pitilessly. The accused wept.

I grew more and more interested. If this was a "correctional" offence, the magistrate must in the ordinary course of things commit the prisoner to a _chambre de conseil_, thereafter to take his trial before a Tribunal Correctionnel. But chamber and tribunal were scattered to the four corners of the earth.

Here, I felt sure, the whole proceedings must collapse and the magistrate be sadly compelled to admit his impotence. The magistrate, however, appeared in nowise perturbed, nor did he for a moment relax his authoritative expression. He was turning over the pages of the _Code d'Instruction Criminelle_, glancing occasionally at a now wholly penitent prisoner trembling before the majesty of the law. At last he spoke. "I will deal with you," he said with an air of indulgence, "under

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