Chapter 7

They were putting little Boudru to bed--the R.H.A. and the Corps of Royal Engineers and Stansfield, the big fat Infantry Sergeant. His little sister, already tucked up in bed, was nearly asleep. Boudru had been allowed to stay up till Sergeant Stansfield had come in from duty. The special privilege had been accorded to the little French boy on this, the last night that the British troops were to spend in the village. Boudru's home was in a portion of our line in which the defence trenches were of the semi-detached type--they did not join up with the other part of the line, and at times the place was distinctly unhealthy. Sometimes it was in the hands of the Huns, sometimes the British rushed it, and held on for a few weeks; there had been times when it had been occupied by both, at other times it was written on the squared official maps as no man's land. It was a spot in which there was always a feeling of something dreadful being close at hand; there was an air of expectancy about it and one felt there was a marked atmosphere of nerves about. You might be sniped from the house opposite, or blown out of the windows by a seventeen-inch shell. You never know. The man who sold you tobacco the day before might be lying stiff in the gutter next day, or more probably still, he might be dining with the German Staff a mile and a half away. All this uncertainty, coupled with the fact that the place was full of spies, and that valuable information had been finding its way through to the German lines, made the General decide to withdraw his troops and take up some trenches behind it.

Boudru sat on the big armchair and swung his white bare legs defiantly. Perhaps it had better be explained that my lord Boudru was five years old. "Boudru going to shut eye?" said the fat infantry sergeant suggestively.

"The cots are down and the beds unrolled," said the R.H.A. man falling into the diction of the barrack-room.

"No," said Boudru. "You must tell me for the last time the story about the wicked German baby killer who was turned into a pig. The man of the guns must tell it, and the fat man of the infantry shall hide beneath the bed and make pig shrieks--many pig shrieks--at the time when he is killed."

"But we shall disturb little sister Elise," said the fat sergeant with visions of a dismal ten minutes wedged beneath the small cot and the floor.

"Elise is not bye-o yet," piped a thin voice from where two eyes were sparkling elfishly from a tangle of golden locks.

"Go on, my English man--There was once a big fat baby killer who lived in Potsdam ..."

Then the R.H.A. man (a journalist by profession, a duke by inclination, and now by destiny a very clever gunner) began the famous story. Never before had the telling of that tale been given with such splendour of effect. The fat sergeant had made pig-noises with multitudinous yells in at least fifteen different keys, and the little cross-eyed driver of the Engineers had dressed up in a real Hun helmet and grey coat. The grand finale in which the Engineer had turned into a pig on all fours and had been mercilessly put to death with the fat sergeant's bayonet, had filled Boudru's soul with joy. He reflected and gloated on the scene far into the night. Then he fell fast asleep and met with most dazzling adventures with a German soldier who had been hiding in the Jacobean oak chest with the fleur-de-lis carved on the side, which stands beneath the bulgy leaded window.

As a grey and wretched dawn came in with a cold and dispiriting rain there came to the ears of little Boudru the steady champing of marching feet in the street below. Slush, slush, slush went all those feet, beating the muddy road, and then the noise of metal on metal woke the silent village streets as the guns went by.

"The soldiers! The soldiers!" exclaimed Boudru as he bounded over and jumped on to the Jacobean chest to watch them pass. It was fated that they were the last English soldiers that Boudru would ever see.

Some weeks later Boudru's mother was busy with odd jobs in the kitchen garden and the children were playing in the front room, there was a ring at the door and the sound of a butt-end of a rifle, as it "grounded" on the cobble stones. When Boudru on tiptoe lifted the latch, the door swung open, and a big man in a greenish uniform stood before him. There was no sign of cap-badge or title on his shoulder straps, and he was horribly dirty. He carried two English ration bags, besides his own rucksack, and they were all filled to bursting with loot. Evil beamed from his narrow, leering eyes; and when he smiled at Boudru it twirled his demon-like mouth into a grotesque shape. He looked both depraved and suspicious, a disreputable scoundrel with a gun, and that, you will find in the fullness of time, was just what he was.

"Let us shut the door," said Elise. "This is not a pretty man." But the man from Stettin pushed past.

"Brat;" said he, "drink."

Boudru's mother had hurried up to the door as fast as her bulk and her stout legs would permit.

Every day she had expected a visit from the Huns. It was useless to argue with such a man, so she took the German in.

"Brandy," said the man.

"There is only a little left ... it is over there, on the sideboard."

The soldier walked over, finished half a bottle, and announced that it was like water.

"More," he ordered, "Shoot you if no find."

The woman at last managed to unearth a bottle of good Burgundy and another bottle of brandy.

He drank both the bottles, and when he had finished, he asked for more like every other Boche will do. Then he chose the front bedroom and threw himself down on the bed in a drunken sleep.

When the next morning broke the French woman went to awaken the thief and while the latter was making his toilet little Boudru entered. He regarded the Hun with gravity for at least five minutes and then delivered himself of his opinion.

"I don't like you," he said slowly, regarding the Hun, with his elfish eyes. "I don't like you. I think you may be like the man in the English soldiers' story, who turned into a pig--a baby killer perhaps. It is because of your red hair that I think you may turn ..."

The man from Stettin who had been trying to drag a comb through his horrible beard and hair, turned, and he looked like a big red devil, the sun being on his head, and red beard and all.

"What's that?" he said, as he lurched ominously across the room. He had swallowed the contents of a flask of Benedictine which he had taken from his rucksack, and the repeated drinks were taking effect.

"I'll sweep the house, so there isn't a bug in a blanket left--you damned brat!" He was bellowing like a bull, chewing his red beard and muttering to himself. As he passed a table, he knocked the empty flask on the floor. It did not break, and he viciously stamped his feet on it, smashing it to pieces. He began to go mad from that moment. As he kicked the wreckage about the room, his glance fell upon his rifle with the fixed bayonet. And then the swine-dog ran amok. Boudru stood with his back to the door: the blood froze in his veins, and his little body stiffened into absolute rigidity.

"Turn into a pig!" shrieked the Hun. "What did you say? Turn into ..."

The bayonet flashed, and little Boudru--but what followed shall not be printed. It would be passing the decent bounds of descriptive writing to put it in black and white. It is sufficient to say that some minutes later the Hun prised the floor-boards up with his bayonet, and Boudru, from that moment, without warning, or leaving any trace, disappeared from the world. He returned in the fullness of time. And this was the way of it.

For the hundredth time that day, the Hun had gone into the bedroom to look out of the bulgy bedroom window. Fear began to come over him without any warning, and he was thinking of little Boudru down there in the dark. The thing within him that served him for a heart was beating queer rhythms ... the beating sounded like a regiment of British Infantry on the march.

"Look," said he to the housewife, "look out on the road. Do you see soldiers?"

The good woman, distraught between suspense and hope for her little one, who had been missing for six long hours, blinked away a tear on her lashes and peered through the diamond panes.

No one was to be seen. But between three and four in the morning the first faint champing of marching feet could be heard and the Hun came down from the bedroom looking as pale as death. He opened the door and stood there listening. The insolent crunch, crunch, crunch of heavy nail-studded service boots came nearer, and a khaki column appeared on the winding road. The housewife, whose aching eyes had searched the road for Boudru all day, saw them too.

"Look," she cried, "look! The English soldiers are coming. Do you see?"

_They were coming!_

The man from Stettin rushed up to the bedroom, and jumped into the oak chest.

"Not tell the English! Not tell!"

Fifteen or twenty soldiers were to be heard grounding rifles and throwing off their equipment in front of the house.

Entered here Sergeant Stansfield, and shouted gaily to the housewife, but the moment he looked into her pale and worn face he understood that some sorrow had befallen her. Before he could hold her she had slid silently down on the floor, at his feet, and covered her face. "Ah,--ah,--ah! O God, help and pity me! They have taken my little son," she cried.

At this moment a soldier rushed in at the door. "I think there is a man who looks like a Boche trying to get out of the bedroom window!" he said. "Will you come, Sergeant? Quick!"

The sergeant went quickly, and returned with some men with fixed bayonets and led them up to the bedroom: He told them to break in. The man was on his knees, with his horrible hands lifted up in supplication. The soldiers kicked the man up and made him go downstairs into the front room.

"See!" said a soldier, who held his bayonet ready, "there is blood on his sleeve." The Hun cursed within his heart.

"It was none of my shedding," he whimpered.

"I had not said so," returned the sergeant quietly.

"We are here to find that out. Perhaps you know something about the lost child?"

"I had no hand in it, God strike me dead!" the Hun answered fervently.

At that moment there was a sort of earthquake upstairs, a clash of falling bricks and slates, a crashing pandemonium that sent everyone's heart to his mouth. A shell had struck the roof. Then the ceiling above bulged like a stuffed sack and burst in a cloud of pink-yellow dust. Something dropped with a dead thud fair and square in the centre of the fine oak refectory table. Sergeant Stansfield bent forward, looked, and then started back. He gave a cry and turned sickly white. On the table lay _the little huddled form of Boudru_. The morning sun that had been paling the candles in the sconces, struck the golden hair and staring eyes, that had a few hours before, held all the spring-time; struck, too, a heavy scarlet patch on the little overall, as the sergeant tenderly turned the little body over....

"Oh! God of Mercy!... How horrible! A bayonet through his heart ..." he muttered. The Hun's sleeve spotted with blood came back to his mind, and filled him with blind, unreasoning rage.

"You swine," he said. "I'll----"

The man from Stettin suddenly felt his heart stop beating. He stood petrified for a moment; then he clutched the table with one feverish movement; and when he saw the pale cherub face, he became covered at once with perspiration. Then the terror, which had paralyzed him a second or so, gave way to the wild instinct of self-preservation. He hit out wildly with both arms, kicking out at the same moment. In a second he was out in the hall, and had locked the door behind him. A door opened somewhere outside, and they heard him running down the garden. Some of the men snatched their rifles, rushed to the window, and threw it open. Four or five shots rang out simultaneously, and the stench of cordite was wafted back on the sharp morning air as the man from Stettin fell in a crumpled heap, his face buried in a clump of violets. The sergeant went into the garden.

"Hum!" he remarked after an instant, "dead, did you say? He's as dead as a doornail ... anyway, it's nothing to do with us! If ever a soul went straight to hell," he muttered to himself, "it was that red devil's."

IV

THE STORY OF A SPY

Donald McNab, private (and distinguished ornament) of the London Regiment, leaned his elbows on the little oak table in the bar of the "Three Nuns," and eyed me with withering contempt. From a corner of the settle I stared--with a wholly unsuccessful attempt to look unconcerned--at a quaint old painting of Sergeant Broughton who first taught Englishmen to box scientifically. When the great are really wrathful it ill becomes pigmy people to jabber or argue. So I waited with bent head and respectful silence to which the passing moods of such an erratic genius are entitled.

When McNab and I had met an hour or so before we had been on the most friendly terms. We had both ordered our pint of beer, filled our pipes, and retired to a corner in the bar parlour feeling at peace with the world--barring of course the German Empire and their allied forces. Everything, in fact, made for peace and goodwill between us; yet, because I had spoken with some levity about our incomplete spy system, McNab's wrath had come down on my head like the proverbial "hundred of bricks."

"It seems strange," I had remarked to him, "that the Huns can always forestall our most carefully-prepared plans through their almost perfect spy system. Our fellows must be dead stupid at the game. Why aren't these German vipers ever nabbed?"

"Dead stupid!" McNab had exclaimed, after gazing at me for a minute in dazed stupefaction at my unspeakable temerity in challenging the proficiency of the British Army. "Get under your Blanco pot!"

Now, when McNab used this picturesque term to me I knew that there was a storm brewing. He only used the expression when he wished to be particularly "cutting," and I received his reproof with, I hope, a correct realisation of my own insignificance.

The old world had rolled along for another twenty minutes ere McNab shifted his legs, cleared his throat, and interfered with what was left in his tankard.

"I wonder," he said musingly to himself, "if these poor yobs over here will ever know the true 'istory of this bloomin' war?" Then back came a smile to his face and he shook his head, indicating, perhaps, that he had answered the question to his complete satisfaction. The joyousness at the thought of some of those unrecorded slices of military history caused my friend to drop again into a contemplative mood, and he started humming a little tune under his breath:

Hello! Hello! who's your lady friend? Who's the little girlie by your side? I've seen you with a girl or two, Oh, oh, oh, I AM surprised at you! Hello! Hello! what's your little game? Don't you think it's time your ways to mend? That's not the gal I saw you with at Brighton, Oh, oh, oh, who's your lady friend?

"If it is not a rude question," I ventured, after another few moments, "did you ever see the capture of a German spy over in France, Mr. McNab?"

"Who are you getting at ... trying to pull my leg?" he demanded, with increased suspicion.

"Come, come," I laughed, "let us agree to differ about our--er--inferior spy system."

"Superior," he insisted.

I surrendered before the gleam of his eye. Fool that I had been, ever to have imagined that I could conquer McNab's steely glance!

"Superior then, if you prefer it."

McNab's eyes, which had glared with indignation, lost their fire and assumed their normal expression of calm and relentless despotism, and the red flag of agitated displeasure disappeared from his tanned face. He seized with alacrity the olive branch (also another tankard of beer) which I held out to him.

"The history of the British Army," he observed as he blew at his ale "'minds me of a married soldier's letter to his wife. The most interesting parts are all left out ... do you get me?"

McNab tilted his hat at a perilous angle on one side of his head, and thrust his hands deep into his pockets.

"Touching upon some of those unwritten exploits of the Army," I darkly hinted: "I'll bet I can find a brilliant historiographer not a hundred miles away from the 'Three Nuns' who could dictate a few of 'em that would fairly make the _Daily Mail_ turn green with envy--eh, McNab?"

"I know the brilliant bloke you mean," my friend conceded modestly, "though calling me 'orrible names like that would brand you as a swanker or a gentleman wot had left his manners in the hall in any barrack room from here to Hindustan. When we were resting at Quality Street near Loos, for example"--he paused a moment, and with a playful dig from his banana-like thumb nearly knocked me on the floor--"why, name of a dog! There you have a case in point!"

"A case of a swanker?"

"A case of one of those spies. We caught the perisher. Begad, we did!"

McNab put the red-hot end of a cigarette into his mouth, stammered with wrath in a medley of international profanity at the unexpected warmth, and would not be comforted till his favourite barmaid had placed a slice of cooling lemon on his tongue.

"My first introduction to the entertaining sport of spy tracking," he mumbled, "was at Loos, where I was sent with several hundred other chaps to help push the Huns out of the Hohenzollern Redoubt. At the present moment, as you know (or ought to by this time), I am a military genius 'ighly thought of at the War Office, a strategist Kitchener has his eye on, and a model soldier quoted every day by my colonel as a shining light to the regiment. But of course you must remember that a few months ago I was practically a yob at the game, and now of the fame (and the extreme shyness that seems to come with it) of my later avatar.

"We took over some temporary billets at a shady little spot not far behind the British trenches which was then known as 'Quality Street,'" he continued, "and, as I not unreasonably supposed that the smartest and most intelligent bloke in the regiment would be sent to 'elp the colonel, I requested the Dog's Leg (Anglice--lance-corporal) to point out his abode to me.

"'Ask the Quarter Bloke over along in the end cottage, old sport,' he said with a grin, 'he'll be most 'appy, I've no doubt to personally conduct to the old pot-an-pan, and while you're there just ask him to let you have that jug of defaulters' extra milk for me.' It was a 'wheeze' among the boys to send a poor innocent bloke off for this milk. The point of the 'wheeze' is in the fact that as defaulters are chaps doing jankers (Anglice--punishment) they are hardly likely to get any extra milk dished out to them. I did not see the joke at first; but on application to that autocratic beggar--Quartermaster King was his tally--he fully explained things to me in that witheringly sarcastic manner peculiar to sergeant-majors and quarter-blokes.

"'Defaulter's milk?' echoed he. 'Why, you lop-eared leper, you've got corpuscular fool wrote as plain as a motor lorry number all over your ugly face. If I wasn't sure that you was not more of a born idiot than a ruddy knave, etc., etc., etc., I would have you slick in mush before your feet could touch the ground!'

"Much crest-fallen, and terribly mortified, I returned to the cottage which had been selected to shelter me noble self, only to be met there with a volley of derisive laughter, repeated demands for the jug of Defaulter's milk, and questions about the quarter bloke's health.

"'A cat may look at a _King_,' said the Dog's Leg, and fell backwards out of the open window at his own joke, breaking 'is collar bone. One should never forget, at every time, as the Scriptures say, that pride allus goes before a fall, and that all the King's 'orses and all the King's men can't not even pick 'im up again!"

My murmured compliments on his amazing aptness in the knowledge of Holy Writ were checked by a sudden discovery that my best silver cigarette case had vanished from the table.

"Which of you civilians has stole the gentleman's silver case?"

This question, uttered not in the friendliest possible terms, was addressed to a young gentleman with a very pimply face, and kaleidoscopic coloured socks, of the genus Slacker, who had suddenly found the painting of Sergeant Broughton an object of absorbing interest.

This inquiry meeting with no response from the Slimy Slacker, (to use McNab's expressive name for him), he gave utterance to a sigh of resignation.

"I believe, sir," suggested an old gentleman who was warming his toes at the fire, "that you deposited the gentleman's cigarette case--er--inadvertently in your own pocket!"

"Why, strike me crimson!" cried McNab, diving his beef-steakish hands into his tunic pockets. "Why, so I did! I'm the biggest giddy fool at that kind of wheeze that ever lived. It's a knock-out, ain't it? Never mind--'_honi soit qui mal y_ eighteen pence,' as the French poet bloke said!

"It so happened that on the very next day our old man's servant went sick, and in spite of my extreme youth and innocence, I was selected from the crowd to fill the vacant billet. And then it was that the Colonel realised that fate had dropped a heaven-sent blessing on his knees in the shape of a--well, in the shape of an ingenious bloke like me. He lifted up his voice in thanksgiving for that the British Army held warriors so wise, and then looked up his whiskey and cigars.

"At one end of Quality Street there stood a Y.M.C.A. hut. On the next day when I pushed the door of this Bun-Wallah's paradise open, the first person I saw was old Tommy--Tommy wot had fought up and down the Godforsaken veldt with me for three years on end, Tommy who had always the knack of droppin' out of the blue from nowhere.

"'Well, 'ere's a go!' he cried dropping half a cup of boiling coffee down another chap's neck, as 'is smile broadened, 'it's a 'ell of a time since I struck you.'

"I saw the dawn of recognition on his ugly mug; and I could have guessed to a word the joyful expressions of welcome that were springing to his lips."

McNab paused.

"Quite so," I prompted, seeing the change that took place in my friend's face.

"I am afraid I should have guessed dead wrong," continued McNab with his eyes downcast. "However, what he did spit out was: 'strike me up a gum-tree if it ain't the bloke what borrowed 'alf a crown off me when I was quartered at the "Shot" in '98.'

"I was pretty well worked up at this remark; but I said to him with quiet dignity: 'I believe, Tommy, that I sent it back by post.'

"'You sent me back a threepenny bit,' he says, with a very naughty word, 'and told me it was my 'alf crown worn down.'

"'Come, come, old chum!' I laughed, 'let us forget all about that, such a thing is really only "very small beer" indeed.'

"'Humph!' grunted Tommy. 'It was a blighted small 'alf crown, too.'

"'Sit down,' he continued, clutching me by the wrist and dragging me into a vacant chair. It was not in champagne, of course, that we drank each other's health. But you can always trust old Tommy to have a little pig's ear hidden somewhere. 'What's the matter with a bottle of Bass?' says he to me. ''Tis against ole Kitchener's wishes,' says I. 'Of course it is,' says Tommy; 'and wot is more, it's the ruin of dear ole England--God bless it!' 'Rot yar innards--let's go and 'ave some,' I says bein' always one to reason out matters to a logical conclusion.