________________________________________________
_ 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
f
orts 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. _
Read next: Book Two: Enid: Chapter 10
Read previous: Book Two: Enid: Chapter 8
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