" ... all villages, chateaux, and houses are burnt down during this night. it was a beautiful sight to see the fires all round us in the distance. in every village one finds only heaps of ruins and many dead. now come the good hours...."—diary of german private, 4th comp. j?ger btln., no. 11., aug. 23-27, 1914.
what's death?—you'll love me yet!
pippa passes.
when the dawn came, crystal-bright and pure, the two girls left the ruins of the bellevue and wandered off among the hills. they had no food. they did not know where they were going. they did not know where they wanted to go. soon rain came on, and fell in floods all day. they lost themselves in dim green valleys; they pushed through dripping copses of hazel; they sank ankle-deep in spongy mosses, and waded through unnamed torrents. once they crouched among the bracken while a gray patrol rode by, shouting and singing, uproariously drunk. a little later they came on a lonely cottage with a dead girl lying across the threshold. she had been bayoneted, and worse. a baby of two years was strung up by the neck to the door handle; another, of only a few weeks, wailed feebly in a pool of blood and water beside the mother. dorothea darted upon it with a cry; cradling it in her soft arms, against her breast, she stepped over the girl's body into the hut, forgetful of the horror of death in the claims of this minute piece of life. the man of the house was inside. he had been surprised at his dinner, and had defended himself with the carving-knife. he had taken a good deal of killing, as the floor and walls bore witness; nevertheless, the murderers had kicked his body into a corner, sat down at his table, and finished his meal.
dorothea was searching the shelves for milk or any other[pg 253] food, when she heard a shout outside, followed by a cry—the oddest little cry she had ever heard. she caught up the knife with which the man had defended himself, and ran out. it was lettice who had made that odd little sound; she was struggling with an uhlan, very drunk in the legs but very strong in the arms, who was trying to force her down. dorothea stuck the knife into his neck from behind, dragged it out and stuck it in again. the man dropped lettice and wheeled round, firing his revolver; but his hand wavered away, and the shot went into the ground. he sank down with a grunt and lay there between them, the bright blood pumping out scarlet. dorothea looked at lettice; her eyes flamed; she held the baby still clasped to her breast.
"i've killed him," she said. "i'm glad."
lettice did not speak; her hands were at her throat, mechanically settling her tie; she turned and re?ntered the forest without a word. "wait half-a-minute!" dorothea called after her; and lettice waited, in the brake, back turned to the house. she had to wait a good many minutes; whether one or sixty, it was all the same to her. then dorothea came running up, breathless. "i've found just a drop of milk, and this, see," she said, displaying one of the long belgian loaves. lettice was to suppose she had spent her time in ransacking the larder. in point of fact, she had been rolling, hauling, pushing the dead german into the well; she did not wish his body to be the excuse and the signal for a fresh campaign of vengeance.
they spent that night in one of the limestone caves of the semois. in spite of the milk, in spite of dorothea's sheltering arms, the baby died of exhaustion in the cold hour before the dawn. dorothea wept bitter tears, and left it lying covered with ferns, on a bed of moss; she could not bear to pile stones on the tender little limbs and ivory face. a turnip-field gave them a breakfast more sustaining than hazel nuts and blackberries, but for the most part they kept to the woods; they were afraid of the open country. by this time they had lost all sense of direction. the rain still fell hopelessly. there was no sun to guide them; the hills[pg 254] were all hidden in mist; and the semois, when they came on it in its wild and twisting valley, seemed never to flow twice in the same direction. yet they wandered on, because they had begun wandering and had not spirit to stop.
towards sunset they came suddenly to the edge of a hill, and saw below them, deep buried in a cup-like hollow, a farm. from where they stood an orchard sloped steeply to the group of white buildings, beyond them the green meadow fell away to a brook; the opposite slope was a stubble field, crowned with a line of firs.
"why," said dorothea, "why—"
they had wandered in a circle and come back to their starting-point. it was the ferme de la croix.
lettice, who had not spoken for hours, found her tongue. "don't go down," she said, "we shall only find somebody else dead."
"we might find something to eat," said dorothea, more hopeful. "the house does look all right, and i'm sure madame hasquin would give us the supper off her own plate, if she hadn't anything else. but oh, my good gracious! how we must have wandered! i'd hoped we were half-way to mezières by now. and yet, you know, i did think the country seemed to be looking familiar somehow this last half-hour. don't you come down, lettice; you stay here with the things while i go and explore."
lettice, who was possessed of a dumb devil that day, shifted her bundle from her left hand to her right and said nothing. slipping from tree to tree down the orchard, dorothea peeped at the house from under cover. all was still, except the joy-song of a hen which had just laid an egg. live fowls and live germans being incompatible, dorothea came out of hiding and walked boldly up the pebbled path to the door. on either side bloomed roses, dahlias, lavender where the bees were humming. the evening sun came out, and shone peacefully on the white walls. dorothea rapped. no answer; only a sandy cat ran out of the bushes and twined round her skirts. she knocked again, then pushed open the door and entered.
[pg 255]
a spotless white passage with a dark, uneven, shiny floor and doors on either side, old and irregular. dorothea opened the first. she saw a pleasant parlor, low-pitched, with lattices facing the sunset; a carved oak press; an eight-day clock, still ticking; a table laid for dinner with beef-steak, gray in its gray greasy gravy, stewed pears, pommes sautées, salad in a china bowl, golden country beer in a large decanter. glasses stood half empty, knives and forks were crossed on half-eaten plates of meat, chairs had been pushed back anyhow. there was no living creature but the cat, who sprang up on the window ledge, with a low crooning purr, among the red geraniums in the sun.
a hand fell softly on dorothea's shoulder, and she turned with a great start; but it was only lettice, who had toiled after her with both bundles, and had come up noiseless behind, as her custom was.
"that's panic," she said, nodding towards the deserted table.
room by room they explored the house; the kitchen with its vast open fireplace, the queer uneven stairs, the tiny bedrooms, so tempting with their carved bedsteads and spotless linen and scarlet wadded quilts ("je tiens à mes lits"—poor madame!), their white-washed walls and deep-set lattices framed in jasmine; the round tower, dark save for the swords of sunshine that pierced its western loopholes, and rustling with fowls; the well-filled storeroom. everything was there but the owners. they had heard a bruit and a rumor, and they had fled; had stampeded in abject terror before the advance of germany. and so lonely was the farm, hidden in woods and served only by a cart track, that neither ravager nor refugee had found it. the wanderers sank into its deep peace and slept.
it could not hope to escape permanently, however, for germans work by the map; so on dorothea's advice the first thing they did next morning was to make a cache of provisions in the orchard. well for them they thought of it, for that very afternoon they were visited by a wandering party of uhlans. dorothea, washing her skirt in the yard, heard[pg 256] them coming, and had just time to escape with lettice to the woods. there being nobody to kill, the visitors had to content themselves with sacking the house, which they did with zest. it was odd to see chairs and mirrors come hurtling out of the bedroom windows, odder still to see a drunken uhlan parading about in madame's voluminous best chemise. they wrung the necks of the fowls; they drove off the two mild cows; they set fire to the ricks, and tried to burn the house as well, but luckily they had no petrol, this being a private venture not a military operation, and its massy walls defied them. it was not the first time they had stood fire. finally, they killed the sandy cat, who was misguided enough to greet them as she greeted dorothea. she had been a lean, hard-flanked, and indiscriminatingly amiable creature, with a vulgar loud purr; still, it was distressing to see her tied to a tree and shot to death with table-knives.
after this they rode off, singing the inevitable deutschland über alles with more noise than melody, and the girls came out of hiding to take stock of the damage. it was extensive. the german soldier had by that time learned to loot effectually, and what they had not stolen they had smashed. the poor pretty garden was trampled into mire. the kitchen was ankle-deep in broken crockery. a half-killed pig was squealing its life out in the passage. the mattresses had been slit open and spread with filth from the stable. they had wiped their boots on the tablecloth; they had used the coffee-pot as a spittoon; they had covered the white-washed walls with what the expressive french idiom calls des saletés; they had done other things which need not be described. in fine, they had contrived, within the space of a summer afternoon, to be so ingeniously filthy and destructive that not a corner of the house was habitable.
lettice and dorothea camped that night in the barn. next day, while trying to cleanse their pigsty, they were surprised by a fresh party of visitors; but these were sober, and the officer in command was the same comparatively humane person who had burned the bellevue. his mission now was not to strike terror, but to make an inventory of[pg 257] all domestic animals; and he did not look pleased when he fell over the dead porker in the passage. hastily suppressing lettice, who remained impracticably hostile, dorothea made her appeal to the honor of the german army. she used her tongue and her beautiful eyes so well that, after listening to her tale, the officer gave her what she wanted—a sort of permis de séjour, exempting the farm from further requisitions. indeed there was little left to take.
after this they had peace, and settled down to a strange, precarious, isolated life. for some weeks they hardly set foot outside the farm. this extreme seclusion was not really necessary; for times had changed and the policy of the conquerors now was not to scare the country folk away, but to coax them back to their homes and their ordinary work. the german reign of terror in belgium seems to have been based on the theory that one german soldier is worth x belgian civilians. therefore when sniping took place (or when they fancied it had taken place, or feared it might take place, or thought a locality needed a lesson to teach them what to expect if it did take place) the order went out to kill. "without distinction of persons, the innocent will suffer with the guilty." much of the ravaging was done deliberately, by order: as at the sack of rochehaut. much was done by an equally deliberate relaxation of orders: as at the cottage in the woods. in part the german plan succeeded, for it certainly stamped out sniping. in part it recoiled upon itself. to strike terror is a very fine thing, but the results may be embarrassing to an army of occupation. besides, it really looked so very bad to neutrals!
lettice and dorothea, however, did not concern themselves with this change of policy. the cottage in the woods had cured them of any wish to wander. even dorothea had had her fill of adventures. it was long before she ventured as far as poupehan, to ask for news; and when she did, she wished she had stayed at home. the fall of namur, the fall of brussels, the coming fall of paris—how long before they heard of the capitulation of london?
