Sunday.—I get up early and go to Mass with Mlle Irma, having first obtained permission from the soldiers. We walk along the sides of the road, under the shadow of the trees, a wise precaution these days. Osterre chapel is packed to the doors. I have a curious feeling that those paint and plaster saints high up on their little pedestals are alive. St. Antoine’s nose looks longer and more pinched than ever, and he is gazing down as though ashamed to be of so little use to us in our hour of need. St. Christopher is mild, so is St. Joseph; the Madonna seems to smile at us with a modest kind of shrinking sympathy across pots of flaming geraniums.
Osterre chapel is packed. The sheep-and-goats division of the sexes appears to obtain in the Ardennes. The women’s side is over-crowded. We could hang out “standing room only” and be merely truthful. The men’s scarcely less so. All the women are as scrupulously neat in their Sunday silk blouses and flower-trimmed hats as though they had never heard of such a thing as war. One or two of the black-bonneted old peasants are making their rosaries damp with tears. I can see the beads, so brightly reflected against the polished wooden seats, shaking a little. At the end of the service, a box like a newly opened sardine tin, at the end of a long pole, is thrust before me by a tiny acolyte. Then we rise and go home comforted. We have shifted the burden of our troubles to other—wiser shoulders.
COALS OF FIRE
The Tax-collector is resting here for a few hours on his way home. He has brought with him his son, who looks dead tired with his twenty-mile walk. The lad’s luggage has all been left behind. But Aywaille was too near Liège to be safe. The Tax-collector will be glad to reach his journey’s end.
“All day long yesterday I watched the German troops march through the town,” he tells me. “It was pitiable to see those columns of splendidly equipped men, simply dropping from fatigue. Some could scarcely put one foot before the other.”
“They are our enemies.”
“My sister stood in the street for hours, refilling buckets of water from which the exhausted men swilled their necks and arms. She cut them tartine after tartine until all our bread was gone and she could hardly stand herself.”
“They are probably going down to shoot the peasants’ fathers, sons and brothers in Liège,” I remark coldly.
“From my sister’s point of view, they are suffering and they are men. That is enough....”
Compassion is evidently a Belgian vice!