Part 6

"This regiment having left the Camp at Hondezeele two months and a half ago, it is unfortunately impossible to take the measures desired in the matter. Moreover, having ascertained the great cost of a fence of sufficient height, I beg to suggest that it would be more advantageous to the allied Governments to replace the gate-keeper at Hondezeele by a person of mature age and proved experience, to whom the spectacle described herewith would be inoffensive and even agreeable."

"No, Parker, no," said the colonel firmly, "I shall not sign that. Give me a piece of paper. I will answer myself."

He wrote simply:

"Noted and returned. "BRAMBLE, "Colonel."

"You are a wise man, sir," said Parker.

"I know the game," said the colonel. "I have played it for thirty years."

"Once upon a time," said the doctor, "there were two officers who, on the same day, each lost something belonging to His Majesty’s Government. The first one mislaid a coal-bucket; the second a motor-lorry. Now you must know, Aurelle, that in our army an officer has to pay for anything which he may lose by negligence out of his own pocket. The two officers, therefore, received notices from the War Office advising one that he would have to pay three shillings, and the other that a thousand pounds would be stopped from his pay. The first one wished to defend himself; he had never had any coal-buckets, and tried to prove it. He stopped his promotion, and in the end had to pay the three bob. The second, who knew a thing or two, just wrote at the bottom of the paper, ’Noted and returned,’ and sent it back to the War Office. There, following an old and wise rule, a clerk lost the correspondence and the officer never heard anything more of _that_ little matter."

"That isn’t a bad story, doctor," said Major Parker; "but in the case of the loss of property belonging to the Government there is a much better method than yours—Colonel Boulton’s method.

"Colonel Boulton commanded an ammunition depot. He was responsible, among other things, for fifty machine-guns. One day he noticed that there were only forty-nine in the depot. All the inquiries, and punishment of the sentries, failed to restore the missing machine-gun.

"Colonel Boulton was an old fox and had never acknowledged himself in the wrong. He simply mentioned in his monthly return that the tripod of a machine-gun had been broken. They sent him a tripod to replace the other without any comment.

"A month later, on some pretext or other, he reported the sighting apparatus of a machine-gun as out of order; the following month he asked for three screw-nuts; then a recoil plate, and bit by bit in two years he entirely destroyed his machine-gun. And correspondingly, bit by bit, the Army Ordnance Department reconstructed it for him without attaching any importance to the requisitions for the separate pieces.

"Then Colonel Boulton, satisfied at last, inspected his machine-guns, and found fifty-one.

"While he had been patiently reconstructing the lost gun, some damned idiot had found it in a corner. And Boulton had to spend two years of clever manipulation of his books to account for the new gun which had been evolved out of nothing."

"Messiou," said the colonel, "do you remember the gate-keeper at Hondezeele? I should not have thought it of her."

"No more should I," said Aurelle. "She was very pretty."

"Messiou!" said the padre.

*CHAPTER XVII*

"Doctor," said the padre, "give me a cigar."

"Are you aware, padre, that my cigars were rolled on the bare thighs of the young girls of Havana?"

"O’Grady," said the colonel severely, "I consider that remark out of place."

"Give me one all the same," said the padre. "I must smoke a cigar to help me find a text for my sermon. The quartermaster made me promise to go and see the motor-drivers who are at the back, and I don’t know what to talk to them about."

"Look here, padre, I will give you an appropriate text; lend me your Bible a moment. Ah, here it is. Listen! ’But David said, Ye shall not do so, my brethren, with that which the Lord hath given us ... but as his part is that goeth down to the battle, so shall his part be that tarrieth by the stuff; they shall part alike.’"

"Admirable," said the padre, "admirable! But tell me, O’Grady, how is it that an old sinner like you knows the Holy Scriptures so well?"

"I studied the Book of Samuel a good deal from an asylum doctor’s point of view," said the doctor. "Saul’s neurasthenia interested me. His attacks are very well described. I have also diagnosed the madness of Nebuchadnezzar. They were two very different types. Saul was apathetic and Nebuchadnezzar violent."

"I wish you would leave Nebuchadnezzar alone," said the colonel.

"I am very much afraid of asylum doctors," said Major Parker. "Violent, depressed, or apathetic, we are all mad, according to them."

"What do you call mad?" said the doctor. "I certainly can see in you, and in the colonel, and Aurelle, all the phenomena which I observed in the asylum."

"Ugh!" said the colonel, horrified.

"But I do, sir. Between Aurelle, who forgets the war by reading Tolstoi, and some of my old friends who thought they were Napoleon or Mahomet, there is a difference in degree but not in nature. Aurelle browses on novels from a morbid desire to live the life of someone else; my patients substitute for their miserable life that of some great personage whose history they have read and whose lot they envy.

"Oh, I know your objections, Aurelle. You know, all the time you are dreaming of the loves of Prince Bolkonsky, that you are the Interpreter Aurelle, attached to the Lennox Highlanders, but when Queen Elizabeth is scrubbing the floor of my office, she does not know that she is Mrs. Jones, charwoman, of Hammersmith. But incoherence is not the monopoly of madness: all the main ideas of a sane man are irrational erections built up, for better or worse, to express his deepest feelings."

"Parker," said the colonel, "can you think of anything to stop him?"

"A No. 5 grenade, sir," said the major.

But the doctor went on imperturbably:

"One of my patients was a country gentleman, who after being a model of piety for the first part of his life suddenly became an atheist. He gave carefully thought out reasons for it, and discoursed with a good deal of erudition on questions of doctrine, but the only true cause of his conversion to the wrong side was because his wife ran away with the clergyman of his village. Oh, I beg your pardon, padre, you don’t mind, do you?"

"I? I have not been listening to you for ages," said the padre, who was dealing out patience.

"It is just the same thing," continued the doctor, turning to the docile Aurelle, "with a man who is too refined for the class in which chance has placed him. At first he is simply jealous and unhappy. Influenced by these feelings, he becomes violently critical of society in order to account for his hate and disappointment.

"Nietzsche was a genius because he delighted in persecution. Karl Marx was a dangerous maniac. It is only when the feelings of discontent which he tries to explain coincide with those of a whole class, or a whole nation, that the impassioned theorist becomes a prophet, or a hero; while, if he confines himself to explaining that he would rather have been born an Emperor, they shut him up."

"Moral," said the major, "shut up all theorists."

"And the doctor," said the colonel.

"No, not all," said the doctor. "We treat the subject just as the ancients did. All primitive people thought that a lunatic was possessed by a spirit. When his incoherent words more or less accord with the moral prejudices of the time, the spirit is a good one, and the man is a saint. In the opposite case, the spirit is evil and the man must be suppressed. It is just according to the time and place and the doctors, whether a prophetess would be worshipped as a priestess or ducked as a witch. Innumerable violent lunatics have escaped the cells, thanks to the War, and their very violence has made heroes of them. And in every Parliament there are at least five or six undisputed idiots who got elected for their madness, through the admiration of their constituents."

"Say five or six hundred," said Major Parker, "and it will be the first sensible thing you have said to-night."

"That’s because my madness agrees with yours on that subject," said the doctor.

"Doctor," said the colonel, "you understand treatment by suggestion, don’t you? I wish you would calm down your hospital sergeant a bit. He is so nervous that he begins to tremble and becomes perfectly speechless if I speak to him. I really believe I terrify him. See what you can do, like a good fellow."

Next morning, Dr. O’Grady sent for Sergeant Freshwater to his tent and talked kindly to him.

Freshwater, a lean Albino with heavy stupid eyes, owned that he lost his head whenever the colonel came near him.

"Well, my friend," said the doctor, "we will cure you of that in five minutes. Sit down there."

He made some passes to create an atmosphere favourable to suggestion, then began:

"You are not afraid of the colonel, you know he is a man just like you and me—you rather like talking to him. Look closely at his face when he speaks to you. His moustache is always cut a little too short on the left side."

The doctor went on like this for a quarter of an hour describing the rugged features and funny ways of the colonel, then sent away the sergeant, telling him that he was cured, and not to forget it the first time he met his commanding officer.

A few hours later, Colonel Bramble, going out for his lunch, met the hospital sergeant on one of the duck-boards used for going through the camp. Freshwater stepped on one side, saluted, and began to laugh silently.

"Whatever is the matter, sergeant?" said the astonished colonel.

"Oh, sir," replied Freshwater in fits of laughter, "I cannot help laughing when I look at you, you have such a funny face!"

The colonel, in a few well-chosen words, destroyed the doctor’s learned suggestions for ever; then, establishing himself in front of the tinned lobster, he complimented O’Grady on his miraculous cure.

"I have never seen," said the padre, "any creatures so stupid, so wicked, so rotten, or so dense as English doctors."

"Medicine is a very old joke," said Major Parker, "but it still goes on. Now, doctor, tell the truth for once: what do you know more than we do about illnesses and their remedies?"

"That’s right," said the padre, "attack his religion; he often attacks mine."

"When I was in India," said the colonel, "an old army doctor gave me for every malady the remedy which just suited me. For palpitations of the heart, a large glass of brandy; for insomnia, three or four glasses of port after dinner; for stomachic disorders, a bottle of dry champagne at each meal. And, as long as one was feeling well, whisky and soda."

"Excellent, sir," said Aurelle. "Before the War I drank nothing but water and I was always ill; since I have been with you I have adopted whisky and I feel much better."

"Yes, you look it," said the colonel. "I had a friend, Major Fetherstonhaugh, who began to have fits of dizziness when he was about forty; he went to see a doctor who thought it was the whisky and advised him to drink milk for a time; well, in ten days he was dead."

"And a good thing too," said the padre.

"But I expect——" began the doctor.

"Happy are those who expect nothing," said the padre, "for they shall not be disappointed."

"What, you too, padre!" said the doctor. "Take care; if you ruin doctors by your malevolent remarks, I shall found a society for the exportation to the Colonies of mechanical idols and ovens for cooking missionaries."

"That is an excellent idea," said the padre. "I must see about it."

*CHAPTER XVIII*

The brigade, kept in reserve for the division, was ordered to go and camp at H——. As a dentist measures the extent of a cavity at a glance, the men of the Lennox, expert in bombardments, cast a professional eye over the village. Round the château and the church it was done for: houses in ruins, pavements torn up, trees smashed. The weaving factory had been badly damaged. The rest was not so unhealthy, a little knocked about, perhaps, but habitable.

The house where Colonel Bramble had established his Mess had already been hit by a shell. It had burst in the garden, breaking the window-panes and marking the walls. Madame, a dear little old lady, made light of these blemishes, which had depreciated her house in value.

"Oh, just a shell, _monsieur l’officier_!" she said. "Quite a small shell; I put the base of it there on my mantelpiece. It’s nothing, as you can see. True, they make a mess of everything, but I am not afraid of them!"

The colonel asked her how many windows had been broken.

"I don’t like this house," said the padre, as they sat down to dinner.

"The life of a soldier," replied the colonel, "is one of great hardship, not infrequently mingled with moments of real danger."

"Be not dismayed, padre," said the doctor. "Shells fall like drops of water: if it rains much the whole pavement gets wet."

"The Lennox Mess has always been lucky," said Major Parker.

"Luck is nothing," said the doctor.

"One can see you are not a gambler," remarked Aurelle.

"One can see that you are not a mathematician," said the doctor.

The padre expostulated:

"What? Luck nothing? How about little Taylor, killed by a shell in Poperinghe Station at the very moment that he was arriving at the front for the first time! You don’t call that bad luck?"

"Not more than if an old habitué like me was wiped out by a whizz-bang, padre. You are astonished at Taylor being killed the first minute, just as you would be surprised if, in a lottery of a million tickets, Number One should win, although that number had obviously as much chance as, say, 327,645. Someone must be the last man killed in this war, but you will see that his family will not think it ordinary."

"You are a fanatic, O’Grady," said Parker, "you must have an explanation for everything; there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamed of in your philosophy. I believe, myself, in good luck and bad luck because I have noticed it: I believe in presentiments because I have had them, and events have confirmed them. When I was being sent home, after the Transvaal War, I got an order to embark on a certain ship. Well, two days before it started I suddenly had a presentiment that I must avoid sailing in that ship at all costs. I went sick and waited a fortnight longer. The transport I missed was completely lost and no one ever knew how. Then again, why are you so certain, doctor, that aspirin will cure your headache? Because aspirin has cured it before. Where’s the difference?"

"The major is right," said Aurelle. "To say that you do not believe in a man’s bad luck because you cannot find it at his autopsy, is like saying that the tuner has taken the piano to pieces, and therefore Mozart had no soul."

The quartermaster, who was dining with them that evening, threw his weight into discussion:

"There _are_ things that cannot be explained, doctor. For instance, I hit you in the face: you shut your eye—why?"

There was an astounded silence.

"Another instance," remarked the padre at last. "Why is it that if there is a pause in the conversation, it is always twenty minutes to, or twenty minutes past, the hour?"

"But that’s not true," said the doctor.

"It was true this time, anyhow," said Aurelle, looking at his watch.

"It may be once or twice," said the doctor irritably, "but it cannot always happen."

"All right, doctor, all right," said the padre. "You notice it for several days and I think you will change your mind."

The colonel said:

"My men tell me that if a shell falls on a dug-out where there are gunners and infantry, the latter are killed and the gunners are spared. Why?"

"But it is not true, sir."

"And why must one never light three cigarettes with the same match?"

"But you may, sir, it does not matter a bit."

"Ah, there I disagree with you, doctor," said the colonel. "I am not superstitious, but I would not do that for anything in the world."

"Why do people dressed in green always lose at Monte Carlo?" said Aurelle.

"But it is not true!" roared the doctor, exasperated.

"It is easy to argue like you," said Parker. "Everything you do not agree with is not true."

"There are," said the padre, "no creatures so wicked and so dense as English doctors."

"Messiou," said the colonel, "are the gunners equally lucky in the French Army?"

"I have often remarked it," said Aurelle, who liked Colonel Bramble very much.

The colonel therefore triumphed, and tried to put an end to the discussion, which bored him.

"I am so very sorry," he said, "I cannot give you the gramophone to-night. I have no more needles."

"That _is_ a pity," said the padre.

The window-panes shook; a big gun went off close to the house. Aurelle went to the window and saw behind a farm, silhouetted in black against the orange twilight of the sky, a yellowish smoke, slowly dispersing.

"There’s the old man beginning to strafe again," said the padre. "I don’t like this house."

"You will have to put up with it, padre; the Staff captain won’t give us another; he’s a boy who knows his own mind."

"Yes," said the colonel, "he is a very nice boy too; he is one of Lord Bamford’s sons."

"His father, the old Lord, was a fine rider," said Parker.

"His sister," replied the colonel, "married a cousin of Graham, who was a major in our first battalion at the beginning of the War, and is now a brigadier-general."

Aurelle, foreseeing that such an interesting subject, so rich in the possibility of unexpected developments, would occupy the entire evening, tried to scribble some verses, still meditating on luck and chance.

"Tu l’as dit, ô Pascal, le nez de Cléopâtre, S’il eût été plus court ... nous n’en serions pas là."

A new and formidable detonation put the subtle metre of rhyme out of his head; discouraged, he tried another:

"Croyez pas que je moralise, Si je vous envoie ces bobards, C’est que notre mess analyse Ce soir la question du hasard..."

Another shell fell so close that the colonel got up suddenly.

"They are beginning to bombard the château again," he said. "I am going to see where that one fell."

Major Parker and the doctor followed him into the street, but Aurelle, who was again rhyming, stayed with the padre, who had just begun the same patience for the fourteenth time that evening. The three officers had gone about a hundred yards when another explosion took place behind them.

"That one was not far from the Mess," said the doctor. "I am going to tell Madame to go down into the cellar."

He retraced his steps and found a new shell-hole in front of the house. The house seemed all right; through the broken window the doctor saw the padre and called out to him:

"A near thing that time, padre. Are you all right? Where is Aurelle?"

But the padre did not move: with his head leaning on his arms crossed over the scattered cards, he appeared to be gazing vaguely at the doctor, who entered at a bound and touched the padre on the shoulder.

He was dead. A piece of shell had entered his temple, which was bleeding slowly. Aurelle had fallen on the floor. He was unconscious and covered with blood, but the doctor, bending over him, found that he still breathed. As he was unfastening his tunic and shirt, the colonel and Parker arrived with their measured tread and stopped abruptly at the door.

"The padre has been killed, sir," said the doctor simply. "Aurelle is hit, too, but I don’t think it is serious. No, it’s his shoulder—nothing much."

The colonel groaned sympathetically.

Parker helped O’Grady to lay the Frenchman on a table; a crumpled piece of paper attracted the colonel’s attention; he picked it up and read with difficulty:

"Pourquoi me fermes-tu les yeux Lorsque tu me baises la bouche?"

"What is it all about?" he said.

"It belongs to Aurelle," said the doctor.

The colonel carefully folded the little sheet of paper and slid it respectfully into the young Frenchman’s pocket. Then, after the doctor had finished dressing the wound and had sent for an ambulance, they laid the padre on Madame’s humble bed. They all took their hats off and stood silent for some time contemplating the strangely softened features of the childlike old man.

The doctor looked at his watch; it was twenty minutes past nine.

*CHAPTER XIX*

Aurelle, on leaving hospital, was attached, while convalescent, to the English colonel, Musgrave, who commanded a supply depot at Estrées, a little village well behind the line. He missed the evenings with the Lennox Mess, but buying fodder and wood took him some way out into the pretty undulating country with its clear streams, and he loved Estrées, hiding its innumerable belfries among the flowery hills.

It was a very antique city, and in its youth, in the time of the _seigneurs_ of Estrées, had played an important part in the affairs of France. For several hundred years she had defended her ramparts against the troops of the Kings of England, and from her walls she could see those same soldiers to-day camped about her, this time as familiar and courteous guests. Her tenacious burghers had repulsed both Leaguers and Spaniards with equal success. She now slept in smiling old age, having seen too many things to be surprised any more, while still retaining from the times of her glory her casket of beautiful mansions, built among courts and gardens with the noble simplicity of line dating from the best periods.

Colonel Musgrave and his officers inhabited the large and handsome house of the Dutch merchant, Van Mopez, whom Colbert had established at Estrées to introduce the art of weaving and dyeing cloth. Aurelle liked to go and sit in the garden and read a History of Estrées written by Monsieur Jean Valines, correspondence member of the Amiens Academy, and author of "Nouvelles observations sur les miracles de la chapelle d’Estrées."

This excellent work contained accounts of the great rejoicings and high festivals with which Estrées the Faithful had received the Kings, when they came to kneel and worship at the feet of the miraculous image in the Chapel of St. Ferréol.

The municipal worthies, between the royal visits, prudently and carefully preserved the white and blue draperies embroidered with fleurs-de-lis, and the decorations of painted scenery.

The Revolution had rather upset these domestic arrangements; the fleurs-de-lis had to be removed and a red fringe sewn along the blue and white draperies, so that the square of Saint-Ferréol could be decorated at a small cost for the fête of the Supreme Being. Aurelle loved the description:

"The cortège, preceded by music and drums, consisted first of a half-company of the National Guard carrying a banner on which was inscribed: ’Up with the People, down with Tyrants.’

"Then came the mothers of families carrying their infants in their arms; children of both sexes clothed in the most beautiful ornaments of their age—innocence and candour; young girls adorned with their charms and virtues; and the members of that Society so dreaded by traitors, in which were united the defenders of the truth, the upholders of public opinion, and the indefatigable guardians of the people.

"The whole cortège gathered at the foot of a mound erected in the square of Saint-Ferréol. There, the people of Estrées swore fidelity to the laws of nature and humanity, and subsequently a group of figures representing Despotism and Imposture were consumed by flames; Wisdom arose out of the ashes and on his shield was written: ’I guard the Republic.’"