The Adjutant stared. He was not accustomed to interpolations in foreign tongues in his orders. But this young officer was so obviously unconscious of offense, and the interference so opportune, that there was nothing to be said. He talked to the new-comers as they supped, and, apologizing for having to put them in the little ground-floor room with the orderly officer, retired to his own.
Silence and darkness fell upon the Spanish Farm, only broken by the steps of the sentries, the change of guard, and the dull mutter and star-shell flicker from the line, and for some hours all those human beings that lay in and around the old house, lost consciousness of their hopes, fears, and wants.
* * * *
English officers and men who billeted in the Spanish Farm (and practically the whole English Army must have passed through or near it at one time or another) to this day speak of it as one of the few places they can still distinguish in the blur of receding memories, one of the few spots of which they have nothing but good to tell. In part this may be easily explained. The old house was comparatively roomy, well kept, water-tight. There was less overcrowding, no leaking roof to drip on one’s only dry shirt—and besides, though the regulations were more strictly observed here than anywhere, that fact gave almost an impression of home—order, cleanliness, respect ruled here yet a little—but perhaps there is another reason—perhaps houses, so old and so continually handled by human beings, have almost a personality of their own: perhaps the Spanish Farm that had sheltered Neapolitan mercenaries fighting the French, Spanish Colonists fighting the Flemish, French fighting English or Dutch—and now English and Colonials fighting Germans—perhaps the old building bent and brooded over these last of its many occupants—perhaps knew a little better than other houses what men expected of it.
* * * *
Madeleine thought no more of the War, and the population it had brought to the Spanish Farm, until half-past seven, when the mess-orderlies began to prepare breakfast. Obstinately refusing to allow anyone to touch her stove, she cooked that incomprehensible meal of oat-soup (“porridge” they called it!), and bacon and eggs, after which she knew, they ate orange confiture. She, her father, and the farm hands, had long taken their lump of bread and bowl of coffee, standing. Her attention was divided between the hum of the separator in the dairy and her washing drying on the line, when she heard her father’s voice calling: “Madeleine, leinsche!” (“Little Madeleine!”). She called out that she was in the kitchen.
The old man came, moving more quickly than usual, voluble in Flemish, excited. The soldiers had moved out all the flax-straw lying in the long wooden drying-shed behind the house, on the pasture, and all the machines, reapers and binders, drills and rakes. Moreover, they had taken for firewood hop-poles that had been expressly forbidden.
Madeleine washed her hands at the sink, saying she would see about it. But she was saved the trouble. Her father went out into the yard, unable to keep still in his impatience, and she heard him in altercation with old Adams. They drifted into the mess-room. As she was drying her hands, there was a knock on the kitchen door, and she saw her father ushering in the dark young officer of the evening before. Her brow cleared. She had not the least doubt she could “manage” the young man.
The young man surpassed expectations. Madeleine found it unnecessary to keep to her rather limited English. His French, while not correct, was expansive. He admitted her version of the farmer’s rights under Billeting Law, but would not accept the sum, running into hundreds of francs, which Jerome Vanderlynden, typical peasant at a bargain, asked for compensation. It appeared that the quiet-looking young man knew something of flax culture and more of agricultural machinery. He quoted within a very little the cost of re-stacking the flax, oiling the machinery, with the price of two burnt hop-poles. He offered forty francs.
Old Vanderlynden made his usual counter: “What if I go to Brigade Head-quarters about it!”