Monsieur le Capitaine, you will not take a seat? No? And your
requisition--you have your commandant's written order and signature, no
doubt?" The officer blustered. "No, no, Monsieur le Capitaine, I am the
head of the civil government in this town; I take no orders except from
the head of the military authority. You have doubtless forgotten Hague
Regulation, Article 52; your Government signed it, you will recollect."
The officer hesitated. The _maire_ looked out on the _place_; it was
full of armed men, but he did not flinch. "You see, monsieur," he went
on suavely, "there are such things as receipts, and they have to be
authenticated." The officer turned his back on him, took out his field
note-book, scribbled something on a page, and, having torn it out,
handed it to one of his men with a curt instruction.
The _maire_ resumed his dictation to the hypnotised clerk, while the
officer sat astride a chair and executed an impatient _pas seul_ with
his heels upon the parquet floor. Once or twice he spat demonstratively,
but the _maire_ took no notice. In a few minutes the soldier returned
with a written order, which the officer threw upon the desk without a
word.
The _maire_ scrutinised it carefully. "Ten thousand kilos of bread!
Monsieur, we provide five thousand a day for the refugees, and this will
tax us to the uttermost. The bakers of the town are nearly all _sous les
drapeaux_. Very well, monsieur," he added in reply to an impatient
exclamation from the officer, "we shall do our best. But many a poor
soul in this town will go hungry to-night. And the receipts?" "The
requisitioning officer will go with you and give receipts," retorted the
officer, who had apparently forgotten that he had placed the _maire_
under arrest.
* * * * *
Subdued lights twinkled like glow-worms in the streets as the _maire_
returned across the square to the Hôtel de Ville. He threaded his way
through groups of infantry, narrowly escaped a collision with three
drunken soldiers, who were singing "Die Wacht am Rhein" with laborious
unction, skirted the park of ammunition waggons, and reached the main
entrance. He had been on his feet for hours visiting the _boulangeries_,
the _pâtisseries_, the hay and corn merchants, persuading,
expostulating, beseeching, until at last he had wrung from their
exiguous stores the apportionment of the stupendous tribute. It was a
heavy task, nor were his importunities made appreciably easier by the
receipt-forms tendered, readily enough, by the requisitioning officer
who accompanied him, for the inhabitants seemed to view with terror the
possession of these German documents, suspecting they knew not what. But
the task was done, and the _maire_ wearily mounted the stairs.
The officer greeted him curtly. The _maire_ now had leisure to study his
appearance more closely. He had high cheek-bones, protruding eyes, and a
large underhung mouth which, when he was pleased, looked sensual, and,
when he was annoyed, merely cruel. The base of his forehead was square,
but it rapidly receded with a convex conformation of head, very closely
shaven as though with a currycomb, and his ears stood out almost at
right angles to his skull. The ferocity that was his by nature he
seemed to have assiduously cultivated by art, and the points of his
moustaches, upturned in the shape of a cow's horns, accentuated the
truculence of his appearance. In short, he was a typical Prussian
officer. In peace he would have been merely comic. In war he was
terrible, for there was nothing to restrain him.
Meanwhile the officer called for a corporal's guard to place the _maire_
under arrest. "But you will first sign the following _affiche_--by the
General's orders," he exclaimed roughly.
Le Maire informe ses concitoyens que le commandant en chef des
troupes allemandes a ordonné que le maire et deux notables soient
pris comme otages pour la raison que des civils aient tiré sur des
patrouilles allemandes. Si un coup de fusil était tiré à nouveau
par des civils, les trois otages seraient fusillés et la ville
serait incendiée immédiatement.
Si des troupes alliées rentraient le maire rappelle à la population
que tout civil ne doit pas prendre part à la guerre et que si l'un
d'eux venait à y participer le commandant des troupes allemandes
ferait fusilier également les otages.
"One moment," said the _maire_ as he took up a pen, "'_les civils_'! I
ordered the civil population to deposit their arms at the _mairie_ two
days ago, and the _commissaire de police_ and the gendarmes have
searched every house. We have no armed civilians here."
"Es macht nichts," said the officer; "we shall add '_ou peut-être des
militaires en civil_.'"
The _maire_ shrugged his shoulders at the disingenuous parenthesis. It
was, he knew, useless to protest. For all he knew he might be signing
his own death-warrant. He studied the style a little more attentively.
"Mon Dieu, what French!" he said to himself; "'était,' 'seraient,'
'venait'! What moods! What tenses! Monsieur le Capitaine," he continued
aloud, "if I had used such French in my exercises at the Lycée my
instituteur would have said I deserved to be shot. Pray allow me to make
it a little more graceful." But the Prussian's ignorance of French
syntax was only equalled by his suspicion of it. The _maire's_ irony
merely irritated him and his coolness puzzled him. "I give you thirty
seconds to sign," he said, as he took out his watch and the inevitable
revolver. The _maire_ took up a needle-like pen, dipped it in the ink,
and with a sigh wrote in fragile but firm characters "X---- Y----." The
officer called a corporal's guard, and the _maire_, who had fasted since
noon, was marched out of the room and thrust into a small closet upon
the door of which were the letters "_Cabinet_." This, he reflected
grimly, was certainly what in military language is called "close
confinement." The soldiers accompanied him. There was just room for him
to stretch his weary body upon the stone floor; one soldier remained
standing over him with fixed bayonet, the others took up their position
outside.
Meanwhile a company of Landwehr had bivouacked in the square, four
machine-guns had been placed so as to command the four avenues of
approach, patrols had been sent out, sentries posted, all lights
extinguished, and all doors ordered to be left open by the householders.
Billeting officers had gone from house to house, chalking upon the doors
such legends as "_Drei Männer_," "_6 Offiziere--Eingang verboten_," and,
on rare occasions "_Gute Leute hier_." The trembling inhabitants had
been forced to wait on their uninvited guests as they clamoured noisily
for wine and liqueurs. All the civilians of military age, and many
beyond it, had been rounded up and taken under guard to the church;
their wives and daughters alone remained, and were the subject of
menacing pleasantries. So much the _maire_ knew before he had returned
from his errand. As he lay in his dark cell he speculated painfully as
to what might be happening in the homes of his fellow-townsmen. He sat
up once or twice to listen, until the toe of the sentry's boot in his
back reminded him of his irregularity. Now and again a woman's cry broke
the silence of the night, but otherwise all was still. He composed
himself to sleep on the floor, reflecting that he must husband his
strength and his nerves for what might lie ahead of him. He was very
tired and slept heavily in spite of his cold stone bed. At the hour of
one in the morning he was awakened by a kick, and he found himself
staring at an electric torch which was being held to his face by a tall
figure shrouded in darkness. It was the captain. He sat up and rubbed
his eyes.
"'_Fusillé_'! Bien! so I am to be shot! and wherefore, Monsieur le
Capitaine?"
"Some one has fired upon us," said the officer, "one of your dirty
fellows; you must pay for it."
"And the order?" asked the _maire_ sleepily; "you have the Commandant's
order?"
"Never mind about the order," said the officer reassuringly, "the order
will be forthcoming at eight o'clock. Oh yes, we shall shoot you most
authoritatively--never fear."
The officer knew that nothing could be done until eight o'clock, for he
dared not wake the Commandant, but he did not see why he should deny
himself the pleasure of waking up this pig of a _maire_ to see how he
would take it. The _maire_ divined his thoughts, and without a word
turned over on his side and pretended to go to sleep again. From under
his drooping eyelids he saw the officer gazing at him with a look in
which dislike, disappointment, and pleasurable expectation seemed to be
struggling for mastery. Then with a click he extinguished his torch and
withdrew.
At eight o'clock the _maire_ awoke to learn with mild surprise that he
was not to be shot. Beyond that his guard would tell him nothing. It was
only afterwards he learnt that one of the drunken revellers had been
prowling the streets, and, having given the sentries a bad fright by
letting off his rifle at a lamp-post, had expiated his adventure at the
hands of a firing party in the cemetery outside the town.
For two days the _maire_ was unmolested. He was allowed to see his
_adjoint_,[25] who came to him with a troubled face.
"The babies are crying for milk," he said, "the troops have taken it
all. I begged one of the officers to leave a little for the inhabitants,
but he said the men did not like their coffee without plenty of hot
milk." The _maire_ reflected for a moment, and then dictated an _avis_
to the inhabitants enjoining upon them to be as sparing in their
consumption of milk as possible for the sake of the "mères de famille"
and "les petits enfants."
"Tell the _commissaire de police_ to have that posted up immediately,"
he added. "We can do no more."
"They have taken the bread out of our mouths," resumed the _adjoint_,
"and now they are despoiling us of our goods. They are like a swarm of
bailiffs let loose upon our homes. Everywhere they levy a distress upon
our chattels. There is an ammunition waggon outside my house; they have
put all the furniture of my _salon_ upon it."
"You should make a protest to the Commandant," said the _maire_, but not
very hopefully.
"It is no use," replied the _adjoint_ despondingly. "I have. He simply
shrugged his shoulders and said, 'C'est la guerre.' It is always so.
They have shot Jules Bonnard."
"Et pourquoi?" asked the _maire_.
"I know not," said the _adjoint_. "They found four market-gardeners
returning from the fields last night and shot them too--they made them
dig their own graves, and tied their hands behind their backs with their
own scarves. I protested to a Staff officer; he said it was 'verboten'
to dig potatoes. I said they did not know; how could they? He said they
ought to know. Then he abused me, and said if I made any more complaints
he would shoot me too. They have made the _civils_ dig trenches."
"Ah," said the _maire_. He knew it was a flagrant violation of the Hague
Regulations, but it was not the tithe of mint and cummin of the law that
troubled him. It was the reflection that the _civil_ who is forced to
dig trenches is already as good as dead. He knows too much.
"And the women," continued the _adjoint_, in a tone of stupefied horror,
"they are crying, many of them, and will not look one in the face. Some
of them have black eyes. And the young girls!"
The _maire_ brooded in impotent horror. His meditations were interrupted
by the entrance of the captain. "The Commandant wishes to see you _tout
de suite_," he exclaimed. "March!" He was conducted by a corporal's
guard, preceded by the captain, into the presence of the General, who
had taken up his quarters in the principal mansion looking out upon the
square. The General was a stout, square-headed man, with grey moustaches
and steel-blue eyes, and the _maire_ divined at a glance that here was
no swashbuckler, but a man who had himself under control. "I have
imposed a fine of 300,000 francs upon your town; you will collect it in
twenty-four hours; if it is not forthcoming to the last franc I shall be
regretfully compelled to burn this town to the ground."
"And why?" exclaimed the _maire_, whom nothing could now surprise,
though much might perplex.
The General seemed unprepared for the question. He paused for a moment
and said, "Some one has been giving information to the enemy."
"No!"--he held up his hand, not impolitely but finally, as the _maire_
began to expostulate--"I have spoken."
"But," said the _maire_ desperately, "we shall be ruined. We have not
got it. And all our goods have been taken already."
"You have our receipts," said the General. "They are as good as gold.
German credit is very high; the Imperial Government has just floated a
loan of several milliards. And you have our stamped _Quittungen_." He
became at once voluble and persuasive in his cupidity, and forgot
something of his habitual caution. "You surely do not doubt the word of
the German Government?" he said. The _maire_ doubted it very much, but
he discreetly held his tongue. "And our requisitioning officers have not
been niggardly," continued the General; "they have put a substantial
price on the goods we have taken." This was true. It had not escaped the
_maire_ that the receipt-forms had been lavish.
"I will do my best," said the _maire_ simply.
He was now released from arrest, and he retired to his house to think
out the new problem that had presented itself. The threat to burn down
the town might or might not be anything but bluff; he himself doubted
whether the German Commandant would burn the roofs over his men's
heads, as long as the occupation lasted. The military disadvantages were
too obvious, though what the enemy might do when they left the town was
another matter. They might shoot him, of course; that was more than
probable.
But how to find the money was an anxious problem and urgent. The
municipal _caisse_ was empty: the managers of the banks had closed their
doors and carried their deposits off to Paris before the Germans had
entered the town; of the wealthier bourgeoisie some had fled, many were
ruined, and the rest were inadequate. The _maire_ pondered long upon
these things, leaning back in his chair with knitted brows in that
pensive attitude which was characteristic. Suddenly he caught sight of a
blue paper with German characters lying upon a walnut table at his
elbow. He took it up, scrutinised it, and studied the signature:
Empfangschein.
Werth 500 fr. erhalten.
Herr Hauptmann von Koepenick.
Then he smiled. He got up, put on his overcoat, took up his hat and
cane, and went forth into the drizzling rain.
* * * * *
Two hours later he was at the headquarters of the Staff and asked to see
the Commandant. He was shown into his presence without delay. "Well?"
said the Commandant. "Monsieur le Général, I have collected the fine,"
said the _maire_. The General's face relaxed its habitual sternness; he
grew at once pleasant and polite. "Good," he said. The _maire_ opened a
fat leather wallet and placed upon the table under the General's
predatory nose a large pile of blue documents, some (but not all)
stamped with the violet stamp of the German A.Q.M.G. "If the
_hochgeehrter_ General will count them," said the _maire_, "he will see
they come to 325,000 francs. It is rather more than the fine," he
explained, "but I have made allowance for the fact that they are not
immediately redeemable. They are mostly stamped, and--_they are as good
as gold_."
For three minutes there was absolute silence in the room. The gilt clock
in its glass sepulchre on the mantelpiece ticked off the seconds as
loudly as a cricket on the hearth in the stillness of the night. The
_maire_ speculated with more curiosity than fear as to how many more of
these seconds he had to live. Never had the intervals seemed so long nor
their registration so insistent. The ashes fell with a soft susurrus in
the grate. The Commandant looked at the _maire_; the _maire_ looked at
the Commandant. Then the Commandant smiled. It was an inscrutable smile;
a smile in which the eyes participated not at all. There was merely a
muscular relaxation of the lips disclosing the teeth; to the _maire_
there seemed something almost canine in it. At last the General spoke.
"Gut!" he said gutturally; "you may go."
* * * * *
"You astonish me," I said to the _maire_, as he concluded his narrative.
We were sitting in his parlour, smoking a cigar together one day in
February in a town not a thousand miles from the German lines. "You
know, Monsieur le Maire, they have shot many a municipal magistrate for
less. I wonder they didn't make up their minds to shoot you." The
_maire_ smiled. "They did," he said quietly. He carefully nicked the ash
off his cigar, as he laid it down upon his desk, and opened the drawer
of his escritoire. He took out a piece of paper and handed it to me. It
was an order in German to shoot the _maire_ on the evacuation of the
town.
"You see, monsieur," he exclaimed, "your brave soldiers were a little
too quick for them. You made a surprise attack in force early one
morning and drove the enemy out. So surprising was it that the Staff
officers billeted in my house left a box half full of cigars on my
sideboard! You are smoking one of them now--a very good cigar, is it
not?" It was. "And they left a good many official papers behind--what
you call 'chits,' is it not?--and this one among them. Please mind your
cigar-ash, monsieur! You see I rather value my own death-warrant."
Moved by an irresistible impulse I rose from my chair and held out my
hand. The _maire_ took it in mild surprise. "Monsieur," I said frankly,
if crudely, "you are a brave man. And you have endured much."
"Yes, monsieur," said the _maire_ gravely, as he glanced at a
proclamation on the wall which he has added to his private collection of
antiquities, "that is true. I have often been _très fâché_ to think that
I who won the Michelet prize at the Lycée should have put my name to
that thing over there."[26]
FOOTNOTES:
[25] Deputy.
[26] This narrative follows with some fidelity the course of events as
related to the writer by the _maire_ of the town in question. But for
the most obvious of reasons the writer has deemed it his duty to
suppress names, disguise events, and give the narrative something of the
investiture of fiction. It is, however, true "in substance and in
fact."--J.H.M.
XXIV
THE HILL
It was one of those perfect spring days when the whole earth seems to
bare her bosom to the caresses of the sun. The sky was without a cloud
and in the vault overhead, blue as a piece of Delft, a lark was
ascending in transports of exultant song. The hill on which we stood was
covered with young birch saplings bursting into leaf, and the sky itself
was not more blue than the wild hyacinths at our feet. Here and there in
the undergrowth gleamed the pallid anemone. A copper wire ran from pole
to pole down the slope of the hill and glittered in the sun like a
thread of gold. A little to our right two circular mirrors, glancing
obliquely at each other, stood on a tripod, and a graduated sequence of
flashes came and went, under the hands of the signallers, with the
velocity of light itself. A few yards behind us on the crest of the hill
stood a windmill, its great sails motionless as though it were a brig
becalmed and waiting for a wind, and astride one arm, like a sailor on
a yard, a carpenter was busy, with his mouth full of nails. The tapping
of his hammer and the song of the lark were the only sounds that broke
the warm stillness of the April day. A great plain stretched away at our
feet, and in the fields below women were stooping forward over their
hoes.
The white towers of Ypres gleamed ghostlike in the distant haze. The
city had the wistful fragility of some beautiful mirage, and looking at
it across the pleasant landscape I thought of the Pilgrim's vision of
the Golden City shining in the sun beyond the Land of Beulah. Two or
three miles away on our right the ground rose gently to a range of low
wooded hills, and on their bare green slopes brown furrows showed up
like a cicatrice. They were the German trenches. On the crest of the
ridge a white house peeped out between the trees. That house seemed an
object of peculiar interest to the battery-major at my side. He was
stooping behind the "Director" with his eye to the sights as though he
was focussing the distant object for a photograph. He fixed the outer
clamp, unscrewed the inner clamp, and having got his sights on the
house, he reversed the process and swung round the sights to bear on a
little copse to our left. "One hundred and five," he said meditatively
as he found the angle. The N.C.O. took up the range-finder and measured
the distances first to the house, then to the copse. The major took up
an adjustable triangle, and with a movement of thumb and forefinger
converted it into the figure of an irregular "X." As he read off the
battery angle on the "Plotter" the N.C.O. communicated it and the
elevation to the telephone operator, who in turn communicated it to the
battery in the copse. "Battery angle seventy. Range four thousand."
Gunners are a laconic people, and their language is as economical of
words as a proposition in Euclid; their sentences resemble those
Oriental languages in which the verb is regarded as a superfluous
impertinence. Language is to them a visual and symbolical thing in which
angles and distances are predicated of churches, trees, and four-storied
houses. Now in the copse on our left six field-guns were cunningly
concealed, and even as the telephone operator spoke the dial-sights of
those six guns were being screwed round and the elevating gear adjusted
till they and the range-drum recorded the results of the major's
meditations upon the hill. Then the guns in the copse spoke, and the air
was sibilant with their speech. A little cloud no bigger than a man's
hand arose above the roof of the white house on the ridge. Our battery
had found its mark.
Somewhere behind that ridge were the enemy's batteries and they were
yet to find. But even as we searched the landscape with our
field-glasses an aeroplane rose from behind our own position and made
for the distant ridge, its diaphanous wings displaying red, white, and
blue concentric circles to our glasses like the scales of some huge
magpie-moth, while a long streamer of petrol smoke made faint
pencillings in the sky behind it. As it hovered above the ridge seven or
eight little white clouds like balls of feathers suddenly appeared from
nowhere just below it. They were German shrapnel. But the aeroplane
passed imperturbably on, leaving the little feathers to float in the sky
until in time they faded away and disappeared. In no long time the
aeroplane was retracing its flight, and certain little coloured discs
were speaking luminously to the battery, telling it of what the observer
had seen beyond the ridge. Between the aeroplane, the observer, the
telephone, and the guns, there seemed to be some mysterious freemasonry.
And this impression of secret and collusive agencies was heightened by
the vibration of the air above us, in which the shells from the
batteries made furrows that were audible without being visible, as
though the whole firmament were populated with disembodied spirits. The
passivity of the toilers in the field below us, who, absorbed in their
husbandry, regarded not the air above them, and the dreaming beauty of
the distant city almost persuaded us that we were the victims of a
gigantic illusion. But even as we gazed the city acquired a desperate
and tragic reality. Voices of thunder awoke behind the ridge, the air
was rent like a garment, and first one cloud and then another and
another rose above the city of Ypres, till the white towers were blotted
out of sight. A black pall floated over the doomed city, and from that
moment the air was never still, as a rhythm of German shells rained upon
it. The storm spread until other villages were involved, and a fierce
red glow appeared above the roofs of Vlamertinge.