In a clearing of the Forêt de Lyons, near Martagny, in Normandy,
and by the side of a barely distinguishable road, stands the rustic
half-timbered cottage of Octavie Delacourt. A solitary habitation
indeed, but one well fitted to the mental outlook of a lonely woman--no
fair young heroine of romance, as some readers may hastily conclude,
but a widow of over fifty with hair turning a silvery grey. Her
husband--a forester, and the builder of the little home--had died from
a fever a year before the war. Childless, she had elected to live on
there alone, partly through necessity, partly because of the memories
which the surroundings stirred in her mind whenever she went forth
to collect sticks for her fire, or when, lying in bed at night, she
heard the wind in the trees. Twenty years with "her man," twenty years
of labour in common, had made her a fervent lover of the forest. It
had become, as it were, her domain. Certainly no one knew better its
confusing tangle of roads and pathways.
The outbreak of the war naturally had an effect on the mind and habits
of Octavie Delacourt, but, alone in the world as she was, it affected
her much less than it had done her friends and acquaintances in the
neighbouring villages. In her case the war fever took the form of
restlessness--an eager, insatiable desire to learn the truth about the
danger which was threatening her dear France.
As the cloud darkened over the country her anxiety for news grew keener
and keener. It seemed as though her sub-conscious self was aware that
the tide of invasion was drawing nearer and nearer to the fair fields
and orchards of Normandy, and that one morning she would wake up to
find Martagny, Gournay, and Les Andelys in the hands of the Boches. So
every day, in those early weeks of the war, she was up betimes and,
having carefully done up her grey tresses and put on a newly-ironed
blue apron, set forth to one or other of the neighbouring villages,
where she would be able to read the latest "communiqué" and pick up any
stray item of news that might filter through from Paris.
About eight o'clock on the morning of September 16th, 1914, Octavie
Delacourt set out in this way, her destination on this occasion
being Gournay and the house of an old friend of her husband, a small
landowner named Rismude. It is a good distance by road from Martagny
to Gournay, so she decided to take a short cut through the Forêt de
Lyons. Setting her best foot foremost, she struck off through the trees
with the swinging stride of a hardy countrywoman, and soon picked up
a little pathway amidst the undergrowth which she knew would lead
her in the right direction. After walking for some ten minutes at
full speed, she came to a part of the forest known as "La Molière,"
the site of a disused chalk quarry, the gasping white mouth of which
is partly hidden by dense foliage. It was here that her eye--long
experienced in woodcraft--noticed something unusual near the path she
was following: a number of green branches, freshly cut from the trees,
which someone--apparently in vain--had been trying to make into a fire.
Stopping in front of the charred remains, she could not suppress the
utterance of the reflection which sprang to her mind:--
"How stupid to cut green branches for a fire!"
Hardly had the words passed her lips than Octavie felt a heavy hand
descended on her shoulder. With thumping heart and suddenly blanched
face she spun half round and beheld her aggressor--a heavy-featured man
in a strange dress who, with a cynical smile on his thick lips and a
hard look in his little grey eyes, had noiselessly appeared from behind
a tree.
"How you frightened me!" exclaimed Octavie, retaining her
self-possession, in spite of her fright, and endeavouring to shake off
the leaden fingers which weighed on her slender frame.
But not a word in reply came from the mysterious man, who might have
been made of cast-iron, so motionless did he stand. Gradually, as
Octavie Delacourt fell to examining him, the hideous truth began to
dawn upon her, and her heart almost stopped beating. She had never set
eyes before on a German soldier; she had never even seen a picture of
one. But she had heard tell of their uniform, in a vague sort of way,
and suddenly, one might say instinctively, she recognized the ash-grey
dress and the round cap of the same colour. How came the wearer of
these tell-tale clothes to be in her forest, not fifteen miles from Les
Andelys, and within rifle-shot of her native village of Martagny?