The Red Cross Barge

by Marie Belloc Lowndes

'Some have cut straight across the front of what remains of the contemptible little British army—at least that was the general disposition when I was last in touch with the Staff. About those corps there is no anxiety, for, as I told you just now, the British are done.'

A gleam of joy shot across the Herr Doktor's now haggard face. And the other hurried on: 'So, too, are the French who fell back with them. But that new, fresh army under Maunoury—that was a colossal surprise! Once it is disposed of, we shall renew our advance on Paris.' He hesitated for a moment, and then the pleasure of finding a listener conquered prudence. 'The Crown Prince did not come up to time. His army was to have joined ours on September 2—Von Kluck was waiting for him. There could be no final attack on Paris without the "Draufgänger." You understand? It was our future War Lord's perquisite——'

The Herr Doktor nodded comprehendingly. Oddly enough, he had never seen the Crown Prince, but from various things he had heard about him he supposed him to be not unlike Prince Egon.

4

After leaving the square, the Herr Doktor and Jeanne Rouannès found every street and every alley barred. And though the uniform of the 'Militär-Arzt' generally opened a way without much difficulty, Max Keller soon realised, with bitter, dumb self-reproach that he had wasted priceless minutes in asking and in answering futile questions. Perhaps because he had now spent a length of treasure-stored days in a country where time means at once so very much more, and so very much less, than it does in modern Germany, he was no longer in mental touch with the type of human being created by the sinister amalgam of sentimental idealism and military discipline.

To a German officer any waste of time, especially on active service, is abhorrent, and during the half-hour the Herr Doktor and his companion had spent in the square, Valoise had been rapidly divided into districts, and the looting therein, as far as was possible, systematised. Thus as soon as a certain number of marauders had been allowed to go through into it, further entry to a street was barred; and to the Herr Doktor there was something horribly grotesque in the contrast between the sharp discipline enforced by the patrols who sealed each thoroughfare, and the orgy of thieving and senseless destruction which they were apparently set there to supervise and protect.

It seemed, too, as if Nature herself had become a willing accomplice to the powers of evil, for the bright, delicious sunlight, the delicate breeze already touched to an autumnal sharpness, shone on, and blew about, the pitiful heaps of household plenishings which grew and swelled before each doorway.

In tacit agreement the two fugitives—for such they now felt themselves to be—chose a roundabout way to the Rue des Jardins; and as they hurried along, looking straight before them, averting their eyes from the sights which lay to their right and to their left, the Herr Doktor yet became conscious that here and there a house was being spared outrage. Before one such a number of his fellow-countrymen had squatted down on the cobble-stones, and were engaged in happily eating and drinking their fill. An old Frenchwoman, with a pitifully eager, servile manner, was waiting on them, bringing out of the villa, of which she was evidently the care-taker, armfuls of red-sealed bottles of wine. And yet, as he passed this house which was being spared outrage, the Herr Doktor quickened his footsteps. Somehow the sight he saw there shocked him more than did that of greater disorder.

Tides of shame, bewilderment, and pain welled up in his sore, burdened heart. Would the girl who now walked, with quick short steps, her head held high, looking always straight before her, ever forget the scenes they were now passing through? There was no fear now in her face, only a look of measureless scorn, disgust, and contempt. And it was he, rather than she, who felt a passion of relief when at last they emerged, through a final patrol, to find the intersecting web of streets composing the highest lap of the Haute Ville still free of soldiery.

The long, sunny Rue des Jardins looked unnaturally as usual, but when the two walked up through the garden of the Villa Rouannès, they saw that the front door was still locked, and the green wooden shutters of all the windows on the ground floor still barred. Thérèse and Jacob had evidently been stopped, and turned back, on their flight home from the cemetery.