Thoughts that meet thoughts. Mental appeals—demands—entreaties.... The hands of their souls, reaching out through the dark hours, clasp those of other souls in greetings and farewells.
CHAPTER LX
KULTUR!
The Belgian village-town had been so sorely knocked about that the names of its faubourgs, boulevards, and thoroughfares were obliterated. Hence, one is fain to substitute others, such as the Street Where The Naked Body Of The Little Girl Hung Up On Hooks In the Butcher's Window, the Passage Of The Three Dead British Soldiers With Slit Noses And Pounded Feet,—The Square Of The Forty Blindfolded Civilian Corpses, and the Place Of The Church Of The Curé They Crucified For Warning The British By Ringing The Bells. Of this sacred edifice—Romanesque and dating from the tenth century—little remained beyond the crypt and the stump of the tower. Some calcined and twisted bones, a scorched rag of a cassock, represented M. le Curé, that faithful shepherd of souls. Of M. le Curé's flock, not one remained to tell the story of the tragic episode that had reared the grim pile of blackening corpses in the Market Square, and added seven hundred homeless refugees to the rivers of human wretchedness ceaselessly rolling South.
In the bright sunshine of the fine October morning that had followed a night of rain and thunder, the grimly-altered shadows of shell-torn buildings lay black on the ripped-up pavements and shrapnel-pocked walls. A sandy-white cat lapped gratefully at a puddle, a dishevelled fowl pecked between the cobblestones, a pigeon or two preened on the broken ridge-tiles. To the eye of a skilled observer hovering hawk-like in the hot blue heavens, raking the streets through high-powered Zeiss binoculars, nothing human remained alive in this Aceldama. Yet when the two-seated bomb-carrying Taube with the big man and the small boy in it had banked and climbed, and hummed away Southwards on its aërial mission of ruin and destruction, one British officer, sorely wounded, lay in what had been the ground-floor living-room of a well-to-do baker's shop.
A Captain of a Guards infantry battalion belonging to a Brigade of the First Division of the First Army Corps. Marching, counter-marching, digging, and fighting rearguard actions had kept the Brigade's hands full during those blazing days and drenching nights of August and September, whilst the battered Divisions that had borne the brunt of the huge German offensive, reduced to one-twentieth of their effective, had hurried Southwards, leaving a trail of blood.
"Those other beggars have had all the luck!" the Brigade had growled when it had any time for growling. But it had won shining honours at the Marne, and had been heavily engaged at the Aisne, losing many of its men and officers. In the Aisne battle, particularly, the man we are concerned with had won special mention in Dispatches for a deed of great gallantry. Three days previously, an order from General Headquarters had moved his battalion on the little village town.
Their R.F.A. Battery had been posted a quarter-mile distant, commanding the north-east and east where the Germans were known to be. Machine-guns were placed at the principal road-ends debouching on the west where the Germans might be: the main streets had been barricaded with transport-waggons and motor-lorries, all the Maxims left had been hidden behind the sand-bagged windows of a factory—a gaunt, brick sky-scraper, long a thorn to the beauty-loving eye of M. le Curé—the walls of houses ending streets leading to the country had been loopholed for musketry, and a howitzer from the battery and a machine-gun had been spared to protect the bridge south of the town, a little place resting in the elbow of a small babbling river. Watches and patrols had been set and pickets placed, and then these war-worn Britons had dispersed into billets, or gone into barracks, too weary to eat, craving only for sleep.... That big mound of blackened ruins near the railway station, left intact for strategic purposes by the enemy, now stood for the barracks—just as that calcined heap of masonry, and twisted iron girders at the town's north angle now represented the hospital. Both had blazed, two huge, unquenchable, incendiary-shell-kindled pyres, to light the retreat of the battalion south.
Secure on those points of menace, north-east, east, and west, the exhausted battalion had slept like dead men. The townspeople, relieved in mind by the presence of so many English soldiers, slept like Flemings—very nearly the same thing. The Burgomaster slept; M. le Maire followed his example. M. le Docteur and M. l'Avocat slumbered profoundly too. Only M. le Curé, being restless for some reason or other, resolved to spend the night on the church-tower in the company of his breviary, an electric reading-lamp, a bottle of strong coffee, and a battered but excellent night-glass, the property of his late maternal uncle, an Admiral of the French Navy.
Four hours they had slept, when a furious clangour from the church bells awakened the sleepers. Shrill whistles screamed, bugles were sounded, Staff officers and company commanders clattered out of their quarters—the battalion jumped like one man to its feet. Voices talked over the wires of the field-telephones. An artillery patrol-leader had ridden into the advance of a column of heavy motor-lorries approaching the bridge that crossed the river, carrying the highway that had brought the battalion from the south. Lorries heavy-laden with—French infantry!—for an outpost's flashlight on the advance had revealed the Allies' uniform. Well, what of it! French troops were in the east upon the Yser. But still the crazy church-bells jangled and clanged and pealed, shrieking: