Young Hilda At The Wars Part 8

"Clever woman, this," said the Commandant, saluting Mrs. Bracher. "How did you come to know the place?"

"Monsieur Rollo uses double tires on a wet soil," she explained.

"Monsieur Rollo will now bring his signal lamp outside the house," the Commandant said curtly. "He will signal the enemy that our reinforcements and ammunition have arrived, and that an attack to-night will be hopeless. He may choose to signal wrongly. In that case, you men will shoot him on the instant that firing begins at Pervyse."

The soldiers nodded. They marched Rollo to the field, and thrust his signal lamp into his hands.

"One moment," he said. He turned to Mrs. Bracher.

"Where is the American girl to-night?" he asked.

"At Pervyse, of course," replied the nurse, "where she always is. The very place where you wanted to bring your men through and kill us all."

"I had forgotten," he said. "If Mademoiselle Hilda is at Pervyse, then I signal, as you suggest"--he turned to the Commandant--"but not because you order it--you and your little pop-guns."

Mrs. Bracher sniffed scornfully.

"One last bluff of a bluffer, as Hilda would say," she muttered.

The soldiers stood in circle in the mud of the field, the tall green-clad figure in their midst.

Rollo turned on the blinding flash that stabbed through the night. He held it high above his head, and at that level moved it three times from left to right. Then he swung the light in full circles, till it became a pinwheel of flame. Four miles away by the sea to the north, a white light shot up into the sky, rose twice like a fountain, and was followed by a starlight that fed out a green radiance.

"The attack is postponed," he said.

THE BROTHERHOOD OF MAN

The German lay on a stretcher in the straw of the first dressing-station. His legs had been torn by shot. He was in pain. He looked into the faces of the men about him, the French doctors and dressers, the Belgian infantry. The lantern light was white and yellow on their faces. He drew out from the inner pocket of his mouse-colored coat a packet of letters, and from the packet the picture of a stout woman, who, like himself, was of middle-age. He handed it to the French doctor. "Meine Frau," he said.

At the outer rim of the group, a Belgian drew a knife, ran it lightly across his own throat, and pointed mockingly to the German on the stretcher.

IV

THE PIANO OF PERVYSE

The Commandant stepped down from his watch tower by the railway tracks.

This watch tower was a house that had been struck but not tumbled by the bombardment. It was black and gashed, and looked deserted. That was the merit of it, for every minute of the day and night, some watcher of the Belgians sat in the window, one flight up, by the two machine guns, gazing out over the flooded fields, and the thin white strip of road that led eastward to the enemy trenches. Once, fifteen mouse-colored uniforms had made a sortie down the road and toward the house, but the eye at the window had sighted them, and let them draw close till the aim was very sure. Since then, there had been no one coming down the road.

But a watcher, turn by turn, was always waiting. The Commandant liked the post, for it was the key to the safety of Pervyse. He felt he was guarding the three women, when he sat there on the rear supports of a battered chair, and smoked and peered out into the east.

He came slowly down the road,--old wounds were throbbing in his members--and, as always, turned into the half-shattered dwelling where the nurses were making their home and tending their wounded.

"How is the sentry-box to-night?" asked Hilda.

"Draughty," said the Commandant, with a s.h.i.+ver; "it rocks in the wind."

"You must have some rag-time," prescribed Hilda, and seated herself at the piano.

It was Pervyse's only piano, untouched by sh.e.l.l and shrapnel, and nightly it sounded the praise of things. The little group drew close about the American girl, as she led them in a "c.o.o.n song."

"I say," said Hilda, looking up from the keys, "would any one believe it?"

"Believe what?" asked Mrs. Bracher.

"The lot of us here, exchanging favorites, with war just outside our window. I tell you," repeated Hilda, "no one would believe it."

"They don't have to," retorted Mrs. Bracher, sharply. She had grown weary of telling folks at home how matters stood, and then having them say, "Fancy now, really?"

The methodical guns had pounded the humanity out of Pervyse, and, with the living, had gone music and art. There was nowhere in the wasted area for the tired soldiers to find relief from their monotony. War is a dreary thing. With one fixed idea in the mind--to wait, to watch for some careless head over the mounded earth, and then to kill--war is drearier than slave labor, more nagging than an imperfect marriage, more dispiriting than unsuccessful sin. The pretty bra.s.s utensils of the dwellings had been pillaged. Canvas, which had once contained bright faces, was in shreds. The figures of Christ and his friends that had stood high in the niches of the church, had fallen forward on their faces. All the little devices of beauty, cherished by the villagers, had been shattered.

One perfect piano had been left unmarred by all the destruction that had robbed the place of its instruments of pleasure. With elation and laughter the soldiers had discovered it, when the early fierceness of the attack had ebbed. Straightway they carried it to the home of the women.

When the Commandant first saw it, soon after its arrival in their living-room, he beamed all over.

"The Broadwood," he said. "How that brings back the memories! When I was a young man once in Ostend, I was one of eight to play with Paderewski, that great musician. Yes, together we played through an afternoon. And the instrument on which I played was a Broadwood. I cannot now ever see it, without remembering that day in the Kursaal, and how he led us with that fingering, that vigor. Do you know how he lifts his hand high over the keys and then drops suddenly upon them?"

"Yes, I have seen it," said Hilda; "like the swoop of an eagle."

"I do not know that bird," returned the Commandant, "but that is it. It is swift and strong. He comes out of a stricken country, too; that is why he can play."

"I wonder, feeling that way, that you ever gave up your music," said Hilda. "Why didn't you go on with it?"

"I had thought of it. But there was always something in me that called, and I went into the army. For years we have known this thing was coming. A man could not do otherwise than hold himself ready for that.

And now it is left to you young people to go on--always the new harmony, that sings in the ears, and never comes into the notes."

The Commandant, Commandant Jost, was perhaps the best of all their soldier friends. He was straight and st.u.r.dy, a pine-tree of a man in his early fifties. He was famous in Flanders for his picked command of 110, all of them brave as he was brave, ready to be wiped out because of their heart of courage. Often the strength of his fighting group was sapped, till one could count his men on the fingers of the hands. But always there were fresh fellows ready to go the road with him. He never ordered them into danger. He merely called for volunteers. When he went up against absurd odds, and was left for dead, his men returned for him, and brought him away for another day. His time hadn't come, he said. It was no use shooting him down, and clipping the bridge from his nose,--when his day came, he would be done for, but not ahead of that.

This valiant Belgian soldier was a mystic of war.

In the trenches and at the hospitals, Hilda had met a race of prophets, men who carry about foreknowledge and premonitions. St.u.r.dy bearded fellows who salute you as men about to die. They are perfectly cheery, as brave as the unthinking at their side, but they tramp firmly to a certain end. War lets loose the rich life of subconsciousness which most mortals keep bottled up in the sleepy secular days of humdrum. Peril and sudden death uncork those heady vapors, and sharpen the super-senses.

This race of men with their presciences have no quarrel with death. They have made their peace with it. It is merely that they carry a foreknowledge of it--they are sure they will know when it is on the way.

No man of the troops was more smitten with second-sight, than this friend of the Pervyse women, this courageous Commandant. His eyes were level to command, but they grew distant and luminous when his mood was on him. This gift in him called out the like in other men, and his pockets were heavy with the keepsakes of young soldiers, a photograph of the beloved, a treasured coin, a good-bye letter, which he was commissioned to carry to the dear one, when the giver should fall. With little faith that he himself would execute the commissions, he had carefully labelled each memento with the name and address of its destination. For he knew that whatever was found on his body, the body of the fighting Commandant, the King's friend, would receive speedy forwarding to its appointed place.

It was an evening of spring, but spring had come with little promise that way. Ashes of homes and the sour dead lay too thickly over those fields, for nature to make her great recovery in one season. The task was too heavy for even her vast renewals. Patience, she seemed to say, I come again.

The Commandant was sitting at ease enjoying his pipe.

"Mademoiselle Hilda," said he. Hilda was sitting at the piano, but no tunes were flowing. She was behaving badly that evening and she knew it.

She fumbled with the sheaves of music, and chucked Scotch under the chin, and doctored the candles. She was manifesting all the younger elements in her twenty-two years.

"Mademoiselle Hilda," insisted the Commandant. He was sentimental, and full of old-world courtesies, but he was used to being obeyed. Hilda became rapt in contemplating a candlestick.