[1] Pronounced Knock-ā-loe.
_SECOND CHAPTER_
Christmas has gone; the spring has come; the seed is in the ground;
the cattle are out on the hill after their long winter imprisonment in
the cow-houses; but the war is still going on and Robbie has not yet
returned home.
It is a bright spring morning. Mona is coming back from Peel in her
shandry when she sees three gentlemen walking over the farm with her
father, one of them in officer’s uniform, the other two in silk hats
and light overcoats.
As she turns in at the gate she sees a fourth gentleman come down from
the hillside and join them in the lane. He wears a Norfolk jacket, has
a gun under his arm and two or three dogs at his heels. Mona recognizes
the fourth gentleman as their landlord, and as she drives slowly past
she hears her father say to him:
“But what about the farm, sir, when the war is over?”
“Don’t trouble about that,” says the landlord. “You are here for life,
Robert--you and your children.”
Mona puts up her horse and goes into the house, and when the gentlemen
have gone her father comes in to her. With a halting embarrassment he
tells her what has happened. One of the gentlemen had been the Governor
of the island, the strangers had been officials from the Home Office.
“It seems the Government in London have come to your opinion, girl.”
“What’s that?” says Mona.
“That the civilian Germans must be interned.”
“Interned? What does that mean?”
“Shut up in camps to keep them out of mischief.”
“Prison camps?”
“That’s so.”
“Serve them right, the spies and sneaks! But why did the gentlemen come
here?”
“The Governor brought them. He thinks Knockaloe is the best place in
the island for an internment camp.”
Mona is aghast.
“What? Those creatures! Are we to be turned out of the farm for the
like of them?”
“Not that exactly,” says the old man, and he explains the plan that had
been proposed to him by the gentlemen from London. He and his family
are to remain in the farm-house and keep that part of the pasture land
that lies on the hill-side in order to provide the fresh milk that will
be required for the camp.
Mona is indignant.
“Do you mean that we are to work to keep alive those Germans whose
brothers are killing our boys in France? Never! Never in this world.”
Her father must refuse. Of course he must. The farm is theirs--for as
long as the lease lasts, anyway.
“Tell the Governor to find some other place for his internment camp.”
The old man explains that he has no choice. What the Government wants
in a time of war it must have.
“Very well,” says Mona; “let them have the farm and we’ll go elsewhere.”
The old man tells her that he must remain. He is practically
conscripted.
“They don’t want _me_, though, do they?”
“Well, yes, they do. They are not for having other women about the
camp, but under the circumstances they must have one woman anyway.”
“It won’t be me, then. Not likely!”
The old man pleads with the girl. Is she going to leave him alone?
“Me growing old, too, and Robbie at the war!”
At length Mona consents. She will remain for her father’s sake, but
she hates the thought of living in the midst of Germans and helping to
provide for them.
“It will be worse than being at the war--a thousand times worse.”
It is a fortnight later. Huge wagons, full of bricks and timber and
other building materials, with vast rolls of barbed wire, have been
arriving at the farm, and a multitude of bricklayers and carpenters
have been working all day long and half the night. Ugly stone-paved
paths have been cut through the green fields; the grass-grown lane
from the farm-house to the high road has been made into a broad bare
avenue; gorse-covered hedges, already beginning to bloom, have been
torn down, and long rows of hideous wooden booths have been thrown up
and then tarred and pitched on their faces and roofs. It has been like
magic--black magic, Mona calls it.
Already a large area on the left of the avenue, encompassed by double
lines of barbed wire, which look like cages for wild beasts, is ready
for occupation. It is called Compound Number One.
Mona is now the only woman on the land, the maids being dismissed, and
men and boys employed to take their places. The last of the girls to go
is a pert young thing from Peel. Her name is Liza Kinnish, and before
the war she used to make eyes at Robbie. Now that other men are to come
she wants to remain, but Mona packs her off with the rest.
It is evening. Mona hears the whistle of the last train pulling up
in the railway station, and a little later the cadenced tramp, tramp,
tramp, as of an advancing army on the high road.
It is the first of the Germans. From the door of the house she looks
at them as they come up the avenue--a long procession of men in dark
civilian clothes, marching in double file, with a thinner line of
British soldiers on either side of them. Mona shudders. She thinks they
look like a long black serpent.
Next morning from the window of her bedroom Mona sees more of them.
They are a sullen-looking lot, but generally well-dressed and with a
certain air of breeding. On going towards the cow-house she speaks to
one of the guard. He tells her they are the best she is likely to see.
Many of them are well-to-do men. Some are rich, and have been carrying
on great businesses in London and living in large houses and even
mansions. Later she hears from her father that they are grumbling about
their quarters and the food provided for them.
“Let them,” she says. “They deserve no better.”
In a half-hearted way the old man excuses them. After all they are
prisoners, cut off from their wives and children.
“Well, and what worse off are they than our men who are fighting at the
front? The hypocrites! The traitors!”
“You’re hard, woman, you’re hard,” says the old man.
It is another fortnight later. The black magic has been going on as
before, and Compound Number Two, on the right of the avenue, is ready
for occupation.
At the same hour in the evening Mona hears the tramp, tramp, tramp, as
of another army coming up the high road. It is the second company of
the Germans, and they are a hundredfold worse-looking than the first.
A coarse, dirty, brutal lot, some of them in rags--sailors, chiefly,
who have been captured at the docks in Liverpool and Glasgow and in
certain cases taken off ships at sea. But they are all in high spirits,
or pretend to be so. They come up the avenue laughing, singing and
swearing.
Mona is standing at the door to look at them. They see her, address her
with coarse pleasantries which she does not understand, and finally
make noises with their lips as if they were kissing her. She turns
indoors.
“The scum! The beasts!” she says.
“You’re hard, woman, you’re hard,” says the old man.
A month later Compound Number Three is ready, and once more there is
the sound of marching on the high road. Mona, who is in the house,
will not go to the door again. She is sour of heart and stomach at the
thought that she has to live among the Germans and help to provide for
them.
She hears the new batch pass through to their compound, which is on the
seaward side of the farm-house, and is compelled to notice that, unlike
their predecessors, they make no noise. Next morning her father tells
her they are young men for the most part, young clerks, young doctors,
young professional men of many sorts.
“Quite a decent-looking lot,” the old man says.
Mona curls her lips. They are Germans. That’s enough for her.
“You’re hard, woman, you’re hard,” the old man says. “What did the old
Book teach thee to pray?--_Our_ Father!”
Mona’s hatred of the Germans is deepening every hour, yet twice a day
she has to meet with some of them. Morning and evening she serves
the regulated supply of milk to the men who come from the compounds,
attended by their guard. They try to engage her in conversation, but
she rarely answers them, and she tries not to listen.
Always the last to come is a pale-faced young fellow from the
Third Compound. He has a hacking cough, and Mona thinks he must be
consumptive. An impulse of pity sometimes seizes her, but she fights it
down. After all, what matter? He belongs to the breed of the brutes who
plotted the war.
The newspapers continue to come, and every night after supper the old
man reads the war news to his household. The Germans, who seem to have
been always advancing, are beginning to fall back. The armies of the
Allies are co-operating, and it is hoped that before long a decisive
blow will be struck. The old man’s voice, which has usually had a
certain tremor, grows strong and triumphant to-night. And when he has
come to the end of his reading of the Gospel, which always follows the
reading of the newspaper, he closes the big book, drops his head over
it, shuts his eyes and, putting his hands together, says:
“Peace I leave with you. My peace I give unto you; not as the world
giveth give I unto you. Let not your heart be troubled, neither let it
be afraid.”
When the farm-servants have gone out of the kitchen, Mona, who has been
standing by the fireplace leaning one hand on the high mantelpiece,
says, in a vibrant voice:
“Father, do you really want peace?”
“Goodness sakes, girl, why not?”
“_I_ don’t. I want war and more war until those demons are driven home
or wiped out of the world.”
A few days later a letter comes from Robbie. He has been made
lieutenant, and is in high spirits. They have had a pretty rotten time
thus far, but things are coming round now. He has heard it whispered
that there is to be a great offensive soon, and that he himself is to
go, for the first time, up to the front trenches. He is in a hurry now,
preparations going forward so furiously, but they’ll hear of him again
before long.
“So bye-bye for the present, dad, and wish me luck! And, by the way,
tell Mona I read a part of her last letter to some of the officers at
the mess last night, and when I had finished they all cried out, like
one man, ‘My God! That girl’s a stunner!’ And then the major said, ‘If
we had a thousand men with the spirit of your sister the war wouldn’t
last a month longer.’”
A week has passed since Robbie’s letter, and the newspapers report
a wonderful victory--the enemy is on the run. Every evening, at the
hour when the postman is expected to arrive at the camp, the old
man, who has said nothing, has been out on the paved way in front of
the farm-house (the “street,” as the Manx call it), in his sleeve
waistcoat, smoking his pipe and with the setting sun from over the sea
on his face.
The other letter Robbie promised has not come yet. But this evening
through the kitchen window Mona sees the postman striding slowly up the
garden path with his head down and a letter in his hand, and something
grips at her heart. The postman gives the letter to her father, and
goes off without speaking. The old man fumbles it, turning the envelope
over and over in his hands. It is a large one, and it has printing
across the top. At length, as if making a call on his resolution, he
opens it with a trembling hand, tearing the letter as he drags it out
of the envelope. He looks at it, seems to be trying to read it and
finding himself unable to do so. Mona goes out to him, and he gives her
the torn sheet of typewriting.
“Read it, girl,” he says helplessly, and then he lays hold of the
trammon tree that grows by the porch. Mona begins, “The Secretary of
State for War regrets....”
She stops. There is no need to go farther. Robbie has fallen in action.
The truth dawns on the old man in a moment. An unseen flash as of
lightning seems to strike him, and he reels as if about to fall. Mona
calls to some of the farm hands, and they help her father indoors and
up to bed, and then run for the nearest doctor--the English doctor of
the First Compound.
The old man has had a stroke. It is a slight one, but he must stay in
bed for a long time and be kept absolutely quiet. No more letters or
newspapers--nothing that will startle or distress him. It is his only
chance.
Mona does not cry, but her eyes flash and her nostrils quiver. Her
hatred of the Germans is now fiercer than ever. They have killed her
brother and stricken her father. May God punish them--every one of
them! Not their Kings and Kaisers only, but every man, woman and child!
If He does not, there is no God at all--there cannot be.
_THIRD CHAPTER_
Three months pass. The Internment Camp has been growing larger and
larger. There are five compounds in it now, and twenty-five thousand
civilian prisoners, besides the British Commandant and his officers and
guard--two thousand more. It is a big ugly blotch of booths and tents
and bare ground, surrounded by barbed wire and covering with black
ashes like a black hand the green pastures where the sweet-smelling
farm had been. In the middle of the camp, cut off from the compounds,
is the farm-house, and its outhouses, with their many cows, and its
farm-servants who sleep in the rooms over the dairy.
Mona is the only woman among twenty-seven thousand men. The Commandant,
who is kind, calls her “The Woman of Knockaloe.” The first shock
of her brother’s loss and her father’s seizure is over and she is
going on with her work as before. After all the “creatures” of the
cow-house have to be attended to, and if she could not leave Knockaloe
before the Germans came she cannot leave it now when her father lies
half-paralysed upstairs.
As often as she can do so during the day she runs up to him, and at
night, after she has given the men their supper, she reads to him.
It is only the Bible now, and by the old man’s choice no longer
the Gospels, but the Old Testament--Job with its lamentations, and
afterwards the Psalms, but not the joyful ones, only those in which
David calls on the Lord to revenge him upon his enemies. Her father is
a changed man. His heart has grown bitter. He takes a fierce joy in
David’s denunciations and mutters them to himself when he is alone.
The girl was right. Those spawn of the Pit--what fate is too bad for
them?
Christmas comes, the second Christmas, then spring, the second spring.
Mona watches the life of the camp with loathing. Rising in the grey of
the morning, she sees the prisoners ranging round their compounds like
beasts in a cage, and on going to bed in the dark she sees the white
light of the arc-lamps which have been set up at the far corners of the
camp to prevent their escape during the night. She hears of frequent
rioting, rigorously put down, and then of an attempt at insurrection
in the messroom of the First Compound and of four prisoners being shot
down by the guard. Serve them right! She has no pity.
She overhears the guards talking of indescribable vices among the
men of the Third Compound and then of terrible punishments. Her work
sometimes requires that she should pass this compound, and as often as
she does so she becomes conscious that behind the barbed wires the men
are looking at her with evil eyes and laughing like monkeys. Her flesh
creeps--she feels as if they were stripping her naked. The beasts! The
monsters!
One sunny morning in the early summer Mona is awakened by the loud
boom of a gun from the sea. Looking out she sees a warship coming to
anchor in the bay. Later she sees great activity in the officers’
quarters and hears that the Home Secretary has come from London to
make an inspection of the camp and that the Commandant has sent for
the Governor. Still later she sees the three going the rounds of
the compounds. Towards noon they pass the farm on their way to the
Commandant’s dining-room, and, the kitchen window being open, Mona
hears what the stranger, who looks angry, is saying:
“What can you expect? Shut men up like dogs and what wonder if they
develop the vices of dogs! The only remedy is work, work, work.”
A few days after that the joiners and bricklayers are building
workshops all over the camp and within a month there is the sound
of hammering and sawing and planing from inside these places, as if
the prisoners were working. Mona laughs. They will never turn these
creatures into human beings--never!
Autumn comes and the fields outside the camp are waving yellow and red
to the harvest, but the Manx boys, nearly all that are worth anything,
are away at the war, and the farmers are saying the corn will lie down
uncut and rot on the ground if they cannot get help to gather it.
One night she hears that the better-behaved of the prisoners are to be
sent out to the neighbouring farms to work at the harvesting, and next
morning she sees a batch of them going off with their guard, down the
avenue and through the gates.
“There’ll be trouble coming of this,” she thinks. “Such men are not to
be trusted.”
Inside a month the camp is ringing with a scandal. The letters arriving
at the camp for the prisoners have always been examined by censors.
Most of the letters have come from friends in their own country, but
now it is found that some are from Manx girls, who, having met with
German prisoners while working on the land, have struck up friendships.
One of these girls has written to tell her German lover that she is in
“trouble” and that the wife of her master is turning her out. Her name
is Liza Kinnish.
Mona’s anger is unbounded. The slut! She has a brother at the war too!
Mona has no pity for such creatures. While their boys out there at the
front are fighting and dying for them they are carrying on at home with
these German reptiles! Serve them right, whatever the disgrace that
falls on them!
“I’d have such women whipped--yes, whipped in the public market-place.”
From that time forward Mona hates the prisoners as she had never hated
them before. She cannot bear to look into their German faces or to hear
the sound of their German voices. All the same she has to live among
them for her father’s sake and even to serve them twice a day with the
milk from the dairy.
Late in the year, at seven in the morning, she is measuring the milk
into the cans, which are marked with the numbers of the various
compounds. The prisoners come to carry them away, saluting her with the
mist about their mouths as they do so, but she makes no answer. When
she thinks they have all gone she finds the can of the Third Compound
still standing by the dairy door where she had left it.
The pale-faced boy who coughed always came for that, and was generally
the last to arrive. After a while, when she has her back to the door,
she hears a voice behind her.
“Is this for me, miss?”
She starts. Something in his voice arrests her. It is not harsh and
guttural, like that of the other prisoners, but soft, deep and human.
For one dizzy moment she almost thinks it is Robbie’s.
She turns. A young man, whom she has never seen before, is on the
threshold. He is about thirty years of age, tall, slim, erect,
fair-haired, with hazel eyes and a clean-cut face that has an open
expression. Can this be a German?
After a moment of silence Mona says:
“Who are you?”
He tells her. The young fellow who had fetched the milk before had
broken a blood-vessel on awakening early that morning and been carried
up to the hospital.
“What’s your name?”
“Oskar.”
“Oskar what?”
“Oskar Heine.”
“And you are in Compound Three?”
“Yes.”
Mona gazes at him in silence for a moment, and then recovering herself,
she says:
“Yes, that’s yours.”
The young man touches his cap and says:
“Thank you.”
Mona tries to answer him but she cannot. He goes off, carrying his can,
and with his guard behind him. Mona finds herself looking after him,
first through the door and then through the dairy window.
All that day she goes about her work with a serious face and is cross
with the farm hands when they do anything amiss. And at night, when
supper is over, and her father calls down to her to come up and read
his Bible, she calls back.
“Not to-night, dad--I’ve got a headache.”
Then she sits before the fire alone and does not go to bed until
morning.
_FOURTH CHAPTER_
Another month has passed. Mona has been fighting a hard battle with
herself. Some evil spirit seems to have found its way into her heart
and she has had to struggle against it all day and every day.
“It can’t be true! It’s impossible! I should hate myself,” she thinks.
To fortify herself against her secret enemy she spends as much time as
she can spare with her father. The old man is now bitterer than ever
against the Germans. They have killed his son, and he can never forgive
them.
“Let God arise and let his enemies be scattered.... Let not the ungodly
have their desire, O Lord; let hot burning coals fall upon them; let
them be cast into the fire and into the pit, that they may never rise
again.”
Mona hears the old man’s voice through the thin partition wall that
separates her room from his, and she makes an effort to join in his
imprecations. But the terrible thing is that she catches herself
thinking they are wicked psalms, and that David, when he said such
things, was not “a man after God’s own heart” but a devil.
This frightens her and she tries to make amends to her conscience by
being as harsh as possible to the prisoners. When Oskar comes to the
dairy with the rest she never allows herself to look at him, and when
he speaks, which is seldom, she snaps at him or else tries not to hear
what he is saying. But one morning she is compelled to listen.
“Ludwig’s gone.”
“Ludwig?”
“The man who used to come for the milk.”
“The boy with the cough?”
“Yes. Died in the night and is to be buried to-morrow. Just twenty-two
and such a quiet young fellow. He was the only son of his mother
too, and she is a widow. I’ve got to write and tell her. She’ll be
broken-hearted.”
Mona feels a tightening at her throat, and then tears in her eyes, but
she forces herself to say: “Well, she’s not the only mother who has
lost a son. People who make wars must expect to suffer for them.”
Oskar looks at her for a moment and then goes off without speaking
again. At the next moment she catches herself looking after him through
the window just as he turns his head and looks back.
“Oh God, forgive me! Forgive me!” she thinks and feels as if she would
like to beat herself.
A week later when Oskar comes as usual he is carrying a small wooden
box, which he sets down inside the dairy door. It is from Ludwig’s
mother, and contains one of the little glass domes of artificial
flowers which the Germans lay on the graves of their dead.
“She asks me to lay them on Ludwig’s, but how can I, not being allowed
to go out of the gates?”
The lid of the box has been loosened, and lifting it, he shows the
glass dome with an inscription attached. Mona allows herself to stoop
and look at it. It is in German.
“What does it say?” she asks.
“‘With Mother’s everlasting love.’”
Mona feels as if a knife has gone to her heart, but she rises hastily
and says sharply: “You may take it away. I’ll have nothing to do with
it,” and Oskar goes off, but he leaves the box behind him.
All day long she tries not to look at it, but it is constantly meeting
her eye, and in the evening, when her work is done and everything is
quiet, she picks up the box, puts it under her cloak and turns towards
the gates of the encampment.
“Better have it out of my sight,” she thinks as she goes into the
churchyard of Kirk Patrick.
She has no difficulty in finding the place. Other Germans have died
and been buried since the camp began. Here they lie in a little square
by themselves at the back of the church, with recumbent white marble
stones above them inscribed with their foreign names. On the last of
the graves, not yet covered, she lays the flowers and then throws the
box away.
“After all, it’s only human. Nobody can blame me for that.”
But do what she will she cannot help thinking of the German boy and of
his mother weeping for him in his German home.
She has heard the tramp of a horse’s hoofs on the road behind her, and
as she returns through the lych-gate the rider draws up and speaks
to her. It is the Commandant, who has been taking his evening ride
before dinner. He asks what she has been doing and she tells him quite
truthfully. He looks serious and says: “It’s natural that you should
feel pity for some of these men, but take an old man’s advice, my
child, and don’t let it go any further.”
Mona tries to follow the Commandant’s counsel, but doing so tears her
heart until it bleeds. Even the hours with her father fail to fortify
her. The old man is well enough now to sit up in a chair in his bedroom
and certain of his neighbouring farmers are permitted to see him.
One of them, a babbling fellow, tells him of the sinking of a great
passenger liner by an enemy submarine and the loss of more than a
thousand lives.
The old man breaks into a towering passion. “Those sons of darkness,
may the Lord destroy them for ever! May the captain of that submarine
never know another night’s sleep as long as he lives! May the cries of
the drowning torment his soul until it comes up for judgment, and may
it then be damned for ever!”
“Be quiet, father,” says Mona. “You know what the doctor said. Besides,
is it Christian-like to follow the sins of a man to the next world and
wish his soul in hell?”
But when she is alone in her own room she knows that her Christian
charity is all a delusion.
“Oh God help me! God help me! Send me something to help me,” she cries.
One morning in summer the Commandant calls on her father and she leads
him upstairs. He takes a little leather-covered case out of his pocket
and, opening it by its spring, shows a military medal.
“What is it?” asks the old man.
“The Victoria Cross, old friend, won by your son for conspicuous
bravery in battle and sent to you by the King.”
The old man wipes his eyes and says: “But who is to wear it now that
Robbie is gone?”
“May I make a suggestion?” says the Commandant. “Let your daughter wear
it. Why not?”
“Yes, yes, why not?” says Mona, and she seizes it convulsively and pins
it on her breast.
Next morning, feeling braver, with the medal on her breast, she looks
Oskar Heine full in the face when he comes to the dairy door as usual.
He sees it and asks what it is and where it came from, and with a proud
lift of the head she tells him, almost defiantly, about Robbie and what
he did at the war.
“What a splendid fellow your brother must have been,” says Oskar.
Mona gasps. All her pride and defiance seem to be stricken out of her
in a moment.
The English newspapers continue to come, and one evening, in the midst
of reports of indescribable German barbarities, Mona finds a letter
from an English soldier to his family telling of a good act by an
enemy. He had been wounded in an engagement in Belgium and, left all
day for dead on the battlefield, he had crawled at night on his stomach
over half a mile of churned-up land to a lonely farmhouse, being drawn
to it by a dim light in a window. The farmer had turned out to be an
old German, but he had been “a white man” for all that, and though some
of the officers of the victorious German army were even then drinking
and singing and making merry in his front parlour, he had smuggled the
wounded British lad into his cellar, and helped him to escape in the
morning.
Some dizzy impulse, vaguely associated with misty thoughts of Oskar,
causes Mona to carry the newspaper upstairs and to read the boy’s
letter to her father.
“So there’s good and bad in all races, you see. That old German farmer
must be a good creature,” she says. Whereupon the old man, who has
pulled himself up in bed to listen, says, with tight-set lips and an
angry frown:
“Maybe he is, but who knows if he isn’t the father of the brute who
fired the explosive bullet into my son’s heart?”
Mona drops the newspaper and flies from the room, and the old man cries
after her in a whimpering voice:
“What’s coming over thee, girl? I can’t tell in the world what’s coming
over thee.”
_FIFTH CHAPTER_
One morning Mona hears of something that seems to strengthen her
against her secret enemy. A prisoner in Compound Four, which lies
nearest to the hill, has been captured during the night in an attempt
to escape by means of a tunnel from his dormitory to the open
field under “Corrin’s Folly.” The case has been brought before the
Commandant, and he has referred it to the civil court in Peel. With
nothing to complain of now, what ingrates these Germans are!
Mona hurries to the court-house. It is full to overflowing with police,
guards and townspeople. The Governor of the island has been sent for,
and he is sitting on the bench with the High Bailiff. The prisoner is
in the dock with a soldier on either side of him. His appearance is
a shock to Mona. Instead of the hardened sinner she had expected to
look upon, she sees a thin, pale, timid-looking man with fever in his
frightened eyes.
The facts are proved against him by the captain of the guard, and
by one of his fellow-prisoners. For two months at least he had been
tunnelling the ground from beneath his bed to the field outside the
barbed-wire fences, working at night, while the other prisoners were
asleep, and concealing the soil he dug out of the ground in the empty
space under the stage of the camp theatre, which was also the camp
chapel. At the last moment, just as he was about to emerge from the
earth in the darkness of night, he had been caught by one of the guard,
who had acted on the information of his nearest bed-fellow.
Already the story of this treachery has swallowed up Mona’s feeling
against the prisoner, but when, in reply to the Governor, who addresses
him sharply, he tells his own story, in halting words and with a tremor
in his voice, she finds the tears dropping on the military medal she is
wearing on her bosom.
He is a hairdresser, married to an Englishwoman and has two children,
both little. After his marriage he had always meant to take out his
nationalization papers, but when he had saved enough money to do so his
wife was not well, for she was expecting her first baby, so he spent it
in taking her to the seaside for a holiday. Afterwards they set up a
shop in a suburb of London and that took everything.
“Come to the point. Don’t waste the time of the court,” says the
Governor.
The prisoner struggles on with his story. At first when he was brought
to the camp his wife wrote every week, telling him how she was and how
the children were. His eldest little girl had been going to a private
school, and when her schoolmates asked her where was her father she
used to say: “Daddy is at the war,” for that was what his wife had told
the child. But the truth got out at last, and then the parents of the
other children demanded that his little girl should be dismissed, and
she was, and now she was on the streets.
“Quick! What has all that got to do with your attempt to escape?” says
the Governor, and Mona feels as if she wants to strike him.
“But that’s not everything, your Excellency,” says the prisoner.
“Go on,” says the High Bailiff.
“After a time my wife stopped writing, and then I had a letter from a
neighbour.”
“What did it say?” asks the High Bailiff, and with a fierce flash of
his wild eyes the prisoner tells him.
Another German, who for some reason had been exempted from internment,
had been put in by the authorities to help his wife to carry on the
business, which was going to wreck and ruin. He was a scoundrel, and he
had got hold of his wife, who had given in to him for the sake of the
children.
“It drove me mad to think of it, sir. That’s why I worked at night,
making that tunnel under the ground, while the other men were sleeping.
I wanted to get back and kill him.”
“Good thing we caught you in time, then,” says the Governor.
The sentence is bread and water and seven days’ solitary confinement.
Mona, who wants to cry out in court, hurries home, and she is there
when the guard brings the prisoner back. He looks like a picture of
despair--bewildered, distraught and hopeless.
Mona finds it harder than ever after this to listen to her father’s
imprecations when somebody tells him of German victories.
“Let God arise and let his enemies be scattered.... Root them out, O
Lord, that they be no more a people.”
Sometimes she makes a sort of remonstrance, and then the old man looks
up at her and says again:
“What’s come over thee, woman? I don’t know in the world what’s coming
over thee.”
Every morning on getting up she looks away over the barbed-wire fence
to the open fields beyond where the young men and the girls are
working, as Robbie and she used to do in the early dawn at harvest.
And every night on going to bed she stares down at the bare, black,
cinder-covered encampment lit up from end to end by its fierce white
arc-lights. More than ever now she feels like that hairdresser, and
wants to escape from the camp. Yet the strange thing is that she knows
quite well that even if she could do so she would not.
Oskar Heine has been made a camp captain for good behaviour, and is
permitted to move about as he likes, yet they rarely meet and hardly
ever speak. But one day he comes alone to the door of the dairy, and
holding out something that is in the palm of his hand he says:
“Do you know this?”
It is Robbie’s silver lever watch.
“Where did you get it?”
“An old schoolfellow of mine sent it from home--from Mannheim.”
“How did he come by it?”
He tells her. At the beginning of the last British advance his
schoolfellow had been shot immediately in front of the first line of
the British trenches. He had lain there for some time with the bullets
whistling over his head, crying out for his mother (as men do on the
battlefield if they think they are dying), when he heard an English
soldier say:
“Look here, lads, I can’t listen to this chap any longer; I’m going to
fetch him in.” Then the soldier had climbed over the top and dragged
him down to the British trench; but in doing so he had himself been
potted. The British lads had put them both into a dug-out, lying side
by side, and when their advance began they had gone on and left them.
How long they lay together Oskar’s schoolfellow did not know. When he
came to himself he had found he was getting better, but his companion
was fatally wounded. At length the brave fellow (he was a lieutenant)
had tugged at his pocket, and dragged out his watch and said: “Look
here, Fritz old chap, if you live to go home send this to my sister;
she lives at Knockaloe.”
Mona tosses in bed all that night, gazing into the darkness with
terror, after she has drawn her curtains close to shut out the light
of the arc-lamps. Remembering what her father had said when she read
the soldier boy’s letter, she had not shown the watch to her father,
but hidden it away in a drawer. It had come to her like a reproach from
the dead, and she was afraid to look at it.
All at once she asks herself _why_? If those two brave boys lying out
there in that deserted dug-out, the one thinking of his sister at
Knockaloe and the other of his mother in her German home, could be
friends at the last, was it the devil that had made them so?
“Oh God, my God, why do men make wars?”
_SIXTH CHAPTER_
Mona knows that this is the beginning of the end. She finds herself
thinking of Oskar constantly, and especially when she is dropping
off to sleep at night and awakening in the morning. With a hot and
quivering heart she asks herself what is to come of it all. She does
not know. She dare not think. A feeling of shame and dread seems to
clutch her by the throat.
One day the neighbouring farmer who comes to visit her father blurts
out another of his shocking stories. It is about a mid-day raid over
London.
Towards noon on a beautiful summer day, in an infant school in East
London, a hundred little children, ranging in age from three years to
six, had been singing their hymn before the time came to scamper home
in childish glee to dinner, when out of the sunshine of the sky two
bombs had fallen from a German air-machine and killed ten of them and
wounded fifty. The scene had been a frightful shambles. Some of the
children had been destroyed beyond all recognition, their sweet limbs
being splashed like a bloody avalanche against the broken walls. And
when, a moment later, their mothers had come breathless, bare-headed
and with wild eyes to the schoolhouse door, they saw the mangled bodies
of their little ones brought out in a stream of blood.
Mona enters her father’s bedroom just as the babbler is finishing his
story. The old man, who is quivering with rage, has struggled to his
feet and is stamping his stick on the floor and swearing--nobody ever
having heard an oath from his lips before.
“They’ll pay for it, though--these damned madmen and their
masters--they’ll pay for it to the uttermost farthing! Cursed be of
God, these sons of hell!”
The Government in London must make reprisals. They must destroy
a thousand German children for every British child that had been
destroyed!
Mona tries first to appease and then to reprove him. What good will it
do the poor dead children in London that other children in Germany,
now living in the fulness of their childish joy, should be massacred?
“The children are innocent....”
“Innocent? They’ll not be long innocent. They’ll grow up and do the
same themselves. Oh my God, do Thou to them as with the Midianites who
perished at Endor, and became as the dung of the earth!”
“Hush! Hush! Father! Father!”
“Why not? What’s coming over thee, woman? What’s been happening
downstairs to change thee?”
At that word Mona feels as if a sword has pierced her heart, and she
hurries out of the room.
After a while the mother-instinct in her comes uppermost. Her father is
right. To make war on children is the crime of crimes. The people who
do such things must belong to the race of the devil.
That evening she is crossing to the “haggard” when she meets Oskar
Heine coming out of his compound. She does not look his way, but he
stops her and speaks.
“You’ve heard what’s in the papers?”
“Indeed I have.”
“I’m ashamed. I’m sorry.”
“Never mind about sorry. Wait until the same is done to your own
people, and then we’ll see, we’ll see.”
He is about to tell her something, but she will not listen, and goes
off with uplifted head.
A week passes. Mona has seen nothing more of Oskar Heine. Being free
to come and go as he likes, he must be keeping out of her way. She is
feeling less bitter about that shocking thing in London. After all,
it was war. It is true that all the victories of war are as nothing
against the golden head of one darling child, but then nobody sees that
now. Nobody in the world has ever seen it--nobody but He....
“_Suffer the little children to come unto me...._”
But only think! That was said two thousand years ago, and yet ... and
yet....
Christmas is near, the third Christmas. Mona reads in the newspaper
that it has been agreed by the Marshal and generals commanding on both
sides of the Western Front that there shall be a four hours’ truce of
the battlefields on Christmas Eve. How splendid! A truce of God in
memory of what happened two thousand years ago! Why couldn’t they have
it in the camp also? She suggests the idea to Oskar.
“Glorious! Why can’t we?” he says.
He will find a way to put the matter up to the Commandant, and then he
will speak to the prisoners.
Since the prisoners have been set to work they have been living a more
human life in their amusements also. Every compound has its band. The
guards have their band, too. Mona hears from Oskar that the Commandant
consents.
“It’s Christmas! God bless me, yes, why not?” he says.
The prisoners are delighted, and the guards agree to pray with them.
“Oh, they’re not such bad chaps after all,” the captain says.
At the beginning of Christmas week there is the muffled sound at night
of the bands in various parts of the camp practising inside their
booths. Oskar comes to the door of the farm-house to say that they
intend to play in unison, and want the “Woman of Knockaloe” to choose
the carols and hymns for them. Mona chooses what she knows. “Noël,”
“The Feast of Stephen,” and “Lead, Kindly Light.”
“Splendid!” says Oskar. He is to be the conductor in Compound Three.
Snow falls, then comes frost, and on Christmas Eve the ground of
the black camp is white and hard, and a moon is shining--a typical
Christmas.
Mona has had a bustling day, but at nine she is finished and goes
upstairs to sit with her father. The old man, who is in bed, has heard
something of her activities, and is not too well pleased with them.
“What’s coming over thee, girl?” he keeps on repeating. “What’s coming
over thee anyway?”
“Goodness sakes, why ask me that, dad? It’s Christmas, isn’t it?”
Having three hours to wait, she sits by the fire and reads to him--from
the Gospels this time:
“_And lo, the angel of the Lord came upon them, and the glory of the
Lord shone round about them; and they were sore afraid._
“_And the angel said unto them, Fear not; for, behold, I bring you good
tidings of great joy, which shall be to all people._
“_For unto you is born this day, in the city of David, a Saviour, which
is Christ the Lord...._
“_And suddenly there was with the angel a multitude of the heavenly
host, praising God and saying_,
“_Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace, goodwill toward
men._”
Mona stops. The old man is breathing heavily. He has fallen asleep.
At eleven o’clock Mona is in her own room. What a magnificent night!
The moon is shining full through the window, making its pattern on the
carpet. Outside it is so bright that the entire camp is lit up by it,
and there had been no need to switch on the big arc-lamps.
The camp lies white in the sparkling snow. For the first time for more
than three years it is not distinguishable from the country round
about. The white mantle of winter has made camp and country one.
It is quiet out there in the night. Not a breath of wind is stirring. A
dog is barking in the Fifth Compound, which is half a mile away. There
is no other sound except a kind of smothered hum from the inside of the
booths, where twenty-five thousand men are waiting for the first hour
of Christmas Day--only this and the rhythmical throb of the tide on the
distant shore. The old man in the next room is still breathing heavily.
Mona, too, is waiting. She is sitting up on her bed, half-covered by
the counterpane. At one moment she remembers Robbie’s watch and thinks
of taking it out of the drawer and winding it up and putting it on, but
something says “Not yet.” Although Peel church is nearly a mile away,
she tells herself that on this silent night she will hear the striking
of the clock.
She thinks of the battlefront in France. The truce of God is there too.
No booming of cannon, no shrieking of shells, only the low murmur of
a sea of men in the underground trenches and the bright moon over the
white waste about them. Thank God! Thank God!
At a quarter to twelve she is up again and at the window. A dim,
mysterious, divine majesty seems to have come down on all the troubled
world. The moon is shining full on her face. She hears marching on the
crinkling snow--the band of the guard are crossing the avenue to take
up the place assigned to them on the officers’ tennis-court. Behind
them there is the shuffling of irregular feet--her farm-hands are
following.
Then, through the thin air comes the silvery sound of the clock of
Peel church striking midnight, and then, clear and distinct, from the
guards’ band the first bar of “The Feast of Stephen.”
“_When the snow lay on the ground...._”
After that another bar of it from the Third Compound (Oskar must be
conducting):
“_Deep and crisp and even...._”
Then comes another bar from the First Compound, and then another and
another from the distant Compounds Four and Five.
After that there is a second carol:
“_Noël, Noël, born is the King of Israel...._”
Then another carol and another, all played like the first, and finally,
verse by verse, from near and far, the hymn she had selected:
“_Lead, kindly light, amid the encircling gloom._”
Mona is crying. Now she understands herself--why she suggested this to
Oskar and why Oskar has carried it out. If only peace would come the
barrier that divides them would be broken down! God send it! God send
it!
Her breath on the window-pane has frosted the cold glass, but she is
sure she sees somebody coming towards the house. It is a man, and he is
stumbling along, half doubled up as if drunk or wounded. He is making
for the front door. Trembling with half-conscious apprehension of the
truth, Mona runs downstairs to open it.
The man is Oskar Heine. By the light of the lamp she had left burning
on the table she sees him. He is clutching with one hand a bough of the
trammon tree that grows by the porch, and in the other he holds a sheet
of blue paper. His cap is pushed back from his forehead, which is wet
with perspiration, his eyes are wild, and his face is ashen.
“May I come in?”
“Indeed yes.”
He comes into the house, never having done so before, and drops heavily
into the old man’s seat by the fire, which is dying out.
“What is it?” she asks.
“Look,” he says, and hands her the paper. “It has just come. The post
was late to-night.” His voice seems to be dying out also.
Mona takes the paper. It is in English, and, standing by the lamp, she
begins to read it aloud:
“_American Consulate_--_Mannheim_.”
“That’s my home--Mannheim.”
“_I regret to inform you...._”
“Don’t! Don’t!”
Mona reads the rest of the letter to herself. It is from the American
Consul, and tells Oskar that in a British air raid in the middle of
the night the house in which his mother had lived with his sister had
been struck by a bomb, and the wing in which his sister slept had been
utterly destroyed.
Mona makes a cry and involuntarily reads aloud again:
“_The child is missing and it is believed...._”
“Don’t! Don’t!”
There is silence between them for a moment, only broken by Oskar’s low
sobs and Mona’s quick breathing.
“Your sister?”
“Yes, I wanted to tell you about her that night of....”
“I know,” says Mona. With a stab of remorse the memory of what she had
said has come back to her.
“Only ten. Such a sweet little thing--the sweetest darling in the
world. Used to write every week and send me her sketches. My father
died when she was a baby, and since then she has looked on me as father
and brother too. And now.... Oh, it is too stupid! It is too stupid!”
Mona cannot speak, and he goes on saying:
“It is too stupid. It is too stupid!”
He drops his head into his hands, and Mona sees the tears oozing out
between his fingers.
“Mignon! My little Mignon!”
Still Mona does not utter a word, and at last he gets up and says:
“I had to tell you. There was no one else.”
His face is broken up and he is turning to go. Mona can bear no more.
By a swift, irresistible, unconquerable, almighty impulse she flings
her arms about his neck.
Meantime, the old man upstairs had been awakened by the bands. He had
raised himself in bed to listen. The carols out there in the night
touched him at first, but after a while they made him feel still more
bitter. He was thinking about Robbie. What was the good of singing
about peace in the midst of war? Peace? There would be no peace until
the righteous God, with His mighty hand and outstretched arm, had hewn
His enemies to pieces!
He heard a heavy thud at the door downstairs, and then a man’s voice,
with Mona’s, in the kitchen. His first thought was of “The Waits,” for
which Manx girls stayed up on Christmas Eve, and then a blacker thought
came to him.
He struggled out of bed, pulled on his dressing-gown, fumbled for his
walking-stick, and made for the stairs. It was dark on the landing,
but there was light below coming from the kitchen, and, making a great
effort, he staggered down.
How long Mona and Oskar were in each other’s arms they did not know. It
might have been only for a moment. But all at once they became aware of
a shuffling step behind them. Mona turns to look. Her father is on the
threshold.
The old man’s face is ghastly. His eyes blaze, his mouth is open and
his lips quiver, as if he is struggling for breath and voice. At length
both come, and he falls on Mona with fearful cries.
“Harlot! Strumpet! So this is what has been changing thee! Thy brother
dead in France, and thou in the arms of this German! May God punish
thee! May thy brother’s spirit follow thee day and night and destroy
thee! Curse thee! Curse thee! May the curse of God....”
The old man’s voice chokes in his throat. His face changes colour, and
he totters and falls.
Before Mona is aware of it some of the farmhands are in the house
picking the old man up. She had left the outer door open, and they had
heard her father’s cries.
They carry him back to bed, limp and unconscious. Mona stands for
some moments as if smitten by a blow on the brain. A horror of great
darkness has fallen on her. When she recovers self-possession she looks
round for Oskar. He has gone.
_SEVENTH CHAPTER_
The old farmer died, without speaking, a few days after his second
seizure. Mona watched with him constantly. Sometimes she prayed, with
all the fervour of her soul, that he might recover consciousness. But
the strange thing was that sometimes she found herself hoping that he
might never do so.
When the end came she was overwhelmed with remorse, but still
struggling to defend herself. It was early morning, and she was alone
with him at the last. In the wild burstings of affection, mingled with
self-reproach, she cried:
“I couldn’t help it, father. I couldn’t help it.”
They buried her father at Kirk Patrick in the family grave of the
Craines, which was close to the German quarter. Her relations from all
parts of the island came “to see the old man home.” There were uncles
and aunts and cousins to the third and fourth degree, most of them
quite unknown to her. When the service was over they went back to the
farm-house, by permission of the camp authorities, to hear the will
read by the vicar. It had been made shortly after the death of Robbie
and consisted of one line only:
“_I leave all I have to my dear daughter._”
The uncles and aunts and cousins, who had no claim on the dead man,
were shocked at his selfishness.
“Is there no legacy to anybody, parson?”
“None.”
“Not so much as a remembrance?”
“Nothing. Everything goes to Mona.”
“We’ll leave it with her, then,” they said, and rose to go. As they
passed out of the house Mona heard one of them say to another:
“It will be enough to make the man turn in his grave, though, if the
farm goes to a Boche some day.”
That night, sitting late over a dying fire, Mona overhears a group of
men and boys talking on “the street,” outside. They are her servants on
the farm. Having heard her father’s denunciation of her on Christmas
Eve they have since been circulating damaging reports, and now they are
busy with their own plans for the future.
“She has killed the old man, that’s the long and short of it.”
“So it is.”
“I’m working no more for a woman that’s done a thing like that.”
“Me neither.”
A week later they came to Mona one by one with various lying excuses
for leaving her. Asking no questions she pays them off and lets them go.
She has been alone for three days when the Commandant, with his kind
eyes, comes to see what he can do. What if he sends some of the guard
to help her?
“No, sir, no.”
“Some of the Germans, then?”
“N-o.”
“But, good gracious, girl, you can’t carry on the farm by yourself.”
“I’m strong. I’ll manage somehow, sir.”
“But sixteen cows--it’s utterly impossible--utterly!”
“Half of them are dry now and will have to go out to grass. I can
attend to the rest, sir.”
“But won’t you be afraid to live in this house alone--a woman, with men
like these about you?”
“I don’t think I will, sir.”
Half a year has passed. Mona has seen nothing of Oskar since Christmas.
With a thrill of the heart she hears of the wide liberty he has won by
his ability and good behaviour. But even in that there is a certain
sting. He is free of the camp now as far as the barbed wire extends;
why does he not come to see her? Sometimes she feels bitter that he
does not come, but again the strange thing is that sometimes she is
sure that if he did come she would run away from him.
All the same, she has a sense of his presence always about her. No
matter how early she rises in the morning she finds that the rough work
of the farm, unfit for a woman, has been done by other hands before she
has reached the cow-house.
For a long time this sense as of a supernatural presence, unseen and
unheard, helping her and caring for her and keeping guard over her,
strengthens her days and sweetens her nights. But at length something
happens which causes her courage to fail.
Rumour has come to the camp that a great enemy offensive is shortly to
be made on the Western front. To meet the need of it the old guard of
tried and trusted men are sent overseas, and their places filled by a
new guard, which seem to have been recruited from the very sweepings of
the streets.
The captain of this new guard assigned to the first three compounds
(the nearest to the farmhouse) turns out to be a brute. His antecedents
are doubtful. His own men, to whom he is a tyrant, say he has been a
barman in a public-house somewhere, and that a few years before the war
he was convicted of a criminal assault on a woman.
Mona becomes aware that she is attracting the attention of this
ruffian. He is asking questions about her, following her with his evil
eyes, and making coarse remarks that are intended to meet her ears.
“Fine gal! Splendid! What a woman for a wife, too!”
During the day he finds excuses to call at the farm-house and engage
her in conversation. At length he knocks at her door at night. It is
late, the camp is quiet, nobody is in sight anywhere. Before knowing
who knocked Mona has opened the door. The man makes an effort to enter,
but she refuses to admit him. He pleads, coaxes, threatens and finally
tries to force his way into the house.
“Don’t be a fool, girl. Let me in,” he whispers.
She struggles to shut the door in his face. Her strength is great, but
his is greater, and he has almost conquered her resistance when the
figure of another man comes from behind.
It is Oskar. With both hands he takes the blackguard by the throat,
drags him from the door and flings him five yards back into the road,
where he falls heavily and lies for a moment. Then he gets up and
shambles off, saying nothing, and at the next instant Oskar himself,
without a word to Mona, turns away.
It is midsummer. The insular horse-racing has begun--an event in which
the prisoners are keenly interested, but of which they are supposed
to know nothing. Since the changing of the guard the _morale_ of the
camp has gone down headlong. Drink has been getting in--nobody knows
how. It is first discovered in the First Compound, commonly called the
millionaire’s quarter.
Suspecting an illicit traffic the officers raid a tent occupied
by a German baron, and find half a dozen men about a table, with
champagne, cigars, brandy and every luxury of a fashionable night
club. A searching inquiry is made by the Commandant. It has no result.
The captain of the guard, who is zealous in helping, can offer no
explanation.
Later it is discovered that still worse corruption is going on in the
Second Compound. The sailors are quarrelling, fighting and rioting
under the influence of raw spirits, generally rum, probably much
above proof. Where does their money come from? And how does the drink
get into the camp? For their work in the workshops and on the land
the prisoners are paid, but their small earnings (less a tax to the
camp and a small sum for “fag-money”) go into the camp bank, to be
distributed when the war is over. Once more an inquiry is fruitless.
The men refuse to speak, and the captain of the guard is bewildered.
One morning, on rising, Mona sees Oskar Heine in the avenue talking
through the barbed-wire fence to a group of sailors in the Second
Compound. The men are behaving like infuriated animals, clenching
and shaking their fists as if vowing vengeance. A moment afterwards
she sees the captain, with a quick step, as if coming from the First
Compound, cross the avenue, disperse the men by a fierce command, and
then turn hotly on Oskar. Mona is too far away to hear what is being
said, but she sees that Oskar, without answering, walks slowly away.
An hour afterwards, when she is at work in the dairy, she hears harsh
cries from the Second Compound. Going to the door she sees a shocking
scene. The infuriated prisoners, whom she had seen talking to Oskar,
augmented by at least a hundred others, are hunting a man as if with
the intention of lynching him. They are shouting and gesticulating,
and the man is screaming. They have torn his coat off, and the upper
part of his body is almost naked. He is running to and fro as if trying
to escape from his pursuers, and they are beating him as he flies and
kicking him when he falls. The soldiers on guard at the gate of the
compound are racing to the man’s relief and threatening with their
rifles, but the rifles are being wrenched out of their hands and turned
against them. The clamour is fearful. The whole compound is in wild
disorder.
“The thief! The cheat! Search him! Strip him!”
Without waiting to think what she is doing, but with a frightful
apprehension of danger to Oskar, Mona runs into the compound (there
being no one at the gate to prevent her), and with her strong arms,
which are bare to the elbows, she struggles through the mob of drunken
men.
“Stop! Stand back! You brutes!”
More from the sound of her voice than from the strength of her muscles
the prisoners fall away and she reaches their victim. He is on the
ground at her feet, bleeding about the face and head and crying for
mercy.
It is the captain of the guard!
When the miserable creature sees who has rescued him he squirms to her
feet and calls on her to save him. A body of the guard from another
compound come running up and carry him away, and the infuriated men
slink off to the cover of their quarters.
Later in the day Mona hears that six of the prisoners have been
arrested and sent to the lock-up at Peel and that Oskar Heine is one of
them. Still later she learns that they are to be brought up for trial
in the morning.
What is Oskar to be charged with? Mona has not been summoned, but she
decides to go to the trial. She has a presentiment of something evil
that is to happen to her there, but all the same she determines to go.
_EIGHTH CHAPTER_
Mona rises next day before the cows have begun to call, and as soon as
her work in the dairy is done she hurries off to Peel. The court-house
is as crowded as before with guards and townspeople. With difficulty
she crushes her way into the last place by the door.
The proceedings have begun and the prisoners are standing in the dock
with their backs to her--five unkempt heads of common-looking sailors
and Oskar’s erect figure, with his fair hair, at the end of them.
The Governor is on the bench, and he has the High Bailiff and the
Commandant on either side of him. The captain of the guard, with a
bandage across his forehead, is in the witness-box. He is answering the
questions of the advocate for the Crown.
“And now, Captain, tell us your own story.”
Humbly saluting the court, with many “sirs” and “worships” and
“excellencies,” the captain tells his tale. It was yesterday about
this time. He had hardly entered the Second Compound in the ordinary
discharge of his duty when he was set upon, without the slightest
warning or provocation, by a gang of the prisoners. There must have
been two hundred of them, but the six men in the dock had been the
ring-leaders. Five of the six belonged to the Second Compound, but the
sixth came from the Third, and he was the worst of the lot. Being a
camp captain he was allowed to move about anywhere, and he had often
abused his liberty to undermine the captain’s authority.
“How do you know that?” asks the High Bailiff.
“My guard have told me what he has said, your Worship, but I heard him
myself in this case.”
“What did you hear?”
“I was behind the baron’s bungalow in the First Compound, your Worship,
when I heard him telling the men of the second to lynch and murder me.”
The Governor leans forward and says:
“You mean that this sixth man has a spite against you?”
“A most bitter spite, your Excellency.”
“Have you given him any cause?”
“No cause whatever, your Excellency.”
“What is his name?”
“Oskar Heine.”
“Let Oskar Heine be called,” says the Governor.
As Oskar steps out of the dock Mona feels hot and dizzy. Being a
prisoner he is not sworn.
He stands at the foot of the witness-box, but his head is up, and when
he answers the questions of the advocate appointed to represent the
prisoners he does not seem to be afraid.
“You have heard the evidence of the captain.”
“I have.”
“Is it true--what he says about yourself?”
“No, sir, not a word of it.”
“Did you take any part in the attack that was made on him?”
“None whatever.”
“Did you tell the other prisoners to do what they did?”
“No, I did not; but if I had known as much about the captain then as I
know now I should have done.”
“Done what?” asks the Governor sharply.
“Told them to do what they did--and worse.”
“And what do you know now, if you please?”
“That he has been cheating and bullying and blackmailing and corrupting
them.”
“And if you had known this before what would you have told them to do,
as you say?”
“Thrash him within an inch of his life.”
“You admit that?”
“I do, sir.”
The Governor turns to the High Bailiff and says:
“Is it necessary to go further? The man denies that he took part in
the actual assault, but no evidence could be more corroborative of the
captain’s story.”
The High Bailiff appears to assent, and the advocate for the defence,
who had intended to call the other prisoners, signifies by a gesture
that he thinks it is hopeless to do so now.
“I ask for the utmost penalty of the law against the six prisoners,”
says the advocate for the Crown, “for a brutal and cowardly assault on
an officer of the army in the lawful discharge of his duty.”
There is some low talking on the bench which Mona, who is breathing
audibly, does not hear, and then the High Bailiff prepares to give
judgment.
“This is a serious offence. If such riots were to be permitted at
the encampment all military discipline would be at an end. Therefore
it is the duty of the civil authorities in dealing with civilian
prisoners....”
The High Bailiff’s voice is drowned by a noise near the door. A woman’s
tremulous voice is heard to say:
“Wait a minute, sir.”
At the next moment Mona is seen pushing her way to the front. The
advocate for the Crown recognizes her, and thinking she comes to
support his case, he rises and says:
“This is the young woman I spoke of in my opening as having saved the
life of the captain from the fury of the prisoners. If it is not too
late she may be able to say something that will throw light on the
conduct of the men and on their motive.”
“No, not on the conduct and motive of the men, but on that of the
captain,” says Mona.
There is further murmuring on the bench, and then the High Bailiff says:
“Let her be called.”
Being in the witness-box and sworn, Mona, with the eyes of the judges,
advocates and spectators upon her, begins to tremble all over, but she
answers firmly when spoken to.
“You wish to say something about the captain--what is it?”
“That he is a bad man, and a disgrace to the army.”
The Governor puts up his eyeglass and looks at her. Then he smiles
rather cynically and says:
“You seem to know something about the army, miss. What is the medal you
are wearing on your breast?”
“The Victoria Cross, sir,” says Mona, throwing up her head, “won by
my brother when he died in the war, and sent home to my father by the
King.”
The eyeglass drops from the Governor’s nose and his face straightens.
After a moment of silence the High Bailiff says:
“What you say of the captain--is it from hearsay or from personal
experience?”
“From personal experience, sir.”
There is another moment of silence and then the High Bailiff says:
“Tell us.”
Mona takes hold of the rail of the witness-box, and it is seen that her
fingers are trembling. She tries to begin, but at first the words will
not come. At length, lifting her eyes as if saying to herself, “Oh,
what matter about me?” she tells the story of the captain’s attempt at
a criminal assault upon her; how, late at night, when she was alone and
unprotected he had tried to force his way into her house and had almost
overcome her resistance when Oskar Heine came up and laid hold of him
by the throat and flung him back into the road.
“So if there’s any spite,” she says, “it’s not Heine’s against the
captain, but the captain’s against Heine.”
There is a dead hush in the court-house until she has done. Then
the High Bailiff looks down at Oskar, who is still standing by the
witness-box, and says:
“Is this true?”
Oskar answers in a husky voice:
“I’m sorry the young lady has said it, sir, but it’s true, perfectly
true.”
“It’s a lie,” shouts the captain, tossing up his red face defiantly.
“Is it?” cries Oskar quickly. And then throwing out his arm and
pointing to the captain, he says:
“Look at him. The marks of my hands are on his throat at this moment.”
Instantly the captain drops his chin into his breast, but not before
everybody on the bench has seen the black stamp of four fingers and a
thumb on the man’s red throat.
The advocate for the defence rises and asks permission (things having
gone so far) to call the other prisoners.
One by one the five are called and tell the same story--that when the
horse-racing began the captain, who went to Belle Vue nearly every
afternoon, enticed them to trust him with their stakes; but though they
found out afterwards that their horses had often won, he had always
lied to them and kept their money.
“Heine advised us to complain to the Commandant, but we decided to
strip the man and search his pockets, and having a drop to drink we
went further than we intended.”
“It’s a pack of lies,” roars the captain.
“No, it’s not that neither,” says a voice from behind the prisoners.
It is one of the guard who had brought the men to court, and stepping
out of the bench at the back of the dock, he says:
“Swear me next, your Worship.”
“Take care what you’re saying, Radcliffe,” cries the captain in a voice
that is almost unintelligible from anger. “No lies here, remember.”
“No, I’ve told enough for you at the camp. I’m going to tell the truth
for once, Captain.”
The soldier corroborates the evidence of the prisoners, and adds that
the guard themselves have been similarly cheated, blackmailed and
bullied.
“More than that, it’s the captain himself who has been bringing drink
into the camp, especially into the millionaires’ compound. He is making
a big purse out of it, too, and only two nights ago, when he was in
liquor, he boasted that he had five hundred pounds in the bank already.”
After that the proceedings are brought to a quick conclusion, the
Governor being afraid of further disclosures. The six men are sentenced
to one day’s imprisonment, but having been as long as that in custody
already they are acquitted.
And then the trial being over, the Commandant addresses the captain,
telling him he is not to return to the camp, but to prepare to be sent
over the water to-morrow morning.
“It’s a few men like you who give the enemy their excuse for saying we
are as bad as they are.”
The court having risen, the prisoners are taken out between their
guard. Oskar Heine passes close to the place where Mona is standing,
but he does not raise his eyes to her.
Only then, her excitement being over, does Mona realize what she has
done for herself. The townspeople are surging out of the court-house,
and, as they go, they are casting black looks at her. She awaits until
she thinks they are gone, and then, venturing out, she finds a throng
of them, women as well as men, on the steps and about the gate, and
they fall on her with insults.
“Here she comes!” “The traitor!” “It’s an ill bird that fouls its own
nest.” “The woman might have held her tongue, anyway; not given away
her own countryman to save a dirty Boche.”
A hiss that is like the sound of water boiling over hot stones follows
her down the street and out of the town, until she reaches the country.
Half-way home she is overtaken by the Commandant in his motor-car. He
stops to speak to her, and his kind face looks serious, almost stern.
“I’m willing to believe that what you did was done in the interest of
justice, but all the same I’m sorry for you, my girl, very sorry.”
The six prisoners have arrived at the camp before her, and a report of
what she has done at the trial has passed with the speed of a forest
fire over the five compounds. As she walks up the avenue, hardly able
to support herself, the brutal sailors of the Second Compound, the same
that had formerly offended her by their vulgar familiarity, rush to the
barbed wire to lift their caps to her. She does not look at them, but
hurries into the house, overwhelmed with shame and confusion.
To get through the work of the day is hard, and when night comes she
drops into her father’s seat by the fire and sits there for hours,
forgetting that she has eaten nothing since morning.
It is all over. The secret she has been struggling so hard to hide even
from herself, denying it over and over again to her conscience, she has
proclaimed aloud in public.
She loves this German--she who had hated all his race as no one else
had ever hated them! Everybody knows it, too, and everybody loathes
her. And her father--if she had killed her father before, as people
said, she has killed him a second time that day, covering his very
grave with disgrace.
“I couldn’t help it,” she thinks, but that brings her no comfort now.
At one moment she tells herself that since she has renounced her race
she must run away somewhere--she cannot live at Knockaloe any longer.
But then she thinks of Oskar, that he must remain, and cries in her
heart:
“I can’t! I can’t!”
And remembering what Oskar had said about her in court she throws up
her head and thinks:
“Why should I?”
When the time comes to lock up the house for the night she finds a
letter which has been pushed under the door. It is on prisoners’
notepaper and in a handwriting she has never seen before, and it
contains three words only:
“_God bless you!_”
Instantly, instinctively, she lifts it to her lips and kisses it. But
at the next moment, as she is going upstairs, the old weakness comes
sweeping back on her.
“I couldn’t help it! I couldn’t help it! God forgive me!”
_NINTH CHAPTER_
It is Christmas week again--the last Christmas of the war. Two Swiss
doctors, appointed by the warring nations to inspect the Internment
Camps throughout Europe, have arrived at Knockaloe.
After going the rounds of the five compounds they come to the farm to
test the milk. They are pleasant men, and Mona asks them to take tea.
Sitting at the table in the kitchen they talk together, not paying
much attention to Mona, of the complaints made by the prisoners,
particularly by one of them, who had said he had not been able to eat
the potatoes provided because they had been full of maggots, whereupon
the sergeant of the guard, who had been showing them round, had cried:
“Don’t believe a word of it--the man’s a liar,” and then the prisoner
had said no more.
“I dare say the fellow was lying all right,” says one of the doctors,
“but that sergeant is a bit of a beast.”
“Is it like that in all the camps--in Germany, for instance?” asks Mona.
“Worse there than anywhere. Some of the officers in German camps are
barbarians without bowels of compassion for anybody, and some of your
British prisoners are living the lives of the damned.”
“But that’s the devilish way of war. It seems to make martyrs and
heroes of the men who lose by it, and brutes and demons of the men who
win.”
“Not always, my friend.”
“No, not always, thank God!”
After that they turn to Mona, congratulating her on the cleanliness of
her dairy, and asking her what help she has to keep things going. Being
afraid to speak of Oskar, she tells them she is alone.
“Wonderful!” says one of them. “But it’s what I always say--one person
working with his heart will do more than ten who are working with their
hands only.”
“It’s the same on the battlefield,” says the other. “And that’s why
this country has won the war, and the Germans have lost it.”
“Lost it?” says Mona. “Is the war over, then?”
“It soon will be, my girl. Your enemy may make a last kick, but the war
cannot last much longer.”
Mona’s heart leaps up. Can it be possible that the war is coming to an
end? Then it will soon be well with her and Oskar.
It is not because Oskar is a German, but because the Germans are at war
with her own people that her people look black at her. It is war, not
race, that is the great obstacle to their love, and when the war is
over the obstacle will be gone.
“O Lord, stop the war, stop it, stop it,” she prays every night and
every morning.
There are to be no carols this Christmas, but special services are to
be held in the camp on Christmas Day, and a great Lutheran preacher is
coming to conduct them.
On Christmas Eve Mona is carrying a bowl of oats to a young bull
she has put out on the mountain, when she hears the singing of a
hymn in the prison chapel and she stops to listen. It must be the
prisoner-choir practising for to-morrow’s service, and it must be Oskar
who is playing the harmonium.
“_Ein feste Burg ist unser Gott...._”
The language is unknown to her, but the tune is familiar; she used to
sing it herself when she was in the choir of the Wesleyan Chapel:
“_A sure stronghold our God is still...._”
The same hymn, the same religion, the same God, the same Saviour, and
yet.... How wicked! How stupid!
On Christmas morning Mona has finished her work in the dairy when she
hears the far-off sound of the church bells in Peel, and looking out
over the camp she sees groups of the prisoners (Oskar among them)
making their way to the prison chapel.
Suddenly, as she thinks, a new thought comes to her. If it is the same
religion, why shouldn’t she go to the service? If the guard will
permit her to pass, why shouldn’t she?
Almost before she is aware of what she is doing she has run upstairs,
changed into her chapel clothes, and is crossing the avenue towards the
gate of the Third Compound.
The camp chapel (half church, half theatre) is a large wooden barn
with a stage at one end, no seats on the floor. On the stage, behind a
small deal table, the Lutheran pastor, in a black gown, is reading the
lesson from his big Bible. On the floor in front of him are five or six
hundred men, all standing in lines. They make a pitiful spectacle--some
young (almost boys), some elderly (almost old), some wearing good
clothes, some in rags, some well shod, some with their naked feet
showing through the holes in their worn-out shoes, some with fine
clear-cut features, and some with faces degraded by drink and debased
by crime. Every eye is on the pastor, and there is no sound in the bare
place but the sound of his voice.
The silence is broken by the lifting of the latch of a door near to
the stage. At the next moment a woman enters. Everybody knows her--it
is “the Woman of Knockaloe.” She stands for a moment as if dazed by the
eyes that are on her, and then somebody by her side (she knows who it
is, although she does not look at him) touches her arm and leads her
to a chair, which has been hurriedly brought in from an ante-room and
placed in the middle of the front row.
When the lesson is finished the pastor gives out a hymn. It is the
same hymn as she heard last night, but after the man from the door has
stepped forward and played the overture on the harmonium, she finds
herself on her feet in the midst of the prisoners.
In full, clear, resonant voices the men are singing in their German,
when suddenly they become aware that a woman is singing with them in
English--the same hymn to the same tune.
“_Ein feste Burg ist unser Gott...._”
“_A sure stronghold our God is still...._”
The voices of the men sink for a moment, as if they are listening, and
then, as by one spontaneous impulse, they rise and swell until the
place seems to throb with them.
When the hymn comes to an end Mona sits and the pastor begins his
sermon. She can understand only a word of it now and again, and her
eyes wander to the door. Oskar is there. His head is up and his eyes
are shining.
“O Lord, stop the war, stop it, stop it!”
Summer has come again; the sun rises and sets, the birds sing and nest,
the landscape preserves its solemn peace, but still the war goes on.
The last kick of the enemy, which the Swiss doctors had foreseen, has
been made and it is over. After a devastating advance, there has been a
still more devastating retreat.
The prisoners in the camp know all about it. Their spirits had risen
and fallen according to the fortunes of their armies at the front. At
first they were truculent. They talked braggingly about vast German
forces marching upon London, blowing up Buckingham Palace, putting
an end to the British Empire, and then turning their attention to
America. Afterwards they were sceptical. If the English newspapers
reported German defeats they knew better, having received their German
newspapers which reported German victories. Now they are sullen. What
is the war about, anyway? Nothing at all! In ten years’ time nobody
will know what was the cause of it!
Mona is in a fever of excitement. Is the war coming to an end at last?
What does Oskar think? Why doesn’t he come to her? Is he still thinking
he has brought trouble enough on her already?
At length he comes. It is late at night. She hears his voice calling to
her in a tremulous tone from the other side of the open door.
“Mona!”
He has never called her by that name before.
“Yes?”
She is standing on the threshold, trembling from head to foot, never
before having been face to face with him since the night of her
father’s seizure.
“It’s all over, Mona.”
“What is, Oskar?”
“Germany is beaten. The Hindenburg line is broken, and revolution has
begun in Berlin.”
“Does that mean that the war will soon be at an end?”
“It must be.”
She hesitates for a moment, then she says, with a quivering at her
heart:
“But surely you are glad of that, Oskar--that the war will soon be at
an end?”
He looks into her face and then turns away his own.
“I don’t know. I can’t say,” he answers.
She looks after him as he goes off. Her eyes gleam and her heart throbs.
_TENTH CHAPTER_