No Man's Land (64 page)

‘
Chez-moi
, sir!' Bill Gates called to Claude, saluting with a bloody hand, as he stood skinning rabbits before the door of his billet. ‘Bunny casualties are heavy in town this week!'

‘You know, Wheeler,' David remarked one morning as they were shaving, ‘I think Maxey would come back here on one leg if he knew about these excursions into the forest after mushrooms.'

‘Maybe.'

‘Aren't you going to put a stop to them?'

‘Not I!' Claude jerked, setting the corners of his mouth grimly. ‘If the girls, or their people, make complaint to me, I'll interfere. Not otherwise. I've thought the matter over.'

‘Oh, the girls—' David laughed softly. ‘Well, it's something to acquire a taste for mushrooms. They don't get them at home, do they?'

*

When, after eight days, the Americans had orders to march, there was mourning in every house. On their last night in town, the officers received pressing invitations to the dance in the square. Claude went for a few moments, and looked on. David was dancing every dance, but Hicks was nowhere to be seen. The poor fellow had been out of everything. Claude went over to the church to see whether he might be moping in the graveyard.

There, as he walked about, Claude stopped to look at a grave that stood off by itself, under a privet hedge, with withered leaves and a little French flag on it. The old woman with whom they stayed had told them the story of this grave.

The Curé's niece was buried there. She was the prettiest girl in Beaufort, it seemed, and she had a love affair with a German officer and disgraced the town. He was a young Bavarian, quartered with this same old woman who told them the story, and she said he was a nice boy, handsome and gentle, and used to sit up half the night in the garden with his head in his hands – homesick, lovesick. He was always after this Marie Louise; never pressed her, but was always there, grew up out of the ground under her feet, the old woman said. The girl hated Germans, like all the rest, and flouted him. He was sent to the front. Then he came back, sick and almost deaf, after one of the slaughters at Verdun, and stayed a long while. That spring a story got about that some woman met him at night in the German graveyard. They had taken the land behind the church for their cemetery, and it joined the wall of the Curé's garden. When the women went out into the fields to plant the crops, Marie Louise used to slip away from the others and meet her Bavarian in the forest. The girls were sure of it now; and they treated her with disdain. But nobody was brave enough to say anything to the Curé. One day, when she was with her Bavarian in the wood, she snatched up his revolver from the ground and shot herself. She was a Frenchwoman at heart, their hostess said.

‘And the Bavarian?' Claude asked David later. The story had become so complicated he could not follow it.

‘He justified her, and promptly. He took the same pistol and shot himself through the temples. His orderly, stationed at the edge of the thicket to keep watch, heard the first shot and ran toward them. He saw the officer take up the smoking pistol and turn it on himself. But the Kommandant couldn't believe that one of his officers had so much feeling. He held an
enquête
, dragged the girl's mother and uncle into court, and tried to establish that they were in conspiracy with her to seduce and murder a German officer. The orderly was made to tell the whole story; how and where they began to meet. Though he wasn't very delicate about the details he divulged, he stuck to his statement that he saw Lieutenant Muller shoot himself with his own hand, and the Kommandant failed to prove his case. The old Curé had known nothing of all this until he heard it aired in the military court. Marie Louise had lived in his house since she was a child, and was like his daughter. He had a stroke or something, and has been like this ever since. The girl's friends forgave her, and when she was buried off alone by the hedge, they began to take flowers to her grave. The Kommandant put up an
affiche
on the hedge, forbidding any one to decorate the grave. Apparently, nothing during the German occupation stirred up more feeling than poor Marie Louise.'

It would stir anybody, Claude reflected. There was her lonely little grave, the shadow of the privet hedge falling across it. There, at the foot of the Curé's garden, was the German cemetery, with heavy cement crosses, – some of them with long inscriptions; lines from their poets, and couplets from old hymns. Lieutenant Muller was there somewhere, probably. Strange, how their story stood out in a world of suffering. That was a kind of misery he hadn't happened to think of before; but the same thing must have occurred again and again in the occupied territory. He would never forget the Curé's hands, his dim, suffering eyes.

Claude recognized David crossing the pavement in front of the church, and went back to meet him.

‘Hello! I mistook you for Hicks at first. I thought he might be out here.' David sat down on the steps and lit a cigarette.

‘So did I. I came out to look for him.'

‘Oh, I expect he's found some shoulder to cry on. Do you realize, Claude, you and I are the only men in the Company who haven't got engaged? Some of the married men have got engaged twice. It's a good thing we're pulling out, or we'd have banns and a bunch of christenings to look after.'

‘All the same,' murmured Claude, ‘I like the women of this country, as far as I've seen them.' While they sat smoking in silence, his mind went back to the quiet scene he had watched on the steps of that other church, on his first night in France; the country girl in the moonlight, bending over her sick soldier.

When they walked back across the square, over the crackling leaves, the dance was breaking up. Oscar was playing ‘Home, Sweet Home,' for the last waltz.

‘Le dernier baiser
,' said David. ‘Well, tomorrow we'll be gone, and the chances are we won't come back this way.'

Willa Cather
was born in Virginia in 1873 and died in New York in 1947. This piece is taken from
One of Ours
, which was published in 1922 and won the Pulitzer Prize the following year. When Willa was ten, the family moved to Nebraska, and it was there that she found the themes that were to inspire her best work, including the
Prairie Trilogy
–
O Pioneers
,
The Song of the Lark
and
My Antonia
– and
One of Ours
. This last is the story of Charles Wheeler, a Nebraska man, who enlists when the USA joins the war and finds a meaning to his life on the battlefields of Europe: it is here that he feels for the first time that he matters.
One of Ours
contains powerful battle scenes but also scenes that show great sympathy for those who remained behind on the home front, whose lives were overwhelmed by the consequences of the fighting.

IRENE RATHBONE

WHO DIES IF ENGLAND LIVES?

from
We that Were Young

T
HAT EVENING AFTER SUPPER
Joan went straight to her room, and sat for a long time in her kimono by the open window. There wasn't a breath of air.

She had been kept so hard at it for the past few weeks that she had scarcely been beyond the hospital grounds; in her rare off hours she had felt too bone-weary to do anything but lie reading in the rest-room or on the grass outside. The last time she had seen Pamela – some time in June – the girl had been like a dancing fairy over her engagement. Joan could see her now, standing in a patch of sunlight in Lady Butler's little drawing-room, exclaiming jubilantly: ‘I'm done for, Joan! I'm completely done for!' and contrasted that radiant creature with the tight-lipped figure of this afternoon – the gold in her all turned to iron, the song to silence.

What was the use of winning the war, Joan cried to herself in sudden despair, if none of the men who won it were to live? The papers were for ever quoting ‘Who dies if England lives?' But after all what was England? The old men who sat at home, and in clubs, and gloatingly discussed the war? The bustling business men who thought they ran it? The women with aching hearts? Or the young manhood of the nation – that part of the nation that should be working, mating, begetting, but which now was being cut down? There was no question – the last. And in a year or two there'd be no ‘England.'

She thought of Colin, Philip, and other friends, not seen for so long, and now in hourly danger. Colin's letters had been very scrappy of late. She thought of a second cousin of hers, killed in the fighting round La Boiselle. She thought of her cousin Jack lying badly wounded at Boulogne. The waste, the waste of it all!

Sighing, she drew her writing-pad towards her. Might as well do something. Better to write than to think.

Write to Jack. Write to Betty to go and look up Jack in hospital. Write, too, to Barbara Frewen, who had recently gone over there to nurse. She read through again Barbara's last two letters.

The first was written from Sussex, early in July. ‘We really do seem to be getting a move on at last, and the guns for the past ten days have been perfectly appalling – booming incessantly, day and night. It has been like one huge throb through all the air. The windows rattle all the time, and even the china on the washstands. One daren't think what it must be like out there.'

The second was from No. 14 Stationary, Wimereux, and had come last week. ‘Most extraordinary luck getting here, for I never even asked for France. The hospital is right on the sea, as you know. We work in tents and huts which are delightfully airy and bright. Of course it's within easy reach of Betty and all of them, and I've already paid several visits to the Alexandra, and also to the dear old Connaught (which, my dear, does not look so nice as in our day!). Yesterday I spent a heavenly afternoon in the woods at Hardelot, and how I thought of you! I could just see you there sitting on the ramparts, surrounded with poetry-books! I am much more at peace in my mind now that I am nursing, but also I shall never like the work so much. That time with the Y. M. C. A. was a beautiful time, all so sunny and romantic somehow. But it was a very easy life, we could do practically what we liked, and we felt – didn't we? – that it was too pleasant. How is your friend, that boy whom I sent you out for a walk with from Ostrohove? My Sam is somewhere behind the lines at the moment, thank heaven – at one of those instruction schools. He hopes to come up and see me at Boulogne before long.'

Yes, it was all sunny and romantic! thought Joan, looking back on those days, already so long ago. She envied Barbara being in dear Boulogne again – even though it was as a V. A. D., and not as a Y. M. worker.

It was nearly midnight when she finished writing to her various friends (the letter to Pamela was the most exhausting of all); and when, dazed with fatigue, she dropped into bed, the last thing that her sleepy eyes beheld was her apron, with its red cross, hanging over the back of the chair. Symbol of servitude. For how many months, for how many years, would she, and her kind, be wearing uniform?

*

Miss Leather was right. Joan never heard another word from Matron about the Richardson business; and her early indignation died down as she realised that Matron had no more meant the insulting things she had said to her than a sergeant-major meant the things he roared out when he strafed a Tommy. She had employed a drastic form of utterance to express disapprobation of a small lapse, and that was all there was to it.

And so, when the time came, Joan signed her death-warrant (as the V. A. D.s called it) without let or hindrance, and thankfully bound herself to serve at the 1st London for the next six months, at a salary of £20 a year.

But that the spirit of the hospital – as far as the regular staff went – was an unimaginative and flinty one was shown a few weeks later by an event which shook the whole community.

Working with Phipps in Sister Grundle's ward was a girl called O'Reilly – a good-natured creature, a little slow and vague, but willing. Somehow or other, in spite of the warm weather, O'Reilly had managed to catch a very bad cold. She took no notice of it at first, but after a time it went on to her chest, and she had prolonged fits of coughing. As the cough kept her awake for hours at night, and was a source of intense irritation to Sister Grundle by day, O'Reilly suggested that she had perhaps better ‘go sick.' Sister Grundle glared at her opprobriously, for a moment, over a gigantic bosom, then took her temperature, saw that it was a few points above normal, and, more to be rid of her than for any humanitarian reason, dispatched her to Matron.