is nothing. We of Belgium are like rain falling on a field: they
[the Germans] are like rain falling. We do not choose: they do not
choose. It is all--nothing.”

Alexis leaped forward, his tricky eyes blazing, his moustaches
stiff with anger. These patriotic outbursts were no new thing to
me, yet I was astonished at him. He trembled with honest emotion.
“Madame! You are no Belgian, you are no Christian, you are no
woman!” he shouted. “You have no sense of honour, you have no
patriotism, you have no decency. Bah! you would have us handed over
to the Boches!” He stopped his tirade abruptly and addressed me in
French, “Monsieur, the car is ready in a moment, if you please.
This woman--this woman----” He raised his arm as if he would strike
her. All this time she had stood watching and listening, still
smiling heavily and making no move. “This woman is a peasant, she
is not human, she is a beast.... Here!” he called to the innkeeper,
who had reappeared, “give me the matches. Hold the basin there.”
He jumped back to his place and pressed the self-starter. The
motor hummed with curious coughs and gasps from the jury-rigged
cylinder. “It will march until we reach home,” called Alexis, his
voice still keyed high with anger. “Monsieur is ready?”

I paid the modest reckoning and climbed into the tonneau. The woman
stared past me at Alexis; even my “good day” was unheard or at any
rate unnoticed. The motor roared and the frightened swallows flew.
The innkeeper flung open the double gates, removing his cap and
bowing low, and we rolled slowly into the square.

There was a patter of slippers on the cobblestones behind us, a
gasp and a choking cry, and madame was hanging to the running-board
beside Alexis, pouring forth a torrent of passionate Flemish. The
German sentries before the Stadthuis across the square stared
anxiously, passersby stopped as if thunder-struck, I looked back
and saw the old innkeeper standing open-mouthed and motionless in
the doorway.

“Mon Dieu, monsieur, she wants to go with me!” muttered Alexis,
mechanically stopping the car. The woman flung her arms toward me
with a piteous gesture. Her heavy, ugly face streamed tears. All
her reserve, her self-control were gone. She had chosen at last,
and she had chosen this!

“Wants what, you fool?” I exclaimed, appalled. “Drive on, Alexis.
Make her go back. You know the Germans would arrest us at the first
sentry-post. Damn you, anyway!” I roared, my anger mounting to
outraged brutality to think that a chauffeur’s cheap amour might
land us both in a German jail. “What have you done to get us into
this mess?”

He thrust his fist into the pleading face. “Go back, go back,” he
grunted, apparently without a trace of feeling for her.

“You must go back, madame,” I exclaimed. “You must go back!”

She ignored me and again burst into a storm of entreaty, all aimed
at Alexis. “No, no, no, no,” he shouted in answer to her pleas. “Go
back to your husband! Go, you--animal!”

At that word she dropped from the car. “Go on, Alexis, quick!” I
exclaimed.

Her hand flew to her breast with the old gesture. As the automobile
leaped forward, she walked a few steps toward the inn. I turned and
watched her: Alexis stared straight in front of him. She wheeled
and looked after us, her hand still at her breast, her body swaying
from side to side. Then she looked at the inn, and again at the
fleeing car. Finally, as we dashed away from the square, I saw
her stumbling toward the wretched old man, who still stood in the
blazing sunlight which streamed through the open doorway, while the
swallows of Diest circled and cried over his hoary head.

XI

PENSIONERS

Wilson belonged emphatically to the genus _Homo sapiens_; species,
_Texicana_; habitat, southwestern parts of the United States and
Antwerp, Belgium. He was tall and lithe and handsome, and also
sentimental. He was the only member of the American Commission for
Relief in Belgium who flatly refused to fly the American flag from
his automobile; he was the only member who publicly declared that
he said his prayers every night, but, as he confided to me once
in a moment of great emotion, he had never in his life prayed for
the President of the United States. The reason for these startling
facts was that Wilson was an unreconstructed rebel and wore pinned
in his shirt, just over his heart, a little butternut badge which
his grandfather had worn in ’63--a symbol of the dead Confederacy
and the Lost Cause.

We used to sing him a gay song which ran:

    An unreconstructed rebel, that is what I am.
    For this fair land of freedom I do not give a damn!
    I’m glad we fought against them: I’m sorry that they won,
    And I do not ask your pardon for anything I’ve done.

    I fit with Stonewall Jackson: of that there is no doubt;
    Got wounded in three places a-storming Fort Lookout.
    I coched the rheumatism campaigning in the snow,
    But I killed a sight o’ Yankees, and I wisht it had been mo’.

    I hates the Yankee nation and everything they do.
    I hates the Declaration of Independence, too.
    I hates the Yankee eagle with all his scream and fuss,
    But a lying, thieving Yankee, I hates him wuss and wuss!

We called him “Johnny Reb,” “Tex,” or “Stonewall Jackson,” just as
it happened to strike us.

Wilson was disturbed about something. “The Socialists are right,”
he said, thoughtfully, drawing his six feet two from the chair
beside my office desk. “There’s only one way to prevent wars--kill
the spirit of patriotism. Look at that old fool out there!” he
continued, bitterly, pointing toward a gray-bearded Landsturm
soldier in shapeless flat service cap, faded gray-green uniform
and high hob-nailed boots, who, with gun on shoulder, strode along
the pavement of the Graanmarkt on his way to the _Kommandantur_:
“That old fellow is probably a toy-maker in Nuremberg or a barber
in Munich, and here he is wandering round Belgium ready to die for
Kaiser and Vaterland!”

“Mankind’s a failure,” I acknowledged cheerfully. “Go on, Wilson.”
I knew these moods.

“The trouble is this,” he drawled. “There are five old Belgians in
the outer office who have come to ask about their pension money.
It’s the first time I’ve had to do with Yankee pensioners. They
were here yesterday,” he went on, impressively, “and for a solid
hour I listened to one of ’em making patriotic speeches and telling
me how he fought and bled and died for my country--_my country!_--a
damned Yankee pensioner.”

I laughed gleefully, and Wilson turned on his heel. “Sit down,
you Johnny Reb,” I gasped. “What’s it all about? Are they Belgian
citizens who fought in our Civil War?”

“‘Civil War’!” he quoted. “There you go again! Haven’t I explained
to you that you mustn’t call it the ‘Civil War?’ It’s the ‘War
between the States.’”

A timid, eminently respectful knock interrupted us, and Peeters,
the clerk, thrust his head through the half-open door, bowing to
each of us in turn. “The men have come,” he announced.

“What men, Peeters?”

“The men who saw Mr. Wilson yesterday.” He coughed apologetically.
“The men for the pensions. They want to see you, sir.”

I looked at Wilson, who was still meditating flight and cursing
under his breath. “Send them right in, Peeters. Mr. Wilson and I
are delighted to see them.”

“Delighted, are we?” my victim snarled; then his voice changed to
honeyed sweetness--the sweetness underlying all Southern courtesy
and hospitality, which is the sweetest in the world. “_Aah, goeden
dag, myneheeren, quel plaisir de vous revoir! Mynheer van der
Aa, Mynheer de Vos, Mynheer Dekkers, Mynheer van Oolen, Mynheer
Anderson._” He introduced them with a flourish--a little file of
old men, dressed in dingy Sunday best, with heavy leather shoes in
place of the customary slippers or wooden _blokken_, each holding
his cap in his hand, each bearded and bewhiskered, each with thick
weather-worn skin and little eyes folded deep in wrinkled cheeks.
These were the pensioners.

The first of them was scarcely five feet high. Little black eyes
snapped out from beneath his bushy brows, and he wore a sweeping
white moustache and an imperial. The second was tall and had once
been blond; now he was bald as a prophet, and his great white
beard swung from his heavy head like a broad pendulum ticking
off the minutes. The third was blind; his graceful, narrow head
tilted forward, a flickering smile played about his mouth, and I
noticed that when his attention was strongly attracted his eyes
occasionally turned up with a strange abortive movement, as if he
might take the darkness by surprise and change it into light. The
fourth man stood straight and soldierly, his knees tight together,
his great feet splayed out from his ankles, and his arms hanging
perpendicularly. He had an ox-like head, and his wide shoulders
were heavy and stooped with age. The fifth man was an aged negro,
and feeble-minded.

Peeters handed me a little paper which I read aloud: “Jan van
der Aa, Pieter de Vos, Georges Dekkers, Willem van Oolen, David
Anderson. Is that right?”

“_Ja, ja, mynheer_”--“_Parfaitement, monsieur_”--“Yes, sair,” the
voices quavered.

“Don’t you all speak English?” I demanded. “You’re entitled to
American pension money, yet you don’t speak our language? _Vous ne
parlez pas_----”

The little man with the imperial burst into volcanic speech. “Sir,”
he ejaculated, “they have forgotten the Eengleesh, but I--I speak
it pairfectly.”

Wilson sighed. “Yes, hang it, he does!” he whispered to me. “He’s
the damnedest, convincingest, Fourth-of-July orator you ever
listened to. Now he’s off! You can’t stop him!”

“You are Jan van der Aa?” I interrupted, after the first sentence.

“Jan van der Aa, sir,” he acknowledged, bowing, and continued
impressively: “Sirs, you see beforre you five men who fought in
the Grrand Arrmy of the Rrepublic, in the grrandest arrmy of
the grreatest rrepublic of the earth.” He rolled the rr’s like
thunder down the valleys of his speech. “It was not for nothing
that we fought. Liberrty and Union are not little things. They
are eterrnal. They are the same in everry country and in everry
time. We five were at Gettysburrg and Cold Harrbourr, de Vos was
at Antietam, Dekkars was wounded at Atlanta, I was at Chickamauga
underr Thomas, Anderson was at Peterrsburrg”--the strange, foreign
accent turned the familiar battle names into mighty voices, voices
to conjure dead men from the grave and dead deeds from the old
books where they lie buried; the man before us was a born orator,
he was winsome, sweet, powerful, pathetic, by turns--“Forrt
Fisherr, Culpeperr Courrt-House, Vicksburrg, Shiloh, Champion’s
Hill, Cairro, Chattanooga.” The tremendous words rolled forth; the
file of old men stirred; they awoke and threw up their heads as he
trumpeted forth these names, and I seemed to see them young again
and soldiers of the Republic.

But Van der Aa stopped abruptly. He turned half apologetically to
the others, speaking a most vulgar and harsh Flemish: “’_k Heb
’t verget_--I’d forgotten what we came for--our moneys,” he said.
“Sirs”--he addressed Wilson and me once more--“our pension moneys
are overdue. We have received nothing since Antwerp was captured.
The American Consul-General writes, but we receive nothing. Will
you tell Washington of us? The Government have forgotten; we are
far away, and so they have forgotten us.”

I turned inquiringly to Wilson.

“Oh, tell them you’ll get their money for them. Tell them
anything,” he whispered, harshly, fumbling his handkerchief. “Stop
that devil of a Van der Aa! You don’t understand; that man can talk
you to tears!”

“Mr. Wilson knows all about the case,” I said. “He will cable
to Washington the first time he goes to Rotterdam. We shall do
everything in the world to get your money.”

Van der Aa thanked me with a gesture and a low bow, and repeated my
words in Flemish to the others. They thanked us slowly. “And now,
sirs----” he began again.

“Stop him, for God’s sake!” groaned Wilson.

“Mynheer van der Aa----”

“----the only things men gladly die for, freedom and union. Freedom
and union, one and inseparable, now and forever.”

The spell came over us like a ghost--the ghost of something high
and splendid--and the voice of America spoke in conquered Belgium.
Not through American lips, but through the lips of an alien; and
not the voice of America to-day, divided, disunited, enslaved
in a thousand ways to fear and base interests; not the America,
I suppose, of the sixties, blatantly provincial, cursed with
over-confidence, torn with civil war; but the voice of the ideal
America--that America of the spirit which Lincoln must have seen
as Moses saw the Holy Land from Mount Nebo, the America which may
be, which must be; the mighty nation like a city set upon a hill,
with the glory of heaven shining upon her, and young men and women
singing in her streets.

I mopped my eyes; Wilson coughed and blew his nose. The five old
men stood imperturbable, and Van der Aa spoke on and on. He was
pitiless and glorious. As he talked I saw a flag borne to the tops
of tall mountains, flung over precipices, whipped through morasses
and dismal swamps, flung up from the sea and set firm in rocky
earth; and that flag was the American flag--the flag of Wilson’s
country and my country. These men had followed that flag--these
five aliens. I saw freedom and union like simple things, things to
be held in the hand as well as in the heart; necessary, elemental,
homely things. And I saw the world-wide war which is waged in
every land against freedom and union--the fight of caste against
caste, of class against class, of masters with slaves, of the state
against its citizens, of the thousand and one Frankenstein monsters
of commerce and industry and politics and religion, fighting
against the human beings who have created them. Everywhere I gazed
there was war.

“Liberty and union, one and inseparable, now and forever,”
concluded Van der Aa, his right arm outstretched to emphasize his
last period, the eyes of the blind man straining up to catch the
vanished sun.

Next morning Wilson’s motor car arrived an hour late at the office,
and I noticed that from a staff wired to the wind-shield there
floated a little American flag.

“Yes,” he said, defiantly, “I say kill patriotism and you kill war.
I’m taking the first step. I used to be for the South against the
world, now I’m for America against the world, and maybe some day
I’ll be for all the world against the world.

“I’ll see you late to-night,” he added, very seriously. “I’ve got
to go to Rotterdam to cable Washington about those old pensioners.”

XII

DOÑA QUIXOTE

Her parents had always regarded her as a sort of stepchild. There
was Elaine, her elder sister, docile, petite, with fair looks and
a proper dot, married at eighteen and mother of two babies; but
Virginie was twenty and unwed. Although I did not know her until
1914, I can fancy the picture in the ancient moated castle of Drie
Toren two years before when Virginie faced the old Baron, her
father, and declared her independence of parental restraints of all
sorts. The old Baron, bearded like a Numidian lion, had a special
vocabulary for matters which concerned his unmarried daughter.
“_Incroyable! pénible! triste! terrible! effrayante! bête!_”--I
heard them dozens of times a day--and the shy, wilted floweret of
a Baroness, her mother, sat with hands placidly folded, waiting
for the final catastrophe which was sure to overwhelm her “_pauvre
Virginie_.”

La Baronne Virginie was delighted to tell me of the famous
interview with her father. She told it with shrieks and giggles,
between puffs from one of my strongest cigarettes, her cold,
gray-blue eyes--inherited from some merciless Viking ancestor who
had once harried the coasts of Flanders--dancing with delight, and
her bright golden hair waving as she tossed her head to give point
to the jest.

“_‘Mais, ma chérie,’ il m’a dit._

“‘_Mais, mon père,’ j’ai dit_.... The devil! I forget always and
speak French. That morning I was very angry, so I slid down the
banisters and shrieked with the top of my breath, and there was my
father at the foot of the stair, like this!” She made an adorable
caricature of the leonine astonishment of her father at sight of
the apparition of his daughter, her foot caught in her skirt,
kicking vigorously to free herself and spreading tatters of lace
petticoat over the Chinese carpet. “‘Come here,’ he roared, as if I
were a servant. ‘Come here, cher _Papatje, s’il te plaît_. I have
something to say,’ I answer very respectfully, as a Belgian girl
must always speak: ‘I will not marry. I will not worship some man
like Jules. (Jules is my brother-in-law. He has red hair and a wart
on his nose. Ugh!) I will not have babies. I will not be as Elaine.
No, no, no, no, no, I will not. I am going to England to be a
suf-fer-a-gette. I will burn churches and bite people. I hate men!’”

“But do you hate us, really?” I interrupted.

“Of course!” The light of her eyes was like the light on Swiss
glaciers. “I hate all men--you especially.”

I was hurt, and showed it.

“Ha! I do,” she repeated, following up her advantage. “And I hate
my father--enough, not much, just a little. ‘_Oufff!_’ he says to
me, ‘what for a person is this my daughter! Have I not give you
all in the world, miserable one?’ ‘No,’ I answer. ‘Freedom? No.’
‘Freedom!’ he says. ‘Yes, freedom,’ I answer again. ‘It is the
century of the woman. We must have freedom.’ (I got that from an
American book, but I did not tell him. He was so troubled already.)

“So next day I went to England, and in England I burned one church
and bit two people.”

It was I who named her Doña Quixote. For all her Viking eyes
she was a perfect Spanish type, such a type as one occasionally
finds nowadays in villages of the Dutch Province of Zeeland or
in the Belgian Provinces of East Flanders and Antwerp, almost
the sole reminders of the days when the Dons lorded it in the
Low Countries. She was not brunette, but a Spanish blonde, with
a magnificent complexion burnished on the cheeks, straight,
aristocratic nose, and jeweled mouth. The oval of her face was
positively Mediterranean, and seeing her glorious hair I knew what
the Elizabethan poets meant by singing of “golden wires.” She was
adorable, perfect, and cold as frost.

“But, mademoiselle,” I began.

“Madame!” she interrupted. “Always call me madame.”

“Pardon, but why?”

“Never ask me the why of anything. It is because I choose. Isn’t
that enough?”

“No,” I burst out angrily. “I’m a reasonable being, I’ll have you
to know, and I must be treated reasonably. What the dickens----?”

She laughed suddenly and delightedly. “Ice, ice, I thought you were
of ice. I thought all Americans were of ice, Monsieur. Good! You
thaw. I shall tell you, because you know how to get angry like a
Belgian.”

“Stop teasing me,” I muttered, ashamed, sorry, and indignant.

“At the convent school in Bruges where I went to school the nuns
call us ‘madame’. It is a school for the petty nobility, you
understand, so we are called ‘madame’ just as the little Princess
Marie-Jose is called ‘Madame’ and not ‘Mademoiselle la Princesse.’
I like it.”

“Well, I don’t.”

“That is all one to me,” she responded calmly. “You are to call me
‘madame’.”

“I won’t. Not until you are married, and maybe I won’t even then.
Maybe I’ll call you by your first name.”

She examined curiously my flushed face, stubborn, unhappy,
disgusted with my own boorishness, but seeing no way out. Her cold
gaze took in all that she wanted; noted that I was a fly in her
spider-net; and she dimpled and thawed graciously. “Please!” she
begged.

“Mademoiselle--er--er----” I stuttered, “do you know Spanish?”

“Not a word. But I have read ‘Don Quixote,’ of course.”

“Doña--that is Spanish for a noble lady. I shall call you
Doña--Doña Quixote.”

“Wha-at?”

For the first and, I was about to say, the last time, I caught her
off her guard, astonished, wounded, a bit angry. But the one word
was all I wanted. It showed me I could bully her. That word had
been warm and human, utterly unlike the icy flood which normally
came from her lips. “Doña Quixote!” I repeated blandly.

“You shall do nothing of the sort. Don Quixote was a madman.”

“Yes, and you are a madwoman. You won’t listen to the people who
love you.”

“You are not to say that word to me again.”

“What word?”

“That word! You know--_that_ word.”

“Doña?”

“The other one: the one that begins with _l_ and has four letters!”

XIII

IN THE STREET OF THE SPY

The Commissaire of the Arrondissement of Metseys beat on the
glass front of the limousine and arrested the mad career
of the Government automobile in which we were riding. The
soldier-chauffeur (a Belgian in the near-British uniform which the
Belgian army now wears, with a small round button in his cap marked
with the Belgian colours in concentric circles--black, white, red)
turned and looked back into the car inquiringly. “We stop here,”
the Commissaire announced in pantomime.

Just five minutes before we had rushed directly under a battery
of heavy French guns blazing away like furnaces. I did not know
they were French guns--although the accent was marked!--until
the Commissaire told me; but then he knew every battery, every
cantonment, every airdrome, and every hospital in that little
bit of Belgium behind the Yser lines which is still free from
the invaders. As we passed the battery, a wave of sulphur had
engulfed us, the glass of the limousine rattled dangerously, and
that mad chauffeur, putting on all power, had rushed us down
the winding Flemish road, scattering stray groups of mild-eyed
Belgian infantrymen and cavalrymen and grazing the metallic flanks
of lumbering British motor lorries, their canvas sides splashed
with Flanders mud, on their way down to the lines. He had rushed
us over a little canal where two or three soldiers were fishing
sleepily, in spite of the noise of the bombardment. He had dashed
us alongside a field of over-ripe wheat, through a long avenue of
stunted willows, across an acre of barbed-wire entanglements, and
into the town of Zandt, its gray walls gleaming in the splashing
sunlight which had just followed the customary morning shower, its
claret-red roofs burnished like the morocco binding of old books.

We stepped stiffly from the car on to the slippery cobblestones and
stared about us.

“The Germans shell Zandt almost every day,” said the Commissaire
coolly. “That French battery we just passed will probably wake them
up. Put the car in the lee of that wall, Pierre,” he called to the
chauffeur. “We shall be back in ten minutes.”

“This, gentlemen,” he said, as we walked down the principal street
of Zandt, “is called the Street of the Spy, because, up to this
moment, no German shells have fallen in it. The population of Zandt
pretend that it is because the Germans have a spy living in this
street. Droll, isn’t it?”

We laughed with him. It is true that no shells had fallen in the
Street of the Spy, but they had missed it by inches, not yards or
rods. If I have ever said that the Germans do not use heavy calibre
shells on unfortified villages and towns, I apologize. They use
their very heaviest shells on these little defenceless villages of
west Flanders just behind the Yser lines; they throw almost daily
shells which are as destructive as cyclones into three or four room
dwelling-houses. A row of such houses falls like a sand castle when
such a shell arrives.

“But the people want to stay here, of course,” explained the
Commissaire. “Where can they go? The peasant and the man of the
small town has no capital except his farm or his house or his
_winkel_--his little shop. He has no bank account. He is primitive.
He is simple. All he has in the world is here in Zandt. And
so he stays. Yes, we give them gas-masks, for the Germans use
asphyxiating gas very often here. But it is hardest on the children
and the little babies.

“Those boys we are sending away to-morrow to a safe place in
France.” He pointed to two youngsters, nine and seven years old,
peering through the broken glass of a near-by window.

“Are you glad to go, _manneken_?” he asked the elder.

“Oh, yes, yes, mynheer.”

“But why?”

“Because one has fear of the bombardment, mynheer,” said the boy,
shivering.

“This you must see,” said the Commissaire, ducking his head and
leading us into a small passageway between two brick walls. “It is
the most interesting person in Zandt. She is eighty-three years
old. She lost her only grandson in the war. She has nothing to eat
except from her little garden. There, see!”

We had emerged on the edge of a tiny plot of land, perhaps
twenty-two feet square. A gray one-story cottage, covered with
mossy thatch, bounded it on one side; low walls and an outhouse
inclosed it on the others. The little plot was cultivated, densely,
compactly, expertly--a mosaic of fruits and green vegetables. Two
apricot trees trimmed in the French fashion were trained along the
wall, and a low vine, with some sort of pendent fruit, hung from
the outhouse.

But strangest of all there were three beds of ornamental flowers. I
stared hard at them, and suddenly I saw that they were graves!

“Good-day, madame,” the Commissaire called, touching his hat. “See,
these are American gentlemen come to look at your little garden.”

She came slowly from the cottage, a wisp of lace in her white hair,
wearing the ceremonial black frock which a peasant woman puts on
for such feast days as the Feast of the Assumption, a white apron,
and leather shoes. “You are welcome, gentlemen, you are welcome,”
she said, with the grace of a chatelaine.

“But aren’t those graves?” I asked, pointing to the beds of
nasturtiums, geraniums, and marigolds which covered three long
mounds at the end of the garden, taking up almost half of the room
available for vegetables and fruits. “Madame, aren’t those graves?”

“Oh, yes, mynheer,” she said.

“They have not been here long, madame?” I was looking at the
transplanted geraniums, well rooted in the mud, but not yet wholly
at home, and the raw, muddy rim about the edges of the three mounds.

“Since April, mynheer. I tend them myself,” she added proudly.

I turned to the Commissaire. “None of those is her grandson’s
grave?” I asked in a low voice.

“Oh, no,” he muttered. “Her grandson died in Germany. He was taken
prisoner at Liége in August, 1914. Madame,” he said to her, “the
gentleman asks if he may look at your graves.”

“Oh, yes, mynheeren.” She fluttered down before us, bent
rheumatically at the first mound, and pulled at a weed which the
rain had freshened.

“‘Pray for the soul of Franz Mueller,’” I read in breathless
amazement. “A Boche?”

“A Boche, of course!” said the Commissaire.

“And the other two--they are Boches also? ‘Pray for the soul of
Max Edelsheim’ and ‘Pray for the soul of Erich Schneider,’” I read
aloud. The neat wooden crosses bore also the regimental numbers of
the men and the date of their death.

“Boches, too. It happens that they were killed in this garden on a
reconnaissance.”

“But why don’t you remove them? You can put them somewhere else,
and then this poor old woman can use all her garden. I should think
she could hardly raise enough to eat from all this little plot, let
alone from half of it.”

We had spoken in French, and of course the old proprietress had
not understood. The Commissaire now turned to her, speaking the
rhythmic, metrical Flemish of west Flanders. “Madame, the mynheer
says that we should take up these bodies and place them in the
churchyard. Do you wish it done so?”

At first she did not seem to understand, and bent inquiringly
toward the Commissaire, her little gray eyes screwed up in
bewilderment at his words. “What is it, mynheer?” she asked.

“Mynheer says that we should remove the three Germans and let you
have your garden.”

“Oh, nay, nay,” she remonstrated, shaking her head emphatically.
“Nay, mynheeren. God gave me these three graves instead of the
grave of my boy. I could not tend them so well if they were in the
churchyard. It is too far from my house. Nay, nay, let the three
sleep here.”

“But you have not the room, madame.”

“There is room in my heart and in my garden, mynheer. I shall keep
these three graves, and maybe in Germany there is some one who will
keep the grave of my boy.”

“Messieurs, there is no use arguing with a Belgian peasant,” said
the Commissaire of Metseys, as we walked back through the Street
of the Spy to our waiting automobile. “But she has a fine spirit,
that old grandmother.”

XIV

THE WHITE ISLAND

A STORY OF THE GALLIPOLI ADVENTURE

The aviation launch rolled slowly in the grip of the grounds well
behind one of the desolate islands off Tenedos, southwest of the
entrance to the Dardanelles. The afternoon was windless and humid.
Warm, dripping fog covered the launch and hid from her the outlines
of the rocky, treeless island in the lee of which she lay. Fog
had sprinkled the deck as if with baptismal water, and the day
was noiseless except for the lazy slapping of waves against the
launch’s side.

A hydro-aeroplane alongside dipped and rose rhythmically with
the launch’s motion, and the aviator, Lieutenant Douka, of the
Royal Flying Corps, muffled in a British airman’s uniform, with
thick wadded helmet on his head, goggles, and rubber gauntlets,
bent over and tested the bomb-dropping mechanism. Those who had
known Douka as a student in America or as an unambitious idler in
Paris would hardly have recognized him in his new rôle. He had
always been romantic, but he explained this amiable weakness as an
inheritance from his Byzantine ancestors. “My grandparents were
Greek, you know,” was his offhand explanation to college friends of
his glowing fondness for the classics and things Hellenic. His two
or three trips to Greece had been marred by the unpleasant contrast
between the Greece he had imagined and the Greece of to-day.
He could scarcely make himself understood in the modern tongue
of Hellas; it irritated him, as modern English would doubtless
irritate Chaucer. “A degenerate language and a degenerate people,”
he told himself. Yet he had taken up aviation at Pau, not as a
sport--although that is what he told his friends--but as one of the
gifts he could offer modern Greece when the day of her final fight
with the Turk should dawn.

The war came. He went hopefully to Athens. There came a day
when King Constantine overrode his people, Venizelos retired,
constitutional government in Greece ceased to be, and Douka went to
London and volunteered in time for the Dardanelles expedition.

But he gave no sign of all this as he tested and retested the
bomb-dropping mechanism hanging between the pontoons which
supported the machine, and pushed and pulled the controls. He
thrust his feet against the pedals and examined the petrol and oil
throttles. “Right, lieutenant?” called the skipper of the launch.
“Right, sir,” he answered. “Belay there! Lively!” the skipper
shouted to two sailors who held the machine. A mechanician spun
the propeller and dropped from sight; the motor churned nervously;
Lieutenant Douka lifted his hand and signalled that all was
satisfactory. The launch shot sidewise, and the ’plane skated
swiftly forward, leaving a foaming wake. She tilted and shot
forward faster, then up from the water and heavily into the mist.
Douka swung her back and around the launch. Along the deck beneath
him the sailors stood at attention, but a gust of gray smoke showed
him that his escort was already in motion, off for the mother-ship
and the flock of aeroplanes at Imbros, and he was alone, sailing
away to bomb the _Sultan Omar_, the flagship of the Turkish fleet.

He looked at the clock--it read 3:17; then at the oil gauge--it
was working properly. He climbed to fifteen hundred feet. Under
him the mist lay like an Arctic snow-field, broken by pools of
rotten ice through which the gray sea stared. The sea abruptly
changed to gray land, and he mounted higher. He was flying at a
height of four thousand feet over Asia, the ancestral enemy of his
race and his continent. Somewhere down in the haze beneath lay
Troy. Douka smiled bitterly as he thought again of the ten years’
warfare, and of how the Greeks had blotted her from the earth.
The sullen roar of his motor seemed to stimulate his imagination.
The mist thinned slightly, and he saw far away the narrow blue
ribbon of the Dardanelles--the blood-thickened boundary between
free Europe and the despotic East. Haughty Xerxes once sat on those
cliffs and watched his Asiatic worms crossing to conquer the West.
Twenty-eight centuries had battled on that blue line. Always it had
been the same, age after age, century after century, always the
Greek against the Asiatic, the Greek against the barbarian, and for
five hundred years the disinherited Christian Greek against the
Moslem Turk. Muffled in his helmet as he was, he began to sing an
old Byzantine war song--a song his grandmother had taught him. His
hate rose like a bird in a gale; his clutched hands bit into the
rubber sheathing of the levers; he drove ahead at top speed, but
his wrath seemed to leap out before him like a racer distancing the
thing behind. To kill, to destroy, to blot out, utterly obsessed
him.

High over the Sea of Marmora he flew toward Constantinople.
Battles without end had been fought on the watery plains below.
There the vast Greek Empire had struggled to the death with the
hordes of Asia. The mist which had half hidden the land thinned
and disappeared. The choppy air became cleaner and easier to
fly through. He climbed to eight thousand feet. Far away he
caught sight of the Golden Horn, the royal city of Constantine
the Great, like a Grecian jewel set in Oriental gold, or like a
Grecian body pierced by the bright spears of Turkish minarets.
For five centuries she had been the spoil of the East. He cursed
her conquerors and laughed to himself. What if he should bomb the
mosque of Omar or the Sultan’s palace?... He shook his fist at
Scutari as if the city were a person. Little flowers of dirty-white
smoke bloomed in the air beside him and above him; once he seemed
to fly through a shower where before all had been clear, and he
felt small pieces of steel drumming like rain on the wings of his
’plane. It was a burst of shrapnel. He laughed and flew on.

Up the Bosphorus he drove, searching the sea with his eyes. The
British Secret Service had reported the _Sultan Omar_ at Bojukdere.
He strained for a sight of her.

Then suddenly, like a mirage, he saw the half-moon of a harbour
and black ships at anchorage. He drew rapidly near. A violent puff
of smoke rose from the funnels of the largest ship. She had seen
him, or she had been warned, and was endeavouring to escape. He
recognized her with a cry of delight. She was the _Sultan Omar_.

Hidden forts on the green hills about the harbour burst into life.
Smoke, flame, and the dull thud of cannon rose to him, for he was
flying lower and lower. A shrapnel shell flashed just in front
of him and showered steel splinters against his windshield. He
screamed with laughter. It seemed to him ridiculously funny that
they should think they could kill him or escape him.

He volplaned; from seven thousand feet he sank to one thousand,
then to eight hundred--to seven hundred--to six hundred--to five
hundred. A curving white wake showed him that his victim was
in motion. He was almost over her. Rifles cracked as the crew
endeavoured to reach him with their bullets. He did not hear them.
His right arm swung deliberately back to the bomb-thrower. He was
near. He was over. He jerked madly, and the pent volcano fell
straight on the warship.

The air rocked and heaved. His ’plane almost turned a somersault,
and he fought to restore its balance in an atmosphere reeling like
a typhoon. Solid waves of air beat and buffeted him. He jerked the
levers and fought furiously. Then, like a bronco, the machine found
her feet, prancing and shuddering in the choppy air, and up he
climbed. A glance over his shoulder was enough, even if the boiling
air had not told him of his success. The blue sea was black with
wreckage; men like insects floated in the water, but the _Sultan
Omar_ had disappeared.

The air still cracked and roared as the Turks shelled him. The
whole land seemed to wake, and the setting sun shone through a
curtain of dirty smoke. A Turkish aeroplane slid up in long spirals
behind him to cut off his retreat; petrol dripped slowly from a
leak in his reservoir caused by shrapnel or a rifle bullet. It was
the price of his success; a glance told him that he could not stop
the leak. He had often thought of that moment. Should he go back
and risk capture by the Turks? No; he would fly straight out into
the Black Sea and die alone in its waters. He would fly out into
the sea where his ancestors had sailed centuries before the Moslems
had taken Constantinople; the sea of the Golden Fleece, of Medea,
of Xenophon and the Ten Thousand, of the long campaigns against the
Persians. He would die there.

The sun set swiftly. In the twilight his mind seemed to slip its
leash and play high jinks with him. His palms grew into the handles
of the controls and became part of the mechanism; his fingers
lengthened into levers, his legs into rods upholding the aeroplane,
and he flew, screaming, laughing, and cursing, until night fell
like a plummet from the dusky sky.

Suddenly his machine struck the level surface of the sea and
buckled forward. Douka awoke, as if from sleep, tore the harness
from his aching head, and slumped forward against the straps,
waiting for the end. The wreckage of his machine still floated on
the long, slow waves, and rocked easily to and fro, but one of the
pontoons was crushed and another was leaking.

He felt no wind against his face, and the sea was calm. “Lucky,”
he thought listlessly, knowing that at a touch of wind or wave
the ’plane would go under. It might float for hours, or only for
minutes; he did not care. Death was certain.

But there seemed to be a sound of voices in the air, a distant
singing and a splash of oars. “Delirium,” he said calmly. “But
how beautifully they sing! What is it? It is Greek! Why, it is the
old Greek: ‘To thee, Zeus, blessings upon our timid flocks.’” His
wondering lips formed the words which he had learned in school.

Then out of the darkness swam a boat, and in the boat were a
steersman and four men at the oars, and the men were singing a hymn
to Zeus, the Father of all and the King of all. To Lieutenant Douka
nothing now seemed strange. To his shaken mind it seemed good to
hear them, good to see them, good to find them loosing the straps
which held him to the wrecked machine, and lifting him, in silence,
into their boat.

Half an hour they rowed, when Douka caught across the level sea
a hot breath of wind and the odour breathed from rye-fields in
midsummer. “Land! It is land!” he exclaimed. “It is land--the
White Island,” they answered gently. Both he and they had spoken
in the classic Greek, the Greek of the old heroic days--not the
bastard modern speech, larded with cruel words from the Turks and
the rough idioms of northern barbarians. His tired eyes strained
forward. Like night mist advancing upon them came the land, white
like foam and very fair; and he heard cicadas chanting in the olive
trees, and the warm breath of the night brought murmurs of song and
the sibilant lapping of waves along a sandy shore.

All the island was white. A crescent moon stole out of cloudbanks
and stared down on white sands, white balustrades, the white walls
of palaces, white hills swelling against the darkness, silvery
white olive groves, and slowly moving figures, clad all in white,
pacing along the stairs.

A white crane beside the landing-place awoke, flapped his wings,
and flew slowly off. Stately men and beautiful women thronged the
quay and looked down curiously as the boat grated against the
beach. “We have brought another from the wars,” the steersman
called to them. “Welcome, friend,” those on the quay called gently;
and “Thanks, friends,” Douka answered.

His tortured muscles knotted and failed as he tried to climb from
the boat, and he fell back helplessly. Two of the oarsmen bent to
him, lifted him like a child, and bore him between them up the long
flights of steps. He had fainted.

When he awoke, his nude body lay on a warm marble slab, and two
male attendants of the bath were kneading his aching flesh with
perfumed hands. Their touch was like ice and like fire, and life
seemed poured back into his body as into a wineskin as they
worked. The hands stole over him, gradually more and more softly,
exploring, soothing, stupefying. He slept.... He awoke once more,
to find that they had placed him in what seemed to be a bed of
live coals, in a white furnace which burned and leaped with light,
but the crackling heat did not harm him, and again he slept....
He awoke in a high-roofed hall, and all around him was light and
laughter, jets of fountains and music of slow streams; and the two
attendants plunged him again and again into pools which received
him as into a bed and covered him with warm floods.

Then he was rubbed with oils, and a garland was placed on his head.
Two girls came, bringing him clothing--a blue-bordered peplos, a
white mantle for his shoulders, and white sandals for his feet.
“Drink,” they said, and they gave him a cup of barley crushed in
water flavoured with mint.

“Now it is time for the feast,” they cried gayly. “Come to the
feast.” And they led him through alleys bordered with white
violets, hyacinths, roses, crocuses, and ghostly narcissi. In the
cleft hills the olive groves gleamed like pools of moonlight; a
waking dove gurgled drowsily, and the cicadas sang; and to left
and right he heard faint snatches of old Greek hymns and saw white
figures moving slowly along the sandy paths.

So they brought him to the banquet in a high-roofed hall of marble,
lit by flambeaux in sconces along the walls, garlanded with white
lilies, and spread with Oriental tables and low couches. And boys
and girls flew laughingly about serving the meats and drink.

He was led to his place, and reclined in the antique fashion on a
cushion beneath his elbow. Then guests began to appear through the
wide marble doors. To his delight and astonishment he knew them.
They were like old friends--friends of his youth, friends of the
youth of all the world; and they came into the hall with garlands
in their hair and bright robes upon them and gayety and peace in
their looks.

There came Achilles, his gigantic arm over the shoulders of Hector,
and a smile on his youthful face as he talked; and goat-bearded,
bandy-legged Thersites, limping and chattering endlessly; and
stately Nestor; broad-breasted, stout Agamemnon; Priam, leaning
on an ivory staff; wily Odysseus, walking alone in the throng;
huge, ungainly Ajax; gossipy Menelaus, Sarpedon, and Patroclus;
Neoptolemus leading by the hand the sweet boy Astyanax; Diomedes,
Æneas, smooth-shaven Troilus, black Memnon, laughing Paris. And
the women! white-armed Briseïs, motherly Hecuba, Andromache and
gentle Cressida, Chryseïs, grave Cassandra, Penelope, Polyxena,
Iphigenia, the lithe, dark-eyed beauty of Myrine the Amazon, and
the golden radiance of Helen, her face like noon sunlight--Helen of
Sparta, for whose sake the Greeks are forever named Hellenes, at
whose shrine all men worship, and shall worship so long as beauty
endures--these came into the high-roofed hall; these, and many more.

And after them came an old blind singer, a lyre in his hands, a
laurel crown on his head. “Homer, Homer!” they cried. “A welcome
to Homer!” All rose as he passed, and they led him to the highest
place in the hall, and took their pillows again, applauding him.

They poured libations and began the banquet, drinking from
four-handled cups studded with gold. They ate no flesh. There was
no mark of death in the hall, or violence, or cruelty. They talked
gayly, and all their talk was of peace; they told old stories, but
all their stories were of peace; and when they sang, their songs
were of peace. And always the boys and girls served them, laughing.

Douka drank from his cup, and it was filled again and again. Pain
and hatred fell from him like a garment; he laughed and jested with
the rest--with Paris of Troy, Paris of Asia, Paris of the East,
smiling on his right, and bearded Odysseus on his left. “Tell us
a tale, Odysseus,” he begged at last, “a tale of your travels and
your prowess.” And Odysseus, shaking great tones from his chest
like snowflakes in winter, told of Nausicaa, daughter of King
Alcinoüs, and the game of ball on the Phocæan shore.

“Prowess?” he ended. “There is no prowess but kindliness. Only
kindliness lives forever in the memory.”

Then Helen, smiling at them, cried: “Sing, Homer, sing, for the
moon has set, and the Pleiades; it is midnight, and the time is
going by. Sing of hearth and shrine, sing of youth and age, sing of
love, sing of peace, sing of the flocks safe from harm, the plowed
earth and the groves, and the untroubled sea. Sing of the child
nestling close to his mother, and of joy, joy, joy! Sing to us of
these, old Homer.”

And Homer sang.

At three o’clock in the morning a Turkish torpedo-boat patrolling
in the Black Sea came upon the aviator who had destroyed the
_Sultan Omar_. He lay in the wreckage of his hydro-aeroplane. The
Turks took him unresistingly into their craft. They say that he
sang softly to himself in an obscure Grecian dialect and babbled
incessantly of Helen and the heroes who fell before Troy.

THE END

THE COUNTRY LIFE PRESS GARDEN CITY, N. Y.

Transcriber’s Notes:

Page 46: la Toisond ’Or changed to la Toison d’Or.

Page 49: Hotel de Ville changed to Hôtel de Ville.

Inconsistent hyphenation retained as printed. A few printing
punctuation errors were corrected.

End of Project Gutenberg's Tales from a Famished Land, by Edward Eyre Hunt