Kitabı oku: «The Day of Wrath: A Story of 1914», sayfa 14
CHAPTER XIV
THE MARNE – AND AFTER
“
That’s awkward, sir,” said the corporal, as the detachment moved off into the night, leaving the motor-car’s acetylene lamps still blazing merrily.
“Why ‘awkward’?” demanded Dalroy.
“Because, when we fellows met in a wood near Monze, we agreed that we’d stick together, and fight to a finish; but if any man strayed by accident, or got hit so badly that he couldn’t march, he took his chances, and the rest went on.”
“Quite right. How does that affect the present situation?”
“Well, sir,” said Bates, after a pause, “there’s you an’ the lady. Our chaps are interested, if I may say it. You ought to have heard their langwidge, even in whispers, when that – well, I can’t call him anything much worse than what he was, a German officer – when he was telling you off, sir.”
“What did the German officer say, sergeant?” put in Irene innocently.
“Corporal, your ladyship. Corporal Bates, of the 2nd Buffs.”
“I’m sorry to have to interrupt,” said Dalroy. “You must give Lady Irene a full account some other time. If you are planning to cross the Schelde to-night there is a long march before you. We part company at the lane you spoke of. I leave her ladyship in the care of you and your men with the greatest confidence. I make for Oosterzeele. If Jan Maertz is a prisoner, I must do what lies in my power to rescue him. If I fail, I’ll follow on and report at Gand in the morning.”
For a little while none spoke. The other men marched in silence, a safeguard which they had made a rigid rule while piercing their way by night through an unknown country held by an enemy who would not have given quarter to any English soldier.
Bates was really a very sharp fellow. He had sense enough to know that he had said enough already. Dalroy’s use of Irene’s title conveyed a hint of complications rather beyond the ken of one whose acquaintance with the facts was limited to an overheard conversation between strangers. Moreover, soldier that he was, the corporal realised that one of his own officers was not only deliberately risking his life in order to save that of a Belgian peasant, but felt in honour bound to do no less.
So Irene was left to tread the narrow path unaided. To her lasting credit, she neither flinched nor faltered.
“We may find it difficult to reach Gand, so I’ll wait for you in Ostend, Arthur,” she said composedly.
Now, these two young people had just been snatched from death, or worse, in a manner which, a few weeks earlier, the least critical reader of romantic fiction would have denounced as so wildly improbable that imagination boggled at it. Irene, too, had unmistakably told the man who had never uttered a word of the love that was consuming him that neither rank nor wealth could interpose any barrier between them. It was hard, almost unbearable, that they should be parted in the very hour when freedom might truly come with the dawn.
Dalroy trudged a good twenty paces before he dared trust his voice. Even then, he blurted out, not the measured agreement which his brain dictated, but a prayer from his very heart. “May God bless and guard you, dear!” was what he said, and Irene’s response was choked by a pitiful little sob.
Suddenly Dalroy, whose hearing was quickened by the training of Indian shikar, touched the corporal’s arm, and stood fast. Bates gave a peculiar click in his throat, and the squad halted, each man’s feet remaining in whatever position they happened to be at the moment.
“Horses coming this way,” breathed Dalroy.
“Right, sir. This’ll be your two, with Jan wot’s-his-name, I hope. Leave them to us, sir. – Smithy, Macdonald, and Shiner – forward!”
Three shapes materialised close to the trio in front. The rain was still pelting down, and the trees nearly met overhead, so the road was discernible only by a strip of skyline, itself merely a less dense blackness.
“Them two Yewlans,” explained the corporal, “probably bringing a prisoner. Mind you don’t hurt him.”
No more explicit instructions were given or needed. Of such material were the First Hundred Thousand.
“Take her ladyship back a few yards, sir,” gurgled Bates. “The horses may bolt. If they do we must stop ’em before they gallop over us.”
Every other consideration was banished instantly by the thrill of approaching combat. By this time, Dalroy was steeped in admiration for his escort’s methods, and he awaited developments now with keen professional curiosity. And this is what he saw, after a breathless interval. A flash in the gloom, and the vague silhouettes of two hussars on horseback. One horse reared, the other swerved. One man never spoke. The other rapped out an oath which merged into a frantic squeal. By an odd trick of memory, Dalroy recalled old Joos’s description of the death of Busch: “He squealed like a pig.”
Then came a cockney voice, “Cheer-o, mitey! We’re friends, ammies! Damn it all, you ain’t tikin’ us for Boshes, are yer?”
“Hola! Jan Maertz!” shouted Dalroy.
“Monsieur!”
Irene laughed – yes, laughed, though two men had died before her eyes! – at the amazement conveyed by the Walloon’s gruff yelp.
“Don’t be alarmed! These are friends, British soldiers,” went on Dalroy.
“I thought they were devils from hell,” was the candid answer.
Jan was unquestionably frightened. For one thing, his hands were tied behind his back, and he was being led by a halter fashioned out of a heel-rope, a plight in which the Chevalier Bayard himself might have quaked. For another, he had been plodding along at the side of one of the horses, thinking bitterly of the fair Léontine, whose buxom waist he would never squeeze again, when a beam of dazzling light revealed a crouching, nondescript being which flung itself upward in a panther-like spring, and buried a bayonet to the socket in the body of the nearest trooper. No wonder Jan was scared.
The soldiers had caught both horses. Dalroy, a cavalryman, had abandoned the earlier remounts with a twinge of regret. He thought now there was no reason why he and Irene should not ride, as the day’s tramp, not to speak of the strain of the past hour, might prove a drawback before morning.
“Can you sit a horse astride?” he asked her.
“I prefer it,” she said promptly.
Bates offered no objection, as long as they followed in rear. The hussar’s cloaks came in useful, and Dalroy buckled on a sword-belt. Jan announced that he was good for another twenty miles provided he could win clear of those sales Alboches. He was eager to relate his adventures, but Dalroy quieted him by the downright statement that if his tongue wagged he might soon be either a prisoner again or dead.
A night so rife with hazard could hardly close tamely. The rain cleared off, and the stars came out ere they reached the ferry on the Schelde, and a scout sent ahead came back with the disquieting news that a strong cavalry picket, evidently on the alert, held the right bank. But the thirteen had made a specialty of disposing of German pickets in the dark. In those early days of the war, and particularly in Flanders, Teuton nerves were notoriously jumpy, so the little band crept forward resolutely, dodging from tree to tree, and into and out of ditches, until they could see the stars reflected in the river. Dalroy and Irene had dismounted at the first tidings of the enemy, turning a pair of contented horses into a meadow. They and Maertz, of course, had to keep well behind the main body.
The troopers, veritable Uhlans this time, had posted neither sentry nor vedette in the lane. Behind them, they thought, lay Germany. In front, across the river, the small army of Belgium held the last strip of Belgian territory, which then ran in an irregular line from Antwerp through Gand to Nieuport. So the picket watched the black smudge of the opposite bank, and talked of the Kron-Prinz’s stalwarts hacking their way into Paris, and never dreamed of being assailed from the rear, until a number of sturdy demons pounced on them, and did some pretty bayonet-work.
Fight there was none. Those Uhlans able to run ran for their lives. One fellow, who happened to be mounted, clapped spurs to his charger, and would have got away had not Dalroy delivered a most satisfactory lunge with the hussar sabre.
No sooner had Bates collected and counted sixteen people than the tactics were changed. Five rounds rapid rattled up the road and along the banks.
“I find that a bit of noise always helps after we get the windup with the bayonet, sir,” he explained to Dalroy. “If any of ’em think of stopping they move on again when they hear a hefty row.”
A Belgian picket, guarding the ferry, and, what was of vast importance to the fugitives, the ferry-boat, wondered, no doubt, what was causing such a commotion among the enemy. Luckily, the officer in charge recognised a new ring in the rifles. He could not identify it, but was certain it came from neither a Belgian nor a German weapon.
Thus, in a sense, he was prepared for Jan Maertz’s hail, and was even more reassured by Irene’s clear voice urging him to send the boat.
Two volunteers manned the oars. In a couple of minutes the unwieldy craft bumped into a pontoon, and was soon crowded with passengers. Never was sweeter music in the ears of a little company of Britons than the placid lap of the current, followed by the sharp challenge of a sentry: “Qui va là?”
“A party of English soldiers, a Belgian, and an English lady,” answered Dalroy.
An officer hurried forward. He dared not use a light, and, in the semi-obscurity of the river bank, found himself confronted by a sinister-looking crew. He was cautious, and exceedingly sceptical when told briefly the exact truth. His demand that all arms and ammunition should be surrendered before he would agree to send them under escort to the village of Aspen was met by a blank refusal from Bates and his myrmidons. Dalroy toned down this cartel into a graceful plea that thirteen soldiers, belonging to eight different regiments of the British army, ought not to be disarmed by their gallant Belgian allies, after having fought all the way from Mons to the Schelde.
Irene joined in, but Jan Maertz’s rugged speech probably carried greater conviction. After a prolonged argument, which the infuriated Germans might easily have interrupted by close-range volleys, the difficulty was adjusted by the unfixing of bayonets and the slinging of rifles. A strong guard took them to Aspen, where they arrived about eleven o’clock. They were marshalled in the kitchen of a comfortable inn, and interviewed by a colonel and a major.
Oddly enough, Corporal Bates was the first to gain credence by producing his map, and describing the villages he and his mates had passed through, the woods in which they hid for days together, and the curés who had helped them. Bates’s story was an epic in itself. His men crowded around, and grinned approvingly when he rounded off each curt account of a “scrap” by saying, “Then the Yewlans did a bunk, an’ we pushed on.”
Dalroy, acting as interpreter, happened to glance at the circle of cheerful faces during a burst of merriment aroused by a reference to Smithy’s ingenuity in stealing a box of hand grenades from an ammunition wagon, and destroying a General’s motor-car by fixing an infernal machine in the gear-box. The mere cranking-up of the engine, it appeared, exploded the detonator.
“Is that what you were doing under the car outside the barn?” he inquired, catching Smithy’s eye.
“Yes, sir. I’ve on’y one left aht o’ six,” said Smithy, producing an ominous-looking object from a pocket.
“Is the detonator in position?”
“Yus, sir.”
“Will you kindly take it out, and lay it gently on the table?”
Smithy obeyed, with reassuring deftness.
Dalroy was about to comment on the phenomenal risk of carrying such a destructive bomb so carelessly when he happened to notice the roll collar of a khaki tunic beneath Smithy’s blue linen blouse.
“Have you still retained part of your uniform?” he inquired.
“Oh, yus, sir. We all ’ave. We weren’t goin’ to strip fer fear of any bally Germans – beg pawdon, miss – an’ if it kime to a reel show-dahn we meant ter see it through in reggelation kit.”
Every man of twelve had retained his tunic, trousers, and puttees, which were completely covered by the loose-fitting garments supplied by the priest of a hamlet near Louvignies, who concealed them in a loft during four days until the mass of German troops had surged over the French frontier. The thirteenth, a Highlander, actually wore his kilt!
The Belgian officers grew enthused. They insisted on providing a vin d’honneur, which Irene escaped by pleading utter fatigue, and retiring to rest.
Dalroy opened his eyes next morning on a bright and sunlit world. It might reasonably be expected that his thoughts would dwell on the astounding incidents of the past month. They did nothing of the sort. He tumbled out of a comfortable bed, interviewed the proprietor of the “Trois Couronnes,” and asked that worthy man if he understood the significance of a Bank of England five-pound note. During his many and varied ’scapes, Dalroy’s store of money, carried in an inner pocket of his waistcoat, had never been touched. Monsieur le Patron knew all that was necessary about five-pound notes. Very quickly a serviceable cloth suit, a pair of boots, some clean linen, a tin bath, and a razor were staged in the bedroom, while the proprietor’s wife was instructed to attend to mademoiselle’s requirements.
Dalroy was shaving, for the first time in thirty-three days, when voices reached him through the open window. He listened.
Smithy had cornered Shiney Black in the hotel yard, and, in his own phrase, was puttin’ ’im through the ’oop.
“You don’t know it, Shiney, but you’re reely a verdamd Henglishman,” he said, with an accurate reproduction of Von Halwig’s manner if not his accent. “The grite German nytion is abart ter roll yer in the mud, an’ wipe its big feet on yer tummy. You’ve awsked fer it long enough, an’ nah yer goin’ ter git it in the neck. Blood an’ sausage! The cheek o’ a silly little josser like you tellin’ the Lord-’Igh-Cock-a-doodle-doo that ’e can’t boss everybody as ’e dam well likes! Shiney, you’re done in! The Keyser sez so, an’ ’e ought ter know. W’y? That shows yer miserable hignorance! The Keyser sez so, I tell yer, so none o’ yer lip, or I, Von Schmit, o’ the Dirty ’Alf-Hundredth, will biff you on the boko. But no! I must keep me ’air on. As you an’ hevery hother verdamd Henglishman will be snuffed aht before closin’-time, I shall grashiously tell thee wot’s wot an’ ’oo’s ’oo. Germany, the friend o’ peace – no, you blighter, not Chawlie Peace, the burglar, but the lydy in a nightie, wiv a dove in one ’and an’ a holive-branch in the other – Germany will wide knee-deep in Belgian an’ French ber-lud so as to ’and you the double Nelson. By land an’ sea an’ pawcels post she’ll rine fire an’ brimstone on your pore thick ’ead. What ’ave you done, you’d like ter know? Wot ’aven’t you done? Aren’t you alive? Wot crime can ekal that when the Keyser said, ‘Puff! aht – tallow-candle!’ Ach, pig-dorg, I shpit on yer!”
“You go an’ wash yer fice once more, Smithy,” said Shiney, forcing a word in edgeways. “It’ll improve your looks, per’aps. I dunno.”
“That’s done it,” yelped Smithy, warming to his theme. “That’s just yer narsty, scoffin’ British w’y o’ speakin’ to quiet, respectable Germans. That’s wot gets us mad. I’m surprised at yer, Shiney! Yer hattitude brings tears to me heyes. Time an’ agine you’ve ’eard ahr bee-utiful langwidge – ”
“I ’ave, indeed,” interrupted Shiney. “But none o’ it ’ere, me lad. There’s a reel born lydy in one o’ them bedrooms.”
“I’m not torkin’ o’ the kind of tosh you hunderstand,” retorted Smithy. “I’m alludin’ to the sweet-sahndin’ langwidge o’ our conquerors. You’ve ’eard it hoffen enuf from the sorft mowves o’ Yewlans. On’y larst night you ’eard it spoke by that stawr hactor, Von ’Allwig, of the Potsdam Busters. Yet you can git nothink orf yer chest but a low-dahn cockney wheeze w’en a benefactor’s givin’ yer the strite tip. Pore Shiney! Ye think yer goin’ back to Hengland, ’ome, an’ beauty – to the barrick-square, bully-beef an’ booze, an’ plenty o’ it. Dontcher believe it! Wot you’re in fer is a dose o’ German Kultur. W’en yer ship’s been torpedoed fourteen times between Hostend an’ Dover, w’en yer sarth-eastern trine ’as bumped inter a biker’s dozen o’ different sorts o’ mines, w’en you’re Zepped the minnit you crorse the Strend to the nearest pub, you’ll begin ter twig wot the Hemperor of All the ’Uns is ackshally a-doin’ of. It’s hall hup wiv yer, Shiney! You’ve ether got ter lie dahn an’ doi, er learn German. Nah, w’ich is it ter be? Go west wiv yer benighted country, or go nap on the Keyser?”
“Torkin’ o’ pubs reminds me,” yawned Shiney. “I couldn’t get any forrarder on that ginger-pop the Belgian horficers gev us. In one o’ them Yewlans’ pawket-books there was five French quid. Wot abart a bottle o’ beer?”
“What abart it?” agreed Smithy instantly.
The soap was drying on Dalroy’s face, but he thrust his head out of the window to look at two of Britain’s first line swaggering through the gateway of the inn, and whistling, “It’s a long, long way to Tipperary.” Smith and Shiney were true types of the somewhat cynical but ever ready-witted and laughter-loving Londoner, who makes such a first-rate fighting man. They were just a couple of ordinary “Tommies.” The deadly fury of Mons, the daily and nightly peril of the march through a land stricken by a brutal enemy, the score of little battles which they had conducted with an amazing skill and hardihood – these phases of immortality troubled them not at all. An eye-rolling and sabre-rattling emperor might rock the social foundations of half the world, his braggart henchmen destroy that which they could never rebuild, his frantic gang of poets and professors indite Hymns of Hate and blasphemous catch-words like “Gott strafe England”; but the Smithies and Shinies of the British army would never fail to cock a humorous eye at the vapourers, and say sarcastically, “Well, an’ wot abart it?”
Somehow, on 7th September 1914, there was a hitch in the naval programme devised by the Deutscher Marineamt. The Belgian packet-boat, Princess Clementine, steamed from Ostend to Dover through a smiling sea unvexed by Krupp or any other form of Kultur. Warships, big and little, were there in squadrons; but gaunt super-Dreadnought and perky destroyer alike was aggressively British.
England, too, looked strangely unperturbed. There had been sad scenes on the quay at the Belgian port, but a policeman on duty at the shore end of the gangway at Dover seemed to indicate by a majestic calm that any person causing an uproar would be given the alternative of paying ten shillings and costs or “doing” seven days.
The boat was crowded with refugees; but Dalroy, knowing the wiliness of stewards, had experienced slight difficulty in securing two chairs already loaded with portmanteaus and wraps. He heard then, for the first time, why Irene fled so precipitately from Berlin. She was a guest in the house of a Minister of State, and one of the Hohenzollern princelings came there to luncheon on that fateful Monday, 3rd August.
He had invited himself, though he must have been aware that his presence was an insult and an annoyance to the English girl, whom he had pestered with his attentions many times already. He was excited, drank heavily, and talked much. Irene had arranged to travel home next day, but the wholly unforeseen and swift developments in international affairs, no less than the thinly-veiled threats of a royal admirer, alarmed her into an immediate departure. At the twelfth hour she found that her host, father of two girls of her own age – the school friends, in fact, to whom she was returning a visit – was actually in league with her persecutor to keep her in Berlin.
She ran in panic, her one thought being to join her sister in Brussels, and reach home.
“So you see, dear,” she said, with one of those delightfully shy glances which Dalroy loved to provoke, “I was quite as much sought after as you, and I would certainly have been stopped on the Dutch frontier had I travelled by any other train.”
The two were packed into a carriage filled to excess. They had no luggage other than a small parcel apiece, containing certain articles of clothing which might fetch sixpence in a rag-shop, but were of great and lasting value to the present owners.
At Charing Cross, while they were walking side by side down the platform, Irene shrieked, “There they are!” She darted forward and flung herself into the arms of two elderly people, a brother in khaki, with the badges of a Guard regiment, and a sister of the flapper order.
Dalroy had been told at Dover to report at once to the War Office, as he carried much valuable information in his head and Von Halwig’s well-filled note-book in his pocket. He hung back while the embracing was in progress. Then Irene introduced him to her family.
“You’ll dine with us, Arthur,” she said simply. “I’ll not tell them a word of our adventures till you are present.”
“You could have heard a pin drop,” was the excited comment of the flapper sister when endeavouring subsequently to thrill another girl with the sensation created by Irene’s quiet words. Literally, this trope was not accurate, because the station was noisier than usual. Figuratively, it met the case exactly.
Lady Glastonbury, a gray-haired woman with wise eyes, promptly emulated the action of the British army during the retreat from Mons, and “saved the situation.”
“Of course you’ll stay with us, too, Captain Dalroy,” she said with pleasant insistence. “Like Irene, you must have lost everything, and need time to refit.”
Dalroy murmured some platitude, lifted his hat, and only regained his composure after two narrow escapes from being run over by taxis while crossing Northumberland Avenue.
A newsboy tore past, shouting in the vernacular, “Great Stand by Sir John French.”
Dalroy was reminded of Smithy, and Shiney, and Corporal Bates. He saw again Jan Maertz waving a farewell from the quai at Ostend. He wondered how old Joos was faring, and Léontine, and Monsieur Pochard, and the curé of Verviers.
Another boy scampered by. He carried a contents bill. Heavy black type announced that the British were “holding” Von Kluck on the Marne. Dalroy’s eyes kindled. His work lay there. When the soldier’s task was ended he would come back to Irene.
