A gleam of joy shot across the Herr Doktor's now haggard face. And the other hurried on: 'So, too, are the French who fell back with them. But that new, fresh army under Maunoury—that was a colossal surprise! Once it is disposed of, we shall renew our advance on Paris.' He hesitated for a moment, and then the pleasure of finding a listener conquered prudence. 'The Crown Prince did not come up to time. His army was to have joined ours on September 2—Von Kluck was waiting for him. There could be no final attack on Paris without the "Draufgänger." You understand? It was our future War Lord's perquisite——'
The Herr Doktor nodded comprehendingly. Oddly enough, he had never seen the Crown Prince, but from various things he had heard about him he supposed him to be not unlike Prince Egon.
After leaving the square, the Herr Doktor and Jeanne Rouannès found every street and every alley barred. And though the uniform of the 'Militär-Arzt' generally opened a way without much difficulty, Max Keller soon realised, with bitter, dumb self-reproach that he had wasted priceless minutes in asking and in answering futile questions. Perhaps because he had now spent a length of treasure-stored days in a country where time means at once so very much more, and so very much less, than it does in modern Germany, he was no longer in mental touch with the type of human being created by the sinister amalgam of sentimental idealism and military discipline.
To a German officer any waste of time, especially on active service, is abhorrent, and during the half-hour the Herr Doktor and his companion had spent in the square, Valoise had been rapidly divided into districts, and the looting therein, as far as was possible, systematised. Thus as soon as a certain number of marauders had been allowed to go through into it, further entry to a street was barred; and to the Herr Doktor there was something horribly grotesque in the contrast between the sharp discipline enforced by the patrols who sealed each thoroughfare, and the orgy of thieving and senseless destruction which they were apparently set there to supervise and protect.
It seemed, too, as if Nature herself had become a willing accomplice to the powers of evil, for the bright, delicious sunlight, the delicate breeze already touched to an autumnal sharpness, shone on, and blew about, the pitiful heaps of household plenishings which grew and swelled before each doorway.
In tacit agreement the two fugitives—for such they now felt themselves to be—chose a roundabout way to the Rue des Jardins; and as they hurried along, looking straight before them, averting their eyes from the sights which lay to their right and to their left, the Herr Doktor yet became conscious that here and there a house was being spared outrage. Before one such a number of his fellow-countrymen had squatted down on the cobble-stones, and were engaged in happily eating and drinking their fill. An old Frenchwoman, with a pitifully eager, servile manner, was waiting on them, bringing out of the villa, of which she was evidently the care-taker, armfuls of red-sealed bottles of wine. And yet, as he passed this house which was being spared outrage, the Herr Doktor quickened his footsteps. Somehow the sight he saw there shocked him more than did that of greater disorder.
Tides of shame, bewilderment, and pain welled up in his sore, burdened heart. Would the girl who now walked, with quick short steps, her head held high, looking always straight before her, ever forget the scenes they were now passing through? There was no fear now in her face, only a look of measureless scorn, disgust, and contempt. And it was he, rather than she, who felt a passion of relief when at last they emerged, through a final patrol, to find the intersecting web of streets composing the highest lap of the Haute Ville still free of soldiery.
The long, sunny Rue des Jardins looked unnaturally as usual, but when the two walked up through the garden of the Villa Rouannès, they saw that the front door was still locked, and the green wooden shutters of all the windows on the ground floor still barred. Thérèse and Jacob had evidently been stopped, and turned back, on their flight home from the cemetery.
'I think we can get in at the back, through the kitchen,' said Jeanne, breaking silence at last.
She led him round the house, to a door which stood wide open, and through the pleasant, exquisitely clean kitchen, where he had sometimes had occasion to seek old Thérèse while tending the dying Frenchman.
Together they walked through into the empty house, and the Herr Doktor spent the short time she kept him waiting in walking restlessly about the darkened salon, which had become so familiar and so dear.
Each minute seemed an eternity—an eternity filled with suspense and acute, unreasoning fear, for he knew that any moment he might hear the sound of eager, predatory feet tramping up the Rue des Jardins; and he visualised with dreadful clearness the little fragrant garden filled with a mob of his fellow-countrymen, decent enough men at home no doubt, but here, in their grey uniforms and spiked helmets, transformed into thieves, drunkards, and, he feared, worse.
At last Jeanne Rouannès opened the door. She was clad in the Red Cross uniform and veil-like cap which had now come to look unfamiliar in his eyes, for she had never worn them in her father's presence. She held a large, shabby leathern purse in her hand. 'This is the money—a thousand francs—my father always kept in the house. Will you take care of it for me?' She held it out to him. 'They say that'—she hesitated a moment, then said reluctantly—'they say that the Prussians always look first for the money, and then for the wine.'
He took the purse from her silently, and then, for what seemed to him a long time, though it was not five minutes, she stood in the centre of the square, shadowed sitting-room. A little light filtered through the chinks in the old wooden shutters, and slowly she gazed this way and that, as if desirous of imprinting an image of everything that was there on her heart and memory. But when they had left the house, and were walking through the garden, even when they reached the door in the wall, she did not once look back.
They met with no adventures on their way to the Grande Place, for they chose a roundabout way, along field paths, and under the glades of the forest trees in what had been one of the loveliest of the smaller royal demesnes of old France. And as they at last came out from behind the Abreuvoir the Herr Doktor saw with silent, intense relief that here, too, everything looked as usual. The great open space before them was as empty of life and movement as he had always known it. There was, however, one rather curious exception; but it was a pleasant exception, for it lent an air of spurious brightness, even of cheerfulness, to the scene. This was that the doors and windows of the large villas which formed the left of the Grande Place of Valoise were now all wide open, and were evidently being prepared for the overflow from the Tournebride.
Suddenly, however, as the Herr Doktor's eyes wandered down the broad thoroughfare leading straight to the river, he saw that all was not quite as normal in this part of the town as he had at first thought, for all the way down the hill, every window of the humbler houses had been battered in!
An old woman was even now engaged in carefully sweeping up the glass in the roadway in front of her little shop, and gradually he became aware that the shop itself was completely gutted, and that there was a dark yawning hole where the window, filled with toys and sweetmeats, had been.
Once more his heart ached with sick disgust and pain while slowly he and his companion began walking towards the long, low buildings of the Tournebride.
The beautiful old inn, at any rate, looked exactly as when he had last seen it that morning, though the great gilt gates, which had been closed for over a fortnight, were now wide open. It was clear that the Commandant of the German forces now holding Valoise had fixed his headquarters there, but the Herr Doktor's eyes sought vainly for the sentries who should have been standing at either side of the open gates. This second occupation of Valoise was indeed unlike the first!
'While I the Herr Commandant interview, can you with Madame Blanc here stay?' he observed suddenly.
As they passed through the gates the Herr Doktor was sorry indeed to see that hundreds of empty and broken bottles were lying under the chestnut trees, on the now wine-stained paving stones. These empty, broken bottles gave an untidy, rakish air to the shady, stately courtyard where the first conquerors of Valoise had spent such peaceful, restful hours.
On they walked, picking their way among the débris. The place seemed deserted.
Puzzled, and feeling at once relieved and uncomfortable, the Herr Doktor stayed his steps for a moment, and the girl at his side did so too. Her eyes filled with tears, a sense of terrible degradation seemed to soil her soul, and, as the moments sped by, her companion was filled with growing apprehension and unease.
Why was the Tournebride thus deserted? Officers, as well as the men who had drunk the wine from the bottles now lying empty and broken about his feet, had been here very lately, for on a wooden table standing in the middle of the courtyard were a dozen or more large glass goblets—one even now half full of white wine—and empty, gold-foiled bottles. There also, on this wooden table, lay the bunch of keys which always dangled at Madame Blanc's ample waist.
Madame Blanc? Yes, if, as now seemed to be the case, the Commandant and his staff were all out in the town, he could leave Mademoiselle Rouannès with her while he went to look for them. In that thought he found a measure of relief. The knowledge that Jeanne Rouannès would have to run the gauntlet of the Prussian officers' eyes had been hateful to him.
But where was Madame Blanc?
Calling out her name, he walked across to the half-open door of the kitchen; and then, suddenly, Jeanne Rouannès, hardened as she had become that day to dreadful sights and sounds, uttered a low exclamation of fear and surprise. 'Great God!' she exclaimed in French, 'what is that? What is that, down there?'
The Herr Doktor peered towards the place where she was staring, and with eyes which gradually filled with pain and horror, he saw that a thin stream of blood was oozing sluggishly through the doorway where he had stood so often talking to the Frenchwoman, with whom, at last, he had become good friends.
He stumbled forward, full of a dreadful foreboding, and tried to push back the door. But it would only swing forward.
Waving the girl back with a sharp, quick gesture, he pressed through the aperture, and then he, too, uttered an exclamation, a hoarse guttural cry of distress, for just behind the door, huddled up on the floor of her kitchen, lay the dead body of Madame Blanc.
The landlady of the Tournebride had been shot half a dozen times, at close range, in the breast, not struck—as the German surgeon for a brief moment had supposed and hoped—by a stray fragment of shell.
'Ach!' he muttered under his teeth, 'this is bad—very bad!' But Jeanne Rouannès, now standing just behind him, remained silent. She looked as if the tears had frozen on her face, and of the two she was the more composed, as, in silence, they dragged the dead woman a little further into the kitchen, and tried to arrange her poor, fat body into some semblance of decent death.
At last, having done the little they could, they came out again into the sunshine, and crossed once more the courtyard of the ownerless Tournebride. And still, of the two, it was the man who looked, and perchance felt, the more affected. In his companion all sensation seemed dulled, and as they walked along, perforce traversing many painful scenes—for they had now re-entered the zone of looting and disorder—she seemed really unconscious of what was going on about her.
Not till they had wandered for a long way, hither and thither, did they find the headquarters of the Commandant established in the Mairie. It was there that the Herr Doktor listened, with a rush of impotent anger, to the curt intimation that the French Red Cross nurse, instead of receiving a pass out of Valoise, must proceed at once to the German Field Ambulance which was already at work in the church hard by.
Still draped in the black-and-silver trappings laboriously hung by the women of Valoise to do funeral honour to Dr. Rouannès, the parish church, when Jeanne Rouannès entered it, was already transformed into a hospital ward; and, as she came slowly back to normal conditions of heart and brain, she was amazed to see all that these capable, if rough-looking, German medical orderlies had accomplished.
Not only had every kind of bed already been commandeered from the houses round, but through medieval glass which the Great Revolution had spared, the sun shone on huge cases containing every kind of surgical requisite ready for immediate use.
An operating theatre equipment had been set out in the Lady Chapel, and a wave of colour flooded the French girl's face when she saw that the trestles on which her father's rude coffin had rested were now serving as the base of the principal operating table. She could not help wondering in her ignorance why all these elaborate preparations had been made, for the only wounded occupant of this strange war-hospital was a two-year-old girl, injured in the head by a fragment of one of the half-dozen shells which had fallen in the town two hours before.
'To the little child attend you,' the Herr Doktor muttered in her ear. 'I will ensure that no disagreeables you befall. The Herr Stabsarzt is a good man—perhaps have you of him heard, my gracious miss; he is the surgeon Octavius Mott of Ems. Very famous and skilful is he.'
Quickly, and yet with much ceremony, he brought her up to the big, shaggy, spectacled German, who greeted her courteously with the words, uttered in a French as good as her own, 'We shall have plenty of work for you presently, Mademoiselle.'
Then, as Max Keller, in a quick, rather anxious undertone, explained that Mademoiselle Rouannès was the just orphaned daughter of a French Red Cross doctor, the Herr Stabsarzt became perceptibly more cordial. 'She does not look strong enough for the labours which will presently begin. You must watch over the poor bereaved one,' he said kindly; 'she looks a truly refined, gentle being, as well as full of French prettiness and grace. There are plenty of ugly old women in this town whom we shall be able to make useful when the wounded come in.'
The Herr Doktor's face became transformed. He could have knelt and kissed the hand of the great, the skilful, the so understanding and humane Octavius Mott! The Herr Stabsarzt, looking at him from out his shrewd little eyes, saw something in the plain sensitive face that touched him. 'So?' he said to himself, 'there is already an excellent Franco-German alliance established here!'
The soldier looters of Valoise slept heavily that night. Their miserable victims, those among them who had not fled into the surrounding country, crowded back into their ravished, empty houses, and into those out-buildings and stables which had escaped the notice of the marauders—anywhere to be free of hateful and terrifying presences. They hoped, poor wretches, with that curious hope and faith in the future, which in the French temperament survives all material disasters, and makes recuperation comparatively easy, that with the morning the enemy would hasten away from the sacked town. This, as they all knew, was what had happened elsewhere.
But, with the breaking of the cloudless dawn, came a new terror to the unhappy people, for shells again began dropping into the town, and, for a while at least, panic and confusion reigned, even among the sated German soldiery. The French batteries, hidden away to the right of Valoise, had evidently obtained trustworthy information from within the town, for their attack was carefully directed to the group of villas on the hill where the officers had established themselves, but the church,—the church which now flew the Red Cross flag, and was still the glory of Valoise, was spared.
At last the French guns found another range, that of the German batteries, and as these replied, so strange and so exciting was the artillery duel, that women, and even children, crowded into the streets and, with upturned faces, watched the shells from the even then famous '75, and the heavier German missiles, go hurtling by overhead.
And then very soon, from the plains below and the woods above Valoise, the wounded came pouring in. They were brought in every kind of vehicle, from the luxurious motor ambulances belonging to the German Red Cross, to handcarts drawn by donkeys and by dogs.
At the end of the first hour, Jeanne Rouannès told herself that there was no room for more. But on and on they came, in a terrible, continuous procession, and place still had to be found for them. After the beds had all been filled, the stone floor, hastily covered with stacks of straw, had to serve as resting-place for many more. Very soon, too, all the houses, and the often more comfortable stables and out-buildings of the town, were also full and overfull....
The French Red Cross nurse was ordered to remain in the church, and reluctantly she found herself compelled to admire the energy, the method, the quick, if to her heartless, type of efficient intelligence, the German surgeons there brought to their terrible tasks. In whatever part of the church she happened to be, whatever the duty in which she was engaged, during those hours of horror and strain, when all the miraculous resources of youth—her fine health of body, and finer stoicism of soul—alone brought her through the awful ordeal, the Herr Doktor watched over, and as far as was in his power, helped her to perform her arduous, pitiful works of mercy.
Very soon—so soon that it seemed retrospectively to have been at the end of the first morning—everything a normal surgeon and his dressers require had been used up, and that though, by the forethought of Herr Doktor Max Keller, all the clean, looted linen which had been put safely away for transport to Germany had early been requisitioned by the Field Ambulance.
The German wounded far outnumbered the French, and at first the fact had filled the French Red Cross nurse with a relief of which she felt ashamed.
Then suddenly she understood the strange disparity! To these keen, clear-thinking German surgeons their own countrymen came first as a matter of course, and the best was naturally reserved for them. They were skilful, and as humane as it was in them to be, to all those whom they attended, but the grey-clad wounded were obviously the most important.
The knowledge that this was so filled Jeanne Rouannès with revolt, and bitter anger. As she half mechanically performed the duties set her, she thought of her own shattered countrymen, lying for the most part outside and unattended; and she was filled with repugnance, even horror, for all these Germans, both the wounded and the whole, who lay and stood about her. As far as was possible, she lavished the small surgical science she possessed, and the measureless pity and tenderness that was hers in ample measure, on the few French wounded who were brought into the church.
Then suddenly a strange thing happened. A dying German, to whom she had just given an injection of camphorated oil, held out his hand, gropingly. She took the rough, blackened hand in hers, and he murmured 'Mutter,' in a voice full of agonised longing and entreaty. From that moment Jeanne Rouannès no longer made, even in her inmost heart, any distinction between the French and German wounded. She tended them as far as was in her power, and in the measure of her strength, with the same kindness and untiring devotion.
In addition to the wounded—the wounded brought in from the scenes of the fierce rearguard actions now being fought round Valoise—were the injured townspeople, the old women and the little children who became unwitting targets for the bombs, the shells, and even the arrows, which now and again fell from the German aeroplanes circling in the air above.
Occasionally, not often, the French Red Cross nurse would obtain permission to go out into the town to attend on some of them; and perhaps because the thought of any personal danger was so far from them both, during those strange and terrible days, the Herr Doktor Max Keller and Jeanne Rouannès, when engaged on such outside works of mercy, met with none of the mishaps which befell many of those about them.
Such trifling, even childish, incidents and happenings remained imprinted on her heart! Thus, she was shaken with rage and disgust when shown that the curiously shaped steel arrow which had fatally injured a little child, had fastened to it, not only a miniature German flag, but an absurd message, written in bad French, pinned to the flag.
As to the sights which filled her eyes when she was away from the shadowed church, the one which remained the most vividly present to her, in after days, was the effect produced by a fragment of shell which happened to unseal the top of a hydrant. Just out of reach of a fiercely burning building, the water rose like a colossal fountain, throwing exquisite sprays of prismatic colour into the sunny air.
All through those four September days, while friend and enemy destroyed the Haute Ville of Valoise, the sun shone hotly in a clear sky, the air was filled with a soft, luminous haze which rose from the river, and the fierce fighting in the woods behind the town went on in glades and coverts filled with the magic beauty of early autumn scents and tints.
Jeanne Rouannès suddenly awoke from what had been a seven hours' deep, death-like sleep. Awoke? Ah no! As she sat up in a darkness broken by tiny, wraithlike shafts of sunlight, she half smiled, half frowned at the strangeness of the nightmare in the mazes of which she found herself involved.
Instead of being in her blue-and-white room at home, surrounded by all her girlish treasures, and lying in the old-fashioned mahogany bed, opposite which hung a charming portrait, painted some thirty years ago, of her gentle, dead mother, she seemed to be—of all the most absurdly improbable places—in the sacristy of the parish church, and sitting up, fully dressed, on a heap of dirty grey coats!
There came over her a sudden misgiving—a mysterious sinking of the heart. Perhaps this was the beginning of illness—of a very serious, terrible illness? She was conscious of agonising, shooting pain in her head, and over her eyes, also of dull, aching sensations in her limbs, especially in her arms.... But if only she could shake herself free of this evil nightmare, she would not mind the pain....
Then there seemed to steal into her delicate nostrils a most horrible odour—And it was that now dreadfully familiar smell, that sweetish, sickly, penetrating smell, which brought back full consciousness to Jeanne Rouannès.
This was no dream—no nightmare. She was in very truth lying, or rather now sitting up, in the sacristy of the old church! It was there that the Herr Doktor had arranged her rude couch the night before; he, too, who had folded one of her blood-stained Red Cross overalls to make a pillow for her head, and, finally, with the thoughtful kindness on which she had grown unconsciously to rely, darkened the two narrow windows with various holy vestments which he had unceremoniously pulled out of M. le Curé's cupboard. She even remembered, now, the form of English words in which, with a queer break in his tired, worn voice, he hadorderedher to lie down and sleep.
He had done it all for the best—she knew that. And yet, and yet she was faintly resentful of his well-meant care. For now she was uneasily conscious that she felt less able than she had felt yesterday to go on with her work—the terrible, urgent, unceasing work which lay just the other side of the oak door leading into the church.
Through that door there now came the loud sounds of knocking which had evidently awakened her. Each knock reverberated horribly in her brain.
The Herr Doktor would be sorry—concern would fill his anxious, red-rimmed eyes, when he saw how tired, how dreadfully tired, in spite of her long night's rest, poor Jeanne now was!
Fumbling in her pocket, she found a little box he had given her two days ago, when she had confessed to a spasm of the headache which was now again full on her, making her feel blind and sick. She had not believed that one of the tiny white capsules in this little box would do her any good—but she had taken it to please him, to show courtesy to one who was always so kind and courteous to her, and who had been so good, so more than good, to her dear father. And then a miracle had happened! Not only had her headache gone, but also her sense of utter weariness and confusion of mind. 'Not more than every four hours must you one take,' he had explained, and she had tried not to exceed the allowance. She had lived and worked on those capsules ever since. But it was eight hours since she had had the last.
Nothing on the part of those whom she still in her heart called 'the Prussians'—a name dating from her childhood—could now surprise Jeanne Rouannès. She was equally ready for their hearty kindness or their equally strong and heartless brutality. During those last three days she had seen much of both.
And yet she was surprised—surprised and, yes, terribly moved—when, on opening the sacristy door, she saw what was going on in the church. All that had been brought there, unpacked and arranged with so much science and care five days ago, was now being prepared for removal. The Sanitäts-Aerzte were busily engaged in supervising the work, and the old Frenchwomen who had been impressed to help in the improvised Feld-Lazaret were assisting the German orderlies with what looked unnecessarily cheerful zeal.
It was a painful scene, a scene of noise, of confusion, and of the angry, hoarse shouting of orders. Lying in the beds arranged in rows on either side of the aisles, stretched out on the now sodden, dirty straw which had been brought in when the beds had given out, the wounded, and, in many cases, the dying, men lay staring with glazed, apathetic eyes at all that was going on about them.
Suddenly an order rang out, in a voice with which Jeanne Rouannès had only kindly, almost pleasant, associations—that of the Herr Stabsarzt.
At once, wheeling about with sharp precision, each of the German orderlies ceased whatever work he was engaged on, and with firm, ungentle hands began rolling up in their bed-coverings those among the wounded—French as well as German—who were regarded as 'hopeful cases.' The moans, the sudden cries of pain and fear of the wretched men rang out, and the Red Cross nurse rushed impulsively forward, words of protest on her lips.
'You will have enough to do caring for those we are compelled to leave behind us,' said the Herr Stabsarzt Octavius Mott dryly, and then, as he looked into her young, grieving face, his voice softened. 'I know my poor fellows will have care and goodness from you, my dear demoiselle.'
But even now Jeanne Rouannès did not understand, and it fell to her old friend, the Herr Doktor Max Keller, to tell her the truth. She attributed his strange, agitated manner, the look of dreadful suffering on his plain, pallid face, to the nature of that truth, for 'The French will soon in this town be,' he muttered hurriedly. 'Therefore must we this morning in retreat go. That is why I am compelled you to leave. But permission your Curé here to bring obtained have I. I can you with that good old man safely leave.'
The Germans evacuating Valoise? She knew now why the women round her were working so well and briskly, why there were even furtive smiles on some of their weary faces. The Prussians were being driven away—the victorious French would soon be here!
But Jeanne Rouannès was too tired, too bewildered, to feel more than dully glad.
A few moments later Max Keller obtained from the Herr Stabsarzt unwilling permission to leave the church. 'You must find the priest as soon as you can,' said the old German gruffly, 'for we have to be off in about an hour. Mademoiselle Rouannès will be quite safe here—with the wounded.' But as he shot a look into the younger man's set, unhappy face, he said to himself, 'You'd like to take her along with you, my poor fellow. So? But this is no time for love nonsense!'
The Mairie of Valoise was close to the church, and had, so far, escaped bombardment. It was a shabby-looking, modern house, in a narrow street now filled with military motors and transport wagons. And now, both within and without the Mairie, were all the signs of rather hurried, ignominious departure.
Unchallenged the Herr Doktor walked into a dirty hall full of huge packing-cases and crates ready for removal. To the left, above a large half-open door, were inscribed the words 'Salle des Mariages,' and pulling open the door, he walked in.
At an ornate table covered with maps and papers, below an allegorical painting of Hymen, an intelligence officer sat writing. He looked hot, tired and flurried. Raising his head, he frowned disagreeably. 'What is the matter now, Herr Doktor? I sent all the necessary orders to the Field Ambulance three hours ago!' he exclaimed. 'I regret to tell you that every moment is of value, for Valoise must be entirely evacuated by eight o'clock. We have certain information that the town is to be again bombarded at nine, but this time the French will be destroying what will be left here of their own people!'
At that pleasant thought his countenance lightened.
The Herr Doktor walked right up to the table. He was not in a mood to stand any bullying. 'We have to give the parish priest instructions about our wounded,' he said curtly.
'The parish priest? You mean one of the hostages?' The intelligence officer pushed aside a packet of printed forms and sought hastily under it. 'Here is the key of their prison—if indeed it is still standing! To tell you the truth, I have been too busy to concern myself about these two Frenchmen, and it is a good thing for them, Herr Doktor, that you have this business with the Curé! Yes, by all means, bring the priest to the church, and leave him there in charge. As for the Mayor, he can be released later. That Mayor is a truculent fellow!' He smiled a little grimly. 'You can hand this key to the priest just before you move off.'
The Herr Doktor took the key, and walked quietly to the door. Did the Herr Major mean that, but for his, Max Keller's, accidental intervention, the hostages would have been left to await release by their own countrymen? But that was quite against the usages of civilised warfare!
After he had left the Rue de la Mairie and entered the zone of destruction caused by the bombardment of the last few days, the Herr Doktor had to pick, to leap, sometimes almost to excavate, his way through the ruins of what had been a pleasant, residential quarter of the happy little town.
What a scene of tragic and, yes, sordid desolation lay all about him, and what an awful stillness—a stillness which made him start at the sounds made by his own footfalls!
All the landmarks with which he had become vaguely familiar during the last three weeks were gone. They seemed obliterated. Heaps of rubble, and decomposing masses of filth, from which he hastily averted his eyes when warned of their nearness by another of his sensitive senses, rose mountainously round the shattered sides and backs of those houses of which the walls remained standing. Where there had been placid beauty, there was now an ugliness that verged on the diabolic grotesque; where there had been healthy life, there was now foul corruption.
At last, after what seemed an eternity of difficult going, he saw, through a hole blown out in an otherwise still intact wall, a beautiful garden. Beds of blooming, delicately tinted flowers rose amid grass which still looked fresh and green, though here and there, across a stretch of lawn, there yawned a deep pit made by a bursting shell.
He clambered through into the peaceful demesne with a sensation of gasping relief, and wandered on till a turn brought him close to what looked like a massive ruin, out of which, high up above his head, there lurched two large pieces of fine, brass-incrusted, mahogany furniture. With a shock of regret he realised that this was all that now remained of the largest of the villas commanding the Grande Place, for through an open door, set deep in the wall of the garden, he caught a glimpse of the familiar open space.
He hurried forward, relieved to know that his perilous, disagreeable journey was nearing its end.
And then, as he emerged on to the now deserted Grande Place, the Herr Doktor's feelings of relief changed with terrible suddenness to horror. For the first time he felt his nerve give way, and there swept over him an overmastering desire to rush back and obliterate from his memory the hideous sight on which his eyes now rested.
Bathed in the bright, early morning sunlight, close to him, on his right, the stone-rimmed Abreuvoir was surrounded by a herd of dead and dying horses. There they had galloped, maddened by pain; there they had wandered down, wounded, starving, and thirsty, from the uplands, drawn by some strange, secret instinct as to where water was. Many of the poor creatures still had saddles on their sore backs, and others had attached to them remains of the harness which had bound them to artillery and transport wagons.
Averting his eyes determinedly from the piteous sight, he ran across the Grande Place towards the screen of chestnut trees behind which lay the Tournebride, and when he reached the high gilt gates, of which the posts were wreathed in now fading orange trumpet flowers, he uttered aloud an exclamation of almost sobbing relief. The long, low, rose-red mass of brick buildings seemed intact, and that though two of the high trees in the courtyard lay split and riven, their blackened trunks broken up into what now looked like monstrous pieces of firewood.
But, alas! as he went on, as he penetrated farther and farther into the courtyard, he saw that all that now remained of the beautiful old inn was the rose-red façade; behind that façade everything had been destroyed by shell or fire. Through the upper windows he could see the sky, and a muslin embroidered curtain, still delicately white, fluttered outwards.
He edged his way to where an arch had given access to the kitchen garden of the inn. Arch and wall had escaped destruction, but the garden beyond had been rifled of everything; fruit, ripe or unripe, had been plucked; vegetables pulled up from the ground; and the flower borders trampled into a bare wilderness of dust and mud. Two taps had been left running, and a space which had contained a miniature apple orchard had become a swamp. But the square, windowless fruit-house stood unscathed in the midst of the desolation. Yet, as he walked along the dusty path, a nervous sense of misgiving came over the Herr Doktor; he felt he would like to find the building before him empty, and that though it made his journey useless.
Putting the key in the door, he turned it—then recoiled in involuntary disgust, so fetid and so hot was the blast of air which met him. Opening the door widely he walked through into the large room, and saw that his suspicions of the officer who had handed him the key with such ambiguous, sinister words were indeed justified!
Each of the two French hostages lay stretched out on his pallet bed; the Mayor's body and face were turned to the wall, but the priest lay on his back, and all over his wax-like, yellowing, dead face, and on his white hair, a cloud of flies had settled.
Suddenly the Mayor, with a painful effort, turned and sat up. He feebly dragged his limbs across the brown blanket on which he had been lying, and whispered, 'For the love of God, a little water, Monsieur,' but his swollen tongue could hardly form the words.
The Herr Doktor rushed out into the garden. Yes, there, close by, was running water. But he could see nothing to pour it into. He made a cup of his two hands, and walking this time with slow, steady footsteps, he came back into what had become a charnel-house.
It was after his third journey for water that he heard the Frenchman speak again, in low, husky tones. 'The old man died yesterday morning. He had, it seems, a malady of the heart. But he predicted that I should be saved, and as long as he was alive to say fine and consoling things to me, I kept my courage.'
'You have courage now,' said the German surgeon, feelingly.
'No, Monsieur, my courage has all gone. I am horribly frightened—I am like a child.' He brought out the words with a hoarse, choking effort, and tears forced themselves into his sunken eyes, and lost themselves in his unkempt beard.
To the Herr Doktor, this unexpected incident was proving, rather to his own surprise, almost unendurably painful—and, yes, humiliating. Such accidents should not be allowed to happen in so splendidly organised an army as were the cultured German hosts. He was not a vindictive man, but he longed to bring the officer responsible for—for this bit of callous cruelty, to condign and very sharp punishment.
'Listen,' he said in his odd, twisted French. 'I now go must. But first will I something find in which plenty of water to leave. And, Monsieur le Maire, I have good news for you.' He waited a moment, then went on, with an effort, 'The French will soon in Valoise be, for within an hour shall we the town leave. But before leaving, I will arrange that food suitable to your requirements shall brought be.'
He went out again into the ravaged garden, and, now that the greatest need for it had gone by, he espied a watering-pot close to where he had looked so eagerly a few minutes ago. Filling it up, he hurried back into the fruit-house.
'Do not therein a moment longer stay,' he said in a low voice. 'Into the air and the sun come you now out. If that you do, soon recovered quite you will be.'
The Herr Stabsarzt was enjoying a steaming cup of hot coffee under the porch of the church which had been his headquarters for five stirring days.
Everything was packed and ready for departure. And the German Red Cross surgeons and their staff were now only waiting for the return of the Herr Doktor Max Keller, and for the parish priest of Valoise.
All final directions had been given to, and intelligently noted down by, Mademoiselle Rouannès. Not that there was much to say or to hear. Patience and pity were all that seemed likely to be needed, for only the dying—those past hope of recovery either as fighters or as prisoners—were being left behind.
Suddenly a shell burst close to the porch under which the Herr Stabsarzt was eating his hasty breakfast. He uttered a quick, sharp exclamation of anger. It would indeed be rough luck if any of his wounded, the men now stretched out in motor ambulances, and in other less comfortable conveyances, were killed while waiting for the start!
'Any harm done?' he shouted, rising to his feet. But half a dozen reassuring voices answered him.
The foremost portion of the melancholy convoy, that is, the motor ambulances, crammed with the wounded men whose condition was considered too serious for the makeshift wagons or springless carts pressed into the Red Cross service, was already under way. Only one large grey motor, that reserved for the Herr Stabsarzt and his own personal assistants, stood waiting in the open space in front of the church. They would be the last Germans to leave Valoise.
As he sat there, under the grey stone porch—for he was a wise man, and as he had a great deal of enforced standing to do he never stood when he could sit—the Herr Stabsarzt felt more at ease, more 'zufrieden' than he had felt for a long time. A successful medical man—be he physician or surgeon—generally has a kindly, tolerant, understanding outlook on human nature. And this was so with the Herr Stabsarzt Octavius Mott of Ems. But as the minutes went by, and the screaming of the shells grew more insistent, and as they began bursting nearer to the quarter of Valoise they had hitherto spared, he blamed himself for having granted Max Keller's request.
'The poor devils out there, to say nothing of ourselves, will soon be in some danger if this goes on,' he observed to his chief orderly; 'it's time we were——' and then, before he could finish his sentence, there came an awful explosion, followed by the dull thuds of falling masonry, while from close by rose cries and shouts of fear, surprise, and pain.
An Englishman or a Frenchman would have instinctively rushed to see what damage had been done, and especially would he have done so had he been an English or French surgeon. But the Herr Stabsarzt did not move. He simply shrugged his shoulders. His professional labours in Valoise were at an end. If any civilian inhabitant had been wounded by that shell he, or more probably she, must wait for the French Red Cross.
There was a confused stir of sound—exclamations in French and in German. Someone had evidently been seriously hurt—someone was going to be taken into the church.
But what was this which was being borne along so carefully, and by four of his own orderlies, on one of the stretchers which fitted into his own motor ambulance? The Herr Stabsarzt stood up again, and looked anxiously towards the little procession coming slowly towards him. Presently, with surprise and consternation, he saw that the huddled up figure, of which the head, face, and breast were thickly covered with dust and blood, wore the same uniform as he did himself!
'It's surely the Herr Doktor Max Keller?' exclaimed the man by his side. 'Ach, poor fellow! What a sight!'
'Donnerwetter!' The Herr Stabsarzt was not given to swearing, still this piece of black bad luck was too much for his feelings, the more so that he knew his own sympathetic, sentimental heart was responsible.
But after he had bent over the mangled, moaning form of his unfortunate colleague, he softened. This, after all, was the fortune of war! If he had drunk his coffee rather more quickly, it might have happened to himself—it might happen yet.
But what was to be done with the Herr Doktor? Plainly the poor man was in no condition to be moved at all, still less to take a long journey. The Herr Stabsarzt made a brief, but still a very thorough, examination, out there in the wind and sunlight, and that examination made up his mind for him. The only thing to do was to leave Max Keller behind, to take his chance of meeting with a humane and skilful French surgeon. It looked as if at the best there was but very, very little that could be done for him.
Turning away with a troubled face, the Herr Stabsarzt pushed his way back into the church; and, as he did so, a feeling of acute nausea, of intense depression, came over him. How awful, how inhuman, above all howuseless, all this was!
Then he told himself that he had been too long in the fresh air; that was why he suddenly found that subtle, sweetish, devilish, gangrene stench so foul, so trying.
He called out sharply from where he stood—'Mademoiselle? Mademoiselle Rouannès!'
Leaving the bedside of a dying German over whom she had been bending, the young Red Cross nurse hastened down the nave towards him. Her face was a little flushed, her eyes wet, from the piteous ordeal of trying to ease the last moments of a dying man with whose language she was unacquainted, whose last earnest messages she could never hope to transmit to those he loved. It was an ordeal she had gone through often during the last few days, but to which, as yet, she could not make herself grow callously accustomed; and now she was herself too shaken, too eager to get back to the man she had just left, to notice the disturbed expression of the German surgeon's face. Indeed, the meaning of the words he uttered, as he came up close to her, took some moments to penetrate her brain.
'There has been an accident, Mademoiselle. A shell burst close to the Herr Doktor Max Keller. He has been gravely injured, wounded by large fragments of shell in the face and head, while his right arm has been crushed by a piece of masonry or iron girder. He is not in a state to be moved. We must leave him behind in your care. For his sake, I hope a French Red Cross surgeon will soon be here.' He spoke quickly, pronouncing the name of his colleague in the German way, and to Jeanne Rouannès' ears the name, so uttered, suggested nothing.
'I will do my best to alleviate his pain and to make him comfortable,' she spoke mechanically, and her eyes wandered uncertainly. Where was this newly wounded man?
'I know right well that you will!' The Herr Stabsarzt looked at the French Red Cross nurse curiously. Was it possible that Max Keller's absorption in herself, his plainly-to-be-perceived state of 'Verliebtheit' was ignored by her? Why the poor fellow had been injured, practically killed, in her service! And where, by the way, was the old Curé?
'I ask myself, Mademoiselle, if there is any place other than here where the Herr Doktor could be taken—a place clean, quiet and, yes, airy?'
'The Herr Doktor?' She flushed a little. Then it was one of the German surgeons who had been injured? She had thought the man in question to be one of the orderlies.
'He had a great liking for the barge. More than once he expressed to me the opinion that it was the ideal place for wounded men. Could not room be found there for him?'
And then, at last, Jeanne Rouannès understood. 'Is it—is ithewho has been hurt?' she asked. And now there was no lack of concern or distress in her voice.
'Yes, it is the Herr Doktor Max Keller—he who was in Valoise before we arrived here,' he answered gravely. 'And the thought of my good colleague dying in this disturbed and noisy place is painful to me.'
'He shall immediately be taken to the barge. I will come and see to everything. There is a small cabin where he will be quite comfortable, and very, very quiet.'
'And I have your promise to tend him till a French surgeon can take charge of him?'
'But certainly,' she answered. He noticed that she spoke a little breathlessly. 'I promise not to leave him till then.'
Again the Herr Stabsarzt looked at her curiously. Did her troubled face express only the natural sympathy of a sensitive, soft-hearted woman—or something more?
'I will myself accompany you to the barge. We will walk behind the stretcher. It is not very far. Do you wish to tell the women here where you will be?'
'No, Monsieur le Médecin,' and this time a wave of colour flooded her face. 'If I do that, they will constantly be sending for me. Everything is in order. There is nothing I could do, that they cannot do.'
She spoke with the decision, the simple directness, which the Herr Stabsarzt admired. What would he not give, in times of peace of course he meant, to have such a capable young woman as this French girl had proved herself to be, in charge of the nurses in his beloved clinik!
Jeanne Rouannès tended the Herr Doktor all that long, still, cloudless day, as together they had tended so many wounded men during those days and nights which had seemed, to her at least, to contain an eternity of painful effort and strain, of dull despair, of agonising sights.
But here, in this clean, water-lapped little cabin-room, there reigned a delicious quietude, only broken by the drowsy murmur of the river which flowed swiftly just outside, past the wooden walls of the barge. From far off, making the stillness the more intense, came the deep booming of great guns, but with the falling of night that also ceased.
She had been prodigal with the morphia the German surgeon had left with her, and still more with that strange, suggestively-named drug, heroine. For she was dully, but none the less firmly, determined that this man should not suffer as some of the men she had tended during the last few days had suffered. He, at least, had earned immunity from that hellish pain by all the pain he had spared others.
He lay so rigidly unmoving that had he not sometimes breathed out a long, tired sigh, and now and again, not often, moved his bandaged head an inch to the right or an inch to the left, she might have doubted if he still lived.
At last an immense, limitless lassitude seemed to fall on Jeanne Rouannès. Soul, as well as body, cried out and hungered for rest. Slipping down on to the floor, to the left side of the bed, she propped her head against the hard back of a wooden chair and dozed.
She woke—was it moments or hours later?—to hear a little, stuffless sound—that of the Herr Doktor's hand moving feebly across the sheet.
Turning slightly round, and lifting up her right arm, she clasped the poor, limp, nerveless hand in hers....
How many hands, hard, dirty, tortured hands, she had in pity clasped during the last few weeks!—the honest, valiant hands of her young, wounded, fellow-countrymen, in those peaceful, early days of war that now seemed to her so unutterably long ago. Lately, the hands she had held in hers, often in a useless, pitiful attempt to make them understand words of kindness or of hope, had been the huge hands of wounded Germans, those big men-children who had seemed to her so much less stoical in the braving of pain than the more highly-strung French soldiers.
The hand she now held was small and delicate, the hand of a surgeon and a student. How kindly that poor hand, now lying limply clasped in hers, had tended her father! At this thought, this recollection, she pressed it more closely, and as she did so, Max Keller, unknowing where he was, though aware of her nearness, came back to semi-consciousness.
Before his sightless eyes there suddenly gleamed the lights of the Schloss at Weimar, reflected in the waters of the Ulm. Then with extraordinary vividness he saw the Schloss gates—those gates which he had passed such myriads of times in his thirty-four years of life.... A moment later, he was gazing, with the same sense of vivid reality, at the bronze fountain, let into an old wall, of which the subject—found by Goethe in a church in Spain—is that of two beautiful youths, brothers who died young. One youth, who holds a torch reversed, has his arm round the other's neck. Beneath their feet the clear water has gushed forth since the day when Goethe's eyes first rested on the finished work, and now, lying there in the little cabin-room of a French Red Cross barge, Weimar's dying son seemed to hear the delicious bubbling of the spring.
There, too, he saw the door through which so often walked the one woman whom Goethe had supremely loved.
Thousands of times had the happy Goethe walked through that low door on his way to the beloved....
At last, vaguely, obscurely, there came to the Herr Doktor the knowledge of where he was, and who was with him there. But the knowledge brought confusion, and distress of mind. His associations with this little cabin-room were all of the mother-spoilt, given-to-base-pleasures princeling, his Highness Prince Egon von Witgenstein. The thought that the Prince might be in Valoise, lying in wait for the young French Red Cross nurse, disturbed him, made him restless. If only he could remember! But it was as if great stretches of his mind and memory were darkened, hopelessly.
'Honoured miss?' he muttered feebly.
And she answered, oh so gently, in a voice he had never heard her use to him, though often these last few days he had heard it whispering kind, consoling, hopeful things to the suffering and the dying: 'Yes, my friend?'
'Where is Prince Egon—my patient who was here?'
'He left for Paris the day my father became so much worse—don't you remember?'
He remembered nothing, but the nurse reassured and comforted him, gave him a sense of spacious leisure in which to think of himself. 'What has to me happened?' he asked. 'Why am I here?'
'You were wounded by a shell, and I think by the wall of a falling house. We—I and your head surgeon—thought you would be more comfortable here than in the church.'
'And have you the whole time here been?' he asked wonderingly.
'Yes, and I have promised to stay with you till a surgeon comes.'
'You are hülfreicher than any surgeon,' he muttered, in so low a tone that she had to lift herself and bend over him to hear the words she did not understand.
The pale white glimmer of the dawn filtered through the white curtain stretched across the little window, and she saw that there was a change, a pinched grey look, in his face. Tears started to her eyes. Then he was not better, as she had ardently hoped. This return to consciousness, to connected thought, was not the good sign she had ignorantly supposed it to be?
Suddenly he groaned, a spent, weary groan. 'Pardon, honoured miss, it is fatigue which the pain hard makes.'
She gave him morphia. 'Try and sleep, my poor friend, and I will do likewise. The morning will soon be here.'
There came a series of loud, excited rappings on the door. It burst open, and a little girl—a child to whom in the past, which now seemed æons away, she had been kind—stood breathless, smiling, 'Mamselle! Mamselle! Our soldiers are here! Come and see them. I ran away from mother to tell you! They said you were here.'
Jeanne Rouannès put a finger to her lips. She gave a swift look at the unconscious form stretched stiffly out on the narrow bed. If only she could get a surgeon now, at once—
Putting on her cap, she followed the child up the wooden steps leading to the deck of the barge, and even as she did so, she heard the steady, rhythmic sound of marching, broken across by confused, shrill cries of joy and welcome.
Her heart began to beat; she hastened across the sunlit deck of the barge, and ran swiftly down the narrow stone jetty, with the excited little girl clinging to her hand.
'Les voilà! Les voilà!'
And through a mist of tears Jeanne Rouannès gazed on a sight she will never forget.
They came swinging along, the familiar, active, red-trousered figures looking so slight, so short, soold-fashionedafter the huge, splendidly-equipped Germans. But though war-worn, shabby as their predecessors had never been shabby even at their worst, these countrymen of hers wore their hot, short blue jackets, their wide poppy-coloured trousers with an air—that most inspiring air of all airs—the air of victory.
How ecstatically happy the sight would have made Jeanne Rouannès a month ago! Now, they simply seemed to her oppressed heart and brain a pageant which brought vague shadowy fears, and a need on her part for thought and action, for which she felt unfit, inadequate.
At last there rode up a regiment of Dragoons. Above their silver helmets—still silver, for these were the early days of war, and the French had not yet learnt the wise and cunning tricks of their enemies—black plumes nodded. Suddenly they were halted, and their commander turned his horse, and rode up under the trees to the spot where the Red Cross nurse was standing. He lifted his helmet off his head, and showed a young, brave, happy face.
'Madame?' he said courteously. 'Can you tell me when the Germans left Valoise? Have they had time to go far? Did they leave in order or in disorder? Is it true that the upper part of the town is in ruins?'
She answered his questions, and then put one of her own. 'Have you a Red Cross doctor here, M. le Capitaine?'
'Alas! no. The Red Cross attached to my brigade was sent for yesterday. There has been very fierce fighting, Madame—a series of great combats. But my troops are comparatively fresh—they still have to win their laurels.' He looked round, and lowered his voice. 'Have you any German wounded? I hope not. But though they run no real danger'—he had seen a look of—was it fear?—flash into her face—'our soldiers are terribly incensed, for we have come across awful things done by those brutes during the last few days.' His face contracted with reminiscent pain and horror. 'Such sights do not make one feel tender to even a wounded Boche.'
The Red Cross nurse gave him a long sad look. What beautiful, sincere, blue eyes she had—what a firm, finely drawn mouth! He wondered where her husband was fighting.
'I must tell you, mon capitaine, that there are, or perhaps I should say were, a number of dying Germans in the church. All that could be moved "they" took away. But down here, in the barge, I have a very special case——'
She moistened her lips and went desperately on, scarcely aware that he was listening to her with great respect and attention. 'The dying man on the barge is an Englishman, himself a surgeon of the Red Cross, who was wounded by a shell only yesterday. He was untiringly good to our wounded—to all the wounded. It is my great wish M. le Capitaine, that he should have a quiet death.'
'But certainly,' he said eagerly. 'What would not I do—what would we not all do—for any Englishman? I will put two of my own men to guard the approaches to your barge, Madame. As for the wounded in the church, I will at once go there myself, and see that everything is done for the poor devils.'
They bowed ceremoniously to one another, and 'mon capitaine' allowed himself the pleasure of gazing after the slight, graceful figure of the Red Cross nurse as long as it remained within his arc of vision. That was not long, for Jeanne Rouannès sped away swiftly—fearful of what she would find in the little cabin room. It seemed to her so long since she had left it, and she was nervously afraid lest he might have recovered consciousness, and missed her. 'I am coming,' she called out, breathlessly, in English, and then again as she came close to the door, 'I am here,' she said.
But the Herr Doktor went on staring sightlessly before him. He was busily talking, talking argumentatively, in hoarse, broken whispers to himself, and his fingers picked at the brown blanket.
Sinking down on her knees, she grasped his clammy hands in hers, and laid them to her cheek in a passion of desire to soothe, to comfort, to make easier the struggle she thought lay immediately before him.
Suddenly there floated in the sound of men's voices singing—a vast, magnificent roaring volume of sound—'Allons, enfants de la Patrie—ie—ie—ie ...'
There came a gleam across the dying man's face. 'Das ist schön' ('That is beautiful'), he whispered.
'... le jour de gloire est arrivé!'
The Herr Doktor murmured 'Das genügt mir!' ('That is enough!') and his head fell back, sinking deep into the soft pillow.
Jeanne Rouannès went on holding his dead hand for a few moments. Then she got up from her knees, and made the sign of the Cross on his damp forehead. As she did so, there burst on her ears the closing lines of the great battle hymn of freedom—