restless Celtic spirit was the first to fall a victim to the mania
for escape. Five times he eluded his watchful guard, and five times
was recaptured, sullen and still determined, taking his punishment
of solitary confinement as a matter of course, with a purpose dogged
and unbroken. For solitary confinement in cells was no cure for the
disease: it was like malaria, once in the system it was ineradicable.
The weeks dragged on. Parcels and letters arrived from home and
conditions gradually improved, but Niall remained obsessed with his
yearning for liberty. Other men who had escaped and been recaptured
began to realise the futility of it, and the news which filtered
through the German newspapers of the turn of the tide and the
progress of the Allied forces tended to encourage them to settle down
to await developments. And one night the camp was electrified with
the announcement of the defection of Bulgaria. It was the beginning
of the end, and the star of hope shone clear in the firmament. Yet it
had no effect on Gordon Niall, for the following night he made yet
another attempt to escape.
He had thought it out carefully; and at midnight, three friends,
strenuously protesting at his foolishness, hoisted him up to the
little window of their hut which overlooked the prison yard. It was
not more than twelve yards from the wire enclosure, and within four
feet of it rose a telegraph pole. The window had been very carefully
prepared, and it did not take Niall many minutes to remove the glass,
drop the panes into the keeping of his friends below, and wriggle on
to the narrow ledge. He listened carefully, and looked up and down
the yard, white in the searching glare of the great electric lamps
which turned night into day. A high wind and a driving sleet favoured
him, for the sentry who passed shortly afterwards on his beat by the
barbed wire was walking quickly with his chin sunk in the collar of
his coat. Niall waited till he had gone, then, crouching for a moment
on the window ledge, he sprang forward, clutched at the telegraph
pole, clung to it for a few seconds, then laboriously hauled himself
up to the cross-bars. Here he rested for a while and allowed the
sentry once more to pass. Then, judging that he would just have time
to reach the further pole, which was a few feet on the far side of
the wire, before the man returned, he commenced his perilous journey.
Painfully and cautiously he straddled across the wires and began
to work himself along. The swirling blasts of the strong wind more
than once almost swept him from his precarious hold, and the icy
rain numbed his cut and bleeding hands. Beneath his weight the wires
swayed and sagged ... yet he struggled on his desperate way. It was
more difficult than he had supposed, and sick, with nervous strain
and physical exhaustion, he determined to risk discovery and hang
where he was, halfway across, until the sentry passed again. The
minutes dragged, and then round the corner of the next hut the man
appeared, his shoulders hunched in the driving rain, his eyes on the
ground. Above him, clinging frantically to the wire, Niall waited,
his heart in his mouth. The man walked almost beneath him, seeing
nothing; and in a few seconds the prisoner again began to toil along
the wires. At length, almost fainting with fatigue and strain, he
clutched his goal and drew himself across the cross-bars, and waited,
panting, his heart throbbing as if it would burst, until the sentry
should repass him. He soon approached. Nearer and nearer he came. He
tramped beneath the crouching figure on the top of the telegraph
pole. Niall muttered a prayer of thankfulness for the fierce wind and
the torrential rain.
The blood suddenly roared in his ears with excitement ... the man had
stopped ... was he going to look up?... he stamped his feet for a
minute or two, then resumed his monotonous beat.
Niall quickly clutched the pole with his arms and knees and slithered
to the ground. Bending low he ran swiftly across the area illumined
by the glare from the prison yard, and found himself in the
enveloping darkness of the night.
* * * * *
The fugitive had a roughly accurate knowledge of the immediate
countryside, gained by constant observation during the occasional
walks which had been permitted the prisoners, under escort. He
purposed making for a thick wood which lay about two miles to the
westward, and there concealing himself during the following day when
the hue and cry would be in full swing. When night again came round
he would push ahead; if possible, keeping a general course to the
north-west, which, he anticipated, would in time bring him to some
point on the Dutch frontier. He had saved up a quantity of food,
which, with strict economy, he hoped might last him at a pinch for a
fortnight. If, by that time, he had not reached the frontier, things
might become awkward; but this was an eventuality too distant to be
considered at the moment.
He found himself at the outskirts of the forest an hour later, and
forged ahead through the crowding trees and thick undergrowth until
dawn broke, when he searched about for a secure hiding-place. He
resolved not to climb a tree as he felt that sleep was a necessity.
Fortune favoured him by the discovery of a large fox-hole in a dense
thicket; and down this he forced his way feet first, carefully wound
up his wrist watch, and in five minutes was fast asleep.
It was one o'clock in the afternoon when he awoke. Scarcely a sound
broke the tense silence of the wood. The rain had passed and the sun
shone clear above the trees. He ate some biscuits and a meagre slice
of tinned meat, washed his face and hands in a neighbouring stream,
made some rough calculations on a sheet of paper as to direction,
and settled down to wait for nightfall. With the advent of dusk he
again set off through the forest.
For twelve long weary days and nights he successfully eluded capture
and kept up the same monotonous round--hiding by day and pushing
ahead by night. He had been forced on many occasions to retrace his
steps or make circuitous rounds owing to coming suddenly on villages
or towns, and he had not made the progress he had resolved to make.
His food, too, he had miscalculated; and at the close of the twelfth
day he found himself with his rations at an end, and hopelessly
befogged as to his whereabouts. For another day and night he held out
bravely, and then narrowly avoided detection in a fruitless attempt
to steal a chicken from a farmyard. At the expiry of a fortnight he
was starving and in the throes of a fever.
He came to a final decision. He would start again at dusk and press
on. If by daylight there was no sign of the frontier he would give
himself up. There was nothing else for it. He was in desperate
straits: his clothes were torn to rags and he was almost overcome by
the fierce grip of the fever that was rapidly consuming his little
remaining strength. He had given up all hope of winning to the haven
of neutral territory; it might not be far away, perhaps, but his
power of endurance was at an end. However, he would forge ahead that
night, whatever happened.
As soon as darkness rendered it safe he emerged from his concealment
and struck westward along the edge of a rough country road. For hours
he toiled along meeting with nobody, but making poor progress. He
was becoming light-headed, and he lurched heavily as he walked. At
intervals he burned and shivered and sweated fiercely. Time and again
he fell on his face, but on each occasion he staggered to his feet
and struggled ahead.
The night wore on, and through the clouds on the eastern skyline
a palish light began to filter. The skies grew dull grey and then
softer like the wing of a dove. Over the fields and hedgerows the
luminous glow grew clearer as the wheels of the Dawn rolled on,
touching the bare branches of the trees and silvering the green
stagnant water in the ditch, by whose edge reeled and pitched an
exhausted atom of humanity.
Niall raised his bloodshot eyes to the heavens.
"Well, this is the end of it," he muttered, "and probably the end of
me too. I don't mind ... it's been a good effort, and I'm so tired
... my God, how tired I am!"
A hundred yards ahead a high wall began, evidently the bound of
some large country residence, and not much further on was a small
iron gate. Inside, a footpath led winding among the trees of a wide
parkland. With shaking hands Niall unlatched the gate and followed
the path. He could not see now where he was going: a red mist hung
like a veil before his eyes. Once he ran against a tree, striking his
head violently against the trunk. Dazedly he raised his hand to his
forehead and felt it wet.... Shortly afterwards he reached the end of
the parkland. Things grew clearer again, and he saw before him, not
three hundred yards away, the grey battlemented towers of a stately
castle. For a few moments he stared at it in a fuddled manner, then
he collapsed into a ditch full of rotting leaves.
* * * * *
When he regained consciousness it was night. He must have lain there
all day. Slowly past events came back to him, and he raised himself
with difficulty on his elbow and looked at the winking lights in
the castle windows. The fever did not trouble him now: all he was
conscious of was a fierce, overpowering craving for food and warmth
and rest. The twinkle of the lights called to him. It was a German
house, certainly, but he would get something to eat there, and they
would let him rest--how he wanted rest! His thoughts flew back to his
home in the distant western isles. Would they be thinking of him?
he wondered. Thank God, they couldn't see him now. His mother, and
Eileen his sister ... they would be in the old library where they
always sat at night, that vast stone-walled room above the cliff
where the moaning of the sea rose eternally. And his father would be
asleep in the red leather chair by the gun-room fire. He smiled as
the vision rose before him. Would he ever see it again? Great God,
why did men want to kill one another?...
His rambling thoughts switched off in another direction ... if they
could see him now, perhaps his old father would go to the glass case
on the library wall, take from its resting place the black chanter,
and blow on it for the last time! He laughed hoarsely--a good joke
that! Delirious and cracked, his voice suddenly croaked forth the
weird notes of the black chanter's tune. Horrible and broken it rose
on the still night air.
In a few moments the delirium passed, and with a mighty effort he got
on his hands and knees. Painfully and slowly he began to crawl across
the damp grass of the park towards the shadowy mass of the silent
castle.
"They'll give me food," he gasped ... "and let me rest."
IV
The Countess von Behr sat in a deep chair by the open fireplace
of her boudoir in the Schloss Bersenburg. On the white marble
mantelshelf a painted china clock pointed to a quarter past eleven.
The luxuriously furnished room was in deep shadow, the only light
coming from two massive silver candelabra upon the grand piano in a
recess by the window. The flickering glow from the red embers lit up
fitfully the face of the woman who gazed abstractedly into the fire.
Four years of mental strain and suffering had left their mark on
Helene von Behr, for there were lines about her eyes and her mouth
had grown harder. These years had fallen with tragic weight upon
the shoulders of the exiled girl, doomed by the exigencies of the
times to live alone in this vast gloomy house, her heart in bleeding
France, her body in a country which by hereditary instinct she
had always disliked, but now hated with all the intensity of her
passionate southern heart. So she had dragged out her solitary days
in the seclusion of the Schloss, one of that vast multitude, young in
years but old in suffering, whose souls have been ruthlessly crushed
beneath the iron wheels of the chariots of war.
The Count had been keenly alive to the delicacy of his domestic
situation, and from the outbreak of hostilities, though he had
been almost constantly resident in Berlin owing to his important
connection with the Foreign Office, he had deemed it the prudent
course to leave his French wife in the solitariness of his country
home; a policy which saved both himself and her from inevitable
embarrassments which might at once prove detrimental to the interests
of the one, and intolerable to the other.
The unutterable agony of the weary months in a position which was
both false and horrible to her, conscious as she could not fail to
be of the veiled contempt and cleverly concealed hostility of her
servants, and the less disguised dislike of her few neighbours, had
told heavily upon the lonely woman. Two months ago things had become
almost insufferable when the news came that the Vicomte de Fontaigne
had been laid in a soldier's grave. To fight for the Republic was
one thing, but to fight for France was quite another: and so, at the
hour of crisis, like the rest of his order, the haughty nobleman
had put his politics in his pocket and offered his services to the
Govermnent. The grief of her father's death, borne alone, friendless
and exiled, had almost crushed Helene. Yet it seemed as if her
perplexities were never to end: for that very afternoon a telegram
had come intimating in crude staring words, that the Count von Behr
had been shot dead in the Wilhelmstrasse while endeavouring from a
window to appease a revolutionary mob.
She had tried to analyse her feelings when the news was conveyed to
her. She had never loved him, but in his own blunt way he had been
kind and considerate to her; and the sudden tears which she shed were
from the heart, for she sincerely regretted his death. Yet despite
this fact she could not stifle the insistent thought that she was
free--free to go back to France and to the Chateau Fontaigne, that
pearl of her soul, when this holocaust of death was past and over;
a thought rendered doubly moving by the knowledge that the dawn was
already breaking! She had often wondered what it would be like in the
future for a child of France to be wedded for ever to a German.
As she sat before the fire she felt restless and ill at ease. Her
jumbled thoughts refused to be focussed on any one aspect of her
affairs. She felt something strange in the atmosphere, something that
oppressed her. It seemed in the air, it was all around, real yet
indefinable. Time and again she looked round half nervously as if
expecting to find someone in the room with her....
She settled deeper into her chair and listlessly watched a morsel
that fell red from the fire ... it grew pink and then grey. It still
smoked a little, then died. As the lonely woman stared into the
embers there suddenly rose before her a boyish face, so clear and
vivid that she was startled by it. There was pain in the eyes that
looked at her, pain and dull weariness, and the dumb suffering of
a yearning spirit. Helene shivered.... How often during these last
years had that face risen before her, and the sunlight and happiness
of ten brief days in a deserted Lucerne had fallen on her tired heart
like the dew of heaven. She had never forgotten him--how could she?
She had wondered so often where he was. She knew he was not dead: for
he was first in that list of names which she had given to a friend
in Berne, desiring him to keep her acquainted with their fortunes.
She often thought, had she done wrong that night when she kissed his
young mouth? But it didn't really matter, after all: she had done
him no harm, and long ago he would have forgotten her. Men forgot so
quickly. For his own sake she hoped he had: yet--in spite of herself
she prayed that he hadn't. And as she looked ahead, to-night, to
her coming liberty, she wondered.... But the face in the fire made
her uneasy. A queer tune throbbed in her head--his tune! She had
heard it in her thoughts all night; wild, unrhythmical, it seemed
to have vibrated in the stillness of the shadowy room--mysterious,
passionate, compelling. Once it had been so realistic that she had
been convinced that she actually heard it--out in the night; and she
had pulled aside the curtains and peered out into the darkness.
She stretched her arms above her head. She felt stifled: surely the
room was very hot. Rising, she moved restlessly to the window and
looked out. It was a clear, starry night; with a silver moon peeping
from behind some scudding clouds. She lingered, gazing up at the
beauty of the heavens. Then, just as she was about to let the thick
curtain drop, suddenly, muffled yet distinct, she heard a man's voice
rise on the night air. It cried one English word--"Help!"
For a minute she stood startled and irresolute, then she flung open
the window. Below, on the white of the wide gravel sweep, she could
dimly see a dark form lying stretched before the massive steps of the
doorway. She leaned over the edge and called. No answer came. She
drew back into the room and touched the electric bell. A few seconds
later, an old sleepy-eyed footman appeared, their last remaining
manservant.
"Quick," she cried, "there is a man lying outside on the gravel. I
think he is dead. Get some help and bring him into the hall. I'll
come down myself immediately."
The man bowed solemnly and withdrew; and when five minutes later
she descended the broad oak staircase, Helene saw an excited knot
of servants depositing a human burden on the great fur rug before
the cavernous hall fireplace. She approached and looked down upon
the form of a man, little more than a skeleton, his clothes ragged
and smeared with filth, his thin sunken face bearded and dirty. The
cluster of servants stared at him open-mouthed.
The sick man moved an arm. He drowsily muttered a few words; feebly,
but Helene and the domestics heard them:
"Must be near the frontier now.... Thank God!"
"English," said the old footman resentfully, but a quick look from
his mistress silenced any further remark. She despatched the man for
the local doctor and sent the women for blankets, hot water, brandy,
pillows; and she herself knelt by the miserable creature and gently
loosened his ragged collar. The emaciated face recalled nothing to
her as she looked--but, a few seconds later, Gordon Niall opened
his eyes, and, trembling like an aspen leaf, and white to the lips,
Helene von Behr recognised him.
"Mother of God!" she gasped.
The floodgates of memory opened and the great waters poured over
her soul. She felt the walls and the floor of the vast gloomy hall
reeling about her; but, with an almost superhuman effort of will, she
regained her composure, and met the eyes that looked into her ashen
face with a look of wonder and amazement. The fever seemed to have
left him, and for the moment Niall was perfectly conscious. She bent
down and pillowed his head on her arm.
"Helene," he whispered, "is it you?... where am I?"
"It's all right, dear," she said soothingly. "You're quite safe.
Don't speak--you must rest."
The servants returned and Niall was made as comfortable as possible.
Helene thought rapidly. At all costs she must be alone with him for
a time. She dismissed the whispering women upon various errands.
Yes, she said to their enquiries, she would stay with him till they
returned.
When they were alone Niall looked up.
"I escaped, you know," he said weakly. "I've had an awful time--but
I'm safe now, Helene, am I not?... across the frontier, eh?"
"Yes, yes, my Gordon," she answered, smoothing back his matted hair,
"you're across the frontier, and you'll soon be well." She almost
choked as she remembered that the frontier was only five miles away.
He sighed contentedly and closed his eyes. For a while he lay very
still; then he spoke, with difficulty.
"My left tunic pocket," he gasped, "feel in it, Helene ... that's
right ... now, open that flap."
From the tattered leather pocket-book she pulled out a dried withered
flower. His eyes gleamed as he saw it. He turned his face to her.
"Your rose," he whispered--"at Lucerne, you know."
A severe fit of shivering seized him. His eyes closed. From the
corners of his mouth two thin rivulets of blood began to trickle ...
he opened his eyes.
"Helene," he muttered spasmodically, "Helene--the frontier ... I must
get across the frontier ... before the morning."
The end was near and she knew it. With her left hand she extracted
from her bosom a little gold crucifix and held it before the dying
eyes. In a voice, choked with emotion, she said in his ear,
"Say after me, my Gordon ... 'Jesu, have mercy!'"
"_Jesu--have--mercy!_"
"Now, and in the hour of death"--
"_Now, and--in--the hour of--death_"--
"Have mercy on me, a sinner!"
"_Have mercy--on--me--a sinner!_"--
He shivered as in a blast of icy wind, then smiled like a tired child
and nestled his head against her breast. And very quietly he crossed
the silent frontier of that shadowy country, whence no traveller
returns.
* * * * *
The servants were clustered about her, and the stout village doctor
was bending over the thin body stretched on the fur rug; but Helene,
her head bowed, neither looked up nor spoke....
THE PIPES
BY EDMUND CANDLER
On Christmas night the pipers came into the mess. They had piped
the regiment across many a hot place in France and escorted bombing
parties down many a German trench. In one action four out of the
eight were hit and two killed. They touch a chord deep down somewhere
which no doubt has its proper scientific name. The eye of the piper
which conceals his gladness, denying all rapture, is a key to the
undemonstrative temper of the men who would rather die than throw up
their bonnets and shout.
A subaltern of nineteen years put the case for the pipes to me in his
own eloquent slang.
"Of course I get cold feet sometimes" he said, "like everyone else.
But the pipes soon warm one. MacFarlane, the Company Piper, piped us
across on the 25th, the regimental slogan, you know. By Jove, it was
top-hole."
We called him the Chicken. Being bigger in the beam than in the
shoulders and having a slightly forward stoop he looked in his kilt
like a preternaturally large nestling just emerged from the egg. To
see him walking reminded one of a determined young chicken. He had an
assurance unnatural in the new-born which set off his callowness and
puzzled one. It was not side. To hear him talk made one smile. You
would think he had plumbed experience and was already convinced about
the main issues of life, celibacy or marriage, the rights and wrongs
of Demos, peace and war, and the like. One smiled in sympathy, not
in derision, accepting the indisputable explanation that the Chicken
had had special privileges in the egg. And one thanked the war for an
ingenuousness of speech, the bloom of which would have been rubbed
off in a week of peace-time conditions in a mess.
"MacFarlane was killed with a bombing party," the subaltern went on.
"They let hell loose,--all their machine guns, rifle grenades, trench
mortars, and every rifle thirty rounds at least. Our fellows came in
half an hour afterwards, having been snug in a shell-hole through the
whole show. Only two of our men were hit--by a trench mortar. One was
MacFarlane. It was a horrid sight--made me feel a bit green. Nothing
was left of them, and you couldn't tell who they were save by their
identity discs. I put a sentry by the traverse on both sides and gave
orders that no one was to pass. It wouldn't have done for these young
recruits to see the mess," this pink-faced subaltern of nineteen
explained with paternal solicitude.
His tenderness for the recruits amused me, for the absence of down
on his chin made the Chicken look younger than his years. But I
marvelled more at the complacency with which he found himself in
command. He spoke of his blooded veterans--Perthshires, if you
please, the salt of the British Army, as if he were a huntsman
holding them in the leash; yet it was only in spirit that he had
attained to man's estate. One phrase struck me. He was describing the
capture of Hun murderers, or if not actual murderers the comrades and
accomplices of murderers, men whom his Highlanders wanted to kill.