escaped and O'Hagan pushed through them, and sprang up the broad
stairway mid choking volumes of smoke. When reached the room above the
porch the heat was fierce, and the roaring of the fire filled his ears,
and he had scarce carried the terrified girl out of the room when a side
door fell in, and a branch of flame shot brandishing through the
aperture, and the head of the stairs became lit up with a dreadful and
fluctuating glare. He carried her swiftly down the stairs, he feared
every moment that they would crumple and fall in. But he fought his way
grimly, and his jerky swear words were lost in the roaring of the fire.
Another moment and they were in the open. Firelight and moonlight
illuminating the country around with confused and violent lustre, and
banked against the stars and the sky they could see a glowing track of
smoke.
"That was a near thing, Miss."
"I thought my end had come!" she said, the colour returning slowly to
her face. "There would have been no chance at all if you had not come up
for me, as I was then almost suffocated. It was a very brave act!" She
did not thank him--she couldn't have spoken plain words of thanks to
save her life--but O'Hagan knew what she thought--"Don't say any more
about it, Miss, I am really a coward at heart."
"I'm sure I owe my life to you," she said earnestly. "I know there are
some things for which thanks are an insult, but you will not mind if I
offer you a little token of gratitude?"
O'Hagan's hand was resting on a small silver cross in his pocket, and in
another moment he solemnly handed the girl the money and notes he had
stolen. "Why, whatever is this?" asked the girl, staring at O'Hagan in
bewildered amazement.
"That's yours," he said by way of assistance.
"But I don't understand!" she cried, greatly puzzled.
"Well, Miss, I suppose it does require some elucidation," O'Hagan
replied somewhat nervously. "You see, it's only a return of stolen
goods. You remember visiting a house in the big grey motor car
yesterday, Miss?"
"Yes."
"Well, I stole your bag from under the seat. I have given you back again
all that I have left. But I will take this little cross as a token." He
dangled the little silver charm before her face, and before she had time
to take in the situation O'Hagan had disappeared.
* * * * *
The long plains of Northern Europe stretched before the gaze of a
regiment of British infantry--great undulations of sodden earth left by
the winter rains and thaws. There, in the piercing cold that froze the
feet, they waited the signal to advance. Stray bullets whined and pinged
as they struck the wire and sand bags on the top of the trenches;
occasionally a man fell on his face; and the ghastly change in the faces
of the troops bore testimony to the effects. Hilaire O'Hagan lay
stretched upon his face, occasionally looking towards his officer. His
heart beat like the pulsing of a motor car. His throat felt dry, his
cheeks were burning. At times a cold shiver passed right through his
frame. He fidgeted and lolled from one side, to the other. It seemed to
him that he had waited hours for the signal to get over the trenches. He
tried to strike a match for his pipe; his hand was trembling furiously.
It occurred to him that after having passed through the gory awfulness
of six months' incessant fighting, he was beginning to lose his nerve.
He was no longer master of himself. He was afraid. Every man has the
instinct that prompts fear, for upon that instinct the whole foundation
of life-preservation is founded. But over and above this instinct,
common to all of us, O'Hagan had imagination--the graphic, vivid
imagination that always lurks in Irish blood. Is not the entire history
of the Celt a rejection of the things of this world for the Shadow and
the dream? Upon this basis of fear and imagination O'Hagan started to
build, building and building until he had created a grand structure of
blind terror which yielded a most exquisite torture to his mind.
A whistle sounded and a shudder traversed the men all down the trench.
The officer called to his men. He mounted the parapet and jumped over.
There was a sound like the rushing of a river as the regiment poured
itself over the trench. The men advanced slowly and dazedly. Now any
acute observer would note that the men were bewildered and had little
heart in the fight. Their faces worked; and they struggled to walk on,
but it seemed useless. The bullets were pattering all around and taking
heavy toll. Then a few yards in front a shrapnel shell kicked up the
mud. The German guns had found the range. Someone shouted out the fatal
words "Lie down." The regiment was soon hugging the earth, which was
about the best thing they could have done. Great showers of shrapnel
burst over them, and the bullets struck down on them in a continuous
shower. Some men rose to their feet, and the shrapnel withered them.
Suddenly one shell burst over O'Hagan, blotting out all around him in
smoke and dust, and brutally jerking his mind to fullest tension. This
shell fire was hell! With the crash imagination and fear began to work
together in his overworked brain--both at once in the queerest jumbling
manner. In a few moments O'Hagan was on his feet running away--racing as
if not merely for his life, but his soul.
When O'Hagan's brain cooled and his sight cleared he found himself in
the doorway of a little wrecked church. The German shells had gashed
and ripped the sides and roof, so that birds flew in and out at will.
Hundreds of sparrows chirped in the oak beams above. The shells had
pitted, starred and jerked up the blue flagstones in the porch on which
O'Hagan stood. Parts of the old church had been shelled nearly level;
little twisted fragments of beautiful leaded windows had been swept up
in a pile outside with other wreckage. As O'Hagan walked up the aisle a
feeling came over him that he knew much of the old place. A quintessence
and distillation of peace and comradeship seemed to inhabit the soft
gloam of its chancel. He found himself drifting back to past days and
seeing dimly in a thin white cloud faces that seemed familiar and yet
were unnameable. Then one face stood out distinctly, and O'Hagan watched
it with breathless wonder and fascination. He moved closer up to it; he
would have given much not to have done so, but he could not help
himself--he looked closer, and it was--the face of the monk who had
appeared to him once before. When the cloud had cleared a little, the
outline of the monk wearing a hood and cowl became visible. Then was
there a voice that he identified at once despite the lapse of two years
since he had last heard it. "I have been wanting to speak to you,
brother, for many hours, but _something_ I cannot explain to mortal man
has prevented me." The priest instantly turned round and O'Hagan
understood that he meant him to follow. His heart sank at once, and he
experienced a sense of dreadful oppression and foreboding, and with a
sudden thrill, partly of fear, and partly of curiosity he followed. They
passed up the aisle and a perfectly familiar staircase. Then he opened a
door, and went in, and at the same moment, sheer unreasoning terror
seized him. He was afraid, but did not know why: he was simply afraid.
Then like a sudden recollection, when one remembers some trivial
adventure of childhood, O'Hagan looked for the old lead coffin. He cast
his eyes about with a certain air of proprietorship, and compared the
room with the room of his dreams. Nothing had changed. And then, with a
sudden start of unexplained dread, he saw that the coffin was in the
corner--the same leaden coffin that he knew so well with the same
curious greyish light coming from it. There was lettering on the lid.
"What's written there? What's there? Who's there?" he called. He called
and continued to call; then another terror, the terror of the sound of
his own voice seized him; he did not dare to call again; he whispered.
There was something written on the coffin that his mind reeled to
entertain. Without quite knowing how he came to be there, O'Hagan found
himself bending over the coffin. He read the lettering, and it was:
_Hilaire O'Hagan ob. 1696 aetat 35.
Parva domus, magna quies._
He sank down on his knees with a childish sob. Sometimes the old church
seemed absolutely still, and the only sound to be heard was the sighing
of the night breeze below him in the pines, but sometimes the place
seemed full of muffled movements, and once O'Hagan could have sworn that
the large carved handle of the door turned. Even as he stood there he
heard steps just outside, and with a sudden horror, he saw the heavy
door slowly open. A priest stood in the open doorway with an inscrutable
smile on his lips--the same clean-shaven man with a long aquiline nose
and singularly square chin, that he had seen before in his dreams.
"Brother," he said, in a moved voice. "You must go back and help your
comrades. There is no peace for you yet. Yes, brother, I know it is
written that we shall rest from our labours--but the beginning of our
rest is not yet. _We_ must go and help them in the firing line
yonder----"
"No, no, holy man!" O'Hagan pleaded. "I have had enough.... There is
hell over there."
"They are calling us, don't you hear them--the living and the dead----"
O'Hagan could see those great green flashes that burst in the sky so
near to him. He could almost hear the angry zipping of high explosive
shrapnel close over his head. God! how he hated it all!
"How hard it is, Father, to make these children understand!" came softly
from the priest's lips.
O'Hagan's regiment had retired to their trenches in good order. They
were some of those trenches round about Ypres, and all the world has
read how the Germans battered and delivered terrific infantry attacks on
this part of our line without cessation. A certain morning, about six
o'clock, the Huns decided to deliver a sharp attack, and there was
"considerable artillery activity" on the part of the German guns. Such
activity was spoken of in the trenches as "raising the lid off Hell."
There was a lull after about an hour's rain of every kind of missile
that man has invented to batter his brother with. Then the Huns came on
in earnest. Some reached the trenches only to be met with a murderous
fire: they fell in little huddled heaps in the blood and the mud and the
slime of the trenches. But the whole German race seemed to be flowing in
on the British, and they fairly got into the trenches, though they were
twice driven out. Yard by yard the battalion retired. The next moment an
unearthly, fluorescent light shot and flooded along the trenches. The
troops gasped for a moment, and then started back. Standing on a
traverse in full view of Germans and Englishmen was a tall man with
yellow hair, in a priest's cassock. He was brandishing a sword that
flashed like a tongue of flame, and crying "Turn back! turn back!
advance!"
Private Hilaire O'Hagan, the deserter, stood beside him holding a
massive brass altar cross above his head. From that moment O'Hagan
behaved like one possessed. He hurled himself over the traverse into the
"green" of the German regiment, and started hacking and stabbing with
the pointed end of the cross. The Huns did not like the look of such a
wild apparition and refused to face him. Bit by bit they retired and
O'Hagan took advantage of a moment to take a green silk Irish flag, with
a crownless harp, from his pocket, and attach it to the spike of the
cross. Then, roaring like a lion and brandishing his strange weapon, he
fell on them once more--and as they broke he saw the hooded priest
driving them before him with his flaming sword. A great joy seemed to
burn up in his soul. Men who watched him said he ran amok. His great
voice rose high above the chattering machine guns in a beautiful
Franciscan chant and the voice of the priest joined in. What O'Hagan,
bearing his mighty cross, must have looked like in the eerie dawn mist,
Heaven knows. But seeing such an apparition and hearing the strange
chant, it is possible the Huns thought the devil had joined in the
fight. Then a man in the rear trench pointed to the west, where a great
image of the cross was shining against a blood red sky, and a voice
cried "Forward." It passed from man to man, and the regiment advanced,
howling, with O'Hagan. They drove the Germans before them like chaff
before a fan, and fell back, in triumph, to their lost trenches. They
saw O'Hagan stagger a little and then turn round to where the regiment
boiled with joy in the trenches.
"You are back, my children," he shouted. "It is well, for my poor soul
desires rest.... Aye, rest indeed!"
A great peace settled on O'Hagan's face, as he slowly collapsed and lay
very still.
Not long after this a country parson received a letter from a
hare-brained member of his flock, who for many years had been good
enough to keep him in touch with his doings in far lands. The old vicar
had heard that the "young scoundrel," as he called him, had joined a
volunteer regiment, and was in the thick of the fighting around Ypres.
The letter was written in pencil on leaves torn from a note-book. The
portion that will interest the reader of this story most is here quoted.
"On Monday I came across an old friend (?) of ours--Hilaire O'Hagan. We
had a brush with about five thousand Huns, and we had under-estimated
their strength. They rushed us in the dawning--a living, greenish-grey
wave rolled over our trenches, shooting and hacking at the heart of
what had once been a regiment of British Infantry. When the second wave
lapped over, our men were overborne but they were trying, by common
instinct, to reach the second line trenches where they could re-form.
Then I saw O'Hagan who had dropped from God knows where, standing
silhouetted against the red of dawn on the front line trench. He was
waving a brass cross and the bullets were pattering around him and
making a noise like rats skipping about an empty house. My God! Pluck! I
never thought O'Hagan had it in him. I tell you, he hurled himself down
on the rifles of a thousand Huns, and 'drove them hence' with his mighty
brass cross. Our men were soon rallying on the lost trench. The
stragglers clutched at each other, and pointed to where the cross
flashed and reeled in the seething mass. Under cover of night our bearer
party brought in O'Hagan stone dead with over twenty bullet wounds in
him. I know, vicar, when you read this, it will flash into your mind
that poor O'Hagan had been drinking again. You may banish any such
thought ... there was a different look in O'Hagan's eyes. He had seen
the 'immortal light, all young and joyful, million-orbed,
million-coloured, as on the first morning.' We carried him and his cross
over to an old monastery where we found one of those quaint lead
coffins--like the one in the crypt in _our_ old church--and laid him at
rest beneath the cool blue flagstones outside the chancel door. One of
our men, a stone-mason in times of peace, roughly graved his name on the
slab above him. As I walked back to the trenches I turned back to have a
last look at the grave. A priest was standing over it with hands
outstretched to bless...."
THE END
* * * * *
_Printed in Great Britain by Hazell, Watson & Viney, Ld., London and
Aylesbury, for Simpkin, Marshall, Hamilton, Kent & Co., Ltd._