Part 17 (2/2)

He was now released from arrest, and he retired to his house to think out the new problem that had presented itself. The threat to burn down the town might or might not be anything but bluff; he himself doubted whether the German Commandant would burn the roofs over his men's heads, as long as the occupation lasted. The military disadvantages were too obvious, though what the enemy might do when they left the town was another matter. They might shoot him, of course; that was more than probable.

But how to find the money was an anxious problem and urgent. The munic.i.p.al _caisse_ was empty: the managers of the banks had closed their doors and carried their deposits off to Paris before the Germans had entered the town; of the wealthier bourgeoisie some had fled, many were ruined, and the rest were inadequate. The _maire_ pondered long upon these things, leaning back in his chair with knitted brows in that pensive att.i.tude which was characteristic. Suddenly he caught sight of a blue paper with German characters lying upon a walnut table at his elbow. He took it up, scrutinised it, and studied the signature:

Empfangschein.

Werth 500 fr. erhalten.

Herr Hauptmann von Koepenick.

Then he smiled. He got up, put on his overcoat, took up his hat and cane, and went forth into the drizzling rain.

Two hours later he was at the headquarters of the Staff and asked to see the Commandant. He was shown into his presence without delay. ”Well?”

said the Commandant. ”Monsieur le General, I have collected the fine,”

said the _maire_. The General's face relaxed its habitual sternness; he grew at once pleasant and polite. ”Good,” he said. The _maire_ opened a fat leather wallet and placed upon the table under the General's predatory nose a large pile of blue doc.u.ments, some (but not all) stamped with the violet stamp of the German A.Q.M.G. ”If the _hochgeehrter_ General will count them,” said the _maire_, ”he will see they come to 325,000 francs. It is rather more than the fine,” he explained, ”but I have made allowance for the fact that they are not immediately redeemable. They are mostly stamped, and--_they are as good as gold_.”

For three minutes there was absolute silence in the room. The gilt clock in its gla.s.s sepulchre on the mantelpiece ticked off the seconds as loudly as a cricket on the hearth in the stillness of the night. The _maire_ speculated with more curiosity than fear as to how many more of these seconds he had to live. Never had the intervals seemed so long nor their registration so insistent. The ashes fell with a soft susurrus in the grate. The Commandant looked at the _maire_; the _maire_ looked at the Commandant. Then the Commandant smiled. It was an inscrutable smile; a smile in which the eyes partic.i.p.ated not at all. There was merely a muscular relaxation of the lips disclosing the teeth; to the _maire_ there seemed something almost canine in it. At last the General spoke.

”Gut!” he said gutturally; ”you may go.”

”You astonish me,” I said to the _maire_, as he concluded his narrative.

We were sitting in his parlour, smoking a cigar together one day in February in a town not a thousand miles from the German lines. ”You know, Monsieur le Maire, they have shot many a munic.i.p.al magistrate for less. I wonder they didn't make up their minds to shoot you.” The _maire_ smiled. ”They did,” he said quietly. He carefully nicked the ash off his cigar, as he laid it down upon his desk, and opened the drawer of his escritoire. He took out a piece of paper and handed it to me. It was an order in German to shoot the _maire_ on the evacuation of the town.

”You see, monsieur,” he exclaimed, ”your brave soldiers were a little too quick for them. You made a surprise attack in force early one morning and drove the enemy out. So surprising was it that the Staff officers billeted in my house left a box half full of cigars on my sideboard! You are smoking one of them now--a very good cigar, is it not?” It was. ”And they left a good many official papers behind--what you call 'chits,' is it not?--and this one among them. Please mind your cigar-ash, monsieur! You see I rather value my own death-warrant.”

Moved by an irresistible impulse I rose from my chair and held out my hand. The _maire_ took it in mild surprise. ”Monsieur,” I said frankly, if crudely, ”you are a brave man. And you have endured much.”

”Yes, monsieur,” said the _maire_ gravely, as he glanced at a proclamation on the wall which he has added to his private collection of antiquities, ”that is true. I have often been _tres fache_ to think that I who won the Michelet prize at the Lycee should have put my name to that thing over there.”[26]

FOOTNOTES:

[25] Deputy.

[26] This narrative follows with some fidelity the course of events as related to the writer by the _maire_ of the town in question. But for the most obvious of reasons the writer has deemed it his duty to suppress names, disguise events, and give the narrative something of the invest.i.ture of fiction. It is, however, true ”in substance and in fact.”--J.H.M.

XXIV

THE HILL

It was one of those perfect spring days when the whole earth seems to bare her bosom to the caresses of the sun. The sky was without a cloud and in the vault overhead, blue as a piece of Delft, a lark was ascending in transports of exultant song. The hill on which we stood was covered with young birch saplings bursting into leaf, and the sky itself was not more blue than the wild hyacinths at our feet. Here and there in the undergrowth gleamed the pallid anemone. A copper wire ran from pole to pole down the slope of the hill and glittered in the sun like a thread of gold. A little to our right two circular mirrors, glancing obliquely at each other, stood on a tripod, and a graduated sequence of flashes came and went, under the hands of the signallers, with the velocity of light itself. A few yards behind us on the crest of the hill stood a windmill, its great sails motionless as though it were a brig becalmed and waiting for a wind, and astride one arm, like a sailor on a yard, a carpenter was busy, with his mouth full of nails. The tapping of his hammer and the song of the lark were the only sounds that broke the warm stillness of the April day. A great plain stretched away at our feet, and in the fields below women were stooping forward over their hoes.

The white towers of Ypres gleamed ghostlike in the distant haze. The city had the wistful fragility of some beautiful mirage, and looking at it across the pleasant landscape I thought of the Pilgrim's vision of the Golden City s.h.i.+ning in the sun beyond the Land of Beulah. Two or three miles away on our right the ground rose gently to a range of low wooded hills, and on their bare green slopes brown furrows showed up like a cicatrice. They were the German trenches. On the crest of the ridge a white house peeped out between the trees. That house seemed an object of peculiar interest to the battery-major at my side. He was stooping behind the ”Director” with his eye to the sights as though he was focussing the distant object for a photograph. He fixed the outer clamp, unscrewed the inner clamp, and having got his sights on the house, he reversed the process and swung round the sights to bear on a little copse to our left. ”One hundred and five,” he said meditatively as he found the angle. The N.C.O. took up the range-finder and measured the distances first to the house, then to the copse. The major took up an adjustable triangle, and with a movement of thumb and forefinger converted it into the figure of an irregular ”X.” As he read off the battery angle on the ”Plotter” the N.C.O. communicated it and the elevation to the telephone operator, who in turn communicated it to the battery in the copse. ”Battery angle seventy. Range four thousand.”

Gunners are a laconic people, and their language is as economical of words as a proposition in Euclid; their sentences resemble those Oriental languages in which the verb is regarded as a superfluous impertinence. Language is to them a visual and symbolical thing in which angles and distances are predicated of churches, trees, and four-storied houses. Now in the copse on our left six field-guns were cunningly concealed, and even as the telephone operator spoke the dial-sights of those six guns were being screwed round and the elevating gear adjusted till they and the range-drum recorded the results of the major's meditations upon the hill. Then the guns in the copse spoke, and the air was sibilant with their speech. A little cloud no bigger than a man's hand arose above the roof of the white house on the ridge. Our battery had found its mark.

Somewhere behind that ridge were the enemy's batteries and they were yet to find. But even as we searched the landscape with our field-gla.s.ses an aeroplane rose from behind our own position and made for the distant ridge, its diaphanous wings displaying red, white, and blue concentric circles to our gla.s.ses like the scales of some huge magpie-moth, while a long streamer of petrol smoke made faint pencillings in the sky behind it. As it hovered above the ridge seven or eight little white clouds like b.a.l.l.s of feathers suddenly appeared from nowhere just below it. They were German shrapnel. But the aeroplane pa.s.sed imperturbably on, leaving the little feathers to float in the sky until in time they faded away and disappeared. In no long time the aeroplane was retracing its flight, and certain little coloured discs were speaking luminously to the battery, telling it of what the observer had seen beyond the ridge. Between the aeroplane, the observer, the telephone, and the guns, there seemed to be some mysterious freemasonry.

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