Pagan

by W. F. Morris

  CHAPTER THREE

  PAGAN was awakened by the sound of movement near him, and he opened his eyes to see Bertha drawing back the curtains and to find broad daylight streaming into the room. A steaming enamel can stood by the marble-topped chest of drawers, and his dried clothes hung across the chair beside the bed. At the movement of his head upon the pillow, Bertha said, “Bon jour, M’sieu,” tapped on the connecting door and disappeared into Baron’s room.

  Pagan dressed leisurely. The rain and wind of the previous night had gone, and the sun shone from a cloudless sky. The view from the red-curtained casement was no longer dark and menacing with an air of mystery and emptiness; it was grand and inspiring. In the bright morning sunlight the opposite hill, which before had been glimpsed only as a wavy dark line against the night, was revealed as a green mountain side, clothed with thick leafy woods, towering to a bare grassy hump against the clear blue of the sky. The inn, as they had already discovered, stood upon the very edge of the hill, and sheer from the foot of the wall which stretched below the window, the ground sloped steeply in green grassy curves till the view was cut off some six hundred feet down by the broad swell of the hillside. Here the roofs of three or four cottages glimmered in the sunlight, and from their midst a narrow white road looped and twisted as it mounted upwards to disappear round another swelling slope to the right. But away to the left, where the contours ran inwards, the view extended far down over leafy sun-lit woods and cherry orchards to the toy-like roofs and chimneys of a considerable village in the valley bed nearly two thousand feet below.

  Baron came into the room as Pagan stood by the window knotting his tie. He leaned over the sill and nodded downwards. “Yes, Charles, you were right,” he said. “If the old rope had broken last night it would have been a long, long way to Tipperary.”

  They breakfasted off coffee and croisants in the long, clean brick-floored room, and Bertha waited upon them, neat, efficient and enigmatic. She presented the bill, which was gratifyingly small, and produced a packet of sandwiches which she had cut with her own capable hands, to help them on to mittagessen as she expressed it.

  Baron put the packet in his pocket.

  “If ever I found a chair of wifely science at Girton or Newnham,” remarked Pagan, “you, Bertha, shall be its first occupant—though by then I hope, you will be married to a real nice German who will allow you to unlace his boots for him and stroke his stubbly hair when he has had too much lager.” He struck an attitude. “Full many a gem of purest ray serene the dark unfathomed inns of Alsace bear: full many a flower is born to blush unseen and scratch its fingers on a German’s hair!”

  Bertha listened to this outburst in solemn seriousness unmoved, and then a flicker of a smile passed for a second across her stolid face. “M’sieu pulls the leg,” she said in English.

  Baron guffawed. Pagan shook his head and grinned. “No, no, Bertha,” he said, “I suspect it is you who have been pulling ours.”

  They slipped on their packs and set out. They had decided to descend to the valley and make their way down it to the plain. Their route took them past the little terrace with its overturned chair to a narrow track that wound downwards round a bare grassy hummock. At the end of five minutes the inn was out of sight. To their right was the green valley with the houses of the township a shining reddish blur far below and the peaks of the opposite valley side ringing the sky; to their left rose the great bare grassy hump round which the track ran.

  Baron stopped suddenly and pointed upwards On the summit of the hump above them, silhouetted against the sky, stood a tree; not green and leafy like those in the woods below them, but a bare pole of a tree with short ragged branches like a clothes prop. “What does that remind you of, Charles?” he asked.

  Pagan looked up. “If I were in Picardy, I should know what to say,” he grunted.

  Baron nodded. “But as we are in peaceful Alsace and not on the Somme, it can’t be,” he urged.

  “I don’t know,” murmured Pagan. “There was some scrapping in these parts, I believe—those Alpini fellows, you know. Anyway, I would stake my last bean that that tree up there is the twin brother of those splintered chaps on the Somme.”

  They went on again with many glances sideways at ragged tree on the skyline above them. A man was coming towards them up the track, and Pagan stopped him as they met. He was a dark, olive-skinned little man with an air of superficial grooming like a waiter. “Bon jour,” said Pagan. And then with a sweep of his hand upwards, “Pardon, M’sieu, but unless I am blind, there is a dead tree up there of the kind we used to see a lot of on the battlefields further north. What about it?”

  He spoke in English, and for once his guess was a good one, for the man answered with only a slight French accent. “But yes, M’sieu there are battlefields up there. Linge—Schratsmenele—very heavy fighting.”

  Pagan glanced at Baron. “We shall have to have a look at this.”

  Baron nodded. “But I expect there will be nothing to be seen,” he objected. “They will have tidied it all up like the Somme—corn growing and new concrete houses.”

  The man shook his head vigorously. “No corn. No houses. All rocks. Too high.” He held his arms wide apart. “Big abris—yes! Trenches, entanglements—yes!” He nodded again emphatically.

  “Probably he is right,” said Pagan. “It must be a good three thousand feet up. The land would be useless for cultivation and therefore it would be worth nobody’s while to tidy it.”

  “Yes, but I know what you are like, Charles, once you get exploring on old bits of the line. We shall probably not get in till midnight.”

  The little man took up the word midnight. Night was a bad time to be on the battlefields, he said. He strongly advised them to be clear of the line before dark.

  Pagan nodded. “And so we shall,” he said. “My companion here, who has been crossed in love, exaggerates. And anyway we shall not break our necks falling into trenches or tear our innards out on the wire; we are used to that sort of thing.”

  But he did not mean that, the man said. They were battlefields, he explained. Many men had died there. And he shivered with pretended fear.

  “Oh, I get you,” said Pagan. “The very witching time of night when churchyards yawn and graves give up their dead!”

  Baron laughed. “Spooks are about the only thing I’m not afraid of on a battlefield,” he grinned. “Anyway we thank you for your warning.”

  The man raised his hat and continued on his way. Baron looked at Pagan. “Well, what about it, Charles?”

  Pagan nodded. “I think so. A mysterious inn; now a haunted battlefield. Oh yes, I think so.”

  It was hot work trudging up the bare hill-side, but although the lone tree was now hidden by the convex curve of the ground, Pagan led straight towards it across the short, dry slippery grass. Behind them across the valley other and higher peaks appeared behind the hills that had ringed the sky at the inn. Pagan was ahead, and presently he pointed to a shallow, circular, weedgrown depression in the grass. “Shellhole,” he grunted.

  “Feels quite like home,” murmured Baron.

  As they toiled up the crest the dead tree came again into view, and with an entirely new vista. This bare hummock, which had towered above the inn and seemed to be the highest point of the encircling hills, was now seen to be but the lower end of a sickle-shaped ridge whose northern extremity rose another five or six hundred feet. The western side of this ridge descended as a bare grassy slope to a saddle between the hills—that which they had crossed in the murk and rain of the previous evening—but on the eastern side the ground dropped steeply and was covered with the bare shivered poles of a dead pine forest. Some hundred yards below them a narrow white road mounted this tormented slope, following the hollow curve of the ridge, and disappeared northwards over a col by a square blotch which Baron’s binoculars revealed as a military cemetery.

  Baron pulled out his map and looked around him. Through the tangle of trenches, brambles, boulder
s and wire that covered the crest there was no path, and the going would be difficult if not impossible. “Passage interdit, as the French say,” he remarked. “The obvious thing is to get down to that road which looks as though it would take us bang through the whole bag of tricks.” He consulted the map. “If we go back a bit round the shoulder of this hill and keep well to the left we ought to strike it.”

  They went back round the shoulder of the hill, crossed a col between grassy humps and found themselves upon the road. To the right the ground dropped several hundreds of feet to the head waters of a stream: to the left it rose steeply to the ragged sky-line of the ridge; and the whole mountain side from valley to crest was a wilderness of boulders, brambles, splintered branches and shivered tree trunks, furrowed with mouldering and half-obliterated trenches.

  The road itself, mounting steeply through this devastation, was littered with fragments of dead wood, scraps of rusty wire, and twisted sheets of galvanised iron that were as full of holes as a cullender; and every few yards along the steep weed-grown bank to the left gaped the black entrance of a dug-out. In many of these time had rotted the supporting props and the great roofs of three and four layers of trunks and sandbags, crowned by a flourishing crop of grass and purple weed, hung aslant or had been precipitated half way across the road.

  But many of the dug-outs, built with German thoroughness of reinforced concrete, looked as strong as on the day they were made; and clambering over the mounds of rubble and debris that blocked the entrance, Pagan and Baron found them occupied by broken frame wire netting bunks, rusty tins and rubbish. And on the battered slope above them also, projecting here and there from the young undergrowth, were the weed-grown sandbags and rotting logs of other dug-outs.

  “By gad, I would like to explore this place,” exclaimed Pagan. “But it would take a month. There must be thousands of cubby holes up there hidden under the weeds and debris.”

  They tramped on and reached the high-perched cemetery with its orderly rows of little wooden crosses. Here the narrow road turned to the left round the shoulder of the highest point of the ridge, and a narrow track led over this hump which rose another fifty feet above them.

  By silent consent they took this track, which conforming to the windings of an old weed-grown communicating trench a yard or two to the right, brought them to the razor-edged summit of the ridge. Just over the crest, among the litter of dead-splintered wood, grey boulders, tangled wire and flourishing weeds, ran an old fire trench. It had been practically hewn out of the rock; for in most places the covering earth was not more than a foot deep, and here and there natural traverses had been formed by taking advantage of the big outcrops of bare rock. A little further down the slope beyond the loose rock parapet of this grim looking trench, the rusty protecting wire showed like a foul web among the long grass and weeds; and beyond that again was more wire and the ragged weed-grown parapet of another trench.

  “That must be the old French line,” said Baron. “And this solid stone arrangement the Bosche. As usual he had the advantage of ground and observation. And what observation!”

  Indeed, from both aesthetic and military standpoints the view was magnificent. Every movement of the French must have been visible from this trench, and they could hardly have brought a man up that slope to their front line except under cover of darkness. Hills and valleys and woods stretched in a grand panorama before them; and behind them stretched the hills and valleys again, topped in the distance, beyond the invisible Rhine, by the purple line of the Black Forest.

  “So if Brother Bosche was homesick he could sit up here and see his precious fatherland,” commented Pagan. “Bit of an improvement upon the delightful scenery of the Salient, what!”

  They followed the track along the ridge to the cliff edge of a quarry where the fire trench ended with an immensely strong concrete pill-box that commanded magnificent views in every direction. Roughly hewn steps led down to the quarry, on the far side of which ran the remains of a French trench.

  “This must have been a sticky spot,” said Pagan as he stood among the tangles of rusty wire on the quarry floor looking up at the precipitous steps and the frowning pill-box. “One can just imagine a dark night and half a dozen stout fellows with blackened faces creeping out from the trench through this wire and up those ramshackle steps in single file. Then one fellow loosens a bit of stone with his foot. Down it rolls. Up goes a Bosche light and then …! Yes, quite a health resort this must have been.”

  Beyond the quarry was a saddle in the ridge where the lines, French and German, approached each other and intermingled in a hopeless confusion of shell holes, half obliterated trenches, wisps of rusty wire and splintered tree trunks. Battered steel helmets lay here and there and the bent and rusted metal parts of rifles and equipment.

  Pagan looked around him with raised eyebrows. “This is obviously where the French attacked to get observation on the other side of the ridge,” he said. “Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more, or close the wall up with your Gallic dead! And then of course the Bosche counter-attacked—and judging by the state of the ground, there must have been two performances nightly and the usual matinées. Nice cheery little spot!”

  Baron nodded. “Very!” he agreed. “Well, which way now?”

  The path along the crest had now brought them almost three quarters of the way back towards the lone tree at the southern end of the ridge; and on the opposite side of the saddle they were again faced by that trackless jungle of boulders, old trenches and tree stumps. On the French side of the ridge, however, the ground descended as a steepish grassy slope to a broad depression or col, through which ran a narrow track, and peeping above a grassy contour to the left were the chimneys and gable end of a house.

  “That must be our mysterious inn,” said Baron. “And that track down there must be the one we came along last night, little dreaming that this bit of the line was above us hidden by the clouds and rain.”

  Pagan nodded. “I had not realised that Bertha’s pub was so close to this old trench system.”

  “And yet it must have stood all through the war,” said Baron. “It is certainly older than that, though the roof looks like a recent addition. The contour of the ground must have saved it. Probably the Bosche couldn’t lob a shell into just that spot.”

  “Or he had a pal living there,” put in Pagan grimly. “You remember the miraculous escape of the château at Suzanne. That was German owned, I’ve heard.”

  Baron nodded. “Yes, that was certainly a sticky business.”

  “Well, what do we do now?” asked Pagan. “You are navigating officer for the day. Function as requisite.”

  Baron sat down and lugged out a map. “If we carry on as we originally intended, the only thing is to drop down to that track and so back past the Poilu’s Rest or whatever Bertha calls her pub. But now that we are on top of the hill it seems a pity to go down. Possibly we might get across to Kaisersburg without having to climb any more.”

  “I don’t give a hoot what way we go so long as you bring us to within reasonable distance of food at lunch time,” Pagan told him.

  Baron pulled out Bertha’s packet of sandwiches. “Here, have a go at those. I never knew such a fellow for thinking about his belly. And with a view like this round you too!”

  Pagan munched the sandwiches appreciatively. “The view is excellent,” he agreed. “And so is the grub. I am nourishing both body and mind while you work out the march tables.” He waved a half-eaten sandwich emphatically. “But mind there is a pub at the end of it. My heart is in the café there with lager, and journeys end in lovers’ meetings.”

  Presently Baron folded up the map and struggled to his feet. “When you have finished hogging it we will start. I have worked out quite a good route.”

  “But are you sure that there is a lunch at the end of it?” persisted Pagan.

  Baron sighed and reopened the map with an air of over-taxed patience. “We shall lunch by a lake,” he said sl
owly and distinctly. “A shining blue lake.”

  “And very nice too—as far as it goes,” conceded Pagan. “But you don’t expect me to drink lake water, do you?”

  Baron prodded the map with his finger. “Read!” he commanded.

  Pagan put on an imaginary pair of glasses and read slowly, letter by letter, “A … u … b.”

  “Exactly! Auberge,” retorted Baron. “Estaminet, albergo, inn, tavern, hostel, pot-house, bar or pub!”

  “Why, so it is!” exclaimed Pagan in tones of mock astonishment. “What a thing it is to have the gift of tongues!”

  Baron stuffed the map back into his pocket. “Well, are you ready?”

  Pagan picked up his stick and sloped arms with it in military fashion. “Lead on, Macduff, and damned be he that first cries, ‘Hold enough’. ”

  They went back along the ridge northwards. It was hot going in the sun over the rough, broken ground, but they soon left the tortured earth and debris of the battlefield behind them. The path descended gently along the flank of a steep, wooded hill. It was cool and quiet beneath the trees, and although their feet made no sound on the carpet of pine needles which covered the track, their voices rang out clearly as though in a church. Lizards and occasionally a grass snake scuttled from their path, and to the left down cathedral-like vistas between the tall straight trunks they caught glimpses of the blue mirror surface of the lake that lay in the bottom of a deep green bowl, formed by the encircling wooded hills.

  Their path emerged from the forest as a grassy track slanting round the green inner side of the bowl, and now close below them lay the lake, mirroring on its placid surface the sunlit grass and woods and clear blue sky. The track curved down to the level of the water where a dam of mellow stone, built across the narrow valley outlet, formed a terrace, with the lake on one hand and the bush bordered and boulder-strewn bed of a mountain torrent on the other. A narrow rustic bridge led from the track to the terrace, and beneath it the outflow of the lake slid green and glassy to cascade in a white foaming plume to the rocky bed of the torrent. Beneath the trees beyond the terrace stood a long, low, one storey building.