A Prince of the Captivity (Unabridged). Buchan JohnЧитать онлайн книгу.
of this village natural came to headquarters, and every now and then he had to appear before the local Commandant. These officers were frequently changed, but for the most part they were of the same type—elderly dug-outs who asked only for a quiet life. At such interviews Jules produced his papers, and told in a wailing recitative the simple story of his life. The worst that happened was usually a warning to stay at home and not tramp the country, lest he should find himself one fine day against a wall looking at a firing squad—at which he would grin sheepishly and nod his head. But one day he had a terrifying experience. There was a new Commandant, a Bavarian captain who had been temporarily invalided from the front line, a young man with an eye like an angry bird’s, and no bowels of compassion for simple folk. For two hours he kept Jules under the fire of his questions, which he delivered with a lowering brow and a menacing voice. “That animal may be dangerous,” he told his lieutenant. “He is witless, and so can be used as a tool by clever men. A telephone wire, you understand—a senseless thing over which news passes. He must be sent farther east.” But this Commandant was moved elsewhere in a week, and nothing more was heard of his threat. A more dangerous man, if Jules had had the sense to realise it, was a friendly, fatherly personage, who tried to draw him into confidences, and would suddenly ask questions in German and English. But Jules only stared dully at such experiments, until his inquisitor shrugged his shoulders and gave them up.
Had anyone from Villers l’Evêque met Jules on the road on one of his tramps he would have seen only a shaggy young peasant—rather better shod than most peasants, since he had got the cobbler to make him a stout pair of marching boots—who seemed in high spirits, for he cried a greeting to every passer-by and would sing silly child’s songs in his high falsetto. But much of Jules’s travelling was done off the roads, where no one saw him, and in the dark of moonless nights. Then he was a different being. His clumsy gait and slouching carriage disappeared, and he would cover country at a pace which no peasant could have matched. Into queer places his road often took him. He would lie for long in a marshy meadow till a snipe’s bleat made him raise his head, and then another man would crawl through the reeds and the two would talk. Once he spent two days in the undergrowth of a wood close to a road where German columns passed without end. He seemed to have many friends. There was an old wood-cutter in the hills between the Meuse and the Ourthe who several times gave him shelter, and foresters in the Ardennes, and a blind woman who kept an inn outside Namur on the Seilles road. Indeed, there was a host of people who had something to say to him in whispers, and when he listened to them his face would lose its vacancy. They seemed to respect him too, and when they spoke to him their tone had not the condescension of the Villers folk…
Sometimes he did strange things. In a lonely place at night he would hide himself for many hours, his head raised like that of a horse at covert-side who waits for the first music of the hounds. Often he waited till dawn and nothing came, but sometimes there would be a beat of wings far up in the air which was not the beat of a Fokker, and the noise would follow of a heavy body crushing the herbage. He would grope his way in the direction of the sound, and a man would appear from the machine with whom he spoke—and that speech was not French or Flemish. By and by the aeroplane would vanish again into the night sky, and Jules would look after it wistfully for a little, before by devious paths he took his road home.
A close observer, had there been one at hand, would have been puzzled by his treatment of cigarettes. On his travels he was always giving and receiving them, and some he never smoked. A barmaid would toss him carelessly a dilapidated caporal, and it would go behind his ear, and no match would come near it. More than once in the Three Parrots a pedlar from Liège, or a drover who had brought to the valley some of the small cattle of the hills, would offer him a box from which he would take two, one to smoke and one to keep. In turn he would give away cigarettes which he had rolled himself, and some went to very special people, who did not smoke them, but carried them with them in their travels, and in the end handed them secretly to somebody else. If such cigarettes had been unrolled, it would have been found that the paper was stiffer than the ordinary and more opaque, and that on the inner side next the tobacco there was something written in a small fine hand. Jules himself could write this hand, and practised it late at night in his cubby-hole of a bedroom next to Widow Raus’s cow-shed.
These cigarettes wandered far, most of them beyond the frontier. A girl who had been a mannequin in a Paris shop took some of them to Holland; some went into the heavens with the airmen whom Jules met in the dark of the night; and some journeyed to Brussels and Antwerp and then by devious ways to the coast and over-seas. There was that in them which would have interested profoundly the Commandant at Villers l’Evêque—notes of German troops and concentrations, and now and then things which no one knew outside the High Command, such as the outline for the Ypres attack in the spring of ‘15, and the projected Flanders offensive which was to follow the grand assault on Verdun… Only once was Jules in danger of detection, and that was when a Würtemberg captain, who was a little fuddled, plucked the cigarette from his ear and lit it. He swore that the thing drew badly and flung it on the floor, whereupon the provident Jules picked up the stump and himself smoked it to a finish.
Twice he went to Brussels to see his relatives, journeys arranged for by much weary intercession with the Commandant, and duly furnished with passes. On these visits he did not see much of his kin, but he interviewed a motley of queer persons in back streets. Under the strictest military rule there are always a few people who can move about freely—women who are favoured by high officials, bagmen of the right sympathies who keep the wheels of commerce moving, all the class, too, who pander to human vices. With some of these Jules mixed, and Villers would have rubbed its eyes to see how he bore himself. Instead of a disconsidered servant he became a master, and in back rooms, which could only be reached by difficult alleys and through a multitude of sentries, he would give instructions which were docilely received by men and women who were not peasants.
Once it was necessary that he should cross the Dutch border by what was called in the slang of his underworld the “Allée Couverte.” He started his journey as an old mechanic with a permit to take up a plumber’s job at Turnhout. But long before he got to Turnhout he changed his appearance, and he had a week in the straw of barns and many anxious consultations with furtive people till early one dark autumn morning he swam a canal, crawled through a gap in the electrified wire (where oddly enough the sentry was for a moment absent) and two hours later breakfasted with a maker of chemical manures who seemed to be expecting him. His host spoke to him in English and lent him clothes which made him look like a young merchants’ clerk after he had shaved his beard… Jules spent four days in Holland, and at an hotel in Amsterdam had a meeting, which lasted late into the night, with an English business man who was interested in oil—a business man whose back was very straight for one who spent his days in a counting-house. Jules called him “Sir” and stood at attention till he was bidden to sit down. This Englishman had much to tell him and much to hear, and what he heard he wrote down in a little black note-book. He addressed Jules as “More,” but once he slipped and called him “Melfort.” Then he seemed to recollect himself. “I think you knew Melfort,” he said. “Adam Melfort. You may be interested to hear that his D.S.O. has just been gazetted—he is a second-lieutenant on the Special List.”
Jules was absent that time for more than a month from the Raus farm. He returned at last from Brussels with a doctor’s certificate duly countersigned by the military, which testified that he had been ill with typhoid in the house of a second cousin. His beard had been shaved during his fever, and his lean cheeks and the sprouting growth on his chin were visible proof of his sickness. He returned to his old routine, except that the Widow for a little did not work him so hard on the farm. “That Jules!” she complained to the neighbours. “The good God is too hard on him. He has bereft him of sense, and now He has made him as feeble as a pullet.” Also his wanderings ceased for the space of more than a month.
Time passed and the Widow’s half-witted nephew grew into the life of the place, so that he was as familiar an object as the windmill on the rise above the Bois de Villers. Commandant succeeded Commandant, and the dossier of Jules was duly handed on. The tides of war ebbed and flowed. Sometimes the neighbourhood of Villers was black with troops moving westward, and then would come a drain to the south and only a few Landsturm companies were left in the cantonments. There was such a drain during the summer