The Old Blood Part 24

There, mistily through the dust, blue coats and red trousers showed in a moving stream to the rear between intervals of transport. The guns had had something of the splendour of war, but not these weary men leaving the soil of France behind to the enemy, beards from four weeks'

campaigning white and brown with dust, eyes sunken, feet hobbling and sore, plodding on to the rear.

From this point of high ground a small town was visible in another lap of the hills, where French towns prefer to lie snug from the wind. The air was clear; sound carried far. A scream different from that of the sh.e.l.ls from the mouth of French guns was heard; a scream that came toward them and ended in a crash, as if a steel ball had split into fragments, as it had. Over the house-tops of the town rose a cloud of dust and black smoke. Then another, and, sound travelling slower than sight, they again heard the rush of the projectile and its burst.

Henriette gripped Phil's arm, but said nothing.

An officer of infantry looked around and nodded at the burst over the town in understanding. He spoke to an old colonel with white moustache who seemed asleep on his horse. The colonel shook his head as much as to say that there was no danger; that nothing could reach them at that range.

Helen had not seen the bursts in the town. She was trying to get the old colonel, the wounded men on the tops of wagons, the wounded on foot, in lines which should tell of the meaning of retreat in the suggestiveness of types.

"I'm not sure that we ought to remain here," said Phil.

"Why not?" asked Helen.

He pointed to the bursting sh.e.l.ls.

"Oh, I couldn't go away!" was her only response.

Then the pencil dropped from her hand. Phil ducked as instinctively as if some one had struck the back of his neck and Henriette clung close to him with a cry of terror, for that approaching scream which had been distant was coming straight for them in the growing volume of a horror that froze the marrow. All the men on the road struck for one side or the other, their ducking forms flashing immutably on the retina of the eye in that awful second before a cloud of earth and dust spouted from an explosion on the other side of the road.

They were still alive. It was miraculous that they should be when they had died a score of deaths in that second. Helen tried to pick up her pencil and Henriette moaned: this much of an impression before the second sh.e.l.l came. It was nearer; death this time, without doubt. But it burst a hundred yards in front of them and some fragments whizzed by their ears.

Phil looked around for cover; for anything which would give them some protection. There was nothing near except wheat shocks. He swung Henriette around on the other side of him from the direction of the sh.e.l.ls and called out to lie down. He could think of nothing else unless they ran. But which way should they run? The next burst was between them and the house; the next on the other side of the road.

That was four. He remembered that batteries had four guns and fired in salvos. The target was evidently the road and the thing to do, then, must be to get away from the road.

"Run for it!" he cried. "That gully!"

Helen sprang up. Henriette tried to rise and could not. She was numbed with terror. Her eyes in mortal appeal spoke her helplessness.

He was almost glad of this. It made him seem of some use as a masculine being in face of this h.e.l.lish burst of destruction, which made unarmed men as feeble as a fly under a hammer. He did the natural thing, picked her up in his arms. She seemed very light, very yielding and trembling and strangely pale, beautiful, and trusting.

"Hurry on, Helen! I'll keep up with you, I'm so scared!" he called.

His voice sounded quite merry, as he meant it should. What travesty!

He wished that he were back in Longfield or Mexico, anywhere than in that particular portion of France which a German battery was pounding.

Other figures were running, too. The world seemed full of skurrying figures. Flight was the fashion.

More screams, ending in explosions, and with every one the figure in his arms trembled. But each scream was farther behind them as they hurried on. When he reached the gully he laid his burden on the gra.s.s at the bottom of it. If the target were the road they ought to be safe. At least, he could take a minute to decide what next to do. He looked back toward the road and saw the soldiers forming line in the fields under the direction of their officers. The old colonel sitting erect on his horse still remained beside the road, shouting his commands. A black cloud hid him and when it cleared away he and the horse were gone and there was a hole in the road where they had been.

Then a crack overhead drew Phil's attention from the road. There was a whizzing through the air and little spurts of dust rose from the earth, and over all a puff of smoke like those he had seen in the distance against the green hills. Phil understood that this was shrapnel and the other which burst in the earth was a high explosive.

What next? The gully was not long. Should he attempt another run?

But a shrapnel bursting over the other end of the gully made him hesitate. The two girls were hugging the bank and he dropped down beside Henriette, who caught his hand in hers, trembling again with new fear. Helen was lying face downward, holding fast to her portfolio.

She looked toward him and in her eyes was the mischievous challenge and on her lips was playing the same humour he had seen across the table at Truckleford.

"Now don't you wish you had gone on to Paris?" she asked.

"Not unless you came," he answered. "Look there!"

Another high explosive had burst, and where they had been sitting beside the road a rising column of smoke showed a hole.

"I--I----" whispered Henriette, and her eyes spoke what her lips could not.

But was the road the target? Another scream straight for them and again they thought: "This is death!" The explosion twenty or thirty yards short of the gully covered them with dust. A human something, red and blue, half rolled, half tumbled down the bank at their feet and lay there inert, stunned. A gash showed on the soldier's cheek and his hand reached for his arm where the torn flesh was trickling red. With the other he fumbled instinctively for a first field dressing.

Here was something positive to do. Phil, who had envied the cool officers directing their men in the preoccupation of action, tore down the sleeve and opened the dressing. There was silence now; no screams in the air; no explosions. Yes, utter silence had settled over the field except for the officer's commands. Drops of blood fell from the soldier's cheek on Phil's hands as he applied the first aid and Henriette's fingers were aimlessly hovering about trying to a.s.sist.

"You are a good spirit, Mademoiselle," said the soldier, happy in the realisation of life and the cessation of the sh.e.l.l-fire.

"Yes, Henriette," Phil added.

"I will go on," said the soldier, scrambling to his feet. "It is nothing."

"But are you strong enough?" Phil protested.

"I was not hit in the legs. A little farther along the road I'll get on a wagon," he said. "And you, Monsieur, you and the ladies run to the nearest cellar. That one has fainted, Monsieur--and thank you!"

He was gone.

Phil turned to see Helen prostrate, her head on her portfolio. But she recovered herself as he started toward her, looking up at him vaguely; then with a surge of vitality and a gesture of disgust she sat up.

"It was the sight of blood," she said. "I could not bear that. I'm very ashamed, but quite all right, now," she concluded, with a toss of her head and a smile.

"I helped dress his wound, poor fellow!" Henriette murmured.

CHAPTER XVIII

A RUN FOR IT

Phil leapt up the side of the gully, with a view to finding which was the safest and quickest way back to the chateau. The scene before him, so clear in its meaning even to his unknowing civilian eye, held his attention for the instant to the exclusion of his object. Those little moving spots coming over a hill this side of the town, scattering under puffs of shrapnel, must be the French rearguard; and the sh.e.l.ls from the battery behind the woods bursting over the hill beyond must be aimed at German infantry. To the end of the gully and then sharp to the right across the open was the best route for the chateau.

"And for us it is double quick, before we get more sh.e.l.ls!" he called to the girls as he dropped back into the gully and gave his hand to Henriette to a.s.sist her to rise. Helen was already on her feet, quite herself again.

"As they say in America, we must beat it!" she exclaimed.

So they ran to the end of the gully and then across the field. The German guns seemed to have lost interest in that part of the world.

They stopped on the terrace by common impulse, so keen is curiosity when danger seems out of reach but is still at large within view; the girls breathless and flushed and Phil with that indescribable relief of a man who has been under fire with women and sees them safely out of it. Of course they were only comparatively safe. They were within the range of many guns and at any minute that a German commander would choose, another tornado would break over their heads.

The French could be seen still more distinctly now, trickling over the landscape in retreat, in and out of the cover of valleys and woods, with puffs of shrapnel smoke in vicious pursuit. It all seemed like some game, until another one of those hideous screams ended in a crash in front of the woods that hid the French battery. The next was in the woods. This was enough to tell the battery commander that his hiding-place was located. In a race with death, the battery horses galloped up and away went the guns, with the German sh.e.l.ls smashing the emplacements which had just been vacated. But the tenacious, skilful gunners did not go far--only behind the next ridge, where they began again to pour death into the advancing German infantry.

"I thought so!" came a voice breaking in upon the little group.

"n.o.body is so foolhardy as a woman!" said General Rousseau, shaking his finger at Helen and Henriette. "When I heard that you were staying behind I came at once to warn you. That is not fireworks out there; it's death. Any minute it may be turned on these woods or on the chateau. Your place is the cellar, both of you, till this is over, do you hear?" he thundered, "or I'll take my stick to you!" He was so peremptory that Henriette turned to go, but Helen hesitated.

"And you, too, Mademoiselle!" he commanded.

"Attention! About face! March!" said Helen, saluting and clicking her heels together.

"Promise me you will not go wandering about the village making sketches till all firing is stopped!"