Leaves from a Field Note-Book Part 16

XXII

CHRISTMAS EVE

(_1914_)

"Halt! Stop, I mean."

The ring of choristers in khaki and blue flannel faced with cotton wool looked at their conductor, a sergeant in the Glosters, with intense and painful concentration. They were rehearsing carols in the annexe of a Base hospital on Christmas Eve, and the sergeant was as hard to please as if they were recruits doing their first squad drill. They were a scratch lot, recruited by a well-meaning chaplain to the Forces, from Base "details" and convalescents. Their voices were l.u.s.ty, but their time erratic, and one ardent spirit was a bar ahead and gaining audibly with each lap despite the desperate spurts of the rest.

"Opened out his throttle--'e has," whispered an Army driver professionally to his neighbour; "'e's a fair cop for exceedin' the speed limit."

The sergeant glanced magisterially at the offender, a young Dorset, who a year ago was hedging and ditching in the Vale of Blackmore, but who has lately done enough digging for a whole parish.

"You've lost your connecting files, me lad," he exclaimed reproachfully; "you ain't out on patrol, yer know. 'Shun! Now again! 'Christians'."

Christians, awake! Salute the happy morn, Whereon ...

The familiar melody was shut behind me as I closed the door. Those West-country voices awoke in me haunting memories of my childhood, and, in a flash, I saw once again a ring of ruddy faces on a frosty night, illuminated by the candle in a shepherd's horn lantern, their breath a luminous vapour in the still air, and my mother holding me up at the window of our Wilts.h.i.+re house, as I looked out from the cas.e.m.e.nt of the nursery upon the up-turned faces of the choristers below and wondered mazily whether they had brought Father Christmas with them.

A low cry of pain reached my ears as I opened the door of Surgical Ward A.I. A nurse was removing a field-dressing from a soldier just brought down from the Front. The surgeon stood over him ready to spray the wound with peroxide. "Buck up, old chap," cried the patients in the neighbouring beds who looked on encouragingly at these ministries.

Another moan escaped him as the discoloured bandage, with its faint odour of perchloride, was stripped from the raw and inflamed flesh.

"Next gramophone record, please!" chanted his neighbours. The patient smiled faintly at the exhortation and set his teeth.

"That's better, sonny," whispered the nurse with benign approval.

"It won't hurt you, old chap, I'm only going to drain off the septic matter," interjected the surgeon in holland overalls, with sleeves tucked up to the elbow. "Here, give me that tube." The dresser handed him a nickel reed from the sterilising basin.

With a few light quick movements the wound was sprayed, dressed, cleansed, and anointed, and the surgeon, like the good Samaritan, pa.s.sed on to the next case. Only last night the patient was in the trenches, moaning with pain, as the stretcher-bearers carried him to the aid-post, and from the aid-post to the forward dressing station, whence by an uneasy journey (there were no sumptuous hospital-trains in those days) he had come hither. But what of the others who were hit outside the trenches and who lay even now, this Christmas Eve, in that dreadful No Man's Land swept by the enemy's fire, whither no stretcher-bearer can go--lying among the dead and dying, a field of creeping forms, some quivering in the barbed wire, where dead men hang as on a gibbet, hoping only for a cleanly death from a bullet before their wounds fester and poison the blood in their veins.

Whereon--the Saviour--of mankind--was--born.

The measured cadence fell on my ear as I left the ward and pa.s.sed beyond the annexe. The sergeant had now got his section well in hand. I turned up the long winding road towards my quarters. It was a cold moonlight night, and every twig of broom and beech was sharply defined as in a black-and-white drawing. Overhead each star was hard and bright, as though a lapidary had been at work in the heavens, and never had the Great Bear seemed so brilliant. But none so bright and legible--or so it seemed to me--as Mars in all that starry heraldry.

"Bon soir, monsieur!" It was the voice of the sentry, and came from behind a barricade of hurdles, thatched with straw, on the crest of the road over the downs. His bayonet gleamed like a silver needle in the moonlight, and he was alone in his vigil. No shepherds watched their flocks by night, neither did angels sing peace on earth and goodwill towards men. Only the cold austerity of the stars kept him company.

Perhaps the first Christmas Eve was just such a starry night as this; the same stars may have looked down upon a manger in Bethlehem. But on the brow of the hill was one of those wayside shrines which symbolise the anguish of the Cross, and these very stars may have looked down upon the hill of Calvary.

IV

THE FRONT AGAIN

XXIII

THE COMING OF THE HUN

The _maire_ sat in his parlour at the Hotel de Ville dictating to his secretary. He was a stout little man with a firm mouth, an indomitable chin, and quizzical eyes. His face would at any time have been remarkable; for a French provincial it was notable in being clean-shaven. Most Frenchmen of the middle cla.s.s wear beards of an a.s.syrian luxuriance, which to a casual glance suggest stage properties rather than the work of Nature. The _maire_ was leaning back in his chair, his elbows resting upon its arms and his hands extended in front of him, the thumb and finger-tips of one hand poised to meet those of the other as though he were contemplating the fifth proposition in Euclid. It was a characteristic att.i.tude; an observer would have said it indicated a temperament at once patient and precise. He was dictating a note to the _commissaire de police_, warning the inhabitants to conduct themselves "paisiblement" in the event of a German occupation, an event which was hourly expected. Much might depend upon that proclamation; a word too little or too much and Heaven alone knew what innuendo a German Commandant might discover in it. Perhaps the _maire_ was also not indifferent to the question of style; he prided himself on his French; he had in his youth won a prize at the Lycee for composition, and he contributed occasional papers to the journal of the Societe de l'Histoire de France on the antiquities of his _department_. Most Frenchmen are born purists in style, and the _maire_ lingered over his words.

"Continuez, Henri," he said with a glance at the clerk. "_Le Maire, a.s.siste de son adjoint et de ses conseillers munic.i.p.aux et de delegues de quartier, sera en permanence a l'hotel de Ville pour a.s.surer_--"

There was a kick at the door and a tall loutish man in the uniform of a German officer entered, followed by two grey-coated soldiers. The officer neither bowed nor saluted, but merely glared with an intimidating frown. The _maire's_ clerk sat in an atrophy of fear, unable to move a muscle. The officer advanced to the desk, pulled out his revolver from its leather pouch, and laid it with a lethal gesture on the _maire's_ desk. The _maire_ examined it curiously. "Ah, yes, M.

le Capitaine, thank you; I will examine it in a moment, but I have seen better ones--our new service pattern, for example. Ja! Ich verstehe ganz gut," he continued, answering the officer's reckless French in perfect German. "Consider yourself under arrest," declaimed the officer, with increasing violence. "We are in occupation of your town; you will provide us within the next twenty-four hours with ten thousand kilos of bread, thirty thousand kilos of hay, forty thousand kilos of oats, five thousand bottles of wine, one hundred boxes of cigars." ("Mon Dieu! it is an inventory," said the _maire_ to himself.) "If these are not forthcoming by twelve noon to-morrow you will be shot," added the officer in a sudden inspiration of his own.

The _maire_ was facing the officer, who towered above him. "Ah, yes, Monsieur le Capitaine, you will not take a seat? No? And your requisition--you have your commandant's written order and signature, no doubt?" The officer bl.u.s.tered. "No, no, Monsieur le Capitaine, I am the head of the civil government in this town; I take no orders except from the head of the military authority. You have doubtless forgotten Hague Regulation, Article 52; your Government signed it, you will recollect."

The officer hesitated. The _maire_ looked out on the _place_; it was full of armed men, but he did not flinch. "You see, monsieur," he went on suavely, "there are such things as receipts, and they have to be authenticated." The officer turned his back on him, took out his field note-book, scribbled something on a page, and, having torn it out, handed it to one of his men with a curt instruction.

The _maire_ resumed his dictation to the hypnotised clerk, while the officer sat astride a chair and executed an impatient _pas seul_ with his heels upon the parquet floor. Once or twice he spat demonstratively, but the _maire_ took no notice. In a few minutes the soldier returned with a written order, which the officer threw upon the desk without a word.

The _maire_ scrutinised it carefully. "Ten thousand kilos of bread!

Monsieur, we provide five thousand a day for the refugees, and this will tax us to the uttermost. The bakers of the town are nearly all _sous les drapeaux_. Very well, monsieur," he added in reply to an impatient exclamation from the officer, "we shall do our best. But many a poor soul in this town will go hungry to-night. And the receipts?" "The requisitioning officer will go with you and give receipts," retorted the officer, who had apparently forgotten that he had placed the _maire_ under arrest.

Subdued lights twinkled like glow-worms in the streets as the _maire_ returned across the square to the Hotel de Ville. He threaded his way through groups of infantry, narrowly escaped a collision with three drunken soldiers, who were singing "Die Wacht am Rhein" with laborious unction, skirted the park of ammunition waggons, and reached the main entrance. He had been on his feet for hours visiting the _boulangeries_, the _patisseries_, the hay and corn merchants, persuading, expostulating, beseeching, until at last he had wrung from their exiguous stores the apportionment of the stupendous tribute. It was a heavy task, nor were his importunities made appreciably easier by the receipt-forms tendered, readily enough, by the requisitioning officer who accompanied him, for the inhabitants seemed to view with terror the possession of these German doc.u.ments, suspecting they knew not what. But the task was done, and the _maire_ wearily mounted the stairs.

The officer greeted him curtly. The _maire_ now had leisure to study his appearance more closely. He had high cheek-bones, protruding eyes, and a large underhung mouth which, when he was pleased, looked sensual, and, when he was annoyed, merely cruel. The base of his forehead was square, but it rapidly receded with a convex conformation of head, very closely shaven as though with a currycomb, and his ears stood out almost at right angles to his skull. The ferocity that was his by nature he seemed to have a.s.siduously cultivated by art, and the points of his moustaches, upturned in the shape of a cow's horns, accentuated the truculence of his appearance. In short, he was a typical Prussian officer. In peace he would have been merely comic. In war he was terrible, for there was nothing to restrain him.

Meanwhile the officer called for a corporal's guard to place the _maire_ under arrest. "But you will first sign the following _affiche_--by the General's orders," he exclaimed roughly.

Le Maire informe ses concitoyens que le commandant en chef des troupes allemandes a ordonne que le maire et deux notables soient pris comme otages pour la raison que des civils aient tire sur des patrouilles allemandes. Si un coup de fusil etait tire a nouveau par des civils, les trois otages seraient fusilles et la ville serait incendiee immediatement.

Si des troupes alliees rentraient le maire rappelle a la population que tout civil ne doit pas prendre part a la guerre et que si l'un d'eux venait a y participer le commandant des troupes allemandes ferait fusilier egalement les otages.

"One moment," said the _maire_ as he took up a pen, "'_les civils_'! I ordered the civil population to deposit their arms at the _mairie_ two days ago, and the _commissaire de police_ and the gendarmes have searched every house. We have no armed civilians here."

"Es macht nichts," said the officer; "we shall add '_ou peut-etre des militaires en civil_.'"

The _maire_ shrugged his shoulders at the disingenuous parenthesis. It was, he knew, useless to protest. For all he knew he might be signing his own death-warrant. He studied the style a little more attentively.

"Mon Dieu, what French!" he said to himself; "'etait,' 'seraient,'

'venait'! What moods! What tenses! Monsieur le Capitaine," he continued aloud, "if I had used such French in my exercises at the Lycee my inst.i.tuteur would have said I deserved to be shot. Pray allow me to make it a little more graceful." But the Prussian's ignorance of French syntax was only equalled by his suspicion of it. The _maire's_ irony merely irritated him and his coolness puzzled him. "I give you thirty seconds to sign," he said, as he took out his watch and the inevitable revolver. The _maire_ took up a needle-like pen, dipped it in the ink, and with a sigh wrote in fragile but firm characters "X---- Y----." The officer called a corporal's guard, and the _maire_, who had fasted since noon, was marched out of the room and thrust into a small closet upon the door of which were the letters "_Cabinet_." This, he reflected grimly, was certainly what in military language is called "close confinement." The soldiers accompanied him. There was just room for him to stretch his weary body upon the stone floor; one soldier remained standing over him with fixed bayonet, the others took up their position outside.

Meanwhile a company of Landwehr had bivouacked in the square, four machine-guns had been placed so as to command the four avenues of approach, patrols had been sent out, sentries posted, all lights extinguished, and all doors ordered to be left open by the householders.

Billeting officers had gone from house to house, chalking upon the doors such legends as "_Drei Manner_," "_6 Offiziere--Eingang verboten_," and, on rare occasions "_Gute Leute hier_." The trembling inhabitants had been forced to wait on their uninvited guests as they clamoured noisily for wine and liqueurs. All the civilians of military age, and many beyond it, had been rounded up and taken under guard to the church; their wives and daughters alone remained, and were the subject of menacing pleasantries. So much the _maire_ knew before he had returned from his errand. As he lay in his dark cell he speculated painfully as to what might be happening in the homes of his fellow-townsmen. He sat up once or twice to listen, until the toe of the sentry's boot in his back reminded him of his irregularity. Now and again a woman's cry broke the silence of the night, but otherwise all was still. He composed himself to sleep on the floor, reflecting that he must husband his strength and his nerves for what might lie ahead of him. He was very tired and slept heavily in spite of his cold stone bed. At the hour of one in the morning he was awakened by a kick, and he found himself staring at an electric torch which was being held to his face by a tall figure shrouded in darkness. It was the captain. He sat up and rubbed his eyes.

"'_Fusille_'! Bien! so I am to be shot! and wherefore, Monsieur le Capitaine?"