THE GOOD HOURS
" ... All villages, châteaux, and houses are burnt down during
this night. It was a beautiful sight to see the fires all round us
in the distance. In every village one finds only heaps of ruins
and many dead. Now come the good hours...."--Diary of German
private, 4th Comp. Jäger Btln., No. 11., Aug. 23-27, 1914.
What's death?--You'll love me yet!
_Pippa Passes._
When the dawn came, crystal-bright and pure, the two girls left the
ruins of the Bellevue and wandered off among the hills. They had no
food. They did not know where they were going. They did not know where
they wanted to go. Soon rain came on, and fell in floods all day. They
lost themselves in dim green valleys; they pushed through dripping
copses of hazel; they sank ankle-deep in spongy mosses, and waded
through unnamed torrents. Once they crouched among the bracken while a
gray patrol rode by, shouting and singing, uproariously drunk. A little
later they came on a lonely cottage with a dead girl lying across the
threshold. She had been bayoneted, and worse. A baby of two years was
strung up by the neck to the door handle; another, of only a few weeks,
wailed feebly in a pool of blood and water beside the mother. Dorothea
darted upon it with a cry; cradling it in her soft arms, against her
breast, she stepped over the girl's body into the hut, forgetful of
the horror of death in the claims of this minute piece of life. The
man of the house was inside. He had been surprised at his dinner, and
had defended himself with the carving-knife. He had taken a good deal
of killing, as the floor and walls bore witness; nevertheless, the
murderers had kicked his body into a corner, sat down at his table, and
finished his meal.
Dorothea was searching the shelves for milk or any other food, when
she heard a shout outside, followed by a cry--the oddest little cry
she had ever heard. She caught up the knife with which the man had
defended himself, and ran out. It was Lettice who had made that odd
little sound; she was struggling with an Uhlan, very drunk in the legs
but very strong in the arms, who was trying to force her down. Dorothea
stuck the knife into his neck from behind, dragged it out and stuck
it in again. The man dropped Lettice and wheeled round, firing his
revolver; but his hand wavered away, and the shot went into the ground.
He sank down with a grunt and lay there between them, the bright blood
pumping out scarlet. Dorothea looked at Lettice; her eyes flamed; she
held the baby still clasped to her breast.
"I've killed him," she said. "I'm _glad_."
Lettice did not speak; her hands were at her throat, mechanically
settling her tie; she turned and reëntered the forest without a word.
"Wait half-a-minute!" Dorothea called after her; and Lettice waited,
in the brake, back turned to the house. She had to wait a good many
minutes; whether one or sixty, it was all the same to her. Then
Dorothea came running up, breathless. "I've found just a drop of milk,
and this, see," she said, displaying one of the long Belgian loaves.
Lettice was to suppose she had spent her time in ransacking the larder.
In point of fact, she had been rolling, hauling, pushing the dead
German into the well; she did not wish his body to be the excuse and
the signal for a fresh campaign of vengeance.
They spent that night in one of the limestone caves of the Semois. In
spite of the milk, in spite of Dorothea's sheltering arms, the baby
died of exhaustion in the cold hour before the dawn. Dorothea wept
bitter tears, and left it lying covered with ferns, on a bed of moss;
she could not bear to pile stones on the tender little limbs and ivory
face. A turnip-field gave them a breakfast more sustaining than hazel
nuts and blackberries, but for the most part they kept to the woods;
they were afraid of the open country. By this time they had lost all
sense of direction. The rain still fell hopelessly. There was no sun to
guide them; the hills were all hidden in mist; and the Semois, when
they came on it in its wild and twisting valley, seemed never to flow
twice in the same direction. Yet they wandered on, because they had
begun wandering and had not spirit to stop.
Towards sunset they came suddenly to the edge of a hill, and saw below
them, deep buried in a cup-like hollow, a farm. From where they stood
an orchard sloped steeply to the group of white buildings, beyond them
the green meadow fell away to a brook; the opposite slope was a stubble
field, crowned with a line of firs.
"Why," said Dorothea, "why--"
They had wandered in a circle and come back to their starting-point. It
was the Ferme de la Croix.
Lettice, who had not spoken for hours, found her tongue. "Don't go
down," she said, "we shall only find somebody else dead."
"We might find something to eat," said Dorothea, more hopeful. "The
house does look all right, and I'm sure Madame Hasquin would give us
the supper off her own plate, if she hadn't anything else. But oh, my
good gracious! how we must have wandered! I'd hoped we were half-way to
Mezières by now. And yet, you know, I did think the country seemed to
be looking familiar somehow this last half-hour. Don't you come down,
Lettice; you stay here with the things while I go and explore."
Lettice, who was possessed of a dumb devil that day, shifted her bundle
from her left hand to her right and said nothing. Slipping from tree to
tree down the orchard, Dorothea peeped at the house from under cover.
All was still, except the joy-song of a hen which had just laid an egg.
Live fowls and live Germans being incompatible, Dorothea came out of
hiding and walked boldly up the pebbled path to the door. On either
side bloomed roses, dahlias, lavender where the bees were humming. The
evening sun came out, and shone peacefully on the white walls. Dorothea
rapped. No answer; only a sandy cat ran out of the bushes and twined
round her skirts. She knocked again, then pushed open the door and
entered.
A spotless white passage with a dark, uneven, shiny floor and doors
on either side, old and irregular. Dorothea opened the first. She saw
a pleasant parlor, low-pitched, with lattices facing the sunset; a
carved oak press; an eight-day clock, still ticking; a table laid for
dinner with beef-steak, gray in its gray greasy gravy, stewed pears,
_pommes sautées_, salad in a china bowl, golden country beer in a large
decanter. Glasses stood half empty, knives and forks were crossed on
half-eaten plates of meat, chairs had been pushed back anyhow. There
was no living creature but the cat, who sprang up on the window ledge,
with a low crooning purr, among the red geraniums in the sun.
A hand fell softly on Dorothea's shoulder, and she turned with a great
start; but it was only Lettice, who had toiled after her with both
bundles, and had come up noiseless behind, as her custom was.
"That's panic," she said, nodding towards the deserted table.
Room by room they explored the house; the kitchen with its vast open
fireplace, the queer uneven stairs, the tiny bedrooms, so tempting with
their carved bedsteads and spotless linen and scarlet wadded quilts
("je tiens à mes lits"--poor Madame!), their white-washed walls and
deep-set lattices framed in jasmine; the round tower, dark save for the
swords of sunshine that pierced its western loopholes, and rustling
with fowls; the well-filled storeroom. Everything was there but the
owners. They had heard a bruit and a rumor, and they had fled; had
stampeded in abject terror before the advance of Germany. And so lonely
was the farm, hidden in woods and served only by a cart track, that
neither ravager nor refugee had found it. The wanderers sank into its
deep peace and slept.
It could not hope to escape permanently, however, for Germans work by
the map; so on Dorothea's advice the first thing they did next morning
was to make a cache of provisions in the orchard. Well for them they
thought of it, for that very afternoon they were visited by a wandering
party of Uhlans. Dorothea, washing her skirt in the yard, heard them
coming, and had just time to escape with Lettice to the woods. There
being nobody to kill, the visitors had to content themselves with
sacking the house, which they did with zest. It was odd to see chairs
and mirrors come hurtling out of the bedroom windows, odder still to
see a drunken Uhlan parading about in Madame's voluminous best chemise.
They wrung the necks of the fowls; they drove off the two mild cows;
they set fire to the ricks, and tried to burn the house as well, but
luckily they had no petrol, this being a private venture not a military
operation, and its massy walls defied them. It was not the first time
they had stood fire. Finally, they killed the sandy cat, who was
misguided enough to greet them as she greeted Dorothea. She had been
a lean, hard-flanked, and indiscriminatingly amiable creature, with a
vulgar loud purr; still, it was distressing to see her tied to a tree
and shot to death with table-knives.
After this they rode off, singing the inevitable _Deutschland über
Alles_ with more noise than melody, and the girls came out of hiding
to take stock of the damage. It was extensive. The German soldier
had by that time learned to loot effectually, and what they had not
stolen they had smashed. The poor pretty garden was trampled into mire.
The kitchen was ankle-deep in broken crockery. A half-killed pig was
squealing its life out in the passage. The mattresses had been slit
open and spread with filth from the stable. They had wiped their boots
on the tablecloth; they had used the coffee-pot as a spittoon; they
had covered the white-washed walls with what the expressive French
idiom calls _des saletés_; they had done other things which need not be
described. In fine, they had contrived, within the space of a summer
afternoon, to be so ingeniously filthy and destructive that not a
corner of the house was habitable.
Lettice and Dorothea camped that night in the barn. Next day, while
trying to cleanse their pigsty, they were surprised by a fresh party of
visitors; but these were sober, and the officer in command was the same
comparatively humane person who had burned the Bellevue. His mission
now was not to strike terror, but to make an inventory of all domestic
animals; and he did not look pleased when he fell over the dead porker
in the passage. Hastily suppressing Lettice, who remained impracticably
hostile, Dorothea made her appeal to the honor of the German army. She
used her tongue and her beautiful eyes so well that, after listening to
her tale, the officer gave her what she wanted--a sort of _permis de
séjour_, exempting the farm from further requisitions. Indeed there was
little left to take.
After this they had peace, and settled down to a strange, precarious,
isolated life. For some weeks they hardly set foot outside the farm.
This extreme seclusion was not really necessary; for times had changed
and the policy of the conquerors now was not to scare the country folk
away, but to coax them back to their homes and their ordinary work.
The German reign of terror in Belgium seems to have been based on the
theory that one German soldier is worth x Belgian civilians. Therefore
when sniping took place (or when they fancied it had taken place, or
feared it might take place, or thought a locality needed a lesson to
teach them what to expect if it did take place) the order went out to
kill. "Without distinction of persons, the innocent will suffer with
the guilty." Much of the ravaging was done deliberately, by order:
as at the sack of Rochehaut. Much was done by an equally deliberate
relaxation of orders: as at the cottage in the woods. In part the
German plan succeeded, for it certainly stamped out sniping. In part
it recoiled upon itself. To strike terror is a very fine thing, but
the results may be embarrassing to an army of occupation. Besides, it
really looked so very bad to neutrals!
Lettice and Dorothea, however, did not concern themselves with this
change of policy. The cottage in the woods had cured them of any wish
to wander. Even Dorothea had had her fill of adventures. It was long
before she ventured as far as Poupehan, to ask for news; and when she
did, she wished she had stayed at home. The fall of Namur, the fall of
Brussels, the coming fall of Paris--how long before they heard of the
capitulation of London?