THE MILLS OF GOD

They were putting little Boudru to bed the R.H.A. and the Corps of Royal Engineers and Stansfield, the big fat Infantry Sergeant. His little sister, already tucked up in bed, was nearly asleep. Boudru had been allowed to stay up till Sergeant Stansfield had come in from duty. The special privilege had been accorded to the little French boy on this, the last night that the British troops were to spend in the village. Boudru’s home was in a portion of our line in which the defence trenches were of the semi-detached type they did not join up with the other part of the line, and at times the place was distinctly unhealthy. Sometimes it was in the hands of the Huns, sometimes the British rushed it, and held on for a few weeks; there had been times when it had been occupied by both, at other times it was written on the squared official maps as no man’s land. It was a spot in which there was always a feeling of something dreadful being close at hand; there was an air of expectancy about it and one felt there was a marked atmosphere of nerves about. You might be sniped from the house opposite, or blown out of the windows by a seventeen-inch shell. You never know. The man who sold you tobacco the day before might be lying stiff in the gutter next day, or more probably still, he might be dining with the German Staff a mile and a half away. All this uncertainty, coupled with the fact that the place was full of spies, and that valuable information had been finding its way through to the German lines, made the General decide to withdraw his troops and take up some trenches behind it.

Boudru sat on the big armchair and swung his white bare legs defiantly. Perhaps it had better be explained that my lord Boudru was five years old. “Boudru going to shut eye?” said the fat infantry sergeant suggestively.

“The cots are down and the beds unrolled,” said the R.H.A. man falling into the diction of the barrack-room.

“No,” said Boudru. “You must tell me for the last time the story about the wicked German baby killer who was turned into a pig. The man of the guns must tell it, and the fat man of the infantry shall hide beneath the bed and make pig shrieks many pig shrieks at the time when he is killed.”

“But we shall disturb little sister Elise,” said the fat sergeant with visions of a dismal ten minutes wedged beneath the small cot and the floor.

“Elise is not bye-o yet,” piped a thin voice from where two eyes were sparkling elfishly from a tangle of golden locks.

“Go on, my English man There was once a big fat baby killer who lived in Potsdam ...”

Then the R.H.A. man (a journalist by profession, a duke by inclination, and now by destiny a very clever gunner) began the famous story. Never before had the telling of that tale been given with such splendour of effect. The fat sergeant had made pig-noises with multitudinous yells in at least fifteen different keys, and the little cross-eyed driver of the Engineers had dressed up in a real Hun helmet and grey coat. The grand finale in which the Engineer had turned into a pig on all fours and had been mercilessly put to death with the fat sergeant’s bayonet, had filled Boudru’s soul with joy. He reflected and gloated on the scene far into the night. Then he fell fast asleep and met with most dazzling adventures with a German soldier who had been hiding in the Jacobean oak chest with the fleur-de-lis carved on the side, which stands beneath the bulgy leaded window.

As a grey and wretched dawn came in with a cold and dispiriting rain there came to the ears of little Boudru the steady champing of marching feet in the street below. Slush, slush, slush went all those feet, beating the muddy road, and then the noise of metal on metal woke the silent village streets as the guns went by.

“The soldiers! The soldiers!” exclaimed Boudru as he bounded over and jumped on to the Jacobean chest to watch them pass. It was fated that they were the last English soldiers that Boudru would ever see.

Some weeks later Boudru’s mother was busy with odd jobs in the kitchen garden and the children were playing in the front room, there was a ring at the door and the sound of a butt-end of a rifle, as it “grounded” on the cobble stones. When Boudru on tiptoe lifted the latch, the door swung open, and a big man in a greenish uniform stood before him. There was no sign of cap-badge or title on his shoulder straps, and he was horribly dirty. He carried two English ration bags, besides his own rucksack, and they were all filled to bursting with loot. Evil beamed from his narrow, leering eyes; and when he smiled at Boudru it twirled his demon-like mouth into a grotesque shape. He looked both depraved and suspicious, a disreputable scoundrel with a gun, and that, you will find in the fullness of time, was just what he was.

“Let us shut the door,” said Elise. “This is not a pretty man.” But the man from Stettin pushed past.

“Brat;” said he, “drink.”

Boudru’s mother had hurried up to the door as fast as her bulk and her stout legs would permit.

Every day she had expected a visit from the Huns. It was useless to argue with such a man, so she took the German in.

“Brandy,” said the man.

“There is only a little left ... it is over there, on the sideboard.”

The soldier walked over, finished half a bottle, and announced that it was like water.

“More,” he ordered, “Shoot you if no find.”

The woman at last managed to unearth a bottle of good Burgundy and another bottle of brandy.

He drank both the bottles, and when he had finished, he asked for more like every other Boche will do. Then he chose the front bedroom and threw himself down on the bed in a drunken sleep.

When the next morning broke the French woman went to awaken the thief and while the latter was making his toilet little Boudru entered. He regarded the Hun with gravity for at least five minutes and then delivered himself of his opinion.

“I don’t like you,” he said slowly, regarding the Hun, with his elfish eyes. “I don’t like you. I think you may be like the man in the English soldiers’ story, who turned into a pig a baby killer perhaps. It is because of your red hair that I think you may turn ...”

The man from Stettin who had been trying to drag a comb through his horrible beard and hair, turned, and he looked like a big red devil, the sun being on his head, and red beard and all.

“What’s that?” he said, as he lurched ominously across the room. He had swallowed the contents of a flask of Benedictine which he had taken from his rucksack, and the repeated drinks were taking effect.

“I’ll sweep the house, so there isn’t a bug in a blanket left you damned brat!” He was bellowing like a bull, chewing his red beard and muttering to himself. As he passed a table, he knocked the empty flask on the floor. It did not break, and he viciously stamped his feet on it, smashing it to pieces. He began to go mad from that moment. As he kicked the wreckage about the room, his glance fell upon his rifle with the fixed bayonet. And then the swine-dog ran amok. Boudru stood with his back to the door: the blood froze in his veins, and his little body stiffened into absolute rigidity.

“Turn into a pig!” shrieked the Hun. “What did you say? Turn into ...”

The bayonet flashed, and little Boudru but what followed shall not be printed. It would be passing the decent bounds of descriptive writing to put it in black and white. It is sufficient to say that some minutes later the Hun prised the floor-boards up with his bayonet, and Boudru, from that moment, without warning, or leaving any trace, disappeared from the world. He returned in the fullness of time. And this was the way of it.

For the hundredth time that day, the Hun had gone into the bedroom to look out of the bulgy bedroom window. Fear began to come over him without any warning, and he was thinking of little Boudru down there in the dark. The thing within him that served him for a heart was beating queer rhythms ... the beating sounded like a regiment of British Infantry on the march.

“Look,” said he to the housewife, “look out on the road. Do you see soldiers?”

The good woman, distraught between suspense and hope for her little one, who had been missing for six long hours, blinked away a tear on her lashes and peered through the diamond panes.

No one was to be seen. But between three and four in the morning the first faint champing of marching feet could be heard and the Hun came down from the bedroom looking as pale as death. He opened the door and stood there listening. The insolent crunch, crunch, crunch of heavy nail-studded service boots came nearer, and a khaki column appeared on the winding road. The housewife, whose aching eyes had searched the road for Boudru all day, saw them too.

“Look,” she cried, “look! The English soldiers are coming. Do you see?”

They were coming!

The man from Stettin rushed up to the bedroom, and jumped into the oak chest.

“Not tell the English! Not tell!”

Fifteen or twenty soldiers were to be heard grounding rifles and throwing off their equipment in front of the house.

Entered here Sergeant Stansfield, and shouted gaily to the housewife, but the moment he looked into her pale and worn face he understood that some sorrow had befallen her. Before he could hold her she had slid silently down on the floor, at his feet, and covered her face. “Ah, ah, ah! O God, help and pity me! They have taken my little son,” she cried.

At this moment a soldier rushed in at the door. “I think there is a man who looks like a Boche trying to get out of the bedroom window!” he said. “Will you come, Sergeant? Quick!”

The sergeant went quickly, and returned with some men with fixed bayonets and led them up to the bedroom: He told them to break in. The man was on his knees, with his horrible hands lifted up in supplication. The soldiers kicked the man up and made him go downstairs into the front room.

“See!” said a soldier, who held his bayonet ready, “there is blood on his sleeve.” The Hun cursed within his heart.

“It was none of my shedding,” he whimpered.

“I had not said so,” returned the sergeant quietly.

“We are here to find that out. Perhaps you know something about the lost child?”

“I had no hand in it, God strike me dead!” the Hun answered fervently.

At that moment there was a sort of earthquake upstairs, a clash of falling bricks and slates, a crashing pandemonium that sent everyone’s heart to his mouth. A shell had struck the roof. Then the ceiling above bulged like a stuffed sack and burst in a cloud of pink-yellow dust. Something dropped with a dead thud fair and square in the centre of the fine oak refectory table. Sergeant Stansfield bent forward, looked, and then started back. He gave a cry and turned sickly white. On the table lay the little huddled form of Boudru. The morning sun that had been paling the candles in the sconces, struck the golden hair and staring eyes, that had a few hours before, held all the spring-time; struck, too, a heavy scarlet patch on the little overall, as the sergeant tenderly turned the little body over....

“Oh! God of Mercy!... How horrible! A bayonet through his heart ...” he muttered. The Hun’s sleeve spotted with blood came back to his mind, and filled him with blind, unreasoning rage.

“You swine,” he said. “I’ll

The man from Stettin suddenly felt his heart stop beating. He stood petrified for a moment; then he clutched the table with one feverish movement; and when he saw the pale cherub face, he became covered at once with perspiration. Then the terror, which had paralyzed him a second or so, gave way to the wild instinct of self-preservation. He hit out wildly with both arms, kicking out at the same moment. In a second he was out in the hall, and had locked the door behind him. A door opened somewhere outside, and they heard him running down the garden. Some of the men snatched their rifles, rushed to the window, and threw it open. Four or five shots rang out simultaneously, and the stench of cordite was wafted back on the sharp morning air as the man from Stettin fell in a crumpled heap, his face buried in a clump of violets. The sergeant went into the garden.

“Hum!” he remarked after an instant, “dead, did you say? He’s as dead as a doornail ... anyway, it’s nothing to do with us! If ever a soul went straight to hell,” he muttered to himself, “it was that red devil’s.”