Mufti Page 2

  Chugging along through screen after screen of brown camouflage which hid the little railway line from the watchful gaze of Kemmel, he seemed to be passing through some mysterious land. By day it was hideous enough; but in the dusk the flat dullness of it was transfigured. Each pond with the shadows lying black on its unruffled surface seemed a fairy lake; each gaunt and stunted tree seemed to clothe itself again with rustling leaves. The night was silent; only the rattle of the little train, as it rumbled over bridges which spanned some sluggish brook or with a warning hoot crossed a road – broke the stillness. Great shell-holes filled with rotting debris flashed by, the mouldering ruins of an old chateau frowned down as they twisted and turned through the grounds where once men had flirted and women had sighed. Now the rose garden was used as a rubbish heap for tins; and by the overgrown sundial, chipped and scarred by a stray shell, two wooden crosses stuck out of the long rank grass. At last they reached the Canal, and the engine stopped near the Lille road.

  Close by, the flares lobbed up, green against the night; and a white mist covered the low-lying ground. Across the road lay trees in all directions, while, through the few that remained standing, a cold bright moon threw fantastic shadows. On each side of the road, screened by the embankment from machine-gun fire, sat groups of men waiting for the trains.

  At last Vane heard the first one – faintly in the distance. It loomed up suddenly out of the mist and crept across the road. Without a word the men detailed to push it seemed to rise out of the ground. Silently they disappeared with it, like ghouls at some mysterious ceremony. With muffled couplings it made no sound; and in a few minutes it was ready in position, with its leading truck where once the owner of a farm had sat before the fire, after the day’s work.

  And so they came – eight in all. Any noise – any suspicion on the part of the Boche, a bare quarter of a mile away, and a machine-gun would have swept the ground. But the night was silent, the flares still went peacefully up, and the wind had not changed. It blew gently and steadily towards the German lines. Only there was now just a faint smell of pineapple in the air; one of the cylinders was leaking…

  Figures loomed up unexpectedly out of the mist; occasionally a low curse could be heard as a man stumbled into a shell hole…

  “Everything all right; everybody clear?” The gas expert peered at Vane in the darkness. “Right! well, let her go.”

  A series of reports sounded deafeningly loud, as the detonators of the cylinders were fired by electricity; a steady, hissing noise as a great wall of white vapour mingled with the mist and rolled forward towards the Germans. The gas attack had begun. To an airman returning from a bombing raid, who circled for a moment above, it looked like a sheet being slowly spread over the country below; a beautiful – an eerie – picture. To those on the ground who watched it, it seemed as a solid wall of dense fog moving relentlessly forward – like the mist that comes creeping over the Downs till those caught in it can scarce see their hand in front of their face. To the Boche it was death…

  Patrols going out the next night found men twisted and blackened with the smell of pineapple still on their swollen lips; in the hospitals behind, men writhed and muttered hoarsely, struggling for breath and struggling in vain. The attack had been successful – and all was as it should be. Undoubtedly the Germans started gas in a country where the prevalent wind was south-west – and it doesn’t pay in war to be a fool…

  Vane wished that one or two German men of science had been occupying the Boche outpost line instead of… War – modern war!

  “It will go clean through their helmets,” said the gas expert. “One hour in most cases, and when it gets weaker, twenty-four – or even more. That’s the stuff to give ’em.”

  At last the performance was over, and the trains having delivered the goods returned to their own place.

  “Most successful.” The gas expert, rubbing his hands together, came up to Vane as he stood on the Lille road. “I think we’ve got quite a number of the blighters. And not a single casualty!”

  “Good,” said Vane. “But what a filthy method of fighting.”

  “The Germans started it,” returned the other.

  “I know they did,” laughed Vane. “That’s probably why it’s so filthy.”

  The gas officer looked thoughtful. “I’m not certain that I agree with you, Vane. War is such a filthy business, however you look at it, that one would be a fool not to harness science in every possible way...”

  “Don’t you believe it,” scoffed Vane. “Science has harnessed us. We’ve started the bally motor with the gear in, and now we’re running after it trying to catch up. Can I give you a lift back on my private stink machine?…”

  They strolled up the road together to where the tractor was waiting.

  “Man no longer the master of his destiny, you mean?” said his companion.

  “Don’t make me laugh too loud,” returned Vane, “or the Boche might hear; unless you’ve killed ’em all...”

  “You’re wrong, my friend – utterly wrong.” They came to where the railway track crossed the road and he halted to pull out his pipe, before getting on to the little engine.

  “I tell you, Vane…”

  And at that moment a flight of cockchafers seemed to sweep down the road. Vane felt the stinging pain in his right shoulder, and then he looked foolishly at the gas expert…

  “You were saying,” he began…

  But his late companion had taken a machine-gun bullet through his heart.

  Chapter 1

  The beach at Paris Plage is associated in the minds of most people who went there before the war with a certain amount of gaiety. There were bands, and fair ladies, and various other delights generally connected with popular French watering-places. Incidentally the beach is a beach – not a collection of sharp boulders. There is real sand – lots of it; the sort that gets hot and comforting in the sun, and invites people who have eaten too much luncheon to sleep. And during the war, though the bands and other delights have departed, the sand has remained a source of pleasure to hundreds of people in need of a temporary rest cure. They have come from the big hospitals at Etaples; they have come from the officers’ rest-house. Some have even come in motor cars from the trenches just for the day, and one and all they have lain on the beach and slept and then departed the better for it.

  On a certain afternoon during the height of the German offensive in the spring of 1918 a girl was sitting on the beach staring out to sea. On the horizon a black smudge of smoke stood up against the vivid blue of the sky; while, close in shore, a small sailing boat was barely making headway in the faint breeze.

  The girl was a VAD, and the large French family which had planted itself close by cast little curious glances at her from time to time. And she was worth looking at, with her fair hair, deep blue eyes and that wonderful complexion which seems to be the exclusive property of the British. Madame remarked on it to Monsieur, glancing at the white faces of her own daughters three, and Monsieur grunted an assent. Personally he was more occupied with the departed glories of Paris Plage than with a mere skin of roses and milk; at least the worthy man may have deemed it desirable to appear so.

  “Pauvre petite,” went on the kindly matron, “but she looks tired…so tired.” She heaved a deep sigh. “Mais que voulez-vous? c’est la guerre.” She watched her offspring preparing to paddle, and once again she sighed. There was no band, no amusement – “Mon Dieu! but it was triste. This accursed war – would it never end?”

  Margaret Trent’s looks did not lie; she was tired. The rush of work just lately had almost broken her physical endurance, and there seemed but little chance of any slackening in the near future. She felt that all she wanted was rest – utter, complete rest, where such things as bandages and iodine were unknown. And even as the longing came to her she knew that a week of it would be all that she could st
and. She could see beyond the craving ache to stop – the well-nigh irresistible cry of her body for rest. She could feel the call of spirit dominating mere bodily weariness. And it drove her on – though every muscle cried a halt.

  Before the war she had been in that set which drifted pleasantly through life, and yet she had not been of it. She danced perfectly; she played tennis and golf and went to the proper places at the proper times – but she was different. She had in her a certain idealistic dreaminess, an intense love of the beautiful in life. Sordid things filled her with a kind of horror, and when the war came she tried to banish it from her mind like a dreadful nightmare. But there were stories in the papers, and there were letters from friends telling of losses and unspeakable sufferings. There was war all round her and one day the great unrest got hold of her, and would not be put aside. She felt she had to do something…

  And so she became a VAD and in the fullness of time arrived in France. Her friends prophesied that she would last a month – that she would never stand the sight of blood and wounds. Her answer had been two years at Etaples. And to those who know, that is an answer conducive of many things.

  At times she tried to recall her outlook on life four years ago. She had enjoyed herself up to a point, but all the time she had been groping towards something she did not possess. She had read carefully and with discrimination, and the reading had only filled her with an added sense of her own futility. She felt that she wanted to do something – but what was there for her to do?

  Marriage, naturally, had come into her mental horizon. But there had only been one man who had ever attracted her sufficiently to make it anything but an idle speculation. There had been a time, one season in London, when this man had been her constant companion, and she had been far from disliking it. At times he had seemed to be serious, and as a matter of fact the subtle difference between her and the stock pattern crowd had interested him more than he admitted even to himself. Then one day she discovered that a certain flat and its occupant were very closely connected with his bank account. It was by pure accident that she found it out. A chance remark which she overheard at a dinner party… And the night before at the Grafton Galleries she had allowed him to kiss her as she had never before allowed a man…

  It revolted her; and the man, astonished at first at her sudden change of manner, finally became annoyed, and the episode ceased. They still met; there was no quarrel – but they met only as casual acquaintances.

  It was at that stage of her reflections that a shadow fell across her and she looked up. For a moment the coincidence failed to strike her, and then with a surprised little laugh she held out her hand.

  “Why, Derek,” she said, “I was just thinking of you.”

  Vane, his right arm tightly bound in a sling, sat down beside her.

  “I thought you looked pretty weary,” he laughed. “Jove! but it’s great seeing you again, Margaret…! And the peace of it all.” He waved his left hand round the deserted beach. “Why, it’s like old times – before the world went mad…” He fumbled with his cigarette case, until she took it out of his hand, and struck a match for him.

  “What ward are you in?” she asked, when he had made himself comfortable.

  “Number 13; got here yesterday.”

  “I come on night duty there tonight. What’s your trouble?”

  “Machine-gun,” he answered briefly. “A nice clean one through the shoulder. And the man beside me took the next bullet through his heart.” He laughed shortly. “What a gamble – what a damn silly gamble, isn’t it?”

  She looked thoughtfully out to sea. The train of ideas his sudden appearance had interrupted was still half consciously occupying her mind.

  “Four years, isn’t it, since we met?” she said after a while.

  “Four centuries, you mean. Four wasted centuries. Nothing will ever be the same again.”

  “Of course it won’t. But don’t you think it’s just as well?” She faced him smilingly. “There was so much that was all wrong, Derek; so much that was rotten.”

  “And do you think that four years’ insanity is going to prove the remedy?” Vane laughed cynically. “Except that there are a few million less men to carry on the rottenness” –

  Margaret shook her head. “We wanted something to wake us up; it’s been drastic, but we’re awake.”

  “And what most of us want is to go to sleep again. Don’t you feel tired, Margaret, sometimes?”

  “Yes – I suppose I do. But it’s the tiredness that comes with doing – not drifting… It’s we who have got to make the new Heaven and the new Earth, Derek…”

  Again Vane laughed. “Still as idealistic as ever, I see. Six months after peace we shall be scrambling and fighting and snarling again – after jobs and money and work.”

  Margaret Trent was silent, tracing a pattern in the sand with her finger. “The worry of scrambling after a job is not likely to hit you very hard,” she said at length.

  “Which is perhaps as well,” he returned lightly; “for I’m certainly too weary to take the trouble. I shall go away, if I’m alive to do it, to the South Sea Islands and live on fruit. The only proviso is that it should be sufficiently ripe to drop into my mouth, and save me the trouble of picking it.”

  The girl turned and looked at him suddenly. “You’ve got it rather bad old boy, haven’t you?”

  “Got what?” he asked slowly.

  “Mental jaundice,” she answered. “Your world askew.”

  “Do you wonder?” he returned grimly. “Isn’t the world askew?”

  “And if it is, someone has got to put it back.”

  “That’s what the little boy said when he pulled the chest of drawers over on top of him and lay struggling under it. But he couldn’t do it himself. It’s got beyond us, Margaret – and God seems to have forgotten. There is just a blind, malignant Fate running the show.”

  She looked at him gravely. “You’re wrong, Derek – utterly wrong. The game is still in our hands, and we’ve got to keep it there. What are you smiling at?”

  “I was wondering,” he answered, “whether the last time I was told I was wrong, the sentence would have been concluded similarly. Unfortunately, the speaker died in the middle, thereby proving his contention.”

  “Oh! but you’re little,” she cried, striking her hands together. “Don’t you see that you’ve got to look beyond the individual – that you’ve got to think Big?”

  “We leave that to the newspaper men,” he retorted cynically. “Our smiling heroes; our undaunted soldiers! They are heroes, those Tommies; they are undaunted, but it’s because they’ve got to be. They’re up against it – and the Juggernaut of Fate knows he’s got ’em. And they know he’s got ’em. They just eat and drink and are merry for tomorrow they… Ah! no; that’s wrong. We never die out here, Margaret; only the other fellow does that. And if we become the other fellow, it’s so deuced unexpected I don’t suppose it matters much.”

  “But, we’ve got to go through with it, haven’t we?” she said quietly.

  “Of course we have,” he answered with a laugh; “and the knowledge of that fact cuts about as much ice with the men in the mud holes up there as brave little Belgium or suffering little Serbia. I tell you we’re all dazed, Margaret – just living in a dream. Some of us take it worse than others, that’s all. You want the constitution of an elephant combined with the intelligence of a cow to fight these days.”

  “And yet,” she said with a grave little smile, “underlying it all, there’s the big ideal surely… If I didn’t think that, if I didn’t know that, I… I couldn’t go on.”

  “To which particular ideal do you allude?” he asked cynically. “The League of Nations; or the triumph of Democracy, or the War to end War. They all sound so topping, don’t they? Received with howls of applause by the men who haven’t had their boo
ts off for a week.” He thumped the sand savagely. “Cut the cackle, my dear girl; cut the cackle. This little performance was started by a few of the puppets who thought they had a winning hand, and the other puppets called a show down. And then the game passed out of their hands. They write books about it, and discover new Gods, and pass new Acts of Parliament – but the thing takes no notice. It just goes on – inexorably. Man has been dabbling with stakes that are too big for him, Margaret. And the trouble is that the cards up in the trenches are getting mighty tattered.”

  She looked at him curiously. “I’d never have thought it would have taken you like that, Derek… Not quite as badly.”

  “You formed your opinion in the bad old days, didn’t you?” he said lightly. “When we danced and made love at the Grafton Galleries.” She flushed a little, but did not lower her eyes. “Such a serious girl you were too, Margaret; I wonder how you ever put up with a brainless sort of ass like me.”

  “Because I liked you,” she answered quietly, and suddenly it struck Vane, almost with a feeling of surprise, that the girl sitting beside him was more than attractive. He wondered why he had let her slip so easily out of his life. And the train of thought once started seemed a not unpleasant one… “You’ll get it back soon, Derek – your sense of proportion. You’ve got to.”

  “So that I can help build the new Heaven and the new Earth,” he laughed.

  “So that you may help build the new Heaven and the new Earth,” she repeated gravely rising to her feet. “I must go back or I’ll miss my tea.”

  “Have a cup with me in the village.” Vane scrambled up and fell into step beside her. They passed Monsieur still snoring, and Madame nodding peacefully over her knitting, and crossed the deserted promenade. Then in silence they walked up into the main street of the little town in search of a tea shop.

  “Do you realise, Margaret,” he remarked as they sat down at a small marble-topped table, “that I haven’t seen or spoken to a woman for six months?… Heaven help us! Aren’t there any cakes?”