Front matter (continued 2)

CHAPTER VI

They had left their bedroom windows uncurtained, that the morning light might waken them, and they were hardly later than the August sun in opening their eyes on the world. Though they had slept but little, and by snatches, they turned out of bed without regret; the flood of sunlight brought warmth into their hearts and the shadowy horror of the night before was lifted with the mists of the valley; but all the same the place, once only faintly mysterious, was now actively malicious and distasteful, was tainted with a lurking dread. Thus to their pleasure at the thought of noise and London was added relief at the prospect of escape from a solitude grown fearful since yesterday. They dressed with haste and rising spirits; and it was with undisguised joy that they collected their few possessions and stuffed them into their hold-alls.

William, whose toilet and preparations for the journey were completed in advance of his wife's, descended first to the kitchen, where, in the continued and regretted absence of their housekeeper, he struggled valiantly with the making of breakfast while Griselda finished her packing. The meal so prepared fell short of complete success; coffee as brewed by William was not the same beverage as coffee prepared by Madame Peys, nor were its tepid attractions enhanced by the absence of their usual and plentiful ration of milk. Thanks to the defection of the Peys family, they were not only milkless but eggless; and such remains of bread and butter as they could find in the cupboard were the only accompaniment to William's suggestion of coffee. In the circumstances there was but little temptation to risk the loss of the Brussels train by lingering over the table and less than five minutes sufficed for their simple meal. Having despatched it, they strapped their hold-alls and stepped out briskly on their way to the station and home—the sun still low on the eastward ridge of the valley and the dew still heavy on the grass. They hardly turned to look back at the cottage, so glad were they to leave it behind them; and in the elation of their spirits they sped down the path with a quite unnecessary haste. They were escaping from nature and solitude, and their hearts sang cheerily of Bloomsbury.

When they rounded the bend in the path that brought them within sight of the farm their first thought was that the missing family had returned; for outside the gate were three horses, standing riderless and with heads near together. There was something reassuring in the sight of the beasts as they stood in the sunlight shifting and flicking their tails, something that gave the lie to the terrors of the night before; the presence of horses betokened the presence of men, and the presence of men dissipated the sense of mystery that had brooded over an empty house with a nameless grave in its garden. Griselda drew a comfortable breath of relief as she supposed they had time to call in and settle the last week's bill with Madame Peys.

"I do wish," she pondered regretfully, "that I could understand what she says. I must say I should like to know what the explanation is—about that grave ... I suppose they've come back to fetch away the rest of the furniture, and things—those aren't their horses, though!"

"No," William assented, considering the sleek strong beasts, "they have only got cart-horses ... I wonder." ...

A man stepped suddenly out from behind the shifting horses—so suddenly that they both started. He had been standing by the gate with the bridles gathered in his hand, hidden by his charges from William and Griselda as they had been hidden from him. When, hearing their voices, he stepped into sight, he stood with his heels together, very erect and staring at them—a young man squarely and sturdily built, with under his helmet a reddish face and a budding black moustache. He was clad in a tight-fitting greyish uniform, and a sword hung by his side. He stared and the pair stared back at him—curiously but not quite so openly.

"It's a soldier," Griselda commented—adding, like William, "I wonder——" They both wondered so much that they hesitated and slackened their pace; the presence of a military man but complicated the problem of the farm. Coupled with the absence of the Peys family, it revived their suspicions of the night before, their suspicions of crime and a hasty flight from justice ... and involuntarily their eyes turned to the garden, and sought the outline of the grave beyond the gooseberry bushes.

"It really does look," Griselda whispered, "as if there was something—not right."

As she whispered the soldier rapped out a loud monosyllable; it was enunciated so curtly and sharply that they started for the second time and came to an involuntary halt. For the space of a second or two they stood open-mouthed and flustered—and then Griselda, recovering from the shock, expressed her indignant opinion.

"How rude!" she said. "What does he shout at us like that for?"

"I suppose," her husband conjectured, "he wants us to stop."

"Well," said Griselda, "we have stopped." Her tone was nettled and embittered. It annoyed her to realize that, involuntarily and instinctively, she had obeyed an official order; it was not, she felt what her Leaders would expect from a woman of her training and calibre. It was that and not fear that disconcerted her—for, after the first shock of surprise at the man's rough manner, neither she nor her husband were in the least overawed; on the contrary, as they stood side by side with their baggage in their hands, gazing into the sunburnt face of the soldier, something of the contempt they felt for his species was reflected in their light-blue eyes. Of the two pairs of light-blue eyes William's perhaps were the more contemptuous: his anti-militarism was more habitual and ingrained than Griselda's.

What William looked at was a creature (the soldier) of whom he knew little and talked much; his experience of the man of war was purely insular, and his attitude towards him would have been impossible in any but a native of Britain. He came of a class—the English lower middle—which the rules of caste and tradition of centuries debarred from the bearing of arms; a class which might, in this connection, have adapted to its own needs the motto of the House of Rohan. "Roi ne puis; prince ne daigne; Rohan je suis," might have been suitably englished in the mouths of William's fellows as, "Officer I cannot be; private I will not be; tradesman or clerk I am." Further, he had lived in surroundings where the soldier was robbed of his terrors; to him the wearer of the king's uniform was not only a person to whom you alluded at Labour meetings with the certainty of raising a jeer, but a target at whom strikers threw brickbats and bottles with energy and practical impunity. Should the target grow restive under these attentions and proceed to return them in kind, it was denounced in Parliament, foamed at by the Press, and possibly court-martialled as a sop to indignant Labour. Thus handicapped it could hardly be looked on as a formidable adversary ... and William, without a thought of fear, stared the field-grey horseman in the eyes.

The field-grey horseman, on his side, stared the pair of civilians up and down—with a glance that matched the courtesy of his recent manner of address—until, having surveyed them sufficiently, he called over his shoulder to some one unseen within the house. There was something in his face and the tone of his loud-voiced hail that made the temper of Griselda stir within her; and for the second time that morning she wished for a command of the language of the country—this time for the purposes of sharp and scathing rebuke. As a substitute she assumed the air of cold dignity with which she had entered the taxi on the night of her protest at the meeting.

"Come on, William," she said. "Don't take any notice of him, dear."

The advice, though well meant, was unfortunate. As William attempted to follow both it and his wife, the soldier moved forward and struck him a cuff on the side of the head that deposited him neatly on the grass. Griselda, who—in order to convey her contempt for official authority and disgust at official insolence—had been pointedly surveying the meeting of hill and horizon, heard a whack and scuffle, a guttural grunt and a gasp; and turned to see William, with a hand to his cheek, lying prone at the feet of his assailant. She rounded on the man like a lion, and perhaps, with her suffragette training behind her, would have landed him a cuff in his turn; but as she raised her arm it was caught from behind and she found herself suddenly helpless in the grasp of a second grey-clad soldier—who, when he heard his comrade's hail, had come running out of the house.

"Let me go," she cried, wriggling in his grasp as she had wriggled aforetime in the hands of a London policeman, and kicking him deftly on the shins as she had been wont to kick Robert on his. For answer he shook her to the accompaniment of what sounded like curses—shook her vehemently, till her hat came off and her hair fell down, till her teeth rattled and the landscape danced about her. When he released her, with the final indignity of a butt with the knee in the rear, she collapsed on the grass by her husband's side in a crumpled, disreputable heap. There for a minute or two she lay gasping and inarticulate—until, as her breath came back and the landscape ceased to gyrate, she dragged herself up into a sitting position and thrust back the hair from her eyes. William, a yard or two away, was also in a sitting position with his hand pressed against his cheekbone; while over him stood the assailants in field-grey, apparently snapping out questions.

"I don't understand," she heard him protest feebly, "I tell you I don't understand. Griselda, can't you explain to them that I don't speak French?"

"Comprends pas," said Griselda, swallowing back tears of rage. "Comprends pas—so it's not a bit of good your talking to us. Parlez pas français—but that won't prevent me from reporting you for this disgraceful assault. You cowards—you abominable cowards! You're worse than the police at home, which is saying a good deal. I wonder you're not ashamed of yourselves. I've been arrested three times and I've never been treated like this."

At this juncture one of the men in field-grey seized William by the collar and proceeded to turn out his pockets—extracting from their recesses a purse, a pipe, a handkerchief, a fountain pen, and a green-covered Cook's ticket. He snapped back the elastic on the Cook's ticket, and turned the leaves that remained for the journey home.

"London," he ejaculated suddenly, pronouncing the vowels in un-English fashion as O's.

"London!" his companion echoed him—and then, as if moved by a common impulse, they called on the name of Heinz.

There was an answering hail from the farmhouse kitchen, whence issued promptly a fattish young man with a mug in his hand, and a helmet tilted on his nose. With him the assailants of William and Griselda entered into rapid and throaty explanations; whereat Heinz nodded assentingly as he advanced down the garden path to the gate, surveying the captives with interest and a pair of little pigs'-eyes. Having reached the gate he leaned over it, mug in hand, and looked down at William and Griselda.

"English," he said in a voice that was thicker than it should have been at so early an hour of the morning; "English—you come from London? ... I have been two years in London; that is why I speak English. I was with a hairdresser in the Harrow Road two years; and I know also the Strand and the Angel and Buckingham Palace and the Elephant." (He was plainly proud of his acquaintance with London topography.) "All of them I know, and when we arrive in London I shall show them all to my friends." He waved his hand vaguely and amiably to indicate his grey-clad companions. "You come from London, but you shall not go back there, because you are now our prisoners. I drink your damn bad health and the damn bad health of your country and the damn bad health of your king."

He suited the action to the word and drained his mug; and having drained it till it stood upright upon his nose, proceeded to throw it over his shoulder to shatter on the brick path. Whether from natural good temper or the cheering effect of potations his face was wreathed in an amiable smile as he crossed his arms on the bar of the gate and continued to address his audience—

"We shall take you to our officer and you will be prisoners, and if you are spies you will be shot."

There was something so impossible about the announcement that William and Griselda felt their courage return with a rush. Moreover, though the words of Heinz were threatening the aspect of Heinz was not; his fat young face with its expansive and slightly inebriated smile was ridiculous rather than terrifying, even under the brim of a helmet. William, thankful for the English acquired during the two years' hairdressing in the Harrow Road, admonished him with a firmness intended to sober and dismay.

"This is not a time for silly jokes. I am afraid that you do not realize the seriousness of the situation. I shall feel it my duty to make a full report to your superiors—when you will find it is no laughing matter. My wife and I, proceeding quietly to the station, have been grossly and violently assaulted by your two companions. We gave them no provocation, and the attack was entirely uncalled for. I repeat, I shall feel it my duty to report their conduct in the very strongest terms."

He felt as he spoke that the reproof would have carried more weight had it been delivered in a standing position; but his head still reeled from the stinging cuff it had received and he felt safer where he was—on the ground. It annoyed him that the only apparent effect of his words upon Heinz was a widening of his already wide and owlish smile.

"Oh, you'll report their conduct, will you?" he repeated pleasantly and thickly. "And who will you report it to, old son?"

William stiffened at the familiarity, and the tone of his reply was even colder and more dignified than that of the original rebuke.

"To the nearest police authority; I shall not leave Belgium until my complaint has been attended to. If necessary I shall apply for redress to the British Consul in Brussels."

The expansive smile on the face of Heinz was suddenly ousted by an expression of infinite astonishment. His fat chin dropped, his little eyes widened, and he pushed back his helmet, that he might stare the better at William.

"Say it again," he demanded—slowly and as if doubtful of his ears, "You shall apply to the British Consul—the British Consul at Brussels?"

"Certainly," William assured him firmly; and Griselda echoed "Certainly." The threat they judged had made the desired impression, for so blank and disturbed was the countenance of Heinz that his two companions broke into guttural questioning. The former hairdresser checked them with a gesture and addressed himself once more to William.

"I think," he announced, "you are balmy on the crumpet, both of you. Balmy," he repeated, staring from one to the other and apparently sobered by the shock of his own astonishment. Suddenly a gleam of intelligence lit up his little pig's-eyes—he leaned yet further over the gate, pointed a finger and queried—

"You do not read the newspapers?"

"As a rule I do," William informed him, "but we have not seen any lately—not since we left England."

"And how long is it since you left England?"

William told him it was over three weeks.

"Three weeks," the other repeated, "three weeks without newspapers ... and I think you do not speak French, eh?"

"My wife," William answered, "understands it—a little. But we neither of us speak it." His manner was pardonably irritated, and if he had not judged it imprudent he would have refused point-blank to answer this purposeless catechism. Nor was his pardonable irritation lessened when amusement once more gained the upper hand in Heinz. Suddenly and unaccountably he burst into hearty laughter—rocked and trembled with it, holding to the gate and wiping the tears from his cheeks. Whatever the joke it appealed also to his comrades, who, once it was imparted between Heinz's paroxysms, joined their exquisite mirth to his own. The three stood swaying in noisy merriment, while Griselda, whitefaced and tight-lipped, and William with a fast disappearing left eye awaited in acute and indignant discomfort some explanation of a jest that struck them as untimely. It came only when Heinz had laughed himself out. Wiping the tears once more from his eyes, and with a voice still weakened by pleasurable emotion, he gave them in simple and unpolished language the news of the European cataclysm.

"I tell you something, you damn little ignorant silly fools. There is a war since you came to Belgium."

Probably they thought it was a drunken jest, for they made no answer beyond a stare, and Heinz proceeded with enjoyment.

"A War. The Greatest that ever was. Germany and Austria—and Russia and France and Belgium and England and Servia."

He spoke slowly, dropping out his words that none might fail of their effect and ticked off on a finger the name of each belligerent.

"Our brave German troops have conquered Belgium and that is why we are here. We shall also take Paris and we shall also take Petersburg and we shall also take London. We shall march through Regent Street and Leicester Square and over Waterloo Bridge. Our Kaiser Wilhelm shall make peace in Westminster Abbey, and we shall take away all your colonies. What do you think of that, you damn little fools?"

There are statements too large as there are statements too wild for any but the unusually imaginative to grasp at a first hearing. Neither William nor Griselda had ever entertained the idea of a European War; it was not entertained by any of their friends or their pamphlets. Rumours of war they had always regarded as foolish and malicious inventions set afloat in the interest of Capitalism and Conservatism with the object of diverting attention from Social Reform or the settlement of the Woman Question; and to their ears, still filled with the hum of other days, the announcement of Heinz was even such a foolish invention. Nor, even had they given him credence, would they in these first inexperienced moments have been greatly perturbed or alarmed; their historical ignorance was so profound, they had talked so long and so often in terms of war, that they had come to look on the strife of nations as a glorified scuffle on the lines of a Pankhurst demonstration. Thus Griselda, taught by The Suffragette, used the one word "battle" for a small street row and the fire and slaughter of Eylau—or would have so used it, had she known of the slaughter of Eylau. And that being the case, Heinz's revelation of ruin and thunder left her calm—disappointingly so.

"I think," she said loftily, in answer to his question, "that you are talking absolute nonsense."

There are few men who like to be balked of a sensation and Heinz was not among them. He reddened with annoyance at the lack of success of his bombshell.

"You do not believe it," he said. "You do not believe that our brave German troops have taken Belgium and will shortly take Paris and London? Very well, I will teach you. I will show you. You shall come with us to our officer and you shall be shot for spies."

He came through the gate and clambered into his saddle, his companions following suit; William and Griselda instinctively scrambled to their feet and stood gazing up in uncertainty at the three grey mounted men.

"Get on," said Heinz with a jerk of his head down the valley; and as William and Griselda still stood and gazed his hand went clap to his side and a sword flashed out of its sheath. Griselda shrieked in terror as it flashed over William's head—and William bawled and writhed with pain as it came down flat on his shoulder.

"Get on," Heinz repeated—adding, "damn you!" and worse—as the blade went up again; and William and Griselda obeyed him without further hesitation. Their heads were whirling and their hearts throbbing with rage; but they choked back its verbal expression and stumbled down the valley path—in the clutch of brute force and with their world crumbling about them. It was a most unpleasant walk—or rather trot; they were bruised, they were aching from the handling they had received, and their breath came in sobs from the pace they were forced to keep up. Did they slacken it even for an instant and fall level with the walking horses, Heinz shouted an order to "Hurry, you swine!" and flashed up his threatening sword; whereupon, to keep out of its painful and possibly dangerous reach, they forced themselves to a further effort and broke into a shambling canter. The sweat poured off them as they shambled and gasped, casting anxious glances at the horses' heads behind them; and their visible distress, their panting and their impotent anger, was a source of obvious and unrestrained gratification to Heinz and his jovial companions. They jeered at the captives' clumsy running and urged them to gallop faster. When Griselda tripped over a tussock and sprawled her length on the grass, they applauded her downfall long and joyously and begged her to repeat the performance. The jeers hurt more than the shaking, and she staggered to her feet with tears of wretchedness and outraged dignity running openly down her nose—seeking in vain for that sense of moral superiority and satisfaction in martyrdom which had always sustained her en route to the cells of Bow Street. She hated the three men who jeered at her miseries and could have killed them with pleasure; every fibre of her body was quivering with wrath and amazement. Neither she nor William could speak—they had no breath left in them to speak; but every now and then as they shambled along they turned their hot faces to look at each other—and saw, each, a beloved countenance red with exertion and damp with perspiration, a pair of bewildered blue eyes and a gasping open mouth.... So they trotted down the valley, humiliated, dishevelled, indignant, but still incredulous—while their world crumbled about them and Europe thundered and bled.

CHAPTER VII

Looking back on the morning in the month of August, nineteen hundred and fourteen, when he made his first acquaintance with war as the soldier understands it, William Tully realized that fear, real fear, was absent from his heart until he witnessed the shooting of the hostages. Until that moment he had been unconvinced, and, because unconvinced, unafraid; he had been indignant, flustered, physically sore and inconvenienced; but always at the back of his mind was the stubborn belief that the pains and indignities endured by himself and his wife would be dearly paid for by the perpetrators. He could conceive as yet of no state of society in which Law and the bodily immunity of the peaceful citizen was not the ultimate principle; and even the sight of a long grey battalion of infantry plodding dustily westward on the road by the river had not convinced him of war and the meaning of war. They came on the trudging torrent of men as they debouched from the valley on to the main road; and their captors halted them on the grass at the roadside until the close grey ranks had passed. William and Griselda were thankful for the few minutes' respite and breathing-space; they wiped their hot faces and Griselda made ineffectual attempts to tidy her tumbled hair. She was reminded by her pressing need of hairpins that they had left their bags on the scene of their misfortune, outside the farmhouse gate; they conversed about the loss in undertones, and wondered if the bags would be recovered. They were not without hopes, taking into account the loneliness of the neighbourhood.... When the battalion, with its tail of attendant grey carts, had passed, Heinz ordered them forward again—and they moved on, fifty yards or so behind the last of the grey carts, and trusting that their goal was at hand.

"If they're only taking us as far as the village," Griselda panted hopefully.

They were—to the familiar little village with its miniature railway station between the river and the cliff. The column of infantry plodded dustily through and past it, but Heinz followed the rear-guard only halfway down the street before he shouted to his prisoners to halt. They halted—with an alacrity born of relief and a sense of the wisdom of prompt obedience to orders—before an unpretentious white building with a sentry stationed on either side of the door. Heinz swung himself down from his horse and went into the house, leaving William and Griselda in charge of his comrades and standing at the side of the road.

William and Griselda looked about them. They had passed through the place several times and were accustomed enough to its usual appearance to be aware of the change that had come over it. The rumbling grey carts behind which they had tramped were already at the end of the village; they could see all the sunlit length of the street and take stock of the new unfamiliar life which filled it from end to end.

It was a life masculine and military; an odd mixture of iron order and disorder; of soldiers on duty and soldiers taking their ease. The street itself was untidy and littered as they had never seen it before; its centre had been swept clear, so that traffic might pass unhindered, but the sides of the road were strewn with a jetsam of fragmentary lumber. A country cart that had lost a wheel sat clumsily in front of the church near a jumble of broken pottery, and a chair with its legs in the air was neighboured by trusses of straw. All down the street the doors stood widely open—here and there a house with starred or shattered windows looked unkempt and forlornly shabby. Beyond shivered panes and occasional litter of damaged crockery and furniture there was no sign of actual violence; the encounter that had taken place there—a cavalry skirmish between retreating Belgian and advancing German—had left few traces behind it.

The civilians of the village, with hardly an exception, were invisible. The landlord of the café was serving his soldier customers, and two labourers were unloading sacks, from a miller's dray under the eye of a guard; and when William and Griselda had been waiting for a few minutes an old man crossed the road hurriedly from opposite house to house—emerging from shelter like a rabbit from its burrow and vanishing with a swift running hobble. As for women, they saw only two—whom they were not to forget easily.

They stood, the two women, a few yards away on the further side of the road; almost opposite the door by which Heinz had disappeared and with their eyes continually fixed on it. One—the elder—was stout and grey-headed, very neatly dressed in black with a black woollen scarf on her shoulders; her hands were folded, meeting on her breast, and every now and then she bent her head over them while her lips moved slowly and soundlessly. At such moments she closed her eyes, but when she lifted her head again they turned steadily to the door. The woman who stood beside her was taller and younger, middle-aged, upright, and angular; she also wore a black dress, and above her sharp and yellowish features an unbecoming black hat—a high-crowned hat with upstanding and rusty black bows. What struck you about her at the first glance was her extreme respectability—in the line of her lean shoulders, in the dowdily conventional hat; at a second, the fact that her mouth was a line, so tightly were her lips compressed. She also stood with her eyes fixed on the door. William and Griselda looked at the pair curiously; it was odd and uncomfortable to see them standing at the side of the road, their clothes dusted by passing cars, not moving or speaking to each other.

For the rest, from end to end of the street there were only soldiers in sight. Soldiers taking their noisy ease at the tables outside the café—any number of them crowded round the little green tables while the sweating landlord ran to and fro with a jug or a tray of glasses and an obvious desire to propitiate. Other soldiers, less noisy, led a string of horses to water; and a rigid file of them with rifles grounded, was drawn up on the further side of the street not far from the waiting women; some ten or a dozen of motionless helmeted automata, with a young officer, a ruddy-faced boy, pacing up and down the road in front of them. Through a gap in the row of white houses William and Griselda saw another group of men in their shirt-sleeves at work on the railway line—the line that should have taken them to Brussels; they seemed to be repairing some damage to the permanent way; and further down the village two or three soldier mechanics were busied inquisitively at the bonnet of a heavy grey car drawn up at the side of the road. While they waited and watched other heavy grey cars of the same pattern rumbled into the street and along it; and motor cycles one after another hooted and clanked past them to vanish in a smothering trail of dust.

In after days William tried vainly to recall what he felt and thought in the long hot minutes while they waited for Heinz to reappear and for something to happen. He supposed that it was the fiercer sensations of the time that followed which deadened the impressions of the half-hour or so during which they stood in the sunny street expecting they knew not what; and though he remembered, and remembered vividly, the outward show and manner of the place—its dusty road, its swarming soldiers, its passing cars and cycles and the bearing of the two silent women—the memory brought with it no hint of his accompanying attitude of mind. All he knew was that he had not been seriously alarmed.... He might have recalled his impressions with more success had he and Griselda discussed at the time their new and surprising experiences; but an attempt to enter into conversation was promptly checked by one of their attendant guards. What he actually said was unintelligible, but his manner conveyed his meaning and thereafter the captives considered their situation in silence.

He did not know how long it was before the hostages came out into the street; but he remembered—it was his first distinct memory of a vivid personal impression—the instantaneous thrill of relief and excitement with which, after their dreary wait, he saw the first signs of movement at the sentry-guarded door. A man—a soldier—came out swiftly and went to the boy-officer, who thereupon stopped his pacing; there was a clicking of heels, a salute and a message rapidly delivered; the boy-officer turned and shouted to his men and, his men moved at the word, their rifles going to their shoulders, as if by the impulse of one will. William's eye was caught and held by the oiled swiftness, the mechanical simultaneousness of the movement; he stared at the line of uniforms, now rigidly inactive again, till a hand from behind gripped his collar and impelled him urgently sideways. One of his captors had adopted this simple method of informing him that way must be made for those about to issue from the door of the sentry-guarded house. He choked angrily and brought up against the wall—to which Griselda, taking warning, had hastily backed herself. He was still gasping when the little procession came out; a soldier leading it, a couple more with bayonets fixed—two civilians walking together—a couple more soldiers with bayonets fixed and last of all an officer, a fattish, youngish, moustachioed man whom the sentries stiffened to salute. He came a little behind his men, paused on the step and stood there framed in the doorway with his hand resting on his sword, the embodiment of conscious authority; the others, the two civilians and their guard, went on to the middle of the road. There, in the middle of the road, they also halted—the soldiers smartly, the captives uncertainly—and William saw the two civilians clearly.

One was a short and rotund little man who might have been sixty to sixty-five and might have been a local tradesman—nearly bald and with drooping moustaches, rather like a stout little seal. Essentially an ordinary and unpretentious creature, he was obviously aiming at dignity; his chin was lifted at an angle that revealed the measure of the roll of fat that rested on his collar, and he walked almost with a strut, as if he were attempting to march. Afterwards William remembered that he had seen on the little man's portly stomach some sort of insignia or ribbon; at the time it conveyed nothing to him, but he was told later that it was the outward token of a mayor. He remembered also that the little man's face was pale, with a sickly yellow-grey pallor; and that as he came down the steps with his head held up the drooping moustache quivered and the fat chin beneath it twitched spasmodically. There was something extraordinarily pitiful about his attempt at a personal dignity which nature had wholly denied him; William felt the appeal in it even before he grasped the situation the meaning and need of the pose.

The man who walked on his left hand was taller and some years younger—middle-aged, slightly stooping and with slightly grizzled hair and beard. He belonged to an ordinary sedentary type, and William, thinking him over later, was inclined to set him down a schoolmaster, or perhaps a clerk. He wore steel-rimmed eye-glasses and his black coat was shiny on the back and at the elbows; he had none of his fellow's pomposity, and walked dragging his feet and with his eyes bent on the ground. He raised them only when, as they halted in the middle of the road, the respectable woman in black called out something—one word, perhaps his name—came up to him and caught him by the shoulder. He answered her quickly and very briefly—with hardly more than a word—and for a second or two after he had spoken she stood quite still, with her hand resting on his shoulder. Then, suddenly, her sallow face contorted, her thin mouth writhed and from it there came a cry that was too fierce to be called a groan and too hoarse to be called a scream; she flung herself forward on the neck of the grizzled man and her lean black arms went round it. He tried to speak to her again, but she silenced him by drawing down his head to her breast; she held it to her breast and pressed it there; she rocked and swayed a little from side to side, fondling the grizzled hair and kissing it to a stream of broken endearment. Her grief was animal, alike in its unrestraint and its terrible power of expression; convention fell away from her; in her tidy dress and with her dowdy hat slipping to one shoulder she was primitive woman crooning over her dying mate.... When she was seized and drawn away from her man, her curved fingers clung to his garments. Two soldiers held her and she writhed between them choking out a hoarse incoherent appeal to the officer standing in the frame of the doorway with his hand on the hilt of his sword; she went on crying herself hoarser as her captors urged her further down the street and at last, in mercy to those who looked on, out of sight through an open doorway. William had his hands to his ears when the door shut. No one, in spite of the persistence of her cries, came out into the street to inquire the cause of her grief; but it seemed to William afterwards that he had been aware here and there of furtive faces that appeared at upper windows.

While they forced the dowdy woman away from him her man stood motionless, turned away from her with his head bent and his eyes on the ground, so that he started when a soldier came up behind him and tapped him sharply on the arm. The soldier—he had stripes on his sleeve and seemed a person of authority—held a handkerchief dangling from his hand; and, seeing it, the grizzled-haired captive removed his steel-rimmed eyeglasses.

"Don't look," said William under his breath. "Griselda, don't look."

For the first time mortal fear had seized him by the throat and shaken him. He knew now that he stood before death itself, and the power to inflict death, and his heart was as water within him. His wife was beside him—and when he realized (as he did later on with shame) that the spasm of terror in those first moments of comprehension had been stronger than the spasm of pity, he excused it by the fact of her presence. His fear in its forecast of evil took tangible shape. Griselda at his elbow had her eyes and her mouth wide open; she was engrossed, fascinated—and he was afraid, most horribly afraid, that in her amazement, her righteous pity, she might say or do something that would bring down wrath upon them. He remembered how bold she had been in the face of a crowd, how uplifted by sacred enthusiasm! ... He plucked her by the sleeve when he whispered to her not to look—but she went on staring, wide-eyed and wide-mouthed, for the first time unresponsive to his touch and the sound of his voice.

They bandaged the eyes of the two prisoners—the rotund pompous little mayor and the man who might have been a schoolmaster. All his life William remembered the look of the rotund mayor with a bandage covering him from forehead to nose-tip and his grey moustache quivering beneath it—a man most pitifully afraid to die, yet striving to die as the situation demanded. And he remembered how, at the moment the bandage was knotted on the mayor's head, there stepped up to him quietly the stout old woman who had stood praying on the further side of the road with her eyes fixed upon the door. She held up a little crucifix and pressed it to the quivering grey moustache.... Griselda clutched William by the wrist and he thought she was going to cry out.

"Don't, darling, don't!" he whispered. "Oh, darling, for both our sakes!" ...

He did not know whether it was his appeal or her own terror and amazement that restrained her from speech—but she stood in silence with her fingers tightened on his wrist. He wished she would look away, he wished he could look away himself; he tried for an instant to close his eyes, but the not-seeing was worse than sight, and he had to open them again. As he opened them a car roared by raising a smother of dust; but as the cloud of its passage settled he saw that the two blindfolded men were standing with their backs to a blank wall—a yellow-washed, eight-foot garden wall with the boughs of a pear-tree drooping over it. It was opposite the yellow-washed wall, across the road, that the file of soldiers was drawn up; the captives were facing the muzzles of their rifles and the red-faced boy-officer had stationed himself stiffly at the farther end of the file. The dust settled and died down—and there followed (so it seemed to William) an agony of waiting for something that would not happen. Long beating seconds (three or four of them at most) while two men stood upright with bandaged eyes and rifles pointed at their hearts; long beating seconds, while a bird fluted in the pear-tree—a whistle-note infinitely careless.... And then (thank God for it!) a voice and a report that were as one.... The man with the grizzled hair threw out an arm and toppled with his face in the dust; the mayor slid sideways against the wall with the blood dribbling from his mouth.

CHAPTER VIII

Fundamentally William was no more of a coward than the majority of his fellow-men, and, put to it, he would have emulated the shivering little mayor and tried to strut gamely to his end; it was as much sheer bewildered amazement as the baseness of bodily terror that had him by the throat when he saw the hostages done to death—sickening and shaking him and, for the moment, depriving him of self-control. Never before, in all his twenty-eight years, had he seen a man come to his end; so far death had touched him only once, and but slightly, by the unseen passing of a mother he had not loved; thus the spectacle of violent and bloody dying would of itself have sufficed to unnerve and unman him. To the natural shrinking from that spectacle, to his natural horror at the slaying of helpless men, to his pity and physical nausea was added the impotent, gasping confusion of the man whose faith has been uprooted, who is face to face with the incredible. Before his eyes had been enacted the impossible—the ugly and brutal impossible—and beneath his feet the foundations of the earth were reeling. The iron-mouthed guns and the marching columns which had hitherto passed him as a dusty pageant took life and meaning in his eyes; they were instruments of the ugly impossible. There was meaning too in the lonely grave and in the lonely house—whence men had fled in terror of such scenes as his eyes had witnessed. So far, to him, the limit of human savagery had been the feeding through the nose of divers young women who, infected with the virus of martyrdom, demanded to be left to die—and now he had witnessed the killing of men who desired most greatly to live. At the time he did not—because he could not—analyse either the elements of the situation or his own attitude towards it; but he knew afterwards, vaguely but surely, that in that one bewildering and ruthless moment the heart of his faith was uprooted—his faith in that large vague entity the People, in the power of Public Opinion and Talk, in the power of the Good Intention.... Until that moment he had confounded the blunder with the crime, the mistaken with the evilly intentioned. It had not seemed to him possible that a man could disagree with him honestly and out of the core of his heart; it had not seemed to him possible that the righteous could be righteous and yet err. He knew now, as by lightning flash, that he, Faraday, a thousand others, throwing scorn from a thousand platforms on the idea of a European War, had been madly, wildly, ridiculously wrong—and the knowledge stunned and blinded him. They had meant so well, they had meant so exceedingly well—and yet they had prophesied falsely and fact had given them the lie. Until that moment he had been in what he called politics the counterpart of the Christian Scientist, despising and denying the evil that now laughed triumphant in his face. With its triumph perforce he was converted. War was: men were shot against walls. Converted, though as yet he knew not to what form of unknown faith.

He did not see what became of the two dead bodies—whither they were taken or by whom they were buried—for they had barely fallen to the ground and his eyes were still closed that he might not look on the blood that was dribbling from the mayor's moustache when a hand tapped him smartly on the shoulder and he found Heinz standing beside him. He had a glimpse of men moving round the bodies, a glimpse of his wife's face staring and sickly, another of a passing motor-cycle, and then Heinz turned him to the door where the sentries stood on guard. With his captor's hand on his shoulder he went into the low white house, along a little passage on the ground floor and into a room on the right, at the back of the house; Griselda coming after him, still staring and white-faced and likewise with a hand on her shoulder. In the room—large and sunny with windows looking on to a garden—was a man in uniform and spectacles writing at a table, and, erect and complacent beside him, the fattish moustachioed officer who had watched the execution from the doorstep. He was lighting a cigar with a hand that did not tremble. William and Griselda were escorted by their guards into the middle of the room and planted there, standing in front of him.

After what he had seen, and with the memory of Heinz's threats, William Tully believed most firmly that he too was about to die; and with the conviction there filled his heart (as it would have filled the heart of any honest lover) a great and intolerable pity for Griselda, his new-made wife. She, the woman, would be left where he, the man, would be taken—and he dared not turn his head towards her lest he might see her face instinct with the agony of the coming parting, lest, foreseeing and resisting it, she should fling her arms about him and croon over him as the sallow-faced woman in respectable black had crooned over the head of her man. Her meanings, the meanings of a woman unknown, had torn at his inmost heart; how should he bear it when Griselda, his darling, clung fast to him and cried in vain for pity? ... That he might not see Griselda's face even with the tail of an eye he stared hard and steadily over the officer's shoulder. He never forgot the wall-paper beyond the well-filled grey uniform; it was dingy mud and orange as to ground with a ponderous pattern of clumped and climbing vegetables. In one spot, opposite the window, where a blaze of sunlight struck it, the mud and orange was transfigured to shining gold—and William knew suddenly that he had never seen sunlight before. For the first time he saw it as vivid glory from heaven—when his eyes (as he thought) would soon close on its splendour for ever. Not only his sight but his every sense was alert and most sharply intense; on a sudden the thudding of guns in the distance was threateningly nearer at hand, and, in the interval between the gun-bursts, a wasp beating up and down the window-pane filled the room with a spiteful humming.

It was while he stood waiting for the doom he believed to be certain, while the German captain looked him up and down and addressed curt unintelligible questions to those who had made him their prisoner—that there stirred in the breast of William Tully the first faint sense of nationality. He did not recognize it as such, and it was not to be expected that he should, since his life for the last few strenuous years had been largely moulded on the principle that the love of one's country was a vice to be combated and sneered at. If you had told him a short day earlier that the thought of the soil he was born on could move and thrill and uplift him, he would have stared and despised you as a jingo, that most foolish and degraded of survivals; yet with his eyes (as he thought) looking their last on the blazing gold that was sunlight, with the sword suspended over his trembling head, something that was not only his pitiful love for Griselda, something that was more than his decent self-respect, fluttered and stirred within him and called on him to play the man. It bade him straighten his back before men of an outlandish race, it bade him refrain from pleading and weakness before those who were not of his blood; and for the first time for many years he thought of himself as a national, a man of the English race. Not consciously as yet and with no definite sense of affection for England or impulse to stand by her and serve her; but with a vague, unreasoning, natural longing for home and the narrow things of home. It mattered not that the England he longed for was small, suburban, crowded and noisily pretentious; he craved for it in the face of death, as other men crave for their spacious fenlands or the sweep of their open downs. England as he knew her called him, not with the noisy call of yesterday, but in a voice less strident and more tender; he knew now that it was dreadful to die away from her. Instinctively, thinking on London, he drew himself up to the height of his five foot five and—as the mayor had done before him—he lifted his chin in would-be defiance and dignity.

There—with the attempt to subdue the trembling flesh and defy brute insolence and tyranny—the resemblance between the two men's cases ended. For the time being William ran no risk of a violent and bloody ending; there was no further need of an example and he had offended the conqueror only by his poor little presence. Further—though he expressed his enjoyment of it less noisily and emphatically than his three subordinates had done—the humour of his prisoner's situation appealed to Heinz's superior officer almost as much as it had appealed to Heinz himself. He grinned perceptibly as he questioned the couple in his somewhat halting English; chuckled audibly when they confirmed his subordinate's statement as to their complete ignorance of the European upheaval; and when he had elicited the fact that the hapless pair had been spending their honeymoon in the secluded valleys of Ardennes he removed his cigar from his moustachioed lips that he might chuckle long and unhindered.

"Honeymoon," he repeated, his stout shoulders trembling with merriment. "In a nice, quiet place, wiz no one to interrupt zee kissings. Never mind—you will have a very good honeymoon with us and you will very soon be able to go back to England. Just so soon as the Sherman Army shall have been there. You should be very pleased that you are safe with us: it is more dangerous to be in London."

William, with his nerves tuned up to face a firing party, withered miserably under heavy jocularity. He knew instinctively that his life was saved to him; but the assurance of safety was conveyed in a jeer, and at the moment (so oddly are we made) the jeer hurt more than the assurance of safety relieved him. He had mastered his anguish and strung himself up—to be treated as a figure of fun; the spectacled clerk at the writing-table was laughing so heartily that he had to remove his glasses and wipe them before he continued his labours. William tingled all over with helpless rage as Griselda tingled beside him. But yesterday he would have told you loftily that both he and his wife were inured to public, above all to official, ridicule; but it is one thing to brave ridicule with an approving audience in the background, another to face it unapplauded, uncrowned with the halo of the martyr.... They reddened and quivered whilst incomprehensible witticisms passed between the captain and his clerk. It was an intense relief when a nod and a brief order signified that the jest was sufficiently enjoyed and their audience with the captain at an end. They were too thankful even to resent the roughness with which Heinz collared his man while his comrade collared Griselda.

CHAPTER IX

One of the features of the interview that struck William later on was this—during all the long minutes that it lasted Griselda had spoken no words. For once the tumult and amazement of her soul was beyond her glib power of expression and it was only as they came into the open air that—for the first time since she had seen the hostages die—she unclosed her lips and spoke.

"What are they going to do with us?" she asked. Her voice was husky and uncertain, and the words came out in little jerks.

William gave the question no answer: for one thing because his ignorance of their destiny was as thorough as his wife's; for another because speech, by reason of Heinz's firm grip on his collar, was so difficult as to be almost impossible. The man had his knuckles thrust tightly between shirt and skin; William purpled and gasped as he trotted down the street with a collar stud pressing on his windpipe. Behind him when he started came Griselda and her guard; as he could not twist his head to look over his shoulder he had no suspicion that the couples had parted company, and it was not until his captor turned him sharply to the right down a by-road leading to the station that he discovered, in rounding the corner, that his wife and her escort were no longer following in his footsteps. The momentary sidelong glimpse he caught of the road gave him never a sight of Griselda; she had vanished without word or sign. For a moment he could hardly believe it and walked on stupidly in silence; then, the stupor passing, his terror found voice and he clamoured.

"Where's my wife?" he cried out and writhed instinctively to free himself. His reward was a tightening of the German's strangle-hold, some most hearty abuse and some even heartier kicks. Under the punishment he lost his foothold and would have fallen but for Heinz's clutch upon his collar; when the punishment was over he was brought up trembling and choking. In that moment he suffered the fiercest of torments, the fire of an ineffectual hate. He hated Heinz and could have torn him; but he had been taught the folly of blind wrestling with the stronger and, for Griselda's sake, he swallowed his fury and cringed.

"Where is she?" he begged most humbly and pitifully as Heinz thrust him forward again. "For mercy's sake tell me what you have done with my wife—with my wife? ... If you will only let me know where she is? That's all—just to let me know."

He was answered by the silence of contempt and a renewed urge along the road; he obeyed because he could do no other, whimpering aloud in the misery of this new and sharpest of misfortunes. As he pled and whimpered terrible thoughts came hurrying into his brain; all things were possible in these evil times and among these evil men—and there was a dreadful, hideously familiar phrase anent "licentious soldiery": a phrase that had once been just a phrase and that was now a present horror beating hard in his burning head. He stumbled on with the tears running down his cheeks, and discovered suddenly that he was whispering under his breath the name of God—all things else having failed him. He did not realize that he was sobbing and shedding great tears until halfway along the road when a German soldier met them. The man as he passed turned his head to laugh at the sight of a face grotesque and distorted in its wretchedness; whereupon there flared up again in William that new sense of blood and breed and with it an instant rush of shame that he had wept before these—Germans! He gulped back his tears, strove to stiffen his face and clenched his hands to endure.

He had need in the hours that came after of all his powers of endurance alike of body and of mind. The day that already seemed age-long was far from being at its height when Griselda was taken away from him and all through the heat till close upon sundown he was put to hard physical toil. Level with the village the railway line had been torn up and the little wayside station was a half-burnt mass of wreckage; a detachment of retreating Belgians had done their best to destroy it, had derailed an engine and half a dozen trucks and done such damage as time allowed to a stretch of the permanent way. In its turn a detachment of Germans was hard at work at removal of the wreckage and repairs to the line; and into their service they had pressed such villagers as had not fled at their approach. A cowed, unhappy band they toiled and sweated, dug, carried loads and levelled the broken soil; some stupidly submissive, some openly sullen to their captors, some pitiably eager to please: all serfs for the time being and all of them ignorant of what the next hour might bring forth of further terror or misfortune.

To this captive little company William Tully was joined, handed over by Heinz to its taskmaster—to become of them all the most pitiable, because for the first time in all his days set to bend his back and use his muscles in downright labour of the body. What to others was merely hardship, to him became torment unspeakable; he wearied, he sweated, he ached from head to heel. When he pulled at heavy wreckage he cut his soft clumsy fingers; when he dragged a load or carried it he strained his unaccustomed back. His hands bled and blistered and the drops of perspiration poured off him; when he worked slowly because of his weariness or lack of skill, authority made no allowance for either and a blow often followed a curse. Sometimes incomprehensible orders were shouted at him and he would run to obey confusedly, for fear of the punishment meted out without mercy to the dilatory—guessing at what was required of him, sometimes rightly and sometimes wrongly. The day remained on his mind as an impression of muddled terror and panic intense and unceasing.

When he thought he was not being watched he would lift his head from his toil and strain his eyes this way and that in the hope of a glimpse of Griselda. Unspeakably greater than his fear for himself was the measure of his fear for his wife. He knew that somewhere she must be held by force in the same way that he was held, otherwise she would have sought him out long ere this, and, even if not allowed to approach or speak would have managed to see him and make him some sign that his heart might be set at rest. His brain was giddy with undefined horror and once or twice he started and raised his head imagining that Griselda was calling to him. Once when he looked up his eye caught the bluff towering over the valley and he remembered with an incredulous shock that it was only yesterday that he and his wife, stretched out on the turf, had watched the galloping of the ants of soldiers beneath it—that it was not a day since they had listened indifferently to the mutter of guns in the distance and talked with superior detachment of manoeuvres and the folly of militarism. Side by side on the short-cropped turf they had watched unmoved and listened without misgiving. Only yesterday—nay, only this morning when the sun rose—the world was the world and not hell.

He knew though, engrossed by his private agony, he did not give it much heed, that all the afternoon there was heavy traffic on the road that ran through the village, traffic going this way and that; now and again through the clatter of the work around him its rumble came to his ears. Noisy cars went by and heavy guns, regiments of infantry and once or twice a company of swift-moving horse that sped westward in a flurry of dust. As the hot, industrious hours crawled by even his terror for Griselda was swallowed up in the numbing and all-pervading sense of bodily exhaustion and ill-being, in the consciousness of throbbing head, parched mouth and miserable back. At midday when the captives were doled out a ration of meat and bread he lay like a log for the little space during which he was allowed to rest; and, resting, he dreaded from the bottom of his soul the inevitable call back to work. With it all was the hopeless, the terrifying sense of isolation; he was removed even from his fellow-sufferers, held apart from them not only by the barrier of their alien speech but by his greater feebleness and greater physical suffering. Only once during those sun-smitten and aching hours did he feel himself akin to any of the men around him—when a flat-capped, sturdy young German soldier, taking pity on his manifest unfitness for the work, muttered some good-natured, incomprehensible encouragement and handed him a bottle to drink from. The sharp taste of beer was a liquid blessing to William's dry tongue and parched throat; he tilted the bottle and drank in great gulps till he choked; whereat the flat-capped German boy-soldier laughed consumedly but not unkindly.

It must have been well on in the afternoon—for the shadows were beginning to lengthen though the sun burned hotly as ever—when over the noises of the toil around him and over the rumble of traffic on the road the persistent beat of guns became loud enough to make itself noticeable. All day William had heard it at intervals; during his brief rest at midday it had been frequent but distant; now it had spurted into sudden nearness and was rapid, frequent, continuous. A little group of his fellow-toilers looked up from their work as they heard the sound, drew closer together and exchanged mutterings till an order checked them sharply; and even after the order was rapped out one square-shouldered, brown-faced countryman continued to stare down the valley with stubbornly determined eyes.

William's eyes followed the countryman's, and for a moment saw nothing but what he had seen before—cliffs, the river and the hot blue sky, without a feather of cloud to it; then, suddenly, away down the valley, there puffed out a ball of white smoke, and before it had faded another. The man with the stubborn eyes grunted something beneath his breath and turned again to his work; William, continuing to gaze curiously at the bursting puffs, was reminded of his duties by a louder shout and the threat of a lifted arm. He, too, bent again and with haste to his work; to look up furtively as the thunder deepened and see always those bursts of floating cloud down the valley or against the hot horizon.

He knew, or rather guessed, in after days when his sublime ignorance of all things military had been tempered by the newspapers, by daily war-talk and by actual contact with the soldier, that the sudden appearance of those bursting puffs had indicated some temporary and local check to the advancing German divisions, that a French or Belgian force must have pushed or fought its way across the triangular plateau between the Meuse and its tributary; must have driven before them the Germans in the act of occupying it, must have brought up their guns and commanded for the moment a stretch of the lateral valley and the line of communications along it. It was not left long in unmolested possession thereof; nearer guns answered it swiftly from all directions, from other heights and from the valley; shells whined overhead, from time to time the ground shook, and it dawned upon William, as he looked and listened, that what he saw was a battle.

At first he was more impressed by the thought than he was by the actuality—since the effects of the conflict were not in the beginning terrible. True there was something threatening in the near-by thudding of a German battery when first it made itself heard. But such harm as it inflicted was unseen by William, and for the space of an hour or so it drew no returning fire and the village stood untouched and undamaged. But as the evening drew in the thunder deepened and quickened; both sides, it would seem, had brought up reinforcements, and guns opened fire from new and unexpected places, from heights, from behind garden walls. Down the road along which William had been urged with ungentleness by Heinz a gun-team clattered and jingled at breakneck speed; it pulled up close to the railway line, not fifty yards from the spot where the prisoners were working in the shadow of a clump of young trees; the gun was placed swiftly in position, the horses were led away and after a momentary interval the men began to fire—steadily, swiftly, on the order. William watched them with his mouth wide open till reminded smartly of his idleness; they were so swift, precise and machine-like. It required an effort of the imagination to remember what they were doing.

"Killing," he said to himself, "those men are killing!" And he found himself wondering what their faces looked like while they killed? Whether they liked doing it? ...

He supposed later (when that first ignorance of things military was a little less sublime) that the firing from the immediate neighbourhood of the village had at first inflicted but little damage on the opposing forces on the heights; at any rate it remained practically unanswered till close upon sunset, the French or Belgian gunners concentrating their fire upon enemies nearer, more aggressive, or more vulnerably placed. Perhaps (he never knew for certain) they had got the better, for the time being, of those other more aggressive or more vulnerable opponents; perhaps they had received reinforcements which had enabled them to push higher up the valley or had at last been punished by a fire hitherto ineffectual; whatever the cause, as the sun grew red to the westward, a first shell screamed on to the dusty road outside the village and burst in a pother of smoke and flying clods. William heard the burst and saw the cloud rise; he was still round-eyed when another shell screamed overhead to find its billet in a garden wall a few yards behind the battery, scattering the stones thereof and splintering the boughs of an apple-tree. A shower of broken fragments came pattering about the station; William was perhaps too much stupefied by pain and weariness to understand the extent of his danger but several of his fellows stirred uneasily and two of them threw down their spades and started in headlong flight. They were brought up swiftly by the threat of a bayonet in their path; one of them came back sullenly dumb, the other whimpering aloud with a hand pressed to his face. William saw that his cheek was bleeding where a flying fragment had caught it. He was looking at the man as he nursed his torn face and bemoaned himself when a third shell struck what remained of the station roof.

William did not know whether he fell on his face instinctively or was thrown by the force of the explosion; he remembered only that as he scrambled to his feet, half-deafened and crying for help, he saw through a settling cloud of dust the disappearing backs of some three or four men who were all of them running away from him. He was seized with a mortal terror of being left alone in this torment of thunder and disaster; he believed he must be hurt, perhaps hurt to the death, and a pang of rage and self-pity went through him at the thought of his desertion by his fellows. He started after the vanishing backs, calling out to them to wait, abusing and appealing, and stumbling over ruin as he ran. The distant gunners had found their enemies' range, and he had not made half a dozen yards when he ducked to the threat of another shell that burst, as he thought, close beside him. He cringed and shivered for a moment, covering his eyes with his hands; then, finding himself uninjured, darted off at an angle, still shielding his eyes and gasping out, "God, oh God—for mercy's sake, oh God!" He knew in every fibre of his trembling body that he was about to die, and his prayer was meant not only for himself but for Griselda. As he ran on blindly, an animal wild and unreasoning, a hand caught him above the ankle and he screamed aloud with rage and terror at finding himself held fast.

"Let me go," he cried struggling; then, as the hand still gripped, bent down to wrest himself free and looked into a face that he knew—a young plump face with a budding moustache surmounted by a flat German cap. It was twisted now into a grin of agony, but all the same he recognized the face of the German boy-soldier who had dealt kindly with him that afternoon in the matter of the bottle of beer. He was lying on his back and covered from the middle downwards with a litter of broken beam and ironwork blown away from the ruin of the station. The effect of the recognition on William was curiously and instantly sobering; he was no longer alone in the hell where the ground reeled and men ran from him; he was no longer an animal wild and unreasoning, but a man with a definite human relationship to the boy lying broken at his feet. He began to lift the wreckage from the crushed legs and talked as he did so, forgetting that the wounded man in all likelihood understood not a word of his English.

"All right, I'll get it off, I'll help you. You were good to me giving me a drink, so I'll stay and help you. Otherwise I oughtn't to wait, not a minute—you see, I must look for my wife. My first duty is to her—she's my wife and I don't know where she is. But I won't leave you like this because of what you did for me this afternoon." He wrenched and tugged at the shattered and entangled wreckage till the boy shrieked aloud in his torment—the cry terrified William and he desisted, wringing his hands. "I'm sorry, I'm sorry, but I couldn't help it. God knows I didn't mean to hurt you and if I could be gentler I would, but it's so damnably, damnably heavy. Oh God, if some one would come and help me, if someone would only come! You see it's so heavy I can't move it without hurting you."

He explained and apologized to ears that heard not for the boy had fainted in his pain; his deep unconsciousness made extrication easier and William tugged again at the lumber until he had tugged it away. One of the wounded man's leg's was a wrenched and bloody mass; William shuddered at the sight, looked down stupidly at the dead white face and wondered what was to be done—then, feeling that something must at least be tried, put his arms round the inert body and strove to lift it from the ground. The only results were breathlessness on his part and a groan from the unconscious German. William dropped him instantly on hearing the groan, trembling at the idea of inflicting yet more suffering, torn by the thought of Griselda, longing to go and yet ashamed to leave the boy-soldier without aid. He might have hesitated longer but a for fresh explosion and crash of falling masonry; it was followed by a long-drawn screaming intolerable to hear—an Aie, Aie, Aie of unspeakable bodily pain. With a sudden sense of being hunted, being driven beyond endurance, William turned and shook his impotent fists in the direction of the unseen guns. "Can't you stop one moment?" he screamed idiotically, hating them and dancing with rage. "Can't you stop, you devils—you devils! Don't you see I'm only trying to help him?" If he had ever made any distinction between friend and enemy artillery, he had lost all idea of it now; the guns for the moment were a private persecution of himself, and he was conscious only of being foully and brutally bullied by monstrous forces with whom he argued and at whom he cursed and spat.

It was the sight of what had once been a horse that brought him again to his senses. His eye fell on it as he danced in his mad ineptitude at the side of the helpless German; it had been one of the team that galloped a gun down the by-road and was now a pulp of raw flesh, crushed bone, and most hideously scattered entrail. He stared for a moment at the horror, incredulous and frozen—then sickened, turned and ran from it in a passion of physical loathing.

For a minute or two he ran he knew not whither—straight ahead, anywhere to be away from the horror; then, as his shuddering sickness passed, there rushed back the thought of Griselda, and he reproached himself that he had halted even for a moment and even for a purpose of mercy; all his energies both of mind and body were turned to the finding of his wife. They must die, he was sure of it; he prayed only that they died together. The way he had taken lay outside the walled gardens between the village and the railway line; and as he ran he called her—"Griselda, Griselda!"—in a voice that he hardly caught himself, so persistent was the uproar of the guns. When he fled from the neighbourhood of the dismembered horse he had left behind him the path leading directly to the main street of the village—which it was his aim to reach since there he had last seen Griselda. Seeking another way to it, he halted when he came to a door in the wall, wrestled with the latch and flung himself angrily against it; it resisted, locked, and he ran on again, still panting out his wife's dear name. Twenty yards further on he came to another door in the wall and this time it opened to his hand.

In the garden beyond was no sign of the chaos that had overwhelmed his world since the morning. An orderly border of orderly flowers, espaliered walls and a tree or two ruddy with apples; and on a shaven plot of the greenest grass an empty basket chair with beside it a white cat reposing with her paws tucked under her chin. The white cat may have been deaf, or she may have been merely intrepid; whatever the cause her nerves were unaffected by the fury of conflict and she dozed serenely under shell-fire, the embodiment of comfortable dignity. She opened a warily observant eye when William rushed into her garden; but being a well-fed cat, and accustomed to deference, she took no further precaution. She stirred not even when he hurried past her to her dwelling-house, and as he entered it by an open window her nose descended to rest on her folded paws.

The room he ran into through the open window left no impression on the mind of William Tully; it was dark after the sunlight outside, and he supposed it must have been empty. He went rapidly along the short passage beyond it, making for the front door; he met no one, heard no one, and his fingers were touching the latch when he saw, through an open door to the right of him, the figure of a kneeling woman. She was stout, dressed in black and grey-headed and she knelt leaning on a chair in the middle of the polished floor; her eyes were closed, her lips moved, and her hands were clasped under her chin. The sound of William's feet did not reach her through the tumult of fighting without, nor did he stay to disturb her. When he lived in the world and not hell it would have seemed to him strange and unfitting that he should intrude on an old woman's privacy and secret prayer; now nothing was strange, nothing unfitting or impossible.... He supposed that she was the white cat's mistress, noted without emotion that her cheeks were wet with tears and thought vaguely that her face was familiar, that he had seen it somewhere before. Afterwards it came to him that he had seen it when the hostages died in the morning, that it was she who had prayed in the road with folded hands and pressed her crucifix to the mayor's long grey moustache. He wondered, then, what became of her and her well-fed indifferent cat.

That was afterwards, many weeks afterwards; for the time being he had no interest to give her, his thoughts were only of Griselda and the means by which she might be found. His plan, so far as it could be called a plan, was to run from house to house in the village street until he came to the place where she was captive; but when he stepped into the road it was to find it impossible of passage by reason of the men and vehicles that choked the stretch in front of him. Almost opposite the door he came through, a motor-ambulance, going eastward with its load, had collided with an ammunition wagon going west, thus bringing to a standstill more ammunition wagons and a battery of horse-artillery, its foremost ranks thrown back in confusion by a threatening skid of the ambulance. There was much whistling, and shouting of orders in the attempt to reform and clear the road; horses reared from the suddenness with which they were pulled up and men ran to their heads to steady them. While the locked wheels were wrestled with, a bandaged bloody face peered round the tail of the ambulance; the press swayed to and fro, filling the road from side to side, and William, unable to move, flattened back against the door from which he had issued, out of reach of the wicked heels of a restive horse. For the first moment he expected some one to seize and arrest him, and had he not unthinkingly closed the door behind him he would have beat a hasty retreat; but there was bloodier and busier work on hand than the corraling of stray civilians, and no man touched or questioned him as he pressed himself against the neat green-painted door. Struggling with their own most urgent concerns, not a soldier so much as noticed him; and it was borne in on William that if the wicked heels had caught him and kicked his life out, not a man would have noticed that either.

Further down the street was a cloud of slowly rising black smoke—and suddenly through it a banner of flame leaped up and waved triumphantly; one of the tidy two-storied houses had been set afire by a shell. As William watched the resplendent flare the crowd round the two vehicles composed itself into something like order, and the ambulance—its driver, by the excited movements of his mouth, still shouting out angry explanations—was backed from the path of the advancing troops and thrust crippled against the wall. The guns on one side of the road, the wagons on the other stirred forward—at first slowly, then, as the line straightened itself out, with a rattle of increasing speed. As they passed the house afire the smoke rolled down on them and hid them from William's sight.

CHAPTER X

With the conviction that no one was heeding his comings and goings, a certain amount of assurance came back to William Tully, and as the way cleared before him he set off down the street without any attempt at concealment. By house to house visitation he sought for his wife through the village; it was there she had been taken from him, and he thrust back the deadly suspicion that she need not have remained in the place where she had disappeared from his sight.

There was not a closed door in the length of the street, and nowhere was his entrance barred; the call to arms had temporarily cleared the houses of the invaders quartered in them, and he ran from one doorway to another unhindered, calling on Griselda as he entered, looking into every room, and then out to repeat the process. The two first houses were empty from garret to cellar, but with signs of having been left, recently and hurriedly, by the soldiers billeted therein; odds and ends of military kit were scattered about, chairs overturned and left lying; and in one room, a kitchen, on a half-extinguished fire, a blackened frizzle of meat in a frying-pan filled the air with a smell of burning. The third house he thought likewise empty; downstairs there was the same litter—overthrown furniture and food half eaten on the table; but opening the door of an upper room he came on a woman with three children. The woman started to her feet as the door opened, a child hugged to her bosom and other two clinging to her skirt; and William had a passing impression of a plump, pallid face with lips apart and wide, wet eyes, half-imploring and half-defiant. One of the children was crying—its mouth was rounded in a roar—but you heard nothing of its vigorous plaint for the louder din without. William made a gesture that he meant to be reassuring, shut the door and ran back into the street.

He went in and out desperately, like a creature hunted or hunting; and, having drawn blank in house after house, the deadly thought refused to be thrust and kept under. If they had taken her away, she might be ... anywhere! East or west, gone in any direction, and leaving no clue for her following. Anywhere in a blind incomprehensible world, where men killed men and might was right, and life, as he knew it from his childhood up, had ended in an orgy of devilry! He went on running from house to house, while shells screamed and burst and guns clattered by, and no man gave heed to his running or the tumult and torture of his fears. Upstairs and down and out again—upstairs and down and out.

He was nearing the end of the street when he found her at last; in the upper back room of a little white house some yards beyond the building in flames, and not far from the spot where they had seen the hostages die. She was alone and did not move when he flung the door open; crouched in a corner with her head on her knees, she neither saw nor heard him. For an instant it seemed to him that his strength would fail him for gladness, and he staggered and held to the door; as the giddiness passed he ran to her, babbling inaudible relief, and pulled the hands from her face. He had an instant's glimpse of it, white and tear-marked, with swollen lips and red eyes; then, as his arms went round her and he had her up from the floor, it went down on his shoulder and was hidden. He felt her clinging to him, trembling against him, sobbing against him while he held her—and all his soul was a passion of endearment and thankfulness.... So for a minute or two—perhaps longer—they clung to each other, reunited: until William, his sense of their peril returning, sought to urge his wife to the door.

She came with him for a step or two, her head still on his shoulder; then, suddenly, she shivered and wrestled in his arms, thrust him from her, rushed back to the end of the room and leaned against it, shaking with misery. Her arm was raised over her hidden face and pressed against the wall; and he saw what he had not seen before, that the sleeve was torn and the flesh near the wrist bruised and reddened. He saw also—his eyes being opened—that it was not only her hair that was tumbled; all her dress was disordered and awry. There was another tear under the armpit where the sleeve had given way and the white of her underlinen showed through the gap.... His heart cried out to him that she had struggled merely as a captive, had been restrained by brute force from escaping—but his own eyes had seen that she turned from him as if there was a barrier between them, as if there was something to hide that yet she wished him to know.... For a moment he fought with the certainty, and then it came down on him like a storm: for once in his life his imagination was vivid, and he saw with the eyes of his mind as clearly as with the eyes of his body. All the details, the animal details, her cries and her pitiful wrestlings; and the phrase "licentious soldiery" personified in the face of the man who had been Griselda's gaoler. Round and roughly good-humoured in repose with black eyebrows and a blue-black chin.... He caught her by the hands and said something to her—jerked out words that stammered and questioned—and she sobbed and turned her face from him again.... After that he could not remember what he felt or how long he stood in the middle of the room, oblivious of danger and staring at her heaving shoulders and the tumbled hair that covered them; but it seemed to him that he talked and moved his hands and hated—and did not know what to do.

In the end there must have come to him some measure of helpless acquiescence, or perhaps he was quieted and taken out of himself by the need of giving help to Griselda. After how long he knew not he found himself once more with his arms around her; she let him take her hand, he kissed it and stroked her poor hair. This time she came with him when he led her to the door, and they went down the stairway together. Near the street door she hesitated and halted, and he saw she had something to say.

"Where are we going?" she asked, with her lips to his ear. "Can we get away?"

He told her he thought so, that now was the time when they might slip away unnoticed—trying to encourage her by the assumption of a greater confidence than he felt. Fortune favoured them, however, and the assumption of confidence was justified; though the bombardment had slackened as suddenly as it had begun, the remnant of German soldiery left in the place was still too much occupied with its own concerns to interfere with a couple of civilians seeking safety in the rear of the fire-zone, and no one paid any heed to them as they made their way along the street. They turned inevitably westward—away from the guns—down the road they had come that morning: two hunted, dishevelled little figures, keeping well to the wall and glancing over their shoulders. The crush of wagons, of guns and men, had moved forward and out of the village, which, for the moment, seemed clear of all but non-combatants—save for the ubiquitous cyclist who dashed backwards and forwards in his dust. An ambulance was discharging its load at a building whence waved the Red Cross, and near at hand, but out of sight, a battery was thudding regularly; but of the few uniformed figures in the street itself there was none whose business it was to interest himself in their movements. They hurried on, clinging to each other and hugging the wall—except when a heap of fallen brickwork, a derelict vehicle or other obstacle forced them out into the road.

They were almost at the entry of the village when they came upon such an obstacle: the upper part of one of the endmost houses had evidently been struck by a shell, for a large slice of roof and outside wall had crumbled to the pathway below. It had crumbled but recently, since the dust was still clouding thickly above the ruin and veiling the roadway beyond it; hence, as they skirted its borders, it was not until he was actually upon them that they were aware of a motor-cyclist speeding furiously out of the dusk. The roar of the battery a few yards away had drowned the whirr of his machine, and Griselda was almost under it before she had warning of its coming. The stooping rider yelled and swerved, but not enough to avoid her; she went down, flung sideways, while the cyclist almost ran on to the heap of rubble on his right—then, recovering his balance, dashed forward and was lost in the dusk. Save for that momentary swerve and stagger, he had passed like a bolt on his errand, leaving Griselda crumpled in the road at William's feet. To his mind, no doubt, a mishap most luckily avoided. Griselda lay without moving, her face to the dust, and for one tortured moment William thought the life beaten out of her; but when he raised her, her lips moved, as if in a moan, and as he dragged her for safety to the side of the road she turned her head on his arm. He laid her down while he ran for water from the river; panted to its brim, soaked his handkerchief for lack of a cup, brought it back and pressed it to her forehead. Her eyes, when she opened them, were glazed with pain and her lips drawn tightly to her teeth; when he wanted to raise her to a sitting position she caught his hand thrust it from her and lay with her white face working. So she lay, for minutes that seemed hours, with her husband kneeling beside her.... Men passed them but stayed not; and once, when William looked up, a car was speeding by with helmeted officers inside it—too intent on their own hasty business of death to have so much as a glance to spare for a woman in agony of bodily pain and a man in agony of mind.

The night had come down before Griselda was able to move. With its fall the near-by battery was silenced and the distant thunder less frequent; so that William was able to hear her when she spoke and asked him to lift her. He sobbed for joy as he lifted her, gently and trembling lest he hurt her; she sat leaning on his arm, breathing painfully and telling him in jerks that it was her side that pained her most—her left side and her left arm, but most of all her side. At first she seemed dazed and conscious only of her sufferings—whimpered about them pitifully with intervals of silence—but after ten minutes or so she caught his sleeve and tugged it.

"Let's get away. Help me up!"

He suggested that she should rest a little longer, but she urged him with trembling, "Let's get away!" and he had perforce to raise her. In spite of the fever for flight that had taken possession of her she cried out as he helped her to her feet and stood swaying with her eyes shut and her teeth bitten hard together. He would have lain her down again, but she signed a "No, no!" at the attempt and gripped at his shoulder to steady herself; then, after a moment, guided his arm round her body, so that he could hold her without giving unnecessary pain.

"You mustn't press my side—I can't bear it. But if you put your hand on my shoulder——"

They moved away from the village at a snail's pace, Griselda leaning heavily on her husband. Behind them at first was the red light from burning houses; but as they crawled onwards the darkness of the valley closed in on them until, in the sombre shadow of the cliff, William could only distinguish his wife's face as a whitish patch upon his shoulder. When she groaned, as she did from time to time, he halted to give her relief, but she would never allow him to stand for more than a minute or two; after a few painful breaths there would come the tug of her fingers at his coat that was the sign to move forward again. Once or twice she whispered to know if any one were coming after them, and he could feel her whole body a-quiver with fear at the thought.

Barred in by cliff to right and river to left, they kept perforce to the road—or, rather, to the turf that bordered it. The traffic on the road itself had not ceased with the falling of night; cars were coming up and guns were coming up and the valley was alive with their rumble—and at every passing Griselda shrank and her fingers shivered in their grip upon William's sleeve.

"Can't we get away from them?" she whispered at last. "Right away and hide—can't we turn off the road?"

He said helplessly that he did not know where, until they reached the entrance to their valley. "It's all cliff—and the river on the other side."

She had known it without asking; there was nothing for it but to drag herself along. To both the distance was never-ending; Griselda's terror of recapture communicated itself to her husband, and he shivered even as she did at the rattle of a passing car. Instinctively they kept to the shadow, stumbling in its blackness over the uneven ground below the cliff. Once, when a couple of patrolling horsemen halted near them in the roadway, they crouched and held their breath during an eternity of dreadful seconds while they prayed that they had not been noticed. It seemed to William that his heart stopped beating when one of the horsemen walked his beast a yard or two nearer and flashed a light into their faces; but the man, having surveyed them, turned away indifferently and followed his comrade down the road. That was just before they came to the gap in the heights that led into the valley of silence.

As they entered it for the last time, in both their minds was the thought that they might find it barred to them; and the beating of their hearts was loud in their ears as they crept into its friendly shadow.

"The woods," Griselda whispered.

They turned into the woods and took cover; and, with a yard or two, the blackness under the trees had closed in on them, blotting out all things from sight. They halted because they could see to walk no further.

"Let me down," Griselda said—and her husband knew by the gasp in her voice that she was at the end of her powers of endurance. He explored with an outstretched hand for a tree trunk and lowered her gently to the ground with her back supported against it; she panted relief as he sat down beside her and groped for her fingers in the darkness.... So they sat holding to each other and enveloped in thickest night.