They were at St Moritz--as usual.
He and M. Gantier had been for a tramp through the Val Suvretta, and,
coming home late, were rushing into their evening clothes to join Mr.
and Mrs. Belknap at dinner (as they did now regularly, Troy having
reached the virile age of fifteen, and having to justify the possession
of a smoking-jacket and patent-leather shoes). He was just out of his
bath, and smothered in towels, when the tutor opened the door and thrust
in a newspaper.
"There will be war--I must leave to-morrow."
Troy dropped the towels.
War! War! War against his beautiful France! And this young man, his
dearest friend and companion, was to be torn from him suddenly,
senselessly, torn from their endless talks, their long walks in the
mountains, their elaborately planned courses of study--archæology,
French literature, mediæval philosophy, the Divine Comedy, and vistas
and vistas beyond--to be torn from all this, and to disappear from Troy
Belknap's life into the black gulf of this unfathomable thing called
War, that seemed suddenly to have escaped out of the history books like
a dangerous lunatic escaping from the asylum in which he was supposed to
be securely confined!
Troy Belknap was stunned.
He pulled himself together to bid a valiant farewell to M. Gantier (the
air was full of the "Marseillaise" and Sambre-et-Meuse, and everybody
knew the Russians would be in Berlin in six weeks); but once his tutor
was gone the mystery and horror again closed in on him.
France, his France, attacked, invaded, outraged; and he, a poor helpless
American boy, who adored her, and could do nothing for her--not even
cry, as a girl might! It was bitter.
His parents, too, were dreadfully upset; and so were all their friends.
But what chiefly troubled them was that they could get no money, no
seats in the train, no assurance that the Swiss frontier would not be
closed before they could cross the border. These preoccupations seemed
to leave them, for the moment, no time to think about France; and Troy,
during those first days, felt as if he were an infant Winkelried, with
all the shafts of the world's woe gathered into his inadequate breast.
For France was his holiday world, the world of his fancy and
imagination, a great traceried window opening on the universe. And now,
in the hour of her need, all he heard about him was the worried talk of
people planning to desert her!
Safe in Paris, Mr. and Mrs. Belknap regained their balance. Having
secured (for a sum that would have fitted up an ambulance) their
passages on a steamer sailing from England, they could at length look
about them, feel sorry, and subscribe to all the budding war charities.
They even remembered poor Madame Lebuc, stranded by the flight of all
her pupils, and found a job for her in a refugee bureau. Then, just as
they were about to sail, Mrs. Belknap had a touch of pneumonia, and was
obliged to postpone her departure; while Mr. Belknap, jamming his
possessions into a single suit-case, dashed down to Spain to take ship
at Malaga. The turn affairs were taking made it advisable for him to get
back as quickly as possible, and his wife and son were to follow from
England in a month.
All the while there came no news of M. Gantier. He had rejoined his
depot at once, and Troy had had a post-card from him, dated the 6th of
August, and saying that he was leaving for the front. After that,
silence.
Troy, poring over the morning papers, and slipping out alone to watch
for the noon communiqués in the windows of the Paris _Herald_, read of
the rash French advance in Alsace, and the enemy's retaliatory descent
on the region the Belknaps had so often sped over. And one day, among
the names of the ruined villages, he lit on that of the little town
where they had all lunched with the Gantiers. He saw the box-garden with
the horn-beam arbour where they had gone to drink coffee, old M.
Gantier ceremoniously leading the way with Mrs. Belknap; he saw Mme.
Gantier, lame and stout, hobbling after with Mr. Belknap; a little old
aunt with bobbing curls; the round-faced Gantier girl, shy and rosy; an
incredibly dried and smoked and aged grandfather, with Voltairian eyes
and sly snuff-taking gestures; and his own friend, the eldest of the
three brothers; he saw all these modest beaming people grouped about
Mme. Gantier's coffee and Papa Gantier's best bottle of "_Fine_," he
smelt the lime-blossoms and box, he heard the bees in the lavender, he
looked out on the rich fields and woods and the blue hills bathed in
summer light. And he read: "Not a house is standing. The curé has been
shot. A number of old people were burnt in the Hospice. The mayor and
five of the principal inhabitants have been taken to Germany as
hostages."
The year before the war, he remembered, old M. Gantier was mayor!
He wrote and wrote, after that, to his tutor; wrote to his depot, to his
Paris address, to the ruin that had been his home; but had no answer.
And finally, amid the crowding horrors of that dread August, he forgot
even M. Gantier, and M. Gantier's family, forgot everything but the
spectacle of the Allied armies swept back from Liège, from Mons, from
Laon, from Charleroi, and the hosts of evil surging nearer and ever
nearer to the heart of France.
His father, with whom he might have talked, was gone; and Troy could not
talk to his mother. Not that Mrs. Belknap was not kind and full of
sympathy: as fast as the bank at home cabled funds she poured them out
for war charities. But most of her time was spent in agitated
conference with her compatriots, and Troy could not bear to listen to
their endlessly reiterated tales of flight from Nauheim or Baden or
Brussels, their difficulties in drawing money, hiring motors, bribing
hotel-porters, battling for seats in trains, recovering lost luggage,
cabling for funds, and their general tendency to regard the war as a
mere background to their personal grievances.
"You were exceedingly rude to Mrs. Sampson, Troy," his mother said to
him, surprised one day by an explosion of temper. "It is so natural she
should be nervous at not being able to get staterooms; and she had just
given me five hundred dollars for the American ambulance."
"Giving money's no use," the boy growled, obscurely irritated; and when
Mrs. Belknap exclaimed, "Why, Troy, _how callous_--with all this
suffering!" he slunk out without answering, and went downstairs to lie
in wait for the evening papers.
The misery of feeling himself a big boy, long-limbed, strong-limbed, old
enough for evening clothes, champagne, the classics, biology, and views
on international politics, and yet able to do nothing but hang about
marble hotels and pore over newspapers, while rank on rank, and regiment
on regiment, the youth of France and England, swung through the dazed
streets and packed the endless trains--the misery of this was so great
to Troy that he became, as the days dragged on, more than ever what his
mother called "callous," sullen, humiliated, resentful at being
associated with all the rich Americans flying from France.
At last the turn of the Belknaps came too; but, as they were preparing
to start, news came that the German army was at Lille, and civilian
travel to England interrupted.
It was the fateful week, and every name in the bulletins--Amiens,
Compiègne, Rheims, Meaux, Senlis--evoked in Troy Belknap's tortured
imagination visions of ancient beauty and stability. He had done that
bit of France alone with M. Gantier the year before, while Mrs. Belknap
waited in Paris for belated clothes; and the thought of the great
stretch of desolation spreading and spreading like a leprosy over a land
so full of the poetry of the past, and so rich in a happy prosperous
present, was added to the crueller vision of the tragic and magnificent
armies that had failed to defend it.
Troy, as soon as he was reassured about his mother's health, had
secretly rejoiced at the accident which had kept them in France. But now
his joy was turned to bitterness. Mrs. Belknap, in her horrified
surprise at seeing her plans again obstructed, lost all sense of the
impending calamity except as it affected her safety and Troy's, and
joined in the indignant chorus of compatriots stranded in Paris, and
obscurely convinced that France ought to have seen them safely home
before turning her attention to the invader.
"Of course I don't pretend to be a strategist," whimpering or wrathful
ladies used to declare, their jewel-boxes clutched in one hand, their
passports in the other, "but one can't help feeling that if only the
French Government had told our Ambassador in _time_, trains might have
been provided...."
"Or why couldn't _Germany_ have let our Government know? After all,
Germany has no grievance against America...."
"And we've really spent enough money in Europe for some consideration
to be shown us ..." the woeful chorus went on.
The choristers were all good and kindly persons, shaken out of the rut
of right feeling by the first real fright of their lives. But Troy was
too young to understand this, and to foresee that, once in safety, they
would become the passionate advocates of France, all the more fervent in
their championship because of their reluctant participation in her
peril.
("What did I do?--Why, I just simply _stayed in Paris_.... Not to run
away was the only thing one _could_ do to show one's sympathy," he heard
one of the passport-clutchers declare, a year later, in a New York
drawing-room.)
Troy, from the height of his youthful indignation, regarded them all as
heartless egoists, and fled away into the streets from the sound of
their lamentations.
But in the streets was fresh food for misery; for every day the once
empty vistas were filled with trains of farm-waggons, drawn by slow
country horses, and heaped with furniture and household utensils; and
beside the carts walked lines of haggard people, old men and women with
vacant faces, mothers hugging hungry babies, and children limping after
them with heavy bundles. The fugitives of the Marne were pouring into
Paris.
Troy dashed into the nearest shops, bought them cakes and fruit,
followed them to the big hippodrome where they were engulfed in the
dusty arena, and finally, in despair at his inability to do more than
gape and pity, tried to avoid the streets they followed on their way
into Paris from St. Denis and Vincennes.
Then one day, in the sunny desert of the Place de la Concorde, he came
on a more cheering sight. A motley band of civilians, young,
middle-aged, and even grey-headed, were shambling along together, badged
and beribboned, in the direction of the Invalides; and above them
floated the American flag. Troy flew after it, and caught up with the
last marchers.
"Where are we going?... Foreign Legion," an olive-faced "dago" answered
joyously in broken American. "All 'nited States citizens.... Come and
join up, sonnie...." And for one mad moment Troy thought of risking the
adventure.
But he was too visibly only a schoolboy still; and with tears of envy in
his smarting eyes he stood, small and useless, on the pavement, and
watched the heterogeneous band under the beloved flag disappearing in
the doorway of the registration office.
When he got back to his mother's drawing-room the tea-table was still
surrounded, and a lady was saying: "I've offered _anything_ for a
special train, but they won't listen...." And another, in a stricken
whisper: "If they _do_ come, what do you mean to do about your pearls?"