FOOTNOTE:
[24] On leave in England.
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 lusty, 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 Wiltshire house, as I looked out from the casement 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, passed 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 passed 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 Hôtel 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 class wear beards of an Assyrian 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 attitude; 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 Lycée for composition, and he contributed occasional papers to the journal of the Société 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, assisté de son adjoint et de ses conseillers municipaux et de délégués de quartier, sera en permanence à l'hôtel de Ville pour assurer—" 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 blustered. "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 Hôtel 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 pâtisseries, 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 documents, 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 assiduously 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 ordonné que le maire et deux notables soient pris comme otages pour la raison que des civils aient tiré sur des patrouilles allemandes. Si un coup de fusil était tiré à nouveau par des civils, les trois otages seraient fusillés et la ville serait incendiée immédiatement.
Si des troupes alliées rentraient le maire rappelle à la population que tout civil ne doit pas prendre part à la guerre et que si l'un d'eux venait à y participer le commandant des troupes allemandes ferait fusilier également 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-être 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; "'était,' 'seraient,' 'venait'! What moods! What tenses! Monsieur le Capitaine," he continued aloud, "if I had used such French in my exercises at the Lycée my instituteur 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 Männer," "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.
"'Fusillé'! Bien! so I am to be shot! and wherefore, Monsieur le Capitaine?"
"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 reassuringly, "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 "mères de famille" and "les petits 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 tithe of mint and cummin 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 principal 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 niggardly," 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 municipal 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 attitude 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 Général, 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 documents, 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 glass 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 participated 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 municipal 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 très fâché to think that I who won the Michelet prize at the Lycée should have put my name to that thing over there."[26]