We had reached the deepest woods, when a gasping, choking cry stopped
us short. The thicket directly before us stirred and then lay still
as death. The cry had been horrible as a Banshee's wail, and as
mysterious, but it was not the cry of an animal; it was human, and it
came from a human being in agony. The Baas crossed himself swiftly and
leaped forward, and instantly we had parted the protecting bushes and
were looking down on a man lying flat on the ground--a spectre with
a thin white face, chattering teeth, enormous frightened eyes, and a
filthy, much worn German uniform.
"What are you doing here?" I demanded.
The soldier did not answer, he did not rise, he lay motionless and
hideous like a beast. Then I caught sight of his left ankle, enormously
swollen and wrapped in rags, and his hands--they were thin as sticks.
The man was helpless, and he was starving.
And now came a strange thing. We two walked slowly around the man on
the ground as if he were a wild creature caught in a snare. We felt no
pity or astonishment; only curiosity. Utterly unemotionally we took
note of him and his surroundings. He had no gun, no knife, and no
blankets. He lay on some broken boughs, and he seemed to have covered
himself with boughs at night. The wild, haggard eyes turned in their
sockets and watched us as we moved, but otherwise no part of the man
stirred. He seemed transfixed, frozen in an agony of fear and horror.
"Ashes! He has had a fire here, monsieur, but it was days ago." At the
man's feet the Baas had discovered the remnants of a little fire. "Holy
blue!" he added in astonishment, "he has eaten these!"
A pile of small green twigs lay near the fire. The bark had been chewed
from them!
A buzzing swarm of flies, disturbed by our investigations, rotated in
the air, and a faint, bad odor hung about the place, indescribably
stale and filthy.
At the end of our search we turned again to the man on the ground.
"Who are you? What are you doing here?" I demanded again. There was no
answer. "Baas, have you a flask?"
The old man slowly drew a little leather-clad bottle from his breast
pocket and passed it to me in silence. He offered it with obvious
reluctance, and watched jealously as I knelt and dropped a little
stream of liquid between the parted lips of the creature on the ground.
The man's lips sucked inward, his throat choked at the raw liquor,
he opened his mouth wide and gasped horribly for breath, his knees
twitched, and his wrists trembled as if he were dying. Then the parched
mouth tried to form words; it could only grimace.
For a moment I felt a mad impulse to leap on that moving mouth and
crush it into stillness; such an impulse as makes a hunter wring the
neck of a wounded bird. Instead, I continued dropping the stinging
liquor and listening.
Then came the first word. "More!" the black lips begged, and I emptied
the flask into them. The Baas sighed plaintively. "German?" the soldier
whispered.
"No. American," I answered.
"The other one?"
"Belgian."
The frightened eyes closed in evident relief. The man seemed to sleep.
"But you?" I asked.
"I'm German--a soldier," he said.
"Lost?"
"Missing." He used the German word _vermisst_--the word employed in the
official lists of losses to designate the wounded or dead who are not
recovered, and those lost by capture or desertion.
"You understand, Baas?"
"No, monsieur."
"He says he is a German soldier--a deserter, I suppose, trying to make
his way over the frontier to Holland. And he is starving."
The Baas's face became a battle-ground of emotions. His kindly eyes
glared merrily, his lips twisted until his beard seemed to spread
to twice its natural width. Instantly his face became grave again,
then puzzled, even anxious. A stream of invective and imprecation in
mingled French and Flemish poured from his troubled lips, and he
stamped his feet vigorously.
"He can't stay here," I concluded.
"It is death to help him," said the Baas.
"For you, yes; for me, no. The Germans can only disgrace me as a member
of the Relief Commission. They cannot kill me."
"He must not be left to die here, monsieur."
"The Germans will probably search your house if we take him there."
"He may betray us if we help him."
"That is possible. But you see he is very weak--almost dead."
"He may be a spy."
"That again is possible. But see! He has eaten twigs!"
"He is a damned pig of a German!"
"But you do not feed even pigs on sticks and leaves."
"I am afraid, monsieur."
"So am I, Baas. Yet you must decide, and not I. It is much more
dangerous for you than for me."