But hardly a dream, for here were the ruins of a real city, and fresh ruins, too. Still curling up from the church was smoke from the burning rafters, and over there the hungry dogs, and the stragglers mournfully digging something out of the ruins. However preposterous it seemed, none the less it was a city that yesterday ran high with the tide of human life. And thousands of people, when they recall the lights and shadows, the pains and raptures, which make up the thing we call life, will think of Termonde. Thousands of people, when they think of home and all the tender memories that cluster round that word, say "Termonde."' And now where Termonde was there is a big black ragged spot—an ugly gaping wound in the landscape. There are a score of other wounds like that.

There are thousands of them.

There is one bleeding in every Belgian heart.

The sight of their desolated cities cut the soldiers to the quick.

They turned the names of those cities into battle cries. Shouting "Remember Termonde and Louvain," these Belgians sprang from the trenches and like wild men flung themselves upon the foe.



Chapter XI

Atrocities And The Socialist



"With these sentries holding us up at every cross-roads, there is no use trying to get to Antwerp," said the free-lance.

"Yes, there is," retorted the chauffeur. "Watch me the next time." He beckoned to the first sentry barring the way, and, leaning over, whispered into the man's ear a single word. The sentry saluted, and, stepping to one side, motioned us on in a manner almost deferential. We had hardly been compelled to stop.

After our tedious delays this was quite exhilarating. How our chauffeur obtained the password we did not know, nor did we challenge the inclusion of 8 francs extra in his memorandum of expenses. As indicated, he was a man of parts. The magic word of the day, "France," now opened every gate to us.

Behind the Antwerp fortifications the Belgian sappers and miners were on an organized rampage of destruction. On a wide zone every house, windmill and church was either going up in flames or being hammered level to the ground.

We came along as the oil was applied to an old house and saw the flames go crackling up through the rafters. The black smoke curled away across the wasted land and the fire glowed upon the stolid faces of the soldiers and the trembling woman who owned it. To her it was a funeral pyre. Her home endeared by lifetime memories was being offered up on the altar of Liberty and Independence. Starting with the invaders on the western frontier, clear through to Antwerp by the sea, a wild black swathe had been burnt.

By such drastic methods space was cleared for the guns in the Belgian forts, and to the advancing besiegers no protection would be offered from the raking fire. The heart of a steel-stock owner would have rejoiced to see the maze of wire entanglement that ran everywhere. In one place a tomato-field had been wired; the green vines, laden with their rich red fruit, were intertwined with the steel vines bearing their vicious blood-drawing barbs whose intent was to make the red field redder still. We had just passed a gang digging man-holes and spitting them with stakes, when an officer cried:

"Stop! No further passage here. You must turn back."

"Why?" we asked protestingly.

"The entire road is being mined," he replied.

Even as he spoke we could see a liquid explosive being poured into a sort of cup, and electric wires connected. The officer pictured to us a regiment of soldiers advancing, with the full tide of life running in their veins, laughing and singing as they marched in the smiling sun. Suddenly the road rocks and hell heaves up beneath their feet; bodies are blown into the air and rained back to the earth in tiny fragments of human flesh; while brains are spattered over the ground, and every crevice runs a rivulet of blood. He sketched this in excellent English, adding:

"A magnificent climax for Christian civilzation, eh! And that's my business. But what else can one do?"

For the task of setting this colossal stage for death, the entire peasant population had been mobilized to assist the soldiers. In self-defense Belgium was thus obliged to drive the dagger deep into her own bosom. It seemed indeed as if she suffered as much at her own hands, as at the hands of the enemy. To arrest the advancing scourge she impressed into her service dynamite, fire and flood. I saw the sluice-gates lifted and meadows which had been waving with the golden grain of autumn now turned into silver lakes. So suddenly had the waters covered the land that hay- cocks bobbed upon the top of the flood, and peasants went out in boats to dredge for the beets and turnips which lay beneath the waters.

The roads were inundated and so we ran along an embankment which, like a levee, lifted itself above the water wastes. The sun, sinking down behind the flaming poplars in the west, was touching the rippling surface into myriad colors. It was like a trip through Fairyland, or it would have been, were not men on all sides busy preparing for the bloody shambles.

After these elaborate defensive works the Belgians laughed at any one taking Antwerp, the impregnable fortress of Western Europe. The Germans laughed, too. But it was the bass, hollow laugh of their great guns placed ten to twenty miles away, and pouring into the city such a hurricane of shell and shrapnel that they forced its evacuation by the British and the Belgians. Through this vast array of works which the reception committee had designed for their slaughter, the Germans came marching in as if on dress parade.

A few shells were even now crashing through Malines and had played havoc with the carillon in the cathedral tower. During a lull in the bombardment we climbed a stairway of the belfry where, above us, balanced great stones which a slight jar would send tumbling down. On and up we passed vents and jagged holes which had been ripped through these massive walls as if they were made of paper. It was enough to carry the weight of one's somber reflections without the addition of cheerful queries of the movie-man as to "how would you feel if the German gunners suddenly turned loose again?"

We gathered in a deal of stone ornaments that had been shot down and struggled with a load of them to our car. Later they became a weight upon our conscience. When Cardinal Mercier starts the rebuilding of his cathedral, we might surprise him with the return of a considerable portion thereof. To fetch these souvenirs through to England, we were compelled to resort to all the tricks of a gang of smugglers.

I made also a first rate collection of German posters. By day I observed the location of these placards, announcing certain death to those who "sniped on German troops," "harbored courier- pigeons," or "destroyed" these self-same posters.

At night with trembling hands I laid cold compresses on them until the adhering paste gave way; then, tucking the wet sheets beneath my coat, I stole back to safety. At last in England I feasted my eyes on the precious documents, dreaming of the time when posterity should rejoice in the possession of these posters relating to the German overlordship of Belgium, and give thanks to the courage of their collector. Unfortunately, their stained and torn appearance grated on the aesthetic sensibilities of the maid.

"Where are they?" I demanded on my return to my room one time, as I missed them.

"Those nasty papers?" she inquired naively.

"Those priceless souvenirs," I returned severely. She did not comprehend, but with a most aggravatingly sweet expression said:

"They were so dirty, sir, I burned them all up."

She couldn't understand why I rewarded her with something akin to a fit of apoplexy, instead of a liberal tip. That day was a red-letter one for our photographers. They paid the price in the risks which constantly strained their nerves. But in it they garnered vastly more than in the fortnight they had hugged safety.

But, despite all our efforts, there was one object that we were after that we never did attain. That was a first-class atrocity picture. There were atrocity stories in endless variety, but not one that the camera could authenticate. People were growing chary of verbal assurances of these horrors; they yearned for some photographic proof, and we yearned to furnish it.

"What features are you looking for?" was the question invariably put to us on discovering our cameras.

"Children with their hands cut off," we replied. "Are there any around here?"

"Oh, yes! Hundreds of them," was the invariable assurance.

"Yes, but all we want is one—just one in flesh and bone. Where can we find that?"

The answer was ever the same. "In the hospital at the rear, or at the front." "Back in such-and-such a village," etc. Always somewhere else; never where we were.

Let no one attempt to gloss the cruelties perpetrated in Belgium. My individual wish is to see them pictured as crimson as possible, that men may the fiercer revolt against the shame and horror of this red butchery called war. But this is a record of just one observer's reactions and experiences in the war zone. After weeks in this contested ground, the word "atrocity" now calls up to my mind hardly anything I saw in Belgium, but always the savageries I have witnessed at home in America.

For example, the organized frightfulness that I once witnessed in Boston. Around the strikers picketing a factory were the police in full force and a gang of thugs. Suddenly at the signal of a shrill whistle, sticks were drawn from under coats and, right and left, men were felled to the cobblestones. After a running fight a score were stretched out unconscious, upon the square. As blood poured out of the gashes, like tigers intoxicated by the sight and smell thereof, the assailants became frenzied, kicking and beating their victims, already insensible. In a trice the beasts within had been unleashed.

If in normal times men can lay aside every semblance of restraint and decency and turn into raging fiends, how much greater cause is there for such a transformation to be wrought under the stress of war when, by government decree, the sixth commandment is suspended and killing has become glorified. At any rate my experiences in America make credible the tales told in Belgium.

But there are no pictures of these outrages such as the Germans secured after the Russian drive into their country early in the war. Here are windrows of mutilated Germans with gouged eyes and mangled limbs, attesting to that same senseless bestial ferocity which lies beneath the veneer.

All the photographers were fired with desire to make a similar picture in Belgium, yet though we raced here and there, and everywhere that rumor led us, we found it but a futile chase.

Through the Great Hall in Ghent there poured 100,000 refugees. Here we pleaded how absolutely imperative it was that we should obtain an atrocity picture. The daughter of the burgomaster, who was in charge, understood our plight and promised to do her best. But out of the vast concourse she was able to uncover but one case that could possibly do service as an atrocity.

It was that of a blind peasant woman with her six children. The photographers told her to smile, but she didn't, nor did the older children; they had suffered too horribly to make smiling easy. When the Germans entered the village the mother was in bed with her day-old baby. Her husband was seized and, with the other men, marched away, as the practice was at that period of the invasion, for some unaccountable reason. With the roof blazing over her head, she was compelled to arise from her bed and drag herself for miles before she found a refuge. I related this to a German later and he said: "Oh, well, there are plenty of peasant women in the Fatherland who are hard at work in the fields three days after the birth of their child."

The Hall filled with women wailing for children, furnished heartrending sights, but no victim bore such physical marks as the most vivid imagination could construe into an atrocity.

"I can't explain why we don't get a picture," said the free lance. "Enough deviltry has been done. I can't see why some of the stuff doesn't come through to us."

"Simply because the Germans are not fools," replied the movie- man; "when they mutilate a victim, they go through with it to the finish. They take care not to let telltales go straggling out to damn them."

Some one proposed that the only way to get a first-class atrocity picture was to fake it. It was a big temptation, and a fine field for the exercise of their inventive genius. But on this issue the chorus of dissent was most emphatic.

The nearest that I came to an atrocity was when in a car with Van Hee, the American vice-consul at Ghent. Van Hee was a man of laconic speech and direct action. I told him what Lethbridge, the British consul, had told me; viz., that the citizens of Ghent must forthwith erect a statue of Van Hee in gold to commemorate his priceless services. "The gold idea appeals to me, all right," said Van Hee, "but why put it in a statue!" He routed me out at five one morning to tell me that I could go through the German lines with Mr. Fletcher into Brussels. We left the Belgian Army cheering the Stars and Stripes, and came to the outpost of sharpshooters. Crouching behind a barricade, they were looking down the road. They didn't know whether the Germans were half a mile, two miles, or five miles down that road.

Into that uncertain No-Man's-Land we drove with only our honking to disturb the silence, while our minds kept growing specters of Uhlans the size of Goliath. Fletcher and I kept up a hectic conversation upon the flora and fauna of the country. But Van Hee, being of strong nerves, always gleefully brought the talk back to Uhlans.

"How can you tell an Uhlan?" I faltered.

"If you see a big gray man on horseback, with a long lance, spearing children," said Van Hee, "why, that's an Uhlan."

Turning a sharp corner, we ran straight ahead into a Belgian bicycle division—scouting in this uncertain zone. In a flash they were off their wheels, rifles at their shoulders and fingers on triggers.

Two boys, gasping with fear, thrust their guns up into our very faces. In our gray coats we had been taken for a party of German officers. They were positive that a peasant was hanging in a barn not far away. But we insisted that our nerves had had enough for the day. Even Van Hee was willing to let the conversation drift back to flowers and birds. We drove along in chastened spirit until hailed by the German outpost, about five miles from where we had left the Belgians. No-Man's-Land was wide in those days.

But what is it that really constitutes an atrocity? In a refugee shed, sleeping on the straw, we found an old woman of 88. All that was left to her was her shawl, her dress, and the faint hope of seeing two sons for whom she wept. Extreme old age is pitiful in itself. With homelessness it is tragic. But such homeless old age as this, with scarce one flickering ray of hope, is double-distilled tragedy. If some marauder had bayoneted her, and she had died therefrom, it would have been a kindly release from all the anguish that the future now held in store for her. Of course that merciful act would have constituted an atrocity, because it would have been a breach in the rules of the war game.

But in focusing our attention upon the violations of the code, we are apt to forget the greater atrocity of the violation of Belgium, and the whole hideous atrocity of the great war. That is getting things out of proportion, for the sufferings entailed by these technical atrocities are infinitesimal alongside of those resulting from the war itself.

Another point has been quite overlooked. In recounting the atrocities wrought by Prussian Imperialism, no mention is made of those that it has committed upon its own people. And yet at any rate a few Germans suffered in the claws of the German eagle quite as cruelly as any Belgians did. One fine morning in September three Germans came careening into Ghent in a great motor car. They were dazed to find no evidence of their army which they supposed was in possession. Before the men became aware of their mistake, a Belgian mitrailleuse poured a stream of lead into their midst, killing two of them outright. The third German, with a ball in his neck, was rescued by Van Hee and placed under the protection of the American flag.

Incidentally that summary action, followed by a quick visit to the German general in his camp on the outskirts, saved the city. That is a long story. It is told in Alexander Powell's "Fighting in Flanders," but it suffices here to state that by a pact between the Belgian burgomaster of Ghent and the German commandant it was understood that the wounded man was not to be considered a prisoner, but under the jurisdiction of the American Consulate.

A week after this incident Van Hee paid his first visit to this wounded man in the Belgian hospital. He was an honest fellow of about forty—the type of working-man who had aspired to nothing beyond a chance to toil and raise a family for the Fatherland. Weltpolitik, with its vaunting boast of "World-power or Downfall," was meaningless to him and his comrades gathered in the beer- gardens on a Sunday.

Suddenly out of this quiet, uneventful life he was called to the colors and sent killing and burning through the Belgian villages. His officers had told him that it would be a sorry thing for any German soldier to be captured, for these Belgians, maddened by the pillage of their country, would take a terrible revenge upon any luckless wretches that fell into their hands. Now, more suddenly than anything else had ever happened in his life, a bullet had stabbed him in the throat and he found himself a prisoner at the mercy of these dreaded Belgians.

"Why are they tending me so carefully during these last seven days?" "Are they getting me ready for the torturing?" "Are they making me well in order that I may suffer all the more?" Grim speculation of that kind must have been running through his simple mind. For when we opened the door of his room, he slunk cowering over to his bed, staring at us as if we were inquisitors about to lead him away to the torture chamber, there to suffer vicariously for all the crimes of the German army.

His body, already shrunken by overwork, visibly quivered before us, the perspiration beading on his ashen face.

We had come to apprise him of his present status as a citizen under the protectorate of America.

Van Hee approached the subject casually with the remark: "You see, you are not a Frenchman!"

"No, I am not a Frenchman," the quailing fellow mechanically repeated.

"And you are not a Belgian," resumed Van Hee.

He was not quite sure about disclaiming that, but he saw what was expected of him. So he faltered: "No, I am not a Belgian." "And you are not an Englishman, eh?" According to formula he answered: "No, I am not an Englishman!" but I sensed a bit more of emphasis in the disavowal of any English taint to his blood.

Van Hee was taking this process of elimination in order to clear the field so that his man could grasp the fact that he was to all intents an American, and at last he said:

"No longer are you a German either."

The poor fellow was in deep seas, and breathing hard. Everything about him proclaimed the fact that he was a German, even to his field-gray uniform, and he knew it. But he did not venture to contradict Van Hee, and he whispered hoarsely: "No, I am not a German either."

He was completely demoralized, a picture of utter desolation.

"If you are not German, or Belgian, or French, or English, what are you then?"

The poor fellow whimpered: "0 Gott! I don't know what I am."

"I'll tell you what you are. You're an American!" exclaimed Van Hee with great gusto. "That's what you are—an American! Get that? An American!"

"Ja, ja ich bin ein Amerikaner!" he eagerly cried ("Yes, yes, I am an American!"), relieved to find himself no longer a man without a country. Had he been told that he was a Hindoo, or an Eskimo, he would have acquiesced as obediently.

But when he was shown an American flag and it began to dawn on him that he had nothing more to fear from his captors, his tenseness relaxed. And when Van Hee said: "As the American consul I shall do what I can for you. What is it you want the most?" a light shone in the German's eyes and he replied:

"I want to go home. I want to see my wife and children."

"I thought you came down here because you wanted to see the war," said Van Hee.

"War!" he gasped, and putting hands up to his eyes as if to shut out some awful sights, he began muttering incoherently about "Louvain," "children screaming," "blood all over his breast," repeating constantly "schrecklich, schrecklich." "I don't want to see any more war. I want to see my wife and my three children!"

"The big guns! Do you hear them?" he said.

"I don't want to hear them," he answered, shaking his head.

"They're killing you Germans by the thousands down there," announced Van Hee. "I should think you would want to get out and kill the French and the English."

"I don't want to kill anybody," he repeated. "I never did want to kill anybody. I only want to go home." As we left him he was repeating a refrain: "I want to go home"—"Schrecklich, schrecklich." "I never did want to kill anybody."

Every instinct in that man's soul was against the murder he had been set to do. His conscience had been crucified. A ruthless power had invaded his domain, dragged him from his hearthside, placed a gun in his hands and said to him: "Kill!"

Perhaps before the war, as he had drilled along the German roads, he had made some feeble protest. But then war seemed so unreal and so far away; now the horror of it was in his soul.

A few days later Van Hee was obliged to return him to the German lines. Again he was marched out to the shambles to take up the killings against which his whole nature was in rebellion. No slave ever went whipped to his task with greater loathing.

Once I saw slowly plodding back into Brussels a long gray line of soldiers; the sky, too, was gray and a gray weariness had settled down upon the spirits of these troops returning from the destruction of a village. I was standing by the roadside holding in my arms a refugee baby.

Its attention was caught by an officer on horseback and in baby fashion it began waving its hand at him. Arrested by this sudden gleam of human sunshine the stern features of the officer relaxed into a smile. Forgetting for the moment his dignity he waved his hand at the baby in a return salute, turning his face away from his men that they might not see the tears in his eyes. But we could see them.

Perhaps through those tears he saw the mirage of his own fireside. Perhaps for the moment his homing spirit rested there, and it was only the body from which the soul had fled that was in the saddle here before us riding through a hostile land. Perhaps more powerfully than the fulminations of any orator had this greeting of a little child operated to smite him with the senseless folly of this war. Who knows but that right then there came flashing into his mind the thought: "Why not be done with this cruel orphaning of Belgian babies, this burning down of their homes and turning them adrift upon the world?"

Brutalizing as may be the effect of militarism in action, fortified as its devotees may be by all the iron ethics of its code, I cannot help but believe that here again the ever-recurring miracle of repentance and regeneration had been wrought by the grace of a baby's smile; that again this stern-visaged officer had become just a human being longing for peace and home, revolting against laying waste the peace and homes of his fellowmen. But to what avail? All things would conspire to make him conform and stifle the revolt within. How could he escape from the toils in which he was held? Next morrow or next week he would again be in the saddle riding out to destruction.

The irony of history again! It was this German folk who said, centuries ago: "No religious authority shall invade the sacred precincts of the soul and compel men to act counter to their deepest convictions." In a costly struggle the fetters of the church were broken. But now a new iron despotism is riveted upon them. The great state has become the keeper of men's consciences. The dragooning of the soul goes on just the same. Only the power to do it has been transferred from the priests to the officers of the state. To compel men to kill when their whole beings cry out against it, is an atrocity upon the souls of men as real as any committed upon the bodies of the Belgians.

Amidst the wild exploits and wilder rumors of those crucial days when Belgium was the central figure in the world-war, the calmness of the natives was a source of constant wonder. In the regions where the Germans had not yet come they went on with their accustomed round of eating, drinking and trading with a sang froid that was distressing to the fevered outsider.

Yet beneath this surface calmness and gayety ran a smoldering hate, of whose presence one never dreamed, unless he saw it shoot out in an ugly flare.

I saw this at Antwerp when about 300 of us had been herded into one of the great halls. As one by one the suspects came up to the exit gate to be overhauled by the examiners, I thought that there never could be such a complacent, dead-souled crowd as this. They had dully waited for two hours with scarce a murmur.

The most pathetic weather-worn old man—a farm drudge, I surmise—came up to the exit. All I heard were the words of the officer: "You speak German, eh?"

At a flash this dead throng became an infuriated blood-thirsting mob. "Allemand! Espion!" it shouted, swinging forward until the gates sagged. "Kill him! Kill the damned German!"

The mob would have put its own demand into execution but for the soldiers, who flung the poor quivering fellow into one corner and pushed back the Belgians, eager to trample him to the station floor.

There was the girl Yvonne, who, while the color was mounting to her pretty face, informed us that she "wanted the soldiers to keel every German in the world. No," she added, her dark eyes snapping fire, "I want them to leave just one. The last one I shall keel myself!"

Yet, every example of Belgian ferocity towards the spoilers one could match with ten of Belgian magnanimity. We obtained a picture of Max Crepin, carbinier voluntaire, in which he looks seventy years of age—he was really seventeen. At the battle of Melle he had fallen into the hands of the Germans after a bullet had passed clean through both cheeks. In their retreat the Germans had left Max in the bushes, and he was now safe with his friends.

He could not speak, but the first thing he wrote in the little book the nurse handed him was, "The Germans were very kind to me." There was a line about his father and mother; then "We had to lie flat in the bushes for two days. One German took off his coat and wrapped it around me, though he was cold himself. Another German gave me all the water in his canteen." Then came a line about a friend, and finally: "The Germans were very kind to me." I fear that Max would not rank high among the haters.

Whenever passion swept and tempted to join their ranks, the figure of Gremberg comes looming up to rebuke me. He was a common soldier whose camaraderie I enjoyed for ten days during the skirmishing before Antwerp. In him the whole tragedy of Belgium was incarnated. He had lost his two brothers; they had gone down before the German bullets. He had lost his home; it had gone up in flames from the German torch. He had lost his country; it had been submerged beneath the gray horde out of the north.

"Why is it, Gremberg," I asked, "you never rage against the Boches? I should think you would delight to lay your hands on every German and tear him into bits. Yet you don't seem to feel that way."

"No, I don't," he answered. "For if I had been born a Boche, I know that I would act just like any Boche. I would do just as I was ordered to do."

"But the men who do the ordering, the officers and the military caste, the whole Prussian outfit?"

"Well, I have it in for that crowd," Gremberg replied, "but, you see, I'm a Socialist, and I know they can't help it. They get their orders from the capitalists."

The capitalists, he explained, were likewise caught in the vicious toils of the system and could act no differently. Bayonet in hand, he expounded the whole Marxian philosophy as he had learned it at the Voorhuit in Ghent. The capitalists of Germany were racing with the capitalists of England for the markets of the world, so they couldn't help being pitted against each other. The war was simply the transference of the conflict from the industrial to the military plane, and Belgium, the ancient cockpit of Europe, was again the battlefield.

He emphasized each point by poking me with his bayonet. As an instrument of argument it is most persuasive. When I was a bit dense, he would press harder until I saw the light. Then he would pass on to the next point.

I told him that I had been to Humanite's office in Paris after Jaures was shot, and the editors, pointing to a great pile of anti-war posters, explained that so quickly had the mobilization been accomplished, that there had been no time to affix these to the walls.

"The French Socialists had some excuse for their going out to murder their fellow workers," I said, "and the Germans had to go or get shot, but you are a volunteer. You went to war of your own free-will, and you call yourself a Socialist."

"I am, but so am I a Belgian!" he answered hotly. "We talked against war, but when war came and my land was trampled, something rose up within me and made me fight. That's all. It's all right to stand apart, but you don't know."

I did know what it was to be passion swept, but, however, I went on baiting him.

"Well, I suppose that you are pretty well cured of your Socialism, because it failed, like everything else."

"Yes, it did," he answered regretfully, "but at any rate people are surprised at Socialists killing one another—not at the Christians. And anyhow if there had been twice as many priests and churches and lawyers and high officials, that would not have delayed the war. It would have come sooner; but if there had been twice as many Socialists there would have been no war."

The free-lance interrupted to call him out for a picture before it was too dark. Gremberg took his position on the trench, his hand shading his eyes. It is the famous iron trench at Melle from which the Germans had withdrawn.

He is not looking for the enemy. If they were near, ten bullets would have brought him down in as many seconds. He is looking into the West.

And to me he is a symbol of all the soldiers of Europe, and all the women of Europe who huddle to their breasts their white-faced, sobbing children. They are all looking into the West, for there lies Hope. There lies America. And their prayer is that the young republic of the West shall not follow the blood-rusted paths of militarism, but somehow may blaze the way out of chaos into a new world-order.



PART IV Love Among The Ruins



Chapter XII

The Beating Op "The General,"



"The saddest sound in all the world," says A Sardou, "is the beating of the General." On that fateful Saturday afternoon in August, after nearly fifty years of silence through the length and breadth of France, there sounded again the ominous throbbing of the drums calling for the general mobilization of the nation. At its sound the French industrial army melted into a military one. Ploughshares and pruning-hooks were beaten into machine-guns and Lebel rifles. The civilian straightway became a soldier.

We were returning from Malmaison, the home where Napoleon spent with Josephine the happiest moments of his life. Our Parisian guide and chauffeur were in chatting, cheerful mood though fully alive to all the rumors of war. They were sons of France, from their infancy drilled in the idea that some day with their comrades they were to hear this very drum calling them to march from their homes; they had even been taught to cherish the coming of this day when they should redeem the tarnished glory of France by helping to plant the tricolor over the lost provinces of Alsace and Lorraine.

But that the dreaded, yet hoped-for day had really arrived, seemed preposterous and incredible—incredible until we drove into the village of Reuilly where an eager crowd, gathering around a soldier with a drum, caused our chauffeur to draw sharply up beside the curb and we came to a stop twenty feet from the drummer. He was a man gray enough to have been, if not a soldier, at least a drummer boy in 1870. The pride that was his now in being the official herald of portentous news was overcast by an evident sorrow.

As if conscious of the fact that he was to pound not on the dead dry skin of his drum, but on living human hearts, he hesitated a moment before he let the sticks falls. Then sharp and loud throbbed the drum through the still-hushed street. Clear and resolute was the voice in which he read the order for mobilization. The whole affair took little more than a minute. Those who know how heavily the disgrace and disaster of 1870 lie upon the French heart will admit that it is fair to say that all their life this crowd had lived for this moment. Now that it had come, they took it with tense white looks upon their faces. But not a cheer, not a cry, not a shaking of the fist.

The only outwardly tragic touch came from our chauffeur. When he heard the words "la mobilization" he flung down his cap, threw up his hands, bowed his head a second, then gripped his steering wheel and, for fifteen miles, drove desperately, accurately, as though his car were a winged bullet shooting straight into the face of the enemy. That fifteen-mile run from Reuilly to Paris was through a long lane of sorrow: for not to one section or class, but to all France had come the call to mobilize. Every home had been summoned to the sacrifice of its sons.

We witnessed nowhere any wailings or wringing of hands or frantic, foolish pleading to stay at home. Long ago the question of their dear ones going had been settled. Through the years they had made ready their hearts for this offering and now they gave with a glad exaltation. How bravely the French woman met the demand upon her, only those of us who moved in and out among the homes during those days of mobilization can testify. The "General" was indeed to these mothers, wives and sweethearts left behind the saddest sound in all the world.

But if it were so sad as Sardou said in 1870, when 500,000 answered to its call, how infinitely sadder was it in 1914 when ten times that number responded to its wild alarum, a million never returning to the women that had loved them. But such statistics are just the unemotional symbols of misery. We can look at this colossal sum of human tragedy without being gripped one whit. If we look into the soul of one woman these figures become invested with a new and terrible meaning.

Such an opportunity was strangely given me as we stood in a long queue outside the American embassy waiting for the passports that would make our personages sacrosanct when the German raiders took the city. A perspiring line, we shuffled slowly forward, thanking God that we were not as the Europeans, but had had the good sense to be born Americans. While in the next breath we tiraded against the self-same Government for not hurrying the American fleet to the rescue.

The alien-looking gentleman behind me mopped his brow and muttered something about wishing that he had not thirsted for other "joys than those of old St. Louis."

"Pennsylvania has her good points, too," I responded.

That random shot opened wide to me the gates of Romance and High Adventure. It broke the long silence of the girl just ahead.

"It's comforting just to hear the name of one's own home state," she said. "I lived in a little village in the western part of Pennsylvania," and, incidentally, she named the village where my father had once been minister of the church. I explained as much to her and marveled at the coincidence.

"More marvel still," she said, "for we come not only from the same state and the same village, but from the same house. My father was minister in that same church."

Nickleville is the prosaic name of that little hamlet in western Pennsylvania. Any gentle reader with a cynic strain there may verify this chronicle and find fresh confirmation for the ancient adage that "Fact is stranger far than Fiction."

That selfsame evening we held reunion in a cafe off the Boulevard Clichy. There I first discerned the slightness of her frame and marveled at the spirit that filled it. She was exuberant in the joy of meeting a countryman and, with the device of laughter, she kept in check the sadness which never quite came welling up in tears.

She was typical American but let her bear here the name by which her new friends in France called her—Marie. One might linger upon her large eyes and golden hair, but this is not the epic of a fair face but of a fair soul—vigorous and determined, too. To the power therein even the stolid waiter paid his homage.

"Pardon," he interjected once, "we must close now. The orders are for all lights out by nine. It is the government. They fear the Zeppelins."

"But that's just what I'm afraid of, too," Marie answered. "How can you turn us out into that darkness filled with Zeppelins?" He succumbed to this radiant banter and, covering every crevice that might emit a ray of light, he let us linger on long after closing time.

Marie's was one of those classic souls which by some anomaly, passing by the older lineages and cultures of the East, find birthplace in a bleak untutored village of the West. To this bareness some succumb, and the divine afflatus dies. Still others roam restlessly up and down, searching until they find their milieu and then for the first time their spirit glows.

Music had breathed upon this girl's spirit, touched with a vagabond desire. To satisfy it she must have money. So she gave lessons to children. Then a publisher bought some little melodies that she had set to words. And lastly, grave and reverend committeemen, after hesitating over her youth, made her head of music in a university of western Montana.

Early in 1914, with her gold reserves grown large enough for the venture, she set sail for the siege of Paris. To her charm and sterling worth it had soon capitulated—a quicker victory than she had dared to hope for. Around her studio in a street off the Champs Elysees she gathered a coterie of kindred souls. She told of the idealism and camaraderie of the little circle, while its foibles she touched upon with much merriment. Behind this outward jesting I gained a glimpse of the fight she had made for her advance.

"It's been hard," I said, "but what a lot you have found along the way."

"Yes, far more than you can imagine," she replied; "I have found Robert le Marchand."

"And who is he?"

"Well, he is an artist and an athlete, and he is just back from Albania—where he had most wonderful adventures. He has written them up for 'Gaulois.' His home is in Normandy. And he is heir to a large estate in Italy in the South—in what looks like the heel on the map. And he has a degree from the Sorbonne and he is the real prince of our little court. And, best of all, he loves me."

Then she told the story of her becoming the princess of the little court.

"From his ancestral place in Italy," she said, "Robert sent me baskets of fruit gathered in his groves by his own hands. In one he placed a sprig of orange-blossoms. We laughed about it when we met again and———"

I saw that after this affairs had ripened to a quick conclusion. In drives along the boulevards, in walks through the moonlit woods, at dinners, concerts, dances—these two mingled their dreams for their home in Normandy. The only discord in this summer symphony was a frowning father.

Marie was the epitome of all charms and graces. Yes. But she came undowered—that was all. And firm he stood against any breach in the long established code of his class. But they did not suffer this to disturb their plans and reveries, and through those soft July days they roamed together in their lotus-land. Then suddenly thundered that dream-shattering cannon out of the north.

"I was out of town for the week end," Marie continued; "I heard the beating of the 'General' and at call for mobilization I flew back here as quickly as I could. It was too late. There was only a note saying that he had gone, and how hard it was to go without one farewell."

"Now what are you going to do?"

"What can I do with Robert gone and all his friends in the army too?"

"Let me do what I can. Let me play substitute," I volunteered.

"Do you really mean what you just said?" she queried.

"I really do," I answered.

"Well, then, do you paddle a canoe?"

"Yes, but what has that to do with the question?" I replied perplexedly.

"Everything," she responded. "Robert is stationed at Corbeille, fifteen miles below here on the Seine. I have the canoe and tomorrow I want you to go with me down the river to Robert.".

My mind made a swift diagnosis of the situation. All exits from Paris carefully watched; suspicion rife everywhere—strangers off in a canoe; a sentinel challenge and a shot from the bank.

"Let us first consider———" I began.

"We can do that in the canoe to-morrow," she interrupted.

And I capitulated, quite as Paris had.

We stepped out into the darkness that cloaked the silent city from its aerial ravagers. As we walked I mused upon this modern maiden's Iliad. While a thousand hug the quiet haven, what was it that impelled the one to cut moorings and range the deep? A chorus of croaking frogs greeted our turn into a park.

"Funny," said Marie, "but frogs drove me out of Nickleville! There was nothing to do at home but to listen to their eternal noise; to save my nerves I simply had to break away."

The prospect of that canoe trip was not conducive to easy slumber. The frog chorus in that Pennsylvania swamp, why had it not been less demonstrative? Still lots could happen before morning. One might develop appendicitis or the Germans might get the city. With these two comforting hopes I fell asleep. Morning realizing neither of them, I walked over to Marie's studio.

"Well, then, all ready for the expedition?" I said, masking my pessimism with a smile.

For reply she handed this note which read:

"Dear Marie: I have been transferred from Corbeille to Melun. It makes me ill to be getting ever farther and farther away.—Robert."

With the river trip cancelled, life looked more roseate to me. "And now we can't go after all," I said, mustering this time the appearance of sadness.

"Oh, don't look so relieved," she laughed, "because we're going anyhow."

"But what's the use? He has gone."

"Well, we are going where he has gone, that's all," she retorted.

I pointed out the facts that only military trains were running to Melun; that we weren't soldiers; that the river was out of the question; that we had no aeroplane and that we couldn't go overland in a canoe.

"But we can with our wits," Marie added.

I explained how lame my wits were in French, and that two consecutive sentences would bring on trial for high treason to the language.

"Oh, but you don't furnish the wits," Marie retorted. "You just furnish the body."

In her plan of campaign I gathered that I was to act as a kind of convoy, from which she was to dart forth, torpedoing all obstacles. I was quite confident of her torpedoing ability but not of my fitness to play a star part as a dour and fear-inspiring background. She packed her bag and presently we were making our way to the station through a blighted city.

At the Gare du Nord a cordon of soldiers had been thrown about the station; crowds surged up against the gates, a few frantically pleading and even crying to get through. The guards, to every plea and threat returned a harsh "C'est impossible." Undaunted by the despair of others, she looked straight into the eyes of the somber gate-keeper and, with every art, told the story of Robert le Marchand, brave young officer of France; of his American girl and his deep longing for her. When she had stirred this lethargic functionary into a show of interest in this girl, with a revealing gesture she said: "And here she is; please, Monsieur, let me go." "Ah, Mademoiselle, I would like to," he replied, "but are not all the soldiers of France longing for wives and sweethearts! Mon Dieu! if they all rode there would be no room for the militaire. The Boches would take us in the midst of our farewells. There is never any end to leave-takings."

"But, Monsieur, I did not have one good-by."

"No, Mademoiselle. C'est impossible."

The guardian of the second gate took her plea in a way that did more credit to his heart than to his knowledge of geography. He thought (and we made no effort to disillusionize him) that she had come all the way from America since the outbreak of war. It nearly moved him to tears. Was he surrendering? Almost. But recovering his official negative head-shake and trusting not to words, he fell back upon the formula: "No, Madame, c'est impossible."

The truth had failed and so had the half-truth. To the next forbidding guard Marie came as a Red Cross nurse, hurrying to her station.

"Your uniform, Madame," he interposed.

"No time to get a uniform; no time to get a permission," she explained.

"Take time, Madame," was his brusque dismissal.

Each time rebuffed, she tried again, but against the full battery of her blandishments the line was adamant.

"It's no use," I said. "We may as well go home."

"No retreat until we've tried our last reserves," she responded, clinking some coins together in her hand. "We'll try a change of tactics."

We reconnoitered and decided that an opening might be made through guardian number two. He had almost surrendered in the first engagement. This time, along with the smile, she flashed a coin. Perchance he had already repented of his first refusal. Anyhow, if an officer of France could be made happy with his sweetheart and at the same time a brave gendarme could be made richer by a five-franc piece, would not La Belle France fight so much the better? The logic was incontestable. "This way, Mademoiselle, Monsieur, and be quick, please."

We had passed through the lines into a riot of red and blue uniforms. Soldiers were everywhere sprawled over the platforms, knotted up in sleep, yawning, stretching their limbs, eating, smoking and swearing. No one knew anything about tickets, trains or aught else.

Swirled about in an eddying tide of entraining troops, we were flung up against a stationary being garbed as a railway dispatcher. He bluffed and blustered a bit. Our story, however, supplemented by some hard cash, procured calm and presently we found ourselves in a compartment with two tickets marked Melun, a few rations and sundry admonitions not to converse with fellow- passengers until the train started.

It is hard to explain why any one should want to communicate in German to an American girl in a French railway compartment in wartime. But explain why some people want to play with trip- hammers and loaded guns. We know they do. And so, though aware that there were spy-hunting listeners all around, a mad desire to utter the forbidden tongue obsessed me. Wry faces from Marie, emphasized by repeated pinches at each threatened outbreak, brought me back to my senses and to Anglo-Saxon.

Not only one who spoke, but even one who understood the hated tongue was a suspect. For the least knowledge of the enemy's language was to some the hall-mark of a spy. The game played throughout France and Belgium was to fling a sudden command at the suspect, catching the unwary fellow off-guard, and thus trap him into self-betrayal.

An official would say sharply: "Nehmen Sie ihre Hutte ab" (Take off your hat). Or there would come a sudden challenge on the street, "Wohin gehen Sie?" (Where are you going?) If instinctively one obeyed or replied in German, he was there caught with the goods.

Our major domo under the influence of the coin, or what he had procured at the vintner's in exchange therefor, grew a bit playful. He suddenly flung open the door and cried, "Steigen Sie auf." If I had comprehended his meaning involuntarily I would have obeyed, but luckily my brain has a slow shifting language gear. By the time it began dawning upon me that we had been told to vacate the car Marie had fixed me with her eyes and gripped me like a vise with her hand so that I knew that I was to stay put. One man involuntarily started and then checked himself. He was so patently a Frenchman though that everybody laughed. The major domo chuckled and marched away, much pleased with his playful humor.

At last, with much jolting, we started on our crawling journey. Sometimes the snail-pace would be accelerated; our hopes would then expand, only to collapse again with a bang. Again we would be sidetracked to let coal-cars, cattle cars and flat cars with guns go by. Civilians were ciphers in the new order, and if it served any military purpose to dump us into the river, in we would have gone with no questions asked. We sat about, a wilted and dispirited lot. Occasionally some one would thrust his head out the window to observe progress. He was generally rewarded by a view of the Eiffel Tower from a new angle, for it seemed that we were simply being shunted in and about and all around the city.

The most icy reserve must find itself cracked and thawing in the intimacies which a jerking railway car precipitates. There is no dignity which is proof against a sound bump upon the head. Thus our irritations and suspicions gave way to laughter, and laughter brings all the barriers down. The compartment became a confessional. The anxious looking man opposite was hoping to get to his estate and to bury a few of his most treasured things before the Germans came. The two young fellows with scraggly beards were brothers, given five days' leave to see a dying father; three days had been spent in a vain effort to get started there. Another man had a half telegram which read, "Accident at home you———" Not another word had he been able to get through. The silent young man in the corner smiled pleasantly when his turn came but volunteered no information. I likewise passed.

Marie, wishing to fortify herself with all possible help in her venture, told her tale in full. An immediate proffer came from the hitherto taciturn young man in the corner. "Why, this is romance in earnest. I do wish that I might be of some help," he said with genuine interest.

Our new friend we found had for a grandfather no less a dignitary than Alexander Dumas. His name he told us was Louis Dumas, an artist, not yet called to the colors, and bound now for Villeneuve, "and before we can really get acquainted, here we are," he said as the train came to a stop.

As he stepped to the door it was flung open by an officer who shouted, "Everybody out! This car is for the military." We protested. We displayed our tickets. The officer laughed and, seizing one reluctant passenger, dragged him out. A quickly ejected and much dejected band, we found ourselves upon the street of a little outlying village nine miles from Paris. It had taken half as many hours to get there.

We fell upon the one village gendarme with a volley of questions. By pitching her voice above the hubbub, Marie got in her inquiry about the distance to Melun.

"Thirty kilometers by the main road," he answered.

This, then, was the issue of that tense day of strategy and daring: to be stranded in this suburb from which it was impossible to go forward to Melun and almost as difficult to return to Paris. Marie crumpled under the blow and then I realized how much it had cost her to maintain that calm outward demeanor.

By sheer will-power she had kept the tears from her eyes and the tremor from her limbs. Long held in leash, they now leaped out to possess her.

Dumas ran hither and thither, hunting conveyance but in vain. Three of his friends had automobiles. He called them by telephone. All cars had been commandeered. He stood with head drooping in real dejection.

"Ah, I have it!" he exclaimed, "my friend Veilleau, he has an aeroplane and he will do it."

This was quite too much even for Marie's soaring spirit; but she scarcely had time to picture herself ranging the sky when Dumas was back again, sorrowfully confessing failure. Aeroplanes likewise had heard the tocsin; they had sterner business than wafting lovers through the sky; they were carrying explosives and messages in the service of France. Dumas looked almost as disappointed as the wilted little figure he was trying to help.

When the villagers understood her plight, they were full of sympathy, full of condolences, but also full of tales of arrest for those traveling on the main road.

"Where was this road, anyhow?"

"Out there," they replied.

Turning a corner, we looked down the long row of poplars that lined the main road to Melun.



Chapter XIII

America In The Arms Op France



Any poplar-fringed road in France holds its strange lure. Dignity and grace lie in these tall swaying trees sentinelling the way on either side. To the poet, it is at all times the way to Arcady. But at eventide when the mystic light comes streaming from the west, touching the billowing green into gold, then even to the prosaic there is a call from the whispering, wind-stirred leaves to go a- grailing and to find at the end the palace or the princess. This time it was the prince who was calling. This little sad-featured girl was a- tune to hear his call. Perhaps in the purple mist she could even see her prince and feel the pleading of those outstretched arms. Wistfully she looked down her road to Arcady; but how far away the end and so bestrewn with terrors.

Are psychic forces subject to ordinary physical laws, and do they act most powerfully along unobstructed ways? At any rate the voltage was high in the psychic currents that swept the straight road to Melun that afternoon, for when this saddened girl turned from her long gaze down the road to Melun it was with a transfigured face. Her tear-dimmed eyes shone with a calm resolve and the uplifted chin foreboded, I perceived, no good to my dreams of rest and resignation.

To know the worst I ventured: "Well, how are we going to get to Paris?"

"You mean Melun?" she gently smiled.

"Sheer madness," I replied. "A carriage is out of the question, and if we had one there would be a hundred guards to turn us back."

We stepped aside while two military trucks in their gray war-paint went lurching by. She followed them with her eyes until they disappeared into the distant haze where poplar and purple sky melted into one.

"Going straight to Robert," she cried, clasping her hands, "and if they only knew how much I want to go, I don't believe they would refuse me."

Preposterous as it was, if they could indeed have seen the longing in her eyes I felt certain they wouldn't either. Discreetly I refrained from saying so.

We walked slowly back to the partial barricade which compelled the motors to slow down. A siren heralded the approach of a car. I drew her aside into the ditch. Wrenching her hand loose she cried:

"I don't care what happens. I'm going to stop this car!" Planting herself squarely in the path of the great gray thing, she signaled wildly for it to stop. The goggled driver bore straight down upon the little figure, then swerving sharply to one side jammed on the brakes and came to a sudden halt.

"What's the trouble?" said the other occupant of the car, a thick- set swarthy fellow in a captain's uniform. "Washout, bombs or Uhlans?"

"No, it's Robert!" Marie exclaimed.

"Robert?" he cried, angered at this delay.

His aroused curiosity took the sting out of his words as he exclaimed, "Who the devil is Robert?"

She told him who Robert was, told it with her soul naming in her face. Her voice implored. Her eyes entreated. The black cloud that had overcast the captain's countenance at the impertinence of her action melted slowly away into a genial smile. And yet had fortune been unkind she might have brought us some calculating routinist with pride in strict obedience to the letter of the military law.

"It's a plain infraction of all the regulations," he said, "but if you can risk all this for him, I can risk this much for you. Step up," he added, lifting her into a seat, and giving me a place behind with the baggage. It had happened all too swiftly for comprehension. We were on the road to Arcady again—and this time in high estate. With fifty horses racing away under the hood of our royal car, we were speeding forward like a bullet.

Adown this road in the days of chivalry traveled oft the noble chevaliers and knights. In shining cavalcades they rode forth for glory in their lady's name. But never was there truer tribute to the spirit of High Romance than when down this same road, athrone upon a war-gray car, came this little Pennsylvania music-teacher.

All the way we rode exalted, with hearts too full for speech. And our benefactor gave us no occasion for it. His eyes were fixed straight ahead upon the speeding road, alert for obstacles or rapt in visions of his own dear ones; or, more probable still, deep in reconsideration of his rashness in harboring two strangers who might turn out to be traitors.

"Ten spies were shot here in the last two days," was his one laconic communication. As the Romanesque towers of Melun's Notre Dame came into view, he drew up by a post which marked a mile from the city, saying,

"The rest of the way I believe you had better go on foot." With a polite bow and a smile he bade us adieu and was off, leaving us quite non-plussed. But the swift ride had driven refreshment and resolution into us. After some spirited passages with a few astounded sentries, we found ourselves in the city of our quest.

It was a small garrison center. Into it now from every side had poured rivulets of soldiers until the street shimmered with its red and blue. Melun had changed roles with Paris. A desert quiet brooded over the gay capital, while this drab provincial place was now athrum with activity—not the activity of parade but of the workshop. The air was vibrant with the clangor of industry. Everywhere soldiers were cleaning guns, grooming horses, piling sacks. The only touch to lighten this depressing dead-in- earnestness came from a group of soldiers engaged in filling a huge bolster. They playfully tried to push one of their number in with the straw. In one doorway two men were seeking to render their uniforms less of a target by inking their brass-buttons black, while two rollicking fellows perched high upon a bread-wagon were making the welkin ring with vociferous demands for passage way. That was what everybody wanted. We, too, pressed forward into the throng.

Enough other civilians were scattered amidst the masses of soldiery to render us not too conspicuous. And such a weltering anarchy it was: men, horses, and guns jammed together in one grand promiscuous jumble. Who was to organize discipline and victory out of such a turmoil? But that there was a directing mind moving through this democratic chaos, the Germans later learned to know full well. Likewise, the two strangers congratulating themselves on being lost in the vast confusion.

To get our bearings we seated ourselves in a small cafe, and were intently poring over a map when a shuffling noise made us look up. A detachment of soldiers was entering the cafe. Much to our astonishment, they came to attention in front of us. They constituted the spy-hunting squad. All day they walked the city on the trail of suspects. To trap a prospective victim, and just as they were relishing the shooting of him to be compelled to release him, and then to drag on to the next prospect, and to repeat the process was not inspiriting. Apparently luck had gone against them, but at sight of us a new hope lit their eyes.

Two officers, bowing politely, said: "Pardon, Monsieur; pardon, Madame! Your papers."

Being held up as a spy, however nerve-racking, contributes considerably to one's sense of self-importance. It's a rare thrill for a civilian to be waited on by a reception committee in full dress uniform.

But this was by all odds the most imposing array of military yet. I remember being distinctly impressed by the comic opera setting; the gay costumed soldiers in a crowded French cafe, the big American and the little heroine. In a moment the soldier chorus would go rollicking off singing some ditty like:

"Let high respect come to their station, For they are members of a mighty nation."

I deliberated for a few seconds, for presently our papers like talismen would exorcise all dangers. With a gesture suitably sweeping for the close of this act, I smiled assuringly, reached into that inner right-hand pocket, and felt a terrific thump of the heart as I clutched an empty void and forthwith drew out an empty hand. The smile turned a little sickly. I repeated. Likewise a third time. The smile died and a cold sweat gathered on my brow. It was now more like a Turkish bath than a comic opera. The rollicking soldier chorus began to look curiously like a band of assassins.

I was positive that I had tucked these papers in that pocket. Had some evil spirit whisked them away? I conducted a frantic and furious search through every pocket. As one after another they turned out empty an increasing gloom settled down upon my face, and upon the faces of the assassins was registered a corresponding increment of joy.

Reader, have you ever been warden of the theater tickets? As your party thronged up to the entrance, do you remember the stand-still of your heart when you found that the tickets weren't in the pocket that you put them, followed by the discovery that they weren't in any other pocket? Do you remember spasmodically ramming your hands into all your pockets until your arms took on the motions of a sailor at the pump, trying to save the old ship at sea? Remember the black looks insinuating you were an idiot and the growing conviction on your part that they were not far wrong? Multiply and intensify all these sensations a thousandfold and you will get a faint idea of how one feels when he is trying to locate his passports and the officials are hoping that he can't.

Several months elapsed in as many seconds. To break the appalling silence, I began gibbering away in a jargon compound of gesticulation, English and remnants of High School French. Why, oh, why wouldn't somebody say something? At last the commissionaire, hitherto impassive, said:

"Vielleicht Sie konnen Deutsch sprechen." ("Perhaps you can speak German.") It was so kind of him that I plunged headlong into the net. "Ja ich kann Deutsch sprechen," I fairly shouted.

("Yes, I can speak German.") I would have confessed to Chinese or Russian, so anxious was I to get on speaking terms with some one.

"So you speak German," said the commissionaire significantly; "I thought as much." The soldiers looked at their Lebel rifles as though the not unpleasant duty of making them speak for France would soon be theirs. In their eyes now I was a German spy and Marie was my accomplice. I began to be almost convinced of it myself.

Now if this were fiction and not just a straight setting down of facts the papers might here be produced by a breathless courier or dropped from an aeroplane. But they weren't.

At this crisis when all seemed lost, Marie rallied. She said: "Look in the lining of your coat."

I was unaware of any hole in the lining but, duly obedient, I reached inside and found an opening. Some papers rustled in my hand. I clutched them like a madman, violently drew them forth and, perceiving that they were the precious documents, waved them about like a dancing dervish. The soldiers were distinctly disappointed and cast an evil eye on Marie, as though holding her personally responsible for cheating them out of a little target- practice.

The commissionaires examined the papers, smiled as graciously as before they had frowned and, with the crestfallen soldiers resuming their old look of boredom, they disappeared as mysteriously as they had come.

Out into the gathering gloom we followed too, and trudged to the barracks upon the hill.

At the entrance the familiar "Qui va la?" (Who goes there?) rang a challenge to our approach. We informed the subaltern that it was Sergeant le Marchand that we sought.

A confusion of calls echoed through the court. An orderly then announced that Robert le Marchand was sick; this was followed by the report that he was out; then some more conflicting reports, followed by Robert le Marchand himself. A new-lit lantern in the archway diffused a wan light around his pale face while he peered forward into the dusk. He could not see at first, but as by a dream- voice out of the mist came his name, twice repeated: "Robert, Robert."

Was this some torturing hallucination? Before he had time to consider that, the reality flung herself into his arms. Again and again he clasped the nestling figure, as if to assure himself that it was not an apparition that he held but his very own sweetheart.

They stood there in the archway, quite oblivious to the passing soldiers. The soldiers seemed to understand and, smiling approval of this new entente—America in the arms of France—they silently passed along.

The first transports of surprise and joy being over, he begged for an explanation of this miracle. Briefly I sketched the doings of the day, and as he saw this wisp of a girl braving all dangers for love's sake, he was in one moment terror-stricken at the risks she had run, and in the next aglow with admiration for her splendid daring. Dangers had haloed her and he sat silent like a worshiper.

"Instead of a tragedy," he exclaimed, "it's like a story with a happy ending. But let me tell how narrowly we escaped a tragic ending," he added, drawing Marie closer to him.

On the fifth of August it seems that his squad had been stationed upon the bridge over the Seine at Corbeille. The orders were to prevent any passage over the bridge and under the bridge— particularly the latter, as the authorities suspected an attempt upon the part of enemy plotters to use the waterways in and out of Paris. Traffic had been suspended and orders had been explicit: "Shoot any water-craft, without challenge, as it turns the bend at the Corbeille bridge."

Corbeille had been the objective of our proposed canoe journey. There had been abundant warrant then in the very constitution of things for my psychic shivers at the first broaching of that canoe- trip.

Our escape had been by a narrow margin. If that telegram, "Left Corbeille and gone to Melun," had missed us, Robert le Marchand's first shot might have meant death, not to his enemy but to his own life and soul. On the eve of the great war he might have embraced his dearest one cold and lifeless. But instead of that somber ending, here she was, warm, radiant and laughing—doubly precious by the trials through which she had passed and the death from which she had been delivered.



Chapter XIV

No-Man's-Land



The movements of the 231ier Regiment d'Infanterie were publicly announced. It was scheduled to entrain on the morrow for the front between Metz and Nancy. Robert le Marchand needed not to go. Pronounced unfit by the regimental doctor, his name had been placed upon the hospital list. Amidst the bustle of preparation for departure he spent the day in quietude, and Marie played nurse to the invalid.

Her little tale about being a Red Cross worker told at the Gare du Nord turned out to be the truth and not the fable that she had fancied. Robert's recovery was so rapid that the doctor was astonished. He was understanding, however; also he was a very kindly doctor. He came and smiled and nodded his approval.

Then he went away, still leaving Robert on the sick list.

A long season of such delightful convalescence was now his for the taking. Golden days they promised to be to him and to Marie, but to France those early August days held portents of defeat and disaster. So one gathered from the ugly rumors from the frontier. The great battle raging in the north had its miniature in their souls. Theirs to choose days of ease and dalliance or the call to duty.

When the 231st regiment formed into line the afternoon of August 7th, the sergeant, radiant and happy, was with them again. But the tears in his eyes? That perplexed his comrades. Those who knew the secret let the romance lose none of its glamour in the telling until Marie became, forsooth, the heroine of the regiment.

At four o'clock the regimental band struck up the Marseillaise and the regiment moved down the road. The sergeant's feet kept time with his marching men, while his eyes turned to the blue figure on a balcony, whose hand was fluttering a limp white handkerchief. She was striving her best to wave a cheerful farewell. The repeated strains: "Ye sons of France awake to glory," came each time more faintly as the regiment moved steadily away. There is always pain in such a growing distance. But it was not all pain to the tear-stained girl upon the balcony. She had her part in that glory. Had she not, too, made her sacrifice.

It was quite as if the regiment had sailed away under sealed orders. Metz and Nancy had been broadcasted about as the objective of the 231st. But that had been just a blind for German informers. For the next communique mentioning the regiment came from far to the west, where it had been hurried to hold up the grave threat upon Paris. At Soissons the gray-green advance rolled itself up against the red and blue of the 231st.

Back and forth the battle line surged through the old streets, now lurid with the light of blazing houses. A shell falling on the town-hall fired this ancient land-mark. A great flame-fountain burst up from the heart of the city. "Rescue the archives!" was the cry. For this, volunteers were called. The dash of a sergeant and his men into the burning hall and back again through the bullet-spattered streets is related in the Journal Officiel. It tells of the safe return of the archives, but of few survivors. For impetuous valor in this exploit, the name of Sergeant le Marchand was changed to Lieutenant le Marchand.

That was my last tidings of Marie and Robert, until a year later a letter came to me in a shaky but familiar hand. It had the post- mark of Hornell Sanitarium, New York. It was from Marie, and one glance revealed the tragedy. Briefly it was this:

In the attempted Champagne drive of 1915 the 231st regiment was ordered to rush the barbed wire barricade and drive a wedge into the enemy's line. At command Lieutenant le Marchand leaped from cover to lead the charge of his men. Scarcely had he uttered his cry, "En avant!" when he was dropped in his tracks, a bullet through his brain. Over his body, with revenge adding to their fury, the regiment swept like mad. The trenches, a quarry of prisoners, and the thrill of high praise from the general were theirs—a triumph with a bitter taste, for some, creeping back, had found their young lieutenant crumpled where he fell, the moonlight cold upon his blood-stained face. "In order that France might live he was willing to close his eyes upon her forever." Curiously his sword was sticking upright just as it had dropped from his hand. They buried him where he lay upon the edge of No-Man's-Land. Tears were showered on his grave, and on that fatal bullet many bitter curses.

But this does not complete the tale of murder wrought by that slug of lead. Each plunging bullet blazes its black trail of the spirit-killed.

A month later and three thousand miles away this German missile struck the heart of an American girl with a more cruel impact than it had struck the brain of this lieutenant of France. She, too, crumpled and fell upon the thorns. His had been a speedy, painless death; one sharp electric stroke and then the closing night. A like oblivion would have been sweet to her. But she had to face it out alone. Upon her torn heart were beaten a thousand hammer-strokes, and through the endless nights she bore the anguish of a thousand deaths.

The death-lists of Europe hold 5,000,000 other names besides Lieutenant le Marchand's. Behind each name there marches with springless steps one or more figures shrouded in black.

A year later one of these figures arose from her burial alive, a whitened shadow of her former self.

"I know that I ought not to have collapsed, just as I know that I ought not to hate the Germans," Marie wrote. "I'm pulling myself together now, and I am trying to work and to forgive. But my thoughts are always wandering out to just one spot—that is where Robert lies. When peace comes I'm going straight over there and with my own hands I shall dig through every trench until I find him."

Tragic futility indeed! One recompense for the colossal slaughter and the long war; few shall ever find their dead.

On a recent Sunday morning I stepped into a church of a Lake City of the West. The organ was filling the large structure with its sounds; gradually out of the dim light came the face of the player.

A hard road had she traveled since last I saw her, a trim little blue- clad figure waving good-by from that balcony in Melun. It was not strange that her face was white. There was nothing strange either in the passion of that music.

These experiences of Gethsemane and Calvary had been first enacted in her own soul. The organ was but giving voice to them. There was a plaintive touch in the minor chords, as if pleading for days that were gone. It climbed to a closing rapture, as if two who had parted here had, for the moment, hailed each other in the world of Souls.



Afterword



It seems sometimes as if the torch of civilization had been almost extinguished in this deluge of blood. This darkening of the face of the earth has cost more than the blood and treasure of the race—it has involved a terrific strain on the mind and soul of man.

The blasting of hundreds of villages, the sinking of thousands of ships, and the killing of millions of men is no small monument to the power of the human will. Deplore as we may the sanguinary ends to which this will has been bent, it has at any rate shown itself to be no weakling. We must marvel at the grim tenacity with which it has held to its goal through the long red years.

But now it is challenged by an infinitely bigger task.

The great nations sundered apart by this hideous anarchy have become hissings and by-words to each other. One group has been cast outside the Pale to become the Ishmaels of the universe. The purpose is to keep them there.

Yet try as we may we cannot live upon a totally disrupted planet without bringing a common disaster upon us all. It may be a matter of decades and generations but eventually the reconciliation must come.

To start civilization on the upward path again, to make the world into a neighborhood anew, to achieve the moral unity of humanity, is that infinitely bigger task with which the human will is challenged. As in the last years it has relentlessly concentrated its energies upon the Great War, now through the next decades and generations it must as steadfastly hold them to the Great Reconciliation. The tragedy of it all is that humanity must go at this crippled by a hatred like acid eating into the soul.

Villages will arise again from their ruins, the plow shall turn anew the shell-pitted fields into green meadow-lands, a kindly nature will soon obliterate the scars upon the landscape, but not the deep searings on the soul. Europe must grapple with this work of reconstruction handicapped by this black devil poisoning the mind and vitiating every effort. The worst curse bequeathed to the coming generations is not the mountain of debt but this heritage of hate.

It does not behoove Americans to stand on inviolate shores and prate of the wickedness of wrath. Moreover, this evil is not to be exorcised by a pious wish for it not to be. It is. And there is every excuse under the arch of heaven for its existence.

If we had felt the eagles' claws tearing at our flesh; if, like Europe, our soil was crimsoned with the blood of our murdered; if millions of our women were breaking their hearts in anguish—we too would consider it a gratuitous bit of impertinence to be told not to cherish rancor towards those who had unleashed the hellhounds of lust and carnage upon us.

As it is, we are not sacrosanct. Three thousand miles have not sufficed to keep the deadly virus out of our system. The violation of Belgium kindled a fire against the invaders which the successive cruelties served to fan into a flaming resentment.

Then came our own losses—a mere grazing of the skin alongside of the bleeding white of Europe. But it has touched us deep enough to rouse even a sense of vindictiveness. This kept to ourselves will do injury to ourselves alone. But when we shout or whisper across the seas that we too despise the barbarians we help no one. We simply help to render the heartbreaking task of reconciliation well-nigh impossible by lashing to a wilder fury the people already blinded, embittered and frenzied by their own hate. Those who, above the luxury of giving full rein to their own passions, put the welfare of the French, English, Belgians and other broken peoples of earth, will do everything in their power to eradicate this gangrene from their souls.

THE END