FRANZ AND HIS FAMILY
Christmas, 1918, and peace on the Western Front. That was the thought in
everyone’s mind at the little Badheim hospital—that for the first time
since 1914 the guns were silent on Christmas Day. But Lucy’s happiness
was not what she had hoped for, though she seemed as gay as the others
as she helped decorate the bare hospital halls with evergreen forest
boughs, dark against the bright background of Allied flags. Michelle
guessed her secret longing, nevertheless, with the quick sympathy which
made the French girl so readily understand the joys and sorrows of those
she loved.
“It is not the same for you as for me—this Noël,” she said to Lucy as
they worked together to make the long tables cheerful for the homesick
soldiers’ eyes, “for you have not your brother back.”
“It isn’t only that I miss him, Michelle,” exclaimed Lucy, glad to put
her troubled thoughts into words for Michelle’s friendly ear, “it’s that
he’s still in danger. They say he is only scouting over the Bolshevik
lines, but you know what that means. The enemy is there—I can’t help
worrying.”
“I know you cannot,” agreed Michelle, without offering useless
consolation. “It is very hard. I thought _Maman_ and I were of all the
most unlucky when Armand was shot on the day of _l’armistice_, but now
he is almost well and we have no more to fear.”
So much and so deeply had Michelle lived and suffered in the past four
years that she did not even think to bewail the loss of home and fortune
that the war had brought. The Germans were defeated and her mother and
Armand spared. That seemed just now the granting of all she had to wish
for.
Lucy had found herself more than once watching her friend’s face in the
few days since Michelle and her mother arrived at Badheim. On Armistice
Day she had realized that Michelle could not respond to the joyful news
with any abandon of light-heartedness. The bitter suffering of the long
years of war had made the little French girl grow up before her time.
Even now, with her blackest cares behind her, with hope and confidence
in the future, Michelle’s lovely face was still serious in repose, and
her dark blue eyes held a lingering sad watchfulness that did not suit
her sixteen years. Only now and then, when the two friends ran into the
forest to collect the fir boughs, when Michelle’s black hair was
loosened about her neck and her radiant smile chased away all memories
from the happy present, did Lucy catch a glimpse of that careless gayety
which the war had stolen from her.
In spite of Lucy’s troubled thoughts of Bob she found unlimited pleasure
and consolation in Michelle’s company. Together the two worked as they
had worked in the old days at Château-Plessis, to brighten the wounded
men’s gloom. Only now they were among friends, with no sharp-eyed German
surgeons on the watch. This thought somehow made Lucy almost resigned to
being in Germany.
“We have to be here, instead of at home, but at any rate we can do what
we please. It’s we who give the orders now,” she said to Michelle the
morning of Christmas Day. A German farmer from beyond Badheim village
was unloading supplies from his cart beside the hospital steps, and some
of the convalescents with awakening interest were gathered around.
“Yes, the German trees can’t take us prisoner,” said Michelle with
whimsical gravity, looking up at the great sighing pines closing in
around them. “They are lovely—these forest trees. It was not the
Germans, but God who planted them.”
Lucy felt again a touch of the enchantment that had caught her the first
day she had entered the forest stillness. But at thought of the cottage
in the clearing—now familiar ground—the face of the German woodcutter
came before her once more to spoil the beauty. And yet there was nothing
about the man, silent or quietly civil with the hospital workers, to
make so definite an impression on her mind. She spoke her thoughts
aloud.
“I can never see that Franz without remembering all the hatefulness of
every German I’ve known in the past two years. While he’s about I can’t
forget I am in Germany.”
“He does not forget it either,” was Michelle’s reply.
“Oh, I don’t think he bears us any grudge, Miss. He’s pleasant enough
when we walk to the spring or the clearing,” remarked a young
convalescent soldier sitting on the steps. “He’s old and soured by a
hard life. Poor, too, to judge by the rags the kids wear.”
Michelle looked up at the soldier’s face, a boyish one, with pale cheeks
rounding out with returning health and frank, merry gray eyes.
“Franz has not forgiven,” she said again. “Don’t you see he has not?”
The young soldier did not much care one way or the other. “Maybe you’re
right,” he agreed peaceably. “We’re going to have _some_ dinner,” he
added, following with his eyes the packages being carried toward the
kitchen. “Gee, it’s great to be hungry again.”
Christmas dinner was more of a success than anyone had hoped for. The
convalescents could not help responding to such kind efforts, and in
doing so they forgot their homesickness and began to appreciate their
real good-fortune. Then, returning strength gave a good share of them
hearty appetites, which found a reasonable number of German or American
good things for their satisfaction. And the bright flags, the soft green
of the fir branches, and the red berries which Lucy and Michelle had
searched for in the forest, made the dining-room and tables gay and
almost homelike to the young Americans gathered there. Some were still
in wheeled chairs, with hollow cheeks and no interest in the food before
them, but even these cheered up a little as talk and laughter grew
louder, as songs of home were sung and toasts offered with cheers or
laughter.
Larry Eaton was there, at Lucy’s invitation, and he, Madame de la Tour,
Armand, Michelle and Lucy sat together at one end of a table. Larry was
in wonderful spirits, or else he tried with all his kind heart to make
Lucy forget Bob’s absence. Madame de la Tour, in the midst of the noisy,
crowded roomful, said little. Her eyes were upon her son as he smiled
and talked and tried to coax his feeble appetite for her pleasure.
All at once it seemed to Lucy that the Christmas gayety had more of the
pathetic than the merry about it, and that the toasts drunk were
bantering and would-be light-hearted ones, because reminders of home
brought some of those weak, white-faced convalescents close to tears.
After it was all over and the men scattered, some wheeled away to rest
after too much excitement, Lucy, Michelle, Armand and Larry walked into
the forest, where the sinking sun had begun to send its slanting beams.
“I’d like to come here to get well,” remarked Larry, sniffing the piney
air. As he spoke a cold wind, rising with the approach of sunset, swept
through the trees and made the girls draw their capes closer. Larry
added thoughtfully, “I mean I’d like it here now—the war over and all.
It’s not a place to come to as a German prisoner. Rather spooky, if you
were inclined to be down on your luck.”
“Do you find it that way too, Larry?” cried Lucy, delighted to hear her
own thoughts put into words. “I’ve felt that so often about this forest
in the two weeks I’ve been here. Have you ever read silly books where,
when the hero feels desperate about anything, a thunder-storm comes up
to give him a background? Well, this forest never changes, yet however I
feel, it makes me feel more so.”
“Say it once more, please,” said Larry grinning, while Armand turned
amused eyes on Lucy’s serious face.
“I can’t say it properly,” she protested, flushing a little. “I mean
that the forest makes me feel everything more deeply. If I’m happy when
I come into it, it looks beautiful and I am twice as happy, but if I
come here anxious, not having had a word from Bob in days, it’s gloomy
and unfriendly, so that I don’t stay any longer than I must.”
“I understand very well,” said Michelle in her pretty, quiet voice. “It
is that here, beneath the trees, one can think very clearly, and when
the thoughts are sad ones——”
“You’d rather they were interrupted,” put in Larry, pulling off bits of
pine-bark to throw at two squirrels chattering on a limb overhead.
“Seems to me we’re getting dismal for Christmas Day. Whose idea was
this, anyway, to make a call on the Boches?”
“Michelle’s and mine,” said Lucy. “We promised Franz’ children some
fruit and candy. Poor things, they have hardly anything. Franz is
awfully poor, or else he is a perfect pig.”
“The children—they look cold, Captain Eaton,” added Michelle. “Do you
know if all the peasants around Coblenz are very poor?”
“Some are. Of course many suffered in the war, though nothing in
comparison to the French. But there’s a real scarcity of food and
clothing here now.”
“They have plenty of wood to burn,” said Lucy. “But when the children
run out-of-doors they shiver in those rags they wear.”
“The _maman_ looks sad and hopeless. She seems not at all to care,”
remarked Michelle wonderingly.
“The father is your special friend, isn’t he, Lucy?” asked Larry, his
eyes twinkling.
“Yes, he’s my favorite,” she agreed, refusing to be teased. “He makes me
think of the good old days last year in Château-Plessis.”
“Truly, he is not a _joli type_,” said Armand. “There is something hard
about his eyes and smile.”
“Does he act sulky with the hospital staff?” asked Larry.
“Oh, no,” said Lucy. “He supplies us with wood. Probably he can’t help
looking the way he does. He’s just German.”
“This must be the son and heir,” said Larry.
A little boy, just able to run alone, with a yellow thatch of hair above
his eager face, and arms outstretched to help his stumbling feet, burst
through the trees and made for Lucy, panting, “_Guten abend, Fräulein!
Fröhliche Weihnacht!_”
“Merry Christmas yourself, _mein Herr_,” Larry responded, stooping to
pick up the little German as he tripped and fell over a root in his
excitement. “Better look where you’re going.”
“Hurt yourself, Freidrich?” asked Lucy in German, while Michelle brushed
pine-needles from the child’s hair.
“_Nein_,” he answered, still panting, and, rising on tiptoe, tried to
peep into the basket that Larry carried, not quite daring to approach
the young officer, though burning curiosity was fast overcoming his
fear.
The next moment two more children came running from the clearing, the
little girl whom Lucy had first seen at the spring, and a boy about a
year older than Freidrich. All three wore torn cotton clothing over
which ragged coats or shawls were held together by their cold, bare
fingers. Their flaxen heads were uncovered and their stockings slipped
down over wooden shoes.
“_Ça m’étonne_,” said Michelle, shaking her head. “The German peasants
are very careful with their children, as I remember them.”
“Perhaps they can’t get clothes,” suggested Larry. “Wool is terribly
high now in Germany. They are rather nice-looking kids.”
“Yes, a little above the peasant class,” remarked Armand, patting the
shoulder of the four-year-old boy, Freidrich’s brother, who walked
beside the French officer, casting eager, curious glances up at him.
“What is your name, little one?” he asked in German.
The child hung his head in silence, but the little girl, her bright eyes
turned for a moment from the basket, the center of all their hopes,
answered promptly:
“His name is Wilhelm, Herr Officer, and my name is Adelheid. And our
father’s name is Franz Kraft. I am seven years old.”
She ended with a smile and a bobbing curtsey. Larry said, in a peculiar
German something like Bob’s, “Thank you, my little maiden.” He was about
to ask her if the cottage which now appeared in sight was her home, but
his German failing him, he asked it instead of Lucy in English,
remarking, “He must do quite a business—this Franz. He has enough wood
cut already to last the hospital all winter.”
The woodcutter had heaped his fagots in neat piles over about one-half
of the clearing, which covered perhaps two acres.
“He has men come to help him cut,” Lucy explained. “They cart the wood
away to towns and villages near here. He’s quite a well-known character,
to judge by the visitors he has. If he’s popular, I don’t care for
German taste.”
“Now, Fräulein? Can we see now?” begged Adelheid, dancing up and down in
her impatience.
“Yes, right now,” consented Lucy, sitting down on a pine stump in front
of the cottage and taking the basket from Larry.
As she uncovered it a gasp of delight rose from three little throats,
and Lucy felt Freidrich’s and Wilhelm’s panting breaths against her
face, as they bent toward her in irresistible excitement.
“_Pauvres petits_,” murmured Michelle, touching Adelheid’s thin little
shoulder.
There was nothing in the basket but fruit and Red Cross candy, with some
bits of tinsel saved from the tree that had ornamented the ward where
the men lay who were too sick to attend the Christmas dinner. But as
Lucy distributed the basket’s contents the children’s cheeks flushed
pink and their eyes shone as they stammered, “_Danke, gnädige Fräulein,
danke_.”
A step sounded on the threshold and Adelheid held up her full hands to
cry joyfully, “Look, Papachen, look!”
Franz’ big, lean frame filled the doorway, his face heated from woodland
labors. With a soiled red handkerchief he began, at sight of his
visitors, to brush bark and dirt from his shabby clothing. His
expression was somewhat grim as he glanced at the foreigners; but at the
children’s insistence, after one quick, frowning contraction of his
heavy brows, his sour lips curved in something like a smile. He stroked
Adelheid’s head, having made the visitors before his threshold an
awkward bow, and, to their astonishment, addressed them in French—German
French, remarkable in sound and accent:
“_Ponjour, Messieurs et Mestemoiselles. Merci peaucoup. Foulez-fous
entrer tans ma bauvre maison?_”
Michelle was the first to decipher this utterance. She smiled faintly
and shook her head. “We came only to see the children,” she explained,
also in French.
Franz’ keen eyes had left her face to scrutinize the two officers who
stood behind her, though as soon as their glance met his he shifted his
gaze to the children and summoned his difficult smile once more.
“Let’s go,” said Lucy, looking up from where she sat holding Freidrich,
and trying to persuade him not to cram all his candy into his mouth at
once.
Footsteps sounded again inside the cottage and a woman appeared behind
Franz, and, peering out over his shoulder, nodded to Lucy with a smile
as cheerless as her husband’s, but tired and spiritless rather than
sullen. She was young, but sad and anxious looking. Her light brown hair
was twisted up anyhow on her head, and the sleeves of her faded calico
were rolled above her elbows.
“Thank you, kind Fräulein,” she said, amiably enough. “The little ones
are grateful. Good-day to your young friend, and to each Herr Officer.”
With this greeting she shuffled back into the cottage, without a word to
her husband, who was staring at the ground now, forgetting his attempts
at civility.
“Good-afternoon,” said Lucy, getting up, still holding little
Freidrich’s hand. The others nodded to the German as they turned back
toward the forest, the children tagging at their heels.
“We will walk a little way with you, shall we?” asked Adelheid, dancing
ahead. She had stuck the bits of tinsel that fell to her share into her
flaxen braids, and looked, as she flitted about among the great
tree-trunks, like a child come to life out of a German fairy tale.
“Have you lived here always, Adelheid?” asked Larry, smiling at her.
Adelheid’s bright eyes fixed his as for a second she puzzled over his
bad German; then, understanding, she said quickly, “Oh, no, Herr
Officer. But we have lived here a good while. Let me think. Well, I
can’t remember, but we came here when there was fighting. Papachen left
off being a soldier to bring us here. He said it was better so—then he
need not fight any more. But our mother was not pleased.”
“Need not fight any more because he became a woodcutter?” asked Larry
doubtfully.
“I don’t know, _mein Herr_. That was what he said. He was sad and the
mother was sad. We were poor, because we had no longer the farm.”
“You used to have a farm?”
“Yes—a fine one, with pigs and a field. But the fighting came, and they
took all that place.”
“Who took it?” Larry persisted.
Adelheid glanced shyly at Armand’s face, then, almost whispering,
explained to Larry, “It was the French. They said it all belonged to
them. They let us stay where we were, but soon there was a battle and
everyone had to run away.”
“What was the place called?” asked Michelle with sudden understanding.
“It was the Reichsland, Fräulein,” said Adelheid, proud of her attentive
audience. “They sometimes talked French there.”
“Alsace-Lorraine!” exclaimed Armand.
“That’s where he learned French,” said Larry. “I thought it was strange
in a German peasant.”
“He is not a peasant,” insisted Armand. “He is just what the child
says—a farmer. When the fighting in Alsace-Lorraine commenced his land
was ruined, and he was too much leagued with the Germans to face the
French occupation.”
“But I wonder why the Boches let him leave the army,” Larry pondered.
“Was your father wounded, Adelheid?” he asked.
“No, _mein Herr_, I don’t remember it.”
“Adelheid!” Through the forest stillness Franz’ voice sounded harshly.
“_Komm hier schnell_, Adelheid!”
“_Ja, ja!_” responded the little girl, shouting. With a skip, she seized
her brothers by the hand, and, turning for a smiling farewell and a
“come soon again,” ran back toward the clearing, the little boys
stumbling along at her side.
“Perhaps Papachen suspected that we were hearing the family history,”
surmised Larry, watching the children disappear among the firs. “If he
has any secrets to hide he had better keep Adelheid locked up.”
“Isn’t she a cunning little girl?” said Lucy. “I wish they weren’t
Germans. I don’t know what is the matter with their mother. I suppose
she’s poor and worried.”
“Probably she’s thinking of the farm they lost,” said Larry. Then,
putting Franz and his family out of his mind as they began mounting the
slope which showed the approach of the hospital clearing, “Can’t you get
a holiday and come to Coblenz, Lucy? I’m lonely without you or Bob. I’m
losing my morale.”
All three of the others laughed at his gloomy voice, and Larry remarked
with smouldering resentment, “It’s always that way when I get the blues.
I’m laughed at. I’m considered a light-hearted soldier, and if I’m
anything else I get no sympathy.”
“Yes you do, Larry—plenty from me,” Lucy protested. “But, you see, I
count on you a lot myself, so I have to laugh at the idea of your
getting low in your mind, or I’d feel twice as lost as I do alone.”
“Is that plain to you, Captain Eaton?” asked Armand, amused, and Larry,
smiling in spite of himself, said more cheerfully:
“That’s a real Lucy explanation. Well, I’ll have to carry on in the Home
Sector and play up to my part.”
“Other people have had to,” said Lucy, glancing at Michelle. She could
not yet look into her friend’s face without remembering with a warm
thrill of admiration the almost hopeless days of captivity when
Michelle’s splendid courage and cheerfulness had spurred her to equal
fortitude. “I’m afraid I don’t quite stand on my own legs when trouble
comes,” she added, with some irrelevance for those who could not follow
her thoughts. “I always need someone to keep me going.”
“I don’t know. You’ve stood up pretty well, I think,” said Larry, more
eager in her defense than in his own. “For instance, the time you——”
“Escaped from Château-Plessis,” broke in Michelle, with equal
enthusiasm. “There was not anyone to push you to the lines of the
_Alliés_, or to shut the Germans’ eyes.”
“And how about the night you flew with me into Germany?” persisted
Larry. “I didn’t encourage you then, that’s sure.”
“I don’t mean all that,” Lucy interposed, flushing warmly at having
provoked this unexpected praise. “Anyone can be brave once in a while.
With me it’s more desperation than courage. If ever you hear that I’ve
done anything you think took nerve, you may know I did it because
something else frightened me still more.”
“You can’t take your motives to pieces that way,” objected Larry, never
good at argument. “You were brave, and that’s all there was to it.”
“But the sort of bravery that I admire,” Lucy continued earnestly, “is
the sort that lasts. I was more hopeless after five weeks at
Château-Plessis than Michelle after four years. I couldn’t have endured
what she did.”
“Oh, perhaps I saw fear and sorrow so often in those years I came to
know well their faces and did not mind them,” said Michelle, trying to
speak lightly. “My courage was not very great—a prisoner has the same.”
She slipped her hand through Lucy’s arm as she spoke. “Do not think I
did not sometimes borrow strength from you, _mon amie_.”
“Both kinds of courage are needed,” said Armand, thoughtfully. “It took
both to win the war.”
“You ought to know,” said Lucy to herself, smiling as she looked up at
the Frenchman’s thin face, above his wasted frame. She thought of the
times he had risked inglorious death as a spy in his country’s service.
“We have a visitor,” said Michelle, as they left the forest and began to
ascend the clearing behind the hospital.
She pointed to a gray army motor-car standing in the road. At the same
moment Larry exclaimed, “It’s General Gordon’s car. Your father has
come, Lucy.”
“Yes, he promised to, as soon as the Christmas celebrations were over in
Coblenz.” Lucy quickened her pace and in a minute saw her father coming
down the veranda steps to meet her.
“Merry Christmas, Father! I’m so glad to see you!” she cried, hugging
him. “You don’t look very gay,” she added, searching his face with her
clear eyes. “Father, are you homesick, too?”
“I’m all right, little daughter,” replied General Gordon, smiling,
though his face did not relax into its usual calm confidence.
“Come and see Michelle and her brother?” Lucy urged. Her eyes held a
sudden anxiety which she tried to put from her as she made the
introductions and listened to her father’s pleasant talk with her
friends.
Armand was looking tired and in a moment Michelle led him away to rest.
General Gordon, Lucy and Larry walked over to the cottage and sat down
in one corner of the bare little parlor.
Almost at once Lucy put the question trembling on her lips. “Father,
there’s something wrong! Please tell me?”
“I’m sorry—on Christmas Day,” began General Gordon reluctantly. Then at
Lucy’s frightened eyes he added quickly, “It’s not so very bad, Lucy.
They say he’s all right. Greyson telegraphed me to-day from Archangel.
Bob had a fall in his plane and has broken his leg. Greyson assures me
there is no danger. He will send word again to-morrow.”
Lucy’s cheeks flamed with the desperate effort to keep back her tears.
Her heart was pounding in her throat and she dared not try to speak. But
in spite of herself the tears overflowed her eyes and glistened on her
lashes when she heard Larry’s troubled voice beside her and felt her
father catch her hand in his warm, firm clasp. She gave a quick,
grateful sob.
“_You_ know how we feel, Larry,” she said, looking up at him as she
winked away her tears.