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Discovering Diverse Content Through
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and scuffle, a guttural grunt and a gasp; and turned to see William,
with a hand to his cheek, lying prone at the feet of his assailant. She
rounded on the man like a lion, and perhaps, with her suffragette
training behind her, would have landed him a cuff in his turn; but as
she raised her arm it was caught from behind and she found herself
suddenly helpless in the grasp of a second grey-clad soldier—who,
when he heard his comrade's hail, had come running out of the
house.
"Let me go," she cried, wriggling in his grasp as she had
wriggled aforetime in the hands of a London policeman, and kicking
him deftly on the shins as she had been wont to kick Robert on his.
For answer he shook her to the accompaniment of what sounded
like curses—shook her vehemently, till her hat came off and her hair
fell down, till her teeth rattled and the landscape danced about her.
When he released her, with the final indignity of a butt with the knee
in the rear, she collapsed on the grass by her husband's side in a
crumpled, disreputable heap. There for a minute or two she lay
gasping and inarticulate—until, as her breath came back and the
landscape ceased to gyrate, she dragged herself up into a sitting
position and thrust back the hair from her eyes. William, a yard or
two away, was also in a sitting position with his hand pressed
against his cheekbone; while over him stood the assailants in field-
grey, apparently snapping out questions.
"I don't understand," she heard him protest feebly, "I tell you I
don't understand. Griselda, can't you explain to them that I don't
speak French?"
"Comprends pas," said Griselda, swallowing back tears of rage.
"Comprends pas—so it's not a bit of good your talking to us. Parlez
pas français—but that won't prevent me from reporting you for this
disgraceful assault. You cowards—you abominable cowards! You're
worse than the police at home, which is saying a good deal. I
wonder you're not ashamed of yourselves. I've been arrested three
times and I've never been treated like this."
At this juncture one of the men in field-grey seized William by
the collar and proceeded to turn out his pockets—extracting from
their recesses a purse, a pipe, a handkerchief, a fountain pen, and a
green-covered Cook's ticket. He snapped back the elastic on the
Cook's ticket, and turned the leaves that remained for the journey
home.
"London," he ejaculated suddenly, pronouncing the vowels in
un-English fashion as O's.
"London!" his companion echoed him—and then, as if moved by
a common impulse, they called on the name of Heinz.
There was an answering hail from the farmhouse kitchen,
whence issued promptly a fattish young man with a mug in his hand,
and a helmet tilted on his nose. With him the assailants of William
and Griselda entered into rapid and throaty explanations; whereat
Heinz nodded assentingly as he advanced down the garden path to
the gate, surveying the captives with interest and a pair of little
pigs'-eyes. Having reached the gate he leaned over it, mug in hand,
and looked down at William and Griselda.
"English," he said in a voice that was thicker than it should have
been at so early an hour of the morning; "English—you come from
London? ... I have been two years in London; that is why I speak
English. I was with a hairdresser in the Harrow Road two years; and
I know also the Strand and the Angel and Buckingham Palace and
the Elephant." (He was plainly proud of his acquaintance with
London topography.) "All of them I know, and when we arrive in
London I shall show them all to my friends." He waved his hand
vaguely and amiably to indicate his grey-clad companions. "You
come from London, but you shall not go back there, because you are
now our prisoners. I drink your damn bad health and the damn bad
health of your country and the damn bad health of your king."
He suited the action to the word and drained his mug; and
having drained it till it stood upright upon his nose, proceeded to
throw it over his shoulder to shatter on the brick path. Whether from
natural good temper or the cheering effect of potations his face was
wreathed in an amiable smile as he crossed his arms on the bar of
the gate and continued to address his audience—
"We shall take you to our officer and you will be prisoners, and
if you are spies you will be shot."
There was something so impossible about the announcement
that William and Griselda felt their courage return with a rush.
Moreover, though the words of Heinz were threatening the aspect of
Heinz was not; his fat young face with its expansive and slightly
inebriated smile was ridiculous rather than terrifying, even under the
brim of a helmet. William, thankful for the English acquired during
the two years' hairdressing in the Harrow Road, admonished him
with a firmness intended to sober and dismay.
"This is not a time for silly jokes. I am afraid that you do not
realize the seriousness of the situation. I shall feel it my duty to
make a full report to your superiors—when you will find it is no
laughing matter. My wife and I, proceeding quietly to the station,
have been grossly and violently assaulted by your two companions.
We gave them no provocation, and the attack was entirely uncalled
for. I repeat, I shall feel it my duty to report their conduct in the very
strongest terms."
He felt as he spoke that the reproof would have carried more
weight had it been delivered in a standing position; but his head still
reeled from the stinging cuff it had received and he felt safer where
he was—on the ground. It annoyed him that the only apparent
effect of his words upon Heinz was a widening of his already wide
and owlish smile.
"Oh, you'll report their conduct, will you?" he repeated
pleasantly and thickly. "And who will you report it to, old son?"
William stiffened at the familiarity, and the tone of his reply was
even colder and more dignified than that of the original rebuke.
"To the nearest police authority; I shall not leave Belgium until
my complaint has been attended to. If necessary I shall apply for
redress to the British Consul in Brussels."
The expansive smile on the face of Heinz was suddenly ousted
by an expression of infinite astonishment. His fat chin dropped, his
little eyes widened, and he pushed back his helmet, that he might
stare the better at William.
"Say it again," he demanded—slowly and as if doubtful of his
ears, "You shall apply to the British Consul—the British Consul at
Brussels?"
"Certainly," William assured him firmly; and Griselda echoed
"Certainly." The threat they judged had made the desired
impression, for so blank and disturbed was the countenance of Heinz
that his two companions broke into guttural questioning. The former
hairdresser checked them with a gesture and addressed himself
once more to William.
"I think," he announced, "you are balmy on the crumpet, both
of you. Balmy," he repeated, staring from one to the other and
apparently sobered by the shock of his own astonishment. Suddenly
a gleam of intelligence lit up his little pig's-eyes—he leaned yet
further over the gate, pointed a finger and queried—
"You do not read the newspapers?"
"As a rule I do," William informed him, "but we have not seen
any lately—not since we left England."
"And how long is it since you left England?"
William told him it was over three weeks.
"Three weeks," the other repeated, "three weeks without
newspapers ... and I think you do not speak French, eh?"
"My wife," William answered, "understands it—a little. But we
neither of us speak it." His manner was pardonably irritated, and if
he had not judged it imprudent he would have refused point-blank
to answer this purposeless catechism. Nor was his pardonable
irritation lessened when amusement once more gained the upper
hand in Heinz. Suddenly and unaccountably he burst into hearty
laughter—rocked and trembled with it, holding to the gate and
wiping the tears from his cheeks. Whatever the joke it appealed also
to his comrades, who, once it was imparted between Heinz's
paroxysms, joined their exquisite mirth to his own. The three stood
swaying in noisy merriment, while Griselda, whitefaced and tight-
lipped, and William with a fast disappearing left eye awaited in acute
and indignant discomfort some explanation of a jest that struck
them as untimely. It came only when Heinz had laughed himself out.
Wiping the tears once more from his eyes, and with a voice still
weakened by pleasurable emotion, he gave them in simple and
unpolished language the news of the European cataclysm.
"I tell you something, you damn little ignorant silly fools. There
is a war since you came to Belgium."
Probably they thought it was a drunken jest, for they made no
answer beyond a stare, and Heinz proceeded with enjoyment.
"A War. The Greatest that ever was. Germany and Austria—and
Russia and France and Belgium and England and Servia."
He spoke slowly, dropping out his words that none might fail of
their effect and ticked off on a finger the name of each belligerent.
"Our brave German troops have conquered Belgium and that is
why we are here. We shall also take Paris and we shall also take
Petersburg and we shall also take London. We shall march through
Regent Street and Leicester Square and over Waterloo Bridge. Our
Kaiser Wilhelm shall make peace in Westminster Abbey, and we shall
take away all your colonies. What do you think of that, you damn
little fools?"
There are statements too large as there are statements too wild
for any but the unusually imaginative to grasp at a first hearing.
Neither William nor Griselda had ever entertained the idea of a
European War; it was not entertained by any of their friends or their
pamphlets. Rumours of war they had always regarded as foolish and
malicious inventions set afloat in the interest of Capitalism and
Conservatism with the object of diverting attention from Social
Reform or the settlement of the Woman Question; and to their ears,
still filled with the hum of other days, the announcement of Heinz
was even such a foolish invention. Nor, even had they given him
credence, would they in these first inexperienced moments have
been greatly perturbed or alarmed; their historical ignorance was so
profound, they had talked so long and so often in terms of war, that
they had come to look on the strife of nations as a glorified scuffle
on the lines of a Pankhurst demonstration. Thus Griselda, taught by
The Suffragette, used the one word "battle" for a small street row
and the fire and slaughter of Eylau—or would have so used it, had
she known of the slaughter of Eylau. And that being the case,
Heinz's revelation of ruin and thunder left her calm—disappointingly
so.
"I think," she said loftily, in answer to his question, "that you
are talking absolute nonsense."
There are few men who like to be balked of a sensation and
Heinz was not among them. He reddened with annoyance at the lack
of success of his bombshell.
"You do not believe it," he said. "You do not believe that our
brave German troops have taken Belgium and will shortly take Paris
and London? Very well, I will teach you. I will show you. You shall
come with us to our officer and you shall be shot for spies."
He came through the gate and clambered into his saddle, his
companions following suit; William and Griselda instinctively
scrambled to their feet and stood gazing up in uncertainty at the
three grey mounted men.
"Get on," said Heinz with a jerk of his head down the valley;
and as William and Griselda still stood and gazed his hand went clap
to his side and a sword flashed out of its sheath. Griselda shrieked in
terror as it flashed over William's head—and William bawled and
writhed with pain as it came down flat on his shoulder.
 "Get on," Heinz repeated—adding, "damn you!" and worse—as
the blade went up again; and William and Griselda obeyed him
without further hesitation. Their heads were whirling and their
hearts throbbing with rage; but they choked back its verbal
expression and stumbled down the valley path—in the clutch of
brute force and with their world crumbling about them. It was a
most unpleasant walk—or rather trot; they were bruised, they were
aching from the handling they had received, and their breath came
in sobs from the pace they were forced to keep up. Did they slacken
it even for an instant and fall level with the walking horses, Heinz
shouted an order to "Hurry, you swine!" and flashed up his
threatening sword; whereupon, to keep out of its painful and
possibly dangerous reach, they forced themselves to a further effort
and broke into a shambling canter. The sweat poured off them as
they shambled and gasped, casting anxious glances at the horses'
heads behind them; and their visible distress, their panting and their
impotent anger, was a source of obvious and unrestrained
gratification to Heinz and his jovial companions. They jeered at the
captives' clumsy running and urged them to gallop faster. When
Griselda tripped over a tussock and sprawled her length on the
grass, they applauded her downfall long and joyously and begged
her to repeat the performance. The jeers hurt more than the
shaking, and she staggered to her feet with tears of wretchedness
and outraged dignity running openly down her nose—seeking in vain
for that sense of moral superiority and satisfaction in martyrdom
which had always sustained her en route to the cells of Bow Street.
She hated the three men who jeered at her miseries and could have
killed them with pleasure; every fibre of her body was quivering with
wrath and amazement. Neither she nor William could speak—they
had no breath left in them to speak; but every now and then as they
shambled along they turned their hot faces to look at each other—
and saw, each, a beloved countenance red with exertion and damp
with perspiration, a pair of bewildered blue eyes and a gasping open
mouth.... So they trotted down the valley, humiliated, dishevelled,
indignant, but still incredulous—while their world crumbled about
them and Europe thundered and bled.

CHAPTER VII

Looking back on the morning in the month of August, nineteen

hundred and fourteen, when he made his first acquaintance with
war as the soldier understands it, William Tully realized that fear, real
fear, was absent from his heart until he witnessed the shooting of
the hostages. Until that moment he had been unconvinced, and,
because unconvinced, unafraid; he had been indignant, flustered,
physically sore and inconvenienced; but always at the back of his
mind was the stubborn belief that the pains and indignities endured
by himself and his wife would be dearly paid for by the perpetrators.
He could conceive as yet of no state of society in which Law and the
bodily immunity of the peaceful citizen was not the ultimate
principle; and even the sight of a long grey battalion of infantry
plodding dustily westward on the road by the river had not
convinced him of war and the meaning of war. They came on the
trudging torrent of men as they debouched from the valley on to the
main road; and their captors halted them on the grass at the
roadside until the close grey ranks had passed. William and Griselda
were thankful for the few minutes' respite and breathing-space; they
wiped their hot faces and Griselda made ineffectual attempts to tidy
her tumbled hair. She was reminded by her pressing need of hairpins
that they had left their bags on the scene of their misfortune,
outside the farmhouse gate; they conversed about the loss in
undertones, and wondered if the bags would be recovered. They
were not without hopes, taking into account the loneliness of the
neighbourhood.... When the battalion, with its tail of attendant grey
carts, had passed, Heinz ordered them forward again—and they
moved on, fifty yards or so behind the last of the grey carts, and
trusting that their goal was at hand.
"If they're only taking us as far as the village," Griselda panted
hopefully.
They were—to the familiar little village with its miniature railway
station between the river and the cliff. The column of infantry
plodded dustily through and past it, but Heinz followed the rear-
guard only halfway down the street before he shouted to his
prisoners to halt. They halted—with an alacrity born of relief and a
sense of the wisdom of prompt obedience to orders—before an
unpretentious white building with a sentry stationed on either side of
the door. Heinz swung himself down from his horse and went into
the house, leaving William and Griselda in charge of his comrades
and standing at the side of the road.
William and Griselda looked about them. They had passed
through the place several times and were accustomed enough to its
usual appearance to be aware of the change that had come over it.
The rumbling grey carts behind which they had tramped were
already at the end of the village; they could see all the sunlit length
of the street and take stock of the new unfamiliar life which filled it
from end to end.
It was a life masculine and military; an odd mixture of iron
order and disorder; of soldiers on duty and soldiers taking their
ease. The street itself was untidy and littered as they had never
seen it before; its centre had been swept clear, so that traffic might
pass unhindered, but the sides of the road were strewn with a
jetsam of fragmentary lumber. A country cart that had lost a wheel
sat clumsily in front of the church near a jumble of broken pottery,
and a chair with its legs in the air was neighboured by trusses of
straw. All down the street the doors stood widely open—here and
there a house with starred or shattered windows looked unkempt
and forlornly shabby. Beyond shivered panes and occasional litter of
damaged crockery and furniture there was no sign of actual
violence; the encounter that had taken place there—a cavalry
skirmish between retreating Belgian and advancing German—had
left few traces behind it.
The civilians of the village, with hardly an exception, were
invisible. The landlord of the café was serving his soldier customers,
and two labourers were unloading sacks, from a miller's dray under
the eye of a guard; and when William and Griselda had been waiting
for a few minutes an old man crossed the road hurriedly from
opposite house to house—emerging from shelter like a rabbit from
its burrow and vanishing with a swift running hobble. As for women,
they saw only two—whom they were not to forget easily.
 They stood, the two women, a few yards away on the further
side of the road; almost opposite the door by which Heinz had
disappeared and with their eyes continually fixed on it. One—the
elder—was stout and grey-headed, very neatly dressed in black with
a black woollen scarf on her shoulders; her hands were folded,
meeting on her breast, and every now and then she bent her head
over them while her lips moved slowly and soundlessly. At such
moments she closed her eyes, but when she lifted her head again
they turned steadily to the door. The woman who stood beside her
was taller and younger, middle-aged, upright, and angular; she also
wore a black dress, and above her sharp and yellowish features an
unbecoming black hat—a high-crowned hat with upstanding and
rusty black bows. What struck you about her at the first glance was
her extreme respectability—in the line of her lean shoulders, in the
dowdily conventional hat; at a second, the fact that her mouth was a
line, so tightly were her lips compressed. She also stood with her
eyes fixed on the door. William and Griselda looked at the pair
curiously; it was odd and uncomfortable to see them standing at the
side of the road, their clothes dusted by passing cars, not moving or
speaking to each other.
For the rest, from end to end of the street there were only
soldiers in sight. Soldiers taking their noisy ease at the tables outside
the café—any number of them crowded round the little green tables
while the sweating landlord ran to and fro with a jug or a tray of
glasses and an obvious desire to propitiate. Other soldiers, less
noisy, led a string of horses to water; and a rigid file of them with
rifles grounded, was drawn up on the further side of the street not
far from the waiting women; some ten or a dozen of motionless
helmeted automata, with a young officer, a ruddy-faced boy, pacing
up and down the road in front of them. Through a gap in the row of
white houses William and Griselda saw another group of men in their
shirt-sleeves at work on the railway line—the line that should have
taken them to Brussels; they seemed to be repairing some damage
to the permanent way; and further down the village two or three
soldier mechanics were busied inquisitively at the bonnet of a heavy
grey car drawn up at the side of the road. While they waited and
watched other heavy grey cars of the same pattern rumbled into the
street and along it; and motor cycles one after another hooted and
clanked past them to vanish in a smothering trail of dust.
In after days William tried vainly to recall what he felt and
thought in the long hot minutes while they waited for Heinz to
reappear and for something to happen. He supposed that it was the
fiercer sensations of the time that followed which deadened the
impressions of the half-hour or so during which they stood in the
sunny street expecting they knew not what; and though he
remembered, and remembered vividly, the outward show and
manner of the place—its dusty road, its swarming soldiers, its
passing cars and cycles and the bearing of the two silent women—
the memory brought with it no hint of his accompanying attitude of
mind. All he knew was that he had not been seriously alarmed.... He
might have recalled his impressions with more success had he and
Griselda discussed at the time their new and surprising experiences;
but an attempt to enter into conversation was promptly checked by
one of their attendant guards. What he actually said was
unintelligible, but his manner conveyed his meaning and thereafter
the captives considered their situation in silence.
 He did not know how long it was before the hostages came out
into the street; but he remembered—it was his first distinct memory
of a vivid personal impression—the instantaneous thrill of relief and
excitement with which, after their dreary wait, he saw the first signs
of movement at the sentry-guarded door. A man—a soldier—came
out swiftly and went to the boy-officer, who thereupon stopped his
pacing; there was a clicking of heels, a salute and a message rapidly
delivered; the boy-officer turned and shouted to his men and, his
men moved at the word, their rifles going to their shoulders, as if by
the impulse of one will. William's eye was caught and held by the
oiled swiftness, the mechanical simultaneousness of the movement;
he stared at the line of uniforms, now rigidly inactive again, till a
hand from behind gripped his collar and impelled him urgently
sideways. One of his captors had adopted this simple method of
informing him that way must be made for those about to issue from
the door of the sentry-guarded house. He choked angrily and
brought up against the wall—to which Griselda, taking warning, had
hastily backed herself. He was still gasping when the little procession
came out; a soldier leading it, a couple more with bayonets fixed—
two civilians walking together—a couple more soldiers with bayonets
fixed and last of all an officer, a fattish, youngish, moustachioed man
whom the sentries stiffened to salute. He came a little behind his
men, paused on the step and stood there framed in the doorway
with his hand resting on his sword, the embodiment of conscious
authority; the others, the two civilians and their guard, went on to
the middle of the road. There, in the middle of the road, they also
halted—the soldiers smartly, the captives uncertainly—and William
saw the two civilians clearly.
 One was a short and rotund little man who might have been
sixty to sixty-five and might have been a local tradesman—nearly
bald and with drooping moustaches, rather like a stout little seal.
Essentially an ordinary and unpretentious creature, he was obviously
aiming at dignity; his chin was lifted at an angle that revealed the
measure of the roll of fat that rested on his collar, and he walked
almost with a strut, as if he were attempting to march. Afterwards
William remembered that he had seen on the little man's portly
stomach some sort of insignia or ribbon; at the time it conveyed
nothing to him, but he was told later that it was the outward token
of a mayor. He remembered also that the little man's face was pale,
with a sickly yellow-grey pallor; and that as he came down the steps
with his head held up the drooping moustache quivered and the fat
chin beneath it twitched spasmodically. There was something
extraordinarily pitiful about his attempt at a personal dignity which
nature had wholly denied him; William felt the appeal in it even
before he grasped the situation the meaning and need of the pose.
The man who walked on his left hand was taller and some years
younger—middle-aged, slightly stooping and with slightly grizzled
hair and beard. He belonged to an ordinary sedentary type, and
William, thinking him over later, was inclined to set him down a
schoolmaster, or perhaps a clerk. He wore steel-rimmed eye-glasses
and his black coat was shiny on the back and at the elbows; he had
none of his fellow's pomposity, and walked dragging his feet and
with his eyes bent on the ground. He raised them only when, as
they halted in the middle of the road, the respectable woman in
black called out something—one word, perhaps his name—came up
to him and caught him by the shoulder. He answered her quickly and
very briefly—with hardly more than a word—and for a second or two
after he had spoken she stood quite still, with her hand resting on
his shoulder. Then, suddenly, her sallow face contorted, her thin
mouth writhed and from it there came a cry that was too fierce to be
called a groan and too hoarse to be called a scream; she flung
herself forward on the neck of the grizzled man and her lean black
arms went round it. He tried to speak to her again, but she silenced
him by drawing down his head to her breast; she held it to her
breast and pressed it there; she rocked and swayed a little from side
to side, fondling the grizzled hair and kissing it to a stream of broken
endearment. Her grief was animal, alike in its unrestraint and its
terrible power of expression; convention fell away from her; in her
tidy dress and with her dowdy hat slipping to one shoulder she was
primitive woman crooning over her dying mate.... When she was
seized and drawn away from her man, her curved fingers clung to
his garments. Two soldiers held her and she writhed between them
choking out a hoarse incoherent appeal to the officer standing in the
frame of the doorway with his hand on the hilt of his sword; she
went on crying herself hoarser as her captors urged her further
down the street and at last, in mercy to those who looked on, out of
sight through an open doorway. William had his hands to his ears
when the door shut. No one, in spite of the persistence of her cries,
came out into the street to inquire the cause of her grief; but it
seemed to William afterwards that he had been aware here and
there of furtive faces that appeared at upper windows.
While they forced the dowdy woman away from him her man
stood motionless, turned away from her with his head bent and his
eyes on the ground, so that he started when a soldier came up
behind him and tapped him sharply on the arm. The soldier—he had
stripes on his sleeve and seemed a person of authority—held a
handkerchief dangling from his hand; and, seeing it, the grizzled-
haired captive removed his steel-rimmed eyeglasses.
"Don't look," said William under his breath. "Griselda, don't
look."
For the first time mortal fear had seized him by the throat and
shaken him. He knew now that he stood before death itself, and the
power to inflict death, and his heart was as water within him. His
wife was beside him—and when he realized (as he did later on with
shame) that the spasm of terror in those first moments of
comprehension had been stronger than the spasm of pity, he
excused it by the fact of her presence. His fear in its forecast of evil
took tangible shape. Griselda at his elbow had her eyes and her
mouth wide open; she was engrossed, fascinated—and he was
afraid, most horribly afraid, that in her amazement, her righteous
pity, she might say or do something that would bring down wrath
upon them. He remembered how bold she had been in the face of a
crowd, how uplifted by sacred enthusiasm! ... He plucked her by the
sleeve when he whispered to her not to look—but she went on
staring, wide-eyed and wide-mouthed, for the first time
unresponsive to his touch and the sound of his voice.
They bandaged the eyes of the two prisoners—the rotund
pompous little mayor and the man who might have been a
schoolmaster. All his life William remembered the look of the rotund
mayor with a bandage covering him from forehead to nose-tip and
his grey moustache quivering beneath it—a man most pitifully afraid
to die, yet striving to die as the situation demanded. And he
remembered how, at the moment the bandage was knotted on the
mayor's head, there stepped up to him quietly the stout old woman
who had stood praying on the further side of the road with her eyes
fixed upon the door. She held up a little crucifix and pressed it to the
quivering grey moustache.... Griselda clutched William by the wrist
and he thought she was going to cry out.
"Don't, darling, don't!" he whispered. "Oh, darling, for both our
sakes!" ...
He did not know whether it was his appeal or her own terror
and amazement that restrained her from speech—but she stood in
silence with her fingers tightened on his wrist. He wished she would
look away, he wished he could look away himself; he tried for an
instant to close his eyes, but the not-seeing was worse than sight,
and he had to open them again. As he opened them a car roared by
raising a smother of dust; but as the cloud of its passage settled he
saw that the two blindfolded men were standing with their backs to
a blank wall—a yellow-washed, eight-foot garden wall with the
boughs of a pear-tree drooping over it. It was opposite the yellow-
washed wall, across the road, that the file of soldiers was drawn up;
the captives were facing the muzzles of their rifles and the red-faced
boy-officer had stationed himself stiffly at the farther end of the file.
The dust settled and died down—and there followed (so it seemed
to William) an agony of waiting for something that would not
happen. Long beating seconds (three or four of them at most) while
two men stood upright with bandaged eyes and rifles pointed at
their hearts; long beating seconds, while a bird fluted in the pear-
tree—a whistle-note infinitely careless.... And then (thank God for
it!) a voice and a report that were as one.... The man with the
grizzled hair threw out an arm and toppled with his face in the dust;
the mayor slid sideways against the wall with the blood dribbling
from his mouth.
 CHAPTER VIII

Fundamentally William was no more of a coward than the majority

of his fellow-men, and, put to it, he would have emulated the
shivering little mayor and tried to strut gamely to his end; it was as
much sheer bewildered amazement as the baseness of bodily terror
that had him by the throat when he saw the hostages done to death
—sickening and shaking him and, for the moment, depriving him of
self-control. Never before, in all his twenty-eight years, had he seen
a man come to his end; so far death had touched him only once,
and but slightly, by the unseen passing of a mother he had not
loved; thus the spectacle of violent and bloody dying would of itself
have sufficed to unnerve and unman him. To the natural shrinking
from that spectacle, to his natural horror at the slaying of helpless
men, to his pity and physical nausea was added the impotent,
gasping confusion of the man whose faith has been uprooted, who is
face to face with the incredible. Before his eyes had been enacted
the impossible—the ugly and brutal impossible—and beneath his feet
the foundations of the earth were reeling. The iron-mouthed guns
and the marching columns which had hitherto passed him as a dusty
pageant took life and meaning in his eyes; they were instruments of
the ugly impossible. There was meaning too in the lonely grave and
in the lonely house—whence men had fled in terror of such scenes
as his eyes had witnessed. So far, to him, the limit of human
savagery had been the feeding through the nose of divers young
women who, infected with the virus of martyrdom, demanded to be
left to die—and now he had witnessed the killing of men who
desired most greatly to live. At the time he did not—because he
could not—analyse either the elements of the situation or his own
attitude towards it; but he knew afterwards, vaguely but surely, that
in that one bewildering and ruthless moment the heart of his faith
was uprooted—his faith in that large vague entity the People, in the
power of Public Opinion and Talk, in the power of the Good
Intention.... Until that moment he had confounded the blunder with
the crime, the mistaken with the evilly intentioned. It had not
seemed to him possible that a man could disagree with him honestly
and out of the core of his heart; it had not seemed to him possible
that the righteous could be righteous and yet err. He knew now, as
by lightning flash, that he, Faraday, a thousand others, throwing
scorn from a thousand platforms on the idea of a European War, had
been madly, wildly, ridiculously wrong—and the knowledge stunned
and blinded him. They had meant so well, they had meant so
exceedingly well—and yet they had prophesied falsely and fact had
given them the lie. Until that moment he had been in what he called
politics the counterpart of the Christian Scientist, despising and
denying the evil that now laughed triumphant in his face. With its
triumph perforce he was converted. War was: men were shot
against walls. Converted, though as yet he knew not to what form of
unknown faith.
He did not see what became of the two dead bodies—whither
they were taken or by whom they were buried—for they had barely
fallen to the ground and his eyes were still closed that he might not
look on the blood that was dribbling from the mayor's moustache
when a hand tapped him smartly on the shoulder and he found
Heinz standing beside him. He had a glimpse of men moving round
the bodies, a glimpse of his wife's face staring and sickly, another of
a passing motor-cycle, and then Heinz turned him to the door where
the sentries stood on guard. With his captor's hand on his shoulder
he went into the low white house, along a little passage on the
ground floor and into a room on the right, at the back of the house;
Griselda coming after him, still staring and white-faced and likewise
with a hand on her shoulder. In the room—large and sunny with
windows looking on to a garden—was a man in uniform and
spectacles writing at a table, and, erect and complacent beside him,
the fattish moustachioed officer who had watched the execution
from the doorstep. He was lighting a cigar with a hand that did not
tremble. William and Griselda were escorted by their guards into the
middle of the room and planted there, standing in front of him.
After what he had seen, and with the memory of Heinz's
threats, William Tully believed most firmly that he too was about to
die; and with the conviction there filled his heart (as it would have
filled the heart of any honest lover) a great and intolerable pity for
Griselda, his new-made wife. She, the woman, would be left where
he, the man, would be taken—and he dared not turn his head
towards her lest he might see her face instinct with the agony of the
coming parting, lest, foreseeing and resisting it, she should fling her
arms about him and croon over him as the sallow-faced woman in
respectable black had crooned over the head of her man. Her
meanings, the meanings of a woman unknown, had torn at his
inmost heart; how should he bear it when Griselda, his darling, clung
fast to him and cried in vain for pity? ... That he might not see
Griselda's face even with the tail of an eye he stared hard and
steadily over the officer's shoulder. He never forgot the wall-paper
beyond the well-filled grey uniform; it was dingy mud and orange as
to ground with a ponderous pattern of clumped and climbing
vegetables. In one spot, opposite the window, where a blaze of
sunlight struck it, the mud and orange was transfigured to shining
gold—and William knew suddenly that he had never seen sunlight
before. For the first time he saw it as vivid glory from heaven—when
his eyes (as he thought) would soon close on its splendour for ever.
Not only his sight but his every sense was alert and most sharply
intense; on a sudden the thudding of guns in the distance was
threateningly nearer at hand, and, in the interval between the gun-
bursts, a wasp beating up and down the window-pane filled the
room with a spiteful humming.
It was while he stood waiting for the doom he believed to be
certain, while the German captain looked him up and down and
addressed curt unintelligible questions to those who had made him
their prisoner—that there stirred in the breast of William Tully the
first faint sense of nationality. He did not recognize it as such, and it
was not to be expected that he should, since his life for the last few
strenuous years had been largely moulded on the principle that the
love of one's country was a vice to be combated and sneered at. If
you had told him a short day earlier that the thought of the soil he
was born on could move and thrill and uplift him, he would have
stared and despised you as a jingo, that most foolish and degraded
of survivals; yet with his eyes (as he thought) looking their last on
the blazing gold that was sunlight, with the sword suspended over
his trembling head, something that was not only his pitiful love for
Griselda, something that was more than his decent self-respect,
fluttered and stirred within him and called on him to play the man. It
bade him straighten his back before men of an outlandish race, it
bade him refrain from pleading and weakness before those who
were not of his blood; and for the first time for many years he
thought of himself as a national, a man of the English race. Not
consciously as yet and with no definite sense of affection for England
or impulse to stand by her and serve her; but with a vague,
unreasoning, natural longing for home and the narrow things of
home. It mattered not that the England he longed for was small,
suburban, crowded and noisily pretentious; he craved for it in the
face of death, as other men crave for their spacious fenlands or the
sweep of their open downs. England as he knew her called him, not
with the noisy call of yesterday, but in a voice less strident and more
tender; he knew now that it was dreadful to die away from her.
Instinctively, thinking on London, he drew himself up to the height of
his five foot five and—as the mayor had done before him—he lifted
his chin in would-be defiance and dignity.
There—with the attempt to subdue the trembling flesh and defy
brute insolence and tyranny—the resemblance between the two
men's cases ended. For the time being William ran no risk of a
violent and bloody ending; there was no further need of an example
and he had offended the conqueror only by his poor little presence.
Further—though he expressed his enjoyment of it less noisily and
emphatically than his three subordinates had done—the humour of
his prisoner's situation appealed to Heinz's superior officer almost as
much as it had appealed to Heinz himself. He grinned perceptibly as
he questioned the couple in his somewhat halting English; chuckled
audibly when they confirmed his subordinate's statement as to their
complete ignorance of the European upheaval; and when he had
elicited the fact that the hapless pair had been spending their
honeymoon in the secluded valleys of Ardennes he removed his
cigar from his moustachioed lips that he might chuckle long and
unhindered.
"Honeymoon," he repeated, his stout shoulders trembling with
merriment. "In a nice, quiet place, wiz no one to interrupt zee
kissings. Never mind—you will have a very good honeymoon with us
and you will very soon be able to go back to England. Just so soon
as the Sherman Army shall have been there. You should be very
pleased that you are safe with us: it is more dangerous to be in
London."
William, with his nerves tuned up to face a firing party, withered
miserably under heavy jocularity. He knew instinctively that his life
was saved to him; but the assurance of safety was conveyed in a
jeer, and at the moment (so oddly are we made) the jeer hurt more
than the assurance of safety relieved him. He had mastered his
anguish and strung himself up—to be treated as a figure of fun; the
spectacled clerk at the writing-table was laughing so heartily that he
had to remove his glasses and wipe them before he continued his
labours. William tingled all over with helpless rage as Griselda tingled
beside him. But yesterday he would have told you loftily that both he
and his wife were inured to public, above all to official, ridicule; but
it is one thing to brave ridicule with an approving audience in the
background, another to face it unapplauded, uncrowned with the
halo of the martyr.... They reddened and quivered whilst
incomprehensible witticisms passed between the captain and his
clerk. It was an intense relief when a nod and a brief order signified
that the jest was sufficiently enjoyed and their audience with the
captain at an end. They were too thankful even to resent the
roughness with which Heinz collared his man while his comrade
collared Griselda.

CHAPTER IX

One of the features of the interview that struck William later on was
this—during all the long minutes that it lasted Griselda had spoken
no words. For once the tumult and amazement of her soul was
beyond her glib power of expression and it was only as they came
into the open air that—for the first time since she had seen the
hostages die—she unclosed her lips and spoke.
"What are they going to do with us?" she asked. Her voice was
husky and uncertain, and the words came out in little jerks.
William gave the question no answer: for one thing because his
ignorance of their destiny was as thorough as his wife's; for another
because speech, by reason of Heinz's firm grip on his collar, was so
difficult as to be almost impossible. The man had his knuckles thrust
tightly between shirt and skin; William purpled and gasped as he
trotted down the street with a collar stud pressing on his windpipe.
Behind him when he started came Griselda and her guard; as he
could not twist his head to look over his shoulder he had no
suspicion that the couples had parted company, and it was not until
his captor turned him sharply to the right down a by-road leading to
the station that he discovered, in rounding the corner, that his wife
and her escort were no longer following in his footsteps. The
momentary sidelong glimpse he caught of the road gave him never a
sight of Griselda; she had vanished without word or sign. For a
moment he could hardly believe it and walked on stupidly in silence;
then, the stupor passing, his terror found voice and he clamoured.
"Where's my wife?" he cried out and writhed instinctively to free
himself. His reward was a tightening of the German's strangle-hold,
some most hearty abuse and some even heartier kicks. Under the
punishment he lost his foothold and would have fallen but for
Heinz's clutch upon his collar; when the punishment was over he
was brought up trembling and choking. In that moment he suffered
the fiercest of torments, the fire of an ineffectual hate. He hated
Heinz and could have torn him; but he had been taught the folly of
blind wrestling with the stronger and, for Griselda's sake, he
swallowed his fury and cringed.
"Where is she?" he begged most humbly and pitifully as Heinz
thrust him forward again. "For mercy's sake tell me what you have
done with my wife—with my wife? ... If you will only let me know
where she is? That's all—just to let me know."
He was answered by the silence of contempt and a renewed
urge along the road; he obeyed because he could do no other,
whimpering aloud in the misery of this new and sharpest of
misfortunes. As he pled and whimpered terrible thoughts came
hurrying into his brain; all things were possible in these evil times
and among these evil men—and there was a dreadful, hideously
familiar phrase anent "licentious soldiery": a phrase that had once
been just a phrase and that was now a present horror beating hard
in his burning head. He stumbled on with the tears running down his
cheeks, and discovered suddenly that he was whispering under his
breath the name of God—all things else having failed him. He did
not realize that he was sobbing and shedding great tears until
halfway along the road when a German soldier met them. The man
as he passed turned his head to laugh at the sight of a face
grotesque and distorted in its wretchedness; whereupon there flared
up again in William that new sense of blood and breed and with it an
instant rush of shame that he had wept before these—Germans! He
gulped back his tears, strove to stiffen his face and clenched his
hands to endure.
He had need in the hours that came after of all his powers of
endurance alike of body and of mind. The day that already seemed
age-long was far from being at its height when Griselda was taken
away from him and all through the heat till close upon sundown he
was put to hard physical toil. Level with the village the railway line
had been torn up and the little wayside station was a half-burnt
mass of wreckage; a detachment of retreating Belgians had done
their best to destroy it, had derailed an engine and half a dozen
trucks and done such damage as time allowed to a stretch of the
permanent way. In its turn a detachment of Germans was hard at
work at removal of the wreckage and repairs to the line; and into
their service they had pressed such villagers as had not fled at their
approach. A cowed, unhappy band they toiled and sweated, dug,
carried loads and levelled the broken soil; some stupidly submissive,
some openly sullen to their captors, some pitiably eager to please:
all serfs for the time being and all of them ignorant of what the next
hour might bring forth of further terror or misfortune.
 To this captive little company William Tully was joined, handed
over by Heinz to its taskmaster—to become of them all the most
pitiable, because for the first time in all his days set to bend his back
and use his muscles in downright labour of the body. What to others
was merely hardship, to him became torment unspeakable; he
wearied, he sweated, he ached from head to heel. When he pulled
at heavy wreckage he cut his soft clumsy fingers; when he dragged
a load or carried it he strained his unaccustomed back. His hands
bled and blistered and the drops of perspiration poured off him;
when he worked slowly because of his weariness or lack of skill,
authority made no allowance for either and a blow often followed a
curse. Sometimes incomprehensible orders were shouted at him and
he would run to obey confusedly, for fear of the punishment meted
out without mercy to the dilatory—guessing at what was required of
him, sometimes rightly and sometimes wrongly. The day remained
on his mind as an impression of muddled terror and panic intense
and unceasing.
When he thought he was not being watched he would lift his
head from his toil and strain his eyes this way and that in the hope
of a glimpse of Griselda. Unspeakably greater than his fear for
himself was the measure of his fear for his wife. He knew that
somewhere she must be held by force in the same way that he was
held, otherwise she would have sought him out long ere this, and,
even if not allowed to approach or speak would have managed to
see him and make him some sign that his heart might be set at rest.
His brain was giddy with undefined horror and once or twice he
started and raised his head imagining that Griselda was calling to
him. Once when he looked up his eye caught the bluff towering over
the valley and he remembered with an incredulous shock that it was
only yesterday that he and his wife, stretched out on the turf, had
watched the galloping of the ants of soldiers beneath it—that it was
not a day since they had listened indifferently to the mutter of guns
in the distance and talked with superior detachment of manoeuvres
and the folly of militarism. Side by side on the short-cropped turf
they had watched unmoved and listened without misgiving. Only
yesterday—nay, only this morning when the sun rose—the world was
the world and not hell.
He knew though, engrossed by his private agony, he did not
give it much heed, that all the afternoon there was heavy traffic on
the road that ran through the village, traffic going this way and that;
now and again through the clatter of the work around him its rumble
came to his ears. Noisy cars went by and heavy guns, regiments of
infantry and once or twice a company of swift-moving horse that
sped westward in a flurry of dust. As the hot, industrious hours
crawled by even his terror for Griselda was swallowed up in the
numbing and all-pervading sense of bodily exhaustion and ill-being,
in the consciousness of throbbing head, parched mouth and
miserable back. At midday when the captives were doled out a ration
of meat and bread he lay like a log for the little space during which
he was allowed to rest; and, resting, he dreaded from the bottom of
his soul the inevitable call back to work. With it all was the hopeless,
the terrifying sense of isolation; he was removed even from his
fellow-sufferers, held apart from them not only by the barrier of their
alien speech but by his greater feebleness and greater physical
suffering. Only once during those sun-smitten and aching hours did
he feel himself akin to any of the men around him—when a flat-
capped, sturdy young German soldier, taking pity on his manifest
unfitness for the work, muttered some good-natured,
incomprehensible encouragement and handed him a bottle to drink
from. The sharp taste of beer was a liquid blessing to William's dry
tongue and parched throat; he tilted the bottle and drank in great
gulps till he choked; whereat the flat-capped German boy-soldier
laughed consumedly but not unkindly.
It must have been well on in the afternoon—for the shadows
were beginning to lengthen though the sun burned hotly as ever—
when over the noises of the toil around him and over the rumble of
traffic on the road the persistent beat of guns became loud enough
to make itself noticeable. All day William had heard it at intervals;
during his brief rest at midday it had been frequent but distant; now
it had spurted into sudden nearness and was rapid, frequent,
continuous. A little group of his fellow-toilers looked up from their
work as they heard the sound, drew closer together and exchanged
mutterings till an order checked them sharply; and even after the
order was rapped out one square-shouldered, brown-faced
countryman continued to stare down the valley with stubbornly
determined eyes.
William's eyes followed the countryman's, and for a moment
saw nothing but what he had seen before—cliffs, the river and the
hot blue sky, without a feather of cloud to it; then, suddenly, away
down the valley, there puffed out a ball of white smoke, and before
it had faded another. The man with the stubborn eyes grunted
something beneath his breath and turned again to his work; William,
continuing to gaze curiously at the bursting puffs, was reminded of
his duties by a louder shout and the threat of a lifted arm. He, too,
bent again and with haste to his work; to look up furtively as the
thunder deepened and see always those bursts of floating cloud
down the valley or against the hot horizon.
He knew, or rather guessed, in after days when his sublime
ignorance of all things military had been tempered by the
newspapers, by daily war-talk and by actual contact with the soldier,
that the sudden appearance of those bursting puffs had indicated
some temporary and local check to the advancing German divisions,
that a French or Belgian force must have pushed or fought its way
across the triangular plateau between the Meuse and its tributary;
must have driven before them the Germans in the act of occupying
it, must have brought up their guns and commanded for the
moment a stretch of the lateral valley and the line of
communications along it. It was not left long in unmolested
possession thereof; nearer guns answered it swiftly from all
directions, from other heights and from the valley; shells whined
overhead, from time to time the ground shook, and it dawned upon
William, as he looked and listened, that what he saw was a battle.
At first he was more impressed by the thought than he was by
the actuality—since the effects of the conflict were not in the
beginning terrible. True there was something threatening in the
near-by thudding of a German battery when first it made itself
heard. But such harm as it inflicted was unseen by William, and for
the space of an hour or so it drew no returning fire and the village
stood untouched and undamaged. But as the evening drew in the
thunder deepened and quickened; both sides, it would seem, had
brought up reinforcements, and guns opened fire from new and
unexpected places, from heights, from behind garden walls. Down
the road along which William had been urged with ungentleness by
Heinz a gun-team clattered and jingled at breakneck speed; it pulled
up close to the railway line, not fifty yards from the spot where the
prisoners were working in the shadow of a clump of young trees; the
gun was placed swiftly in position, the horses were led away and
after a momentary interval the men began to fire—steadily, swiftly,
on the order. William watched them with his mouth wide open till
reminded smartly of his idleness; they were so swift, precise and
machine-like. It required an effort of the imagination to remember
what they were doing.
"Killing," he said to himself, "those men are killing!" And he
found himself wondering what their faces looked like while they
killed? Whether they liked doing it? ...
He supposed later (when that first ignorance of things military
was a little less sublime) that the firing from the immediate
neighbourhood of the village had at first inflicted but little damage
on the opposing forces on the heights; at any rate it remained
practically unanswered till close upon sunset, the French or Belgian
gunners concentrating their fire upon enemies nearer, more
aggressive, or more vulnerably placed. Perhaps (he never knew for
certain) they had got the better, for the time being, of those other
more aggressive or more vulnerable opponents; perhaps they had
received reinforcements which had enabled them to push higher up
the valley or had at last been punished by a fire hitherto ineffectual;
whatever the cause, as the sun grew red to the westward, a first
shell screamed on to the dusty road outside the village and burst in
a pother of smoke and flying clods. William heard the burst and saw
the cloud rise; he was still round-eyed when another shell screamed
overhead to find its billet in a garden wall a few yards behind the
battery, scattering the stones thereof and splintering the boughs of
an apple-tree. A shower of broken fragments came pattering about
the station; William was perhaps too much stupefied by pain and
weariness to understand the extent of his danger but several of his
fellows stirred uneasily and two of them threw down their spades
and started in headlong flight. They were brought up swiftly by the
threat of a bayonet in their path; one of them came back sullenly
dumb, the other whimpering aloud with a hand pressed to his face.
William saw that his cheek was bleeding where a flying fragment
had caught it. He was looking at the man as he nursed his torn face
and bemoaned himself when a third shell struck what remained of
the station roof.
William did not know whether he fell on his face instinctively or
was thrown by the force of the explosion; he remembered only that
as he scrambled to his feet, half-deafened and crying for help, he
saw through a settling cloud of dust the disappearing backs of some
three or four men who were all of them running away from him. He
was seized with a mortal terror of being left alone in this torment of
thunder and disaster; he believed he must be hurt, perhaps hurt to
the death, and a pang of rage and self-pity went through him at the
thought of his desertion by his fellows. He started after the
vanishing backs, calling out to them to wait, abusing and appealing,
and stumbling over ruin as he ran. The distant gunners had found
their enemies' range, and he had not made half a dozen yards when
he ducked to the threat of another shell that burst, as he thought,
close beside him. He cringed and shivered for a moment, covering
his eyes with his hands; then, finding himself uninjured, darted off at
an angle, still shielding his eyes and gasping out, "God, oh God—for
mercy's sake, oh God!" He knew in every fibre of his trembling body
that he was about to die, and his prayer was meant not only for
himself but for Griselda. As he ran on blindly, an animal wild and
unreasoning, a hand caught him above the ankle and he screamed
aloud with rage and terror at finding himself held fast.
"Let me go," he cried struggling; then, as the hand still gripped,
bent down to wrest himself free and looked into a face that he knew
—a young plump face with a budding moustache surmounted by a
flat German cap. It was twisted now into a grin of agony, but all the
same he recognized the face of the German boy-soldier who had
dealt kindly with him that afternoon in the matter of the bottle of
beer. He was lying on his back and covered from the middle
downwards with a litter of broken beam and ironwork blown away
from the ruin of the station. The effect of the recognition on William
was curiously and instantly sobering; he was no longer alone in the
hell where the ground reeled and men ran from him; he was no
longer an animal wild and unreasoning, but a man with a definite
human relationship to the boy lying broken at his feet. He began to
lift the wreckage from the crushed legs and talked as he did so,
forgetting that the wounded man in all likelihood understood not a
word of his English.
"All right, I'll get it off, I'll help you. You were good to me giving
me a drink, so I'll stay and help you. Otherwise I oughtn't to wait,
not a minute—you see, I must look for my wife. My first duty is to
her—she's my wife and I don't know where she is. But I won't leave
you like this because of what you did for me this afternoon." He
wrenched and tugged at the shattered and entangled wreckage till
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