In Germany, February, 1919
Ten months have passed since I broke off,—ten months in which I have shrunk again and again from opening this chronicle to write down the final chapters. For months, only the constant affection of De Saint Omer, who has watched over me like a brother, and the loyalty of Anne have kept me sane and struggling to accept life as it has had to be readjusted and lived out. I have beenthrough battle after battle, buried twice under a torrent of shells, sought the thickest of the danger, and come through unscathed. The war is ended, the armistice has come, and ahead is the more difficult thing—life.
A month ago I tried to write and gave it up. This last week a new calm has come into my spirit,—a strange, sudden convalescence, like the lifting of a long fever. I shall suffer to write down the end, and yet I shall suffer more until it is done. It is only the record of a last few hours, six or seven in all, and yet it is the record of the ending of a lifetime and the beginning of another. To write it will not be difficult. Every word, every look is implanted in my memory, has haunted me in the delirium of the night and the walking unreality of the day, from the moment I came into the courtyard at R—— until the final parting, when I saw her with the baby in her arms.
*****
She might have come, passed at my side and gone, without my ever knowing it if it had not been for her old nurse, Marianne. R—— was under a prolonged bombardment that morning. The Boches must have had wind of the passage of an artillery support, for they opened up on the crossroads in the public square at dark and kept at it venomously all night. Our casualties were heavy and, just before dawn, a squadron of Fokkers bombed us, adding to the inferno. We stuck close to our cellars all morning,—De Saint Omer, our Boche Von Holwitz, and myself, but towards noon, as the fire seemed to lessen somewhat, or rather to leave the streets of the village and concentrate on the Square, De Saint Omer decided to take his prisoner back to headquarters and have him sent to the rear. He went out with Von Holwitz who, to give the devil his due, showed good nerve, and I promised to follow presently.
I finished shaving and tidying up and started after them, but hardly had I poked my head out before the Boches began to search out the village with shrapnel, and I was driven to shelter. At the end of an hour I succeeded in making my way through the ruins of cellars to an area of comparative quiet. The streets were badly cut up and blocked. I crossed behind a pile of masonry, entered the wreck of the church, and gaining the shelter of a wall, passed into the garden of what had once been a convent. There I stopped amazed.
A child—hardly more than a baby—was seated in the gravel path, gravely picking up the pebbles and build them in heaps, and by his side an old peasant woman, on her knees, was sobbing and telling her beads.
The village had, I knew, its smatter of refugees, hidden away in cellars, awaiting an opportunity to escape, and the spot was somewhat out of the line of fire. But the sight of a child, sitting unconcernedly there, under the split skies where shells were screaming to and fro, while half a mile away the houses were crumbling and great holes being torn in the streets, filled me with horror.
I stepped forward, and said, peremptorily:
“Que diable faites vous ici, ma bonne vielle?”
She looked up at me, startled at my voice. I stared at her, sprang back, started forward and, placing my hand on her shoulder, peered at her. Over the passage of months, of a hundred shifting scenes, a memory came slowly back to me, a face seen in the wet dawn of a November morning, on the docks at Bordeaux.
“Marianne!”
Her jaw dropped and she started up, staring at me,—but no recognition came to her.
Marianne! Then the childwas—
*****
The next moment, I heard De Saint Omer’s voice around the wall. A sudden flash of what had happenedcame to me. I stumbled to the opening, turned the corner, and came upon them: De Saint Omer, Von Holwitz, planted in a corner, and before me, in the blue and white uniform of the Red Cross—Bernoline!
*****
The next moment, oblivious of all the rest, I had her in my arms. She lay there, inert, weakly incapable of words, a poor, fluttering bird, listening to my voice that cried out to her. Gradually, her arms rose, passed around my neck, and tightened there.
“Ah, mon Dieu, even you!”
I realized nothing; neither the significance of her cry of despair, nor the grim erectness of the brother, nor the shadowy third, waiting with crossed arms against the wall. I only knew life had come again to me. I had her. I would never let her go. She had come to me again, again into my life! No matter what had been the past, no matter what her reasons, her pleadings or her will,—this time nothing could separate us again. I had come out of the inferno and the delirium back to life and hope.
“Bernoline, I have almost gone mad!”
She took my head in her hands and looked in my eyes.
“Ah mon bien aimé—if I could have spared you this! David, give me your strength for these last minutes!”
“What do you mean?”
I looked from her to the two men and back again. Still I did not seize the situation. Then, all at once, the tense rigidity of their attitudes struck me. I had the feeling of arriving on the skirts of tragedy,—of something having happened before, of my being out of it—an intruder, a mere spectator—while something ominous and terrifying was moving to its culmination. I felt that and instinctively I caught her in my arms again, to hold her against the unseen thing that threatened us. I tried to collectmy wits to piece together this mystery. If De Saint Omer were here—then he, too, knew. Bernoline had told him; with the child present no concealment was possible.
Then, I think for the first time, out of the blur, I became aware of the incongruity of Von Holwitz being there. I looked at him and saw the stone pallor on his face. Yet I did not understand.
“What is it? What are you all waiting for? Bernoline, why is that man here?”
Then I saw it in her face! Good God!