[17] Smart.

[18] Welsh for a singing meeting.

[19] Mad.

[20] Imbecile.

[21] A mole.

[22] Trembled.

[23] Screaming.

XX

THE FUGITIVES

     “But pray that your flight be not in the winter.”

Some four or five miles north of Bailleul, where the douane posts mark the marches of the Franco-Belgian frontier, is the village of Locre.  Here the clay of the plains gives way to a wooded ridge of low hills, through which the road drives a deep cutting, laying bare the age of the earth in a chronology of greensand and limestone.  Beyond the ridge lies another plain, and there it was that on a clammy winter’s day I came upon two lonely wayfarers.  The fields and hedgerows were rheumy with moisture which dripped from every bent and twig.  The hedges were full of the dead wood of the departed autumn, and on a decrepit creeper hung a few ragged wisps of Old Man’s Beard.  The only touch of colour in the landscape was the vinous purple of the twigs, and a few green leaves of privet from which rose spikes of berries black as crape.  Not a living thing appeared, and the secret promises of spring were so remote as to seem incredible.

The man and woman were Flemish of the peasant class; the man, gnarled like an old oak, the purple clots in the veins of his wrists betraying the senility of his arteries; the woman, withered as though all the sap had gone out of her blood.  She had a rope round her waist, to the other end of which a small cart was attached; under the cart, harnessed to the axle, two dogs panted painfully with their tongues out; behind the cart the man pushed.  It contained a disorderly freight:  a large feather-bed, a copper cauldron, a bird-cage, a mattock, a clock curiously carved, a spinning-wheel with a distaff impoverished of flax, and some kitchen utensils, which, as the woman stumbled and the cart lurched, clanked together.

As our car drew up, they stopped, the woman holding her hands to her side as though to recover breath.

“Who are you?  Where do you come from?” said my companion, a French officer.

They stared uncomprehendingly.

He spoke again, this time in Flemish: 

“Van waar komt gy?  Waar gaat gy heen?”

The man pointed with his hand vaguely in the direction of the Menin ridge.

There followed a conversation of which I could make but little.  But I noticed that they answered my companion in a dull, trance-like way, as though our questions concerned no one so little as themselves.

“They’re fugitives,” he repeated to me.  “Been burnt out of their farm by the Bosches near the Menin ridge.”

“Are they all alone?” I asked.

He put some further questions.  “Yes, their only son was shot by the Germans when they billeted there.”

“Why?”