Jena or Sedan? Part 42

Wolf gave an accurate and connected account of what had occurred. The clerk's pen flew swiftly over the paper. Then the examining officer read the report aloud. "Is that correct?" he asked Wolf. "Yes, sir."

He turned to Findeisen: "I ask you also, is that correct? If you have any objection to make, out with it! For as it stands, the account is not exactly favourable to you. Therefore I ask you if you have anything to say against this version?"

Then Findeisen gave his first answer during the proceedings, he shook his head.

"Nothing, then?" asked the examining officer. The gunner repeated, "Nothing."

Deputy sergeant-major Heimert, as the only witness, had nothing else to depose beyond what Wolf had already said: and Findeisen again persisted in his silence.

After this, the officer closed the judicial examination. He gave orders that Wolf should be conducted back to his cell, while Findeisen was to be confronted with the corpse of the sergeant.

Keyser's death had resulted from fracture of the skull, due to its forcible impact against the wall. The medical report, however, stated that fatal consequences had resulted on account of the unusual thinness of the skull.

The two orderlies took Findeisen between them and escorted him to the infirmary. Wolf went with the soldier on guard diagonally across the yard back to the guard-house. He mounted the steps composedly. Before the door he stopped for a moment, drew the fresh air deep into his lungs, and looked all round him. Then he was locked into his cell again.

The examination had opened his eyes; he had been on quite a wrong tack when he had hoped to convince his judges by a fiery speech. In the midst of this cold calm procedure, his words would sound distorted and fantastic, and his eloquent tongue would fail him. The views of these men were separated from his by an impa.s.sable gulf. However good a will they might have, they were absolutely incapable of understanding him.

No, he would undergo his examination quietly and without any attempt at eloquence. Would not the naked facts speak loudly enough in his favour?

He no longer had any hope of an acquittal. On the contrary, he knew he would be condemned; but his punishment could not be severe. He called to memory all the similar cases that he had known. They had almost always resulted in less than a year of imprisonment. It was true that in none of these had there been an actual a.s.sault on the person of a superior, such as he had committed. But could that make a very great difference?

On the whole he thought it most likely that he would get off with about six months, and he already began to arm himself with patience to bear the hundred and eighty dreary days. It was quite certain that even one hundred and eighty days must have an end.

Suddenly he felt hungry, greedily hungry, and he hastily attacked the food he had hitherto left untouched. The meat lay in the cold gravy surrounded by congealed fat. The first mouthful gave him a strong feeling of disgust; nevertheless, he swallowed the meat down quickly, and finished the gravy to the last drop.

It was soon disposed of, and then he began to take stock of his surroundings: the grey walls, the water jug, and the stool in the corner; the plank bed, strapped up to the wall during the day. The grated window was high above the ground; but he could reach it by standing on his stool. Even that, however, was not of much use; for all view was cut off by a wooden screen, so arranged that the light only penetrated from above, and he had to twist his head considerably in order to catch the least glimpse of the sky.

Wolf remained in this cramped position as if fascinated, gazing upward, with his cheek against the cold stone of the wall. Grey clouds were pa.s.sing over the tiny bit of sky visible to him. Occasionally the whole of the narrow s.p.a.ce was filled in with a clear deep blue.

One of the panes of the window was open, admitting a breath of fresh pure air. It seemed to the prisoner that without this mouthful of free air he would not be able to breathe, and he pressed his face against the woodwork of the window as if suffocating.

Gradually it grew dark outside. The wind rose, and a few heavy drops of rain pattered on the boards of the screen. In the yard outside the trumpeter sounded the call to stable-duty. The poor fellow in the narrow cell remembered that this evening he should have rejoined the circle of his socialist comrades. Instead of which, here he was twisting his neck to see even a little bit of the sky, rather than the ghastly grey walls of his prison.

As the evening went on even that comfort failed. Everything was grey in the grey light around him.

As a gust of damp air blew in he once more drew a deep breath and got down from the stool.

Within the cell it was quite dark; but suddenly a square of light appeared in the door,--the little window through which the prisoner could be observed from without. The gas had been lit in the corridor, and the unsteady light of the unprotected, flickering jet penetrated the gloom of the cell.

At the same moment the corporal on guard appeared on the threshold. He brought with him the third of a loaf of bread, and he proceeded to let down the bed from the wall.

"Shall I shut the window?" he asked.

Wolf answered hastily, "No, no, sir."

The corporal nodded, looked round once more to see if everything was in order, and quitted the cell, turning the key twice in the lock.

The reservist heard him go along the pa.s.sage to Findeisen's cell.

Shortly after, the click of the spurs was again audible pa.s.sing his door, and then everything was as still as before.

Wolf lay on the bed and munched hard lumps of bread, from time to time taking a drink of water. After that he fell into a soothing reverie, more and more forgetting his position, till at last he settled himself down comfortably on the hard wood, and fell fast asleep.

In the middle of the night he began to feel very cold. Instinctively he tried not to awake, as if even in sleep he knew how comfortless his surroundings were. He thrust his hands up his coat-sleeves and curled himself up on the bed; but at last the cold waked him completely.

More benumbing still than the frost of the autumn night was the consciousness of his misery. He s.h.i.+vered with cold, and yet could not rouse himself sufficiently to get up.

In the darkness of the night, the clear light of the hopes which had so heartened him grew pale. An unspeakable fear a.s.sailed him that he might be condemned to long years of imprisonment, and the darkness which engulfed him now seemed like a symbol of that terrible time,--an endless horror.

Through the window could be heard the monotonous pouring of the rain.

The night wind was caught in the wooden screen, sent a damp breath into the cell, and swept on with a low moan.

In the intervals between these sounds, Wolf thought he could hear an indistinct sc.r.a.ping and scratching. From time to time it ceased, then began again. Could it be rats in the drain under the cell?

In the morning he started up suddenly. The key was thrust hastily into the lock, and the door opened violently.

The corporal on guard appeared on the threshold.

"Is _this_ one here, at any rate?" he cried.

The dawn only lighted the cell faintly; but he could make out the form of the prisoner, and gave a sigh of relief.

"Thank G.o.d!" he said. "I am spared that, anyhow. They aren't both gone."

He called a gunner in, and searched every corner with a lantern.

While he was on his knees lighting the s.p.a.ce under the bed, the gunner whispered furtively to Wolf, "The other man has escaped."

At first the reservist did not understand. Escaped? How was that possible?

He looked round the cell, and was unable to imagine how any one could escape from such a place.

Suddenly he remembered the scratching and sc.r.a.ping in the night, and his eyes sought for some tool with which it might be possible to break a hole through a wall. He noticed the strong iron trestles which supported the bed when it was let down; it might perhaps be done with one of them. But no. Up by the window the thickness of the wall could be seen; it must be close on twenty inches.

And yet Findeisen had escaped!

Necessity had quickened the wits of the dull lad, and had made him inventive. When they confronted him with the corpse of the sergeant, he realised that he had committed a murder; and from that moment he felt his head no longer safe on his shoulders. The fear of death lent him a subtlety of which he would never otherwise have been capable.

He had, as Wolf guessed, used the iron bed support as an implement. He had at once recognised that it would be impossible to break through the princ.i.p.al external wall; the other walls, however, might be expected to be considerably less strong, and they sounded hollower when he tapped them. Findeisen knew that one of them merely divided his cell from another, and so was useless for his purpose. But beyond the other wall lay a shed in which the fire-engine was kept. Its window, he knew, was only covered with wire-netting, and opened on to a field.

And as soon as all was quiet in the guard-house he had set to work, listening anxiously in the direction of the corridor during the pauses of his boring and levering. The wall was only the length of a brick thick, and after the first stone had been broken out bit by bit, it cost but little labour to widen the hole enough to let a man pa.s.s.

The night sentinels declared that they had not remarked anything unusual. Besides, they had an excuse in the regulations; for in such pouring rain they were permitted to take shelter in the sentry-boxes.

So it was not even known when the prisoner had escaped.

A warrant for his arrest was sent out, but in vain. Gunner Findeisen had disappeared.

Later during the same morning on which Findeisen, avoiding all frequented paths, had slipped away through undergrowth and thickets to the frontier, Wolf, a prisoner awaiting trial, was removed to the house of detention in the capital.

The train in which he and the soldier who guarded him travelled pa.s.sed another at an intermediate station. Reservists were looking out of every carriage; men from every branch of the service were mixed together, and all were alike in the wildness of their spirits.