Those Times and These

Well, late one afternoon in the early fall of the year, the workers had quit their tasks and were gathering in toward a common centre, before the oncoming of dusk, when they heard cries and beheld the crotchety old woman who shared leadership with the blinded man, running toward them. She had been gathering beets in one of the patches to the southward of their ruins; and now, as she came at top speed along the path that marked where their main street had once been, threading her way swiftly in and out among the grey mounds of rubbish, she held a burden of the red roots in her long bony arms.

She lumbered up, out of breath, to tell them she had seen soldiers approaching from the south. Since it was from that direction they came, these soldiers doubtlessly would be French soldiers; and, that being so, the dwellers in Courney need feel no fear of mistreatment at their hands. Nevertheless, always before, the coming of soldiers had meant fighting; so, without waiting to spy out their number or to gauge from their movements a hint of their possible intentions, she had hastened to spread the alarm.

“I saw them quite plainly!” she cried out between pants for breath. “They have marched out of the woods yonder – the woods that bound the fields below where the highroad to Laon ran in the old days. And now they are spreading out across the field, to the right and the left. Infantry they are, I think – and they have a machine gun with them.”

“How many, grandmother? How many of them are there?”

It was the eyeless man who asked the question. He had straightened up from where he sat, and stood erect, with his arms groping before him and his nostrils dilated.

“No great number,” answered the old woman; “perhaps two companies – perhaps a battalion. And as they came nearer to me they looked – they looked so queer!”

“How? How? What do you mean by queer?” It was the blind man seeking to know.

She dropped her burden of beetroots and threw out her hands in a gesture of helplessness.

“Queer!” she repeated stupidly. “Their clothes now – their clothes seemed not to fit them. They are such queer-looking soldiers – for Frenchmen.”

“Oh, if only the good God would give me back my eyes for one little hour!” cried the blind man impotently. Then, in a different voice, “What is that?” he said, and swung about, facing north. His ears, keener than theirs, as a blind man’s ears are apt to be, had caught, above the babble of their excited voices, another sound.

Scuttling, shuffling, half falling, the palsied man, moving at the best speed of which he was capable, rounded a heap of shattered grey masonry that had once been the village church, and made toward the clustered group of them. His jaws worked spasmodically. With one fluttering hand he pointed, over his left shoulder, behind him. He strove to speak words, but from his throat issued only clicking, slobbery grunts and gasps.

“What is it now?” demanded the old woman.

She clutched him, forcing him to a quaking standstill. He kept on gurgling and kept on pointing.

“Soldiers? Are there more soldiers coming?”

He nodded eagerly.

“From the north?”

He made signs of assent.

“Frenchmen?”

He shook his head until it seemed he would shake it off his shoulders.

“Germans, then? From that way the Germans are coming, eh?”

Again he nodded, making queer movements with his hands, the meaning of which they could not interpret. Indeed, none there waited to try. With one accord they started for the deepest and securest of their burrows – the one beneath the battered-down sugar-beet factory. Its fallen walls and its shattered roof made a lid, tons heavy and yards thick, above the cellar of it. In times of fighting it had been their safest refuge. So once more they ran to hide themselves there. The ragged children scurried on ahead like a flight of autumn leaves. The very old men and the women followed after the children; and behind all the rest, like a rearguard, went the cripple and the old woman, steering the blind man between them.

At the gullet of a little tunnel-like opening leading down to the deep basement below, these three halted a brief moment; and the palsied man and the woman, looking backward, were in time to see a skirmisher in the uniform of a French foot soldier cross a narrow vista in the ruins, perhaps a hundred yards away, and vanish behind a culm of broken masonry. Seen at that distance, he seemed short, squatty – almost gnomish. Back in the rear of him somewhere a bugle sounded a halting, uncertain blast, which trailed off suddenly to nothing, as though the bugler might be out of breath; and then – pow, pow, pow! – the first shots sounded. High overhead a misdirected bullet whistled with a droning, querulous note. The three tarried no longer, but slid down into the mouth of the tunnel.

Inside the cellar the women and children already were stretched close up to the thick stone sides, looking like flattened piles of rags against the flagged floor. They had taken due care, all of them, to drop down out of line with two small openings which once had been windows in the south wall of the factory cellar, and which now, with their sashes gone, were like square portholes, set at the level of the earth. Through these openings came most of the air and all of the daylight which reached their subterranean retreat.

The old woman cowered down in an angle of the wall, rocking back and forth and hugging her two bony knees with her two bony arms; but the maimed soldiers, as befitting men who had once been soldiers, took stations just beneath the window holes, the one to listen and the other to watch for what might befall in the narrow compass of space lying immediately in front of them. For a moment after they found their places there was silence there in the cellar, save for the rustling of bodies and the wheeze of forced breathing. Then a woman’s voice was uplifted wailingly: “Oh, this war! Why should it come back here again? Why couldn’t it leave us poor ones alone?”

“Hush, you!” snapped the blinded man in a voice of authority. “There are men out there fighting for France. Hush and listen!”

A ragged volley, sounding as though it had been fired almost over their heads, cut off her lamentation, and she hid her face in her hands, bending her body forward to cover and shield a baby that was between her knees upon the floor.

From a distance, toward the north, the firing was answered. Somewhere close at hand a rapid-fire gun began a staccato outburst as the gun crew pumped its belts of cartridges into its barrel; but at once this chattering note became interrupted, and then it slackened, and then it stopped altogether.

“Idiots! Fools! Imbeciles!” snarled the blind man. “They have jammed the magazine! And listen, comrade, listen to the rifle fire from over here – half a company firing, then the other half. Veterans would never fire so. Raw recruits with green officers – that’s what they must be… And listen! The Germans are no better.”

Outside, nearby, a high-pitched strained voice gave an order, and past the window openings soldiers began to pass, some shrilly cheering, some singing the song of France, the Marseillaise Hymn. Their trunks were not visible. From the cellar could be seen only their legs from the knees down, with stained leather leggings on each pair of shanks, and their feet, in heavy military boots, sliding and slithering over the cinders and the shards of broken tiling alongside the wrecked factory wall.

Peering upward, trying vainly at his angled range of vision to see the bodies of those who passed, the palsied man reached out and grasped the arm of his mate in a hard grip, uttering meaningless sounds. It was as though he sought to tell of some astounding discovery he had just made.

“Yes, yes, brother; I understand,” said the blind man. “I cannot see, but I can hear. There is no swing to their step, eh? Their feet scuffle inside their boots, eh? Yes, yes, I know – they are very weary. They have come far to-day to fight these Huns. And how feebly they sing the song as they go past us here! They must be very tired – that is it, eh? But, tired or not, they are Frenchmen, and they can fight. Oh, if only the good God for one little hour, for one little minute, would give me back my eyes, to see the men of France fighting for France!”

The last straggling pair of legs went shambling awkwardly past the portholes. To the Breton, watching, it appeared that the owner of those legs scarcely could lift the weight of the thick-soled boots.

Beyond the cellar, to the left, whither the marchers had defiled, the firing became general. It rose in volume, sank to a broken and individual sequence of crashes, rose again in a chorus, grew thin and thready again. There was nothing workmanlike, nothing soldierlike about it; nothing steadfastly sustained. It was intermittent, irregular, uncertain. Listening, the blind man waggled his head in a puzzled, irritated fashion, and shook off the grasp of his comrade, who still appeared bent on trying to make something clear to him.

With a movement like that of a startled horse the old leader-woman threw up her head. With her fingers she clawed the matted grey hair out of her ears.

“Hark! Hark!” she cried, imposing silence upon all of them by her hoarse intensity. “Hark, all of you! What is that?”

The others heard it too, then. It was a whining, gagging, thin cry from outside, dose up against the southerly wall of their underground refuge – the distressful cry of an un-happy child, very frightened and very sick. There was no mistaking it – the sobbing intake of the breath; the choked note of nausea which followed.

“It is a little one!” bleated one woman.

“What child is missing?” screeched another in a panic. “What babe has been overlooked?”

Each mother took quick and frenzied inventory of her own young, groping out with her hands to make sure by the touch of their flesh to her flesh that her offspring were safely bestowed. But when, this done, they turned to tell their leader that apparently all of Courney had been accounted for, she was gone. She had darted into the dark passage that led up and outward into the open. They sat up on their haunches, gaping.

A minute passed and she was back, half bearing, half pulling in her arms not a forgotten baby, but a soldier; a dwarfish and misshapen soldier, it seemed to them, squatting there in the fading light; a soldier whose uniform was far too large for him; a soldier whose head was buried under his cap, and whose face was hidden within the gaping collar of his coat, and whose booted toes scraped along the rough flagging as his rescuer backed in among them, dragging him along with her.

In the middle of the floor she released him, and he fell upon his side in a clump of soiled cloth and loose accoutrement; and for just an instant they thought both his hands had been shot away, for nothing showed below the ends of the flapping sleeves as he pressed his midriff in his folded arms, uttering weak, tearful cries. Then, though, they saw that his hands were merely lost within the length of his sleeves, and they plunged at the conclusion that his hurt was in his middle.

“Ah, the poor one!” exclaimed one or two. “Wounded in the belly.”

“Wounded?” howled the old woman. “Wounded? You fools! Don’t you see he has no wound? Don’t you see what it is? Then, look, you fools – look!”

She dropped down alongside him and wrestled him, he struggling feebly, over on his back. With a ferocious violence she snatched the cap off his head, tore his gripped arms apart, ripped open the coat he wore and the coarse shirt that was beneath it.

“Look, fools, and see for yourselves!” Forgetting the danger to themselves of stray bullets, they scrambled to their feet and crowded up close behind her, peering over her shoulders as she reared back upon her bent knees in order that they might the better see.

They did see. They saw, looking up at them from beneath the mop of tousled black hair, the scared white face and the terror-widened eyes of a boy – a little, sickly, undernourished boy. He could not have been more than fourteen – perhaps not more than thirteen. They saw in the gap of his parted garments the narrow structure of his shape, with the ribs pressing tight against the tender, hairless skin, and below the arch of the ribs the sunken curve of his abdomen, heaving convulsively to the constant retching as he twisted and wriggled his meagre body back and forth.

“Oh, Mother above!” one yowled. “They have sent a child to fight!”

As though these words had been to him a command, the writhing heap half rose from the flags.

“I am no child!” he cried, between choking attacks of nausea. “I am as old as the rest – older than some. Let me go! Let me go back! I am a soldier of France!”

For all his brave words, his trembling legs gave way under him, and he fell again and rolled over on his stomach, hiding his face in his hands, a whimpering, vomiting child, helpless with pain and with fear.

“He speaks true! He speaks true!” yelled the old woman. Now she was on her feet, her lean face red and swollen with a vast rage. “I saw them – I saw them – I saw those others as I was dragging this one in. He speaks true, I tell you. There was a captain – he could not have been more than fifteen. And his sword – it was as long as he was, nearly. There are soldiers out there like this one, whose arms are not strong enough to lift the guns to their shoulders. They are children who fight outside – children in the garb of men!”

The widow, who continually wept, sprang forward. She had quit weeping and a great and terrible fury looked out of her red-lidded eyes. She screeched in a voice that rose above the wails of the rest:

“And it was for this, months ago, that they took away from me my little Pierre! Mother of God, they fight this war with babies!”

She threw herself down on all fours and, wriggling across the floor upon her hands and knees, gathered up the muddied, booted feet of the boy soldier and hugged them to her bosom.

In the middle of the circle the old woman stood, gouging at her hair with her hands.

“It is true!” she proclaimed. “They are sending forth our babies to fight against strong men.”

The palsied man twisted himself up to her. He shook his head to and fro, as if in dissent of what she declared. He pointed toward the north; then at the sobbing boy at his feet; then north again; then at the boy; and, so doing, he many times and very swiftly nodded his head. Then he repeated the same gesticulations with his arms that he had made at the time of giving the first alarm of the approach of the enemy. Finally he stooped his back and shrank up his body and hunched in his shoulders in an effort to counterfeit smallness and slightness, all the while gurgling in a desperate attempt to make himself understood. All at once, simultaneously his audience grasped the purport of his pantomime.

“The Germans that you saw, they were children too – children like this one?” demanded the old woman, her voice all thickened and raspy with her passion. “Is that what you mean?”

He jerked his head up and down in violent assent, his jaws clicking and his face muscles jumping. The old woman shoved him away from in front of her.

“Come on with me!” she bade the other women, in a tone that clarioned out high and shrill above the sobbing of the boy on the floor, above the gurgling of the cripple and the sound of the firing without. “Come on!”

They knew what she meant; and behind her they massed themselves, their bodies bent forward from their waists, their heads lowered and their hands clenched like swimmers about to breast a swift torrent.

“Bide where you are – you women!” the blinded man commanded. He felt his way out to the middle of the room, barring their path with his body and his outspread arms. “You can do nothing. The war goes on – this fight here goes on – until we win!”

“No, no, no, no!” shouted back the old beldam, and at each word beat her two fists against her flaccid breasts. “When babies fight this war this war ends! And we – the women here – the women everywhere – we will stop it! Do you hear me? We will stop it! Come on!”

She pushed him aside; and, led by her, the tatterdemalion crew of them ran swiftly from the cellar and into the looming darkness of the tunnel, crying out as they ran.

Strictly speaking, the beginning of this story comes at the end of it. One morning in the paper, I read, under small headlines on an inner page, sandwiched in between the account of a football game at Nashville and the story of a dog show at Newport, a short dispatch that had been sent by cable to this country, to be printed in our papers and to be read by our people, and then to be forgotten by them. And that dispatch ran like this:

BOYS TO FIGHT WAR SOON

Germany Using Some Seventeen Years Old.

Haig Wants Young Men

London – The war threatens soon to become a struggle between mere boys. The pace is said to be entirely too fast for the older men long to endure. It is declared here that by the middle of 1917, the Entente Allies will be facing boys of seventeen in the German Army.

General Sir Douglas Haig, commanding the British Expeditionary Forces, is said to have objected to the sending out of men of middle age. He wants young men of from eighteen to twenty-five. After the latter year, it is said, the fighting value of the human unit shows a rapid and steady decline… The older men have their place; but, generally speaking, it is said now to be in “the army behind the army” – the men back of the line, in the supply and transport divisions, where the strain is not so great. These older men are too susceptible to trench diseases to be of great use on the firing line. England already is registering boys born in 1899, preparatory to calling them up when they attain their eighteenth year.

So I sat down and I wrote this story.

CHAPTER V. THE CURE FOR LONESOMENESS

THEY were on their way back from Father Minor’s funeral. Going to the graveyard the horses had ambled slowly; coming home they trotted along briskly so that from under their feet the gravel grit sprang up, to blow out behind in little squills and pennons of yellow dust. The black plumes in the headstalls of the white span that drew the empty hearse nodded briskly. It was only their colour which kept those plumes from being downright cheerful. Also, en route to the cemetery, the pallbearers, both honorary and active, had marched in double file at the head of the procession. Now, returning, they rode in carriages especially provided for them.

The first carriage – that is to say, the first one following the hearse – held four passengers: firstly, the widowed sister of the dead man, from up state somewhere; secondly and thirdly, two strange priests who had come over from Hopkinsburg to conduct the services; finally and fourthly, the late Father Minor’s housekeeper, a lean and elderly spinster whose devoutness made her dour; indeed, a person whom piety beset almost as a physical affliction. Seeing her any time at all, the observer went away filled with the belief that in her particular case the more certain this woman might be of blessedness hereafter, the more miserable she would feel in the meantime. Now, as her grief-drawn face and reddened eyes looked forth from the carriage window upon the familiar panorama of Buckner Street, all about her bespoke the profound conviction that this world, already lost in sin, was doubly lost since Father Minor had gone to take his reward.

In the second carriage rode four of the honorary pallbearers, and each of them was a veteran, as the dead priest had been: Circuit Judge Priest, Sergeant Jimmy Bagby, Doctor Lake, and Mr. Peter J. Galloway, our leading blacksmith and horseshoer. Of these four Mr. Galloway was the only one who worshipped according to the faith the dead man had preached. But all of them were members in good standing of the Gideon K. Irons Camp.

As though to match the changed gait of the undertaker’s horses, the spirits of these old men were uplifted into a sort of tempered cheerfulness. So often it is that way after the mourners come away from the grave. All that kindly hands might do for him who was departed out of this life had been done. The spade had shaped up and smoothed down the clods which covered him; the flowers had been piled upon the sexton’s mounded handiwork until the raw brown earth was almost hidden. Probably already the hot morning sun was wilting the blossoms. By to-morrow morning the petals would be falling – a drifting testimony to the mortality of all living things.

On the way out these four had said mighty little to one another, but in their present mood they spoke freely of their departed comrade – his sayings, his looks, little ways that he had, stories of his early life before he took holy orders, when he rode hard and fought hard, and very possibly swore hard, as a trooper in Morgan’s cavalry.

“It was a fine grand big turnout they gave him this day,” said Mr. Galloway with a tincture of melancholy pride in his voice. “Almost as many Protestants as Catholics there.”

“Herman Felsburg sent the biggest floral design there was,” said Doctor Lake. “I saw his name on the card.”

“That’s the way Father Tom would have liked it to be, I reckin,” said Judge Priest from his corner of the carriage. “After all, boys, the best test of a man ain’t so much the amount of cash he’s left in the bank, but how many’ll turn out to pay him their respects when they put him away.”

“Still, at that,” said the sergeant, “I taken notice of several absentees – from the Camp, I mean. I didn’t see Jake Smedley nowheres around at the church, or at the graveyard neither.”

“Jake’s got right porely,” explained Judge Priest. “He’s been lookin’ kind of ga’nted anyhow, lately. I’m feared Jake is beginnin’ to break.”

“Oh, I reckin tain’t ez bad ez all that,” said the sergeant. “You’ll see Jake comin’ round all right ez soon ez the weather turns off cool ag’in. Us old boys may be gittin’ along in years, but we’re a purty husky crew yit. It’s a powerful hard job to kill one of us off. I’m sixty-seven myself, but most of the time I feel ez peart and skittish ez a colt.” He spoke for the moment vaingloriously; then his tone altered: “I’m luckier, though, than some – in the matter of general health. Take Abner Tilghman now, for instance. Sence he had that second stroke Abner jest kin make out to crawl about. He wasn’t there to-day with us neither.”

“Boys,” said Doctor Lake, “I hope it’s no reflection on my professional abilities, but it seems to me I’ve been losing a lot of my patients here recently. I’m afraid Ab Tilghman is going to be the next one to make a gap in the ranks. Just between us, he’s in mighty bad shape. Did it ever occur to any of you to count up and see how many members of the Camp we’ve buried this past year, starting in last January with old Professor Reese and winding up to-day with Father Minor?”

None of them answered him in words. Only Judge Priest gave a little stubborn shake of his head, as though to ward away an unpleasant thought. Tact inspired Sergeant Bagby to direct the conversation into a different channel.

“I reckin Mrs. Herman Felsburg won’t know whut to do now with that extry fish she always fries of a Friday,” said the sergeant.

“That’s right too, Jimmy,” said Mr. Galloway. “Well, God bless her anyway for a fine lady!”

Had you, reader, enjoyed the advantage of living in our town and of knowing its customs, you would have understood at once what this last reference meant. You see, the Felsburgs, in their fine home, lived diagonally across the street from the little priest house behind the Catholic church. Mrs. Felsburg was distinguished for being a rigid adherent to the ritualistic laws of her people. Away from home her husband and her sons might choose whatever fare suited their several palates, but beneath her roof and at the table where she presided they found none of the forbidden foods.

On Fridays she cooked with her own hands the fish for the cold Shabbath supper and, having cooked them, she set them aside to cool. But always the finest, crispest fish of all, while still hot, was spread upon one of Mrs. Felsburg’s best company plates and covered over with one of Mrs. Felsburg’s fine white napkins, and then a servant would run across the street with it, from Mrs. Felsburg’s side gate to the front door of the priest house, and hand it in to the dour-faced housekeeper with Mrs. Felsburg’s compliments. And so that night, at his main meal of the day, Father Minor would dine on prime river perch or fresh lake crappie, fried in olive oil by an orthodox Jewess. Year in and year out this thing had happened once a week regularly. Probably it would not happen again. Father Minor’s successor, whoever he might be, might not understand. Mr. Galloway nodded abstractedly, and for a little bit nothing was said.