pressed hospitality upon them.... The desolate mother was termed "Poor
Dear" in a dozen different keys of sympathy. But she only looked with
dull vague eyes in the faces of would-be philanthropists. When kindly
hands tried to draw the little ones away, she grabbed them and held on.
"She doesn't understand us, the Poor Dear Creature!" Thus the Goblin,
gulping within her rows of pearls, red-eyed under her towering osprey
_panache_. "What she has suffered! It shatters one to realise. Can
one credit that dear Count Tido could have belonged to such a race?
Miss Helvellyn claims her by right of discovery, I believe, so farewell
to my plans for her benefit! But Belgians, I understand, are to be had
in any quantity, and Belgians I must and will have! Think of those rows
and _rows_ of new cottages standing empty at Wathe Regis, and that huge
caravanserai that nobody can live in at the corner of Russell Square!
Do you hear me, Sir Thomas? Oh, how clever of you, Lady Eliason! Sir
Thomas, listen! Lady Eliason _positively promises_ that Sir Solomon
shall interest himself in this. _Of course_ there must be a Fund, and a
Committee, and a Headquarters! The Fund must be Huge, the Committee
Representative.... Dear Lady Beauvayse is to be our Hon. Secretary....
With your legal knowledge and influence, and your passion for
philanthropy, Sir Thomas, don't tell me You are going to keep out of
this! You are damned if you do! did you say? Bless you! Who are these
queer people coming in?"
Two nuns in the familiar habit worn by Roman Catholic Sisters of
Charity, little black-robed figures with starched white coifs, broad
white guimpes and flowing black veils, had passed the Club windows a
moment previously. A tall, slight woman in Quaker grey had seen and
hurried in pursuit of the Sisters, recognised as members of a Belgian
Community, to whom Mrs. Saxham explained the situation, speaking in her
exquisite French. The Sisters replied in a less polished accent, their
discreet eyes ignoring curious glances as their guide ushered them into
the crowded drawing-room.
The crowd parted before them, revealing Rachel and her children. The
nuns moved forwards and stood within the radius of those heavy, vacant
eyes. Life leaped into them. She cried out in her thick Flemish tongue
and was answered, and rose up, the children clinging to her. In a
moment the Sisters had advanced upon her, taken the baby from the
cramped arms that now resigned it, taken the mother also into a pair of
black-sleeved arms. And she was weeping on the bosom of Charity, and
telling them the dreadful story that is told anew every day. Presently
she and Vic, Josephine, Georgette, and Albert the big-headed, were
eating cake and drinking coffee under the sheltering wing of the
Sisters, but though some elderly Members still hovered in their
neighbourhood, the question of a Fund and a Committee had usurped the
attention of the Club.
Lady Eliason and Lady Wathe were selecting a Quorum.... Rhona Helvellyn
had proposed to Lynette an adjournment to the Chintz Room. They had
reached the swing-doors of the drawing-room, when with violence they
banged open to admit Brenda Helvellyn in the maddest spirits, escorted
by Doda Foltlebarre and Sissi Eliason and half a dozen of the wilder,
younger members of the Club.
Said Rhona, barring her junior's way with a long thin arm as Brenda
rollicked past her:
"Mrs. Saxham, let me introduce my sister Brenda. Brenda admires you
frightfully!"
Brenda, staring with wide bright eyes at the object of her alleged
admiration, offered a pink, moist, recently washed hand to Lynette. At
Rhona's indignant exclamation she started and pulled away the hand,
stammering:
"They wouldn't let me! ..."
"Wouldn't let you change into decent clothes when I'd 'phoned Home to
have some sent here? Tell me another!"
"Well, then, the things hadn't come!"
"And if they haven't, why not have stayed upstairs until they do come?"
"All alone.... Oh! I couldn't! Anything awful might happen up
there...." The peach-face of sixteen winced and the eyebrows puckered.
"And Doda and Sissi simply _love_ me in these things. They said I must
come down and be seen!"
Doda and Sissi and the guilty six exchanged rapturous winks and
grimaces. Certainly a damsel of sixteen, whose superb crimson tresses
are crowned with the squashed ruin of a muslin "Trouville" hat, and
whose slender form is draped in the wilted wraith of a light green
aquascutum, is more than likely to create a _succes fou_, on her
appearance in a London drawing-room.
"'Seen!'" Rhona snorted. "Well, you are a sight, there's no denying.
From your head to your feet--My merry Christmas! what _have_ you got on
your feet?"
Brenda tittered nervously, poking out a slim foot in a huge golosh lined
with wearied red flannel.
"They're the Mere Econome's. There wasn't time to dress properly. We
were turned out of the Convent, haven't I told you!--just as we stood.
It was early in the morning. Seven o'clock Mass was just over. We were
trooping in to the _Refectoire_ for coffee. We went to Mass and did our
lessons, in spite of the awful guns. Then ... all at once--" She began
to laugh, and a mask of fine glittering dew broke out over her peachy
face from the temples to the upper lip. "The earth began to shake. The
French were retreating from Charleroi. They streamed past and past,
horsemen and guns and marching men, just as they'd gone by two days
before when we waved and cheered them from the garden. Only this time
there were wounded men.... The ambulance waggons were heaped with
them--all bloody and dreadful.... Oh! And then the shells began to
fall ... among the waggons and on the Convent! "The Germans are
coming," the soldiers called to us. 'Fly while you have time!'"
"Shut up!" Rhona ordered the girl. "Haven't I told you not to talk, you
stoopid! There weren't any shells--it's all your silly nerves. There
might have been--but there weren't!"
"But the shells were hitting the Convent walls ... and bursting. The
house was on fire. And the French Commandant said to the _Maitresse
Generale_: 'It will be _rase_ over your heads if you remain, Madame.
_On n'y fait quartier a personne--les Allemands_! They are advancing in
incredible numbers. The road to Calais lies open before them because of
the Great Catastrophe of yesterday. Our hearts are sad, not only for
our own losses, but for the misfortunes of our friends across the----'"
"WILL you be silent! He never said so!"
With her scarlet head surmounting the shiny waterproof, Brenda rather
reminded one of a Green Hackle, the likeness to the splendid
gauze-winged fly being increased by the brightness of her eyes. Very
round, very wide open, and with strange lines radiating from the
pin-point speck of pupil to the outer band ringing the hazel irids, they
stared from that crystal-beaded mask of hers. "But, Rhona," she
reiterated, bewildered by her senior's vehemence of contradiction, "he
_did_ say so! And the Convent was burning when we left!"
"If it was, you're to forget it--d'you hear me? And look here, if you
dare to talk like this at home----"
"I won't. I know the Mater mustn't be upset! Look here, I'll swear I
won't, if that'll do! Only don't say I've got to stop upstairs, will
you? They're so gay here," Brenda pleaded humbly--"it'll help me to
forget!"
"All right!" and with a warning scowl from Rhona the sisters parted.
Lynette Saxham asked, looking after the little bizarre figure of Brenda
with wistful tenderness in her eyes:
"Will she recover from the shock of the horrors she has seen the more
quickly because you forbid her to speak of them?"
"I don't know.... I haven't thought.... It's my mother I bother most
about.... You see, Roddy's Battery--Roddy's my brother--has gone with
the Expedition. If Brenda talks rawhead and bloody-bones--but I'll take
care she don't, the little fool!"
The eyes of both women followed the funny little figure. Lynette said as
it was absorbed in a crowd of laughing friends:
"Would you prefer that we finished our talk here?" She glanced at the
settee in a glass-screened angle near the fireplace, and Rhona assented
with evident relief. Her Chiefs of the W.S.S.S., she explained, were
anxious that Mrs. Saxham should consent to speak at the Royal Hall Mass
Meeting of Protest Against the Delay of Parliament in passing the Woman
Suffrage Bill. The Meeting was fixed for the middle of October. Mrs.
Saxham's sympathy with the Movement was to be gathered from her
writings. A personal expression would be valued by the W.S.S.S.
"I am in sympathy to the extent of joining in any form of protest or any
description of organised Demonstration that is not characterised by
violence," said Lynette. "To brawl at public meetings"--Rhona wondered
whether she had heard of her own baulked attempt to heckle the Bishops
at the Guildhall Banquet?--"to assault public personages and damage
private or public property is not the method by which the Franchise will
be gained. To make war upon men is not the way, I think, to win their
suffrages for women. But I will gladly speak at the Meeting, please be
kind enough to tell the Chiefs."
"It's awfully sporting of you--when you've been in such trouble. It
must have been quite too awful," bungled Rhona, "about your boy!"
"About my boy! ..." Lynette caught her breath and nipped her lower lip
between her teeth to keep back the cry that else must have escaped her.
"You are kind.... You will be infinitely kinder if you say no more!"
"I beg your pardon. I'm frightfully clumsy!" apologised Rhona.
"Roddy--my brother who's at the Front--once told me that I had the tact
of a steam-cultivator and the discretion of a runaway motor-bus." She
added: "I'm afraid you think I was rough on Brenda. But the Mater's
heart-trouble keeps us all on tenterhooks, and for her sake--no matter
what horrors are hinted or whispered--nothing shall make me
believe--anything but the Best, until the Worst is brought to my door!
You understand, don't you? ... What's that? Young Brenda----"
A gust of laughter drew the eyes of both women to the Green Hackle, who,
surrounded by an appreciative circle, including Margot and Trixie
Wastwood, Cynthia Charterhouse, Doda and Sissi, was performing the
maddest _pas seul_ that ever held the floor. One huge golosh flew off,
shaving a gilt-and-crystal electrolier as she finished with a daring
high kick, and dropped down breathless and panting between Margot and
Cynthia Charterhouse.
"You crazy child!" cooed Mrs. Charterhouse, patting one of the pink
hands.
"I feel crazy!" gurgled Brenda, while Doda picked up her battered
Trouville hat and Sissi retrieved hairpins scattered over the Club
carpet. "Oh, my stars! You don't know, you'll none of you ever guess
what it is to me to find you all so gay!" She bounced on the springy
seat until her red locks tossed like the mane of a Shetland pony. "Now
I really can believe--really!--that the whole thing's been a bad dream!
Like you get when Sisters have been too busy to boil the potatoes soft,
or take the cores out of the stewed apples." She turned her head and
the sparkling mask of tiny beads broke out again over her flushed face.
"Who are those _Soeurs de Charite_?" she asked, for the circle of
elderly Members had melted away and the two Religious were now going,
taking with them the Belgian mother and her children, to whom--of course
at the Club's expense--they were to afford a temporary home. "What are
they here for? Why, that's the woman who came with us on the boat from
Ostend! Ah, my God!--it's all true! I can't tell lies any more! Do you
hear, Rhona?" and the bizarre little figure leaped up and stood before
them, defiant and panting. "Not even for you and Mother!" The voice
broke in a wail. "Oh! how can you bear to see everyone so gay when the
Guards and Gunners have been killed at Mons? Seven thousand lying dead,
the French Commandant told us. Thousands taken prisoners--and we sit
laughing here----"
Lynette Saxham caught the little body as it doubled on itself and
dropped like a shot rabbit. She carried it to one of the settees, and
knelt by it, loosening the clothes, working with swift and motherly
hands.
The piano-organ had come back, or another like it,--and was jolting out
the popular pseudo-pathetic strains of "Good-bye, Little Girl,
Good-bye!" The swing-doors had thudded behind the nuns and their
charges. Lady Wathe was just saying to Lady Eliason:
"Then you, dear, will personally apply to the Foreign Office and the
Home Office and the Belgian Ambassador and the County Council. Pray
count on me for _all_ the rest! Sir Solomon is a Tower of Strength! You
agree with me, don't you, Sir Thomas? Mercy on us! _What_ a commotion!
Who has had a telegram from the Front? Who says the Guards and Gunners
have been annihilated? Who says the British Expedition has been
overwhelmed by numbers and forced to Retreat? Will nobody stop that
horrible organ? Will nobody answer me?"
It was the tragic crowning of that day of trivial happenings that the
Iron Curtain that had baffled us so persistently should rise to the tune
of a music-hall ballad at the touch of a schoolgirl's hand. Long before
the huge funeral broadsheets broke out in the gutters of Fleet Street,
the Strand, Pall Mall, and Piccadilly, screaming of the RETIREMENT OF
THE FRENCH FORCES FROM NAMUR AND CHARLEROI, DISASTER TO THE BRITISH
EXPEDITIONARY ARMY, DECIMATION OF FAMOUS REGIMENTS, AND THE RETREAT FROM
MONS, the Tidal Wave of Mourning that was to sweep the United Kingdom
from end to end had crashed down upon the Club.
Ah! how one had underrated them, those dead men who, living, had seemed
to hold themselves so lightly. Who, submitting to be outclassed in
Sport even while holding it the thing best worth living for, had
smilingly accepted those hateful records of 1912-1913.
Theirs is a glorious record now. Above the huge Roll that is wreathed
with bloodstained laurels, droop the Flags of the Allied Nations, their
heavy folds all gemmed with bitter tears. Each nightfall finds the
endless Roll grown longer. Each day-dawn sees the Hope of noble houses,
the pride and stay of homes gentle and simple swallowed up in the abyss
that is never glutted! How long, O Lord? we cry, yet comes no nearer
the End for which the smallest children pray.
And the women.... In the Book of the Prophet Ezekiel we read of a
valley of dry bones over which the Spirit of the Creator breathed. When
that Wind from Heaven stirred them, the dead white bones put on Life and
rose up. A change as miraculous has been wrought in Woman since the
Black Deluge left a deposit of new-made widows and mourning mothers,
red-eyed sisters and silent wan-faced sweethearts, sitting about the
little tables where the empty places showed as awful gaps.
The bereaved did not shed many tears. Their grief was too deep to be
emotional, their newly-awakened spirit too lofty for complaint. Their
pride in their dead men was their upholding. Their bleeding hearts they
only showed to GOD. Before then, He was for many of us non-existent:
for many more a remote, passively observant Personality but tepidly
interested in the affairs of the human race. Would these have learned to
know Him, think you, if there had been no War?
And those whom every newspaper unfolded, every knock at the door might
smite with dire intelligence, right bravely they bore themselves through
that fortnight-long, hideous pipe-dream of the Long Retreat South. For
many of these the torture of suspense was to give place to cruel
certainty, after that unforgettable Sunday of the Sixth September, when
at a distance of twelve kilometres from Paris the retirement of the
Allied Armies suddenly changed to an Advance, and the columns of German
Guard Uhlans in hot pursuit of the British Force, were routed by
Generals Gough and Chetwode with our 3rd and 5th Cavalry Brigades. For
many, many others, the strain has never since slackened. They lie o'
nights as they lay through those nights of September, 1914, and feel the
bed shaking, and the floors and walls vibrating, as the outer rings of
vast concussions spread to them through the troubled ocean of
atmosphere. And in the mornings they will tell you calmly:
"Oh, yes. _He_ is alive, but where he is there is terrible fighting. I
heard the guns." ...
No arguments of people whose sons or husbands are not with the Army in
Belgium, or France, Italy, or Palestine, will convince them that they do
not hear the guns. Or that, borne upon the waves of a subtler medium
than air are not conveyed to them finer, more mysterious vibrations.
Thoughts that meet thoughts. Mental appeals--demands--entreaties....
The hands of their souls, reaching out through the dark hours, clasp
those of other souls in greetings and farewells.
*CHAPTER LX*
*KULTUR!*
The Belgian village-town had been so sorely knocked about that the names
of its faubourgs, boulevards, and thoroughfares were obliterated.
Hence, one is fain to substitute others, such as the Street Where The
Naked Body Of The Little Girl Hung Up On Hooks In the Butcher's Window,
the Passage Of The Three Dead British Soldiers With Slit Noses And
Pounded Feet,--The Square Of The Forty Blindfolded Civilian Corpses, and
the Place Of The Church Of The Cure They Crucified For Warning The
British By Ringing The Bells. Of this sacred edifice--Romanesque and
dating from the tenth century--little remained beyond the crypt and the
stump of the tower. Some calcined and twisted bones, a scorched rag of
a cassock, represented M. le Cure, that faithful shepherd of souls. Of
M. le Cure's flock, not one remained to tell the story of the tragic
episode that had reared the grim pile of blackening corpses in the
Market Square, and added seven hundred homeless refugees to the rivers
of human wretchedness ceaselessly rolling South.
In the bright sunshine of the fine October morning that had followed a
night of rain and thunder, the grimly-altered shadows of shell-torn
buildings lay black on the ripped-up pavements and shrapnel-pocked
walls. A sandy-white cat lapped gratefully at a puddle, a dishevelled
fowl pecked between the cobblestones, a pigeon or two preened on the
broken ridge-tiles. To the eye of a skilled observer hovering hawk-like
in the hot blue heavens, raking the streets through high-powered Zeiss
binoculars, nothing human remained alive in this Aceldama. Yet when the
two-seated bomb-carrying Taube with the big man and the small boy in it
had banked and climbed, and hummed away Southwards on its aerial mission
of ruin and destruction, one British officer, sorely wounded, lay in
what had been the ground-floor living-room of a well-to-do baker's shop.
A Captain of a Guards infantry battalion belonging to a Brigade of the
First Division of the First Army Corps. Marching, counter-marching,
digging, and fighting rearguard actions had kept the Brigade's hands
full during those blazing days and drenching nights of August and
September, whilst the battered Divisions that had borne the brunt of the
huge German offensive, reduced to one-twentieth of their effective, had
hurried Southwards, leaving a trail of blood.
"Those other beggars have had all the luck!" the Brigade had growled
when it had any time for growling. But it had won shining honours at
the Marne, and had been heavily engaged at the Aisne, losing many of its
men and officers. In the Aisne battle, particularly, the man we are
concerned with had won special mention in Dispatches for a deed of great
gallantry. Three days previously, an order from General Headquarters
had moved his battalion on the little village town.
Their R.F.A. Battery had been posted a quarter-mile distant, commanding
the north-east and east where the Germans were known to be.
Machine-guns were placed at the principal road-ends debouching on the
west where the Germans might be: the main streets had been barricaded
with transport-waggons and motor-lorries, all the Maxims left had been
hidden behind the sand-bagged windows of a factory--a gaunt, brick
sky-scraper, long a thorn to the beauty-loving eye of M. le Cure--the
walls of houses ending streets leading to the country had been loopholed
for musketry, and a howitzer from the battery and a machine-gun had been
spared to protect the bridge south of the town, a little place resting
in the elbow of a small babbling river. Watches and patrols had been set
and pickets placed, and then these war-worn Britons had dispersed into
billets, or gone into barracks, too weary to eat, craving only for
sleep.... That big mound of blackened ruins near the railway station,
left intact for strategic purposes by the enemy, now stood for the
barracks--just as that calcined heap of masonry, and twisted iron
girders at the town's north angle now represented the hospital. Both
had blazed, two huge, unquenchable, incendiary-shell-kindled pyres, to
light the retreat of the battalion south.
Secure on those points of menace, north-east, east, and west, the
exhausted battalion had slept like dead men. The townspeople, relieved
in mind by the presence of so many English soldiers, slept like
Flemings--very nearly the same thing. The Burgomaster slept; M. le
Maire followed his example. M. le Docteur and M. l'Avocat slumbered
profoundly too. Only M. le Cure, being restless for some reason or
other, resolved to spend the night on the church-tower in the company of
his breviary, an electric reading-lamp, a bottle of strong coffee, and a
battered but excellent night-glass, the property of his late maternal
uncle, an Admiral of the French Navy.
Four hours they had slept, when a furious clangour from the church bells
awakened the sleepers. Shrill whistles screamed, bugles were sounded,
Staff officers and company commanders clattered out of their
quarters--the battalion jumped like one man to its feet. Voices talked
over the wires of the field-telephones. An artillery patrol-leader had
ridden into the advance of a column of heavy motor-lorries approaching
the bridge that crossed the river, carrying the highway that had brought
the battalion from the south. Lorries heavy-laden with--French
infantry!--for an outpost's flashlight on the advance had revealed the
Allies' uniform. Well, what of it! French troops were in the east upon
the Yser. But still the crazy church-bells jangled and clanged and
pealed, shrieking:
"REVEILLEZ-VOUS, MESSIEURS LES ANGLAIS! VOUS ETES SURPRIT, LES
ALLEMANDS SONT ICI! REVEILLEZ-VOUS! AUX ARMES! AUX ARMES!"
And another broad arrow of dazzling blue-white light showed
motor-lorries packed with spiked helmets and green-grey tunics, behind
the _kepis_ topping men in blue coats and red breeches. The gunners of
the howitzer, spared for the point commanding the road south of the
bridge, were picked off by German sharpshooters before they could fire.
The officer with the machine-gun was bayoneted and the gun itself
seized. Revolvers cracked and spat incessantly, bayonets plunged
through the darkness into grunting bodies. Britons and Boches strove in
a melee of whirling rifle-butts and pounding fists. And by the light of
star-shell, shrapnel, and machine-gun-fire from the other side of the
river began to play indiscriminately on the assailants and the assailed.
Under cover of this fire, the Germans would have rushed the bridge, but
for the Factory stuffed with machine-guns, pumping lead from its
windows, and the howitzer--Oh! bully for the howitzer! thought the
wounded man.
His company had been entrenched as a reserve near the bridge in the
mouth of a faubourg running westwards. They had doubled out to support
the bridge-party in the moment of alarm. He had been shot then in the
right arm and had gone on using his revolver with the left hand. It was
not until some well-timed shrapnel from the R.F.A. battery north-east of
the town began to burst among the green-grey uniforms, and the Kaisermen
took to their motor-lorries and went off, carrying their wounded and
leaving many dead--that Franky had been sensible of any pain.