COALS OF FIRE
TheTax-collector is resting here for a few hours on his way home. He has brought with him his son, who looks dead tired with his twenty-mile walk. The lad’s luggage has all been left behind. But Aywaille was too near Liège to be safe. The Tax-collector will be glad to reach his journey’s end.
“All day long yesterday I watched the German troops march through the town,” he tells me. “It was pitiable to see those columns of splendidly equipped men, simply dropping from fatigue. Some could scarcely put one foot before the other.”
“They are our enemies.”
“My sister stood in the street for hours, refilling buckets of water from which the exhausted men swilled their necks and arms. She cut them tartine after tartine until all our bread was gone and she could hardly stand herself.”
“They are probably going down to shoot the peasants’ fathers, sons and brothers in Liège,” I remark coldly.
“From my sister’s point of view, they are suffering and they are men. That is enough....”
Compassion is evidently a Belgian vice!
Even Madame Job is breaking out in an unexpected quarter. She is satisfied for the moment as to Albert’s safety, so I am surprised to find her this evening occupying her favourite position on the lowest step of the kitchen stairs with her blue check apron over her head.
Spasmodic snuffles under the cotton screen warn me what to expect. I gently pull down the covering and stroke her face.
“We shall win,” I say consolingly.
At this Madame breaks down completely.
“Win? The poor, poor Prussians will be killed, all killed. There was one so young to-night, with eyes so sad.” (Snort and snuffle.) “Have they not also wives and mothers who will mourn their loss?”
I find no words in which to confute this obvious truth.
Madame soon revives. In her careful Walloon brain she has conceived what she calls “un plan.”
“If I care for the Prussians” (I know she is hoping that heaps and heaps will be brought in from the battlefield to test her word), “perhapsthey will care for my Albert should he be wounded in the forts there below....”
I do not dare to tell her that the Belgians have themselves blown up the Chaudfontaine forts and that her beloved Albert is doubtless numbered with the dead....