William—An Englishman · Chapter 9 (1/2)

IX

One of the features of the interview that struck William later on was this⁠—during all the long minutes that it lasted Griselda had spoken no words. For once the tumult and amazement of her soul was beyond her glib power of expression and it was only as they came into the open air that⁠—for the first time since she had seen the hostages die⁠—she unclosed her lips and spoke.

“What are they going to do with us?” she asked. Her voice was husky and uncertain, and the words came out in little jerks.

William gave the question no answer: for one thing because his ignorance of their destiny was as thorough as his wife’s; for another because speech, by reason of Heinz’s firm grip on his collar, was so difficult as to be almost impossible. The man had his knuckles thrust tightly between shirt and skin; William purpled and gasped as he trotted down the street with a collar stud pressing on his windpipe. Behind him when he started came Griselda and her guard; as he could not twist his head to look over his shoulder he had no suspicion that the couples had parted company, and it was not until his captor turned him sharply to the right down a byroad leading to the station that he discovered, in rounding the corner, that his wife and her escort were no longer following in his footsteps. The momentary sidelong glimpse he caught of the road gave him never a sight of Griselda; she had vanished without word or sign. For a moment he could hardly believe it and walked on stupidly in silence; then, the stupor passing, his terror found voice and he clamoured.

“Where’s my wife?” he cried out and writhed instinctively to free himself. His reward was a tightening of the German’s stranglehold, some most hearty abuse and some even heartier kicks. Under the punishment he lost his foothold and would have fallen but for Heinz’s clutch upon his collar; when the punishment was over he was brought up trembling and choking. In that moment he suffered the fiercest of torments, the fire of an ineffectual hate. He hated Heinz and could have torn him; but he had been taught the folly of blind wrestling with the stronger and, for Griselda’s sake, he swallowed his fury and cringed.

“Where is she?” he begged most humbly and pitifully as Heinz thrust him forward again. “For mercy’s sake tell me what you have done with my wife⁠—with my wife?⁠ ⁠… If you will only let me know where she is? That’s all⁠—just to let me know.”

He was answered by the silence of contempt and a renewed urge along the road; he obeyed because he could do no other, whimpering aloud in the misery of this new and sharpest of misfortunes. As he pled and whimpered terrible thoughts came hurrying into his brain; all things were possible in these evil times and among these evil men⁠—and there was a dreadful, hideously familiar phrase anent “licentious soldiery”: a phrase that had once been just a phrase and that was now a present horror beating hard in his burning head. He stumbled on with the tears running down his cheeks, and discovered suddenly that he was whispering under his breath the name of God⁠—all things else having failed him. He did not realize that he was sobbing and shedding great tears until halfway along the road when a German soldier met them. The man as he passed turned his head to laugh at the sight of a face grotesque and distorted in its wretchedness; whereupon there flared up again in William that new sense of blood and breed and with it an instant rush of shame that he had wept before these⁠—Germans! He gulped back his tears, strove to stiffen his face and clenched his hands to endure.

He had need in the hours that came after of all his powers of endurance alike of body and of mind. The day that already seemed age-long was far from being at its height when Griselda was taken away from him and all through the heat till close upon sundown he was put to hard physical toil. Level with the village the railway line had been torn up and the little wayside station was a half-burnt mass of wreckage; a detachment of retreating Belgians had done their best to destroy it, had derailed an engine and half a dozen trucks and done such damage as time allowed to a stretch of the permanent way. In its turn a detachment of Germans was hard at work at removal of the wreckage and repairs to the line; and into their service they had pressed such villagers as had not fled at their approach. A cowed, unhappy band they toiled and sweated, dug, carried loads and levelled the broken soil; some stupidly submissive, some openly sullen to their captors, some pitiably eager to please: all serfs for the time being and all of them ignorant of what the next hour might bring forth of further terror or misfortune.

To this captive little company William Tully was joined, handed over by Heinz to its taskmaster⁠—to become of them all the most pitiable, because for the first time in all his days set to bend his back and use his muscles in downright labour of the body. What to others was merely hardship, to him became torment unspeakable; he wearied, he sweated, he ached from head to heel. When he pulled at heavy wreckage he cut his soft clumsy fingers; when he dragged a load or carried it he strained his unaccustomed back. His hands bled and blistered and the drops of perspiration poured off him; when he worked slowly because of his weariness or lack of skill, authority made no allowance for either and a blow often followed a curse. Sometimes incomprehensible orders were shouted at him and he would run to obey confusedly, for fear of the punishment meted out without mercy to the dilatory⁠—guessing at what was required of him, sometimes rightly and sometimes wrongly. The day remained on his mind as an impression of muddled terror and panic intense and unceasing.

When he thought he was not being watched he would lift his head from his toil and strain his eyes this way and that in the hope of a glimpse of Griselda. Unspeakably greater than his fear for himself was the measure of his fear for his wife. He knew that somewhere she must be held by force in the same way that he was held, otherwise she would have sought him out long ere this, and, even if not allowed to approach or speak would have managed to see him and make him some sign that his heart might be set at rest. His brain was giddy with undefined horror and once or twice he started and raised his head imagining that Griselda was calling to him. Once when he looked up his eye caught the bluff towering over the valley and he remembered with an incredulous shock that it was only yesterday that he and his wife, stretched out on the turf, had watched the galloping of the ants of soldiers beneath it⁠—that it was not a day since they had listened indifferently to the mutter of guns in the distance and talked with superior detachment of manoeuvres and the folly of militarism. Side by side on the short-cropped turf they had watched unmoved and listened without misgiving. Only yesterday⁠—nay, only this morning when the sun rose⁠—the world was the world and not hell.

He knew though, engrossed by his private agony, he did not give it much heed, that all the afternoon there was heavy traffic on the road that ran through the village, traffic going this way and that; now and again through the clatter of the work around him its rumble came to his ears. Noisy cars went by and heavy guns, regiments of infantry and once or twice a company of swift-moving horse that sped westward in a flurry of dust. As the hot, industrious hours crawled by even his terror for Griselda was swallowed up in the numbing and all-pervading sense of bodily exhaustion and ill-being, in the consciousness of throbbing head, parched mouth and miserable back. At midday when the captives were doled out a ration of meat and bread he lay like a log for the little space during which he was allowed to rest; and, resting, he dreaded from the bottom of his soul the inevitable call back to work. With it all was the hopeless, the terrifying sense of isolation; he was removed even from his fellow-sufferers, held apart from them not only by the barrier of their alien speech but by his greater feebleness and greater physical suffering. Only once during those sun-smitten and aching hours did he feel himself akin to any of the men around him⁠—when a flat-capped, sturdy young German soldier, taking pity on his manifest unfitness for the work, muttered some good-natured, incomprehensible encouragement and handed him a bottle to drink from. The sharp taste of beer was a liquid blessing to William’s dry tongue and parched throat; he tilted the bottle and drank in great gulps till he choked; whereat the flat-capped German boy-soldier laughed consumedly but not unkindly.

It must have been well on in the afternoon⁠—for the shadows were beginning to lengthen though the sun burned hotly as ever⁠—when over the noises of the toil around him and over the rumble of traffic on the road the persistent beat of guns became loud enough to make itself noticeable. All day William had heard it at intervals; during his brief rest at midday it had been frequent but distant; now it had spurted into sudden nearness and was rapid, frequent, continuous. A little group of his fellow-toilers looked up from their work as they heard the sound, drew closer together and exchanged mutterings till an order checked them sharply; and even after the order was rapped out one square-shouldered, brown-faced countryman continued to stare down the valley with stubbornly determined eyes.

William’s eyes followed the countryman’s, and for a moment saw nothing but what he had seen before⁠—cliffs, the river and the hot blue sky, without a feather of cloud to it; then, suddenly, away down the valley, there puffed out a ball of white smoke, and before it had faded another. The man with the stubborn eyes grunted something beneath his breath and turned again to his work; William, continuing to gaze curiously at the bursting puffs, was reminded of his duties by a louder shout and the threat of a lifted arm. He, too, bent again and with haste to his work; to look up furtively as the thunder deepened and see always those bursts of floating cloud down the valley or against the hot horizon.

He knew, or rather guessed, in after days when his sublime ignorance of all things military had been tempered by the newspapers, by daily war-talk and by actual contact with the soldier, that the sudden appearance of those bursting puffs had indicated some temporary and local check to the advancing German divisions, that a French or Belgian force must have pushed or fought its way across the triangular plateau between the Meuse and its tributary; must have driven before them the Germans in the act of occupying it, must have brought up their guns and commanded for the moment a stretch of the lateral valley and the line of communications along it. It was not left long in unmolested possession thereof; nearer guns answered it swiftly from all directions, from other heights and from the valley; shells whined overhead, from time to time the ground shook, and it dawned upon William, as he looked and listened, that what he saw was a battle.

At first he was more impressed by the thought than he was by the actuality⁠—since the effects of the conflict were not in the beginning terrible. True there was something threatening in the nearby thudding of a German battery when first it made itself heard. But such harm as it inflicted was unseen by William, and for the space of an hour or so it drew no returning fire and the village stood untouched and undamaged. But as the evening drew in the thunder deepened and quickened; both sides, it would seem, had brought up reinforcements, and guns opened fire from new and unexpected places, from heights, from behind garden walls. Down the road along which William had been urged with ungentleness by Heinz a gun-team clattered and jingled at breakneck speed; it pulled up close to the railway line, not fifty yards from the spot where the prisoners were working in the shadow of a clump of young trees; the gun was placed swiftly in position, the horses were led away and after a momentary interval the men began to fire⁠—steadily, swiftly, on the order. William watched them with his mouth wide open till reminded smartly of his idleness; they were so swift, precise and machine-like. It required an effort of the imagination to remember what they were doing.

“Killing,” he said to himself, “those men are killing!” And he found himself wondering what their faces looked like while they killed? Whether they liked doing it?⁠ ⁠…

He supposed later (when that first ignorance of things military was a little less sublime) that the firing from the immediate neighbourhood of the village had at first inflicted but little damage on the opposing forces on the heights; at any rate it remained practically unanswered till close upon sunset, the French or Belgian gunners concentrating their fire upon enemies nearer, more aggressive, or more vulnerably placed. Perhaps (he never knew for certain) they had got the better, for the time being, of those other more aggressive or more vulnerable opponents; perhaps they had received reinforcements which had enabled them to push higher up the valley or had at last been punished by a fire hitherto ineffectual; whatever the cause, as the sun grew red to the westward, a first shell screamed on to the dusty road outside the village and burst in a pother of smoke and flying clods. William heard the burst and saw the cloud rise; he was still round-eyed when another shell screamed overhead to find its billet in a garden wall a few yards behind the battery, scattering the stones thereof and splintering the boughs of an apple-tree. A shower of broken fragments came pattering about the station; William was perhaps too much stupefied by pain and weariness to understand the extent of his danger but several of his fellows stirred uneasily and two of them threw down their spades and started in headlong flight. They were brought up swiftly by the threat of a bayonet in their path; one of them came back sullenly dumb, the other whimpering aloud with a hand pressed to his face. William saw that his cheek was bleeding where a flying fragment had caught it. He was looking at the man as he nursed his torn face and bemoaned himself when a third shell struck what remained of the station roof.

William did not know whether he fell on his face instinctively or was thrown by the force of the explosion; he remembered only that as he scrambled to his feet, half-deafened and crying for help, he saw through a settling cloud of dust the disappearing backs of some three or four men who were all of them running away from him. He was seized with a mortal terror of being left alone in this torment of thunder and disaster; he believed he must be hurt, perhaps hurt to the death, and a pang of rage and self-pity went through him at the thought of his desertion by his fellows. He started after the vanishing backs, calling out to them to wait, abusing and appealing, and stumbling over ruin as he ran. The distant gunners had found their enemies’ range, and he had not made half a dozen yards when he ducked to the threat of another shell that burst, as he thought, close beside him. He cringed and shivered for a moment, covering his eyes with his hands; then, finding himself uninjured, darted off at an angle, still shielding his eyes and gasping out, “God, oh God⁠—for mercy’s sake, oh God!” He knew in every fibre of his trembling body that he was about to die, and his prayer was meant not only for himself but for Griselda. As he ran on blindly, an animal wild and unreasoning, a hand caught him above the ankle and he screamed aloud with rage and terror at finding himself held fast.