That Which Hath Wings: A Novel of the Day

by Richard Dehan

Where French police were posted at cross-roads and a working-party of British Engineers were mending the highway—filling up shell-pits, and the cunningly-concealed emplacements where a battery of French 75's had been in action a few months before, and the shrapnel-riddled houses of a small village yet harboured a few wizened Flemish peasants, was the point whence you first caught sight of the towers of the ancient capital of Western Flanders, rising above a bank of grey mist, sucked from the thawing earth by the warmth of the April sun.

An historic city of gabled houses, a city on a river long lost and vaulted over—a city as famous through its industries of cloth-weaving, and the exquisite manufacture of cob-webby lace of Valenciennes, as precious to students of Art and Literature by reason of its stirring history, and the wonders it enshrined. A matchless city, the glory of Flandre Occident, with its Cloth Hall of the marvellous Early Gothic façades, its Renaissance Nieuwerk and ancient Stedehuus, its glorious cathedral on the north opposite the Halles, with the unfinished tower by Marten Untenhove, and the triumphal arch in the West porch by Urban Taillebert.

Since October, 1914, when a British Brigade with two battalions of another B.B., had successfully withstood the desperate attacks of the flower of the Prussian Imperial Guard, the beautiful old city had suffered bombardment, furious, purposeful, desultory, or intermittent, from the enemy's 11.2-in. long range Krupps. That First Battle—fought upon a line extending from a few miles north-east of the city—had been succeeded after the partial lull of winter, by a second, a stubborn and sanguinary renewal of the struggle, rendered hideous by the use of the Boche's trump-card, flaming oil-jets and asphyxiating gas.

Now the pride of Flandre Occident stood as it stands to-day, like the heart of a martyr calcined but unconsumed in the cold ashes of the pyre. Its sad and stately dignity was marvellously beautiful, under the blue April sky, with its lashes of wintry sleet. Its gardens were dressed in green spring livery, the grass was peeping between the cobble-stones, the scorched and broken chestnut-trees that had shaded the promenades on the site of its ancient ramparts were thrusting out their pinky-brown finger-like buds. And above the shell-pitted waste of uncut brass now representing the Plaine d'Amour,—where the reviews used to take place and the Kermesses, and athletic Club competitions—where the aërodrome is cut by the line of the canal that receives the waters of the subterranean river—a lark was singing joyfully as it climbed its airy spiral, and a blind man was standing by the twisted ruins of a British aëroplane drinking in the music that rained from the sky.

In the battered Rue d'Elverdinghe, behind a block of the ruined prison, the car that had brought Sherbrand waited. A grey car with the Red Cross and a miniature replica of Old Glory on the bonnet. The Belgian chauffeur smoked cigarettes and read the Independence Belge industriously; the American V.A.D. orderly smoked also, surveying the wreckage at the end of the wide thoroughfare, between whose gaunt and roofless walls was revealed a vista of the Grand Place,—where the west façade of the Cathedral reared, a calcined skeleton above the ruined Halles,—and the Belfry whose massiveness defied the genii of destruction for a few weeks to come. Yet he kept his eye on his charge, solicitously. No creature is so utterly unaided by the senses, so pathetically defenceless as a recently blind man.

Drives were part of the treatment prescribed for Sherbrand by the American surgeon of the Hospital at Pophereele. The chauffeur and the attendant were instructed to humour him, and his humour craved solitude and the sense of space. This excursion to the plain lying north-west of the stricken city where Death and Ruin were Burgomaster and Bishop was not the first by several. The few remaining inhabitants—the pale women who made lace in the shelter of broken doorways, the feeble old folks from the almshouses, who peered from their cellar-refuges at the crunch and grind of armoured wheels upon the bricks and timbers heaped upon the littered thoroughfares—dully wondered at these visits of the blind Englishman.

They had seen many strange things of late, the red-eyed, meagre, ague-bitten old people, since that day in early October when fifteen thousand Kaisermen, chanting the German War Song, had defiled for six mortal hours through the streets of their ancient town.

"There are a great many of you gentlemen," some of the old folks had ventured to say.

"That may be so," they had been told, "but we have millions waiting to follow. We are sure to win; the French are cowards, and the English stupid fools. As for you—you are now all Belgo-Germans, our Kaiser has said so! When we leave here we are going to Calais, Paris next, and then London—it's nothing at all to get to London in our magnificent Zeppelins!"

Then suddenly the Germans had gone away—and with them trains of waggons crammed with booty. A week later, amidst the vivas of the people, twenty-one thousand British had poured into the town. They had rolled down the streets like a tawny river singing lustily: