Part 11

“No, miss, we are not taking many prisoners now. No, we’re not likely to. Well, think of our case. Just one little bit out of the whole long line. They caught our sergeant--the sergeant of my company. We were all very fond of him. Well, miss, they put him up where we could all see him--top of their trench--and tortured him. Yes, miss, all day they tortured him in sight of us, and all day we were trying to get at them and we couldn’t. And when in the evening we did get at them, he was dead, miss. We were all very fond of him. We weren’t likely to give much quarter after that. And our officers”--here he smiles suddenly--“well, miss, we’re Territorials, you see. Our officers just let us loose. We’re Territorials,” he repeated. “They can’t keep us as they keep the regulars. Not in the same military way. No, miss, we didn’t give much quarter!”

Our daughter groans a little. She understands, she sympathizes, yet she regrets. She would like our men to be as absolutely without reproach as they are without fear.

“But you wouldn’t bring yourself down to the level of the Germans,” she says; “you wouldn’t cease doing right because they do wrong?”

He fixes her with bright blue eyes, and they are hard as steel.

“Your British blood will boil,” he says slowly.

It seems impossible to associate such a dark and awful tragedy with this slim English boy and his unconquerable air of joyous youth. The Signorina remembers the repeated phrase, “We were all very fond of him,” and she sickens from the thought of that hellish picture of cruelty and agony on one side, of the impotent grief and rage on the other.

To change the subject, she says:

“How were you wounded?”

And then it transpired he had been carrying in the British wounded at the end of that day. He had been hit in the leg without knowing it, and just as he was starting off to help to carry in the German wounded, he collapsed.

_To help to carry in the German wounded!_ Those Germans who had tortured his own comrade all day! Dear Tommy! Dear, straight, noble, simple British soldier! How could one ever have mistrusted your rough justice or your Christian humanity?

Real boy that he is, he warms up to the glee of narrating his audacities when out at night with a party on listening-post duty.

“Rare fun it was,” he declares.

He used to creep up to the enemy’s trench and bayonet what came handy.

“I couldn’t fire, you see, miss, nor do anything likely to make a noise, so it had to be done on the quiet. But I got a good many that way.”

Baby Vivi is tired of her game of cards. For a while past she has been amusing herself by boxing the two sitting soldiers. Very well-delivered vigorous thumps she applies on their chests with her little fists, and they obligingly go over backwards on the grass. She now comes to exercise her powers on the Territorial. He catches her in his arms.

The men all look at the little girl with strange, troubled, tender eyes. One knows what is at the back of their thought. One of them expresses it presently.

“To think that anyone could ever hurt a little creature like that!”

Vivi’s young mother sits with her small group further away. She has told them how she has fled out of her castle in the Ardennes at dawn, without having had time even to pack her children’s clothes. They had thought themselves safe with the pathetic hopefulness that filled poor Belgium from the moment when the French troops and the English appeared in strength upon the soil. “Now all is well,” they said; “now we are safe.”

A French General and his staff lodged in the château, and the men camped in the park. On the vigil of the day fixed for their intended advance, the General took her on one side. An old man, he had been through the whole of the war of ’70. He solemnly warned her of the folly of remaining in her home, as she intended.

“Madame, I know the Germans. I know of what they are capable. I have seen them at work; I have not forgotten.”

Should the invader reach a certain point within ten miles of the district she must fly.

All that night the aviators kept coming with messages, and in the early dawn they started. She was up and saw the cavalcade winding away through the park. She stood in the porch to wish them God-speed. The young men were full of ardour. They were going forth to meet the enemy. The General was grave. When he had reached the public road, he sent one of his aide-de-camps riding back at a gallop. Was it a premonition of disaster, or had secret news reached him by some emissary from the field of conflict? The message to her was, that she was to be gone at once with her family. At once!

The young husband had already departed at break of day in their automobile. He and his machine had been offered to the service of the country and accepted. The mother, with her four little children--among them the sturdy, two-year-old Viviane--had to walk to the station, with what luggage could be got together and trundled down in a wheelbarrow. Luckily it was not far--their own station just outside the park-gates. They got the last train that ran from that doomed spot. The German guns were within earshot as they steamed away.

In their hurry they had forgotten to bring any milk or water for the baby girl. The heat was suffocating. The only thing that could be laid hold of was a bottle of white wine which someone had thrust into a bag. Vivi clamoured, and they gave her half a glassful in the end. She enjoyed it very much, and it did not disagree with her at all.

The men in their blue garb listen to some of this story with profound attention. They have a very touching, respectful, earnest way of talking to the Belgian lady, and are very anxious to impress upon her that soon they will have her country cleared of the enemy.

“You tell her that, miss. She do believe it, don’t she? We’re going to sweep them out in no time. Tell her that, miss. That’s what we’re over there for. She’ll soon be able to get back there--back in her own home.”

One of them gazes at her for a while in a kind of brooding silence, and then says huskily:

“Isn’t it a mercy you got away, ma’am--you and your little children!”

He knows. He has seen.

Then Viviane is called upon to sing “Tipperary.”

Though only just three, this child, as has been said before, she looks a sturdy four. The most jovial solid, red-cheeked, blue-eyed, smiling, curly-haired little girl that it is possible to imagine. Her mother says that she never lost her balance and tumbled down even when she first began to toddle; and one can well believe it. There is a mixture of strength and deliberation in everything she does that makes one regret she is not a boy. But she has pretty, coaxing, coquettish ways that are quite feminine.

She now puts her head on one side, and ogles with her blue eyes first one soldier and another, and smiles angelically as she pipes “Tipperary.”

This is a favourite song among the infant population these days. The child of a friend of ours calls it her hymn, and sings it in church.

There is something really engaging in Viviane’s roll of the “r’s.” Her Tipperary is very guttural and conscientious, and her “Good-bye, Piccadeely” always provokes the laughter of admiration.

Encouraged by applause, she bursts into, “We don’t want to lose you, but we think you ought to go.” And is quite aware, the little rogue, of the effect she will presently produce when, upon an incredibly high note, she announces, “We will _keess_ you.”

After this, she breaks into piety with, “Paradise, oh! Paradise.”

The little plump nurse gets up and shakes out her cloak. It is getting quite late, and they must go back to the hospital. She marshals her charges up on the terrace. They obey her just as if they were very good little boys in charge of their schoolmistress.

“Now say good-bye, and thank you. I’m sure you’ve all enjoyed yourselves. No. 20, where’s your hat? Go down and get your hat, No. 20. No; his poor leg’s tired. You go down and get it, No. 13.”

“I seen it a while ago,” No. 13 announces obligingly.

They say “good-bye” and “thank you” with the conscientiousness of their simple hearts. We shake, one after the other, those outstretched hands that grip back so cordially.

A guest of the Villino--an honoured guest, who is not only one of the most distinguished women artists of the day, but has lived all her married life within sound of the drum; who has been always inspired by the sights and scenes, the high glories and noble disasters of warfare--expresses the feeling struggling in our hearts as she retains the hand of the last of the file of blue-coats in hers: “What an honour to shake the hand of a British soldier!”

We hear them troop away through the little courtyard, laughing and talking. We think, as the small nurse said, that they have had a pleasant time.

* * * * *

One of the small side amusements in life is to hear other people’s reflections upon experiences that one has lived through together, and to measure the distance that lies between different points of view. It makes one realize how extraordinarily difficult it must be to obtain reliable evidence.

A neighbour has obligingly come in to help us with the entertainment. She is the pleasant, middle-aged Irish widow of an Irish doctor, and her good-humour is as pronounced as her brogue. Finding herself alone on the terrace with the Signorina after the departure of the convalescents, she mystified her with the following remark:

“How frightened the poor old lady was!”

The poor old lady? The Signorina was all at sea. There was no one answering to such a description among us to-day.

“The poor old lady,” repeated the other firmly. “Yes, Lady ----. I was talking to her, and oh! anybody could see how terrified she was. Nervous, you know; trembling at the mention of the war, upset, shrinking away. And no wonder, I’m sure,” she concluded genially. “Hasn’t she got a son out there?”

She betook herself down the steps towards her cottage. Our daughter watched the purple-spotted blouse meandering downwards from terrace to terrace till it disappeared. She was too astounded even to be able to remonstrate.

And, indeed, of what use would it have been? That Lady ----, distinguished, humorous, with her figure erect and slender as a girl’s, and her refined, delightful face stamped with genius on the brow, and with the most delicate humour about the mouth; that this incomparable woman, actually in the zenith of her power, personal as well as artistic, a being whom it seems that age can never touch, to whom the years have so far only brought a maturing of all kinds of excellence, should have appeared to anyone as the _poor old lady_! And that she should be further classed among the frightened! She who more than any fighter of them all sees the romance of war, the high lesson of war; who only the day before, speaking of a discontented soldier friend, had said to us in tones of wonder:

“He’s not enjoying war! It seems so strange.”

There was nothing for it but to laugh. But what an insight into the manner in which “other people see us.”

In the Signora’s early teens her family indulged in a Dublin season, during which a very worthy prelate, the Cardinal Archbishop of her Church, died. He was full of years and good works, but at no moment of his existence remarkable for good looks.

A sprightly housemaid of the establishment demanded permission to go and visit the church where he was laid out in state. On her return the Padrona’s mother inquired how the sight had impressed her, expecting a duly pious response.

Quoth the damsel, with her brisk Dublin accent:

“Well, really, ’m, I thought the Cawdinal looked remawkably well!”

As a rule, however, the Irish lower classes are more quick to seize shades of feeling, refinements of emotion, than the poor of other races; especially--to hark back to a former page--that peasantry of the older type in which a vivid spirituality was kept alive by their faith. A chaplain has written to us from the Isle of Wight speaking of the immense consolation he had had in the presence of some Irish soldiers among the troops stationed there. “Their faith made me ashamed.”

But indeed the feeling of religion among all our men, of whatever creed, and from whatever part of the British Isles they have come, is not one of the least remarkable manifestations of the war.

“I knew I would not be killed,” said a wounded soldier beside whose bed we sat the other day. “But I knew I’d come back a better man, and I think I have.”

Then he added that the only thing that troubled them, lying in hospital, was the thought of the comrades in the thick of it, and not being able to help them.

“Of course,” he went on thoughtfully, “we can pray. We all do that, of course; we do pray, and we know that helps.”

This man was neither Irish nor Catholic.

Infinitely touching are the remarks they make, these dear fellows; beautiful sometimes in their unconscious heroism.

“Well, at least,” said the Signorina to a man permanently crippled by shrapnel, saddened by the decision that he could never go back to the front. “At least you know you’ve done your little bit.”

“Ah, but you see, miss,” he answered in all simplicity, “among us the saying goes, no one has really done his little bit till he’s underground.”

“Will you mind going back?” said a rather foolish friend of ours to an exhausted, badly wounded sufferer in a Dublin hospital. He had seen Mons and its horrors, all the brutality of war with little of its concomitant glory. The eyes in his drawn face looked up at her steadily.

“If it’s my dooty, lady, I’m ready to go.”

“I’d give my other leg to go back,” said a maimed lad to Lady ----. He was in a hospital at Lyndhurst, a fair, splendid boy, not yet eighteen.

“Don’t make me too soft, Sister,” pleaded an Irish Fusilier with five bullet wounds in his back, to his kindly nurse in the little convent hospital near here. “I’ve got to finish my job out there.”

At a recent lecture delivered on “Five Months with the British Expeditionary Force”--his own experience--Professor Morgan made use of these remarkable words: “Our men count no cost too high in the service of the nation. They greet death like a friend, and go into battle as to a festival.”

What wonder, then, that there should be such an unshakable spirit of confidence throughout the whole of our army, for with conscience at peace, and eyes fixed on their high ideal, they go forth to fight, knowing that, as a great preacher has said, those who do battle in a just cause already carry the flame of victory on their foreheads.

IX

IT’S A FAR CRY TO PERSIA

“Come, my tan-faced children, Follow well in order, get your weapons ready! Have you your pistols?--Have you your sharp-edged axes?

* * * * *

For we cannot tarry here--we must march, my darlings; we must bear the brunt of danger!

* * * * *

O resistless, restless race! O beloved race in all! O, my breast Aches with tender love for all! O, I mourn and yet exult. I am rapt with love for all!”

WALT WHITMAN.

The master of the Villino got the telegram when he was shaving, that morning of October 26.

“Slightly wounded. Going London.--H.”

He came straight in to the Signora, who instantly read all kinds of sinister meanings into the reticent lines.

Slightly wounded! H. would be sure to say that whatever had happened. Even if he had lost an arm or a leg he might very well try and break it to us in some such phrase. There were certainly grounds for consolation in the fact that he should be “going London,” but were not the papers full of accounts of the felicitous manner in which the transport of very serious cases was being daily accomplished?

The only brother and very precious! Always in the Signora’s mind--stalwart, middle-aged man as he is--doubled by and impossible to dissociate from a little fair-haired boy, the youngest of the family, endeared by a thousand quaint, childish ways. That he should be wounded, suffering Heaven knew what unknown horror of discomfort and pain, was absurdly, but unconquerably to her heart, the hurting of the child. Alas! if an elder sister feels this, what must the agony of the mothers be all through the world to-day!

We telephoned to the clearing station at Southampton, and found that the ambulance train had already started. Then the master of the Villino, and the sister whose home is with us, determined to leave for London themselves and endeavour to trace our soldier.

It was late in the afternoon when a comforting telegram came through to those left behind; it told us that H. had been run to earth; that the wound was indeed favourable; that he was well in health, and that we might expect him here to be nursed in a couple of days.

Very glad the Villino was to have him, very proud of its own soldier, deeply thankful to be granted the care of him!

The Signorina immediately instituted herself Red Cross nurse, the local lectures having borne fruit after all. The wound was for us and for him a very lucky one, but the doctor called it dreadful, and, indeed, one could have put one’s hand into it; and Juvenal, summoned to assist at the first dressing, fainted at the sight. But it had not touched any vital point, and though the muscle under the shoulder-blade was torn in two, it has left no weakness in the arm.

Like all soldiers we have met, he will not hear of the suggestion that it was inflicted by a dum-dum bullet. Nevertheless, it is a singular fact that where the bullet went in the hole is the ordinary size of the missile, and where it came out it is the size of a man’s fist. Something abnormal about that German projectile there must have been. But we were ready to go down on our knees and thank God fasting for a good man’s life; and it was clear that it would take a long time to heal!

Anyone who knows our soldiers knows the perfectly simple attitude of their minds as far as their own share in the great struggle is concerned. Further, they have an everyday, common-sense, unexaggerated manner of speaking of their terrible experiences which helps us stay-at-homes very much--we who are apt to regard the front as a nightmare, hell and shambles mixed.

“We were a bit cut up that day, but we got our own back with the bayonet.”

“Well, they took our range rather too neatly, but man for man Tommy’s a match for the Hun any day, even if we were short of shells.”

“Poor lads! they had to trot off before they’d had their breakfast--a six-mile walk and stiff work to follow--after three days and three nights of it below Hollebeke. We’d been sent back for a rest when the message came; but the men didn’t mind anything, only the loss of the breakfast. ‘Such a good breakfast as it was, sir,’ as one of them said to me. Six o’clock in the morning and a six-mile march! A few of the fellows clapped their bacon into their pockets. The line was broken and the Germans coming in. Someone had to drive them out, and the Worcesters came handy.”

“Oh yes, we did it all right; running like smoke they were, squealing--they can’t stand the bayonet!”

That was the “little bit” where our soldier got his wound.

“It’s nothing at all, me child.”

His sergeant dressed it first at the back of the firing-line, then he walked into Ypres. He went to the hospital, found it crowded--‘Lots of fellows worse than I was’--so he strolled away and had his hair cut!--“A real good shampoo and a shave, and a bath, and then a jolly good dinner!” And then he proceeded to look up some nice fellows of the Irish Horse. And in the end he went back to the hospital, and they “did him up!”

When one thinks that in peace time, if anyone had accidentally received such a wound, what a fuss there would have been! What a sending for doctors and nurses! what long faces! what lamentations, precautions, and misgivings! It makes one understand better the state of things over there. How splendidly indifferent our manhood has become to suffering! How gloriously cheap it holds life itself!

H. is happily not among those unfortunate brave men who suffer nervous distress from the sights, the scenes, and the strain of warfare, but he has a keen, almost a poetic, sensibility to the romance and tragedy of his experiences.

As he sat, those November days, in one of the deep arm-chairs before the great bricked hearth in the Villino library, a short phrase here and there would give us a picture of some episode which stamped itself upon the memory of the listener.

“Lord, it was jolty, driving along in the ambulance to the station! The poor boy next to me--badly wounded, poor chap! lost a lot of blood--he got faint and lay across my breast; went to sleep there in the end.”

“Shells? ’Pon me word, it was beautiful to see them at night! Oh, one’s all right, you know, if one keeps in one’s trenches. One of my subalterns--ah, poor lad! I don’t know what took him--he got right out of the trench and stood on the edge, stretching himself. A shell came along and bowled him over. We dug him out. He was an awfully good-looking boy. There wasn’t a scratch on him, but he was stone dead; his back broken. And there he lay as beautiful as an angel. The Colonel and I, we buried him. He was twenty-three; just married. The Colonel and I used to bury our men at night.”

Suddenly the speaker’s shoulders shook with laughter.

“Those shells! One of my fellows had one burst within a yard of him. Lord, I thought he was in pieces! He was covered in earth and rubbish! ‘Has that done for you?’ I called out to him. ‘I think it has, sir,’ he said, and you should have seen him clutching himself all over! And then there was a grin. ‘No, sir, it’s only a bruise!’ Oh, you get not to mind them, except one kind; that does make a nasty noise--a real nasty noise; it was just that noise one minded. Ugh, when you heard it coming along! Spiteful, it was!”

In the private London hospital where he spent three days the bed next to him was occupied by a Major of Artillery, wounded in the head.

“There was not much wrong with him, poor old chap! but he had got a bit of nerve-strain. Lord, he never let me get a wink, calling out all night in his sleep: ‘D---- that mist! I can’t see the swine. A bit more to the left. Now, now, boys, now we’ve got them! Oh, damn that mist! Ha! we got them that time--got the swine!’”

The doctors who saw our soldier were rather surprised to find him so calm in his mind. They could scarcely believe he should sleep so sound at nights--that the human machine should be so little out of gear. Yet there were days when he called himself “slack,” looked ill enough, and one could see that even a short walk was a severe trial of strength.

We shall not lightly forget a funny little incident which happened upon an afternoon when he seemed peculiarly exhausted. He was sitting in his arm-chair close to the fire, looking grey and drawn, declaring that the north-east wind never agreed with him. A kindly clerical neighbour rushed in upon us. He had just heard that fifty thousand Germans had landed at Sheringham. All the troops were under orders. Despatch riders had galloped from Aldershot to stop the billeting of a regiment just arrived here. The men had started up in the middle of their dinners and begun to pack again. They were to go back to Aldershot and concentrate for the great move. Further--indisputable authority!--the Chief Constable of the county had private information of the invasion.

You should have seen our soldier! He was up out of his chair with a spring, his blue eyes blazing. All the languor, the unacknowledged stiffness and ache of his wound, were gone. If ever there was a creature possessed with the pure joy of battle it was he. How much the womenkind miss who have never seen their men leading a charge! What a vital part of a man’s character lies dormant in times of peace!