Chapter II: Part 2

Indeed, it had been slow for the nurses during the last fortnight. They were "at the front," but the front was peaceful. After the hot toil of the autumn attack and counter-attack, there had come a deadlock to the wearied troops. They were eaten up with the chill of the moist earth, and the perpetual drizzle. So they laid by their machine guns, and silently wore through the grey days.

Victor, the orderly, cranked the engine for Mrs. Bracher, and she hummed merrily away. She drove the car. She was not going to have any fumbling male hand spoil that sweetly running motor. She had chosen the battle-front in Flanders as the perfect place for vindicating woman's courage, coolness, and capacity for roughing it. She was determined to leave not one quality of initiative and daring to man's monopoly. If he had worn a decoration for some "nervy" hazardous trait, she came prepared to pluck it from his swelling pride, cut it in two pieces and wear her half of it.

Her only delay was a mile in from Pervyse. The engine choked, and the car grunted to a standstill. She was in front of a deserted farm-house. She had a half hope that there might be soldiers billeted there. In that case, she could ask one of them to step out and start up the engine for her. Cranking a motor is severe on even a sturdy woman. She climbed out over the dashboard from the wheel side, and entered the door-yard. The barn had been demolished by shells. The ground around the house was pitted with shell-holes, a foot deep, three feet deep, one hole six feet deep. The chimney of the house had collapsed from a well-aimed obus. Mrs. Bracher knocked at the door, and shook it. But there was no answer. The house carried that silent horror of a deserted and dangerous place. It seemed good to her to come away from it, and return to the motor. She bent her back to the crank, and set the engine chugging. It was good to travel along to the sight of a human face.

"No one stationed there?" she asked of the next sentinel.

"It is impossible, Madame," he replied; "the enemy have located it exactly with a couple of their guns. Not one day passes but they throw their shells around it."

As Mrs. Bracher completed the seven-mile run, and tore into the Grand Place of Furnes, she was greeted by cheers from the populace. And, indeed, she was a striking figure in her yellow leather jerkin, her knee-breeches and puttees, and her shining yellow "doggy" boots. She carried all the air of an officer planning a desperate coup. As she cut her famous half-moon curve from the north-east corner of the Place by the Gendarmerie over to the Hotel at the south-west, she saluted General de Wette standing on the steps of the Municipal Building. He, of course, knew her. Who of the Belgian army did not know those three unquenchable women living up by the trenches on the Yser? He gravely saluted the streak of yellow as it flashed by. Just when she was due to bend the curb or telescope her front wheel, she threw in the clutch, and, with a shriek of metal and a shiver of parts, the car came to a stop. She jumped out from it and strode away from it, as if it were a cast-off ware which she was never to see again. She entered the restaurant. At three of the tables sat officers of the Belgian regiments--lieutenants, two commandants, one captain. At the fourth table, in the window, was dear little Doctor Neil McDonnell, beaming at the velocity and sensation of her advent.

"You come like a yellow peril," said he. "If you are not careful, you will make more wounded than you heal."

"Never," returned Mrs. Bracher, firmly; "it is always in control."

The Doctor, who was a considerate as well as a brave leader, well knew how restricted was the diet under which those loyal women lived in the chilly house, caring for "les blessés" among the entrenched soldiers. So he extended himself in ordering an ample and various meal, which would enable Mrs. Bracher to return to her bombarded dug-out with renewed vigor.

"What's the news?" she asked, after she had broken the back of her hunger.

"We are expecting a new member for our corps," replied the Doctor, "a young cyclist of the Belgian army. He fought bravely at Liège and Namur, and later at Alost. But since Antwerp, his division has been disbanded, and he has been wandering about. We met him at Dunkirk. We saw at once how valuable he would be to us, with his knowledge of French and Flemish, and his bravery."

"Which ambulance will he go out with?" asked Mrs. Bracher.

"He will have a touring-car of his own," replied Dr. McDonnell.

"I thought you said he was a cyclist," objected Mrs. Bracher.

"I gave him an order on Calais," explained the Doctor. "He went down there and selected a speed-car. I'm expecting him any minute," he added.

The short afternoon had waned away into brief twilight, and then, with a suddenness, into the blackness of the winter night. As they two faced out into the Grand Place, there was depth on depth of black space, from which came the throb of a motor, the whistle of a soldier, the clatter of hooves on cobbles. Only out from their window there fell a short-reaching radiance that spread over the sidewalk and conquered a few feet of the darkness beyond.

Into this thin patch of brightness, there rode a grey car, two-seated, long, slim, pointed for speed. The same rays of the window lamp sufficed to light up the features of the sole occupant of the car:--high cheek-bones, thin cheeks, and pale face, tall form.

"There he is," said Dr. McDonnell, enthusiastically; "there's our new member."

With a stride of power, the green-clad warrior entered the café, and saluted Dr. McDonnell.

"Ready for work," he said.

"I see you are," answered Dr. McDonnell. "Will you sit down and join us?"

"Gladly--in a moment. But I must first go across the square and see a Gendarme."

"Your car is built for speed," put in Mrs. Bracher.

"One hundred and twenty kilometres, the hour," answered the new-comer. "Let me see, in your language that will be seventy miles an hour. Swift, is it not?"

"Why the double tires?" she asked.

"You have a quick eye," he answered. "I like always the extra tires, you never know in war where the break-down will come. It is well to be ready."

He flashed a smile at her, saluted the Doctor and left the café.

"What a man!" exclaimed Dr. McDonnell.

"That's what I say," agreed Mrs. Bracher. "What a man!"

"Look at him," continued the Doctor.

"I did, hard," answered Mrs. Bracher.

* * * * *

Mrs. Bracher, Hilda, and Scotch, were the extreme advance guard of Doctor McDonnell's Motor Ambulance Corps. The rest of the Corps lived in the Convent hospital in Furnes. It was here that the newcomer and his speed-car were made welcome. He was a success from the moment of his arrival. He was easily the leading member of the Corps. He had a careless way with him. Being tall and handsome, he could be indifferent and yet hold the interest. To women that arrogance even added to his interest. His costume was very splendid--a dark green cloth which set off his straight form; the leather jacket, which made him look like some craftsman; the jaunty cap, which emphasized the high cheek-bones in the lean face. Both his face and his figure being spare, he promised energy. He had the knack of making a sensation whenever he appeared. Only a few among mortals are gifted that way. Most of us have to get our own slippers and light our own cigars. But he was able to convey the idea that it was a privilege to serve him. The busy superintendent of the hospital, a charming Italian woman, cooked special meals for him, and served them in his room, so that he would not be contaminated by contact with the Ambulance Corps, a noisy, breezy group. A boy scout pulled his boots off and on for him, oiled his machine, and cranked his motor. The lean cheeks filled out, the restless, audacious, roving eyes tamed down. A sleekness settled over his whole person. It was like discovering a hungry, prowling night cat, homeless and winning its meat by combat, and bringing that cat to the fireside and supplying it with copious cream, and watching it fill out and stretch itself in comfort.

There was a song just then that had a lilting chorus. It told of 'Rollo, the Apollo, the King of the Swells.' So the Corps named their new member Rollo. How wonderful he was with his pride of bearing, and the insolent way of him. He moved like an Olympian through the herd of shabby little scrambling folk.

"Is it ever hot out your way?" queried Rollo during one of Mrs. Bracher's flying visits to Furnes.

"I could hardly call it hot," replied the nurse. "The walls of our house, that is, the fragments of them left standing, are full of shrapnel. The road outside our door is dented with shell holes. Every house in the village is shot full of metal. There's a battery of seven Belgian guns spitting away in our back-yard. But we don't call it hot, because we hate to exaggerate."

"I'll have to come out and see you," he said, with a smile.

He became a frequent visitor at Pervyse.

"Rollo is wonderful," exclaimed Hilda.

"How wonderful?" asked Mrs. Bracher.

"Only to-day," explained Hilda, "he showed me his field-glasses, which he had taken from the body of a German officer whom he killed at Alost."

"That's true," corroborated Scotch, "and once in his room at the hospital he showed me a sable helmet. Scarlet cloth and gold braid, and the hussar fur all over it. It's a beauty. I wish he'd give it to me."

"How did he get it?" asked Mrs. Bracher.

"He shot an officer in the skirmish at Zele."

"He must have been a busy man with his rifle," commented Mrs. Bracher.

"He was. He was," said Hilda. "Why, he's shot fifty-one men, since the war began."

"Does he keep notches on his rifle?" queried Mrs. Bracher.

"I think it's a privilege to have a man as brave as he is going out with us," replied Hilda. "We must bore him frightfully."

"He's peaceful enough now, isn't he," observed Mrs. Bracher, "trotting around with a Red Cross Ambulance Corps. I should think he'd miss the old days."

* * * * *

Hilda and Mrs. Bracher were having an early morning stroll.

"It's a little too hot up by the trenches," said the nurse; "we'll take the Furnes road."

"It was a wet night, last night," commented she, after they had trudged along for a few minutes.

"Are you going to walk me to Furnes?" asked Hilda.

"You're losing your prairie zip," retorted Mrs. Bracher. "You ought to be glad of the air, after that smelly straw."

"The air is better than the mud," returned Hilda, holding up a boot, which had gathered part of the roadway to itself.

"We'll be there in a minute," said the nurse.

"Where's there?" asked Hilda.

"Right here," answered Mrs. Bracher.

They had come to the deserted farm-house where she had once met with her delay and where she had knocked in vain.

"See here," she exclaimed.

"Wheel marks," said Hilda.

"Motor-car tracks," corrected Mrs. Bracher.

The soggy turf that led from the road into the door-yard of the farm-house was deeply and freshly indented.

"Perhaps some one's here now," suggested Hilda.

"Never fear," answered the nurse. "It's night work."

"Up to two weeks ago," she went on, "this farm was shot at, every day, from over the Yser. Since then, it hasn't been shelled at all."

"What of it?" asked Hilda.

"We'll see," said Mrs. Bracher. "It always pays to get up early, doesn't it, my dear?"

"I don't know," returned the girl, dubiously. She was footsore with Mrs. Bracher's speed.

"Well, that's enough for one morning," concluded the nurse, with one last look about the farm.

"I should think it was," agreed Hilda.

They returned to their dressing-station.

* * * * *

It was early evening, and the nurses had finished their frugal supper. With the dishes cleared away, they were sitting for a cosy chat about the table. Overhead hung a lamp, with a base so broad that it cast a heavy shadow on the table under it. There was a fire of coals in the little corner stove, and through the open door of the stove a friendly glow spread out into the room. As they sat there resting and talking, a tap-tap came at the window.

"Ah, the Commandant is back," said Hilda. The women brightened up. The door opened and their good friend, Commandant Jost, entered. He was a man tall and slender and closely-knit, with a rich vein of sentiment, like all good soldiers. He was perhaps fifty-two or three years of age. His eyebrows slanted down and his moustache slanted up. His eyes were level and keen in their beam of light, and they puckered into genial lines when he smiled. His nose was bent in just at the bridge, where a bullet once ploughed past. This mishap had turned up the end of a large and formerly straight feature. It was good to have him back again after his fortnight away. The evening broke pleasantly with talk of common friends in the trenches.

There came a ring at the door. A knob at the outer door pulled a string that ran to their room and released a tiny tinkle. Victor, the orderly, answered the ring. He had a message for the Commandant. Jost held it high up to read it by the lamp. Hilda brought a lighted candle, and placed it on the table. He sat down, wrote his answer, and gave it to the waiting soldier. He returned, closed the door, and looked straight into the face of each of his friends.

"You have to go?" asked Hilda.

"We expect an attack," he answered. It was then 9:30.

"What time?" asked Hilda.

"The Dixmude and Ramskappele attacks were just before dawn. When the mists begin to rise, and the enemy can see even dimly, then they attack. I think they will attack to-night, just so."

"How does that concern you?" asked Hilda. "What do you have to do?"

"I have just asked my Colonel that I take thirty of my men and guard the section in front of the railroad tracks. That is where they will come through."

"What is the situation in the trenches, to-night?" asked Hilda.

"We have only a handful. Not more than fifty men."

"Not more than fifty!" cried Mrs. Bracher. "How many mitrailleuse have you at the railroad?"

"Six, two in the second story of the house, and four in the station opposite."

"Six ought to be enough to rake the road."

"Yes, but they won't come down the road," explained Jost; "they will come across the flooded field on rafts, with machine guns on the rafts. They can come down on both sides of the trench, and rake the trench. What can fifty men do against four or five machine guns? They will have to run like hares, or else be shot down to a man. They can rake the trenches for two miles on each side."

"What will happen if the Germans get on top of the trenches?" asked Mrs. Bracher.

"The very first thing they will do--they will place a gun on top of the trench, and rake this whole town. They can rake the road that leads to Furnes. It would cut off your retreat to Furnes."

That meant the only escape for the women would be through the back-yard, and over fields knee-deep in mud, where dead horses lie loosely buried in hummock graves.

"What do you think we had better do?" asked Hilda. "To leave now seems like shirking our job."

"There'll be no job for you, if the enemy come through to-night," returned the Commandant; "they'll do the job. But listen, you'll have a little time. If you hear rifle fire or mitrailleuse fire on the trenches, then go, as fast as you can run. If you hear as few as only four soldiers running down this road, take to your heels after them. That will be your last chance."

The bell tinkled again. The orderly called the Commandant into the hall. Jost returned with a message. He read it, and pulled out a note-book from his pocket. He consulted it with care. He sat down at the table, wrote his reply, and gave it to the messenger. He returned, shrugged his shoulders, and went silent. All waited for him to speak. Finally he roused himself.

"The mitrailleuse have only 3500 rounds left to each gun," he said, "and there are no cartridges in the trenches."

"That means," prompted Hilda.

"Four hundred cartridges a minute, those guns fire," he said, "that means eight or nine minutes, and then the Germans."

A pounding came at the front door. A captain entered, throwing his long cape over his shoulder.

"We have no ammunition," he said--"the men have nothing. I've just come from the Colonel."

The Captain was excited, the Commandant silent.

"Shall we evacuate?" Hilda pressed her question with him.

"I cannot answer for you," the Captain said. "If the enemy attack, there's nothing to hold them. They'll come through. If they come, they'll take you women prisoners or kill you. You'll have to make your choice now. There will be no choice then."

"Furnes isn't so prosperous, you know," said Hilda, "even if we did run back there."

Only the day before, Furnes had received a long-distance bombardment that had killed thirty persons and wounded one hundred.

At a word from the Commandant, the orderly left the room. The women heard him drive their ambulance out from shelter, crank up the engine, and run it for five minutes to get it thoroughly heated. Then he turned the engine off, and put a blanket over the radiator, tucking it well in to preserve the heat.

"Let's put what we need into the car," suggested Mrs. Bracher.

They picked up their bags, and went toward the ambulance.

It was pleasant to do something active under that tension. They stepped out into a night of chill and blackness. They could not see ten feet in front of them. It was moon-time but no moon. Heavy clouds were in possession of the sky, weaving a thick texture of darkness.

"There they start," said the Commandant.

Shell fire was beginning from the north, from the direction of the sea.

"They are covering their advance," he went on.

"Those are 21 or 28 Point shells. They are falling short about 1800 yards, but they are coming straight in our direction."

They walked past their car and down the road. They looked across the fields into the black night. Straight down the road a lamp suddenly shone in the gloom. It moved to and fro, and up and down. There was regularity in its motion. A great shaft of answering white light shot up into the night from the north.

"They are signalling from inside our line here," said the Commandant, "over there to the enemy guns beyond Ramskappele. Some spy down here with a flash-lamp is telling them that we're out of ammunition."

"But can't we catch the spy?" urged Hilda. "That light doesn't look to be more than a few hundred yards away."

"That is further away than it looks," answered Jost; "that's all of a mile away. He's hidden somewhere in a field."

Mrs. Bracher seized Victor by the arm, and faced the Commandant.

"I know where he's hidden," she cried. "Let me show you."

The Commandant nodded assent.

"Messieurs, les Belges," she commanded in a sharp, high voice, "come with me and move quickly!"

She brought them back to the car.

"Send for four of your men," she said to Jost. They came.

"Wait in the house," she said to Hilda.

"Now we start," Mrs. Bracher ordered. "Victor, you take the wheel. Drive down the Furnes road."

They drove in silence for five minutes, till her quick eye picked a landmark out of the dimness.

"Drive the car slowly past, and on down the road," she ordered, "don't stop it. We six must dismount while it is moving. Surround the house quietly. The Commandant and I will enter by the front door."

They had come to the deserted farm-house. It loomed dimly out of the vacant fields and against the background of travelling clouds. Victor stayed at the wheel. Mrs. Bracher, the Commandant, and the four soldiers, jumped off into the road. The six silently filed into the door-yard. The four soldiers melted into the night. Mrs. Bracher caught the handle of the door firmly and shoved. The door gave way. She and Jost stepped inside. The Commandant drew his pistol. He flashed his pocket light down the hall and up the stairs. There was nothing but vacancy. They passed into the room at their right hand. Jost's light searched its way around the room. In the corner, stood a tall soldier, dressed in green.

"Let me introduce Monsieur Rollo, the spy," said Mrs. Bracher. There was triumph in her voice. The Commandant put a whistle to his lips and blew. His four men came stamping in, pistols in hand.

"Clever device, this," said Mrs. Bracher. She had stooped and lifted out a large electric flash lamp from under a sweater.

"Clever woman, this," said the Commandant, saluting Mrs. Bracher. "How did you come to know the place?"

"Monsieur Rollo uses double tires on a wet soil," she explained.

"Monsieur Rollo will now bring his signal lamp outside the house," the Commandant said curtly. "He will signal the enemy that our reinforcements and ammunition have arrived, and that an attack to-night will be hopeless. He may choose to signal wrongly. In that case, you men will shoot him on the instant that firing begins at Pervyse."

The soldiers nodded. They marched Rollo to the field, and thrust his signal lamp into his hands.

"One moment," he said. He turned to Mrs. Bracher.

"Where is the American girl to-night?" he asked.

"At Pervyse, of course," replied the nurse, "where she always is. The very place where you wanted to bring your men through and kill us all."

"I had forgotten," he said. "If Mademoiselle Hilda is at Pervyse, then I signal, as you suggest"--he turned to the Commandant--"but not because you order it--you and your little pop-guns."

Mrs. Bracher sniffed scornfully.

"One last bluff of a bluffer, as Hilda would say," she muttered.

The soldiers stood in circle in the mud of the field, the tall green-clad figure in their midst.

Rollo turned on the blinding flash that stabbed through the night. He held it high above his head, and at that level moved it three times from left to right. Then he swung the light in full circles, till it became a pinwheel of flame. Four miles away by the sea to the north, a white light shot up into the sky, rose twice like a fountain, and was followed by a starlight that fed out a green radiance.

"The attack is postponed," he said.

THE BROTHERHOOD OF MAN

The German lay on a stretcher in the straw of the first
dressing-station. His legs had been torn by shot. He was in
pain. He looked into the faces of the men about him, the
French doctors and dressers, the Belgian infantry. The
lantern light was white and yellow on their faces. He drew
out from the inner pocket of his mouse-colored coat a packet
of letters, and from the packet the picture of a stout
woman, who, like himself, was of middle-age. He handed it to
the French doctor. "Meine Frau," he said.

At the outer rim of the group, a Belgian drew a knife, ran
it lightly across his own throat, and pointed mockingly to
the German on the stretcher.

IV

THE PIANO OF PERVYSE

The Commandant stepped down from his watch tower by the railway tracks. This watch tower was a house that had been struck but not tumbled by the bombardment. It was black and gashed, and looked deserted. That was the merit of it, for every minute of the day and night, some watcher of the Belgians sat in the window, one flight up, by the two machine guns, gazing out over the flooded fields, and the thin white strip of road that led eastward to the enemy trenches. Once, fifteen mouse-colored uniforms had made a sortie down the road and toward the house, but the eye at the window had sighted them, and let them draw close till the aim was very sure. Since then, there had been no one coming down the road. But a watcher, turn by turn, was always waiting. The Commandant liked the post, for it was the key to the safety of Pervyse. He felt he was guarding the three women, when he sat there on the rear supports of a battered chair, and smoked and peered out into the east.

He came slowly down the road,--old wounds were throbbing in his members--and, as always, turned into the half-shattered dwelling where the nurses were making their home and tending their wounded.

"How is the sentry-box to-night?" asked Hilda.

"Draughty," said the Commandant, with a shiver; "it rocks in the wind."

"You must have some rag-time," prescribed Hilda, and seated herself at the piano.

It was Pervyse's only piano, untouched by shell and shrapnel, and nightly it sounded the praise of things. The little group drew close about the American girl, as she led them in a "coon song."

"I say," said Hilda, looking up from the keys, "would any one believe it?"

"Believe what?" asked Mrs. Bracher.

"The lot of us here, exchanging favorites, with war just outside our window. I tell you," repeated Hilda, "no one would believe it."

"They don't have to," retorted Mrs. Bracher, sharply. She had grown weary of telling folks at home how matters stood, and then having them say, "Fancy now, really?"

The methodical guns had pounded the humanity out of Pervyse, and, with the living, had gone music and art. There was nowhere in the wasted area for the tired soldiers to find relief from their monotony. War is a dreary thing. With one fixed idea in the mind--to wait, to watch for some careless head over the mounded earth, and then to kill--war is drearier than slave labor, more nagging than an imperfect marriage, more dispiriting than unsuccessful sin. The pretty brass utensils of the dwellings had been pillaged. Canvas, which had once contained bright faces, was in shreds. The figures of Christ and his friends that had stood high in the niches of the church, had fallen forward on their faces. All the little devices of beauty, cherished by the villagers, had been shattered.

One perfect piano had been left unmarred by all the destruction that had robbed the place of its instruments of pleasure. With elation and laughter the soldiers had discovered it, when the early fierceness of the attack had ebbed. Straightway they carried it to the home of the women.

When the Commandant first saw it, soon after its arrival in their living-room, he beamed all over.

"The Broadwood," he said. "How that brings back the memories! When I was a young man once in Ostend, I was one of eight to play with Paderewski, that great musician. Yes, together we played through an afternoon. And the instrument on which I played was a Broadwood. I cannot now ever see it, without remembering that day in the Kursaal, and how he led us with that fingering, that vigor. Do you know how he lifts his hand high over the keys and then drops suddenly upon them?"

"Yes, I have seen it," said Hilda; "like the swoop of an eagle."

"I do not know that bird," returned the Commandant, "but that is it. It is swift and strong. He comes out of a stricken country, too; that is why he can play."

"I wonder, feeling that way, that you ever gave up your music," said Hilda. "Why didn't you go on with it?"

"I had thought of it. But there was always something in me that called, and I went into the army. For years we have known this thing was coming. A man could not do otherwise than hold himself ready for that. And now it is left to you young people to go on--always the new harmony, that sings in the ears, and never comes into the notes."

The Commandant, Commandant Jost, was perhaps the best of all their soldier friends. He was straight and sturdy, a pine-tree of a man in his early fifties. He was famous in Flanders for his picked command of 110, all of them brave as he was brave, ready to be wiped out because of their heart of courage. Often the strength of his fighting group was sapped, till one could count his men on the fingers of the hands. But always there were fresh fellows ready to go the road with him. He never ordered them into danger. He merely called for volunteers. When he went up against absurd odds, and was left for dead, his men returned for him, and brought him away for another day. His time hadn't come, he said. It was no use shooting him down, and clipping the bridge from his nose,--when his day came, he would be done for, but not ahead of that. This valiant Belgian soldier was a mystic of war.

In the trenches and at the hospitals, Hilda had met a race of prophets, men who carry about foreknowledge and premonitions. Sturdy bearded fellows who salute you as men about to die. They are perfectly cheery, as brave as the unthinking at their side, but they tramp firmly to a certain end. War lets loose the rich life of subconsciousness which most mortals keep bottled up in the sleepy secular days of humdrum. Peril and sudden death uncork those heady vapors, and sharpen the super-senses. This race of men with their presciences have no quarrel with death. They have made their peace with it. It is merely that they carry a foreknowledge of it--they are sure they will know when it is on the way.

No man of the troops was more smitten with second-sight, than this friend of the Pervyse women, this courageous Commandant. His eyes were level to command, but they grew distant and luminous when his mood was on him. This gift in him called out the like in other men, and his pockets were heavy with the keepsakes of young soldiers, a photograph of the beloved, a treasured coin, a good-bye letter, which he was commissioned to carry to the dear one, when the giver should fall. With little faith that he himself would execute the commissions, he had carefully labelled each memento with the name and address of its destination. For he knew that whatever was found on his body, the body of the fighting Commandant, the King's friend, would receive speedy forwarding to its appointed place.

It was an evening of spring, but spring had come with little promise that way. Ashes of homes and the sour dead lay too thickly over those fields, for nature to make her great recovery in one season. The task was too heavy for even her vast renewals. Patience, she seemed to say, I come again.

The Commandant was sitting at ease enjoying his pipe.

"Mademoiselle Hilda," said he. Hilda was sitting at the piano, but no tunes were flowing. She was behaving badly that evening and she knew it. She fumbled with the sheaves of music, and chucked Scotch under the chin, and doctored the candles. She was manifesting all the younger elements in her twenty-two years.

"Mademoiselle Hilda," insisted the Commandant. He was sentimental, and full of old-world courtesies, but he was used to being obeyed. Hilda became rapt in contemplating a candlestick.

"Mademoiselle Hilda, a little music, if you please," he said with a finality.

"You play," said Hilda to Scotch, sliding off the soap-box which served to uphold the artist to her instrument.

"Hilda, you make me tired," chided Scotch. "The Commandant has given you his orders."

"Oh, all right," said Hilda.

She played pleasantly with feeling and technique. More of her hidden life came to an utterance with her music than at other times. She led her notes gently to a close.

"Mademoiselle Hilda," said the Commandant from his seat in the shadows on the sofa, "parlez-vous français?"

This was his regular procedure. Why did he say it? They never could guess. He knew that the women, all three, understood French--Mrs. Bracher and Scotch speaking it fluently, Hilda, as became an American, haltingly. Did he not carry on most of his converse with them in French--always, when eloquent or sentimental? But unfailingly he used his formula, when he was highly pleased. They decided he must once have known some fair foreigner who could only faintly stammer in his native tongue, and that the habit of address had then become fixed upon him for moments of emotion.

He repeated his question.

"Oui," responded the girl. He kissed his fingers lightly to her, and waved the tribute in her direction, as if it could be wafted across the room.

"Chère artiste," said he, with a voice of conviction.

"And now the bacarolle," he pleaded.

"There are many bacarolles," she objected.

"I know, I know," he said, "and yet, after all, there is only one bacarolle."

"All right," she answered, obediently, and played on. The music died away, and the girl in her fought against the response that she knew was coming. She began turning over sheets of music on the rack. But the Commandant was not to be balked.

"Parlez-vous français?" he inquired, "vous, Mademoiselle Hilda."

"Oui, mon Commandant," she answered.

"Chère artiste," he said; "chère artiste."

"Ah, those two voices," he went on with a sigh; "they go with you, wherever you are. It is music, that night of love and joy. And here we sit--"

"Yes, yes," interrupted Mrs. Bracher, who did not care to have an evening of gaiety sag to melancholy; "how about a little César Franck?"

"Yes, surely," agreed the Commandant, cheerily; "our own composer, you know, though we never gave him his due."

Hilda ran through the opening of the D Minor.

"Now it is your turn," said she.

"My fingers are something stiff, with these cold nights by the window," replied the Commandant, "but certainly I will endeavor to play."

He seated himself at the instrument.

"Chère artiste," he murmured to the girl, who was retreating to the lounge.

The Commandant played well. He needed no notes, for he was stored with remembered bits. He often played to them of an evening, before he took his turn on watch. He played quietly along for a little. Out of the dark at their north window, there came the piping of a night bird. Birds were the only creatures seemingly untouched by the war. The fields were crowded thick with the bodies of faithful cavalry and artillery horses. Dogs and cats had wasted away in the seared area. Cattle had been mowed down by machine guns. Heavy sows and their tiny yelping litter, were shot as they trundled about, or, surviving the far-cast invisible death, were spitted for soldiers' rations. And with men, the church-yard and the fields, and even the running streams, were choked. Only birds of the air, of all the living, had remained free of their element, floating over the battling below them, as blithe as if men had not sown the lower spaces with slaughter.

And now in this night of spring, one was calling to its mate. The Commandant heard it, and struck its note on the upper keyboard.

"Every sound in nature has its key," he said; "the cry of the little bird has it, and the surf at Nieuport."

"And the shells?" asked Hilda.

"Yes, the shells, they have it," he answered gravely; "each one of them, as it whistles in the air, is giving its note. You have heard it?"

"Yes," answered Hilda.

"Why, this," he said. He held his hands widely apart to indicate the keyboard--"this is only a little human dipping, like a bucket, into the ocean waves of sound. It can't give us back one little part of what is. Only a poor, stray sound out of the many can get itself registered. The rest drift away, lost birds on the wing. The notes in between, the splintered notes, they cannot sound on our little instruments."

A silence had fallen on the group. Out of the hushed night that covered them, a moaning grew, that they knew well. One second, two seconds of it, and then the thud fell somewhere up the line. As the shell was wailing in the air, a hidden string, inside the frame, quivered through its length, and gave out an under-hum. It was as if a far away call had rung it up. One gun alone, out of all the masked artillery, had found the key, and, from seven miles away, played the taut string.

"There is one that registers," said the Commandant; "the rest go past and no echo here."

Firmly he struck the note that had vibrated.

"That gun is calling for me," said he; "the others are lost in the night. But that gun will find me."

"You talk like a soothsayer," said Mrs. Bracher, with a sudden gesture of her hand and arm, as if she were brushing away a mist.

"It's all folly," she went on, "I don't believe it. Good heavens, what is that?" she added, as a footstep crunched in the hall-way. "You've got me all unstrung, you and your croaking."

An orderly entered and saluted the Commandant.

"They've got the range of the Station, mon Commandant," he reported; "they have just sent a shell into the tracks. It is dangerous in the look-out of the house. Do you wish Victor to remain?"

"I will relieve him," said the Commandant, and he left swiftly and silently, as was his wont.

Hilda returned to the piano, and began softly playing, with the hush-pedal on. The two women drew close around her. Suddenly she released the pedal, and lifted her hands from the keys, as if they burned her. One string was still faintly singing which she had not touched, the string of the key that the Commandant had struck.

"Mercy, child, what ails you?" exclaimed Mrs. Bracher. "You've all got the fidgets to-night."

"That string again," said the girl.

She rose from the piano, and went out into the night. They heard her footsteps on the road.

"Hilda, Hilda," called Scotch, loudly.

"Leave her alone, she is fey," said Mrs. Bracher. "I know her in these moods. You can't interfere. You must let her go."

"We can at least see where she goes," urged Scotch.

They followed her at a distance. She went swiftly up the road, and straight to the railway tracks. She entered the house, the dark, wrecked house, where from the second story window, a perpetual look-out was kept, like the watch of the Vestal Virgins. They came to the open door, and heard her ascend to the room of the vigil.

"You must come," they heard her say, "come at once."

"No, no," answered the voice of the Commandant, "I am on duty here. But you--what brings you here? You cannot stay. Go at once. I order you."

"I shall not go till you go," the girl replied in expressionless tones.

"I tell you to go," repeated the Commandant in angry but suppressed voice.

"You can shoot me," said the girl, "but I will not go without you. Come--" her voice turned to pleading--"Come, while there is time."

"My time has come," said the Commandant. "It is here--my end."

"Then for me, too," she said, "but I have come to take you from it."

There was a silence of a few seconds, then the sound of a chair scraping the floor, heavy boots on the boarding, and the two, Commandant and girl, descending the stairs. Unastonished, they stepped out and found the two women waiting.

"We must save the girl," said the Commandant. "Come, run for it, all of you, run!"

He pushed them forward with his hands, and back down the road they had come. He ran and they ran till they reached their dwelling, and entered, and stood at the north window, looking over toward the dim house from which they had escaped. Out from the still night of darkness, came a low thunder from beyond the Yser. In the tick of a pulse-beat, the moaning of a shell throbbed on the air and, with instant vibrancy, the singing string of the piano at their back answered the flight of the shell. And in the same breath, they heard a roar at the railroad, and the crash of timbers. Soft licking flames broke out in the house of the Belgian watchers. Slowly but powerfully, the flames gathered volume, and swept up their separate tongues into one bright blaze, till the house was a bonfire against the heavy sky.

LOST

There were cities in Belgium of medieval loveliness, where
the evening light lay in deep purple on canals seeping at
foundations of castle and church, with the sacred towers
tall in the sky, and a moon just over them, and a star or
two beside.

That beauty has been torn out of a man's consciousness and
spoiled to his love for ever, by moving up a howitzer and
priming it with destruction. First, the rumble of the gun
from far away, then the whistle of flying metal, sharpening
its anger as it nears, then the thud and roar of explosion
as it clutches and dissolves its mark. Now its seven-mile
journey is ended. It has found its home and its home is a
ruin. Over the peaceful earth and under a silent sky, bits
of destruction are travelling, projections of the human
will. Where lately there was a soft outline, rising from the
soil as if the stones of the field had been called together
by the same breath that spread the forest, now there is a
heap of rock-dust. Man, infinite in faculty, has narrowed
his devising to the uses of havoc. He has lifted his hand
against the immortal part of himself. He has said--"The
works I have wrought I will turn back to the dust out of
which they came."

All the good labor of minds and hands which we cannot bring
back is undone in an instant of time by a few pounds of
chemical. That can be burned and broken in the passage of
one cloud over the moon which not all the years of a century
will restore. Seasons return, but not to us returns the
light in the windows of Rheims.

V

WAR

There fell a day when the call came from Ypres to aid the English. A bitter hot engagement had been fought for seven days, with a hundred and twenty thousand men in action, and the woods and fields on the Hoogar road were strewn with the wounded. Dr. McDonnell, the head of the Ambulance Corps, rode over from Furnes to the shell-blackened house of the nurses in Pervyse. With him he brought Woffington, a young Englishman, to drive the ambulance. He asked Hilda to go with them to Ypres.

"Scotch, English and American, all on one seat," said Hilda with a smile.

They covered the thirty miles in one hour, and went racing through the city of Ypres, eastward toward the action. Half way out to the noise of artillery, their car was stopped by an English officer, handsome, courteous, but very firm.

"You cannot go out on this road," he said.

"We will be back before you know it," pleaded Hilda. "We will bring back your wounded. Let me show you."

"Report to me on your way back," he ordered. "My name is Fitzgerald, Captain Fitzgerald."

They rode on. All down the road, straggled wounded men, three miles of them limped, they held up a red hand, they carried a shattered arm in a sling. There was blood on their faces. They walked with bowed head, tired.

"These are the lucky ones," said Woffington, "they only got scotched."

That was the famous battle of Ypres. Of the dead there were more than the mothers of a countryside could replace in two generations. But death is war's best gift. War's other gifts are malicious--fever and plague, and the maiming of strength, and the fouling of beauty--shapely bodies tortured to strange forms, eager young faces torn away. Death is choicer than that, a release from the horror of life trampled like a filthy weed.

"Mons was a birthday party to this," said a Tommy to Hilda. "They're expecting too much of us. The whole thing is put on us to do, and it takes a lot of doing."

Dr. McDonnell and Woffington loaded the car with the severest of the cases, and returned to the white house of the Officer. He was waiting for them, grim, attentive.

Hilda flung up the hood:--two Tommies at length on the stretchers on one side of the car; opposite them, seven Tommies in a row with hand, arm, foot, leg, shoulder, neck and breast wounds. It was too good a piece of rescue work to be strangled with Red Tape. The Officer could not refrain from a smile of approval.

"You may work along this road," he said, "but look out for the other officers. They will probably stop you. But, remember, my permission holds good only for to-day. Then you must go back. This isn't according to regulations. Now, go on to the hospital."

Ten minutes more, and they swung inside the great iron gates of the Sisters of Mercy. Never had Hilda felt the war so keenly as now. She had been dealing with it bit by bit. But here it was spread out beyond all dealing with. She had to face it without solutions.

There, in the Convent, known now as Military Hospital Number One, was row after row of Khaki men in bed. They had overflowed to the stone floor down the long corridors, hundreds of yards of length, and every foot close packed, like fish in a tin, with helpless outstretched men. The grey stones and the drab suits on the bundles of straw,--what a backwash from the tides of slaughter. If a man stood on his feet, he had to reach for a cane. There were no whole men there, except the busy stretcher-bearers bringing in new tenants for the crowded smelly place.

As quickly as they could unload their men, and stuff them into the corridor, Hilda and the doctor and Woffington sped back down the line, and up to the thronged dressing-stations. Wounded men were not their only charge, nor their gravest. They took in a soldier sobbing from the shock of the ceaseless shell fire. The moaning and wasp-like buzz of the flying metal, then the earth-shaking thud of its impact, and the roar of its high explosive, had played upon nerves not elastic enough to absorb the strain, till the man became a whimpering child. And they carried in a man shaking from ague, a big, fine fellow, trembling in every part, who could not lift a limb to walk. That which had been rugged enough for a lifetime of work became palsied after a few weeks of this king's sport. This undramatic slaughter was slower than the work of the guns, but it was as thorough. A man with colic was put into the car.

"I'm bad," he said. The pain kept griping him, so that he rode leaning down with his face pointed at the footboard.

Working as Hilda worked, with her two efficient friends and a well-equipped dressing-station, their own hospital only seven miles to the rear of them, she had been able to measure up to any situation that had been thrust at her. It was buckle to it, and work furiously, and clean up the mess, and then on to the next. But here was a wide-spread misery that overwhelmed her. Dr. McDonnell was as silent as the girl. He had a sensitiveness to suffering which twenty years of London practice had not dulled.

The day wore along, with spurt after spurt to the front, and then the slower drive back, when Woffington guided the car patiently and skilfully, so that the wounded men inside should not be shaken by the motion. They had a snack of luncheon with them, and ate it while they rode. Their little barrel of water, swinging between the wheels, had long ago gone to fevered men.

"First ambulance I've seen in twenty-four hours," said Captain Davies, as he came on them out of the dusk of Hoogar wood. The stern and unbending organization of the military had found it necessary to hold a hundred or more ambulances of the Royal Army Medical Corps in readiness all day in the market place of Ypres against a sudden evacuation. So there were simply no cars, but their one car, to speed out to the front and gather the wounded.

It was strange, in the evening light, to work out along the road between lines of poplar trees. Dim forms kept passing them--two by two, each couple with a stretcher and its burden. An old farm cart came jogging by, wrenching its body from side to side as it struck invisible hummocks and dipped into shell holes. It was loaded with outstretched forms of men, whose wounds were torn at by the jerking of the cart. In companies, fresh men, talking in whispers, were softly padding along the road on their way to the trenches, to relieve the staled fighters. The wide silence was only broken by the occasional sharp clatter and ping of some lonely sniper's rifle.

It was ten o'clock of the evening, and the ambulance had gone out one mile beyond the hamlet of Hoogar. The Doctor and Hilda alighted at the thick wood, which had been hotly contended for, through the seven days. It had been covered with shell fire as thoroughly as a fishing-net rakes a stream. They waited for Woffington to turn the car around. It is wise to leave a car headed in the direction of safety, when one is treading on disputed ground.

A man stepped out of the wood.

"Are you Red Cross?" he asked.

"Yes," said Dr. McDonnell, "and we have our motor ambulance here."

"Good!" answered the stranger. "We have some wounded men in the Château at the other side of the wood. Come with me."

"How far?" asked Hilda.

"Oh, not more than half a mile."

They seeped along over the wet wood road, speaking not at all, as snipers were scattered by night here and there in the trees. They came to the old white building, a country house of size and beauty. In the cellar, three soldiers were lying on straw. Two of them told Hilda they had been lying wounded and uncared for in the trenches since evening of the night before. They had just been brought to the house. She went over to the third, a boy of about eighteen years. He was shot through the biceps muscle of his left arm. He was pale and weak.

"How long have you been like this?" asked the girl.

"Since four o'clock, yesterday," he whispered.

"Thirty hours," said Hilda.

Dr. McDonnell made a request to the officer for help. He gave four men and two stretchers. They put the boy and one of the men on the stretchers, and hoisted them through the cellar window. Woffington and McDonnell took the lantern and searched till they found a wheelbarrow. The third man, wounded in the shoulder, threw an arm over Dr. McDonnell, and Woffington steadied him at the waist. He stumbled up the steps, and collapsed into the barrow.

Woffington and the Doctor took turns in wheeling him through the mud. Hilda walked at their side. The wheel bit deeply into the road under the weight. They had to spell each other, frequently. After a few hundred yards, they met a small detachment of cavalry, advancing toward the house. The horses seemed to feel the tension, and shared in the silence of their drivers, stepping noiselessly through the murk. Woffington was forced to turn the barrow into the ditch. It required the strength of the two men, one at each handle, to shove it out on the road again.

The stretchers had reached the ambulance ahead of the wheelbarrow. They loaded the car hastily--there was no time to swing stretchers. They put the three wounded in on the long wooden seat. The boy with the torn biceps fainted on Hilda's shoulder. She rode in with him. At Hoogar dressing-station, she asked the military doctor for water for the boy. He had come to, and kept whispering--"Water, water."

"I have no water for you," said the Doctor.