That Which Hath Wings: A Novel of the Day
summons of a bell.
The Sister turned again to her big ledger. A list of articles
appertaining to the deceased would have to be checked and verified. Two
pairs of binoculars--surely the one bearing the name and address of an
officer in a British Guards regiment ought to be sent to the Allies'
Headquarters at St. O--. Two purses, one full of English sovereigns, a
stout roll of French bank-notes in a pigskin case, and so forth. When
next she looked round, the Bavarian was wiping his brushes. The
finished inscription now stood:
"HIER RUHT IM GOTT
EIN DEUTSCHER FLIEGENDE OFFIZIER
_T. v. H._
30 YAHRE ALT."
"You are sorry for him, are you not, my good Kuehler?" the nun asked
mildly as the Bavarian scrambled to his solitary foot, and stood
supporting himself against the wall.
"Sorry, my Sister?" He spoke in thick Teutonic French, and looked at
her under his lowering black brows as he reached his crutches out of the
corner and tucked them under his arms. "Why should I be sorry? He's
dead--and so an end of him. _Total kaput_ for another officer!" He
saluted the Sister and stumped out.
*CHAPTER LXXII*
*LOVE THAT HAS WINGS*
Under a blue sky--the forget-me-not blue of April--tiny blizzards--mere
dust of snow--alternated with slashes of sleet. The road running east
from Pophereele was villainous; bad _pave_ in the centre, and on either
side morasses of mud from which rose at irregular intervals, scraggy
poplars hacked by shell-fire and barked by the impact of innumerable
iron-shod wheels.
An almost continuous line of transports bumped over the abominable
_pave_. Staff cars with British Brass Hats and red French _kepis_
gold-braided, motor-guns and caissons, motor-lorries, motor-ambulances,
motor-cyclists, pedestrians--chiefly Belgian peasants in tall peaked
caps and long blue blouses, caked to the knees in sticky mire. Odd
detachments of French Artillery, a squadron of Chasseurs in the new
uniform of sallow blue--a half-battalion of magnificent, singing
Canadians, loaded on the dark green motor-buses that used to run from
Holloway to Westminster Bridge.
Where French police were posted at cross-roads and a working-party of
British Engineers were mending the highway--filling up shell-pits, and
the cunningly-concealed emplacements where a battery of French 75's had
been in action a few months before, and the shrapnel-riddled houses of a
small village yet harboured a few wizened Flemish peasants, was the
point whence you first caught sight of the towers of the ancient capital
of Western Flanders, rising above a bank of grey mist, sucked from the
thawing earth by the warmth of the April sun.
An historic city of gabled houses, a city on a river long lost and
vaulted over--a city as famous through its industries of cloth-weaving,
and the exquisite manufacture of cob-webby lace of Valenciennes, as
precious to students of Art and Literature by reason of its stirring
history, and the wonders it enshrined. A matchless city, the glory of
Flandre Occident, with its Cloth Hall of the marvellous Early Gothic
facades, its Renaissance _Nieuwerk_ and ancient _Stedehuus_, its
glorious cathedral on the north opposite the Halles, with the unfinished
tower by Marten Untenhove, and the triumphal arch in the West porch by
Urban Taillebert.
Since October, 1914, when a British Brigade with two battalions of
another B.B., had successfully withstood the desperate attacks of the
flower of the Prussian Imperial Guard, the beautiful old city had
suffered bombardment, furious, purposeful, desultory, or intermittent,
from the enemy's 11.2-in. long range Krupps. That First Battle--fought
upon a line extending from a few miles north-east of the city--had been
succeeded after the partial lull of winter, by a second, a stubborn and
sanguinary renewal of the struggle, rendered hideous by the use of the
Boche's trump-card, flaming oil-jets and asphyxiating gas.
Now the pride of Flandre Occident stood as it stands to-day, like the
heart of a martyr calcined but unconsumed in the cold ashes of the pyre.
Its sad and stately dignity was marvellously beautiful, under the blue
April sky, with its lashes of wintry sleet. Its gardens were dressed in
green spring livery, the grass was peeping between the cobble-stones,
the scorched and broken chestnut-trees that had shaded the promenades on
the site of its ancient ramparts were thrusting out their pinky-brown
finger-like buds. And above the shell-pitted waste of uncut brass now
representing the Plaine d'Amour,--where the reviews used to take place
and the Kermesses, and athletic Club competitions--where the aerodrome
is cut by the line of the canal that receives the waters of the
subterranean river--a lark was singing joyfully as it climbed its airy
spiral, and a blind man was standing by the twisted ruins of a British
aeroplane drinking in the music that rained from the sky.
In the battered Rue d'Elverdinghe, behind a block of the ruined prison,
the car that had brought Sherbrand waited. A grey car with the Red Cross
and a miniature replica of Old Glory on the bonnet. The Belgian
chauffeur smoked cigarettes and read the _Independence Belge_
industriously; the American V.A.D. orderly smoked also, surveying the
wreckage at the end of the wide thoroughfare, between whose gaunt and
roofless walls was revealed a vista of the Grand Place,--where the west
facade of the Cathedral reared, a calcined skeleton above the ruined
Halles,--and the Belfry whose massiveness defied the genii of
destruction for a few weeks to come. Yet he kept his eye on his charge,
solicitously. No creature is so utterly unaided by the senses, so
pathetically defenceless as a recently blind man.
Drives were part of the treatment prescribed for Sherbrand by the
American surgeon of the Hospital at Pophereele. The chauffeur and the
attendant were instructed to humour him, and his humour craved solitude
and the sense of space. This excursion to the plain lying north-west of
the stricken city where Death and Ruin were Burgomaster and Bishop was
not the first by several. The few remaining inhabitants--the pale women
who made lace in the shelter of broken doorways, the feeble old folks
from the almshouses, who peered from their cellar-refuges at the crunch
and grind of armoured wheels upon the bricks and timbers heaped upon the
littered thoroughfares--dully wondered at these visits of the blind
Englishman.
They had seen many strange things of late, the red-eyed, meagre,
ague-bitten old people, since that day in early October when fifteen
thousand Kaisermen, chanting the German War Song, had defiled for six
mortal hours through the streets of their ancient town.
"There are a great many of you gentlemen," some of the old folks had
ventured to say.
"That may be so," they had been told, "but we have millions waiting to
follow. We are sure to win; the French are cowards, and the English
stupid fools. As for you--you are now all Belgo-Germans, our Kaiser has
said so! When we leave here we are going to Calais, Paris next, and then
London--it's nothing at all to get to London in our magnificent
Zeppelins!"
Then suddenly the Germans had gone away--and with them trains of waggons
crammed with booty. A week later, amidst the vivas of the people,
twenty-one thousand British had poured into the town. They had rolled
down the streets like a tawny river singing lustily:
"Here we are--here we are--here we are again!
Hallo! Hallo! Hallo! HALLO!"
And the crowd had been quick to catch up the chorus, responding:
"Eeeweea--eeweea--eeweea--eggain!
Allo! Allo! Allo! ALLO!"
And the British Headquarters had established itself in its spider-web of
Intelligence at the house of the Burgomaster, and the very next day a
Boche aviator had tried to drop a bomb on it, and had been winged by a
clever shot from an anti-aircraft gun, and brought crashing down on the
Plaine d'Amour. And there had been rejoicings on the part of the young
people who were thoughtless. But the wise old folks had known quite
well that many more Taubes would come.
What an autumn it had been, dear Lord! thought the trembling old people.
The first Sunday in August, with its decorations, processions, hymns,
and litanies, all in honour of Our Lady of Thuyn, had been turned into a
demonstration of penitents. The Kermesse had been prohibited with the
other festivities. No use baking honey-cakes and marzipan. Nobody
would have bought them. The Yprais were too busy listening to the
distant firing of terribly great guns. All the window-panes rattled and
shivered, and the earth vibrated without ceasing. Each morning brought
dreadful news, contradicted every afternoon, and confirmed at night.
Towns bombarded, townsmen shot, hung, or burned, children and
women--even nuns--violated and murdered. Villages wiped out--these were
the stories that found their way into the deafest ears. Crowds of
refugees evacuated from these towns and villages presently began to
throng in. Soon the streets were full from wall to wall. Spies moved
everywhere, and no lights dared be shown at night-time. Bread grew
scarce, the dreadful sound of the guns drew nearer. Wounded, Allies and
Germans also, were brought in, in thousands, by the ambulance-cars. The
hospitals and hotels and convents were full--all the schools--and many
of the private houses. Terrible rumours gained ground of a great battle
about to be fought in the neighbourhood of the town.
Peering from garret-windows by day or night, one could see great banks
of black smoke towering on the north, east, and west horizons, pierced
by broad licking tongues of cherry-coloured flame. Taubes and Allied
aircraft fought battles in the heavens. Bombs were dropped upon public
buildings. Death had begun to be common in the streets when the first
Krupp shells fell and exploded in the moat behind the Abbey Church of
St. Jacques. Ten minutes later--upon the doomed city fell the direst
fury of the German hate.
It had been as though hell had opened, as under that hail of iron and
fire the troops and transports of the Allies, and the long processions
of townspeople afoot and in carts and carriages had rolled out of the
town. Even the dogs had left, following their owners. Like the
cats--who clung to their familiar surroundings, and had to be removed by
force, if they were to be taken--the old folks resisted the sturdy hands
that tugged at them. "Leave us! ..." they quavered. "We are so old!
... We can never bear the journey! ... We should only die upon the roads
if we were to go!"
Many did go, and many died, and of those who stayed behind them, Steel,
Iron, and Fire claimed a heavy toll. But in the Northern quarter, some
yet dwelt in cellar-basements, feeding on mouldy flour, and frozen
potatoes. Sleeping on sacks of straw, covered with rugs or blankets,
warming their lean, shivery bodies at braziers, choking behind masks
taken from slain men through deadly gas-attacks,--creeping up between
bombardments for a breath of purer air. Venturing forth to kneel upon
the littered pavements of roofless churches, and pray to Our Lord before
His vacant tabernacles and shattered Crucifixes--for an end to the
dreadful War.
And no answer came, it seemed, for all their praying. They had grown
used to the dampness underground. Their eyes were now accustomed to the
gloom, as their ears to the stunning crashes of the bombardments--and
the perpetual whirr and buzz and whine of the aircraft in the sky. So
natural had become to them the abomination of desolation that they