Desolate advance-guard of the vast army so soon to invade the shores of Britain, how familiar the figure is now that was then so strange to us in the quaint old-world fashion of its homely garments, the thick white dust and travel-stains that covered it, from the linen coif to the wooden shoes.
She was not old, the woman who sat with her little flock gathered about her, on the Indian stool that had supported the superb person of von Herrnung, what time he had held forth to Mrs. Charterhouse and Lady Wastwood upon the loftiness of German Kultur, the perfection of German female beauty, and the overwhelming mental and bodily superiority of the German Superman. A Walloon peasant from a village near Jodoigne where she and her husband had worked upon a tiny farm.
Perhaps a dozen words of French were hers: "Tout brûle!" and "En Angleterre où il n'y a pas de Boches!"
We were to learn to reap terrible meanings from that hoarse, faint parrot-cry. Truths that raised the hairs upon the flesh and chilled the blood were to be imaged for us in the blank vacuity of her unseeing stare. We were to learn why all her children squinted, from Vic, the sturdy man of seven, and Josephine, his junior, possibly by a year, down to Georgette of the chubby cheeks and crinkly, roguish eyelids, and Albert, of the round blue stare, the big white-haired head, and the marvellous bow legs.
In their dull stunned quietude and their clayey pallor, the mark of the Beast was branded upon them, down to the livid baby in its little cap of soiled linen, swaddled in the old red shawl, that bound down its arms. You might have thought it dead, but for the flutter of a muscle in the cheek, and the faint movement of its lips, feebly sucking at the breast that had been large and bounteous, and now was lax, and flabby, covered by a network of darkish violet veins.
"Who are they? ... What are they? ... Where do they come from? ... Why were they brought here? ... Does no one know? ... Will no one tell? ..."
The silence of amazement was now breaking. The mouths belonging to the faces under the nodding feathers, old and young, handsome and ugly, vacuous and clever, silly and intellectual, were all prattling interrogations like the above. Pride of Place and Joy of Life, Thirst of Pleasure, Lust of Power, Gaiety and Weariness, Wisdom and Folly, Humbug and Sincerity, Meanness and Generosity, ringed-in the dusty group of wooden-shod mysteries and most frightfully wanted to know! And nobody offered any solution of the puzzle. The piano-organ was playing half a dozen doors below the Club, the cracked old tenor quavering to its accompaniment:
"Nous le jurons tu vivras! Tu vivras toujours grande el belle Et ton invincible unité Aura pour devise immortelle——"
The music suddenly broke off. A policeman had ordered the organ to move on....
"Tout brûlé!"
Hitherto the Belgian woman had not looked up, nor changed her listless attitude. Now she lifted her empty expressionless eyes, and hoarsely iterated her parrot-cry. The suckling at her breast whimpered and let go the nipple. She glanced at it, saying in her own thick Flemish tongue:
"Daar is geen melk."[1]
[1] "There is no milk."
She rocked the baby for whom she had no milk. Its feeble whimper was not stilled. She went on to that accompaniment:
"De Duischer kwamen. Zy hebben alles gebrand! De geburen,—mijn voder—mijn man is gedood! Zy hebben hem in het vuur geworpen!"[2]
[2] "The Germans came. They burned everything. The neighbours, and my father, and my husband are dead. They threw them into the fire."
The baby's whimper became a wail of feeble protest. It fought and struggled frantically under the old red swathing shawl. The shawl loosened, slid to the floor, and the wizened arms rose free and jerking. One arm, tightly bandaged below the elbow, ended in a raw and bloody stump. She regarded it with her drained-out stare, not trying to replace the strappings that had bound it, saying in the heavy voice of a sleep-walker:
"Dees ook hebben ze gedaan. God sta ons bij!"[3]
[3] "This too they did. God help us!"
And sobs and weeping broke out around her, as though that little handless arm had been a veritable rod of Moses bringing water from the living rock. But no sigh lifted her bosom, nor were her dry eyelids moistened with the dew of tears. Prussian militarism had wrought its work upon her. She and hers had been trodden as grapes in the Hohenzollern Winepress. Those emptied eyes had seen things done that might well make devils laugh in Hell.
The Club walls vanished away as we looked, and behind that stricken figure spread the devastated plains of Belgium, the Sorrowful, the Glorious, who has endured agony and shame unutterable, that her neighbours might go free. We had a vision of the Son of Man descending in a blood-red, rainy dawning, and heard Him saying to the apostles of German Kultur:
"Inasmuch as ye have done it unto the least of these ... ye have done it unto Me!"
And not a woman among us who had a man with the British Expedition, but prayed in her soul, fervently:
"Vengeance is Thine, for Thou hast said it. But make him Thy scourge, O Lord!"