Part 12 (1/2)
One by one the vacant chairs filled up. At intervals the door behind me would open and an officer would clank in, dusted over with the sift of the French roads. He would bow ceremoniously to his chief and then to the company generally, slip into an unoccupied chair, give an order over his shoulder to a soldier-waiter, and at once begin to eat his dinner with the air of a man who has earned it. After a while there was but one place vacant at our table; it was next to me. I could not keep my eyes away from it. It got on my nerves--that little gap in the circle; that little s.p.a.ce of white linen, bare of anything but two unfilled gla.s.ses. To me it became as portentous as an unscrewed coffin lid. No one else seemed to notice it. Cigars had been pa.s.sed round and the talk eddied casually back and forth with the twisty smoke wreaths.
An orderly drew the empty chair back with a thump. I think I jumped. A slender man, whose uniform fitted him as though it had been his skin, was sitting down beside me. Unlike those who came before him, he had entered so quietly that I had not sensed his coming. I heard the soldier call him Excellency; and I heard him tell the soldier not to give him any soup. We swapped commonplaces, I telling him what my business there was; and for a little while he plied his knife and fork busily, making the heavy gold curb chain on his left wrist tinkle musically.
”I'm rather glad they did not get me this afternoon,” he said as though to make conversation with a stranger. ”This is first-rate veal--better than we usually have here.”
”Get you?” I said. ”Who wanted to get you?”
”Our friends, the enemy,” he answered. ”I was in one of our trenches rather well toward the front, and a sh.e.l.l or two struck just behind me.
I think, from their sound, they were French sh.e.l.ls.”
This debonair gentleman, as presently transpired, was Colonel von Sch.e.l.ler, for four years consul to the German Emba.s.sy at Was.h.i.+ngton, more lately minister for foreign affairs of the kingdom of Saxony, and now doing staff duty in the ordnance department here at the German center. He had the sharp brown eyes of a courageous fox terrier, a mustache that turned up at the ends, and a most beautiful command of the English language and its American idioms. He hurried along with his dinner and soon he had caught up with us.
”I suggest,” he said, ”that we go out on the terrace to drink our coffee. It is about time for the French to start their evening benediction, as we call it. They usually quit firing their heavy guns just before dark, and usually begin again at eight and keep it up for an hour or two.”
So we two took our coffee cups and our cigars in our hands and went out through a side pa.s.sage to the terrace, and sat on a little iron bench, where a shaft of light, from a window of the room we had just quit, showed a narrow streak of flowering plants beyond the bricked wall and a clump of red and yellow woodbine on a low wall.
The rest lay in blackness; but I knew, from what I had seen before dusk came, that we must be somewhere near the middle of a broad terrace--a hanging garden rather--full of sundials and statues and flower beds, which overhung the southern face of the Hill of Laon, and from which, in daylight, a splendid view might be had of wooded slopes falling away into wide, flat valleys, and wide, flat valleys rising again to form more wooded slopes. I knew, too, from what I remembered, that the plateau immediately beneath us was flyspecked with the roofs of small abandoned villages; and that the road which ran straight from the base of the heights toward the remote river was a-crawl with supply wagons and ammunition wagons going forward to the German batteries, seven miles away, and with scouts and messengers in automobiles and on motor cycles, and the day's toll of wounded in ambulances coming back from the front.
We could not see them when we went to the parapet and looked downward into the black gulf below, but the rumbling of the wheels and the panting of the motors came up to us. With these came, also, the remote music of those queer little trumpets carried by the soldiers who ride beside the drivers of German military automobiles; and this sounded as thinly and plaintively to our ears as the cries of sandpipers heard a long way off across a windy beach.
We could hear something else too: the evening benediction had started.
Now fast, now slow, like the beating of a feverish pulse, the guns sounded in faint throbs; and all along the horizon from southeast to southwest, and back again, ran flares and waves of a sullen red radiance. The light flamed high at one instant--like fireworks--and at the next it died almost to a glow, as though a great bed of peat coals or a vast limekiln lay on the farthermost crest of the next chain of hills. It was the first time I had ever seen artillery fire at night, though I had heard it often enough by then in France and in Belgium, and even in Germany; for when the wind blew out of the west we could hear in Aix-la-Chapelle the faint booming of the great cannons before Antwerp, days and nights on end.
I do not know how long I stood and looked and listened. Eventually I was aware that the courteous Von Sch.e.l.ler, standing at my elbow, was repeating something he had already stated at least once.
”Those brighter flashes you see, apparently coming from below the other lights, are our guns,” he was saying. ”They seem to be below the others because they are nearer to us. Personally I don't think these evening volleys do very much damage,” he went on as though vaguely regretful that the dole of death by night should be so scanty, ”because it is impossible for the men in the outermost observation pits to see the effect of the shots; but we answer, as you notice, just to show the French and English we are not asleep.”
Those iron vespers lasted, I should say, for the better part of an hour.
When they were ended we went indoors. Everybody was a.s.sembled in the long hall of the Prefecture, and a young officer was smas.h.i.+ng out marching songs on the piano. The Berlin artist made an art gallery of the billiard table and was exhibiting the water-color sketches he had done that day--all very das.h.i.+ng and spirited in their treatment, though a bit splashy and scrambled-eggish as to the use of the pigments.
A very young man, with the markings of a captain on shoulder and collar, came in and went up to General von Heeringen and showed him something-- something that looked like a very large and rather ornamental steel coal scuttle which had suffered from a serious personal misunderstanding with an ax. The elongated top of it, which had a fluted, rudder-like adornment, made you think of Siegfried's helmet in the opera; but the bottom, which was squashed out of shape, made you think of a total loss.
When the general had finished looking at this object we all had a chance to finger it. The young captain seemed quite proud of it and bore it off with him to the dining room. It was what remained of a bomb, and had been loaded with slugs of lead and those iron cherries that are called shrapnel. A French flyer had dropped it that afternoon with intent to destroy one of the German captive balloons and its operator.
The young officer was the operator of the balloon in question. It was his daily duty to go aloft, at the end of a steel tether, and bob about for seven hours at a stretch, studying the effects of the sh.e.l.l fire and telephoning down directions for the proper aiming of the guns. He had been up seven hundred feet in the air that afternoon, with no place to go in case of accident, when the Frenchman came over and tried to hit him. ”It struck within a hundred meters of me,” called back the young captain as he disappeared through the dining-room doorway. ”Made quite a noise and tore up the earth considerably.”
”He was lucky--the young Herr Captain,” said Von Sch.e.l.ler--”luckier than his predecessor. A fortnight ago one of the enemy's flyers struck one of our balloons with a bomb and the gas envelope exploded. When the wreckage reached the earth there was nothing much left of the operator-- poor fellow!--except the melted b.u.t.tons on his coat. There are very few safe jobs in this army, but being a captive-balloon observer is one of the least safe of them all.”
I had noted that the young captain wore in the second b.u.t.tonhole of his tunic the black-and-white-striped ribbon and the black-and-white Maltese Cross; and now when I looked about me I saw that at least every third man of the present company likewise bore such a decoration. I knew the Iron Cross was given to a man only for gallant conduct in time of war at the peril of his life.
A desire to know a few details beset me. Humplmayer, the scholarly art dealer, was at my side. He had it too--the Iron Cross of the first cla.s.s.
”You won that lately?” I began, touching the ribbon.
”Yes,” he said; ”only the other day I received it.”
”And for what, might I ask?” said I, pressing my advantage.
”Oh,” he said, ”I've been out quite a bit in the night air lately. You know we Germans are desperately afraid of night air.”
Later I learned--though not from Humplmayer--that he had for a period of weeks done scout work in an automobile in hostile territory; which meant that he rode in the darkness over the strange roads of an alien country, exposed every minute to the chances of ambuscade and barbed-wire mantraps and the like. I judge he earned his bauble.