Part 30 (1/2)

Utterly unnerved, Jack sank into the arm-chair. What should he do? If he stayed at Morteyn he stood a good chance of hanging. He could not leave his aunt and uncle, nor could he tell them, for the two old people would fall sick with the anxiety. And yet, if he stayed at Morteyn, and the Germans came, it might compromise the whole household and bring destruction to Chateau and park. He had not thought of that before, but now he remembered also another German rule, inflexible, unvarying. It was this, that in a town or village where the inhabitants resisted by force or injured any German soldier, the village should be burned and the provisions and stock confiscated for the use of King Wilhelm's army.

Shocked at his own thoughtlessness, he sprang to his feet and walked hastily to the terrace. Nothing was to be seen on the road, nor yet in the meadows beyond. Up-stairs he heard Lorraine's voice, and his aunt's voice, too. Sometimes they laughed a little in low tones, and he even caught the rustle of stiff silken embroidery against the window-sill.

His mind was made up in an instant; his coolness returned as the colour returns to a pale cheek. The Uhlans had probably not seen him; if they had, it made little difference, for even the picquet that had chased him could not have recognized him at that distance. Then, again, in a whole regiment it was not likely that the three hors.e.m.e.n who had peeped at Morteyn through the road-gate could have been part of that same cursed picquet. No, the thing to avoid was personal contact with any of the 11th Uhlans. This would be a matter of simple prudence; outside of that he had nothing to fear from the Prussian army. Whenever he saw the schapskas and lances he would be cautious; when these lances were pennoned with black and white, and when the schapskas and schabraques were edged with yellow, he would keep out of the way altogether. It shamed him terribly to think of his momentary panic; he cursed himself for a coward, and dug his clenched fists into both pockets. But even as he stood there, withering himself with self-scorn, he could not help hoping that his aunt and uncle would find it convenient to go to Paris soon. That would leave him free to take his own chances by remaining, to be near Lorraine. For it did not occur to him that he might leave Morteyn as long as Lorraine stayed.

It was late in the afternoon when he lighted a pipe and walked out to the road, where the smooth macadam no longer bore the slightest trace of wheel or hoof, and n.o.body could have imagined that part of an army corps had pa.s.sed there the night before.

He felt lonely and a little despondent, and he walked along the road to the shrine of Our Lady of Morteyn and sat down at her naked stone feet. And as he sat there smoking, twirling his shooting-cap in his hands, without the least warning a horseman, advancing noiselessly across the turf, pa.s.sed him, carbine on thigh, busby glittering with the silver skull and crossbones.

Before he could straighten up another horseman pa.s.sed, then another, then three, then six, then a dozen, all sitting with poised carbines, scarcely noticing him at all, the low, blazing sun glittering on the silver skulls and crossed thigh-bones, deep set in their sombre head-gear.

They were Black Hussars.

A distant movement came to his ear at the same time, the soft shock of thousands of footfalls on the highway. He sprang up and started forward, but a trooper warned him back with a stern gesture, and he stood at the foot of the shrine, excited but outwardly cool, listening to the approaching trample.

He knew what it meant now; these pa.s.sing videttes were the dust before the tempest, the prophecy of the deluge. For the sound on the distant highway was the sound of infantry, and a host was on the march, a host helmeted with steel and shod with steel, a vast live bulk, gigantic, scaled in mail, whose limbs were human, whose claws were lances and bayonets, whose red tongues were flame-jets from a thousand cannon.

The German army had entered France and the province of Lorraine was a name.

Like a hydra of three hideous heads the German army had pushed its course over the Saar, over the Rhine, over the Lauter; it sniffed at the frontier line; licked Wissembourg and the Spicheren with flaming tongues, shuddered, coiled, and glided over the boundary into the fair land of Lorraine. Then, like some dreadful ringed monster, it cast off two segments, north, south, and moved forward on its belly, while the two new segments, already turned to living bodies, with heads and eyes and contracted scales, struggled on alone, diverging to the north and south, creeping, squirming, undulating, penetrating villages and cities, stretching across hills and rivers, until all the land was s.h.i.+ning with shed scales and the sky reeked with the smoke of flaming tongues. This was the invasion of France. Before it Frossard recoiled, leaving the Spicheren a smoking h.e.l.l; before it Douay fell above the flames of Wissembourg; and yet Gravelotte had not been, and Vionville was a peaceful name, and Mars-la-Tour lay in the suns.h.i.+ne, mellow with harvests, gay with the scarlet of the Garde Imperiale.

On the hill-sides of Lorraine were letters of fire, writing for all France to read, and every separate letter was a flaming village. The Emperor read it and bent his weary steps towards Chalons; Bazaine read it and said, ”There is time;” MacMahon, Canrobert, Lebuf, Ladmirault read it and wondered idly what it meant, till Vinoy turned a retreat into a triumph, and Gambetta, flabby, pompous, unbalanced, bawled plat.i.tudes from the Palais Bourbon.

In three splendid armies the tide of invasion set in; the Red Prince tearing a b.l.o.o.d.y path to Metz, the Crown Prince riding west by south, resting in Nancy, snubbing Toul, spreading out into the valley of the Marne to build three monuments of b.l.o.o.d.y bones--Saint-Marie, Amanvilliers, Saint-Privat.

Metz, crouching behind Saint-Quentin and Les Bottes, turned her anxious eyes from Thionville to Saint-Julien and back to where MacMahon's three rockets should have starred the sky; and what she saw was the Red Prince riding like a fiery spectre from east to west; what she saw was the spiked helmets of the Feldwache and the sodded parapets of Longeau. Chained and naked, the beautiful city crouched in the tempest that was to free her forever and give her the life she scorned, the life more bitter than death.

Something of this ominous prophecy came to Jack, standing below the shrine of Our Lady of Morteyn, listening to the on-coming shock of German feet, as he watched the cavalry riding past in the glow of the setting sun.

And now the infantry burst into view, a gloomy, solid column tramp, tramp along the road--jagers, with their stiff fore-and-aft shakos, dull-green tunics, and snuffy, red-striped trousers tucked into dusty half-boots. On they came, on, on--would they never pa.s.s? At last they were gone, somewhere into the flaming west, and now the red sunbeams slanted on eagle crests and tipped the sea of polished spiked helmets with fire, for a line regiment was coming, shaking the earth with its rhythmical tramp--thud! thud! thud!

He looked across the fields to the hills beyond; more regiments, dark ma.s.ses moving against the sky, covered the landscape far as the eye could reach; cavalry, too, were riding on the Saint-Avold road through the woods; and beyond that, vague silhouettes of moving wagons and hors.e.m.e.n, crawling out into the world of valleys that stretched to Bar-le-Duc and Avricourt.

Oppressed, almost choked, as though a rising tide had washed against his breast, ever mounting, seething, creeping, climbing, he moved forward, waiting for a chance to cross the road and gain the Chateau, where he could see the servants huddling over the lawn, and the old vicomte, erect, motionless, on the terrace beside his wife and Lorraine.

Already in the meadow behind him the first bivouac was pitched; on the left stood a park of field artillery, ammunition-wagons in the rear, and in front the long lines of picket-ropes to which the horses were fastened, their harness piled on the gra.s.s behind them.

The forge was alight, the farriers busy shoeing horses; the armourer also bent beside his blazing forge, and the tinkling of his hammer on small-arms rose musically above the dull shuffle of leather-shod feet on the road.

To the right of the artillery, bisected as is the German fas.h.i.+on, lay two halves of a battalion of infantry. In the foreground the officers sat on their camp-chairs, smoking long faence pipes; in the rear, driven deep into the turf, the battalion flag stood furled in its water-proof case, with the drum-major's halberd beside it, and drums and band instruments around it on the gra.s.s.

Behind this lay a straight row of knapsacks, surrounded by the rolled great-coats; ten paces to the rear another similar row; between these two rows stood stacks of needle-guns, then another row of knapsacks, another stack of needle-guns, stretching with mathematical exactness to the grove of poplars by the river. A cordon of sentinels surrounded the bivouac; there was a group of soldiers around a beer-cart, another throng near the wine-cart.

All was quiet, orderly, and terribly sombre.

Near the poplar-trees the pioneers had dug their trenches and lighted fires. Across the trenches, on poles of green wood, were slung simmering camp-kettles.

He turned again towards the Chateau; a regiment of Saxon riders was pa.s.sing--had just pa.s.sed--and he could get across now, for the long line had ended and the last Prussian cuira.s.siers were vanis.h.i.+ng over the hill, straight into the blaze of the setting sun.

As he entered the gate, behind him, from the meadow, an infantry band crashed out into a splendid hymn--a hymn in praise of the Most High G.o.d, slow to anger and plenteous in mercy.

And the soldiers' hoa.r.s.e voices chimed in--