We stared into each other's eyes, trying to guess each other's
thoughts. Every one in Belgium knows that the German army sows its
informers everywhere. We could not even trust each other in that
stricken country. Deserters and traitors were tracked down like dogs.
Any one who gave aid or comfort to such persons did so at the risk of
his life. It is said that pretended deserters deliberately trapped
Belgians into aiding them, and then betrayed their hosts. Something of
the sort was hinted in the famous case of Miss Edith Cavell. Knowledge,
then, bade us be cautious: instinct alone bade us be kind.
The Baas's wide eyes turned again to the creature on the ground, and he
sighed plaintively. "Monsieur," he began, in a very low, gentle voice,
"I will help him. Give me my flask and I will go for food and drink.
Then we must plan. Does it please you to remain here?"
"I shall stay here with him."
"Good! I will go."
I knelt beside the soldier and chafed his filthy hands until blood
flowed again in his dry veins. The swollen pupils of his heavy eyes
brightened. He talked continuously in a thin trickling whisper--a
patter of information about dinners he had eaten, wines he had drunk,
his military service, his hardships, and his physical and mental
sensations. I had read of victims of scurvy in the Arctic snows
dreaming and talking day and night of food, only of food. So it was
with the starving soldier. The liquor had made him slightly delirious,
and he babbled on and on.
His broken ankle pained him. When I moved him about to rest it, his
lightness astonished me. The man had been large and heavy; he was
shrunken to a bag of bones. His uniform hung about him like a sack, and
it seemed as if the slightest jar would snap his arms and legs. Tears
welled under his heavy, dirty eyelids. "Mother! Mother!" he whispered
once. "Art thou there? Mother!" Then as his eyes again cleared and he
saw the trees interarched above him--the trees which the Baas had told
me were one spirit; the grim, silent, sepulchral trees; the haunted,
malignant trees which had wooed him with their shelter and then broken
him and starved him; the trees beneath which his forest-dwelling
ancestors had cowered for thousands of years and to which they had
offered human sacrifices--he broke down and sobbed horribly. "She is
not here! She is not here! No, she is not here!" he repeated over and
over again.