THE DESERTER—A BELGIAN INCIDENT
Told by Edward Eyre Hunt, formerly Antwerp
Delegate of the American Commission for Relief in Belgium
I—STORY OF AN AMERICAN AT THE BARONIAL CASTLE
It was five o'clock in the morning. A riotous sunrise deluged the Campine as I slipped into my clothes and ran down the narrow, twisting tower-stair to keep a secret tryst with the Baas, or overseer. Little slits in the tower wall, cut for mediæval archers, let in the arrows of the sun; and as I ran through the gloomy armory and the high-roofed Flemish dining hall—stripped of their treasure of old pikes, swords, crossbars, and blunderbusses by the diligent Germans—out to the causeway, and over the creaking drawbridge on my way to the stables and the dismantled brewery, I imagined myself an escaped prisoner from the donjons of Château Drie Toren. In truth, I was running away from Baron van Steen's week-end house-party for a breath of rustic air while the others slept.
The stables, tool sheds, hostlers' barracks, bake-oven, and brewery were thatch roofed and walled with brick, toned to a claret-red, pierced with small windows and heavy oaken doors. The doors were banded with the baronial colors—blue stripes, alternating with yellow, like the stripes on a barber pole—and in the centre of the hollow square of farm buildings fumed a mammoth brown manure pile. A smell of fresh cut hay and the warm smell of animals clung about the stables, and I heard the watch-dog rattle his chain and sniff at the door as I passed.
I found the Baas standing before his door, his face wrinkled with pleasure, his cap in his hand. Behind him his wife peered out at us, wiping her fat hands on her skirts, and two half-grown children stared from the nearest window. The Baas and his wife were the parents of sixteen children!
"Good day, mynheer!" every one shouted in chorus.
"Good day, madame; good day, Baas." (I used the Flemish title for overseer—the word from which has come our much-abused word "Boss.") "I'm a deserter this morning: the rest of the Baron's party sleeps."