At the door we peered cautiously out. No one had been aroused. The hot night breathed about us as softly as a sleeping child, ignorant, indifferent, and calm. Tragedy, comedy, farce—we had played them all unwittingly, and no one knew or cared but we!

An old herdick hitched to a decrepit horse stood in the shadow of the street corner! We thrust Yvette, Guilbert, and the poet into its shelter and waved them good-night. “Au revoir, messieurs!” the three called to us gaily.

“Adieu!” McTeague responded. “It is not au revoir: it is good-bye!” Then he added, sotto voce, to me, “They are true artists—unmoral—like marionettes—just figures of the dance, aren’t they?... Come!” he said, after a pause. “They have forgotten it already, but we must go back to the Café du Cid and get the proprietor out of this scrape. Right?”

“Right,” I responded. And we slowly followed the creaking herdick down the narrow street.

V
THE SAVIOUR OF MONT CÉSAR

Rain fell softly, as it frequently falls in Belgium, drenching the ripening fields of Brabant and the ghosts of ruined towns. By six o’clock in the evening we had reached Louvain. My motor-car rolled through the porte de Bruxelles and down the narrow, slippery Flemish streets into the heart of the city. From a sentry box marked with barber-pole stripes in the German colours—black, white, red; black, white, red again—a bearded Landsturm man leaped out, wearing a helmet like a Yohoghany miner’s cap, a faded gray-green service uniform, and high, mud-coloured boots. The car skidded past him over the moist cobblestones. “Halt!” he shouted, waving his rifle; but I flaunted my celluloid-covered pass-case at him and yelled in tourist German, “Amerikanische Hilfskomite,” and he nodded and crawled back into his shelter.

It was the first anniversary of the destruction of Louvain.

Before the majestic Hôtel de Ville—its six slender open towers riding high like a stranded ship in a waste of ruins—sole relic of the old glories of Louvain’s Grand’ Place, Pierre stopped the car and looked back at me inquiringly.

“I shall spend the night at Mont César, Pierre.”

“Good, monsieur.”

“Go to the Kommandantur and ask the commandant for a garage for the Relief Commission’s car.”

“Good.”

“I shall walk to the monastery,” I added in response to his unspoken question. “You may go now.”

“Pardon, but is monsieur to assist at the ceremony in memory of the saviour of Mont César?”

“What saviour, Pierre?”

“Monsieur has not heard—the German officer who saved the monastery: the Prussian who would not burn the monastery, although he was so ordered. Monsieur has not heard?”

“Nonsense, Pierre,” I laughed. “What foolishness is this?”

“Si, si, si, monsieur! It is true,” he insisted vehemently, “every word. I swear it. He would not burn the monastery, that German; and so to-night and for one hundred years the monks sing and march in procession for him.”

“Go find a garage!” I ordered in disgust. The idea of Belgian monks holding service for a German was absurd. Chauffeur tales, I had found, while often interesting, were not always true. “Pierre must think me a fool indeed to tell me such a stupid falsehood,” I thought, as I went grumblingly up the street.

Dusk and the gray rain fell together, covering the gray city with an impenetrable shroud. Ghostly walls and empty balconies, bricks, ashes, gaunt wooden fences to hide the worst of the ruins; a stray dog which snapped as he ran past; women with black shawls over their bent heads hurrying along the street; a file of stodgy German Landsturm plodding through the rain—these things I saw as I walked through the city where Lipsius had taught, the city which had been the home of learning and art and the seat of Catholic piety for more than five centuries, the city whose ruin is one of many eternal blots on the ’scutcheon of Germany.

I climbed up past the tall stately hill called Mont César—a height on which local legend says Cæsar built a camp and a fortress—where the dour, unbeautiful monastery of Mont César broods over the wrecked city.

The pater hospitalis, Jan Heynderyckx, greeted me with grave pleasure. He was not old, yet the beard which just touched the breast of his Benedictine habit was almost white, his eyes were gray and tired, and his skin, in the fluttering candlelight, was like the vellum of mediæval manuscripts. I had an odd fancy that his face was a perfect transcript of his life, limned by the hands of life and death, fear, ecstasy, hope, ambition, love, and hate. He bowed me into a small reception room at the right of the arched door and went for sherry and tobacco. Far away, from the chapel, came the faint thunder of bass voices chanting a service. It echoed and re-echoed through the hollow halls, roaring and subsiding like distant waves. The monks were singing litanies for the murdered city.

The room where I sat was curious; little larger than a closet. On the four walls hung old oil paintings of fathers-superior of the Benedictine order: Dom Pothier, Dom Schmitt, Dom Egbert—sombre, saintly men whose bones long since were dust. But over the wooden mantel opposite me hung a framed photograph. It amused and fascinated me—that one touch of modernity in the bleak monastic hall—and I stared at it dreamily.

“Ah, the photograph, monsieur?” The monk had entered quietly and stood beside me. He, too, gazed at the picture, while his hands poured the wine and set forth Turkish cigarettes. “To your good health, monsieur le Délégué. The photograph?” He took a huge pinch of snuff, flourished his handkerchief, and breathed noisily. “You may look at it if you wish.”

“A thousand thanks, brother,” I answered indifferently, rising and going toward the little frame. The monk followed me, catching up a flickering candle and holding it close to the glass for me to see the better.

“My God!” I almost shouted the words in my astonishment. “It is a German officer!” The picture before us was a cheap cabinet photograph of a lieutenant of infantry, evidently a Prussian, his crop head showing beneath his cap, his steady, narrow eyes gazing straight into ours! His right cheek was slashed with Schmizzes of student duels; his hard mouth was half covered with bristling moustaches, and the white and black ribbon of the Iron Cross, second class, peeped from his buttonhole. “Mahn, Ober-Leutnant,” I read, written across the lower half of the photograph with a military flourish, and under it in fine Flemish script in another hand, “The saviour of Mont César, Louvain, August, 1914.”

“Monsieur is puzzled?”

“Puzzled? I am thunder-struck! Is this Belgium, or is it Germany, brother?”

Father Jan gazed at me sorrowfully. “You do not yet understand. This is still Belgium, and God will punish the guilty. Listen, monsieur, you understand Latin?” He pointed down the corridors where the bass voices were chanting again in unison. “You hear what they are singing?”

“No,” I said.

“Listen, monsieur le Délégué, Primo—anno—magni—belli—in the first year of the Great War—sub—bono—rege—Alberto—in the reign of good King Albert—praefectus Mahnius—monasterium—montis Caesarii—ab exitio—servavit—laus Deo!—Officer Mahn saved from destruction the monastery of Mont César.”

“We had fled to Malines, monsieur, we monks of Mont César, and two days after Louvain had been put to the torch Dom Egbert ordered me to return to the monastery and care for it. Such lamentations, monsieur! My brothers and I knew I was going to my death, and my blood froze even to think of what the Germans might do to me; but I went, monsieur, I went guided by God, doubtless, through the hordes of refugees along the roads, and the Belgian outposts, and the Germans, and so at dusk I reached the porte de Malines and saw our sacred monastery still unharmed by the fires, untouched by the vandals.

“Louvain flared like a furnace. From kilometres away I saw it like a red blot on the sky, and the stench of its burning spread thoughts so mournful that one entered veritably as if into the house of death.

“Monsieur le Délégué, there was no sound here at our monastery, so I knocked, and then suddenly some one had me by the throat with harsh hands and a voice grunted in German, ‘So, spy! I have thee?’

“I was as one dead, monsieur, and fell flat on the stone; but that one said, ‘Up, spy. Ha! Ha! In priest’s costume, art thou, eh? We shall have sport with thee—a spy-priest!’ For he had felt of my cassock in the darkness and he believed, as all the Germans believe, that Belgian officers wore the garb of priests, that they spied disguised as priests, that they even directed rifle-fire and artillery-fire gowned as priests—in a word, they believed every lie which their generals could invent of us. And so my captor dragged me through the doorway and down the black corridor, where all smelled of naphtha as if one were ready to kindle a great fire.

“He stopped; he beat softly on a door; a voice called ‘Herein’: the door opened, and I was flung into the very cell where we sit, monsieur.

“There sat a man at the table where you sit, monsieur le Délégué—the man whose photograph you see—a man young, and hard, and cruel, in the costume of a German officer. He sat alone before his untasted supper dishes. At either end of the table a candle dripped and sputtered. The man’s elbows were propped against the edge of the table, and his head hung forward between the candles, as if he were ill or broken with anxiety.

“He had been reading, monsieur, and he thrust a paper into the breast of his uniform as we entered—the sentry and I. His hand trembled, and his voice trembled, too, but he roared out, ‘Speak, one of you.’

“‘A spy, Herr Leutnant,’ grunted the soldier behind me. ‘He was prowling round the door.’

“‘So?’

“‘He says he is a monk of this monastery.’

“‘So?’

“‘He says he ran away before we burned Louvain.’

“‘So?’

“‘He is a damned spy—a damned franc-tireur. Else why did he come back?’

“I was speechless, monsieur. My throat ached horribly, for I was half throttled; my senses ebbed and flowed like water; I could say nothing.

“‘You understand German, spy?’ the Lieutenant spat at me. ‘You understand German bullets, nicht? You understand Leffe, Latour, Gelrode, Bovenloo?’ He named over some of the towns where our brother-priests had been done to death.

“I spoke. I said, ‘I am Brother Jan, of this monastery.’

“‘You are a spy!’

“‘I am no spy! I am Brother Jan of Mont César!’

“His eyes seemed to probe me in the candlelight. ‘Come here!’ he ordered.

“I advanced a step.

“‘Nearer.’

“I stood directly opposite.

“‘You see this revolver?’ He slipped a metal thing from its holster and placed it beside his plate. ‘I will shoot you if you move so much as a millimetre! Now we shall see who you are.’ He stared past me at the sentry. ‘Fetch the caretaker!’ he ordered.

“Then, monsieur, when we were alone together, the German became strangely quiet. He became as one who is puzzled and who wishes to believe something which he scarcely dares believe. ‘Who are you?’ he asked, almost gently.

“‘I am a Benedictine—Brother Jan Heynderyckx.’

“‘You are of this monastery?’

“‘I am of this monastery.’

“‘You know the monastery?’

“‘As I know my hand.’

“‘Why are you here?’

“‘My father-superior ordered me back from Malines to stay in the monastery—to care for it.’

“The German leaned forward. He took up the revolver and tapped it against the nearer candlestick. ‘If you lie, you die,’ he said roughly, yet it seemed to me, monsieur, as if he wished to believe me, as if he desired something of me, as if a new thought had risen in his mind, or a new and better impulse in his soul, and as if he had resolved on a higher course. I have been a parish priest, monsieur; I needs must know the human heart.

“The door opened and the sentry entered, pushing before him old Piet, the man-of-all-work in the monastery cellars—old Piet whom we had forgotten and left behind when we fled to Malines. He was trembling like an aspen leaf and he bent almost to the floor.

“‘Stick him with the bayonet if he doesn’t stand up,’ the Lieutenant roared. ‘Do you know this person?’ He pointed at me.

“Piet did not look up.

“‘Speak out!’ thundered the officer. ‘Do you know him?’

“‘I cannot understand.’

“‘Hein? hein? You know him?’

“Piet stole a glance at me. ‘Nay,’ he whispered.

“The Lieutenant rose from his chair. His face became the face of a madman. He whipped the revolver from the table and pointed it wildly. His hand shook, his eyes rolled, so that even the sentry was terrified and tried to hide behind old Piet and me. ‘Bitte! Bitte!’ he ejaculated, ‘Bitte, Herr Leutnant!’ But suddenly my courage came, and I spoke swiftly in the familiar Flemish.

“‘Don’t you know me, Piet?’ I asked. ‘I am Brother Jan. Surely you know me!’

“‘You, mynheer Jan, you? Of course, of course I know you. I was afraid,’ the old man babbled. ‘I was afraid of him—the mad devil in the chair. He is going to burn the monastery. He has put naphtha in all the rooms. He is going to burn Mont César!’

“The Lieutenant smiled like one who is pleased, and slid down again into his chair. ‘What does he say?’ he asked.

“‘That you are going to burn Mont César.’

“‘Good, good! You are an honest man, Herr monk. I asked you to see if you would lie to me. I understand Flemish. Take the old man away,’ he ordered, turning again to the sentry, ‘then come here.’

“Then, monsieur, there happened the strangest thing of all. The door closed. We stared into each other’s faces, we were like gamblers with all at stake, haggard, eager, watchful—a priest against a soldier.

“The German leaned forward. ‘Herr monk,’ he said in a voice which was like a whisper, ‘I am not going to burn your monastery. You see before you the saviour of Mont César!’

“Monsieur, for one breathless moment I stood like a stone. I could not believe my ears. The man had gone mad, or else I was myself mad.

“‘You see before you the saviour of Mont César,’ he repeated softly.

“I screamed at him. I thought a thousand horrible things in a moment, men pierced on stakes, boiled in oil, crucified. I screamed, ‘Kill me! Kill me quickly, but do not murder me with words. I will not talk with a madman!’

“‘Herr monk,’ he answered, ‘I am not mad. See!’ He thrust his hand into the bosom of his uniform and pulled out a crumpled paper, ‘See! Here is von Manteuffel’s order; it is dated August 26th. It directs me to burn Mont César. The paper shall be yours, and the monastery is saved!’

“‘You lie!’ I screamed again. ‘What is this new trick of a scrap of paper?’

“‘It is von Manteuffel’s order for me to burn Mont César.’

“‘Ha!’ I laughed at him. ‘A German is ordered to burn a monastery and he disobeys! That is indeed droll! A German who has murdered scores in Belgium, who has burned and pillaged and outraged, now saves a monastery! Ha, ha! That is likely, is it not?’

“‘I have saved Mont César,’ he repeated steadily. ‘Here is the order.’ He thrust the crumpled paper into my hand.

“I stared at it. Monsieur, though the thing is incredible, it is true. The paper was an order from Major von Manteuffel directing Ober-Leutnant Mahn to burn Mont César! The thing was not a forgery. It is incredible, but it is true. I held in my hand the thing which could destroy Mont César!

“‘Give it to me,’ he said. I gave it. ‘It shall be yours, if——’

“‘If——’

“‘If you do not forget him who saved Mont César.’

“‘Ha!’ I laughed at him again. ‘You disobey an order—you who are a lieutenant of infantry—but does that save Mont César? Yours is a relentless, cruel race. You have saved our monastery for a day, maybe: von Manteuffel will burn it to-morrow!’

“This, monsieur, I said because I doubted God’s providence, because I feared men more than God!

“‘Manteuffel will not burn it to-morrow or ever, Herr monk,’ he replied. ‘I have learned that Berlin is angry at the scandal of Louvain, and has forbidden more burnings. Two days have gone by. Your monastery is saved. I have saved Mont César.’

“A third time the sentry entered, and a third time the officer’s face grew stern and his voice rose angrily: ‘Take this monk through the monastery; then bring him here. Be quick. There is no time to lose,’ he said. And I followed the sentry out into the black corridor.

“He secured a lantern and I followed him down the long halls. In each monastery cell, in the refectory, in the kitchen, in the library, everything had been piled in a heap, soaked in naphtha, and prepared for burning. Everything was ready, monsieur, and had been ready for two days. This lieutenant alone had defeated the machinations of that man-devil—that Manteuffel who commanded in Louvain. Why? I do not know, except that it was the will of God that Mont César should be preserved, and the good God, monsieur, uses even the vilest of men to work His will. The Good God uses even Germans——

“Again I stood in the little cell before the saviour of Mont César. ‘Herr Offizier,’ I said, ‘Give me the order, and by the good God whose instrument you are——’

“‘This is not God’s work: it is the devil’s!’ he exclaimed bitterly.

“‘What is the devil’s work—that you have saved the monastery? No. That is of God.’

“‘God or the devil, I am disgraced.’

“‘By God’s will you are saved.’

“‘Saved?’

“‘God will not forget.’

“‘God has forgotten already. I shall be shot for this. I have disobeyed orders.’

“Monsieur, it was the mood of the confessional, was it not? And this man was indeed an instrument of God. Do you blame me that I heard his confession, and that I gave him comfort—he, an alien, an enemy, a Prussian, who had saved Mont César and did not know why he had saved it, except that God had led him? He knew that von Manteuffel had learned of his disobedience; he knew that death and disgrace were before him; yet knowing these things he had persisted, and Mont César was saved.

“Monsieur, God’s will is strange, and the seed that God plants bears strange fruit. All men long for immortality; all men long for something which will bear their name to posterity, and he who had saved Mont César—do you blame him if he longed to be held in remembrance by the monks of our monastery? I promised to place his photograph here where you see it. I promised to write on it ‘The Saviour of Mont César’—as you see. I swore by the cross I wear that all this should be done, and yet—it was God’s will, monsieur—the German was not satisfied. I could see that his mind was tormented still.

“‘Promise me one thing more, Herr monk,’ he begged.

“‘What is it?’ I asked.

“‘Promise me just one thing more.’

“‘Very well. I promise, my son,’ I said. You see, monsieur, I called him ‘son,’ for he was a true son of the Church although a Prussian, and he had obeyed the voice of the good God although he was my enemy.

“‘Your processions on holy days, you monks sing in them?’

“‘We sing, my son.’

“‘Promise me that your monks will remember me.’

“‘I have promised you that.’

“‘Promise me that you will sing in your processions—that you will sing of the saving of Mont César.’

“I promised him, monsieur.

“‘Promise that you will sing of me, of Lieutenant Mahn, who saved your monastery; that you will sing of me for one hundred years!’

“‘Herr, I cannot promise that!’ I exclaimed.

“‘You have promised. Fulfil what you have promised.’

“‘I cannot.’

“His face became like the face of one dead. ‘You have promised,’ he muttered. ‘Sing only that I saved your monastery; only that.’

“Place yourself in that situation, monsieur! Was it so great a thing he asked? God made us to long for immortality; was it after all so great a thing the German asked of me?

“Maybe you think he bargained with me, maybe to you it seems a high price to pay even to him who had saved Mont César—the price of a procession once a year for one hundred years and a chant of remembrance. But no, monsieur, it was not excessive, that price. It was God who demanded it—not he. It was God who willed that he should save Mont César, that he should disobey, that he should be led out in disgrace to die, and that his memory should be held accurst by all but his enemies—by all save the monks of Mont César. Was it, then, so great a thing he asked? I had vowed: I must keep my vow. I bent my head in prayer, and in an instant I was answered. Monsieur, I promised! I would grant that strange wish!

“‘Tell me, Herr monk, what will you sing?’ he begged. ‘Tell me in Latin, just as you will sing it.’

“And I, slowly seeking for the words, began to speak those which you have heard to-night in the halls of Mont César: ‘Primo anno magni belli, sub bono rege Alberto, praefectus Mahnius——’

“‘That means Lieutenant Mahn?’ he asked with eagerness.

“‘Yes. Praefectus Mahnius monasterium montis Caesarii ab exitio servavit—laus Deo!’

“‘Sing it for me,’ he entreated when I was done. And I slowly chanted the words. ‘Teach it to me.’

“Slowly, very slowly I repeated the words again and again and again; and ‘... ab exitio servavit, laus Deo!’ he recited after me.

“How shall I tell you the end, monsieur? There were loud footfalls in the corridor and the door resounded to heavy blows!

“‘They have come for me, Herr monk,’ the officer whispered. ‘Good-bye. I am a dead man. Primo anno magni belli—those are the words?... Herein!’ he called confidently.

“Then in they came—a non-commissioned officer and four privates who filed through the doorway, saluted, and stood at attention. ‘I am named Sergeant Schneider—Herr Leutnant Mahn?’ the leader asked.

“‘Yes,’ responded the lieutenant quietly.

“‘My warrant,’ said the sergeant, offering a paper. ‘You are under arrest. Come.’

“The lieutenant rose slowly from his chair. He thrust his pistol into its holster. His eyes were bright and very calm. For an instant I admired him although he was my enemy; he was so calm, so sure. God was with him, I know. ‘Ab exitio servavit, nicht, Herr monk?’ he asked.

“He picked up from the table the written order of von Manteuffel. ‘Your passport and carte d’identite,’ he continued slowly, as if we had been speaking of them. ‘You may stay in charge of the monastery with Piet. All is in order.... Your photograph, Herr.’ He handed me his own photograph—the photograph you see on the wall, monsieur. ‘Your Ausweiss!’ He gave me the written order from von Manteuffel directing that the monastery be burned. Then he turned quietly to the file of soldiers and walked out before them....

“It is not the face of a bad man, that face in the photograph, monsieur,” said Brother Jan, as I stared again into the steady, narrow eyes of the picture of Lieutenant Mahn. “God asks no questions of men when He would use them. Our monastery is saved through the hand of a stranger and an enemy. It is the work of God, laus Deo! Let us praise God, monsieur.”

VI
GHOSTS

I believe the story, for I have met those sad spirits. It was on a foggy evening in October—All Souls’ Eve—on the road from Brussels to Antwerp, where Belgians and Britons a year before faced the German hordes in weeks of bitter fighting. We were in a terrible hurry. Pierre, the chauffeur, was driving the motor-car; I was seated beside him. The headlights blurred like drowned eyes, and the open windshield dripped with wet. If we met a belated cart, or if we misjudged distances on that winding road, we would never reach our destination alive! But we were in a hurry, for it was All Souls’ Eve—the night of the dead.

Drowned trees writhed in the blurred light, culverts leaped out of the yellow flood like fountains, and dead walls in the burned and ravished villages seemed like rows of Roman tombs. We flew through the murdered town of Eppeghem, down vacant alleys lined with gaunt, disembowelled dwellings, beneath the shell of a church, beside stark walls lit for a breathless instant by the headlight of the motor then blotted into chaos. It was eerie and terrifying. A peculiar odour of decay, the odour of sour soil in early spring when the grip of the ice is relaxed and the buried abominations of winter steal up into the sun, rose from the town and pursued us—a smell like rotten fungi in old crypts. Sounds like the flapping of garments on a clothesline stole through the steady bass roar of the motor, and to my heavy eyes, tortured with staring into the yellow blur ahead, a vague shape seemed to float beside the car, a shape which was strangely human; erect, but rigid, flying along like a dry leaf upright in a gale.

I could see it only with the tail of my eye. It disappeared when I turned my head. It was clearest when I rolled my eyes high and looked through the lower part of the retina—a sort of second-sight, I suppose. The thing puzzled, angered, then frightened me. “Faster! Vite! Vite!” I yelled, suddenly grasping Pierre by the arm. The shadowy thing danced into the edges of the blur of light directly ahead. “Look out, Pierre!” The emergency brake came on with a grind and jolt, and the lights flared with the pulse of the engine. “It’s nothing,” I protested, half ashamed of myself, for evidently Pierre saw nothing. “Encore plus vite.”

We seemed to have lost the shadow-thing, until suddenly I discovered that there were others with it, swinging rigid through the fog like trees uprooted in a cyclone. My eyes were smarting with cold tears: it was like swimming with one’s eyes open in a stiff current. And all the time I watched the shadow-shapes gathering closer. Faintly luminous pale yellow blots seemed to grow in the dingy black of the racing forms. They were phosphorescent, as I think of them now. Something brushed my hair. A clicking sound like castanets came from the empty tonneau behind me, and then a whistling, like the speech of a man with no palate.

“Sssss—Feld—Feld—Feldwebel war ich, aus Bayern—sechs—sechsundzwanzigsten—infanterie Regiment.”

I turned my head with an involuntary sob. There was absolutely nothing in the car. Pierre put on brakes violently.

“Do you see anything?” I demanded.

“Nothing, monsieur.”

“Do you hear or smell anything?”

We listened and sniffed. “Nothing, monsieur,” Pierre said, quivering and crossing himself. The noise of the motor died, and we sat motionless in gruesome darkness listening to the hollow dripping of fog-water on the fallen leaves in the roadway. We were swallowed, lost in mist, with only a square yard of paved road visible before us. “Go on, Pierre,” I said softly.

Then gradually I saw the ghosts more plainly. A woman, bent like an old hinge, flung along beside the flying motor-car, and a naked, frightened child ran fearfully before her. “Ask him, Grutje, ask him about home!” a thin child-voice sobbed. A younger woman whose head had been hacked from her shoulders floated along with them, fondling the severed member and wailing, “De Deutschers—the Germans!” A group of mangled bodies of Belgian artillerymen hung like a swarm of bees together, mouthing curses as they flew, and a gigantic peasant, with clotted beard and arms stretched rigid in the form of a cross, stared with a face stabbed through and through like honey-comb.

“Feldwebel Stoner. König, Kaiser, Vaterland, sie leben hoch!” whispered a voice.

The swarming spirits grew till they darkened the mist. We flew through the empty corridors of Malines, and on to Waelhem—first of the Antwerp forts to fall—up the ridge to Waerloos and Contich, toward Oude God and the inner forts. Still the swarms grew, crowding closer and closer. The eyes of the dead peered like cats’ eyes in the yellow dark, and my soul chilled to ice. The odour of dead clay was so strong I nearly fainted, and bony fingers seemed to press against my back and shoulders as if heavy wires were freezing into the flesh. “Light the dash-light, for God’s sake, Pierre!” I cried, hoping the new electric blur would banish the phantoms, but their sulphurous eyes glowed only the more in its feeble ray.

And the hissing, clicking, and rattling grew. “Feldwebel Stoner, aus Bayern, tot, Eppeghem, September dreizehn ... König, Kaiser, und Vaterland—hoch!” a voice shrilled; “De Deutschers! de Deutschers!” sobbed an echo after it. And then, with a sudden access of horror, I remembered the saying of the peasants; I knew what had wakened those unquiet spirits; knew that they wished to question me; knew that I must answer their questions in the brief hour of their release; all of them I must answer!

“... leben hoch!” screamed the German voice. “Are we in Paris?”

“No!” I shouted.

“... suis Français. Vive la France! ...Have we reached the Rhine?”

“No!”

“... Belge. Is Belgium free?”

“No!”

“... honour, the honour of my country, honour—honour?”

“No!”

“... Sozialdemokrat—for world-peace I fought, that the world might have peace. Is there peace?”

“No!”

“... curé of Weerloo, dead for my church and my flock. Are we victorious?”

“No!”

“Ask, Grutje, ask!” trilled a child’s voice, and a sad shriek answered it: “Home—the little farm on the road to Elewyt beside Kasteel Weerde—is it safe?”

I knew that farm, a blackened ruin like the castle beside it, with two lath crosses leaning crazily over sunken graves in the dooryard. “No!”

“No, no, no!” The horrid refrain beat them back. By ones and tens and hundreds they asked and were denied. They had died as most men live, hoping to-morrow would bring bliss which yesterday withheld. They had died, as most men live, for dreams. In all the world there was no consolation for them, no word of honest hope or recompense. In all the world there was nothing for them but a shallow grave and a little wooden cross.

“I came from Devon to Antwerp, sir, with the Marines. Have we whipped the Huns?”

“No!”

A woman’s passionate voice screamed out: “They murdered my child, they murdered my man, they murdered me. Vengeance! Vengeance! Vengeance!”

“No!... No!... No!...” And I fell forward in the car senseless.

When I awoke the fog had almost disappeared, Pierre was chafing my cold hands, and the shadow-shapes had gone. They had sunken again into their hollow graves, unsatisfied, unconsoled. We rode swiftly on toward Antwerp. A clean breeze stole up from the west, purifying the stricken fields and their sad memories. It tore the last remnants of gray veil from the sky. And as we turned into the black, silent city streets, I leaned my head far back and stared up into the night with a sudden sense of relief and even of comfort. The sick little planet Earth fell away from me, far, far, infinitely far, and about me was unvexed emptiness and the tremendous stars.

VII
THE DESERTER

It was five o’clock in the morning. A riotous sunrise deluged the Campine as I slipped into my clothes and ran down the narrow, twisting tower-stair to keep a secret tryst with the Baas, or overseer. Little slits in the tower wall, cut for mediæval archers, let in the arrows of the sun; and as I ran through the gloomy armoury and the high-roofed Flemish dining hall—stripped of their treasure of old pikes, swords, crossbows, and blunderbusses by the diligent Germans—out to the causeway, and over the creaking draw-bridge on my way to the stables and the dismantled brewery, I imagined myself an escaped prisoner from the donjons of Château Drie Toren. In truth, I was running away from Baron van Steen’s week-end house-party for a breath of rustic air while the others slept.

The stables, tool sheds, hostlers’ barracks, bake-oven, and brewery were thatch roofed and walled with brick, toned to a claret-red, pierced with small windows and heavy oaken doors. The doors were banded with the baronial colours—blue stripes alternating with yellow, like stripes on a barber pole—and in the centre of the hollow square of farm buildings fumed a mammoth brown manure pile. A smell of fresh-cut hay and the warm smell of animals clung about the stables, and I heard the watch-dog rattle his chain and sniff at the door as I passed.

I found the Baas standing before his door, his face wrinkled with pleasure, his cap in his hand. Behind him his wife peered out at us, wiping her fat hands on her skirts, and two half-grown children stared from the nearest window. The Baas and his wife were the parents of sixteen children!

“Good day, mynheer!” every one shouted in chorus.

“Good day, madame; good day, Baas.” (I used the Flemish title for overseer—the word from which has come our much-abused word “Boss.”) “I’m a deserter this morning: the rest of the Baron’s party sleeps.”

“Ah, so,” laughed the wife. “Mynheer is like the German soldiers who desert by dozens nowadays. And would your Honour hide in the forest like them—like the Germans?”

“To be sure. The Baas is to show me the deepest coverts, where mynheer the Baron will never find me more.”

We laughed and passed on. A girl with a neckyoke and full milk pails came by from the dairy; nodding faces appeared at the windows of the farm buildings as we walked toward the woods; bees sped up the air from conical straw hives close to our path; and in a few minutes we were threading our way through a nursery of young pines, tilled like corn rows in Kansas, and all of equal age.

“Monsieur, there is a soul in trees,” said the Baas, affectionately patting an ancient linden on the border of the old forest. The Baas was a man from the Province of Liége, and he preferred to speak French with me rather than Flemish. He had, too, a Walloon lightness of wit which went sometimes incongruously with his heavy frame, as when he said to me once when we were debating the joys of youth versus age, “To be old has its advantages, monsieur. One can then be virtuous, and it is not hard!”

“There is a soul in trees,” he repeated. “All together the trees have a soul. A forest is one spirit. These trees are old men and old women, very patient and kindly and sluggish of blood. They nod their heads in the wind like peasants over a stove. And they talk. Sometimes I think that I can understand their talk—very wise and patient and slow. Men hurry apart, monsieur, but the trees remain together like old married people and watch their children grow up around them.

“Here”—we had turned down a path and were in the fringes of another forest of small pines—“here the Germans have taken trees for their fortifications, slashed and cut, and those trees that are left are like wounded soldiers: they have arms too long or too short, heads smashed, feet uprooted, and yet they wish to live, because they are one spirit.”

“What is this?” I demanded abruptly, for at my feet yawned a little pit, with lumpy clay still fresh about it and a fallen cross lying half hidden in the weeds.

“Ho, that? It is the grave of a German,” said the Baas heartily. He spat into the raw pit. “The German has been taken away, but the children of Drie Toren are still afraid. They will not come by this path on account of the dead Deutscher.”

His foot crushed the rude cross as he talked, and we walked on. But I was vaguely troubled. That vile pit and the thought of what it had contained had spoiled my promenade. As I had found on a thousand other occasions, my freedom in Belgium was only a fiction. The war could not be forgotten, even for an hour.

A partridge thundered up at our feet and rocketed to earth again beyond the protecting pines. In a little glade we surprised four young rabbits together at breakfast. The Baas laid his hand lightly on my arm. “It is sad, monsieur, isn’t it?” he said. “The poachers steal right and left nowadays. The gardes champêtres are no longer armed, so the thieves do as they will. There is more pheasant in the city markets than chicken, and more rabbit than veal. The game will soon be gone, like our horses and cattle.

“You remember, monsieur, the sand dunes by Blankenberghe and Knocke on the Belgian coast? Ah, the rabbits that used to be in those dunes! But now the firing of cannon has driven them all away.”

A silence fell upon us both. The thickets grew denser, and we pushed our way slowly toward the deeper coverts. I found myself thinking of the little crosses along the seaside dunes which marked where greater game than rabbits had fallen—the graves of men—the biggest game on earth—the shallow pits and the frail wooden crosses, like that which the Baas’s leather boot had crushed a half hour before.

We had reached the deepest woods when a gasping, choking cry stopped us short. The thicket directly before us stirred and then lay still as death. The cry had been horrible as a Banshee’s wail, and as mysterious, but it was not the cry of an animal; it was human, and it came from a human being in agony. The Baas crossed himself swiftly and leaped forward, and instantly we had parted the protecting bushes and were looking down on a man lying flat on the ground—a spectre with a thin white face, chattering teeth, enormous frightened eyes, and a filthy, much-worn German uniform.

“What are you doing here?” I demanded.

The soldier did not answer, he did not rise, he lay motionless and hideous, like a beast. Then I caught sight of his left ankle, enormously swollen and wrapped in rags, and his hands—they were thin as sticks. The man was helpless, and he was starving.

And now came a strange thing. We two walked slowly around the man on the ground, as if he were a wild creature caught in a snare. We felt no pity or astonishment; only curiosity. Utterly unemotionally we took note of him and his surroundings. He had no gun, no knife, and no blankets. He lay on some broken boughs, and he seemed to have covered himself with boughs at night. The wild, haggard eyes turned in their sockets and watched us as we moved, but otherwise no part of the man stirred. He seemed transfixed, frozen in an agony of fear and horror.

“Ashes! He has had a fire here, monsieur, but it was days ago.” At the man’s feet the Baas had discovered the remnants of a little fire. “Holy blue!” he added in astonishment, “he has eaten these!”

A pile of small green twigs lay near the fire. The bark had been chewed from them!

At the end of our search we turned again to the man on the ground. “Who are you? What are you doing here?” I demanded again. There was no answer. “Baas, have you a flask?”

The old man slowly drew a little leather-clad bottle from his breast pocket and passed it to me in silence. He offered it with obvious reluctance, and watched jealously as I knelt and dropped a little stream of liquid between the parted lips of the creature on the ground. The man’s lips sucked inward, his throat choked at the raw liquor, he opened his mouth wide and gasped horribly for breath, his knees twitched, and his wrists trembled as if he were dying. Then the parched mouth tried to form words; it could only grimace.

For a moment I felt a mad impulse to leap on that moving mouth and crush it into stillness; such an impulse as makes a hunter wring the neck of a wounded bird. Instead, I continued dropping the stinging liquor and listening.

Then came the first word. “More!” the black lips begged, and I emptied the flask into them. The Baas sighed plaintively. “German?” the soldier whispered.

“No. American,” I answered.

“The other one?”

“Belgian.”

The frightened eyes closed in evident relief. The man seemed to sleep.

“But you?” I asked.

“I’m German—a soldier,” he said.

“Lost?”

“Missing.” He used the German word vermisst—the word employed in the official lists of losses to designate the wounded or dead who are not recovered, and those lost by capture or desertion.

“You understand, Baas?”

“No, monsieur.”

“He says he is a German soldier—a deserter, I suppose, trying to make his way over the frontier to Holland. And he is starving.”

The Baas’s face became a battleground of emotions. His kindly eyes glared merrily, his lips twisted until his beard seemed to spread to twice its natural width. Instantly his face became grave again, then puzzled, even anxious. A stream of invective and imprecation in mingled French and Flemish poured from his troubled lips, and he stamped his feet vigorously.

“He can’t stay here,” I concluded.

“It is death to help him,” said the Baas.

“For you, yes; for me, no. The Germans can only disgrace me as a member of the Relief Commission. They cannot kill me.”

“He must not be left to die here, monsieur.”

“The Germans will probably search your house if we take him there.”

“He may betray us if we help him.”

“That is possible. But you see he is very weak—almost dead.”

“He may be a spy.”

“That again is possible. But see! He has eaten twigs!”

“He is a damned pig of a German!”

“But you do not feed even pigs on sticks and leaves.”

“I am afraid, monsieur.”

“So am I, Baas. Yet you must decide, and not I. It is much more dangerous for you than for me.”

We stared into each other’s eyes, trying to guess each other’s thoughts. Every one in Belgium knows that the German army sows its informers everywhere. We could not even trust each other in that stricken country. Deserters and traitors were tracked like dogs. Any one who gave aid or comfort to such persons did so at the risk of his life. It is said that pretended deserters deliberately trapped Belgians into aiding them, and then betrayed their hosts. Something of the sort was hinted in the famous case of Miss Edith Cavell. Knowledge, then, bade us be cautious; instinct alone bade us be kind.

The Baas’s wide eyes turned again to the creature on the ground, and he sighed plaintively. “Monsieur,” he began, in a very low, gentle voice, “I will help him. Give me my flask and I will go for food and drink. Then we must plan. Does it please you to remain here?”

“I shall stay here with him.”

“Good! I will go.”

I knelt beside the soldier and chafed his filthy hands until blood flowed again in his dry veins. The swollen pupils of his eyes brightened. He talked continuously in a thin trickling whisper—a patter of information about dinners he had eaten, wines he had drunk, his military service, his hardships, and his physical and mental sensations. I had read of victims of scurvy in the Arctic snows dreaming and talking day and night of food, only of food. So it was with the starving soldier. The liquor had made him slightly delirious, and he babbled on and on.

His broken ankle pained him. When I moved him about to rest it, his lightness astonished me. The man had been large and heavy; he was shrunken to a bag of bones. His uniform hung about him like a sack, and it seemed as if the slightest jar would snap his arms and legs. Tears welled under his heavy, dirty eyelids. “Mother! Mother!” he whispered once. “Art thou there? Mother!” Then, as his eyes again cleared and he saw the trees interarched above him—the trees which the Baas had told me were one spirit; the grim, silent, sepulchral trees; the haunted, malignant trees which had wooed him with their shelter and then broken him and starved him; the trees beneath which his forest-dwelling ancestors had cowered for thousands of years and to which they had offered human sacrifices—he broke down and sobbed horribly. “She is not here! She is not here! No, she is not here!” he repeated over and over again.

When the Baas returned, we covered the deserter with our coats and fed him. Perhaps we did wrong to give him food, although I think now that he was doomed before we found him. We did our best, but it was not enough. In less than an hour, after a horrible spell of vomiting, the poor man was beyond all help of ours. His eyes rolled desperately, his breath came in horrid gasps, and he grew rigid like a man in an epileptic fit.

We tore open the breast of his uniform to ease his laboured breathing. A metal identification disk hung on a cord from about his neck over a chest which was like a wicker-work of ribs. His belly was sunken until one almost saw the spinal column through it. His tortured lungs subsided little by little, the terrifying sound of his breathing sank to nothing, his head thrust far back and over to the right side, his arms stiffened slowly, his mouth fell open.

We watched, as if fascinated, the pulsing vein in his emaciated neck, still pumping blood through a body which had ceased to breathe. The top of the blood column at last appeared, like mercury in a thermometer. It fell half an inch with each stroke of the famished heart. It reached the base of the neck and sank from sight, and still we stared and stared. The man was dead, yet I seemed to have an awful vision of billions of sentient cells, billions of little selfish lives which had made up his life, fighting, choking, starving to death within that cooling clay.

The Baas bent his head, uncovered, and crossed himself. With a quick stooping motion he closed the wide-open eyes and straightened the bent limbs. Then he rose to his full height and looked at me sadly. “This man had a mother, monsieur,” he said. “We must forget the rest.”

In the pit where the other German had lain we buried the body of the deserter, and we found and repaired the little lath cross and set it up at the grave’s head. But first I took from about the neck of the corpse the oval medallion which told the man’s name and regimental number. It was a silver medal, finer than those usually worn by privates in the German army. I have it by me as I write, and on it is etched the brave sentence, “God shield you from all dangers of warfare, and render you back to us safe and victorious!”

I was late for breakfast at the Château, but Van Steen kindly made room for me at his right hand. “Aha, monsieur,” he called gaily, “we thought you were helping to find the deserter.”

“Wha-what, monsieur le Baron?” I stuttered in amazement.

“The German deserter. A file of soldiers woke us up at seven o’clock, inquiring for one of their men who ran away from Mons a month ago. They are searching the stables and the forest. They have traced him here to our commune. I hope they catch him!”

My fingers clutched the silver disk in my pocket. “I think they will not catch him, messieurs. He ran away a month ago, you say?”

“A month ago.... But it is nothing to us, eh? Let us eat our breakfasts.” The Baron bowed grandly to me. “Monsieur le Délégué,” he began in his smooth, formal voice, “once again we remind ourselves that it is thanks to you and the generous American people that we have bread. It is thanks to you that our noble Belgium is not starving.... Eh bien! Let us eat our breakfasts.”

And so we did.

VIII
THE GLORY OF TINARLOO

A second time we seated ourselves at our little round table in the restaurant on the boulevard Anspach—the director of the art museum and I. A mug of light Belgian beer was before each of us, and a copy of La Belgique telling of the Somme battles. The director’s hands shook as he reached for the newspaper and his half-finished beer. His breath came in short, apoplectic gasps. He was wildly angry. A couple of minutes before a Flemish newsboy had rushed into the restaurant and shouted, “Aeroplane! The Germans are shooting it!” And the restaurant had emptied like a hive, filling the boulevard, where every one gazed at the dull gray dragonfly droning at an immense height over the city, pursued with soft white smoke-flowers which thudded as they bloomed in the upper air. While we watched, an old peasant in wooden shoes and padded black petticoats dropped her market basket on the director’s toes. He forgot aeroplane and anti-aircraft guns, war, the crowds, and me, his guest. He howled, he cursed, he danced; and now that we were safe again at our table in the restaurant, anathema and malediction still tumbled from his full red lips.

“Ces sales paysants, ils sont des brutes! Imbéciles! Idiots! Cochons!” he stuttered, his feet prancing under the table. “They are beasts truly, monsieur: not men, but beasts, these peasants. What a temper I am in. But these beasts of peasants. Ah!...” he smiled suddenly and went on, “I will tell you a story of them.

“You have heard, monsieur, of Van de Werve, the artist? He was of the school of Rubens; he died in Italy, very young. He had only twenty-three years when he died. He was not rich; he was very poor. But he had the spirit, the genius, the flair, and Rubens loved him. The Master said one day, ‘You must go to Italy to study. Here is a purse of gold. Here are letters of introduction to my friends. Here is a horse. Go to Italy.’ And the young man started. Months went by and no word of him came to Rubens or the other friends he had in Antwerp. He did not arrive in Italy. The purse of gold, the letters of introduction, the horse, the pupil of Rubens—all were completely lost to sight. After a year some friends set out to search for him, and behold! in the village of Tinarloo in Brabant they found him, painting an altar piece for the chapel of that place, and kissing and clipping the daughter of the burgomaster, who sat on his knee! He was always gallant, was Van de Werve, and as he rode into Tinarloo on his way to Italy, he had seen and fallen in love with the burgomaster’s daughter and sat at her feet for a year.

“But the altar piece, monsieur! You have never seen it? Ah, that was magnificent—‘The Virgin of the Stair’—gold, green, ravishing! What atmosphere! What feeling! What soul!

“I saw it only once before the war. I tried to buy it for the museum, but those dirty peasants of Tinarloo would not give it up. Ugh—a village of fat farmers smelling of dungheaps and cattle pens and garlic! Their chapel was bastard Gothic—no fit place for such an altar piece. I urged the curé to sell, but he would not. He was ignorant as his peasants, but he was crafty, too. He said the picture was the glory of Tinarloo, the chief joy of the peasants. I offered him twice as much as I first intended, thinking he meant to bargain with me; three times, four times as much. He refused two thousand francs, monsieur!

“Afterward came the war. I am a brave man, monsieur. I am not afraid of the Germans. When they advanced near to Tinarloo I thought of the ‘Virgin of the Stair.’ ‘It must be saved,’ I said to myself. ‘Those peasants, that curé will be glad to give it up now.’ I hurried there in a cart. Eastward, near Namur, the great guns roared. There stood sentries along the roads. Peasants were running away before the Germans with farmcarts piled with goods. They blocked the road, and I had even to beat them out of my way with my whip.

“So I reached Tinarloo. Every one was terrified. I went to the chapel. The curé was there, and the burgomaster, a toothless old man with a dirty beard. ‘Give me the picture, quick,’ I exclaimed. ‘I will save it from the Germans. Quick!’ ‘No, monsieur,’ said the curé. ‘The picture will stay here. It is the glory of Tinarloo; it is the chief joy of our peasants.’

“There came a scream and a roar from the street, monsieur, like the sound of a great storm, and I knew the Germans were shelling the village. The old burgomaster bellowed something. I do not understand Flemish, but I knew he said something of the church and the picture; maybe it was that the Germans always destroy churches and pictures. He hobbled out ‘The picture, the picture, give me the picture!’ I roared at the curé. ‘Give it to me or I will take it. Fool! the Germans will take it if I do not. Give it to me. Quick!’ ‘It is the glory of Tinarloo; the chief joy of our peasants. I will not give it.’ ‘Then I will take it,’ I shouted, for I was stronger than he, monsieur. He clutched me, but I threw him off and grasped the picture by the corner. There came another roar, terrible, and a part of the church tower fell through the roof. The curé screamed and dropped to his knees, praying. I worked to get the picture from the frame.

“Suddenly, monsieur, I was grasped and thrown down. Those brutes of peasants had come into the church; twelve, fifteen of them, following the burgomaster with the dirty beard. They held me fast with their stinking hands. One of them tried to strangle me, and my neck bears the marks to this day. Bang—a shell fell in the churchyard and bits of shrapnel ripped the windows. The church was choked with dust and roared with noise. The curé stood up before the picture. He yelled to the animals who held me down. They loosed me, and I stood upright, gasping. One of them had a great club in his hand, another a dung-fork, another a flail. They gathered close to the curé, close to the picture, and talked; the fools talked while shells flew, knowing the Germans always aim at churches; yet they talked.

“Then the curé came down to me where I was standing. ‘They say to give you the picture, monsieur,’ he said. ‘But you must swear by this cross to bring it back when all is safe. It is the glory of Tinarloo; it is the chief joy——’

“Monsieur, there was a scream like devils in torment and a shock like earthquake. I was knocked from my feet. Bricks, timbers fell. Dust covered me, and I lost consciousness. Long afterward I found myself lying in the grass of the churchyard, among the black crosses, and the curé kneeling over me; only the curé! ‘Go,’ he said. His mouth was bleeding from a deep cut and his gown was slashed to ribbon. ‘Go, go,’ he said. I heard him as if in a dream. ‘Go! There is no longer any picture. Go! before the Germans come.’

“So I came away, monsieur.... They are strange beasts, these Belgian peasants.”