Printed in Great Britain
All rights reserved
THE CRIME
AT VANDERLYNDEN’S
*
HIGH up in the pale Flemish sky aeroplanes were wheeling and darting like bright-coloured insects, catching from one moment to another the glint of sun on metallic body or translucent wing. To any pilot or observer who had opportunity or gift for mere speculation, the sight that lay spread out below might have appeared wonderful. From far away on the seaboard with its coming and going of ships, there led rail, road, and wire, and by these three came material, human material, and human thought, up to that point just behind the battle-line where in dumps, camps (dumps of men) and Head-quarters (dumps of brains) they eddied a little, before streaming forward again, more slowly and covertly, by night, or below ground, up to the battle itself. There they were lost in that gap in life—that barren lane where the Irresistible Force dashing against the Immovable Post ground such a fine powder, that of material, very little, of men, very few, and of thought, nothing came splashing back.
But pilots and observers were too busy, adding to the Black Carnival, or saving their own skins from those puffs of Death that kept following them up and down the sky, to take any such a remote view; and even had they been interested in it, they could not have lifted the roof off the Mairie of the village—almost town—of Haagedoorne, and have seen, sitting in the Mayor’s parlour, a man of middle size and middle class, a phenomenon in that place, that had been shocked in its village dignity so many times in those few months. For first it had been turned from one of those haunts of Peace, of small slow-moving officialdom, into the “Q.” office of Divisional Head-quarters. It had become inhabited by two or three English Staff Officers, their maps and papers, their orderlies and clerks, policemen and servants; and now, last of all, there was added to them this quiet, absorbed young man—whose face and hair, figure and clothes had all those half-tones of moderate appropriateness of men who work indoors and do not expect too much. A young man who had neither red tabs nor long boots about him—and who seemed to have so much to do.
The old walls stared. The Mairie of Haagedoorne, half wine-shop, half beadle’s office, had seen soldiers in its four hundred years, had been built for Spanish ones, and had seen them replaced by French and Dutch, English and Hessians, in bright uniforms and with a certain soldierly idleness and noise. This fellow had none of it. Sat there with his nose well down, applying himself to maps and papers, occasionally speaking deferentially to Colonel Birchin, who, a proper soldier, his left breast bright with medals, his face blank and slightly bored with breeding, would nod or shake his head. This was all part of the fact that this War was not as other wars. It was too wide and deep, as if the foundations of life had come adrift on some subterranean sea, and the whole fabric were swaying; it had none of the decent intervals, and proper limits, allowing men to shut up for the winter and to carry on their trade all the time.
The dun-coloured person attached to Divisional Staff, whose name was Stephen Doughty Dormer, indulged in none of these reflections. He just got on with it. He was deep in his job when an exclamation from his temporary Chief made him look up. The Colonel was sitting back in his chair (iron-bottomed, officers, for the use of), his beautiful legs in their faultless casings stretched out beneath his army table. He was holding at arm’s-length a blue printed form, filled up in pen and ink.
Dormer knew it well. It was the official form on which Belgian or French civilians were instructed to make their claim for damages caused by the troops billeted on them.
The Colonel’s mouth hung open, his eyeglass had dropped down.
“You speak this—er—language?”