War and the Weird Part 14

"But I don't understand!" she cried, greatly puzzled.

"Well, Miss, I suppose it does require some elucidation," O'Hagan replied somewhat nervously. "You see, it's only a return of stolen goods. You remember visiting a house in the big grey motor car yesterday, Miss?"

"Yes."

"Well, I stole your bag from under the seat. I have given you back again all that I have left. But I will take this little cross as a token." He dangled the little silver charm before her face, and before she had time to take in the situation O'Hagan had disappeared.

The long plains of Northern Europe stretched before the gaze of a regiment of British infantry--great undulations of sodden earth left by the winter rains and thaws. There, in the piercing cold that froze the feet, they waited the signal to advance. Stray bullets whined and pinged as they struck the wire and sand bags on the top of the trenches; occasionally a man fell on his face; and the ghastly change in the faces of the troops bore testimony to the effects. Hilaire O'Hagan lay stretched upon his face, occasionally looking towards his officer. His heart beat like the pulsing of a motor car. His throat felt dry, his cheeks were burning. At times a cold shiver pa.s.sed right through his frame. He fidgeted and lolled from one side, to the other. It seemed to him that he had waited hours for the signal to get over the trenches. He tried to strike a match for his pipe; his hand was trembling furiously.

It occurred to him that after having pa.s.sed through the gory awfulness of six months' incessant fighting, he was beginning to lose his nerve.

He was no longer master of himself. He was afraid. Every man has the instinct that prompts fear, for upon that instinct the whole foundation of life-preservation is founded. But over and above this instinct, common to all of us, O'Hagan had imagination--the graphic, vivid imagination that always lurks in Irish blood. Is not the entire history of the Celt a rejection of the things of this world for the Shadow and the dream? Upon this basis of fear and imagination O'Hagan started to build, building and building until he had created a grand structure of blind terror which yielded a most exquisite torture to his mind.

A whistle sounded and a shudder traversed the men all down the trench.

The officer called to his men. He mounted the parapet and jumped over.

There was a sound like the rushing of a river as the regiment poured itself over the trench. The men advanced slowly and dazedly. Now any acute observer would note that the men were bewildered and had little heart in the fight. Their faces worked; and they struggled to walk on, but it seemed useless. The bullets were pattering all around and taking heavy toll. Then a few yards in front a shrapnel sh.e.l.l kicked up the mud. The German guns had found the range. Someone shouted out the fatal words "Lie down." The regiment was soon hugging the earth, which was about the best thing they could have done. Great showers of shrapnel burst over them, and the bullets struck down on them in a continuous shower. Some men rose to their feet, and the shrapnel withered them.

Suddenly one sh.e.l.l burst over O'Hagan, blotting out all around him in smoke and dust, and brutally jerking his mind to fullest tension. This sh.e.l.l fire was h.e.l.l! With the crash imagination and fear began to work together in his overworked brain--both at once in the queerest jumbling manner. In a few moments O'Hagan was on his feet running away--racing as if not merely for his life, but his soul.

When O'Hagan's brain cooled and his sight cleared he found himself in the doorway of a little wrecked church. The German sh.e.l.ls had gashed and ripped the sides and roof, so that birds flew in and out at will.

Hundreds of sparrows chirped in the oak beams above. The sh.e.l.ls had pitted, starred and jerked up the blue flagstones in the porch on which O'Hagan stood. Parts of the old church had been sh.e.l.led nearly level; little twisted fragments of beautiful leaded windows had been swept up in a pile outside with other wreckage. As O'Hagan walked up the aisle a feeling came over him that he knew much of the old place. A quintessence and distillation of peace and comradeship seemed to inhabit the soft gloam of its chancel. He found himself drifting back to past days and seeing dimly in a thin white cloud faces that seemed familiar and yet were unnameable. Then one face stood out distinctly, and O'Hagan watched it with breathless wonder and fascination. He moved closer up to it; he would have given much not to have done so, but he could not help himself--he looked closer, and it was--the face of the monk who had appeared to him once before. When the cloud had cleared a little, the outline of the monk wearing a hood and cowl became visible. Then was there a voice that he identified at once despite the lapse of two years since he had last heard it. "I have been wanting to speak to you, brother, for many hours, but _something_ I cannot explain to mortal man has prevented me." The priest instantly turned round and O'Hagan understood that he meant him to follow. His heart sank at once, and he experienced a sense of dreadful oppression and foreboding, and with a sudden thrill, partly of fear, and partly of curiosity he followed. They pa.s.sed up the aisle and a perfectly familiar staircase. Then he opened a door, and went in, and at the same moment, sheer unreasoning terror seized him. He was afraid, but did not know why: he was simply afraid.

Then like a sudden recollection, when one remembers some trivial adventure of childhood, O'Hagan looked for the old lead coffin. He cast his eyes about with a certain air of proprietorship, and compared the room with the room of his dreams. Nothing had changed. And then, with a sudden start of unexplained dread, he saw that the coffin was in the corner--the same leaden coffin that he knew so well with the same curious greyish light coming from it. There was lettering on the lid.

"What's written there? What's there? Who's there?" he called. He called and continued to call; then another terror, the terror of the sound of his own voice seized him; he did not dare to call again; he whispered.

There was something written on the coffin that his mind reeled to entertain. Without quite knowing how he came to be there, O'Hagan found himself bending over the coffin. He read the lettering, and it was:

_Hilaire O'Hagan ob. 1696 aetat 35.

Parva domus, magna quies._

He sank down on his knees with a childish sob. Sometimes the old church seemed absolutely still, and the only sound to be heard was the sighing of the night breeze below him in the pines, but sometimes the place seemed full of m.u.f.fled movements, and once O'Hagan could have sworn that the large carved handle of the door turned. Even as he stood there he heard steps just outside, and with a sudden horror, he saw the heavy door slowly open. A priest stood in the open doorway with an inscrutable smile on his lips--the same clean-shaven man with a long aquiline nose and singularly square chin, that he had seen before in his dreams.

"Brother," he said, in a moved voice. "You must go back and help your comrades. There is no peace for you yet. Yes, brother, I know it is written that we shall rest from our labours--but the beginning of our rest is not yet. _We_ must go and help them in the firing line yonder----"

"No, no, holy man!" O'Hagan pleaded. "I have had enough.... There is h.e.l.l over there."

"They are calling us, don't you hear them--the living and the dead----"

O'Hagan could see those great green flashes that burst in the sky so near to him. He could almost hear the angry zipping of high explosive shrapnel close over his head. G.o.d! how he hated it all!

"How hard it is, Father, to make these children understand!" came softly from the priest's lips.

O'Hagan's regiment had retired to their trenches in good order. They were some of those trenches round about Ypres, and all the world has read how the Germans battered and delivered terrific infantry attacks on this part of our line without cessation. A certain morning, about six o'clock, the Huns decided to deliver a sharp attack, and there was "considerable artillery activity" on the part of the German guns. Such activity was spoken of in the trenches as "raising the lid off h.e.l.l."

There was a lull after about an hour's rain of every kind of missile that man has invented to batter his brother with. Then the Huns came on in earnest. Some reached the trenches only to be met with a murderous fire: they fell in little huddled heaps in the blood and the mud and the slime of the trenches. But the whole German race seemed to be flowing in on the British, and they fairly got into the trenches, though they were twice driven out. Yard by yard the battalion retired. The next moment an unearthly, fluorescent light shot and flooded along the trenches. The troops gasped for a moment, and then started back. Standing on a traverse in full view of Germans and Englishmen was a tall man with yellow hair, in a priest's ca.s.sock. He was brandishing a sword that flashed like a tongue of flame, and crying "Turn back! turn back!

advance!"

Private Hilaire O'Hagan, the deserter, stood beside him holding a ma.s.sive bra.s.s altar cross above his head. From that moment O'Hagan behaved like one possessed. He hurled himself over the traverse into the "green" of the German regiment, and started hacking and stabbing with the pointed end of the cross. The Huns did not like the look of such a wild apparition and refused to face him. Bit by bit they retired and O'Hagan took advantage of a moment to take a green silk Irish flag, with a crownless harp, from his pocket, and attach it to the spike of the cross. Then, roaring like a lion and brandishing his strange weapon, he fell on them once more--and as they broke he saw the hooded priest driving them before him with his flaming sword. A great joy seemed to burn up in his soul. Men who watched him said he ran amok. His great voice rose high above the chattering machine guns in a beautiful Franciscan chant and the voice of the priest joined in. What O'Hagan, bearing his mighty cross, must have looked like in the eerie dawn mist, Heaven knows. But seeing such an apparition and hearing the strange chant, it is possible the Huns thought the devil had joined in the fight. Then a man in the rear trench pointed to the west, where a great image of the cross was shining against a blood red sky, and a voice cried "Forward." It pa.s.sed from man to man, and the regiment advanced, howling, with O'Hagan. They drove the Germans before them like chaff before a fan, and fell back, in triumph, to their lost trenches. They saw O'Hagan stagger a little and then turn round to where the regiment boiled with joy in the trenches.

"You are back, my children," he shouted. "It is well, for my poor soul desires rest.... Aye, rest indeed!"

A great peace settled on O'Hagan's face, as he slowly collapsed and lay very still.

Not long after this a country parson received a letter from a hare-brained member of his flock, who for many years had been good enough to keep him in touch with his doings in far lands. The old vicar had heard that the "young scoundrel," as he called him, had joined a volunteer regiment, and was in the thick of the fighting around Ypres.

The letter was written in pencil on leaves torn from a note-book. The portion that will interest the reader of this story most is here quoted.

"On Monday I came across an old friend (?) of ours--Hilaire O'Hagan. We had a brush with about five thousand Huns, and we had under-estimated their strength. They rushed us in the dawning--a living, greenish-grey wave rolled over our trenches, shooting and hacking at the heart of what had once been a regiment of British Infantry. When the second wave lapped over, our men were overborne but they were trying, by common instinct, to reach the second line trenches where they could re-form.

Then I saw O'Hagan who had dropped from G.o.d knows where, standing silhouetted against the red of dawn on the front line trench. He was waving a bra.s.s cross and the bullets were pattering around him and making a noise like rats skipping about an empty house. My G.o.d! Pluck! I never thought O'Hagan had it in him. I tell you, he hurled himself down on the rifles of a thousand Huns, and 'drove them hence' with his mighty bra.s.s cross. Our men were soon rallying on the lost trench. The stragglers clutched at each other, and pointed to where the cross flashed and reeled in the seething ma.s.s. Under cover of night our bearer party brought in O'Hagan stone dead with over twenty bullet wounds in him. I know, vicar, when you read this, it will flash into your mind that poor O'Hagan had been drinking again. You may banish any such thought ... there was a different look in O'Hagan's eyes. He had seen the 'immortal light, all young and joyful, million-orbed, million-coloured, as on the first morning.' We carried him and his cross over to an old monastery where we found one of those quaint lead coffins--like the one in the crypt in _our_ old church--and laid him at rest beneath the cool blue flagstones outside the chancel door. One of our men, a stone-mason in times of peace, roughly graved his name on the slab above him. As I walked back to the trenches I turned back to have a last look at the grave. A priest was standing over it with hands outstretched to bless...."

THE END