The crime at Vanderlynden's

‘Oh, my, I don’t want to die,
I want to go home!’
Song of Kitchener’s Army.
THE SPANISH FARM was awarded the Hawthornden Prize for 1924
THE CRIME AT VANDERLYNDEN’S
By R. H. MOTTRAM Author of THE SPANISH FARM and SIXTY-FOUR, NINETY-FOUR!
LONDON CHATTO AND WINDUS 1926
Printed in Great Britain All rights reserved
THE CRIME AT VANDERLYNDEN’S
HIGH up in the pale Flemish sky aeroplanes were wheeling and darting like bright-coloured insects, catching from one moment to another the glint of sun on metallic body or translucent wing. To any pilot or observer who had opportunity or gift for mere speculation, the sight that lay spread out below might have appeared wonderful. From far away on the seaboard with its coming and going of ships, there led rail, road, and wire, and by these three came material, human material, and human thought, up to that point just behind the battle-line where in dumps, camps (dumps of men) and Head-quarters (dumps of brains) they eddied a little, before streaming forward again, more slowly and covertly, by night, or below ground, up to the battle itself. There they were lost in that gap in life—that barren lane where the Irresistible Force dashing against the Immovable Post ground such a fine powder, that of material, very little, of men, very few, and of thought, nothing came splashing back.
But pilots and observers were too busy, adding to the Black Carnival, or saving their own skins from those puffs of Death that kept following them up and down the sky, to take any such a remote view; and even had they been interested in it, they could not have lifted the roof off the Mairie of the village—almost town—of Haagedoorne, and have seen, sitting in the Mayor’s parlour, a man of middle size and middle class, a phenomenon in that place, that had been shocked in its village dignity so many times in those few months. For first it had been turned from one of those haunts of Peace, of small slow-moving officialdom, into the “Q.” office of Divisional Head-quarters. It had become inhabited by two or three English Staff Officers, their maps and papers, their orderlies and clerks, policemen and servants; and now, last of all, there was added to them this quiet, absorbed young man—whose face and hair, figure and clothes had all those half-tones of moderate appropriateness of men who work indoors and do not expect too much. A young man who had neither red tabs nor long boots about him—and who seemed to have so much to do.