One of Ours
Book II: Enid
Chapter IX
Enid and Mrs. Royce had gone away to the Michigan sanatorium where they spent
part of every summer, and would not be back until October. Claude and his mother
gave all their attention to the war despatches. Day after day, through the first
two weeks of August, the bewildering news trickled from the little towns out
into the farming country.
About the middle of the month came the story of the fall of the forts at
Liege, battered at for nine days and finally reduced in a few hours by siege
guns brought up from the rear,—guns which evidently could destroy any
fortifications that ever had been, or ever could be constructed. Even to these
quiet wheat-growing people, the siege guns before Liege were a menace; not to
their safety or their goods, but to their comfortable, established way of
thinking. They introduced the greater-than-man force which afterward repeatedly
brought into this war the effect of unforeseeable natural disaster, like tidal
waves, earthquakes, or the eruption of volcanoes.
On the twenty-third came the news of the fall of the forts at Namur; again
giving warning that an unprecedented power of destruction had broken loose in
the world. A few days later the story of the wiping out of the ancient and
peaceful seat of learning at Louvain made it clear that this force was being
directed toward incredible ends. By this time, too, the papers were full of
accounts of the destruction of civilian populations. Something new, and
certainly evil, was at work among mankind. Nobody was ready with a name for it.
None of the well-worn words descriptive of human behaviour seemed adequate. The
epithets grouped about the name of "Attila" were too personal, too dramatic, too
full of old, familiar human passion.
One afternoon in the first week of September Mrs. Wheeler was in the kitchen
making cucumber pickles, when she heard Claude's car coming back from Frankfort.
In a moment he entered, letting the screen door slam behind him, and threw a
bundle of mail on the table.
"What do you, think, Mother? The French have moved the seat of government to
Bordeaux! Evidently, they don't think they can hold Paris."
Mrs. Wheeler wiped her pale, perspiring face with the hem of her apron and
sat down in the nearest chair. "You mean that Paris is not the capital of France
any more? Can that be true?"
"That's what it looks like. Though the papers say it's only a precautionary
measure."
She rose. "Let's go up to the map. I don't remember exactly where Bordeaux
is. Mahailey, you won't let my vinegar burn, will you?"
Claude followed her to the sitting-room, where her new map hung on the wall
above the carpet lounge. Leaning against the back of a willow rocking-chair, she
began to move her hand about over the brightly coloured, shiny surface,
murmuring, "Yes, there is Bordeaux, so far to the south; and there is Paris."
Claude, behind her, looked over her shoulder. "Do you suppose they are going
to hand their city over to the Germans, like a Christmas present? I should think
they'd burn it first, the way the Russians did Moscow. They can do better than
that now, they can dynamite it!"
"Don't say such things." Mrs. Wheeler dropped into the deep willow chair,
realizing that she was very tired, now that she had left the stove and the heat
of the kitchen. She began weakly to wave the palm leaf fan before her face.
"It's said to be such a beautiful city. Perhaps the Germans will spare it, as
they did Brussels. They must be sick of destruction by now. Get the
encyclopaedia and see what it says. I've left my glasses downstairs."
Claude brought a volume from the bookcase and sat down on the lounge. He
began: "Paris, the capital city o f France and the Department of the
Seine,—shall I skip the history?"
"No. Read it all."
He cleared his throat and began again: "At its first appearance in history,
there was nothing to foreshadow the important part which Paris was to play in
Europe and in the world," etc.
Mrs. Wheeler rocked and fanned, forgetting the kitchen and the cucumbers as
if they had never been. Her tired body was resting, and her mind, which was
never tired, was occupied with the account of early religious foundations under
the Merovingian kings. Her eyes were always agreeably employed when they rested
upon the sunburned neck and catapult shoulders of her red-headed son.
Claude read faster and faster until he stopped with a gasp.
"Mother, there are pages of kings! We'll read that some other time. I want to
find out what it's like now, and whether it's going to have any more history."
He ran his finger up and down the columns. "Here, this looks like business.
Defences: Paris, in a recent German account of the greatest fortresses of the
world, possesses three distinct rings of defences"—here he broke off. "Now what
do you think of that? A German account, and this is an English book! The world
simply made a mistake about the Germans all along. It's as if we invited a
neighbour over here and showed him our cattle and barns, and all the time he was
planning how he would come at night and club us in our beds."
Mrs. Wheeler passed her hand over her brow. "Yet we have had so many German
neighbours, and never one that wasn't kind and helpful."
"I know it. Everything Mrs. Erlich ever told me about Germany made me want to
go there. And the people that sing all those beautiful songs about women and
children went into Belgian villages and—"
"Don't, Claude!" his mother put out her lands as if to push his words back.
"Read about the defences of Paris; that's what we must think about now. I can't
but believe there is one fort the Germans didn't put down in their book, and
that it will stand. We know Paris is a wicked city, but there must be many
God-fearing people there, and God has preserved it all these years. You saw in
the paper how the churches are full all day of women praying." She leaned
forward and smiled at him indulgently. "And you believe those prayers will
accomplish nothing, son?"
Claude squirmed, as he always did when his mother touched upon certain
subjects. "Well, you see, I can't forget that the Germans are praying, too. And
I guess they are just naturally more pious than the French." Taking up the book
he began once more: "In the low ground again, at the narrowest part of the great
loop of the Marne," etc.
Claude and his mother had grown familiar with the name of that river, and
with the idea of its strategic importance, before it began to stand out in black
headlines a few days later.
The fall ploughing had begun as usual. Mr. Wheeler had decided to put in six
hundred acres of wheat again. Whatever happened on the other side of the world,
they would need bread. He took a third team himself and went into the field
every morning to help Dan and Claude. The neighbours said that nobody but the
Kaiser had ever been able to get Nat Wheeler down to regular work.
Since the men were all afield, Mrs. Wheeler now went every morning to the
mailbox at the crossroads, a quarter of a mile away, to get yesterday's Omaha
and Kansas City papers which the carrier left. In her eagerness she opened and
began to read them as she turned homeward, and her feet, never too sure, took a
wandering way among sunflowers and buffaloburrs. One morning, indeed, she sat
down on a red grass bank beside the road and read all the war news through
before she stirred, while the grasshoppers played leap-frog over her skirts, and
the gophers came out of their holes and blinked at her. That noon, when she saw
Claude leading his team to the water tank, she hurried down to him without
stopping to find her bonnet, and reached the windmill breathless.
"The French have stopped falling back, Claude. They are standing at the
Marne. There is a great battle going on. The papers say it may decide the war.
It is so near Paris that some of the army went out in taxi-cabs." Claude drew
himself up. "Well, it will decide about Paris, anyway, won't it? How many
divisions?"
"I can't make out. The accounts are so confusing. But only a few of the
English are there, and the French are terribly outnumbered. Your father got in
before you, and he has the papers upstairs."
"They are twenty-four hours old. I'll go to Vicount tonight after I'm done
work, and get the Hastings paper."
In the evening, when he came back from town, he found his father and mother
waiting up for him. He stopped a moment in the sitting-room. "There is not much
news, except that the battle is on, and practically the whole French army is
engaged. The Germans outnumber them five to three in men, and nobody knows how
much in artillery. General Joffre says the French will fall back no farther." He
did not sit down, but went straight upstairs to his room.
Mrs. Wheeler put out the lamp, undressed, and lay down, but not to sleep.
Long afterward, Claude heard her gently closing a window, and he smiled to
himself in the dark. His mother, he knew, had always thought of Paris as the
wickedest of cities, the capital of a frivolous, wine-drinking, Catholic people,
who were responsible for the massacre of St. Bartholomew and for the grinning
atheist, Voltaire. For the last two weeks, ever since the French began to fall
back in Lorraine, he had noticed with amusement her growing solicitude for
Paris.
It was curious, he reflected, lying wide awake in the dark: four days ago the
seat of government had been moved to Bordeaux,—with the effect that Paris
seemed suddenly to have become the capital, not of France, but of the world! He
knew he was not the only farmer boy who wished himself tonight beside the Marne.
The fact that the river had a pronounceable name, with a hard Western "r"
standing like a keystone in the middle of it, somehow gave one's imagination a
firmer hold on the situation. Lying still and thinking fast, Claude felt that
even he could clear the bar of French "politeness"—so much more terrifying than
German bullets—and slip unnoticed into that outnumbered army. One's manners
wouldn't matter on the Marne tonight, the night of the eighth of September,
1914. There was nothing on earth he would so gladly be as an atom in that wall
of flesh and blood that rose and melted and rose again before the city which had
meant so much through all the centuries—but had never meant so much before. Its
name had come to have the purity of an abstract idea. In great sleepy
continents, in land-locked harvest towns, in the little islands of the sea, for
four days men watched that name as they might stand out at night to watch a
comet, or to see a star fall.