The sight of the battle-field blotted out that brutal picture--made
him clench his hands until the nails dug deep into the palms, shut
his eyes and set his teeth, fighting down the deadly qualm.... It
was worse than the Red Ravine a hundred times magnified. It was
awful--inconceivably awful.... He found himself muttering:
"I wonder how God can bear to look down on it all!"
With difficulty he controlled his ardent desire to remove himself as
far as possible from this attained vision of his great desire, by
using the legs that had brought him to this hideous scene:
"If some of the fellows who gas about wanting to see War--as I
gassed--not twenty-four hours ago--could be set down where I stand
now, they'd find out, as I have found--that they didn't know what
they were talking about.... Oh, God! ... suppose one of them saw
that German Hussar without a head, sitting upright on a dead horse,
curiously caparisoned with its own intestines, would he go sheer
crazy or tumble down in a swoon?"
He who saw the thing kept on his legs and did not lose his mental
equilibrium. We are so weak to our own knowledge that it is always a
marvel when we find ourselves strong. He found the nausea going and
the dimness clearing from his vision. He could even breathe the
dreadful air, and, standing on the limber of a broken gun-carriage,
stare out over the rigid billows of that silent sea of death and tell
himself that a not inapt comparison would have been Deal Beach, with
ridges of dead men and beasts instead of ridges of pebbles, and
flocks of carrion crows instead of gulls--flapping heavily from one
place to settle down in another and renew their dreadful banquet,
between hoarse croakings that sounded like "More, more, more!"
Starlings in myriads were there, reveling in blood and fat like the
titmice and robins, who manifested predilections calculated to divest
P. C. Breagh of the last remnant of belief in the tender fable of the
Babes in the Wood. Butterflies, Royal Peacock, and Purple Emperor
greedily sipped blood in preference to honey-dew. Hares, rendered
tame by bewilderment and terror, couched among the corpses of men,
their natural enemies.
Toward the northeast rose a knoll, about which the battle seemed to
have raged desperately. For it was high-heaped with bodies of the
green-jacketed Chasseurs on the bony brown horses, and ringed about
with Red Uhlans and Dragoons in blue coats. The black and white
lance-pennons were whipping and flickering in the morning breeze that
brought with it the appalling savor of death....
One had come to work, not to make notes. P. C. Breagh got down from
the limber into the trough between two towering wave-crests and
looked about him helplessly, not knowing where to begin. A
bearer-party of the Prussian Ambulance Service pushed by him. They
were hard-bitten, brown-faced men, who joked and laughed freely. A
scared band of peasants followed, carrying auxiliary stretchers made
of hurdles and sacks and poles.
Upon the heels of these tottered a single figure. Was it a young
girl, or an old woman, so slight and frail, so bowed and blackly
clad? A black silk veil covered the bent face, the small white hands
were knitted across the narrow bosom. A white linen armlet with the
badge of the Red Cross showed vividly against the sleeve of her plain
black merino dress. The little, daintily shod feet that showed under
the dabbled hem of the skirt had red mire upon them. Through the
veil her great eyes gleamed, haggardly moving from side to side,
restlessly seeking....
P. C. Breagh was becoming familiar with that look of strained
apprehension and bleak anxiety, stamped upon the sharpened faces of
those crowds of black-clad men and women who hastened from all
quarters to seek amid the brute and human waste and wreckage of
battle, their own wounded or dead.
She moved with the irregular gait of one walking in a fog, looking
from side to side, questing amid blue and livid or waxen faces for
the face, it was quite plain. Her look passed over bodies that did
not wear the dark-green, silver-laced dolman, and silver-striped red
pantaloons of the mounted Chasseurs of the Guard Imperial. She
ignored faces that were young, and unadorned with the crisp mustache
and the Imperial tuft.
For whom did she seek? A husband, uncle, father? ... What lay in her
path? Something that, did the little foot strike it unwarily, might
bring to an end that anguished search.... The impact seemed so
imminent that his voice died in his throat when he strove to call to
her. He got out in a gasping croak:
"Stop! ... Look! ... Right in your path there! ... For God's sake,
don't touch it--it's a live shell!" ...
She swerved blindly aside in obedience to the warning, though he who
uttered it had spoken in his own tongue. The edge of her skirt
brushed the unexploded shrapnel, a potentiality fraught with hideous
death. But she struck her knee against the wheel of the broken
limber--would have fallen but for P. C. Breagh. Even as the slight
figure stumbled against him, he knew the veil screened the face of
Juliette.
"Mademoiselle de Bayard.... Madame..."
"Ah, it is you--it is you!" she said gaspingly.
And she would have dropped at his feet had he not thrust out strong
hands and caught hers that were still knitted over her breast.
They were so cold, so cold and tiny. They stirred in his grasp like
little half-frozen birds. She freed one, and put aside the heavy
veil, and showed him what havoc Grief can make in loveliness.... She
said--in the toneless wraith of the crystal voice he remembered:
"When you spoke to me in English, I knew Our Lord had not forgotten
me. Ah, Monsieur Breagh, for the love you bear your sister!--for the
love of charity--do not desert me! Me, I am in the greatest
extremity, or I would not venture to appeal to you now. In the midst
of these appalling cruelties and terrors I seek the body of one who
is all the world to me.... For that I may find him living I do not
dare to hope..."
P. C. Breagh choked out, crimsoning and stammering:
"Not your husband? ... You don't mean your husband...?"
She said, with a wonderful, pure dignity:
"Not my husband. My father, sir. It is since a week that I returned
from Belgium upon receiving news of his captivity in the hands of the
Prussians. The intelligence was false--I afterward learned. How--I
cannot now tell you. At this moment, and in the presence of all
these poor corpses, of odor so terrible, of appearance so frightful,
I can remember nothing very well. But this--that I have come from
Rethel since yesterday, and that I have come altogether alone."
"Alone! ... without a guide, or protector of any kind? ... Without
papers?..." His face expressed the blankest surprise.
"A passport was obtained for me," she told him, "by whom I will not
say now, so that from the Belgian frontier I might reach Rethel.
When I quitted Rethel, I was given a military permit by the aid of
which I returned to Verdun. From Verdun, in a train full of French
wounded--in a _fiacre_ part of the way--in a peasant's cart the
remaining distance--I traveled: hoping to reach the Camp of the
Imperial Guard Cavalry at Châtel St. Germain. But at Plappeville
they detained me. A great battle was raging.... What thunder of
guns, what fire and smoke, what terrible confusion, devastation,
wounds, and death did I not behold!..."
She unknitted one of the little rigid hands that he had let go, felt
for her handkerchief, and wiped away the cold drops of anguish that
stood upon her blue-veined temples and about her colorless lips. And
P. C. Breagh could only look at her in an agony of pity, and wonder
at the courage that bore the frail creature up.
"Last night the frightful explosions of cannon ceased A poor peasant
woman had afforded me shelter in her cottage, and shared with me the
milk of her goat and her last loaf of bread. News came before day,
brought by a wounded soldier, whose comrades had been killed, that
the battle had been won by the Army of France, but that M. de Bazaine
had withdrawn our forces for rest and shelter to the Citadel of Metz.
I asked this poor soldier for intelligence of my father's regiment,
the 777th Mounted Chasseurs of the Guard. The reply was: 'Three
regiments of Mounted Chasseurs lie dead on the field of honor. You
will find them south of Flavigny, between the Bois de Vionville and
the Bois de Gaumont.' I cried out then, for the words had pierced me
like sharp iron. I would have run out of the house to find my
father, like a creature distracted, but that an ambulance of the Red
Cross, accompanied by two English Protestant Sisters, passed through
the village on the way to this terrible place. They brought me with
them--'You cannot seek among the dead,' they told me, 'without the
brassard of the Rouge Croix.' This they put upon me, and then they
bring me with them. Now I know not where they are, but I have found
you. Help me, monsieur--and I will pray for you until I die!"
She gave him one wild, supplicating look, put her little frozen hands
together--would have knelt down on the bloody grass to plead with him
the better, if he had seemed to delay. But he caught fire at her
flaming eagerness, and snatched at the wallet of Red Cross
necessaries he had unslung when he had climbed upon the broken limber
to gaze over that sea of Death that spread to the horizon, crying:
"Of course I'll help you look for your father! ... But how to search
for him--and where? ... Tell me ... the regiment and the color of
the uniform?"
Shuddering, she pointed to the green, silver-braided dolman clothing
of one of the rigid figures near them. He noted the red and green
plume of the sealskin talpack, cut through, perhaps, by a stroke of
the heavy saber yet gripped in the stiff right hand of a Prussian
Dragoon. He muttered, even while mentally registering other details
of the Chasseur's uniform--noting the crest embroidered on the green
schabraque of the brown charger whose inert weight rested on its dead
rider's thigh:
"777th Chasseurs ... I've heard German officers telling each other
that they fought like devils yesterday.... Half a dozen regiments
might have been cut up here! And we have to find one man somewhere
in a square mile of piled-up bodies.... If one only had a bloodhound
and one of De Bayard's gloves!..."
Love has a scent as keen as the great dun hound of the hanging
dewlap. The issue of the search was to prove this. For an hour, as
it seemed, they traversed narrow lanes that wound between walls of
dead men. Then the ground rose to a knoll, topped with three
scorched oak-trees that had been stripped of their leaves and lopped
of their branches by the blizzard of metal and fire, still burning,
the air expanding in their sap-channels, exploded with the detonation
of musketry. Charred cinders dropped from them; they gave forth
clouds of acrid-smelling whitish smoke.
About and upon this knoll of the three oak-trees the battle of the
previous day had raged--the billows of the sea of Death had beaten
fiercely. The lane became a crevasse, the floor of which sloped
sharply--from the sides of which projected rigid limbs, human and
equine. But the slender figure in black moved between them--stooped
to pass under them, seldom faltering. When the young man who
followed begged her to turn back, she shook her head without
answering, and kept on. The silent gesture meant:
"Not yet! A little farther still!... Be patient with me, I beg of
you!"
For it seemed to Juliette's tense nerves and overstrained brain as
though those white or blue, or darkly-discolored faces, hideously
distorted or wearing an unnatural expression of calm, were all
staring with their glassy eyes in one direction, pointed out by
myriads of stiffened arms.
She said, tottering with sheer weakness, and turning upon her
companion colorless, black-ringed eyes set in a face most strangely
peaked and shrunken:
"Here where these trees are I will turn, because my strength is
failing.... See, see! O Mother of God!... O Jesu!... HE IS THERE!"
The scream that tore through her slender throat turned P. C. Breagh's
blood to snow-water. He could only gasp, clutching at the folds of
her black school-dress with a vague idea of holding her back from
some sight of intolerable horror:
"Wait! For God's sake! Wait!... Let me!..."
She shook off his unconsciously violent grasp as though it had been a
baby's. She was gone, wading through a languid runnel of
fast-congealing blood, stepping over a broken lance-shaft and a
horse's rigid hind-limb. When P. C. Breagh reached her, she was
crouching on a patch of hoof-torn earth through which the limestone
core of the knoll showed in places, hugging to her bosom a stiff blue
hand.
It wore a familiar ring, that brave right hand, from whose grip the
long cavalry sword had dropped when the Uhlan gave the death-thrust.
But I think, even without the crested sard, his daughter would have
known....
Madness was near enough in that fell hour to brush the bowed veiled
head of Juliette with her tattered mantle of imaginary enemies. She
saw nothing and knew nothing but that her father was there. She
kissed the stiff blue hand, and sang to it and cuddled it. Ophelia
was not more tragic than this Convent school-girl, squatting in the
chilly shadow of a heap of dead horsemen, lavishing futile, foolish
tendernesses on that piece of insensible clay:
"My father, now that I have found thee, we must never be parted
again--never! Indeed, I have tried to obey thee--but I could not
help coming back because I love thee so!... Thou hast been wounded,
but I will nurse thee and cure thee. When thou art well again we
will find a quiet home together, where my mother shall never come.
For she is not good as my grandmother was, and as thou art, my own
father!... I have fear of her, now that I have seen and known!..."
She broke off and listened, as though an answer had come from under
the blood-stained Imperial eagle and the corpses that hid De Bayard
from her view. One of them was the body of the young subaltern who
had borne the standard. Over him sprawled the colossal form of a
German officer of Dragoons. He was not dead, for he moved, and blood
was yet trickling from a sword-cut that had bitten deep into his
shoulder through the cuirass, and a deep gash in the close-cropped
scalp of his unhelmeted head.
"Help! Some drink! _Donner!_ how my head hurts!" he groaned faintly.
P. C. Breagh, judging it a case for practical Samaritanism, got to
him by skirting the heap of dead and scaling it from the opposite
side. Reaching the summit, he dosed the Dragoon with cognac, and was
about to apply a first-aid bandage to the damaged shoulder, when the
red-banded forage-caps and bearded faces of a burial-party of
Prussian Guard infantry strung through the narrow alley below the
level of his operations, and an unforgotten voice said in rough
Teutonic gutturals:
"Hereabouts or near. Begin this--widening the way until carts can
get through to be loaded.... _Kreuzdonnerwetter!_ is that a dog up
there?"
Another voice answered:
"No, _Herr_ Sergeant. It is either a nun or a woman!"
The Sergeant thundered:
"You silly sheepshead! Aren't nuns women? But you _verdammte_
Catholics think such wenches are angels out of the sky. Turn her out
of that--nun or woman!"
With a savage rush of scalding blood to his sun-bronzed cheeks and
temples, P. C. Breagh realized that they meant Juliette. He thrust
his head forward, peering down from his eyrie. The crouching little
shape in black looked no bigger than a big dog. Near her stood a
soldier in the white-faced dark blue uniform of the Guard Infantry.
It was the spectacled ex-chemist Kunz, who had nodded him civil
farewell. Staring up from below was the copper-colored countenance
of the too-zealous Sergeant Schmidt, not rendered more amiable by
mud-splashes and powder grime, in combination with a stitched-up scar
across the bridge of the nose, and a flamboyant overgrowth of beard.
He bellowed to the ex-chemist:
"Speak to her! Ask what is her business."
The spectacled Kunz stooped over the little bowed head, and seemed to
put a question. She lifted her drained white face, shuddered, then
resumed her previous attitude. Interrogated from below, Private Kunz
responded:
"She is deaf, or mad. She only shakes and stares at one!"
The Sergeant bellowed:
"Shout in her ear, fool! You are not courting your sweetheart! Tell
her to get up and move out of this!"
Thus urged, the ex-chemist approached his lips to the little ear
shaded by the black silken tresses, and bawled the order of his
superior. She gave no sign of having heard. Copper-red with
indignation, the Sergeant commanded:
"Turn her out, then! Promptly up with the baggage!"
Kunz, thus adjured, gripped the slight arm, not brutally. At the
touch, Juliette gave a faint cry, and crouched lower, hiding her face
upon the rigid hand she held. And P. C. Breagh saw red, abandoned
his groaning cavalryman and leaped for it, slithering down from the
summit of his dreadful eyrie with a roll of four-inch bandaging
trailing in his wake. Casting caution to the winds, he shouted
savagely to the ex-chemist:
"Let the lady go! Take your hand off! Damn you!--do you hear?"
The words, being English, were not comprehended by the Sergeant. For
an instant he stared open-mouthed at the unexpected apparition. The
next he had bawled out an order to his men, and P. C. Breagh found
himself looking down the long brown barrels of a couple of Prussian
"needlers," accurately covering the exact area of waistcoat behind
which his heart hammered and bumped. There was a creaking of leather
then--and with the jingle of steel on steel, the snort of a horse
reluctant to be ridden into an alley without turning-space. Over the
heads of the Sergeant and his party rose the pricked ears, sagacious
eyes, and broad frontlet of a great, gaunt brown mare, ridden by a
gigantic field officer, wearing the flat white, yellow-banded forage
cap, black pewter-buttoned frock, white cords, and immense spurred
jack-boots of the Coburg regiment of White Cuirassiers.
"Whom have we English here? Who called out 'Take your hands off!'"
From under the peak of the white forage-cap the rider's heavy
domineering stare took in the huddled feminine figure, the disheveled
young man menaced by the Service rifles, and the truculent attitude
of Sergeant Schmidt. He lifted a finger, and the "needlers" became
vertical. He beckoned with the authoritative digit, and P. C. Breagh
drew near. And the sickening horrors of the battlefield faded
suddenly from about the Englishman.... He was back in the
tobacco-scented study of a house in the Wilhelmstrasse, Berlin. And
the resonant tones of the man who stood for Prussia in the mind's eye
of the world were saying, in Bismarck's well-phrased English:
"Even though you belong to a neutral nation, you should not presume
upon the fact too rashly. Had I not been within earshot just now,
you would have paid with your life for your interference. German
military authority is supreme, and in the execution of its duty not
to be turned aside."
P. C. Breagh retorted, tingling to the very finger-tips:
"Your Excellency, I interfered to save this lady from ill-usage."
"She is a Frenchwoman? ... Explain to her," said the resonant voice
coldly and brutally, "that even to reach the side of a fallen lover,
too much may be risked and lost!"
P. C. Breagh said, meeting the imperious stare with yellow-gray eyes
that blazed tigerishly:
"Excellency, the dead man is her father, Colonel de Bayard, 777th
Mounted Chasseurs of the Imperial Guard."
"Stand back," said the domineering voice, "and I will speak to her!"
At a touch of the spur the great brown mare moved forward, breasting
a lance-shaft that barred the narrow alley, terribly squeezing the
Sergeant and his men.
"Mademoiselle de Bayard!" said the authoritative voice.
"Excellency, she does not hear you! The shock has been too
terrible," Carolan was beginning. He was brusquely interrupted with:
"People usually listen when I speak to them." And the curt command
was issued--in French, suave and polished:
"Be good enough, Mademoiselle de Bayard, to stand up and listen to
me!"
The big brown mare snorted angrily and fidgeted. He turned her head
with an iron hand on the curb-bit, looking steadily at the other
female thing.
"Mademoiselle de Bayard, do you hear?"
This time she lifted her sunken head, and turned her small pinched
face his way. In the haggard young mask of frozen anguish two wild
eyes glittered, tearless and stony-hard. Then slowly, as though his
powerful will impelled her, she rose to her knees, and stood upon her
feet before him. He said, in cool, incisive accents:
"Young lady, your father was a gallant soldier. I myself had the
privilege of seeing how he died. I wish such a man had served a
better master!..."
She answered, her white lips barely moving as they framed the
sentence:
"He served the Master of Kings and Emperors, before Whom he stands
now!"
His somber eyes lightened suddenly as though in irritation. He said
in tones that had the clang of overbearing authority:
"I cannot enter now into a theological discussion. The battle-field
is no place for debate, or for unprotected women and young girls....
In your own best interests I counsel you to return home." He
added--and there was no flicker of recognition in the passing glance
vouchsafed to P. C. Breagh: "Alone, if you prefer--or under the
escort of this young Englishman.... I will promise you that your
father's body shall be treated with respect!" His heavy eyes fell on
the stiffened face of the Sergeant, standing rigidly in the attitude
of salute. "Where is the officer in charge of this burial-party?" he
added, grimly enough.
"Here, Excellency!" came from behind him. He glanced over his
shoulder and said to the flurried under-lieutenant who had hurried up
and was standing in the alleyway:
"A separate grave, distinguished by some mark that is recognizable by
the daughter." He looked back at the daughter, saying curtly: "Your
veil!"
She removed it in silence, and handed it to the ex-chemist, who
received the frail fluttering cobweb between his finger and thumb.
Then the brown mare, in obedience to the iron hand upon the bridle,
backed out of the alley of silent witnesses, baring her long,
vicious-looking yellow teeth and showing the whites of her savage
eyes resentfully. From the florid bull-dog face of her rider, barred
with the heavy mustache of iron gray, all memory of the little drama
just enacted had been effaced, as the outlines of a sketch in
charcoal are wiped from wood or stone.
But as the alley widened and his great beast surged round, switching
her tail, putting back her ears and lashing out with her heels so as
to nearly brain the officer, P. C. Breagh thought he caught the words:
"Separate grave ... marked to find easily. All respect ... answer to
me!"
More he might have heard, but for Juliette's sobbing. For God had
remembered her, and sent her tears at last.
She had suddenly seen, lying at her feet, a frayed and crumpled
envelope bearing the Belgian postmark, and addressed in her own
handwriting to M. le Colonel H. A. A. de Bayard, Headquarters of the
777th Mounted Chasseurs of the Guard Imperial with the Army of
France, at Metz. And the intuition of love told her that the dead
man must have carried this, the last message received from his
daughter, hidden in his bosom; and have drawn it forth and kissed
it--as in very truth we know he had--shortly before he died.
"See, see, my friend! Behold my own letter. His sacred blood has
stained it.... His lips perhaps have pressed it!--it well may be
that tears of his have fallen here also! ... Never shall it leave me
until my hand is cold as this is! Adieu, dear hand!" She knelt down
to fondle it, had to be raised almost by force--would have returned
for a last caress--a final prayer, but that P. C. Breagh, rendered
desperate by the evident impatience of the officer and the scowling
looks of the Sergeant and his merry men, lifted her bodily in his
arms and carried her away.
"I pray you put me down! ... Me, I am not an infant!" she protested.
"See you well, Monsieur Breagh, I do not think it _convenable_ that a
gentleman should carry a lady so!..."
Then her strength ebbed from her and she became in truth, an infant.
As her frail body yielded to his clasp, as her head sank down upon
his shoulder, she sighed, a long, quivering sigh.
What of the youth who waded through the frozen sea of Death, bearing
in his arms his worshiped lady? He was footsore and aching in every
bone and muscle from long marches and desperate exertion. His heart
pounded so beneath her cheek that it seemed to him she must hear it
and be frightened, or that he must suffocate and die outright.
Terror and rapture, exquisite pain and exquisite pleasure, mingled in
the draught now held to his lips by Fate, Life's cup-bearer. And as
he drank, with what strange birth-pangs, his budding manhood
burgeoned into flower. He might look back upon his boyhood with
regret, contempt, or tenderness.... He would never be a boy again.
L
The smallest and slenderest of women can be surprisingly heavy, when
carried in the arms of a lover who long has borne her in his heart.
Thus to P. C. Breagh, stumbling with his burden over roads strewn
with weapons, accouterments, mess-tins, and water-bottles, boxes of
biscuit and halves of sugar-loaves discarded by troops retiring in
haste, the appearance of a very tall peasant leading a little
white-faced donkey came as an unspeakably welcome relief. For a
franc in good French money the owner of the donkey was more than
willing to hire out his beast. Thus, seated on this humble animal,
P. C. Breagh's Infanta returned to the cottage where she had passed
the previous night.
It was one of a hamlet boasting the name of Petit Plappeville. To
reach it they skirted the frightful carnage at St. Hubert, threaded
the wood of Châtel St. Germain, crossed the railroad, unmolested by
the Prussian patrols, and, following narrow lanes hidden between
copses, came at last upon its single street.
Madame Guyot, stout, hospitable, and voluble, received Juliette with
cries of welcome and open arms. Mademoiselle should have something
better than dry bread on this occasion, for a neighbor had that
morning killed a calf. Hence veal cutlet, fried in batter--for some
of the hens, scared by yesterday's bombardment, had already begun
laying--and an omelette with fine herbs. No less than young
demoiselles, wounded soldiers require nourishment, and here behold,
English Monsieur accompanying Mademoiselle, here upon the pallet-bed
in the corner of the kitchen one of France's brave defenders in the
person of my Cousin Boisset. Pardon that he cannot rise to salute
you, for the Prussians have made it impossible. During the battle of
St. Privat yesterday, my Cousin Boisset was twice wounded while
serving with the Eighteenth Field Battery of the Sixth Army Corps....
Thus introduced, the gunner told his story, and told it with vivacity
in spite of his evident pain. His bandaged head and the useless leg
roughly swathed in a homespun towel of Madame Guyot's told their
story no less than his nimble tongue and vivacious eyes and hands.
"We were overcome by force of numbers.... The Germans know nothing
of scientific warfare.... Believe me, Mademoiselle and Monsieur, we
swept them down in rows like ninepins painted black. At twelve
hundred yards, and again at fourteen hundred--and the more we killed
the more there were to kill. Name of a pipe!--pardon,
Mademoiselle!--it was inconceivable! We were compelled at length to
cease our fire because our ammunition failed us, and it was not
possible to butcher any more!--Worst of all, our generals lost their
heads, and issued contradictory orders!--Commissariat broke down
before the ammunition-service--we had had nothing to eat for two
days--then we ceased to have shrapnel with which to feed our guns....
So we stood in front of a wood in which we might have taken cover,
being peppered by Prussian fire of infantry and artillery, for three
whole hours!--Three solid hours, Monsieur and Mademoiselle--until we
were remembered, and ordered to retire. When the order came, few
officers remained, and not a single non-commissioned officer was left
to us. Of the three batteries of our brigade Division, two-thirds
lay dead upon the field. With my wounded leg trailing behind me, I
crawled over rank after rank of bodies, pausing over many of my old
comrades.... Then I lay in the wood till dusk, and made crutches of
saplings I cut down with my penknife. With the day I reached my
cousin's house.... You may say 'All this is War'--but what kind of
War? is what I ask you.... I--a soldier when has fought and bled for
France!"
It was the voice of Juliette that answered from the corner of the
blackened oaken settle, where she sat huddled in the leaden stupor
that is born of grief and fatigue:
"Soldier of France, I will try to answer your question.... I am
young and ignorant, but I have read and thought much. And now I have
experienced what never can be forgotten.... I have sat by the corpse
of my father on the battlefield.... I have looked in the face of the
great man who is my country's cruel enemy...."
Madame Guyot, who was frying a panful of veal cutlet, started and
looked round from her sputtering, savory-smelling cookery. The
wounded gunner, propped up on the pallet-bed that stood in the corner
of the low-ceiled, stone-built kitchen, turned keen dark eyes and a
resolute bearded face toward the quarter whence came the silvery
voice:
"It is Bismarck's War," she said. "Stone by stone he has built up
Prussia until her vast shadow has swallowed up all Germany. He has
seen--this huge man of colossal ambitions--that the road to Power
greater still leads through the gate of France. And Diplomacy could
not steal the key, so War is the lever with which he opens it."
"Alas, Mademoiselle," returned the gunner sorrowfully, "it would
never have opened while a French soldier was left alive--if we had
not been betrayed! Have you seen the picture of Cham in last week's
_Charivari_? It reached my battery through one of our officers. It
is true--_mon Dieu!_--it is desperately true. There is the Little
Napoleon of To-day dressed up in the old cocked hat and the tattered
rags of the capote that used to be worn by the Great Napoleon. He
begs at the street-corner for sous--and even the prostitute turns
away from the impostor. 'The End of the Legend!' is written
underneath. It is furiously chic and terribly clever--and
frightfully true, Mademoiselle. For the Napoleonic legend is done
with--finished, for good and all!"
She did not answer, the momentary flash of interest had died out.
With her sad eyes fixed upon the ebony and silver crucifix of her
rosary, she was murmuring a prayer--doubtless for her father's soul.
Seeing her thus absorbed, the soldier glanced at her companion,
shrugged significantly, and tapped his own forehead, as though he
would have said:
"It is well that women have faith in Heaven. See!--she turns to her
beads, the poor little one. She is able to pray!--that is
fortunate.... Otherwise, grief would turn her brain!"
Meeting no response from P. C. Breagh, who sat upon a backless
straw-bottomed chair in the chimney corner, raptly contemplating the
small, sorrowful face, the gunner shrugged again, and exchanged a
wink of intelligence with Madame Guyot, as she took the bubbling pan
from the fire, proclaiming the cutlet cooked to a turn.
Who has loved and does not remember the first meal partaken in the
company of the beloved. To one guest at Madame Guyot's board, the
fried cutlet and tomatoes eaten from her coarse platters of
red-flowered crockery, the home-baked loaf, the jug of thin red wine,
the country cheese and the dish of purple plums that served as
dessert, made a banquet worthy of the gods. To sit opposite that
little drawn, white face with the lowered, swollen eyelids, and watch
her brave pretense of relishing their hostess' victuals, would have
been torture had it not been bliss.
When the homespun cloth had been drawn, the crumbs shaken out upon
the threshold for the hungry poultry, the cat accommodated with a
saucer of scraps, and the hearth swept, P. C. Breagh, glancing at the
cuckoo-clock that had hiccuped twelve, and now pointed to the
half-hour, got up and reluctantly tore himself away.
"You are going?... Back to _him_?... To make sure that those
soldiers have obeyed the orders of M. de Bismarck? Ah! that is what
I have been praying for! Our Lady has put it into your head."
She said it eagerly, with her hand quieting the flutter in her bosom.
Of what else should de Bayard's daughter have been thinking, P. C.
Breagh asked himself. He entreated, his troubled gray eyes wistfully
questioning:
"You won't leave this place until I come back? Pray do not!...
Promise me!"
The soldier, chatting in low tones with the good woman of the
cottage, pricked his hairy ears at the unfamiliar accent of the
English words. Juliette answered in the same tongue:
"Monsieur, I give you my _parole_ of honor. When you come back to
this house, if I am alive, you will find me here, under the _manteau_
of Our Lady. May she protect and guard you. _Au revoir!_..."
P. C. Breagh echoed the final words, and held out his big hand. She
considered it a moment, hesitated, then laid her own in the broad,
blistered palm. As he shut his strong fingers over the fragile
captive, it struggled, then lay still, throbbing like some small
imprisoned bird. And a dimness came before his eyes, and he
hurriedly released her, stammering:
"Take--take care of yourself, won't you? I'll--not be very long
away!"
She called him back. He knew a shock of joy and hurried toward her.
She slipped her Rosary into his hand with a gold coin, faltering with
eyes brimful, and quivering lips:
"This ... to be buried with him!... This--for a priest to read the
Office and offer Mass ... if one can be discovered!... Oh! if I
might come with you!... but no!--I will not be unreasonable. Again,
it must not be that you carry me, as you did to-day!"
He trembled at the poignant recollection. She went on, breathing
fast and eagerly, lifting her eyes, poor rain-washed scillas, to
his--laying her small hand timidly on his shabby sleeve.
"Me, I have an idea!... There is now in Heaven a great saint who was
priest of a little village that lies not far from here.... Since he
died, it is eleven years.... I speak of M. Jean-Baptiste Vianney,
the Blessed Curé of Ars...."
P. C. Breagh nodded recognition of the shining name she mentioned.
She went on, her small fingers pinching a fold of the rough brown
sleeve:
"Sacrifice--mortification--the Cross--these things to the holy Curé
were the Keys of Heaven. The poorest and simplest of his peasants
was not poorer or simpler than he. Even before his death Our Lord
gave him the grace to perform miracles, and always did Our Lady
regard him with tenderness.... See you well, I will pray to the
Blessed Jean Vianney to intercede for me, that God may send a holy
priest to read the Office for the dead!"
Her voice broke, and the bright tears brimmed over her pure
underlids. At the sight a wave of tenderness surged up in him, pure
of all sensuous passion, knowing only the overwhelming desire to
serve, and comfort, and protect.... He bent his head, and kissed the
little hand, before he turned and went from her. When he glanced
back, midway clown the wide dusty street of the hamlet of scattered
cottages, Juliette was standing in the sunshine, looking earnestly
after him.