Part 4

“Monsieur, it was the mood of the confessional, was it not? And this man was indeed an instrument of God. Do you blame me that I heard his confession, and that I gave him comfort--he, an alien, an enemy, a Prussian, who had saved Mont César and did not know why he had saved it, except that God had led him? He knew that von Manteuffel had learned of his disobedience; he knew that death and disgrace were before him; yet knowing these things he had persisted, and Mont César was saved.

“Monsieur, God’s will is strange, and the seed that God plants bears strange fruit. All men long for immortality; all men long for something which will bear their name to posterity, and he who had saved Mont César--do you blame him if he longed to be held in remembrance by the monks of our monastery? I promised to place his photograph here where you see it. I promised to write on it ‘The Saviour of Mont César’--as you see. I swore by the cross I wear that all this should be done, and yet--it was God’s will, monsieur--the German was not satisfied. I could see that his mind was tormented still.

“‘Promise me one thing more, Herr monk,’ he begged.

“‘What is it?’ I asked.

“‘Promise me just one thing more.’

“‘Very well. I promise, my son,’ I said. You see, monsieur, I called him ‘son,’ for he was a true son of the Church although a Prussian, and he had obeyed the voice of the good God although he was my enemy.

“‘Your processions on holy days, you monks sing in them?’

“‘We sing, my son.’

“‘Promise me that your monks will remember me.’

“‘I have promised you that.’

“‘Promise me that you will sing in your processions--that you will sing of the saving of Mont César.’

“I promised him, monsieur.

“‘Promise that you will sing of me, of Lieutenant Mahn, who saved your monastery; that you will sing of me for one hundred years!’

“‘Herr, I cannot promise that!’ I exclaimed.

“‘You have promised. Fulfil what you have promised.’

“‘I cannot.’

“His face became like the face of one dead. ‘You have promised,’ he muttered. ‘Sing only that I saved your monastery; only that.’

“Place yourself in that situation, monsieur! Was it so great a thing he asked? God made us to long for immortality; was it after all so great a thing the German asked of me?

“Maybe you think he bargained with me, maybe to you it seems a high price to pay even to him who had saved Mont César--the price of a procession once a year for one hundred years and a chant of remembrance. But no, monsieur, it was not excessive, that price. It was God who demanded it--not he. It was God who willed that he should save Mont César, that he should disobey, that he should be led out in disgrace to die, and that his memory should be held accurst by all but his enemies--by all save the monks of Mont César. Was it, then, so great a thing he asked? I had vowed: I must keep my vow. I bent my head in prayer, and in an instant I was answered. Monsieur, I promised! I would grant that strange wish!

“‘Tell me, Herr monk, what will you sing?’ he begged. ‘Tell me in Latin, just as you will sing it.’

“And I, slowly seeking for the words, began to speak those which you have heard to-night in the halls of Mont César: ‘_Primo anno magni belli, sub bono rege Alberto, praefectus Mahnius_----’

“‘That means Lieutenant Mahn?’ he asked with eagerness.

“‘Yes. _Praefectus Mahnius monasterium montis Caesarii ab exitio servavit--laus Deo!_’

“‘Sing it for me,’ he entreated when I was done. And I slowly chanted the words. ‘Teach it to me.’

“Slowly, very slowly I repeated the words again and again and again; and ‘... _ab exitio servavit, laus Deo!_’ he recited after me.

“How shall I tell you the end, monsieur? There were loud footfalls in the corridor and the door resounded to heavy blows!

“‘They have come for me, Herr monk,’ the officer whispered. ‘Good-bye. I am a dead man. _Primo anno magni belli_--those are the words?... _Herein!_’ he called confidently.

“Then in they came--a non-commissioned officer and four privates who filed through the doorway, saluted, and stood at attention. ‘I am named Sergeant Schneider--_Herr Leutnant_ Mahn?’ the leader asked.

“‘Yes,’ responded the lieutenant quietly.

“‘My warrant,’ said the sergeant, offering a paper. ‘You are under arrest. Come.’

“The lieutenant rose slowly from his chair. He thrust his pistol into its holster. His eyes were bright and very calm. For an instant I admired him although he was my enemy; he was so calm, so sure. God was with him, I know. ‘_Ab exitio servavit, nicht_, Herr monk?’ he asked.

“He picked up from the table the written order of von Manteuffel. ‘Your passport and _carte d’identite_,’ he continued slowly, as if we had been speaking of them. ‘You may stay in charge of the monastery with Piet. All is in order.... Your photograph, Herr.’ He handed me his own photograph--the photograph you see on the wall, monsieur. ‘Your _Ausweiss!_’ He gave me the written order from von Manteuffel directing that the monastery be burned. Then he turned quietly to the file of soldiers and walked out before them....

“It is not the face of a bad man, that face in the photograph, monsieur,” said Brother Jan, as I stared again into the steady, narrow eyes of the picture of Lieutenant Mahn. “God asks no questions of men when He would use them. Our monastery is saved through the hand of a stranger and an enemy. It is the work of God, _laus Deo!_ Let us praise God, monsieur.”

VI

GHOSTS

Belgian peasants say that on the Eve of All Souls unquiet spirits are loosed from their graves for an hour after sunset. Those who died by violence, or those who died unshriven, rise from the dark and speak to passersby; they rise with the load of their sins upon them, with the hatred, or fear, or agony, or longing which they felt while dying, still in their tortured hearts, and they beg the passersby to take vengeance on their enemies, or to give them news of those they loved or hated. And after a brief hour they sink back again into the dust.

I believe the story, for I have met those sad spirits. It was on a foggy evening in October--All Souls’ Eve--on the road from Brussels to Antwerp, where Belgians and Britons a year before faced the German hordes in weeks of bitter fighting. We were in a terrible hurry. Pierre, the chauffeur, was driving the motor-car; I was seated beside him. The headlights blurred like drowned eyes, and the open windshield dripped with wet. If we met a belated cart, or if we misjudged distances on that winding road, we would never reach our destination alive! But we were in a hurry, for it was All Souls’ Eve--the night of the dead.

Drowned trees writhed in the blurred light, culverts leaped out of the yellow flood like fountains, and dead walls in the burned and ravished villages seemed like rows of Roman tombs. We flew through the murdered town of Eppeghem, down vacant alleys lined with gaunt, disembowelled dwellings, beneath the shell of a church, beside stark walls lit for a breathless instant by the headlight of the motor then blotted into chaos. It was eerie and terrifying. A peculiar odour of decay, the odour of sour soil in early spring when the grip of the ice is relaxed and the buried abominations of winter steal up into the sun, rose from the town and pursued us--a smell like rotten fungi in old crypts. Sounds like the flapping of garments on a clothesline stole through the steady bass roar of the motor, and to my heavy eyes, tortured with staring into the yellow blur ahead, a vague shape seemed to float beside the car, a shape which was strangely human; erect, but rigid, flying along like a dry leaf upright in a gale.

I could see it only with the tail of my eye. It disappeared when I turned my head. It was clearest when I rolled my eyes high and looked through the lower part of the retina--a sort of second-sight, I suppose. The thing puzzled, angered, then frightened me. “Faster! _Vite! Vite!_” I yelled, suddenly grasping Pierre by the arm. The shadowy thing danced into the edges of the blur of light directly ahead. “Look out, Pierre!” The emergency brake came on with a grind and jolt, and the lights flared with the pulse of the engine. “It’s nothing,” I protested, half ashamed of myself, for evidently Pierre saw nothing. “_Encore plus vite._”

We seemed to have lost the shadow-thing, until suddenly I discovered that there were others with it, swinging rigid through the fog like trees uprooted in a cyclone. My eyes were smarting with cold tears: it was like swimming with one’s eyes open in a stiff current. And all the time I watched the shadow-shapes gathering closer. Faintly luminous pale yellow blots seemed to grow in the dingy black of the racing forms. They were phosphorescent, as I think of them now. Something brushed my hair. A clicking sound like castanets came from the empty tonneau behind me, and then a whistling, like the speech of a man with no palate.

“_Sssss--Feld--Feld--Feldwebel war ich, aus Bayern--sechs--sechsundzwanzigsten--infanterie Regiment_.”

I turned my head with an involuntary sob. There was absolutely nothing in the car. Pierre put on brakes violently.

“Do you see anything?” I demanded.

“Nothing, monsieur.”

“Do you hear or smell anything?”

We listened and sniffed. “Nothing, monsieur,” Pierre said, quivering and crossing himself. The noise of the motor died, and we sat motionless in gruesome darkness listening to the hollow dripping of fog-water on the fallen leaves in the roadway. We were swallowed, lost in mist, with only a square yard of paved road visible before us. “Go on, Pierre,” I said softly.

Then gradually I saw the ghosts more plainly. A woman, bent like an old hinge, flung along beside the flying motor-car, and a naked, frightened child ran fearfully before her. “Ask him, Grutje, ask him about home!” a thin child-voice sobbed. A younger woman whose head had been hacked from her shoulders floated along with them, fondling the severed member and wailing, “_De Deutschers_--the Germans!” A group of mangled bodies of Belgian artillerymen hung like a swarm of bees together, mouthing curses as they flew, and a gigantic peasant, with clotted beard and arms stretched rigid in the form of a cross, stared with a face stabbed through and through like honey-comb.

“_Feldwebel Stoner. König, Kaiser, Vaterland, sie leben hoch!_” whispered a voice.

The swarming spirits grew till they darkened the mist. We flew through the empty corridors of Malines, and on to Waelhem--first of the Antwerp forts to fall--up the ridge to Waerloos and Contich, toward Oude God and the inner forts. Still the swarms grew, crowding closer and closer. The eyes of the dead peered like cats’ eyes in the yellow dark, and my soul chilled to ice. The odour of dead clay was so strong I nearly fainted, and bony fingers seemed to press against my back and shoulders as if heavy wires were freezing into the flesh. “Light the dash-light, for God’s sake, Pierre!” I cried, hoping the new electric blur would banish the phantoms, but their sulphurous eyes glowed only the more in its feeble ray.

And the hissing, clicking, and rattling grew. “_Feldwebel Stoner, aus Bayern, tot, Eppeghem, September dreizehn ... König, Kaiser, und Vaterland--hoch!_” a voice shrilled; “_De Deutschers! de Deutschers!_” sobbed an echo after it. And then, with a sudden access of horror, I remembered the saying of the peasants; I knew what had wakened those unquiet spirits; knew that they wished to question me; knew that I must answer their questions in the brief hour of their release; all of them I must answer!

“... _leben hoch!_” screamed the German voice. “Are we in Paris?”

“No!” I shouted.

“... _suis Français. Vive la France!_ ...Have we reached the Rhine?”

“No!”

“... _Belge._ Is Belgium free?”

“No!”

“... honour, the honour of my country, honour--honour?”

“No!”

“... _Sozialdemokrat_--for world-peace I fought, that the world might have peace. Is there peace?”

“No!”

“... curé of Weerloo, dead for my church and my flock. Are we victorious?”

“No!”

“Ask, Grutje, ask!” trilled a child’s voice, and a sad shriek answered it: “Home--the little farm on the road to Elewyt beside Kasteel Weerde--is it safe?”

I knew that farm, a blackened ruin like the castle beside it, with two lath crosses leaning crazily over sunken graves in the dooryard. “No!”

“No, no, no!” The horrid refrain beat them back. By ones and tens and hundreds they asked and were denied. They had died as most men live, hoping to-morrow would bring bliss which yesterday withheld. They had died, as most men live, for dreams. In all the world there was no consolation for them, no word of honest hope or recompense. In all the world there was nothing for them but a shallow grave and a little wooden cross.

“I came from Devon to Antwerp, sir, with the Marines. Have we whipped the Huns?”

“No!”

A woman’s passionate voice screamed out: “They murdered my child, they murdered my man, they murdered me. Vengeance! Vengeance! Vengeance!”

“No!... No!... No!...” And I fell forward in the car senseless.

* * * * *

When I awoke the fog had almost disappeared, Pierre was chafing my cold hands, and the shadow-shapes had gone. They had sunken again into their hollow graves, unsatisfied, unconsoled. We rode swiftly on toward Antwerp. A clean breeze stole up from the west, purifying the stricken fields and their sad memories. It tore the last remnants of gray veil from the sky. And as we turned into the black, silent city streets, I leaned my head far back and stared up into the night with a sudden sense of relief and even of comfort. The sick little planet Earth fell away from me, far, far, infinitely far, and about me was unvexed emptiness and the tremendous stars.

VII

THE DESERTER

It was five o’clock in the morning. A riotous sunrise deluged the Campine as I slipped into my clothes and ran down the narrow, twisting tower-stair to keep a secret tryst with the _Baas_, or overseer. Little slits in the tower wall, cut for mediæval archers, let in the arrows of the sun; and as I ran through the gloomy armoury and the high-roofed Flemish dining hall--stripped of their treasure of old pikes, swords, crossbows, and blunderbusses by the diligent Germans--out to the causeway, and over the creaking draw-bridge on my way to the stables and the dismantled brewery, I imagined myself an escaped prisoner from the donjons of Château Drie Toren. In truth, I was running away from Baron van Steen’s week-end house-party for a breath of rustic air while the others slept.

The stables, tool sheds, hostlers’ barracks, bake-oven, and brewery were thatch roofed and walled with brick, toned to a claret-red, pierced with small windows and heavy oaken doors. The doors were banded with the baronial colours--blue stripes alternating with yellow, like stripes on a barber pole--and in the centre of the hollow square of farm buildings fumed a mammoth brown manure pile. A smell of fresh-cut hay and the warm smell of animals clung about the stables, and I heard the watch-dog rattle his chain and sniff at the door as I passed.

I found the Baas standing before his door, his face wrinkled with pleasure, his cap in his hand. Behind him his wife peered out at us, wiping her fat hands on her skirts, and two half-grown children stared from the nearest window. The Baas and his wife were the parents of sixteen children!

“Good day, mynheer!” every one shouted in chorus.

“Good day, madame; good day, Baas.” (I used the Flemish title for overseer--the word from which has come our much-abused word “Boss.”) “I’m a deserter this morning: the rest of the Baron’s party sleeps.”

“Ah, so,” laughed the wife. “Mynheer is like the German soldiers who desert by dozens nowadays. And would your Honour hide in the forest like them--like the Germans?”

“To be sure. The Baas is to show me the deepest coverts, where mynheer the Baron will never find me more.”

We laughed and passed on. A girl with a neckyoke and full milk pails came by from the dairy; nodding faces appeared at the windows of the farm buildings as we walked toward the woods; bees sped up the air from conical straw hives close to our path; and in a few minutes we were threading our way through a nursery of young pines, tilled like corn rows in Kansas, and all of equal age.

“Monsieur, there is a soul in trees,” said the Baas, affectionately patting an ancient linden on the border of the old forest. The Baas was a man from the Province of Liége, and he preferred to speak French with me rather than Flemish. He had, too, a Walloon lightness of wit which went sometimes incongruously with his heavy frame, as when he said to me once when we were debating the joys of youth versus age, “To be old has its advantages, monsieur. One can then be virtuous, and it is not hard!”

“There is a soul in trees,” he repeated. “All together the trees have a soul. A forest is one spirit. These trees are old men and old women, very patient and kindly and sluggish of blood. They nod their heads in the wind like peasants over a stove. And they talk. Sometimes I think that I can understand their talk--very wise and patient and slow. Men hurry apart, monsieur, but the trees remain together like old married people and watch their children grow up around them.

“Here”--we had turned down a path and were in the fringes of another forest of small pines--“here the Germans have taken trees for their fortifications, slashed and cut, and those trees that are left are like wounded soldiers: they have arms too long or too short, heads smashed, feet uprooted, and yet they wish to live, because they are one spirit.”

“What is this?” I demanded abruptly, for at my feet yawned a little pit, with lumpy clay still fresh about it and a fallen cross lying half hidden in the weeds.

“Ho, that? It is the grave of a German,” said the Baas heartily. He spat into the raw pit. “The German has been taken away, but the children of Drie Toren are still afraid. They will not come by this path on account of the dead _Deutscher_.”

His foot crushed the rude cross as he talked, and we walked on. But I was vaguely troubled. That vile pit and the thought of what it had contained had spoiled my promenade. As I had found on a thousand other occasions, my freedom in Belgium was only a fiction. The war could not be forgotten, even for an hour.

A partridge thundered up at our feet and rocketed to earth again beyond the protecting pines. In a little glade we surprised four young rabbits together at breakfast. The Baas laid his hand lightly on my arm. “It is sad, monsieur, isn’t it?” he said. “The poachers steal right and left nowadays. The _gardes champêtres_ are no longer armed, so the thieves do as they will. There is more pheasant in the city markets than chicken, and more rabbit than veal. The game will soon be gone, like our horses and cattle.

“You remember, monsieur, the sand dunes by Blankenberghe and Knocke on the Belgian coast? Ah, the rabbits that used to be in those dunes! But now the firing of cannon has driven them all away.”

A silence fell upon us both. The thickets grew denser, and we pushed our way slowly toward the deeper coverts. I found myself thinking of the little crosses along the seaside dunes which marked where greater game than rabbits had fallen--the graves of men--the biggest game on earth--the shallow pits and the frail wooden crosses, like that which the Baas’s leather boot had crushed a half hour before.

We had reached the deepest woods when a gasping, choking cry stopped us short. The thicket directly before us stirred and then lay still as death. The cry had been horrible as a Banshee’s wail, and as mysterious, but it was not the cry of an animal; it was human, and it came from a human being in agony. The Baas crossed himself swiftly and leaped forward, and instantly we had parted the protecting bushes and were looking down on a man lying flat on the ground--a spectre with a thin white face, chattering teeth, enormous frightened eyes, and a filthy, much-worn German uniform.

“What are you doing here?” I demanded.

The soldier did not answer, he did not rise, he lay motionless and hideous, like a beast. Then I caught sight of his left ankle, enormously swollen and wrapped in rags, and his hands--they were thin as sticks. The man was helpless, and he was starving.

And now came a strange thing. We two walked slowly around the man on the ground, as if he were a wild creature caught in a snare. We felt no pity or astonishment; only curiosity. Utterly unemotionally we took note of him and his surroundings. He had no gun, no knife, and no blankets. He lay on some broken boughs, and he seemed to have covered himself with boughs at night. The wild, haggard eyes turned in their sockets and watched us as we moved, but otherwise no part of the man stirred. He seemed transfixed, frozen in an agony of fear and horror.

“Ashes! He has had a fire here, monsieur, but it was days ago.” At the man’s feet the Baas had discovered the remnants of a little fire. “Holy blue!” he added in astonishment, “he has eaten these!”

A pile of small green twigs lay near the fire. The bark had been chewed from them!

At the end of our search we turned again to the man on the ground. “Who are you? What are you doing here?” I demanded again. There was no answer. “Baas, have you a flask?”

The old man slowly drew a little leather-clad bottle from his breast pocket and passed it to me in silence. He offered it with obvious reluctance, and watched jealously as I knelt and dropped a little stream of liquid between the parted lips of the creature on the ground. The man’s lips sucked inward, his throat choked at the raw liquor, he opened his mouth wide and gasped horribly for breath, his knees twitched, and his wrists trembled as if he were dying. Then the parched mouth tried to form words; it could only grimace.

For a moment I felt a mad impulse to leap on that moving mouth and crush it into stillness; such an impulse as makes a hunter wring the neck of a wounded bird. Instead, I continued dropping the stinging liquor and listening.

Then came the first word. “More!” the black lips begged, and I emptied the flask into them. The Baas sighed plaintively. “German?” the soldier whispered.

“No. American,” I answered.

“The other one?”

“Belgian.”

The frightened eyes closed in evident relief. The man seemed to sleep.

“But you?” I asked.

“I’m German--a soldier,” he said.

“Lost?”

“Missing.” He used the German word _vermisst_--the word employed in the official lists of losses to designate the wounded or dead who are not recovered, and those lost by capture or desertion.

“You understand, Baas?”

“No, monsieur.”

“He says he is a German soldier--a deserter, I suppose, trying to make his way over the frontier to Holland. And he is starving.”

The Baas’s face became a battleground of emotions. His kindly eyes glared merrily, his lips twisted until his beard seemed to spread to twice its natural width. Instantly his face became grave again, then puzzled, even anxious. A stream of invective and imprecation in mingled French and Flemish poured from his troubled lips, and he stamped his feet vigorously.

“He can’t stay here,” I concluded.

“It is death to help him,” said the Baas.

“For you, yes; for me, no. The Germans can only disgrace me as a member of the Relief Commission. They cannot kill me.”

“He must not be left to die here, monsieur.”

“The Germans will probably search your house if we take him there.”

“He may betray us if we help him.”

“That is possible. But you see he is very weak--almost dead.”

“He may be a spy.”

“That again is possible. But see! He has eaten twigs!”

“He is a damned pig of a German!”

“But you do not feed even pigs on sticks and leaves.”

“I am afraid, monsieur.”

“So am I, Baas. Yet you must decide, and not I. It is much more dangerous for you than for me.”