Works of Robert W Chambers

by Robert W. Chambers

  Grahame called to them from the cottage: “You can get a horse and wagon here! Come and eat something at once!”

  Slowly, with weary, drooping heads, they walked across the road, past a wretched custom-house, where two painted sentry-boxes leaned, past a squalid barnyard full of amber-coloured, unsavoury puddles and gaunt poultry, up to the thatched stone house where Grahame stood waiting. Over the door hung a withered branch of mistletoe, above this swung a sign:

  ESTAMINET.

  “Your Uhlan is in a bad way, I think,” began Grahame; “he’s got a broken arm and two broken ribs. This is a nasty little place to leave him in.”

  “Grahame,” said Jack, earnestly, “I’ve got to leave him. I am forced to go to Sedan as soon as we can swallow a bit of bread and wine. The Uhlan is my comrade and friend; he may be more than that some day. What on earth am I to do?”

  They followed Grahame into a room where a table stood covered by a moist, unpleasant cloth. The meal was simple — a half-bottle of sour red wine for each guest, a fragment of black bread, and a râgout made of something that had once been alive — possibly a chicken, possibly a sheep.

  Grahame finished his wine, bolted a morsel or two of bread and râgout, and leaned back in his chair with a whimsical glance at Lorraine.

  “Now, I’ll tell you what I’ll do, Marche,” he said. “My horses need rest, so do I, so does our wounded Uhlan. I’ll stay in this garden of Eden until noon, if you like, then I’ll drive our wounded man to Diekirch, where the Hôtel des Ardennes is as good an inn as you can find in Luxembourg, or in Belgium either. Then I’ll follow you to Sedan.”

  They all rose from the table; Lorraine came and held out her hand, thanking Grahame for his kindness to them and to Rickerl.

  “Good-by,” said Grahame, going with them to the door. “There’s your dog-cart; it’s paid for, and here’s a little bag of French money — no thanks, my dear fellow; we can settle all that later. But what the deuce you two children are going to Sedan for is more than my old brains can comprehend.”

  He stood, with handsome head bared, and bent gravely over Lorraine’s hands — impulsive little hands, now trembling, as the tears of gratitude trembled on her lashes.

  And so they drove away in their dog-cart, down the flat, poplar-bordered road, silent, deeply moved, wondering what the end might be.

  The repeated shocks, the dreadful experiences and encounters, the indelible impressions of desolation and grief and suffering had deadened in Lorraine all sense of personal suffering or grief. For her land and her people her heart had bled, drop by drop — her sensitive soul lay crushed within her. Nothing of selfish despair came over her, because France still stood. She had suffered too much to remember herself. Even her love for Jack had become merely a detail. She loved as she breathed — involuntarily. There was nothing new or strange or sweet in it — nothing was left of its freshness, its grace, its delicacy. The bloom was gone.

  In her tired breast her heart beat faintly; its burden was the weary repetition of a prayer — an old, old prayer — a supplication — for mercy, for France, and for the salvation of its people. Where she had learned it she did not know; how she remembered it, why she repeated it, minute by minute, hour by hour, she could not tell. But it was always beating in her heart, this prayer — old, so old! — and half forgotten —

  “‘To Thee, Mary, exalted —

  To Thee, Mary, exalted—’”

  Her tired heart took up the rhythm where her mind refused to follow, and she leaned on Jack’s shoulder, looking out over the gray land with innocent, sorrowful eyes.

  Vaguely she remembered her lonely childhood, but did not grieve; vaguely she thought of her youth, passing away from a tear-drenched land through the smoke of battles. She did not grieve — the last sad tear for self had fallen and quenched the last smouldering spark of selfishness. The wasted hills of her province seemed to rise from their ashes and sear her eyes; the flames of a devastated land dazzled and pained her; every drop of French blood that drenched the mother-land seemed drawn from her own veins — every cry of terror, every groan, every gasp, seemed wrenched from her own slender body. The quiet, wide-eyed dead accused her, the stark skeletons of ravaged houses reproached her.

  She turned to the man she loved, but it was the voice of a dying land that answered, “Come!” and she responded with all a passion of surrender. What had she accomplished as yet? In the bitterness of her loneliness she answered, “Nothing.” She had worked by the wayside as she passed — in the field, in the hospital, in the midst of beleaguered soldiers. But what was that? There was something else further on that called her — what she did not know, and yet she knew it was waiting somewhere for her. “Perhaps it is death,” she mused, leaning on Jack’s shoulder. “Perhaps it is his death.” That did not frighten her; if it was to be, it would be; but, through it, through the hideous turmoil of fire and blood and pounding guns and shouting — through death itself — somewhere, on the other side of the dreadful valley of terror, lay salvation for the mother-land. Thither they were bound — she and the man she loved.

  All around them lay the flat, colourless plains of Luxembourg; to the east, the wagon-train of wounded crawled across the landscape under a pallid sky. The road now bore towards the frontier again; Jack shook the reins listlessly; the horse loped on. Slowly they approached the border, where, on the French side, the convoy crept forward enveloped in ragged clouds of dust. Now they could distinguish the drivers, blue-bloused and tattered, swinging their long whips; now they saw the infantry, plodding on behind the wagons, stringing along on either flank, their officers riding with bent heads, the red legs of the fantassins blurred through the red dust.

  At the junction of the two roads stood a boundary post. A slovenly Luxembourg gendarme sat on a stone under it, smoking and balancing his rifle over both knees.

  “You can’t pass,” he said, looking up as Jack drew rein. A moment later he pocketed a gold piece that Jack offered, yawned, laughed, and yawned again.

  “You can buy contraband cigars at two sous each in the village below,” he observed.

  “What news is there to tell?” demanded Jack.

  “News? The same as usual. They are shelling Strassbourg with mortars; the city is on fire. Six hundred women and children left the city; the International Aid Society demanded it.”

  Presently he added: “A big battle was fought this morning along the Meuse. You can hear the guns yet.”

  “I have heard them for an hour,” replied Jack.

  They listened. Far to the south the steady intonation of the cannon vibrated, a vague sustained rumour, no louder, no lower, always the same monotonous measure, flowing like the harmony of flowing water, passionless, changeless, interminable.

  “Along the Meuse?” asked Jack, at last.

  “Yes.”

  “Sedan?”

  “Yes, Sedan.”

  The slow convoy was passing now; the creak of wheel and the harsh scrape of axle and spring grated in their ears; the wind changed; the murmur of the cannonade was blotted out in the trample of hoofs, the thud of marching infantry.

  Jack swung his horse’s head and drove out across the boundary into the French road. On every side crowded the teams, where the low mutter of the wounded rose from the foul straw; on every side pressed the red-legged infantry, rifles en bandoulière, shrunken, faded caps pushed back from thin, sick faces.

  “My soldiers!” murmured Lorraine, sitting up straight. “Oh, the pity of it! — the pity!”

  An officer passed, followed by a bugler. He glanced vacantly at Jack, then at Lorraine. Another officer came by, leading his patient, bleeding horse, over which was flung the dusty body of a brother soldier.

  The long convoy was moving more swiftly now; the air trembled with the cries of the mangled or the hoarse groans of the dying. A Sister of Mercy — her frail arm in a sling — crept on her knees among the wounded lying in a straw-filled cart. Over all, louder, deeper, dominating the confusion
of the horses and the tramp of men, rolled the cannonade. The pulsating air, deep-laden with the monstrous waves of sound, seemed to beat in Lorraine’s face — the throbbing of her heart ceased for a moment. Louder, louder, nearer, more terrible sounded the thunder, breaking in long, majestic reverberations among the nearer hills; the earth began to shake, the sky struck back the iron-throated echoes — sounding, resounding, from horizon to horizon.

  And now the troops around them were firing as they advanced; sheeted mist lashed with lightning enveloped the convoy, through which rang the tremendous clang of the cannon. Once there came a momentary break in the smoke — a gleam of hills, and a valley black with men — a glimpse of a distant town, a river — then the stinging smoke rushed outward, the little flames leaped and sank and played through the fog. Broad, level bands of mist, fringed with flame, cut the pasture to the right; the earth rocked with the stupendous cannon shock, the ripping rifle crashes chimed a dreadful treble.

  There was a bridge there in the mist; an iron gate, a heavy wall of masonry, a glimpse of a moat below. The crowded wagons, groaning under their load of death, the dusty infantry, the officers, the startled horses, jammed the bridge to the parapets. Wheels splintered and cracked, long-lashed whips snapped and rose, horses strained, recoiled, leaped up, and fell scrambling and kicking.

  “Open the gates, for God’s sake!” they were shouting.

  A great shell, moaning in its flight above the smoke, shrieked and plunged headlong among the wagons. There came a glare of blinding light, a velvety white cloud, a roar, and through the gates, no longer choked, rolled the wagon-train, a frantic stampede of men and horses. It caught the dog-cart and its occupants with it; it crushed the horse, seized the vehicle, and flung it inside the gates as a flood flings driftwood on the rocks.

  Jack clung to the reins; the wretched horse staggered out into the stony street, fell, and rolled over stone-dead.

  Jack turned and caught Lorraine in both arms, and jumped to a sidewalk crowded with soldiers, and at the same time the crush of wagons ground the dog-cart to splinters on the cobble-stones. The crowd choked every inch of the pavement — women, children, soldiers, shouting out something that seemed to move the masses to delirium. Jack, his arm around Lorraine, beat his way forward through the throng, murmuring anxiously, “Are you hurt, Lorraine? Are you hurt?” And she replied, faintly, “No, Jack. Oh, what is it? What is it?”

  Soldiers blocked his way now, but he pushed between them towards a cleared space on a slope of grass. Up the slope he staggered and out on to a stone terrace above the crush of the street. An officer stood alone on the terrace, pulling at some ropes around a pole on the parapet.

  “What — what is that?” stammered Lorraine, as a white flag shot up along the flag-staff and fluttered drearily over the wall.

  “Lorraine!” cried Jack; but she sprang to the pole and tore the ropes free. The white flag fell to the ground.

  The officer turned to her, his face whiter than the flag. The crowd in the street below roared.

  “Monsieur,” gasped Lorraine, “France is not conquered! That flag is the flag of dishonour!”

  They stared at each other in silence, then the officer stepped to the flag-pole and picked up the ropes.

  “Not that! — not that!” cried Lorraine, shuddering.

  “It is the Emperor’s orders.”

  The officer drew the rope tight — the white flag crawled slowly up the staff, fluttered, and stopped.

  Lorraine covered her eyes with her hands; the roar of the crowd below was in her ears.

  “O God! — O God!” she whispered.

  “Lorraine!” whispered Jack, both arms around her.

  Her head fell forward on her breast.

  Overhead the white flag caught the breeze again, and floated out over the ramparts of Sedan.

  “By the Emperor’s orders,” said the officer, coming close to Jack.

  Then for the first time Jack saw that it was Georges Carrière who stood there, ghastly pale, his eyes fixed on Lorraine.

  “She has fainted,” muttered Jack, lifting her. “Georges, is it all over?”

  “Yes,” said Georges, and he walked over to the flag-pole, and stood there looking up at the white badge of dishonour.

  CHAPTER XXX

  THE VALLEY OF THE SHADOW

  Daylight was fading in the room where Lorraine lay in a stupor so deep that at moments the Sister of Mercy and the young military surgeon could scarcely believe her alive there on the pillows.

  Jack, his head on his arms, stood by the window, staring out vacantly at the streak of light in the west, against which, on the straight, gray ramparts, the white flag flapped black against the dying sun.

  Under the window, in the muddy, black streets, the packed throngs swayed and staggered and trampled through the filth, amid a crush of camp-wagons, artillery, ambulances, and crowding squadrons of cavalry. Riotous line soldiers cried out “Treason!” and hissed their generals or cursed their Emperor; the tall cuirassiers surged by in silence, sombre faces turned towards the west, where the white flag flew on the ramparts. Heavier, denser, more suffocating grew the crush; an ambulance broke down, a caisson smashed into a lamp-post, a cuirassier’s horse slipped in the greasy depths of the filth, pitching its steel-clad rider to the pavement. Through the Place d’Alsace-Lorraine, through the Avenue du Collège and the Place d’Armes, passed the turbulent torrent of men and horses and cannon. The Grande Rue was choked from the church to the bronze statue in the Place Turenne; the Porte de Paris was piled with dead, the Porte de Balan tottered a mass of ruins.

  The cannonade still shook the hills to the south in spite of the white flag on the citadel. There were white flags, too, on the ramparts, on the Port des Capucins, and at the Gate of Paris. An officer, followed by a lancer, who carried a white pennon on his lance-point, entered the street from the north. A dozen soldiers and officers hacked it off with their sabres, crying, “No surrender! no surrender!” Shells continued to fall into the packed streets, blowing horrible gaps in the masses of struggling men. The sun set in a crimson blaze, reflecting on window and roof and the bloody waters of the river. When at last it sank behind the smoky hills, the blackness in the city was lighted by lurid flames from burning houses and the swift crimson glare of Prussian shells, still plunging into the town. Through the crash of crumbling walls, the hiss and explosion of falling shells, the awful clamour and din in the streets, the town clock struck solemnly six times. As if at a signal the firing died away; a desolate silence fell over the city — a silence full of rumours, of strange movements — a stillness pulsating with the death gasps of a nation.

  Out on the heights of La Moncelle, of Daigny, and Givonne lanterns glimmered where the good Sisters of Mercy and the ambulance corps passed among the dead and dying — the thirty-five thousand dead and dying! The plateau of Illy, where the cavalry had charged again and again, was twinkling with thousands of lanterns; on the heights of Frénois Prussian torches swung, signalling victory.

  But the spectacle in the interior of the town — a town of nineteen thousand people, into which now were crushed seventy thousand frantic soldiers, was dreadful beyond description. Horror multiplied on horror. The two bridges and the streets were so jammed with horses and artillery trains that it seemed impossible for any human being to move another inch. In the glare of the flames from the houses on fire, in the middle of the smoke, horses, cannon, fourgons, charrettes, ambulances, piles of dead and dying, formed a sickening pell-mell. In this chaos starving soldiers, holding lighted lanterns, tore strips of flesh from dead horses lying in the mud, killed by the shells. Arms, broken and foul with blood and mud — rifles, pistols, sabres, lances, casques, mitrailleuses — covered the pavements.

  The gates of the town were closed; the water in the fortification moats reflected the red light from the flames. The glacis of the ramparts was covered by black masses of soldiers, watching the placing of a cordon of German sentinels around the walls.

&n
bsp; All public buildings, all the churches, were choked with wounded; their blood covered everything. On the steps of the churches poor wretches sat bandaging their torn limbs with strips of bloody muslin.

  Strange sounds came from the stone walls along the street, where zouaves, turcos, and line soldiers, cursing and weeping with rage, were smashing their rifles to pieces rather than surrender them. Artillerymen were spiking their guns, some ran them into the river, some hammered the mitrailleuses out of shape with pickaxes. The cavalry flung their sabres into the river, the cuirassiers threw away revolvers and helmets. Everywhere officers were breaking their swords and cursing the surrender. The officers of the 74th of the Line threw their sabres and even their decorations into the Meuse. Everywhere, too, regiments were burning their colours and destroying their eagles; the colonel of the 52d of the Line himself burned his colours in the presence of all the officers of the regiment, in the centre of the street. The 88th and 30th, the 68th, the 78th, and 74th regiments followed this example. “Mort aux Vaches!” howled a herd of half-crazed reservists, bursting into the crush. “Mort aux Prussiens! À la lanterne, Badinguet! Vive la République!”

  Jack turned away from the window. The tall Sister of Mercy stood beside the bed where Lorraine lay.

  Jack made a sign.

  “She is asleep,” murmured the Sister; “you may come nearer now. Close the window.”

  Before he could reach the bed the door was opened violently from without, and an officer entered swinging a lantern. He did not see Lorraine at first, but held the door open, saying to Jack: “Pardon, monsieur; this house is reserved. I am very sorry to trouble you.”

  Another officer entered, an old man, covered to the eyes by his crimson gold-brocaded cap. Two more followed.

  “There is a sick person here,” said Jack. “You cannot have the intention of turning her out! It is inhuman—”

  He stopped short, stupefied at the sight of the old officer, who now stood bareheaded in the lantern-light, looking at the bed where Lorraine lay. It was the Emperor! — her father.