Chacun de nos soldats eut son cri de souffranceDevant ces arbres morts qui jonchaient les terrains:"Les pêchers!" criaient ceux de l'Île-de-France;"Et les mirabelliers!" crièrent les Lorrains.Soldats bleus demeures paysans sous vos casques,Quels poings noueux et noirs vers le nord vous tendiez!"Les cerisiers!" criaient avec fureur les Basques;Et ceux du Rousillon criaient: "Les amandiers!"Devant les arbres morts de l'Aisne ou de la Somme,Chacun se retrouva Breton ou Limousin."Les pommiers!" criaient ceux du pays de la pomme;"Les vignes!" criaient ceux du pays raisin.Ainsi vous disiez tous le climat dont vous êtes,Devant ces arbres morts que vous consideriez,—Et moi, voyant tomber tant de jeunes poètes,Hélas, combien de fois j'ai crié: "Les lauriers!"I love it. Yet I don't quite agree with the beautiful turning at the end, because the laurels of the soldier-poets aren't really dead, nor can they ever die. Even some of the trees which the Boches meant to kill would not be conquered by Germans or death. Many of them, cut almost level with the ground, continued to live, spoutingleaves close to earth as a fountain spouts water when its jet has been turned low. All the victims that could be saved have been saved by the French, carefully, scientifically bandaged like wounded soldiers: and the Becketts talked eagerly of giving money—much money—to American societies that, with the British, are aiding France to make her fair land bloom again. Mother Beckett became quite inventive and excited, planning to start "instruction farms," with a fund in honour of Jim. Seeds and slips and tools and teachers should all be imported from California. Oh, it would be wonderful! And how thankful she and Father were that they had Brian and Molly to help make the plan come true! I shouldn't have liked to catch Julian O'Farrell's eye just then.All the way was haunted by the tragedy of trees, not only the tragedy of orchards, and of the roadside giants that once had shaded the straight avenues, but the martyrdom of trees in the great dark forests—oaks and elms and beeches. At first glance these woods, France's shield against her enemies—rose still and beautiful, like mystic abodes of peace, against the pale horizon. But a searching gaze showed how they had suffered. For every trio of living trees there seemed to be one corpse, shattered by bombs, or blasted by evil gas. The sight of them struck at the heart: yet they were heroes, as well as martyrs, I said to myself. They had truly died for France, to save France. And as I thought this, I knew that if I were a poet, beautiful words would come at my call, to clothe my fancy about the forests.I wanted the right words so much that it was pain when they wouldn't answer my wish, for I seemed to hear only afaint, far-off echo of some fine strain of music, whose real notes I failed to catch.Always forests have fascinated me; sweet, fairy-peopled groves of my native island, and emerald-lit beech woods of England. But I never felt the grand meaning of forests as I felt them to-day, in this ravaged and tortured land. I could have cried out to them: "Oh, you forests of France, what a part you've played in the history of wars! How wise and brave of you to stand in unbroken line, a rampart protecting your country's frontiers, through the ages. Forests, you are bands of soldiers, in armour of wood, and you, too, like your human brothers, have hearts that beat and veins that bleed for France! You are soldiers, and you are fortresses—Nature's fortresses stronger than all modern inventions. You are fortresses to fight in; you are shelters from air-pirates, you hide cannon; you give shelter to your fighting countrymen from rain and heat. You delay the enemy; you mislead him, you drive him back. When you die, deserted by the birds and all your hidden furred and feathered children, you give yourselves—give, give to the last! Your wood strengthens the trenches, or burns to warm the freezingpoilus. Brave forests, pathetic forests! I hear you defy the enemy in your hour of death: "Strike us, kill us. Still you shall never pass!"We had felt that we knew something of the war-zone after Lorraine; but there the great battles had all been fought in 1914, when the world was young. Here, it seemed as if the earth must still be hot from the feet of retreating Germans.The whole landscape was pitted with shell-holes, andspider-webbed with barbed wire. The three lines of French trenches we passed might, from their look, have been manned yesterday. Piled along the neat new road were bombs for aviators to drop; queer, fish-shaped things, and still queerer cages they had been in. There were long, low sheds for fodder. At each turn was the warning word, "Convois." The poor houses of such villages as continued to exist were numbered, for the first time in their humble lives, because they were needed for military lodgings. Notices in the German language were hardly effaced from walls of half-ruined buildings. They had been partly rubbed out, one could see, but the ugly German words survived, strong and black as a stain on one's past. Huge rounds of barbed wire which had been brought, and never used, were stacked by the roadside, and there were long lines of trench-furniture the enemy had had to abandon in flight, or leave in dug-outs: rough tables, chairs, rusty cooking-stoves, pots, pans, petrol tins, and broken dishes: even lamps, torn books, and a few particularly ugly blue vases for flowers.Theymust have been made in Germany, I knew!Wattled screens against enemy fire still protected the road, and here and there was a "camouflage" canopy for a big gun. The roofs of beautiful old farmhouses were crushed in, as if tons of rock had fallen on them: and the moss which once had decked their ancient tiles with velvet had withered, turning a curious rust colour, like dried blood. Young trees with their throats cut were bandaged up with torn linen and bagging on which German printed words were dimly legible. It would have been a scene of unmitigated grimness, save for last summer's enterprisinggrass and flowers, which autumn, kinder than war, had not killed.Late roses and early chrysanthemums grew in the gardens of broken, deserted cottages, as if the flowers yearned to comfort the wounded walls with soft caresses, innocent as the touch of children. On the burned façades of houses, trellised fruit-trees clung, some dead—mere black pencillings sketched on brick or plaster—but now and then one was living still, like a beautiful young Mazeppa, bound to a dead steed.So we arrived at Noyon, less than two hours by car from Compiègne. The nearness of it to the heart of France struck me suddenly. I could hear the echo of sad voices curbing the optimists: "The Germans are still at Noyon!"Well—they are not at Noyon now. They've been gone for many moons. Yet there's a look on the faces of the people in the town—a look when they come to the windows or doors of their houses, or when they hear a sudden noise in the street—which makes those moons seem never to have waned.Washington has adopted Noyon, so the Becketts could not offer any great public charity, but they could sprinkle about a few private good deeds, in remembrance of Jim, who loved the place, as he loved all the Île-de-France. One of Mother Beckett's most valued letters from "Jim-on-his-travels" (as she always says) is from Noyon, and she was so bent on reading it aloud to us, as we drove slowly—almost reverently—into the town, that she wouldn't look (I believe she even grudged our looking!) at the façade of the far-famed Hôtel de Ville, until she'dcome to the end of the last page. She seemed to think that to look up prematurely would be like wanting to see the stage before the curtain rose on the play!I loved her for it—we all loved her—and obeyed as far as possible. But one couldn't shut one's eyes to the Stars and Stripes that flapped on the marvellously ornate front of the old building—flapped like the wings of the American Eagle that has flown across the Atlantic to help save France.Jim—a son of the Eagle—who gave his life for this land and for liberty, would have felt proud of that flag, I think, if he could have seen it to-day: for because she is the adopted child of Washington, Noyon "stars" the emblem of her American mother. She hangs out no other flag—not even that of France—on the Hôtel de Ville. Maybe she'll give her own colours a place there later, but at this moment the Star Spangled Banner floats alone in its glory.No nice, normal-minded person could remember, or morbidly want to remember, the name unkindly given by Julius Cæsar to Noyon, when he had besieged it. I can imagine even Charlemagne waving that cumbrous label impatiently aside, though Noyon mixed with Laon was his first capital. "Noviodunum Belgarum it may have been" (I dare say he said). "ButI'mgoing to call it Noyon!"He was crowned king of Austria in Noyon cathedral—an even older one than the cathedral of to-day, which the Germans have generously omitted to destroy, merely stealing all its treasures! But I feel sure he doesn't feel Austrian in these days, if he is looking down over the"Blessed Damosel's" shoulder, to see what's going on here below. He belonged really to the whole world. Why, didn't that fairy-story king, Haroun al Raschid, send him from Bagdad the "keys of the tomb of Christ," as Chief of the Christian World? They say his ghost haunts Noyon, and was always there whenever a king was crowned, or elected—as Hugh Capet was. Perhaps it may have been Charlemagne in the spirit who persuaded the Germans to their great retreat from the Noyon front this last spring of 1917!"Coming into thePlace, and stopping in front of the Hôtel de Ville, gave me the oddest sense of unreality, because, when we were in Paris the other day, I saw the scene in a moving picture: the first joyful entry of the French soldiers into the town, when the Germans had cleared out. I could hardly believe that I wasn't just a figure flickering across a screen, and that the film wouldn't hurry me along somewhere else, whether I wanted to go or not.There were the venerable houses with the steep slate roofs, and singularly intelligent-looking windows, whose bright panes seemed to twinkle with knowledge of what they had seen during these dreadful eighteen months of German occupation. There were the odd, unfinished towers of the cruciform cathedral—quaint towers, topped with wood and pointed spirelets—soaring into the sky above the gray colony of clustered roofs. There was the cobbled pavement, glittering like masses of broken glass, after a shower of rain just past; and even more interesting than any of these was the fantastically carved façade of the Hôtel de Ville, which has lured thousands of touriststo Noyon in days of peace. Who knows but they have been coming ever since 1532, when it was finished?At first sight, we should never have guessed what Noyon had suffered from the Germans. It was only after wandering through the splendid old cathedral of Notre-Dame, stripped of everything worth stealing, and going from street to street (we paused a long time in the one where Calvin was born, a disagreeable, but I suppose useful, man!) that we began to realize the slow torture inflicted by the Germans. Of course, "lessons" had to be taught. Rebellious persons had to be "punished." Nothing but justice had been done upon the unjust by their just conquerors. And oh, how thorough and painstaking they were in its execution!As they'd destroyed all surrounding cities and villages, they had to put the "evacuated" inhabitants somewhere (those they couldn't use as slaves to work in Germany), so they herded the people by the thousand into Noyon. That place had to be spared for the Germans themselves to live in, being bigger and more comfortable than others in the neighbourhood; so it was well to have as many of the conquered as possible interned under their own sharp eyes. Noyon was "home" to six thousand souls before the war. After the Germans marched in, it had to hold ten thousand. But a little more room in the houses was thriftily obtained by annexing all the furniture, even beds. Tables and chairs they took, too, and stoves, and cooking utensils, which left the houses conveniently empty, to be shared by families from Roye, and Nesle, and Ham, and Chauny—oh, so many other towns and hamlets, that one loses count in trying to remember!How the people lived, they hardly know now, in looking back, some of them told us, as we walked about with a French officer who was our guide. Eighteen months of it! Summer wasn't quite so bad. One can always bear hardships when weather, at least, is kind. But the winters! It is those winters that scarcely bear thinking of, even now.No lights were allowed after dark. All doors must be left open, for the German military police to walk in at any hour of the night, to see what mischief was brewing in the happy families caged together. There was no heating, and often no fire for cooking, consequently such food as there was had to be eaten cold. No nose must be shown out of doors unless with a special permit, so to speak, displayed on the end of it. Not that there was much incentive to go out, as all business was stopped, and all shops closed. Without "le Comité Américain," thousands would have starved, so it was lucky for Noyon that the United States was neutral then!We spent hours seeing things, and talking to people—old people, and children, and soldiers—each one with a new side of the great story to tell, as if each had been weaving a few inches of some wonderful, historic piece of tapestry, small in itself, but essential to the pattern. Then we started for home—I mean Compiègne—by a different way; the way of Carlepont, named after Charlemagne, because it is supposed that he was born there.The forest was even more lovable than before, a younger forest: fairy-like in beauty as a rainbow, in its splashed gold and red, and green and violet and orange of autumn. The violet was "atmosphere," but it was as much a partof the forest as the leaves, or the delicate trunks dim as ghosts in shadow, bright as organ-pipes where sun touched them. Out from the depths came sweet, mysterious breaths, and whispers like prophecies of peace. But to this region of romance there were sharp contrasts. Not even dreams have sharper ones! German trenches, chopped into blackened wastes that once were farmlands, and barbed wire wriggling like snake-skeletons across dreary fields.We got out of our cars, and went into the trenches, thinking thoughts unspeakable. Long ago as the Germans had vanished, and every corner had been searched, our officer warned us not to pick up "souvenirs." Some infernal machine might have been missed in the search and nothing was to be trusted—no, not even a bit of innocent-looking lead pencil.They were trenches made to live in, these! They had been walled with stones from ruined farmhouses. The "dug-outs" were super-dug-outs. We saw concealed cupolas for machine-guns, and "les officiers boches" had had a neat system of douches.There was no need to worry that Brian might stumble or fall in the slippery labyrinths we travelled, for he had Dierdre O'Farrell as guide. I'm afraid I knew what it was to be jealous: and this new gnawing pain is perhaps meant to be one of my punishments. Of course it's no more than I deserve. But that Brian should be chosen as the instrument, all unknowingly, and happily—thathurts!It was just as we were close to Compiègne, not twenty minutes (in motor talk) outside the town, that the "accident" happened.CHAPTER XXIIAt first it seemed an ordinary, commonplace accident. A loud report like a pistol shot: a flat tire down on our car: that was all.We stopped, and the little taxi-cab, tagging on behind like a small dog after a big one, halted in sympathy. Julian O'Farrell jumped out to help Morel, our one-legged chauffeur, as he always does if anything happens, just to remind the Becketts how kind and indispensable he is. We knew that we should be hung up for a good twenty minutes, so the whole party, with the exception of Mother Beckett and me, deserted the cars. Brian was with Dierdre. He had no need of his sister; so I was free to stop with the little old lady, who whispered in my ear that she was tired.Father Beckett and Julian watched Morel, giving him a word or a hand now and then. Dierdre and Brian sauntered away, deep in argument over Irish politics (it's come to that between them: and Dierdre actuallylistensto Brian!). Mother Beckett drifted into talk of Jim, as she loves to do with me, and I wandered, hand in hand with her, back into his childhood. Blue dusk was falling like a rain of dead violets—just that peculiar, faded blue; and as I was absorbed in the tale of a nursery fire (Jim, at six, playing the hero) I had no eyes for scenery. I was but vaguely aware that not far off loomed a gateway,adorned with a figure of the Virgin. A curving avenue led to shadowy, neglected lawns, dimly suggesting some faded romance of history.Presently, from between the open gates came a man in khaki, accompanied by a tall, slim, and graceful dog. It was he, not the man, that caught my eye and for an instant snatched my thought from Little Boy Jim rescuing a rocking-horse at the risk of his life. He was a police dog with the dignity of a prince and the lightness of a plume."Lovely creature!" I said to myself, as he and the khaki man swung toward us down the road. And I wished that Brian could see him, for the dog Brian loved and lost at the Front was a Belgian police dog.Perhaps, Padre, Brian wrote you about his wonderful pet, that he thought worthy to name after the dog-star Sirius. I've forgotten to ask if he did write; but I seldom had a letter from him from the trenches that didn't mention Sirius. Everyone seemed to adore the dog, which developed into a regimental mascot. What his early history was can never be known: but Brian rescued him from a burning château in Belgium, just as Jim rescued the rocking-horse of Mother Beckett's nursery story, though with rather more risk! It was a château where some hidden tragedy must have been enacted, because the Germans took possession of it with the family still there—such of the family as wasn't fighting: two young married women, sisters, wives of brothers. But when the Germans ran before the British, and fired the château as they went, not a creature living or dead was left in the house—except the dog—and nothing has ever been heard of the sisters.The fire was raging so fiercely when Brian's regimentarrived that no one would have ventured into the house if a dog hadn't been heard to howl. You know how Brian loves dogs. When he found that the sound came from a certain room on the ground floor, he determined to get in somehow. Masses of ivy cloaked that side of the château. It was beginning to crackle with fire that flamed out from other windows, but Brian climbed the thick, rope-like stems, hundreds of years old, and smashed his way through the window. The room was filling with smoke. The dog's voice was choked. Brian's eyes streamed, but he wouldn't give up. Only by crawling along the floor under the smoke curtain could he get at the dog. Somebody had meant to murder the animal, for he had been chained to the leg of a table.Brian wrote that the dog realized his danger, and was grateful as a human being to his rescuer. His worship of Brian was pathetic. He seemed to care for no one else, though he was too fine a gentleman not to be polite to all—all, that is, except Germans. They never dared let him loose when prisoners were about. The sight of a gray-green uniform was to that dog what a red rag is to a bull. For him some horror was associated with it—a horror which must remain a mystery for us.The day Brian lost his eyesight he lost Sirius. When he came back to consciousness, only to learn that he was blind, his first thought was of his friend. No one knew what had happened to the dog. The chances seemed to be that the shell which had buried Brian had buried Sirius, too; but Brian wouldn't believe this. Somehow the dog would have contrived to escape. I had to promise that, whenever I happened to see a dark gray, almost blackBelgian police dog of beautiful shape, I would call "Sirius" to see if he answered.More than once since this trip began I've called "Sirius!" to police dogs, not knowing whether they were Belgian, German, or Dutch, and they have answered only with glances of superb scorn. This time I hesitated. The mental picture I saw of myself—a vague young woman, seated in an automobile stranded by the roadside, trying to lure away the dog of a strange man—was disconcerting. While I debated whether to break my promise or behave like a wild school girl, the animal paused in his listless trot. He stopped, as if he'd been struck by an unseen bullet, quivered all over, and shot past us like a torpedo. A minute later I heard a tumultuous barking—a barking as if the gates of a dog's heaven had suddenly opened.I sprang up in the car, and turning round, knelt on the seat to see what was going on behind us. Far away were Brian and Dierdre. And oh, Padre, I can never dislike that girl again! I apologize for everything I ever said against her. She saw that great police dog making for blind Brian. And you know, a police dog can look formidable as a panther. She took no time to think, though the idea might have sprung to her mind that the creature was mad. She simply threw herself in front of Brian. It was an offer of her life for his.I could do nothing, of course. I was too far off. I'm not a screaming girl, but I'm afraid I did give a shriek, for Mother Beckett started up, and cried out: "What's the matter?"I didn't answer her. I hardly heard. I forgot everyoneexcept Brian and that girl. It was only when the thing was over, and we were all talking at once, that I realized how the others had shared my fright.Perhaps Brian recognized the dog's bark at a distance, for he says a dog's voice is individual as a man's. Or his instinct—made magically keen by his blindness—told him in a flash of inspiration what his eyes couldn't see. Anyhow, he knew that Dierdre was in danger, and almost flung her behind him. He was just in time to save her from being thrown down by the dog, who hurled himself like a young avalanche at Brian. To those who had no clue to the truth, it must have seemed that the animal was mad. Julian, and Father Beckett, and the khaki man rushed to the rescue, only to see the dog and Brian in each other's arms, the creature licking Brian's face, laughing and crying at the same time—which you know, Padre, a dog frantic with joy at sight of a long-lost master can do perfectly well! It seems too melodramatic to be true, but itistrue: the dog was Sirius.You'll think now that this is the "astonishing thing" which would—I said—have made this whole trip worth while. But no: the thing I meant has little or nothing to do with the finding of Sirius.Even Mother Beckett could sit still no longer. She had to be helped out of the car by me to join the group round Brian and the dog. She took my arm, and I matched my steps to her tiny trot, though I pined to sprint! We met Father Beckett coming back with apologies for his one minute of forgetfulness. The first time in years, I should think, that he had forgotten his wife for sixty whole seconds!"It's like something in a story or a play," he panted, out of breath. "This is Brian's lost dog. You've heard him talk of Sirius, my dear. There can be no doubt it's the same animal! The man who thought he was its master admits that. Andguesswho he is—the man, not the dog."Mother Beckett reminded her husband that never had she succeeded in a guess. But she was saved trying by the arrival of the man in khaki who, having abandoned his dog—or being abandoned by it—had followed Mr. Beckett."Why, JackCurtis!" gasped the little old lady. "It can't be you!""I guess it's nobody else," laughed a soldierly fellow, with the blackest eyes and whitest teeth imaginable. "I'm doing the war for the New YorkRecord—staying here at the château of Royalieu with the British correspondents for the French front."I longed to get to Brian and be introduced to Sirius, but Mother Beckett caught my arm. "Mary, dear," she cooed, "I'd like you and Mr. Curtis to meet. Jack, this is Miss O'Malley, who would have been our Jim's wife if he'd lived. And Mary, this is one of Jim's classmates at college; a very good friend."The khaki young man (American khaki) held out his hand and I put mine into it. He stared at me—a pleasant, sympathetic, and not unadmiring stare—peering nearsightedly through the twilight."So Jim found you again, after all?" he asked, in a quiet, low voice, not utterly unlike Jim's own. Men of the same university do speak alike all over the world."I—don't quite understand," I stammered. When any sudden question about Jim is flung at me before his parents, I'm always a little scared!"Jim and I had a bet," Mr. Curtis explained, "that he couldn't travelincog., through Europe for a given length of time, in a big auto, doing himself well everywhere, without his real name coming out. He won the bet, but he told me—after he got over a bad dose of typhoid—that he'd lost the only girl he'd ever loved or could love—lost her through that da—that stupid bet. He described the girl. I guess there aren't two of her on earth!""That's a mighty fine compliment, Molly!" said Father Beckett.Just then Brian called, and I wasn't sorry, for I couldn't find the right answer for the man who had separated Jim Beckett from me. It was all I could do to get my breath."Why, of course, that's your brother! I might have known by the likeness. Gee, but it's great about the dog! No wonder it despised the name of 'Sherlock.' Rather a come-down from a star! There's a big story in this. Your party will have to dine with us correspondents, and talk things over. The crowd will be delighted. Say yes, Mrs. Beckett!"I heard no more, for I was on my way to Brian. But by the time I'd thanked Dierdre, been slightly snubbed by her, and successfully presented to Sirius, it was settled that we should spend our evening at Royalieu with the correspondents. The Beckett auto was ready, but the dog's joy was too big for the biggest car, so Brian and I walked to the château, and Jack Curtis with us, to exchange stories ofle grand chien policier, late "Sherlock."Matching the new history on to the early mystery was like fitting in the lost bits of a jigsaw puzzle—bits which, when missing, left the picture void. Between Brian and the war correspondent the pattern came to life: but there's one piece in the middle which can never be restored. Only one person could supply that: a German officer, and he is no longer in this world.Jack Curtis found the police dog, badly wounded, at a place near Paschendaele, where the Germans had temporary headquarters and had been driven out after a fierce struggle. One of the dog's legs was broken, and blood had dried on his glossy coat, but he "registered delight" (as moving picture people say) when he limped out of a half-ruined house to welcome the rush of British khaki. The few inhabitants who had lived in the village through the German occupation, knew the dog as "Siegfried," to which name he had obstinately refused to answer. His German master, a captain, whom he obeyed sullenly, always dragged him about in leash, as he never willingly kept at heel. Everyone wondered why the officer, who was far from lenient with his men, showed patience with the dog. But his orderly explained that Captain von Busche had picked up the starving animal weeks before, wandering about No Man's Land. The creature was valuable, and his dislike of the gray-green uniform had puzzled Von Busche. His failure to win the dog's affection piqued him, and in his blundering way he persevered. The people of the village were more successful. They made friends with "Siegfried," to Von Busche's annoyance; and a day or two before the hurried German retreat under bombardment, the dogwas beaten for deserting his master to follow a little boy. The boy, too, was punished for his "impudence" in calling the dog. People were indignant, and there were secret murmurings about revenge.That night, however, Fate took the matter in hand. Precisely what happened is the bit that must remain missing in the puzzle. The dog slept in the room with his master, in a house where several young officers lived close to headquarters. All of them had been out playing cards at a tavern. Von Busche returned earlier than the rest. He was seen in the street the worse for drink. He went into the house, and must have gone to his room, where the police dog had been shut up for hours in disgrace. A moment later there was a yell, then a gurgling shriek. The neighbours listened—and shrugged their shoulders. The parents of the child who had been beaten by Von Busche lived next door. They heard sounds of a scuffle; furniture falling; faint groans and deep growls. Lips dared not speak, but eyes met and said: "The dog's done what we couldn't do."Silence had fallen long before Von Busche's fellow officers came home; such silence as that town knew, where bombardment ceased not by day or night. Before dawn, a bomb fell on the roof of the house, which till then had never been touched, and the officers all scuttled out to save themselves; all but Von Busche. Whether in the confusion he was forgotten, or whether it was thought he had not come home, no one could tell. He was not seen again till after the Germans had packed up in haste and decamped, which they did a few hours later, leaving the townsfolk to shelter in cellars. It was only when theBritish arrived, and Siegfried limped out from the battered house, that the dog's existence was recalled—and the sounds in the night. Then the house was searched, and Von Busche's body found, half buried under fallen tiles and plaster. There were wounds in his throat, however, not to be accounted for by the accident. The dog's broken leg was also a mystery. "I had the poor boy mended up by a jolly good surgeon," Jack Curtis finished his story. "He's as sound as ever now. He attached himself to me from the first, as if he knew he had to thank me for his cure, but he wasn't enthusiastic. I couldn't flatter myself that I was loved! I had the idea I wasn't what he wanted—that he'd like to tell me what hedidwant, and politely bid me good-bye forever.""You don't know where Von Busche got hold of the dog, do you?" Brian asked."Only what his orderly told people, that it was in Flanders, close to some ruined, burnt-up château that he could hardly be forced to leave, though he was starving.""I thought he'd get back there!" Brian said. "As for Von Busche—I wonder—but no! If it had been he the first time, would the dog have waited all those weeks for his revenge?""I don't understand," said the war correspondent."I don't myself," answered Brian. "But maybe the dog will manage to make me, some day. I was thinking—how I found him, tied to a table in a burning room. If Von Busche—— But anyhow, Sirius, you're no assassin! At worst, you're an avenger."The dog leaped upon Brian at sound of the rememberedname. Odd that three of his names, chosen by different men, should begin with "S"!He's going to be an exciting passenger for the Becketts' car I foresee. But Brian can make him do anything, even to keeping quiet. And the trip can't go on a step without him now!I felt that Jack Curtis had been hoping for a chance to speak with me alone—about Jim. But there was no such chance then. We were met by two of the British correspondents, and a French officer with a very high and ancient title, who was playing host (for France) to the newspaper men in this old château, once a convent. You see, the two cars had shot past as we walked; and by the time we reached the door preparations were being made for an impromptu party.Never was a dinner so good, it seemed, and never was talk so absorbing. Some of it concerned an arch of honour or a statue to be placed over the spot where the first men of the American army fell in France: at Bethelmont; some concerned a road whose construction is being planned—a sacred road through Belgium and France, from the North Sea to Alsace; a road to lead pilgrims past villages and towns destroyed by Germany. This, according to the correspondents who were full of the idea, doesn't mean that the devastation isn't ultimately to be repaired. The proposal is, to leave in each martyred place a memorial for the eyes of coming generations: a ruined church; a burned château; the skeleton of anhôtel de ville, or a wrecked factory; a mute appeal to all the world: "This was war, as the Germans made it. In the midst of peace, Remember!"Beneath my interest in the talk ran an undercurrent of my own private thought, which was not of the future, but of the past. I'd begun to wonder why I had been afraid of Jack Curtis. Instead of dreading words with him alone, I wished for them now.After dinner I had but a few minutes to wait. When I'd refused coffee, he, too, refused, and made an excuse to show me a room of which the correspondents were fond—a room full of old trophies of the forest hunt."Did you notice at dinner how I kept trying to get a good look at your left hand?" Curtis asked."No," I answered, "I didn't notice that.""I'm glad. I was scared you'd think me cheeky. Yet I couldn't resist. I wanted to see whether Jim had given youthering.""The ring?" I echoed."The ring of our bet, the year before the war: the bet you knew about, that kept you two apart till Jim came over to France this second time.""Yes—I knew about the bet," I said, "but not the ring. I—I haven't an engagement ring.""Queer!" Jack Curtis puzzled out aloud. "It was a race between Jim and me which should get that ring at an antique shop, when we both heard of its history. He could afford to bid higher, so he secured it. Not that he was selfish! But he said he wanted the ring in case he met his ideal and got engaged to her. If he'd lost the bet the ring would have been mine. If he didn't give it to you, I wonder what's become of the thing? Perhaps his mother knows. Did she ever speak to you about Jim bringing home a quaint old ring from France, thattime after his fever—a ring supposed to have belonged to the most beautiful woman of her day, the Italian Countess Castiglione, whom Louis Napoleon loved?""No," I said. "He can't have given the ring to his mother, or she would have told me about it, I'm sure. She's always talking of him.""Perhaps it was stolen or lost," Curtis reflected. "Yet I don't feel as if that had happened, somehow! I trust my feelings a good deal—especially since this war, that's made us all a bit psychic—don't you?""I have too many feelings to trust half of them!" I tried to laugh."Have you ever had one, I wonder, like mine, about Jim? Dare I speak to you of this?""Why not?""Well—I wouldn't dare to his mother. Or even to the old man.""Youmustspeak now, please, Mr. Curtis, to me!""It's this; have you ever had the feeling that Jim may be alive?"We were standing. I caught at the back of a chair. Things whirled for an instant. Then I gathered my wits together. "I haven't let myself feel it," I said. "And yet, in a way, Ialwaysfeel it. I mean, I seem to feel—his thoughts round us. But that's because we speak and think of him almost every moment of the day, his father and mother and I. There can be no doubt—can there?""Others have come back from the dead since this war. Why not Jim Beckett?""They said they had—found his body.""Oh, theysaid! Germans say a lot of things. But for the Lord's sake, Miss O'Malley, don't let's upset those poor old people with any such hope. I've only my feeling—and other people's stories of escape—to go upon. I spoke to you, because I guess you've got a strong soul, and can stand shocks. Besides, you told me I must speak. I had to obey.""Thank you for obeying," I said. And just then someone came into the room.Now, Padre, I have told you thegreat thing. What does it matter what happens to me, if only Jack Curtis's "feeling" comes true?CHAPTER XXIIIIt is two days since I wrote, Padre; and I have come back to Compiègne from a world of unnatural silence and desolation. Day before yesterday it was Roye and Nesle; the Château of Ham; Jussy, Chauny and Prince Eitel Friedrich's pavilion. To-morrow we hope to start for Soissons.Yesterday we rested, because Mother Beckett had a shocking headache. (Oh, it was pathetic and funny, too, what she said when we slipped back into Compiègne at night! "Isn't it a comfort, Molly, to see a place again where there arewholehouses?") After Soissons we shall return to Compiègne and then go to Amiens with several of the war correspondents, who have their own car. Women aren't allowed, as a rule, to see anything of the British front, but it's just possible that Father Beckett can get permission for his wife to venture within gazing distance. Of course, she can't—or thinks she can't—stir without me!We took still another road to Noyon (one must pass through Noyon going toward the front, if one keeps Compiègne for one's headquarters) and the slaughter of trees was the wickedest we'd seen: a long avenue of kind giants murdered, and orchards on both sides of it. The Germans, it seems, had circular saws, worked by motors, on purpose to destroy the large trees in a hurry. Theydidn't protect their retreat by barring the road with the felled trunks. They left most of the martyrs standing, their trunks so nearly sawed through that a wind would have blown them down. The pursuing armies had to finish the destruction to protect themselves. Farms were exterminated all along the way; and little hamlets—nameless for us—were heaps of blackened brick and stone, mercifully strewn with flowers like old altars to an unforgotten god.Roye was the first big place on our road. It used to be rich, and its 4,000 inhabitants traded in grain and sugar. How the very name brought back our last spring joy in reading news of the recapture! "Important Victory. Roye Retaken." It was grandly impressive in ruin, especially the old church of St. Pierre, whose immense, graceful windows used to be jewelled with ancient glass that people came from far away to see.Jim had written his mother about that glass, consequently shewouldget out of the car to climb (with my help and her husband's) over a pile of fallen stones like a petrified cataract, which leads painfully up to the desecrated and pillaged high altar. I nearly sprained my ankle in getting to one of the windows, under which my eyes had caught the glint of a small, sparkling thing: but I had my reward, for the sparkling thing was a lovely bit of sapphire-blue glass from the robe of some saint, and the little lady was grateful for the gift as if it had been a real jewel—indeed, more grateful. "I'll keep it with my souvenirs of Jim," she said, "for his eyes have looked on it: and it's just the colour of yours which he loved. He'd be pleased that you found it for me." (Ah, if she knew! I can'thelp praying that she never may know, though such prayers from me are almost sacrilege.)A little farther on—as the motor, not the crow, flies—we came to Nesle, or what once was Nesle. The ghost of the twelfth-century church looms in skeleton form above one more Pompeii among the many forced by the Germans upon France: but save for that towering relic of the past there's little left of this brave town of the Somme, which was historic before the thirteenth century. It gave its name to a famous fighting family of feudal days: and through the last heiress of the line—a beauty and a "catch"—a certain Seigneur de Nesle became Regent of France, in the second Crusade of Louis XII—"Saint Louis." Later ladies of the line became dear friends of another Louis, fifteenth of the name, who was never called saint. Not far from Nesle, Henry V of England crossed the Somme and won the Battle of Agincourt. But now, the greatest dramatic interest is concentrated in the cemetery!We had heard of it at Compiègne and the wild things that had happened there: so after a look at the ruined church, and the once charmingPlace, we went straight to the town burial-place, and our unofficial guide was the oldest man I ever saw. He had lurked rather than lived, through months of German barbarity at Nesle, guarding a bag of money he'd hidden underground. An officer from Noyon was with us; but he had knowledge of the ancient man—a great character—and bade him tell us the tale of the graveyard. He obeyed with unction and with gestures like lightning as it flashes across a night sky. The looks his old eyes dartedforth as he talked might have struck a live German dead."The animals! What do you think they did when they were masters here?" he snarled. "Ah, you do not know the Boches as we learned to know them, so you would never guess. They opened our tombs, the vaults of distinguished families of France. They broke the coffins and stole the rings from skeleton fingers. They left the bones of our ancestors, and of our friends whose living faces we could remember, scattered over the ground, as if to feed the dogs. In our empty coffins they placed their own dead. On the stone or marble of monuments they cut away the names of those whose sacred sleep they had disturbed. Instead, they inscribed the disgusting names of their Boche generals and colonels. Where they could not change the inscriptions they destroyed the tombstones and set up others. You will see them now. But wait—you have not heard all yet. Far from that! When the Tommies came to Nesle—your English Tommies—they did not like what the Boches had done to our cemetery. They said things—strong things! And while they were hot with anger they knocked the hideous new monuments about. They could not bear to see them mark the stolen graves. The little crosses that showed where simple soldiers lay, those they did not touch. It was only the officers' tombs they spoiled. I will show you what they did."We let him hobble ahead of us into the graveyard. He led us past the long rows of low wooden crosses with German names on them, the crosses with British names—(good, sturdy British names: "Hardy,""Kemp," "Logan," "Wilding," planted among flowers of France)—and paused in the aristocratic corner of the city of the dead. Once, this had been the last earthly resting-place of old French families, or of the rich whose relatives could afford expensive monuments. But the war had changed all that. German names had replaced the ancient French ones on the vaults, as German corpses had replaced French bodies in the coffins. Stone and marble monuments had been recarved, or new ones raised. There were roughly cut figures of German colonels and majors and captains. This rearrangement was what the "Tommies" had "not liked." They liked it so little that they chopped off stone noses and faces; they threw red ink, brighter than blood, over carved German uniforms, and neatly chipped away the counterfeit presentment of iron crosses. In some cases, also, they purified the vaults of German bones and gave back in exchange such French ones as they found scattered. They wrote in large letters on tombstones, "Boch no bon," and other illiterate comments unflattering to the dead usurpers; all of which, our old man explained, mightily endeared the Atkinses to the returning inhabitants of Nesle."Those brave Tommies are gone now," he sighed, "but they left their dead in our care. You see those flowers on their graves? It is we who put them there, and the children tend them every day. If you come back next year, it will be the same. We shall not forget.""A great statesman paid us a visit not long after Nesle was liberated," our officer guide took up the story. "He had heard what the Tommies did, and he was not quite sure if they were justified. 'After all, German ornot German, a tomb is a tomb, and the dead are dead,' he argued. But when he saw the cemetery of another place not far away, where the bodies of Frenchmen—yes, and women and little babies!—still lay where Germans had thrown them in stealing their graves, the grand old man's blood rushed to his head. He was no longer uncertain if the Tommies were right. He was certain they had done well; and in his red rage he, with his own hands, tore down thirty of the lying tombstones."Oh, the silence of these dead towns that the Germans have killed with bombs and burning!Youknow what it is like, Padre, because you have passed behind the veil and have knowledge beyond our dreaming: but to me it is atriste révélation. I never realized before what the words "dead silence" could mean. It is a silence youhear. It cries out as the loudest voice could not cry. It makes you listen—listen for the pleasant, homely sounds you've always associated with human habitations: the laughter of girls, the shouts of schoolboys, the friendly barking of dogs. But you listen in vain. You wonder if you are deaf—if other people are hearing what you cannot hear: and then you see on each face the same blank, listening look that must be on your own. I think a night at Chauny, or Jussy, might drive a weak woman mad. But—I haven't come to Chauny or Jussy yet! After Nesle we arrived at Ham, with its canal and its green, surrounding marshes.Ham has ceased to be silent. There are some houses left, and to those houses people have come back. Shops have reopened, as at Noyon, where the French Government has advanced money to the business men. Wedrove into the town of Ham (what is left of it!) just as we were hating ourselves for being hungry. It is sordid and dreadful to be hungry in the midst of one's rage and grief and pity—to want to eat in a place like Ham, where one should wish to absorb nothing but history; yet our officer guide, who has helped make a good deal of history since 1914, seemed to think lunching quite as important as sightseeing. In a somewhat battered square, busy with reopening shops (some of them mostquaintshops, with false hair as a favourite display!) was a hotel. The Germans had lived in it for months. They had bullied the very old, very vital landlady who welcomed us. Their boots had worn holes in the stair carpet, going up and down in a goose-step. Their elbows had polished the long table in the dining room, and—oh, horror!—their mouths had drunk beer from glasses in which the good wine of France was offered to us!"Ah, but I have scrubbed the goblets since with a fortune's worth of soda," the woman volubly explained. "They are purified. If I could wash away as easily the memories behind my eyes and in my ears! Of them I cannot get rid. Whenever I see an automobile, yes, even the most innocent automobile, I live again through a certain scene! We had here at Ham an invalid woman, whose husband the Boches took out and shot. When she heard the news, she threw herself under one of their military cars and was killed. If a young girl passes my windows (alas, it is seldom! the Germans know why) I see once more a procession of girls lined up to send into slavery. God knows where they are now, those children! All we know is, that in this country there is not a girlleft of an age between twelve and twenty, unless she was hidden or disguised when the Boches took their toll. If I hear a sound of bells, I see our people being herded into church—our old, old church, with its proud monuments!—so their houses might be burned before the Germans had to run. They stayed in the church for days and nights, waiting for the château to be blown up. What a suspense! No one knew if the great shock, when it came, might not kill everyone!"As she exploded reminiscences, the old lady fed us with ham and omelette salted with tears. We had to eat, or hurt her feelings, but it was as if we swallowed the poor creature's emotion with our food, and the effect within was dynamic. I never had such a volcanic meal! Our French officer was the only calm one among us, but—he had been stationed in this liberated region for months. It's an old story for him.After luncheon we staggered away to see the great sight of Ham, the fortress-château which has given it history and fame for centuries. The Germans blew up the citadel out of sheer spite, as the vast pink pile long ago ceased to be of military value. They wished to show their power by ruining the future of the town, which lived on itsmonument historique: but (as often happens with their "frightfulness") that object was just the one they failed in. I can't believe that the castle of Ham was as striking in its untouched magnificence as now in the rose-red splendour of its ruin!To be sure, the guardians can never again show precisely where Joan of Arc was imprisoned, or the rooms where Louis Napoleon lived through his six years ofcaptivity, or the little garden he used to cultivate, or the way he passed to escape over the drawbridge, dressed as a mason, with a plank on his shoulder. But the glorious old tower or donjon still stands, one hundred feet high and one hundred feet wide. German gunpowder was too weak to bring it down, and so perhaps the prophecy of the Comte de St. Pol, builder of the fortress, may be fulfilled—that while France stands, the tower of Ham's citadel will stand. Thousands more pilgrims will come in a year, after the war, to see what the Germans did and what they failed to do, than ever came in the mild, prosperous days before 1914, when Ham's best history was old. They will come and gaze at the massive bulk—red always as if reflecting sunset light—looming against the blue; they will peer down into dusky dungeons underground: and the new guardian (a mutilated soldier he'll be, perhaps, decorated with thecroix de guerre) will tell them about the girl of Ham who lured a German officer to a death-trap in a secretoubliette, "where 'tis said his body lies to-day." Then they will stand under the celebrated old tree in the courtyard, unhurt by the explosion, and take photographs of the château the Germans have unwittingly made more beautiful than before."Mon mieux" was the motto St. Pol carved over the gateway; "Our worst" is the taunt the Germans have flung. But the combination of that best and worst is glorious to the eye.From Ham we spun on to Jussy, along the new white road which is so amazing when one thinks that every yard of it had to be created out of chaos a few monthsago. (They say that some sort of surface was given for the army to pass over in three days' work!) At Jussy we came close to therealfront—closer than we've been yet, except when we went to the American trenches. The first line was only three miles away, and the place is under bombardment, but this was what our guide called a "quiet day," so there was only an occasional mumble and boom. The town was destroyed, wiped almost out of existence, save for heaps of rubble which might have been houses or hills. But there were things to be seen which would have made Jussy worth a long journey. It had been a prosperous place, with one of the biggest sugar refineries in France, and the wreckedusinewas as terrible and thrilling as the moon seen through the biggest telescope in the world.Not that it looked like the moon. It looked more like a futurist sketch, in red and brown, of the heart of a cyclone; or of the inside of a submarine that has rammed a skeleton ship on the stocks. But the sight gave me the same kind of icy shock I had when I first saw the moon's ravaged face through a huge telescope.Youtook me, Padre, so you'll remember.If you came to Jussy, and didn't know about the war, you'd think you had stumbled into hell—or else that you were having a nightmare and couldn't wake up. I shall never forget a brobdingnagian boiler as big as a battle tank, that had reared itself on its hind-legs to peer through acheval de friseof writhing girders—tortured girders like a vast wilderness of immense thorn bushes in a hopeless tangle, or a pit of bloodstained snakes. The walls of theusinehave simply melted, and it's hard to realize that itas a building, put up by human hands for human uses, ever existed. There is a new Jussy, though, created since the German retreat; and seeing it, you couldn'thelpknowing that there was a war! The whole landscape is full of cannon, big and little and middle-sized. Queer mushroom buildings have sprung up, for officers' and soldiers' barracks and canteens. Narrow plank walks built high above mud-level—"duck boards," I think they're called—lead to the corrugated iron, tin, and wooden huts. There are aerodromes and aerodromes like a vast circus encampment, where there are not cannon; and the greenish canvas roofs give the only bit of colour, as far as the eye can see—unless one counts the soldiers' uniforms. All the rest is gray as the desert before a dust-storm. Even the sky, which had been blue and bright, was gray over Jussy, and the grayest of gray things were the immense "saucisses"—three or four of them—hanging low under the clouds like advertisements of titanic potatoes, haughtiest of war-time vegetables.Dierdre O'Farrell inadvertently called the big bulks "saucissons," which amused our officer guide so much that he laughed to tears. The rest of us were able to raise only a faint smile, and we felt his disappointment at our lack of humour."Ah, but it is mostfunny!" he said. "I will tell everyone. In future they shall for us be 'saucissons' forever. I suppose it is not so funny for you, because the sight of these dead towns has made you sad. I am almost afraid to take you on to Chauny. You will be much sadder there. Chauny is the sight most pitiful of all. Would you perhaps wish to avoid it?""What about you, Mother?" Father Beckett wanted to know.But Mother had no wish to avoid Chauny. She was not able to believe that anything could be sadder than Roye, or Nesle, or Ham, or more grim than Jussy."He doesn't want to take us to Chauny," Brian whispered to me. We were all grouped together near the cars, with Sirius, a quiet, happy dog. "He's trying to think up a new excuse to get out of it."I glanced at our guide. It waslikeBrian to have guessed what we hadn't seen! Now I was on the alert, the clear-cut French facedidlook nonplussed; and a nervous brown hand was tugging at a smart black moustache."Is there any reason why you think it would be better for us not to go there?" I decided to ask frankly."It's getting rather late," he suggested, in his precise English. "You have also the Pavilion of Prince Eitel Fritz before you. If it grows too dark, you cannot see St. Quentin well, in the distance, and the glasses will be of no use for Soissons.""But we'regoingto Soissons day after to-morrow!" said Father Beckett."And there'll be a moon presently," added Dierdre. She had heard of the ruined convent at Chauny and was determined not to miss it."Yes, there'll be a moon," reluctantly admitted Monsieur le Lieutenant."Is there still another reason?" I tried to help him."Well, yes, there is one, Mademoiselle," he blurted out. "I had meant not to mention it. But perhaps itis best to tell, and then you may all choose whether you go to Chauny or not. There is a certain risk at this time of day, or a little later. You know we are close to the front here, and enemy aeroplanes fly nearly every afternoon over Chauny toward dusk. They hope to catch some important personage, and they come expressly to 'spot' automobiles. The road through the ruined town is white and new, and the gray military cars in which we bring visitors to the front stand out clearly, especially as twilight falls. I'm afraid we have lingered too long in some of these places. If we were a party of men, I should say nothing, but with three ladies——""I can answer for all three, Monsieur," said Mother Beckett, with a pathetically defiant tilt of her small chin."My son, you know, was a soldier. We have come to this part of the world to see what we can do for the people in honour of his memory. So we mustn't leave Chauny out.""Madame, there are no people there, for there are no houses. There are but a few soldiers with an anti-aircraft gun.""We must see what can be done about building up some of the houses so the people can come back," persisted the old lady, with that gentle obstinacy of hers.The French officer made no more objections; and knowing his wife, I suppose Father Beckett felt it useless to offer any. We started at once for Chauny: in fact, we flew along the road almost as fast—it seemed—as enemy aeroplanes could fly along the sky if they pursued. But we had a long respite still before twilight.CHAPTER XXIVOur guide was right. Chauny was sadder than the rest, because there had been more of beauty to ruin. And it was ruined cruelly, completely! Even Gerbéviller, in Lorraine, had been less sad than this—less sad because of Sœur Julie, and the quarter on the hill which her devotion saved; less sad, because of the American Red Cross reconstruction centre, for the fruit trees. Here there had been no Sœur Julie, no reconstruction centre yet. The Germans, when they knew they had to go, gave three weeks to their wrecking work. They sent off, neatly packed, all that was worth sending to Germany. They measured the cellars to see what quantity of explosives would be needed to blow up the houses. Then they blew them up, making their quarters meanwhile at a safe distance, in the convent. As for that convent—you will see what happened there when the Boches had no further use for it!In happy days before the war, whose joys we took comfortably for granted, Chauny had several châteaux of beauty and charm. It had pretty houses and lots of fine shops and a park. It was proud of itsmairieand church and greatusine(now a sight of horror), and the newer parts of the town did honour to their architects. But—Chauny was on the direct road between Cologne and Paris. Nobody thought much about this fact then, except that it helpedtravel and so was good for the country. It is only now that one knows what a price Chauny paid for the advantage. Instead of a beautiful town there remains a heap of cinders, with here and there a wrecked façade of pitiful grace or broken dignity to tell where stood the proudest buildings.The sky was empty of enemy 'planes; but our guide hurried us through the town, where the new road shone white in contrast with our cars; and having hidden the autos under a group of trees outside, led us on foot toward the convent. The approach was exquisite: a long, long avenue of architectural elms, arbour-like in shade, once the favourite evening promenade of Chauny. That tunnel of emerald and gold would have been an interlude of peace between two tragedies—tragedy of the town, tragedy of the convent—if the ground hadn't been strewn with torn papers, like leaves scattered by the wind: official records flung out of strong boxes by ruthless German hands, poor remnants no longer of value, and saved from destruction only by the kindly trees, friends of happy memories. "The Boches didn't take time to spoil this avenue," said our officer. "They liked it while they lived in the convent; and they left in a hurry."Just beyond the avenue lies the convent garden; and though it is autumn, when we stepped into that garden we stepped into an oasis of old-fashioned, fragrant flowers, guarded by delicate trees, gentle as the vanished Sisters and their flock of young girl pupils; sweet, small trees, bending low as if to shield the garden's breast from harm.I wish when Chauny is rebuilt this convent might be left as amonument historique, for, ringed by its perfumed pleasance, it is a glimpse of "fairylands forlorn."One half believes there must have been some fairy charm at work which kept the fire-breathing German dragon from laying this garden waste when he was forced out of his stolen lair in the convent! Little remains of the house, and in the rubbish heap of fallen walls and beams and plaster, narrow iron bedsteads, where nuns slept or young girls dreamed, perch timidly among stones and blackened bricks. But in the garden all is flowery peace: and the chapel, though ruined, is a strange vision of beauty framed in horror.Not that the Germans were merciful there. They burned and blew up all that would burn or blow up. The roof fell, and heaped the floor with wreckage; but out of that wreckage, as out of a troubled sea, rise two figures: St. Joseph, and an almost life-size, painted statue of the Virgin. There the two stand firmly on their pedestals, their faces raised to God's roof of blue, which never fails. Because their eyes are lifted, they do not see the flotsam and jetsam of shattered stained glass, burnt woodwork, smashed benches, broken picture-frames and torn, rain-blurred portraits of lesser saints. They seem to think only of heaven.Though I'm not a Catholic, the chapel gave me such a sense of sacredness and benediction that I felt I must be there alone, if only for a moment. So when our officer led the others out I stayed behind. A clear ray of late sunshine slanted through a broken window set high in a side wall, to stream full upon the face of the Virgin. Someone had crowned her with a wreath of fresh flowers, and had thrust a few white roses under the folded hands which seemed to clasp them lovingly, with a prayer for the peaceof the world. The dazzling radiance brought face and figure to life; and it was as if a living woman had taken the statue's place on the pedestal. The effect was so startling that, if I were a Catholic, I might have believed in a miracle. Protestant as I am, I had the impulse to pray: but—(I don't know, Padre, if I have ever told you this)—I've not dared to pray properly since I first stole the Becketts' love for Brian and me. I've not dared, though never in my life have I so needed and longed for prayer.This time I couldn't resist, unworthy as I am. The smile of peace and pardon on the statue's illumined face seemed to make all sin forgivable in this haunt of holy dreams. "God forgive me, and show me how to atone," I sent my plea skyward. Suddenly the conviction came that Ishouldbe shown a way of atonement, though it might be hard. I felt lighter of heart, and went on to pray that Jack Curtis's hope might be justified: that, no matter what happened to me, or even to Brian, Jim Beckett might be alive, in this world, and come back safely to his parents.While I prayed, a sound disturbed the deep silence. It was a far-away sound, but quickly it grew louder and drew nearer: at first a buzzing as of all the bees in France mobilized in a bee-barrage. Then the buzzing became a roar. I knew directly what it was: enemy aeroplanes.I could not see them yet, but they must be close. If they were flying very low, to search Chauny for visitors, I might be seen if I moved. Those in the garden were better off than I, for they were screened by the trees, but trying to join them I might attract attention to myself.As I thought this, I wondered why I didn't decide uponthe thing most likely to solve all my problems at once. If I were killed, Brian would grieve: but he had the Becketts to love and care for him, and—he had Dierdre: no use disguising that fact from my intelligence, after the episode of the dog! What a chance for me to disappear, having done for Brian all I could do! Oh, why didn't I add another prayer to my last, and beg God to let me die that minute?I'll tell you why I did not pray this, Padre, and why, instead of trying to expose my life, I wished—almost unconsciously—to save it. I hardly realized why then, but I do realize now. It is different in these days from that night in Paris, when I wished I might be run over by a motor-car. At that time I should have been glad to die. Now I cling to life—not just because I'm young and strong, and people call me beautiful, but because I feel Imuststay in the world to see what happens next.I kept as still as a frightened mouse. I didn't move. I scarcely breathed. Presently an aeroplane sailed into sight directly overhead, and flying so low that I could make out its iron cross, exactly like photographs I'd seen. Whether the men in it could see me or not I can't tell; but if they could, perhaps they mistook me for one of the statues they knew existed in the ruined chapel, and thought I wasn't worth bombing.In that case it was St. Joseph and the Virgin who protected me!In a second the big bird of prey had swept on. I was sick with fear for a moment lest it should drop an "egg" on to the garden, and kill Brian or the Becketts, or the lieutenant who had wished to spare us this danger. Eventhe O'Farrells I didn't want hurt; and I was pleased to find out that about myself, because they are a far more constant danger for me than all the aeroplanes along the German front; and when I came face to face with realities in my own soul, I might have discovered a wicked desire for them to be out of the way at any price. But since Dierdre proved herself ready to die for Brian, I do admire if I don't like her. As for Julian—would it be possible, Padre, to miss a person you almost hate? Anyhow, when I tried to imagine how I should feel if I went back to the garden and saw him dead, I grew quite giddy and ill. How queer we are, we human things!But no one was hurt. The whole party hid under the trees; and as the cars were also hidden at a distance, the German fliers turned tail, disappointed; besides, the anti-aircraft gun which we'd been told about, and had seen on our way to the convent, was potting away like mad, so it wasn't healthful for aeroplanes to linger merely "on spec."Mother Beckett was pale and trembling a little, but she said that she had been too anxious about me, in my absence, to think of herself, which was perhaps a good thing. I noticed, when I joined them in the garden, after the roar had changed again to a buzz, that Dierdre stood close to Brian, and that his hand was on her shoulder, her hand on Sirius's beautiful head. Yet I felt too strangely happy to be jealous. I suppose it must have been through my prayer—or the answer to it.When all was clear and the danger over (our guide said that the "birds" never made more than one tour of inspection in an afternoon) we started off again. Father Beckett suggested that his wife had better go home and rest, but she wouldn't hear of it. And when we reached a turning of the road which would lead us to Coucy-le Château, it was she who begged our lieutenant to let us run along that way, "just far enough for a glimpse, atinyglimpse.""My son wrote me it was the most wonderful old château in France," she pleaded. "I've got in my pocket now a snapshot he sent me."The Frenchman couldn't resist. You know how charming the French are to old ladies. "It isn't as safe as—as the Bank of England!" he laughed. "Sometimes they keep this road rather hot. But to-day, I have told you, things are quiet all along. We will take what Madame calls a tiny glimpse."Orders were given to our chauffeur. Brian was with the O'Farrells, coming on behind, and of course the Red Cross taxi followed at our heels like a faithful dachshund. Our big car flew swiftly, and the little one did its jolting best to keep up the pace, for time wouldn't wait for us—and these autumn days are cutting themselves short.Presently we saw a thing which proved that the road was indeed "hot" sometimes: a neat, round shell-hole, which looked ominously new! We swung past it with a bump, and flashed into sight of a ruin which dwarfed all others we had seen—yes, dwarfed even cathedrals! A long line of ramparts rising from a high headland of gray-white chalk-ramparts crowned with broken, round towers, which the sun was painting with heraldic gold: the stump of a tremendous keep that reared its bulk like agiant in his death struggle, for a last look over his shield of shattered walls. This was what German malice had made of Coucy, pride of France, architectural masterpiece of feudal times!
Chacun de nos soldats eut son cri de souffranceDevant ces arbres morts qui jonchaient les terrains:"Les pêchers!" criaient ceux de l'Île-de-France;"Et les mirabelliers!" crièrent les Lorrains.Soldats bleus demeures paysans sous vos casques,Quels poings noueux et noirs vers le nord vous tendiez!"Les cerisiers!" criaient avec fureur les Basques;Et ceux du Rousillon criaient: "Les amandiers!"Devant les arbres morts de l'Aisne ou de la Somme,Chacun se retrouva Breton ou Limousin."Les pommiers!" criaient ceux du pays de la pomme;"Les vignes!" criaient ceux du pays raisin.Ainsi vous disiez tous le climat dont vous êtes,Devant ces arbres morts que vous consideriez,—Et moi, voyant tomber tant de jeunes poètes,Hélas, combien de fois j'ai crié: "Les lauriers!"
Chacun de nos soldats eut son cri de souffranceDevant ces arbres morts qui jonchaient les terrains:"Les pêchers!" criaient ceux de l'Île-de-France;"Et les mirabelliers!" crièrent les Lorrains.
Soldats bleus demeures paysans sous vos casques,Quels poings noueux et noirs vers le nord vous tendiez!"Les cerisiers!" criaient avec fureur les Basques;Et ceux du Rousillon criaient: "Les amandiers!"
Devant les arbres morts de l'Aisne ou de la Somme,Chacun se retrouva Breton ou Limousin."Les pommiers!" criaient ceux du pays de la pomme;"Les vignes!" criaient ceux du pays raisin.
Ainsi vous disiez tous le climat dont vous êtes,Devant ces arbres morts que vous consideriez,—Et moi, voyant tomber tant de jeunes poètes,Hélas, combien de fois j'ai crié: "Les lauriers!"
I love it. Yet I don't quite agree with the beautiful turning at the end, because the laurels of the soldier-poets aren't really dead, nor can they ever die. Even some of the trees which the Boches meant to kill would not be conquered by Germans or death. Many of them, cut almost level with the ground, continued to live, spoutingleaves close to earth as a fountain spouts water when its jet has been turned low. All the victims that could be saved have been saved by the French, carefully, scientifically bandaged like wounded soldiers: and the Becketts talked eagerly of giving money—much money—to American societies that, with the British, are aiding France to make her fair land bloom again. Mother Beckett became quite inventive and excited, planning to start "instruction farms," with a fund in honour of Jim. Seeds and slips and tools and teachers should all be imported from California. Oh, it would be wonderful! And how thankful she and Father were that they had Brian and Molly to help make the plan come true! I shouldn't have liked to catch Julian O'Farrell's eye just then.
All the way was haunted by the tragedy of trees, not only the tragedy of orchards, and of the roadside giants that once had shaded the straight avenues, but the martyrdom of trees in the great dark forests—oaks and elms and beeches. At first glance these woods, France's shield against her enemies—rose still and beautiful, like mystic abodes of peace, against the pale horizon. But a searching gaze showed how they had suffered. For every trio of living trees there seemed to be one corpse, shattered by bombs, or blasted by evil gas. The sight of them struck at the heart: yet they were heroes, as well as martyrs, I said to myself. They had truly died for France, to save France. And as I thought this, I knew that if I were a poet, beautiful words would come at my call, to clothe my fancy about the forests.
I wanted the right words so much that it was pain when they wouldn't answer my wish, for I seemed to hear only afaint, far-off echo of some fine strain of music, whose real notes I failed to catch.
Always forests have fascinated me; sweet, fairy-peopled groves of my native island, and emerald-lit beech woods of England. But I never felt the grand meaning of forests as I felt them to-day, in this ravaged and tortured land. I could have cried out to them: "Oh, you forests of France, what a part you've played in the history of wars! How wise and brave of you to stand in unbroken line, a rampart protecting your country's frontiers, through the ages. Forests, you are bands of soldiers, in armour of wood, and you, too, like your human brothers, have hearts that beat and veins that bleed for France! You are soldiers, and you are fortresses—Nature's fortresses stronger than all modern inventions. You are fortresses to fight in; you are shelters from air-pirates, you hide cannon; you give shelter to your fighting countrymen from rain and heat. You delay the enemy; you mislead him, you drive him back. When you die, deserted by the birds and all your hidden furred and feathered children, you give yourselves—give, give to the last! Your wood strengthens the trenches, or burns to warm the freezingpoilus. Brave forests, pathetic forests! I hear you defy the enemy in your hour of death: "Strike us, kill us. Still you shall never pass!"
We had felt that we knew something of the war-zone after Lorraine; but there the great battles had all been fought in 1914, when the world was young. Here, it seemed as if the earth must still be hot from the feet of retreating Germans.
The whole landscape was pitted with shell-holes, andspider-webbed with barbed wire. The three lines of French trenches we passed might, from their look, have been manned yesterday. Piled along the neat new road were bombs for aviators to drop; queer, fish-shaped things, and still queerer cages they had been in. There were long, low sheds for fodder. At each turn was the warning word, "Convois." The poor houses of such villages as continued to exist were numbered, for the first time in their humble lives, because they were needed for military lodgings. Notices in the German language were hardly effaced from walls of half-ruined buildings. They had been partly rubbed out, one could see, but the ugly German words survived, strong and black as a stain on one's past. Huge rounds of barbed wire which had been brought, and never used, were stacked by the roadside, and there were long lines of trench-furniture the enemy had had to abandon in flight, or leave in dug-outs: rough tables, chairs, rusty cooking-stoves, pots, pans, petrol tins, and broken dishes: even lamps, torn books, and a few particularly ugly blue vases for flowers.Theymust have been made in Germany, I knew!
Wattled screens against enemy fire still protected the road, and here and there was a "camouflage" canopy for a big gun. The roofs of beautiful old farmhouses were crushed in, as if tons of rock had fallen on them: and the moss which once had decked their ancient tiles with velvet had withered, turning a curious rust colour, like dried blood. Young trees with their throats cut were bandaged up with torn linen and bagging on which German printed words were dimly legible. It would have been a scene of unmitigated grimness, save for last summer's enterprisinggrass and flowers, which autumn, kinder than war, had not killed.
Late roses and early chrysanthemums grew in the gardens of broken, deserted cottages, as if the flowers yearned to comfort the wounded walls with soft caresses, innocent as the touch of children. On the burned façades of houses, trellised fruit-trees clung, some dead—mere black pencillings sketched on brick or plaster—but now and then one was living still, like a beautiful young Mazeppa, bound to a dead steed.
So we arrived at Noyon, less than two hours by car from Compiègne. The nearness of it to the heart of France struck me suddenly. I could hear the echo of sad voices curbing the optimists: "The Germans are still at Noyon!"
Well—they are not at Noyon now. They've been gone for many moons. Yet there's a look on the faces of the people in the town—a look when they come to the windows or doors of their houses, or when they hear a sudden noise in the street—which makes those moons seem never to have waned.
Washington has adopted Noyon, so the Becketts could not offer any great public charity, but they could sprinkle about a few private good deeds, in remembrance of Jim, who loved the place, as he loved all the Île-de-France. One of Mother Beckett's most valued letters from "Jim-on-his-travels" (as she always says) is from Noyon, and she was so bent on reading it aloud to us, as we drove slowly—almost reverently—into the town, that she wouldn't look (I believe she even grudged our looking!) at the façade of the far-famed Hôtel de Ville, until she'dcome to the end of the last page. She seemed to think that to look up prematurely would be like wanting to see the stage before the curtain rose on the play!
I loved her for it—we all loved her—and obeyed as far as possible. But one couldn't shut one's eyes to the Stars and Stripes that flapped on the marvellously ornate front of the old building—flapped like the wings of the American Eagle that has flown across the Atlantic to help save France.
Jim—a son of the Eagle—who gave his life for this land and for liberty, would have felt proud of that flag, I think, if he could have seen it to-day: for because she is the adopted child of Washington, Noyon "stars" the emblem of her American mother. She hangs out no other flag—not even that of France—on the Hôtel de Ville. Maybe she'll give her own colours a place there later, but at this moment the Star Spangled Banner floats alone in its glory.
No nice, normal-minded person could remember, or morbidly want to remember, the name unkindly given by Julius Cæsar to Noyon, when he had besieged it. I can imagine even Charlemagne waving that cumbrous label impatiently aside, though Noyon mixed with Laon was his first capital. "Noviodunum Belgarum it may have been" (I dare say he said). "ButI'mgoing to call it Noyon!"
He was crowned king of Austria in Noyon cathedral—an even older one than the cathedral of to-day, which the Germans have generously omitted to destroy, merely stealing all its treasures! But I feel sure he doesn't feel Austrian in these days, if he is looking down over the"Blessed Damosel's" shoulder, to see what's going on here below. He belonged really to the whole world. Why, didn't that fairy-story king, Haroun al Raschid, send him from Bagdad the "keys of the tomb of Christ," as Chief of the Christian World? They say his ghost haunts Noyon, and was always there whenever a king was crowned, or elected—as Hugh Capet was. Perhaps it may have been Charlemagne in the spirit who persuaded the Germans to their great retreat from the Noyon front this last spring of 1917!"
Coming into thePlace, and stopping in front of the Hôtel de Ville, gave me the oddest sense of unreality, because, when we were in Paris the other day, I saw the scene in a moving picture: the first joyful entry of the French soldiers into the town, when the Germans had cleared out. I could hardly believe that I wasn't just a figure flickering across a screen, and that the film wouldn't hurry me along somewhere else, whether I wanted to go or not.
There were the venerable houses with the steep slate roofs, and singularly intelligent-looking windows, whose bright panes seemed to twinkle with knowledge of what they had seen during these dreadful eighteen months of German occupation. There were the odd, unfinished towers of the cruciform cathedral—quaint towers, topped with wood and pointed spirelets—soaring into the sky above the gray colony of clustered roofs. There was the cobbled pavement, glittering like masses of broken glass, after a shower of rain just past; and even more interesting than any of these was the fantastically carved façade of the Hôtel de Ville, which has lured thousands of touriststo Noyon in days of peace. Who knows but they have been coming ever since 1532, when it was finished?
At first sight, we should never have guessed what Noyon had suffered from the Germans. It was only after wandering through the splendid old cathedral of Notre-Dame, stripped of everything worth stealing, and going from street to street (we paused a long time in the one where Calvin was born, a disagreeable, but I suppose useful, man!) that we began to realize the slow torture inflicted by the Germans. Of course, "lessons" had to be taught. Rebellious persons had to be "punished." Nothing but justice had been done upon the unjust by their just conquerors. And oh, how thorough and painstaking they were in its execution!
As they'd destroyed all surrounding cities and villages, they had to put the "evacuated" inhabitants somewhere (those they couldn't use as slaves to work in Germany), so they herded the people by the thousand into Noyon. That place had to be spared for the Germans themselves to live in, being bigger and more comfortable than others in the neighbourhood; so it was well to have as many of the conquered as possible interned under their own sharp eyes. Noyon was "home" to six thousand souls before the war. After the Germans marched in, it had to hold ten thousand. But a little more room in the houses was thriftily obtained by annexing all the furniture, even beds. Tables and chairs they took, too, and stoves, and cooking utensils, which left the houses conveniently empty, to be shared by families from Roye, and Nesle, and Ham, and Chauny—oh, so many other towns and hamlets, that one loses count in trying to remember!
How the people lived, they hardly know now, in looking back, some of them told us, as we walked about with a French officer who was our guide. Eighteen months of it! Summer wasn't quite so bad. One can always bear hardships when weather, at least, is kind. But the winters! It is those winters that scarcely bear thinking of, even now.
No lights were allowed after dark. All doors must be left open, for the German military police to walk in at any hour of the night, to see what mischief was brewing in the happy families caged together. There was no heating, and often no fire for cooking, consequently such food as there was had to be eaten cold. No nose must be shown out of doors unless with a special permit, so to speak, displayed on the end of it. Not that there was much incentive to go out, as all business was stopped, and all shops closed. Without "le Comité Américain," thousands would have starved, so it was lucky for Noyon that the United States was neutral then!
We spent hours seeing things, and talking to people—old people, and children, and soldiers—each one with a new side of the great story to tell, as if each had been weaving a few inches of some wonderful, historic piece of tapestry, small in itself, but essential to the pattern. Then we started for home—I mean Compiègne—by a different way; the way of Carlepont, named after Charlemagne, because it is supposed that he was born there.
The forest was even more lovable than before, a younger forest: fairy-like in beauty as a rainbow, in its splashed gold and red, and green and violet and orange of autumn. The violet was "atmosphere," but it was as much a partof the forest as the leaves, or the delicate trunks dim as ghosts in shadow, bright as organ-pipes where sun touched them. Out from the depths came sweet, mysterious breaths, and whispers like prophecies of peace. But to this region of romance there were sharp contrasts. Not even dreams have sharper ones! German trenches, chopped into blackened wastes that once were farmlands, and barbed wire wriggling like snake-skeletons across dreary fields.
We got out of our cars, and went into the trenches, thinking thoughts unspeakable. Long ago as the Germans had vanished, and every corner had been searched, our officer warned us not to pick up "souvenirs." Some infernal machine might have been missed in the search and nothing was to be trusted—no, not even a bit of innocent-looking lead pencil.
They were trenches made to live in, these! They had been walled with stones from ruined farmhouses. The "dug-outs" were super-dug-outs. We saw concealed cupolas for machine-guns, and "les officiers boches" had had a neat system of douches.
There was no need to worry that Brian might stumble or fall in the slippery labyrinths we travelled, for he had Dierdre O'Farrell as guide. I'm afraid I knew what it was to be jealous: and this new gnawing pain is perhaps meant to be one of my punishments. Of course it's no more than I deserve. But that Brian should be chosen as the instrument, all unknowingly, and happily—thathurts!
It was just as we were close to Compiègne, not twenty minutes (in motor talk) outside the town, that the "accident" happened.
At first it seemed an ordinary, commonplace accident. A loud report like a pistol shot: a flat tire down on our car: that was all.
We stopped, and the little taxi-cab, tagging on behind like a small dog after a big one, halted in sympathy. Julian O'Farrell jumped out to help Morel, our one-legged chauffeur, as he always does if anything happens, just to remind the Becketts how kind and indispensable he is. We knew that we should be hung up for a good twenty minutes, so the whole party, with the exception of Mother Beckett and me, deserted the cars. Brian was with Dierdre. He had no need of his sister; so I was free to stop with the little old lady, who whispered in my ear that she was tired.
Father Beckett and Julian watched Morel, giving him a word or a hand now and then. Dierdre and Brian sauntered away, deep in argument over Irish politics (it's come to that between them: and Dierdre actuallylistensto Brian!). Mother Beckett drifted into talk of Jim, as she loves to do with me, and I wandered, hand in hand with her, back into his childhood. Blue dusk was falling like a rain of dead violets—just that peculiar, faded blue; and as I was absorbed in the tale of a nursery fire (Jim, at six, playing the hero) I had no eyes for scenery. I was but vaguely aware that not far off loomed a gateway,adorned with a figure of the Virgin. A curving avenue led to shadowy, neglected lawns, dimly suggesting some faded romance of history.
Presently, from between the open gates came a man in khaki, accompanied by a tall, slim, and graceful dog. It was he, not the man, that caught my eye and for an instant snatched my thought from Little Boy Jim rescuing a rocking-horse at the risk of his life. He was a police dog with the dignity of a prince and the lightness of a plume.
"Lovely creature!" I said to myself, as he and the khaki man swung toward us down the road. And I wished that Brian could see him, for the dog Brian loved and lost at the Front was a Belgian police dog.
Perhaps, Padre, Brian wrote you about his wonderful pet, that he thought worthy to name after the dog-star Sirius. I've forgotten to ask if he did write; but I seldom had a letter from him from the trenches that didn't mention Sirius. Everyone seemed to adore the dog, which developed into a regimental mascot. What his early history was can never be known: but Brian rescued him from a burning château in Belgium, just as Jim rescued the rocking-horse of Mother Beckett's nursery story, though with rather more risk! It was a château where some hidden tragedy must have been enacted, because the Germans took possession of it with the family still there—such of the family as wasn't fighting: two young married women, sisters, wives of brothers. But when the Germans ran before the British, and fired the château as they went, not a creature living or dead was left in the house—except the dog—and nothing has ever been heard of the sisters.
The fire was raging so fiercely when Brian's regimentarrived that no one would have ventured into the house if a dog hadn't been heard to howl. You know how Brian loves dogs. When he found that the sound came from a certain room on the ground floor, he determined to get in somehow. Masses of ivy cloaked that side of the château. It was beginning to crackle with fire that flamed out from other windows, but Brian climbed the thick, rope-like stems, hundreds of years old, and smashed his way through the window. The room was filling with smoke. The dog's voice was choked. Brian's eyes streamed, but he wouldn't give up. Only by crawling along the floor under the smoke curtain could he get at the dog. Somebody had meant to murder the animal, for he had been chained to the leg of a table.
Brian wrote that the dog realized his danger, and was grateful as a human being to his rescuer. His worship of Brian was pathetic. He seemed to care for no one else, though he was too fine a gentleman not to be polite to all—all, that is, except Germans. They never dared let him loose when prisoners were about. The sight of a gray-green uniform was to that dog what a red rag is to a bull. For him some horror was associated with it—a horror which must remain a mystery for us.
The day Brian lost his eyesight he lost Sirius. When he came back to consciousness, only to learn that he was blind, his first thought was of his friend. No one knew what had happened to the dog. The chances seemed to be that the shell which had buried Brian had buried Sirius, too; but Brian wouldn't believe this. Somehow the dog would have contrived to escape. I had to promise that, whenever I happened to see a dark gray, almost blackBelgian police dog of beautiful shape, I would call "Sirius" to see if he answered.
More than once since this trip began I've called "Sirius!" to police dogs, not knowing whether they were Belgian, German, or Dutch, and they have answered only with glances of superb scorn. This time I hesitated. The mental picture I saw of myself—a vague young woman, seated in an automobile stranded by the roadside, trying to lure away the dog of a strange man—was disconcerting. While I debated whether to break my promise or behave like a wild school girl, the animal paused in his listless trot. He stopped, as if he'd been struck by an unseen bullet, quivered all over, and shot past us like a torpedo. A minute later I heard a tumultuous barking—a barking as if the gates of a dog's heaven had suddenly opened.
I sprang up in the car, and turning round, knelt on the seat to see what was going on behind us. Far away were Brian and Dierdre. And oh, Padre, I can never dislike that girl again! I apologize for everything I ever said against her. She saw that great police dog making for blind Brian. And you know, a police dog can look formidable as a panther. She took no time to think, though the idea might have sprung to her mind that the creature was mad. She simply threw herself in front of Brian. It was an offer of her life for his.
I could do nothing, of course. I was too far off. I'm not a screaming girl, but I'm afraid I did give a shriek, for Mother Beckett started up, and cried out: "What's the matter?"
I didn't answer her. I hardly heard. I forgot everyoneexcept Brian and that girl. It was only when the thing was over, and we were all talking at once, that I realized how the others had shared my fright.
Perhaps Brian recognized the dog's bark at a distance, for he says a dog's voice is individual as a man's. Or his instinct—made magically keen by his blindness—told him in a flash of inspiration what his eyes couldn't see. Anyhow, he knew that Dierdre was in danger, and almost flung her behind him. He was just in time to save her from being thrown down by the dog, who hurled himself like a young avalanche at Brian. To those who had no clue to the truth, it must have seemed that the animal was mad. Julian, and Father Beckett, and the khaki man rushed to the rescue, only to see the dog and Brian in each other's arms, the creature licking Brian's face, laughing and crying at the same time—which you know, Padre, a dog frantic with joy at sight of a long-lost master can do perfectly well! It seems too melodramatic to be true, but itistrue: the dog was Sirius.
You'll think now that this is the "astonishing thing" which would—I said—have made this whole trip worth while. But no: the thing I meant has little or nothing to do with the finding of Sirius.
Even Mother Beckett could sit still no longer. She had to be helped out of the car by me to join the group round Brian and the dog. She took my arm, and I matched my steps to her tiny trot, though I pined to sprint! We met Father Beckett coming back with apologies for his one minute of forgetfulness. The first time in years, I should think, that he had forgotten his wife for sixty whole seconds!
"It's like something in a story or a play," he panted, out of breath. "This is Brian's lost dog. You've heard him talk of Sirius, my dear. There can be no doubt it's the same animal! The man who thought he was its master admits that. Andguesswho he is—the man, not the dog."
Mother Beckett reminded her husband that never had she succeeded in a guess. But she was saved trying by the arrival of the man in khaki who, having abandoned his dog—or being abandoned by it—had followed Mr. Beckett.
"Why, JackCurtis!" gasped the little old lady. "It can't be you!"
"I guess it's nobody else," laughed a soldierly fellow, with the blackest eyes and whitest teeth imaginable. "I'm doing the war for the New YorkRecord—staying here at the château of Royalieu with the British correspondents for the French front."
I longed to get to Brian and be introduced to Sirius, but Mother Beckett caught my arm. "Mary, dear," she cooed, "I'd like you and Mr. Curtis to meet. Jack, this is Miss O'Malley, who would have been our Jim's wife if he'd lived. And Mary, this is one of Jim's classmates at college; a very good friend."
The khaki young man (American khaki) held out his hand and I put mine into it. He stared at me—a pleasant, sympathetic, and not unadmiring stare—peering nearsightedly through the twilight.
"So Jim found you again, after all?" he asked, in a quiet, low voice, not utterly unlike Jim's own. Men of the same university do speak alike all over the world.
"I—don't quite understand," I stammered. When any sudden question about Jim is flung at me before his parents, I'm always a little scared!
"Jim and I had a bet," Mr. Curtis explained, "that he couldn't travelincog., through Europe for a given length of time, in a big auto, doing himself well everywhere, without his real name coming out. He won the bet, but he told me—after he got over a bad dose of typhoid—that he'd lost the only girl he'd ever loved or could love—lost her through that da—that stupid bet. He described the girl. I guess there aren't two of her on earth!"
"That's a mighty fine compliment, Molly!" said Father Beckett.
Just then Brian called, and I wasn't sorry, for I couldn't find the right answer for the man who had separated Jim Beckett from me. It was all I could do to get my breath.
"Why, of course, that's your brother! I might have known by the likeness. Gee, but it's great about the dog! No wonder it despised the name of 'Sherlock.' Rather a come-down from a star! There's a big story in this. Your party will have to dine with us correspondents, and talk things over. The crowd will be delighted. Say yes, Mrs. Beckett!"
I heard no more, for I was on my way to Brian. But by the time I'd thanked Dierdre, been slightly snubbed by her, and successfully presented to Sirius, it was settled that we should spend our evening at Royalieu with the correspondents. The Beckett auto was ready, but the dog's joy was too big for the biggest car, so Brian and I walked to the château, and Jack Curtis with us, to exchange stories ofle grand chien policier, late "Sherlock."
Matching the new history on to the early mystery was like fitting in the lost bits of a jigsaw puzzle—bits which, when missing, left the picture void. Between Brian and the war correspondent the pattern came to life: but there's one piece in the middle which can never be restored. Only one person could supply that: a German officer, and he is no longer in this world.
Jack Curtis found the police dog, badly wounded, at a place near Paschendaele, where the Germans had temporary headquarters and had been driven out after a fierce struggle. One of the dog's legs was broken, and blood had dried on his glossy coat, but he "registered delight" (as moving picture people say) when he limped out of a half-ruined house to welcome the rush of British khaki. The few inhabitants who had lived in the village through the German occupation, knew the dog as "Siegfried," to which name he had obstinately refused to answer. His German master, a captain, whom he obeyed sullenly, always dragged him about in leash, as he never willingly kept at heel. Everyone wondered why the officer, who was far from lenient with his men, showed patience with the dog. But his orderly explained that Captain von Busche had picked up the starving animal weeks before, wandering about No Man's Land. The creature was valuable, and his dislike of the gray-green uniform had puzzled Von Busche. His failure to win the dog's affection piqued him, and in his blundering way he persevered. The people of the village were more successful. They made friends with "Siegfried," to Von Busche's annoyance; and a day or two before the hurried German retreat under bombardment, the dogwas beaten for deserting his master to follow a little boy. The boy, too, was punished for his "impudence" in calling the dog. People were indignant, and there were secret murmurings about revenge.
That night, however, Fate took the matter in hand. Precisely what happened is the bit that must remain missing in the puzzle. The dog slept in the room with his master, in a house where several young officers lived close to headquarters. All of them had been out playing cards at a tavern. Von Busche returned earlier than the rest. He was seen in the street the worse for drink. He went into the house, and must have gone to his room, where the police dog had been shut up for hours in disgrace. A moment later there was a yell, then a gurgling shriek. The neighbours listened—and shrugged their shoulders. The parents of the child who had been beaten by Von Busche lived next door. They heard sounds of a scuffle; furniture falling; faint groans and deep growls. Lips dared not speak, but eyes met and said: "The dog's done what we couldn't do."
Silence had fallen long before Von Busche's fellow officers came home; such silence as that town knew, where bombardment ceased not by day or night. Before dawn, a bomb fell on the roof of the house, which till then had never been touched, and the officers all scuttled out to save themselves; all but Von Busche. Whether in the confusion he was forgotten, or whether it was thought he had not come home, no one could tell. He was not seen again till after the Germans had packed up in haste and decamped, which they did a few hours later, leaving the townsfolk to shelter in cellars. It was only when theBritish arrived, and Siegfried limped out from the battered house, that the dog's existence was recalled—and the sounds in the night. Then the house was searched, and Von Busche's body found, half buried under fallen tiles and plaster. There were wounds in his throat, however, not to be accounted for by the accident. The dog's broken leg was also a mystery. "I had the poor boy mended up by a jolly good surgeon," Jack Curtis finished his story. "He's as sound as ever now. He attached himself to me from the first, as if he knew he had to thank me for his cure, but he wasn't enthusiastic. I couldn't flatter myself that I was loved! I had the idea I wasn't what he wanted—that he'd like to tell me what hedidwant, and politely bid me good-bye forever."
"You don't know where Von Busche got hold of the dog, do you?" Brian asked.
"Only what his orderly told people, that it was in Flanders, close to some ruined, burnt-up château that he could hardly be forced to leave, though he was starving."
"I thought he'd get back there!" Brian said. "As for Von Busche—I wonder—but no! If it had been he the first time, would the dog have waited all those weeks for his revenge?"
"I don't understand," said the war correspondent.
"I don't myself," answered Brian. "But maybe the dog will manage to make me, some day. I was thinking—how I found him, tied to a table in a burning room. If Von Busche—— But anyhow, Sirius, you're no assassin! At worst, you're an avenger."
The dog leaped upon Brian at sound of the rememberedname. Odd that three of his names, chosen by different men, should begin with "S"!
He's going to be an exciting passenger for the Becketts' car I foresee. But Brian can make him do anything, even to keeping quiet. And the trip can't go on a step without him now!
I felt that Jack Curtis had been hoping for a chance to speak with me alone—about Jim. But there was no such chance then. We were met by two of the British correspondents, and a French officer with a very high and ancient title, who was playing host (for France) to the newspaper men in this old château, once a convent. You see, the two cars had shot past as we walked; and by the time we reached the door preparations were being made for an impromptu party.
Never was a dinner so good, it seemed, and never was talk so absorbing. Some of it concerned an arch of honour or a statue to be placed over the spot where the first men of the American army fell in France: at Bethelmont; some concerned a road whose construction is being planned—a sacred road through Belgium and France, from the North Sea to Alsace; a road to lead pilgrims past villages and towns destroyed by Germany. This, according to the correspondents who were full of the idea, doesn't mean that the devastation isn't ultimately to be repaired. The proposal is, to leave in each martyred place a memorial for the eyes of coming generations: a ruined church; a burned château; the skeleton of anhôtel de ville, or a wrecked factory; a mute appeal to all the world: "This was war, as the Germans made it. In the midst of peace, Remember!"
Beneath my interest in the talk ran an undercurrent of my own private thought, which was not of the future, but of the past. I'd begun to wonder why I had been afraid of Jack Curtis. Instead of dreading words with him alone, I wished for them now.
After dinner I had but a few minutes to wait. When I'd refused coffee, he, too, refused, and made an excuse to show me a room of which the correspondents were fond—a room full of old trophies of the forest hunt.
"Did you notice at dinner how I kept trying to get a good look at your left hand?" Curtis asked.
"No," I answered, "I didn't notice that."
"I'm glad. I was scared you'd think me cheeky. Yet I couldn't resist. I wanted to see whether Jim had given youthering."
"The ring?" I echoed.
"The ring of our bet, the year before the war: the bet you knew about, that kept you two apart till Jim came over to France this second time."
"Yes—I knew about the bet," I said, "but not the ring. I—I haven't an engagement ring."
"Queer!" Jack Curtis puzzled out aloud. "It was a race between Jim and me which should get that ring at an antique shop, when we both heard of its history. He could afford to bid higher, so he secured it. Not that he was selfish! But he said he wanted the ring in case he met his ideal and got engaged to her. If he'd lost the bet the ring would have been mine. If he didn't give it to you, I wonder what's become of the thing? Perhaps his mother knows. Did she ever speak to you about Jim bringing home a quaint old ring from France, thattime after his fever—a ring supposed to have belonged to the most beautiful woman of her day, the Italian Countess Castiglione, whom Louis Napoleon loved?"
"No," I said. "He can't have given the ring to his mother, or she would have told me about it, I'm sure. She's always talking of him."
"Perhaps it was stolen or lost," Curtis reflected. "Yet I don't feel as if that had happened, somehow! I trust my feelings a good deal—especially since this war, that's made us all a bit psychic—don't you?"
"I have too many feelings to trust half of them!" I tried to laugh.
"Have you ever had one, I wonder, like mine, about Jim? Dare I speak to you of this?"
"Why not?"
"Well—I wouldn't dare to his mother. Or even to the old man."
"Youmustspeak now, please, Mr. Curtis, to me!"
"It's this; have you ever had the feeling that Jim may be alive?"
We were standing. I caught at the back of a chair. Things whirled for an instant. Then I gathered my wits together. "I haven't let myself feel it," I said. "And yet, in a way, Ialwaysfeel it. I mean, I seem to feel—his thoughts round us. But that's because we speak and think of him almost every moment of the day, his father and mother and I. There can be no doubt—can there?"
"Others have come back from the dead since this war. Why not Jim Beckett?"
"They said they had—found his body."
"Oh, theysaid! Germans say a lot of things. But for the Lord's sake, Miss O'Malley, don't let's upset those poor old people with any such hope. I've only my feeling—and other people's stories of escape—to go upon. I spoke to you, because I guess you've got a strong soul, and can stand shocks. Besides, you told me I must speak. I had to obey."
"Thank you for obeying," I said. And just then someone came into the room.
Now, Padre, I have told you thegreat thing. What does it matter what happens to me, if only Jack Curtis's "feeling" comes true?
It is two days since I wrote, Padre; and I have come back to Compiègne from a world of unnatural silence and desolation. Day before yesterday it was Roye and Nesle; the Château of Ham; Jussy, Chauny and Prince Eitel Friedrich's pavilion. To-morrow we hope to start for Soissons.
Yesterday we rested, because Mother Beckett had a shocking headache. (Oh, it was pathetic and funny, too, what she said when we slipped back into Compiègne at night! "Isn't it a comfort, Molly, to see a place again where there arewholehouses?") After Soissons we shall return to Compiègne and then go to Amiens with several of the war correspondents, who have their own car. Women aren't allowed, as a rule, to see anything of the British front, but it's just possible that Father Beckett can get permission for his wife to venture within gazing distance. Of course, she can't—or thinks she can't—stir without me!
We took still another road to Noyon (one must pass through Noyon going toward the front, if one keeps Compiègne for one's headquarters) and the slaughter of trees was the wickedest we'd seen: a long avenue of kind giants murdered, and orchards on both sides of it. The Germans, it seems, had circular saws, worked by motors, on purpose to destroy the large trees in a hurry. Theydidn't protect their retreat by barring the road with the felled trunks. They left most of the martyrs standing, their trunks so nearly sawed through that a wind would have blown them down. The pursuing armies had to finish the destruction to protect themselves. Farms were exterminated all along the way; and little hamlets—nameless for us—were heaps of blackened brick and stone, mercifully strewn with flowers like old altars to an unforgotten god.
Roye was the first big place on our road. It used to be rich, and its 4,000 inhabitants traded in grain and sugar. How the very name brought back our last spring joy in reading news of the recapture! "Important Victory. Roye Retaken." It was grandly impressive in ruin, especially the old church of St. Pierre, whose immense, graceful windows used to be jewelled with ancient glass that people came from far away to see.
Jim had written his mother about that glass, consequently shewouldget out of the car to climb (with my help and her husband's) over a pile of fallen stones like a petrified cataract, which leads painfully up to the desecrated and pillaged high altar. I nearly sprained my ankle in getting to one of the windows, under which my eyes had caught the glint of a small, sparkling thing: but I had my reward, for the sparkling thing was a lovely bit of sapphire-blue glass from the robe of some saint, and the little lady was grateful for the gift as if it had been a real jewel—indeed, more grateful. "I'll keep it with my souvenirs of Jim," she said, "for his eyes have looked on it: and it's just the colour of yours which he loved. He'd be pleased that you found it for me." (Ah, if she knew! I can'thelp praying that she never may know, though such prayers from me are almost sacrilege.)
A little farther on—as the motor, not the crow, flies—we came to Nesle, or what once was Nesle. The ghost of the twelfth-century church looms in skeleton form above one more Pompeii among the many forced by the Germans upon France: but save for that towering relic of the past there's little left of this brave town of the Somme, which was historic before the thirteenth century. It gave its name to a famous fighting family of feudal days: and through the last heiress of the line—a beauty and a "catch"—a certain Seigneur de Nesle became Regent of France, in the second Crusade of Louis XII—"Saint Louis." Later ladies of the line became dear friends of another Louis, fifteenth of the name, who was never called saint. Not far from Nesle, Henry V of England crossed the Somme and won the Battle of Agincourt. But now, the greatest dramatic interest is concentrated in the cemetery!
We had heard of it at Compiègne and the wild things that had happened there: so after a look at the ruined church, and the once charmingPlace, we went straight to the town burial-place, and our unofficial guide was the oldest man I ever saw. He had lurked rather than lived, through months of German barbarity at Nesle, guarding a bag of money he'd hidden underground. An officer from Noyon was with us; but he had knowledge of the ancient man—a great character—and bade him tell us the tale of the graveyard. He obeyed with unction and with gestures like lightning as it flashes across a night sky. The looks his old eyes dartedforth as he talked might have struck a live German dead.
"The animals! What do you think they did when they were masters here?" he snarled. "Ah, you do not know the Boches as we learned to know them, so you would never guess. They opened our tombs, the vaults of distinguished families of France. They broke the coffins and stole the rings from skeleton fingers. They left the bones of our ancestors, and of our friends whose living faces we could remember, scattered over the ground, as if to feed the dogs. In our empty coffins they placed their own dead. On the stone or marble of monuments they cut away the names of those whose sacred sleep they had disturbed. Instead, they inscribed the disgusting names of their Boche generals and colonels. Where they could not change the inscriptions they destroyed the tombstones and set up others. You will see them now. But wait—you have not heard all yet. Far from that! When the Tommies came to Nesle—your English Tommies—they did not like what the Boches had done to our cemetery. They said things—strong things! And while they were hot with anger they knocked the hideous new monuments about. They could not bear to see them mark the stolen graves. The little crosses that showed where simple soldiers lay, those they did not touch. It was only the officers' tombs they spoiled. I will show you what they did."
We let him hobble ahead of us into the graveyard. He led us past the long rows of low wooden crosses with German names on them, the crosses with British names—(good, sturdy British names: "Hardy,""Kemp," "Logan," "Wilding," planted among flowers of France)—and paused in the aristocratic corner of the city of the dead. Once, this had been the last earthly resting-place of old French families, or of the rich whose relatives could afford expensive monuments. But the war had changed all that. German names had replaced the ancient French ones on the vaults, as German corpses had replaced French bodies in the coffins. Stone and marble monuments had been recarved, or new ones raised. There were roughly cut figures of German colonels and majors and captains. This rearrangement was what the "Tommies" had "not liked." They liked it so little that they chopped off stone noses and faces; they threw red ink, brighter than blood, over carved German uniforms, and neatly chipped away the counterfeit presentment of iron crosses. In some cases, also, they purified the vaults of German bones and gave back in exchange such French ones as they found scattered. They wrote in large letters on tombstones, "Boch no bon," and other illiterate comments unflattering to the dead usurpers; all of which, our old man explained, mightily endeared the Atkinses to the returning inhabitants of Nesle.
"Those brave Tommies are gone now," he sighed, "but they left their dead in our care. You see those flowers on their graves? It is we who put them there, and the children tend them every day. If you come back next year, it will be the same. We shall not forget."
"A great statesman paid us a visit not long after Nesle was liberated," our officer guide took up the story. "He had heard what the Tommies did, and he was not quite sure if they were justified. 'After all, German ornot German, a tomb is a tomb, and the dead are dead,' he argued. But when he saw the cemetery of another place not far away, where the bodies of Frenchmen—yes, and women and little babies!—still lay where Germans had thrown them in stealing their graves, the grand old man's blood rushed to his head. He was no longer uncertain if the Tommies were right. He was certain they had done well; and in his red rage he, with his own hands, tore down thirty of the lying tombstones."
Oh, the silence of these dead towns that the Germans have killed with bombs and burning!Youknow what it is like, Padre, because you have passed behind the veil and have knowledge beyond our dreaming: but to me it is atriste révélation. I never realized before what the words "dead silence" could mean. It is a silence youhear. It cries out as the loudest voice could not cry. It makes you listen—listen for the pleasant, homely sounds you've always associated with human habitations: the laughter of girls, the shouts of schoolboys, the friendly barking of dogs. But you listen in vain. You wonder if you are deaf—if other people are hearing what you cannot hear: and then you see on each face the same blank, listening look that must be on your own. I think a night at Chauny, or Jussy, might drive a weak woman mad. But—I haven't come to Chauny or Jussy yet! After Nesle we arrived at Ham, with its canal and its green, surrounding marshes.
Ham has ceased to be silent. There are some houses left, and to those houses people have come back. Shops have reopened, as at Noyon, where the French Government has advanced money to the business men. Wedrove into the town of Ham (what is left of it!) just as we were hating ourselves for being hungry. It is sordid and dreadful to be hungry in the midst of one's rage and grief and pity—to want to eat in a place like Ham, where one should wish to absorb nothing but history; yet our officer guide, who has helped make a good deal of history since 1914, seemed to think lunching quite as important as sightseeing. In a somewhat battered square, busy with reopening shops (some of them mostquaintshops, with false hair as a favourite display!) was a hotel. The Germans had lived in it for months. They had bullied the very old, very vital landlady who welcomed us. Their boots had worn holes in the stair carpet, going up and down in a goose-step. Their elbows had polished the long table in the dining room, and—oh, horror!—their mouths had drunk beer from glasses in which the good wine of France was offered to us!
"Ah, but I have scrubbed the goblets since with a fortune's worth of soda," the woman volubly explained. "They are purified. If I could wash away as easily the memories behind my eyes and in my ears! Of them I cannot get rid. Whenever I see an automobile, yes, even the most innocent automobile, I live again through a certain scene! We had here at Ham an invalid woman, whose husband the Boches took out and shot. When she heard the news, she threw herself under one of their military cars and was killed. If a young girl passes my windows (alas, it is seldom! the Germans know why) I see once more a procession of girls lined up to send into slavery. God knows where they are now, those children! All we know is, that in this country there is not a girlleft of an age between twelve and twenty, unless she was hidden or disguised when the Boches took their toll. If I hear a sound of bells, I see our people being herded into church—our old, old church, with its proud monuments!—so their houses might be burned before the Germans had to run. They stayed in the church for days and nights, waiting for the château to be blown up. What a suspense! No one knew if the great shock, when it came, might not kill everyone!"
As she exploded reminiscences, the old lady fed us with ham and omelette salted with tears. We had to eat, or hurt her feelings, but it was as if we swallowed the poor creature's emotion with our food, and the effect within was dynamic. I never had such a volcanic meal! Our French officer was the only calm one among us, but—he had been stationed in this liberated region for months. It's an old story for him.
After luncheon we staggered away to see the great sight of Ham, the fortress-château which has given it history and fame for centuries. The Germans blew up the citadel out of sheer spite, as the vast pink pile long ago ceased to be of military value. They wished to show their power by ruining the future of the town, which lived on itsmonument historique: but (as often happens with their "frightfulness") that object was just the one they failed in. I can't believe that the castle of Ham was as striking in its untouched magnificence as now in the rose-red splendour of its ruin!
To be sure, the guardians can never again show precisely where Joan of Arc was imprisoned, or the rooms where Louis Napoleon lived through his six years ofcaptivity, or the little garden he used to cultivate, or the way he passed to escape over the drawbridge, dressed as a mason, with a plank on his shoulder. But the glorious old tower or donjon still stands, one hundred feet high and one hundred feet wide. German gunpowder was too weak to bring it down, and so perhaps the prophecy of the Comte de St. Pol, builder of the fortress, may be fulfilled—that while France stands, the tower of Ham's citadel will stand. Thousands more pilgrims will come in a year, after the war, to see what the Germans did and what they failed to do, than ever came in the mild, prosperous days before 1914, when Ham's best history was old. They will come and gaze at the massive bulk—red always as if reflecting sunset light—looming against the blue; they will peer down into dusky dungeons underground: and the new guardian (a mutilated soldier he'll be, perhaps, decorated with thecroix de guerre) will tell them about the girl of Ham who lured a German officer to a death-trap in a secretoubliette, "where 'tis said his body lies to-day." Then they will stand under the celebrated old tree in the courtyard, unhurt by the explosion, and take photographs of the château the Germans have unwittingly made more beautiful than before.
"Mon mieux" was the motto St. Pol carved over the gateway; "Our worst" is the taunt the Germans have flung. But the combination of that best and worst is glorious to the eye.
From Ham we spun on to Jussy, along the new white road which is so amazing when one thinks that every yard of it had to be created out of chaos a few monthsago. (They say that some sort of surface was given for the army to pass over in three days' work!) At Jussy we came close to therealfront—closer than we've been yet, except when we went to the American trenches. The first line was only three miles away, and the place is under bombardment, but this was what our guide called a "quiet day," so there was only an occasional mumble and boom. The town was destroyed, wiped almost out of existence, save for heaps of rubble which might have been houses or hills. But there were things to be seen which would have made Jussy worth a long journey. It had been a prosperous place, with one of the biggest sugar refineries in France, and the wreckedusinewas as terrible and thrilling as the moon seen through the biggest telescope in the world.
Not that it looked like the moon. It looked more like a futurist sketch, in red and brown, of the heart of a cyclone; or of the inside of a submarine that has rammed a skeleton ship on the stocks. But the sight gave me the same kind of icy shock I had when I first saw the moon's ravaged face through a huge telescope.Youtook me, Padre, so you'll remember.
If you came to Jussy, and didn't know about the war, you'd think you had stumbled into hell—or else that you were having a nightmare and couldn't wake up. I shall never forget a brobdingnagian boiler as big as a battle tank, that had reared itself on its hind-legs to peer through acheval de friseof writhing girders—tortured girders like a vast wilderness of immense thorn bushes in a hopeless tangle, or a pit of bloodstained snakes. The walls of theusinehave simply melted, and it's hard to realize that itas a building, put up by human hands for human uses, ever existed. There is a new Jussy, though, created since the German retreat; and seeing it, you couldn'thelpknowing that there was a war! The whole landscape is full of cannon, big and little and middle-sized. Queer mushroom buildings have sprung up, for officers' and soldiers' barracks and canteens. Narrow plank walks built high above mud-level—"duck boards," I think they're called—lead to the corrugated iron, tin, and wooden huts. There are aerodromes and aerodromes like a vast circus encampment, where there are not cannon; and the greenish canvas roofs give the only bit of colour, as far as the eye can see—unless one counts the soldiers' uniforms. All the rest is gray as the desert before a dust-storm. Even the sky, which had been blue and bright, was gray over Jussy, and the grayest of gray things were the immense "saucisses"—three or four of them—hanging low under the clouds like advertisements of titanic potatoes, haughtiest of war-time vegetables.
Dierdre O'Farrell inadvertently called the big bulks "saucissons," which amused our officer guide so much that he laughed to tears. The rest of us were able to raise only a faint smile, and we felt his disappointment at our lack of humour.
"Ah, but it is mostfunny!" he said. "I will tell everyone. In future they shall for us be 'saucissons' forever. I suppose it is not so funny for you, because the sight of these dead towns has made you sad. I am almost afraid to take you on to Chauny. You will be much sadder there. Chauny is the sight most pitiful of all. Would you perhaps wish to avoid it?"
"What about you, Mother?" Father Beckett wanted to know.
But Mother had no wish to avoid Chauny. She was not able to believe that anything could be sadder than Roye, or Nesle, or Ham, or more grim than Jussy.
"He doesn't want to take us to Chauny," Brian whispered to me. We were all grouped together near the cars, with Sirius, a quiet, happy dog. "He's trying to think up a new excuse to get out of it."
I glanced at our guide. It waslikeBrian to have guessed what we hadn't seen! Now I was on the alert, the clear-cut French facedidlook nonplussed; and a nervous brown hand was tugging at a smart black moustache.
"Is there any reason why you think it would be better for us not to go there?" I decided to ask frankly.
"It's getting rather late," he suggested, in his precise English. "You have also the Pavilion of Prince Eitel Fritz before you. If it grows too dark, you cannot see St. Quentin well, in the distance, and the glasses will be of no use for Soissons."
"But we'regoingto Soissons day after to-morrow!" said Father Beckett.
"And there'll be a moon presently," added Dierdre. She had heard of the ruined convent at Chauny and was determined not to miss it.
"Yes, there'll be a moon," reluctantly admitted Monsieur le Lieutenant.
"Is there still another reason?" I tried to help him.
"Well, yes, there is one, Mademoiselle," he blurted out. "I had meant not to mention it. But perhaps itis best to tell, and then you may all choose whether you go to Chauny or not. There is a certain risk at this time of day, or a little later. You know we are close to the front here, and enemy aeroplanes fly nearly every afternoon over Chauny toward dusk. They hope to catch some important personage, and they come expressly to 'spot' automobiles. The road through the ruined town is white and new, and the gray military cars in which we bring visitors to the front stand out clearly, especially as twilight falls. I'm afraid we have lingered too long in some of these places. If we were a party of men, I should say nothing, but with three ladies——"
"I can answer for all three, Monsieur," said Mother Beckett, with a pathetically defiant tilt of her small chin.
"My son, you know, was a soldier. We have come to this part of the world to see what we can do for the people in honour of his memory. So we mustn't leave Chauny out."
"Madame, there are no people there, for there are no houses. There are but a few soldiers with an anti-aircraft gun."
"We must see what can be done about building up some of the houses so the people can come back," persisted the old lady, with that gentle obstinacy of hers.
The French officer made no more objections; and knowing his wife, I suppose Father Beckett felt it useless to offer any. We started at once for Chauny: in fact, we flew along the road almost as fast—it seemed—as enemy aeroplanes could fly along the sky if they pursued. But we had a long respite still before twilight.
Our guide was right. Chauny was sadder than the rest, because there had been more of beauty to ruin. And it was ruined cruelly, completely! Even Gerbéviller, in Lorraine, had been less sad than this—less sad because of Sœur Julie, and the quarter on the hill which her devotion saved; less sad, because of the American Red Cross reconstruction centre, for the fruit trees. Here there had been no Sœur Julie, no reconstruction centre yet. The Germans, when they knew they had to go, gave three weeks to their wrecking work. They sent off, neatly packed, all that was worth sending to Germany. They measured the cellars to see what quantity of explosives would be needed to blow up the houses. Then they blew them up, making their quarters meanwhile at a safe distance, in the convent. As for that convent—you will see what happened there when the Boches had no further use for it!
In happy days before the war, whose joys we took comfortably for granted, Chauny had several châteaux of beauty and charm. It had pretty houses and lots of fine shops and a park. It was proud of itsmairieand church and greatusine(now a sight of horror), and the newer parts of the town did honour to their architects. But—Chauny was on the direct road between Cologne and Paris. Nobody thought much about this fact then, except that it helpedtravel and so was good for the country. It is only now that one knows what a price Chauny paid for the advantage. Instead of a beautiful town there remains a heap of cinders, with here and there a wrecked façade of pitiful grace or broken dignity to tell where stood the proudest buildings.
The sky was empty of enemy 'planes; but our guide hurried us through the town, where the new road shone white in contrast with our cars; and having hidden the autos under a group of trees outside, led us on foot toward the convent. The approach was exquisite: a long, long avenue of architectural elms, arbour-like in shade, once the favourite evening promenade of Chauny. That tunnel of emerald and gold would have been an interlude of peace between two tragedies—tragedy of the town, tragedy of the convent—if the ground hadn't been strewn with torn papers, like leaves scattered by the wind: official records flung out of strong boxes by ruthless German hands, poor remnants no longer of value, and saved from destruction only by the kindly trees, friends of happy memories. "The Boches didn't take time to spoil this avenue," said our officer. "They liked it while they lived in the convent; and they left in a hurry."
Just beyond the avenue lies the convent garden; and though it is autumn, when we stepped into that garden we stepped into an oasis of old-fashioned, fragrant flowers, guarded by delicate trees, gentle as the vanished Sisters and their flock of young girl pupils; sweet, small trees, bending low as if to shield the garden's breast from harm.
I wish when Chauny is rebuilt this convent might be left as amonument historique, for, ringed by its perfumed pleasance, it is a glimpse of "fairylands forlorn."
One half believes there must have been some fairy charm at work which kept the fire-breathing German dragon from laying this garden waste when he was forced out of his stolen lair in the convent! Little remains of the house, and in the rubbish heap of fallen walls and beams and plaster, narrow iron bedsteads, where nuns slept or young girls dreamed, perch timidly among stones and blackened bricks. But in the garden all is flowery peace: and the chapel, though ruined, is a strange vision of beauty framed in horror.
Not that the Germans were merciful there. They burned and blew up all that would burn or blow up. The roof fell, and heaped the floor with wreckage; but out of that wreckage, as out of a troubled sea, rise two figures: St. Joseph, and an almost life-size, painted statue of the Virgin. There the two stand firmly on their pedestals, their faces raised to God's roof of blue, which never fails. Because their eyes are lifted, they do not see the flotsam and jetsam of shattered stained glass, burnt woodwork, smashed benches, broken picture-frames and torn, rain-blurred portraits of lesser saints. They seem to think only of heaven.
Though I'm not a Catholic, the chapel gave me such a sense of sacredness and benediction that I felt I must be there alone, if only for a moment. So when our officer led the others out I stayed behind. A clear ray of late sunshine slanted through a broken window set high in a side wall, to stream full upon the face of the Virgin. Someone had crowned her with a wreath of fresh flowers, and had thrust a few white roses under the folded hands which seemed to clasp them lovingly, with a prayer for the peaceof the world. The dazzling radiance brought face and figure to life; and it was as if a living woman had taken the statue's place on the pedestal. The effect was so startling that, if I were a Catholic, I might have believed in a miracle. Protestant as I am, I had the impulse to pray: but—(I don't know, Padre, if I have ever told you this)—I've not dared to pray properly since I first stole the Becketts' love for Brian and me. I've not dared, though never in my life have I so needed and longed for prayer.
This time I couldn't resist, unworthy as I am. The smile of peace and pardon on the statue's illumined face seemed to make all sin forgivable in this haunt of holy dreams. "God forgive me, and show me how to atone," I sent my plea skyward. Suddenly the conviction came that Ishouldbe shown a way of atonement, though it might be hard. I felt lighter of heart, and went on to pray that Jack Curtis's hope might be justified: that, no matter what happened to me, or even to Brian, Jim Beckett might be alive, in this world, and come back safely to his parents.
While I prayed, a sound disturbed the deep silence. It was a far-away sound, but quickly it grew louder and drew nearer: at first a buzzing as of all the bees in France mobilized in a bee-barrage. Then the buzzing became a roar. I knew directly what it was: enemy aeroplanes.
I could not see them yet, but they must be close. If they were flying very low, to search Chauny for visitors, I might be seen if I moved. Those in the garden were better off than I, for they were screened by the trees, but trying to join them I might attract attention to myself.
As I thought this, I wondered why I didn't decide uponthe thing most likely to solve all my problems at once. If I were killed, Brian would grieve: but he had the Becketts to love and care for him, and—he had Dierdre: no use disguising that fact from my intelligence, after the episode of the dog! What a chance for me to disappear, having done for Brian all I could do! Oh, why didn't I add another prayer to my last, and beg God to let me die that minute?
I'll tell you why I did not pray this, Padre, and why, instead of trying to expose my life, I wished—almost unconsciously—to save it. I hardly realized why then, but I do realize now. It is different in these days from that night in Paris, when I wished I might be run over by a motor-car. At that time I should have been glad to die. Now I cling to life—not just because I'm young and strong, and people call me beautiful, but because I feel Imuststay in the world to see what happens next.
I kept as still as a frightened mouse. I didn't move. I scarcely breathed. Presently an aeroplane sailed into sight directly overhead, and flying so low that I could make out its iron cross, exactly like photographs I'd seen. Whether the men in it could see me or not I can't tell; but if they could, perhaps they mistook me for one of the statues they knew existed in the ruined chapel, and thought I wasn't worth bombing.
In that case it was St. Joseph and the Virgin who protected me!
In a second the big bird of prey had swept on. I was sick with fear for a moment lest it should drop an "egg" on to the garden, and kill Brian or the Becketts, or the lieutenant who had wished to spare us this danger. Eventhe O'Farrells I didn't want hurt; and I was pleased to find out that about myself, because they are a far more constant danger for me than all the aeroplanes along the German front; and when I came face to face with realities in my own soul, I might have discovered a wicked desire for them to be out of the way at any price. But since Dierdre proved herself ready to die for Brian, I do admire if I don't like her. As for Julian—would it be possible, Padre, to miss a person you almost hate? Anyhow, when I tried to imagine how I should feel if I went back to the garden and saw him dead, I grew quite giddy and ill. How queer we are, we human things!
But no one was hurt. The whole party hid under the trees; and as the cars were also hidden at a distance, the German fliers turned tail, disappointed; besides, the anti-aircraft gun which we'd been told about, and had seen on our way to the convent, was potting away like mad, so it wasn't healthful for aeroplanes to linger merely "on spec."
Mother Beckett was pale and trembling a little, but she said that she had been too anxious about me, in my absence, to think of herself, which was perhaps a good thing. I noticed, when I joined them in the garden, after the roar had changed again to a buzz, that Dierdre stood close to Brian, and that his hand was on her shoulder, her hand on Sirius's beautiful head. Yet I felt too strangely happy to be jealous. I suppose it must have been through my prayer—or the answer to it.
When all was clear and the danger over (our guide said that the "birds" never made more than one tour of inspection in an afternoon) we started off again. Father Beckett suggested that his wife had better go home and rest, but she wouldn't hear of it. And when we reached a turning of the road which would lead us to Coucy-le Château, it was she who begged our lieutenant to let us run along that way, "just far enough for a glimpse, atinyglimpse."
"My son wrote me it was the most wonderful old château in France," she pleaded. "I've got in my pocket now a snapshot he sent me."
The Frenchman couldn't resist. You know how charming the French are to old ladies. "It isn't as safe as—as the Bank of England!" he laughed. "Sometimes they keep this road rather hot. But to-day, I have told you, things are quiet all along. We will take what Madame calls a tiny glimpse."
Orders were given to our chauffeur. Brian was with the O'Farrells, coming on behind, and of course the Red Cross taxi followed at our heels like a faithful dachshund. Our big car flew swiftly, and the little one did its jolting best to keep up the pace, for time wouldn't wait for us—and these autumn days are cutting themselves short.
Presently we saw a thing which proved that the road was indeed "hot" sometimes: a neat, round shell-hole, which looked ominously new! We swung past it with a bump, and flashed into sight of a ruin which dwarfed all others we had seen—yes, dwarfed even cathedrals! A long line of ramparts rising from a high headland of gray-white chalk-ramparts crowned with broken, round towers, which the sun was painting with heraldic gold: the stump of a tremendous keep that reared its bulk like agiant in his death struggle, for a last look over his shield of shattered walls. This was what German malice had made of Coucy, pride of France, architectural masterpiece of feudal times!