I found the Baas standing before his door, his face wrinkled with pleasure, his cap in his hand. Behind him his wife peered out at us, wiping her fat hands on her skirts, and two half-grown children stared from the nearest window. The Baas and his wife were the parents of sixteen children!
“Good day, mynheer!” every one shouted in chorus.
“Good day, madame; good day, Baas.” (I used the Flemish title for overseer—the word from which has come our much-abused word “Boss.”) “I’m a deserter this morning: the rest of the Baron’s party sleeps.”
“Ah, so,” laughed the wife. “Mynheer is like the German soldiers who desert by dozens nowadays. And would your Honour hide in the forest like them—like the Germans?”
“To be sure. The Baas is to show me the deepest coverts, where mynheer the Baron will never find me more.”
We laughed and passed on. A girl with a neckyoke and full milk pails came by from the dairy; nodding faces appeared at the windows of the farm buildings as we walked toward the woods; bees sped up the air from conical straw hives close to our path; and in a few minutes we were threading our way through a nursery of young pines, tilled like corn rows in Kansas, and all of equal age.
“Monsieur, there is a soul in trees,” said the Baas, affectionately patting an ancient linden on the border of the old forest. The Baas was a man from the Province of Liége, and he preferred to speak French with me rather than Flemish. He had, too, a Walloon lightness of wit which went sometimes incongruously with his heavy frame, as when he said to me once when we were debating the joys of youth versus age, “To be old has its advantages, monsieur. One can then be virtuous, and it is not hard!”
“There is a soul in trees,” he repeated. “All together the trees have a soul. A forest is one spirit. These trees are old men and old women, very patient and kindly and sluggish of blood. They nod their heads in the wind like peasants over a stove. And they talk. Sometimes I think that I can understand their talk—very wise and patient and slow. Men hurry apart, monsieur, but the trees remain together like old married people and watch their children grow up around them.
“Here”—we had turned down a path and were in the fringes of another forest of small pines—“here the Germans have taken trees for their fortifications, slashed and cut, and those trees that are left are like wounded soldiers: they have arms too long or too short, heads smashed, feet uprooted, and yet they wish to live, because they are one spirit.”