disorder; of soldiers on duty and soldiers taking their ease. The
street itself was untidy and littered as they had never seen it before;
its centre had been swept clear, so that traffic might pass unhindered,
but the sides of the road were strewn with a jetsam of fragmentary
lumber. A country cart that had lost a wheel sat clumsily in front of
the church near a jumble of broken pottery, and a chair with its legs in
the air was neighboured by trusses of straw. All down the street the
doors stood widely open--here and there a house with starred or
shattered windows looked unkempt and forlornly shabby. Beyond shivered
panes and occasional litter of damaged crockery and furniture there was
no sign of actual violence; the encounter that had taken place there--a
cavalry skirmish between retreating Belgian and advancing German--had
left few traces behind it.
The civilians of the village, with hardly an exception, were invisible.
The landlord of the cafe was serving his soldier customers, and two
labourers were unloading sacks, from a miller's dray under the eye of a
guard; and when William and Griselda had been waiting for a few minutes
an old man crossed the road hurriedly from opposite house to
house--emerging from shelter like a rabbit from its burrow and vanishing
with a swift running hobble. As for women, they saw only two--whom they
were not to forget easily.
They stood, the two women, a few yards away on the further side of the
road; almost opposite the door by which Heinz had disappeared and with
their eyes continually fixed on it. One--the elder--was stout and
grey-headed, very neatly dressed in black with a black woollen scarf on
her shoulders; her hands were folded, meeting on her breast, and every
now and then she bent her head over them while her lips moved slowly and
soundlessly. At such moments she closed her eyes, but when she lifted
her head again they turned steadily to the door. The woman who stood
beside her was taller and younger, middle-aged, upright, and angular;
she also wore a black dress, and above her sharp and yellowish features
an unbecoming black hat--a high-crowned hat with upstanding and rusty
black bows. What struck you about her at the first glance was her
extreme respectability--in the line of her lean shoulders, in the
dowdily conventional hat; at a second, the fact that her mouth was a
line, so tightly were her lips compressed. She also stood with her eyes
fixed on the door. William and Griselda looked at the pair curiously; it
was odd and uncomfortable to see them standing at the side of the road,
their clothes dusted by passing cars, not moving or speaking to each
other.
For the rest, from end to end of the street there were only soldiers in
sight. Soldiers taking their noisy ease at the tables outside the
cafe--any number of them crowded round the little green tables while the
sweating landlord ran to and fro with a jug or a tray of glasses and an
obvious desire to propitiate. Other soldiers, less noisy, led a string
of horses to water; and a rigid file of them with rifles grounded, was
drawn up on the further side of the street not far from the waiting
women; some ten or a dozen of motionless helmeted automata, with a young
officer, a ruddy-faced boy, pacing up and down the road in front of
them. Through a gap in the row of white houses William and Griselda saw
another group of men in their shirt-sleeves at work on the railway
line--the line that should have taken them to Brussels; they seemed to
be repairing some damage to the permanent way; and further down the
village two or three soldier mechanics were busied inquisitively at the
bonnet of a heavy grey car drawn up at the side of the road. While they
waited and watched other heavy grey cars of the same pattern rumbled
into the street and along it; and motor cycles one after another hooted
and clanked past them to vanish in a smothering trail of dust.
In after days William tried vainly to recall what he felt and thought in
the long hot minutes while they waited for Heinz to reappear and for
something to happen. He supposed that it was the fiercer sensations of
the time that followed which deadened the impressions of the half-hour
or so during which they stood in the sunny street expecting they knew
not what; and though he remembered, and remembered vividly, the outward
show and manner of the place--its dusty road, its swarming soldiers, its
passing cars and cycles and the bearing of the two silent women--the
memory brought with it no hint of his accompanying attitude of mind.
All he knew was that he had not been seriously alarmed.... He might
have recalled his impressions with more success had he and Griselda
discussed at the time their new and surprising experiences; but an
attempt to enter into conversation was promptly checked by one of their
attendant guards. What he actually said was unintelligible, but his
manner conveyed his meaning and thereafter the captives considered their
situation in silence.
He did not know how long it was before the hostages came out into the
street; but he remembered--it was his first distinct memory of a vivid
personal impression--the instantaneous thrill of relief and excitement
with which, after their dreary wait, he saw the first signs of movement
at the sentry-guarded door. A man--a soldier--came out swiftly and went
to the boy-officer, who thereupon stopped his pacing; there was a
clicking of heels, a salute and a message rapidly delivered; the
boy-officer turned and shouted to his men and, his men moved at the
word, their rifles going to their shoulders, as if by the impulse of one
will. William's eye was caught and held by the oiled swiftness, the
mechanical simultaneousness of the movement; he stared at the line of
uniforms, now rigidly inactive again, till a hand from behind gripped
his collar and impelled him urgently sideways. One of his captors had
adopted this simple method of informing him that way must be made for
those about to issue from the door of the sentry-guarded house. He
choked angrily and brought up against the wall--to which Griselda,
taking warning, had hastily backed herself. He was still gasping when
the little procession came out; a soldier leading it, a couple more with
bayonets fixed--two civilians walking together--a couple more soldiers
with bayonets fixed and last of all an officer, a fattish, youngish,
moustachioed man whom the sentries stiffened to salute. He came a
little behind his men, paused on the step and stood there framed in the
doorway with his hand resting on his sword, the embodiment of conscious
authority; the others, the two civilians and their guard, went on to the
middle of the road. There, in the middle of the road, they also
halted--the soldiers smartly, the captives uncertainly--and William saw
the two civilians clearly.
One was a short and rotund little man who might have been sixty to
sixty-five and might have been a local tradesman--nearly bald and with
drooping moustaches, rather like a stout little seal. Essentially an
ordinary and unpretentious creature, he was obviously aiming at dignity;
his chin was lifted at an angle that revealed the measure of the roll of
fat that rested on his collar, and he walked almost with a strut, as if
he were attempting to march. Afterwards William remembered that he had
seen on the little man's portly stomach some sort of insignia or ribbon;
at the time it conveyed nothing to him, but he was told later that it
was the outward token of a mayor. He remembered also that the little
man's face was pale, with a sickly yellow-grey pallor; and that as he
came down the steps with his head held up the drooping moustache
quivered and the fat chin beneath it twitched spasmodically. There was
something extraordinarily pitiful about his attempt at a personal
dignity which nature had wholly denied him; William felt the appeal in
it even before he grasped the situation the meaning and need of the
pose.
The man who walked on his left hand was taller and some years
younger--middle-aged, slightly stooping and with slightly grizzled hair
and beard. He belonged to an ordinary sedentary type, and William,
thinking him over later, was inclined to set him down a schoolmaster, or
perhaps a clerk. He wore steel-rimmed eye-glasses and his black coat was
shiny on the back and at the elbows; he had none of his fellow's
pomposity, and walked dragging his feet and with his eyes bent on the
ground. He raised them only when, as they halted in the middle of the
road, the respectable woman in black called out something--one word,
perhaps his name--came up to him and caught him by the shoulder. He
answered her quickly and very briefly--with hardly more than a word--and
for a second or two after he had spoken she stood quite still, with her
hand resting on his shoulder. Then, suddenly, her sallow face
contorted, her thin mouth writhed and from it there came a cry that was
too fierce to be called a groan and too hoarse to be called a scream;
she flung herself forward on the neck of the grizzled man and her lean
black arms went round it. He tried to speak to her again, but she
silenced him by drawing down his head to her breast; she held it to her
breast and pressed it there; she rocked and swayed a little from side to
side, fondling the grizzled hair and kissing it to a stream of broken
endearment. Her grief was animal, alike in its unrestraint and its
terrible power of expression; convention fell away from her; in her tidy
dress and with her dowdy hat slipping to one shoulder she was primitive
woman crooning over her dying mate.... When she was seized and drawn
away from her man, her curved fingers clung to his garments. Two
soldiers held her and she writhed between them choking out a hoarse
incoherent appeal to the officer standing in the frame of the doorway
with his hand on the hilt of his sword; she went on crying herself
hoarser as her captors urged her further down the street and at last, in
mercy to those who looked on, out of sight through an open doorway.
William had his hands to his ears when the door shut. No one, in spite
of the persistence of her cries, came out into the street to inquire the
cause of her grief; but it seemed to William afterwards that he had been
aware here and there of furtive faces that appeared at upper windows.
While they forced the dowdy woman away from him her man stood
motionless, turned away from her with his head bent and his eyes on the
ground, so that he started when a soldier came up behind him and tapped
him sharply on the arm. The soldier--he had stripes on his sleeve and
seemed a person of authority--held a handkerchief dangling from his
hand; and, seeing it, the grizzled-haired captive removed his
steel-rimmed eyeglasses.
"Don't look," said William under his breath. "Griselda, don't look."
For the first time mortal fear had seized him by the throat and shaken
him. He knew now that he stood before death itself, and the power to
inflict death, and his heart was as water within him. His wife was
beside him--and when he realized (as he did later on with shame) that
the spasm of terror in those first moments of comprehension had been
stronger than the spasm of pity, he excused it by the fact of her
presence. His fear in its forecast of evil took tangible shape.
Griselda at his elbow had her eyes and her mouth wide open; she was
engrossed, fascinated--and he was afraid, most horribly afraid, that in
her amazement, her righteous pity, she might say or do something that
would bring down wrath upon them. He remembered how bold she had been
in the face of a crowd, how uplifted by sacred enthusiasm! ... He
plucked her by the sleeve when he whispered to her not to look--but she
went on staring, wide-eyed and wide-mouthed, for the first time
unresponsive to his touch and the sound of his voice.
They bandaged the eyes of the two prisoners--the rotund pompous little
mayor and the man who might have been a schoolmaster. All his life
William remembered the look of the rotund mayor with a bandage covering
him from forehead to nose-tip and his grey moustache quivering beneath
it--a man most pitifully afraid to die, yet striving to die as the
situation demanded. And he remembered how, at the moment the bandage
was knotted on the mayor's head, there stepped up to him quietly the
stout old woman who had stood praying on the further side of the road
with her eyes fixed upon the door. She held up a little crucifix and
pressed it to the quivering grey moustache.... Griselda clutched William
by the wrist and he thought she was going to cry out.
"Don't, darling, don't!" he whispered. "Oh, darling, for both our
sakes!" ...
He did not know whether it was his appeal or her own terror and
amazement that restrained her from speech--but she stood in silence with
her fingers tightened on his wrist. He wished she would look away, he
wished he could look away himself; he tried for an instant to close his
eyes, but the not-seeing was worse than sight, and he had to open them
again. As he opened them a car roared by raising a smother of dust; but
as the cloud of its passage settled he saw that the two blindfolded men
were standing with their backs to a blank wall--a yellow-washed,
eight-foot garden wall with the boughs of a pear-tree drooping over it.
It was opposite the yellow-washed wall, across the road, that the file
of soldiers was drawn up; the captives were facing the muzzles of their
rifles and the red-faced boy-officer had stationed himself stiffly at
the farther end of the file. The dust settled and died down--and there
followed (so it seemed to William) an agony of waiting for something
that would not happen. Long beating seconds (three or four of them at
most) while two men stood upright with bandaged eyes and rifles pointed
at their hearts; long beating seconds, while a bird fluted in the
pear-tree--a whistle-note infinitely careless.... And then (thank God
for it!) a voice and a report that were as one.... The man with the
grizzled hair threw out an arm and toppled with his face in the dust;
the mayor slid sideways against the wall with the blood dribbling from
his mouth.
*CHAPTER VIII*
Fundamentally William was no more of a coward than the majority of his
fellow-men, and, put to it, he would have emulated the shivering little
mayor and tried to strut gamely to his end; it was as much sheer
bewildered amazement as the baseness of bodily terror that had him by
the throat when he saw the hostages done to death--sickening and shaking
him and, for the moment, depriving him of self-control. Never before,
in all his twenty-eight years, had he seen a man come to his end; so far
death had touched him only once, and but slightly, by the unseen passing
of a mother he had not loved; thus the spectacle of violent and bloody
dying would of itself have sufficed to unnerve and unman him. To the
natural shrinking from that spectacle, to his natural horror at the
slaying of helpless men, to his pity and physical nausea was added the
impotent, gasping confusion of the man whose faith has been uprooted,
who is face to face with the incredible. Before his eyes had been
enacted the impossible--the ugly and brutal impossible--and beneath his
feet the foundations of the earth were reeling. The iron-mouthed guns
and the marching columns which had hitherto passed him as a dusty
pageant took life and meaning in his eyes; they were instruments of the
ugly impossible. There was meaning too in the lonely grave and in the
lonely house--whence men had fled in terror of such scenes as his eyes
had witnessed. So far, to him, the limit of human savagery had been the
feeding through the nose of divers young women who, infected with the
virus of martyrdom, demanded to be left to die--and now he had witnessed
the killing of men who desired most greatly to live. At the time he did
not--because he could not--analyse either the elements of the situation
or his own attitude towards it; but he knew afterwards, vaguely but
surely, that in that one bewildering and ruthless moment the heart of
his faith was uprooted--his faith in that large vague entity the People,
in the power of Public Opinion and Talk, in the power of the Good
Intention.... Until that moment he had confounded the blunder with the
crime, the mistaken with the evilly intentioned. It had not seemed to
him possible that a man could disagree with him honestly and out of the
core of his heart; it had not seemed to him possible that the righteous
could be righteous and yet err. He knew now, as by lightning flash,
that he, Faraday, a thousand others, throwing scorn from a thousand
platforms on the idea of a European War, had been madly, wildly,
ridiculously wrong--and the knowledge stunned and blinded him. They had
meant so well, they had meant so exceedingly well--and yet they had
prophesied falsely and fact had given them the lie. Until that moment he
had been in what he called politics the counterpart of the Christian
Scientist, despising and denying the evil that now laughed triumphant in
his face. With its triumph perforce he was converted. War was: men
were shot against walls. Converted, though as yet he knew not to what
form of unknown faith.
He did not see what became of the two dead bodies--whither they were
taken or by whom they were buried--for they had barely fallen to the
ground and his eyes were still closed that he might not look on the
blood that was dribbling from the mayor's moustache when a hand tapped
him smartly on the shoulder and he found Heinz standing beside him. He
had a glimpse of men moving round the bodies, a glimpse of his wife's
face staring and sickly, another of a passing motor-cycle, and then
Heinz turned him to the door where the sentries stood on guard. With
his captor's hand on his shoulder he went into the low white house,
along a little passage on the ground floor and into a room on the right,
at the back of the house; Griselda coming after him, still staring and
white-faced and likewise with a hand on her shoulder. In the
room--large and sunny with windows looking on to a garden--was a man in
uniform and spectacles writing at a table, and, erect and complacent
beside him, the fattish moustachioed officer who had watched the
execution from the doorstep. He was lighting a cigar with a hand that
did not tremble. William and Griselda were escorted by their guards
into the middle of the room and planted there, standing in front of him.
After what he had seen, and with the memory of Heinz's threats, William
Tully believed most firmly that he too was about to die; and with the
conviction there filled his heart (as it would have filled the heart of
any honest lover) a great and intolerable pity for Griselda, his
new-made wife. She, the woman, would be left where he, the man, would
be taken--and he dared not turn his head towards her lest he might see
her face instinct with the agony of the coming parting, lest, foreseeing
and resisting it, she should fling her arms about him and croon over him
as the sallow-faced woman in respectable black had crooned over the head
of her man. Her meanings, the meanings of a woman unknown, had torn at
his inmost heart; how should he bear it when Griselda, his darling,
clung fast to him and cried in vain for pity? ... That he might not see
Griselda's face even with the tail of an eye he stared hard and steadily
over the officer's shoulder. He never forgot the wall-paper beyond the
well-filled grey uniform; it was dingy mud and orange as to ground with
a ponderous pattern of clumped and climbing vegetables. In one spot,
opposite the window, where a blaze of sunlight struck it, the mud and
orange was transfigured to shining gold--and William knew suddenly that
he had never seen sunlight before. For the first time he saw it as
vivid glory from heaven--when his eyes (as he thought) would soon close
on its splendour for ever. Not only his sight but his every sense was
alert and most sharply intense; on a sudden the thudding of guns in the
distance was threateningly nearer at hand, and, in the interval between
the gun-bursts, a wasp beating up and down the window-pane filled the
room with a spiteful humming.
It was while he stood waiting for the doom he believed to be certain,
while the German captain looked him up and down and addressed curt
unintelligible questions to those who had made him their prisoner--that
there stirred in the breast of William Tully the first faint sense of
nationality. He did not recognize it as such, and it was not to be
expected that he should, since his life for the last few strenuous years
had been largely moulded on the principle that the love of one's country
was a vice to be combated and sneered at. If you had told him a short
day earlier that the thought of the soil he was born on could move and
thrill and uplift him, he would have stared and despised you as a jingo,
that most foolish and degraded of survivals; yet with his eyes (as he
thought) looking their last on the blazing gold that was sunlight, with
the sword suspended over his trembling head, something that was not only
his pitiful love for Griselda, something that was more than his decent
self-respect, fluttered and stirred within him and called on him to play
the man. It bade him straighten his back before men of an outlandish
race, it bade him refrain from pleading and weakness before those who
were not of his blood; and for the first time for many years he thought
of himself as a national, a man of the English race. Not consciously as
yet and with no definite sense of affection for England or impulse to
stand by her and serve her; but with a vague, unreasoning, natural
longing for home and the narrow things of home. It mattered not that
the England he longed for was small, suburban, crowded and noisily
pretentious; he craved for it in the face of death, as other men crave
for their spacious fenlands or the sweep of their open downs. England
as he knew her called him, not with the noisy call of yesterday, but in
a voice less strident and more tender; he knew now that it was dreadful
to die away from her. Instinctively, thinking on London, he drew
himself up to the height of his five foot five and--as the mayor had
done before him--he lifted his chin in would-be defiance and dignity.
There--with the attempt to subdue the trembling flesh and defy brute
insolence and tyranny--the resemblance between the two men's cases
ended. For the time being William ran no risk of a violent and bloody
ending; there was no further need of an example and he had offended the
conqueror only by his poor little presence. Further--though he
expressed his enjoyment of it less noisily and emphatically than his
three subordinates had done--the humour of his prisoner's situation
appealed to Heinz's superior officer almost as much as it had appealed
to Heinz himself. He grinned perceptibly as he questioned the couple in
his somewhat halting English; chuckled audibly when they confirmed his
subordinate's statement as to their complete ignorance of the European
upheaval; and when he had elicited the fact that the hapless pair had
been spending their honeymoon in the secluded valleys of Ardennes he
removed his cigar from his moustachioed lips that he might chuckle long
and unhindered.
"Honeymoon," he repeated, his stout shoulders trembling with merriment.
"In a nice, quiet place, wiz no one to interrupt zee kissings. Never
mind--you will have a very good honeymoon with us and you will very soon
be able to go back to England. Just so soon as the Sherman Army shall
have been there. You should be very pleased that you are safe with us:
it is more dangerous to be in London."