burden of hatred is the heaviest that man can bear upon this earth;
and we should faint under the weight of it. On the other hand, we do
not wish once more to be the dupes and victims of confidence and love.
Here again our soldiers, in their simplicity, which is so clear-seeing
and so close to the truth, anticipate the future and teach us what to
admit and what to avoid. We have seen that they do not hate the man;
but they do not trust him at all. They discover the human being in him
only when he is unarmed. They know, from bitter experience, that, so
long as he possesses weapons, he cannot resist the frenzy of
destruction, treachery and slaughter; and that he does not become
kindly until he is rendered powerless.
Is he thus by nature, or has he been perverted by those who lead him?
Have the rulers dragged the whole nation after them, or has the whole
nation driven its rulers on? Did the rulers make the nation like unto
themselves, or did the nation select and support them because they
resembled itself? Did the evil come from above or below, or was it
everywhere? Here we have the great and obscure point of this terrible
adventure. It is not easy to throw light upon it and still less easy
to find excuses for it. If our enemies prove that they were deceived
and corrupted by their masters, they prove, at the same time, that
they are less intelligent, less firmly attached to justice, honour and
humanity, less civilized, in a word, than those whom they claimed the
right to enslave in the name of a superiority which they themselves
have proved not to exist; and, unless they can establish that their
errors, perfidies and cruelties, which can no longer be denied, should
be imputed only to those masters, then they themselves must bear the
pitiless weight. I do not know how they will escape from this
predicament, nor what the future will decide, that future which is
wiser than the past, even as, in the words of an old Slav proverb, the
dawn is wiser than the eve. In the meanwhile, let us copy the prudence
of our soldiers, who know what to believe far better than we do.
* * * * *
THE MASSACRE OF THE INNOCENTS
XXIV
THE MASSACRE OF THE INNOCENTS
_The Massacre of the Innocents_ appeared for the first time
in 1886, in a little periodical called _La Pléïade_ which
some friends and I had founded in the Latin Quarter and
which died of inanition after its sixth number. My reason
for making room in the present volume for these pages
marking a very modest start--they were the first that found
their way into print--is not that I am under any delusion as
to the merits of this youthful work, in which I had simply
aimed at reproducing as best I could the different episodes
of a picture in the Brussels Museum, painted in the
sixteenth century by Pieter Brueghel the Elder. But it
appeared to me that circumstances had made of this humble
literary effort a sort of prophetic vision; for it is but
too likely that similar scenes must have been repeated in
more than one of our unhappy Flemish or Brabant villages and
that to describe them as they were lately enacted we should
have only to change the name of the butchers and probably,
alas, to accentuate their cruelty, their injustice and their
hideousness!--M. M.
It was close upon supper-time, that Friday the twenty-sixth day of the
month of December, when a little shepherd-lad came into Nazareth,
sobbing bitterly.
Some peasants drinking ale in the Blue Lion opened the shutters to
look into the village orchard and observed the child running over the
snow. They saw that he was Korneliz' boy and cried from the window:
"What's the matter? Get home with you to bed!"
But he replied in terror that the Spaniards were come, that they had
set fire to the farm, hanged his mother among the walnut-trees and
bound his nine little sisters to the trunk of a big tree.
The peasants rushed out of the inn, gathered round the child and plied
him with questions. Then he also told them that the soldiers were on
horseback and wore mail, that they had driven away the cattle of his
uncle Petrus Krayer and that they would soon be entering the forest
with the cows and sheep.
All ran to the Golden Sun, where Korneliz and his brother-in-law were
also drinking their pot of ale; and the inn-keeper sped into the
village, shouting that the Spaniards were at hand.
Then there was a great din in Nazareth. The women opened the windows
and the peasants left their houses with lights which they put out as
soon as they reached the orchard, where it was bright as midday,
because of the snow and the full moon.
They crowded round Korneliz and Krayer in the market-place, in front
of the two inns. Several had brought their pitchforks and their rakes
and consulted one another, terror-stricken, under the trees.
But, as they knew not what to do, one of them went to fetch the
parish-priest, who owned Korneliz' farm. He came out of his house with
the sacristan, bringing the keys of the church. All followed him into
the churchyard; and he shouted to them from the top of the tower that
he could see nothing in the fields nor in the forest, but that there
were red clouds in the neighbourhood of his farm, though the sky was
blue and full of stars over all the rest of the country.
After deliberating for a long time in the churchyard, they decided to
hide in the wood through which the Spaniards would have to pass and to
attack them if they were not too many, so as to recover Petrus
Krayer's cattle and the plunder which they had taken from the farm.
They armed themselves with pitchforks and spades; and the women
remained near the church with the priest.
Seeking a suitable spot for their ambuscade, they came to a mill on
the skirt of the forest and saw the farm burning amid the starlight.
Here, under some huge oaks, in front of a frozen pool, they took up
their position.
A shepherd whom they called the Red Dwarf went up the hill to warn the
miller, who had stopped his mill when he saw the flames on the
horizon. He invited the fellow in, however; and the two of them placed
themselves at a window to watch the distance.
In front of them the moon was shining over the burning farm; and they
saw a long host marching over the snow. When they had taken stock of
it, the Dwarf went down to those in the forest; and presently they
descried four horsemen above a herd of animals that seemed to be
cropping the grass.
As the men, in their blue hose and their red cloaks, were looking
around them on the edge of the pool and under the snow-lit trees, the
sacristan pointed to a box-hedge; and they went and hid behind it.
The cattle and the Spaniards came over the ice; and the sheep on
reaching the hedge were already beginning to nibble at the leaves,
when Korneliz broke through the bushes; and the others followed with
their pitchforks into the light. Then there was a great slaughter on
the pond, while the huddled sheep and the cows gazed at the battle in
their midst and at the moon above them.
When the men and the horses had been killed, Korneliz ran into the
meadows towards the flames; and the others stripped the dead. Then
they went back to the village with the herds. The women watching the
gloomy forest from behind the walls of the churchyard saw them
approaching through the trees and, with the priest, hurried to meet
them; and they returned dancing gleefully all amongst the children and
the dogs.
While they made merry under the pear-trees in the orchard, where the
Red Dwarf hung up lanterns as a sign of kermis, they consulted the
priest as to what they were to do.
They at last resolved to put a horse to a cart and fetch the bodies of
the woman and her nine little daughters to the village. The dead
woman's sisters and the other peasant-women of her family climbed into
it, as did the priest, who was not well able to walk, being advanced
in years and very stout.
They entered the forest once more and arrived in silence at the
dazzling white plain, where they saw the naked men and the horses
lying on their backs upon the gleaming ice among the trees. Then they
went on to the farm, which they could see burning in the distance.
When they came to the orchard and to the house all red with flames,
they stopped at the gate to mark the great misfortune that had
befallen the farmer in his garden. His wife was hanging all naked from
the branches of a great walnut-tree; he himself was mounting a ladder
to climb the tree, around which the nine little girls were waiting
for their mother on the grass. Already he was walking among the huge
boughs, when suddenly he saw the crowd, black against the snow,
watching him. Weeping, he made signs to them to help him; and they
went into the garden. Then the sacristan, the Red Dwarf, the landlord
of the Blue Lion and he of the Golden Sun, the parish-priest, with a
lantern, and many other peasants climbed into the snow-laden
walnut-tree to cut down the corpse, which the women of the village
received in their arms at the foot of the tree, even as at the descent
from the Cross of Our Lord Jesus Christ.
The next day they buried her; and nothing else out of the common
happened at Nazareth that week. But, on the following Sunday, hungry
wolves ran through the village after high mass and it snowed until
noon; then the sun suddenly shone in the sky; and the peasants went
in to dinner, as was their wont, and dressed for benediction.
At that moment there was no one in the market-place, for it was
freezing cruelly. Only the dogs and hens remained under the trees,
where some sheep were nibbling at a three-cornered patch of grass,
while the priest's maid-servant swept away the snow from the
presbytery-garden.
Then a troop of armed men crossed the stone bridge at the end of the
village and halted in the orchard. Some peasants came out of their
houses; but, on recognizing the Spaniards, they retreated in terror
and went to their windows to see what would happen.
There were some thirty horsemen, clad in armour, around an old man
with a white beard. Behind them they carried red and yellow
foot-soldiers, who jumped down and ran over the snow to shake off
their stiffness, while several of the men in armour also alighted and
eased themselves against the trees to which they had fastened their
horses.
Then they turned to the Golden Sun and knocked at the door. It was
opened hesitatingly; and they warmed themselves at the fire and called
for ale.
Next they came out of the inn, carrying pots and jugs and wheaten
loaves for their comrades, who sat ranked around the man with the
white beard, waiting in the midst of the lances.
As the street was empty, the commander sent horsemen to the back of
the houses, to guard the village on its open side, and ordered the
foot-soldiers to bring to him all the children of two years old and
under, to be massacred, as is written in the Gospel according to St.
Matthew.
The soldiers went first to the inn of the Green Cabbage and to the
barber's cottage, which stood side by side, midway in the street.
One of them opened a stable-door; and a litter of pigs escaped and
scattered over the village. The inn-keeper and the barber came out and
humbly asked the soldiers what they wanted; but the men knew no
Flemish and went in to look for the children.
The inn-keeper had one, which sat crying in its little shirt on the
table where they had just had dinner. A man took the child in his arms
and carried it away under the apple-tree, while the father and mother
followed him with cries of lamentation.
The soldiers also threw open the cooper's shed and the blacksmith's
and the cobbler's; and the calves, cows, asses, pigs, goats and sheep
strayed about the market-place. When the men broke the glass of the
carpenter's windows, several of the peasants, including the oldest and
richest farmers in the parish, assembled in the street and went
towards the Spaniards. They doffed their hats and caps respectfully to
the leader in his velvet cloak and asked him what he was going to do;
but even he did not understand their language; and some one went to
fetch the priest.
He was making ready for benediction and putting on a gold cope in the
sacristy. The peasant called out:
"The Spaniards are in the orchard!"
Horrified, the priest ran to the church-door, accompanied by the
serving-boys carrying tapers and censer.
Then he saw the animals released from their sheds roaming on the snow
and the grass, the horsemen in the village, the soldiers outside the
doors, the horses tied to the trees along the street and the men and
women entreating him who was holding the child in its shirt.
He rushed to the churchyard; and the peasants turned anxiously to
their priest, coming through the pear-trees like a god robed in gold,
and stood around him and the man with the white beard.
He spoke in Flemish and Latin; but the commander shrugged his
shoulders slowly up and down to show that he did not understand.
His parishioners asked him under their breath:
"What does he say? What is he going to do?"
Others, on seeing the priest in the orchard, came timidly from their
farms; the women hurried up and stood whispering among the groups;
while some soldiers who were besieging an inn ran back at the sight of
the great crowd that was forming in the market-place.
Then the man who was holding by one leg the child of the landlord of
the Green Cabbage cut off its head with his sword.
The head fell before their eyes and the body fell after it and lay
bleeding on the grass. The mother picked it up and carried it away,
leaving the head behind her. She ran towards the house, but stumbled
against a tree and fell flat on the snow, where she lay in a swoon,
while the father struggled between two soldiers.
Some of the younger peasants threw stones and blocks of wood at the
Spaniards, but the horsemen all lowered their lances together, the
women fled and the priest began to cry out in horror with his
parishioners, all among the sheep, the geese and the dogs.
However, as the soldiers were once more moving down the street, the
folk stood silent to see what they would do.
The band entered the shop kept by the sacristan's sisters and then
came out quietly, without harming the seven women, who knelt on the
doorstep praying.
Next they went to the inn owned by the Hunchback of St. Nicholas. Here
also the door was opened directly, to appease them; but they
reappeared amid a great outcry, with three children in their arms and
surrounded by the Hunchback, his wife and his daughters, clasping
their hands in token of entreaty.
On reaching the old man, the soldiers put down the children at the
foot of an elm, where they remained, sitting on the snow in their
Sunday clothes. But one of them, who wore a yellow frock, rose and
toddled towards the sheep. A man ran after it with his naked sword;
and the child died with its face in the grass, while the others were
killed not far from the tree.
All the peasants and the inn-keeper's daughters took to flight,
shrieking as they went, and returned to their homes. The priest, left
alone in the orchard, besought the Spaniards with loud cries, going on
his knees from horse to horse, with his arms crossed upon his breast,
while the father and mother, sitting in the snow, wept piteously for
the dead children that lay in their laps.
As the soldiers ran along the street, they remarked a big blue
farm-house. They tried to break down the door, but it was of oak and
studded with nails. Then they took some tubs that were frozen in a
pool in front of the house and used them to climb to the upper
windows, through which they made their way.
There had been a kermis at this farm; and kinsfolk had come to eat
waffles, ham and custards with their family. At the sound of the
broken panes, they had assembled behind the table covered with jugs
and dishes. The soldiers entered the kitchen and, after a desperate
struggle, in which many were wounded, they seized the little boys and
girls, as well as the hind, who had bitten a soldier's thumb. Then
they left the house, locking the door behind them to prevent the
inmates from going with them.
Those of the villagers who had no children slowly left their homes and
followed them from afar. When the soldiers carrying their victims came
to the old man, they threw them on the grass and deliberately killed
them with their spears and their swords, while all along the front of
the blue house the men and women leant out of the windows of the upper
floor and the loft, cursing and rocking wildly in the sunshine at the
sight of the red, pink and white frocks of their little ones lying
motionless on the grass among the trees. Then the soldiers hanged the
hind from the sign of the Half Moon on the other side of the street;
and there was a long silence in the village.
The massacre now began to spread. Mothers ran out of the houses and
tried to escape to the open country through the gardens and
kitchen-plots; but the horsemen scoured after them and drove them back
into the street. Peasants, holding their caps in their clasped hands,
followed upon their knees the men who were dragging away their
children, among the dogs which barked deliriously amid the din. The
priest, with his arms raised aloft, ran along the houses and under the
trees, praying desperately, like a martyr; and soldiers, shivering
with cold, blew on their fingers as they moved about the road, or,
with their hands in the pockets of their trunks and their swords
tucked under their arms, waited beneath the windows of the houses that
were being scaled.
On seeing the grief-stricken terror of the peasants, they entered the
farm-houses in little bands; and in like fashion they acted throughout
the length of the street.
A woman who sold vegetables in the old red-brick cottage near the
church seized a chair and ran after two men who were carrying off her
children in a wheel-barrow. When she saw them die, a sickness overcame
her; and she suffered the folk to press her into the chair, against a
tree by the road-side.
Other soldiers climbed up the lime-trees in front of a house painted
lilac and removed the tiles in order to enter the house. When they
came out again upon the roof, the father and mother, with outstretched
arms, also appeared in the opening; and they pushed them down
repeatedly, cutting them over the head with their swords, before they
could descend into the street.
One family, which had locked itself into the cellar of a rambling
cottage, cried through the grating, where the father stood madly
brandishing a pitchfork. An old, bald-headed man was sobbing all alone
on a dung-heap; a woman in yellow had fainted in the market-place and
her husband was holding her under her arms and moaning in the shadow
of a pear-tree; another, in red, was kissing her little girl, who had
lost her hands, and lifting first one arm and then the other to see if
she would not move. Yet another ran into the country and the soldiers
pursued her through the hayricks that bounded the snow-clad fields.
Beneath the inn of the Four Sons of Aymon there was a tumult as of a
siege. The inhabitants had barred the door; and the soldiers went
round and round the house without being able to make their way in.
They were trying to clamber up to the sign by the fruit-trees against
the front wall, when they caught sight of a ladder behind the
garden-door. They set it against the wall and mounted one after the
other. Thereupon the landlord and all his household hurled tables,
chairs, dishes and cradles at them from the windows. The ladder upset
and the soldiers fell down.
In a wooden hut, at the end of the village, another band found a
peasant-woman bathing her children in a tub by the fire. Being old and
almost deaf, she did not hear them come in. Two soldiers took the tub
and carried it off; and the dazed woman went after them, with the
children's clothes, wanting to dress them. But, when she came to the
door and suddenly saw the splashes of blood in the village, the swords
in the orchard, the cradles over-turned in the street, women on their
knees and women waving their arms around the dead, she began to cry
out with all her strength and to strike the soldiers, who put down the
tub to defend themselves. The priest also came hastening up and,
folding his hands across his vestment, entreated the Spaniards before
the naked children, who were whimpering in the water. Other soldiers
then came up and pushed him aside and bound the raving peasant-woman
to a tree.
The butcher had hidden his little daughter and, leaning against his
house, looked on in unconcern. A foot-soldier and one of the men in
armour went in and discovered the child in a copper cauldron. Then the
butcher, in desperation, took one of his knives and chased them down
the street; but a band that was passing struck the knife from his
grasp and hanged him by the hands to the hooks in his wall, among the
flayed carcases, where he twitched his legs and jerked his head and
cursed and swore till evening.
Near the churchyard, a crowd had assembled outside a long green
farm-house. The farmer stood on his threshold weeping bitter tears; as
he was very fat, with a face made for smiling, the hearts of the
soldiers softened in some measure as they sat in the sun with their
backs to the wall, listening to him and patting his dog the while. But
the one who was dragging the child away by the hand made gestures as
though to say:
"You may save your tears! It is not my fault!"
A peasant who was being hotly pursued sprang into a boat moored to the
stone bridge and pushed across the pond with his wife and children.
The soldiers, not daring to venture on the ice, strode angrily through
the reeds. They climbed into the willows on the bank, trying to reach
them with their spears; and, when they failed, continued for a long
time to threaten the family, where they all sat cowering in the middle
of the water.
Meanwhile, the orchard was still full of people, for it was there that
most of the children were slain, in front of the man with the white
beard who directed the massacre. The little boys and girls who were
big enough to walk alone also collected there and, munching their
bread-and-butter, stood looking on curiously to see the others die or
gathered round the village idiot, who lay upon the grass playing a
whistle.
Then suddenly a movement ran through the length of the village. The
peasants were turning their steps toward the castle, standing on a
high mound of yellow earth at the end of the street. They had caught
sight of the lord of the village leaning on the battlements of his
tower, watching the massacre. And the men, women and old folk
stretched out their arms to him where he sat in his cloak of purple
velvet and cap of gold and entreated him as though he were a king in
heaven. But he threw up his arms and shrugged his shoulders, to show
his helplessness; and, when they implored him in ever-increasing
anguish and knelt bareheaded in the snow, uttering loud cries, he
turned back slowly into the tower; and in the hearts of the peasants
all hope died.
When all the children were killed, the tired soldiers wiped their
swords on the grass and supped under the pear-trees. Then the
foot-soldiers mounted behind the others and they all rode out of
Nazareth together, by the stone bridge, as they had come.