The Danish Doctor's note.The Danish Doctor's note.
Finally Monsieur X. suggested that he should leave it for me at the American Consulate.
Eventually, long after it came to me in London from the American Consulate, with a note from the Dane asking them to see that I got it safely.
When I think of it now, I feel sad to have so mistrusted that friendly Dane. What did he think, I wonder, to find me suddenly flown? Perhaps he will read this some day, and understand, and forgive.
Ah, how mournful, how heart-breaking was the almost incredible change that had taken place in the free, happy country of former days and this ruined desolate land of to-day. As we flashed along towards Holland we passed endless burnt-out villages and farms, magnificent old châteaux shelled to the ground, churches lying tumbled forward upon their graveyards, tombstones uprooted and graves riven open. A cold wind blew; the sky was grey and sad; in all the melancholy and chill there was one thought and one alone that made these sights endurable. It was that the poor victims of these horrors were being cared for and comforted in England's and Holland's big warm hearts.
I could scarcely believe my eyes when I saw on the Dutch borders those sweet green Dutch pine-woods of Putte stretching away under the peaceful golden evening skies. Trees!Trees!Were there really such things left in the world? It seemed impossible that any beauty could be still in existence; and I gazed at the woods with ravenous eyes, drinking in their beauty and peace like a perishing man slaking his thirst in clear cold water.
Then, suddenly, out of the depths of those dim Dutch woods, I discerned white faces peering, and presently I became aware that the woods were alive with human beings. White gaunt faces looked out from behind the tree-trunks, faces of little frightened children, peeping, peering, wondering, faces of sad, hopeless men, gazing stonily, faces of hollow-eyed women who had turned grey with anguish when that cruel hail of shells began to burst upon their little homes in Antwerp, drawing them in their terror out into the unknown.
Right through the woods of Putte ran the road to the city of Berg-op-Zoom, and along this road I saw a huge military car come flying, manned by half a dozen Dutch Officers and laden with thousands of loaves of bread. Instantly, out of the woods, out of their secret lairs, the poor homeless fugitives rushed forward, gathering round the car, holding out their hands in a passion of supplication, and whispering hoarsely, "Du pain! Du pain!" Bread! Bread!
It was like a scene from Dante, the white faces, the outstretched arms, the sunset above the wood, and the red camp fires between the trees.
MY HOSTS IN HOLLAND.My Hosts in Holland.
Yesterday I was in Holland.
To-day I am in England.
But still in my ears I can hear the ring of scathing indignation in the voices of all those innumerable Dutch when I put point-blank to them the question that has been causing such unrest in Great Britain lately: "Are the Dutch helping Germany?"
From every sort and condition of Dutchmen I received an emphatic "never!" The people of Holland would never permit it, and in Holland the people have an enormous voice. Nothing could have been more emphatic or more convincing than that reply. But I pressed the point further. "Is it not true, then, that the Dutch allowed German troops to pass through Holland?"
The answer I received was startling.
"We have heard that story. And we cannot understand how the Allies could believe it. We have traced the story," my informant went on, "to its origin and we have discovered that the report was circulated by the Germans themselves."
I pressed my interrogation further still.
"Would it be correct, then, to say that the attitude of Holland towards England is distinctly and unmistakably friendly among all sections of the community in Holland?"
My informant, one of the best known of Dutch advocates, paused a moment before replying.
Then seriously and deliberately he made the following statement:—
"In the upper circles of Dutch Society—that is to say, in Court circles and in the military set that is included in this classification—there has been, it is true, a somewhat sentimental partiality for Germany and the Germans. This preference originated obviously from Prince Henry's nationality, and from Queen Wilhelmina's somewhat passive acceptance of her husband's likes and dislikes. But the situation has lately changed. A new emotion has seized upon Holland, and one of the first to be affected by this new emotion was Prince Henry himself. When the million Belgian refugees, bleeding, starving, desperate, hunted, flung themselves over the Dutch border in the agony of their flight, we Dutch—and Prince Henry among us—saw for ourselves for the first time the awful horror of the German invasion."
"And so the Prince has shewed himself sympathetic towards the Allies?"
"He has devoted himself to the Belgian Cause," was the reply. "Day after day he has taken long journeys to all the Dutch cities and villages where the refugees are congregated. He has visited the hospitals everywhere. He has made endless gifts. In the hospitals, by his geniality and simplicity he completely overcame the quite natural shrinking of the wounded Belgian soldiers from a visitor who bore the hated name of German."
I knew it was true, too, because I had myself seen Prince Henry going in and out of the hospitals at Bergen-op-Zoom, his face wearing an expression of deep commiseration.
"But what about England?" I went on hurriedly. "How do you feel to us?"
"We are your friends," came the answer. "What puzzles us is how England could ever doubt or misunderstand us on that point. Psychologically, we feel ourselves more akin to England than to any other country. We like the English ways, which greatly resemble our own. Just as much as we like English manners and customs, we dislike the manners and customs of Germany. That we should fight against England is absolutely unthinkable. In fact it would mean one thing only, in Holland—a revolution."
Over and over again these opinions were presented to me by leading Dutchmen.
A director of a big Dutch line of steamers was even more emphatic concerning Holland's attitude to England.
"And we are," he said, "suffering from the War in Holland—suffering badly. We estimate our losses at 60 per cent, of our ordinary trade and commerce."
He pointed out to me a paragraph in a Dutch paper.
"If the export prohibition by Britain of wool, worsted, etc., is maintained, the manufactures of woollen stuffs here will within not a very long period, perhaps five to six weeks, have to be closed for lack of raw material."A proposition of the big manufacturers to have the prohibition raised on condition that nothing should be delivered to Germany is being submitted to the British Government. We hope that England will arrive at a favourable decision."
"If the export prohibition by Britain of wool, worsted, etc., is maintained, the manufactures of woollen stuffs here will within not a very long period, perhaps five to six weeks, have to be closed for lack of raw material.
"A proposition of the big manufacturers to have the prohibition raised on condition that nothing should be delivered to Germany is being submitted to the British Government. We hope that England will arrive at a favourable decision."
"You know," I said tentatively, "that rumour persists in attributing to Holland a readiness to do business with Germany?"
"Let me be quite frank about that," said the director thoughtfully. "It is true that some people have surreptitiously been doing business with Germany. But in every community you will find that sort of people. But our Government has now awakened to the treachery, and we shall hear no more of such transactions in the future."
"And is it true that you are trying to change your national flag because the Germans have been misusing it?"
"It is quite true. We are trying to adopt the ancient standard of Holland—the orange—instead of the red, white and blue of to-day."
As an earnest of the genuine sympathy felt by the Dutch as a whole towards the Belgian sufferers I may describe in a few words what I saw in Holland.
Soup for the refugees.Soup for the Refugees.
Out of the black horrors of Antwerp, out of the hell of bombs and shells, these million people came fleeing for their lives into Dutch territory. Penniless, footsore, bleeding, broken with terror and grief, dying in hundreds by the way, the inhabitants of Antwerp and its villages crushed blindly onwards till they reached the Dutch frontiers, where they flung themselves, a million people, on the pity and mercy of Holland, not knowing the least how they would be treated. And what did Holland do? With a magnificent simplicity, she opened her arms as no nation in the history of the world has ever opened its arms yet to strangers, and she took the whole of those million stricken creatures to her heart.
The Dutch at Bergen-op-Zoom, where the majority of the refugees were gathered, gave up every available building to these people. They filled all their churches with straw to make beds for them; they opened all their theatres, their schools, their hospitals, their factories and their private homes, and, without a murmur, indeed, with a tenderness and gentleness beyond all description, they took upon their shoulders the burden of these million victims of Germany's brutality.
"It is our duty," they say quietly; and sick and poor alike pour out their offerings graciously, without ceasing.
In the Grand Place of Bergen-op-Zoom stand long lines of soup-boilers over charcoal fires.
Behind the line of soup-boilers are stacks of bones, hundreds of bags of rice and salt, mountains of celery and onions, all piled on the flags of the market-place, while to add to the liveliness and picturesqueness of the scene, Dutch soldiers in dark blue and yellow uniforms ride slowly round the square on glossy brown horses, keeping the thousands of refugees out of the way of the endless stream of motor cars lining the Grand Place on its four sides, all packed to the brim with bread, meat, milk, and cheese.
Inside the Town hall the portrait of Queen Wilhelmina in her scarlet and ermine robes looks down on the strangest scene Holland has seen for many a day.
The floors of the Hotel de la Ville are covered with thousands of big red Dutch cheeses. Twenty-six thousand kilos of long loaves of brown bread are packed up almost to the ceiling, looking exactly like enormous wood stacks. Sacks of flour, sides of pork and bacon, cases of preserved meat and conserved milk, hundreds of cans of milk, piles of blankets, piles of clothing are here also, all to be given away.
The town of Bergen-op-Zoom is full of heart-breaking pictures to-day, but to me the most pathetic of all is the writing on the walls.
It is a tremendous tribute to the good-heartedness of the Dutch that they do not mind their scrupulously clean houses defaced for the moment in this way.
Scribbled in white chalk all over the walls, shutters, and fences, windows, tree-trunks, and pavements, are the addresses of the frenzied refugees, trying to get in touch with their lost relations.
On the trees, too, little bits of paper are pinned, covered with addresses and messages, such as "The Family Montchier can be found in the Church of St. Joseph under the grand altar," or "Anna Decart with Pierre and Marie and Grandmother are in the School of Music." "Les soeurs Martell et Grandmère are in the Church of the Holy Martyrs." "La Famille Deminn are in the fifth tent of the encampment on the Artillery ground." "M. and Mme. Ardige and their seven children are in the Comedy Theatre." .... So closely are the walls and shutters and the windows and trees scribbled over by now that the million addresses are most of them becoming indistinguishable.
While I was in Holland I came across an interesting couple whom I speedily classified in my own mind.
One was a dark young man.
He had a peculiar accent. He told me he was an Englishman from Northampton.
Perhaps he was.
He said the reason he wasn't fighting for his country was because he was too fat.
Perhaps he was.
The other young man said he was American.
Perhaps he was.
He had red hair and an American accent. He had lived in Germany a great deal in his childhood. All went well until the red-haired man made the following curious slip.
When I was describing the way the Germans in Antwerp fled towards the sausage, he said, "How they will roar when I tell them that in Berlin!" Swiftly he corrected himself.
"In New York, I mean!" he said.
But a couple of hours later the Englishman left suddenly for London, and the American left for Antwerp. As I had happened to mention that I had left my baggage in Antwerp, I could quite imagine it being overhauled by the Germans there, at the instigation of the red-haired young gentleman with the pronounced American accent.
A rough estimate of the cost to the Dutch Government of maintaining the refugees works out at something like £85,000 a week. This, of course, is quite irrespective of the boundless private hospitality which is being dispensed with the utmost generosity on every hand in Rotterdam, Haarlem, Flushing, Bergen-op-Zoom, Maasstricht, Rossendal, Delft, and innumerable other towns and villages.
Some of the military families on their meagre pay must find the call on them a severe strain, but one never hears of complaints on this score, and in nine cases out of ten they refuse absolutely to accept payment for board and lodging, though many of the refugees are eager to pay for their food and shelter.
"We can't make money out of them!" is what the Dutch say. A new reading this, of the famous couplet of a century ago:—
In matters of this kind the fault of the Dutch,Was giving too little and asking too much.
There is no more Belgium to go to.
So I am in France now.
But War-Correspondents are not wanted here. They are driven out wherever discovered. I shall not stay long.
All my time is taken up in running about getting papers; my bag is getting out of shape; it bulges with the Laisser Passers, and Sauf Conduits that one has to fight so hard to get.
However, to be among French-speaking people again is a great joy.
And to-day in Dunkirk it has refreshed and consoled me greatly to see Madame Piers cooking.
The old Frenchwoman moved about her tiny kitchen,—her infinitesimally tiny kitchen,—and I watched her from my point of observation, seated on a tiny chair, at a tiny table, squeezed up into a tiny corner.
It really was the smallest kitchen I'd ever seen, No, you couldn't have swung a cat in it—you really couldn't.
And no one but a thrifty French housewife could have contrived to get that wee round table and little chair into that tiny angle.
Yet I felt very cosy and comfortable there, and the old grey-haired French mother, preparing supper for her household, and for any soldier who might be passing by, seemed perfectly satisfied with her cramped surroundings, and kept begging me graciously to remain where I was, drinking the hot tea she had just made for me, while my boots (that were always wet out there) dried under her big charcoal stove. And always she smiled away; and I smiled too. Who could help it?
She and her kitchen were the most charming study imaginable.
Every now and then her fine, old, brown, thin, wrinkled hand would reach over my head for a pot, or a brush, or a pan, from the wall behind, or the shelf above me, while the other hand would stir or shake something over the wee gas-ring or the charcoal stove. For so small was the kitchen that by stretching she could reach at the same time to the wall on either side.
Then she began to pick over a pile of rough-looking green stuff, very much like that we in England should contemptuously call weeds.
Pick, pick, pick!
A diamond merchant with his jewels could not have been more careful, more delicate, more, watchful. And as I thought that, it suddenly came over me that to this old, careful, thrifty Frenchwoman those weedy greens were not weeds at all, but were really as precious as diamonds, for she was a Frenchwoman, clever and disciplined in the art of thrift, and they represented the most important thing in all the world to-day—food.
Food means life.
Food means victory.
Food means the end of the War, and PEACE.
You could read all that in her black, intelligent eyes.
Then I began to sit up and watch her more closely still.
When she had picked off all those little hard leaves, she cracked up the bare, harsh stalks into pieces an inch long, and flung them all, leaves and stalks, into a saucepan of boiling water, which she presently pushed aside to let simmer away gently for ten minutes or so.
Meanwhile she is carefully peeling a hard-boiled egg, taking the shell off in two pieces, and shredding up the white on a little white saucer, never losing a crumb of it even.
An egg! Why waste an egg like that? But indeed, she is not going to waste it. She is using the yolk to make mayonnaise sauce, and the white is for decoration later on. With all her thrift she must have things pretty. Her cheap dishes must have an air of finish, an artistic touch; and she knows, and acts up to the fact, that the yellow and white egg is not wasted, but returns a hundred per cent., because it is going to make her supper look a hundred times more important than it really is.
Now she takes the greens from the saucepan, drains them, and puts them into a little frying-pan on the big stove; and she peppers and salts them, and turns them about, and leaves them with a little smile.
She always has that little smile for everything, and I think that goes into the flavour somehow!
And now she pours the water the greens were boiled in, into that big soup-pot on the big stove, and gives the soup a friendly stir just to shew that she hasn't forgotten it.
She opens the cupboard, and brings out every little or big bit of bread left over from lunch and breakfast, and she shapes them a little with her sharp old knife, and she hurries them all into the big pot, putting the lid down quickly so that even the steam doesn't get out and get wasted!
Now she takes the greens off the fire, and puts them into a dear little round white china dish, and leaves them to get cold.
She opens her cupboard again and brings out a piece of cold veal cutlet and a piece of cold steak left over from luncheon yesterday, and to-day also. What is she going to do with these? She is going to make them our special dish for supper. She begins to shred them up with her old sharp blade—shreds them up finely, not mincing, not chopping, but shredding the particles apart—and into them she shreds a little cold ham and onion, and then she flavours it well with salt and pepper. Then she piles this all on a dish and covers it with golden mayonnaise, and criss-crosses it with long red wires of beetroot.
The greens are cold now, and she dresses them. She oils them, and vinegars them, and pats and arranges them, and decorates them with the white of the chopped egg and thin little slices of tomato.
"Voilà! The salad!" she says, with her flash of a smile.
Salad for five people—a beautiful, tasty, green, melting, delicious salad that might have been made of young asparagus tips! And what did it cost? One farthing, plus the labour and care and affection and time that the old woman put into the making of it—plus, in other words, her thrift!
Now she must empty my tea-pot.
Does she turn it upside down over a bucket of rubbish as they do in England, leaving the tea-leaves to go to the dustman when he calls on Friday?
She would think that an absolutely wicked thing to do if she had ever heard of such proceedings, but she has not.
She drains every drop of tea into a jug, puts a lid on it, and places it away in her safe; then she empties the tea-leaves into a yellow earthenware basin, and puts a plate over them, and puts them up on a shelf.
I begin to say to myself, with quite an excited feeling, "Shall I ever see her throw anything away?"
Potatoes next.
Ah! Now there'll be peelings, and those she'll have to throw away.
Not a bit of it!
There are only the very thinnest, filmiest scrapings of dark down off this old dear's potatoes. And suddenly I think of poor dear England, where our potato skins are so thick that a tradition has grown from them, and the maids throw them over their shoulders and see what letter they make on the floor, and that will be the first letter ofhisname! Laughing, I tell of this tradition to my old Frenchwoman.
And what do you think she answers?
"The skin must be very thick not to break," she says solemnly. "But then you English are all so rich!"
Are we?
Or are we simply—what?
Is it that, bluntly put, we are lazy?
After the fall of Antwerp, when a million people had fled into Holland, I saw ladies in furs and jewels holding up beseeching, imploring hands to the kindly but bewildered Dutch folk asking for bread—just bread! It was a terrible sight! But shall we, too, be begging for bread some day? Shall we, too, be longing for the pieces we threw away? Who knows?
Finally we sat down to an exquisite supper.
First, there was croûte au pot—the nicest soup in the world, said a King of France, and full of nourishment.
Then there was a small slice each of tender, juicy boiled beef out of the big soup-pot, never betraying for a minute that that beautiful soup had been made from it.
With that beef went the potatoes sautée in butter, and sprinkled with chopped green.
After that came the chicken mayonnaise and salad of asparagus tips (otherwise cold scraps and weeds).
There are five of us to supper in that little room behind the milliner's shop—an invalided Belgian officer; a little woman from Malines looking after her wounded husband in hospital here; Mdlle. Alice, the daughter, who keeps the millinery shop in the front room; the old mother, a high lace collar on now, and her grey hair curled and coiffured; and myself. The mother waits on us, slipping in and out like a cat, and we eat till there is nothing left to want, and nothing left to eat. And then we have coffee—such coffee!
Which reminds me that I quite forgot to say I caught the old lady putting the shells of the hard-boiled egg into the coffee-pot!
And that is French cooking in War time!
Permit du Dunkirque.Permit du Dunkirque.
Next morning, Sunday, about half-past ten, I was walking joyfully on that long, beautiful beach at Dunkirk, with all the winds in the world in my face, and a golden sun shining dazzlingly over the blue skies into the deep blue sea-fields beneath.
The rain had ceased. The peace of God was drifting down like a dove's wing over the tortured world. From the city of Dunkirk a mile beyond the Plage the chimes of Sabbath bells stole out soothingly, and little black-robed Frenchwomen passed with prayer books and eyes down bent.
It was Sunday morning, and for the first time in this new year religion and spring were met in the golden beauty of a day that was windswept and sunlit simultaneously, and that swept away like magic the sad depression of endless grey monotonous days of rain and mud.
And then, all suddenly, a change came sweeping over the golden beach and the turquoise skies overhead and all the fair glory of the glittering morning turned with a crash into tragedy.
Crash! Crash!
Bewildered, not understanding, I heard one deafening intonation after another fling itself fiercely from the cannons that guard the port and city of Dunkirk.
Then followed the shouts of fishermen, soldiers, nurses and the motley handful of people who happened to be on the beach just then.
Everybody began shouting and everybody began running and pointing towards the sky; and then I saw the commencement of the most extraordinary sight this war has witnessed.
An English aeroplane was chasing a German Taube that had suddenly appeared above the coast-line. The German was doing his best to make a rush for Dunkirk, and the Englishman was doing his best to stop him. As I watched I held my breath.
The English aeroplane came on fiercely and mounted with a swift rush till it gained a place in the bright blue skies above the little insect-like Taube.
It seemed that the English aviator must now get the better of his foe; but suddenly, with an incredible swiftness, the German doubled and, giving up his attempt to get across the city, fled eastwards like a mad thing, with the Englishman after him.
But now one saw that the German machine responded more quickly and had far the better of it as regards pace, leaving the pursuing Englishman soon far behind it, and rushing away across the skies at a really incredible rate.
But while this little thrilling byplay was engaging the attention of everyone far greater things were getting in train.
Another Taube was sneaking, unobserved, among the clouds, and was rapidly gaining a place high up above Dunkirk.
And now it lets fall a bomb, that drops down, down, into the town beneath.
Immediately, with a sound like the splitting of a million worlds, everything and everyone opens fire, French, English, Belgians, and all.
The whole earth seems to have gone mad. Up into the sky they are all firing, up into the brilliant golden sunlight at that little black, swiftly-moving creature, that spits out venomously every two or three minutes black bombs that go slitting through the air with a faint screech till they touch the earth and shed death and destruction all around.
And now—what's this?
All along the shore, slipping and sailing along across the sky comes into sight an endless succession of Taubes.
They glitter like silver in the sunlight, defying all the efforts of the French artillery; they sail along with a calm insouciance that nearly drives me mad.
Crash! crash! crash! Bang! bang! bang! The cannon and the rifles are at them now with a fury that defies all words.
The firing comes from all directions. They are firing inland and they are firing out to sea. At last I run into a house with some French soldiers who are clenching their hands with rage at that Taube's behaviour.
One! two! three! four! five! six! seven! eight! nine! ten!
Everyone is counting.
Eleven! twelve! thirteen! fourteen! fifteen! sixteen!
"Voilà un autre!" cry the French soldiers every minute.
They utter groans of rage and disgust.
The glittering cavalcade sails serenely onward, until the whole sky-line from right to left above the beach is dotted with those sparkling creatures, now outlined against the deep plentiful blue of the sky, and now gliding and hiding beneath some vast soft drift of feathery grey-white cloud.
It is a sight never to be forgotten. Its beauty is so vivid, so thrilling, that it is difficult to realise that this lovely spectacle of a race across the sky is no game, no race, no exhibition, but represents the ultimate end of all the races and prizes and exhibitions and attempts to fly. Here is the whole art of flying in a tabloid as it were, with all its significance at last in evidence.
The silver aeroplanes over the sea keep guard all the time, moving along very, very slowly, and very high up, until the Taube has dropped its last bomb over the city.
Then they glide away across the sea in the direction of England.
I walked back to the city. What a change since I came through it an hour or so before! I looked at the Hotel de Ville and shuddered.
All the windows were smashed; and just at the side, in a tiny green square, was the great hole that showed where the bomb had fallen harmlessly.
All the afternoon the audacious Taube remained rushing about high above Dunkirk.
But later that afternoon, as I was in a train en route for Fumes, fate threw in my way the chance to see a glorious vindication!
The train was brought suddenly to a standstill. We all jumped up and looked out.
It was getting dusk, but against the red in the sky two black things were visible.
One dropped a bomb, intended for the railway station a little further on.
By that we knew it was German, but we had little time to think.
The other aeroplane rushed onwards; firing was heard, and down came the German, followed by the Frenchman.
They alighted almost side by side.
We could see quite plainly men getting out and rushing towards each other.
A few minutes later some peasants came rushing to tell us that the two Germans from the Taube both lay dead on the edge of that sandy field to westward.
Then our train went on.
The train went on.
It was dark, quite dark, when I got out of it ac last, and looked about me blinking.
This was right at the Front in Flanders, and a long cavalcade of French soldiers were alighting also.
Two handsome elderly Turcos with splendid eyes, black beards, and strange, hard, warrior-like faces, passed, looking immensely distinguished as they mounted their arab horses, and rode off into the night, swathed in their white head-dresses, with their flowing picturesque cloaks spread out over their horses' tails, their swords clanking at their sides, and their blazing eyes full of queer, bold pride.
Then, to my great surprise, I see coming out of the station two ladies wrapped in furs, a young lady and an old one.
"Delightful," I think to myself.
As I come up with them I hear them enquiring of a sentinel the way to the Hotel de Noble Rose, and with the swift friendliness of War time I stop and ask if I may walk along with them.
"Je suis Anglais!" I add.
"Avec beaucoup de plaisir!" they cry simultaneously.
"We are just arrived from Folkestone," the younger one explains in pretty broken English, as we grope our way along the pitch-black cobbled road. "Ah! But what a journey!"
But her voice bubbles as she speaks, and, though I cannot see her face, I suddenly become aware that for some reason or other this girl is filled with quite extraordinary happiness.
Picking our way along the road in the dark, with the cannons growling away fiercely some six miles off, she tells me her "petite histoire."
She is a little Brussels bride, in search of her soldier bridegroom, and she has, by dint of persistent, never-ceasing coaxing, persuaded her old mother to set out from Brussels, all this long, long way, through Antwerp, to Holland, then to Flushing, then to Folkestone, then to Calais, then to Dunkirk, and finally here, to the Front, where her soldier bridegroom will be found. He is here. He has been wounded. He is better. He has always said, "No! no! you must not come." And now at last he had said, "Come," and here she is!
She is so pretty, so simple, so girlish, and sweet, and the mother is such a perfect old duck of a mother, that I fall in love with them both.
Presently we find ourselves in the quaint old Flemish Inn with oil lamps and dark beams.
The stout, grey-moustached landlord hastens forward.
"Have you a message for Madame Louis." The bride gasps out her question.
"Oui, Oui, Madame!" the landlord answers heartily. "There is a message for you. You are to wait here. That is the message!"
"Bien!"
Her eyes flame with joy.
So we order coffee and sit at a little table, chattering away. But I confess that all I want is to watch that young girl's pale, dark face.
Rays of light keep illuminating it, making it almost divinely beautiful, and it seems to me I have never come so close before to another human being's joy.
And then a soldier walks in.
He comes towards her. She springs to her feet.
He utters a word.
He is telling her her husband is out in the passage.
Very wonderful is the way that girl gets across the big, smoky, Flemish café.
I declare she scarcely touches the ground. It is as near flying as anyone human could come. Then she is through the door, and we see no more.
Ah, but we can imagine it, we two, the old mother and I!
And we look at each other, and her eyes are wet, and so are mine, and we smile, but very mistily, very shakily, at the thought of those two in the little narrow passage outside, clasped in each others' arms.
They come in presently.
They sit with us now, the dear things, sit hand in hand, and their young faces are almost too sacred to look at, so dazzling is the joy written in both his and hers.
They are bathed in smiles that keep breaking over their lips and eyes like sun-kissed breakers on a summer strand, and everything they say ends in a broken laugh.
And then we go into dinner, and they make me dine with them, and they order red wine, and make me have some, and I cease to be a stranger, I become an old friend, intermingling with that glorious happiness which seems to be mine as well as theirs because they are lovers and love all the world.
The old mother whispers to me softly when she got a chance: "He will be so pleased when he knows! There's a little one coming."
"Oh, wonderful little one!" I whisper back.
She understands and nods between tears and smiles again, while the two divine ones sit gazing at the paradise in each other's eyes.
And through it all, all the time, goes on the hungry growl of cannons, and just a few miles out continue, all the time, those wild and passionate struggles for life and death between the Allies and Germans, which soon—God in His mercy forbid—may fling this smiling, fair-headed boy out into the sad dark glory of death on the battle-field, leaving his little one fatherless.
Ah, but with what a heritage!
And then, all suddenly, I think to myself, who would not be glad and proud to come to life under such Epic Happenings. Such glorious heroic beginnings, with all that is commonplace and worldly left out, and all that is stirring and deep and vital put in.
Never in the history of the world have there been as many marriages as now. Everywhere girls and men are marrying. No longer do they hesitate and ponder, and hang back. Instead they rush towards each other, eagerly, confidentially, right into each others' arms, into each others' lives.
"Till Death us do part!" say those thousands of brave young voices.
Indeed it seems to me that never in the history of this old, old world was love as wonderful as now. Each bride is a heroine, and oh, the hero that every bridegroom is! They snatch at happiness. They discover now, in one swift instant, what philosophers have spent years in teaching;—that "life is fleeting," and they are afraid to lose one of the golden moments which may so soon come to an end for ever.
But that is not all.
There is something else behind it all—something no less beautiful, though less personal.
There is the intention of the race to survive.
Consciously, sometimes,—but more often unconsciously—our men and our women are mating for the sake of the generation that will follow, the children who will rise up and call them blessed, the brave, strong, wonderful children, begotten of brave, sweet women who joyously took all risks, and splendid, heroic men with hearts soft with love and pity for the women they left behind, but with iron determination steeling their souls to fight to the death for their country.
How superb will be the coming generation, begotten under such glorious circumstances, with nothing missing from their magnificent heritage, Love, Patriotism, Courage, Devotion, Sacrifice, Death, and Glory!
A week after that meeting at the Front I was in Dunkirk when I ran into the old duck of a mother waiting outside the big grey church, towards dusk.
But now she is sorrowful, poor dear, a cloud has come over her bright, generous face, with its affectionate black eyes, and tender lips.
"He has been ordered to the trenches near Ypres!" she whispers sadly.
"And your daughter," I gasp out.
"Hush! Here she comes. My angel, with the heart of a lion. She has been in the church to pray for him! She would go alone."
Of our three faces it is still the girl wife's that is the brightest.
She has changed, of course.
She is no longer staring with dazzled eyes into her own bliss.
But the illumination of great love is there still, made doubly beautiful now by the knowledge that her beloved is out across those flat sand dunes, under shell-fire, and the time has come for her to be noble as a soldier's bride must be, for the sake of her husband's honour, and his little one unborn.
"Though he fall on the battle-field," she says to me softly, with that sweet, brave smile on her quivering lips, "he leaves me with a child to live after him,—his child!"
And of the three of us, it is she, the youngest and most sorely tried, who looks to have the greatest hold on life present and eternal.
To meet some one you know at the Front is an experiment in psychology, deeply interesting, amusing sometimes, and often strangely illuminative.
Indeed you never really know people till you meet them under the sound of guns.
It is at Furnes that I meet accidentally a very eminent journalist and a very well-known author.
Suddenly, up drives a funny old car with all its windows broken.
Clatter, clatter, over the age-old cobbled streets of Furnes, and the car comes to a stop before the ancient little Flemish Inn. Out jump four men. Hastening, like school-boys, up the steps, they come bursting breezily into the room where I have just finished luncheon.
I look! They look!! We all look!!!
One of them with a bright smile comes forward.
"How do you do?" says he.
He is the chauffeur, if you please, the chauffeur in the big golden-brown overcoat, with a golden-brown hood over his head. He looks like a monk till you see his face. Then he is all brightness, and sharpness, and alertness. For in truth he is England's most famous War-Photographer, this young man in the cowl, with the hatchet profile and dancing green eyes, and we last saw each other in the agony of the Bombardment of Antwerp.
And then I look over his shoulder and see another face.
I can scarcely believe my eyes.
Here, at the world's end, as near the Front as anyone can get, driving about in that old car with the broken windows, is our eminent journalist, in baggy grey knee breeches and laced-up boots.
"Having a look round," says the journalist simply. "Seeing things for myself a bit!"
"How splendid!"
"Well, to tell you the truth, I can't keep away. I've been out before, but never so near as this. The sordidness and suffering of it all makes me feel I simply can't stay quietly over there in London. I want to see for myself how things are going."
Then, dropping the subject of himself swiftly, but easily, the journalist begins courteously to ask questions; what am I doing here? where have I come from? where am I going?
"Well, at the present moment," I answer, "I'm trying to get to La Panne. I want to see the Queen of the Belgians waiting for the King, and walking there on the yellow, dreamy sands by the North Sea. But the tram isn't running any longer, and the roads are bad to-day, very bad indeed!"
All in an instant, the journalistic instinct is alive in him, and crying.
I watch, fascinated.
I can see him seeing that picture of pictures, the sweet Queen walking on the lonely winter sands, waiting for her hero to come back from the battlefields, just over there.
"Let us take you in our car! What are we doing? Where were we going? Anyway, it doesn't matter. We'll take the car to La Panne!"
And after luncheon off we go.
Every now and then I turn the corner of my eye on the man beside me as he sits there, hunched up in a heavy coat with a big cigar between his babyish lips, talking, talking; and what is so glorious about it all is that this isn't the journalist talking, it is the idealist, the practical dreamer, who, by sheer belief in his ideals has won his way to the top of his profession.
I see a face that is one of the most curiously fascinating in Europe. A veiled face, but with its veil for ever shifting, for ever lifting, for ever letting you get a glimpse of the man behind. Power and will are sunk deep within the outer veil, and when you look at him at first you say to yourself, "What a nice big boy of a man!" For those lips are almost babyish in their curves, the lips of a man who would drink the cold pure water of life in preference to its coloured vintages, the lips of an idealist. Who but an idealist could keep a childish mouth through the intense worldliness of the battle for life as this man has fought it, right from the very beginning?
Over the broad, thoughtful brow flops a lock of brown hair every now and then. His eyes are grey with blue in them. When you look at them they look straight at you, but it is not a piercing glance. It seems like a glance from far away. All kinds of swift flashing thoughts and impulses go sweeping over those eyes, and what they don't see is really not worth seeing, though, when I come to think of it, I cannot recall catching them looking at anything. As far as faces go this is a fine face. Decidedly, a fine arresting face. Sympathetic, likeable. And the strong, well-made physique of a frame looks as if it could carry great physical burdens, though more exercise would probably do it good.
Above and beyond everything he looks young, this man; young with a youth that will never desert him, as though he holds within himself "the secrets of ever-recurring spring."
On we fly.
We are right inside the Belgian lines now; the Belgian soldiers are all around us, brave, wonderful "Petits Belges!"
They always speak of themselves like that, the Belgian Army: "Les Petits Belges!"
Perhaps the fact that they have proved themselves heroes of an immortality that every race will love and bow down to in ages to come, makes these blue-coated men thus lightly refer to themselves, with that inimitable flash of the Belgian smile, as "little Belgians."
For never before was the Belgian Army greater than it is to-day, with its numbers depleted, its territory wrested from it, its homes ruined, its loved ones scattered far and wide in strange lands.
Like John Brown's Army it "still goes fighting on," though many of its uniforms, battered and stained with the blood and mud and powder of one campaign after another, are so ragged as to be almost in pieces.
"We are no longer chic!"
A Belgian Captain says it with a grin, as he chats to us at a halt where we shew our passes.
He flaps his hands in his pockets of his ragged overcoat and smiles.
In a way, it is true! Their uniforms are ragged, stained, burnt, torn, too big, too little, full of a hundred pitiful little discrepancies that peep out under those brand new overcoats that some of them are lucky enough to have obtained. They have been fighting since the beginning of the War. They have left bits of their purple-blue tunics at Liège, Namur, Charleroi, Aerschot, Termonde, Antwerp. They have lost home, territory, family, friends. But they are fighting harder than ever. And so gloriously uplifted are they by the immortal honour they have wrested from destiny, that they can look at their ragged trousers with a grin, and love them, and their torn, burnt, blackened tunics, even as a conqueror loves the emblems of his glory that will never pale upon the pages of history.
A soldier loosens a bandage with his teeth, and breaks into a song.
It is so gay, so naive, so insouciant, so truly and deliciously Belge, that I catch it ere it fades,—that mocking song addressed to the Kaiser, asking, in horror, who are these ragged beings:
THE BELGIAN TO THE GERMAN.Ils n'ont pas votre bel tunique,Et ils n'ont pas votre bel airMais leur courage est magnifique.Si ils n'ont pas votre bel tunique!A votre morgue ils donnent la nicque.Au milieu de leur plus gros revers,Si ils n'ont pas votre bel tunique,Et ils n'ont pas votre bel air!
"What those poor fellows want most," says the journalist as we flash onwards, "is boots! They want one hundred thousand boots, the Belgian Army. You can give a friend all sorts of things. But he hardly likes it if you venture to give him boots. And yet they want them, these poor, splendid Belgians. They want them, and they must have them. We must give them to them somehow. Lots of them have no boots at all!"
"I heard that the Belgians were getting boots from America," the author puts in suddenly.
The journalist turns his head with a jerk.
"What do you mean," he asks sharply. "Do you mean that they haveorderedthem from America, or that America'sgivingthem."
"I believe what my informant, a sick officer in the Belgian Army, whom I visited this morning, told me was that the Americans weregivingthe boots."
"Are you sure it'sgiving?" the journalist persists. "We English ought to see to that. Last night I had an interview with the Belgian Minister of War and I tried to get on this subject of boots. But somehow I felt it was intrusive of me. I don't know. It's a delicate thing. It wants handling. Yetthey must have the boots."
And I fancy they will get them, the heroes of Belgium. I think they will get their hundred thousand boots.
Then a whiff of the sea reaches us and the grey waves of the North Sea stretch out before us over the edge of the endless yellow sands, where bronze-faced Turcos are galloping their beautiful horses up and down.
We are in La Panne.
The journalist sits still in his corner of the car, not fussing, not questioning, leaving it all to me. This is my show. It is I who have come here to see the gracious Queen on the sands. All the part he plays in it is to bring me.
So the journalist, and the author and the others remain in the car. That is infinitely considerate, exquisitely so, indeed.
For no writer on earth would care to go looking around with the Jupiter of Journalists at her elbow!
Rush, rush, we are on our way back now. The cold wind of wet, flat Flanders strikes at us as we fly along. It hits us in the face and on the back. It flicks us by the ear and by the throat. The window behind us is open. The window to right and the window to left are open too. All the windows are open because, as I said before, they are all broken!
In fact, there are no windows! They've all been smashed out of existence. There are only holes.
"We were under shell-fire this morning," observes the journalist contentedly. Then truthfully he adds, "I don't like shrapnel!"
Any woman who reads this will know how I felt in my pride when a malicious wind whisked my fur right off my shoulders, and flung it through the back window, far on the road behind.
If it hadn't been sable I would have let it go out of sheer humiliation.
But instead, after a moment's fierce struggle, remembering all the wardrobe I had already lost in Antwerp, I whispered gustily, "My stole! It's blown right out of the window."
How did I hope the journalist would not be cross, for we were racing back then against time,without lights, and it was highly important to get off these crowded roads with the soldiers coming and going, coming and going, before night fell.
Cross indeed!
I needn't have worried.
Absence of fuss, was, as I decided later, the most salient point about this man. In fact, his whole desire seemed to make himself into an entire nonentity. He never asserted himself. He never interfered. He never made any suggestions. He just sat quiet and calm in his corner of the car, puffing away at his big cigar.
Another curious thing about him was the way in which this man, used to bossing, organizing, suggesting, commanding, fell into his part, which was by force of circumstances a very minor one.
He was incognito. He was not the eminent journalist at all. He was just an eager man, out looking at a War. He was there,—in a manner of speaking, on suffrance. For in War time, civilians arenotwanted at the Front! And nobody recognized this more acutely than the man with the cigar between his lips, and the short grey knee breeches showing sturdy legs in their dark grey stockings and thick laced-up boots.
The impression he gave me was of understanding absolutely the whole situation, and of a curiously technical comprehension of the wee little tiny part that he could be allowed to play.
"Where are you staying in Dunkirk?" he asked.
"In a room over a milliner's shop. The town's full. I couldn't get in anywhere else."
"Then will you dine with us to-night at half-past seven, at the Hotel des Arcades?"
"I should love to."
And we ran into Dunkirk.
And the lights flashed around me, and that extraordinary whirl of officers and men, moving up and down the cobbled streets, struck at us afresh, and we saw the sombre khaki of Englishmen, and the blue and red of the Belgian, and the varied uniforms and scarlet trousers of the Piou-Piou, and the absolutely indescribable life and thrill and crowding of Dunkirk in these days, when the armies of three nations moved surging up and down the narrow streets.
At seven-thirty I went up the wide staircase of the Hotel des Arcades in the Grand Place of Dunkirk. Quite a beautiful and splendid hotel though innumerable Taubes had sailed over it threatening to deface it with their ugly little bombs, but luckily without success so far,—very luckily indeed considering that every day at lunch or dinner some poor worn-out Belgian Officer came in there to get a meal.
Precisely half-past seven, and there hastening towards me was our host.
He had not "dressed," as we say in England. He had merely exchanged the short grey Norfolk knickerbockers for long trousers, and the morning coat for a short dark blue serge.
His eyes were sparkling.
"There's a Belgian here whom I want you to meet," he said in his boyish manner, that admirably concealed the power of this man that one was for ever forgetting in his presence, only to remember it all the more acutely when one thought of him afterwards. "It's the chief of the Belgian Medical Department. He's quite a wonderful man."
And we went in to dinner.
The journalist arranged the table.
It was rather an awkward one, numerically, and I was interested to see how he would come out of the problematic affair of four men and one woman.
But with one swift wave of his hand he assigned us to our places.
He sat on one side of the table with the Head of the Belgian Medical Corps at his right.
I sat opposite to him, and the author sat on my left, and the other man who had something to do with Boy Scouts on his left, and there we all were, and a more delightful dinner could not be imagined, for in a way it was exciting through the very fact of being eaten in a city that the Germans only the day before had pelted with twenty bombs.
Personalities come more clearly into evidence at dinner than at any other time, and so I was interested to see how the journalist played his part of host.
What would he be like?
There are so many different kinds of hosts. Would he be the all-seeing, all-reaching, all-divining kind, the kind that knows all you want, and ought to want, and sees that you get it, the kind that says always the right thing at the right moment, and keeps his party alive with his sally of wit and gaiety, and bonhomie, and makes everyone feel that they are having the time of their lives?
No!
One quickly discovered that the journalist was not at all that kind of host.
At dinner, where some men become bright and gay and inconsequential, this man became serious.
The food part of the affair bored him.
Watching him and studying him with that inner eye that makes the bliss of solitude, one saw he didn't care a bit about food, and still less about wine. It wouldn't have mattered to him how bad the dinner was. He wouldn't know. He couldn't think about it. For he was something more than your bon viveur and your social animal, this man with his wide grey eyes and the flopping lock on his broad forehead. He was the dreamer of dreams as well as the journalist. And at dinner he dreamed—Oh, yes, indeed, he dreamed tremendously. It was all the same to him whether or not he ate pâté de fois gras, or fowl bouillé, or sausage. He was rapt in his discussion with the Belgian Doctor on his right.
Anæsthetics and antiseptics,—that's what they are talking about so hard.
And suddenly out comes a piece of paper.
The journalist wants to send a telegram to England.
"I'm going to try and get Doctor X. to come out here. He's a very clever chap. He can go into the thing thoroughly. It's important. It must be gone into."
And there, on the white cloth, scribbled on the back of a menu, he writes out his telegram.
"But then," says the journalist, reflectively, "if I sign that the censor will hold it up for three days!"
The Head of the Belgian Medical Department smiles.
He knows what that telegram would mean to the Belgian Army.
"Letmesign it," he says in a gentle voice, "let me sign it and send it. My telegrams are not censored, and your English Doctor will meet us at Calais to-morrow, and all will be well with your magnificent idea!"
Just then the author on the left appears a trifle uneasy.
He holds up an empty Burgundy bottle towards the light.
"A dead 'un!" he announces, distinctly.
But our host, in his abstraction, does not hear.
The author picks up the other bottle, holds it to the light, screws up one eye at it, and places it lengthwise on the table.
"That's a dead 'un too," he says.
Just then, with great good luck, he manages to catch the journalist's grey eye.
"That's a dead 'un too," he repeats loudly.
How exciting to see whether the author, in his quite natural desire to have a little more wine, will succeed in penetrating his host's dreaminess and absorption in the anæsthetics of the Belgian Army.
And then all of a sudden the journalist wakes up.
"Would you like some more wine?" he inquires.
"These are both dead 'uns," asserts the author courageously.
"We'll have some more!" says the journalist.
And more Burgundy comes! But to the eminent journalist it is non-existent. For his mind is still filled with a hundred thousand things the Belgian Army want,—the iodine they need, and the anæsthetics. And nothing else exists for him at that moment but to do what he can for the nation that has laid down its life for England.
Burgundy, indeed!
And yet one feels glad that the author eventually gets his extra bottle. He has done something for England too. He has given us laughter when our days were very black.
And our soldiers love his yarns!
How hard it must be for the soldiers to remember chat there ever was Summer! How far off, how unreal are those burning, breathless days that saw the fighting round Namur, Termonde, Antwerp. Here in Flanders, in December, August and September seem to belong to centuries gone by.
Ugh! How cold it is!
The wind howls up and down this long, white, snow-covered road, and away on either side, as far as the eyes can see, stretches wide flat Flanders country, white and glistening, with the red sun sinking westward, and the pale little silvery moon smiling her pale little smile through the black bare woods.
In this little old Flemish village from somewhere across the snow the thunder and fury of terrific fighting makes sleep impossible for more than five minutes at a time.
Then suddenly something wakes me, and I know at once, even before I am quite awake, that it is not shell-fire this time.
What is it?
I sit up in bed, and feel for the matches.
But before I can strike one I hear again that extraordinary and very horrible sound.
I lie quite still.
And now a strange thing has happened.
In a flash my thoughts have gone back over years and years and years, and it is twenty-eight years ago and I have crossed thousands and thousands of "loping leagues of sea," and am in Australia, in the burning heat of mid-summer. I am a schoolgirl spending my Christmas holidays in the Australian bush. It is night. I am a nervous little highly-strung creature. A noise wakes me. I shriek and wake the household. When they come dashing in I sob out pitifully.
"There's a wolf outside the window, I heard it howling!"
"It's only a dingo, darling!" says a woman's tender voice, consolingly. "It's only a native dog trying to find water! It can't get in here anyway."
I remember too, that I was on the ground floor then, and I am on the ground floor now, and I find myself wishing I could hear that comforting voice again, telling me this is only a dingo, this horrible howling thing outside there in the night.
I creep out of bed, and tiptoe to the window.
Quite plainly in the silvery moonlight I see, standing in the wide open space in front of this little Flemish Inn, a thin gaunt animal with its tongue lolling out. I see the froth on the tongue, and the yellow-white of its fangs glistening in the winter moonlight. I ask myself what is it? And I ask too why should I feel so frightened? For Iamfrightened. From behind the white muslin curtains I gaze at that apparition, absolutely petrified.
It seems to me that I shall never, never, never be able to move again when I find myself knocking at the Caspiar's door, and next minute the old proprietor of the Inn and his wife are peeping through my window.
"Mon Dieu! It is a wolf!"
Old Caspiar frames the word with his lips rather than utter them.
"You must shoot it," frames his wife.
Old Caspiar gets down his gun.
But it falls from his hands.
"I can't shoot any more," he groans. "I've lost my nerve."
He begins to cry.
Poor old man!
He has lost a son, eleven nephews, and four grandsons in this War, as well as his nerve. Poor old chap. And he remembers the siege of Paris, he remembers only too well that terrible, far-off, unreal, dreamlike time that has suddenly leapt up out of the dim, far past into the present, shedding its airs of unreality, and clothing itself in all the glaring horrors of to-day, until again the Past is the Present, and the Present is the Past, and both are inextricably and cruelly mixed for Frenchmen of Caspiar's age and memories.
A touch on my arm and I start violently.
"Madame!"
It is poor old Madame Caspiar whispering tome.
"You are English. You are brave n'est-ce-pas? Canyoushoot the wolf."
I am staggered at the idea.
"Shoot! Oh! I'd miss it! I daren't try it. I've never even handled a gun!" I stammer out.
I see myself revealed now as the coward that I am.
"ThenIshall shoot it!" says old Madame Caspiar in a trembling voice.
She picks up the gun.
"When I was a girl I was a very good shot!"
She speaks loudly, as if to reassure herself.
Old Caspiar suddenly jumps up.
"You're mad, Terèse. Vous êtes folle! You can't even see to read the newspapers,You!"
He takes the gun from her!
She begins to cry now.
"I shall go and call the others," she says, weeping.
"Be quiet," he says crossly. "You'll frighten the beast away if you make a noise like that!"
He crosses the room and peers out again!
"It's eating something!" he says. "Mon Dieu!It's gotChou-chou."
Chou-chou is—wasrather, the Caspiar's pet rabbit.
"You shall pay for that!" mutters old Caspiar. Gently opening the window, he fires.
"Not since 1860 have I seen a wolf," says Caspiar, looking down at the dead beast. "Then they used to run in out of the forest when I was an apprentice in my uncle's Inn. We were always frightened of them. And now, even after the Germans, we are frightened of them still."
"I am more frightened of wolves than I am of Germans," confesses Madame Caspiar in a whisper.
We stand there in the breaking dawn, looking at the dead wolf, and wondering fearfully if there are not more of its kind, creeping in from the snow-filled plains beyond.
Other figures join us.
Two Red-Cross French doctors, a wounded English Colonel, la grandmère, Mme. Caspiar's mother, and a Belgian priest, all come issuing gradually from the low portals of the Inn into the yard.
Then in the chill dawn, with the glare of the snow-fields in our eyes, we discuss the matter in low voices.
It is touching to find that each one is thinking of his own country's soldiers, and the menace that packs of hungry wolves may mean to them, English, Belgian, French; especially to wounded men.
"It's the sound of the guns that brings them out," says a French doctor learnedly. "This wolf has probably travelled hundreds of miles. And of course there are more. Oui, oui! C'est ça Certainly there will be more."
"C'est ça, c'est ça!" agrees the priest.
"Such a huge beast too!" says the Colonel.
He is probably comparing it with a fox.
I find myself mentally agreeing with Madame Caspiar that Germans are really preferable to wolves.
The long, white, snow-covered road that leads back to the world seems endlessly long as I stare out of the Inn windows realizing that sooner or later I must traverse that long white lonely road across the plains before I can get to safety, and the nearest town. Are there more wolves in there, slinking ever nearer to the cities? That is what everyone seems to believe now. We see them in scores, in hundreds, prowling with hot breath in search of wounded soldiers, or anyone they can get.
We are all undoubtedly depressed.
Then a Provision "Motor" comes down that road, and out of it jumps a little, old, white-moustached man in a heavy sheepskin overcoat and red woollen gloves, carrying something wrapped in a shawl.
He comes clattering into the Inn.
His small black eyes are swimming with tears.
"Mon Dieu!" he says, gulping some coffee and rum. "Give me a little hot milk, Madame! My poor monkey is near dying."
A tiny, black, piteous face looks out of the shawl, and huskily the man with the red gloves explains that he has been for weeks trying to get his travelling circus out of the danger-zone.
"The Army commandeered my horses. We had great difficulty in moving about. We wanted to get to Paris. All my poor animals have been terrified by the noises of the big guns. Especially the monkeys. They've all died except this one."