"Killed the same day," responded Coleheart. "It never got into the papers. The whole business was hushed up."
VIII—STORY OF THE HERMIT OF YPRES
All readers of Sir Walter Scott's novels will recollect Old Mortality, the itinerant antiquary, whose craze it was to clean the moss from gravestones and keep their letters and effigies in good condition. Private R. Walker, of Princess Patricia's Canadian Light Infantry, told me the following story concerning a very similar character.
You have probably heard how the Canadians have brought the spirit of the trapper to the trenches; of their patience in marking down their prey. The enemy never know what the Canadians will be about next, and for a wealth of reasons one imagines that to be opposite the Canadian trenches in Flanders must be a nerve-racking experience.
The boys from the land of the Maple Leaf are particularly patient in sapping and mining. They burrow vertical shafts far under the depths at which they estimate the Germans will counter-mine; they destroy the enemy's galleries and, creating a series of craters, occupy them and connect them up with the nearest Canadian trenches.
In these mining operations the Canadians have obtained a good deal of information concerning the enemy's moves from an old fellow they call "Gravestones." His chief occupation is the preservation of the rows of wooden crosses denoting the last resting place of the fallen. The old man's history is passing strange. He is a Belgian. His daughter, prior to the war, had taken the veil, but when the country was invaded the cloisters of most of the convents and monasteries of Belgium were deserted. The men took up arms; the women helped in the hospitals.
"Gravestones" lived at Genappe, in Brabant. When his daughter joined him, from her convent, he took flight to Gembroux, hoping to reach the French border, but the party was intercepted by the Germans. The old man, pretending to lose the power of articulate speech, was set free. Meanwhile the daughter, during the cross-examination of her father, had taken shelter in the old church of the village. Thither she was pursued by some of the German soldiers.
When they entered the church the girl was hiding by the altar; but in alarm, as the soldiers advanced towards her, she seized the great gilt cross surmounting the altar itself and threatened to hurl it down upon the first man who approached her.
Thereupon one of the sergeants ordered his men to open fire upon her, as an example to certain of the villagers who had also taken refuge in the building. Perhaps the men felt the influence of the sacred precincts they had violated; perhaps they respected the girl's bravery. Anyway, they fired low. The girl was not killed, but fell under the altar, both her legs riddled with bullets.
To-day she is believed to be in hospital at Namur, though no accurate information is obtainable. Meanwhile, her father, once a prosperous fabricant of paper at Genappe, works out a slow and terrible scheme of revenge. Lovingly he plants flowers and shrubs on the graves of those who have helped to defeat the Huns, and incidentally he supplies the living with information of the utmost value. Living among some ruins outside Ypres, the bent old fellow is known to all but the Canadians as the "Hermit of Ypres."