Part 35

"They're the Mere Econome's. There wasn't time to dress properly. We were turned out of the Convent, haven't I told you!--just as we stood. It was early in the morning. Seven o'clock Mass was just over. We were trooping in to the _Refectoire_ for coffee. We went to Mass and did our lessons, in spite of the awful guns. Then ... all at once--" She began to laugh, and a mask of fine glittering dew broke out over her peachy face from the temples to the upper lip. "The earth began to shake. The French were retreating from Charleroi. They streamed past and past, horsemen and guns and marching men, just as they'd gone by two days before when we waved and cheered them from the garden. Only this time there were wounded men.... The ambulance waggons were heaped with them--all bloody and dreadful.... Oh! And then the shells began to fall ... among the waggons and on the Convent! "The Germans are coming," the soldiers called to us. 'Fly while you have time!'"

"Shut up!" Rhona ordered the girl. "Haven't I told you not to talk, you stoopid! There weren't any shells--it's all your silly nerves. There might have been--but there weren't!"

"But the shells were hitting the Convent walls ... and bursting. The house was on fire. And the French Commandant said to the _Maitresse Generale_: 'It will be _rase_ over your heads if you remain, Madame. _On n'y fait quartier a personne--les Allemands_! They are advancing in incredible numbers. The road to Calais lies open before them because of the Great Catastrophe of yesterday. Our hearts are sad, not only for our own losses, but for the misfortunes of our friends across the----'"

"WILL you be silent! He never said so!"

With her scarlet head surmounting the shiny waterproof, Brenda rather reminded one of a Green Hackle, the likeness to the splendid gauze-winged fly being increased by the brightness of her eyes. Very round, very wide open, and with strange lines radiating from the pin-point speck of pupil to the outer band ringing the hazel irids, they stared from that crystal-beaded mask of hers. "But, Rhona," she reiterated, bewildered by her senior's vehemence of contradiction, "he _did_ say so! And the Convent was burning when we left!"

"If it was, you're to forget it--d'you hear me? And look here, if you dare to talk like this at home----"

"I won't. I know the Mater mustn't be upset! Look here, I'll swear I won't, if that'll do! Only don't say I've got to stop upstairs, will you? They're so gay here," Brenda pleaded humbly--"it'll help me to forget!"

"All right!" and with a warning scowl from Rhona the sisters parted. Lynette Saxham asked, looking after the little bizarre figure of Brenda with wistful tenderness in her eyes:

"Will she recover from the shock of the horrors she has seen the more quickly because you forbid her to speak of them?"

"I don't know.... I haven't thought.... It's my mother I bother most about.... You see, Roddy's Battery--Roddy's my brother--has gone with the Expedition. If Brenda talks rawhead and bloody-bones--but I'll take care she don't, the little fool!"

The eyes of both women followed the funny little figure. Lynette said as it was absorbed in a crowd of laughing friends:

"Would you prefer that we finished our talk here?" She glanced at the settee in a glass-screened angle near the fireplace, and Rhona assented with evident relief. Her Chiefs of the W.S.S.S., she explained, were anxious that Mrs. Saxham should consent to speak at the Royal Hall Mass Meeting of Protest Against the Delay of Parliament in passing the Woman Suffrage Bill. The Meeting was fixed for the middle of October. Mrs. Saxham's sympathy with the Movement was to be gathered from her writings. A personal expression would be valued by the W.S.S.S.

"I am in sympathy to the extent of joining in any form of protest or any description of organised Demonstration that is not characterised by violence," said Lynette. "To brawl at public meetings"--Rhona wondered whether she had heard of her own baulked attempt to heckle the Bishops at the Guildhall Banquet?--"to assault public personages and damage private or public property is not the method by which the Franchise will be gained. To make war upon men is not the way, I think, to win their suffrages for women. But I will gladly speak at the Meeting, please be kind enough to tell the Chiefs."

"It's awfully sporting of you--when you've been in such trouble. It must have been quite too awful," bungled Rhona, "about your boy!"

"About my boy! ..." Lynette caught her breath and nipped her lower lip between her teeth to keep back the cry that else must have escaped her. "You are kind.... You will be infinitely kinder if you say no more!"

"I beg your pardon. I'm frightfully clumsy!" apologised Rhona. "Roddy--my brother who's at the Front--once told me that I had the tact of a steam-cultivator and the discretion of a runaway motor-bus." She added: "I'm afraid you think I was rough on Brenda. But the Mater's heart-trouble keeps us all on tenterhooks, and for her sake--no matter what horrors are hinted or whispered--nothing shall make me believe--anything but the Best, until the Worst is brought to my door! You understand, don't you? ... What's that? Young Brenda----"

A gust of laughter drew the eyes of both women to the Green Hackle, who, surrounded by an appreciative circle, including Margot and Trixie Wastwood, Cynthia Charterhouse, Doda and Sissi, was performing the maddest _pas seul_ that ever held the floor. One huge golosh flew off, shaving a gilt-and-crystal electrolier as she finished with a daring high kick, and dropped down breathless and panting between Margot and Cynthia Charterhouse.

"You crazy child!" cooed Mrs. Charterhouse, patting one of the pink hands.

"I feel crazy!" gurgled Brenda, while Doda picked up her battered Trouville hat and Sissi retrieved hairpins scattered over the Club carpet. "Oh, my stars! You don't know, you'll none of you ever guess what it is to me to find you all so gay!" She bounced on the springy seat until her red locks tossed like the mane of a Shetland pony. "Now I really can believe--really!--that the whole thing's been a bad dream! Like you get when Sisters have been too busy to boil the potatoes soft, or take the cores out of the stewed apples." She turned her head and the sparkling mask of tiny beads broke out again over her flushed face. "Who are those _Soeurs de Charite_?" she asked, for the circle of elderly Members had melted away and the two Religious were now going, taking with them the Belgian mother and her children, to whom--of course at the Club's expense--they were to afford a temporary home. "What are they here for? Why, that's the woman who came with us on the boat from Ostend! Ah, my God!--it's all true! I can't tell lies any more! Do you hear, Rhona?" and the bizarre little figure leaped up and stood before them, defiant and panting. "Not even for you and Mother!" The voice broke in a wail. "Oh! how can you bear to see everyone so gay when the Guards and Gunners have been killed at Mons? Seven thousand lying dead, the French Commandant told us. Thousands taken prisoners--and we sit laughing here----"

Lynette Saxham caught the little body as it doubled on itself and dropped like a shot rabbit. She carried it to one of the settees, and knelt by it, loosening the clothes, working with swift and motherly hands.

The piano-organ had come back, or another like it,--and was jolting out the popular pseudo-pathetic strains of "Good-bye, Little Girl, Good-bye!" The swing-doors had thudded behind the nuns and their charges. Lady Wathe was just saying to Lady Eliason:

"Then you, dear, will personally apply to the Foreign Office and the Home Office and the Belgian Ambassador and the County Council. Pray count on me for _all_ the rest! Sir Solomon is a Tower of Strength! You agree with me, don't you, Sir Thomas? Mercy on us! _What_ a commotion! Who has had a telegram from the Front? Who says the Guards and Gunners have been annihilated? Who says the British Expedition has been overwhelmed by numbers and forced to Retreat? Will nobody stop that horrible organ? Will nobody answer me?"

It was the tragic crowning of that day of trivial happenings that the Iron Curtain that had baffled us so persistently should rise to the tune of a music-hall ballad at the touch of a schoolgirl's hand. Long before the huge funeral broadsheets broke out in the gutters of Fleet Street, the Strand, Pall Mall, and Piccadilly, screaming of the RETIREMENT OF THE FRENCH FORCES FROM NAMUR AND CHARLEROI, DISASTER TO THE BRITISH EXPEDITIONARY ARMY, DECIMATION OF FAMOUS REGIMENTS, AND THE RETREAT FROM MONS, the Tidal Wave of Mourning that was to sweep the United Kingdom from end to end had crashed down upon the Club.

Ah! how one had underrated them, those dead men who, living, had seemed to hold themselves so lightly. Who, submitting to be outclassed in Sport even while holding it the thing best worth living for, had smilingly accepted those hateful records of 1912-1913.

Theirs is a glorious record now. Above the huge Roll that is wreathed with bloodstained laurels, droop the Flags of the Allied Nations, their heavy folds all gemmed with bitter tears. Each nightfall finds the endless Roll grown longer. Each day-dawn sees the Hope of noble houses, the pride and stay of homes gentle and simple swallowed up in the abyss that is never glutted! How long, O Lord? we cry, yet comes no nearer the End for which the smallest children pray.

And the women.... In the Book of the Prophet Ezekiel we read of a valley of dry bones over which the Spirit of the Creator breathed. When that Wind from Heaven stirred them, the dead white bones put on Life and rose up. A change as miraculous has been wrought in Woman since the Black Deluge left a deposit of new-made widows and mourning mothers, red-eyed sisters and silent wan-faced sweethearts, sitting about the little tables where the empty places showed as awful gaps.

The bereaved did not shed many tears. Their grief was too deep to be emotional, their newly-awakened spirit too lofty for complaint. Their pride in their dead men was their upholding. Their bleeding hearts they only showed to GOD. Before then, He was for many of us non-existent: for many more a remote, passively observant Personality but tepidly interested in the affairs of the human race. Would these have learned to know Him, think you, if there had been no War?

And those whom every newspaper unfolded, every knock at the door might smite with dire intelligence, right bravely they bore themselves through that fortnight-long, hideous pipe-dream of the Long Retreat South. For many of these the torture of suspense was to give place to cruel certainty, after that unforgettable Sunday of the Sixth September, when at a distance of twelve kilometres from Paris the retirement of the Allied Armies suddenly changed to an Advance, and the columns of German Guard Uhlans in hot pursuit of the British Force, were routed by Generals Gough and Chetwode with our 3rd and 5th Cavalry Brigades. For many, many others, the strain has never since slackened. They lie o' nights as they lay through those nights of September, 1914, and feel the bed shaking, and the floors and walls vibrating, as the outer rings of vast concussions spread to them through the troubled ocean of atmosphere. And in the mornings they will tell you calmly:

"Oh, yes. _He_ is alive, but where he is there is terrible fighting. I heard the guns." ...

No arguments of people whose sons or husbands are not with the Army in Belgium, or France, Italy, or Palestine, will convince them that they do not hear the guns. Or that, borne upon the waves of a subtler medium than air are not conveyed to them finer, more mysterious vibrations.

Thoughts that meet thoughts. Mental appeals--demands--entreaties.... The hands of their souls, reaching out through the dark hours, clasp those of other souls in greetings and farewells.

*CHAPTER LX*

*KULTUR!*

The Belgian village-town had been so sorely knocked about that the names of its faubourgs, boulevards, and thoroughfares were obliterated. Hence, one is fain to substitute others, such as the Street Where The Naked Body Of The Little Girl Hung Up On Hooks In the Butcher's Window, the Passage Of The Three Dead British Soldiers With Slit Noses And Pounded Feet,--The Square Of The Forty Blindfolded Civilian Corpses, and the Place Of The Church Of The Cure They Crucified For Warning The British By Ringing The Bells. Of this sacred edifice--Romanesque and dating from the tenth century--little remained beyond the crypt and the stump of the tower. Some calcined and twisted bones, a scorched rag of a cassock, represented M. le Cure, that faithful shepherd of souls. Of M. le Cure's flock, not one remained to tell the story of the tragic episode that had reared the grim pile of blackening corpses in the Market Square, and added seven hundred homeless refugees to the rivers of human wretchedness ceaselessly rolling South.

In the bright sunshine of the fine October morning that had followed a night of rain and thunder, the grimly-altered shadows of shell-torn buildings lay black on the ripped-up pavements and shrapnel-pocked walls. A sandy-white cat lapped gratefully at a puddle, a dishevelled fowl pecked between the cobblestones, a pigeon or two preened on the broken ridge-tiles. To the eye of a skilled observer hovering hawk-like in the hot blue heavens, raking the streets through high-powered Zeiss binoculars, nothing human remained alive in this Aceldama. Yet when the two-seated bomb-carrying Taube with the big man and the small boy in it had banked and climbed, and hummed away Southwards on its aerial mission of ruin and destruction, one British officer, sorely wounded, lay in what had been the ground-floor living-room of a well-to-do baker's shop.

A Captain of a Guards infantry battalion belonging to a Brigade of the First Division of the First Army Corps. Marching, counter-marching, digging, and fighting rearguard actions had kept the Brigade's hands full during those blazing days and drenching nights of August and September, whilst the battered Divisions that had borne the brunt of the huge German offensive, reduced to one-twentieth of their effective, had hurried Southwards, leaving a trail of blood.

"Those other beggars have had all the luck!" the Brigade had growled when it had any time for growling. But it had won shining honours at the Marne, and had been heavily engaged at the Aisne, losing many of its men and officers. In the Aisne battle, particularly, the man we are concerned with had won special mention in Dispatches for a deed of great gallantry. Three days previously, an order from General Headquarters had moved his battalion on the little village town.

Their R.F.A. Battery had been posted a quarter-mile distant, commanding the north-east and east where the Germans were known to be. Machine-guns were placed at the principal road-ends debouching on the west where the Germans might be: the main streets had been barricaded with transport-waggons and motor-lorries, all the Maxims left had been hidden behind the sand-bagged windows of a factory--a gaunt, brick sky-scraper, long a thorn to the beauty-loving eye of M. le Cure--the walls of houses ending streets leading to the country had been loopholed for musketry, and a howitzer from the battery and a machine-gun had been spared to protect the bridge south of the town, a little place resting in the elbow of a small babbling river. Watches and patrols had been set and pickets placed, and then these war-worn Britons had dispersed into billets, or gone into barracks, too weary to eat, craving only for sleep.... That big mound of blackened ruins near the railway station, left intact for strategic purposes by the enemy, now stood for the barracks--just as that calcined heap of masonry, and twisted iron girders at the town's north angle now represented the hospital. Both had blazed, two huge, unquenchable, incendiary-shell-kindled pyres, to light the retreat of the battalion south.

Secure on those points of menace, north-east, east, and west, the exhausted battalion had slept like dead men. The townspeople, relieved in mind by the presence of so many English soldiers, slept like Flemings--very nearly the same thing. The Burgomaster slept; M. le Maire followed his example. M. le Docteur and M. l'Avocat slumbered profoundly too. Only M. le Cure, being restless for some reason or other, resolved to spend the night on the church-tower in the company of his breviary, an electric reading-lamp, a bottle of strong coffee, and a battered but excellent night-glass, the property of his late maternal uncle, an Admiral of the French Navy.

Four hours they had slept, when a furious clangour from the church bells awakened the sleepers. Shrill whistles screamed, bugles were sounded, Staff officers and company commanders clattered out of their quarters--the battalion jumped like one man to its feet. Voices talked over the wires of the field-telephones. An artillery patrol-leader had ridden into the advance of a column of heavy motor-lorries approaching the bridge that crossed the river, carrying the highway that had brought the battalion from the south. Lorries heavy-laden with--French infantry!--for an outpost's flashlight on the advance had revealed the Allies' uniform. Well, what of it! French troops were in the east upon the Yser. But still the crazy church-bells jangled and clanged and pealed, shrieking:

"REVEILLEZ-VOUS, MESSIEURS LES ANGLAIS! VOUS ETES SURPRIT, LES ALLEMANDS SONT ICI! REVEILLEZ-VOUS! AUX ARMES! AUX ARMES!"

And another broad arrow of dazzling blue-white light showed motor-lorries packed with spiked helmets and green-grey tunics, behind the _kepis_ topping men in blue coats and red breeches. The gunners of the howitzer, spared for the point commanding the road south of the bridge, were picked off by German sharpshooters before they could fire. The officer with the machine-gun was bayoneted and the gun itself seized. Revolvers cracked and spat incessantly, bayonets plunged through the darkness into grunting bodies. Britons and Boches strove in a melee of whirling rifle-butts and pounding fists. And by the light of star-shell, shrapnel, and machine-gun-fire from the other side of the river began to play indiscriminately on the assailants and the assailed. Under cover of this fire, the Germans would have rushed the bridge, but for the Factory stuffed with machine-guns, pumping lead from its windows, and the howitzer--Oh! bully for the howitzer! thought the wounded man.

His company had been entrenched as a reserve near the bridge in the mouth of a faubourg running westwards. They had doubled out to support the bridge-party in the moment of alarm. He had been shot then in the right arm and had gone on using his revolver with the left hand. It was not until some well-timed shrapnel from the R.F.A. battery north-east of the town began to burst among the green-grey uniforms, and the Kaisermen took to their motor-lorries and went off, carrying their wounded and leaving many dead--that Franky had been sensible of any pain.

"You've been pipped, old man," had said the commander of the bridge-company, mopping a smudged and perspiring visage with a handkerchief that shrieked for the wash.

"By the Great Brass Hat! so I have, but I'd forgotten all about it," said Franky, surveying the carnage in the golden sunlight of the newly-minted day. "Look at these fellows in French uniforms. It's an insult to the Allies to bury 'em like that. Couldn't we take off the blue coats and red baggies before we stow 'em underground? And the prisoners. What beauties! Whining 'Kamerad!' to our chaps, and putting their hands up for mercy. Do they suppose----"

The speaker ceased, for the brother-officer who had commanded the bridge-company was absorbed in looking through his binoculars at a silvery speck in the western heavens. It grew into a British R.F.C. scouting biplane, that came droning overhead at 4,000, circled, fired a white rocket for attention, dived nearer, circled again, and dropped a scrawled message in a leaded clip-bag.

"_Enemy-column--infantry with motor-lorries and two guns crossing river--bridge a mile to the West of you--hurrying hell-for-leather North. Dropped them two bombs. Bigger column advancing from North with more motor-lorries and howitzers. Look out for squalls that direction. Roads to South all clear._"

"Those crossing the bridge to west of us will be the gentlemen who came round that way to leave their cards!" said the Lieutenant-Colonel Commanding as the biplane sang itself away. "Probably a column detached for the surprise from the bigger force to the north. Well, we seem to have finished top-dog. Let's hope they won't tackle us again until the men have had their coffee. 'Phone the Brigadier at Zille! And 'wireless' the news of the scrimmage to the Divisional Commander at Baix and Marwics thirty miles south of us, and get a message through to Sir Kenneth"--he named the General Officer Commanding the A.C. to which the Brigade belonged. "And give details to the G.H.Q. at St. O., don't forget! Not that we'll get much credit over this." The Colonel scowled, surveying from the sandbagged window of Headquarters, situate in the Factory, the long lines of stretchers being trotted off by the R.A.M.C. bearers to the town Hospital. He rubbed his finger under the bristles of his close-clipped moustache with a rasping sound that conveyed his irritation as he went on: "That's the worst of these rotten little Advance-guard actions! They're expensive, infernally expensive. The casualties are heavy and the credit _nil_."

"Possibly, sir, but at any rate we've wiped out a lot of these Boche beggars," said the Battery Commander, optimistically. "Halloa! Bird over! And it's a Boche plane!"

A two-seated Taube, shining silver in the morning sunshine, had come out of the golden mists to northward, rolling up the landscape under its steel belly with wonderful steady swiftness. At some 3,000 above the town, it hovered, making a queer buzzing noise.

"I've heard that song before," said the Adjutant, his eyes glued to his binoculars. "You remember, sir, at Fegny?"

"The spotter our fellows christened the Buzzard. At his old smoke-signalling tactics." The Colonel snatched the Field-telephone, spoke, and from a gaping skylight at the top of the tall, square, many-windowed Factory an extravagantly-tilted Maxim began to pump lead skywards in a glittering fan-shaped stream. "Queer effect, uncommonly! Looks as if it were raining upside down.... Gad!--I believe that hit him!" he added, as a small dark object fell from the Hunnish monoplane. But it was only the inevitable miniature parachute with the smoke-rocket attached to it belching gouts of black vapour. The Buzzard ceased buzzing, banked, and climbed gracefully out of view.

And then, with a leaping of green-white tongues of flame away in the north, beyond a long sunlit stretch of level country fringed with poplars and streaked with canals, and patched with brown cornfields and golden-tinted woods and apple-laden orchards, and dotted with little towns and villages, the heavy German field-guns and 11.2-inch Krupp howitzers began to shower shrapnel and big steel shells of High Explosive upon the devoted little town.