Part 10 (1/2)

Why was the Tournebride thus deserted? Officers, as well as the men who had drunk the wine from the bottles now lying empty and broken about his feet, had been here very lately, for on a wooden table standing in the middle of the courtyard were a dozen or more large gla.s.s goblets--one even now half full of white wine--and empty, gold-foiled bottles. There also, on this wooden table, lay the bunch of keys which always dangled at Madame Blanc's ample waist.

Madame Blanc? Yes, if, as now seemed to be the case, the Commandant and his staff were all out in the town, he could leave Mademoiselle Rouannes with her while he went to look for them. In that thought he found a measure of relief. The knowledge that Jeanne Rouannes would have to run the gauntlet of the Prussian officers' eyes had been hateful to him.

But where was Madame Blanc?

Calling out her name, he walked across to the half-open door of the kitchen; and then, suddenly, Jeanne Rouannes, hardened as she had become that day to dreadful sights and sounds, uttered a low exclamation of fear and surprise. 'Great G.o.d!' she exclaimed in French, 'what is that?

What is that, down there?'

The Herr Doktor peered towards the place where she was staring, and with eyes which gradually filled with pain and horror, he saw that a thin stream of blood was oozing sluggishly through the doorway where he had stood so often talking to the Frenchwoman, with whom, at last, he had become good friends.

He stumbled forward, full of a dreadful foreboding, and tried to push back the door. But it would only swing forward.

Waving the girl back with a sharp, quick gesture, he pressed through the aperture, and then he, too, uttered an exclamation, a hoa.r.s.e guttural cry of distress, for just behind the door, huddled up on the floor of her kitchen, lay the dead body of Madame Blanc.

The landlady of the Tournebride had been shot half a dozen times, at close range, in the breast, not struck--as the German surgeon for a brief moment had supposed and hoped--by a stray fragment of sh.e.l.l.

'Ach!' he muttered under his teeth, 'this is bad--very bad!' But Jeanne Rouannes, now standing just behind him, remained silent. She looked as if the tears had frozen on her face, and of the two she was the more composed, as, in silence, they dragged the dead woman a little further into the kitchen, and tried to arrange her poor, fat body into some semblance of decent death.

At last, having done the little they could, they came out again into the suns.h.i.+ne, and crossed once more the courtyard of the ownerless Tournebride. And still, of the two, it was the man who looked, and perchance felt, the more affected. In his companion all sensation seemed dulled, and as they walked along, perforce traversing many painful scenes--for they had now re-entered the zone of looting and disorder--she seemed really unconscious of what was going on about her.

Not till they had wandered for a long way, hither and thither, did they find the headquarters of the Commandant established in the Mairie. It was there that the Herr Doktor listened, with a rush of impotent anger, to the curt intimation that the French Red Cross nurse, instead of receiving a pa.s.s out of Valoise, must proceed at once to the German Field Ambulance which was already at work in the church hard by.

PART IV

1

Still draped in the black-and-silver trappings laboriously hung by the women of Valoise to do funeral honour to Dr. Rouannes, the parish church, when Jeanne Rouannes entered it, was already transformed into a hospital ward; and, as she came slowly back to normal conditions of heart and brain, she was amazed to see all that these capable, if rough-looking, German medical orderlies had accomplished.

Not only had every kind of bed already been commandeered from the houses round, but through medieval gla.s.s which the Great Revolution had spared, the sun shone on huge cases containing every kind of surgical requisite ready for immediate use.

An operating theatre equipment had been set out in the Lady Chapel, and a wave of colour flooded the French girl's face when she saw that the trestles on which her father's rude coffin had rested were now serving as the base of the princ.i.p.al operating table. She could not help wondering in her ignorance why all these elaborate preparations had been made, for the only wounded occupant of this strange war-hospital was a two-year-old girl, injured in the head by a fragment of one of the half-dozen sh.e.l.ls which had fallen in the town two hours before.

'To the little child attend you,' the Herr Doktor muttered in her ear.

'I will ensure that no disagreeables you befall. The Herr Stabsarzt is a good man--perhaps have you of him heard, my gracious miss; he is the surgeon Octavius Mott of Ems. Very famous and skilful is he.'

Quickly, and yet with much ceremony, he brought her up to the big, s.h.a.ggy, spectacled German, who greeted her courteously with the words, uttered in a French as good as her own, 'We shall have plenty of work for you presently, Mademoiselle.'

Then, as Max Keller, in a quick, rather anxious undertone, explained that Mademoiselle Rouannes was the just orphaned daughter of a French Red Cross doctor, the Herr Stabsarzt became perceptibly more cordial.

'She does not look strong enough for the labours which will presently begin. You must watch over the poor bereaved one,' he said kindly; 'she looks a truly refined, gentle being, as well as full of French prettiness and grace. There are plenty of ugly old women in this town whom we shall be able to make useful when the wounded come in.'

The Herr Doktor's face became transformed. He could have knelt and kissed the hand of the great, the skilful, the so understanding and humane Octavius Mott! The Herr Stabsarzt, looking at him from out his shrewd little eyes, saw something in the plain sensitive face that touched him. 'So?' he said to himself, 'there is already an excellent Franco-German alliance established here!'

The soldier looters of Valoise slept heavily that night. Their miserable victims, those among them who had not fled into the surrounding country, crowded back into their ravished, empty houses, and into those out-buildings and stables which had escaped the notice of the marauders--anywhere to be free of hateful and terrifying presences. They hoped, poor wretches, with that curious hope and faith in the future, which in the French temperament survives all material disasters, and makes recuperation comparatively easy, that with the morning the enemy would hasten away from the sacked town. This, as they all knew, was what had happened elsewhere.

But, with the breaking of the cloudless dawn, came a new terror to the unhappy people, for sh.e.l.ls again began dropping into the town, and, for a while at least, panic and confusion reigned, even among the sated German soldiery. The French batteries, hidden away to the right of Valoise, had evidently obtained trustworthy information from within the town, for their attack was carefully directed to the group of villas on the hill where the officers had established themselves, but the church,--the church which now flew the Red Cross flag, and was still the glory of Valoise, was spared.