"Well, have you heard the news?"
It was the landlord of the Blue Boar who spoke. He stopped me in the
village street--if you can call a straggling lane with a score of thatched
cottages and half a dozen barns a street--evidently bursting with great
tidings. He is an old soldier himself, and his views on the war are held in
great esteem. I hadn't heard the news, but, whatever it was, I could see
from the landlord's immense smile that there was nothing to fear.
"Jim has got a commission," said the landlord, and he said it in a tone
that left no doubt that now things would begin to move. For Jim is his son,
a sergeant-major in the artillery, who has been out at the front ever since
Mons.
The news has created quite a sensation. But we are getting so used to
sensations now that we are becoming _blasé_. There has never been such a
year of wonders in the memory of any one living. The other day thousands of
soldiers from the great camp ten miles away descended on our "terrain"--I
think that's the word--and had a tremendous two-days' battle in the hills
about us. They broke through the hedges, and slept in the cornfields, and
ravished the apple-trees in my orchard, and raided the cottagers for tea,
and tramped to and fro in our street and gave us the time of our lives.
"_I_ never seed such a sight in _my_ life," said old Benjamin to me in the
evening. "Man and boy, I've lived in that there bungalow for eighty-five
year come Michaelmas, and _I_ never seed the like o' _this_ before.... Yes,
eighty-five year come Michaelmas. And my father had that there land on a
peppercorn rent, and the way he lost it was like this--"
Happily at this moment there was a sudden alarum among the soldiers, and I
was able to dodge the familiar rehearsal of old Benjamin's grievance.
And who would ever have dreamed that we should live to hear French talked
in our street as a familiar form of speech? But we have. In a little
cottage at the other end of the village is a family of Belgians, a fragment
of the flotsam thrown up by the great inundation of 1914. They have brought
the story of "frightfulness" near to us, for they passed through the terror
of Louvain, hiding in the cellars for nights and days, having two of their
children killed, and escaping to the coast on foot.
Every Sunday night you will see them very busy carrying their few chairs
and tables into a neighbouring barn, for on Monday mornings mass is
celebrated there. The priest comes up in a country cart from ten miles
away, and the refugees scattered for miles around assemble for worship,
after which there is a tremendous pow-pow in French and Flemish, with much
laughter and gaiety.
Old Benjamin "don't hold with they priests," and he has grave suspicions
about all foreign tongues, but the Belgians have become quite a part of us,
and their children are learning to lisp in English down at the school in
the valley.
Much less agreeable is the frame of mind towards the occupants of the
cottage next to the Blue Boar. They are the wife and children of a German
who had worked in this country for many years and is now in America. The
woman is English and amiable, but the proximity of anything so reminiscent
of Germany is painful to the village, and especially to the landlord, whose
views about Germans can hardly be put into words.
"I should hope there'll be no prisoners took after _this_," he says grimly
whenever he hears of a new outrage. "Vermin--that's what they are," he
says, "and they should be treated according-ly."
The Germans, in fact, have become the substitute for every term of
execration, even with mild David the labourer. He came into the orchard
last evening staggering under a 15-ft. ladder. We had decided that if we
were going to have the pears before the wasps had spoiled them we must pick
them at once.
"It's a wunnerful crop," said David. "I've knowed this pear-tree [looking
up at one of them from the foot of his ladder] for twenty-five year, and
I've never seen such a crop on it afore."
Then he mounted the ladder and began to pick the fruit.
"Well, I'm blowed," he said, "if they ain't been at 'em a'ready." And he
flung down pear after pear scooped out by the wasps close to the stalk.
"Reg'lar Germans--that's what they are," he said. "Look at 'em round that
hive," he went on. "They'll hev all the honey and them bees will starve and
git the Isle o' Wight--that's what they'll git.... Lor," he added,
reflectively, "I dunno what wospses are made for--wospses _and_ Germans. It
gits over me."
I said it got over me too. And then from among the branches, while I hung
on to the foot of the ladder to keep it firm, David unbosomed his disquiet
to me about enlisting.
"Most o' the chaps round here has gone," he said, "an' I don't like staying
be'ind. Seems as though you were hanging back like. 'Taint that I shouldn't
like to go; but it's this way ... (Hullo, I got my hand on a wasp that
time) ... There's such a lot o' women-folk dependent on me. There's my wife
and there's my mother down the village _and_ my aunt; and not a man to do
anything for 'em but me. After my work on th' farm, I keeps all three
gardens going and a patch of allotment down the valley as well."
"You're growing a lot of good food, and that's military work," I said.
He seemed cheered by the idea, and asked me if I'd like to see the potatoes
he had dug up that evening--they were "a wunnerful fine lot," he said.
So after he had stripped the pear-tree he shouldered the ladder, and we
went down the village to David's garden. There I saw his potatoes, some
lying to dry where they had been dug up, others in sacks. Also his marrows
and beans and cabbages and lettuces. A little apologetically, he offered me
some of the largest potatoes--"just as a hobby," he said, meaning thereby
that it was only a trifle he offered.
As I went away in the gathering dark, with my hands full of potatoes, I met
the landlord of the Blue Boar, his shirt sleeves rolled up as usual above
his brown, muscular arms.
"Bad news that about Mrs. Lummis," he said, looking towards the cottage on
the other side of the road.
"What is that?" said I. "Her son?" There had been no news of him for two
months.
"Yes, poor Jack. She's got news that he was killed near la Bassée in June.
Nice feller--and her only son."
Then, more cheerfully, he added, "Jim's coming home to-morrow. Going to get
his officer's rig out, you know, and have a rest--the first since he went
out a year ago."
"You'll be glad to see him," said I.
"Not half," said he with a vast smile.