XLIX
The sight of the battle-field blotted out that brutal picture—made him clench his hands until the nails dug deep into the palms, shut his eyes and set his teeth, fighting down the deadly qualm.... It was worse than the Red Ravine a hundred times magnified. It was awful—inconceivably awful.... He found himself muttering:
"I wonder how God can bear to look down on it all!"
With difficulty he controlled his ardent desire to remove himself as far as possible from this attained vision of his great desire, by using the legs that had brought him to this hideous scene:
"If some of the fellows who gas about wanting to see War—as I gassed—not twenty-four hours ago—could be set down where I stand now, they'd find out, as I have found—that they didn't know what they were talking about.... Oh, God! ... suppose one of them saw that German Hussar without a head, sitting upright on a dead horse, curiously caparisoned with its own intestines, would he go sheer crazy or tumble down in a swoon?"
He who saw the thing kept on his legs and did not lose his mental equilibrium. We are so weak to our own knowledge that it is always a marvel when we find ourselves strong. He found the nausea going and the dimness clearing from his vision. He could even breathe the dreadful air, and, standing on the limber of a broken gun-carriage, stare out over the rigid billows of that silent sea of death and tell himself that a not inapt comparison would have been Deal Beach, with ridges of dead men and beasts instead of ridges of pebbles, and flocks of carrion crows instead of gulls—flapping heavily from one place to settle down in another and renew their dreadful banquet, between hoarse croakings that sounded like "More, more, more!"
Starlings in myriads were there, reveling in blood and fat like the titmice and robins, who manifested predilections calculated to divest P. C. Breagh of the last remnant of belief in the tender fable of the Babes in the Wood. Butterflies, Royal Peacock, and Purple Emperor greedily sipped blood in preference to honey-dew. Hares, rendered tame by bewilderment and terror, couched among the corpses of men, their natural enemies.
Toward the northeast rose a knoll, about which the battle seemed to have raged desperately. For it was high-heaped with bodies of the green-jacketed Chasseurs on the bony brown horses, and ringed about with Red Uhlans and Dragoons in blue coats. The black and white lance-pennons were whipping and flickering in the morning breeze that brought with it the appalling savor of death....
One had come to work, not to make notes. P. C. Breagh got down from the limber into the trough between two towering wave-crests and looked about him helplessly, not knowing where to begin. A bearer-party of the Prussian Ambulance Service pushed by him. They were hard-bitten, brown-faced men, who joked and laughed freely. A scared band of peasants followed, carrying auxiliary stretchers made of hurdles and sacks and poles.
Upon the heels of these tottered a single figure. Was it a young girl, or an old woman, so slight and frail, so bowed and blackly clad? A black silk veil covered the bent face, the small white hands were knitted across the narrow bosom. A white linen armlet with the badge of the Red Cross showed vividly against the sleeve of her plain black merino dress. The little, daintily shod feet that showed under the dabbled hem of the skirt had red mire upon them. Through the veil her great eyes gleamed, haggardly moving from side to side, restlessly seeking....
P. C. Breagh was becoming familiar with that look of strained apprehension and bleak anxiety, stamped upon the sharpened faces of those crowds of black-clad men and women who hastened from all quarters to seek amid the brute and human waste and wreckage of battle, their own wounded or dead.
She moved with the irregular gait of one walking in a fog, looking from side to side, questing amid blue and livid or waxen faces for the face, it was quite plain. Her look passed over bodies that did not wear the dark-green, silver-laced dolman, and silver-striped red pantaloons of the mounted Chasseurs of the Guard Imperial. She ignored faces that were young, and unadorned with the crisp mustache and the Imperial tuft.
For whom did she seek? A husband, uncle, father? ... What lay in her path? Something that, did the little foot strike it unwarily, might bring to an end that anguished search.... The impact seemed so imminent that his voice died in his throat when he strove to call to her. He got out in a gasping croak:
"Stop! ... Look! ... Right in your path there! ... For God's sake, don't touch it—it's a live shell!" ...
She swerved blindly aside in obedience to the warning, though he who uttered it had spoken in his own tongue. The edge of her skirt brushed the unexploded shrapnel, a potentiality fraught with hideous death. But she struck her knee against the wheel of the broken limber—would have fallen but for P. C. Breagh. Even as the slight figure stumbled against him, he knew the veil screened the face of Juliette.
"Mademoiselle de Bayard.... Madame..."
"Ah, it is you—it is you!" she said gaspingly.
And she would have dropped at his feet had he not thrust out strong hands and caught hers that were still knitted over her breast.
They were so cold, so cold and tiny. They stirred in his grasp like little half-frozen birds. She freed one, and put aside the heavy veil, and showed him what havoc Grief can make in loveliness.... She said—in the toneless wraith of the crystal voice he remembered:
"When you spoke to me in English, I knew Our Lord had not forgotten me. Ah, Monsieur Breagh, for the love you bear your sister!—for the love of charity—do not desert me! Me, I am in the greatest extremity, or I would not venture to appeal to you now. In the midst of these appalling cruelties and terrors I seek the body of one who is all the world to me.... For that I may find him living I do not dare to hope..."
P. C. Breagh choked out, crimsoning and stammering:
"Not your husband? ... You don't mean your husband...?"
She said, with a wonderful, pure dignity:
"Not my husband. My father, sir. It is since a week that I returned from Belgium upon receiving news of his captivity in the hands of the Prussians. The intelligence was false—I afterward learned. How—I cannot now tell you. At this moment, and in the presence of all these poor corpses, of odor so terrible, of appearance so frightful, I can remember nothing very well. But this—that I have come from Rethel since yesterday, and that I have come altogether alone."
"Alone! ... without a guide, or protector of any kind? ... Without papers?..." His face expressed the blankest surprise.
"A passport was obtained for me," she told him, "by whom I will not say now, so that from the Belgian frontier I might reach Rethel. When I quitted Rethel, I was given a military permit by the aid of which I returned to Verdun. From Verdun, in a train full of French wounded—in a fiacre part of the way—in a peasant's cart the remaining distance—I traveled: hoping to reach the Camp of the Imperial Guard Cavalry at Châtel St. Germain. But at Plappeville they detained me. A great battle was raging.... What thunder of guns, what fire and smoke, what terrible confusion, devastation, wounds, and death did I not behold!..."
She unknitted one of the little rigid hands that he had let go, felt for her handkerchief, and wiped away the cold drops of anguish that stood upon her blue-veined temples and about her colorless lips. And P. C. Breagh could only look at her in an agony of pity, and wonder at the courage that bore the frail creature up.
"Last night the frightful explosions of cannon ceased A poor peasant woman had afforded me shelter in her cottage, and shared with me the milk of her goat and her last loaf of bread. News came before day, brought by a wounded soldier, whose comrades had been killed, that the battle had been won by the Army of France, but that M. de Bazaine had withdrawn our forces for rest and shelter to the Citadel of Metz. I asked this poor soldier for intelligence of my father's regiment, the 777th Mounted Chasseurs of the Guard. The reply was: 'Three regiments of Mounted Chasseurs lie dead on the field of honor. You will find them south of Flavigny, between the Bois de Vionville and the Bois de Gaumont.' I cried out then, for the words had pierced me like sharp iron. I would have run out of the house to find my father, like a creature distracted, but that an ambulance of the Red Cross, accompanied by two English Protestant Sisters, passed through the village on the way to this terrible place. They brought me with them—'You cannot seek among the dead,' they told me, 'without the brassard of the Rouge Croix.' This they put upon me, and then they bring me with them. Now I know not where they are, but I have found you. Help me, monsieur—and I will pray for you until I die!"
She gave him one wild, supplicating look, put her little frozen hands together—would have knelt down on the bloody grass to plead with him the better, if he had seemed to delay. But he caught fire at her flaming eagerness, and snatched at the wallet of Red Cross necessaries he had unslung when he had climbed upon the broken limber to gaze over that sea of Death that spread to the horizon, crying:
"Of course I'll help you look for your father! ... But how to search for him—and where? ... Tell me ... the regiment and the color of the uniform?"
Shuddering, she pointed to the green, silver-braided dolman clothing of one of the rigid figures near them. He noted the red and green plume of the sealskin talpack, cut through, perhaps, by a stroke of the heavy saber yet gripped in the stiff right hand of a Prussian Dragoon. He muttered, even while mentally registering other details of the Chasseur's uniform—noting the crest embroidered on the green schabraque of the brown charger whose inert weight rested on its dead rider's thigh:
"777th Chasseurs ... I've heard German officers telling each other that they fought like devils yesterday.... Half a dozen regiments might have been cut up here! And we have to find one man somewhere in a square mile of piled-up bodies.... If one only had a bloodhound and one of De Bayard's gloves!..."
Love has a scent as keen as the great dun hound of the hanging dewlap. The issue of the search was to prove this. For an hour, as it seemed, they traversed narrow lanes that wound between walls of dead men. Then the ground rose to a knoll, topped with three scorched oak-trees that had been stripped of their leaves and lopped of their branches by the blizzard of metal and fire, still burning, the air expanding in their sap-channels, exploded with the detonation of musketry. Charred cinders dropped from them; they gave forth clouds of acrid-smelling whitish smoke.
About and upon this knoll of the three oak-trees the battle of the previous day had raged—the billows of the sea of Death had beaten fiercely. The lane became a crevasse, the floor of which sloped sharply—from the sides of which projected rigid limbs, human and equine. But the slender figure in black moved between them—stooped to pass under them, seldom faltering. When the young man who followed begged her to turn back, she shook her head without answering, and kept on. The silent gesture meant:
"Not yet! A little farther still!... Be patient with me, I beg of you!"
For it seemed to Juliette's tense nerves and overstrained brain as though those white or blue, or darkly-discolored faces, hideously distorted or wearing an unnatural expression of calm, were all staring with their glassy eyes in one direction, pointed out by myriads of stiffened arms.
She said, tottering with sheer weakness, and turning upon her companion colorless, black-ringed eyes set in a face most strangely peaked and shrunken:
"Here where these trees are I will turn, because my strength is failing.... See, see! O Mother of God!... O Jesu!... HE IS THERE!"
The scream that tore through her slender throat turned P. C. Breagh's blood to snow-water. He could only gasp, clutching at the folds of her black school-dress with a vague idea of holding her back from some sight of intolerable horror:
"Wait! For God's sake! Wait!... Let me!..."
She shook off his unconsciously violent grasp as though it had been a baby's. She was gone, wading through a languid runnel of fast-congealing blood, stepping over a broken lance-shaft and a horse's rigid hind-limb. When P. C. Breagh reached her, she was crouching on a patch of hoof-torn earth through which the limestone core of the knoll showed in places, hugging to her bosom a stiff blue hand.
It wore a familiar ring, that brave right hand, from whose grip the long cavalry sword had dropped when the Uhlan gave the death-thrust. But I think, even without the crested sard, his daughter would have known....
Madness was near enough in that fell hour to brush the bowed veiled head of Juliette with her tattered mantle of imaginary enemies. She saw nothing and knew nothing but that her father was there. She kissed the stiff blue hand, and sang to it and cuddled it. Ophelia was not more tragic than this Convent school-girl, squatting in the chilly shadow of a heap of dead horsemen, lavishing futile, foolish tendernesses on that piece of insensible clay:
"My father, now that I have found thee, we must never be parted again—never! Indeed, I have tried to obey thee—but I could not help coming back because I love thee so!... Thou hast been wounded, but I will nurse thee and cure thee. When thou art well again we will find a quiet home together, where my mother shall never come. For she is not good as my grandmother was, and as thou art, my own father!... I have fear of her, now that I have seen and known!..."
She broke off and listened, as though an answer had come from under the blood-stained Imperial eagle and the corpses that hid De Bayard from her view. One of them was the body of the young subaltern who had borne the standard. Over him sprawled the colossal form of a German officer of Dragoons. He was not dead, for he moved, and blood was yet trickling from a sword-cut that had bitten deep into his shoulder through the cuirass, and a deep gash in the close-cropped scalp of his unhelmeted head.
"Help! Some drink! Donner! how my head hurts!" he groaned faintly.
P. C. Breagh, judging it a case for practical Samaritanism, got to him by skirting the heap of dead and scaling it from the opposite side. Reaching the summit, he dosed the Dragoon with cognac, and was about to apply a first-aid bandage to the damaged shoulder, when the red-banded forage-caps and bearded faces of a burial-party of Prussian Guard infantry strung through the narrow alley below the level of his operations, and an unforgotten voice said in rough Teutonic gutturals:
"Hereabouts or near. Begin this—widening the way until carts can get through to be loaded.... Kreuzdonnerwetter! is that a dog up there?"
Another voice answered:
"No, Herr Sergeant. It is either a nun or a woman!"
The Sergeant thundered:
"You silly sheepshead! Aren't nuns women? But you verdammte Catholics think such wenches are angels out of the sky. Turn her out of that—nun or woman!"
With a savage rush of scalding blood to his sun-bronzed cheeks and temples, P. C. Breagh realized that they meant Juliette. He thrust his head forward, peering down from his eyrie. The crouching little shape in black looked no bigger than a big dog. Near her stood a soldier in the white-faced dark blue uniform of the Guard Infantry. It was the spectacled ex-chemist Kunz, who had nodded him civil farewell. Staring up from below was the copper-colored countenance of the too-zealous Sergeant Schmidt, not rendered more amiable by mud-splashes and powder grime, in combination with a stitched-up scar across the bridge of the nose, and a flamboyant overgrowth of beard. He bellowed to the ex-chemist:
"Speak to her! Ask what is her business."
The spectacled Kunz stooped over the little bowed head, and seemed to put a question. She lifted her drained white face, shuddered, then resumed her previous attitude. Interrogated from below, Private Kunz responded:
"She is deaf, or mad. She only shakes and stares at one!"
The Sergeant bellowed:
"Shout in her ear, fool! You are not courting your sweetheart! Tell her to get up and move out of this!"
Thus urged, the ex-chemist approached his lips to the little ear shaded by the black silken tresses, and bawled the order of his superior. She gave no sign of having heard. Copper-red with indignation, the Sergeant commanded:
"Turn her out, then! Promptly up with the baggage!"
Kunz, thus adjured, gripped the slight arm, not brutally. At the touch, Juliette gave a faint cry, and crouched lower, hiding her face upon the rigid hand she held. And P. C. Breagh saw red, abandoned his groaning cavalryman and leaped for it, slithering down from the summit of his dreadful eyrie with a roll of four-inch bandaging trailing in his wake. Casting caution to the winds, he shouted savagely to the ex-chemist:
"Let the lady go! Take your hand off! Damn you!—do you hear?"
The words, being English, were not comprehended by the Sergeant. For an instant he stared open-mouthed at the unexpected apparition. The next he had bawled out an order to his men, and P. C. Breagh found himself looking down the long brown barrels of a couple of Prussian "needlers," accurately covering the exact area of waistcoat behind which his heart hammered and bumped. There was a creaking of leather then—and with the jingle of steel on steel, the snort of a horse reluctant to be ridden into an alley without turning-space. Over the heads of the Sergeant and his party rose the pricked ears, sagacious eyes, and broad frontlet of a great, gaunt brown mare, ridden by a gigantic field officer, wearing the flat white, yellow-banded forage cap, black pewter-buttoned frock, white cords, and immense spurred jack-boots of the Coburg regiment of White Cuirassiers.
"Whom have we English here? Who called out 'Take your hands off!'"
From under the peak of the white forage-cap the rider's heavy domineering stare took in the huddled feminine figure, the disheveled young man menaced by the Service rifles, and the truculent attitude of Sergeant Schmidt. He lifted a finger, and the "needlers" became vertical. He beckoned with the authoritative digit, and P. C. Breagh drew near. And the sickening horrors of the battlefield faded suddenly from about the Englishman.... He was back in the tobacco-scented study of a house in the Wilhelmstrasse, Berlin. And the resonant tones of the man who stood for Prussia in the mind's eye of the world were saying, in Bismarck's well-phrased English:
"Even though you belong to a neutral nation, you should not presume upon the fact too rashly. Had I not been within earshot just now, you would have paid with your life for your interference. German military authority is supreme, and in the execution of its duty not to be turned aside."
P. C. Breagh retorted, tingling to the very finger-tips:
"Your Excellency, I interfered to save this lady from ill-usage."
"She is a Frenchwoman? ... Explain to her," said the resonant voice coldly and brutally, "that even to reach the side of a fallen lover, too much may be risked and lost!"
P. C. Breagh said, meeting the imperious stare with yellow-gray eyes that blazed tigerishly:
"Excellency, the dead man is her father, Colonel de Bayard, 777th Mounted Chasseurs of the Imperial Guard."
"Stand back," said the domineering voice, "and I will speak to her!"
At a touch of the spur the great brown mare moved forward, breasting a lance-shaft that barred the narrow alley, terribly squeezing the Sergeant and his men.
"Mademoiselle de Bayard!" said the authoritative voice.
"Excellency, she does not hear you! The shock has been too terrible," Carolan was beginning. He was brusquely interrupted with:
"People usually listen when I speak to them." And the curt command was issued—in French, suave and polished:
"Be good enough, Mademoiselle de Bayard, to stand up and listen to me!"
The big brown mare snorted angrily and fidgeted. He turned her head with an iron hand on the curb-bit, looking steadily at the other female thing.
"Mademoiselle de Bayard, do you hear?"
This time she lifted her sunken head, and turned her small pinched face his way. In the haggard young mask of frozen anguish two wild eyes glittered, tearless and stony-hard. Then slowly, as though his powerful will impelled her, she rose to her knees, and stood upon her feet before him. He said, in cool, incisive accents:
"Young lady, your father was a gallant soldier. I myself had the privilege of seeing how he died. I wish such a man had served a better master!..."
She answered, her white lips barely moving as they framed the sentence:
"He served the Master of Kings and Emperors, before Whom he stands now!"
His somber eyes lightened suddenly as though in irritation. He said in tones that had the clang of overbearing authority:
"I cannot enter now into a theological discussion. The battle-field is no place for debate, or for unprotected women and young girls.... In your own best interests I counsel you to return home." He added—and there was no flicker of recognition in the passing glance vouchsafed to P. C. Breagh: "Alone, if you prefer—or under the escort of this young Englishman.... I will promise you that your father's body shall be treated with respect!" His heavy eyes fell on the stiffened face of the Sergeant, standing rigidly in the attitude of salute. "Where is the officer in charge of this burial-party?" he added, grimly enough.
"Here, Excellency!" came from behind him. He glanced over his shoulder and said to the flurried under-lieutenant who had hurried up and was standing in the alleyway:
"A separate grave, distinguished by some mark that is recognizable by the daughter." He looked back at the daughter, saying curtly: "Your veil!"
She removed it in silence, and handed it to the ex-chemist, who received the frail fluttering cobweb between his finger and thumb. Then the brown mare, in obedience to the iron hand upon the bridle, backed out of the alley of silent witnesses, baring her long, vicious-looking yellow teeth and showing the whites of her savage eyes resentfully. From the florid bull-dog face of her rider, barred with the heavy mustache of iron gray, all memory of the little drama just enacted had been effaced, as the outlines of a sketch in charcoal are wiped from wood or stone.
But as the alley widened and his great beast surged round, switching her tail, putting back her ears and lashing out with her heels so as to nearly brain the officer, P. C. Breagh thought he caught the words:
"Separate grave ... marked to find easily. All respect ... answer to me!"
More he might have heard, but for Juliette's sobbing. For God had remembered her, and sent her tears at last.
She had suddenly seen, lying at her feet, a frayed and crumpled envelope bearing the Belgian postmark, and addressed in her own handwriting to M. le Colonel H. A. A. de Bayard, Headquarters of the 777th Mounted Chasseurs of the Guard Imperial with the Army of France, at Metz. And the intuition of love told her that the dead man must have carried this, the last message received from his daughter, hidden in his bosom; and have drawn it forth and kissed it—as in very truth we know he had—shortly before he died.
"See, see, my friend! Behold my own letter. His sacred blood has stained it.... His lips perhaps have pressed it!—it well may be that tears of his have fallen here also! ... Never shall it leave me until my hand is cold as this is! Adieu, dear hand!" She knelt down to fondle it, had to be raised almost by force—would have returned for a last caress—a final prayer, but that P. C. Breagh, rendered desperate by the evident impatience of the officer and the scowling looks of the Sergeant and his merry men, lifted her bodily in his arms and carried her away.
"I pray you put me down! ... Me, I am not an infant!" she protested. "See you well, Monsieur Breagh, I do not think it convenable that a gentleman should carry a lady so!..."
Then her strength ebbed from her and she became in truth, an infant. As her frail body yielded to his clasp, as her head sank down upon his shoulder, she sighed, a long, quivering sigh.
What of the youth who waded through the frozen sea of Death, bearing in his arms his worshiped lady? He was footsore and aching in every bone and muscle from long marches and desperate exertion. His heart pounded so beneath her cheek that it seemed to him she must hear it and be frightened, or that he must suffocate and die outright. Terror and rapture, exquisite pain and exquisite pleasure, mingled in the draught now held to his lips by Fate, Life's cup-bearer. And as he drank, with what strange birth-pangs, his budding manhood burgeoned into flower. He might look back upon his boyhood with regret, contempt, or tenderness.... He would never be a boy again.