Chapter 2

The soldier whose march had brought him back to his own village that night stood in the entrance of what had been his home and stared at the smoking walls, the charred roof gaping to the sky, the empty casements. The enemy had been there. He whispered his young wife's name, he called softly to the baby, as if they might be sleeping somewhere within the devastated house. He listened for a reply but none came. Perhaps he would have been thankful even for a groan or a cry of agony, anything that meant life. But all was silence within, without.

Yonder on the winding road at the foot of the hill he could hear the trampling of men, the groaning of wheels, the clank of iron cavalrymen, the jingling of bits and swords, sharp words of command. The army was advancing. He could delay no longer. He must get back to his place in the ranks. Summoning his courage he crossed the threshold and stepped into the vacant emptiness of the house. Everything was gone but the four stone walls. There were unrecognizable heaps of ashes here and there. He bent over them fearfully in the twilight wondering whether the shapeless, formless masses were--

Something caught his eye. The one thing intact apparently. He stooped over it. It was the baby's shoe--white, it had been originally. He remembered it. Now it was stained with blood. That was all that was left--a little baby's shoe, blood spotted. He pressed it to his heart and groaned aloud. A spasm of mortal anguish shook his frame. He lifted his clenched hand toward the sky overshadowing the roofless walls.

Now he suddenly became aware that he was not alone. There was someone else in the room. He saw vaguely, indistinctly, a figure strangely clad, staggering on with bended back as if under some crushing load. He stared in the twilight striving to concentrate his faculties. The figure passed by. On its back was a shadowy something--beams of wood roughly crossed, he decided. It raised its head and looked at him. The face was somehow lighter than the rest.

The man's arm fell. The room was empty after all. He stared at the little shoe. Was it somewhere well with the child, with its mother? Unbuttoning his tunic he thrust the little shoe within, over his heart. He straightened up. Away off on the road a bugle call rang out above the tumult. He turned away, seized his rifle, shouldered it, stepped rapidly toward his regiment and his duty.

VII

The Thorn Crowned

"THE SOLDIERS PLATTED A CROWN OF THORNS AND PUT IT ON HIS HEAD"

VII

The Thorn Crowned

It was ghastly cold in the ruined church. It had been warm enough there during the day, but the fire that had gutted it had died like the young acolyte, like the aged sacristan, the venerable mother, the sweet young novice, the women who had sought shelter there in vain. Neither the dignity of age nor the sweetness of maidenhood nor the innocence of youth nor the sanctity of profession had availed.

The old priest was glad they were dead. Life after what they had suffered had been unthinkable. He thanked God for that oblivion. He wished that he, too, might die in that violated shrine where he had peacefully ministered for so long a time. They had taken the flock, the shepherd must follow. He should have led.

He had fought, oh, he had played the man for the honor of the poor lambs committed to him. Had he done right? Should he not have stood dumb before the shearers? They had shot him and stabbed him and beaten him into insensibility. The last thing he had heard was the shriek of one woman, the piteous appeal of another. They thought he was dead, but he was living. Why had he not died?

How could God be so cruel? This was war. This ruined sanctuary, these broken men and women who had sought only to serve Him! Was there a God indeed? Faith, hope, what were they? Assurance, trust? Words, words! Ah, how he suffered.

It was bitter cold and yet he burned with fever. The tremors of pain so exquisite that they might almost be counted pleasure shot through his ruined, torn, broken figure, yet he recked little of these. It was the shame, the shame. He had been zealous for the Lord of Hosts. There was no God. Men were not made in any image save that of hell. He could not move hand or foot, but he could see. He could speak. He could curse God and die.

As his lips framed that anathema he saw vaguely the figure of a stranger; a slender, wasted body, dark stains upon it in the moonlight. It wore some kind of curious headgear. The man stared. The light was reflected from the sharp points of long thorns. A cloth was fastened about the loins. The figure stood very straight in the desecrated Holy of Holies. A light seemed to come from its face. Its eyes looked at the man with great pity. Slowly the figure raised its arms. Slowly the arms extended themselves; there were blood-stains in the palms of the hands.

"It is He," whispered the priest. "His sorrow was greater than mine. Lord, I believe."

He knew nothing more save that a great peace had suddenly stolen around him.

VIII

The Broken Hearted

"ONE OF THE SOLDIERS WITH A SPEAR PIERCED HIS SIDE"

VIII

The Broken Hearted

"I'll get that man if I die for it," said the soldier. "He's found the one position in the lines from which he can fire into our trenches."

"It's easier said than done," remarked his comrade, "and the minute you cross that spot you come within his range. He'll put a bullet through you before you can level a rifle or press a trigger."

"I'll not go that way," said the man.

"What is your plan?"

"You know that salient yonder on the right? I'm going out of the trench there."

"When?"

"Now. I'll wrap myself in white. That little run of coppice will cover me until I get within a few feet of him, then I'll have to chance it."

"Wish I could help you, old man. I'd like to get that man. He's shot six of the best fellows in the company and--"

"You can help me by making a diversion to attract his attention. Keep him looking at that alley."

A few moments later the soldier shrouded in white crept out of the trench and noiselessly rolled down the slope to the bushes. The snow was deep on the ground. There was no touch of color about the soldier. He even thrust his rifle under the linen in which he had wrapped himself. Outside the shelter of the trenches the wind blew with terrific force. It was terribly cold. He had discarded his overcoat for freedom of motion. Only his indomitable resolution kept him alive. He locked his jaws together to keep his teeth from chattering. The ice-covered snow under his bare hands almost blistered the flesh as he crept along.

He intended to use the bayonet. If he shot the man he was stalking alarm would be given and he would be riddled with bullets before he got back. He was willing to give a life for a life if it were necessary, but he was reluctant to do so if it could be avoided. Cold steel would be better. Cold steel! He smiled grimly. It would need some hot blood to take the chill off the bayonet at the end of his rifle.

Slowly, almost holding his breath lest he be noticed, he edged his way along. He had plenty of time for thought. This was not so easy a job as he had fancied, not the physical part, but the mental strain. He could shoot a man who was shooting at him, he could batter a man over the head who was trying to do the same to him, but this stalking a man in cold blood was different somehow. Cold blood! He laughed soundlessly at his recurrent fancy. He went a little more slowly. Finally he stopped to consider.

From the nook ahead of him in which the enemy had ensconced himself came a sudden rapid rattle of rifle-shots. His friend back in the trench was doing his part. The man was awake--on the alert. It would be something of a fair fight, he thought with some little satisfaction. He surveyed the intervening space beyond the coppice. The men in the trenches on both sides would be awake, too. It would take him a few seconds to cross that space and get at the man he was stalking. Could they shoot him before that? There was some shelter where the enemy was. If the stalker could get to that spot he would be protected for a moment from fire from the enemy's trench.

It would take him a second or two to cross that space. In a second or two what might happen? Well, he would have to risk that. At the very end of the coppice he gathered himself together and rose slowly to a crouching position. Another rain of shots came from the nook; the man's rifle would be empty, he must give him no chance to reload. Now it would be a fair fight with the bayonet.

He threw aside the white draperies that impeded his legs and in half a dozen bounds the two men were face to face.

No shot had been fired. Yes, the magazine of the man's rifle was empty. He heard the crunch of his enemy's feet on the snow. He rose to his feet, his bayoneted rifle extended. The two barrels struck with terrific force. The men swayed, drew back for another thrust, and they were suddenly aware of a mist-like figure between them, a figure draped in white, lightly, diaphanously.

They stood arrested, guns drawn back, and stared. The figure slowly extended its arm, carrying drapery with it. A man's breast was bared. There, over the heart, was a great gaping wound, fresh, as if a broad, heavy blade had pierced it.

There was a clatter on the ice as a gun dropped and another clatter as a similar weapon struck the stone opposite. The two men bent forward, their hands outstretched. They took a step as if to touch the figure and there was nothing there! The hands met. They clasped warmly in the cold against each other.

"My God, what was that?" said the stalker.

"I don't know," answered the other.

"A pierced side!"

"Was it--"

"No. It couldn't be."

"Well, we worship the same God and--"

Ah, they were seen. There were quick words of command from the trenches, a staccato of rifle-shots, and two bodies lay side by side, hands still clasped, while the snow reddened and reddened beneath them.

And it was Christmas eve.

IX

The Forgiver of Sins

"I SAY UNTO THEE UNTIL SEVENTY TIMES SEVEN"

IX

The Forgiver of Sins

"A Priest, for Christ's sake, a priest," moaned the man.

A white-faced sister of charity upon whom had developed the appalling task of caring for the long rows of wounded at the dressing station before they were entrained and sent south to the hospital, hovered over the stretcher.

"My poor man," she whispered, "there is no priest here."

"I can't die without confession--absolution," was the answer. "A priest, get me a priest."

Next to and almost touching the cot on which the speaker writhed in his death agony lay another man apparently in a profound stupor. He wore the uniform of a private soldier and his eyes were bandaged. His face had been torn to pieces by shrapnel, fragments of which had blinded him. At that instant he came out of that stupor. Perhaps the familiar words recalled him to himself. He moved his hand slightly. The sister saw his lips tremble. She bent low.

"Who seeks confession, absolution?" he whispered. "I am a priest."

"You are wounded, dying, father."

"How can I die better than shriving a fellow sinner?"

That was true. The heroic woman turned to the man who still kept up his monotonous appeal.

"The man next to you," she said, "dying like you, is a priest."

"Father," cried the first man with sudden strength. "I must confess before I die."

"Lift me up," said the priest.

The woman slipped her arm about his shoulders and raised him.

"The sister?" began the other.

"I shall be blind and deaf," said the woman.

"Speak on," whispered the priest.

"I have been a great sinner--there isn't time to confess all."

"What is heaviest upon your soul, my son?"

"A woman's fate."

"Ah."

"There were two who loved her--a dozen years ago--she preferred me--I took her away."

"Did you marry her?"

"No. And then we quarreled--I deserted her. When I came to seek her she was gone--young, innocent, penniless, alone in Paris--I have sought her and never found her."

"What is your name?" asked the priest suddenly with a fierce note in his quivering voice.

"Father, can I be forgiven?" answered the man giving his name.

The dying soldier stared anxiously up at his bandaged comrade, at the nun who had hid her face behind the shoulder of the priest. He noticed that her body was shaking.

"And the woman's name?"

The priest suddenly sat upright. He shook off the sister's restraining hand. He tore the bandage from his own face. He bent over the dying man as he murmured the woman's name.

"Wretch," he cried, "look at me."

His face was gashed and cut and torn but something remained by which the other recognized him.

"You!" he cried shrinking away.

"I loved her, too," said the priest. "I would have married her. When she went away with you Holy Church received me."

"Mercy," cried the soldier uplifting his hand.

"What mercy did you show her?"

The priest could not see but he could feel. His hand seized the other's throat.

"My father," interposed the nun. "He has confessed. God will forgive, even as I."

"Who are you?" asked the blind priest, fearfully.

"The woman!" cried the dying man shaking off the other's hand and lifting himself up.

The sight came back to the priest on the instant. The fierce agony that filled his blinded eyes seemed to give place to the gentle touch of a hand upon them. He seemed to hear a mighty word--_Ephphatha_--that meant "be opened." Light flooded his soul. Looking up he was aware of two figures. One of the twain, an old man, gray bearded, was appealing to the other, clad in white raiment and youthful. And the priest suddenly recalled an old and well-known story of a fellow servant who would not have mercy.

"Father, forgive--" whispered the man before him.

As the voice of the dying sinner died away in the silence all was dark again. The priest saw no more, but the horrible pain in his eyes did not return. Over his torn features came a look of calm. He lifted his arm. His wavering hand cut the air in the sign of the cross.

"_Absolvo te_," he murmured as he pitched forward dead upon the breast of the dying.

And the woman tenderly covered them over.

X

The Giver of Life

"HE THAT EATETH OF THIS BREAD SHALL LIVE FOREVER"

X

The Giver of Life

Of the five specters in the boat three were without life. Those whose faint breathing indicated that they had not yet reached the point of death were too weak and indifferent to rid the boat of the bodies of the others. Ever since the homeward-bound whaler had struck a derelict in a gale of wind north of the Falklands and foundered, this little boat, surviving the shipwreck as by a miracle, had drifted on.

For three weeks in vain they had scanned the horizon for a sail. Their scanty supply of bread and water had been consumed in ten days. Thereafter they had nothing. The baby had died first, next a man whose arm had been broken by a falling spar in the disaster, and then the ship's cabin boy. The survivors were a man and a woman. They were both far gone. The woman was plainly dying. The man kept himself up by sheer exercise of will.

Their drifting had been northward toward warmer seas. It was winter in their home land and, though they knew it not, Christmas day. There the tropic sun blazed overhead from an absolutely cloudless sky. There was no vestige of breeze to stir the canvas of the solitary sail or ripple the glassy surface of the smoothed out ocean. The boat lay still. Not even the iron man at the helm could have lifted an oar. It had been dead calm for days. Speech there was none except in the gravest necessity. To talk connectedly was impossible.

After scanning the horizon for the thousandth time the man's burning eyes sought those of the woman at his feet. He was astonished to find them open. Her mouth was working, her parched lips strove to form words. He dropped the tiller which his hand had grasped mechanically, and which was useless since there was no way on the boat, and bent his head lower. Some sudden recrudescence of strength which the dying sometimes receive came to the woman.

"Death," she whispered. "Glad." She turned her head slightly and saw the form of the child. "The Baby--and--I--together."

The man nodded. Tenderly he laid his hot wasted hand on the woman's fevered brow.

"A priest," she said, looking up at him uncomprehendingly.

She was evidently going fast yet she knew what she wanted although she was not conscious that she craved the impossible. It would appear that she had been a good churchwoman. The man could only stare. He was no priest, only a rough sailor.

"A priest," said the woman more clearly. "I want--a priest--the sacrament." By some nervous convulsive effort she lifted her arms up toward him beseeching, appealing. There was another kind of agony in her voice that had not been present when she had moaned for water in the days before.

"The sacrament," she insisted, "I die."

The man looked away. Hard by the boat where there had been but a waste of sea rose a green island. A stretch of pleasant meadow met his eyes. It was so close to him that if he had leaned over the gunwale of the boat he could have laid his hand on the lush grass. Dumbly he wondered where it had been before, how he had come upon it so suddenly, why he had not seen it hours ago.

In front of him were hundreds of people, men, women, and children, plain people in strange simple garb, the like of which he had never seen. In front of these people and with their backs toward him stood a little group of men, in the center a figure in white garments. A lad offered something in a basket.

The man watched, amazed, awe-stricken, yet with a strange peace in his soul. He made no movement to gain the shore. He only looked and looked. The white-robed figure bent over the basket. He lifted from it a crude rough loaf of bread. He raised his eyes to heaven, his lips moved. He broke the bread and gave it.

As the sailor watched the island disappeared as suddenly as it had come. The scene changed. Now he looked into a low room, dimly lighted with strange lamps. Through an open window he saw the stars. The few men that had stood about the man in the grassy meadow were alone with him in that upper chamber reclining about a table. The man lifted from the board a cup of silver. He blessed it and gave it. The fragrance of wine came to the watcher.

He rubbed his eyes and looked again and before him spread the smooth unbroken surface of the monotonous sea. The woman's voice smote his ear again, higher, shriller, with more painful entreaty.

"A priest--for the love of God--the sacrament," she whispered.

The man tore open the last canvas bread-bag. It was tough material but it yielded to his insistence. In the corner there was a single tiny crumb they had overlooked. He lifted it gently with his great hand. He held it up in the air a moment striving to think. He was an English sailor and in his boyhood had been a chorister in a great Cathedral. The mighty words came back to him. He bent over the woman.

"Bread," he whispered. "The body--"

He shattered the water breaker with his fist. There was a suggestion of moisture on the inside of the staves of the cask. He drew his finger across them and touched it to the woman's lips.

"Water," he said hoarsely. "The blood--"

The terror, the yearning, disappeared from the woman's eyes. She looked at the man sanely, gratefully.

"God bless--" she faltered and then her lips stiffened.

Some tag of quaint old Scripture that had impressed him when he first heard it because of its very strangeness, but of which he had never thought in all the years of his rough life since boyhood, came into the man's mind now. He lifted his head as if to see again that figure.

"A priest forever," he gasped, "after the order of Melchis--"

He did not finish the word. The woman was dead. He knew now for what he had been kept alive. His task had been performed. He bowed his head in his hands and entered into life eternal with the others.

Presently a little cloud flecked the sky. Out of the south the wind blew softly. The smooth sea rippled blue and white in the gentle breeze. The little boat, cradling its dead, rocked gently as it drifted on.

XI

The Stiller of the Storm

"BE OF GOOD CHEER; IT IS I; BE NOT AFRAID"

XI

The Stiller of the Storm

"It's Christmas eve at home," murmured the young lad after he had said his prayers and tumbled into his narrow berth on the great ship. "I suppose they're trimming the Christmas tree now and hanging up the stockings. I wish I were there."

He was very young to serve his country, but not too young according to the standards of mankind to be a midshipman on the great steel monster keeping the leaden deep. It was the first time he had ever been away from home on Christmas day, too. The youngsters had all laughed and joked about it in the steerage mess. They had promised themselves some kind of a celebration in the morning, but in his own cot with no one to see, a few tears which he fondly deemed unmanly would come. He had the midnight watch and he knew that he must get some sleep, but it was a long time before he closed his eyes and drifted off to dream of home and his mother.

Athwart that dream came a sudden, frightful, heart-stilling roar of destruction; a hideous crash followed, a terrible rending, breaking, smashing, concatenation of noises, succeeded by frightful detonations, as through the gaping hole torn in the great battleship by the deadly torpedo, the water rushed upon the heated boilers, the explosion of which in turn ignited the magazines. By that deadly underwater thrust of the enemy the battleship was reduced in a few moments to a disjointed, disorganized, sinking mass of shapeless, formless, splintered steel.

As the explosions ceased, from every point rose shrieks and groans and cries of men in the death-agony hurled into eternity and torn like the steel. And then the boy heard the surviving officers coolly, resolutely calling the men to their stations.

He had been thrown from his berth by the violence of the explosion. His face was cut and bleeding where he had struck a near-by stanchion. His left arm hung useless. He had lain dazed on the deck for a few moments until he heard the orders of his lieutenant. He was one of the signal midshipmen stationed on the signal bridge. Whatever happened that was the place to which to go; he still had a duty to perform.

Picking himself up as best he could, he hurried to report to the lieutenant. With such means as were available signals were made. Calls for help? Oh, never! Warnings that the enemy's submarines were in the near vicinity and that other ships should keep away.

The captain was on the half wrecked bridge above. The boy noticed how quiet he was, yet his voice rang over the tumult.

"Steady, men, steady. Keep your stations. Stand by. Be ready."

The old quartermaster whose business it was to tell the hours saluted the captain.

"Eight bells, sir," he said, "midnight. Christmas day," he added.

"Strike them," said the captain.

And, as clear as ever, the four couplets rang out over the chaos and the disaster.

"Christmas day," the boy murmured.

"She's going, men," said the captain, as the cadences died away. "Save yourselves. Abandon the ship."

"Christmas morning," said the boy. "I wonder what they're doing at home."

"Overboard with you, youngster," said the signal lieutenant; "I wish I had a life-preserver for you, but--"

"Merry Christmas, sir," said the lad suddenly.

"Good God!" said the man. "Merry Christmas! They will think of us at home."

What was left of the ship gave a mighty reel.

"Quick or she'll suck you down," the officer roared, as he fairly flung the boy into the water,--and how he hurt that broken arm! "You can swim. Strike out. Good-by."