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 armory and the high-roofed
Flemish dining hall--stripped of their treasure of old pikes, swords,
crossbars, and blunderbusses by the diligent Germans--out to the
causeway, and over the creaking drawbridge 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 colors--blue stripes, alternating with yellow, like
the 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 Honor 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 in 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 Liège, 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
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.