high price to pay even to him who had saved Mont César--the price
of a procession once a year for one hundred years and a chant of
remembrance. But no, monsieur, it was not excessive, that price.
It was God who demanded it--not he. It was God who willed that he
should save Mont César, that he should disobey, that he should be
led out in disgrace to die, and that his memory should be held
accurst by all but his enemies--by all save the monks of Mont
César. Was it, then, so great a thing he asked? I had vowed: I must
keep my vow. I bent my head in prayer, and in an instant I was
answered. Monsieur, I promised! I would grant that strange wish!
“‘Tell me, Herr monk, what will you sing?’ he begged. ‘Tell me in
Latin, just as you will sing it.’
“And I, slowly seeking for the words, began to speak those which
you have heard to-night in the halls of Mont César: ‘_Primo anno
magni belli, sub bono rege Alberto, praefectus Mahnius_----’
“‘That means Lieutenant Mahn?’ he asked with eagerness.
“‘Yes. _Praefectus Mahnius monasterium montis Caesarii ab exitio
servavit--laus Deo!_’
“‘Sing it for me,’ he entreated when I was done. And I slowly
chanted the words. ‘Teach it to me.’
“Slowly, very slowly I repeated the words again and again and
again; and ‘... _ab exitio servavit, laus Deo!_’ he recited after
me.
“How shall I tell you the end, monsieur? There were loud footfalls
in the corridor and the door resounded to heavy blows!
“‘They have come for me, Herr monk,’ the officer whispered.
‘Good-bye. I am a dead man. _Primo anno magni belli_--those are the
words?... _Herein!_’ he called confidently.
“Then in they came--a non-commissioned officer and four privates
who filed through the doorway, saluted, and stood at attention.
‘I am named Sergeant Schneider--_Herr Leutnant_ Mahn?’ the leader
asked.
“‘Yes,’ responded the lieutenant quietly.
“‘My warrant,’ said the sergeant, offering a paper. ‘You are under
arrest. Come.’
“The lieutenant rose slowly from his chair. He thrust his pistol
into its holster. His eyes were bright and very calm. For an
instant I admired him although he was my enemy; he was so calm, so
sure. God was with him, I know. ‘_Ab exitio servavit, nicht_, Herr
monk?’ he asked.
“He picked up from the table the written order of von Manteuffel.
‘Your passport and _carte d’identite_,’ he continued slowly, as
if we had been speaking of them. ‘You may stay in charge of the
monastery with Piet. All is in order.... Your photograph, Herr.’ He
handed me his own photograph--the photograph you see on the wall,
monsieur. ‘Your _Ausweiss!_’ He gave me the written order from von
Manteuffel directing that the monastery be burned. Then he turned
quietly to the file of soldiers and walked out before them....
“It is not the face of a bad man, that face in the photograph,
monsieur,” said Brother Jan, as I stared again into the steady,
narrow eyes of the picture of Lieutenant Mahn. “God asks no
questions of men when He would use them. Our monastery is saved
through the hand of a stranger and an enemy. It is the work of God,
_laus Deo!_ Let us praise God, monsieur.”
VI
GHOSTS
Belgian peasants say that on the Eve of All Souls unquiet spirits
are loosed from their graves for an hour after sunset. Those who
died by violence, or those who died unshriven, rise from the dark
and speak to passersby; they rise with the load of their sins upon
them, with the hatred, or fear, or agony, or longing which they
felt while dying, still in their tortured hearts, and they beg the
passersby to take vengeance on their enemies, or to give them news
of those they loved or hated. And after a brief hour they sink back
again into the dust.
I believe the story, for I have met those sad spirits. It was on
a foggy evening in October--All Souls’ Eve--on the road from
Brussels to Antwerp, where Belgians and Britons a year before
faced the German hordes in weeks of bitter fighting. We were in a
terrible hurry. Pierre, the chauffeur, was driving the motor-car;
I was seated beside him. The headlights blurred like drowned eyes,
and the open windshield dripped with wet. If we met a belated cart,
or if we misjudged distances on that winding road, we would never
reach our destination alive! But we were in a hurry, for it was All
Souls’ Eve--the night of the dead.
Drowned trees writhed in the blurred light, culverts leaped out
of the yellow flood like fountains, and dead walls in the burned
and ravished villages seemed like rows of Roman tombs. We flew
through the murdered town of Eppeghem, down vacant alleys lined
with gaunt, disembowelled dwellings, beneath the shell of a church,
beside stark walls lit for a breathless instant by the headlight
of the motor then blotted into chaos. It was eerie and terrifying.
A peculiar odour of decay, the odour of sour soil in early spring
when the grip of the ice is relaxed and the buried abominations of
winter steal up into the sun, rose from the town and pursued us--a
smell like rotten fungi in old crypts. Sounds like the flapping of
garments on a clothesline stole through the steady bass roar of the
motor, and to my heavy eyes, tortured with staring into the yellow
blur ahead, a vague shape seemed to float beside the car, a shape
which was strangely human; erect, but rigid, flying along like a
dry leaf upright in a gale.
I could see it only with the tail of my eye. It disappeared
when I turned my head. It was clearest when I rolled my eyes
high and looked through the lower part of the retina--a sort
of second-sight, I suppose. The thing puzzled, angered, then
frightened me. “Faster! _Vite! Vite!_” I yelled, suddenly grasping
Pierre by the arm. The shadowy thing danced into the edges of the
blur of light directly ahead. “Look out, Pierre!” The emergency
brake came on with a grind and jolt, and the lights flared with
the pulse of the engine. “It’s nothing,” I protested, half ashamed
of myself, for evidently Pierre saw nothing. “_Encore plus vite._”
We seemed to have lost the shadow-thing, until suddenly I
discovered that there were others with it, swinging rigid through
the fog like trees uprooted in a cyclone. My eyes were smarting
with cold tears: it was like swimming with one’s eyes open in
a stiff current. And all the time I watched the shadow-shapes
gathering closer. Faintly luminous pale yellow blots seemed to grow
in the dingy black of the racing forms. They were phosphorescent,
as I think of them now. Something brushed my hair. A clicking sound
like castanets came from the empty tonneau behind me, and then a
whistling, like the speech of a man with no palate.
“_Sssss--Feld--Feld--Feldwebel war ich, aus
Bayern--sechs--sechsundzwanzigsten--infanterie Regiment_.”
I turned my head with an involuntary sob. There was absolutely
nothing in the car. Pierre put on brakes violently.
“Do you see anything?” I demanded.
“Nothing, monsieur.”
“Do you hear or smell anything?”
We listened and sniffed. “Nothing, monsieur,” Pierre said,
quivering and crossing himself. The noise of the motor died, and
we sat motionless in gruesome darkness listening to the hollow
dripping of fog-water on the fallen leaves in the roadway. We were
swallowed, lost in mist, with only a square yard of paved road
visible before us. “Go on, Pierre,” I said softly.
Then gradually I saw the ghosts more plainly. A woman, bent like an
old hinge, flung along beside the flying motor-car, and a naked,
frightened child ran fearfully before her. “Ask him, Grutje, ask
him about home!” a thin child-voice sobbed. A younger woman whose
head had been hacked from her shoulders floated along with them,
fondling the severed member and wailing, “_De Deutschers_--the
Germans!” A group of mangled bodies of Belgian artillerymen hung
like a swarm of bees together, mouthing curses as they flew, and a
gigantic peasant, with clotted beard and arms stretched rigid in
the form of a cross, stared with a face stabbed through and through
like honey-comb.
“_Feldwebel Stoner. König, Kaiser, Vaterland, sie leben hoch!_”
whispered a voice.
The swarming spirits grew till they darkened the mist. We flew
through the empty corridors of Malines, and on to Waelhem--first of
the Antwerp forts to fall--up the ridge to Waerloos and Contich,
toward Oude God and the inner forts. Still the swarms grew,
crowding closer and closer. The eyes of the dead peered like cats’
eyes in the yellow dark, and my soul chilled to ice. The odour of
dead clay was so strong I nearly fainted, and bony fingers seemed
to press against my back and shoulders as if heavy wires were
freezing into the flesh. “Light the dash-light, for God’s sake,
Pierre!” I cried, hoping the new electric blur would banish the
phantoms, but their sulphurous eyes glowed only the more in its
feeble ray.
And the hissing, clicking, and rattling grew. “_Feldwebel Stoner,
aus Bayern, tot, Eppeghem, September dreizehn ... König, Kaiser,
und Vaterland--hoch!_” a voice shrilled; “_De Deutschers! de
Deutschers!_” sobbed an echo after it. And then, with a sudden
access of horror, I remembered the saying of the peasants; I knew
what had wakened those unquiet spirits; knew that they wished to
question me; knew that I must answer their questions in the brief
hour of their release; all of them I must answer!
“... _leben hoch!_” screamed the German voice. “Are we in Paris?”
“No!” I shouted.
“... _suis Français. Vive la France!_ ...Have we reached the Rhine?”
“No!”
“... _Belge._ Is Belgium free?”
“No!”
“... honour, the honour of my country, honour--honour?”
“No!”
“... _Sozialdemokrat_--for world-peace I fought, that the world
might have peace. Is there peace?”
“No!”
“... curé of Weerloo, dead for my church and my flock. Are we
victorious?”
“No!”
“Ask, Grutje, ask!” trilled a child’s voice, and a sad shriek
answered it: “Home--the little farm on the road to Elewyt beside
Kasteel Weerde--is it safe?”
I knew that farm, a blackened ruin like the castle beside it,
with two lath crosses leaning crazily over sunken graves in the
dooryard. “No!”
“No, no, no!” The horrid refrain beat them back. By ones and tens
and hundreds they asked and were denied. They had died as most men
live, hoping to-morrow would bring bliss which yesterday withheld.
They had died, as most men live, for dreams. In all the world there
was no consolation for them, no word of honest hope or recompense.
In all the world there was nothing for them but a shallow grave and
a little wooden cross.
“I came from Devon to Antwerp, sir, with the Marines. Have we
whipped the Huns?”
“No!”
A woman’s passionate voice screamed out: “They murdered my child,
they murdered my man, they murdered me. Vengeance! Vengeance!
Vengeance!”
“No!... No!... No!...” And I fell forward in the car senseless.
* * * * *
When I awoke the fog had almost disappeared, Pierre was chafing
my cold hands, and the shadow-shapes had gone. They had sunken
again into their hollow graves, unsatisfied, unconsoled. We rode
swiftly on toward Antwerp. A clean breeze stole up from the west,
purifying the stricken fields and their sad memories. It tore the
last remnants of gray veil from the sky. And as we turned into
the black, silent city streets, I leaned my head far back and
stared up into the night with a sudden sense of relief and even
of comfort. The sick little planet Earth fell away from me, far,
far, infinitely far, and about me was unvexed emptiness and the
tremendous stars.
VII
THE DESERTER
It was five o’clock in the morning. A riotous sunrise deluged the
Campine as I slipped into my clothes and ran down the narrow,
twisting tower-stair to keep a secret tryst with the _Baas_, or
overseer. Little slits in the tower wall, cut for mediæval archers,
let in the arrows of the sun; and as I ran through the gloomy
armoury and the high-roofed Flemish dining hall--stripped of their
treasure of old pikes, swords, crossbows, and blunderbusses by
the diligent Germans--out to the causeway, and over the creaking
draw-bridge on my way to the stables and the dismantled brewery,
I imagined myself an escaped prisoner from the donjons of Château
Drie Toren. In truth, I was running away from Baron van Steen’s
week-end house-party for a breath of rustic air while the others
slept.
The stables, tool sheds, hostlers’ barracks, bake-oven, and brewery
were thatch roofed and walled with brick, toned to a claret-red,
pierced with small windows and heavy oaken doors. The doors were
banded with the baronial colours--blue stripes alternating with
yellow, like stripes on a barber pole--and in the centre of the
hollow square of farm buildings fumed a mammoth brown manure pile.
A smell of fresh-cut hay and the warm smell of animals clung about
the stables, and I heard the watch-dog rattle his chain and sniff
at the door as I passed.
I found the Baas standing before his door, his face wrinkled with
pleasure, his cap in his hand. Behind him his wife peered out at
us, wiping her fat hands on her skirts, and two half-grown children
stared from the nearest window. The Baas and his wife were the
parents of sixteen children!
“Good day, mynheer!” every one shouted in chorus.
“Good day, madame; good day, Baas.” (I used the Flemish title
for overseer--the word from which has come our much-abused word
“Boss.”) “I’m a deserter this morning: the rest of the Baron’s
party sleeps.”
“Ah, so,” laughed the wife. “Mynheer is like the German soldiers
who desert by dozens nowadays. And would your Honour hide in the
forest like them--like the Germans?”
“To be sure. The Baas is to show me the deepest coverts, where
mynheer the Baron will never find me more.”
We laughed and passed on. A girl with a neckyoke and full milk
pails came by from the dairy; nodding faces appeared at the windows
of the farm buildings as we walked toward the woods; bees sped up
the air from conical straw hives close to our path; and in a few
minutes we were threading our way through a nursery of young pines,
tilled like corn rows in Kansas, and all of equal age.
“Monsieur, there is a soul in trees,” said the Baas,
affectionately patting an ancient linden on the border of the old
forest. The Baas was a man from the Province of Liége, and he
preferred to speak French with me rather than Flemish. He had, too,
a Walloon lightness of wit which went sometimes incongruously with
his heavy frame, as when he said to me once when we were debating
the joys of youth versus age, “To be old has its advantages,
monsieur. One can then be virtuous, and it is not hard!”
“There is a soul in trees,” he repeated. “All together the trees
have a soul. A forest is one spirit. These trees are old men and
old women, very patient and kindly and sluggish of blood. They nod
their heads in the wind like peasants over a stove. And they talk.
Sometimes I think that I can understand their talk--very wise and
patient and slow. Men hurry apart, monsieur, but the trees remain
together like old married people and watch their children grow up
around them.
“Here”--we had turned down a path and were in the fringes of
another forest of small pines--“here the Germans have taken trees
for their fortifications, slashed and cut, and those trees that
are left are like wounded soldiers: they have arms too long or too
short, heads smashed, feet uprooted, and yet they wish to live,
because they are one spirit.”
“What is this?” I demanded abruptly, for at my feet yawned a little
pit, with lumpy clay still fresh about it and a fallen cross lying
half hidden in the weeds.
“Ho, that? It is the grave of a German,” said the Baas heartily.
He spat into the raw pit. “The German has been taken away, but the
children of Drie Toren are still afraid. They will not come by this
path on account of the dead _Deutscher_.”
His foot crushed the rude cross as he talked, and we walked on.
But I was vaguely troubled. That vile pit and the thought of
what it had contained had spoiled my promenade. As I had found
on a thousand other occasions, my freedom in Belgium was only a
fiction. The war could not be forgotten, even for an hour.
A partridge thundered up at our feet and rocketed to earth again
beyond the protecting pines. In a little glade we surprised four
young rabbits together at breakfast. The Baas laid his hand
lightly on my arm. “It is sad, monsieur, isn’t it?” he said. “The
poachers steal right and left nowadays. The _gardes champêtres_
are no longer armed, so the thieves do as they will. There is more
pheasant in the city markets than chicken, and more rabbit than
veal. The game will soon be gone, like our horses and cattle.
“You remember, monsieur, the sand dunes by Blankenberghe and Knocke
on the Belgian coast? Ah, the rabbits that used to be in those
dunes! But now the firing of cannon has driven them all away.”
A silence fell upon us both. The thickets grew denser, and we
pushed our way slowly toward the deeper coverts. I found myself
thinking of the little crosses along the seaside dunes which marked
where greater game than rabbits had fallen--the graves of men--the
biggest game on earth--the shallow pits and the frail wooden
crosses, like that which the Baas’s leather boot had crushed a half
hour before.
We had reached the deepest woods when a gasping, choking cry
stopped us short. The thicket directly before us stirred and then
lay still as death. The cry had been horrible as a Banshee’s wail,
and as mysterious, but it was not the cry of an animal; it was
human, and it came from a human being in agony. The Baas crossed
himself swiftly and leaped forward, and instantly we had parted
the protecting bushes and were looking down on a man lying flat on
the ground--a spectre with a thin white face, chattering teeth,
enormous frightened eyes, and a filthy, much-worn German uniform.
“What are you doing here?” I demanded.
The soldier did not answer, he did not rise, he lay motionless
and hideous, like a beast. Then I caught sight of his left ankle,
enormously swollen and wrapped in rags, and his hands--they were
thin as sticks. The man was helpless, and he was starving.
And now came a strange thing. We two walked slowly around the man
on the ground, as if he were a wild creature caught in a snare. We
felt no pity or astonishment; only curiosity. Utterly unemotionally
we took note of him and his surroundings. He had no gun, no knife,
and no blankets. He lay on some broken boughs, and he seemed to
have covered himself with boughs at night. The wild, haggard eyes
turned in their sockets and watched us as we moved, but otherwise
no part of the man stirred. He seemed transfixed, frozen in an
agony of fear and horror.
“Ashes! He has had a fire here, monsieur, but it was days ago.” At
the man’s feet the Baas had discovered the remnants of a little
fire. “Holy blue!” he added in astonishment, “he has eaten these!”
A pile of small green twigs lay near the fire. The bark had been
chewed from them!
At the end of our search we turned again to the man on the ground.
“Who are you? What are you doing here?” I demanded again. There was
no answer. “Baas, have you a flask?”
The old man slowly drew a little leather-clad bottle from his
breast pocket and passed it to me in silence. He offered it with
obvious reluctance, and watched jealously as I knelt and dropped
a little stream of liquid between the parted lips of the creature
on the ground. The man’s lips sucked inward, his throat choked at
the raw liquor, he opened his mouth wide and gasped horribly for
breath, his knees twitched, and his wrists trembled as if he were
dying. Then the parched mouth tried to form words; it could only
grimace.
For a moment I felt a mad impulse to leap on that moving mouth and
crush it into stillness; such an impulse as makes a hunter wring
the neck of a wounded bird. Instead, I continued dropping the
stinging liquor and listening.
Then came the first word. “More!” the black lips begged, and I
emptied the flask into them. The Baas sighed plaintively. “German?”
the soldier whispered.
“No. American,” I answered.
“The other one?”
“Belgian.”
The frightened eyes closed in evident relief. The man seemed to
sleep.
“But you?” I asked.
“I’m German--a soldier,” he said.
“Lost?”
“Missing.” He used the German word _vermisst_--the word employed in
the official lists of losses to designate the wounded or dead who
are not recovered, and those lost by capture or desertion.
“You understand, Baas?”
“No, monsieur.”
“He says he is a German soldier--a deserter, I suppose, trying to
make his way over the frontier to Holland. And he is starving.”
The Baas’s face became a battleground of emotions. His kindly eyes
glared merrily, his lips twisted until his beard seemed to spread
to twice its natural width. Instantly his face became grave again,
then puzzled, even anxious. A stream of invective and imprecation
in mingled French and Flemish poured from his troubled lips, and he
stamped his feet vigorously.
“He can’t stay here,” I concluded.
“It is death to help him,” said the Baas.
“For you, yes; for me, no. The Germans can only disgrace me as a
member of the Relief Commission. They cannot kill me.”
“He must not be left to die here, monsieur.”
“The Germans will probably search your house if we take him there.”
“He may betray us if we help him.”
“That is possible. But you see he is very weak--almost dead.”
“He may be a spy.”
“That again is possible. But see! He has eaten twigs!”
“He is a damned pig of a German!”
“But you do not feed even pigs on sticks and leaves.”
“I am afraid, monsieur.”
“So am I, Baas. Yet you must decide, and not I. It is much more
dangerous for you than for me.”
We stared into each other’s eyes, trying to guess each other’s
thoughts. Every one in Belgium knows that the German army sows its
informers everywhere. We could not even trust each other in that
stricken country. Deserters and traitors were tracked like dogs.
Any one who gave aid or comfort to such persons did so at the risk
of his life. It is said that pretended deserters deliberately
trapped Belgians into aiding them, and then betrayed their hosts.
Something of the sort was hinted in the famous case of Miss Edith
Cavell. Knowledge, then, bade us be cautious; instinct alone bade
us be kind.
The Baas’s wide eyes turned again to the creature on the ground,
and he sighed plaintively. “Monsieur,” he began, in a very low,
gentle voice, “I will help him. Give me my flask and I will go for
food and drink. Then we must plan. Does it please you to remain
here?”
“I shall stay here with him.”
“Good! I will go.”
I knelt beside the soldier and chafed his filthy hands until blood
flowed again in his dry veins. The swollen pupils of his eyes
brightened. He talked continuously in a thin trickling whisper--a
patter of information about dinners he had eaten, wines he had
drunk, his military service, his hardships, and his physical and
mental sensations. I had read of victims of scurvy in the Arctic
snows dreaming and talking day and night of food, only of food. So
it was with the starving soldier. The liquor had made him slightly
delirious, and he babbled on and on.
His broken ankle pained him. When I moved him about to rest it,
his lightness astonished me. The man had been large and heavy; he
was shrunken to a bag of bones. His uniform hung about him like
a sack, and it seemed as if the slightest jar would snap his arms
and legs. Tears welled under his heavy, dirty eyelids. “Mother!
Mother!” he whispered once. “Art thou there? Mother!” Then, as
his eyes again cleared and he saw the trees interarched above
him--the trees which the Baas had told me were one spirit; the
grim, silent, sepulchral trees; the haunted, malignant trees which
had wooed him with their shelter and then broken him and starved
him; the trees beneath which his forest-dwelling ancestors had
cowered for thousands of years and to which they had offered human
sacrifices--he broke down and sobbed horribly. “She is not here!
She is not here! No, she is not here!” he repeated over and over
again.
* * * * *
When the Baas returned, we covered the deserter with our coats and
fed him. Perhaps we did wrong to give him food, although I think
now that he was doomed before we found him. We did our best, but it
was not enough. In less than an hour, after a horrible spell of
vomiting, the poor man was beyond all help of ours. His eyes rolled
desperately, his breath came in horrid gasps, and he grew rigid
like a man in an epileptic fit.