"THEY SHALL NOT PASS"
One cold grey morning in February Gertrude Oliver wakened with a
shiver, slipped into Rilla's room, and crept in beside her.
"Rilla--I'm frightened--frightened as a baby--I've had another of my
strange dreams. Something terrible is before us--I know."
"What was it?" asked Rilla.
"I was standing again on the veranda steps--just as I stood in that
dream on the night before the lighthouse dance, and in the sky a huge
black, menacing thunder cloud rolled up from the east. I could see its
shadow racing before it and when it enveloped me I shivered with icy
cold. Then the storm broke--and it was a dreadful storm--blinding flash
after flash and deafening peal after peal, driving torrents of rain. I
turned in panic and tried to run for shelter, and as I did so a man--a
soldier in the uniform of a French army officer--dashed up the steps
and stood beside me on the threshold of the door. His clothes were
soaked with blood from a wound in his breast, he seemed spent and
exhausted; but his white face was set and his eyes blazed in his hollow
face. 'They shall not pass,' he said, in low, passionate tones which I
heard distinctly amid all the turmoil of the storm. Then I awakened.
Rilla, I'm frightened--the spring will not bring the Big Push we've all
been hoping for--instead it is going to bring some dreadful blow to
France. I am sure of it. The Germans will try to smash through
somewhere."
"But he told you that they would not pass," said Rilla, seriously. She
never laughed at Gertrude's dreams as the doctor did.
"I do not know if that was prophecy or desperation, Rilla, the horror
of that dream holds me yet in an icy grip. We shall need all our
courage before long."
Dr. Blythe did laugh at the breakfast table--but he never laughed at
Miss Oliver's dreams again; for that day brought news of the opening of
the Verdun offensive, and thereafter through all the beautiful weeks of
spring the Ingleside family, one and all, lived in a trance of dread.
There were days when they waited in despair for the end as foot by foot
the Germans crept nearer and nearer to the grim barrier of desperate
France.
Susan's deeds were in her spotless kitchen at Ingleside, but her
thoughts were on the hills around Verdun. "Mrs. Dr. dear," she would
stick her head in at Mrs. Blythe's door the last thing at night to
remark, "I do hope the French have hung onto the Crow's Wood today,"
and she woke at dawn to wonder if Dead Man's Hill--surely named by some
prophet--was still held by the "poyloos." Susan could have drawn a map
of the country around Verdun that would have satisfied a chief of staff.
"If the Germans capture Verdun the spirit of France will be broken,"
Miss Oliver said bitterly.
"But they will not capture it," staunchly said Susan, who could not eat
her dinner that day for fear lest they do that very thing. "In the
first place, you dreamed they would not--you dreamed the very thing the
French are saying before they ever said it--'they shall not pass.' I
declare to you, Miss Oliver, dear, when I read that in the paper, and
remembered your dream, I went cold all over with awe. It seemed to me
like Biblical times when people dreamed things like that quite
frequently.
"I know--I know," said Gertrude, walking restlessly about. "I cling to
a persistent faith in my dream, too--but every time bad news comes it
fails me. Then I tell myself 'mere coincidence'--'subconscious memory'
and so forth."
"I do not see how any memory could remember a thing before it was ever
said at all," persisted Susan, "though of course I am not educated like
you and the doctor. I would rather not be, if it makes anything as
simple as that so hard to believe. But in any case we need not worry
over Verdun, even if the Huns get it. Joffre says it has no military
significance."
"That old sop of comfort has been served up too often already when
reverses came," retorted Gertrude. "It has lost its power to charm."
"Was there ever a battle like this in the world before?" said Mr.
Meredith, one evening in mid-April.
"It's such a titanic thing we can't grasp it," said the doctor. "What
were the scraps of a few Homeric handfuls compared to this? The whole
Trojan war might be fought around a Verdun fort and a newspaper
correspondent would give it no more than a sentence. I am not in the
confidence of the occult powers"--the doctor threw Gertrude a
twinkle--"but I have a hunch that the fate of the whole war hangs on
the issue of Verdun. As Susan and Joffre say, it has no real military
significance; but it has the tremendous significance of an Idea. If
Germany wins there she will win the war. If she loses, the tide will
set against her."
"Lose she will," said Mr. Meredith: emphatically. "The Idea cannot be
conquered. France is certainly very wonderful. It seems to me that in
her I see the white form of civilization making a determined stand
against the black powers of barbarism. I think our whole world realizes
this and that is why we all await the issue so breathlessly. It isn't
merely the question of a few forts changing hands or a few miles of
blood-soaked ground lost and won."
"I wonder," said Gertrude dreamily, "if some great blessing, great
enough for the price, will be the meed of all our pain? Is the agony in
which the world is shuddering the birth-pang of some wondrous new era?
Or is it merely a futile
struggle of ants
In the gleam of a million million of suns?
We think very lightly, Mr. Meredith, of a calamity which destroys an
ant-hill and half its inhabitants. Does the Power that runs the
universe think us of more importance than we think ants?"
"You forget," said Mr. Meredith, with a flash of his dark eyes, "that
an infinite Power must be infinitely little as well as infinitely
great. We are neither, therefore there are things too little as well as
too great for us to apprehend. To the infinitely little an ant is of as
much importance as a mastodon. We are witnessing the birth-pangs of a
new era--but it will be born a feeble, wailing life like everything
else. I am not one of those who expect a new heaven and a new earth as
the immediate result of this war. That is not the way God works. But
work He does, Miss Oliver, and in the end His purpose will be
fulfilled."
"Sound and orthodox--sound and orthodox," muttered Susan approvingly in
the kitchen. Susan liked to see Miss Oliver sat upon by the minister
now and then. Susan was very fond of her but she thought Miss Oliver
liked saying heretical things to ministers far too well, and deserved
an occasional reminder that these matters were quite beyond her
province.
In May Walter wrote home that he had been awarded a D.C. Medal. He did
not say what for, but the other boys took care that the Glen should
know the brave thing Walter had done. "In any war but this," wrote
Jerry Meredith, "it would have meant a V.C. But they can't make V.C.'s
as common as the brave things done every day here."
"He should have had the V.C.," said Susan, and was very indignant over
it. She was not quite sure who was to blame for his not getting it, but
if it were General Haig she began for the first time to entertain
serious doubts as to his fitness for being Commander-in-Chief.
Rilla was beside herself with delight. It was her dear Walter who had
done this thing--Walter, to whom someone had sent a white feather at
Redmond--it was Walter who had dashed back from the safety of the
trench to drag in a wounded comrade who had fallen on No-man's-land.
Oh, she could see his white beautiful face and wonderful eyes as he did
it! What a thing to be the sister of such a hero! And he hadn't thought
it worth while writing about. His letter was full of other
things--little intimate things that they two had known and loved
together in the dear old cloudless days of a century ago.
"I've been thinking of the daffodils in the garden at Ingleside," he
wrote. "By the time you get this they will be out, blowing there under
that lovely rosy sky. Are they really as bright and golden as ever,
Rilla? It seems to me that they must be dyed red with blood--like our
poppies here. And every whisper of spring will be falling as a violet
in Rainbow Valley.
"There is a young moon tonight--a slender, silver, lovely thing hanging
over these pits of torment. Will you see it tonight over the maple
grove?
"I'm enclosing a little scrap of verse, Rilla. I wrote it one evening
in my trench dug-out by the light of a bit of candle--or rather it came
to me there--I didn't feel as if I were writing it--something seemed to
use me as an instrument. I've had that feeling once or twice before,
but very rarely and never so strongly as this time. That was why I sent
it over to the London Spectator. It printed it and the copy came today.
I hope you'll like it. It's the only poem I've written since I came
overseas."
The poem was a short, poignant little thing. In a month it had carried
Walter's name to every corner of the globe. Everywhere it was
copied--in metropolitan dailies and little village weeklies--in
profound reviews and "agony columns," in Red Cross appeals and
Government recruiting propaganda. Mothers and sisters wept over it,
young lads thrilled to it, the whole great heart of humanity caught it
up as an epitome of all the pain and hope and pity and purpose of the
mighty conflict, crystallized in three brief immortal verses. A
Canadian lad in the Flanders trenches had written the one great poem of
the war. "The Piper," by Pte. Walter Blythe, was a classic from its
first printing.
Rilla copied it in her diary at the beginning of an entry in which she
poured out the story of the hard week that had just passed.
"It has been such a dreadful week," she wrote, "and even though it is
over and we know that it was all a mistake that does not seem to do
away with the bruises left by it. And yet it has in some ways been a
very wonderful week and I have had some glimpses of things I never
realized before--of how fine and brave people can be even in the midst
of horrible suffering. I am sure I could never be as splendid as Miss
Oliver was.
"Just a week ago today she had a letter from Mr. Grant's mother in
Charlottetown. And it told her that a cable had just come saying that
Major Robert Grant had been killed in action a few days before.
"Oh, poor Gertrude! At first she was crushed. Then after just a day she
pulled herself together and went back to her school. She did not cry--I
never saw her shed a tear--but oh, her face and her eyes!
"'I must go on with my work,' she said. 'That is my duty just now.'
"I could never have risen to such a height.
"She never spoke bitterly except once, when Susan said something about
spring being here at last, and Gertrude said,
"'Can the spring really come this year?'
"Then she laughed--such a dreadful little laugh, just as one might
laugh in the face of death, I think, and said,
"'Observe my egotism. Because I, Gertrude Oliver, have lost a friend,
it is incredible that the spring can come as usual. The spring does not
fail because of the million agonies of others--but for mine--oh, can
the universe go on?'
"'Don't feel bitter with yourself, dear,' mother said gently. 'It is a
very natural thing to feel as if things couldn't go on just the same
when some great blow has changed the world for us. We all feel like
that.'
"Then that horrid old Cousin Sophia of Susan's piped up. She was
sitting there, knitting and croaking like an old 'raven of bode and
woe' as Walter used to call her.
"'You ain't as bad off as some, Miss Oliver,' she said, 'and you
shouldn't take it so hard. There's some as has lost their husbands;
that's a hard blow; and there's some as has lost their sons. You
haven't lost either husband or son.'
"'No,' said Gertrude, more bitterly still. 'It's true I haven't lost a
husband--I have only lost the man who would have been my husband. I
have lost no son--only the sons and daughters who might have been born
to me--who will never be born to me now.'
"'It isn't ladylike to talk like that,' said Cousin Sophia in a shocked
tone; and then Gertrude laughed right out, so wildly that Cousin Sophia
was really frightened. And when poor tortured Gertrude, unable to
endure it any longer, hurried out of the room, Cousin Sophia asked
mother if the blow hadn't affected Miss Oliver's mind.
"'I suffered the loss of two good kind partners,' she said, 'but it did
not affect me like that.'
"I should think it wouldn't! Those poor men must have been thankful to
die.
"I heard Gertrude walking up and down her room most of the night. She
walked like that every night. But never so long as that night. And once
I heard her give a dreadful sudden little cry as if she had been
stabbed. I couldn't sleep for suffering with her; and I couldn't help
her. I thought the night would never end. But it did; and then 'joy
came in the morning' as the Bible says. Only it didn't come exactly in
the morning but well along in the afternoon. The telephone rang and I
answered it. It was old Mrs. Grant speaking from Charlottetown, and her
news was that it was all a mistake--Robert wasn't killed at all; he had
only been slightly wounded in the arm and was safe in the hospital out
of harm's way for a time anyhow. They hadn't learned yet how the
mistake had happened but supposed there must have been another Robert
Grant.
"I hung up the telephone and flew to Rainbow Valley. I'm sure I did
fly--I can't remember my feet ever touching the ground. I met Gertrude
on her way home from school in the glade of spruces where we used to
play, and I just gasped out the news to her. I ought to have had more
sense, of course. But I was so crazy with joy and excitement that I
never stopped to think. Gertrude just dropped there among the golden
young ferns as if she had been shot. The fright it gave me ought to
make me sensible--in this respect at least--for the rest of my life. I
thought I had killed her--I remembered that her mother had died very
suddenly from heart failure when quite a young woman. It seemed years
to me before I discovered that her heart was still beating. A pretty
time I had! I never saw anybody faint before, and I knew there was
nobody up at the house to help, because everybody else had gone to the
station to meet Di and Nan coming home from Redmond. But I
knew--theoretically--how people in a faint should be treated, and now I
know it practically. Luckily the brook was handy, and after I had
worked frantically over her for a while Gertrude came back to life. She
never said one word about my news and I didn't dare to refer to it
again. I helped her walk up through the maple grove and up to her room,
and then she said, 'Rob--is--living,' as if the words were torn out of
her, and flung herself on her bed and cried and cried and cried. I
never saw anyone cry so before. All the tears that she hadn't shed all
that week came then. She cried most of last night, I think, but her
face this morning looked as if she had seen a vision of some kind, and
we were all so happy that we were almost afraid.
"Di and Nan are home for a couple of weeks. Then they go back to Red
Cross work in the training camp at Kingsport. I envy them. Father says
I'm doing just as good work here, with Jims and my Junior Reds. But it
lacks the romance theirs must have.
"Kut has fallen. It was almost a relief when it did fall, we had been
dreading it so long. It crushed us flat for a day and then we picked up
and put it behind us. Cousin Sophia was as gloomy as usual and came
over and groaned that the British were losing everywhere.
"'They're good losers,' said Susan grimly. 'When they lose a thing they
keep on looking till they find it again! Anyhow, my king and country
need me now to cut potato sets for the back garden, so get you a knife
and help me, Sophia Crawford. It will divert your thoughts and keep you
from worrying over a campaign that you are not called upon to run.'
"Susan is an old brick, and the way she flattens out poor Cousin Sophia
is beautiful to behold.
"As for Verdun, the battle goes on and on, and we see-saw between hope
and fear. But I know that strange dream of Miss Oliver's foretold the
victory of France. 'They shall not pass.'"