Part 24

The two officers hunted through the house, outside and round the out-buildings, and found no one; and, nauseated by what they had seen and heart-sick at thought of the women who had been there, returned to the village. As they entered it again they heard pipe music softly played, and seeing down a bye-street a cluster of their men, and hearing the sound of a woman's voice raised loud above the pipe music, they turned off and pushed in to see what was afoot.

They found a woman in the centre of a close-pressing ring of their men, a woman wild-eyed, with grey hair in disorder, with black and blue bruises on her face, with her clothing torn and grimed with dirt.

"Good God!" exclaimed the Adjutant. "Madame!"

He thrust a way through the men to her, but when he spoke to her and asked her to come with him, she clutched and held his wrist, and stood there and made him--short of using force to her--stand and listen with the men. A dozen times he tried to interrupt, but she would not be interrupted, so at last he left her to go on with her tale and asked the other officer to go and bring the C.O.

But before the C.O. came, he, like the men, was under the spell of the woman and of her tale, was listening, like them, with his heart turning cold and a deadly bitter anger rising in his heart. She spoke to them in English, breaking off at times into voluble torrents of French, checking herself and going back and repeating as best she could in English again. But although French words and phrases and sentences were mixed through her English, the tale was horribly plain and clear, the stories detailed and circumstantial enough to make it evident they were desperately true.

She told of women, girls, girl-children, outraged, and afterwards, in some cases, mutilated and bayoneted; she told of old men and boys hauled out and stood against a wall and shot while their women were made to stand and look on; of one woman who refused to make coffee for the Germans until they dipped the head of her infant in a pan of boiling water; of another woman who was crucified, pinned to the door with bayonets while the arm of her child was broken and its body was flung down on the ground before her and left there writhing ... all this and more she told, and helped her story out with rapid gesticulations and imitative motions and sounds of the child squirming and whining and the helpless mother wrenching at the pinning bayonets, while the men pressed in, glowering and cursing under breath, and behind them the pipe music skirled and wailed "roofs to the flames, and their flesh to the eagles."

And then, lastly, she told them of herself and her daughter, the girl of fifteen, fresh from a convent school, timid as a child and shrinking from the look, much less the touch of a man ... and of what they had done to her, while they held her daughter and made her watch; and then had done to the daughter, while she in turn was held to see and not allowed to look away or even close her ears to the cries. She told it all, sparing herself and her child no word and no item of their shame; and then--this was just before the Colonel arrived--she paused and looked round at the ring of savage faces about her, and lifted her two hands and shook them above her head.

"I am French, and you are Anglais," she cried, "but I am woman and you are men. I have told you, so that you may know the animals you fight. I have asked your music-man will he play this song you have, that with the music I say it to you 'Give their roofs to the flames, their flesh to the eagles.' And if ever you have Germans soldat at your mercy, and they cry for pity, remember this village, and its women and my daughter, and me. Give us revanche ... their flesh to the eagles...."

The Colonel broke in here, and, finding she was not to be stopped, turned and ordered the men away, and when they had gone, handed Madame over to some of the village women who watched timidly from their doors. Madame had told nothing but truth they assured him. Mademoiselle? Ah, ma'm'zelle could not be seen; she hid in a cellar and screamed like one mad if any entered or spoke--like mad did one say, but truly she was mad; and Madame scarcely less mad.[30]

They had one more glimpse of Madame as they marched out, a glimpse of her standing in a door and waving and calling something to the pipers as they came past. They knew or guessed what she wanted and the tune they were playing swung abruptly into "The Gathering," and the battalion tramped past the woman to the vengeful skirl of " ... flesh to the eagles."

* * * * *

Affairs had not gone well with the battalion, or what was left of it, through the battle. They had been ordered to advance and take a certain position in what was supposed to be the flank, had forced their way forward over the open under a scourging shell-fire, had suffered heavy losses, and at last gained the point from which they were to make the final attacking rush. But now that they were here it seemed impossible for men to go further and live. A stretch of open still lay before them, and this was swept with a tornado of rifle and machine-gun fire. What was supposed to be a flank of the enemy had become a frontal position, strongly held and evidently meant to be bitterly defended. It was vital to the success of the day that it should be taken, for various tactical reasons we need not touch here. The Colonel had passed the word through his officers and N.C.O.'s of what they were needed to do, and, briefly, why and how much depended on them.

The moment came.

A battalion on their left surged out and went plunging across the open, the high-explosive shells bursting and flinging fountains of spouting black earth and smoke amongst them, the ground puffing and dust-spurting under the hailing bullets. The Highlanders were supposed to wait until this other battalion had gained a certain line before they, the Highlanders, attacked; so they lay in their ditch, watching the line struggle forward and the men falling in swathes under the pouring fire, watched it stop at last and drop flat and then begin to break back to cover. It was no time to wait longer, and the Colonel, making up his mind swiftly, launched his attack. It was met by a devastating storm of fire, even heavier and more deadly than the one they had watched. The battalion, barely clear of their cover, wilted under the storm, hesitated, stopped, and began to fire back at the enemy they could not see. Those of the men who stood firing were cut down quickly, the others dropped prone or jumped into shell-holes or such cover as they could find. The officers did their best, jumping up and running forward and calling on their men to follow. But few of them ran more than a score of paces before bullet or shell fragment found them, and they fell; such men as rose and tried to follow only followed them into the next world. The air was alive and trembling to the whistle and whine and hiss of bullets, their snap and smack and crack, and to the quick following crash on crash of the earth shaking shell-bursts.

Again some of the officers tried to rally and start the line forward; but, by now, so great was the noise, so dense the air with smoke and dust, so chaotic and confused the whole business, that the officers' attempts resulted in no more than spasmodic and isolated movements of little groups, movements that were worse than useless, because each could be dealt with in detail, and, one after another, the sweeping machine-guns sluicing bullets on each and cutting them to pieces in turn. Those that made these separate attempts were mostly cut down; those that watched their failure were more convinced than ever that the whole was useless.

The Colonel, too, saw that it was useless and vain slaughter unless by some desperate chance the line should move together ... and even now it was perhaps too late, because the battalion on the left, lying in the open and scourged with fire, was giving way solidly and struggling back to cover.

It was a crisis in the battle, and where in the crisis many brave men had failed, one brave man tried and won. From somewhere down the line high over the roar of the battle there rose a wailing skirl of the pipes. There was no note of the music that was not familiar to every man there, that they did not know each word to fit to it. The pipes might have been crying the very words aloud to them instead of the music:

"_Thro' the depths of Loch Katrine the steed shall career, O'er the peaks o' Ben Lomond the galley shall steer, And the rocks of Craig Royston like icicles melt Ere our wrongs be forgot, ere our vengeance unfelt._"

It was the voice of their own Highlands, their own clansmen, their own regiment, that was calling to those crouching men in the ditch. They stirred, lifting their heads and looking for the piper. They could not see him, but the pipes shrilled on:

"_Then gather, gather, gather ..._"

The men knew what was coming. "_Gather_" sang the pipes, and, when they were ready gathered, the word or the sign would surely come. The music was rousing them to other memories beyond their Scotland and their name and fame in the Highlands. "_Landless, landless, landless_," cried the pipes, and the men remembered those women back in the village, houseless and homeless, tortured and shamed past telling, remembered too a woman's final word, "But we are women and you are men."

Along the line the wild and useless fire was steadying and dying away; they could see now that this was no time for shooting, but for the cold steel. The Colonel saw and felt that the moment had come, rose crouching to his knees, made ready to leap out and forward. He, too, had been looking for the piper without seeing sign of him. But now, just as he rose,--"_Hulloo, Hulloo ... Gregorlach!_" skirled the pipes, and down the line a figure leaped from cover into full view, halted, marked time for a few steps to the beat of the music, moved steadily forward, the kilt swaying, shoulders and pipe drones swinging, streamers fluttering, and the pipes screaming their hardest.

All along the line men were scrambling to their feet and into the open. "_ ... Gregorlach!_"

The Colonel was out and running forward, the line was up and away--"_Hulloo, Gregorlach!_" and the pipe streamers still fluttering and dancing ahead of the solid rushing wave of kilt and khaki and glinting steel. "_Give their roofs to the flames...._"

In that rush many fell and died; but at the end of it so did many Germans. For this time no bullet storm could stay the charge, the position was reached and taken, and the cold steel came to its own again--came to its own and drove home the meaning of the music that alone had brought it there--"_Their flesh ... to the eagles._"

THE BLACK CHANTER

By CHARLES LAING WARR

It was April above Lucerne, in the year of grace nineteen hundred and fourteen, and everything was young. A witchery of sunlight and scent and blossom etherealised the earth and the heavens; and fields, green as the green diamond at the heart of the world, rioted wantonly to kiss the white dazzling peaks that glittered in the sapphire sky.

On a fallen tree, its bark all frosted with lichen, two young people sat at the edge of a pine copse. They were both in the springtide of life, and they sat in enchanted silence inhaling the perfume of the trees and listening to the birth song of an awakening universe. She was not much over twenty, perhaps, and she was enhaloed with the soul of France. It lurked in the dark glistening coils of her hair, in the gestures of her shoulders and white, nervous hands, her lips. Her eyes, half mystic, half tigerish, wells of lightly slumbering passion, told the eternal story of that indomitable race whose destiny it seems to have been to demonstrate to the world that the life of a nation's soul may be unquenchable, though drowned in every century with blood.

He was obviously from across the Channel; clean built, healthy and handsome. One versed in the characteristic physiognomy of the denizens of our islands would have told you after a moment's observation that he was a Celt. And indeed, the Honourable Gordon Niall, son and heir of the fifteenth Baron Niall of the Western Isles, could play the _piob mor_ and speak the Gaelic as his mother tongue. Twelve years of public school and university life had left him still dreaming foolish dreams and seeing great visions. Which is a proof that he was born into this world a trifle late.

They were happy, these two, in their nest in the hills. They looked out on the world as the good God made it. Among the flower-smothered fields stretched at their feet a placid-minded peasantry lived and moved and had their being. Content with their tree-bowered, log-built chalets and their daily bread, they follow the slow-footed oxen and their wooden ploughs, just as their fathers did a thousand years ago. From day to day their stainless, uneventful life unfolds to them the secret of the untroubled heart, and they believe in the beauty of the world they see and the goodness of the Creator they one day hope to see. They are simple folk, of course.

Helene von Behr loved it as she looked. It made her remember so vividly an old-age worn chateau in the peace of southern France. She felt again in her inmost soul those scents of childhood which outlive all human forgetfulness. She sat and dreamed of it all, and as she dreamed her thoughts became words, and she told them to her companion, who listened with his blue eyes full of a boyish unconcealed adoration for the lovely girl beside him. Her eyes sometimes puzzled him; they puzzled him now. A sad, lambent light was in them; like sunset glints on the shadowing hills of vanished years.

She talked on: about the moat round the grey creeper-covered house, the moat into which she had fallen one day when only six years old. And the forest--so deep and dark and wonderful--with the great oak, into whose branches Napoleon III. had climbed to smoke his everlasting cigarette in peace when he had been the unwelcome guest of her great-uncle, a _grand seigneur_ who had despised the new régime. Old Jean Barbé, the coachman, was remembered too--old Jean, who was always cross but didn't mean to be; and what a funny scar it was over his left eye where her white cat had scratched him!

Then there was the village curé. She said, with simple innocence, that her nurse had told her as a secret that it was whispered he was her uncle, and would have reigned in the chateau had he only travelled into this life down the broad road which leadeth from the altar. But, what a dear he was! She remembered when she made her first confession to him, and how she had wondered if he was smiling, or angry, behind the grating when she told that she had stolen a cigarette from the big silver box on the writing-table of M. le Vicomte de Fontaigne, her father, and had smoked it surreptitiously in the stable beside her pet horse. He used to dine with them every Wednesday evening; and in the calm summer night the table was laid beneath the pear tree at the end of the terrace near the river, which glowed so red in the light of the westering sun. How shabby his soutane always was, and all brown with the stains of snuff!

So she rambled on and spoke of her father, that proud aristocrat, bearing a name to be found in the most abbreviated histories. She laughed when she said that he lived there in magnificent isolation, too proud to serve the Republic!

Then she sighed, and did not tell that nevertheless he had married her against her will to that dull old German diplomatist sitting down there in the Schweizerhof immersed in the voluminous correspondence which was the breath of his life: that correspondence which she secretly blessed in her heart for the free, careless hours it had given her these last ten days with this fresh-faced boy, the only occupant of the scantily filled hotel with whom her lord and master would allow her to associate.

She sat silent, and gazed dreamily at the undulating countryside, radiant in bloom and light and colour, with old Pilatus in the distance, sentinel of ages. The shimmering sunshine quivered all over it, and the scattered chalets, and orchards pink and white with foam, seemed lulled to sleep in the security of God. Once a priest passed, trudging down the white dusty road beneath; once a peasant, the smoke of his long black cigar hanging in a blue filmy wreath about his round felt hat. Far down in the valley tinkled the music of cow bells. A little stream, crystal clear, trickled at her feet ... flies danced in clouds above the edging rushes. The warm smell of the earth was intoxicating like incense....

She was dimly conscious that her companion was whistling softly. He had a habit of doing this when deep in thought, and she recognised the odd little refrain. She had heard him whistle it a dozen times--queer, uncanny, elusive as the mountain mist, with the mystery of the hills in it, and sorrow, and the spirit of brave men. She glanced at him. She knew that this boy had begun to exercise a strange fascination over her, stronger and more dangerous than she dared to confess even to herself. It was not unnatural, for her life these last three years in that grim, dull old schloss in Hanover had been very lonely. The bud will not mate with the yellow leaf, but spring must call to spring; albeit the mongers of the matrimonial market prattle as they please.

"What is it you whistle, my Gordon?" she asked suddenly. "There are strange things in the air. Has it a story from your Scottish hills?"

He sat back and laughed his gay laugh.

"Yes, it has," he answered. "I'll tell it you, if it won't bore you."

"But no: tell me," she said, and prepared to listen, her chin in her hand.

It was a tune they played on the pipes, he said: and it was a wild, barbaric story of war and the fierce passion of men and the tottering fortunes of his race. Six hundred years ago Castle Niall had been besieged by a neighbouring clan, for the Niall of the day had carried off the daughter of its chief, and held her within his walls. The beleaguered garrison was on the verge of starvation, when to Niall came a dream which told him that deliverance would come from a black chanter which would drop from heaven upon the castle roof. Three times, and three times only, would it play a mysterious tune, which none but the head of the house would be able to awaken from the reed; and in the hour of peril or distress the playing of the chanter would bring salvation. When the morning dawned grey over the castle ramparts, they found, lying on the roof, a black chanter as had been foretold. The chief blew on it with trembling lips, and lo! it played of its own accord. Immediately Niall and his men sallied from the fortress and drove their enemies into the sea.

In the intervening centuries the chanter had again been used and brought deliverance. Its virtue would be efficacious only once more. The strange, haunting air had become the battle charge of his race. It was that which he had been whistling. The last time it had been played, in the sixteenth century, the family piper had caught the air and fixed it indelibly on the scroll of memory. He laughed nervously when he had finished. He was afraid she would treat it lightly. But he had told his tale with an old-world seriousness, and although she had felt inclined to smile when he had ended his recital of it, something in his face restrained her. Instead, she patted his brown curly head.

"Come," she said, "it is late. We must go home."

* * * * *

It was their last evening together, for Helene and her husband were leaving the following day. As they walked along under the chestnut trees on the Schweizerhof Quai, Niall was dull and silent. She had stirred the very depths of his young, impressionable heart, this girl. He didn't attempt to deceive himself: he knew he was passionately in love with her. He felt that he hated old von Behr. But--it was all so hopeless.

That night he dined with them. The dinner was not a great success. They were all pre-occupied--Helene and Gordon with crowding thoughts that were very much akin, the Count with a disquieting dispatch from the Wilhelmstrasse and a severe attack of indigestion. At ten o'clock he excused himself: he had writing to do. He pointedly suggested that his wife should go to bed; and he made his adieux to Niall, remarking that they were leaving early in the morning and would not likely see him. Furious with stifled anger, the boy said a conventional good-bye to the woman he loved. She moved away. Count von Behr lingered for a moment, and then betook himself with shambling gait to his accustomed corner of the writing-room, which, for some reason, he preferred to his own private apartment.

The moment he was out of sight Niall hurriedly left the lounge and hastened upstairs. On the first floor he saw her, obviously lingering, a little way down the corridor. She came back as she saw him approach. The boy blushed deeply as he took her hand, and stammered something about not being able to say good-bye in such a beastly cold fashion. His head seemed to be swimming. He had some confused impressions about the white of her evening gown and a great crimson rose at her breast.

"My Gordon," she said softly, with that fascinating inability to control her r's that thrilled him; "Whistle me your tune once again--quickly, for I must go. I shall remember you by it, boy. Perhaps, some day if we meet again, I may be able to whistle it to you!"

She smiled, but her eyes were moist. And Niall drew his parched lips together and managed to whistle the strange, mysterious air. He finished and stood awkwardly facing her, tall and distinguished in his evening clothes. No word of love had ever passed between them, but as they looked into each other's eyes, each read the secret that nothing could hide.

"Adieu, my Gordon," she whispered hastily. "You have been good to me. I won't forget you ... and you'll help me often ... but be sensible, boy--and forget me!"

A moment later she was running down the corridor and vanished at the end. The boy stood for a minute or two rigid where he was, staring blankly at a red rose in his hands, his head reeling with the delicious joy of the knowledge that for one never-to-be-forgotten moment her arms had been thrown round his neck, and on his mouth her warm lips had pressed a swift, burning kiss.

II

Captain Gordon Niall of the Uist Highlanders lay flat on his face beside a loophole in the wall. With a subaltern, two men, and a stray sergeant of the Yorkshire Rifles, he occupied the remains of a former farmstead, now a jumbled heap of bricks and mortar. The only portion of this mass of refuse that looked like a house was a right angle formed by the ends of two walls which rose like a skeleton from the shattered piles of rafters, rubbish, stones, lime, and dead bodies of mangled men.

It was one of the supreme moments resultant upon the German break through near Armentières, that grim, bloody month of April, 1918. The British line existed only in the imagination of an exhausted and bewildered Staff, their faculties half paralysed with fatigue and over work. No one knew with anything even approaching certainty what the situation was. Only one thing was certain because it was obvious, and that was that the very existence of our Armies was hanging in the balance. The British front was hopelessly, irretrievably broken; and a disorganised rabble of tattered regiments, half crazy with weariness and strain and hunger, were retreating in mixed, irregular bands back from the river Lys, through a withering hail of bullets and a raging tornado of shrapnel and high explosive; valiantly and uncomplainingly to take up new positions and renew the desperate struggle against overwhelming odds.