"Well, I heard Dad say we were the back of the Front, and the fellows wouldn"t think anything of me if I hadn"t been _near_ the Front," he said, apologetically. "Hullo, they"re going up!"
An aeroplane was skimming along the ground as a moor-hen scuppers across the water, the mechanics having a.s.sisted her initial progress by pushing the lower stays and then ducking under the planes, as she gathered way, and just missing decapitation. It"s a way they have. She took a run for it, her engine humming like a top, and then rose, and gradually climbed the sky. Peter gazed at her wistfully. "And he promised to take me up some day," he said sadly.
"Yes, some day, Peter," I said encouragingly. "But it"s time we were getting back. You know you"ve got to catch the leave-boat at four o"clock this afternoon."
Peter"s father and I stood on the quay, having taken farewell of Peter.
There was an eminent Staff Officer going home on leave--a very great man at G.H.Q., a lieutenant-general, who inspired no less fear than respect among us all. He knew Peter"s father in his distant way, and had not only returned his salute, but had even condescended to ask, in his laconic style, "Who is the boy?"--whereupon Peter"s father had, with some nervousness, introduced him. All the other officers going home on leave, from a Brigadier down to the subalterns, stood at a respectful distance, glancing furtively at the hawk-like profile of the great man, and lowering their voices. It was a tribute not only to rank but to power. As the ship gathered way and moved slowly out of the harbour I pulled the sleeve of Peter"s father. "Look!" I said. The Lieutenant-General and Peter were engaged in an animated conversation on the deck, and the great man, usually as silent as the sphinx and not less inscrutable, was evidently contesting with some warmth and great interest, as though hard put to keep his end up, some point of debate propounded to him by Peter.
"T----, old chap," I said, "Peter"ll be a great man some day."
Peter"s father said nothing, but his eyes grew misty. Perhaps he was thinking of that lonely grave in the distant plains of the Deccan where Peter"s mother sleeps.
XVII
THREE TRAVELLERS
(_October 1914_)
My train left Paris at 1.52 in the afternoon. It was due at Calais at eight o"clock the same evening. But it soon became apparent that something was amiss with our journey--we crawled along at a pace which barely exceeded six miles an hour. At every culvert, guarded by its solitary sentry, we seemed to pause to take breath. As we approached Amiens, barely halfway on our journey, somewhere about 9.30 P.M., we pa.s.sed on the opposite line of rails a Red Cross train, stationary, and throwing deep rhomboid shadows in the candid moonlight. One glimpse of an open horse-box revealed to me in a flash the secret of our languor.
It was a cold, keen night; the full moon rode high in a starless sky, and there must have been ten or twelve degrees of frost. We had left far behind us the diaphanous veils of mist hovering above river banks, out of which the poplars stood argent and fragile, as though the landscape were a j.a.panese print. Through the open door of the horse-box I saw a soldier stretched upon his straw, with a red gaping wound in his half-naked body. Over him stooped a nurse, improvising with delicate ministries a hasty dressing. In the next carriage the black face of a wounded Senegalese looked out, unearthly in the moonlight. Ahead of us an interminable line of trains (some seventy of them I was told) had pa.s.sed, conveying fresh troops. Then I knew. The Germans, hovering like a dark cloud some twenty miles away, had been reinforced, and a fierce battle was in progress. The news of it had travelled by some mysterious telepathy to every village along the line, and at every crossing groups of pale-faced women, silent and intent, kept a restless vigil. They looked like ghosts in the moonlight; no cheer escaped them as we pa.s.sed, no hand waved an exuberant greeting. In the twilight we had already seen red-trousered soldiers, vivid as poppies against the gra.s.s, digging trenches along the line, and at one point a group of sappers improvising a wire footbridge across the river. The contagion of suspense was in the air,--you seemed to catch it in the faint susurrus of the poplars.
"Shall we get to Calais?" I asked.
"Bon Dieu! I know not," was the reply of the hara.s.sed guard.
We pursued our stealthy journey, reached Abbeville somewhere about midnight, and Boulogne in the small hours. 4 A.M. Calais at last! I joyfully exclaimed. But between Calais Ville and Calais Maritime a group of officers boarded our train and, for some mysterious reason, we were headed off to Dunkirk. It grew colder and more cold, and I had had no food since noon of yesterday. But my thoughts were with our men, the men whom I had lately come to know, now lying out on the bare earth in the moonlit trenches, keeping their everlasting vigil and blowing on their fingers numbed with cold. We reached Dunkirk at 6 A.M. No explanation why the train had played truant at Calais was vouchsafed me, nor was any hope held out of a return. In those days I was travelling as a private person, and was not yet endowed with the prerogatives by which, in the name of a Secretary of State, I could requisition cars and impress men to do my bidding.
At a hopeless moment I had the good fortune to fall in with a King"s Messenger, carrying despatches, who was in the next carriage. He produced his special pa.s.sports, and the prestige of "Courrier du Roi,"
Knight of the Order of the Silver Greyhound, worked a miracle. Every one was at our service. We were escorted to the military headquarters of Dunkirk--through streets already echoing with the march of French infantry, each carrying a big baton of bread and munching as he kept step, to an office in which the courteous commandant was just completing his toilet. The Consul was summoned, the headquarters hotel of the English officers was rung up, and thither we went through an ambuscade of motor-cars in the courtyard.
A lieutenant of the Naval Flying Squadron was ready for us with his powerful Rolls-Royce, and we were soon on the high road to Calais.
Everywhere were the stratagems of war: a misty haze of barbed-wire entanglements in the distant fields, deep trenches, earthworks six feet thick masking rows of guns. Time pressed, but every mile or so we were stopped by a kind of Hampton Court maze, thrown across the road, in the shape of high walls of earth and stone, compelling our lieutenant at the steering-wheel to zigzag in and out, and thereby putting us at the mercy of the sentry who stood beside his hut of straw and hurdles, and presented his bayonet at the bonnet as though preparing to receive cavalry. The corporal came up, and with him a little group of French soldiers, their cheeks impoverished, their gla.s.sy eyes sunk in deep black hollows by their eternal vigil. "Officier Anglais!" "Courrier du Roi!" we exclaimed, and were sped on our way with a weary smile and "Bonjour! messieurs." Women and old men were already toiling in the fields, stooping like the figures in Millet"s "Gleaners," as we raced through an interminable avenue of poplars, past closed inns, past depopulated farms, past wooden windmills, perched high upon wooden platforms like gigantic dovecots. At each challenge a sombre word was exchanged about Antwerp--again that strange telepathy of peril. Calais at last! and a great empty boat with a solitary fellow-pa.s.senger.
He was a London wine-merchant of repute, who had got here at last from Rheims, whither he had gone to pay his yearly inspection of the champagne vintage, only to find the red wine-press of war. Three weeks he had lived like primitive man in the wine-cellars of Rheims, with the sh.e.l.ls screaming overhead--screaming, he says, just like the long-drawn sobbing whistle of an express train as it leaves a tunnel. Never has he lived such days before; never, he fervently prays, will he live them again. From his narrative I got a glimpse of a subterranean existence, as tenebrous and fearful as the deepest circle of Dante"s _Inferno_, with a river of tears falling always in the darkness of the vaults. A great wine-cellar--there are ten miles of them at Rheims--crowded with four thousand people, lighted only by candles, and swarming with huge rats; the blanched faces of women, the crying of children, the wail of babies at the breast. Overhead the crash of falling masonry--the men had armed themselves with big iron pikes to hew their way out in case the vaults fell in. Life in these catacombs was one long threnody of anguish. Outside, the conscious stone of the great monument of mediaeval aspiration was being battered to pieces, and the glorious company of the apostles, the goodly fellowship of the martyrs, suffered another and a less resurgent martyrdom. After days of this crepuscular existence he emerged to find the cathedral less disfigured than he had feared. One masterpiece of the mediaeval craftsmen"s chisel is, however, irremediably destroyed--the figure of the devil. We hope it is a portent.
The King"s Messenger had posted from a distant country, and his way through Dijon had been truly a Via Dolorosa. Thirty-six people standing in the corridor, and in his own crowded compartment--he had surrendered his royal prerogative of exclusion--was a woman on the verge of hysteria, finding relief not in tears but in an endless recital of her sorrow. She and her husband had a son--the only son of his mother--gone to the front, reported badly wounded, and for days, like Joseph and Mary, the anxious parents had sought him, only to find him on the threshold of death, with a bullet in his liver. Again and again she beguiled her anguish by chronicles of his miraculous childhood--his precocious intelligence at five, his prescience at six, his unfathomable wisdom at seven. The silent company of wayfarers listened in patience to the twice-told tale. No one could say her nay as she repeated her litany of pain. She was, indeed, the only pa.s.senger in that compartment whose eyes were dry. _Stabat Mater Dolorosa._
XVIII
BARBARA
It was the d.u.c.h.ess of X."s Hospital at a certain _plage_ on the coast. I had motored thither through undulating country dotted with round beehive ricks and past meadows on which a flock of gulls, looking in the distance like a bed of white crocuses, were settled in platoons. As we neared the coast the scenery changed to shifting dunes of pale sand, fine as flour, and tufted with tussocks of wiry gra.s.s. Here clumps of broom and beech, with an occasional fir, maintained a desperate existence against the salt winds from the Atlantic, and the beeches held up plaintive arms like caryatids supporting the intolerable architrave of the sky. The bare needle-like branches of the broom and fir stood out blackly against the biscuit-coloured sand with the sharp outlines of an etching.
I had taken a hospitable cup of tea with the d.u.c.h.ess in the Matron"s room. She was clothed in fine linen but without her purple; she wore the ordinary and serviceable slate-coloured dress of a nurse. It was here I had the honour of being introduced to Barbara. She was nursing a doll with great tenderness, and had been asking the d.u.c.h.ess why she did not wear her "cowonet."
"This is Barbara--our little Egyptian," said the matron.
Barbara repudiated the description hotly.
"She was born in Egypt," explained the matron.
"Ah," I said, "that wasn"t your fault, Barbara, was it? But it was Egypt"s good fortune."
Barbara ignored the compliment with the simplicity of childhood, and proceeded to explain with great seriousness: "You see, Mummy was travelling, and she comed to Egypt. She didn"t know I was going to happen," she added as if to clear Mummy of any imputation of thoughtlessness.
"And your birthday, Barbara?"
Barbara and I discovered that both of us have birthdays in March--only six days apart. This put us at once on a footing of intimacy--we must have been born under the same star. Barbara proceeded to inform me that she rather liked birthdays--except the one which happened in Egypt. I had half a mind to execute a deed of conveyance on the spot, a.s.signing to her all my own birthdays as an estate _pour autre vie_, with all _profits a prendre_ and presents arising therefrom, for I am thirty-eight and have no further use for them.
"I am afraid there are more than six years between us, Barbara," I said pensively.
Barbara regarded me closely with large round eyes.
"About ten, I fink. I"m seven, you know."
"How nice of you to say that, Barbara. Then I"m only seventeen."
Barbara regarded me still more closely.
"A little more, p"waps--ten monfs."
"Thank you, Barbara. I"ll remind you of that some day." After all, ten years is no obstacle to the course of true love. "But what is the matter with the doll?" Despite a rosy flush the doll has a field-dressing round her auburn locks, and one leg is immensely stout owing to a tourniquet.
Barbara looked at me rather less favourably than before. It was evident that she now thought poorly of my intelligence, and that I had made a _faux pas_.
"I"m a nurse," Barbara explained, loftily, showing an armlet bearing the ensign of the Red Cross. I was about to remind her of 1 & 2 Geo. V. cap.
20, which threatens the penalties of a misdemeanour against all who wear the Red Cross without the authority of Army Council, but I thought better of it. Instead of anything so foolish, I exhibit a delicate solicitude about the health of the patient. I put myself right by referring to it as "he." A less intelligent observer might p.r.o.nounce it to be decidedly of the female s.e.x. Still, I reflected, women have enlisted in the Army before now. I proceeded to inspect the injured limb with professional gravity. "A compound fracture, I think, Barbara. He will require careful nursing."
Barbara liked this--no one in the matron"s room had ever exhibited such a clinical interest in the case before, and she thinks "fwacture" rather imposing.
"Let me feel his pulse," I said. I held a waxen arm between my thumb and forefinger, and looked at my wrist-watch for some seconds, Barbara gazing at me intently.
"Hum! hum! I think we had better take his temperature," I said, as I held a clinical thermometer in the shape of a fountain-pen to the rosebud lips of the patient. "103, I think."
"Will you wite a pwescwiption?" asked Barbara anxiously.