Leaves from a Field Note-Book Part 17

"Some one has fired upon us," said the officer, "one of your dirty fellows; you must pay for it."

"And the order?" asked the _maire_ sleepily; "you have the Commandant's order?"

"Never mind about the order," said the officer rea.s.suringly, "the order will be forthcoming at eight o'clock. Oh yes, we shall shoot you most authoritatively--never fear."

The officer knew that nothing could be done until eight o'clock, for he dared not wake the Commandant, but he did not see why he should deny himself the pleasure of waking up this pig of a _maire_ to see how he would take it. The _maire_ divined his thoughts, and without a word turned over on his side and pretended to go to sleep again. From under his drooping eyelids he saw the officer gazing at him with a look in which dislike, disappointment, and pleasurable expectation seemed to be struggling for mastery. Then with a click he extinguished his torch and withdrew.

At eight o'clock the _maire_ awoke to learn with mild surprise that he was not to be shot. Beyond that his guard would tell him nothing. It was only afterwards he learnt that one of the drunken revellers had been prowling the streets, and, having given the sentries a bad fright by letting off his rifle at a lamp-post, had expiated his adventure at the hands of a firing party in the cemetery outside the town.

For two days the _maire_ was unmolested. He was allowed to see his _adjoint_,[25] who came to him with a troubled face.

"The babies are crying for milk," he said, "the troops have taken it all. I begged one of the officers to leave a little for the inhabitants, but he said the men did not like their coffee without plenty of hot milk." The _maire_ reflected for a moment, and then dictated an _avis_ to the inhabitants enjoining upon them to be as sparing in their consumption of milk as possible for the sake of the "meres de famille"

and "les pet.i.ts enfants."

"Tell the _commissaire de police_ to have that posted up immediately,"

he added. "We can do no more."

"They have taken the bread out of our mouths," resumed the _adjoint_, "and now they are despoiling us of our goods. They are like a swarm of bailiffs let loose upon our homes. Everywhere they levy a distress upon our chattels. There is an ammunition waggon outside my house; they have put all the furniture of my _salon_ upon it."

"You should make a protest to the Commandant," said the _maire_, but not very hopefully.

"It is no use," replied the _adjoint_ despondingly. "I have. He simply shrugged his shoulders and said, 'C'est la guerre.' It is always so.

They have shot Jules Bonnard."

"Et pourquoi?" asked the _maire_.

"I know not," said the _adjoint_. "They found four market-gardeners returning from the fields last night and shot them too--they made them dig their own graves, and tied their hands behind their backs with their own scarves. I protested to a Staff officer; he said it was 'verboten'

to dig potatoes. I said they did not know; how could they? He said they ought to know. Then he abused me, and said if I made any more complaints he would shoot me too. They have made the _civils_ dig trenches."

"Ah," said the _maire_. He knew it was a flagrant violation of the Hague Regulations, but it was not the t.i.the of mint and c.u.mmin of the law that troubled him. It was the reflection that the _civil_ who is forced to dig trenches is already as good as dead. He knows too much.

"And the women," continued the _adjoint_, in a tone of stupefied horror, "they are crying, many of them, and will not look one in the face. Some of them have black eyes. And the young girls!"

The _maire_ brooded in impotent horror. His meditations were interrupted by the entrance of the captain. "The Commandant wishes to see you _tout de suite_," he exclaimed. "March!" He was conducted by a corporal's guard, preceded by the captain, into the presence of the General, who had taken up his quarters in the princ.i.p.al mansion looking out upon the square. The General was a stout, square-headed man, with grey moustaches and steel-blue eyes, and the _maire_ divined at a glance that here was no swashbuckler, but a man who had himself under control. "I have imposed a fine of 300,000 francs upon your town; you will collect it in twenty-four hours; if it is not forthcoming to the last franc I shall be regretfully compelled to burn this town to the ground."

"And why?" exclaimed the _maire_, whom nothing could now surprise, though much might perplex.

The General seemed unprepared for the question. He paused for a moment and said, "Some one has been giving information to the enemy."

"No!"--he held up his hand, not impolitely but finally, as the _maire_ began to expostulate--"I have spoken."

"But," said the _maire_ desperately, "we shall be ruined. We have not got it. And all our goods have been taken already."

"You have our receipts," said the General. "They are as good as gold.

German credit is very high; the Imperial Government has just floated a loan of several milliards. And you have our stamped _Quittungen_." He became at once voluble and persuasive in his cupidity, and forgot something of his habitual caution. "You surely do not doubt the word of the German Government?" he said. The _maire_ doubted it very much, but he discreetly held his tongue. "And our requisitioning officers have not been n.i.g.g.ardly," continued the General; "they have put a substantial price on the goods we have taken." This was true. It had not escaped the _maire_ that the receipt-forms had been lavish.

"I will do my best," said the _maire_ simply.

He was now released from arrest, and he retired to his house to think out the new problem that had presented itself. The threat to burn down the town might or might not be anything but bluff; he himself doubted whether the German Commandant would burn the roofs over his men's heads, as long as the occupation lasted. The military disadvantages were too obvious, though what the enemy might do when they left the town was another matter. They might shoot him, of course; that was more than probable.

But how to find the money was an anxious problem and urgent. The munic.i.p.al _caisse_ was empty: the managers of the banks had closed their doors and carried their deposits off to Paris before the Germans had entered the town; of the wealthier bourgeoisie some had fled, many were ruined, and the rest were inadequate. The _maire_ pondered long upon these things, leaning back in his chair with knitted brows in that pensive att.i.tude which was characteristic. Suddenly he caught sight of a blue paper with German characters lying upon a walnut table at his elbow. He took it up, scrutinised it, and studied the signature:

Empfangschein.

Werth 500 fr. erhalten.

Herr Hauptmann von Koepenick.

Then he smiled. He got up, put on his overcoat, took up his hat and cane, and went forth into the drizzling rain.

Two hours later he was at the headquarters of the Staff and asked to see the Commandant. He was shown into his presence without delay. "Well?"

said the Commandant. "Monsieur le General, I have collected the fine,"

said the _maire_. The General's face relaxed its habitual sternness; he grew at once pleasant and polite. "Good," he said. The _maire_ opened a fat leather wallet and placed upon the table under the General's predatory nose a large pile of blue doc.u.ments, some (but not all) stamped with the violet stamp of the German A.Q.M.G. "If the _hochgeehrter_ General will count them," said the _maire_, "he will see they come to 325,000 francs. It is rather more than the fine," he explained, "but I have made allowance for the fact that they are not immediately redeemable. They are mostly stamped, and--_they are as good as gold_."

For three minutes there was absolute silence in the room. The gilt clock in its gla.s.s sepulchre on the mantelpiece ticked off the seconds as loudly as a cricket on the hearth in the stillness of the night. The _maire_ speculated with more curiosity than fear as to how many more of these seconds he had to live. Never had the intervals seemed so long nor their registration so insistent. The ashes fell with a soft susurrus in the grate. The Commandant looked at the _maire_; the _maire_ looked at the Commandant. Then the Commandant smiled. It was an inscrutable smile; a smile in which the eyes partic.i.p.ated not at all. There was merely a muscular relaxation of the lips disclosing the teeth; to the _maire_ there seemed something almost canine in it. At last the General spoke.

"Gut!" he said gutturally; "you may go."

"You astonish me," I said to the _maire_, as he concluded his narrative.

We were sitting in his parlour, smoking a cigar together one day in February in a town not a thousand miles from the German lines. "You know, Monsieur le Maire, they have shot many a munic.i.p.al magistrate for less. I wonder they didn't make up their minds to shoot you." The _maire_ smiled. "They did," he said quietly. He carefully nicked the ash off his cigar, as he laid it down upon his desk, and opened the drawer of his escritoire. He took out a piece of paper and handed it to me. It was an order in German to shoot the _maire_ on the evacuation of the town.

"You see, monsieur," he exclaimed, "your brave soldiers were a little too quick for them. You made a surprise attack in force early one morning and drove the enemy out. So surprising was it that the Staff officers billeted in my house left a box half full of cigars on my sideboard! You are smoking one of them now--a very good cigar, is it not?" It was. "And they left a good many official papers behind--what you call 'chits,' is it not?--and this one among them. Please mind your cigar-ash, monsieur! You see I rather value my own death-warrant."

Moved by an irresistible impulse I rose from my chair and held out my hand. The _maire_ took it in mild surprise. "Monsieur," I said frankly, if crudely, "you are a brave man. And you have endured much."

"Yes, monsieur," said the _maire_ gravely, as he glanced at a proclamation on the wall which he has added to his private collection of antiquities, "that is true. I have often been _tres fache_ to think that I who won the Michelet prize at the Lycee should have put my name to that thing over there."[26]

FOOTNOTES:

[25] Deputy.

[26] This narrative follows with some fidelity the course of events as related to the writer by the _maire_ of the town in question. But for the most obvious of reasons the writer has deemed it his duty to suppress names, disguise events, and give the narrative something of the invest.i.ture of fiction. It is, however, true "in substance and in fact."--J.H.M.

XXIV

THE HILL

It was one of those perfect spring days when the whole earth seems to bare her bosom to the caresses of the sun. The sky was without a cloud and in the vault overhead, blue as a piece of Delft, a lark was ascending in transports of exultant song. The hill on which we stood was covered with young birch saplings bursting into leaf, and the sky itself was not more blue than the wild hyacinths at our feet. Here and there in the undergrowth gleamed the pallid anemone. A copper wire ran from pole to pole down the slope of the hill and glittered in the sun like a thread of gold. A little to our right two circular mirrors, glancing obliquely at each other, stood on a tripod, and a graduated sequence of flashes came and went, under the hands of the signallers, with the velocity of light itself. A few yards behind us on the crest of the hill stood a windmill, its great sails motionless as though it were a brig becalmed and waiting for a wind, and astride one arm, like a sailor on a yard, a carpenter was busy, with his mouth full of nails. The tapping of his hammer and the song of the lark were the only sounds that broke the warm stillness of the April day. A great plain stretched away at our feet, and in the fields below women were stooping forward over their hoes.

The white towers of Ypres gleamed ghostlike in the distant haze. The city had the wistful fragility of some beautiful mirage, and looking at it across the pleasant landscape I thought of the Pilgrim's vision of the Golden City s.h.i.+ning in the sun beyond the Land of Beulah. Two or three miles away on our right the ground rose gently to a range of low wooded hills, and on their bare green slopes brown furrows showed up like a cicatrice. They were the German trenches. On the crest of the ridge a white house peeped out between the trees. That house seemed an object of peculiar interest to the battery-major at my side. He was stooping behind the "Director" with his eye to the sights as though he was focussing the distant object for a photograph. He fixed the outer clamp, unscrewed the inner clamp, and having got his sights on the house, he reversed the process and swung round the sights to bear on a little copse to our left. "One hundred and five," he said meditatively as he found the angle. The N.C.O. took up the range-finder and measured the distances first to the house, then to the copse. The major took up an adjustable triangle, and with a movement of thumb and forefinger converted it into the figure of an irregular "X." As he read off the battery angle on the "Plotter" the N.C.O. communicated it and the elevation to the telephone operator, who in turn communicated it to the battery in the copse. "Battery angle seventy. Range four thousand."

Gunners are a laconic people, and their language is as economical of words as a proposition in Euclid; their sentences resemble those Oriental languages in which the verb is regarded as a superfluous impertinence. Language is to them a visual and symbolical thing in which angles and distances are predicated of churches, trees, and four-storied houses. Now in the copse on our left six field-guns were cunningly concealed, and even as the telephone operator spoke the dial-sights of those six guns were being screwed round and the elevating gear adjusted till they and the range-drum recorded the results of the major's meditations upon the hill. Then the guns in the copse spoke, and the air was sibilant with their speech. A little cloud no bigger than a man's hand arose above the roof of the white house on the ridge. Our battery had found its mark.

Somewhere behind that ridge were the enemy's batteries and they were yet to find. But even as we searched the landscape with our field-gla.s.ses an aeroplane rose from behind our own position and made for the distant ridge, its diaphanous wings displaying red, white, and blue concentric circles to our gla.s.ses like the scales of some huge magpie-moth, while a long streamer of petrol smoke made faint pencillings in the sky behind it. As it hovered above the ridge seven or eight little white clouds like b.a.l.l.s of feathers suddenly appeared from nowhere just below it. They were German shrapnel. But the aeroplane pa.s.sed imperturbably on, leaving the little feathers to float in the sky until in time they faded away and disappeared. In no long time the aeroplane was retracing its flight, and certain little coloured discs were speaking luminously to the battery, telling it of what the observer had seen beyond the ridge. Between the aeroplane, the observer, the telephone, and the guns, there seemed to be some mysterious freemasonry.