has made a row about the O.S.--the officers' servants who are removed
from the firing line, I know that a large proportion of them do their
share in the trenches. I saw to it that mine did.
"One night there was a digging expedition. An advance trench was to be
made in No Man's Land about a hundred and fifty yards from the Germans.
I was in command of the covering party of thirty-five men; I was a
captain. We, of course, went out ahead. Beauramé was in the party. It
was his first fighting. We had rifles, with bayonets, and bombs, and a
couple of Lewis guns. We came up to the trenches by a road, then went
into the zigzag communication trenches up to the front, the fire-trench.
Then, very cautiously, over the top into No Man's Land. It was nervous
work, for at any second they might discover us and open fire. It suited
us all to be as quiet as human men could be, and when once in a while a
star-shell, a Very light, was sent up from the German lines we froze in
our tracks till the white glare died out.
"The party had been digging for perhaps an hour when hell broke loose.
They'd seen us. All about was a storm of machine-gun and rifle bullets,
and we dropped on our faces, the diggers in their trench--pretty shallow
it was. As for the covering party, we simply took our medicine. And
then the shrapnel joined the music. Word was passed to get back to the
trenches, and we started promptly. We stooped low as we ran over No
Man's Land, but there were plenty of casualties. I got mine in the foot,
but not the wound which rung in this--" Thornton nodded his head at the
crutches with a smile. "It was from a bit of shrapnel just as I made the
trench, and as I fell in I caught at the sand bags and whirled about
facing out over No Man's Land; as I whirled I saw, close by, Beauramé's
face in a shaft of light. I don't know why I made conversation at that
moment--I did. I said:
"When did you get back?"
And his answer came as if clicked on a typewriter. "Me, I stayed, _Mon
Capitaine_. It had an air too dangerous, out there."
I stared in a white rage. You'll imagine--one of my men to dare tell me
that! And at that second, simultaneously, came the flare of a shell star
and a shout of a man struck down, and I knew the voice--John Dudley. He
was out there, the tail end of the party, wounded. I saw him as he
fell, on the farther side of the new trench. Of course, one's instinct
was to dash back and bring him in, and I started. And I found my foot
gone--I couldn't walk. Quicker than I can tell it I turned to Beauramé,
the coward, who'd been afraid to go over the top, and I said in French,
because, though I hadn't time to think it out, I yet realized that it
would get to him faster so--I said:
"Get over there, you deserter. Save the lieutenant--Lieutenant Dudley.
Go."
For one instant I thought it was no good and I was due to have him shot,
if we both lived through the night. And then--I never in my life saw
such a face of abject fear as the one he turned first to me and then
across that horror of No Man's Land. The whites of his eyes showed, it
seemed, an eighth of an inch above the irises; his black eyebrows were
half way up his forehead, and his teeth, luxuriously upholstered with
fillings, shone white and gold in the unearthly light. It was such a mad
terror as I'd never seen before, and never since. And into it I, mad
too with the thought of my sister if I let young John Dudley die before
my eyes--I bombed again the order to go out and bring in Dudley. I
remember the fading and coming expressions on that Frenchman's face like
the changes on a moving picture film. I suppose it was half a minute.
And here was the coward face gazing into mine, transfigured into the
face of a man who cared about another man more than himself--a common
man whose one high quality was love.
"_C'est bien, Mon Capitaine_," Beauramé spoke, through still clicking
teeth, and with his regulation smile of good will he had sprung over the
parapet in one lithe movement, and I saw him crouching, trotting that
absurd, powerful fast trot through the lane in our barbed wire, like
lightning, to the shallow new trench, to Dudley. I saw him--for the
Germans had the stretch lighted--I saw the man pick up my brother-in-law
and toss him over his shoulders and start trotting back. Then I saw him
fall, both of them fall, and I knew that he'd stopped a bullet. And
then, as I groaned, somehow Beauramé was on his feet again. I expected,
that he'd bolt for cover, but he didn't. He bent over deliberately as if
he had been a fearless hero--and maybe he was--and he picked up Dudley
again and started on, laboring, this time in walking. He was hit badly.
But he made the trench; he brought in Dudley.
Then such a howl of hurrahs greeted him from the men who watched the
rescue as poor little Aristophe Beauramé--"
"Ah!" I interjected, and Bobby turned and stared--"as the poor little
scared rat had not dreamed, or had any right to dream would ever greet
his conduct on earth. He dropped Dudley at my feet and turned with his
flabby mouth open and his great stupid eyes like saucers, towards the
men who rushed to shake his hand and throw at him words of admiration
that choked them to get out. And then he keeled over. So you see. It was
an equal chance at one second, whether a man should be shot for a
deserter or--win the Victoria Cross."
"What!" I shouted at my guest. "What! Not the Victoria Cross! Not
Aristophe!"
Bobby looked at me in surprise. "You're a great claque for me," he said.
"You seem to take an interest in my hero. Yes, he got it. He was badly
hurt. One hand nearly gone and a wound in his side. I was lucky enough
to be in London on a day three months later, and to be present at the
ceremony, when the young French-Canadian, spoiled for a soldier, but
splendid stuff now for a hero, stood out in the open before the troops
in front of Buckingham Palace and King George pinned the V.C. on his
breast. They say that he's back in his village, and the whole show. I
hear that he tells over and over the story of his heroism and the rescue
of '_Mon Lieutenant_.' to never failing audiences. Of course, John is
looking after him, for the hand which John saved was the hand that was
shot to pieces in saving John, and the Tin Lizzie can never make his
living with that hand again. A deserter, a coward--decorated by the King
with the Victoria Cross! Queer things happen in war!" There was a stir,
a murmur as of voices, of questions beginning, but Bobby was not quite
through.
"War takes the best of the best men, and the best of the cheapest, and
transfigures both. War doesn't need heroes for heroism. She pins it on
anywhere if there's one spot of greatness in a character. War does
strange things with humanity," said Bobby.
And I, gasping, broke out crudely in three words: "Our Tin Lizzie!" I
said, and nobody knew in the least what I meant, or with what memories I
said it.
HE THAT LOSETH HIS LIFE SHALL FIND IT
The Red Cross women had gone home. Half an hour before, the large
library had been filled with white-clad, white-veiled figures. Two long
tables full, forty of them today, had been working; three thousand
surgical dressings had been cut and folded and put away in large boxes
on shelves behind glass doors where the most valuable books had held
their stately existence for years. The books were stowed now in trunks
in the attic. These were war days; luxuries such as first editions must
wait their time. The great living-room itself, the center of home for
this family since the two boys were born and ever this family had been,
the dear big room with its dark carved oak, and tapestries, and stained
glass, and books, and memories was given over now to war relief work.
Sometimes, as the mistress walked into the spacious, low-ceilinged,
bright place, presences long past seemed to fill it intolerably. Brock
and Hugh, little chaps, roared in untidy and tumultuous from football,
or came, decorous and groomed, handsome, smart little lads, to be
presented to guests. Her own Hugh, her husband, proud of the beautiful
new house, smiled from the hearth to her as he had smiled twenty-six
years back, the night they came in, a young Hugh, younger than Brock was
now. Her father and mother, long gone over "to the majority," and the
exquisite old ivory beauty of a beautiful grandmother--such ghosts rose
and faced the woman as she stepped into the room where they had moved in
life, the room with its loveliness marred by two long tables covered
with green oilcloth, by four rows of cheap chairs, by rows and rows of
boxes on shelves where soft and bright and dark colors of books had
glowed. She felt often that she should explain matters to the room,
should tell the walls which had sheltered peace and hospitality that she
had consecrated them to yet higher service. Never for one instant,
while her soul ached for the familiar setting, had she regretted its
sacrifice. That her soul did ache made it worth while.
And the women gathered for this branch Red Cross organization, her
neighbors on the edge of the great city, wives and daughters and mothers
of clerks, and delivery-wagon drivers, and icemen, and night-watchmen,
women who had not known how to take their part in the war work in the
city or had found it too far to go, these came to her house gladly and
all found pleasure in her beautiful room. That made it a joy to give it
up to them. She stood in the doorway, feeling an emphasis in the quiet
of the July afternoon because of the forty voices which had lately gone
out of the sunshiny silence, of the forty busy figures in long, white
aprons and white, sweeping veils, the tiny red cross gleaming over the
forehead of each one, each face lovely in the uniform of service, all
oddly equalized and alike under their veils and crosses. She spoke aloud
as she tossed out her hands to the room:
"War will be over some day, and you will be our own again, but forever
holy because of this. You will be a room of history when you go to
Brock--"
Brock! Would Brock ever come home to the room, to this place which he
loved? Brock, in France! She turned sharply and went out through the
long hall and across the terrace, and sat down where the steps dropped
to the garden, on the broad top step, with her head against the pillar
of the balustrade. Above her the smell of box in a stone vase on the
pillar punctured the mild air with its definite, reminiscent fragrance.
Box is a plant of antecedents of sentiment, of memories. The woman
inhaling its delicate sharpness, was caught back into days past. She
considered, in rapid jumps of thought, events, episodes, epochs. The day
Brock was born, on her own twentieth birthday, up-stairs where the rosy
chintz curtains blew now out of the window; the first day she had come
down to the terrace--it was June--and the baby lay in his bassinet by
the balustrade in that spot--she looked at the spot--the baby, her big
Brock, a bundle of flannel and fine, white stuff in lacy frills of the
bassinet. And she loved him; she remembered how she had loved that baby,
how, laughing at herself, she had whispered silly words over the stolid,
pink head; how the girl's heart of her had all but burst with the
astonishing new tide of a feeling which seemed the greatest of which she
was capable. Yet it was a small thing to the way she loved Brock now. A
vision came of little Hugh, three years younger, and the two toddling
about the terrace together, Hugh always Brock's satellite and adorer, as
was fitting; less sturdy, less daring than Brock, yet ready to go
anywhere if only the older baby led. She thought of the day when Hugh,
four years old, had taken fright at a black log among the bushes under
the trees.
"It's a bear!" little Hugh had whispered, shaking, and Brock, brave but
not too certain, had looked at her, inquiring.
"No, love, it's not a bear; it's an old log of wood. Go and put your
hand on it, Hughie."
Little Hugh had cried out and shrunk back. "I'm afraid!" cried little
Hugh.
And Brock, not entirely clear as to the no-bear theory, had yet bluffed
manfully. "Come on, Hughie; let's go and bang 'um," said Brock.
Which invitation Hugh accepted reluctantly with a condition, "If you'll
hold my hand, B'ocky."
The woman turned her head to see the place where the black log had lain,
there in the old high bushes. And behold! Two strong little figures in
white marched along--she could all but see them today--and the bigger
little figure was dragging the other a bit, holding a hand with
masterful grip. She could hear little Hugh's laughter as they arrived at
the terrible log and found it truly a log. Even now Hugh's laugh was
music.
"Why, it's nuffin but an old log o' wood!" little Hugh had squealed, as
brave as a lion.
As she sat seeing visions, old Mavourneen, Brock's Irish wolf-hound,
came and laid her muzzle on the woman's shoulder, crying a bit, as was
Mavourneen's Irish way, for pleasure at finding the mistress. And with
that there was a brown ripple and a patter of many soft feet, and a
broken wave of dogs came around the corner, seven little cairn-terriers.
Sticky and Sandy and their offspring. The woman let Sticky settle in her
lap and drew Sandy under her arm, and the puppies looked up at her from
the step below with ten serious, anxious eyes and then fell to chasing
quite imaginary game up and down the stone steps. Mavourneen sighed
deeply and dropped with a heavy thud, a great paw on the edge of the
white dress and her beautiful head resting on her paws, the topaz,
watchful eyes gazing over the city. The woman put her free hand back and
touched the rough head.
"Dear dog!" she spoke.
Another memory came: how they had bought Mavourneen, she and Hugh and
the boys, at the kennels in Ireland, eight years ago; how the huge baby
had been sent to them at Liverpool in a hamper; the uproarious drive the
four of them--Hugh, the two boys, and herself--and Mavourneen had taken
in a taxi across the city. The puppy, astonished and investigating
throughout the whole proceeding, had mounted all of them, separately and
together, and insisted on lying in big Hugh's lap, crying
broken-heartedly at not being allowed. How they had shouted laughter,
the four and the boy taxi-driver, all the journey, till they ached! What
good times they had always had together, the young father and mother and
the two big sons! She reflected how she had not been at all the
conventional mother of sons. She had not been satisfied to be gentle and
benevolent and look after their clothes and morals. She had lived their
lives with them, she had ridden and gone swimming with them, and played
tennis and golf, and fished and shot and skated and walked with them,
yes, and studied and read with them, all their lives.
"I haven't any respect for my mother," young Hugh told her one day. "I
like her like a sister."
She was deeply pleased at this attitude; she did not wish their respect
as a visible quality. Vision after vision came of the old times and
care-free days while the four, as happy and normal a family as lived in
the world, passed their alert, full days together before the war. Memory
after memory took form in the brain of the woman, the center of that
light-hearted life so lately changed, so entirely now a memory. War had
come.
At first, in 1914, there had been excitement, astonishment. Then the
horror of Belgium. One refused to believe that at first; it was a lurid
slander on the kindly German people; then one believed with the brain;
one's spirit could not grasp it. Unspeakable deeds such as the Germans'
deeds--it was like a statement made concerning a fourth dimension of
space; civilized modern folk were not so organized as to realize the
facts of that bestiality.
"Aren't you thankful we're Americans?" the woman had said over and over.
One day her husband, answering usually with a shake of the head,
answered in words. "We may be in it yet," he said. "I'm not sure but we
ought to be."
Brock, twenty-one then, had flashed at her: "I want to be in it. I may
just have to be, mother."
Young Hugh yawned a bit at that, and stretching his long arm, he patted
his brother's shoulder. "Good old hero, Brock! I'll beat you a set of
tennis. Come on."
That sudden speech of Brock's had startled her, had brought the war, in
a jump which was like a stab, close. The war and Lindow--their
place--how was it possible that this nightmare in Europe could touch the
peace of the garden, the sunlit view of the river, the trees with birds
singing in them, the scampering of the dogs down the drive? The distant
hint of any connection between the great horror and her own was pain;
she put the thought away.
Then the _Lusitania_ was sunk. All America shouted shame through sobs of
rage. The President wrote a beautiful and entirely satisfactory note.
"It should be war--war. It should be war today," Hugh had said, her
husband. "We only waste time. We'll have to fight sooner or later. The
sooner we begin, the sooner we'll finish."
"Fight!" young Hugh threw at him. "What with? We can just about make
faces at 'em, father."
The boy's father did not laugh. "We had better get ready to do more than
make faces; we've got to get ready." He hammered his hand on the stone
balustrade. "I'm going to Plattsburg this summer, Evelyn."
"I'm going with you." Brock's voice was low and his mouth set, and the
woman, looking at him, saw suddenly that her boy was a man.
"Well, then, as man power is getting low at Lindow, I'll stay and take
care of Mummy. Won't I? We'll do awfully well without them, won't we,
Mum? You can drive Dad's Rolls-Royce roadster, and if you leave on the
handbrake up-hill, I'll never tell."
Father and son had gone off for the month in camp, and, glad as she was
to have the younger boy with her, there was yet an uneasy, an almost
subconscious feeling about him, which she indignantly denied each time
that it raised its head. It never quite phrased itself, this fear, this
wonder if Hugh were altogether as American as his father and brother.
Question the courage and patriotism of her own boy? She flung the
thought from her as again and yet again it came. People of the same
blood were widely different. To Brock and his father it had come easily
to do the obvious thing, to go to Plattsburg. It had not so come to
young Hugh, but that in good time he would see his duty and do it she
would not for an instant doubt. She would not break faith with the lad
in thought. With a perfect delicacy she avoided any word that would
influence him. He knew. All his life he had breathed loyalty. It was she
herself, reading to them night after night through years, who had taught
the boys hero worship--above all, worship of American heroes,
Washington, Paul Jones, Perry, Farragut, Lee; how Dewey had said, "You
may fire now, Gridley, if you are ready"; how Clark had brought the
_Oregon_ around the continent; how Scott had gone alone among angry
Indians. She had taught them such names, names which will not die while
America lives. It was she who had told the little lads, listening
wide-eyed, that as these men had held life lightly for the glory of
America, so her sons, if need came, must be ready to offer their lives
for their country. She remembered how Brock, his round face suddenly
scarlet, had stammered out:
"I _am_ ready, Mummy. I'd die this minute for--for America. Wouldn't
you, Hughie?"
And young Hugh, a slim, blond angel of a boy, of curly, golden hair and
unexpected answers, had ducked beneath the hero, upsetting him into a
hedge to his infinite anger. "I wouldn't die right now, Brocky," said
Hugh. "There's going to be chocolate cake for lunch."
One could never count on Hugh's ways of doing things, but Brock was a
stone wall of reliability. She smiled, thinking of his youth and beauty
and entire boyishness, to think yet of the saying from the Bible which
always suggested Brock, "Thou shalt keep him in perfect peace whose mind
is stayed on Thee." It was so with the lad; through the gay heart and
eager interest in life pulsed an atmosphere of deep religiousness. He
was always "in perfect peace," and his mother, less balanced, had stayed
her mind on that quiet and right young mind from its very babyhood. The
lad had seen his responsibilities and lifted them all his life. It came
to her how, when her own mother, very dear to Brock, had died, she had
not let the lads go with her to the house of death for fear of saddening
their youth, and how, when she and their father came home from the hard,
terrible business of the funeral, they met little Hugh on the drive,
rapturous at seeing them again, rather absorbed in his new dog. But
Brock, then fourteen, was in the house alone, quiet, his fresh, dear
face red with tears, and a black necktie of his father's, too large for
him, tied under his collar. Of all the memories of her boys, that
grotesque black tie was the most poignant and most precious. It said
much. It said: "I also, O, my mother, am of my people. I have a right to
their sorrows as well as to their joys, and if you do not give me my
place in trouble, I shall do what I can alone, being but a boy. I shall
give up play, and I shall wear mourning as I can, not knowing how very
well, but pushed by all my being to be with my own in their mourning."
Quickly affection for the other lad asserted itself. Brock and Hugh were
different, but Hugh was a dear boy, too--undeveloped, that was all. He
had never taken life seriously, little Hugh, and now that this war-cloud
hung over the world, he simply refused to look at it; he turned away his
face. That was all, a temperament which loved harmony and shrank from
ugliness; these things were young Hugh's limitations, and no ignoble
quality.
In a long dream, yet much faster than the words have told it, in
comprehensive flashes of memory, her elbows on her knees and her face,
in her slender hands, looking out over the garden with its arched way of
roses, with its high hedge, looking past the loveliness that was home to
the city pulsing in summer heat, to the shining zigzag of river beyond
the city, the woman reviewed her boys' lives. Boys were not now merely
one phase of humanity; they had suddenly become the nation. They stood
in the foreground of a world crisis; back of them America was ranged,
orderly, living and moving to feed, clothe, and keep happy these
millions of lads holding in their hands the fate of the earth. Her boys
were but two, yet necessary. She owed them to the country, as other
mothers of men.
There was a whistle under the archway, a flying step, and young Hugh
shot from beneath the rosiness of Dorothy Perkins vines and took the
stone steps in four bounds. All the dogs fell into a community chorus of
barks and whines and patterings about, and Hugh's hands were on this one
and that as he bent over the woman.
"A _good_ kiss, Mummy; that's cold baked potato," he complained, and she
laughed and hugged him.
"Not cold; I was just thinking. Your knee, Hughie? You came up like a
bird."
Hugh made a face. "Bad break, that," he grinned, and limped across the
terrace and back. "Mummy, it doesn't hurt much now, and I do forget,"
he explained, and his color deepened. With that: "Tom Arthur is waiting
for me in town. We're going to pick up Whitney, the tennis champion, at
the Crossroads Club. May I take Dad's roadster?"
"Yes, Hughie. And, Hugh, meet the train, the seven-five. Dad's coming
to-night, you know."
The boy took her hand, looked at her uneasily. "Mummy, dear, don't be
thinking sinful thoughts about me. And don't let Dad. Hold your fire,
Mummy."
She lifted her face, and her eyes were the eyes of faith he had known
all his life. "You blessed boy of mine, I will hold my fire." And then
Hugh had all but knocked her over with a violent kiss again, and he
slammed happily through the screen doors and was leaping up the stairs.
Ten minutes later she heard the car purring down the drive.