* * * * *
She might have come, passed at my side and gone, without my ever knowing it if it had not been for her old nurse, Marianne. R—— was under a prolonged bombardment that morning. The Boches must have had wind of the passage of an artillery support, for they opened up on the crossroads in the public square at dark and kept at it venomously all night. Our casualties were heavy and, just before dawn, a squadron of Fokkers bombed us, adding to the inferno. We stuck close to our cellars all morning,—De Saint Omer, our Boche Von Holwitz, and myself, but towards noon, as the fire seemed to lessen somewhat, or rather to leave the streets of the village and concentrate on the Square, De Saint Omer decided to take his prisoner back to headquarters and have him sent to the rear. He went out with Von Holwitz who, to give the devil his due, showed good nerve, and I promised to follow presently.
I finished shaving and tidying up and started after them, but hardly had I poked my head out before the Boches began to search out the village with shrapnel, and I was driven to shelter. At the end of an hour I succeeded in making my way through the ruins of cellars to an area of comparative quiet. The streets were badly cut up and blocked. I crossed behind a pile of masonry, entered the wreck of the church, and gaining the shelter of a wall, passed into the garden of what had once been a convent. There I stopped amazed.
A child—hardly more than a baby—was seated in the gravel path, gravely picking up the pebbles and build them in heaps, and by his side an old peasant woman, on her knees, was sobbing and telling her beads.
The village had, I knew, its smatter of refugees, hidden away in cellars, awaiting an opportunity to escape, and the spot was somewhat out of the line of fire. But the sight of a child, sitting unconcernedly there, under the split skies where shells were screaming to and fro, while half a mile away the houses were crumbling and great holes being torn in the streets, filled me with horror.
I stepped forward, and said, peremptorily:
“Que diable faites vous ici, ma bonne vielle?”
She looked up at me, startled at my voice. I stared at her, sprang back, started forward and, placing my hand on her shoulder, peered at her. Over the passage of months, of a hundred shifting scenes, a memory came slowly back to me, a face seen in the wet dawn of a November morning, on the docks at Bordeaux.
“Marianne!”