it through a maze of recently captured German trenches. It was a strange
piece of sad ordered gardening in a devastated world. Every minute or
two the flash and shock of a concealed howitzer close at hand shook the
loose earth on the graves, but only seemed to emphasize the still sleep
of this acre. It held a great regiment of graves, mounds of fresh-turned
earth in soldierly ranks, most of them marked with tiny wooden crosses,
rough bits of kindling wood. Some of the crosses bore names, written in
pencil. There was one that bore the names of six men, and the grave was
hardly large enough for a child. They had been blown to pieces by a
single shell.
They passed through the French section first. Here there was an austere
poetry, a simplicity that approached the sublime in the terrible
regularity of the innumerably repeated inscription, "_Mort pour la
France_." In the British section there was a striking contrast. There
was not a word of patriotism; but, though the graves were equally
regular, an individuality of inscription that interested the Spanish
correspondent greatly.
"It is here we pass from Racine to Shakespeare," he said, pointing to a
wooden cross that bore the words:
"_In loving memory of Jim,
From his old pal,
The artful dodger,
'Gone but not forgotten.'_"
"No, no, no," cried the Greek correspondent, greatly excited by the
literary suggestion. "From Flaubert to Dickens! Is it not so, Captain
Crump?"
Captain Crump grunted vaguely and moved on towards the soldier in
charge. May Margaret followed him, the photograph in her hand.
"We want to find number forty-eight," said Captain Crump.
The soldier saluted and led the way to the other end of the ground. Many
of the graves here had not been named. There had evidently been some
disaster which made it difficult. Some of them carried the
identification disc.
"This is number forty-eight, sir," said the soldier, pausing before a
mound that May Margaret knew already by heart. "May I look at the
photograph, sir? Yes. You see, that's the rosary--that black
thing--round the cross."
"The rosary! I don't understand." May Margaret looked at the string of
beads on the cross that bore the name of Brian Davidson.
"I suppose he was a Roman Catholic, sir. They must have taken it from
the body."
"No, he was not a Catholic," whispered May Margaret. She felt as if she
must drop on her knees and call on the mute earth to speak, to explain,
to tell her who lay beneath.
"There must be a mistake," she said at last, and her own voice rang in
her ears like the voice of a stranger. "I must find out. How can I find
out?"
Her face was bloodless as she confronted Captain Crump.
"There's some terrible mistake," she said again. "I can't face his
people at home till I find out. He may be--" But that awful word of hope
died on her lips.
"I'll do my best," said Captain Crump. "It's very odd, certainly; but I
shouldn't--er--hope for too much. You see, if he were living, they
wouldn't have been likely to overlook it. It's possible that he may be
there, or there." He pointed to two graves without a name. "Or again, he
may be missing, of course, or a prisoner. His lot are down at Arras now.
We'll get into touch with them to-morrow and I'll make inquiries. You
want to pass a night in the trenches, don't you? I think it can be
arranged for you to go to that section to-morrow night. Then we can kill
two birds with one stone."
May Margaret thanked him. Behind them, she heard, with that strange
sense of double meanings which the most commonplace accidents of life
can awake at certain moments--the voice of one of the correspondents,
still arguing with the others. "Here, if you like, is Shakespeare," he
said:
"_How should I your true love know
From another one._"
The quotation, lilted inanely as a nursery rime, pierced her heart like
a flight of silver arrows.
"You have not a very pleasant business," the correspondent continued,
addressing a soldier at work in an open grave.
"I've 'ad two years in the trenches, sir, and I'm glad to get it," he
replied.
"Little Christian crosses, planted against the heathen, creeping nearer
and nearer to the Rhine," murmured Julian Sinclair, on the other side of
May Margaret.
The multiplicity of the ways in which it seemed possible for both
soldiers and civilians to regard the war was beginning to rob her of the
power to think.
On their way back, through the dusk, they passed a body of men marching
to the trenches, with a song that she had heard Brian humming:
"_Fat Fritz went out, all camouflaged, like a beautiful bumble-bee,
With daffodil stripes and 'airy legs to see what he could see,
By the light of the moon, in No Man's Land, he climbed an apple tree
And he put on his big round spectacles, to look for gay Paree._
_But I don't suppose he'll do it again
For months, and months, and months;
But I don't suppose he'll do it again
For months, and month, and months;
For Archie is only a third class shot,
But he brought him down at once,_
_AND_
_I don't suppose he'll do it again
For months, and months, and months._"
Soon afterwards, with all these themes interchanging in her bewildered
mind, May Margaret heard Julian Sinclair calling through the dark from
the car ahead: "Take a good look at the next village; it's called
Crécy." The stars that watched the ancient bowmen had nothing new to
tell her; but a few minutes later, as another body of troops came
tramping through the dark to another stanza of their song, there seemed
to be an ancient and unconquerable mass of marching harmonies within the
lilt of the Cockney ballad; like the mass of the sea behind the breaking
wave:
"_'E called 'em the Old Contemptibles,
But 'e only did it once,
And I don't suppose 'e'll do it again,
For months, and months, and months._"
They dined at the château, and she slipped away early to the house of
the curé. Before she slept, she took out Brian's last letter and read
it. She sat on the narrow bed, under the little black crucifix with the
ivory Christ looking down at her from the bare wall. She was glad that
it was there; for it embodied the master-thought of that day's
pilgrimage. Never before had she realized how that symbol was dominating
this war; how it was repeated and repeated over thousands of acres of
young men's graves; and with what a new significance the wayside crosses
of France were now stretching out their arms in the night of disaster.
In Brian's letter there was very little about himself. He had always
been somewhat impatient of the "lyrical people," as he called them, who
were "so eloquently introspective" about the war, and he had carried his
prejudice even into his correspondence. She was reading his letter again
to-night because she remembered that it expressed something of her own
bewilderment at the multiplicity of ways in which people were talking
and thinking of the international tragedy. "I have heard," he wrote,
"every possible kind of opinion out here, with the exception of one. I
have never heard any one suggest any possible end for this war but the
defeat of the Hun. But I _have_ heard, over and over again, ridicule of
the idea that this war is going to end war, or even make the world
better.
"Along with that, I've often heard praise of the very militaristic
system that we are trying so hard to abolish altogether. Of course, this
is only among certain sets of men. But this war has become a war of
ideas; and ideas are not always contained or divided by the lines of
trenches. We are fighting things out amongst ourselves, in all the
belligerent countries, and the most crying need of the Allies to-day is
a leader who can crystallize their own truest thoughts and ideals for
them.
"You know what my dream was, always, in the days when I was trying my
prentice hand in literature. I wanted to help in the greatest work of
modern times--the task of bringing your country and mine together. Our
common language (and that implies so much more than people realize) is
the greatest political factor in the modern world; and, thank God, it's
beyond the reach of the politicians. In England, we exaggerate the
importance of the mere politician. We do not realize the supreme glory
of our own inheritance; or even the practical aspects of it; the
practical value of the fact that every city and town and village over
the whole of your continent paid homage to Shakespeare during the
tercentenary. Carlyle was right when he compared that part of our
inheritance with the Indian Empire. It is in our literature that we can
meet and read each other's hearts and minds, and that has been our
greatest asset during the war. Think what it will mean when two hundred
million people, thirty years hence, in North America, are reading that
literature and sharing it. Shelley understood it. You remember what he
says in the 'Revolt of Islam.' The Germans understand, that's why
they're so anxious to introduce compulsory German into your schools and
colleges. But our own reactionaries are afraid to understand it.
"After all, this war is only a continuation of the Revolutionary war,
when the Englishmen who signed the Declaration of Independence fought an
army of hired Germans, directed by Germans. Even their military maps
were drawn up in German. It's the same war, and the same cause, and I
believe that the New World eventually will come into it. Then we shall
have a real leadership. The scheming reactionaries in Europe will fail
to keep us apart. We shall yet see our flags united. And then despite
all the sneers of the little folk, on both sides of the Atlantic, we
shall be able to suppress barbarism in Europe and say (as you and I have
said): _Those whom God hath joined let no man put asunder._
"There seems to be an epidemic of verse among the armies. I haven't
caught it very badly yet; but these were some of my symptoms in a spare
moment last week:
"_How few are they that voyage through the night,
On that eternal quest,
For that strange light beyond our light,
That rest beyond our rest._
_And they who, seeking beauty, once descry
Her face, to most unknown;
Thenceforth like changelings from the sky
Must walk their road alone._
_So once I dreamed. So idle was my mood;
But now, before these eyes,
From those foul trenches, black with blood,
What radiant legions rise._
_And loveliness over the wounded earth awakes
Like wild-flowers in the Spring.
Out of the mortal chrysalis breaks
Immortal wing on wing._
_They rise like flowers, they wander on wings of light,
Through realms beyond our ken.
The loneliest soul is companied to-night
By hosts of unknown men._"
II
At ten o'clock the next morning, the two cars were moving at sixty miles
an hour along a road that ran parallel with the German trenches. There
was a slight screen of canvas to hide the traffic, for the road by
Dead-Man's-Corner was not the safest way into Arras at that time. But
they reached the city without misadventure, and May Margaret felt nearer
now than ever to the secret of the quest.
No dream was ever so strange as this great echoing shell of the deserted
city where he, too, had walked so recently. He, too, had passed along
these cracked pavements, keeping close to the wall, in order to escape
observation from the enemy, whose lines ran through one end of the city
at this moment. He had seen these pitiful interiors of shattered houses,
where sometimes the whole front had been blown away, leaving the
furniture still intact on two floors, and even pictures, a little askew,
on the walls. He had seen that little black crucifix over that bed;
crossed this grass-grown square; and gone into the shattered
railway-station, where the many-colored tickets were strewn like autumn
leaves over the glass-littered floor. The Spaniard filled his pockets
with them.
They went down a narrow street to the ruins of the cathedral. On one of
the deserted houses there was a small placard advertising the Paris
edition of a London paper, the only sign of the outside world in all
that echoing solitude. The neutrals rejoiced greatly before a deserted
insurance office, which still displayed an advertisement of its
exceedingly reasonable rates for the lives of peaceful citizens. Their
merriment was stopped abruptly by a hollow boom that shook the whole
city and rumbled echoing along the deserted streets from end to end.
"That's a Boche shell," said Crump. "It sounds as if they've got the
cathedral again."
At noon they lunched under the lee of a hill just outside Arras, that
had been drenched with blood a few weeks earlier. The great seas of
thunder ebbed and flowed incessantly from sky to sky, as if the hill
were the one firm island in the universe and all the rest were breaking
up and washing around them. The amazing incongruity of things bewildered
May Margaret again. It was more fantastic than any dream. They sat there
at ease, eating chicken, munching sandwiches, filling their cups with
red wine and white, and ending with black coffee, piping hot from the
thermos bottle. Great puffs of brown smoke rose in the distance where
our shells were dropping along the German line. It looked as if the
trees were walking out from a certain distant wood. Little blue rings of
smoke rose from the peaceful cigarettes around her. Bees and butterflies
came and went through the sunshine; and, in the stainless blue sky
overhead there was a rush and rumor as of invisible trains passing to
and fro. The neutrals amused themselves by trying to distinguish between
our own and the enemy shells.
At two o'clock Crump rose. "I'll take you along now, Grant, if you are
ready," he said. "The rest of you wait here. I shall be back in about
ten minutes."
May Margaret stumbled after him down the hill. At the foot, a soldier
was waiting; and, hardly conscious of the fact that she had exchanged
one guide for another, she found herself plodding silently beside him on
her unchanging quest, toward the communication trenches.
"What do they think about things in England, sir?" said her new
companion at last, with a curiously suppressed eagerness.
"They are very hopeful," said May Margaret.
"When do they think it will be over?"
"Some of them say in six months."
"Ah, yes. I've been here three years now, and they always say that. At
the end of the six months they'll say it again."
It was the first open note of depression that May Margaret had heard.
"Do most of the men feel like that?" she said.
"They don't say so, sir, but they all want it to be over." Then he
added, with the doggedness of his kind, "Not till we get what we're
fighting for, of course. You're a correspondent, sir, aren't you? Well,
I never seen the real fax put in the papers yet. There was one of these
soldier writers the other day. I saw his book in the Y. M. C. A. hut. He
said that the only time he nearly broke his heart was when there was a
rumor that Germany was asking for peace before he was able to get into
it hisself. That's what I call bloody selfish, sir. All this poytry! (he
spat into a shell-hole) making pictures out of it and talking about
their own souls. Mind you I'm all for finishing it properly; but it
ain't right, the way they look at it. It's like saying they're glad the
Belgians had their throats cut because it's taught their own bloody
selves the beauty of sacrifice. If what they say is true, why in the
hell do they want the war ever to stop at all? P'raps if it went on for
ever, we should all of us learn the bloody beauty of it, and keep on
learning it till there wasn't any one left. There was a member of
Parliament out here the other day. He saw three poor chaps trying to
wash in a mine-crater full of muddy water. Covered with lice they was.
The paper described it afterwards. The right honorable gentleman laughed
'artily, it said, same as they say about royalty. Always laughing
'artily. P'raps he didn't laugh. I dunno about that. But if he did, I'd
like him to 'ave a taste of the fun hisself."
They were entering the long tunnel of the communication-trench now. The
soldier went ahead, and May Margaret followed, through smells of earth,
and the reek of stale uniforms, for a mile or more, till they came to
the alert eyes along the fire-step of the front-line trench.
"Here's Major Hilton, sir." A lean young man with a thin aquiline nose
and a face of Indian red approached them, stepping like a cat along the
trench.
"Mr. Grant," he said.
May Margaret nodded, and they were about to shake hands, when one side
of the trench seemed to rise up and smash against their faces, with a
roar that stunned them. May Margaret picked herself up at once, wiping
the bits of grit out of her eyes. The bombardment appeared to be growing
in intensity.
"That was pretty near," said Major Hilton. "You'd better come into my
dugout till this blows over."
He led the way into his gloomy little cavern. It was not much of a
shelter from a direct hit; but it would protect them from flying
splinters at least.
"Mr. Davidson was my friend," said May Margaret at once. "I know his
people. I think there must be some mistake about ... about the grave."
"You're not a relative of his, are you?" said Major Hilton. "Had you
known him for long?"
"No. Less than a year."
"Well, I don't mind telling _you_ that there _was_ a mistake. We
discovered it a few hours after it was made; but we thought it better
not to upset his people by giving them further details."
"He was killed, then," May Margaret whispered; and, if the darkness of
the dugout had not veiled her face, Major Hilton would not have
continued.
"Yes. It was a trench raid. The Boches took a section of our trenches.
When we recovered it, we found him. You'd better not tell his people,
but I don't mind telling _you_. It was a pretty bad case."
"What do you mean?"
"One of those filthy Boche tricks. They'd nailed him up against the
lining of the trench with bayonets. He was still alive when we found
him. But they'll get it all back. We're going to give 'em hell
to-night."
May Margaret was silent for so long that Major Hilton peered at her more
closely. Her white face looked like a bruised thing in the darkness.
"I'm sorry," he said. "Perhaps I shouldn't have told you. They have done
so much of that kind of thing, I suppose we've got used to it. Well,
you've been tramping about all day, and if I were you, as you're going
to spend the night here, I should settle down for a bit in the dugout.
The bombardment seems to be easing off a little, and you'll want to be
awake all night. There'll be some sights coming on of the picturesque
kind--fireworks and things, which is what you want, I suppose, for the
blessed old public."
Far away, in another section of the trenches, there was a burst of
cheering. Major Hilton pricked up his ears to listen; but it was drowned
immediately in another blast outside that sealed the mouth of the dugout
like a blow from a gigantic hammer and plunged them into complete
darkness thick with dust and sand.
"Are you all right?" said Hilton, in a moment or two. "They've blown the
parapet over us. Our chaps will soon get us out."
They sat down and waited. The sound of their rescuers' shovels was
followed almost immediately by the pulling away of a sandbag, and the
dusty daylight filtered in again, bringing with it another roar of
cheering, nearer now, and rolling along the trenches like an Atlantic
breaker.
"What the hell are they shouting about?" Hilton grunted, as he scrambled
through the opening. May Margaret was about to follow him, when the
abrupt answer struck her motionless.
"America has declared war, sir."
"Are you sure?"
"Yes, sir. They are passing the President's message along the line. It
looks as if they mean business."
May Margaret had moved further back into the darkness of the dugout. She
was breathing quickly, panting like a thirsty dog. She dropped on her
knees by an old packing-case in the corner.
"Thank God. Thank God," she repeated, with her eyes shut. Then the tears
came, and her whole body shook.
A hand touched her shoulder. She rose to her feet and saw the bewildered
face of Major Hilton, peering again at her own.
"I'm sorry," she said. "It's the first time I've done it since I was a
kid; but I've been hoping for this ever since the beginning. It's my
country, you see."
"I've just been looking at the President's message," said Hilton. "I'm
an Englishman, but--if a democracy can discipline itself--I'm not sure
that yours won't be the greatest country in the world. I suppose it must
be, or the Lord wouldn't have entrusted so much to you. He gave you the
best that we ever had to give, and that was our Englishman, George
Washington; and the best thing that George Washington ever did, was to
fight the German King and his twenty thousand Hessians. Eh, what?"
It was a little after dusk when the unexpected happened. There had been
a lull in the bombardment; and, on Major Hilton's advice, May Margaret
was resting in the dugout in readiness for the long wakeful night of the
trenches.
She lay there, dazed as from shell-shock by the account of Brian's
death; and the declaration of war from her own country had burst upon
her with an equal violence, leaving her stunned in a kind of "No Man's
Land," a desolate hell, somewhere between despair and triumph. Her world
had broken up. Her mind was no longer her own. Her thoughts were
helpless things between enormous conflicting forces; and, as if to
escape from their rending clutches, as if to cling to the present
reality, she whispered to herself the words of the wounded soldier at
Charing Cross station: "If you meet him, give him hell for _me_! Give
him hell for _me_." It seemed as if it were Brian himself speaking.
Once, with a swift sense of horror, catching herself upon the verge of
insanity, she found that her imagination was furtively beginning to
picture his last agony, and she stopped it, screwing her face up, like a
child pulling faces at a nightmare, and making inarticulate sounds to
drive it away.
Of one thing she was quite certain now. She did not wish to live any
longer in a world where these things were done. She meant, by hook or by
crook, to get to the dangerous bit of the trench, where our men were
only separated by six yards from the enemy, and to stay there until she
was killed. Even if she couldn't throw bombs herself, she supposed that
she could hand them up to others. And any thought that conflicted with
this idea she suppressed, automatically, with her monotonous echo of the
wounded soldier, "Give them hell for _me_."
But she was spared any further trouble about the execution of her plans;
and she knew, at once, that she had come to the end of her quest, when
she heard the quick sharp cries of warning outside.
It was a trench-raid, brief, and unimportant from a military point of
view. The newspapers told London, on the next day, that nothing of
importance had happened. Half a dozen revolvers cracked. There were
curses and groans, a sound of soft thudding blows and grunting, gasping
men, followed by a loud pig-like squeal. Then May Margaret saw three
faces peering cautiously into the dugout, faces of that strange
brutality, heavy-boned, pig-eyed, evil-skulled, which has impressed
itself upon the whole world as a distinct reversion from all civilized
types of humanity. She knew them, as one recognizes the smell of
carrion; and her whole soul exulted as she seized her supreme chance of
striking at the evil thing. She had picked up a revolver almost
unconsciously, and without pausing to think she fired three times with a
steady hand. Two of them she knew that she had killed. The third had
been too quick for her, and in another second she was down on her back,
with a blood-greased boot on her throat, and a throng of evil-smelling
cattle around her. Unhappily, they did not kill her at once; and so the
discovery was made, amidst a storm of guttural exclamations.
When the trench was retaken, half an hour later, a further discovery was
made by Major Hilton. A locket containing a photograph of Brian Davidson
was buried in what remained of her left breast, as if it had been trying
to hide in her heart. It was almost the only thing about her that was
unhurt.
Major Hilton made no explanations; but when the body was removed, he
gave strict orders for it to be buried by the side of Lieutenant
Davidson.
* * * * *