Possibly it was the new sound that woke Hippolyte, or perhaps Casper,
the mongrel wolf-hound, took it for the challenge of some ancestral
enemy. At least, some half-hour later No. 21687 Private John Smith, of
C Company, had a vision. He was not naturally an imaginative man, but
he hastened to report it to the C.S.M.
"Lummy, sir," he said, "if there ain't a bloomin' angel comin' across
the bloomin' marsh!"
And, sure enough, across the very centre of the shivering quag came a
small figure, clothed in a long white robe very like those attributed
to mediæval angels, and with a golden aureole about its head, cast by
the last rays of the dying sun. Actually it was no angel, but little
Hippolyte, looking for his mother. She had left him, very early in the
morning, to go to Mass, trusting him, as often before, to the care of
Casper. Usually she was not gone for more than half an hour or so. On
that day, however, she had not returned in one hour or in three. She
never _would_ return, for before the third hour she was lying dead in
the little square before the church-door--one of a group of six, men
and women, who had been caught leaving the building when the Germans,
in their first assault, enfiladed the main street with machine-gun
fire. They lay side by side, very peacefully, just as they fell, for
the hard-pressed defenders of the village had found no leisure to
remove them.
Hippolyte waited very patiently--as was his wont. He cried a little
from loneliness at first, but his mother, before she left him, had set
out the little portion of milk and bread that was to be his breakfast.
Growing hungry, he sought for it in its accustomed place, ate it, and
fell asleep again. It was the dog at last that disturbed him, later in
the afternoon, by whimpering and scratching at the door, and gave him
the great idea of starting out to find the mother who was so long in
returning.
Child and dog set out together along the imperceptible track of safety
that crept and twisted across the marsh. Alone Hippolyte would almost
certainly have strayed from it, but the dog's surer instinct guarded
him until, just at the moment when hope was at an end, he came as a
vision of hope to the spent company of Englishmen.
That is practically the end of the story, for you can imagine the rest,
except, perhaps, that the child, when he had almost reached the hard
ground, grew afraid of the sound of firing, the noise overhead, and
the gaunt, stark men staring at him in wondering silence. So he turned
homeward again, Casper stalking beside him, sacrificing his lust for
battle to his duty as foster-father. But they went slowly, the child
often turning back to stare with wondering eyes at the increasing chaos
behind him and, as the more impressionable among the soldiers would
have it, beckoning them to follow him towards safety.
Follow they did, but as unbeaten soldiers should, in good order and
with due precautions--and so escaped. The Germans lost time before
they entered the deserted village, for they feared an ambush. When
they _did_ enter, it was long past sunset and the night was too dark
to do anything before dawn. Even then they had no guide to show them
the track across the marsh, and they were forced to skirt it, losing so
much time that the British battalion--if you can call less than three
hundred men a battalion--got clear away, and in due course picked up
the main body, taking with them Hippolyte and Casper.
You would say, if you did not know human nature, that there was no room
for a legend of celestial intervention. But you would be wrong. Even in
the rescued battalion--long since brought up to strength and upholding
its laurels elsewhere in the line--the story holds good that somewhere
unspecified on the Belgian frontier an angel, mediæval in every detail
down to aureole, wings, and celestial robes, did actually intervene
and rescue it from under the very noses of the baffled Boches. And
this although Hippolyte, adopted child of the regiment, sports his
sergeant-major's uniform for everyone to see, and Casper, brilliantly
caparisoned, stalks as a mascot should behind the drums. Elsewhere the
legend has assumed new details, as I realized when a very excellent
clergyman assured me that it was ... George himself, mounted upon a
white horse (so transmogrified, I take it, was black Casper), who rode
up and down the line before the 2nd Battalion of the West Loamshires,
shaking his sword at the advancing Prussian Guard, who not unnaturally
fled in disorder. Perhaps, in Terbeeke, he has by this time become
Ste. Gudule, or some other patron saint of the Belgians, with a fiery
dragon or whatever be her saintly attributes. I don't know, because, as
I say, I was never in Terbeeke, but here at least you have what really
happened, as Madame Tavernier told it to me in the front room of her
Blanchisserie du Cygne, in the village of Durdegem, and in the presence
of Hippolyte himself, who afterwards begged shamelessly for _sous_.