The Girl Philippa
Down on the Sais road four Red Cross motor ambulances were speeding in
the wake of the artillery. A fifth ambulance came up the drive. Sister
Felicite, seated beside the chauffeur, signaled to Sister Eila.
Warner said:
"Are you called for field duty?"
"On the telephone a few minutes ago. They need us this side of Ausone."
He went with her to the ambulance and she swung on board. As the
chauffeur started to back and make a demi-tour, Warner jumped on the
vehicle and shook hands with Dr. Senlis.
"Do you want a bearer?" he asked.
"Yes, if you don't mind."
Sister Eila picked up a brassard bearing the conventional emblem, and
tied it around his left arm above the elbow.
He had not yet noticed the other figure in the ambulance; now he looked
around, stared, and suddenly a violent desire to laugh seized him.
"Asticot!" he exclaimed.
"Oui, c'est moi, M'sieu'," replied that smirking gentleman, with a
demureness that struck Warner as horrible.
"But _why_?" he asked, in frank amazement.
"Ah," rejoined Asticot complacently, "that is the question, M'sieu'. I
myself do not know exactly why I am here."
But he knew well enough. First of all, he had gotten all over any
terror of bullets in Africa. Five years and fifty skirmishes had
blunted that sort of fear in him.
What he wanted to do was to see what was going on. More than that, the
encounter with One Eye in Ausone had strangely moved this rat of the
Faubourgs. He desired to find that Disciplinary Battalion again--the
Battalion which had been for him a hell on earth--but he wanted to look
at it, pushed by a morbid curiosity. If One Eye were there, perhaps
other old friends might still decorate those fierce and sullen ranks.
There was a certain lieutenant, too--gladly he would shoot him in the
back if opportunity offered. He had dreamed for months of doing this.
But there was still another reason that incited Asticot to offer his
services to Sister Felicite as a bearer. The ambulance had been called
to the Ausone Forest. Somewhere within those leafy shades lurked
Wildresse.
Never before had such a hatred blazed in the crippled intellect of
Asticot as the red rage that flared within him when he learned that he
had been employed by a spy who had sold out France.
Anything else he could have understood, any other crime. He was not
squeamish; nothing appalled him in the category of villainy except only
this one thing. Scoundrel as he was, he could not have found it in his
heart to sell his country. And to remember that he had been employed by
a man who _did_ sell France aroused within him a passion for revenge so
fierce that only a grip on the throat of Wildresse could ever satisfy
the craving that made his vision red as blood.
He wore a brassard, this _voyou_ of the Paris gutters, set with the
Geneva cross. And in his pocket was an automatic pistol.
From the rear seat Sister Eila could still see the Bristol biplane in
the sky, circling now high over Ausone Forest and the cultivated hills
beyond. She never removed her eyes from it as the ambulance rolled on
through the dust beside the slower moving line of lorries.
Later the motor lorries turned east; a column of infantry replaced them,
trudging silently along in the sun, their rifles shouldered. Then they
passed a battalion of _chasseurs-a-pied_ in green and blue, swinging
along at a cheerful, lively pace toward the crash of rifles and machine
guns.
Across the river they saw the first German shells explode in the fields,
and dark columns of smoke rise and spread out over the bushes and
standing grain.
For some time, now, Warner had recognized the high whimper of bullets,
but he said nothing until Sister Eila mentioned the noises, guessing
correctly what were the causes.
Asticot shrugged and cuddled a cigarette which Warner had given him,
enjoying it with leering deliberation.
He was inclined to become loquacious, too, whenever a shell exploded
across the river.
"Baoum--baoum!" he sneered. "Tiens! Another overripe egg! The Bosches
will starve themselves with their generosity! Pan! Pouf! V'lan!
Zoum--zo----um! That is shrapnel, M'sieu', as you know. As for me, I do
not care for it. Anything else on the _carte du jour_, but not shrapnel
for Bibi! No! For the big shells, yes; for the machine guns, yes; for
the Demoiselles Lebel, all right! But no shrapnel, _if_ you please----"
Sister Eila looked at him in smiling surprise.
"You would do well in the wards, with your cheerfulness," she said. "I
always was certain that I should find in you some quality to admire."
Asticot looked at her, mouth open, as though thunderstruck. Then, to
Sister Eila's amazement, a blush turned his expressive features scarlet.
To be spoken to like that by a _Sainte_ of Saint Vincent de Paul! To be
admired by a Sister of Charity! He, Asticot, was commended, approved of,
encouraged!
It was too much for Asticot. He turned redder and redder; he started to
relieve his terrible embarrassment by cursing, caught himself in time,
choked, passed his red bandanna over his battered visage, tried to
whistle, failed, and turned his ratty and distressed eyes upon Warner
for relief.
"Cheerfulness _is_ a virtue," said Warner gravely. "You seem to possess
others, also; you have physical courage, you have exhibited gratitude
toward me which I scarcely expected. It is a wonderful thing for a man,
Asticot, to be commended at all by Sister Eila."
Sister Eila smiled and flushed; then her face became serious and she
leaned forward and looked up at the Bristol biplane. Under it the white
fleece of the shrapnel was still floating.
The ambulance stopped; hussars came riding on either side of it; an
officer gave an order to the driver, who turned out among some trees.
The road ahead was crowded with infantry deploying at a double--a
strange, gaunt, haggard regiment, white with dust, swinging out to
whistle signal into the patches of woodland and across the willow-set
meadows to the right.
Sullen sweating faces looked up everywhere among the bayonets; hard
eyes, thin lips, bullet heads, appeared through the drifting dust.
Here and there an officer spoke, and there seemed to be a ringing
undertone of iron in the blunt commands.
They came running in out of the stifling cloud of dust like a herd of
sulky vicious bulls goaded right and left by the penetrating whistle
calls and the menacing orders of their officers.
"One Eye!" yelled Asticot, waving his cap vigorously. "He! Mon vieux!
How are you, old camp kettle?"
A soldier looked up with a frightful leer, waved his arm, and ran
forward.
"C'est un vieux copain a moi!" remarked Asticot proudly. "M'sieu',
voila le Battalion d'Afrique! Voila Biribi qui passe! Tonnerre de
Dieu! There is Jacques! He! Look yonder, M'sieu'! That young one with
the head of a Lyceum lad! Over there! That is the _gosse_ of
Wildresse!"
"_What!_"
"Certainly! That is Jacques Wildresse of Biribi! He! If he knew! Eh?
Poor devil! If he knew what we know! And his scoundrel of a father out
there now in those woods! C'est epatant! Quoi! _B'en_, such things
are true, it seems! And when he looses his rifle, that lad, what if the
lead finds a billet in his own flesh and blood! Eh? Are such things
done by God in these days?"
An officer rode up and said to the chauffeur:
"Pull out of there. Back out to the road!"
But, once on the road again, they were ordered into a pasture, then
ordered forward again and told to take station under a high bank crowned
with bushes.
No shells came over, but bullets did in whining streams. The air
overhead was full of them, and the earth kept sliding from the bank
where the lead hit it with a slapping and sometimes a snapping sound,
like the incessant crack of a coach whip.
Firing had already begun in the woods whither the Battalion of Africa
had hurried with their flapping equipments and baggy uniforms white with
dust. In the increasing roar of rifle fire the monotonous woodpecker
tapping of the machine guns was perfectly recognizable.
Branches, twigs, bits of bark, green leaves, came winnowing earthward in
a continual shower. There was nothing to be seen anywhere except a few
mounted hussars walking their horses up and down the road, and the motor
cyclists who passed like skimming comets toward Ausone.
Sister Eila and Sister Felicite had descended to the road and seated
themselves on the grassy bank, where they conversed in low tones and
looked calmly into the woods.
Asticot, possessed of a whole pack of cigarettes, promenaded his good
fortune and swaggered up and down the road, ostentatiously coming to
salute when an automobile full of officers came screaming by.
The military chauffeur dozed over his steering wheel. Two white
butterflies fluttered persistently around his head, alighting sometimes
on the sleeves of his jacket, only to flit away again and continue their
whirling aerial dance around him.
For an hour the roar of the fusillade continued, not steadily, but
redoubling in intensity at times, then slackening again, but continuing
always.
Hussars came riding out from among the trees. One of them said to
Warner that the ambulances across the Recollette were very busy.
Another, an officer, remarked that the Forest was swarming with Uhlans
who were fighting on foot. Asked by Asticot whether the Battalion
d'Afrique had gone in, the officer answered rather coolly that it was
going in then with the bayonet, and that the world would lose nothing if
it were annihilated.
After he had ridden on up the road, Asticot spat elaborately, and
employed the word "coquin"--a mild explosion in deference to Sister
Eila.
More cavalry emerged from the woods, coming out in increasing numbers,
and all taking the direction of Ausone.
An officer halted and called out to Sister Eila.
"It goes very well for us. The Bat. d'Af. got into them across the
river! The Uhlans are running their horses!--Everywhere they're
swarming out of the woods like driven hares! We turn them by Ausone! A
bientot! God bless the Grey Sisters!"
Everywhere cavalry came trampling and crowding out of the woods and
cantering away toward the north, hussars mostly, at first, then
_chasseurs-a-cheval_, an entire brigade of these splendid lancers,
pouring out into the road and taking the Ausone route at a gallop.
More motor cycles flashed past; then half a dozen automobiles, in which
officers were seated examining maps; then up the road galloped dragoon
lancers, wearing grey helmet slips and escorting three light field guns,
the drivers of which were also dragoons--a sight Warner had never before
seen.
An officer, wearing a plum-colored band of velvet around his red cap,
and escorted by a lancer, came from the direction of Ausone, leaned from
his saddle, and shook the ambulance chauffeur awake.
"Drive back toward Sais," he said. "They are taking care of our people
across the river, and you may be needed below!" He saluted the Sisters
of Charity: "A biplane has fallen by the third pontoon. You may be
needed there," he explained.
Sister Eila rose; her face was ashen.
"What biplane, Major?" she asked unsteadily.
"I don't know. British, I think. It came down under their shrapnel
like a bird with a broken wing."
He rode on. Warner aided the Sisters of Charity to their seats. Then
he and Asticot jumped aboard.
As they turned slowly, two wheels describing a circle through the dusty
grass of the ditch, half a dozen mounted gendarmes trotted out of the
woods with sabers drawn.
Behind them came four mounted hussars. A man walked in the midst of
them. There was a rope around his neck, the end of which was attached
to the saddle of one of the troopers.