第54章

By the time Henri was well enough to resume his former activities it was almost the first of May.The winter quiet was over with a vengeance, and the Allies were hammering hard with their first tolerably full supply of high-explosive shells.

Cheering reports came daily to the little house -, of rapidly augmenting armies, of big guns on caterpillar trucks that were moving slowly up to the Allied Front.Great Britain had at last learned her lesson, that only shells of immense destructiveness were of any avail against the German batteries.She was moving heaven and earth to get them, but the supply was still inadequate.With the new shells experiments were being made in barrage fire - costly experiments now and then; but the Allies were apt in learning the ugly game of modem war.

Only on the Belgian Front was there small change.The shattered army was being freshly outfitted.England was sending money and ammunition, and on the sand dunes small bodies of fresh troops drilled and smiled grimly and drilled again.But there were not, as in England and in France, great bodies of young men to draw from.Too many had been caught beyond the German wall of steel.

Yet a wave of renewed courage had come with the sun and the green fields.And conditions had improved for the Belgians in other ways.They were being paid, for one thing, with something like regularity.Food was better and more plentiful.One day Henri appeared at the top of the street and drove down triumphantly a small unclipped horse, which trundled behind it a vertical boiler on wheels with fire box and stovepipe.

"A portable kitchen!" he explained."See, here for soup and here for coffee.And more are coming.""Very soon, Henri, they will not need me," Sara Lee said wistfully.

But he protested almost violently.He even put the question to the horse, and blowing in his ear made him shake his head in the negative.

She was needed, indeed.To the great base hospital at La Panne wentmore and more wounded men.But to the little house of mercy came the small odds and ends in increasing numbers.Medical men were scarce, and badly overworked.There was talk, for a time, of sending a surgeon to the little house, but it came to nothing.La Panne was not far away, and all the surgeons they could get there were not too many.

So the little house went on much as before.Henri had moved to the mill.He was at work again, and one day, in the King's villa and quietly, because of many reasons, Henri, a very white and erect Henri, received a second medal, the highest for courage that could be given.

He did not teli Sara Lee.

But though he and the men who served under him worked hard, they could not always perform miracles.The German planes still outnumbered the Allied ones.They had grown more daring with the spring, too, and whatever Henri might learn of ground operations, he could not foretell those of the air.

On a moonlight night in early May Sara Lee, setting out her dressings, heard a man running up the street.Rene challenged him sharply, only to step aside.It was Henri.He burst in on Sara Lee.

"To the cellar, mademoiselle!" he said."A bombardment?" asked Sara Lee.

"From the air.They may pass over, but there are twelve taubes, and they are circling overhead."The first bomb dropped then in the street.It was white moonlight and the Germans must have seen that there were no troops.Probably it was as Henri said later, that they had learned of the little house, and since it brought such aid and comfort as might be it was to be destroyed.

The house of the mill went with the second bomb.Then followed a deafening uproar as plane after plane dropped its shells on the dead town.Marie and Sara Lee were in the cellar by that time, but the cellar was scarcely safer than the floor above.From a bombardment by shells from guns miles away there was protection.From a bomb dropped from the sky, the floors above were practically useless.

Only Henri and Rene remained on the street floor.Henri wasextinguishing lights.In the passage Rene stood, not willing to take refuge until Henri, whom he adored, had done so.For a moment the uproar ceased, and in a spirit of bravado Rene stepped out into the moonlight and made a gesture of derision into the air.

He fell there, struck by a piece of splintered shell.

"Come, Rene!" Henri called."The brave are those who live to fight again, not -"But Rene's figure against the moonlight was gone.Henri ran to the doorway then and found him lying, his head on the little step where he had been wont to sit and whittle and sing his Tipperaree.He was dead.Henri carried him in and laid him in the little passage, very reverently.Then he went below.

"Where is Rene?" Sara Lee asked from the darkness.

"A foolish boy," said Henri, a catch in his throat."He is, I think, watching these fiends of the air, from some shelter.""There is no shelter," shivered the girl.

He groped for her hand in the darkness, and so they stood, hand in hand, like two children, waiting for what might come.

It was not until the thing was over that he told her.He had gone up first and so that she would not happen on his silent figure unwarned, had carried Rene to the open upper floor, where he lay, singularly peaceful, face up to the awful beauty of the night.