Adventure Tales 6. H. Bedford-Jones

      I

      For hours we had ridden across desolate Champagne, our horses picking their way over the pockmarked terrain, littered with the incredible debris of a race of degenerates possessing the strength of men coupled with the wanton destructiveness of children.

      The heat of afternoon gave way to the cool breath of evening; the sun set in a fantastic smear of crimson and gold, and the more brilliant stars crept forth from a dome of lapis lazuli. Presently the moon, at the full, rose in almost artificial splendor. Back home they were speaking of it as the “harvest moon.” Here the only harvest was that of death, desolation, and despair.

      Seen beneath its amber light the picture changed from a landscape in brilliant oils to an etching in monstrous blacks and whites. It was as if we were crossing the ghostly contour of some dead planet. The battle line, stilled by the armistice, was well beyond—the returning tide of scattered inhabitants far to the rear. We were alone in a land at once empty and silent.

      Here and there an object caught my eye, and I guided my mount aside to identify it. Once it was the sparkle of moonshine from the staring eyes of a doll. Again, it was a crucifix, the wooden figure hacked and defiled. A broken iron pot lay beside a fifteenth-century missal, painfully transcribed and illuminated by some forgotten monk during slow creeping years. A torn placard affixed to a wall announced a boche beer-drinking contest. Beside it was the impaled body of a kitten—a mere scrap of moldering fur.

      Oftener there was nothing identifiable: houses had been wrecked and leveled, and then seemingly brayed in giant mortars, that there might remain nothing save dust, to be blown away by the wind and worked up into mud, by the rain—to disappear utterly from the face of the earth and the very memories of men.

      We rode in silence for the most part, Lieutenant Paradis and I, depressed by the bleak and artificial desert created by man in one of the garden spots of Europe.

      It was then a weird and startling sight which suddenly materialized before our eyes from the fog-wraiths which clung to a winding river—nothing less than a perfectly preserved little town in the midst of all the woeful wreckage.

      Not absolutely untouched, of course; looking sharp, one observed where a corner of the church belfry had gone, and here and there a gaping hole where a home had stood, but practically intact, even the stained-glass in the church and most of the humble panes of its shops unbroken.

      Here it stood, as if left for a solitary specimen of the vanished villages of Champagne.

      If any such purpose had spared it one could have wished that some other town might have been chosen in its place—for Breaux was unknown to the tourist, it possessed no famous edifice, no supreme example of medieval craftsmanship.

      Still, marvelously sweet, it looked sleeping amid its filmy draperies of vapor, beneath the full moon, with its one principal street widening to a civic center where stood the church, the two inns, the town hall, and on whose cobbled pave had for centuries raged no battle fiercer than that of its bare-headed, wooden-shod market women over the prices of fat geese and luscious grapes.

      It was silent and deserted as our tired horses clumped through it; I noted especially a little wine-shop, with its sign still in its place over the door, its square bottles still in orderly array upon the shelf behind the copper counter.

      That the boches should have spared the church and the tavern answered all queries as to the condition of the other buildings. Breaux had been spared. But why?

      We passed abruptly from it to open country, as one does in France, with no tailing off, such as our suburbs reveal. The town ended as if cut off with a giant’s knife. A little way beyond I turned in my saddle for a parting glance.

      Breaux stood between us and the moon now; and, its nearly horizontal beams striking through the windows and portals, it was as if the entire village was ablaze for some silent and ghostly festival, some voiceless triumph.

      Lieutenant Paradis answered the question in my eyes, speaking for the first time in hours.

      “It is the town which was saved by miracle,” he said. “By the Colonel Eugen Etienne Ste. Marie de Voulx, late of Napoleon’s Young Guard, who rose from the dead to preserve the home of his ancestors.”

      “A miracle?” I responded vaguely. “Ah—yes, like the Angel of Mons and the Christ seen at night upon the battle-fields easing the souls of dying men!”

      For some moments Paradis did not speak; and when he did it was not to refer at once and directly to the miracle of Breaux.

      “Concerning these things who knows? Not I! I neither believe nor disbelieve. But always, in world crises, these reports are current. It was so when Greeks fought Trojans. And do you recall that when the Turks took Constantinople the wretched people sought refuge in their cathedral, and as the enemy burst in upon them there and began slaughtering young and old, women and children, the priest, who was in the midst of celebrating mass, bore the sacred elements out through a little door in the apse; and the Turks sealed it up, and so it has remained unto this day in the mosque of Ste. Sophia.

      “And it is said that on the day when it shall be reconsecrated as a Christian church the little door shall open and the celebrant come forth and resume the canon of the mass, at the point where it was so bloodily interrupted centuries ago.”

      We crossed the brook by a ford since its bridge had been blown up, and as we clambered up the bank Paradis continued:

      “So, in our own war men say that on a certain night when a gap was torn in our lines, a ragged hole open to Calais, and there were no more troops to throw in, there rose silently from the mists strange men in great bearskin shakos, wearing obsolete bandoliers, and carrying clumsy muskets.

      ‘“At their head, upon a gray horse, rode a gray figure, bowed forward in thought, one hand thrust into his breast, a cocked hat upon his head. It was, to be sure, the Little Corporal, risen from the dead to hurl his grizzled Old Guard upon the desecrators of French soil.

      “At any rate, the gap was stopped, nobody knows how or by