Those Times and These

by Irvin S. Cobb

He shook his head until it seemed he would shake it off his shoulders.

“Germans, then? From that way the Germans are coming, eh?”

Again he nodded, making queer movements with his hands, the meaning of which they could not interpret. Indeed, none there waited to try. With one accord they started for the deepest and securest of their burrows—the one beneath the battered-down sugar-beet factory. Its fallen walls and its shattered roof made a lid, tons heavy and yards thick, above the cellar of it. In times of fighting it had been their safest refuge. So once more they ran to hide themselves there. The ragged children scurried on ahead like a flight of autumn leaves. The very old men and the women followed after the children; and behind all the rest, like a rearguard, went the cripple and the old woman, steering the blind man between them.

At the gullet of a little tunnel-like opening leading down to the deep basement below, these three halted a brief moment; and the palsied man and the woman, looking backward, were in time to see a skirmisher in the uniform of a French foot soldier cross a narrow vista in the ruins, perhaps a hundred yards away, and vanish behind a culm of broken masonry. Seen at that distance, he seemed short, squatty—almost gnomish. Back in the rear of him somewhere a bugle sounded a halting, uncertain blast, which trailed off suddenly to nothing, as though the bugler might be out of breath; and then—pow, pow, pow!—the first shots sounded. High overhead a misdirected bullet whistled with a droning, querulous note. The three tarried no longer, but slid down into the mouth of the tunnel.

Inside the cellar the women and children already were stretched close up to the thick stone sides, looking like flattened piles of rags against the flagged floor. They had taken due care, all of them, to drop down out of line with two small openings which once had been windows in the south wall of the factory cellar, and which now, with their sashes gone, were like square portholes, set at the level of the earth. Through these openings came most of the air and all of the daylight which reached their subterranean retreat.

The old woman cowered down in an angle of the wall, rocking back and forth and hugging her two bony knees with her two bony arms; but the maimed soldiers, as befitting men who had once been soldiers, took stations just beneath the window holes, the one to listen and the other to watch for what might befall in the narrow compass of space lying immediately in front of them. For a moment after they found their places there was silence there in the cellar, save for the rustling of bodies and the wheeze of forced breathing. Then a woman's voice was uplifted wailingly: “Oh, this war! Why should it come back here again? Why couldn't it leave us poor ones alone?”

“Hush, you!” snapped the blinded man in a voice of authority. “There are men out there fighting for France. Hush and listen!”

A ragged volley, sounding as though it had been fired almost over their heads, cut off her lamentation, and she hid her face in her hands, bending her body forward to cover and shield a baby that was between her knees upon the floor.

From a distance, toward the north, the firing was answered. Somewhere close at hand a rapid-fire gun began a staccato outburst as the gun crew pumped its belts of cartridges into its barrel; but at once this chattering note became interrupted, and then it slackened, and then it stopped altogether.

“Idiots! Fools! Imbeciles!” snarled the blind man. “They have jammed the magazine! And listen, comrade, listen to the rifle fire from over here—half a company firing, then the other half. Veterans would never fire so. Raw recruits with green officers—that's what they must be.... And listen! The Germans are no better.”