Printed in Great BritainAll rights reserved
Printed in Great BritainAll rights reserved
THE CRIMEAT VANDERLYNDEN’S
THE CRIMEAT VANDERLYNDEN’S
*
HIGH up in the pale Flemish sky aeroplanes were wheeling and darting like bright-coloured insects, catching from one moment to another the glint of sun on metallic body or translucent wing. To any pilot or observer who had opportunity or gift for mere speculation, the sight that lay spread out below might have appeared wonderful. From far away on the seaboard with its coming and going of ships, there led rail, road, and wire, and by these three came material, human material, and human thought, up to that point just behind the battle-line where in dumps, camps (dumps of men) and Head-quarters (dumps of brains) they eddied a little, before streaming forward again, more slowly and covertly, by night, or below ground, up to the battle itself. There they were lost in that gap in life—that barren lane where the Irresistible Force dashing against the Immovable Post ground such a fine powder, that of material, very little, of men, very few, and of thought, nothing came splashing back.
But pilots and observers were too busy, adding to the Black Carnival, or saving their own skins from those puffs of Death that kept following them up and down the sky, to take any such a remote view; and even had they been interested init, they could not have lifted the roof off the Mairie of the village—almost town—of Haagedoorne, and have seen, sitting in the Mayor’s parlour, a man of middle size and middle class, a phenomenon in that place, that had been shocked in its village dignity so many times in those few months. For first it had been turned from one of those haunts of Peace, of small slow-moving officialdom, into the “Q.” office of Divisional Head-quarters. It had become inhabited by two or three English Staff Officers, their maps and papers, their orderlies and clerks, policemen and servants; and now, last of all, there was added to them this quiet, absorbed young man—whose face and hair, figure and clothes had all those half-tones of moderate appropriateness of men who work indoors and do not expect too much. A young man who had neither red tabs nor long boots about him—and who seemed to have so much to do.
The old walls stared. The Mairie of Haagedoorne, half wine-shop, half beadle’s office, had seen soldiers in its four hundred years, had been built for Spanish ones, and had seen them replaced by French and Dutch, English and Hessians, in bright uniforms and with a certain soldierly idleness and noise. This fellow had none of it. Sat there with his nose well down, applying himself to maps and papers, occasionally speaking deferentially to Colonel Birchin, who, a proper soldier, his left breast bright with medals, his face blank and slightly bored with breeding,would nod or shake his head. This was all part of the fact that this War was not as other wars. It was too wide and deep, as if the foundations of life had come adrift on some subterranean sea, and the whole fabric were swaying; it had none of the decent intervals, and proper limits, allowing men to shut up for the winter and to carry on their trade all the time.
The dun-coloured person attached to Divisional Staff, whose name was Stephen Doughty Dormer, indulged in none of these reflections. He just got on with it. He was deep in his job when an exclamation from his temporary Chief made him look up. The Colonel was sitting back in his chair (iron-bottomed, officers, for the use of), his beautiful legs in their faultless casings stretched out beneath his army table. He was holding at arm’s-length a blue printed form, filled up in pen and ink.
Dormer knew it well. It was the official form on which Belgian or French civilians were instructed to make their claim for damages caused by the troops billeted on them.
The Colonel’s mouth hung open, his eyeglass had dropped down.
“You speak this—er—language?”
“Yessah!” (with a prayer it might not be Portuguese). “What language, sir?”
“This is—er—French.”
Yes, he could speak French, and hastened to look. Dormer was a clerk in a bank. Like somany of that species, he had had a grandmother with views as to the improvement of his position in the world, and she had insisted that he should learn the French language. Why she desired this was never discovered, unless it was that she considered it a genteel accomplishment, for she dated from the days when society was composed of two sorts of people, gentle and simple. She belonged to the former category and was in no danger of allowing any of her descendants to lapse. As she paid for the extra tuition involved, her arguments were irrefutable, and the boy intended for no more romantic a career than is afforded by a branch office in a market town, had, in 1900, a fair knowledge of the tongue of Voltaire and Hugo.
He hardly reflected upon the matter again until, in the midst of a European War, he found that that War was being conducted in a country where French was the chief language, and that familiar-sounding words and phrases assailed his ear on every side. This was of considerable service to him, enabled him to add to his own and his brother officers’ comfort; but he never boasted of it, having a profound uncertainty, after years of clerkdom, about anything so foreign and out of office hours. The legend of his peculiar ability persisted, however; and when after more than a year of incredible fatigues and nastiness, his neat methods and perfect amenity to orders were rewarded by the unofficial job of helpingin the A. and Q. office of a division, he found his legend there before him. It was therefore with a sigh, and a mental ejaculation equivalent to “Spare me these useless laurels,” that he got up and went over to his Chief’s table, to be confronted by the sentence:
“Esquinté une vierge chez moi!”
“What’sEsquinté? It’s not in Cassells’ Dictionary!”
“I should say—knocked asquint, sir! Spoiled, ruined; they often say it, if the troops go into the crops.”
“Well, how does it read, then? Knock asquint; no, that won’t do; ruined, you say. Ruined a Virgin in my house. This sounds like a nice business, with the French in their present mood!”
Dormer simply could not believe it and asked:
“May I see the claim?”
“Certainly. Come here. Stop me wherever I go wrong.”
He knew more French than Dormer gave him credit for. He read the blue form, printed question and pen-and-ink reply to the end. It went like this:
Q. When was the damage committed?
A. Last Thursday.
Q. What troops were responsible? Give the number and name of the English detachment.
A. A soldier of the 469 Trench Mortar Battery (T.M.B.).
Q. Were you present and did you see the damage done?
A. No, but my daughter knows all about it.
Q. In what conditions was the damage done?
A. He broke the window (vitrage). She called out to him, but he replied with oaths.
Q. Can you prove responsibility (a) by witness?
A. My daughter.
Q. (b) Byprocès-verbal.
A. They insulted the Mayor when he came to do it!
Q. (c) By admission of the culprits.
A. Not necessary. It is visible.
Q. Did you complain to the officer commanding troops?
A. He would not listen.
And so on.
Deposed and sealed at the Mairie of Hondebecq, Nord, as the claim for compensation of Mr. Vanderlynden, cultivator, 64 years old, by us Swingadow, Achille, Mayor.
“What do you say to that?” asked the Chief.
Dormer had a good deal to say, but kept it down. “I can’t believe it, sir. I know the billet. I remember Miss Vanderlynden. She’s as strong as a man and much more determined than most. It’s a mistake of some sort!”
“Pretty circumstantial mistake, isn’t it? Look at this covering letter received with it.”
He held out a memorandum headed: “GrandQuartier General,” in French, to the effect that one desired it might be given appropriate attention. And another from a department of English General Head-quarters with “Passed to you, please.”
“The French have had their knife into us for some time. This’ll be a nice case for them to take up. We must make an arrest at once. Sergeant!”
That Sergeant was a famous London Architect. He came to the door of the ante-room in which he worked.
“In what Corps Area is Hondebecq?”
The Sergeant spotted it in a moment, on the big map pinned up on the wall.
“Very well, wire them to take this up, and make an arrest.”
“There is just one point I should like to put, sir!”
As Dormer said it, he felt it to be “cheek.” His Chief turned upon him the eyeglass of a regular officer who found it rather difficult to imagine how a junior temporary officer could put a point. But Dormer had seen two Courts-Martial, and the thought of some poor brute hauled out of a trench, and marched about for no better purpose than that, kept him firm.
“If an arrest is made, you will have to go on with the proceedings.”
“Naturally.”
“Then you will need a statement from thevictim. If we had that first, we should know the truth!”
“Well, you’d better go and get it, as you know the people. You can see Corps and insist on an arrest. But, most important of all, try what a little money can do. He says a thousand francs. Well, you must see what he will come down to.”
Outside Divisional Head-quarters, Dormer turned to the right, to go to his billet, but a military policeman, stepping out from the shelter of the buildings, saluted.
“They’re shelling that way, sir!”
It gave Dormer a queer familiar feeling in the pit of the stomach. Shelling, the daily routine of that War. But being a very punctilious temporary officer, and taking his almost non-existent position in Divisional Staff very seriously, he pulled himself together.
“Oh, well, they’d have hit me long ago, if they could!” He passed on, followed by a smile. He said those things because he felt them to be good for the morale of the troops. Sure enough, he had not gone many yards before the air was rent by a familiar tearing sound, followed by the usual bump and roar. It was well in front of him, and to the left, and he went on reassured. A few yards farther on, close to the side street where he was billeted over a pork-butcher’s shop, he noticed people coming out of their houses and shops to stare, while oneelderly woman, rounder than any artist would dare to portray, asked him:
“O Monsieur, is the bombard finished?” in the Anglo-Flemish which years of billeting were beginning to teach the inhabitants of the town. But the centre of excitement was farther on, where the little street of houses petered out between small, highly cultivated fields. Here the first shell had fallen right upon one of those limbers that were to be found being driven up some obscure street at any hour of the day or night. Two dazed drivers had succeeded in cutting loose and quieting the mules. A horse lay dead in the gutter. Against the bank leaned the Corporal, his face out of sight, as if in the midst of a hearty laugh. It needed only a glance, however, to see that there was no head upon the shoulders. It was just one of those daily disagreeable scenes which to Dormer had been so utterly strange all his life, and so familiar for the last year. Dormer made no fuss, but took charge. He knew well enough that the drivers would stand and look at each other. He sent one of them for a burial party from the nearest Field Ambulance, saw that the other tied up the mules and made a bundle of the dead man’s effects—paybook, knife, money, letters—the pitiful little handkerchief-ful of all that remains for a soldier’s loved ones—while he himself pushed his way into the orderly room of the nearest formation, that showed any signs of telephonewires. He had not many yards to go, for the camps lay along each side of that Flemish lane, as close as houses in a street.
He was soon inside an Armstrong hut, with the field telephone at his disposal, and while waiting to be given the orderly room of the Brigade Transport to which the casualty belonged, he happened to close his eyes. The effect was so striking that he immediately opened them again. There, on the underside of his eyelids, was the headless body he had just left. Curiously enough, it did not lie against the bank, as he had seen it, but seemed to swim towards him, arms above his head, gesticulating. Once his eyes were open again, of course it disappeared.
About him was nothing more wonderful than the interior of an Armstrong hut Orderly Room, an army table, an army chair. Some one’s bed and bath shoved in a corner. Outside, trampled mud, mule-lines, cinder tracks, Holland elms, flat, stodgy Flanders all desecrated with War. He got the number he wanted, told the Brigade to fetch their broken limber, gave his rank and job, and put up the telephone. The impression he had had was so strong, however, that walking back along the cinder path, he closed his eyes again. Yes, it was still there, quite plain, the details of the khaki uniform all correct and clear cut, spurred boots and bandolier, but no head, and the arms raised aloft, exhorting or threatening.
If he went on like this he would have to see aMedical Officer, and they would send him down to the Base, and he would find his job filled up, and have to go elsewhere and start all over fresh, trying to do something that was not desperately boring or wholly useless. He had been doing too much, going up at night for “stunts,” and working in Q. office all day. He would have to slack off a bit.
By the time he got back to Divisional H.Q. the car stood ready. The feelings of one who, having been hauled out of the infantry, had then to return to the Forward Areas, were curiously mixed. Of course no one wanted to be shelled or bombed, to live where the comforts of life were unpurchasable, and the ordinary means of locomotion out of use. And yet—and yet—there was a curious feeling of going home. That great rowdy wood and canvas and corrugated iron town, miles deep and nearly a hundred miles long, was where one belonged. That atmosphere of obvious jokes and equally obvious death, disinfectant, tobacco, mules, and wood smoke had become one’s life, one’s right and natural environment.
His companion on this joyless ride was Major Stevenage, the A.P.M. of the Division, an ex-cavalry officer of the regular army, in appearance and mentality a darker and grimmer edition of Colonel Birchin.
Dormer showed him the Vanderlynden dossier as they bowled along. He surveyed it with theweariness of a professional to whom an amateur exhibits a “masterpiece.”
“Colonel Birchin thinks it’s rape, does he?”
“Yes!”
“He’s wrong, of course. Q. office always are! What do you think it is yourself?”
“A nasty snag. What happened doesn’t matter. You and I could settle it for forty francs. But the French have got hold of it. It’s become official.”
“What do you suggest?” Major Stevenage put in his monocle.
“We must go and see the Maire, and get it withdrawn. Let’s see. Hondebecq? It’s the Communal Secretary Blanquart we must see. Shrewd fellow and all on our side. These schoolmasters hate the peasants.”
Dormer knew the area well. Hondebecq was the typical village of French Flanders. That is to say, it was a cluster of cottages in whichrentiers—peasants who had scraped a few savings out of the surrounding fields—lived on about forty pounds a year English; in its centre, a pavedgrand’ placeheld a few modest shops, a huge high-shouldered church, carefully refaced with red brick, and a big, rambling “Estaminet de la Mairie,” next to the village school.
It was here that they found Blanquart, Communal Secretary, schoolmaster, land surveyor, poor man’s lawyer, Heaven only knows what other functions he used to combine. He was theonly man in the Commune handy with pen and paper, and this fact must have substantially added to his income. But, like all his kind, he could not forget that he came from Dunkirk or Lille; he had moments when his loneliness got the better of his pride and he would complain bitterly of the “sacred peasants.”
They found him seated in his little front parlour—he only functioned in the official room at the Estaminet on State occasions—busy with those innumerable forms by which the food of France was rationed, her Army conscripted, her prices kept in check and her civil administration facilitated. In the corner between the window and the clock sat an old peasant who said only, “Bonjour.”
Blanquart greeted them effusively, as who should say: “We others, we are men of the world.” He made polite inquiries about the officers’ health and the weather and the War, leading up to the introduction: “Allow me to present you to Mister our Mayor! And now what can I do for you?”
Major Stevenage, a little lost in the mixed stream of good French and bad English, left it to Dormer.
“It is with reference to the claim of Vanderlynden! Can one arrange it?”
Blanquart had only time to put in: “Everything arranges itself,” before the Mayor cut him short.
“You have some nice ideas, you others. Arrange it, I believe you. You will arrange it with our Deputy.”
Blanquart put in: “Mister the Mayor was insulted by the troops. We wrote to our Deputy!”
Major Stevenage fidgeted. He had found it most difficult to go through this sort of thing, day after day, for years. He had been trained to deal with Asiatics. He turned on Blanquart:
“Why didn’t you write to me first?” but the Mayor cut in again. His general outlook on life was about that of an English agricultural labourer plus the dignity of Beadledom. This latter had been injured, and the man, who seldom spoke a dozen sentences a day, now was voluble. He understood more English than one gave him credit for.
“Why write to you, officer, you are all of the same colour!” (By this time not a German attack could have stopped him.) “My Garde Champêtre comes to tell me that there is a crime of violence at Vanderlynden’s. They demand that I go to makeprocès-verbal. I put on my tricolour sash. I take my official notebook. I arrive. I demand the officer.Il s’est foutu de moi!(Untranslatable.) He says he has orders to march to the trenches. His troops hold me in derision. They sing laughable songs of me in my official capacity——”
“It is very well, Monsieur the Maire,”Dormer broke in. “We go to make an arrestation. Can you indicate the culpable?”
“But I believe you, I can indicate him,” cried the old man.
Dormer waited breathlessly for some fatal name or number which would drag a poor wretch through the slow exasperation of Court-Martial proceedings.
“It was a small brown man!”
“That does not lead us very far!” said Dormer icily.
“Wait!” The old man raised his voice. “Achille!” The door opened, and Achille Quaghebeur, the Garde Champêtre, in attendance on the Maire, stepped in and closed it behind him. He had, in his dark green and sulphur-coloured uniform, with his assumption of importance, the air of a comic soldier out of “Madame Angot.” “Produce the corroborative article!”
Achille found in his tail pocket surely the oldest and most faded of leather pocket-books. From this in turn he produced a piece of A.S.C. sacking, on which the word OATS was plainly printed in black.
“Voila!” said the Maire.
“Totally useless!” growled the Major, turning red.
This made the Maire furious; he grasped the intonation and expression if not the words.
“You others, you are enough to send one tosleep standing up. One produces thecorroborativepieces and you treat them as useless.” And there followed a tirade during which Dormer drew the Major outside, with profuseBonjours!He thought that Blanquart was trying to sign to him that he wanted to say something to him privately. But the Major was upset, his dignity was hurt. A soldier by profession, he had reduced the settlement of claims to a fine art. He was said to have settled three thousand between the time he was made A.P.M. to the division on the Aisne to the day of his death at Bailleul. He told the chauffeur to drive to Vanderlynden’s. The man seemed to know the way, and had probably been to the place many times. As the car jolted and ground over the cobbles into the yard, Dormer said:
“I shall ask for the daughter, Madeleine.”
“Just so!”
“I don’t believe——”
“Nor do I,” said the Major stoutly.
Neither of them could pronounce the word “rape.”
They got out, knocked at the door and knocked again. The place seemed not so much empty and deserted as enveloped in one of those encompassing noises that only sort themselves out on investigation. Too deep for a separator, too near for an aeroplane, Dormer diagnosed it: “They’ve got the Government thrasher in the back pasture, next the rye!” (He had a goodmemory and could tell pretty well how most of the people distributed crops and work.)
They recrossed the bridge of the moat and skirting the latter entered the back pasture. There against the gate that gave on to the arable “plain,” as it was called in those parts, was the Government thrasher, the women labourers, and right on the top of the stack, old Vanderlynden.
Dormer shouted! Vanderlynden paid not the slightest heed. Perhaps he was deaf, no doubt the thrasher buzzed loud enough; but above all he was one of those old peasants whose only reply to this unheard-of War in which all had been plunged was to work harder and more continuously, and to show less and less consciousness of what went on round about them. There he stood, black against that shy and tender blue of Flemish sky, the motions of his body mechanical, his face between collarless shirt and high-crowned, peaked cap, expressionless. Finally, Dormer took one of the short stout girls that were employed in raking the straw away from the travelling band, and shook her roughly by the arm.
She was, of course, a refugee Belgian. No one else would work like that, not even a Chinese woman. Like a clockwork figure, she began to speak in “English”:
“No bon offizer billet all full you go Mairie!” without stopping for one moment her raking.
Dormer held her forearm rigid, and stopped her.
“Saagte patron heer t’kom!”
That reached her consciousness. Throwing down her implement, she put both hands to her mouth and began shouting “Hoi!” at old Vanderlynden, and might have gone on shouting indefinitely if Dormer had not gone round to the French Army mechanic who drove the machine and given him an English canteen cigarette. That would have stopped an offensive. It soon stopped the thrasher and Vanderlynden looked down at his visitors.
“Good day, Patron!” called Dormer; “can we see Mademoiselle?”
The old man got down with unexpected agility. “Good day, my officer, what is it that there is?”
Dormer held out the blue claim form. At the sight of it, there came into Vanderlynden’s face the look that a mule gives its feed, when, expecting and even enjoying bits of wood, leather, and nails, it comes across a piece of tin: not so much protest as long and malevolent calculation of the unknown. As a matter of fact he could not read more of it than his signature. He muttered once or twice, “myn reclamorsche,” but got no further.
“Can we see Mademoiselle?” repeated Dormer.
The old man stared at him with the incredulity of a villager who finds a stranger ignorant of village news: “But, my officer, my young lady is gone!”
At that moment the French mechanic, who hadlighted his cigarette and now only wanted to be done with the job, put his lever over, and set the thrasher buzzing again. As if spell-bound, old Vanderlynden gave one leap and regained his place on the stack. The Belgians fell to at their several jobs. The corn flew, the wheels whizzed, the grain rattled in the hopper, the straw swished in long swathes beneath the rakes. Dormer and the Major were left standing, idle and forgotten, with their War, while the real business of the farm went steadily forward, only a little hastened because the thrasher had to be at Watten next day.
They walked back to the car, in a black frame of mind. Neither spoke, from war habit of not mentioning the omnipresent perversity of things. But Madeleine Vanderlynden’s departure from the farm, coming after the wording of the claim, was ominous indeed.
Travelling by motor has many disadvantages, but against all these it has one crowning advantage: to those who are weary and overspent, it provides more immediately and completely than any other physical sensation the feeling of escape. What magic lies behind that word! To get into the car and go, no matter whither, and to leave at any rate one incomprehensible muddle behind him: that was the illusion while the chauffeur was starting.
No farther off than the gate of the pasture, swaying at slowest speed over the unevenness ofthe entry, the car stopped. A motor-cyclist slithered up beside it, saluted the A.P.M. and produced one of those scores of messages that fluttered about just beyond the end of the field telephone. Dormer might have passed unknown, but the A.P.M. was unmistakable. Having handed over the flimsy envelope, the pocket Hermes threw his leg over the saddle of the gibbering machine that carried him, and was away up the lane and out on to thepavéroad, out of sight before the A.P.M. could get out the words “No answer.”
The A.P.M. sat frowning at the pink Army message form. The chauffeur sat frowning, one hand on the wheel, his foot keeping the engine going by light continual touches on the accelerator, his face screwed round to catch the order to proceed. The Sergeant of police sat perfectly still and impassive, looking before him, the sunlight glinting on the tiny fair hairs of his clipped moustache. The cyclist had gone, the chauffeur wanted to go, and, after a moment, quietly slipped into first gear and let the car gently gather way. The policeman did not have to want. He had simply to sit still and his morning would pass as his other mornings did, in passively guarding law and order in the organization of the British Armies in France and Flanders. It was not until the car was already moving at more than walking pace that the A.P.M. spoke, and Dormer got the queerest sensation from thesequence of such small events. For the first time it seemed to him that the A.P.M. was not in possession of the initiative. It was these private soldiers, waiting, coming and going, that forced him to give an order. The impression lasted only a moment, but it was disturbing. Decidedly, Dormer felt, he was not well, having such notions. Then he had no more time to think, for the A.P.M. was holding out the pink wire for him to read. He read:
“Corps requires signed statement of withdrawn claim.” The illusion of escape was gone. The botheration was not behind, it was ahead of them.
“No use saying she isn’t there. We shall have to concoct something.” He was obviously waiting for Dormer to suggest.
“I think, sir, we might go back to Blanquart, and find out the girl’s whereabouts. The Maire will be gone by now!”
“Thank goodness. To Hondebecq Mairie.” The car flew from second to top speed.
Back at the Grand’ Place of the village, the car stopped, the chauffeur folded his hands, at the order to wait, the A.P.M. and Dormer entered the Estaminet. It was empty, as Dormer had foreseen. The Maire and his Secretary were not people who had time to waste, and were both gone about their jobs—the Maire to his farm, the clerk to his school, the classes of which were plainly audible through the wall, grinding out some lesson by heart, in unison, like some gigantic gramophonewith a perpetual spring. It was the hour at which all France prepares for its substantial meal.
Outside, the Grand’ Place was empty, save for the sunshine, not here an enemy, as farther south, but the kindly friend that visits the coasts of the North Sea all too rarely, wasting its pale and tepid gold on the worn stones, on the green-shuttered, biscuit-coloured façades of substantial two-storied houses, with steep roofs and tall chimneys, behind which protruded the summits of ancient Holland elms. For a long while there was no movement, save the flutter of a straw caught in the cobbles. The A.P.M. fidgeted. There was no sound but the classes next door, the wind in the street, the faint tremor of the window-panes, in response to some distant inaudible shelling.
“You wouldn’t think there was a war going on within twenty miles?”
“Twenty kilometres, sir!”
“Is it possible? Are we going to wait all day, Dormer?”
“No, sir, only a moment; the people of the house can’t be far off, but the door behind the bar is locked. I don’t want to go into the school myself, Blanquart won’t like it, and one wants to keep on the right side of him.”
“Why won’t he like it? He’ll have to.”
“The children get out of hand, sir, at the sight of a uniform. I’ve noticed it when I’ve been billeting.”
“Do they?”
“Yes, sir; it’s all fun to them still.”
“Is it?” The A.P.M. grimaced and began reading the signs over the little shops: “Charcuterie—what’s that?”
“Baked-meat shop. Pork-butcher’s we should call it, sir!”
“Quincaillerie.”
“Hardware!”
“Who’s this, coming across the square?”
“Belgian refugee, sir!”
Dormer had no doubt about it. The heavy round-shouldered figure, the mouth hanging loosely open, the bundle carried under the arm, the clumsy boots, the clothes apparently suspended round the waist by a string. Her story was written all over her: turned out of some Walloon or Flemish farm or town, at the approach of the Germans—tramping along a road with a retreating army all mixed up with a nation on the move, she had lost home, parents, occupation, all in a few hours, and was glad to get board and bed and any odd job that she could do.
“Is this the sort of person we have to interview?”
“Oh no, sir. Different type!”
The woman showed some mild interest at the sight of the car, and exchanged banter in pidgin English with the chauffeur and policeman. The invitation from the latter “promenade,” and the smiling, flattered refusal “promenade no bon!”could be heard. Then she entered and stood before them.
“Bonjour, offizer, what you want?”
“Will you kindly tell the Maire’s Secretary one waits to see him.”
“You want billets?” in English. “Billets na poo!”
“No!” Dormer was always piqued when his French was disregarded or misunderstood. “We want M. Blanquart!”
“All right.” She returned with him in a moment.
“M. Blanquart, we have been to the farm and seen Vanderlynden. He’s very busy, and we didn’t get much out of him, but we gather his daughter has left home. Do you know her address?”
A look of incredulity visited the face of the schoolmaster. He pointed across the square. “There. She has taken the ‘Lion of Flanders.’ She gives lunch to officers!”
When this was conveyed to the A.P.M. he was considerably annoyed. “Why couldn’t that old fool Vander what’s-his-name say so?”
Blanquart understood perfectly, not only the words, but the feeling. “Ah, Monsieur, there you have the peasant. I have lived among them all my life. I am not of them, I am from St. Omer, but I know them well. They are like that. They are thrashing. They are sowing. They cannot attend to anything else, even if it be theirown business. You and I shall be treated like the weather, something to be used or avoided....”
But the A.P.M. had stepped out of the Estaminet de la Mairie. Dormer lingered, just sufficiently to say:
“We are much obliged, M. Blanquart, we will attend to the affair.” For he had been brought up to behave as a little gentleman and knew that politeness cost nothing and that he might require the Secretary of the Mairie again.
Outside, the chauffeur was busy underneath the car, the policeman stood beside it, legs apart, hands clasped behind his back, face expressing absolutely nothing. In a few strides Dormer caught up to the A.P.M.
“This lady speaks good English, sir. No doubt you will conduct the inquiry yourself?”
“I hope so, if we really have found the person at last. We’ve wasted nearly the whole morning.”
Dormer was relieved; his mind, always inclined to run a little in advance, had already arrived at the point at which some one would have to ask this woman:
“Are you the victim of this shocking crime?” He didn’t want to do it, for he felt that it was the A.P.M.’s business.
The two officers entered the Café-Restaurant of the “Lion of Flanders.” The whole of the ground floor, a long, low room looking out into the Grand’ Place, had been cleared and set with little tables. Round the desk from which thePatronne supervised the business, one or two officers from neighbouring billets were drinking mixed vermouth. The air was redolent of preparation, and it was only because they remained standing that the A.P.M. and Dormer attracted attention. Finally, a rough middle-aged woman in an apron asked what she could do for these gentlemen. Feeling the subject to be increasingly delicate, Dormer ordered two mixed vermouths and then asked if they might speak to Mademoiselle Vanderlynden upon business. The drinks were served, and behind them came the person required. No sooner had she come and inquired what was wanted, than Dormer wished to goodness she had not. He realized more than ever how difficult it would be to say to such a person, “Are you the victim of the unmentionable crime?” But there she stood, quite good looking, imperturbable, a little impatient perhaps, obviously wanting to know without delay why she had been sent for in the middle of a busy morning. This was comforting in a sense; it showed there was something wrong with the whole atrocious story. On the other hand it was awkward, one had to go on and explain. So he pulled out the blue printed claim: the A.P.M. in spite of what had been said, left it to him.
“It is about this claim of your father’s.”
She took it, scrutinized it a moment, and handed it back:
“Ah, that.” She was not helpful.
“You are of course familiar with the whole story?”
“Yes, I remember it all.”
The A.P.M. was listening attentively, impressed by her glib, adequate English, and even more so by her personality. Dormer, on the other hand, was occupied with his own feelings.
“There is some mistake, is there not?”
“No, there is no mistake.”
“The Major has come to see the—er—the damage!”
“I shall be pleased to go with you to the farm, after lunch.”
“That’s a jolly good idea,” the A.P.M. broke in. “We’ll have lunch here, and go and look at the damage afterwards.”
“Very good. Will you take a chair, sir?” and she was gone.
“You see, it wasn’t what you thought,” the A.P.M. went on, finishing his drink at a gulp, and making Dormer feel, for the twentieth time, what a grossly unfair War it was.
The lunch was long, far more of the Flemish midday dinner than the French déjeuner. The A.P.M. took the lot, commented freely, enjoyed himself immensely. There werehors d’œuvres(sardines, beans in oil, some sort of sausage, a kind of horse-radish, “Wonder where the devil she gets ’em?” said the A.P.M.), soup (ordinary, but enlivened by parsley and bits or toast friedin fat and something, third cousin to a piece of garlic, “scrumptious”), veal and spinach (very good, but “no fish, pity!”). In a moment, Mademoiselle Vanderlynden stood over them. “I am sorry, we have only sardines, they will not let the fish come by train!” Chicken and salad (“Excellent. Ah, they understand oil, the French”), little biscuits, coffee that dripped through a strainer into glasses, rum (“That’s English, I bet!”), and Dormer, shy in such matters, and without social code, began wondering whether he could offer to pay.
He had learned during bitter years, one rule: “Always treat an A.P.M. if you can!” This had not been his preoccupation during the meal. He had been haunted by a tag of verse—from the “Ingoldsby Legends” which he certainly hadn’t read for twenty years. He was not one to read “poetry.” But neither had he a regular soldier’s trained indifference. He knew where it was going to end, this quest on which they were engaged. Some poor brute who had volunteered to come to this blessed country to fight the Germans, would be hauled out of some ghastly apology for a “rest” camp—if he were lucky—more likely out of some dug-out or cellar, or even from Hospital—placed under arrest—frightened dumb, if by any chance he had any speech in him, and finally tried by a court to whom he was a “Tommy” (the sort of person who enlisted in the regular army because he wasout of work), and sentenced to some penalty. And here was the A.P.M. eating and drinking with gusto. It reminded Dormer of:
Send for Trefooze, and Lieutenant Tregooze,Send for Sir Carnaby Jenks of the Blues.How much must I fork out, my trump,For the whole first floor of the Magpie and Stump?
Send for Trefooze, and Lieutenant Tregooze,Send for Sir Carnaby Jenks of the Blues.How much must I fork out, my trump,For the whole first floor of the Magpie and Stump?
Send for Trefooze, and Lieutenant Tregooze,
Send for Sir Carnaby Jenks of the Blues.
How much must I fork out, my trump,
For the whole first floor of the Magpie and Stump?
the rhyme of the drunken swells who couldn’t even keep awake to see a man hanged. It was, however, the ideal state of mind for making war.
The A.P.M. was saying to Mademoiselle Vanderlynden: “The bill please, Madam,” and when he got it, “By Gad, did we drink all that? Well, I don’t grudge it.”
So he was going to pay. The room was emptying now, there were no troops in the village, and most of the officers lunching there (with shy propitiatory looks toward the A.P.M.) had some way to ride to get back to their units. Here was Mademoiselle ready to go and show them the damage. She wore no hat, but her clothes were good of their kind and she carried the day’s takings clasped to her breast, in a solid little leather dolly-bag, far from new. The A.P.M. allowed her the rare privilege of a lift in the car. They went back over the same road that the two officers had followed in the morning. Once more Dormer had his queer feelings. There was something wrong about this. Three times over the same road and nothing done. As theyturned into the by-road, Mademoiselle Vanderlynden held up her hand. “Stop here, please!”
They were at the corner of the big pasture before the house. There was an ordinary hedge, like an English one, thickened at this angle into a tiny copse, with a dozen young poplars. Mademoiselle soon found a gap in the fence and led them through, remarking, “The troops made this short cut!”
They found themselves in Vanderlynden’s pasture, like hundreds of others over a hundred miles of country. There were no troops in it at the moment, but it had the air of being continuously occupied. In long regular lines the grass had been trampled away. Posts and wire, and a great bank of manure marked the site of horse-lines. Nearer the house, tents had been set up from time to time, and circles, dotted with peg and post holes, appeared half obliterated. At the corners of the field were latrines, and at one spot the cookers had blackened everything.
“Billets for the troops!” reflected Dormer, to whom the idea of lodging in the open had never ceased to be a thoroughly bad joke. “Stables for horses, stables for men!” Obviously enough the machinery of War had been here in full swing. Dormer (a man of no imagination) could almost see before him the khaki-clad figures, the sullen mules, the primitive vehicles filing into the place, tarrying ever so briefly and filing out again to be destroyed. But MademoiselleVanderlynden was occupied with the matter in hand, and led to the other side of the coppice, where there had been built by some previous generation of pious Vanderlyndens a little shrine. It was perhaps eight feet high, six feet thick, and had its glazed recess towards the main road. But the glazing was all broken, the altar torn down, and all those small wax or plaster figures or flowers, vases, and other objects of the trade in “votive offerings” andobjets de piétéwhich a Vanderlynden would revere so much more because he bought them at afournitures ecclésiastiques, rather than made them with his own hands, were missing. Army wire had been used to fasten up the gaping aperture.
“There you are,” said Mademoiselle. She added, as if there might be some doubt as to ownership: “You can see that it is ours. Here is our name, not our proprietors!”
Sure enough, on a flat plaster panel was a partially effaced inscription: “Marie Bienheureuse—prie pour—de Benoit Vanderl—femme Marthe—Juin 187——”
The A.P.M. lighted a cigar, and surveyed the ruins. He was feeling extremely well, and was able to take a detached unofficial attitude. “Oh, so that’s the Virgin, is it?”
“No. That is the place for the image. The image is broken, as I told you, and we removed the pieces.”
“Very good. Then I understand you claima thousand francs for the damage to the brick-work and the—er—altar furniture which was—ah, broken—it seems too much, you know!”
“Perhaps, sir, you are not well ack-vainted with the price of building materials!” (Ah, thought Dormer, she speaks pretty good English, but that word did her.)
“Oh, I think so, I’m a bit of a farmer myself, you know. I have a place in Hampshire, where I breed cattle.”
Mademoiselle’s voice seemed to rise and harden:
“Yes, sir; but if you are rich, that is not a reason that you should deny justice to us, who are poor. I do not know if I can get this altar repaired, and even if I can there is also the question of theeffraction——”
“The what?”
“Legal damages for breaking in—trespass, sir,” put in Dormer, alarmed by the use of French. He could see she was getting annoyed, and wished the A.P.M., the lunch, the claim, the farm and the War, all the blessed caboodle, were with the devil.
“Oh, I see.”
“Et puis, and then there aredédommagements—what would you say if I were to knock down your Mother’s tomb?”
“What’s that. Oh, I can’t say, I’m sure. I really can’t go into all this. Captain Dormer, there is obviously no arrest to be made. It ispurely a claim for compensation. I will leave it to you. I must be getting back.Comprenez, Mademoiselle, this officer will hear what you have to say and will settle the whole matter with you. Famous lunch you gave us. Au revoir. If you care for a game of bridge this evening, Dormer, come round to B Mess!”
Dormer took out his field notebook and conducted the inquiry partly in English, partly in French.
They sat in the cavernous old tiled kitchen, half-filled with the stove and its stupefying heat, half with the table, scrubbed until the grain of the wood stood out in ribs.
Mademoiselle Vanderlynden had dismissed the A.P.M. from her mind with the remark that he was a droll type, and gave Dormer her full attention, rather as if he had been a dull boy in the lowest class, and she his teacher.
“When did this occur?”
“Why, in April. It was wet, or he would not have done it!”
“Did you see it done?”
“Yes. I even tried to stop it!”
“Where were you?”
“Why naturally I was at that hole in the fence. One cannot always hire a boy to keep the cattle from straying.”
“Well?”
“Well, then the troops came in. They were not pretty to see!”
“What troops were they?”
She turned over a dirty dog-eared memorandum book.
“469 Trench Mortar Battery.”
“So they had had a bad time?”
“One gathered that. They were very few, and some of their material was missing. At the last came this man with his two mules. One was sick, one was wounded. Most of the men, as soon as they had put up their animals, fell down and slept, but this one kept walking about. It was almost dark and it was beginning to rain. I asked him what he wanted.”
“What did he say?”
“‘To Hell with the Pope!’”
The shibboleth sounded so queer on her lips that Dormer glanced at her face. It was blank. She had merely memorized the words in case they might be of use to her. She went on:
“He did not like the images on the altar! Then he began to break the glass, and pull down the woodwork. One saw what he wanted. It was shelter for his mules.”
“You cautioned him that he was doing wrong?”
“I believe you. I even held him by the arm.”
“That was wrong of you, Mademoiselle. You should have informed his officer.”
“Oh, you must understand that his officer was asleep on the kitchen floor. But so asleep. He lay where he had fallen, he had not let gothe mug from which he drank his whisky. So much—(she held up four graphic fingers)—ah, but whisky you know!”
“I see. You were unable to report to the officer in charge of the party. But still, you should never touch a soldier. He might do you an injury, and then, at a court of inquiry, it would be said against you that you laid hands on him.”
“Oh, you understand, one is not afraid, one has seen so many soldiers these years. And as for the court of inquiry, we have had four here, about various matters. They all ended in nothing.”
“Well, well, you endeavoured to prevent the damage, and being unable to report to the proper authority, you made your claim for damage in due course. But when the officer woke up, you informed him that you had done so?”
“Why necessarily, since we had the Maire to make aprocès-verbal!”
“So I hear, from the Maire himself. But apparently the Maire did not do so, for the procès-verbal is not included with the other papers.”
“No, the Maire was prevented by the troops. (A grim smile broke for a moment the calculated business indifference on the face of one who excluded emotion, because it was a bad way of obtaining money.) Oh, la-la! There was acontretemps!”
“Do you mind telling me what occurred?” She seemed to regret that brief smile, and apologized to herself.
“All the same, it was shameful. Our Maire is no better than any other, but he is our Maire. One ought to respect those in power, ought not one, sir?”
“In what way were the troops lacking in respect?”
“They sang. They sang—casse-tête—enough to split your head, all the way to the village!”
“Oh, they were on the move, were they?”
“It was pitiable, I assure you, sir, it was shameful to see.Ces pauvres êtres.They hardly had any sleep. Only a few hours. Then it seems the Bosche made a counter-attack, and paff! here comes a motor-cyclist, and they were obliged to wake up and fall in. Some of them could only stand up with difficulty. But at length, they were ready; then the Maire came. We had sent for himd’urgence, when we saw the troops were going, because you can’t make aprocès-verbalof a person who is no longer there!”
“No, quite right. But why did they sing?”
“Ah,ça tombait d’accord. Just as the officer gives the word, the Maire arrives. We had informed him it was a crime of violence, and he had taken it very serious. He is old, our Maire. He had put on his—écharpe.”
“What is that?”
She made a vivid gesture with her hands.
“It goes so! It is tricolour. It is the Maire’s official dress!”
“Ah, his official scarf!”
“That is it. Also, he had mounted his hat!”
“How did he do that?”
“The usual way. But it was a long hat, a hat ofgrande tenue—like a pot of confiture.”
“Mademoiselle, this will not do. I cannot settle this matter here and now, I must pass on all the papers to my superior officer, who will place them with the proper authority. They will ask ‘Is there noprocès-verbal?’ Am I to say: ‘The Maire went to make one. He put on his hat and the troops began to sing.’ It sounds like a joke.”
“Ah, you others, you are always the ones to laugh. It was just exactly as I have said. They sang!”
“But you told me just now that they were tired out!”
“Quite true!”
“It will never sound so. What did they sing?”
“Old Hindenburg has bought a hat!”
In a moment Dormer was convinced. The words painted, framed and hung the picture for him. He had just been beginning to hope that the whole thing would break down from sheer improbability. He now saw it stamped and certified with eternal truth. There was no need for her to add: “They were not gay, you understand, they wereexalté!”
“Excited!”
“Ah! Excited, like one is after no sleep and no food and then something very strange. They were excited. They called the Maire ‘Maréchal Hindenburg,’ and ‘Bosche,’ and ‘Spy.’ Those are words that ought not to be used between allies!”
“No, Mademoiselle, they ought not.”
But for a moment, the hardness left her face, she became almost impersonal.
“It was curious. They sang that—sur une aire de psaume, to a church tune.”
“Yes, yes!” agreed Dormer. Out of the depth of his experience as a churchwarden welled up the strains of Whitfield, No. 671, and out of the depths of his experiences as a platoon commander came a sigh: “They will do it.”
He went through his notes to see if there were anything more he wanted to know, but from business habit he had already possessed himself of the essentials. He did not like the way the thing was shaping. He knew only too well what happened in the army. Some individual being, besides a number on a pay roll, a human creature, would do something quite natural, perhaps rather useful, something which a mile or two farther on, in the trenches, would be worth, and might occasionally gain, the Military Medal. This business of breaking down a bit of wood and plaster, to shelter mules, had it occurred a little farther on, had it been amatter of making a machine-gun emplacement in an emergency, would have earned praise. It showed just that sort of initiative one wanted in War-time, and which was none too easy to get from an army of respectable civilians. But at the same time, in billets, there was another set of rules just as important, which in their essence discouraged initiative and reduced the soldier to a mere automaton. The otherwise excellent thing which he did broke those rules. That again did not matter much, unless it was brought into accidental prominence by colliding with some other event or function—this Maire and his dignity for instance, would play the very devil, make a mountain out of a molehill, such was the perversity of things. Fascinated against his better judgment which told him “The less you know about the business, the better,” he found himself asking:
“What was this man like, Mademoiselle?”
There was no answer, and he looked up. She had left him, gone into the back kitchen to some job of her own. She had left him as though the War were some expensive hobby of his that she really could not be bothered with any longer. On hearing his voice she returned and he repeated his question. He never forgot the answer.
“Like—but he was like all the others!”
“You couldn’t pick him out in a crowd?”
“Perhaps. But it would be difficult. Hewas about as big as you, not very fat, he had eyes and hair like you or anyone else.”
“You didn’t, of course, hear his name or number?”
“They called him ‘Nobby.’ It was his name, but they call every one ‘Nobby.’ His number was 6494. I saw it on his valise.”
“On his pack?”
“Yes.”
“Thank you, Mademoiselle. You have told me all I want.” In his heart he feared she had told him much too much, but she had gone on with her work. He rose to go, but passing the dark entry of the back kitchen, he stopped, as though to avoid a shell. He thought he saw a headless figure, but it was only a shirt which Mademoiselle Vanderlynden had flung over a line before putting it through the wringer. He went out. She did not accompany him. She was busy, no doubt.
He had to walk to the main road, but once there, found no difficulty in “jumping” a lorry that took him back to Divisional Head-quarters. On the steps of the Town Hall he crossed the A.P.M. It was very late for that functionary to be about. He had not even changed into “slacks.”
“Hello, young feller, you got back then?”
“Yes, sir.” Dormer rather wanted to say, “No, sir, I’m not here, I’m at the farm where you left me.”
The A.P.M. passed on, but turned to call out:“No bridge to-night. We’re on the move!”
So it seemed. The interior of the old building was in confusion. The Quartermaster-Sergeant was burning orders, schedules, rolls and parade states of the Corps they were leaving. Signallers were packing their apparatus, batmen were folding beds and stuffing valises. Policemen were galvanized into a momentary activity.
To Dormer it was the old, old lesson of the War. Never do anything, it is always too late. He had been bound, by a careful civilian conscience, to try to get to the bottom of the matter. He might just as well have torn it up and let it take its chance. No, the Vanderlyndens would never let it rest until they got some sort of satisfaction. The Mayor and the French Mission and Heaven knows who else would have something to say. He wrote a brief but careful report, and sent the thing off to an authority at Boulogne who dealt with such matters.
The weeks that followed were full of education for Dormer’s detached, civilian mind. Accustomed to be part of a battalion, almost a close family circle of known faces and habits, then associated with the staff of a division that stuck in one place, he had never before seen an army, and that army almost a nation, on the move. Under his eyes, partly by his effort, fifteenthousand English-speaking males, with the proper number of animals and vehicles, impedimenta, movable or fixed, had got into trains, and got out of them again, and marched or been conveyed to a place where Dormer had to take leave of all preconceived notions of life.
No-Man’s-Land, with trenches beside it, he was familiar with, but here were miles of had-been No-Man’s-Land, grassless, houseless, ploughed into brown undulations like waves of the sea by the barrages that had fallen upon it; covered with tents and huts, divided by wandering rivers of mud or dust, which had been at some distant time, weeks before, roads. Into this had poured, like the division to which he was attached, forty other divisions, always in motion, always flowing from the railhead behind, up to the guns in front, shedding half the human material of which they were composed, and ebbing back to railhead to go elsewhere.
He came to rest in a tiny dug-out on a hillside of loose chalk, which he shared with a signal officer, and past which, at all hours of the day and night, there passed men, men, men, mules, men, guns, men, mules, limbers, men, men, men.
At least this is how they appeared to him. Forced by Nature to sleep for some of the hours of darkness, and forced by the Germans to be still for all the clearest of the daylight, it was at the spells of dusk and dawn that he became busiest, and that infernal procession was everbefore his eyes. It was endless. It was hopeless. By no means could his prim middle-class mind get to like or admire anything so far from the defined comfort and unvarying security to which he belonged and to which he longed to return. It was useless. With the precision of a machine, that procession was duplicated by another moving in the opposite direction. Lorries, ambulances, stretchers, men, men, guns, limbers, men, men, men. The raw material went up. The finished article came back. Dormer and his companion and their like, over twenty miles of line, sorted and sifted and kept the stream in motion.
That companion of his was not the least of his grievances. The fellow was no Dormer, he was opposite by name and nature. His name was Kavanagh, and one of the meagre comforts Dormer got was by thinking of him as a d——d Irishman. He was, or had been going to be, a schoolmaster, and next to nature (or nationality), the worst thing about him was he would talk. And he wouldnotkeep his hands still. Two things that Dormer most gravely disapproved of, and which he attributed in equal shares to lack of experience of the world, and too much signalling.
His talk was such tripe, too! He never lost a moment. He started first thing in the morning. All the traffic that was going up forward was gone. The earth was empty, save for anti-aircraft guns pop-popping at planes high in theItalian blue. Dormer had shaved and breakfasted and hoped to catch up some of the sleep he had lost during the night. But would that fellow allow that? No. Listen to him now, under the tiny lean-to they had contrived, by the dug-out steps, for washing purposes. He was—reciting—would one call it?