A TINY village lay among the mountains of a country from which for four
years the men had gone forth to fight. First the best men had gone, then
the older men, then the youths, and lastly the school boys. It will be
seen that no men could have been left in the village except the very
aged, and the bodily incapacitated, who soon died, owing to the war
policy of the Government which was to let the useless perish that there
might be more food for the useful.
Now it chanced that while all the men went away, save those left to die
of slow starvation, only a few returned, and these few were crippled and
disfigured in various ways. One young man had only part of a face, and
had to wear a painted tin mask, like a holiday-maker. Another had two
legs but no arms, and another two arms but no legs. One man could
scarcely be looked at by his own mother, having had his eyes burned out
of his head until he stared like Death. One had neither arms nor legs,
and was mad of his misery besides, and lay all day in a cradle like a
baby. And there was a quite old man who strangled night and day from
having sucked in poison-gas; and another, a mere boy, who shook, like a
leaf in a high wind, from shell-shock, and screamed at a sound. And he
too had lost a hand, and part of his face, though not enough to warrant
the expense of a mask for him.
All these men, except he who had been crazed by horror of himself, had
been furnished with ingenious appliances to enable them to be partly
self-supporting, and to earn enough to pay their share of the taxes
which burdened their defeated nation.
To go through that village after the war was something like going
through a life-sized toy-village with all the mechanical figures wound
up and clicking. Only instead of the figures being new, and gay, and
pretty, they were battered and grotesque and inhuman.
There would be the windmill, and the smithy, and the public house. There
would be the row of cottages, the village church, the sparkling
waterfall, the parti-colored fields spread out like bright kerchiefs on
the hillsides, the parading fowl, the goats and cows,--though not many
of these last. There would be the women, and with them some children;
very few, however, for the women had been getting reasonable, and were
now refusing to have sons who might one day be sent back to them
limbless and mad, to be rocked in cradles--for many years, perhaps.
Still the younger women, softer creatures of impulse, had borne a child
or two. One of these, born the second year of the war, was a very blonde
and bullet-headed rascal of three, with a bullying air, and of a roving
disposition. But such traits appear engaging in children of sufficiently
tender years, and he was a sort of village plaything, here, there, and
everywhere, on the most familiar terms with the wrecks of the war which
the Government of that country had made.
He tried on the tin mask and played with the baker's mechanical leg, so
indulgent were they of his caprices; and it amused him excessively to
rock the cradle of the man who had no limbs, and who was his father.
In and out he ran, and was humored to his bent. To one he seemed the son
he had lost, to another the son he might have had, had the world gone
differently. To others he served as a brief escape from the shadow of a
future without hope; to others yet, the diversion of an hour. This last
was especially true of the blind man who sat at the door of his old
mother's cottage binding brooms. The presence of the child seemed to him
like a warm ray of sunshine falling across his hand, and he would lure
him to linger by letting him try on the great blue goggles which he
found it best to wear in public. But no disfigurement or deformity
appeared to frighten the little fellow. These had been his playthings
from earliest infancy.
One morning, his mother, being busy washing clothes, had left him alone,
confident that he would soon seek out some friendly fragment of soldier,
and entertain himself till noon and hunger-time. But occasionally
children have odd notions, and do the exact opposite of what one
supposes.
On this brilliant summer morning the child fancied a solitary ramble
along the bank of the mountain-stream. Vaguely he meant to seek a pool
higher up, and to cast stones in it. He wandered slowly straying now and
then into small valleys, or chasing wayside ducks. It was past ten
before he gained the green-gleaming and foam-whitened pool, sunk in the
shadow of a tall gray rock over whose flat top three pine-trees swayed
in the fresh breeze. Under them, looking to the child like a white cloud
in a green sky, stood a beautiful young man, poised on the sheer brink
for a dive. A single instant he stood there, clad only in shadow and
sunshine, the next he had dived so expertly that he scarcely splashed up
the water around him. Then his dark, dripping head rose in sight, his
glittering arm thrust up, and he swam vigorously to shore. He climbed
the rock for another dive. These actions he repeated in pure sport and
joy in life so often that his little spectator became dizzy with
watching.
At length he had enough of it and stooped for his discarded garments.
These he carried to a more sheltered spot and rapidly put on, the child
still wide-eyed and wondering, for indeed he had much to occupy his
attention.
He had two arms, two legs, a whole face with eyes, nose, mouth, chin,
and ears, complete. He could see, for he had glanced about him as he
dressed. He could speak, for he sang loudly. He could hear, for he had
turned quickly at the whir of pigeon-wings behind him. His skin was
smooth all over, and nowhere on it were the dark scarlet maps which the
child found so interesting on the arms, face, and breast of the burned
man. He did not strangle every little while, or shiver madly, and scream
at a sound. It was truly inexplicable, and therefore terrifying.
The child was beginning to whimper, to tremble, to look wildly about for
his mother, when the young man observed him.
"_Hullo!_" he cried eagerly, "if it isn't a child!"
He came forward across the foot-bridge with a most ingratiating smile,
for this was the first time that day he had seen a child and he had been
thinking it remarkable that there should be so few children in a valley,
where, when he had travelled that way five years before, there had been
so many he had scarcely been able to find pennies for them. So he cried
"Hullo," quite joyously, and searched in his pockets.
But, to his amazement, the bullet-headed little blond boy screamed out
in terror, and fled for protection into the arms of a hurriedly
approaching young woman. She embraced him with evident relief, and was
lavishing on him terms of scolding and endearment in the same breath,
when the traveler came up, looking as if his feelings were hurt.
"I assure you, Madam," said he, "that I only meant to give your little
boy these pennies." He examined himself with an air of wonder. "What on
earth is there about me to frighten a child?" he queried plaintively.
The young peasant-woman smiled indulgently on them both, on the child
now sobbing, his face buried in her skirt, and on the boyish, perplexed,
and beautiful young man.
"It is because he finds the Herr Traveler so strange-looking," she said,
curtsying. "He is quite small," she showed his smallness with a gesture,
"and it is the first time he has even seen a whole man."