Kitabı oku: «The Day of Wrath: A Story of 1914», sayfa 7
CHAPTER VII
THE WOODMAN’S HUT
The miller was cunning as a fox. He argued, subtly enough, that if a man just arrived from Argenteau was the first to discover the dead Prussians, the neighbourhood of Argenteau itself might be the last to undergo close search for the “criminals” who had dared punish these demi-gods. Following a cattle-path through a series of fields, he entered a country lane about a mile from Visé. It was a narrow, deep-rutted, winding way – a shallow trench cut into the soil by many generations of pack animals and heavy carts. The long interregnum between the solid pavement of Rome and the broken rubble of Macadam covered Europe with a network of such roads. An unchecked growth of briars, brambles, and every species of prolific weed made this particular track an ideal hiding-place.
Gathering the party under the two irregular lines of pollard oaks which marked the otherwise hardly discernible hedgerows, Joos explained that, at a point nearly half-a-mile distant, the lane joined the main road which winds along the right bank of the Meuse.
“That is our only real difficulty – the crossing of the road,” he said. “It is sure to be full of Germans; but if we watch our chance we should contrive to scurry from one side to the other without being seen.”
Such confidence was unquestionably cheering. Even Dalroy, though he put a somewhat sceptical question, did not really doubt that the old man was adopting what might, in the circumstances, prove the best plan.
“What happens when we do reach the other side, Monsieur Joos?” he inquired.
“Then we enter a disused quarry in the depths of a wood. The Meuse nearly surrounds the wood, and there is barely room for a tow-path between the river’s edge and a steep cliff. The quarry forms the landward face, as one may say, and among the trees is a woodman’s hut. I shall be surprised if we find any Germans there.”
“From your description it seems to be a suitable post for a strong picket watching the river.”
“No, monsieur. The slope falls away from the river, while the opposite bank is flat and open. I have been a soldier in my time, and I understand these things. It would be all right for observation purposes if these pigs hadn’t seized the bridge-heads at Visé and Argenteau; but I saw their cursed Uhlans on the left bank many hours ago.”
“Lead on, friend,” said Dalroy simply. “When we come within a hundred mètres of the main road let me do the scouting. I’ll tell you when and how to advance.”
“Is monsieur a soldier then?”
“Yes.”
“An officer perhaps?”
“Yes.”
“Ah, a thousand pardons if I presumed to lecture you. Yet I am certainly in the right about the wood.”
“I have never doubted you, Monsieur Joos. Do you know what time the moon rises?”
“Late. Eleven o’clock at the earliest.”
“All the better, if you are sure of the way.”
“I could find it blindfolded. So could Léontine. She goes there to pick bilberries.”
The homely phrase was unconsciously dramatic. From the highroad came the raucous singing of German soldiers, the falsetto of drunkards with an ear for music. In the distance heavy artillery was growling, and high explosive shells were bursting with a violence that seemed to rend the sky. Over an area of many miles to the west the sharp tapping of musketry and the staccato splutter of machine guns told of hundreds of thousands of men engaged in a fierce struggle for supremacy. On every hand the horizon was red with the glare of burning houses. The thought of a village girl picking bilberries in a land so scarred by war and rapine produced an effect at once striking and fantastic. It was as though a ray of pure white light had pierced the lurid depths of a volcano.
Dalroy advised the women to take off their linen aprons, and Madame Joos to remove as well a coif of the same material. He unfastened and threw away the stump of the bayonet. Then they moved on in Indian file, the miller leading.
A definite quality of blackness loomed above the low-lying shroud of mist which at night in still weather always marks the course of a great river.
“The wood!” whispered Joos. “We are near the road now.”
Dalroy went forward to spy out the conditions. A column of infantry was passing. These fellows were silent, and therefore sinister. They marched like tired men, and their shuffling feet raised a cloud of dust.
An officer lighted a cigarette. “Those guzzling Prussians would empty the Meuse if it ran with wine,” he growled, evidently in response to a remark from a companion.
“Our brigadier was very angry about the broken bottles in the streets of Argenteau,” said the other. “Two tires were ruined before the chauffeur realised that the place was littered with glass.”
These were Saxons, cleaner-minded, manlier fellows than the Prussians. Behind them Dalroy heard the rumble of commissariat wagons. He failed utterly to understand the why and wherefore of the direction the troops were taking. According to his reckoning, they should have been going the opposite way. But that was no concern of his at the moment. He knew the Saxon by repute, and hurried back to the two men and three women crouching under a hedge, having already noted a little mound on the left of the cross-roads where cover was available. He explained what they were to do – steal forward, one by one, hide behind the mound, and dart across when a longer space than usual separated one wagon from another, as the mounted escort would probably be grouped in front and in rear of the convoy.
“Ah, that is the cavalry,” said Joos. “It stands on a rock by the roadside.”
“It is hard to distinguish anything owing to mist and dust,” said Dalroy. “Of course, the darkness is all to the good. – If you ladies do not scream, whatever happens, and you run quickly when I give the word, I don’t think there will be any real danger.”
In the event, they were able to cross the road in a body, and without needless haste. A horse stumbled and fell, and had to be unharnessed before being got on to its feet again. The incident held up the column during some minutes, so Dalroy was not compelled to abandon the rifle, which it would have been foolish in the extreme to carry if there was the slightest chance of being seen.
Thenceforth progress was safe, though slow and difficult, because the gloom beneath the trees was that of a vault. Even the miller perforce yielded place to Léontine’s young eyes and sureness of foot. There were times, during the ascent of one side of the quarry, when whispered directions were necessary, while Madame Joos had to be hauled up a few awkward places bodily.
Still, they reached the hut, a mere logger’s shed, but a veritable haven for people so manifestly in peril. They were weary, too. No member of the Joos household had slept throughout the whole of Tuesday night, and the women especially were flagging under the strain.
The little cabin held an abundant store of shavings, because its normal tenant rough-hewed his logs into sabots. Here, then, was a soft, warm, and fragrant resting-place. Dalroy took command. He forbade talking, even in whispers. Maertz, who promised to keep awake, was put on guard outside till the moon rose.
The wisdom of preventing excited conversation was shown by the fact that the five people huddled together on the shavings were soon asleep. There was nothing strange in this. Humanity, when surfeited with emotion, becomes calm, almost phlegmatic. Were it otherwise, after a week of war soldiers would not be sane men, but maniacs.
Dalroy resolved to sleep for two hours. About eleven o’clock he got up, went quietly to the door, and found Maertz seated on the ground, his back propped against the wall, and his head sunk on his breast. As a consequence, he was snoring melodiously.
He woke quickly enough when the Englishman’s hand was clapped over his mouth and held there until his torpid wits were sufficiently clear that he should understand the stern words muttered in his ear.
“Pardon, monsieur,” he said shamefacedly. “I thought there was no harm in sitting down. I listened to the guns, and began counting them. I counted one hundred and ninety-nine shots, I think, and then – ”
“And then you risked six lives, Léontine’s among them!”
“Monsieur, I have no excuse.”
“Yet you have been a soldier, I suppose? And you gabble of serving your country?”
“It will not happen again, monsieur.”
Dalroy pretended an anger he did not really feel. He wanted this stolid Walloon to remain awake now, at any rate, so turned away with an ejaculation of contempt.
Maertz rose. He endured an eloquent silence for nearly a minute. Then he murmured, “Monsieur, I shall not offend a second time. Counting guns is worse than watching sheep jumping a fence.”
The moon had risen, revealing a cleared space in front of the hut. A dozen yards away a thin fringe of brushwood and small trees marked the edge of the quarry, while the woodcutter’s path was discernible on the left. A slight breeze had called into being the myriad tongues of the wood, and Dalroy realised that the unceasing cannonade, joined to the rustling of the leaves, would drown any sound of an approaching enemy until it was too late to retreat. He knew that Von Halwig, not to mention the military authorities at Visé, would spare no effort to hunt out and destroy the man who had dared to flout the might of Germany, so he was far from satisfied with the apparent safety of even this secluded refuge.
“Have you a piece of string in your pockets?” he demanded gruffly.
Trust a carter to carry string, strong stuff warranted to mend temporarily a broken strap. Maertz gave him a quantity.
“I am going to the cross-road,” he continued. “Keep a close watch till I return. When you hear any movement, or see any one, say clearly ‘Visé.’ If it is I, I shall answer ‘Liège.’ Do you understand?”
“Perfectly, monsieur. A challenge and a countersign.”
Dalroy believed the man might be trusted now. Taking the rifle, he made off along the path, treading as softly as the cumbrous sabots would permit. He was tempted to go bare-footed, but dreaded the lameness which might result from a thorn or a sharp rock. At a suitable place, half-way down the steep path by the side of the quarry, he tied a pistol to a stout sapling, and, having fastened a cord to the trigger, arranged it in such fashion that it must catch the feet of any one coming that way. The weapon was at full cock, and in all likelihood the unwary passer-by would get a bullet in his body.
It was dark under the trees, of course, but the moon was momentarily increasing its light, and the way was not hard to find. He memorised each awkward turn and twist in case he had to retreat in a hurry. Once the lower level was reached there was no difficulty, and, with due precautions, he gained the shelter of a hedge close to the main road.
The stream of troops still continued. Few things could be more ominous than this unending torrent of armed men. By how many similar roads, he wondered, was Germany pouring her legions into tiny Belgium? Was she forcing the French frontier in the same remorseless way? And what of Russia? When he left Berlin the talk was only of marching against the two great allies. If Germany could spare such a host of horse, foot, and artillery for the overrunning of Belgium, while moving the enormous forces needed on both flanks, what millions of men she must have placed under arms long before the mobilisation order was announced publicly! And what was England doing and saying? England! the home of liberty and a free press, where demagogues spouted platitudes about the “curse of militarism,” and encouraged that very monster by leaving the richest country in the world open to just such a sudden and merciless attack as Belgium was undergoing before his eyes!
Lying there among the undergrowth, listening to the tramp of an army corps, and watching the flicker of countless rifle-barrels in the moonlight, he forgot his own plight, and thought only of the unpreparedness of Britain. He was a soldier by training and inclination. He harboured no delusions. Man for man, the alert, intelligent, and chivalrous British army was far superior to the cannon-fodder of the German machine. But of what avail was the hundred thousand Britain could put in the field in the west of Europe against the four millions of Germany? Here was no combat of a David and a Goliath, but of one man against forty. Naturally, France and Russia came into the picture, yet he feared that France would break at the outset of the campaign, while Austria might hold Russia in check long enough to enable Germany to work her murderous design. Be it remembered, he could not possibly estimate the fine and fierce valour of the resistance offered by Belgium. It seemed to him that the Teuton hordes must already be hacking their way to the coast, leaving sufficient men and guns to contain the Belgian fortresses, and halting only when the white cliffs of England were visible across the Channel.
If his anxious thoughts wandered, however, and a gnawing doubt ate into his soul lest the British fleet might, as the Germans in Visé claimed, have been taken at a disadvantage, he did not allow his eyes and ears to neglect the duties of the hour.
A fall in the temperature had condensed the river mist, and the air near the ground was much clearer now than at eight o’clock. The breeze, too, gathered the dust into wraiths and scurrying wisps through which glimpses of the sloping uplands toward Aix were obtainable. During one of these unhampered moments he caught sight of something so weird and uncanny that he was positively startled.
A sorrow-laden, waxen-hued face seemed to peer at him for an instant, and then vanish. But there could be no face so high in the air, twenty feet or more above the heads of a Prussian regiment bawling “Deutschland, Deutschland, über alles.” The land was level thereabouts. The apparition, consequently, must be a mere trick of the imagination. Yet he saw, or fancied he saw, that same spectral face twice again at intervals of a few seconds, and was vexed with himself for allowing his bemused senses to yield to some supernatural influence. Then the vision came a fourth time, and a thrill ran through every fibre in his body.
Because there could be no mistake now. The face, so mournful, so benign, so pitying, bore on the forehead a crown of thorns! Even while the blood coursed in Dalroy’s veins with the awe of it, he knew that he was looking at the figure of Christ on the Cross. This, then, was the calvary spoken of by Joos, and invisible in the earlier murk. The beams of the risen moon etched the painted carving in most realistic lights and shadows. The pallid skin glistened as though in agony. The big, piercing eyes gazed down at the passing soldiers as the Man of Sorrows might have looked at the heedless legionaries of Rome.
The travelled Briton, to whom the wayside calvary is a familiar object in many a continental landscape, can seldom pass the twisted, tortured figure on the Cross without a feeling of awe, tempered by insular non-comprehension of the religious motive which thrusts into prominence the most solemn emblem of Christianity in unexpected and often incongruous places. Seen as Dalroy saw it, a hunted fugitive crouching in a ditch, while the Huns who would again destroy Europe were lurching past in thousands within a few feet of where he lay, the image of Christ crucified had a new and overwhelming significance. It induced a vague uneasiness of spirit, almost a doubt. That very day he had killed four men and gravely wounded a fifth, and there was no shred of compunction in his soul. Yet, in body and mind, he was worthy of his class, and this gray old world has failed to evolve any finer human type than that which is summed up in the phrase, an officer and a gentleman. For the foulest of crimes, either committed or contemplated, he had been forced to use both the scales and the sword of justice; but there was something wholly disturbing and abhorrent in the knowledge that two thousand years after the Great Atonement men professedly Christian should so wantonly disregard every principle that Christ taught and practised and died for. He reflected bitterly that the German soldier, whether officer or private, is enjoined to keep a diary. What sort of record would “Heinrich,” or Busch, or the three Westphalian lieutenants have left of that day’s doings if they had lived and told the truth?
The answer to these vexed questionings came with the swift clarity of a lightning flash. Another rift in the dust-clouds revealed the upper part of the Cross, and the moonbeams shone on a gilded scroll. Dalroy knew his Bible. “And a superscription also was written over Him in letters of Greek, and Latin, and Hebrew: ‘This is the King of the Jews.’ And one of the malefactors which were hanged railed on Him, saying, ‘If Thou be Christ, save Thyself and us.’”
From that instant one God-fearing Briton, at least, never again allowed the shadow of a doubt to darken his faith in the divine if inscrutable purpose. He had passed already through dark and deadly hours, while others were then near at hand; but he was steadfast in doing what he conceived his duty without seeking to interpret the ways of Providence. “If Thou be Christ?” It was the last taunt of the unbeliever, though the veil of the temple would be rent in twain, and the earth would quake, and the graves be opened, and the bodies of the saints arise and be seen by many!
A harsh command silenced the singing. An officer had reined in his horse, and was demanding the nature of the errand which brought a squad of men from Visé.
“Sergeant Karl Schwartz, Herr Hauptmann,” reported the leader of the party. “An Englishman, assisted by a miller named Joos and his man, Maertz, has killed three of our officers. He also wounded Herr Leutnant von Huntzel, of the 7th Westphalian regiment, who has recovered sufficiently to say what happened. The general-major has ordered a strict search. I, being acquainted with the district, am bringing these men to a wood where the rascals may be hiding.”
“Killed three, you say? The fiend take all such schwein-hunds and their helpers! Good luck to you. —Vorwärts!”
The column moved on. Schwartz, the treacherous barber of Visé, led his men into the lane. There were eleven, all told – hopeless odds – because this gang of hunters was ready for a fight and itching to capture a verdammt Engländer. And Joos’s “safe retreat” had been guessed by the spy who knew what every inhabitant of Visé did, who had watched and noted even such a harmless occupation as Léontine’s bilberry-picking, who was acquainted with each footpath for miles around, from whose crafty eyes not a cow-byre on any remote farm in the whole countryside was concealed.
This misfortune marked the end, Dalroy thought. But there was a chance of escape, if only for the few remaining hours of the night, and he took it with the same high courage he displayed in going back to the rescue of Irene Beresford in the railway station at Aix. He had a rifle with five rounds in the magazine and one in the chamber. At the worst, he might be able to add another couple of casualties to the formidable total already piled up during the German advance on Liège.
The sabots offered a serious handicap to rapid and silent movement, but he dared not dispense with them, and made shift to follow Schwartz and the others as quietly as might be. He was helped, of course, by the din of the guns and the rustling of the leaves; but there was an open space in the narrow road before it merged in the wood which he could not cross until the Germans were among the trees, and precisely in that locality Schwartz halted his men to explain his project. Try as he might, Dalroy, crouched behind a pollard oak, could not overhear the spy’s words. But he smiled when the party went on in Indian file, Schwartz leading, because the enemy was acting just as he hoped the enemy would act.
He did not press close on their heels now, but remained deliberately at the foot of the hill and on the edge of the quarry. Standing erect, with the rifle at the ready, he waited. He could hear nothing, but judged time and distance by counting fifty slow steps. He was right to a fifth of a second. A shot rang out, and was followed instantly by a yell of agony. He saw the flash, and, taking aim somewhat below it, fired six rounds rapidly. A fusillade broke out in the wood, the Germans, like himself, firing at the one flash above and the six beneath. A bullet cut through his blouse on the left shoulder and scorched his skin; but when the magazine was empty he ran straight on for a few yards, turned to the right, stepping with great caution, and threw himself flat behind a rock. As he ran, he had refilled the magazine, but now meant using the rifle as a last resource only.
In effect, matters had fallen out exactly as he calculated. Schwartz had blundered into the man-trap set on the path half-way up the cliff, and was shot. The others, lacking a leader, and stupefied by the firing and the darkness, bolted like so many rabbits to the open road and the moonlight as soon as the seeming attack from the rear ceased.
Uncommon grit was needed to press on through a strange wood at night, up a difficult path bordering a precipice when each tree might vomit the flame of a gunshot. And these fellows were not cast in heroic mould. Their one thought was to get back the way they came. They were received warmly, too. The passing regiment, hearing the hubbub and seeing the flashes, very reasonably supposed they were being taken in flank by a Belgian force, and blazed away merrily at the first moving objects in sight in that direction.
Dalroy does not know to this day exactly how the battle ended in rear, nor did he care then. He had routed the enemy in his own neighbourhood, and that must suffice. Regaining the path, he sped upward, pausing only to retrieve the pistol which had proved so efficient a sentinel. Judging by the groans and the stertorous breathing which came from among the undergrowth close to the path, Karl Schwartz’s services as a spy and guide were lost to the great cause of Kultur. Dalroy did not bother about the wretch. He pressed on, and reached the plateau above the quarry. The clearing was now flooded with moonlight, and the doorway of the hut was plainly visible. Jan Maertz was not at his post, but this was not surprising, as he would surely have joined old Joos and the terrified women at the first sounds of the firing.
“Liège!” said Dalroy, speaking loudly enough for any one in the hut to hear. There was no answer. “Liège!” he cried again, with a certain foreboding that things had gone awry, and dreading lest the precious respite he had secured might be wasted irretrievably.
But the hut was empty, and he realised that he might grope like a blind man for hours in the depths of the wood. The one-sided battle which had broken out in the front of the calvary had died down. He guessed what had happened, the blunder, the frenzied explanations, and their sequel in a quick decision to detach a company and surround the wood.
In his exasperation he forgot the silent figure surveying the scene at the cross-roads, and swore like a very natural man, for he was now utterly at a loss what to do or where to go.
