Abbildungen der Seite
PDF
EPUB

to study, with an historian's eye, the ground he darkly fought over the first time he went to Gray; thus may we review our young misdeeds, self-pitying and time-mellowed. And when he went to Gray the second time he saw the great bronze chassepot there.

An excessive friend of mine collects old rifles, and makes his dining-room look like a non-commissioned officers' mess. He assures his guests that he owns a Baker, a Delvigne, a Brunswick, a Minie, an Enfield, a needle-gun, a Chassepot, a Snider, a MartiniHenry, a Mauser, a Gras, a Winchester, a Mannlicher, a Lee-Metford, a Lebel, and what-not. He slings them chronologically, labelled with the names by which these toys for a young Apollyon are known, and they take away my appetite when I dine amidst their array. 'Tis the plague of his life that he cannot unearth an example of the original rifle, the old Adam and first father of all rifles, the crude and imperfect killing-tool which was all that Chrissom men had to content themselves with between Anno Domini 1498 and the year of Our Lord 1631. As for myself, I should prefer a collection of spinning-wheels, and I might have made one by now had I taken that thirty-five franc chance at Dijon. But do not opine that I cannot let off a rifle. I can; I can make a bull, like any Irish Fusilier; I can hit the ball on the jet; I can ring the bell; I can perforate the card quite respectably. I am handier with a rifle than with a spinning-wheel; point of fact. But what a cold, hard, smooth-devilish thing a rifle is to be handy with, or to collect! Cold, hard, but not smooth is the great bronze chassepot on the Soldiers' Monument which the Rektor and I have seen at Gray. High set in bronze upon the pedestal of that touching memorial a shot soldier staggers, and his rifle falls; but it falls into the clutch of his boyish son.

La Revanche! That is still the fixed idea in Gaul; that is still the inhumane but human intention. You realize the cold hard smooth fixity of it when you come to the Gap in the Vosges, as from Gray you may quickly do. On a night of the Autumn manœuvres for instance, when the garrisons and Reservists are out from Toul and Langres and encamped upon the Plateau, you may realize those Gallic preparations for revenge, that last and dearest joy of the untutored soul. There lie the embattled hosts, at rest after a rehearsal. At a telegram, a word of command, an affront of France, they would spring into "magnificently stern array." Meanwhile they rest, at nightfall. Listen

Les diligen-ces
Part' pour Mayen-ce,
Bordeaux, Floren-ce
Et tous pays.

A little reg-legged soldier wrapped in his fusty great-coat lies beside a bivouac fire on the Plateau de Langres, and hums to himself that old song. "Les diligences partent pour Mayence," do they? No diligences will ever depart for Mainz again, but those shining straight lines in the valley, those parallel bars, prepared as if for gymnastic uses and prolonged to apparent infinity, may carry armed travellers towards Mainz some day. Spreading out like the bones of a fan, to touch at twenty points the Gap in the Vosges, they run, those hard, smooth-devilish railways built for war, all for war. Grass grows hay-high between those rails; no train conveys a single civilian passenger or an ounce of peaceable merchandise along them. Idle they lie and grimly they wait, strategic iron roads built all for war; the motor-car cannot antiquate them or abolish their purposed use. The motor-car that takes the highway from Dijon to Sedan goes through Domremy, and the troops

that marched from Toul three days ago went swinging past the church where Jeanne Darc knelt in her ecstasy, and past the house wherein the Deliverergirl was born. And "Halt!" cried the colonels there. "Port arms! Salute!" The sabres flashed in the beautiful curves and sway of that accolade, the rifles were raised and ranked like thurifers before a shrine. Deliverance for France again they dream of, do the Gauls, but not from English and Burgundians this time.

Thirty thousand red-legged soldats prepare for open-air sleep on the Plateau, and presently the last bugles sound. Solemn, virile, and largo is the music of the extinction des feux; poesy intense, fraught with charm and melancholy, breathes through that chain of slow, grave notes. They float across table-land and valley, they die upon the silent fields all blonde with stubble. Cover fires? There are fires of memory and emotion which are never extinguished in France. Think you that Madame X at Dijon has forgotten? "Revenge?" Gambetta thundered, "Think of it always, if you speak of it never!" Seldom do they speak of it in Gallia now, but they think of it still. They remember. The men who have come to forty and fifty year remember; and if the young soldiers on the Plateau cannot remember, they know. They have heard; their fathers have told them. They have seen the Gloria victis statue at Bordeaux. And at Gray they have understood the meaning of the chassepot, falling from the shot Gaul's fingers into his son's young hand.

The curfew bugle is silent, the fires of the bivouac flicker down, the troops are already asleep; but as for the little red-legged soldat, still he wakes and still he hums. His feet as he lies point Eastward, Rhineward, Gothward, revengeward; over yonder is the Gap which admits to the fair province

which France has lost. And listen again he is humming again, this little red-legged, hot-headed young soldier; it is the Sentinelles veillez of M. Fragerolles which he hums

Sentinelle au pantalon rouge,

A l'Est que vois-tu?
Je vois un nuage qui bouge,

Vapeur de sang qui est perdu.
L'éclair y trace, en formes nettes,
De grands zig-zags de baïonettes;
Sentinelles, veillez!

Yes, he will watch. Nowadays, now that all the little nations in the world are emphasizing themselves, shall not the Grande France?

But the tardy moon has risen. It climbs to the edge of the Plateau; it looks down at the couchant myriads cast there in the mimicry of death. And the little red-legged fellow shivers, for the strewn plain and the deathpale moon remind him of the tale his father tells. Of when his father lay wounded on the deserted field of Sedan. Of how such a moon as that rose up and rested at the edge of the battlefield, distant but plain before his father's eyes. Of how-ah, strange and awesome sight!-forth from the moon a black thing seemed to spring, and to make towards him slowly; a thing like a black bar that moved, that crept, that advanced; a black bar short and narrow, straight marching out of the moon towards the sopping red spot where the soldier lay. Out of the eerie moon it seemed to come, straight, direct, inevitable upon him, and his fear shrieked aloud. But soon his hope cried out, for the black bar was a priest, a priest bare-headed, kilting his cassock and marching with reddened souliers across the awful wetness of the field; a priest, breviary in hand, and chanting the Miserere and the prayer for the dying and the dead. . . . Just such a peeping moon as this one, and just such a man-strewn plain, the little red-legged fellow reflects; and

he himself, perhaps, forlorn little soldat, tawdry little tin soldier for the play-game of both children at Paris and Berlin, to lie as his father did, shell-torn at the thigh and sabrebroken in the arm, if war shall come again. And then for France—who knows?-perhaps another Sedan. . . .

Sepulchrally the churchbell in the valley tolls ten, and the little redlegged fellow has fallen asleep at last. But near him a dragoon is dreaming; he dreams that he rides, rides, rides, with flashing sabre and tossing horsehair plume. He has thought of la revanche, and he dreams that the chance is come; he can speak of it now, he can shout of it-but he dreams that his troop is ill-marshalled, and he cries out a warning. "Aux armes! V'là l'ennemi! Au secours, je vous dis, nom de Dieu! V'là les Prussiens, je vous dis! Apprétez-vous! Sabre-main-à gauche en bataille! Au galop! Char-r-r-gez! Hourah!" A sleepy corporal curses him into silence; again there is deathlike quietude, and the mimicry of death once more.

that best of comicality. Pitiful and considerate for others, yet suddenly boiling and bubbling with rage on inadequate occasions, like a geyser. And even to his name-Fluellen, Thlewellyn-the Welshman, the Elizabethan Welshman, and also the Victorian Welshman to a t. "All the waters of Wye cannot wash the Welsh plood out of his pody." As a thumbnail sketch Fluellen's is the most perfect pen-and-ink portrait ever drawn; I would know him again amongst a million on the thither Lethean shore. For may I eat the leek of the liar if one does not see his shade-a pale green, leek-green, it is in color-any night when one walks about "that famed Picard field" where he fought so well.

Battlefields of France, which generations of Madame Gamps have labored to provide with food for powder-Agincourt where Fluellen did so valiantly, Poitiers, Crécy, Toulouse, Chateaudun, Dijon, Mars-la-Tour, St. Quentin, and endless others-multitudinous champs de bataille which something still seems to incarnadine I have felt your horrible charm. Hobbinol and I have collected battlefields; Gravelotte, I have traced the hoof-marks of your cavalry charge; Sedan, I have trod your furrows flat. I have followed the flight of the miserablest of Napoleons, I have slept where he slept the night of disaster irretrievable, the very Pelion upon Ossa of defeat. And there at Bouillon, in an annexe of Godfrey's feudal castle, in the whitewashed salles of a petty Versailles, I have seen the names of Marie and Gretchen, Lina and Louise, scratched or pencilled on the whitewash by Gauls and Goths who lay side by side in a common pain and hospital, chumming together as they tried to talk to each other of their wives or sweethearts and their wounds. Upon the hearts of the Maries and

That, or nearly that, is what one may hear on a night of the Autumn manœuvres, when one goes the rounds with one's ami, Major Leliene. And afterwards in the tent one talks of Fluellen, of Shakespeare's Fluellen, of the nuances there are in Shakespeare's Fluellen, and of how little those nuances can be understood by a Gaul or a Goth who does not understand the Welsh. For look you, as he himself would say, "there is very excellent" nuances in Shakespeare's Fluellen. Is he not the arrant Welsh gentleman, strange in his consonants but musical in his vowels and cadences? "Marvellous valorous," hot as cayenne pepper, touchy as the sensitive plant, extravagant in hyperbolical speech, pedantic in erudition, and over-proud of his claims of long descent. Comic with the unconscious Welsh humor, Gretchens, the Linas and Louises, the

old clients of Madame Gamps who spin and knit, who watch and pray, the names of battlefields are writ deep, methinks. "Trailst thou the puissant pike?" Good; but sometimes it were braver to smooth the distaff-wool and treadle the unending wheel. I think of Fluellen-my Fluellen, his white hair gleaming in the candlelight of the cardtable at the Club, and I remember his day on the tower at Dijon. And then I think of Mademoiselle below, anxious and harried, heart-aching but serviable, waiting on gruff Gothic guests at her mother's inn-smiling with them, even perhaps and all the while her thoughts, her honest love, her terrors out in the covertless fields of Burgundy with the escaping or perhaps unescaping and shot down Capitaine, "of the most handsome and the most good."

I have never collected battlefields in Russia, nor seen the spot "a little beyond the west bank of the Dnieper" where on a day of the Retreat from Moscow General Lejeune "sat down to rest on the trunk of a tree, beside a fine young artilleryman who had just been wounded." Two doctors happened to pass by, and Lejeune desired them to examine the wound. "His arm must be amputated at once!" they declared, and Lejeune asked the young soldier if he could bear it. "Anything you like, mon Général," was the stout reply. "But there are only two of us," the doctors said, "so you, General, will be good enough to help us, perhaps?" Lejeune was to let the poor fellow lean against him the while. "Sit back to back with him, sir, and you will see nothing of it." Lejeune did not see, but he heard; he heard the The Cornhill Magazine.

noise which the saw made as it cut through the bone. ""Tis a pity we haven't a little wine here to help him rally," the doctors said. "I happened to have half a bottle of Malaga with me," Lejeune recounted. "I was hoarding it up for my own use, a drop at a time, but I gave it to the poor fellow who was looking terribly pale. His eyes brightened, at one gulp he emptied the flask, and then, returning it, 'It is still a long way to Carcassonne!' he said, and walked on with a firm step, at a pace I could hardly follow."

Such was the courage of Pierre the artilleryman, all Poland and Germany and half France away from his native Carcassonne-a long way indeed. But what of the heroism of Suzonne his wife, busy at Carcassonne with her spinning-wheel and her chickens, yet not so busy that she could not think, imagine, and dread all day and all night. "There! Now, if not before, he is shot! He falls dead! I really am a widow now-oh my child, you are fatherless!" In war-time the passionate hearts of good women bleed worse, I think, than any amputated arm. Do you see brave Pierre the artilleryman, Pierre the manchot, tramping back over Poland, Germany, and half France to beautiful Carcassonne? I see Suzonne setting out with her child in her arms, to tramp towards Russia until she can know the truth, less torturing than her fears. And under all this feathered and gilded business of war I see the grim nursery-play of young Apollyons, who sneer at Madame Gamps and spinning-wheels, the while they toy with chassepots and with diabolic spitting shells.

J. H. Yoxall.

[blocks in formation]

"Who are you, you little black boy?" princely House in Asia, claims the she asked insolently.

[blocks in formation]

"And where is Pelesu, pray?" asked the girl, her lips curling scornfully. “I have never heard of Pelesu."

Unlike Saleh, she spoke her adopted language perfectly, yet with that slight lengthening of the vowels and over-precise enunciation of the consonants which, when accompanied with a fluty falsetto voice, proclaims the "Chee-Chee" to the Anglo-Indian with uncompromising distinctness.

"Pelesu is a State-a very large State in the Malay Peninsula," answered Saleh sulkily.

The little Princess tossed her head and laughed. "Oh, that savage place!" she said. "I knew your father could not be one of the great princes of India, or I should have heard of him. I," she added proudly, "I am a daughter of the

proud distinction of the same mythical ancestry; but the little Princess laughed contemptuously at such preposterous pretensions.

"It is in the books-the Malay books. I have read it," said Saleh feebly.

"There are plenty of lies in the books," rejoined the little Princess sententiously. "But our chronicles are true. They are ever so old, and all the world knows about our descent. My people were kings for thousands and thousands of years!"

"And aren't they kings any longer?" inquired Saleh innocently.

This time the little Princess bent upon him a look of scornful pity that was withering.

"Have you learned no history, you little black boy?" she asked.

"Oh yes," said Saleh, with the ineradicable childishness of his race, and anxious, too, to display his knowledge. "I know a lot of history, about Julius Cæsar, and William the Conqueror, and Clive, and Warren Hastings, and Oliver Cromwell, the wicked regicide, and Marie Antoinette, and . . . and . . . Sir Stamford Raffles, . . . and-"

"Oh, all that stuff!" she interrupted. "That is nothing; but the story of the House of Baram Singh is real history. The English robbed us!"

« ZurückWeiter »