CHAPTER XXXIII

"OUR" GERMANS

"The Stranger within my gates, He may be evil or good, But I cannot tell what powers control-- What reasons sway his mood; Nor when the Gods of his far-off land May re-possess his blood." --KIPLING.

Gone away!

The news was given to me by Elizabeth, who had it from her _fiancé_, Colonel Fielding.

His friend and host, Captain Holiday, had gone up to London to attend a medical board; also he had business which might keep him away for some time.

He'd be away for weeks!

A great blankness fell upon me, and when it lifted I felt that I had been pushed rudely out of my fool's paradise.

Care for me? Of course, he couldn't care for me. Men don't go away without a single word of good-bye from girls of whom they care at all. I had an example of that in Harry. He and Captain Holiday cared for me about equally! That is, not two straws!

I had been a lunatic to delude myself into the belief that I was the girl of whom Dick Holiday had held forth to me--"Just the girl I want!"

Not Joan Matthews! No, no, Muriel Elvey was the girl he'd meant all that time. Yes! I was now once more miserably certain of that, in spite of all that Colonel Fielding had said.

"Men," as Elizabeth declares, "are such poor judges of what girl another man might want to marry!"

Meanwhile Mrs. Elvey and her daughter were still ensconced at the Lodge, where they were to stay, it seemed, until their host returned. I heard all the news about them, for "you know what gossips men are," says Elizabeth, "men who pretend that we have the monopoly of this fault!"

It was Colonel Fielding who hinted to Elizabeth--who told me--that he fancied those ladies were glad of a comfortable little country place whereat to stay on the cheap now that they had let their London maisonnette. He had an idea that a good deal of Mrs. Elvey's money had gone, lately, in one of the many commercial enterprises that the war had brought down and down.

Which was another reason why pretty Miss Muriel would be glad enough to hook (if she could) a cousin who was also a landed proprietor! Obviously she meant to stay on while there was the ghost of a chance of her being asked to stay for good!

These comments were not mine, by the way, but more of Elizabeth's _fiancé's_ opinions. Really that young man had as broad a streak of what is called "feminine cattishness" in his composition as any girl that ever I met!

Still, for those weeks before the harvest, he was the only channel for me to a world that held Dick Holiday. It was through him that I heard that the medical board had decided that Captain Holiday's nerves required another six weeks' rest before he returned to light duty again.

He remained away.

The only gleam of silver to this black cloud for me was that he remained away, not only from me, but from Muriel as well.

Wasn't this rather curious?

Then I decided that perhaps he was giving Muriel time to make up her mind about him while he was away. Perhaps he clung to that hoary-headed, white-whiskered, mendacious old theory that "absence makes the heart grow fonder."

By the time a heart is already involved it is too "fond" to admit of any change! So I found out to my cost. And if there is no heart in the case, as Colonel Fielding declared, how can it "grow" anything at all?

Muriel would remain whatever Muriel was.

I had a note from her one day, scented with her special perfume, to ask me and Elizabeth to come up to tea at the Lodge "as she found that we were able to go out to tea on Sundays."

Elizabeth went. I made a polite excuse and stayed under the trees outside the hut with Vic.

The fact was I felt I just couldn't bear my first sight of The Lodge, Dick Holiday's bachelor abode, to be shown to me as a frame for the picture of Muriel, sitting there in his easy chair, pouring out tea for his friends out of his teapot, offering light cakes that his old housekeeper had made, ringing his bell, behaving altogether as if everything that was his were already hers--himself included.

This would happen. I felt it! But I didn't--oh--I didn't want to have it rubbed in before the time!

So I stayed away and tried to cultivate a philosophical attitude of mind. A hundred years hence it would all be the same, whether Dick Holiday had married his pretty cousin, or whether I had taken the chance that once was mine, and had written to say "Yes" to Richard Wynn!

Further, it didn't matter to England (who must be fed) whether one of her Land-girls was blissfully happy or was unlucky in love. But it did matter that her harvest should prosper and should be brought safely in.

This last question was one that weighed very heavily, those days, on the mind of that gentle giant, our employer, Mr. Price.

I used to meet him striding over the land on those stilt-long legs of his, or leaning over gates and contemplating the big stretches of gold that were the cornfields, with his grey tweed cap pushed a little to one side over a frown of thoughtful anxiety between those ingenuous, intelligent blue eyes of his.

But that frown would always give place to a smile for any of his workers that he encountered, and a "Well, fine day again today. Beautiful weather it is, really! Let us hope it keeps up for another ten days, and then we shall do all right, if only----"

Ah, that was the cause for anxiety!

"If only we had a few more to help with us, now, to bring it in!"

"Mr. Price, we'll all work," I assured him one morning, "like two!"

"Indeed, I know that. You are doing splendidly," he said kindly. "But you can't do more than flesh and blood, after all! And, dear me!"--he pushed the cap yet further to one side--"when I think---- Now, this farm is only just under a thousand acres." His blue eyes swept the green-and-rusty-gold view of it.

"Sixty acres I used to have under corn," he went on, "and now what have I got? One hundred and fifty! I wouldn't have believed it if you'd told me in 'Fourteen. And then I had all the men. Even then we considered we had a big enough job on at harvest time. But now---- Who is there? Myself and Ivor and the soldier-substitute, and----"

He went off murmuring to himself, shaking his tweed-capped head in a worried way over the problem that gave him more than three times the work he had known before the war, but to be done by one-fourth of the staffs that had been his in peace-time!

All over the country, as we knew, that problem stared the farmers of 1918 in the face.

We Land Girls were doing our bit towards helping to solve it. Yes! Elizabeth and Vic and I, with all the other Vics and Dorises, the Aggies and Jeans, and Gladyses, and Eileens of Britain. But even so there were not yet enough of us trained and able to cope with the problem. We were ready to give all our time, and all our strength, and all our good-will.

But all the good-will in the world does not turn a woman, however much else she can accomplish, into a creature that can do a man's day's work in the harvest-field. Ask the farmers, who have nothing but praise for their loyal Land Girls.

They will tell you, as Mr. Price would, that we have been splendid, that we can milk, tend stock, clean out sheds, drive the motor-tractors, carry out the jobs of which there are never any end about the farm, and take the places of the farm-boys now at the Front with the utmost credit to our sex, but----

But it still takes the strength of two of us to do the work of one of them.

More workers, still more workers, needed on England's harvest! Every day the corn ripening that should feed England; every day the boats going down by means of which England was to be fed!

Do you wonder that my own private worries sank into the background for a space? I was surprised to find that the thought of Dick Holiday could be kept well at the back of my mind; and that I could even stop myself from grieving fruitlessly over the bitterness of the idea that he might have been mine, and from sentimentalizing over my (very vague) memories of him as a lad of nineteen at my home.

I was "seriously wounded" in the love-fight. But I could keep myself well in hand. I reflected that now I knew why men take their love disappointments in a more balanced way (at least outwardly) than women were wont to do. Men have not only work, but more interesting work with which to fill their baffled hearts. As a result of our taking to these jobs, perhaps there would now be fewer women in the world who would allow themselves to be warped and blighted by unhappy love affairs.

At least it was something to hope for! thought I, turning from my own problem to that of the farmers.

The solution came--at all events to Mr. Price and some of his friends in the neighbourhood.

One smiling morning, as Elizabeth, Vic, and I tramped to work along the lanes, the solution overtook and passed us.

It took the form of a big dray drawn by two grey horses and driven by a rather pale-faced young sergeant in khaki with one empty sleeve; on this dray sat comfortably a group of six or seven men not wounded at all, apparently, wearing grey coats and dark trousers patched with big ovals of scarlet and bright blue cloth. On their heads they wore--all except one of them--small round caps having red bands and a button in the front. They were blond, sunburnt, heavy-looking; and they turned an inquiring stare upon us as the dray went by.

With one voice Vic, Elizabeth and I exclaimed involuntarily:

"Germans!"

German prisoners to work on the farms were the answer to a problem serious enough.

But this answer brought other complications, as I will tell you.

* * * * * * *

Of those German prisoners, four were to be employed upon Mr. Price's farm.

One of the four was the man I had noticed as not wearing the red-banded military cap, but a sailor's, having the name of a German man-o'-war on the ribbon. All four, who came from the prison camp outside "the town," were to be brought every morning to work, and taken away every evening by the dray that came to pick them up after it had called for their comrades, who had been taken to work upon another farm about a couple of miles away.

Sybil's employers had also taken one of them, and some other people near had asked for one.

Shortly a new topic of conversation in the neighbourhood was supplied by "our German prisoners."

"Good workers they are, that nobody can deny," was Mrs. Price's verdict.

Unanimous was the chorus of praise for the way those fellows went at it, and the amount they'd get done in a day; a lot more than our own chaps, by George! (said some), and how quiet they were, and conscientious, and well-behaved! No trouble did they give; none whatsoever!

"A Godsend to the farmers, they're going to be," pronounced Mr. Price at the dinner hour one day when the corn was still in cutting. The noise of the motor-tractors filled the country as if with the hum of a hundred giant locusts, while the sheaves fell in lines behind the cutter-and-binder. In one field the Germans were setting up the sheaves in fives.

"What we should do without those boys presently I don't know," declared Mr. Price from his end of the table. "I'm sure we ought all to be very grateful to them!"

"What? To them dirty Huns?" This exclamation burst from Vic as she sat heartily devouring suet-pudding at my side. "Grateful to them, Mr. Price?"

Indignation flushed the handsome, sunburnt, Cockney face that she turned upon our employer.

Mildly his blue eyes met her scandalized dark ones.

"Why not, Vic?" he asked.

"Why! I should think it's they who ought to be jolly well grateful to us," retorted Vic warmly, "for allowing 'em to be alive at all, once we got hold of 'em. After all they done!

"Huh!" she continued. "Why I can't pass the gang of 'em working in the fields there without thinking, 'Yes! There you are, my lads! It's cost us Lord knows how many of the best to take you, and there you are alive and jolly in the nice fresh air, working just as you've a mind to, having everybody as decent as pie to you. It's a woman they ought to have as Commandant, not a soft-hearted man!"

The gentle giant continued to look mildly across the table at this indignant one. I could see that he could not understand her outburst on this subject. Those four men in his field there--they were Huns, yes, but captured Huns. Fighting no longer against us. Working for us. No longer enemies of ours. They were helpless and in our hands, and we could not be hard upon them! This was how it appeared to him. And his whole, kindly, home-worshipping Welsh heart spoke in his simple answer to Vic's tirade.

"Poor boys," he said. "Far from their homes!"

I spoke up here. "Plenty of our own boys are as far from theirs."

"Yes," put in Elizabeth. "And are they being treated by the Germans one-half as decently as these are being treated by us, do you suppose?"

"Not likely!" with much feeling, from Vic. I knew she'd had a special "boy" who had been a prisoner in Wittenberg during that relentless first winter of the war. He had died of it, Vic's young corporal of the London Regiment.

Other women seem to have forgiven the enemy those horrors of deliberate starvation, cold, dirt, and disease, which destroyed their sons or sweethearts, but not Vic Jelks, the Cockney Land Girl, whose motto is "keep smiling" above the sorrow which was too proud to wear any black. Vic is one of England's woman-folk who do not forget.

"Indeed some of these Germans seem quite as decent as our own men," Mr. Price urged. "Why, the other day when I was away selling that horse, I was hearing about some old farmer in Merionethshire who has a German prisoner living in and working. Now the farmer's only son is a prisoner of war in Germany working on a farm.

"Talking to the German one day about where his home was, what do you think the farmer found out? Why, that it was the father of his German that had got his (the farmer's) son working for him! And what was the end of it? The German prisoner wrote home to his people. 'Be kind to your Welshman, for these people here will do anything for me.' So you see, Miss Vic!"

But Vic would not let him have the last word.

"Did you say Merionethshire, Mr. Price? Wasn't it somewhere there that a big potato crop failed, because the potatoes were put in by Germans? The blighters had cut all the eyes out of 'em so that they shouldn't sprout. How's that, eh? That's the way they'll do you in, after all their jaw about 'kindness' and the lot. That's the dirty trick they play you--if you'll excuse my language, Mrs. Price!"

The farmer's wife, with her usual briskness, had risen and had fetched two large bottles of milk, a farmhouse loaf and a basin full of the butter that I'd made yesterday.

"Now here's the lunch for these much-discussed prisoners," Mrs. Price announced. "You needn't look as if you thought I were trading with the enemy, any of you girls, because I'm not. I'm sending the men out something to eat because I know it makes them work better if they're fed right.

"I'm not asking you girls to look at them, or speak to them, or take them their food"--here she tucked the lot into a big string bag used for carrying vegetables--"in fact, I wouldn't allow it. Mr. Price will do all that. Won't you, John? Here you are, dear."

She handed him the bag of provisions and whisked away like a busy little bird.

Mr. Price took the bag and set off across the farmyard and out of the red-painted gate where Dick Holiday had once lingered to talk to me.

I walked beside the farmer now, for Mrs. Price had told me to bring in a cow and her calf, which were to be found in the meadow beyond that cornfield where the four Germans worked. Crossing the road we encountered a charming figure in summery attire, carrying a big green sunshade. Muriel Elvey!

She nodded patronizingly to me. Upon Mr. Price she smiled as sweetly as she did upon all men. Curious girl!

"What have you got there?" Muriel asked, tilting the sunshade to one side and pointing a white-gloved finger at the bag that the tall farmer was dangling. "Bread and milk? What, to feed the German prisoners? What fun! May I come and watch them feeding, Mr. Price? Like the animals at the Zoo sort of thing. Do let me; I'm so bored now my cousin is away. Nobody to talk to. You can't count Colonel Fielding exactly; he is such a milksop!" declared the girl whom Colonel Fielding had so ruthlessly analysed; she was obviously conscious of his opinion. "That is, I only like big men to talk to, that I can look up to!" with an upward glance. "Where are these Germans? Ah, there!"

For we had come into the cornfield now, where the captive Huns were taking their noontide rest. In a patch of shadow cast by the trees at the end of the field they stretched themselves at ease. One was lying face downwards, his shirt-sleeved elbows in the corn-stubble, and reading a letter. One sat leaning against the trunk of the tree, arms folded, cap over his eyes, his ruddy, uncharacteristically dark face turned towards us as we came up.

"He's quite good-looking for a Boche," pronounced Muriel Elvey, with a critical glance, as though this were some exhibition of strange animals--which, to be sure, it was. "But then, of course, some of them that I used to dance with over there were handsome--the officers, at all events. These are all ordinary soldiers, of course, aren't they? One's a sailor, I see. How amusing! What were they all before the war, Mr. Price? Do you know?"

"I can't tell you, Miss Elvey," the gentle giant answered this pretty chatterer. "I'd like to know myself what that dark one is--a farmer himself, I'm sure, by the way he goes about his work. But not one of these understands a word of English, and there's none of us on the farm that knows any German."

Now here my employer was mistaken. I knew German pretty well.

For two years after my people left the old home in Wales I had been sent to the same finishing school in Berlin as Muriel Elvey. That was five or six years ago now. But I remembered, I believed I could have spoken to these men in their own tongue.

Only--no, I couldn't have spoken to them. I should have hated to think of their being badly treated, these Germans; starved or tortured as they tortured and starved our British soldiers when wounded and helpless in their hands. That would have made me unhappy, not so much for them as for ourselves to think that we Britons could sink to such acts.

Personally, I didn't want to show any kindness to these men. Let them, now they were deprived of the power to do any more mischief, be of as much use as they could.

I didn't want to question them or look at them either out of good-nature or curiosity. A sudden hard coldness fell upon me as I saw that big fellow in the sailor's cap.

A German sailor! What does that say? I had had one brother at sea, mine-sweeping--Jack--who used to sing:

"I'll sail with the scum of the lowest towns, But not with such the Likes o' They!"

He had been shot as he put off in an open boat from his wrecked ship.

No, I didn't want to speak German. I didn't want any German to get a word from the lips of an English girl.

But Muriel Elvey cried with a laugh:

"Oh, call them up. What fun! I'll speak to them!"

Mr. Price beckoned to the group of Huns.

They rose. Two of them, the sailor and the dark soldier whom Muriel had pronounced "quite good-looking for a Boche," made as if to come nearer.

"Now, Mr. Price! Let me give them their rations!" Muriel begged prettily. She put aside her sunshade, took the bag of provisions from the farmer's hand, and stepped forward.

The eyes of all four Germans were fastened eagerly upon her; she was without a doubt the most alluring sight that had met their gaze since last it had fallen on a good, pre-war, "echt-Deutsch" meal of veal and sour cabbage with damson sauce.

In fact, they looked at her rather as if she were something to eat, this dainty English girl, "fresh as milk and blood," as their own idiom has it, with her summery hat shading her big eyes, and her frock one of the usual bouquets of delaine she wore, in colour white and yellow this time, and of a cut that gave generous glimpses of the yellow gossamer silk stockings above her suede shoes.

It was exactly the kind of look with which the Prussian officers had been wont to ogle the school-procession of us as we walked down Unter den Linden in the old days on our way to classes.

I had heard that Germans have only two ways of looking at a woman....

I felt I didn't like them to look at an English girl like that!

Muriel seemed to have no such thought as these Germans took their food from her hand and drew nearer to her, smiling into her face and answering the greeting she gave to them in their own tongue.

"You like working here on the land?" she asked them in the careful German that we had acquired in our Berliner pension.

"Yes, indeed, gracious young lady," returned the rosy-faced, dark-eyed German soldier. "It is much better here in the country. There is never anything going on in a town!"

"Oh! I do not agree with you!" declared Muriel. "I prefer the town myself. The farmer here wants to know what you were in civil life?"

The young German answered that he helped his father, who had a big farming-estate in the Rhine country. This Muriel translated to Mr. Price, who replied:

"I thought he knew all about the work. He's a nice young fellow, this. Very kind. Very pleasant way with him. Look how pleased he is to hear you talk to him, Miss Elvey! I hope he isn't longing too much after his home, the poor fellow!"

And the Welsh farmer turned his kindliest smile upon this son of German farming-folk.

I am bound to say it was difficult to connect that dark-eyed, honest-faced young peasant with the atrocities committed over Europe by his kind. He spoke and bore himself modestly and decently. Every line of his rather heavy, comely countenance proclaimed him a truly harmless soul.

But it is when such thousands of these harmless souls are moulded and driven by those fiends who have cankered a once merely decent, sentimental, dreamy nation--it is then that the atrocities are made possible--the atrocities for which they all alike are paying now--too lightly!

The other man to whom Muriel spoke in German did not even appear harmless to me.

For the blue eyes of the German sailor, even while they smiled ingratiatingly at the pretty visitor, remained hard, watchful, and crafty. From the first instant I mistrusted that man!

He spoke with an accent that showed he was of a class better educated than his companion.

"How excellently the gracious young lady speaks German! She lived, without doubt, for many years in my country?" he said.

"I was at school in Berlin for two years," Muriel told him, using as friendly a tone as if she were speaking to one of our own naval men. "Berlin was delightful, I thought, before the war! Charming! As long as I live I shall always remember the smell of the Berlin 'Conditoreien'--such heavenly confectioners' shops! As you went by, you always got a whiff of very good cigars mixed with the smell of boiling-hot chocolate; delicious!"

She went on chattering, as she always did seem able to chatter to men, freely and easily. Whether they were Huns or South Sea Islanders, as Mrs. Price put it, men would be men to Muriel Elvey--that is, the atoms which made up the atmosphere of admiration that was her breath of life!

"Berlin and the Tiergarten and the All-darlingest Opera! How I did enjoy them all," Muriel gushed in German. "I did have a good time; at the houses of my school-fellows where I was invited--everybody was so charming and hospitable to me!"

"That is--yes--very understandable," put in the Hun sailor, with a bolder glance. "They who would not be charming to such a charming young English lady must indeed without taste be!"

Muriel, swinging her parasol, smiled graciously upon this compliment--from a German!

Standing there in that Welsh cornfield, watching this little interlude between that captured Hun and that pretty English girl, I couldn't help remembering the fate of other pretty girls, in countries less fortunate than ours, laid waste by these men.

Rosy girls of Flanders, neat black-haired girls of France, have been driven off into slavery and worse under the rule of the Germans.

Germans would have done the same by the girls of Great Britain! Think of it. Had their long-laid plans succeeded for the invasion of this coveted country of ours, our women--always made much of in the old days by Germans!--our women would have been part of "the loot of cities." Men like these in this very field would have treated Muriel Elvey, me, all of us! no differently from the way in which they treated the girls of Lille. England's women!

They would never be able to do it now. For that we had our fighting men, our unsleeping Fleet, to thank.

And it seemed to me a kind of disloyalty to those defenders of ours that Muriel should smile upon the German sailor when he told her in that ingratiating tone: "I regret that our countries are at war."

The retort rushed into my mind: "I hope you'll all be made to regret it a lot worse before the end!"

But I did not speak.

Muriel said lightly and fluently: "I regret it, too! War becomes such a bore, after so long! Really, I do not know what we began fighting for, and I don't think that England wants to go on any more than Germany----"

Here I could not help putting in, indignantly, in English: "Oh! How can you say these things! To a German! Oh, Muriel----"

Before I said more, another voice called her name--sharply, too.

"Muriel!"

It was the voice of Captain Holiday.

Standing engrossed in hearing Muriel's talk with the prisoner, we had scarcely noticed the sound that had broken into it--the wheels of the light dog-cart that had driven up the lane behind the hedge. In the dog-cart sat Dick Holiday driving; his friend, Colonel Fielding, was beside him.

He jumped down as Dick Holiday pulled up the horse.

"Good afternoon, Mr. Price," said Dick Holiday. My heart jumped to see him as he saluted me; his brown face, however, had never a smile.

"Muriel, get in," he said, "I'll drive you back to the Lodge."

Colonel Fielding, with a more genial greeting to me, held open the field gate for Miss Elvey.

But Muriel allowed them to wait for her.

"Hullo, Cousin Dick," she called out airily from the cornfield. "What a way you have of popping in and out like a harlequin at a pantomime, haven't you? Mother and I thought we weren't going to see you for another whole day. How's London?"

"It still stands where it did," returned her cousin drily. He was evidently in no laughing mood. "Get in by me, Muriel."

Muriel strolled through the gate. "You don't seem to have come back in very gay spirits," she said. Then she turned to wave her little, white-gloved hand to the sailor to whom she had been talking.

I saw Dick Holiday give her a very steady glance. She laughed as she stood by the trap waiting before she put her foot on the step.

"Don't look black at me," she said to him. "I know you did tell me I wasn't to speak to the Germans. But I told you I would and I have. So there, Master Dick!" (Coquettishly.) "And these are very nice Germans, too, as it happens. I've had quite a chat with that delightful sailor-man with the blue eyes. I'm sure he's nothing to do with the people who do the dreadful things. These Germans are different."

As he gave her his hand to help her up into the trap I heard her cousin say, distinctly and steadily:

"I wish you would remember one thing. No Germans are 'different.' All Germans are the same Germans at bottom when you come to it! All Germans are--Germans!"

He took up the reins.

Elizabeth's Falconer (jumping up behind as lightly as any jockey) gave me a smile, an ineffable gesture that was to spell "Pro-German, eh? _She's_ in for a good strafing from old Dick; breakers ahead, cheerio!"

And off they drove.

Mr. Price and I, leaving the cornfield, went on to that meadow where the cow and her calf were that had to be brought up to the farm.

"Dear me, Captain Holiday was very hard about letting Miss Elvey say a word to those boys," remarked the farmer to me as we walked along. "There is no harm in this lot of Germans. No harm, I am sure."

For the generous-hearted Welshman judges as he would be judged himself. Void of guile, he could not see guile where it lurked. He was like the best and shrewdest of our own soldiers; clean fighters, they were incredibly slow to believe what dirty fighters these others were. It has taken months and years of bitter experience to show Britain that; Britain with her obstinate dislike to believing anything really bad of the nation with whom she fights!

Even now she does not believe they are as black as they are painted!

Do we not hear that about us every day, and isn't it the trait that our enemy builds on and takes advantage of, to our own sorrow?

Now Mr. Price, of Holiday's Farm, Careg, was of that lovable and broadminded type that believes the best of all men, even Germans! until the very last moment.

His moment of disillusionment about one particular German was at hand.

As he himself said ruefully about the affair afterwards:

"Who'd have thought it? I would not have expected it of that man; I would not, indeed----"

But let me tell you from the beginning what happened.