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Title: Guerrilla
Author: Lord Dunsany [Edward John Moreton Drax Plunkett,
eighteenth Baron Dunsany] (1878-1957)
Date of first publication: 1944
Place and date of edition used as base for this ebook:
   Indianapolis and New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1944 (First U.S. Edition)
Date first posted: 14 July 2008
Date last updated: 14 July 2008
Project Gutenberg Canada ebook #145

This ebook was produced by: Iona Vaughan,
Mark Akrigg & the Online Distributed Proofreading Team
at http://www.pgdpcanada.net




Guerrilla

_A Novel_


by

LORD DUNSANY




THE BOBBS-MERRILL COMPANY

_PUBLISHERS_

INDIANAPOLIS NEW YORK




COPYRIGHT, 1944, BY LORD EDWARD DUNSANY

PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES




_FOREWORD_


The man who told this tale had got to London, after sufferings of which
he never spoke. He was full of hope, a hope so firm that it induced in
him almost a kind of gaiety, and certainly a fine energy. He was an
uncle of the lad of whom the story chiefly tells. And the story went
something like this: without details, with few names of persons or
places, nor even the name of the country. Something had taught him to
mention names rarely, and to believe that German ears were always
listening, even in London.

But it is not the names or the places or the lesser details that are
important. And I cannot be sure enough that this violent story of mine
of this little fraction of the rage of a furious year will last to be
read in the calm days that shall come after our war, for me to describe
with any more exactitude this story, magnificent in its spirit and hope
and courage.




GUERRILLA




I


The army had surrendered, the Germans were through the mountains; and
what was always referred to as The Land, as though in reality there were
no other country to care about, was one more particle of the German
loot. To men accustomed to horses, the Germans had come with amazing
speed; to men who never spoke of a distance by measurement, but only of
the time it took to get from one place to another, their pace was
bewildering. One day they were ringing their bells in the little
capital, for news of a fine stand that one of their divisions had made.
The next day the Germans were marching down the main street.

Puzzled citizens were walking slowly about the central square; and, when
a man stood up on a dais where tea was usually served in the afternoons,
and began to make a speech, there was soon a crowd. A few politenesses
and little flatteries, and he began to explain the position. England had
begun the war, he explained, by attacking Poland. The Germans had
therefore had to establish a defensive position there; and, in order to
make this impregnable, they had to occupy several other countries as a
purely temporary measure. To these countries they came for the
countries' own good, as otherwise England would seize them, and this was
particularly the case with The Land. Hitler himself had appointed a
Protector for The Land, and, if he were duly obeyed, his protection
would be equally shared by all, and The Land would have the advantage of
the highest possible culture, which was only to be enjoyed by those
nations banded together in the new European order established by Adolf
Hitler. Resistance would be most severely punished, and was also
useless, because they had no rifles, and could not possibly fight in the
plains, where they would be helpless against the big German tanks.
Anyone who went into the mountains would be foolish, because the German
aeroplanes, of which there were hundreds of thousands, could go over the
mountains as easily as tanks could go over the plains, and even quicker.
The army had surrendered, and it was the duty of all civilians to
maintain order and wear a quiet demeanour. The Germans wished them well,
and he reciprocated by calling for three cheers for Adolf Hitler. He got
a cheer from a few; the rest were silent; and three men who had not
cheered were led away by German policemen and instantly shot.

The sound of the volley from a small wood near by, in which the men
were shot, came, as it was intended to come, to the central square.
But instead of having an effect, as the Germans had planned, it had
two effects. One effect was the one the Germans intended, merely
fear; but on most of the crowd the effect was one that the Germans
have never understood.

There was no protest: all in the square were unarmed. The crowd moved
quickly away from the speaker, and slowly out of the square; Srebnitz
was among them, the nephew of the old man who told this story in London.
Srebnitz had just left school and not yet gone to the university, where
he was due for his first term in a fortnight's time. He went away
mournfully, about halfway between the two moods I have mentioned. He
went back to his home, where he lived with his father and mother in a
street not far from the square. He went into the room in which his
parents were sitting. His mother looked up quickly when he came in, but
said nothing. His father did not even look up. At last Srebnitz spoke.

"Is The Land finished?" he said.

His father smiled grimly. "That is impossible," he said.

"Oh, no," was his mother's answer to Srebnitz.

"Why is it impossible?" asked the boy.

"After three thousand years of freedom," said his father, "it cannot
be lost."

"But why not?" his son asked.

"You don't know what three thousand years are," his father replied.
"In all that time freedom grows so hard that it is like a piece of
rock at the core of a mountain, that cannot be broken or ground away,
and cannot disappear ever."

"We have no rifles," said his son.

His father sighed and shrugged his shoulders, but would not abandon his
point. His wife said nothing, but agreed with him and hoped that their
son would share his father's point of view. But the son only repeated
all the arguments about mountains and tanks and plains that the man had
used who had spoken in the square, although he hated the man; and his
father had nothing to say against these arguments; for tanks and planes
were all new to him, or rather new to his thought: he had heard about
them for more than twenty years, but he had not thought of them much.
Deep in his thoughts was the old thought of The Land and its three
thousand years of story, and he felt that aeroplanes may come and go,
and all other inventions that had been on trial as yet for so short a
time, while The Land must go on for ever. But he could only repeat
that The Land was eternal, and had nothing whatever to say to help
Srebnitz when he asked how they could help her. Srebnitz had an
air-gun, which for the last five years had been the principal
treasure of his life. He used to go up with it into the mountain
beyond the city, and sometimes, very rarely, shoot a coney.

"I have my air-gun," he said.

But his father only smiled. Why? thought the boy, and felt the smile was
unjust. His father could tell him of no actual deed, no material thing,
that could be of any practical use. And when he mentioned one, small but
at least something, he only met with derision. Almost he flared up, to
defend himself and his air-gun, but he saw his mother's face looking so
sad, and his country's case seemed to himself so hopeless, that he
walked mournfully away and went up to his own room.

In an air that was vibrating with events, every sound seemed to be
magnified. He heard the bronze knocker on their door send echoes through
the house, and the trifle altered his mood as a pebble may alter the
face of a pond. And it altered it for the better, for his hopes were
then at the lowest at which they had ever been, and any change was good.
He ran down the stairs with the speed of a man who is expecting a
visitor, though he expected nothing; and, opening the door, he found his
friend Gregor, a young man who had been at school with him and had left
for the university the term before. He was standing there, with his
handsome southern face, dark hair and keen eyes, and Srebnitz saw in an
instant that that expression of misery, that was in nearly all faces
now, was not in Gregor's face. Two women passed, both with tears in
their eyes, but Gregor's eyes were flashing, as they usually were when
he talked with Srebnitz, and Srebnitz's spirits rose at the sight: here
seemed some glimmer of hope where there had been none at all, a light in
complete darkness. Perhaps Srebnitz was volatile, but these were times
in which all men were volatile.

"What are you going to do?" asked Gregor.

Do? There seemed nothing to do. Yet the very question cheered Srebnitz.
Gregor must think that something could be done. Srebnitz had the
admiration for Gregor that boys have for an elder boy, picked from among
other elder boys as one standing out even among them. All elder boys are
wonderful to the younger ones: indeed half a year's growth is a
phenomenon making a real, and rather mysterious, difference, such as
more rarely exists among full-grown men; and, added to these few months
of extra age, was the superiority of Gregor himself, which made him
stand out even among his own exact contemporaries; or at least so it
seemed to Srebnitz. The world knows nothing of the great figures between
eighteen and nineteen years old, as viewed by those between seventeen
and eighteen. Sometimes such a lad fulfils his promise, and dazzles the
world as he dazzled the boys that knew him: more often the chances of
life and his character, interwoven together, produce something that
soon fades in the light of the years, while a boy that nobody quite
remembers has at length from mankind the kind of honour that ought to
have gone to the captain of the football eleven. But it was not in
football that Gregor shone, a game with which they toyed rather than
played, nor even at their own national game; it was not in athletics
at all that Gregor excelled in such a way as to win the admiration of
Srebnitz, but in an intense brightness of mind, which could go to the
heart of poetry as the humming-bird hawk-moth goes to the hearts of
the flowers, which great numbers of them were doing every evening at
the time that the Germans arrived.

It was from Gregor's conversation that Srebnitz found whole new worlds.
He was all to Srebnitz that Chapman had been to Keats. He quoted to him
not only from Byron, of whom Srebnitz knew already, but told him that
there were other poets in the world beyond The Land. He had astounded
Srebnitz with Coleridge. He had told him, roughly, in their own
language, the story of Kubla Khan. Gregor himself did not know much
English, and his story was wholly in prose, but his keen enthusiasm
passed the enchantment on. Queer fragments of it stayed in Srebnitz's
mind, and grew there like flowers from seeds brought from a far country.

"There were very old voices there," said Gregor, "that prophesied war."
That was one of the sounds of a strange dark scene that remained in
Srebnitz's imagination for ever.

Another fragment told of a girl singing. "She sang of Mount Abora," said
Gregor, with eyes shining. Had Srebnitz had any idea of where Mount
Abora was, the effect on his imagination, and indeed on the memories of
his life, would have been weaker; as it was, the gardens and forests of
a new and very wonderful land were added to the store that his mind had
garnered, and there they lay among all those facts and illusions upon
which he looked whenever his eyes turned inwards. And in those gardens
was always a girl singing; and far far beyond the gardens and over the
forest, a grey shape faint in pale sky, arose the peak of Mount Abora.
Had it been shown on the map, it was only a mountain. Had he seen it
with his own eyes, it was still but a mountain, a material thing,
unenchanted. But a Coleridge told of it, and as translation withered it,
and as Gregor brought it to life again, it was a thing so wonderful as
to be the theme of a song; and the Abyssinian girl brought it nearer,
calling it over the world with a power denied to Mahomet.

And here was Gregor asking what Srebnitz was going to do, as though a
free choice were still possible, as though freedom, after all, had not
left The Land. What could be done?

"What are you going to do?" asked Srebnitz.

"I am going into the Mountain," said Gregor.

A tramp of marching feet was heard, as the boys went inside. On the
way up to Srebnitz's room Gregor explained that an army was gathering
there, led by Hlaka, a veteran of an old war, who had gone to the
Mountain, and was already among the peaks when the Germans arrived in
the capital, and his followers would join him there one by one.
Srebnitz listened at first with flaming hopes, but upon them suddenly
fell like thunder-showers the arguments of the traitor in the Square:
they had no guns, no rifles. All the light suddenly went out of
Srebnitz's eyes as they walked across his room to the window. "We
have no rifles," said Srebnitz.

"There are plenty there," said Gregor, pointing out over the town.

The marching feet were nearer: it was a battalion of German infantry
coming down the street. Gregor opened the window and waved his
handkerchief to them and, as they came underneath, shouted "_Sieg
heil._"

"What does that mean?" asked Srebnitz, puzzled and mournful.

"I don't know," said Gregor, "but it is something the Germans shout."

"Why do you do it?" asked Srebnitz.

"Because I want one of their rifles," Gregor replied.

Srebnitz looked in astonishment at his face, and saw nothing there but a
grim determination. Srebnitz's astonishment had no effect on that look,
and it remained there steadfast. Then Srebnitz knew that Gregor had
really a plan, and that something could be done. Gregor turned from him
again to the window and went on waving his handkerchief, and again
shouted "_Sieg heil._" It was long before Gregor turned from the window.

"Every man who brings a rifle," he said, "will be admitted to Hlaka's
army."

"One of theirs?" asked Srebnitz.

"One of theirs," said Gregor.

Gregor went to the window again and leaned out and looked down the
street after the German battalion. He was no longer waving his
handkerchief, and he had a different look in his eyes now. Then he
closed the window and turned back to Srebnitz.

"And bring some cartridges if you can," he said. "Rifles are no good
without cartridges."

"You are really going?" said Srebnitz.

"I am going tonight," said Gregor.

"How lovely," cried Srebnitz.

"Not at all," Gregor answered. "It is very terrible indeed. When I go
there will be reprisals, and they will kill people."

"They will kill innocent people?" gasped Srebnitz.

"I don't know what 'innocent people' means," said Gregor. "They will
kill people who have done nothing, because I have done my duty. It is
most terrible. It will be as though I had plunged my knife into their
hearts. But Our People must be free. Or dead. Many have died in three
thousand years. But all who lived have been free. We must be free."

Srebnitz gazed at him and hope came among his dreams, as Gregor had once
brought Mount Abora into his imagination.

Gregor went on. "Say _Heil Hitler_ wherever you go. The little monkey
likes it, and his slaves insist on it. Say it whenever you speak to
anyone, and whenever you stop speaking to them. I waved from your
window and shouted one of their shouts, so that they shan't come here
first, when they come to shoot people. But they'll come here some
day, and it's better to die on the Mountain. They'll kill your father
and mother when they come."

Srebnitz gasped. "They wouldn't do that!" he exclaimed.

Gregor turned round on Srebnitz, full in front of him, close.

"You must understand the Germans," he said. "Get your mind clear. If
they are harmless decent people, you don't want to kill them, at least
not the way we shall do it. You must find out what they are, before you
know how to treat them. You don't shoot your neighbours' dogs; you do
shoot the fox. Find out what they are, for yourself; then you'll know
how to treat them. When you are ready, come to the Mountain."

The Mountain was quite close to the town: they could see its peaks clear
from the window, and could sometimes see moving dots that were wild
sheep: nothing else lived there.

"I am ready now," said Srebnitz.

"No," said Gregor. "You believe what I say. That's nice of you. But
wait till you know it for yourself. You will fight better that way.
You will fight then as we shall have to fight. This isn't war, you
know. No battles and medals and strategy. This is guerrilla. This is
killing, as we kill animals. That is to say, as butchers in the town,
and as hunters up in the Mountain."

To his astonishment Srebnitz saw that Gregor was going. He gazed at
him. Gregor had told him nothing of what he was to do, and he had
looked to Gregor for the minutest instructions. Hoping yet to be told
how to act, he said:

"But how do I get a rifle?"

"You have a knife?" asked Gregor.

"Yes," answered Srebnitz.

And, as Srebnitz said that, Gregor's face lit up with a most charming
smile, which lingered upon it as he walked across the room and was
shining there still as he went out of the door, looking back into
Srebnitz's face.




II


Srebnitz went downstairs to the room where his parents sat, full of
his new hopes. "There's an army up in the Mountain," he said. "It
will free The Land."

Half an hour earlier his father was telling him there was hope, when he
had none. Now he was instructing his father in the same thing, as though
it were new. Naturally they did not quite agree: the old man was not
going to sit at a desk and be instructed by his son, especially in a
matter in which he had so recently been the instructor.

"Who told you that?" his father asked. And when the boy said that it was
the brilliant Gregor, he only found that Gregor meant nothing to his
father, and that he did not believe in the army. Then he mentioned the
name of Hlaka, and that did impress his father. But where was Hlaka? How
could he get to him? Suddenly there surged back into Srebnitz's mind the
horrible words of Gregor, that they would shoot his father and mother.
Srebnitz did not believe it; and that was what Gregor had meant when he
had said that he was not yet ready to go to the Mountain. He did not
believe it, and yet the thought came back with a deadening shock. For it
was a dreadful thing to think of, even though it could not be true. As
they talked there came knocks on the door, strangely different from
Gregor's knocks. They sounded so angrily impatient that Srebnitz ran to
open the door. There was a Prussian major there.

"_Heil Hitler_," said Srebnitz.

"_Heil Hitler_," replied the major.

It was true then; they did talk like that.

"_Sprechen Sie Deutsch?_" said the major.

"_Nein_," said Srebnitz, for the words they had spoken so far were the
only German words that Srebnitz knew. And then the Prussian officer
spoke to him with a fairly good accent in his own Near Eastern language.

"I am billeted here," said the officer.

"Won't you come in?" said Srebnitz, for he was of a polite though fierce
people, and he brought the officer into the sitting-room. Srebnitz's
mother got up from her chair timidly, but the old man refused to move.
This man was not his guest, and he came of a free people.

"I am billeted here," said the Prussian officer.

The old man nodded his head; he was powerless to keep the German out.

"We have come to safeguard our own frontiers from aggression," said the
officer, "and for the good of your own Land."

The old man turned slightly in his chair, away from the German.

"It is so everywhere," said the German to Srebnitz. "The old have not
yet learned, but all the young are for Hitler."

Srebnitz was silent for a few moments, and then he said: "_Heil
Hitler._"

"_Heil Hitler_," repeated the German.

One eyebrow of Srebnitz's father rose slightly; his mother sat silent.

"Show the officer to your bedroom," said his father. "You must sleep
here on the floor."

Srebnitz did as his father told him. The German seemed pleased with
the room, or with Srebnitz's politeness to him, and almost smiled. He
was silent a few moments, evidently thinking what he could do for
Srebnitz. Then he said:

"Tell your father and mother to change their minds while there is still
time. Now I will go and send round my kit."

And he went amiably down the stairs.

An officer, thought Srebnitz, an officer. He would not have a rifle. And
he decided to bide his time.

When Srebnitz went downstairs again his father said to him: "Why did
you say that?"

He spoke in a strange grim voice that was new to Srebnitz. Like a
judge speaking. As though on behalf of many alive and dead he
questioned his son.

And the son replied with the words that Gregor had said to him: "This is
not a war, Father. It is guerrilla."

And his father seemed to have understood at once, and said no more, but
sat looking into the fire and often smiling quietly. Then Srebnitz
remembered that he kept his knife in his room, and went up to get it
before the German returned. It was a thin knife, about eight inches
long, in a sheath of red leather. It is the usual custom of the people
of that land to keep their knives about as sharp as we keep our razors,
and Srebnitz's knife was like the rest, but he drew it out and honed it
with a little stone, to make sure, and stropped it on leather, until
the German came back and knocked with his angry knocks again on the
door. Then Srebnitz sheathed his knife and hid it under his clothes;
and always after that wore it hung on a strip of leather next to his
skin. He ran downstairs and looked in at the sitting-room, on his way
to open the door. Perhaps his mother guessed why he went upstairs,
or perhaps she merely wondered.

"Did you go upstairs to make the room comfortable for the officer?"
she asked.

"Yes," said Srebnitz, "or for one of them. I went to get this."

And he opened his shirt and showed the top of the handle of the knife, a
carved piece of wild-sheep's horn inlaid with little pieces of silver
wire. His mother nodded, but never said a word. His father saw too, and
said nothing. The knocks on the door came again, more angry and longer,
and Srebnitz hurried to open the door.

"_Heil Hitler_," said Srebnitz.

"_Heil Hitler_," replied the officer.

Yes, they had only been parted for little over five minutes, and it was
evidently quite correct to say this all over again.

The German had an orderly with him, with both hands full of kit. No
rifle amongst it, Srebnitz noticed. This meant that he must get his
rifle elsewhere, and he was glad for his parents' sake.

Then he remembered that he had not passed on this man's warning to
his parents. He showed the way to the staircase and, leaving the
officer to go up with the orderly and the kit, went into the
sitting-room. Somehow he could not think of words in which to tell
what he had to say, so he repeated the German officer's own words,
warning his parents to change their minds while there was still time.
But the old man only smiled and slightly shook his head. He would
have done the same if invited to play football. He was too old for
such changes. His wife smiled a little too, and sighed once, and then
they heard the feet of the major returning down the stairs.

One often hears of a typical Englishman, a typical soldier, a typical
bus-conductor, but very rarely sees any of these types, and when seen
they seem slightly absurd; a typical man is in fact a caricature. But
this officer was a typical Prussian officer: his face was large and red,
and there were hundreds of red veins in it; his body was very plump,
although not fat, except for his neck; and the line of his neck went
straight to the top of his head, with no bulge anywhere, except for the
fat of the neck. His neck was red like his face, and his moustache was
much cared for: one could not say it was well cared for; it was rather
as though a man had employed several gardeners to plant nettles and
weeds, or wild jungle-growths, in orderly rows in a garden. His
moustache was a dark shade of yellow, and his eyes were blue, and
there were bright red veins in his eyes, as well as in his face. At
first sight of him you thought of a savage from cannibal lands, who
had been drinking blood all his life; but that was a first impression
that could linger only a moment, for a second glance showed that, far
from being a savage, he had been drilled night and day ever since he
was eight, and was as far removed from the natural savage as a
performing ape that has been all its life in a circus is removed from
his happy brothers still at large in the woods. Though he gave
orders all day now, he made every movement as though the trainer were
still behind him, and the trainer's whip over his head.

Supper was now preparing and, as the German saw his hostess's
preparations, a brighter scarlet seemed to shine in the veins of his
eyes. No shortage of food had come as yet to The Land. Srebnitz was out
of the room when the others sat down to supper. He had gone to get an
armful of clothes from his bedroom, to throw them down in the corner in
which he was going to sleep. He had scarcely been gone three minutes
when he returned with his bundle; and the quarrel had already occurred.
The old lady had said grace before sitting down to supper, and the
German had tolerated that, but had added the name of Hitler. It was not
this that had been the cause of the quarrel; this had only caused
exasperation: the actual quarrel arose over the precedence that was due
to God's name or to Hitler's. They were sitting very silent when
Srebnitz returned; and he saw at once that there had been a quarrel, and
feared for his parents' lives. It was only a fear awakened by Gregor's
words, for he did not yet know the Germans.

The supper was eaten in silence. Beer was brought in silence to the
German officer by Srebnitz's father. And then the German relaxed. He
relaxed like a traction-engine that has come over the crest of a hill;
his movements were smoother, less awkward. At last he smiled, as heavy
engines might smile, if their ghosts spoke together at night, when man
had gone. "After all," he said ingratiatingly to Srebnitz's mother,
"what do we know of these great figures? It is but for us to obey."

Still he got no response.

"A curious people," he said aloud, but in German, so as not to give
them offence.

Srebnitz watched every minute go by, and hoped the end of the evening
might come, before either his father or mother had said something that
the German would never forgive, if they had not done so already. As soon
as the first dimness strayed into the room he went and lay down on his
heap of clothes in the corner, though the German was still at the table.
Somehow the mere movement had more than the effect that he hoped, and
the little party broke up, the German going upstairs and Srebnitz's
father and mother going soon to their own bedroom.

All the sounds in the streets outside were changed: there were more
feet, fewer voices. Sometimes Srebnitz heard a shout far off. The whole
volume of sound was different; the very voice of the city was altered.
As none of the voices to which he listened told anything in words, and
as none of the dim echoes of sounds that reached him told anything to
his reason, Srebnitz listened all the more acutely, bringing his
imagination to the aid of his ears, and he lay long awake in the
sorrowful city. Suddenly in the night the city's voice changed again,
and changed so sharply that Srebnitz awoke. What did it say this time?
Still he could not tell. But its voice was alert and horrified.

The Prussian went out next morning without his breakfast.

"Mother," said Srebnitz as they sat over their own breakfast, "you
nearly quarrelled with him last night. Please don't. He forgave you.
But, if he had not, Gregor says..."

"He insulted God," said his mother.

"What did he say?" asked Srebnitz, thinking that perhaps he might
explain it away.

"He said He was not a European," she answered.

"But is He?" asked Srebnitz.

"It was not that," his mother replied. "But he implied very clearly that
he himself was a European and, better than that, a Prussian."

"But he is," said Srebnitz.

"And therefore superior to God," his mother continued.

"He was joking," said the boy.

"We don't joke like that," said his mother.

"No," said Srebnitz. "But don't be hard on him if he can't see things as
we do. Because Gregor says..."

"What does Gregor say?" said his mother, though not in a voice that
sounded as though she sought instruction from Gregor.

"Gregor says..." But somehow what Gregor had said seemed rather
absurd, and he could not bring himself to repeat it. "Well, he'll be
hungry when he comes back," he said. "Let's give him a good breakfast.
We must make him comfortable while he is here. Perhaps they will go
soon."

"Perhaps," said his mother.

The German soon returned. Srebnitz had been thinking that his impression
that his face was red could not be really true. It was a bright, bright
red. He strode into the room and made a speech. He said, speaking so as
to have been heard by a large audience, had one been there, that the
people of The Land were a savage people. "We come to the country for its
own good," he said, "and in order to protect it from England. And how
have they shown their gratitude? What have they done?" He paused, then
shouted louder, "What have they done?"

Then Srebnitz saw that an answer was needed, and said, "We don't know."

"You don't know," repeated the German. "No, because it is incredible.
You accursed people have murdered a German sentry."

"It is incredible," said Srebnitz.

It was the _mot juste_. But his mother said nothing. The Prussian looked
at her, to hear what she would say. Still she said nothing.

"Very well," he said suddenly, and strode out of the house.

"That's right," said Srebnitz when he had gone. "I was afraid you might
say something to make him angry. We must be rather quiet while he is in
this mood. In a day or two it will blow over."

And then his father came in to have his breakfast: he had been upstairs
making the German's bed. He had heard the shouting and knew what had
happened. He said nothing as he came in, but his face seemed to wear
resignation, like an ancient national dress.

"Gregor has killed a sentry," said Srebnitz.

And the old man nodded his head. He sat down to his breakfast and seemed
to be waiting for something. Presently the major returned with three
armed soldiers. He marched in, and they behind him. The Prussian had a
paper in his hand and at once began to shout. The gist of his shouting
was that Aryan life was sacred; that the German people, the most
cultured in the world, knew this, but there were inferior races that did
not know it. To these races the Germans must act like parents and teach
the simple lesson; stern parents, until the lesson was learned. When
these good lessons were learned, all the world would be happy; meanwhile
there must be reprisals. Fifty persons must be shot to atone for the
murder of the sentry. The behaviour of his host had been correct: it was
therefore a pleasure to spare him. Young Srebnitz, like the youth of the
whole world, would learn to love Hitler if he did not already. The
behaviour of his mother was incorrect.

He turned round on his heel and marched out of the house, and the
soldiers led away the old woman. Her husband followed them. Srebnitz
too followed as far as the door. For one moment all three soldiers
had their backs to him. He looked as earnestly at their large
shoulder-blades as he had ever looked at anything. Then one of them
made a half-turn, and Srebnitz seemed to have changed his mind. He
did not realise then that he would never see either of his parents
again. He did not yet wholly believe Gregor.

His mother was shot dead that afternoon. His father had insisted on
accompanying her to the wall before which she had to stand; so the
Germans had laughed, and shot him too.

That evening when Srebnitz heard what had happened, the despair of the
day before had wholly left him; there was scarcely even grief in his
heart, and no fear and no other emotion except one, which wholly filled
it, a deep and ardent yearning to get a rifle.




III


There is a story of Kipling's about a man whose pet ape tore his
master's wife to pieces from jealousy, and, knowing he had been naughty,
kept away from the man for some days, till the man lured him back with
little kindnesses, and finally killed him.

The position between Srebnitz and the Prussian major on the day after
the reprisals was, in their attitude towards each other, somewhat
that of the man and the ape, after the ape had killed the woman. Did
Srebnitz feel resentment? the major wondered. He did not seem to; and
yet the officer, from his knowledge of psychology, which he had once
studied at a German university, suspected that Srebnitz might have
such a feeling, even although it was reasonably groundless. Men do
not act always from reason alone, he had once been taught. And yet he
reasoned with Srebnitz.

In war, he explained to him, certain things were necessary, and
logically followed on other things. And he explained to Srebnitz the
usage of reprisals, with the exactitude of a chess player explaining an
opening. Srebnitz agreed at once. The position was clear enough to the
major, but he was a little surprised to find that it was so clear to a
man who had not the advantage of German culture. And so he explained it
all over again, which logically was what he ought to have done if
Srebnitz had not understood him, but not when he did understand. Well,
there was no harm in making sure; and the clear logic of his argument
had a soothing effect on the major's own mind, which was slightly teased
now and again with doubts as to whether Srebnitz was as well disposed to
him as he appeared, and as he certainly ought to be. If one loses one's
queen at chess to an important piece on the other side, one does not
bear resentment to that piece.

Srebnitz did not appear to act in any such foolish way, and logically
ought not to do so; so why suppose that he did? And yet the fact
remained that nobody could tell what anyone outside Germany would think
about anything. And this fact, however absurd, should be borne in mind,
for a reasonable man must never neglect a fact. In Germany the moment
the Fuehrer spoke on the wireless on any subject, one knew what
everyone thought on that subject: in an ordered country it must be so;
then all men acted the same way, because they thought the same way, and
their action came with the weight of a single blow, eighty million
people striking together; and such a blow must be victorious. It was
very simple; it was the difference between organization and running
wild, the difference between culture and savagery, and incidentally
the difference between victory and occupation. The occupied countries
must be taught this now, like children in school; those as yet
unoccupied must learn by defeat. "So," said the Prussian out loud.
Srebnitz smiled. Was it a natural smile? All that the major and his
forbears had learned for three generations said that it was, for how
else should other peoples act towards Prussians? But some older,
simpler lore, that had not studied psychology, seemed to be doubting
that smile. One more word to Srebnitz.

But Srebnitz said, "I must cook your dinner now. It will not be cooked
quite as well as it used to be."

"Naturally," said the Prussian.

Then Srebnitz went to the kitchen to do his best.

A foolish remark about the cooking. How could a man cook as well as a
woman? Only an uncultured people, thought the major, would trouble to
point out such a thing. Did the boy think he would punish him for the
inferior cooking? Germans were not unreasonable.

Srebnitz brought in the dinner, and the meat was tough, as the officer
had expected. He made no complaint. He knew well enough that a woman's
place was the kitchen. Even a German man would not try to compete there,
still less an uncultured man. The woman had cooked well. But such things
could not be considered in war. Reprisals came first. Indeed it was by
reprisals that Germany must keep her hold on the occupation of the
world. Decent cooking would follow.

The major and Srebnitz ate together. Often Srebnitz's hand would move to
his waist and linger there for a moment.

"Your stomach aches?" asked the Prussian.

"No, no, no," said Srebnitz. "Yes, it does." And suddenly Srebnitz
realised that he must have been fondling the handle of the knife that
was under his shirt.

It might have been an awkward twenty minutes while the Prussian major
and Srebnitz ate their dinner, were it not for the young man's frequent
smiles. One thing prevented the military shrewdness of the major from
detecting any falsity in those smiles, and that was that they were
entirely sincere: whenever Srebnitz smiled he was thinking of his rifle
that he was going to get and take away to the Mountain. The Mountain and
its bright freedom, and the free men whom he would meet there, filled
his mind as flowers are filled with sunlight. After dinner the major
marched out. And Srebnitz was left in the lonely house, to sit by the
kitchen fire and make his plans. And the more he planned, the harder it
seemed to be, till the daring act that should win the rifle seemed the
easiest step of all. First of all, the Germans had imposed a curfew
within half an hour of sunset, as one of the punishments for the
death of their sentry. This would mean his arrest if found at night
in the streets at all, even without carrying a German rifle, and
there would be a bayonet with it too. There would be a long way to go
through the streets from the place where the sentry would be. And
then there was a moon about four days old: that would not help things
either. Srebnitz's plans had not progressed very far when there came
a knock at the door. It was not the terrible Gestapo; in fact it was
evidently not a German at all. Srebnitz could not guess who it could
be; and, had he guessed for long, the man he saw in the doorway would
have been the last of his guesses. It was Gregor.

"Gregor!" Srebnitz exclaimed.

Gregor smiled.

"They have killed my father and mother," said Srebnitz.

"Yes, and mine," said Gregor. "Our fathers and mothers were lost when
the Germans first came. We are probably all lost. But The Land will
be free."

"I will get the rifle," said Srebnitz.

"That is right," said Gregor. "It will be beautiful up on the
Mountain with a rifle. Their sentries wear bandoliers. Remember to
bring the bandolier."

"There's a curfew."

"I came to tell you about that," said Gregor. "You must go by moonlight,
so that the sentry can see you. You couldn't get close in the dark. Have
a piece of white paper in your hand. Say '_Erlaubnis_'--that means
'permit'--and give it to him."

"But when he reads it?" said Srebnitz.

"He must never read it," said Gregor.

"No," said Srebnitz. "And then?"

"Then take his rifle and bandolier, and take off your boots, and hide
till the moon goes down. There will be nobody near at the time,
because you will choose a time when the sentry is alone, before you
take your permit to him. Tie your boots round your neck; you will
want them on the Mountain."

"Where will I hide?" asked Srebnitz.

"The two best places are the wood and the public gardens," said Gregor,
for a pinewood came right into the town. "So avoid those two. The
Germans will search them as soon as they miss their sentry; there are
plenty of little gardens among the houses; you know them all; and you
can move on from one to another whenever the street is quiet."

Srebnitz did not speak, but gazed thoughtfully into the fire, for they
had come to the kitchen.

"Well?" said Gregor.

"I was thinking of the rifle and bayonet," said Srebnitz.

"Don't bring the bayonet," said Gregor. "Hlaka doesn't want them. The
Germans will be twenty, and even fifty, to one, when we fight, so we
can't sail in with the bayonet."

"Fifty to one?" said Srebnitz.

"Perhaps a hundred to one," said Gregor. "But that doesn't trouble
Hlaka. He makes up the difference by brains. But you must use your
brains, or Hlaka will flog you."

Perhaps a troubled look came into Srebnitz's face, for he knew he
was not as clever as Gregor, and he feared that he might fail the
redoubtable Hlaka.

"You've shot coneys, haven't you?" said Gregor.

"A few," said Srebnitz. "But only with an air-gun."

"That's all the brains you need," said Gregor, "and more than enough. A
stupid man might kill a coney with a rifle, if he took a long shot, but
not with an air-gun. And we don't take long shots."

"From how far do you fire?" asked Srebnitz.

"What is the furthest that you have ever shot a coney?" asked Gregor.

"I shot one once at seventy-five metres," said Srebnitz. "I paced it."

"Then never fire at over seventy metres," said Gregor, "at a German. The
first five cartridges, think of your mother; the next five think of your
father; and don't waste one. We don't fight battles. If an officer gave
an order to open fire at four hundred yards, Hlaka would execute him. No
battles; only killing."

"And the rifle," said Srebnitz to remind Gregor of a point from which
they had wandered away.

"You must do as you think best," said Gregor. "Indeed you must do that
at all times. What I did myself was to carry it through the streets
while they were quiet; but I had a small saw with me so that I could saw
off the stock in any place where I hid, and carry the barrel under my
waistcoat and down my trouser-leg. As it turned out I did not use the
saw. If you do carry it that way it's best to have a stick, and walk a
bit lame. Here is the saw."

And he gave Srebnitz a small sharp saw, only a few inches long.
"Don't bring the stock," he said, "if you cut it off. You can carve
another stock out of a cork-tree. And now get your air-gun, and let's
see how you can shoot."

While Srebnitz went to get his air-gun Gregor picked up a large empty
match-box and, opening it to make it a little larger, and walking out
of the house and across the street, set it up on the pavement against
the opposite house. Rifle practice, even of so humble a sort, in the
streets of a conquered city, and among two of the conquered,
surprised Srebnitz as soon as he saw what Gregor had planned. But
Gregor said: "This is how we must live from now on; doing whatever we
like, but choosing our time for it. I will watch from this window.
The moment you hear me shut it, put your air-gun away."

So Gregor leaned his head out of the window, looking up and down the
street, while Srebnitz fired four shots at the match-box from six yards
inside the house, and every shot hit it. Then Gregor went and picked the
match-box up, and nothing had disturbed them. As Gregor walked across
the street with the incriminating match-box in his hand, the idea came
to Srebnitz that more might be done than he had hoped, for the trifle
caught his eye, whereas he had not seen Gregor's journey all the way to
the town from the Mountain.

"What part of the Mountain shall I come to?" asked Srebnitz.

"Any part," said Gregor. "We shall find you. You will be watched all
the way. If you carry the rifle in your hand, carry it with the
stock foremost."

Then he picked up the air-gun and looked at it.

"That's a nice air-gun," he said. "You could learn to hit a coin at
seventy metres with that. Would you like it up on the Mountain?"

"Oh yes," said Srebnitz. "Shall I bring it?"

"No. You will have your rifle to bring," said Gregor. "I'll take it for
you. It will go nicely."

And there and then he began to slip it down his waistcoat with the stock
uppermost. And Srebnitz gave him several hundred lead slugs in a round
tin. These Gregor poured loose into his pockets, and handed back the
tin. Then he walked out into the street.

"See you soon," he shouted, and was gone.

Srebnitz went back to his seat by the fire, and back to his thoughts.
He had no need of the fire's warmth, for spring was far on its way
over all those lands, though the swallows had not yet got as far as
England, and the fire was only there for cooking: he sat by the fire
so as to see the past in it, which his fancy could sometimes discern
in its luminous scenery. He would have liked to have left some
flowers upon his parents' graves; but, thinking it all out, he
decided that he must choose between that and vengeance.

Then, having made his choice, he went out for a walk through the
streets of the little capital to see where the sentries were: and he
went in the direction of the Mountain. Having found what he wanted, he
returned to the house, stopping on the way at a street corner at which
they always sold flowers, and where men were selling them even yet, and
buying a bunch at the cost of a whole pound of tea, because he realised
that money would not be of much more use to him for a long time to come.
These he brought back to the house and he began to prepare supper. The
major had not yet returned.

He had not been at work in the kitchen long when a furious knocking
was heard at the door and the major was there, having come back for
his supper.

"_Heil Hitler_," said Srebnitz.

"_Heil Hitler_," replied the major with the same solemn face. Would he
never get tired of saying this? thought Srebnitz.

Srebnitz had all his wits about him now, realising that now, if ever, he
must keep them about him. For he meant to go that night a bit before the
moon went behind the Mountain. He could not bring himself to say much to
the major, but he smiled more frequently than he had at dinner. He is
beginning to get over the loss of his parents, thought the Prussian.

After supper, when he went into the kitchen to put the plates away, he
packed into his pockets and about his clothes all the tea and sugar
there was in the house, and a good deal of butter and some slices of
bacon, and put nearly sixteen pounds of bread into a sack. Would the
major go to bed before the moon set? He could not sit and watch him
without letting some trace of his anxiety show through, so he stayed
most of the time in the kitchen, where the major heard him moving
saucepans and washing plates. Already through a window he saw the
moon hanging low. Would beer help? He opened two bottles and placed
them beside the major, who was pleased. Then he returned to the
kitchen. There he found a sheet of paper and made out his permit; he
wrote on it "It is a free Land." For a moment he wondered how to sign
it, then signed with his own name.

After what seemed a long time, but may have been only ten minutes, he
heard a yawn, then silence, and more silence. His father's old clock
sounded loud in it. Suddenly a hope came to him, and he looked quietly
into the sitting-room: it was as he hoped and the major had fallen
asleep. He scattered some flowers then in rooms and nooks and corners
that were especially frequented by memories of his parents, and
slipped out into the street, and locked the door on the far side and
threw the key away.

The moon was still in the sky, but getting near to the Mountain. The
street was quite deserted, and he went quietly in the direction of a
little public garden with two gates on the street, over both of which
the Germans had put a sentry; and the further of the two sentries was
the one that Srebnitz had chosen, because he was the nearer to the
Mountain. This meant that he would have to make a detour, up a street to
the right and back down another, in order to come to the further sentry
without being seen by the nearer. The bit of garden was only a hundred
yards long, and the distance between the two sentry-posts was no more
than that; but they walked up and down and met in the middle, and would
be two hundred yards apart at the end of their beats.

He walked softly, though with his boots on, and felt strangely free. He
felt, although the feeling was not crystallised into thought, that Man
was opposed to the night, that all his doors and locks and laws were
against it. Out-of-doors now, in the silent street, no locks or laws
held him. The night was no longer against him; it was his friend: and he
was on the side of the night. In the houses freedom was lost now: all
who abided by laws in that land abided by German laws: only in the night
and on the Mountain were his people still free.

He heard the sound of three men marching, and they seemed more in the
night. Then he saw the glint of an electric torch flashing out now
and then. To go back would be to lose time, and the moon was getting
low. There was a side-street only fifty yards ahead, which he thought
he could reach if he hurried, before the men came within hearing of
his light feet.

He ran softly and reached it, and ran up the steps of a house on the
far side of the side-street and flattened himself against the door;
not the first house, but the second, so as to have sufficient start
if the patrol turned up that street. They were coming down the far
side of the street he had left. If the steps left the pavement to
cross the street, he would have ample time to get away from them.
But they drew level and kept straight on.

He left the door and continued his journey, and the night seemed more
than ever his friend. Then the silence was broken again, this time by a
voice, a high voice calling incoherently, somebody singing. The singer
was coming towards him out of the distance and dark: it was a drunken
man. For a moment Srebnitz was astonished at any sound of festivity in
that fallen city; then he realised that it was some poor devil trying to
drown the sorrow of Europe in a glass of wine. He came down the street
the way the patrol had gone, and Srebnitz heard, as he came nearer, the
ruins of songs of his country. He stood still as the man passed him on
the other side of the street, so that the man should not hear him and
shout to him. And away the wild singing went, sending up fragments of
the songs of The Land into the lonely night. For a long while he heard
him; then a volley from two or three rifles, and all was quiet.

He heard the sound of more men coming behind him, but that did not
trouble him, because he was near the first sentry now and the time was
come for him to leave the wide street and turn up to his right, and then
soon to his left and to his left again, which would bring him back to
the street that he was in, and close to the further sentry. He turned to
his right and passed by little gardens, where trees leaned their dark
heads out over the railings, trees that seemed friendly to Srebnitz, and
free, trees that had never said _Heil Hitler_: freedom was gone from men
in The Land, but it seemed still to linger among these leaves.

When he came to his next turning he paused, to hear how far the marching
feet had got. If they should turn from the main road where he had turned
he would have to make fresh plans, but they went on straight past the
turning. Then he turned to his left and was about level with them. As he
turned to his left again, he heard them marching on up the wide road,
past the far end of the street he had just entered. He was very near the
sentry now. He followed the sound of the marching feet for a little way,
softly; then he turned back and, as soon as the patrol was out of
hearing, walked loudly towards the sentry, whose feet he could now hear,
his approach from that direction giving the impression that he must have
passed the patrol. He had also timed his walk so as to meet the sentry
when he was farthest away from his comrade.

Now he saw the sentry, in such light as there was from the moon, and
held out his white paper. Before the sentry challenged Srebnitz
called out, "_Erlaubnis_," and added the word Doctor in his own
language, hoping that the Germans would have picked up the word for
doctor in any country they entered. If he looked too young for a
doctor, the word might be taken to mean that he was in search of one.
He waved the paper in the direction in which the patrol had gone,
with the implication that they had seen it, and then stretched it out
to the sentry, repeating the word _Erlaubnis_; for it was death to be
out in the streets after dark without a permit.

Srebnitz came of a race that had held a small country from before the
Christian era. They had done this by outstanding courage, and of course
by agriculture, but also by cunning. Cunning was honoured among them,
probably because they knew, or only dimly felt, that it was one of the
pillars upon which their nation rested, and without which their race
might have fallen into the dust.

Srebnitz handed the paper to the sentry in the same hand that held the
knife: the blade of the knife was under his hand and lying along his
wrist. The sentry tried to read it, but there was not enough moonlight.
Then Srebnitz spoke of his mother in his own language. Whether the words
surged up unbidden out of his thoughts, or whether he spoke to distract
the sentry's attention, he did not know himself.

"My mother was always kind," he said.

And then he stabbed the sentry to the heart. The thin knife slipped in
easily. The sentry coughed and Srebnitz seized his throat with his left
hand for fear that he should cry out: with his right hand he caught the
rifle before it could fall, for he knew that the sound of a falling
rifle would waken the whole street.

He had forgotten to loosen his boot-strings, so he cut them now with the
knife, as the other sentry marched towards the point at which the two of
them were accustomed to meet. Srebnitz's sentry seemed quite dead, as he
took his hand from his throat. Then he slipped the bandolier over the
dead man's head and threw it over his own shoulder, and took off his
boots and ran, picking up his small sack of bread as he went, which he
had left on the pavement before going up to the sentry. A flash of
moonlight on the bayonet as he ran reminded him that Gregor had told
him that Hlaka did not need bayonets, and that he was better without
it now; so he unfixed it from the rifle and, with a neat knack they
have in those parts, threw it into a door, where it stuck; a warning,
Srebnitz thought, if the people in the house should be traitors;
otherwise a message of hope.

Soon he heard the steps of the patrol again, for he was now overtaking
them. So he stopped to think, and to rest; not because he was tired, but
in order to have his speed fresh when it might be needed. The other
sentry seemed not to have left his beat, and there was no pursuit as
yet. It struck Srebnitz then that the safest place for him was as near
as possible to the patrol. If they turned he must run: till then they
would warn him whenever they passed a sentry, and there would be no more
patrols, just behind them.

For a long while he followed the patrol, till it turned down a street
that led away from the Mountain. Srebnitz kept straight on, and went
now more cautiously.




IV


The moon was very near to the left side of the Mountain, but it still
gave too much light; and Srebnitz looked, as he went, for a place to
hide. If the dead sentry was discovered before the moon set, which
seemed more than likely, he decided to go on at once, as the certain
danger behind would then be greater than the unknown danger in front;
but as yet he heard no noise.

He passed a garden, but there seemed no cover there, and the moonlight
was all over it. Trees were plentiful along the street, but they were
only pepper-trees, with thin trunks. The kind of cover he looked for did
not seem to be there, and there were no clouds near the moon. The houses
he passed had gardens in front of them, but too minute to grow any trees
except almond or orange or peach: none of them gave any cover.

And then he saw a garden so neat and calm and well tended, with the
moonlight shining on patches of lemon-blossom, bright in the dark of the
leaves, and with something else about it that he could not define, but
that charmed him somehow as the echo of chimes that had just stopped
ringing on a summer's evening ... so neat and calm and charming that
the idea came to him suddenly that in this house he might find shelter.
Without any hesitation or any further thought he went straight up to the
door and knocked with his knuckles; nor was there time for any
hesitation, for he had been too long in the moonlit street already to
hope to go much longer without being seen; and indeed as he knocked he
heard marching feet again, between him and the Mountain. He knocked
again, a little louder. The door was opened by someone with a knitted
shawl over her face, through which she could see.

Srebnitz walked in with his rifle, and his right hand all over blood,
and much of the sleeve, and said: "It is for The Land."

The figure behind the shawl nodded, and made a gesture with one hand to
an inner door. Then she shut the door on the street, while Srebnitz,
still with his rifle in his hand, walked in to the room to which she
had pointed. There two old ladies sat knitting, two unmarried
sisters. They glanced at Srebnitz's rifle and the blood on his hand,
and went on with their knitting.

"It is a fine evening," said one of them.

"Yes," said Srebnitz, and then added what he had said in the doorway:
"It is for The Land."

"Yes, yes," said the other old lady. "Are you going to the Mountain?"

"Yes," said Srebnitz. "To Hlaka."

"You must have some tea before you go," she said.

The marching footsteps drew nearer, and another patrol passed the door,
as they all listened.

"The moon will set soon," said the old lady who had offered the tea. Her
name was Isabella.

"Properly speaking," said her sister, "it will go behind the Mountain.
But that will suit quite well."

"I must wash my hands," said Srebnitz very hastily, looking down with a
shocked expression at his own right hand in that neat, tidy room.

"That is as you wish," said Isabella. "But, if you are going to Hlaka,
they say--do they not, Angelica?--that he will receive you better with
your right hand unwashed."

"That is what I have heard," said Angelica.

"Sophia," called Isabella, "bring us some tea for this young gentleman.
And your name?" she said to Srebnitz.

"I think not," said Angelica.

"Very well then, perhaps not," said Isabella.

So Srebnitz remained anonymous.

"My dear young man," said Isabella, "you have no blanket. Nobody goes
up to the Mountain without a blanket. It is very cold up there as
soon as the sun sets."

"Yes," said Angelica, "he must have a blanket." And she went to get one.

And now Srebnitz heard the sounds of a stir down the road by which he
had come, the very sounds that he had been expecting, and he and his
hostess knew they had found the sentry.

"You must not go by that road," Isabella said, pointing to the front
door. "But Sophia will show you a lane that goes straight to the
Mountain."

They were still listening to the noises in the town, when Angelica
returned with the blanket, which she made up into a long roll and handed
to Srebnitz, and a strip of leather with which to fasten the ends.
Srebnitz thanked her and threw it over his right shoulder.

"Not that shoulder," said Angelica. "They never wear it that way."

And Srebnitz realised, rather shamefacedly, that the way he was trying
to wear it would get in the way of his rifle. Very soon Sophia came in
with the tea, this time with no shawl over her face.

"This is our niece Sophia," said Isabella.

Srebnitz gazed at her and said nothing.

"And your name?" said Sophia when the silence had gone on long enough.

"His name is Monsieur de la Montagne," said Angelica.

"Good evening, Monsieur de la Montagne," said Sophia.

"Good evening," said Srebnitz.

Then they all had tea.

"There are lovely flowers up in the Mountain," said Isabella.

"Beautiful, I believe," said Angelica.

Men in thick boots hurried past the house, going up the street that
already slanted towards the Mountain, away from the town.

"And are your parents well?" asked Angelica.

"Yes," said Srebnitz.

And the two old ladies sighed.

Even an aeroplane came over after a while, and still there were hurrying
Germans in the street.

"Are they going to bomb, do you think?" asked Isabella of her sister.

"Most unlikely," replied Angelica. "They have their own men all over the
town."

"So I thought," said Isabella. "I only asked."

"Of course, you never know with Germans," said Angelica.

"No," said Isabella.

And the aeroplane throbbed away towards the Mountain, but the sounds of
men in the street did not diminish.

Suddenly there came a roar of knocks on the street-door.

"Quick, Sophia," said Isabella. And she threw two of the four
tea-cups into the grate, and their saucers after them, where they lay
broken among the ashes. Then she walked to the door of their
sitting-room. "To the Mountain," she said to Sophia, "and remember to
lock the back-door after you."

Srebnitz wanted to thank her, but there was not time.

"We shall see you again one day," she said. "You can thank us then. Or
perhaps there may be reprisals along our street. If so we shall meet
again where there are no Germans."

"My dear!" exclaimed Angelica. "Beethoven!"

"Yes, yes. Of course," said Isabella. "I should have excepted him."

The knocking came again, and shook the whole door, and plaster began to
fall from where the hinges were straining. Isabella walked slowly down
the few yards of passage, and called out, "Who is there?"

"Police," came the shouted answer. "Open at once."

"Certainly," said Isabella.

Sophia and Srebnitz were in the kitchen now, and the door was shut
behind them. As Isabella opened the front door, Sophia opened the back.
As the Germans entered the house she picked up part of a ham, then
followed Srebnitz out of the back door and locked it from the outside.
They were in a little garden now, glistening with fruit-trees. Sophia
handed the ham to Srebnitz to put into his sack, which now also held his
boots, as they walked through the garden. She walked fast, but without
anxiety, for it was a long way round to the back of the house by any way
except by the back door. They came to a small wicket, which Sophia
opened, and they were in a narrow lane leaned over by lemon trees, and
orange and peach and wisteria.

For a little while the moon shone faintly on white blossoms; then
Srebnitz and Sophia came to the darkness where the moon was hid by
the Mountain.

"I have brought another blanket for you," said Sophia.

And Srebnitz saw that she had it draped over her. He was glad of that,
for he had decided that, with all the blood on his sleeve, it would be
no use hiding the rifle as Gregor had done. If found by daylight, he was
sure to be shot: if found by night without a permit, it would be the
same thing. So it was better to have his rifle handy, and the blanket
might do to hide it from aeroplanes. He was troubled about Sophia;
indeed he was vaguely troubled from the first moment he saw her; but
here she was out in a dark night, in a town full of Germans; nor would
it have been any better, but worse, if the dark night had been lit. He
wanted her to go back, but the Germans were there. He was troubled too
about the old ladies, whose kindness seemed too fragile to endure in
such an age as this: the Germans would be upon them even now.

"Your aunts," he said. "Should I not wait to see if they need help?"

"They never need help," said Sophia.

"But..." muttered Srebnitz.

"Not for themselves," she said. "For The Land only."

"But what will they do to them?" asked Srebnitz, as they still walked
away.

"Oh, they are very good at talking to Germans," said Sophia. "They have
been to our house before."

"What do your aunts say?" he asked.

"They listen to all that the Germans say, first," she said.

"And then?" asked Srebnitz.

"Then they talk about blood," said Sophia. "Pigs' blood, I mean; and all
the things you can do with it, and about a sausage called _blut-wurst_.
They know all about cooking, and they can talk German."

"And the Germans listen?" he asked.

"On their knees," said Sophia.

And he glanced at her face for fear she was laughing at him. But it was
too dark to see.

"One of them asked Aunt Isabella yesterday," Sophia went on, "if she was
not highly born. And she said Yes, she was one of the pigs of Swines'
Sty. But she said it in our language, which is in any case finer than
theirs; and I think they were awed by the sound of it. Anyway, they
didn't shoot her, and I don't think they will tonight."

Srebnitz sighed. "But what about you?" he asked.

"I shall go back, when they are gone," she said.

"How will your aunts account for your not being there now?" he asked.

"They may not find out I live there," she said. "There were only two
cups on the table. If they do find out, I think Aunt Angelica will
explain to them. She is very good at talking the shepherds' dialect, and
she can talk it very fast."

All the while they were walking quickly towards the Mountain.

At first there were gardens at the backs of the houses, all the way on
their left, and on the right what looked like orchards or orange-groves,
but it was now too dark to be sure.

"Have you a box of matches?" asked Srebnitz. "I cannot see your face."

"You saw it in the house," said Sophia.

"That was a long time ago," said Srebnitz.

"Have you no matches?" asked Sophia.

"No," said Srebnitz.

"Hlaka will say something to you, if you come to him without matches,"
said Sophia.

"What will he say?" asked Srebnitz.

"He will say a great deal," said Sophia.

"Will he be angry?"

"I hope not," Sophia replied.

"Why will he say a great deal?" asked Srebnitz.

"Because he likes his men to have more sense," answered Sophia.

Srebnitz thought a while about that, and realised that Hlaka would be
right.

"What is Hlaka like when he is angry?" he asked.

"They say things are bad on the Mountain when Hlaka is angry," she said.

"How long has he been in the Mountain?" asked Srebnitz.

"Over a week," said Sophia. "He went up there when the Germans broke
through the line. He was too old to be a regular soldier, and had not
fought in this war till he went to the Mountain."

"Has he fought any battles yet?" asked Srebnitz.

"He doesn't fight," said Sophia. "He kills."

That was what Gregor had said.

"In the end he will die fighting," said Sophia. "But he wishes to kill
first."

"Has he killed many yet?" asked Srebnitz.

"I don't know," said Sophia. "They say he means to kill two hundred
with his own hand before he shows himself much, and that he will be
very little seen on the Mountain until he has done that. And that is
what he makes all his men do; hardly to kill as many as he does, but
not to be seen. Hlaka gets very angry if he hears much firing,
because he knows his men have been showing themselves, and he flogs
them. Sometimes he goes down into the town. But that is different. He
does not go as Hlaka."

"Will you give me a box of matches?" asked Srebnitz, rightly guessing
she had some.

"Yes," said Sophia, "if you do not waste them." And he held out his
hand. "Not now," said Sophia, "you do not need them yet."

The dark lane led away from the houses now, to the right among fields
and orchards. They walked in silence and darkness. Other young men
had told of walking with girls along lanes on spring nights such as
this, and Srebnitz had thrilled to hear; but instead of stars and
fruit-blossoms over their heads, though they were actually there,
there seemed something else over both of them: it was the huge wings
of Death. He thought of the beauty of Sophia's face, and wanted to
see it again, but she would not give him a match. And then, just as
he was going to ask again, they saw flashes of light ahead of them,
for they were coming back to streets. All the houses were dark, and
the flashes were from electric torches carried by Germans. "You
cannot come any further," said Srebnitz.

But Sophia said, "You cannot find your way alone. I will turn back when
I come to the houses."

They slanted towards their left, and there were the houses, and beyond
them the Mountain, visible under the stars. Rubbish-heaps, and tins
thrown out from small houses, were about them; and they came to a
street, slabs of bare rock at first, and then pavement. A wider street
crossed it a little way off, and it was from this that the flashes came,
and shone down the side-streets as the Germans came to crossings. Here
Sophia, speaking in whispers now, gave Srebnitz the blanket she carried
and the matches that he had asked for, and showed him the way: he must
cross two more streets after the wide one, and that would bring him to
open country, or to country as open as it ever is near a town, wire and
market-gardens and very soon a small wood, and then the Mountain.

"Do you think you will be able to see the Mountain?" she asked.

And in the darkness Srebnitz could not be sure whether or not she was
laughing at him. So he said that he could see the Mountain now. Then it
was time to say good-bye, and Srebnitz stepped on the pavement, pausing
for a moment to find all the words of thanks that were due, and to warn
Sophia to go quietly and watchfully. But Sophia was gone.




V


For a while Srebnitz stood listening, but all was quiet down the lane by
which Sophia went. Then he moved without a sound along the little
street, and soon came to the edge of the wider street, from which the
lights had flashed. He was still in his bare feet. The lights were
flashing in the street, both to left and to right of him, and it seemed
full of Germans. So he walked across it; and the street to which he
came seemed empty, and it slanted steeply, as though its pavement were
the hem of a cloak that covered the feet of the Mountain.

There were no sounds ahead of him, yet he walked warily, for the Germans
in the town were uneasy, as the sounds behind him showed, and he
expected them to have sentries at all the exits, especially towards the
Mountain. He crossed another street safely, but now he heard sounds of
marching behind him, as a patrol turned from the wider street and up the
street he was in. Srebnitz quickened his pace then to a very slow run,
but went no faster than that, in case he should run into a sentry ahead
of him. A sentry was less likely to be out in the road than on the
pavement, but Srebnitz ran on the pavement for the sake of the ease with
which his bare feet could move on its smooth surface, and the mastery
that he felt that his speed could give him there against any opponent he
might meet in the night; and he felt almost as safe from the marching
feet behind him as a hawk might feel from the feet of a gamekeeper on a
night as dark as this. He crossed another street, the last of them, and
still he had met no opposition. Then he dropped to a walk again; the
German patrol was still behind him, but his only fear now was of a
barricade, or a group of sentries, at the end of the street.

He went very cautiously past the last houses, and then the pavement
ended and there was no sentry there. More than likely the men marching
behind him were the very men who were to close the end of the street,
and he was a few yards ahead of the news of what he had done. Certainly
the patrol came no further than the end of the street.

Very soon the road by which he was travelling was no more than an
ordinary country road. He stopped then and listened attentively for as
long as he thought it would take Sophia to return to her home, and,
hearing no shots, was sure she had got home in safety. Then he looked
carefully at both sides of the road to see what sort of obstacles
bounded it, and found a hedge on both sides, not too thick for him to
get through if he had to.

Then he walked on slowly down the road, and presently the hedges ceased
altogether. Then he came to the wood of which Sophia had told him, a
pine-wood dark and mysterious in the night, but he felt that with his
bare feet and his rifle he was as dangerous as any mystery in the wood.
Tall asphodels shone faintly in the light from the stars: nothing else
in all the wood gathered any radiance. Srebnitz felt more confidence now
than he had felt before in that night, for he felt that if he met anyone
now he could use his rifle and still get to the Mountain before he was
overtaken; and if the worst should come to the worst, he meant to use
it, which would have been impossible in the town, if he was to escape
afterwards; and he meant to escape, for he had much to do for The Land.
The road ran through the wood and brought him to heathy country without
fields. The Mountain rose before him, but the road ran rather to the
right than straight upwards. Yet he kept to the road, which seemed to
know its business, rather than go straight up, which seemed so easy;
for he had heard of men who had been lost on the Mountain.

When he was far from the town he sat down and put on his boots, tying
them with many knots, for he had cut the laces earlier in the night. He
put them on, not so much for protection for his feet on the road, but in
case he should have to take to the rough country. The road had no
boundaries any longer, and he felt almost perfectly safe now, for any
patrol he might meet on the road would never overtake him in the rough
country by night. He had only to run a few yards to his left, and the
night and the Mountain would take care of him.

So he went on slowly through the night, thinking of Hlaka, and of the
victory of The Land, which many doubted and which the Germans had not
even considered as a possibility, or as an eventuality worthy of the
trouble of any of their speakers to deny, but Srebnitz saw it
vividly, and Hlaka up in the Mountain never saw anything else; for
Srebnitz victory for The Land was a faith, but Hlaka up in the
Mountain with his band of free men saw it all round him as the saints
see Paradise. The eastern stars paled and a light came low in the sky
and the night seemed to grow colder.

Srebnitz was glad of the second blanket that Sophia had given him, and
that he wore like a cloak. He was too young to know that sleeplessness
and hunger are two other causes of cold, besides the obvious one of the
wind before dawn on a mountain; but a very elementary instinct prompted
him to eat food, and he sat down by the road and cut a slice from the
ham that Sophia had given him and a slice of bread from a loaf, both
with the knife that had killed the sentry. The knife reminded him of his
fulfilled dream, the rifle now in his hands, and he raised the rifle to
his lips and kissed it.

Dawn as he ate came up coldly and slowly, first in a dead hush, then
with the familiar sounds that accompany dawn in Europe, rising up from
the far town, the dull and occasional rap of volleys of musketry.
Reprisals already, thought Srebnitz. A feeling of horror went through
him for a moment. And then he remembered Gregor's words, that all these
people were lost already. Today, tomorrow or next day they would die:
only The Land would be saved. At a certain altitude above the town
Liberty seemed to dwell. Down below in the streets he was a fugitive, a
man without a permit, and in his father's house he was one of a
conquered race; but just about where he was now something in the feel of
the air seemed to tell him there ran the frontier of Liberty. Near here,
or further up where Hlaka served her, Liberty was enthroned. Her banners
were beginning to show over the Mountain now, as the sun, although not
yet risen, caught floating clouds; and larks rose up to sing to her. Her
palace roof was over his head, the open sky; its great bastion rose
beside him, the wild Mountain. He was going to join her guards. Then the
boy's mind, playing with fancies, tried to picture what uniform the
guards of Liberty should wear, and fancied them for a moment gorgeous
in gold lace, marching into the capital when victory came. And suddenly
a glance, straying from dreams, fell on his own clothes, and he realised
that the Guards of Liberty were cloaked with a brown blanket, and wore
plain clothes, much like his own, with a red sleeve.




VI


The fancies had turned to dreams, and Srebnitz, starting up and seeing
broad daylight, realised that it was time for him to go on at once,
before any patrol should come out from the town. He flung an end of his
blanket over one shoulder and stooped to pick up his rifle on his right
side, then sprang to his left, spun around and looked all about him, and
found his rifle was gone. If an earthquake had sunk the Mountain into
the earth, leaving him on the brink, he could not have felt more aghast.
Indeed the Mountain seemed lost to him now. For he could not go to Hlaka
without a rifle. But then he could not go back to the town, with blood
on his sleeve. What could he do? And after a while another question came
to him. Why had the German rifle been taken from him, and he been left
alive? A man picknicking in an Indian jungle, and falling asleep,
scarcely expects his cup of tea to be drunk by a tiger, and himself to
be spared. If the cup of tea was drunk, it was not by a tiger. Who then
took his rifle? The sun had not risen when he had fallen asleep. It was
death to be out without a permit between sunset and sunrise. And it was
death to be in possession of arms. And death to rob the German army of
anything. And as for his right sleeve...! Was another man going to
join Hlaka with his rifle? It was the thought of that that made him turn
up the Mountain, still following the road, instead of going the other
way. He would go to Hlaka and complain that he had been robbed.

He hurried up the road for nearly an hour. Then, where the last scraps
of wild vegetation grew, before scrub and flowers ended in bare
mountain, he saw a few thin sheep grazing, and an old shepherd standing
near them, not far from the road, in one of the vast coats that the
shepherds of those lands wear, made out of many sheep-skins. The
shepherd was tall and still powerful, and was looking at Srebnitz with a
fixed look, more like a frown.

Srebnitz shouted "Good morning" to him, but the shepherd neither
answered nor changed his expression. So Srebnitz went on, but felt
uneasily that from those craggy eyebrows he was being frowned upon
still.

After that he saw nobody any more, and in another hour he came, in the
bare mountain, to the end of the road amongst rocks as large as
cottages, lying below a cliff. Tracks wound up from there, but only
tracks, and Srebnitz wondered what Gregor had meant, when he had said
that he could go to any part of the Mountain and that he would come on
Hlaka. He called with the long clear cry, that they use in that land,
calling the name of Gregor. And the only answer was echoes.

His despair stimulated in him a feverish energy, and he hurried by one
of the steep foot-tracks still higher upward. A few bits of a heath-like
plant, or stunted bush, grew about him: the rest of the slope was a
shiny crumbled stone. To his right the Mountain rose into peaks, but
above him the sky-line was not far away. This he soon reached, and saw
before him a flat circular space, scarcely a hundred yards across, with
little steep hills all round it. He went down to it by a small pass
between two miniature hills, and walked across it, and found that he had
come to the top of that part of the Mountain. He called again, but even
the echoes seemed less responsive here.

He looked away over the plains that lay to the north of the Mountain,
and, the sun having gone behind a cloud, he saw them all shadowed. All
Europe is under a shadow, thought Srebnitz; and, finding Nature matched
by his mood, drew dark omens from the sombre guise of the view.

He turned round then and walked back to look at the city below him, on
the other side, to the south. As he recrossed the level arena he
noticed, this time, in the midst of it a looser patch of sandy soil, a
little circle less than a yard across. He went up to look at it and
disturbed the loose soil with his foot; as he did so and revealed black
cinders beneath, a voice said to him in ordinary conversational tones,
"Leave that alone."

He looked up and at first saw no one. Then a young man walked towards
him down a rocky slope of the hills that stood round the arena no
higher than the houses of a good street. He carried a rifle, and
wore a bandolier.

Srebnitz gazed at him in silence, and as he gazed he saw other men come
over the rocks all round him. There were about ten of them, men in rough
dress like his own; and Srebnitz said to the man that he saw first: "I
have come to join Hlaka."

The man walked further towards him before he spoke, and when he spoke he
said: "Hlaka does not take everyone."

In desperation then Srebnitz staked his wealth: "I have six loaves of
bread," he said, "and a ham and twenty-five cartridges."

In the man's face Srebnitz thought he saw some acknowledgment of the
weight of his argument when he mentioned the bread, and almost a slight
smile at the fewness of his cartridges. But the man said nothing till he
came to the level ground and walked still nearer to Srebnitz and looked
at him. Then he said: "Hlaka is angry with you."

"Hlaka?" said Srebnitz. "Why?"

The other men were coming near him too and among them he saw Gregor. His
face lit up, but a very slight smile showed on Gregor's, and there was
no welcome in any of the faces, as though no smile or welcome could
thrive on the Mountain under the anger of Hlaka. Srebnitz opened his
sack and drew out the ham and the loaves and said: "I have brought
these," and took out the bacon that was hidden under his clothes, and
the packets of tea and sugar out of his pockets, and laid them all down
beside the loaves and ham on the sack. The eyes of all showed interest.
Then Gregor came up to Srebnitz and drew him a little away from the rest
and said to him gravely in a low voice: "Why did you not carry your
rifle with the stock foremost as I told you?"

Srebnitz said: "It was almost dark. Nobody could see me. I should have
remembered as soon as it got light."

Gregor said: "Hlaka can see in the dark."

"I am sorry," said Srebnitz.

"And then," Gregor went on, "you went to sleep. Hlaka never lets any men
sleep until they are hidden. And you went to sleep on the road."

"By the side of the road," said Srebnitz.

But Gregor paid no attention. His face was grave, and they walked for a
while in silence.

"Who got my rifle?" asked Srebnitz.

"You must ask Hlaka that," said Gregor. "He is Master of the Mountain."

"But how will he know?" asked Srebnitz.

"Nothing goes on in the Mountain that he does not know," answered
Gregor.

"What will he do?" asked Srebnitz.

"He is very angry," said Gregor. Then he glanced at Srebnitz's right
hand and sleeve. "I'll tell you what," he said; "as soon as you see
Hlaka, shake hands with him. He may shake hands with you when he sees
your hand like that. And then perhaps..."

"But where is Hlaka?" asked Srebnitz.

"I told you," said Gregor. "He is in the Mountain. You only had to come
to the Mountain to find him."

"But what part of the Mountain?" asked Srebnitz.

"Here," said Gregor.

And walking down a slope of the little rocky hill, Srebnitz saw the old
shepherd, but taller and straighter than he had seemed before, and even
fiercer. Like all the others he carried a rifle, and Srebnitz thought he
recognized his; at least it had a patch of blood of the same size on the
same part of the stock. As Hlaka came to the flat arena Srebnitz walked
towards him and stretched out his right hand, as Gregor had advised,
towards the frowning figure. Hlaka flashed a fierce glance at him.

"Is that man's blood?" he asked, moving his rifle to his left hand and
pointing at Srebnitz's right.

"Yes," said Srebnitz.

"Then I will shake hands with you," said Hlaka, and a grim smile came
to his lips.

"May I have my rifle?" asked Srebnitz, emboldened by that smile.

"No," said Hlaka. "You have a man's hand, but a sheep's brains." Then
he turned to Gregor and said: "Teach him sense. And he shall have
his rifle."

Gregor began at once. "You must not shout on the Mountain," he said. "If
you want any of us at any time, light a fire by day and walk away from
it as fast as you can down-wind for ten minutes. There is always a wind
on the Mountain. And one of us will come to you there, ten minutes walk
down-wind of the fire. If you should want one of us at night light two
fires some yards apart, and the second one, which should be the smaller
of the two, will show the direction in which you went. Walk for a
quarter of an hour at night, and then wait until someone comes to you.
And you must obey orders. I told you to carry your rifle with the stock
forward. Any man unknown to Hlaka, with a rifle on the Mountain,
carrying it any other way is likely to be shot."

"Did Hlaka take my rifle?" asked Srebnitz.

"Hlaka educates us all," was all that Gregor said.

"Educates?" said Srebnitz, with something in his voice that seemed to
boast that the education he had just absorbed from the final course of
the top class of his school was something superior to any education that
could be possessed by a rough fierce man like Hlaka.

"Listen," said Gregor. "There is only one study for Europe now. You had
a pen and ink when you went to school, and masters taught you how to use
them, and told you everything. Now you have your knife and you are under
one of the greatest masters at our end of Europe, and you know nothing.
But you will learn a great deal. You will learn never to go to sleep
where anybody can find you. You will learn not to shout when the enemy
is within hearing. You will learn not to uncover the ashes of fires that
have been hidden. We will teach you hundreds of things. And when you
have learned them you will save The Land with all of us, and march back
to the town when the flag flies again, or perhaps stand in bronze in
the Central Square for ever. You brought a satchel of good books with
you," and Gregor pointed to the loaves and ham and packets of tea and
sugar on the sack. "You will learn."

"I brought these cartridges too," said Srebnitz, touching his bandolier,
for his repute seemed to be sunk low and he wanted to raise it a little.

"Yes," said Gregor. "Tell me how you got them."

And Srebnitz told the story, walking up and down the flat arena among
the miniature peaks. Gregor listened with the attention of a schoolmaster
hearing a boy's lesson. When Srebnitz had finished he nodded.

"That was all right, wasn't it?" said Srebnitz

"No," said Gregor. "You shouldn't have thrown the bayonet into that
door."

"But why not?" asked Srebnitz.

"You must learn things like that," said Gregor. "It showed the direction
in which you were going. It showed you were going up that street. And
that street leads to the Mountain."

"But I might have been stopping anywhere on the way," said Srebnitz.

"Yes," said Gregor. "You might have been going to have a cup of tea
in any of the houses. But after killing the sentry the Gestapo would
expect you to be leaving the town, and you showed them the direction
in which you would leave it."

"I see," said Srebnitz.

"You must study these things," said Gregor. "There is only one branch
of study now for all Europe, and there's no master better than Hlaka.
But he is severe."

"I'll try," said Srebnitz.

"What way is the wind blowing?" said Gregor.

"I don't know," replied Srebnitz.

"You must always know from what point the wind is blowing," said Gregor.

A low whistle sounded, and all the men in the little arena began moving
outwards towards the rocks.

"There is an aeroplane coming," said Gregor.

"Where is it?" asked Srebnitz.

"We can't see it yet," said Gregor. "We have a listening apparatus. We
go to those caves," and he pointed to hollows under ledges of rock where
the wild sheep sometimes rested. They were no more than hollows worn by
the wind in a softer stratum about three feet deep, under a harder one,
and they did not go many feet into the mountain. Gregor began to walk
towards one of them, and Srebnitz turned to come with him.

"You mustn't leave your sack and bread lying there," said Gregor.

Srebnitz ran to collect them, while Gregor walked towards the sheltering
rock. Srebnitz rejoined him just as he reached it.

"There it comes," said Gregor, pointing to a speck in the sky, and both
of them went into the shallow cave. The aeroplane roared over, and went
away to the north. When it was out of hearing Srebnitz crawled out, but
Gregor told him to wait.

"If he is searching the Mountain," he said, "he will circle back about
now."

But no aeroplane returned. It was away on some journey.

"Where is the army?" asked Srebnitz, wondering that the plane had seen
nothing.

"Some of them are up among those peaks," said Gregor.

Something in his hesitation as he spoke brought into Srebnitz's mind a
surprising suspicion.

"Where is the main body?" he asked.

"It is enough for the purpose," said Gregor, "and grows every day."

"Are we the main body?" asked Srebnitz.

Gregor smiled, but said nothing; and later that day Srebnitz learned
that the total force in the Mountain was fifteen men. His hopes of
being allowed to join the band now increased. Presently Gregor spoke
again. "Don't think we are too few," he said. "Every man has two
hundred cartridges, and we all use our brains. The Land will be
freed, and we shall free it."

And now Hlaka and all his men, for five more had come down the Mountain,
were gathered in the midst of the little arena, where the sandy soil had
been thrown over the cinders.

"A cloudy day," said Gregor, "we shall have a hot dinner."

Srebnitz, who did not at once see the connection, remained silent. But
as soon as a fire was lit he saw, as his imagination had been unable to
see, that the surrounding slopes would hide the column of smoke, and
that the lighter clouds of it that might stray over the rocks could only
be seen against a clear sky.

An armful of dry scrub had made the fire and one of the men stood
watching it with bunches of dry grass in his hands, which he put under
any twigs that were smoking too much, turning the smoke to flame. A
cauldron and a tripod had been brought out of a cave, and in it the cook
boiled mutton. A heap was lying on the ground near the fire, which
Gregor explained to Srebnitz was a wet blanket ready to throw over the
fire if an aeroplane came. There seemed as much to learn in the Mountain
as on the day when a boy is first introduced to algebra, or even Euclid,
and Gregor explained that the sides of the blanket had all been cut into
curves, because nothing in nature is straight and angular, and anything
that is stands out at once and catches the eye. And Gregor explained
that when the blanket was used men would tread on it to lower its
height, and throw a few handfuls of earth on it to break up its colour.

The cook had been, a few days before, the chef in one of the best hotels
in the town, which he had left before the Germans came; and, as he found
that the manager was preparing to receive German officers, he brought
away with him, for better uses, all the pots and pans and knives that he
needed for cooking. He was a hearty man, with a plump red face, on
which was a merry expression, shadowed, as a bright precipice might be
shadowed by the passing wing of an eagle, by one grim purpose. He, like
all the rest, had a stubbly chin, on which a beard was growing, all but
grey-headed Hlaka, who, perhaps proud of his dark moustache, would allow
no white hairs to grow near it, and so shaved; or perhaps he felt that
his face was so well known in The Land that to alter the look of it
would be like defacing a coin.

All the men cut their meat with the same thin sharp knives that
Srebnitz had used to get the rifle that he had now lost. They sat
down in a circle round the fire, with Hlaka at the head of the group;
that is to say, facing towards the city. Some touch of geniality came
into the grim man's features seated there with his men, and, though
all of them were given the appearance of brigands by their arms and
their clothes, and outlaws by their situation, there was a look in
all their faces that went with neither of these things. Nor was that
look at all the look of a people of a defeated country; far more they
looked like creatures escaped from prison, not criminals, but rather
happy sparrows on windowsills outside some place of torment. Never
had liberty seemed so precious in that land as it seemed now when it
was so rare, and there was none among them who did not feel to the
full the luxury of being free. Defeat below them in the town, that
lay under the shadow of Hitler, did not prevent them making jokes as
they passed round their sweet and resinous wine in bottles of antique
pattern. Whatever the past had been, the present was merry, and the
future, for them, was radiant.

Srebnitz, although not yet permitted a rifle, was allowed the friendship
of these men, and soon they heard from him how his parents had been
slaughtered. Hlaka looked up, at that, and asked suddenly for the name
of the Prussian major of whom Srebnitz had told, the man who had found
the attitude of his mother incorrect. Srebnitz had found out the major's
name before he had left his home, while the Prussian slept in a chair:
it was Major von Wald, and this he told. And Hlaka said to a man beside
him: "Bring me the book."

And this man went away to one of the many hollows between ledge and
ledge of rock, and brought a book in a binding of rough leather, while
another man brought him a pen and ink. And Hlaka took the pen, made of
an eagle's feather, and dipped it into the ink and said to Srebnitz: "It
is death for any man to have his name in this book."

Then he threw a pinch of sand over the name that he had written, and
gave one of his men the book to return to its safe place.

The clouds that had been gathering in the morning grew blacker during
the meal, and before it was ended there fell one of those showers that
fill for a few hours the watercourses of the Mountain, that are often
dry for weeks, except for a few pools that lie in the deeper hollows,
and keep alive butterflies and wandering men, and wild sheep and more
other lives than one knows of. It came down suddenly from the clouds to
the north, and helped that small band of free men to quench their fire,
and washed Srebnitz's right hand clean. Two men removed the cauldron and
its tripod, the cook went away with his pots and pans, while others
threw wet sand over the cinders and all of them went for shelter into
their shallow caves. And soon there was no sign of men in the Mountain,
or that any free men were living in all The Land.




VII


In the small cave, sheltering from the rain, Srebnitz's lessons
continued. Gregor explained to him that there were five thousand Germans
in the town, and that one by one these must be killed. The first thing,
he said, was not to show yourself, and he showed him how to hide in
front of things as well as behind things, and taught him to know where
the horizon would be to any watcher below, so that he should never come
between a German's eyes and the sky. He told him about the oak-scrub,
the heath and the myrtle, and the various kinds of cover. And he must
never fire a shot at a hundred yards. Hlaka might sometimes fire at two
hundred, he said; but no one else was allowed to fire at a hundred.
Infantry sometimes fired at a thousand yards, said Gregor; but that was
in war, and in war it took a ton of lead to kill a man. This was
guerrilla; and they had not a ton to spare. If they never wasted a
cartridge and never showed themselves, they would kill the Germans in
time. "But won't the Germans do the same thing and kill us?" said
Srebnitz. "And they are two or three hundred to one."

"No," said Gregor. "They have not the brains for it. Very fine plans
are worked out for them, by men well capable of working out plans.
There are no better plans in the world. And they have worked them out
for years, while we were all sleeping. And there are no better men to
obey those plans than Germans."

"Then why won't they work?" asked Srebnitz.

"They do work," said Gregor. "They broke the Maginot Line and conquered
Europe, and have taken all The Land except this Mountain. They were
brilliant plans, well carried out. But they made no plan for fighting in
oak-scrub on a mountain. And it's too late now."

"Why is it too late?" asked Srebnitz.

"I don't quite know," said Gregor. "But all the plans were made years
ago, when Hitler was speaking of peace, and they have to follow those
plans now. Everything they have done was foreseen. And we of course, who
foresaw nothing, we lost where they won. But where they did not foresee,
there are no plans; and without plans Germans can do nothing. They
foresaw everything for two years, but the two years are running to an
end, and the plans go no further. Soon they will be like children lost
in the dark. Hlaka will make his plans from hour to hour; but they will
ask their great generals for plans, and the generals will look among
their papers and not find any more."

"And can we fight five thousand men?" asked Srebnitz.

"Why not?" said Gregor. "Five thousand men can't kill a coney. Some
men are born hunters; the Germans are born plotters. Good plotters
too. But we are hunters."

"We shall win, then," said Srebnitz, but a little doubtfully.

"Certainly we shall win," said Gregor. "But you must obey Hlaka."

Then Gregor picked up the little air-gun that was in the cave and gave
Srebnitz a small spade and told him to come and practise some shooting.

"But I can shoot from here," said Srebnitz.

"No," said Gregor. "We never shoot till we are hidden."

"But I am hidden here," said Srebnitz.

"No," said Gregor. "That is too easy. You cannot always go to a cave
when you want to shoot. You must learn how to hide yourself on the
Mountain, wherever you are."

"What is the spade for?" asked Srebnitz, as they walked out of the cave.

"We all carry spades or trowels," said Gregor. "It is often necessary
in order to hide ourselves. And we are not allowed to shoot until we
have done that."

Gregor led the way out by the back of the arena through the rocks to the
north, stooping and crawling when he came to the top of the crags. Then
they came round to their left and walked down the bare slope on the
south side, facing the town.

"Can't they see us here?" asked Srebnitz.

"Hlaka wants us to be seen a bit on the Mountain today," Gregor replied.
And they went on till they came to the heath and the patches of
oak-scrub. There he told Srebnitz to hide himself.

"Where?" asked Srebnitz.

"Anywhere," answered Gregor.

And Srebnitz lay down behind a tuft of heath and took the air-gun from
Gregor. Then Gregor went with a match-box and set it up on a stone at
seventy paces, lower down the slope. Then he walked back to Srebnitz.

"I can see you clearly from there," he said. "Only your head and
shoulders are hidden."

And he made Srebnitz dig so as to sink himself a little, and made him
dig up two more plants of heath, and hide the scar where he had dug them
up, and showed him how to arrange them. Then he went back to within two
or three yards of the match-box and looked towards Srebnitz and, when he
was satisfied that he could not be seen from that point by a man
standing up, he made a signal to Srebnitz. And Srebnitz began shooting.
And Gregor corrected his aim after every shot. Srebnitz shot about forty
pellets, and Gregor was pleased with his shooting.

"All you have to do now," he said, "is to learn to hide yourself."

"I am afraid it was only with an air-gun," said Srebnitz, feeling that
some little depreciation was due after Gregor's praise.

"An air-gun is the next best thing after a military rifle," said
Gregor, "because the back-sight is dark. No sporting rifles are any
good, because the back-sights are shiny. The gunmakers make them
shiny with thin strips of silver. No-one can see a bright foresight
properly over a shining back-sight. But our rifles are all military
rifles, and they are all right."

Then they walked back to the little arena which, with the caves in the
rocks near it, was more their home than any other part of the Mountain.

It was still raining as they went into their cave; but Gregor explained
to Srebnitz that they took no notice of rain, because, as it was said
among the shepherds and as Hlaka's men appeared to find it, ill-health
was impossible on the Mountain; but in spite of this, he said, they
always slept in dry clothes, and would all dry their clothes before a
good fire that night.

Hlaka had been walking about, watching the clouds, and before evening
they cleared away from the sun, rolling southwards in great splendour,
and Hlaka began to send a message by helio down to the town.

"What is he signalling?" asked Srebnitz.

"He signals names of German officers that are in that book," said
Gregor. "He would be sending the name of Major von Wald now."

Three times Hlaka signalled, to different parts of the town.

"Has he signalled his address?" asked Srebnitz, for the twinkling
flashes seemed too few for that.

"No," said Gregor, "he sends no addresses. They will know where to
find him down there."

"What code does he use?" ask Srebnitz.

"No code," replied Gregor. "Just the name in plain Morse."

"Will they not take precautions?" asked Srebnitz.

"Yes," said Gregor. "They will take many precautions. They are no
use against us."

And Srebnitz began to feel from that moment that there was some strange
power in Hlaka, with his little band on the Mountain, which must not be
measured merely by such numbers as fifteen and five thousand; a power
that dared in its infancy to challenge the might of Germany, a growing
power of which hope whispered that it might one day free The Land.

He had not helioed from near the caves, but from the ridge of the
Mountain further along to the west. When he returned to his cave one of
the men came with a message to Gregor, and Gregor told Srebnitz that
they would march just before dark to another part of the Mountain. He
explained that other armies fall in before they march, and stand for
some time on parade, but that Hlaka's men did the opposite and scattered
and would all meet Hlaka as darkness fell, at the point he had named.
The stormy clouds of sunset all turned to gold, and Hlaka's men saw in
them a prophetic glory. The Germans in the town saw the same golden
splendour; but, if they had augurs among them who could read the future,
they surely read a menace in that sunset, that to the men on the
Mountain boded only glory.




VIII


Birds passed over the Mountain into silence and twilight, and Hlaka's
men one by one stole out from their caves, and moved a little way
westwards and disappeared. All knew where the meeting-place was to be
except Srebnitz, and Gregor went with him. A star came out as they went,
and very soon day was hidden by the western end of the Mountain. They
were moving through heath near to the line where it ended on the bare
rocks of the Mountain. They were walking in some sort of track that
Srebnitz could scarcely see, among the dark plants of the heath, and he
followed Gregor till Gregor was only a dark shape in the night, and they
came to the meeting-place and found Hlaka standing there with some of
his men beside him. And the rest came quietly up, shape by shape
appearing suddenly out of the darkness. All had armfuls of wood, and
these they threw down before Hlaka, and handfuls of straw were brought
and set alight, and soon a great cluster of flames was dancing there on
the Mountain. The men took their coats off and held them to dry at the
fire. Srebnitz glanced in the direction of the town, for, though they
were near the top of the ridge, they were on the southern side of it,
towards the west, and in full view of the streets.

"Why does he not light his fire on the other side of the Mountain?"
asked Srebnitz.

"That is Hlaka's affair," said Gregor.

And he turned towards the fire, where the cook was already getting to
work with his frying-pan, and Srebnitz followed. The men sat down, not
in a circle round the fire, but in a semi-circle facing the west, all
but one man who stood watching. It was slices of ham that the cook was
frying, and they were very soon ready and were handed round quickly on
tin plates. When the slices of ham were eaten, one bottle of wine was
sent round. Then a gourd-like instrument with strings was brought out by
a man called Iskander, and he played a few bars with a bow and was about
to sing, when the man on watch shouted "Flash!"

They got up quickly then, and two men helped the cook and they walked
away from the fire with everything that they had, back in the direction
from which they had come.

Then they heard the boom of a gun and its echoes wandering away, roaming
up little valleys that twisted into the Mountain, and coming at last to
the peaks, and running along them awhile from rock to rock, and falling
back into silence. Then they heard the sound of a shell, that had gone
up from the town into the night sky, coming down towards them and
humming as it came. It fell nearly two hundred yards short of the fire
and burst, and its fragments flew over the Mountain, crying with that
wild scream that man has let loose amongst man, not having sufficient
wild beasts with which to tear his enemies. And when the last of the
echoes from this shell had fallen from peak and cliff, like dead
mountaineers into the darkness and silence, Srebnitz saw the flash of
another shot in the town.

Then men who had lain down when they heard the first shell coming got up
now and walked still further away from the fire and lay down again when
they heard the snarl of the second shell, which burst far over the fire
near the top of the ridge. Again they went on, and Srebnitz saw a third
flash, and heard the boom of the cannon again send its echoes all over
the Mountain; and the third shell lit in the very midst of the fire,
sending up with most graceful curves a fountain of ruby and gold; and
Hlaka's men all cheered, for they loved good shooting.

Then they all went back to the caves in which they used to sleep.

"Hlaka wants them to see something of us up here," Gregor explained to
Srebnitz, "because he wants more rifles."

Srebnitz, who was learning the ways of the Mountain was beginning to
understand. "They will come up to look for us?" he said.

"Yes," said Gregor. "They will come."

"Will Hlaka let me have my rifle?" asked Srebnitz.

"All rifles on this mountain are his rifles," said Gregor. "But I will
tell him that you shot straight at seventy yards, and he may let you
have it tomorrow."

"Will they come tomorrow?" Srebnitz asked.

"Yes," said Gregor, "they are certain to come tomorrow. And we shall get
some more rifles."

It was as warm as our summer, down on the plain, but spring climbed the
Mountain slowly, and almost stumbled at night; so that in the shallow
caves that the wild sheep knew, it was little warmer in April than are
the gusts and smiles of an April morning in England.

Srebnitz learned then that the cold of the night comes as much from
below as from above, or from left and right, and Gregor told him not to
lay his blankets over him, but to wrap each one round him. This Gregor
taught, as elsewhere, in other times, it is taught what (a+b)
multiplied by (a-b) amounts to, and Srebnitz learned as boys learn such
elementary things, never to be forgotten afterwards, but needing no
correction from any master, for the things themselves taught him; as
though a+b should rise up from the paper and roughly show their ways,
while a-b jostled close to insist on their different lore. But,
besides blankets, Srebnitz had a mattress more than a foot thick, made
out of heath and coarse grass, which all the men used for beds, and
which was not only a protection against the hardness of the mountain,
but against some of the cold.

Winds that wander at night and whisper to grasses, dogs barking far off,
the voices of night-birds hunting, and all the other sounds that keep
awake the dwellers in houses in their first night under the stars,
failed to keep Srebnitz for many minutes this side of the border of
dreamland. For a little while he felt the discomforts of being without a
bed, or warmth, or adequate shelter, and felt their novelty and rejoiced
in it; then his own sense of freedom from all the rules and orderly ways
of man, which the winds and the mountain nurtured, grew into something
grander, and he thought of the freedom of the people of The Land, which
he had gone to the Mountain to aid, and this thought grew in splendour,
until over the border of dreamland it shone among other dreams.




IX


Gregor and Srebnitz were in the same cave, and early in the night they
were joined by a man who had been on watch; but nothing disturbed
Srebnitz until the daylight streamed in and the song of a bird woke him.
Or so it seemed to Srebnitz; but there was a stir in the little
encampment, and a certain anticipation that all were feeling was perhaps
thrilling the air and somehow calling Srebnitz away from dreams. Then
Gregor, who was already up and about, stooped down and shouted into the
cave to tell Srebnitz that breakfast was ready, and Srebnitz came out
and walked with him over the little arena to the place where the fire
was burning, and the cook already frying rashers of bacon, and Hlaka and
most of his men sat by the fire. Srebnitz, full of zeal for the new life
he was living, and eager to know as much of it as he could, asked Gregor
as they walked what they would do that morning.

"We have breakfast first," said Gregor.

But they were already within sound of the sizzling of the bacon, and
Srebnitz wanted to know more.

"But after that?" asked Srebnitz.

"After that," said Gregor, "we shall go down to the heath and myrtle.
The Germans are coming."

"The Germans!" repeated Srebnitz.

And Hlaka, seated beside the fire facing towards the city, and having
heard their words, shouted to Srebnitz: "They saw our fire last
night. It was very observant of them. They could not see the fire in
the hearts of free men. But they saw our fire on the Mountain. They
hit it with their gun, so they are not quite blind. But they are
coming nearer to look."

And then Srebnitz blurted out, without even thinking, the words that
were nearest his heart: "Can I have my rifle?"

"Your rifle?" said Hlaka thoughtfully. And after a while he said, "Yes.
If you can take it from me while I am asleep."

"I shall never find you asleep," said Srebnitz, sighing.

And that somehow pleased Hlaka. "No," he said gravely, and added:
"Take your rifle," and handed it to Srebnitz, for it was by his side.
"And you may have the cartridges in your bandolier," he went on.
"But if you waste more than five of them, you will never be given any
more." And Hlaka turned to finish his breakfast.

Srebnitz gathered from the talk of the men round the fire that an
aeroplane had come over earlier, without waking him, and had carefully
searched the Mountain; and that afterwards about fifty men had been seen
on the march, coming away from the town, but were now lost to sight.
Sometimes he listened to the talk by the fire about what was going to
happen. Sometimes he turned adoring eyes on his rifle.

The bacon was eaten and coffee passed round, coffee with gritty sediment
an inch or two deep at the bottom of the tin mugs, better than any
coffee that Srebnitz had ever tasted yet; and while the men drank it
Hlaka explained what they had to do: the Germans, he said, would come by
the only road, with scouts out in front; if they had scouts on each side
as well, walking through the oak-scrub and myrtle and heath, the
movement of their whole force would be so slow that they would be easily
dealt with, but they would not have the patience for this and they would
all go by the road; where the slope rose steeply from the roadside
Iskander would wait for them, about seventy yards back amongst the
myrtle, and would get as many as he could; if they attacked him straight
up the mountain, he would retire before them from bush to bush and shoot
many more as he went; but they would have more sense than that and would
come round on his left or right, and so they would meet another of
Hlaka's men, also hidden; and, as they tried to close with him, they
would meet another. Seven of the men would be disposed like that, and
Hlaka would be with the rest beside the road, much lower down the
Mountain, waiting for what remained of the German party. Then his eye
fell on Srebnitz: "You can go with Iskander," he said. "And if you show
yourself, you're no good to me, and the Germans can have you."

Then they marched off. That is to say they scattered from round the
fire, and each man soon disappeared from the sight of anyone that might
be watching the Mountain. The Germans, as Hlaka's men left their fire
and their breakfast, were coming out of the pine-wood through which
Srebnitz had come. Iskander and all the rest were over the ridge on the
north side of the Mountain, moving westwards, till they came to little
valleys or clefts along which they could move unseen, and went down them
on the side that the Germans were. After crossing the ridge with
Iskander, Srebnitz saw no more of any of the others. They went where a
small stream was running, refreshed by recent rain, and where trees grew
two or three times the height of a man, as they grew nowhere else on the
upper mountain. Iskander had brought his stringed instrument with him,
rather than trust it in a cave near the fire, where the Germans might
find it and break it, for the fire had been left burning to guide them
up the Mountain, past where Hlaka's men would be waiting for them. He
played the instrument as they went through the wood, and sang to it
softly, singing old songs of The Land. As they came out of the wood on
to a slope of myrtle and heath they saw the whole length of the road
below them. "There they are," said Iskander. And they saw the Germans
marching, with three scouts out in front, all on the road.

Srebnitz unslung his rifle and gripped it and moved his finger towards
the trigger. Iskander stopped his playing.

"If Hlaka ever sees you do that he will have you flogged," he said.

Srebnitz removed his finger hastily from the trigger.

"Nobody ever does that," said Iskander, "except actually to fire a shot,
or to be photographed. We are not being photographed today, and the
Germans are two miles off. So don't be silly."

Srebnitz was stung by Iskander's words, and still more deeply abashed by
his own stupidity, but he was learning all the time. And Iskander with
his rifle still slung from his shoulder went on playing the tunes which
in remote summer evenings had grown up in The Land, though now he sang
no longer. They went down the slope till they were close to the road, to
which the hill plunged steeply. They only had to stoop slightly to be
hidden from the road by the slope of the ground. There they stopped, and
first Iskander made Srebnitz hide himself, choosing his own tuft of
heath; and this Srebnitz did, making use of all that he had learned from
Gregor the day before. Iskander crawled lower down and looked at him,
and was satisfied, and then found a place for himself a few yards away
and unslung his rifle and lay down. Directly below them they could not
see the road, for the hill took a steeper plunge within thirty yards of
it, but a little to the right of that point they had a perfect view of
fifty or sixty yards of road, until a hump of the hill hid it; to their
left they could see no more of it, for it curved left-handed on its way
up, behind the slope of the hill. Iskander still strummed with his
fingers on the wires that ran over his gourd; a martial air, as Srebnitz
tried to think, but it was only some rustic song, fallen on Iskander's
memory from the history of a free people. He sang no longer, or, if he
did, the song was inaudible to Srebnitz only a few yards away.

"Who will shoot first?" asked Srebnitz in a low voice.

"Who ever gets a good bead first on a German," Iskander replied. "But
let the scouts go by."

After that they spoke no more. Sometimes Iskander stood up and peered
over the heath, and lay down again. After about the fifth time that he
did this he made a sign to Srebnitz, and lay quite still. Srebnitz
watched the road intently where it curved out of sight a hundred
yards away. Then he heard the boots of men marching, and very soon
after that two men came into view. Srebnitz never moved, and the men
marched on. As they went out of sight below him another man came
round the bend and, when he disappeared after the other two, the
tramp of boots became louder.

And then the German column came into sight, marching in threes. The
leading men were only a hundred yards away, and Srebnitz was about to
clutch at the trigger again, when he remembered Iskander's scorn. Then
he got the bead of his rifle on the Germans and felt sure that he could
not miss, because they were all bunched together, but remembered his
orders not to fire at over seventy yards, and knew that he would be
judged by what he did now, and dared not disobey. The men marched on,
and he kept his sights on them till they seemed to be at about
seventy yards; then, being certain of his aim, he fired, and fired a
second shot as fast as he could. He did not hear Iskander's shot,
because he fired at the same moment.

The Germans at once left the road and got into the heath below it,
Iskander firing his second shot as they went; and three men were left
lying on the road. Stooping amongst the myrtle, which partly hid them,
some of the Germans went back the way they had come, and Iskander shot
one of them; others went on in the direction in which they had been
going, near to the road, but stooping amongst the myrtle and
oak-scrub; and a few remained below Iskander and Srebnitz, shooting
at where they supposed them to be, but they were out of sight of the
two, and therefore out of shot.

Presently Iskander crawled forward, going through the heath like a
snake; and after a while he fired one shot, and then crawled back to
Srebnitz. Srebnitz heard for the first time the intensely sharp crack of
bullets crashing through air; but they were quite harmless, because he
and Iskander were behind the skyline of the men who were shooting
towards them. Iskander explained that they were coming round them on
both sides up the slope, and that he and Srebnitz, who could no longer
see any Germans below them, would move further up the hill.

"Did you get him?" asked Srebnitz.

Iskander nodded his head, and led the way up the hill, still unseen by
the Germans. Then, hearing a shot from the men that were now on their
right, and then two more, Iskander turned in their direction, and
Srebnitz followed, both stooping among the bushes of myrtle. But they
had not gone far in that direction when they heard a machine-gun, if not
two, turned on to the slope below them, from which the Germans were
attacking the centre of the little line of men, the centre which had
been Iskander and Srebnitz, but was now only myrtle and heath. So
Iskander led Srebnitz more to their left, till they got to a point on
the Mountain that was straight above where they had fired their first
shots, and Iskander told Srebnitz to get cover here.

"They will come straight up the slope," he said, "after they have
finished with their machine-guns. That is their way."

Then he got cover for himself, facing down the slope. There were clearly
two machine-guns now, and the ricochets screamed over their heads, and
occasionally a stream of crashing cracks of bullets that had hit
nothing. There were three or four more shots on what was now their left,
and the sound of a shot came from their right, and then another and then
a third. In miniature the Germans were doing a pincer movement, and the
shots on the right and the left were from Hlaka's men, every one of them
fired from close, and no bullets wasted. The copious fire of the
machine-guns ceased, and the silence was broken only by two more shots
on the left and two on the right; and presently a head appeared over the
heath, coming up the slope, and a line of ten men appeared.

"Wait," said Iskander. And Srebnitz waited until he was sure the men
were within seventy yards. Then he shot a German through the chest, and
fired quickly at another and missed, while Iskander killed one.

"Don't waste bullets," said Iskander in a low voice.

Srebnitz remembered that he had wasted one himself down by the road, yet
Iskander's warning steadied him.

Still the Germans had not seen them, and the shots that they fired
were no guide to them, because at those close ranges the rifle cannot
be heard, but only the crash of the bullet. They were coming slowly
up the steep slope, and Srebnitz shot another, and Iskander shot one
more also. There were no longer any Germans straight in front of
them, and the six survivors at the left end of the German line went
on doggedly up the slope. One came close enough to have seen them for
certain when he came past the myrtle bush behind which Iskander was,
but Iskander shot him, and the rest went on. Soon they were out of
sight to Iskander and Srebnitz, lying down in the heath, and Srebnitz
raised his head over a flowering shrub, but Iskander signed to him to
lie down again, and crawled up to him.

"They'll get above our men and shoot down at them," he said. Then he led
Srebnitz stooping through the heath, till they were exactly below the
five men that had gone up the mountain.

There they got cover again, and Iskander began to sing an old martial
air of his country. He sang it loudly this time, accompanying his song
with the music of his strange instrument. The five men halted then, and
turned round and listened. Iskander ceased singing, and the men came
back down the hill.

Still there were shots from both the left and the right. The Germans'
bayonets were fixed, and they came quicker down the slope than they had
gone up, and Srebnitz was wondering if they would stop them in time.
Just as he wondered, Iskander shot one, who fell with his rifle crashing
on to a rock, and his uncouth helmet rolled for a space down the hill.
Srebnitz shot another; and at that moment the Germans saw them, and all
three came for them, leaping down the hill. But two men passing between
two obstacles, a rock and a stunted oak, came for a moment so close to
each other that they made one target, and Srebnitz was able to fire a
quick shot without fear of missing, and one of the men dropped. And now
it was bayonet against rifle, two men against two.

The Germans could not stop to fire, because by the time they steadied
themselves and shot they would have made a stationary target for too
long; so they rushed on down the hill and came to within a few yards,
and Iskander and Srebnitz both fired before the bayonets could reach
them. Iskander and Srebnitz had now shot fifteen men. If the three on
their left and the three on their right had done as well, there would
be few Germans left.

Iskander and Srebnitz started towards what may be called the right
flank, if a line of eight men may be thought large enough to have
flanks. But now the firing ceased and the Germans were drawing off
down the hill, out of range of men who were forbidden to fire at
over a hundred yards.

Iskander then ran down the slope, calling to Srebnitz to follow, to the
place from which they had fired their first shots, for there were three
rifles lying on the road, and a sudden fear came to Iskander that the
retreating Germans that had gone further up the Mountain would pick up
this valued treasure. But these Germans went wide of the road through
the scrub below, with a big enough detour to avoid any more losses. Soon
all that were left of them were on the road again and there was no way
of overtaking them except by following down the road, where Hlaka's men
must have been seen, which was forbidden by Hlaka; for the going was far
too rough over the heath and rocks for any men going that way to keep
pace with men on the road. But Hlaka's eight men, including himself,
were in line down below, hidden on each side of the road, waiting.

As soon as the Germans were out of sight Srebnitz ran up the slope to
gather the treasure of ten rifles, and hundreds of rounds of
ammunition, while Iskander went down to the road to get the three
rifles there and two more below it.

The firing had been so close that all the Germans that Srebnitz saw
were either dead or dying except one of the two men that had bunched
together, who had made so easy a shot that Srebnitz had nearly missed
through feeling too sure. This man was shot through the side of the
ribs, but not fatally, and was lying on the heath, with his rifle
near him. He stretched out his hand for it as Srebnitz came up, but
was just unable to reach it. Srebnitz moved the rifle further away,
and then put his handkerchief in a wad over one of the wounds to
check the bleeding. He did this with one hand, because he could not
trust the German enough to put down his rifle. His first aid was
therefore slow, and he had not finished when Iskander came up, and
looked at him with a certain toleration, but did not help. When
Iskander was there Srebnitz put down his rifle, out of reach of the
German, and checked the bleeding more easily.

"Hlaka won't have prisoners, you know," said Iskander. "Nor will they."

But Srebnitz went on till he had got the wad of his handkerchief to stay
in its place, tied there by the German's handkerchief.

"Can you walk?" asked Srebnitz.

The German nodded.

"Then make off," Srebnitz said.

And the German walked slowly away. Iskander watched him go in silence,
till he came to the road, and turned to the right to go back the way by
which he had come. "Tell him," said Iskander to Srebnitz then, "that it
doesn't matter, but if he goes that way he will be shot."

So Srebnitz ran after the German and explained as well as he could,
mostly by signs, that he had better make his way through the open heath.
And very soon after that, there came to add a point to what Srebnitz
said the sound of firing from Hlaka and the men with him; almost a
volley at first, then eight separate shots, then a little more firing,
then silence. The German walked slowly away through the rough country
downhill. He had not spoken as yet. Then when he had gone about twenty
yards some thought seemed to strike him, and he stopped for a moment in
meditation. Then he looked over his shoulder at Srebnitz and said in
German the one word "Thanks," and went on his way.

Srebnitz returned to Iskander, who smiled as though at some childish
prank, unwise but forgivable, and they started to hide a few of their
fifteen new rifles and part of the ammunition, and to carry the rest of
their booty up to the caves.

The three men who had been on their left were there before them and, one
of these being the cook, the fire was lighted and dinner being prepared.
Iskander and this little group of three asked each other how many rifles
they had got, and the three greeted Srebnitz, but not much was said and
there was little rejoicing.

The men were thoughtful, as the magnitude of their task for the first
time seemed to come down on them. Fifteen men, escaped from the
disaster that had overwhelmed all the rest of their countrymen and
was inflicting on hundreds of thousands a form of slavery and
tempting five or six of the weaker ones to treachery, fifteen men not
only escaped from disaster, but free all of a sudden from the laws
and rules that there must always be wherever there is pavement, to
lead a life whose cold and hunger and all other hardships invariably
charm all men that have known it, fifteen men bound by a new chain of
friendship stronger than any they had known before, led by a man they
loved, though he sometimes flogged them; these men had been merry at
first, rejoicing in the novelties of each day and in their abundant
freedom. But now, with all this wealth of new weapons, each man
perceived that freedom was not a light and lovely thing to be merely
enjoyed by himself, but that it was something vast, like a colossal
statue of gold, to be carried laboriously amongst many men, to be set
up in the midst of the capital. This, a thing to be dreamed of
always, was not a thing to be practically thought of while they had
only fifteen rifles; but now, when they knew they must have something
like sixty, theirs seemed a poor and trivial force with which to hope
to free a country from the armies of a predatory empire.

Three more men came to the camp-fire and, after a few questions and
hearty greetings, they too were grave and thoughtful.

And then Hlaka arrived, but not with all his men: his rule that no man
was to show himself was simple enough, and he enforced it with as much
discipline as that which elsewhere runs to waste in teaching men to
clean buttons until they flash; and the Mountain was kind to Hlaka's
rule, but mountains are not easily tamed, and no such rules work always,
and two of his men had been seen and shot through the head.

Hlaka walked silently to the fire, with no change in the expression
of his face since he had gone down the mountain. Then his eye fell
on Srebnitz.

"How many rifles?" he asked.

"Fifteen between us," said Srebnitz, pointing to Iskander.

"How many cartridges did you waste?" asked Hlaka.

"Two between us," said Srebnitz.

Then the expression changed in the rugged face round the eyes, with a
change such as spring makes on that mountain when the north wind drops
overnight, and Hlaka smiled.




X


They sat by a small fire eating their dinner, the survivors of Hlaka's
men, a fire mostly of little twigs and coarse grass, because the sky was
too clear for them to risk much smoke. They had taken forty-five rifles
and two machine-guns and about nine thousand cartridges.

Hlaka made Srebnitz a full member of the band of Liberators, as he
called them, raising his hand and blessing his rifle in the name of
The Land. "And I make you," he added, "in the name of The Land, what
all these men are also, the commander of four thousand men. We have
not the men yet, but our hopes know them. They will come to us out of
the future, and you shall command them when they come. They are there
where our hopes see them and are there till our hopes fail, which
will be never."

After that he spoke no more. And all the others talked of the fight,
while Hlaka sat still and silent, like a grey mountain rock.

A little way off on the slope one of Hlaka's men handled the mirror of a
helio; far down below there rose, above the dark tops of the pine-trees
around it, the tiled dome of a church, a miniature of the church of San
Sophia in Istanbul, and on one of its dark windows facing towards the
Mountain a speck of light was wavering and dancing. No Morse was used
this time; just the speck of borrowed sunlight on the stained glass,
hovering there for five minutes.

And in a few more minutes a Bishop of the Orthodox Eastern Church
walked out of the grove and garden about the church on to the
pavement of a street of the capital, and walked through the town
towards the west and the north. He wore a tall black hat with no
brim, and a long black cassock, and a gold cross on his chest,
suspended from his neck by a chain, and he carried a long black stick
with a gold top to it. He had a silken black beard, and a most serene
face. He walked calmly right through the town, and no German stopped
him. All that he did was as calm as dawn or sunset.

He passed the gate where Srebnitz had killed the sentry; he went out by
the same end of the town and walked through the pine-wood; and before
the sun was low, Hlaka's men saw him, a solitary figure, dark against
the road and small in the distance, coming up the Mountain. Still he
kept the same pace, walking without hurry on the flat, and without
fatigue on the Mountain.

Two aeroplanes roared all along the slope, flying low, like a pair of
birds of prey looking for field-mice, and Hlaka's men hid. The Bishop
continued his slow promenade. The aeroplanes disappeared, and Hlaka's
men came out again; and Hlaka sent eight of them down the road to escort
the Bishop to his headquarters. They escorted him rather as dogs usually
escort their master on a walk in the country, that is to say they ran
through the myrtle and heath on each side of him. But, though the Bishop
seldom saw them from the road where he walked, he perceived their
intention, which was to do him honour.

And so he came at length to the little arena among the circle of small
crags. And Hlaka bowed to him and told him that two of the Liberators
of The Land, as they should be known hereafter, were dead, and that
he had sent the signal that had brought the Bishop, in order that
they should be buried with such honour as was due to the fame they
should have in the years to be.

The two graves were already dug, just over the little crags on the slope
that looked to the city; and there the Bishop intoned the burial service
of the Church of the East, while Hlaka's men stood near, but behind the
crags, so that they were unseen from the streets below. Then the simple
graves were filled in, with a rough stone at the head of each, on which
a name was scratched with a knife. But nothing was simple about the
graves to Hlaka; for, though he lived and worked and thought actively in
the present, his dreams all dwelt with the future, in which he vividly
saw the whole Land free, and two sepulchres of marble on the Mountain
facing towards the city.

And in that perpetual vision of Hlaka's it is probable that the two men
now in their graves appeared as immortal legendary figures, almost made
visible by a line of the burial service, with which his thoughts were
now echoing, "And everlasting be their memory."

Then to the Bishop after his long walk Hlaka offered the hospitality
of the Mountain, which was food and drink served to him by the
mountaineers on a great chair made out of many coats, whose back was
a rock draped with more of them; but to Hlaka it was not so much the
Mountain to which he invited the Bishop, but to the free Land of
which he knew that he would one day be the Liberator. For as
something more than a leader of fourteen men living in a few caves he
appeared to receive the Bishop, and the Bishop gravely accepted this
grander welcome. He would have rested awhile in the great chair which
Hlaka's men had made for him; but Hlaka, who never stayed in one
place long, was anxious that the Bishop should be safely away before
the Germans did whatever they might do next.

The Bishop felt Hlaka's anxiety, and soon rose and blessed the men, and
walked over the rocks to the road, where Hlaka bowed his farewell to
him, bareheaded, and the Bishop raised his hand and blessed him and
turned for home. And, as he turned, Hlaka said to him: "I have rifles
for forty-nine more men."

The Bishop nodded his head, and walked home down the mountain road.

With the Bishop his escort went as far as the pine-wood, keeping
level with him through scrub-oak and myrtle as he went down the road.
One of the escort was Srebnitz. At the edge of the pine-wood, where
the others stopped and lay behind bushes and watched, Srebnitz ran up
to the Bishop to ask him about the safety of Sophia. The Bishop did
not know her by name and Srebnitz described her, graceful,
bright-eyed, illuminated by her own youth and by Srebnitz's own
vision of her, which made a different picture from what any other man
had seen, as all artists' portraits of the same face differ, but it
conveyed some picture to the Bishop, a picture of a very young girl,
so that he was able to say to Srebnitz: "She is safe. No girl under
twenty was killed this morning or yesterday."

       *       *       *       *       *

Evening was descending upon the Mountain as Srebnitz and the rest of the
Bishop's escort returned to the rocky peaks, and the chill came that is
the forerunner of night. The sun had long disappeared from them, though
it was not yet set over the plains, which still shone with the level
rays on the north side of the mountain. Golden lights began to twinkle
from far-off windows, and Hlaka's men took note that some new regulation
permitted this in the town.

Then the sun set, as they could tell by the smile that went out of the
countryside spread far below them; and at that moment the German bombers
came. Force of habit probably sent them just at sunset, as it was a
favorite time of theirs in which to attack, and so they came now, though
there was no reason to choose this particular time to attack men who
had no guns. They came, twenty of them, sweeping along the ridge and
bombing the heath and myrtle on the south side of it. And Srebnitz heard
that sound that German culture and the genius of Hitler have made so
familiar to all Europe that it scarcely need be described, the long
whining scream and the blow that jarred the earth, and all living and
inanimate things within hundreds of yards. Suffice it that Hlaka's men
felt the swiftly repeated blows that shook air and earth all round them,
and heard the grey mountain peaks repeat meditatively, from peak to peak
into distance, this clamour of man, that engaged their august attention,
as no murmur of his had ever done before.




XI


The German squadron of bombers did no harm whatever, unless for some
slight scars on the face of the Mountain, that may attract the curiosity
of future geologists. The Germans had suffered defeat on the Mountain,
and had struck the Mountain in revenge, and to some extent were
satisfied. They must have seen with their glasses some slight stir where
the funeral had been, for those of Hlaka's men to whom the bombs fell
nearest were the two that were dead.

Srebnitz, and even the more experienced Gregor, thought that there
would be no fire for their supper that night; but Hlaka lit many
fires, moving from one as soon as there came a flash from a gun
below, and lighting another a little way off, and going on again to
another as soon as another shell came. But by the time he had eight
or nine fires he left them burning, and moved with all his rifles and
stores to another part of the Mountain.

They went along the slope to the east, and further up, to where the
wild sheep lived, above any vegetation except small and scattered
trees. There they found more caves and spent some hours going
backwards and forwards, bringing their rifles to them, and carrying
up goatskins full of water, for they were above the springs. The
caves were wider and longer than the ones they had known, as though
the wind and the frost had worked with more freedom at that height;
but they were no deeper, for the layer of softer rock that the wind
scooped was of the same width all over the Mountain.

On the sandy floor of one of these caves Srebnitz slept for some hours,
but when cold hints of dawn could be seen from the Mountain, Hlaka sent
him out to watch on the rocky face that looked towards the city, for he
anticipated some revenge of the Germans for their defeat. The light
widened in the vast view, and dawn appeared, and Srebnitz faintly heard
the sound of a few volleys far off in the town, but no other sign than
these was made by the Germans.

When the sun came clear into sight others came out on to the face of the
Mountain, and Srebnitz went back to a narrow ravine in which the cook
had lit a fire, and reported to Hlaka that no Germans had left the city
or done anything he could notice, except to carry out a few executions.
Hlaka listened gravely to all Srebnitz had to say, and said nothing
himself. Then he went to the little fire where the others were, and they
asked him how many Germans he had seen; and, when he said None, they too
seemed uneasy. Even the cook stopped in the midst of a smile, to hear
him, and a thoughtful look came on his face. Srebnitz turned a
questioning look to Gregor.

"You see," said Gregor, "they should attack now. We beat them badly,
so they won't like us. And we shall never be so few again. So now is
their chance."

"But do you want them to attack us?" asked Srebnitz.

"No," said Gregor, "but Hlaka thought they would attack at dawn and, if
there is no sign of them yet, Hlaka doesn't know what they are going to
do. He nearly always knows what they are going to do. We can't fight
fifteen to five thousand if he doesn't know everything."

"How does he know?" asked Srebnitz.

"I don't know that," said Gregor. "He fought them years ago, and he
knows the Germans."

"Yes, he knows them," said the cook.

"It makes it difficult for us," said Gregor, "when we don't know what
the Germans are going to do. And Hlaka is troubled."

"They bombed the Mountain yesterday," said Srebnitz.

"Yes," said Gregor. "Hlaka thought they would, and thought that might be
all. But it isn't."

"How do you know?" asked Srebnitz.

"Hlaka says so," said Gregor.

"But why?" asked Srebnitz.

"He knows," Gregor said. "For one thing they didn't boast last night on
the wireless that they had killed us all. If they had been at all
content with their bombing, they would have done that. So they are going
to do something more, and Hlaka won't be easy till he finds out. I have
never known him not to be able to say what the Germans are going to do."

"He must be a wonderful man," said Srebnitz.

"He is," said Gregor. "And they are very methodical. You soon get to
know their ways."

Nobody else said much, for they were all puzzled, and were all uneasy
because Hlaka was unsure. And Srebnitz ate his breakfast in silence.
Then they all walked out of the little ravine on to the southern slope
and gazed over rocks at the city, but could see no sign of movement of
any Germans coming towards the Mountain.

Much of that day they spent in putting their rifles and stores away
in their new hiding-places. But Hlaka stood on the Mountain behind a
rock nearly as tall as himself, and gazed towards the city for hours.
At dinner all seemed shadowed by Hlaka's uneasiness, and there was
little talk and no song. And Hlaka sat silent among them, like a dumb
prophet. He had made no pretence to be a prophet, but there on the
Mountain with his little band of men knowledge of what his mighty
enemy was likely to do was so necessary that a kind of intuition was
called up in him by the sore need of The Land. When dinner was over
he strode away to the rocky slope once more and gazed again at the
city, and still in vain. Not even an aeroplane came over. Srebnitz he
sent away along the tops of the Mountain to shoot one or two wild
sheep, for their supply of meat was low. For the rest of that day he
searched the caves in which they hid, and peered over ridges into
high steep valleys in which they sometimes fed, and often saw their
tracks, but never came up with them. Then the sun set in a splendour
of scarlet clouds; and darkness, following upon sunset closer than it
does in more northern latitudes, began to fall all round him.

Srebnitz turned homeward to the caves that were his only home now
and, as he turned, heard a pebble fall on the mountain. He turned
back again and went to look over a ridge not many paces away, and
there he saw a flock of fifty wild sheep moving behind a great-horned
leader, going down the northern slope of the Mountain. He put up his
rifle, but could not properly see the sight. He might have wounded
one, had he fired many shots, but he neither wished to wound one of
these fine animals, nor saw any use in doing so, and did not dare to
waste cartridges. For a long time he saw the brown patch that they
made on the mountain, always moving downwards, until he was sure they
were heading for the green plain to the north, a thing he had not
expected wild sheep to do till the last man was dead.

Darkness fell long before he came to the caves, and he moved slowly in
the night over those rocks, under the light of the moon, till he was
guided home by the glow of a small fire that Hlaka's men had lit in the
ravine to help him, where its light was hidden from the town.

There he found Hlaka and all his men by the fire, and told what he had
seen, not expecting to be believed.

But Hlaka said: "Yes, they do that. They know when war is coming to the
Mountain. They did it last time, and I have heard they have often done
it before, and the eldest leads them and they go to other mountains away
to the north. They say they will do a hundred miles in a night. I don't
know how they know the way, or how they know what war is. But there are
a great many things I don't know."

He was silent awhile and no one spoke. If there were many things that
Hlaka did not know, there was little for any other of them to say. And
he repeated "Many things," and was silent again. Silent and grave. Then
he lifted his head and smiled, and said: "Indeed I only know one thing:
that we will free The Land."

Suddenly he was silent, and listening, motionless as a rock. And after
a while a step was heard on the mountain by other men, and a dark shape
appeared, till the firelight fell on it, and a man walked up to them
and said: "I have come to join Hlaka."

And many more men came that night to the Mountain, from which the
wild sheep had gone away on their great journey. One by one they
came, or in twos and threes, all through the night; and the fire was
kept glowing softly to guide them in. And before dawn came there were
exactly forty-nine, the number that Hlaka had mentioned to the
titular Bishop of Ilion.

But while these men were slipping quietly into the camp of Hlaka,
and before many of them had yet arrived, Srebnitz had gone again to
watch on the mountain, in the hope of gaining some hint of the
mystery that puzzled Hlaka, and perhaps discovering what the Germans
meant to do, attempting to avenge their defeat. All was dark and
silent; even the moon was clouded; and in the darkness Hlaka had not
yet divined anything.

And suddenly the clue came to Srebnitz out of the night. Far away down
by the pine-wood, through which he had come from the town on the night
when he got his rifle, he saw a light flashing. He watched the rapid
flashes and tried to remember them, and did remember the first few: they
went short short short, long long long, short short short, short short
short, long long long, short; and after that Srebnitz could remember no
more, nor keep pace with the rest. There were not many more letters, and
then the light stopped. He did not know the Morse code, and knew that it
was as important in the life he was leading now, as the art of Caxton
himself in a calmer age. Sadly he knew that he must confess his
ignorance to Hlaka. But he had a piece of pencil in his pocket and an
old envelope, which he tore open, for he could not see on which side the
writing was: then he dotted down the dots and dashes as far as he
remembered them, and waited, gazing down towards the pine-wood with the
pencil in his hand, to see if the signal would come again. And it came
when he was quite ready, just as though the signaller had waited for
this; the same shorts and longs as before, and then went on with two
longs. His memory had failed him just in the middle of a letter, where
the regular arrangement of shorts and longs had changed: that letter was
short long long, and was followed by four shorts, and then by two
shorts, and then by a short and a long. He waited yet, and the message
was repeated a third time. And he checked it and found that he had it
right, and took it back to Hlaka. He went up to Hlaka by the fire and
confessed: he said, "I cannot read Morse."

Hlaka looked at him and said nothing. Then he showed Hlaka the actual
message in dots and dashes, that he had written down. And Hlaka took it
and read it. Nothing in his expression changed.

"Yes," he said. "I know now what they will do."




XII


When Hlaka had spoken he sat quite silent awhile, gazing into the fire.
But when it seemed that his plans were made, he lifted his head and
spoke quickly. "We must march," he said. "They are attacking women."

Then he sent three men to reply to the signal from different points;
merely four dots from electric torches, signalling the letter H. Then he
told his men where they must go, for Hlaka's men did not march in fours
or in threes, but moved more like hunting dogs, not going one behind the
other, but each one knowing where the others are: to the pine-wood
first, he said; and then to a house which he described at the near end
of the town; and, as he described it, Srebnitz began to see that it was
the house of the two old ladies. "I know that house," he exclaimed.

"Then you will be the scout," said Hlaka. "Go to the pine-wood and find
who signalled. If you cannot find anyone, go on to the house. But,
before you go into the town, come back and leave your rifle with Gregor,
who will wait outside the wood."

The cook was to stay by the little fire that was hidden in the ravine
and receive the rest of the men that were coming in to join Hlaka,
while several of these men themselves were to go to different points
on the Mountain to guide the rest. If Hlaka was not back by dawn the
cook was to get Srebnitz's air-gun and test all the newcomers, and
train them as well as he could.

Srebnitz and Gregor started off together, and saw no more of the others
nor even heard them; but Gregor told him that they were close, though he
could not see or hear them either. Sometimes a pebble rolled away, like
the one the wild sheep had dislodged, but there was no other sound, so
the whole force of Hlaka marched in dead silence. Their progress was
slow over the rocks in the dark, and neither Srebnitz nor Gregor spoke,
except for an occasional word in a low voice from Gregor to guide
Srebnitz past some obstacle. At last they came to the road, where it
ended below their old camping-ground. And, now that they could walk
without difficulty, Gregor and Srebnitz began to talk in low voices.

"So you know the house," said Gregor.

"Yes," said Srebnitz. "What is happening there?"

"I think the Germans are attacking it," said Gregor.

"But two old ladies live there," Srebnitz said. "They are most
inoffensive and harmless. And there is a girl there."

"They are just the people the Germans would attack," Gregor answered.
"They have men called psychologists, who work out what people like us
feel. Their plan is to hurt us by hurting others; and the more
inoffensive the people they hurt, the more they think it will hurt us."

"What will they do to them?" asked Srebnitz.

"I don't know," said Gregor. "If you find no one in the wood, you must
go to the house and find out, and come back and tell me, and then we
will all go."

"What was the message?" asked Srebnitz.

"It was an S.O.S.," said Gregor.

For a while they walked in silence, while all manner of dark fears
passed through Srebnitz's mind. He could not believe that they would
hurt Sophia, or rather he would not believe it; but he remembered how he
had not thought they could kill his father and mother, and his fears
overwhelmed his struggle to believe that Sophia was safe. He asked
Gregor a few anxious and idle questions, whose answers could not be
known. Then they went on in silence.

Srebnitz hurried, but Gregor checked him, for they would have got too
far ahead of the rest. It was the road that Srebnitz had taken when he
had come from the town, the only road up the Mountain, but it looked all
different at night.

The moon was behind the Mountain and they had no light now but stars,
and the faint gleam of the road. Then they came to that part of the road
that Srebnitz had walked by night; and, though he could recognize no
feature of it in the darkness, the Mountain seemed to look at him with
the same expression with which it had looked at him when he was coming
away from the pine-wood; for mountains like people alter their attitude
to us as we alter ours to them, and by the appearance of the line of
crags against the sky Srebnitz knew his whereabouts.

Again the idle questions from Srebnitz as to what the Germans would do
to the women in that house. But he, like Gregor, had heard the volleys
at dawn, and was as well informed in such matters as the man from whom
he so wistfully sought information.

Then the dark shape of the pine-wood came into sight, and Gregor
repeated to Srebnitz his instructions, which were to search the wood for
whoever had sent the message, and, if finding no one, to go on to the
house in which the two old ladies lived, and to find out what was wrong,
and come back and tell Gregor. Gregor would wait on the road to take
Srebnitz's rifle from him, if he should have to go on to the town. He
had not reminded Srebnitz to bring his knife, any more than clerks in
London are reminded to bring their fountain-pens; for to carry a knife is
a habit amongst that people.

Then Srebnitz went alone into the wood. He left the road, in case there
were Germans in the wood, for he would have shown up against the grey
road, whereas everyone in the wood was in equal darkness. From tree to
tree he went slowly right through the wood on the left-hand side of the
road, then moved further still to his left and came quietly back. Then
he went towards the road, intending to cross it and to explore the wood
on the other side. Just as he came to the point from which he had
started, he heard the sound of a dry twig crack behind him. He spun
round with his rifle ready, and heard a quiet voice ask him, as though
seeking information. "You are not going to shoot? Are you?"

It was Sophia. And once again Srebnitz had the feeling, so out of
place in the sinister gloom of that wood, that Sophia might be
laughing at him.

"Sophia!" exclaimed Srebnitz.

"Yes," said Sophia.

"Did you send that message?" he asked.

"Yes," she replied.

"What was it?" said Srebnitz.

"S.O.S., Sophia," she answered.

So that was what it was.

"What is the matter?" he asked.

"The Germans are interrogating my aunts," she said.

"Asking them questions?" said Srebnitz.

"Interrogating them," repeated Sophia.

There was somehow some difference; and from Sophia's tone of voice
Srebnitz got the idea that the difference was an ominous one.

"Are they still there?" asked Srebnitz.

"They were there not long ago," said Sophia. "I went back to watch after
sending the message, and have only just come here to meet you."

"How did you know I should see your message at once?" he asked.

"I didn't send it to you," she said.

"Not to me?" he said.

"No," said Sophia.

"To whom then?" he asked.

"To Hlaka," she said.

"Hlaka!" he exclaimed.

"Yes," she said. "Did you think I was signalling to you?"

"No," said Srebnitz. "But does Hlaka know your name?"

"Yes," she said. "Does that surprise you?"

"No," he said. "And do you know Hlaka?"

"I know him very well," she said.

"Of course a great many people do," said Srebnitz.

"Of course," said Sophia.

He was not satisfied, but there was no time for more talk.

"How many Germans are there in your aunts' house?" he asked her.

"Five," she said. "One at the front door, none at the back, and two
officers inside the house with a corporal and private."

"What rooms are they in?" he asked.

"The officers are in the room you know," she said, "and the other two
are just outside in the passage."

"Have they been there ever since you sent the message?" asked Srebnitz.

"Yes," said Sophia, "two of them pouring out questions all the time.
They won't stop until my aunts have said something they want them to
say. And they'll never do that."

"And then?" said Srebnitz.

"You must come quickly," said Sophia.

To march through the streets with rifles seemed impossible, and how
to deal, without them, with five armed men close together Srebnitz
could not see.

"I must tell Hlaka," he said.

"Is he here?" asked Sophia.

"Yes," said Srebnitz, "quite close."

Sophia's face lit up, but the light that romantic fancies light in the
face of a lad went out of Srebnitz's face at the same moment, as a field
in April goes dim and greeny-grey, while the green of another field
close to it turns almost to gold.

"Will you still be here?" asked Srebnitz.

"Yes," said Sophia, "if you are not gone too long."

Then Srebnitz went back to Gregor, and told him what he had heard, and
said they must find Hlaka.

"Don't speak so loud," said a voice near to him. And it was Hlaka.
Srebnitz repeated to him his information. And Hlaka said, "We must go to
the house." Then he uttered one of the many cries that an owl makes at
night, and very soon his men were all round him.

"We must go into the town," he said. "We will leave our rifles at the
far end of the wood, with Mihail to look after them. There are only four
men in the house and one outside. I will deal with the first three."

One by one he gave brief instructions to his men in a low voice, then
led the way down the road to the edge of the wood. There he stopped his
men with one sign of his hand, and walked a little way into the wood
with Sophia. Srebnitz could not hear what they said. Then they all went
through the wood in their usual marching order, that is to say not far
away from each other, but each man taking his own line and slipping from
tree to tree, like a tree's shadow going quietly through the night to
visit its neighbour. At the far end of the wood they left their rifles
with that one of Hlaka's men who was called Mihail, and Sophia remained
with him. With Mihail also they all left their boots.

Then they hurried on down the road to the town. No street-lamps were
burning there, but a rare light twinkled here and there from a window.
For the Germans knew that the Allies would not bomb this city. As they
came to the edge of the town, Hlaka halted them and told Srebnitz to
keep close to him and to get into the garden of the old ladies' house as
far as he could without being seen; and Iskander he told to come also,
and to shoot either through the window or in the house itself when the
door should be opened, as opportunity offered. "For I am afraid it must
come to shooting," said Hlaka. "And we must go away very fast with the
old ladies as soon as that has happened."

"But we have no rifles," said Srebnitz to Iskander.

"We shall pick one up in the garden," Iskander said.

While Hlaka was speaking to Srebnitz in a low voice, standing close,
Srebnitz noticed for the first time that he now wore very ragged clothes
and carried a long stick.

Then Hlaka's army marched on, as it always marched, not like soldiers,
but shadows, separate shadows that, with their bare feet on the
pavement, moved now like worthy recruits for a regiment of the guards of
the King of Shadows. Dark, without any sound whatever, they moved
through the dark streets, shadow by shadow, like the shadows of the iron
clamps of a lantern following one another as the lantern is twirled in a
hand. Unseen they went down the street that led into the town, unseen
they passed the two larger intersecting streets and reached the lane
that Srebnitz knew, the lane whose romance seemed once to belong to
Srebnitz, but nothing seemed to belong to anyone now except to the grim
Hlaka. Under the fruit-trees they went, and came to the gate in the
garden through which Sophia had once brought Srebnitz, and passed it
and, turning up a narrow street to their right, soon came to the street
on which looked, over a little garden, the front windows and door of the
house they sought. They turned again to their right, Hlaka leading; then
he made a swift sign with his hand to caution Iskander and Srebnitz, and
the house of the old ladies came in sight.

The great stature of Hlaka fell forward with the suddenness of an
avalanche in spring on the Mountain, and the bulk of his chest seemed to
decrease, and with drooping head and stooped figure he went forward,
tapping as he went with his stick. At once was heard the rattle of a
rifle being brought down from the slope.

"Halt!" shouted the sentry from the doorstep of the old ladies' house.

"I am blind," came the voice of Hlaka.

"What are you doing here?" shouted the sentry.

"I have lost my way," said Hlaka. "Show me my way home."

And he turned in by the little gateway and hobbled up the path, with a
look of decrepitude and yet with speed, as a wounded rat might move.

"This is not your way," shouted the sentry.

"Show me my way," whined Hlaka.

"What are you doing out at night?" said the sentry, pointing his bayonet
at him. But still Hlaka hobbled on.

"Night is my day," he said, "as it is to all whose day is night."

That puzzled the sentry, and for a moment he tried to make sense of
it; and, while his wits were so occupied, Hlaka stabbed him. He
signed then to Srebnitz, who ran up and received the rifle from
Hlaka. Hlaka had been speaking German and continued to speak it,
speaking about a permit to be out after curfew and profusely thanking
the sentry, who lay quite dead. Meanwhile he knocked at the door,
three rather timid knocks. The door was opened.

"A message for the captain," said Hlaka. "I am sent because I am blind,
and night is no darker to me than day."

And he began to fumble for the message among his rags. Srebnitz saw two
men inside the door, and Hlaka swaying slightly as he fumbled, and
moving his position as he swayed. The curtain had been drawn partly back
from the window of the room in which the old ladies sat and the blind
had been raised, perhaps so that the sentry could see into the room. But
those in the bright light could not see the sentry.

In a flash that left a picture long in his memory Srebnitz saw the
whole room, the mantelpiece with two china candlesticks on it with
little china figures holding the candles, two humming-birds each in a
domed glass case, and a small clock in the middle; a velvet
overmantel and small pictures in velvet frames, two comfortable
armchairs dressed in chintzes with a design of small roses, and the
old ladies in the chairs still knitting, and two ferocious Prussian
officers talking rapidly one after the other.

This Srebnitz saw in a flash, before his eyes turned back to Hlaka.
Hlaka seemed to be shifting his position so as to get close in front
of the first man, but the other man was peering round his shoulder
and evidently looking for the sentry. Suddenly he raised his rifle.
At this moment the first man fell in a heap on the floor with no more
sound than a gasp, and Hlaka leapt on the man behind him. Iskander
rushed past Srebnitz into the doorway; and Srebnitz saw that he would
have a clearer view through the window, as the two officers went to
the sitting-room door to see what was wrong in the passage, and drew
their pistols as they went. One officer actually did reach the
passage, but at that moment Srebnitz broke the window-pane with his
bayonet, and the second officer turned and raised his pistol, and
Srebnitz fired first. That was the only shot fired, for Iskander ran
right into the other officer like a footballer, and killed him with
his knife before he had time to fire. Only one shot was better than
Hlaka had hoped; yet there is no mistaking a shot at night in a town,
so there was little time to spare.

Iskander signed to Srebnitz to come in quickly, and dragged the
sentry in and shut the door and took one of the rifles, while Hlaka
picked up another.

"Dear me," said Isabella.

Angelica smiled and said nothing.

"Now to the Mountain," said Hlaka.




XIII


Hlaka seized a hand of Isabella and hurried her through the kitchen as
though he knew the way. With a wave of his head and a look he signed to
Iskander to do the same with Angelica.

"I must bring a few things," said Isabella.

"There is no time," said Hlaka.

"We had everything ready, in case it happened," said Isabella. "We have
all we want in two sacks."

"Where are they?" asked Hlaka, as they came to the back door.

"Beside our beds," said Isabella. "We can get them in a minute."

"You should have kept them downstairs," said Hlaka. "There's not a
minute to spare."

"We should very much like them," said Angelica.

"Get them," said Hlaka to Srebnitz. "Give me your rifle."

"Two satin bags," said Angelica, "each on a chair by our beds."

Hlaka slung Srebnitz's bayoneted rifle over his shoulder. His own was
in his left hand. With his right hand he seized Isabella's left hand
again and hurried her through the garden. He relied on Srebnitz's
young speed to overtake them, but his own speed was now that of
Isabella and of Angelica: the seconds he gained with them over delay,
the yards he could run with them, before the shot woke the town, were
all that he now thought of.

Srebnitz ran upstairs to the two bedrooms, and found the satin sacks
just where Isabella had said. It's cold on the Mountain, he thought.
There was a large cupboard in each room, and Srebnitz looked in both and
brought the two thickest coats. All the neat dresses hanging there
seemed to wear a forlorn look, a look not easily described to any who
have not seen a doomed house, known at once to those who have. As
Srebnitz gazed at them he heard steps in the street. From one of the
beds he seized two blankets and ran downstairs. Then a thought came to
him that should have come before: a dead man lay in the sitting-room,
and the curtains were drawn back. He ran, and the steps came nearer.
There was no time to draw the curtains, or time to blow out six candles,
three on each of the little china candelabras, held by bright Dresden
figures. So he threw both to the floor. As they fell he saw the pistol
of the German officer that he had shot, lying beside him.

The steps came nearer, two men, not running, but evidently coming to
investigate, for they were walking fast. Would they guess which house
it was in which the shot had been fired? Srebnitz hoped not. For
though he had learned Hlaka's way of feeling the master of these men,
and knew he could easily defend himself, yet he knew that more
shooting, and from the same house, was certain to bring so many
Germans that Hlaka's whole force might be endangered. One shot was
different; it might be accidental. And yet the Germans scarcely
seemed to think so, for now he heard more feet marching, a patrol of
several men. As Srebnitz picked up the pistol the two men passed the
door. There must be another pistol in the passage. So he got that
too, and put them both in his pockets. They might be useful on the
Mountain, thought Srebnitz; but the thought led to the question of
ammunition. He searched both bodies in the dark, and found two small
pouches holding twenty more cartridges each. As he took the
cartridges from the officer in the sitting-room, the patrol came
close. Though much encumbered with coats and blankets over his
shoulder, and the two satin bags, he had a hand to spare, with which
to snatch a fresh ham as he ran through the kitchen. The back-door
was open. He ran through and shut it, but did not stop to lock it,
for the chief danger seemed to him to be from the streets ahead, and
that increased every second.

All seemed quiet at the back, as he ran through the dark garden, and
all seemed quiet in the lane; but soon a hand clutched his arm as
he ran: it was Gregor, who had waited for him, and took from him
the two satin bags, and then ran on beside him. "I've a pistol for
you," said Srebnitz.

"Put it in my pocket," said Gregor, with a satin bag in each hand.

Srebnitz did so as they ran.

Before they came to the end of the dark lane they saw the shapes of the
others. They were all together now. And two men ran one on each side of
Angelica and holding her hands, and two more helped Isabella. Hlaka was
glancing anxiously at the old ladies, almost watching each breath, for
upon their pace depended everything. When one glimmering window showed
that they came near streets again he made two of his men carry them,
still running, so as to rest them.

They came to the street, and all was quiet. There they spread out in
their old way, going on their bare feet like separate shadows. There
they put the two old ladies down, but their shoes made a sound on the
pavement as they walked. So two men carried them again. Still all was
quiet in the street.

Now they approached the wide street that they had to cross, and no sound
came from that either. Then a distant lorry was heard, down the street
to their left. But it stopped, and all was silent again. They neared the
wide street now, and hopes were high.

Suddenly there flashed before them, only a few yards away, the great
beam of a searchlight right down the midst of the street that they had
to cross. Hlaka halted his men as they came level with him, and waited.
But the searchlight did not move or even flicker, and remained a great
barrier across their way. At the same time they heard a patrol marching
up the middle of the road.

Still as the shadows of trees stood Hlaka's men. The patrol marched past
the end of the street they were in, eight of them, every figure clear in
the searchlight within twelve yards of Hlaka, and marched on up the wide
street. Hlaka raised his hand to keep his men where they were and
slipped on into the wide street, silently as a night-bird leaving its
branch. At the corner of the street he beckoned, and all his men came up
to him. The pavement was in darkness, and the whole road was lit. The
searchlight that lit it was a hundred yards away on a lorry. The lorry
was facing away from him, illuminating the street beyond with its own
two lamps. Every stone in the road shone clear as jewellery, but nearer
the lorry there was darkness between the beam and the road. To this
darkness Hlaka pointed, and led his men fifty yards nearer the lorry,
two of them still carrying the old ladies. Fifty yards from the lorry he
stopped them, where the beam was a foot and a half from the ground.

Then he crawled into the road, and lay under the beam and signed to
them all to do the same. He lifted a hand and held it near to the
beam, and made them all pass under his hand. More steps were heard
marching up from the town, but they were a long way off and the sound
went far in the night. Hlaka's men had only a few yards to crawl,
while the others marched two hundred. They all crawled quickly under
Hlaka's hand, even the two old ladies. Moths showed vividly in the
beam, with all their colours gleaming, while Hlaka's men went unseen;
and the last of them passed under the beam by the time the patrol had
marched up to the lorry. The far pavement was dark like the other,
and still the beam never moved.

They hurried along the pavement and came to the crossing, and turned to
their left, and the barrier of light was behind them. They knew that the
patrol that was behind them would turn either to left or right when it
came to the cross-roads, because there was another patrol so close in
front of it; and Hlaka, with the knowledge he had of such things, knew
it would turn to the left. Yet they were marching at the usual pace,
while Hlaka's men were running.

If they met no obstacle, they need not fear the patrol. But, if anything
stopped them in front, they might be caught in a trap.

They crossed the next street safely.

Hlaka had made the old ladies go amongst the first under the beam, so as
to give the slowest all the start he could, and the slowest were bound
to be the men that carried Isabella and Angelica, even though Hlaka
relieved them before they were tired.

Another crossing was passed in safety, the last, and once more hopes
were high. Again came danger ahead of them. They had gained much on the
patrol that was marching behind them; but now Hlaka saw two lights
swinging across the road ahead, which were electric torches carried by
two men who were coming down the road towards his men. He noted quickly
their method and the rhythmic swing of their lights; then he gave his
rifle and bayonet to Srebnitz, because he was the youngest and able to
move quicker than Hlaka could, and gave quick orders to him and
Iskander, and to another man who had a rifle and bayonet. They were to
lie down in the road in front of the two men, who were only swinging
their light about fifteen yards ahead of them: they must wait until they
were seen, and then run at the men and bayonet them. Meanwhile Hlaka
kept onward, and did not halt his little force until the two men were
close. Thus the patrol behind gained barely thirty yards on them.

The three young men that were to run at the two were out in front of the
rest. Soon they saw the two men coming, but the two did not see them,
because their eyes, relying on artificial light, could see little that
was not lighted by their torches. They were two soldiers, with rifles
slung, and carrying electric torches in their right hands. The lights
went methodically across the road to and fro, never more than fifteen
yards in front of them.

Hlaka had ordered that there must be no firing by his men, and none
allowed by the Germans. To carry out the last part of the order Srebnitz
knew would be impossible without the best start that a runner could
make. He watched the light of the torches meeting about the middle of
the road, and swinging regularly to left and right as the two men came
on. Meanwhile he heard the patrol coming nearer, behind him. And now the
two men were within fifteen yards, and the lights were swinging into the
middle of the road. They met only a few inches in front of the three men
that were waiting, and swung out again to the pavements.

Srebnitz got up and ran forward, and got five yards before a light came
back and caught him. The other two got up immediately after, and raced
forward with Srebnitz. Had the Germans not had torches in their hands,
there would have perhaps been time. They threw the torches down and
unslung their rifles, and got them up to their shoulders; but time, that
is so great an ingredient of war, allowed them no more than that. Three
bayonets struck the two Germans. One of them shouted.

And Hlaka's men ran on, all but two whom he told to get the two
rifles, and the ammunition in the belts if they could get it before
the patrol saw them.

But the patrol had heard the shout and was now coming on at a run.

So they left the ammunition, taking only the loaded rifles; for, if they
had been seen and fired at, they feared that the sound of the firing
would wake the town too wide. They ran on before they were seen, gaining
easily on the patrol, which sounded to be from eight to a dozen men, and
soon overtook the rest; but these were not gaining; so Hlaka told the
men that were carrying the two ladies to put them down and to run
beside them again holding their hands. He risked the sound of their feet
being heard now, for the patrol must know that they were before it in
any case, as the two men in the road had just been killed, and the men
who did it had not gone past the patrol, and the road led only one other
way, so that the men behind must know they were off to the Mountain.

Speed was the important thing now. Isabella and Angelica ran lightly,
and were not heard by the patrol, above the sound of the Germans' own
boots. Hlaka's party were once more gaining. They had only another
hundred and fifty yards to go, and they would be out of the town in wild
land that sloped up to the Mountain. There they would feel safe, like
wild things in their coverts.

But at this moment Hlaka heard, and all of them, the sound of the
engines of a lorry behind them. It was the lorry that had illuminated
the street they had crossed: it was not the smooth roar of an engine
running, but the troubled uneasy muttering of an engine being turned
round. For the engine was luckily facing the wrong way. It had only a
hundred yards to get to the cross-roads; but it was not yet turned
round. Hlaka's men must have run fifty yards by the time the lorry was
turned; then it moved forward a few yards no faster than they were
going, gained speed and rushed to the crossing. There, instead of
turning to the left and pursuing them, it turned to the right, in order
to illuminate the street in which they ran before the patrol. They saw
the flash of the beam swing right across the street, and were still
twenty yards from the end. Then they heard the grating of gears as the
engines were reversed, and the lorry came up the street behind them, and
its wandering beam began to peer down the street to look for them.

Once it nearly caught them, but just fell short where the road heaved
over a culvert, and sent a great shadow rushing at them. Then it lit up
the patrol, and they saw it marching in threes.

And at that moment Hlaka and the two ladies came to the last houses. The
road, as it left the town, forsook its orderly straightness immediately
and took a turn to its right. And round the last house on the right
Hlaka's men ran into darkness. Through the first gap in the hedge on the
right they all ran, and the hedge on the left was illuminated by the
weird beam of the searchlight before the last one was through. There
they lay down in a line behind the hedge.

Five of Hlaka's men now had rifles, and two had pistols, and all had
knives; but he did not wish to fight while the two ladies were with him,
if a fight could be avoided. Though only twenty yards from the edge of
the town, his men felt a new confidence, that seemed to flow into their
hearts down the dark slope of the Mountain; while the patrol that came
out from the city with the searchlight close behind them, as they saw
the open land and the night and the Mountain before them, felt that they
crossed the frontier of an unfamiliar country.

The patrol did not leave the road to search for Hlaka's men in the wide
night, but marched on down it for half a mile and then returned to the
town; while the men on the lorry turned the searchlight round, and then
the lorry, and drove it a long way up the road, where it looked like a
great comet that had come to visit the Mountain.

As soon as the patrol was a hundred and fifty yards past them, Hlaka
marched his men on down the road behind them; and, when it turned, he
led his men back again to the dark of the untamed land. Then the lorry
turned back. The beam was sweeping on each side of the road as it came
towards the town, and there was scarcely any cover where Hlaka's men now
lay, except the darkness of night. Some thought of attacking the lorry
seemed to come to Hlaka's men, as some of them rose to their hands and
knees and looked at him. But the patrol was too close behind for that,
and he went forward alone. Hlaka was lost to sight of his men at once,
and the lorry came nearer with its great searching beam, till the huge
shadows leaping up from it were close to the mountaineers. And then they
heard one shot, and the light went out. The shot had come from the far
side of the road from the one on which Hlaka had left his men, and in
that direction men from the lorry pursued him, and some of the patrol
went to help them, while the rest stood still and watched. And they
pursued until they all perceived the vanity of trying to overtake Hlaka
on the slope of the Mountain by night.




XIV


Over the open country Hlaka's men, with Isabella and Angelica, moved
towards the pine-wood. But when the lorry, with its blinded
searchlight, returned to the town, and there was no more sound of
marching, they went back to the road, where walking was easier for
the two ladies. Before long they came to the pine-wood. Srebnitz
peered into the wood, and did not at first see Mihail; he stood too
still, with dark clothes, in the darkness.

Then he saw a patch of dress, less dim than the wood, and Sophia was
coming towards him. For whom did she look? But her first question
was, "Where is Hlaka?"

"He'll be here soon," said Srebnitz, and went to the others to pick up
the rifles they had left in the wood, and to divide the things to be
carried besides.

All this they did hastily, for their great home towered above them, and
it was late, and the feeling for home that all men have at such an hour,
and after a hard day, was coming upon them. The city was still not far,
with its pavements, its closed doors, its rules and its regulations, now
intensified by men who loved regulations and were against all that is
free. And they yearned for the Mountain, which gave them freedom with
welcoming hands and would one day free The Land. So each of them picked
up his rifle, and put on his boots, and five of them slung a new rifle
over their shoulders, and all took the mountain road. And before they
had trodden it long, Hlaka was marching among them.

As the slope of the Mountain began to heave against them, the men might
have felt fatigue after their long night; but, cheered by the dark shape
of their rocky home, they climbed with a new vigour, and all the cares
that trouble men in cities were soon far below them.

To Isabella and Angelica, who often sitting in their armchairs with calm
and unmoved faces, while Sophia went to and fro, were reading tales of
romantic adventure, this night on the Mountain, and even the bloodshed
in their house, were as though steps had been taken, which perhaps had
once not seemed likely, but which were nevertheless but a little way
from the land of their dreams to the land of this strange reality. And
so when the man who had been questioning them dropped dead in their
sitting-room, the contrast between the corpse and their velvet
overmantel was not so much the scene that stamped itself on their
memory, as the sight of the dream come true.

To Sophia all the world was full of romance: it was even in her aunts'
house in the town, more in the garden, more still in the lane under the
fruit-trees, and most of all somewhere between the twilight on the
Mountain and the stars.

So, among armed men on the Mountain, the aunts were in scenes they had
read of, and Sophia was walking where her dreams had been, so that to
neither did the adventure seem unfamiliar.

Sophia was walking with Hlaka, and Srebnitz walked a little apart in
silence. If it was jealousy that he felt, it might seem out of place
where any man of Hlaka's age was the cause; and Sophia was barely
seventeen. But there was an energy about Hlaka that defied age, as he
had defied the Germans with his army of fifteen men, and was even now
defying all Germany, confident that her armies would be beaten back to
her borders. So Srebnitz walked alone. And after a while Sophia came up
to him. He heard her voice beside him before he heard her step.

"Did you get a good rifle?" she asked.

"I don't know," he said.

For a little while there was silence.

And then Sophia said, "It was kind of you to get my aunts' things."

Suddenly it seemed to Srebnitz that Sophia might not be lost to him
for ever. And, as he had just thought that she was, his new thought
fitted so ill with his former thought that he could not make head or
tail of either of them. He realised, now, that he had answered
gruffly about the rifle, and said, with some thought of making
amends: "I brought a ham too. I hope I did right."

"Yes," said Sophia. "They'll burn the house now."

"They'll burn it!" exclaimed Srebnitz. "Why?"

"Because they can't burn my aunts and me," said Sophia.

"If they did that...!" said Srebnitz.

"What would you do?" asked Sophia.

"I would lock many of them into a house," said Srebnitz, "and burn them
alive."

"That would be very unkind," said Sophia.

"Very," said Srebnitz.

And his vehement word broke the thread of some playful remark that
Sophia had planned to make, and for a while both were silent, while
thoughts arose in the mind of the young man that were worthy of Sophia
and attuned to the solemnity of the Mountain, but would not break into
words. Nor would anyone find words easy for the thoughts that were in
his mind, for they looked on Sophia as somehow akin to the Mountain. She
seemed to his fancy to have little to do with the house of her aunts, or
with any houses, something to do with their garden, more with the lane
under the lemon trees, and most of all with the Mountain. And words
might trace what was eternal in Sophia and what was eternal in the
Mountain, and what each had in common with the stars, but such words do
not come easily, and to Srebnitz they had not yet come at all; when a
golden light, too large and bright for a star, a light like a small sun,
fell slowly towards the far end of the Mountain.

"How lovely!" exclaimed Sophia.

But the loveliness of the small sun was deceptive. It was a light
dropped by an aeroplane, and many a man that has seen that sunny glow by
night has never seen the real sun rise again. Two of Hlaka's men did
not, new men who had come to the Mountain only that night and had not
yet learned Hlaka's lesson to go unseen: the bomb that followed the
star found them still gazing at the golden light, and scattered their
broken bodies over the mountain. Sophia and Srebnitz, and all who
marched with Hlaka, saw the night leap away from the flash of the bomb,
where an insane daylight shone for a frantic instant; and, when night
came back to the peaks, they heard it troubled for long with the
wandering reverberations that roamed from the single explosion. Above
the last of the mutterings the explosion made to the peaks they heard
the throbbing of the engines of aeroplanes, and a flight of bombers was
coming along the Mountain, dropping golden stars as they came.

Before the first bomb fell, at the sight of the first gold star, Hlaka
had led the old ladies from the road and showed them where to hide
amongst the heath, and a single word from him had scattered his men.
Srebnitz led Sophia quickly to a patch of myrtle, and concealed her
and hid himself; and the bombers above the ridge came by with their
golden stars, from which long shadows leaped wildly, wakened and
routed with the retreating darkness, but they did not discover any of
Hlaka's men, and no more bombs were dropped. Then the batteries
outside the town opened, and fired shrapnel at the place where the
first bomb had dropped; but of this Hlaka took no notice, and
collected his party again and went on up the road.

"Their spirits are low because we beat them," he said.

Srebnitz gazed uneasily at the shrapnel, whose intensely red burst
seemed to be just where the cook, and the men who joined that night,
were waiting for them at Hlaka's new headquarters. But Hlaka, trusting
the Mountain to protect them, spoke slightingly of the guns, and, while
the booming of guns and shells was running from crag to crag, said,
"They are trying to hearten themselves. But it is better to beat drums."

Perhaps the economy that he himself practised with bullets had made him
unduly critical of an ordinary display of gunfire. Presently the guns
ceased, no more aeroplanes came over, and all the peaks were silent.

In the silence Srebnitz shivered; then he noticed that the shape of
Sophia beside him, which he had rather imagined than seen, was now
clearly visible; the shapes of the others were showing too, with hands
and faces and even features, which had only been pieces of darkness a
while ago, darker than the rest of the night; and Srebnitz looked
upward, and it was dawn; dawn not yet visible with any colours, from
where they walked along the face of the ridge (nor were all the stars
gone), but the plains on the other side of the Mountain must have seen
it, and night was already retreating. Cold and fading westwards it went
away, and Srebnitz thought of the Germans and the day that his dreams
saw. And when a clearer light came over the Mountain Sophia saw more
than that light in Srebnitz's eyes, and knew that they shone from hope.

       *       *       *       *       *

To the old camping-ground they came again, to the little arena among the
circle of rocks, and slept in the caves near by for what was left of the
night, while the sky over them seemed to be a space that the night had
ravaged and that was not yet rescued by the advance of day. Hlaka gave a
cave to Isabella and Angelica for themselves and Sophia, with apologies
for the hardness of his mountain, to which he welcomed them with the
diffidence of the host of some aged inn, and hoped that, with the coats
and blankets that Srebnitz had brought, they would be able to sleep.
"Not so well as the two Prussian officers," said Isabella.

"But well enough," said Angelica.




XV


When morning had been long on the Mountain, Hlaka brought Sophia and her
aunts from the cave to the little arena, in which a fire was once more
burning. There Srebnitz's ham was roasted and cut with their sharp
knives, and plates were handed round like those that man made use of
thousands of years ago, smooth pieces of stone, such as war, rummaging
among bygone things, brings sometimes from distant ages, to mix with
inventions our day has made in his honour. And not far away was a
stream, whose water was fresher than any that cities know. Sleep, food,
water and warmth are four things whose value is acknowledged in times of
peace and amongst ordered ways; but their value in these times and
places is not known at its true worth, where so many other things, such
as railway time-tables, bus-tickets and finance, have to be assessed at
the same time. Here on the Mountain in time of war they stood out as
four primal things.

When they had rested and warmed themselves they heaped bundles of
heath and myrtle on to the fire, and left it, and, travelling along
the other side of the ridge, made their way to their new
headquarters, where they had left the cook.

Day shone on the plain to the north for miles and miles. Looking over
The Land in the sunlight, and far away to the north, Srebnitz could see
no sign that it was not free; and for a while he wondered; and then he
realised rather slowly that, mighty though Hitler was, the curse that
he had had the power to call up only availed against man, or that,
where it blasted Nature, it harmed the green fields and forests
little more than the industries of the days of peace harmed them, and
indeed that many a scarred and pitted hillside would grow green again
and be full of birds and flowers, far sooner than the fields that
pavement and tarmac covered in miles of peaceful cities. But, however
that were, a curse lay over The Land, which Srebnitz and every one of
Hlaka's men were resolved and sworn to lift.

They came slowly, at the pace of Isabella and Angelica, over difficult
ground, to the camp that they had left the night before, further along
the range and higher up the Mountain. There all the men that had come
in the night were gathered; or, rather, partially scattered, each
near the rocks or cave that should give him cover as soon as an
aeroplane might be seen or heard. And there the cook told Hlaka of
the loss of the two men.

Hlaka remained silent: his one care was for The Land; his one
thought, liberty. If he had any sympathies to spare from that care,
they seemed not to be for men whom he knew must have showed
themselves, and who were therefore, in Hlaka's opinion, not the kind
of men who would be able to free The Land.

Then he went away to a cave to be alone with his thoughts, thoughts that
to him were what music is to musicians, or research to scientists, and
even more what prophecy is to prophets, thoughts that were solely
concerned with what the Germans would do. That they were methodical by
nature he knew, and that would tend to make them do what they had done
before, as they often did; but he knew that industry had made them
clever, up to the limits of which their minds were capable, so he knew
they would not repeat an action that had been a failure. Therefore,
Germans though they were, they would do something new.

With a strange and invisible chase the thoughts of Hlaka up there on the
Mountain tried to follow the thoughts of a German general, planning down
in the city. Whether or not he hunted his quarry down was never to be
known, though none of his men doubted that Hlaka knew.

But before the sun that day had left the morning, to slant towards
evening and the end of the Mountain, they saw a solitary figure very far
off, coming up the mountain-road. All through the afternoon they
watched him, an unarmed man in civilian clothes, till he came to the end
of the road, and from there was guided by one of Hlaka's men up to his
camp; and he was to have much to do with Hlaka's plans. He was a barber
in a small way of business in the town. Few knew him, but all greeted
him as a new comrade, and he heartily greeted them. The cook brought out
a bottle of one of their sweet wines, unknown even by name, in England,
and he drank to The Land and to Victory.

The cook had been busy all that morning till Hlaka came, teaching the
new men how to shoot at short ranges with Srebnitz's air-gun and not to
shoot at all until they were hidden, and not to make metallic noises,
such as are made by a rifle touching a rock, and not to wait and try for
the perfect shot that would hit a button at a hundred yards, but to take
the shot that was good enough when the chance occurred; and all the
things that he was able to teach clearly to men in a single morning.
But, when Hlaka came, he took the air-gun away and said that he would
use it himself, and that the men should practise with rifles, and that
any man that he could see at a hundred yards he would shoot with the
air-gun. Then he made men bring a great number of blankets to one of the
caves, and had it upholstered with curtains and a carpet for Sophia and
her aunts. And, while he was attending to this, some of the men brought
the barber to him, for he had been telling them the Germans' plans, and
they brought him for Hlaka to hear them.

Hlaka sent them all away but the barber, for he did not discuss his
plans with any of them. And when they were gone he asked what the
Germans intended to do. And the barber said that he had heard from a
German sergeant that they were not going to attack the Mountain with any
more men, but would only fire occasional shells, because they had lost
too many men on the Mountain already. And the barber, who had a
drinking-horn still in his hand with some of the sweet wine left in it,
drank again to victory, standing before Hlaka sitting on a rock.

"Did he tell you I had a rifle for you?" asked Hlaka, jerking his head
sideways towards the city.

"Yes," said the barber.

"Who?" said Hlaka.

The barber paused for an instant, and then gave some name that was not
the name of the titular Bishop of Ilion.

Then Hlaka knew that he was a spy.

Hlaka nodded his head and shrugged his right shoulder.

"It is pleasant to see the sun," said Hlaka, lifting his head a little
towards it, but not taking his eyes off the barber.

"It is indeed," said the man.

"Tell me what your masters are going to do," said Hlaka. "And if every
word you say is the truth, you shall see the sun again."

The shrug of his right shoulder had loosened his rifle, which was over
his shoulder on a strap, and brought it forward: Hlaka now held it in
both hands.

"I--I..." said the barber.

"One word that is not the truth," said Hlaka, "and it will be the
last."

The barber looked intently at him and then said: "I will tell you
everything."

"Then you shall live," said Hlaka with a smile.

"I am a poor man, and they tempted me," said the barber. And he waited
for some remark from Hlaka. But Hlaka said nothing.

And the barber went on: "They compelled me to come to the Mountain and
to find out the number of your men."

"I have sixty-one," said Hlaka.

Somehow this sudden piece of truth disconcerted the spy. He had not yet
counted the men, but he saw from Hlaka's face that it was the truth.

"And to find out your plans," continued the barber.

"I will tell you my plans," said Hlaka, "when I know theirs."

And he looked up at the sun, though one eye still watched the barber.
And that was the eye that really watched, for the glance towards the
sun was only a gesture. Once more the barber looked at Hlaka
intently, and sighed. Then he did what he had not done much for many
years, and told the truth. "They will completely surround the
Mountain with all their men," he said.

"That is right," said Hlaka. Though whether he meant that they or the
barber were adopting the right course, the barber did not know.

"Then," said the barber, "they will come up the mountain wherever there
are none of your men, and cut the mountain in two, and bring up the men
that are surrounding the empty part to strengthen the line surrounding
the part where you are. And they will have a tank on the road, to
prevent you getting to the lower slopes. And they hope to seize all the
springs without any fighting, because they think you are above the
springs. Then they will not lose a lot of men in attacking you, as they
did last time, because you will have to attack them. They know how
difficult it is to attack men lying down on the Mountain."

"How do you know all this?" said Hlaka.

"Alas," said the barber, "I am poor, it is my mtier. How can I support
myself, and a family of four children, with cutting hair and shaving in
a small street and trimming a few beards, and sometimes, God knows how
rarely, a shampoo, and that is only sixpence. God gave me two ears and I
listen to talk. And He gave me a memory. That is all. Would you starve
in a garden full of fruit? What I hear in my shop keeps me from
starving. My family and I would have starved ere now without it. Once I
heard a man say that he saw a man with a walking-stick and a particular
kind of hat and wearing a tie of certain colours walk down a certain
street. I chanced to remember the description of the man: my memory is
like that, and I passed the information on, as most men do with most
things that they hear. I described the man's tie exactly. And the man
to whom I described it paid me money that kept me and my family for
a whole day, and in comfort, and with wine for me in the evening.
Was there harm in describing a tie that a man wore? Is there military
significance in a necktie?"

"Did he escape alive?" asked Hlaka.

"What? Who?" said the barber.

"The Englishman," replied Hlaka.

"It was before the Germans entered," said the barber. "I think he
escaped."

"And now," said Hlaka, "it is your own life that is in peril."

"Chieftain," said the barber, "I have told you everything."

"Tell me more," said Hlaka.

"I know no more," said the barber.

"When will they surround the Mountain?" said Hlaka.

"God knows," said the barber. "But they expect me back tomorrow night."

"In the morning you would have told them all you had spied," said Hlaka.

"I would tell them perhaps what I saw in the Mountain," said the barber,
"like any man who goes for a long walk."

"And they would march the same day," said Hlaka.

"Perhaps the following day," said the spy.

"Who sent you?" asked Hlaka.

"Major von Wald," said the barber.

"I believe you speak the truth," said Hlaka.

"As God is over us I do," said the barber.

"Then you shall have your life," said Hlaka. And the barber knelt to
thank him.

"At a price," added Hlaka.

"Master, at any price," said the spy.

"We have an account to settle with Major von Wald," said Hlaka. "Pay
Major von Wald for us, and you shall live."

"With ... with the knife?" asked the barber.

"With the knife," said Hlaka. "His blood or yours."

"How will I do it?" asked the barber.

"It is not difficult," said Hlaka. "As I told you, I have sixty-one men.
They all know you, and you know Major von Wald. They know where you are
to be found, and you know where he is to be found. You cannot both live.
It may be," said Hlaka, "that others will have settled what we owe to
Major von Wald before you find him. In that case you will pay in some
other currency. But you are worth Major von Wald."

"I am honoured," said the barber.

"One villain for another villain," said Hlaka. "Go." And he pointed to
where some of his mountaineers were watching a little way off.

The barber went back, smiling, to the men that were watching him. What
Hlaka had said to him may have been hard; but he had heard hard words
before and, besides that, he had not a very high opinion of men, and did
not therefore set much store by their words. On the other hand his life,
which for some moments had seemed in great peril, was, at least for the
present, safe. As for Major von Wald, the matter might not be too
difficult to arrange. The barber had an ingratiating manner, and he
thought he might either approach him within reach of his heart, some
time when he was alone, or even obtain his protection against all
Hlaka's men. For a moment he thought of shaving, and of luring the
major to his shop; but his shop was too public a place, and he
dismissed that thought at once. If he could get to Germany--mighty
Germany, that held all Europe in her tremendous grasp--he would be
safe from Hlaka and all his men. And yet, turning over in his mind
and rummaging through the immense store of a spy's information,
amongst the dust of his memory, some little flashes twinkling amongst
its layers seemed to warn him, what even some statesmen did not then
know for certain, that of this mighty power in a few years time there
might be left no more than is left today of the Colossus of Rhodes.
These were the thoughts of the barber as he walked to the group of
armed men, some of whom were henceforth to watch him until Hlaka
should decide that he could be safely sent to the city to purchase
his life with that of Major von Wald.




XVI


Having got his information, Hlaka turned to supplies. He called for
the cook, and asked him how much food the new men had brought, and
what he still had in the store. Little was left. Nor was their supply
of water large enough to last more than three or four days, if the
Germans were to cut them off from the streams. His position high on
the rocky crags was good for fighting against men climbing up, but
impossible to defend against a siege.

Hlaka now had ample ammunition, not for infantry fighting in any
campaign such as has been fought in the last two hundred years, but
enough for the warfare in which he was engaged, in which no volleys were
fired, and each shot was fired close and accurately, for none of his men
dared waste bullets. Hlaka's need was for marksmen and, though he had no
hope of making a marksman in two days out of a man who could not shoot,
he counted on training good fighting material, even in so short a time,
to be able to hit a soldier at eighty yards, advancing not like a
hunter, but like a drilled man in unfamiliar country.

The material he had was the men of a race that had had some familiarity
for three thousand years with the instruments of music and battle. In
those mountains a flute might sound at any time, or a note from the
twang of a string would send a touch of mystery through the twilight;
and if you searched on those mountains for the musician you would not
find a maestro, nor anybody that was even taught by one; you would find
a shepherd, or a boy herding goats, dressed for the mountains; yet they
had the ear all right. Or show a good rifle to any of those men, and
there comes that light in his eyes at once that you see amongst
connoisseurs when some ancient and beautiful piece of china is shown to
them, or some rare carving in jade or an exquisite etching. Weapons and
song had been known so long by this people that, if you put into the
hands of one of them an instrument of war or of melody, his fingers
flickered about it waiting to be taught, if he did not well know the
way of it already. There might be some among them that knew neither the
knack of war nor of music; there might even be one, among hundreds, who
had no longings reaching out to either of those ways; but such a man
would not have gone up from spring almost to winter, from the comfort of
houses to rocks and the open stars, from safety to such a war.

Hlaka ordered now that one-half of their ammunition was to be used, if
necessary, to train the men till they could hit a match-box at eighty
yards and hide themselves from the sight of a man at that distance.

Though Hlaka's first need was the need of marksmen, he knew the
ingredients of war, and had no thought of waging it with any one of them
missing. Therefore he ordered one of his men to go down to a farm he
knew, the highest one in the Mountain, and to drive up the whole flock
of sheep that the farmer had: there were only twenty, but Hlaka
estimated that they would keep his men for more than a week.

This farmer had so far eluded the suspicions of the Germans, who
believed that he only cared for a peaceful life and cared no more for
the fortunes of his country or the fate of the world than to leave them
in the hands of the _Herrenvolk_. But all he really cared for was
liberty, and he looked to see Hlaka one day free The Land. Whatever he
had that Hlaka wanted he gave: all he asked was that when his sheep
should be required they should be driven off by armed men.

Other men Hlaka sent down the mountain road to a culvert through which
a rivulet ran, carrying bags of gun-cotton. Hlaka had also amongst his
stores a small electric battery and a hundred yards or so of wire. This
party were to conceal the gun-cotton in the culvert, and find a place of
concealment for the man who would work the electric battery.

And another man Hlaka sent down the Mountain into the plain to the
north, to make his way to another farm and to bring from it four
mules as soon as the dusk had fallen. On these four mules this man
and the three women were to travel all night to the north. There they
would find shelter in a house forty miles away, and go on the next
night and find shelter again. No house was named. They had a very
simple pass-word: it was _Heil Hitler_; and, if when the answer was
given the "r" was rolled at the end, then all was well and the
mountaineer only had to say "In the name of Hlaka." And, after that,
all would be done that could be done for honoured guests in a
household of a naturally hospitable people.

While Hlaka was making his plans and giving orders, Srebnitz walked
with Gregor among the bare rocks of those peaks. It was good land for
fighting; that is to say, for those that fought high up, against men
who climbed from below. But it was bad land in which to live, land to
which the wild sheep went, not because they liked bare mountain, but
because they feared men: they would have chosen the green lawns, had
they had the choice. And now Liberty walked in the lands that the
wild sheep knew, because the green plains of Europe were not for
them or her. Very far off to the north, they saw the line of another
range of mountains, a paler blue than the sky.

Gregor asked Srebnitz about the fight in the house, and Srebnitz
began to tell him, but very soon he drifted away from the subject.
"Sophia," he said. "You saw her."

"Yes," said Gregor.

"She is very beautiful," said Srebnitz.

"Yes," Gregor replied.

He wanted to tell Gregor how beautiful, but the right words would not
come; so he sighed and turned to another subject: "Why did the Germans
want to accuse her aunts?" he asked.

"Because they found out," said Gregor. "Some spy must have told them."

"Told them what?" asked Srebnitz.

"That they are Hlaka's sisters."

"Hlaka's sisters!" exclaimed Srebnitz.

The old ladies with their knitting and easy chairs in the comfortable,
tidy room. Was that the blood that led the mountaineers, and defied the
whole might of Germany? He thought for a moment. Then he saw that it
was. Their quiet calm house, their serene faces, their garden and the
old fruit-trees, their Dresden china, German though it was, and their
old and orderly ways--all these things must be against Hitler; and if he
roused such blood to fight, might he not call up such a figure as Hlaka,
to defend gardens and quiet rooms to the last, even on the bare
Mountain? Yes, he saw now that their brother might be such as Hlaka.
And then another thought surged into his mind.

"Then Sophia?" he blurted out.

"She is his daughter," said Gregor.

"Oh, yes," said Srebnitz, trying to conceal his astonishment.

And Gregor said something about Sophia's mother, who had died long ago,
a woman of the mountains they could dimly see to the north; but
Srebnitz, with his mind flashing with new visions of Sophia, never heard
what he said. No scientist had taught him that all the metals in the sun
are to be found in Earth and her sister planets, but some instinct surer
than science had given him a glimpse of the unity of Creation, so that
he often saw some trivial event of his everyday life mirrored in stars
or mountains; and he suddenly thought now of a day when he had first
gone to the grey crags of the Mountain and found, where there was no
grass and scarcely soil, a pink rock-rose upon a precipice. And it had
for a moment surprised him, as it surprised him now to hear that the
fair and slender Sophia was the daughter of rugged Hlaka.




XVII


At about sunset the mountaineers moved along the Mountain some way
from their caves, and there prepared a big fire out of oak-scrub to
cook their supper and to keep them warm and cheerful while they ate
it; for they still had enough provisions left for a meal of meat.
There they all gathered, and there Isabella, Angelica and Sophia sat
near Hlaka on a heap of blankets.

Srebnitz was anxious lest a shell should come while Sophia was there,
for the fire was sending up a large column of smoke, and even the light
of it began to glow as the twilight faded away, which it does so soon in
that latitude. But looking at the others he soon saw that they were
content, noticing that they trusted in Hlaka; and it was evident that,
whether from experience or prophecy, Hlaka knew that the German guns
were not going to fire that night. Indeed they never enquired how Hlaka
got his knowledge: it was enough for them that he knew. And one may
mention that what Hlaka knew was a very simple piece of knowledge: he
had their spy with him and the spy was expected to stay till the
following evening, and the Germans would not shoot at their own spy,
unless they had something special to gain by it.

Only two men knew, besides Hlaka, that the barber was a spy, and he
did not know that they knew. They sat near him and had their rifles,
but they pretended that they were on watch for aeroplanes. All the
rest of the mountaineers treated him as a comrade, and so did the
two men that knew.

With the fire between him and Hlaka, and the men about him talking
cheerfully to him, the barber's spirits soon rose from any depth to
which Hlaka may have downcast them, and he talked and listened as he
was wont to talk and listen in the shop where he plied his two
trades. At the height of his mirth one of his two guards turned to a
man by his side and asked him to bring from their stores a bottle of
a certain wine made only on one small island, a wine much treasured
by the people of that land; and the man who went to get it wondered
that so much honour was to be paid to the latest member of their
band. But the man who guarded him saw that the wine that he had
already had loosened the locks on his lips and that this rare vintage
would open them wide and recklessly.

The bottle was brought and the drinking-horn of the spy was filled with
wine, and he drank and became still merrier. And, when he was humming a
song, his two guards brought him before Hlaka, hoping for more
information. But the face of Hlaka in the firelight suddenly sobered
him. And he said that he was a poor man, and unworthy to speak with the
chieftain. And they led him away from Hlaka to the other side of the
fire, and sat near, watching him.

Had a man passed that camp-fire and noticed all the men that were
gathered about it, but without the glance that observes deeply, he
might have reported that the happiest man in the group was the barber
and that the saddest was Srebnitz. And indeed his report might have
been true, for there is an exhilaration about the presence of Death,
and the barber had been very near him; whereas the shining peaks of
love overlook abysses, in the shadows of which the hopes of Srebnitz
were wandering, as he saw the preparations now being made for
Sophia's long journey. He did not know when they would meet again.
He did not know how she would welcome him if ever they did, and he
wished to speak with her so as to get some clue, but he could not
lead her away from the terrible Hlaka. It was Sophia herself that
gave him the opportunity that he had thought was lost; when, just as
she and her aunts were leaving the fire, having said farewell to Hlaka,
she pitied the man that was to accompany them, because of all the
baggage he had to carry; and, looking over her shoulder as though at
random, to speak to the nearest man, her glance fell upon Srebnitz.

"Help him to carry some of those blankets, please," said Sophia. "He'll
never be able to manage so many."

The man protested that he could easily carry the blankets; but Srebnitz
came, and carried one of the blankets down the Mountain towards where
the mules were waiting.

"Don't hurry," said Sophia, "you have so much to carry."

And this was true in a way, for Srebnitz had his rifle as well as the
blanket; and the light was leaving the rocks, so that fast walking was
difficult. And besides that, thought Srebnitz, Sophia cannot have
noticed exactly what I am carrying. So he went slowly, as she told
him, walking last of all. And presently Sophia dropped back a little
behind her aunts. Isabella glanced round at her, but after all said
nothing. As they came to the line at which they first saw moths
flying, and they were past the bare rocks, and shrubs began to
appear, Sophia was walking with Srebnitz.

"The chieftain is your father," said Srebnitz.

A momentary look, almost of alarm, crossed Sophia's face, as though she
had learned to fear such a statement. But the Mountain was all round her
now, and she smiled. "Yes," she said, "but never mention that anywhere
outside the Mountain."

"Why not?" asked Srebnitz.

"Reprisals," answered Sophia.

"Did they know when they came to your house?" asked Srebnitz.

"They suspected," said Sophia. "And they wanted to make my aunts
confess."

They walked in silence awhile, for Srebnitz was a little awed by knowing
that Sophia was the daughter of that Consort of Liberty, and that she
was of the royal blood of the Mountain.

Sadness prolonged their silence. Sophia was sad because she knew that as
she went down that slope she went to a land enslaved, and upon Srebnitz
the coming parting with Sophia weighed heavily.

Then the mountaineers sang by their fire on the height, one of the
ballads of that ancient people, and the song reached to them, welling
over the Mountain; and, though they could not distinguish the syllables,
they knew the simple words. Indeed the words were too simple to show
forth in print, to dare to challenge the gaze of a reader's eyes, and it
is probable that they had never been written down. They were something
about a goat that was lost from the herd, and about a young goatherd who
searched for it; but without the accompanying music on the stringed
instruments of that land, and the note of the horn of the goatherd,
there is really nothing to say of it. And yet it called up for Srebnitz
and Sophia echoes out of the vast of lost ages, and brought a voice as
of The Land itself, babbling perhaps in infancy, from over the heave of
the years, that spoke from the days when all their people were free, to
those that were free still, though only upon that mountain.

To Sophia there was all the romance about Srebnitz of one who helped to
guard the liberty that The Land had had for ages; and somehow she found
another glow that illumined him, from no deed of his own, but from hers;
for she had helped him on his way when he was lost and pursued, on the
night that they first met; and this too cast upon him some of the
enchantment that we mean by the word romance.

She to him was nothing to be so logically described, but he thought of
her, and remembered her long after, as so clearly associated with the
grandeur of the crags, and with the beauty of leaves and flowers and
wandering moths, so mingled with the last of the twilight that shone in
the sky and dimly gleamed on her face, that it might be said that his
memories gazed towards her as to an incarnation of the Mountain. Its
rocky slopes did not seem too harsh for the grace of Sophia, for he
thought of the wild beauty of the flowers that they put forth; and,
whether he knew it or not, there was a tenderness in the grim Hlaka's
fierce love for The Land, that had blossomed in the beauty of Sophia.

Their talk was of trivial things, the mere words trivial as the words
of the song that they heard above them ringing down the ages; yet those
words would have told of time-outlasting things, if they could have
spoken aright of the vision of those two minds, which saw the future as
a glittering land where roads ran golden with sunlight, and the past as
a splendid gloom that romance had illumined, while the present shone
between them in an enchanted glory.

When planets shone, and one or two of the stars, and a glimmer of light
was still in the western sky, they came where, on the rough feet of the
mountain, two of Hlaka's men were waiting with the four mules.

As Srebnitz heard the stir of the hooves that moved as the long ears
caught the sound of feet on the mountain, Srebnitz knew that the long
story of his days with Sophia was over, until some time far from his
knowledge. The long story. How many days was it? How many hours? But
Srebnitz did not count it in days or hours. The years of his life had
run smoothly, with new experience gradually opening before him, as his
boyhood grew to maturity. And suddenly manhood had come to him like an
avalanche; when, instead of being cared for by his father and mother,
and guided by the laws and ways of his country, he saw his parents led
away, not to return, and he had to save his country, whose laws were
lost. In such a time there had flashed on him the beauty of Sophia,
shining in the midst of disaster; and events had followed of a magnitude
and with a rapidity that so crowded his days, that they were not to be
compared with the events of his other days, but rather matched, in the
making of the destiny of Srebnitz, the events of as many of his years.
In his memory one of the days since the Germans came loomed as large as
that; and it may well be that in his life the time of those three or
four days was condensed or intensified in such a way as to make it the
equal of two or three idle years. This we can never know, since we have
no way of measuring time, except by the ticking of clocks and the
movement of sun and stars. There are, or have been, alchemists with the
power to condense time, showing that, like air and unlike water, it has
the property of being able to be so treated. Aeschylus, Euripides,
Sophocles, Aristophanes and Shakespeare were some of these: they
condensed and intensified the events of lifetimes, so that anyone
watching a piece of the work of any of these for a few hours would see
and feel, with jubilance or in sorrow, but in either case profoundly, as
much of the way of man, and the behaviour towards him of Destiny, as
they would see in reading the most careful record of the whole life of
many a man of their own time and country. And there is another besides
those I have mentioned who illuminates man's story and intensifies hours
and days with the same tremendous power that these had, one whom four of
them called Ares and the fifth called Mars.

In times thus enchanted, and among terrible splendours, moved
Srebnitz to his meeting with Sophia. He did not feel his emotions as
men feel them who walk calmly down pavements in times of peace, and
he did not count the days that he had known her as the days that they
mark on almanacks, but rather as the people in a theatre count time,
while a lifetime passes before them in an evening. And it seemed a
long, long story.

And what of Sophia's feelings? She was silent as they went down the last
of the slope; she mounted a mule; Isabella and Angelica mounted too, and
the mountaineer that was to accompany them. Hlaka's men let go of the
bridles, and Sophia with a quick movement kissed her hand to Srebnitz.
Isabella turned her head as quickly upon Sophia, and was about to speak,
when the two mountaineers that had been holding the mules took off their
hats and bowed low to her and Angelica and kissed a hand to each.

"Is all the world going mad?" said Isabella.

Angelica sighed and answered, "Perhaps."

And in the light of that information it seemed that Isabella decided to
humour it, and kissed her hand to the man who had kissed his to her. And
Angelica, before the darkness quite hid her, did the same as her sister.

From the sorrowful border between plain and mountain where the parting
had been, Srebnitz and the two mountaineers climbed back to the
hospitality of the crags.




XVIII


When Srebnitz and the two mountaineers got back to the point from which
they had started red embers were still glowing, and still no shell had
been fired at them. But Hlaka and all his men had left, and gone back to
their caves. Thither the three men followed.

It may have been from the sadness of his mind, overcast by his parting
from Sophia, that the thought arose, or it may be that the waterless
slope he trod brought a plain truth close to his eyes; but, whatever its
origin, Srebnitz for the first time felt doubt. To fight with sixty-one
men against five thousand, in country of which the enemy would know
nothing, seemed not impossible when led by Hlaka; but three things go to
the making of black gunpowder, and a few more to the making of war, and
one of these was water; and it was very clear that those peaks could not
be held long. And then into the sadness of Srebnitz's mind there came
insidiously, like deadly insects to marshes, the words of the traitor
that had made his speech in the market-place on the day the Germans
marched in: they could not fight against tanks in the plains. The
oak-scrub and the myrtle between the two, where water was to be had,
Hlaka had for some reason abandoned; no one knew why, for he never
discussed his plans, but made them from his experience of past years and
whatever that may have taught him of the future.

"What shall we do for water?" asked Srebnitz of one of the two men that
were with him.

"Hlaka will see to that," said the man, and something in his tone warned
Srebnitz that his doubt was being detected; and doubts about leaders are
useless, for victory will not come to doubting followers if the leader
is right, and if he is wrong they are all lost in any case. No one else
could lead this little band against the German forces: it was Hlaka or
nothing, and Srebnitz said no more. But still the doubt persisted. Did
it come to Srebnitz from sadness? Did sadness raise phantoms before his
eyes? Or did it brighten them to see more clearly a truth that should
already be clear enough? Srebnitz never knew.

He went on in silence till they came to the caves. Tired, in the late
night, some miles from civilisation, there came on Srebnitz a feeling he
often felt in those days with Hlaka, though he never expressed it in
words, a feeling of home close to him just when he needed it most, the
sudden comfortable realisation that the rocks and the stars, the dark
peaks of the Mountain and the crisp night air, were what roof and walls
are to less free men.

He went to the cave in which his blankets were, and wrapped them both
round him and lay down. A small sack made him a pillow, and he kept on
his boots, not in order to be instantly ready, but merely because the
slight increase of comfort he might have obtained by removing them was
one of the trifles out of a past life which he forgot on the Mountain,
as he seemed to come closer to eternal things such as the stars and
liberty. A cold wind running into the cave and searching amongst its
nooks, something he once would have looked upon as a draught and as
being annoying and hostile, was now to him more like a neighbour, a
friendly spirit resident in the Mountain: he felt it passing over his
hands and face, and heard its low whisperings for a little while, and
very soon was asleep.

He was called in the morning by Aurora herself, for his cave faced to
the east, and as soon as the sun leapt up the whole of the camp was
awake. There was no matter of clocks here: as soon as the sun was
risen the day had started: the day was part of their life, and they
started with it.

Hlaka was already out on the Mountain, where he had long been inspecting
the rocks. Gregor and Iskander came by the cave and called to Srebnitz,
who walked with them to the place among the rocks at which they were to
have breakfast, which had been cooked over a fire nearly a mile away.
The sheep had arrived during the night, as Gregor told Srebnitz, and
three or four had been killed and the rest hidden in a cave. Srebnitz
heard no sound of them, and wondered in what cave they were hidden. But
Gregor stopped his questionings. It seemed that such things were not to
be talked about. In reality the bulk of the flock had gone down the
Mountain, and was taken northward all night by one of the new members of
Hlaka's band who, true though he was to the cause of liberty and of
Europe, was not able to be brought up in so short a time as there was to
spare to Hlaka's standard for marksmen.

In a small ravine they all breakfasted, while one sentry watched,
without a bayonet or even a rifle: he watched only with his ears, at an
instrument that could hear aeroplanes at a great distance. No evil thing
having yet befallen the spy, the relief so exalted him that his spirits
were the highest of any one of the band.

On Hlaka's face, when he returned from the rocks, there was no
expression but one, which seemed to hide from all the men around him a
personality sunk deep in thought. After breakfast he beckoned to the
spy, and walked a little way with him, and when they were out of hearing
of the rest Hlaka said: "Your friends expect you this evening, so we
must lose you. There are few things you can tell them about me that they
will wish to know. But if you tell them any of those..."

"I will tell them nothing, master," said the spy.

"Perhaps not," said Hlaka. "There are men that have told them about my
movements; but you will not meet those men."

"I do not keep such company, master," the barber answered.

"You will keep such company," said Hlaka, "if you tell them what I do
not wish to be known."

"Never, master."

Hlaka said nothing and a fear came over the barber, a mere hint of it,
like the chill from one waif of a wing of Fear. And he said: "Where are
they, master?"

"They are all dead," said Hlaka.

A silence fell on the barber.

"Your name," said Hlaka, "is Trigoloutros; your shop is 44 in the Street
of the Martyrs; and we can find you at any time."

"I know what I have to do," said Trigoloutros.

"That is well," said Hlaka, and returned to his men.

Left alone, the spy loitered about the rocks for a while as though
undecided whether to wait to return till the hour that his masters
expected him, or whether to accept at once what seemed like Hlaka's
dismissal. He glanced at the figure of Hlaka going back to the caves,
and took a step in his direction, then suddenly turned and went the
other way. And those that watched the road during the morning saw him
walking out of the Mountain towards the town.

All day Hlaka continued his preparations, as he seemed to have done all
the night, for no one saw Hlaka sleep. At the same time that he chose
and examined his battlefield he superintended the drill of his recruits,
or what stood them instead of drill, which was to learn to go unseen and
to shoot with moderate accuracy at short ranges. No march past of the
most splendid troops in the world would have pleased Hlaka so much as a
march past, through rocks and myrtle, that was invisible from the
saluting-base. At the same time he sent men to draw such stores as he
needed from what may be called his depots. For it was only to the
superficial eye that Hlaka appeared to be without commissariat, and
Hlaka drew his food and stores as he needed them from his depots as
regularly as any leader in the field, even if the men of his
commissariat moved irregularly, and even surreptitiously, to the
farms that held his stores. No forms had to be filled in, no accounts
kept by a quartermaster: what Hlaka needed was given him by the whole
country, in return for which he was one day to give liberty to The
Land. Three or four ropes twenty yards long were what some of his men
were now seeking among the farms below the Mountain. The peaks
towards the city went down among bare grey rocks with a great sweep
like those of draperies, till they came to the oak-scrub and myrtle
and then to the heaths; but to the northward there were amongst the
slopes some belts of rock that were sheer.

About halfway down the Mountain on that side one of these precipices ran
for a few hundred yards without any gap or cleft cut by avalanche or
water, and was fifty or sixty feet high. A few pine-trees crowned the
top of it. It was not for defence that Hlaka had chosen this precipice,
for no defence was needed on that part of the Mountain, since no one
could climb the precipice, or, if he did, would be choosing the most
difficult part of the slope and would waste the time of the whole
attack, if the rest were compelled to keep pace with him. Equally
difficult it was to descend, and for this reason Hlaka chose it for his
line of retreat, when the time should come for retreating. No one would
expect him to retire over a sixty-foot precipice, and it was here that
he tied his ropes to the trunks of the pine-trees and coiled them up
into heaps at the butts of the trees. That was to the north of the
crags, where the far blue mountains could be seen shining faintly.

To Srebnitz and the men who had joined Hlaka before him he explained
what he meant to do, and what the Germans would do. "We shall crush them
with numbers," he said. A curious remark from a man who was about to
fight with sixty-one men against five thousand, and yet he was right
enough, for on a terrain that he knew well, wherever he moved his men
they would be overwhelmingly superior to part of a line that was
surrounding a mountain. Had he been able to find water at that altitude
he would have probably held out among those peaks for as long as the war
lasted. Amongst the myrtle and heath, where the water was, Hlaka had
decided that he could not hold out indefinitely, because the Germans
could have taken the peaks and fired down on him, while others came up
from below: Hlaka did not tell his men this, for he did not discuss his
plans with them, but that was the reason he had gone to the higher
ground above the springs of the streams. Then Hlaka stood and gazed at
the far blue mountains, till his men wondered if he meant to make so
great a journey through land that the enemy held.

"But are they in The Land?" asked one of them.

For it is a small country and, though the nearer peaks of the blue
mountains were inside its borders, a part of the range ran into other
lands.

"There are no frontiers any longer," said Hlaka. "It matters nothing
whether we are in our own Land or in lands that are for us, or even in
those that are for the enemy. Where there are mountains, there will be
free men. But there are no more frontiers."

"How shall we get there, Chieftain?" asked one of his men.

"The wild sheep went," replied Hlaka, and deigned to say nothing more to
explain how men should do what sheep had done.




XIX


When Hlaka and his men came over the crags to the rocky slope on which
they were camped, far below which lay the city, they saw a sight
infrequent upon that mountain in times of peace and still rarer in time
of war, for a taxi was coming up the mountain road. Hlaka's sentries,
lying behind rocks with their rifles, watched it with curiosity. Before
it got to the end of the road it stopped and a man got out, whom even at
that distance they recognized as Trigoloutros by his slinking gait. He
walked on up the rest of the road and started climbing the bare slope
towards them among the large rocks, while the taxi began to turn and,
when it had done that, waited. Trigoloutros saw no one as he climbed;
but, when he was about in the midst of Hlaka's force, one of them came
up to him and led him to Hlaka. Hlaka was sitting now in front of his
cave on a pile of sacks.

"Master," said Trigoloutros, "I have found something that you would wish
to know, and have come to tell you."

"How did you get the taxi?" asked Hlaka.

The spy looked towards it in a surprised way, as though he wondered too.
"I hailed it," he said, "and asked the man to drive me up to your
Excellency."

"How do you know what news I wish to hear?" asked Hlaka.

"Master," said Trigoloutros, "it is my mtier to know such things. And I
hoped to please you by coming at once."

"What is your news?" said Hlaka.

"They will execute the Bishop of Ilion at dawn tomorrow," the spy said.

"Where is he now?" said Hlaka.

"In the prison," said Trigoloutros.

"Where will they execute him?"

"By the execution wall in the pine-wood," said the spy.

"You must go to von Wald," said Hlaka, "and tell him that we are coming
to rescue the Bishop at dawn."

"Tell him that you are coming?" said the spy.

"All of us," said Hlaka. "And then you may say to him what you will. You
barbers can talk. But, whatever you say, he must give the order for the
Bishop to be executed at once instead of at dawn. That will be about
midnight, when you go to see the major. Some of us will be there, behind
the wall in the pine-wood. They will bring the Bishop to the wall with
the firing-party in front of it. The Germans will expect one volley, and
one volley there will be; and that will be the last play of that sort,
or of any sort, that will be seen by that firing-party. Be sure that you
do not fail with Major von Wald. For if the Bishop dies..." and Hlaka
gave one look at the spy and saw that further words were not needed.

"I will do my best, master," said Trigoloutros.

Hlaka said nothing.

The pine-wood to which the spy referred was one that came right into
the town and to the very wall of the prison. Cities have strange things
in them; Constantine in Algeria has a profound ravine, Bristol and
Dublin have the sea, Edinburgh has a precipice, and there are paved
streets that suddenly turn up a mountain; indeed cities have many
surprises: this one has a small forest.

"I will do my best, master," Trigoloutros said again.

Hlaka gave him another look, but did not speak. And the look suddenly
awoke so much fear in the spy, that his wiles were all awakened from the
lairs in which they slept lightly in the hidden dark of his brain, and
he pondered cunningly how to lure Major von Wald to give the fatal order
that should save the Bishop of Ilion. He smiled at Hlaka, hoping to
placate him, for Hlaka's look still frightened him; but the look froze
his smile, and he saw that there was nothing for it but to do as he had
been told.

"I will do it, master," said Trigoloutros.

Hlaka nodded. And the spy turned to go. Before he went Hlaka said: "Do
not get von Wald's order till you see a fire here on the Mountain. Watch
the Mountain. When the fire is lit we shall be ready."

"I will watch, master," said Trigoloutros.

Hlaka said no more, and the spy went down the rocks towards the road and
his taxi.

Then Hlaka called to Srebnitz, Iskander and Gregor, and the cook, and
three more of his best shots, and they all had a meal together before
the rest, while Hlaka told them his plan.

They were to march, as Hlaka's army marched, not in fours but in ones,
not by their right or by their left, but each man guiding himself; not
marching upright, but slipping from doorpost to doorpost, running in
bare feet on pavement, hiding in gardens, and then running on again:
they were to take dark blankets, and wear them as cloaks, with their
rifles under their cloaks, and each man must have his knife in his hand,
but lying hidden along the arm. They were to meet in the pine-wood
behind the low white wall, in front of which Hitler's men carried out
their executions. A little outside the edge of the town where a few
fruit-trees stood amidst open country, nearly the whole of the rest of
Hlaka's force would wait, so that, if they had to fight their way back,
they would not have far to go before they could outnumber any pursuers.

They were ready as soon as twilight touched the Mountain. And, as soon
as the light from the sunset was dimmer than that of the moon, the eight
men moved down the slope through myrtle and heath, aiming for a part of
the town a long way to the left of the end through which they had come
before, that is to say to the east. Birds were flying back to the trees
as they went, and bats were about before they came to the town. They
were moving through light by which men could not be seen at a distance.

As they came nearer the town the night came with them, and they moved
among shadows, less visible than the moths that rose from the heath they
disturbed, to sail upon swift pale wings that gleamed in the moonlight.
When they were close to the town's edge there was that touch of blue on
white walls that is part of the moon's enchantment. All was quiet in the
town amongst whose municipal by-laws was one that imposed death for
being out after sunset, except for the enemy, the boots of whose patrols
sounded now and again through the stillness.

It was a little city, although a capital, perhaps not greatly larger
than Canterbury. Two or three small streets were all they had to cross
before they came to the little forest that lay in the heart of the town.
A black cat stole into the town down a little street, heard marching
feet in front and stopped to listen, and slipped into a garden among
magnolias and lemon-trees: Gregor, whose dark shape, with bare feet,
moved also along that street, did the same as the cat had done. And
Srebnitz, who was a few yards away, copied Gregor. When the street was
hushed again, all three ran on.

To anyone watching from a window of that street the night would have
seemed full of shadows, as does any moonlit night; and amongst those
shadows were Hlaka and the rest of his eight men. All of them came,
unseen by any German, to the pine-wood that, so strangely in a city,
sheltered Nature even by day, and by night was such a place as might
harbour yet, so far as one could imagine, whatever ancient spirits
had ever blessed The Land; and wanderers in that wood when the world
was at peace felt they were nearer to things that lurked at the edge
of their understanding, and were nearer to unknown shapes that the
poets had seen, than most people in other cities may hope to come.
Right up to the very walls the forest came, as though Nature here
were not afraid of man, nor man hostile to Nature. The little
white-washed wall, barely five feet high and built of rounded stones,
that ran into it for a little way and then stopped as though lost in
the forest, was not sophisticated enough to jar on the calm of the
pines, and looked as though it could never scare a dryad. It was
against this wall that the Germans were accustomed to place any men
or women that they desired to execute.

Hlaka had signalled with an electric torch to men behind him just before
he came to the pines, and they had flashed the signal on to the Mountain
and a fire was burning now on one of the peaks. Hlaka drew up his men
shoulder to shoulder along the wall on the far side from the prison, and
stole softly away through the wood like a creature of fable. Softly he
slipped out into the streets of the town, and came to the street in
which Srebnitz's parents had lived.

There he waited listening, ready to hide if a patrol should come, but
expecting another step. And the other step was heard. It was the barber.
And he passed by Hlaka in the dark without seeing him, as men often went
by Hlaka. And Hlaka put his left hand over the barber's mouth, and
rapped his right hand above his heart, and whispered in his ear, "It
will be like that, if..." And when he lifted his left hand, and the
barber could breathe again, and was about to protest that never would he
betray Hlaka, Hlaka said "Hush," and slipped back among shadows again,
and returned to his men in the forest.

There are men whom those in high places receive at any time; for those
in high places cannot choose with whom they will associate, as easily as
others can choose. Trigoloutros was always sure of being received by
such. He knocked on the door of the house that had been Srebnitz's home,
two quick light knocks followed by two heavy slow ones, and the door was
opened at once, and the spy slunk in.

"Master," said Trigoloutros, "the disaffected men, the bandits, have
found out about the Bishop, and they will rescue him at dawn with their
whole force, unless..."

"Unless?" said the major.

"Unless they should be forestalled," said the spy. "They believe the
execution will be at dawn."

"So it will," said the major.

"Then they will rescue him," said the spy.

"By what road will they come?" said Major von Wald.

"Master, one cannot tell with Hlaka's men," said the spy. "But they will
come at dawn."

"Is this true?" said the major.

"Master, I swear it is true," said the spy. "How should I lie to so
important an officer, when a few hours will reveal everything? If
Hlaka's men are not soon on their way from the Mountain I have lied to
you, master, and do not deserve to live. If Hlaka's men do not come you
will know. How should I dare to lie?"

"I will send out men to stop them," said the major, and his hand went to
a telephone that was now in the room.

"Master," said Trigoloutros so plaintively, and so appealingly
stretching out his hands, that the major turned to him and did not lift
the receiver, "they will slip round in the dark. We cannot tell by what
way they will come. By daylight they could never get back, if they
waited by the execution-wall and the Bishop did not come."

The major paused and was silent, and did not lift the receiver. When
Trigoloutros saw that he had got the idea he said no more and left it
all to the major, who presently lifted the receiver and got on to the
prison and said: "Let the Bishop be executed at once."

That was all. And Trigoloutros began to protest again that the coming of
Hlaka and his men to the town would prove that he spoke the truth, as he
always did, at any rate to the Germans. But those that have the entre
to high places for such reasons as passed-in the barber, stay in such
places no longer than their enchantment is able to work. The enchantment
was the information he brought and, this having been given, there was no
more welcome for Trigoloutros; so he tried to smile, and he made a bow,
and was soon shown out, and went back to his shop holding a pass in his
hand which entitled him to be in the streets at night, and live.




XX


Dmitripoulos, titular Bishop of Ilion, had been arrested the day before
and tried that morning by a German court-martial that had sentenced him
to death.

The Bishop had not entirely understood the charges, but there was no
doubt that he was guilty. He had the idea that he received his orders
only from the head of his Church, and that the head of his Church was a
higher power even than Hitler. Consequently all orders he received from
the Germans, although heard with the utmost politeness, were, if they
clashed with the ritual or discipline of his church, invariably
ignored. So it was not long before a German sergeant and two soldiers
with fixed bayonets had called at the Bishop's house, and were
smilingly received by the Bishop, whom they marched off to prison.
From this he was brought next day before the court-martial, to whose
president he bowed, and then listened to a charge with a great many
clauses, many of which appeared true.

The Bishop found it difficult to defend himself without impoliteness,
and against some of the charges for this reason he made no defence
whatever. But it is unlikely that his defence against these would have
been more successful than the defence that he did make against the rest,
and death was monotonously the penalty for each of them. There were
twenty charges, and the court-martial found the Bishop guilty of all,
and sentenced him to death; and he bowed again and was led away.

Back in his cell in the prison the Bishop reflected on many things. His
thoughts, intensified by the nearness of death, looked keenly into the
present, the past and the future. He saw vividly the strength of Germany
in the present, and how armies, from a force amounting to millions, sent
into small countries, could easily crush them and could hold them by
the terrible methods such as he himself had experienced, which paralyzed
the nerves of weaker men, leaving them helpless, while some that were
weak and cunning were driven by fear actually to work for the terror
that was oppressing them. Into the future he looked with singular
clearness, perhaps scarcely to be expected in a man without military
knowledge, and saw how the methods that made the Germans so powerful in
the present would drive them forth like pariahs in the future from all
lands, back to their own.

His thoughts, as they flitted backwards and forwards through time, swift
as a butterfly caught in a net, saw Hitler as a colossus of granite,
vaster than any image that Egyptian monarchs had left: he saw that
colossus again a little while hence, a little further on through the
years that he viewed, shattered by its fall and its own great weight,
and lying broken so small that flowers came up through the pieces and
the world grew fair again.

Then his thoughts turned from these things, from the dark present and
from the ruin yet to come to the colossus that darkened it, and they
looked only into the past, and to the beauty of The Land before the
colossus came. These days were before Hitler had ever attacked Russia,
and the Bishop can have had little to guide his insight into the future,
unless it was sheer prophecy.

And now he turned to the past. He had very serene memories, and his
thoughts travelled as brightly down them as winged things riding a
sunbeam. They passed through dim churches in which small lamps glowed
and flashes of light came from silver and gold in ikons, and out beyond
into earlier days before he had been a priest, and even a long while
before, back as far as scenes that till now he thought were forgotten.

The thoughts were simple and clear, and might be told, but not in one
volume; for these last thoughts that ran swiftly over the years,
looking down at the days of them from the altitude of his last hours,
were more numerous than can be told of in one book, even by a pen
that was able to do them justice. There was material there for many
books and many poems. Indeed a writer searching for human thoughts
rising up from the earth's surface, under which their roots go down
beyond reach of the eye, is like a botanist looking for flowers on a
prairie that goes far beyond the horizon: if he gather a few and
bring them home unwithered, those he must leave ungathered, and even
unseen, are in millions beyond computation. So the thoughts of the
Bishop of Ilion on this day were more than could be gathered by any
pen, and so far as we know are lost; but then we do not know.

Very early that afternoon such sunlight as came to his cell through
the small barred window began to fade away, but no brightness passed
from the scenes of his youth in gardens that he remembered; rather,
in the dimmer light his inner vision strengthened, as if it had been
a little dazzled by visible light, and he saw more clearly yet the
light of the days long past. Alas that there must be many men in
various lands, sitting thus in prison close to their last hour, with
a German sentry outside.

Once the gaoler came in to bring the Bishop his dinner. He was a
compatriot of the Bishop, a native of The Land, and had been gaoler
there for years: when the Germans came they employed him at his old
work without question. He had had no especial interest in the
Germans, or much knowledge of them, or of anything outside the city,
but when they came they took to each other at once. There seemed
something in his work and something in Hitler's, if one may compare
very small things with great, that were attuned to each other; and
so, although in a very humble way, he felt a sympathy for the
authority that had dominion of most of Europe.

The Bishop asked him what time dawn would be, and this the gaoler
knew well, for he had lately called many of his guests at an hour
that got them ready in time for the dawn, and he calculated roughly
that it was two minutes later each day. He told the Bishop, and the
Bishop thanked him.

Then the gaoler went out with his keys and locked the door, and the
Bishop was left alone again with his memories: like returning swallows
seeing the eaves they knew, his memories crossed the years to red-tiled
villages under the hills of The Land and by the edge of old
cork-forests, into whose glades they went among the splendour of forests
owing nothing to man; and whether they flew to these glades or through
gardens that man had beautified, always there rose at the edge of all
scenes that his memory saw a distant pale-blue line of wrinkled
mountains, that seemed to be seated gravely watching The Land as a
summer's day went by, and as the centuries crossed it. The sight of
those mountains that many years of gazing at them had left so clear in
that vision that we call memory helped the Bishop to look more easily
upon time than he could have looked at it with a finite mind, were his
mind unaided by these mighty shapes that seemed to him to be somewhere
midway between time and eternity. And the beauty of them seemed to
promise well to his hopes; for, if they really stood between time and
eternity, the beauty of this door at the end of time was full of promise
of what might be beyond.

Sometimes among his thoughts a dark fear would glide, as to how it would
be at dawn, shadowing and chilling these bright scenes for some moments,
but there were serene spaces amongst his memories to which he was able
to turn where these fears did not follow, and mostly these serene spaces
lay under the blue mountains. And beyond those mountains, beyond The
Land, beyond the world--what was there?

He had set aside much of the night for prayer, for he did not mean to
sleep; and now evening was coming on, and with it darkness in the cell.
In this darkness he saw past days with the greatest clearness; and it is
here that the volumes were needed and the enchanted pen, if any justice
were to be done to all the tales to be told, that he saw as he searched
the past. Nor could the life of any man be told adequately without many
volumes and an enchanted pen, for the thoughts of men are the material
for poetry, wherever they can be seen and their swift flight overtaken.

At midnight the Bishop's meditations were disturbed by the sound of the
lock of his door, and the gaoler returned. He was almost a little shy,
some decent sense revealing to him how much he intruded.

"It is to be tonight instead of at dawn," he said.

"When?" asked the Bishop.

"Now," said the gaoler.

"But that gives me no time for my prayers," said the Bishop.

The gaoler shrugged his shoulders and looked down at the floor. Then the
steps of three men marching were heard in the passage outside.

"But I am not yet ready," said the Bishop.

The men marched in at that moment, a corporal and two other soldiers,
and a glance at their faces showed to the Bishop of Ilion that no
words of his could have any effect on them or even convey any
meaning. And at the same moment he saw that the words were untrue: he
was ready; he had always been ready. He would have liked to have said
more prayers, but he would have liked many things which could not
possibly thrive beneath the weight of what now crushed The Land. He
saw in two flashes all these decent things crushed, and also some
sort of essence arising up from their ruin, which should utterly
overcome the force that now crushed them.

"I beg your pardon," he said. "I am ready."

And the corporal marched him away between the two men. Some sort of
regret came to the gaoler, like a flower growing on rock; but it passed,
like a flower withered. The prison gate was at the edge of the
pine-wood and, when it was opened, three more soldiers joined them.
There was an officer also, waiting outside, and while the three men fell
in behind the Bishop the officer walked into the wood. The party went no
more than forty yards, when the corporal halted them. Then he led the
Bishop up to the white wall and began to blindfold him.

"What need in the dark?" said the Bishop.

But the corporal did not seem to understand. The firing-party were
only a few yards away, on account of the darkness of the night, which
would have made shooting difficult at more than a few yards. The men
were in two ranks, with a space at the right of the rear rank for the
corporal, to which he now went. The officer a little to the right of
the firing-party had an electric torch, which he now turned on to the
Bishop's chest, where a gold crucifix twinkled. And then he drew a
breath to give an order, and the breath went out through his side,
for at that moment Hlaka shot him. And the volley that the Germans,
listening in the prison, expected to hear came from eight rifles
instead of six, and was fired from over the wall instead of at it.
One belated shot came after the rest, as in a badly fired volley: it
was Hlaka shooting the sixth man, who alone had not dropped at once.
For a moment Hlaka and his six men waited motionless, to see if any
surprise had been caused to the Germans; but nothing stirred in the
prison; the firing-party and their officer were past all surprises:
nobody was surprised but the Bishop. Hlaka slipped over the wall
and went up to him.

"It is Hlaka," he said in his ear. "The Germans are dead now." And he
began to untie the bandage over his eyes, which was knotted over a
little circle of plaited hair that the priests of the Orthodox church
wear at the back.

"Thank you," said the Bishop.

"We must go to the Mountain," said Hlaka. "Would it be too much to ask
you to take off your boots?"




XXI


More than anything Hlaka avoided firing at night in the town, on
account of the great difficulty of getting away afterwards, and he
forbade all his men to do it. But the volley tonight rather lulled
than disturbed the Germans, for they had been warned by telephone to
expect an execution at midnight. One senior officer was awakened from
sleep by the single shot following the rest, which seemed to him so
completely to spoil the volley that he determined to report the
matter in the morning and have it enquired into. All military
undertakings of whatever sort should be carried out in a smart and
orderly way, an execution no less than drill; indeed more so. The
sound of the volley would be heard all over the town, and by whatever
the Germans did the population would judge them: in addition to this
an execution was exemplary, and whatever was held up as an example
either in peace or war should be perfect in every respect. A volley
like that did not teach with the clearness that was desirable. It was
like a schoolmaster with a cough. So thought the colonel.

Major von Wald was disgusted with it. He felt that it was especially his
execution; and to have it go off like that was as though his washing
were to be drying in the public eye, and one of his pieces of apparel on
the line were to be torn and badly darned. Other such thoughts occurred
to other Germans, for they are an orderly nation; but to nobody did it
occur that the firing-party had been fired on, or that the executioners
were dead and the Bishop alive.

As fast as Hlaka could lead the Bishop he hurried through the streets.
They were as quiet as though nothing had occurred. Like shadows the rest
of Hlaka's party ran towards the Mountain before and behind him. The
streets were brighter than the pine-wood, the dark flat tops of whose
trees kept out most of the moon. The Bishop wore darker clothes than did
any of Hlaka's men, and that was to the good, but he had not the
panther's tread of those men, nor their intuitive knowledge of danger
and how to avoid it. Each man now had two rifles to carry except Hlaka,
and one who carried only a pistol besides his own rifle; for they had
stripped the firing-party and the officer who commanded them of their
fire-arms and ammunition.

They went halfway through the streets towards the edge of the town
without any sign of danger and then they heard a step coming towards
them. It was too firm and loud to be that of one of the citizens out at
night, defying death. Hlaka stopped the Bishop and turned and led him
backward a little way to where a dark shrub by a doorway might give
cover. The steps came nearer along the pavement, down the street from
the Mountain. It was only one man. Neither the Bishop nor Hlaka spoke.
Suddenly there was a cry, and the feet stopped. The unknown man had
fallen into the hands of one of the mountaineers. Then Hlaka ran on
with the Bishop towards the Mountain; and his men all ran too, so as
to reach the edge of the town before the Gestapo should come to
enquire about that cry. They were sure to come, for none of The Land
had the right to cry in the streets at night, and if it should be a
German that would be far more serious. But there were only two or
three hundreds yards more to do, and just outside the town the whole
of Hlaka's force would be waiting. Before they had run a hundred
yards Gregor said to Srebnitz, who was running beside him: "We can
use our rifles now, if they try to stop us."

And both unslung their rifles, for they could clearly get to the edge of
the town before any Germans that heard their shots could overtake them.
Probably all the others did the same, but no more steps were heard, and
they did not have to fire. They all reached the edge of the town, and
had not gone far over the open country before they saw shapes in the
moonlight, which when they moved were seen to be fifty of Hlaka's men.
Then Hlaka knelt down and put on the Bishop's boots.

For an hour they climbed the Mountain, straight up through the heath,
the Bishop in front with two of Hlaka's men to help him, and the rest of
the force between him and the city; and there was no sound of pursuit.
At the end of the hour Hlaka came up to the Bishop and apologised for
the fatigue that he must feel, and asked if he would now go to bed for a
few hours. The Bishop smiled and agreed, thinking that Hlaka referred to
the bare heath. But to his surprise he saw a mattress laid down beside
him and two men arranging the sheets and blankets and a pillow, and even
a bolster. For Hlaka had sent several men to the houses at the edge of
the town, where they had been given these things and a large number of
eggs, as well as bread and cheese and butter and a few tins of sardines.
The Bishop slept in his bed for over three hours, a deep and restful
sleep, for his mind was too tired to dream, and his limbs were tired
too. And all Hlaka's men slept in their beds, which were tufts of heath,
except a crescent of sentries watching towards the town. An hour before
dawn Hlaka called the Bishop and they all went on up the Mountain.

By this time the Germans appeared to have enquired about their
firing-party, or to have sent men to bury the Bishop, for guns began to
fire in the town, and star-shells burst over the Mountain and dropped
their small gold suns, which slowly set amongst rocks and myrtle and
heath all over the slope of the Mountain. As one came dropping near to
Hlaka's men he called to them to stand still, and in whatever attitudes
they were they stood as though suddenly frozen. The star-shell showed
them up, but the night is full of shapes, and no German picked out
theirs from the shapes of rocks and myrtles. A little shrapnel followed,
but only sent vainly against the peak that Hlaka's men had left.

When dawn touched the roofs of the city far below them, and shone in
grey windows, the mountaineers were still amongst the myrtle. The
light grew vaster and the few windows winked with orange lights of
their own, and chimneys smoked here and there; and one of Hlaka's men
turned round and gazed towards the houses, and stood awhile
motionless. With the light of dawn on his face, Hlaka seemed to read
his thoughts, for he suddenly said to him: "We have no families.
Liberty is our mother and sister and children."

Then the man turned and went on up the Mountain. They came again to the
caves in the high peaks, and found breakfast ready for them, prepared by
the few men that Hlaka had left behind. They all ate their food by a
small but welcome fire whose embers sent up no smoke, and sometimes as
they ate Iskander sang. To the Bishop Hlaka apologized for the rude
surroundings in which he sat. But the Bishop said: "I have a pleasant
view from the windows of my house, yet never have I had such a view as
this to see while I ate my breakfast."

And indeed it was a view that held half a kingdom, for they were just
over the ridge to the north and could see the plain below them like a
great garden, whose far wall was the blue mountains, gleaming now as
though they were the frontier of fairyland and were all newly enchanted.
And in the garden that went from wall to wall, from the peak where they
sat away to the far blue mountains, grew all the crops that The Land had
known for ages, and one or two others, such as tobacco, which had not
come till The Land was already old. And at a great distance a glimpse of
another frontier showed, the deep blue edge of a region over which the
Italians claimed sway in error, and which the Germans never have
understood. By that frontier Tyranny halted; and across it a man might
shout "_Heil Hitler_" as loud as he would, and, though his voice were
even heard above the boom of the other voice, would get no answer but
the world-wide derision of what an old Greek poet called the countless
smiles of always-laughing ocean.




XXII


After breakfast Hlaka showed the Bishop into a cave that was curtained
by two blankets, where his bed was again prepared for him, for the Bishop
had not yet slept enough for sufficient rest after even a quiet day.

Then Hlaka set about his preparations for the attack that, according to
the information of the barber, was likely to come next day; and chiefly
he continued his men's rifle-practice, making them stalk pebbles at
eighty yards and shoot at them from behind cover, for he had little more
time to train his men than the Duke of Monmouth had before the battle
of Sedgemoor. A sentry made a sign from one of the crags, and Hlaka
going towards him saw a man hurrying up the road from the town. It was a
furtive figure that came towards them, and yet it was not the barber.
After a while Hlaka sent down one of his men to guide the stranger to
him from beyond the end of the road. He turned out to be a man with a
letter from Trigoloutros, which he was to deliver to Hlaka. He seemed
afraid of Hlaka and his men, and yet the speed with which he had
hurried up from the town seemed to show he had other fears. If a man
can be meaner than a spy, he seemed to be meaner than Trigoloutros,
as though he were one that served spies but was not yet fully
admitted by them to their company. He took off his hat before Hlaka
and gave him the letter, and remained holding his hat in both hands
while Hlaka read it. The letter went:


    "CHIEFTAIN,

    "They suspect me because I said you would come at dawn, and you did
    not come at the time I said. There are men watching in my street
    now. I know that they watch so that I shall not escape. I shall soon
    be questioned by the Gestapo. Men who are watched are always
    questioned. I may be questioned today. Come quickly, master, with
    all your men and rescue me. I shall be able to tell you a great deal
    if you bring me safely into the Mountain, for I know all the
    Germans' plans. Very senior officers have spoken often with me. I
    wish you well, and would serve you. But if you did not rescue me,
    and if the Gestapo ask me questions about your Excellency, I should
    be compelled, God knows how greatly against my will, to tell them
    what I have observed in the Mountain and what I know of your
    Excellency's plans. Believe me, master, I observe a great deal: I
    cannot help it: God gave me that kind of eye. No time for more,
    master. Help. Help quickly.

                                "Your Excellency's devoted servant,

                                    "ANDREAS TRIGOLOUTROS."


"Tell him," said Hlaka, "that I will send him a verbal message."

"He is greatly pressed for time," said the messenger.

"I will send the message at once," said Hlaka.

The eye of Trigoloutros's messenger roved round the crags as though
expecting some sort of hospitality, but Hlaka dismissed him forthwith.
As he went, Hlaka called to Srebnitz and showed him the barber's letter
and gave him a brief order. It was not often that Hlaka when giving an
order ever gave any reason for it, and showing the letter to Srebnitz
was an unusual favour to him.

Srebnitz went straight down the mountainside without his rifle, the
way they had come that morning, a shorter way than the way by the
road which went away to his right. He went all the morning among the
myrtle bushes and through the plants of heath, and showed very little
till he came to the town.

There he walked openly through the streets with the brim of his hat
pulled down, and avoiding as much as he could the glances of any eye,
his forehead hidden from view and a stubbly chin showing. Nobody
recognized him, and no German questioned him, and he came to the Street
of the Martyrs. There he noticed a man in plain clothes with that
vacant look in his face which is always worn by men who suspect and
watch; but by no possible disguise could Srebnitz have made himself
appear more completely in need of a barber than by what a few days on
the Mountain had already done for him, and so he walked into the shop of
Trigoloutros, a very likely customer. Two men were in the shop beside
the barber. Srebnitz caught his eye, and looked away and said nothing.

Trigoloutros signed with his head towards an empty chair beside a man
who was waiting, and went on cutting the hair of the other customer.
This business he hurried somewhat and soon assured the man that his hair
was exactly the right length now; and this customer paid him and went
away. Without looking at Srebnitz, Trigoloutros asked the next man to
come to his chair and fastened his cloth round his shoulders. This man
also wanted his hair cut, and Trigoloutros cut it as fast as he could,
speaking of such things as might have been discussed five years ago by a
man uninterested in any public affairs.

When he had finished he half turned his head to Srebnitz saying, "Now
you, sir." And when the other man went out these two were, as they both
desired, alone in the shop. Srebnitz sat in the barber's chair and
glanced hastily at the street-door, which Trigoloutros obligingly shut.

"A shave, please," shouted Srebnitz as Trigoloutros went to the door.

The barber came back and put his white cloth round Srebnitz and began
to shave him, while Srebnitz sat silent. It was always Trigoloutros's
custom to wait for his customers to speak. Srebnitz seemed uncomfortable
at first under his white apron, but he soon settled down. After a while
he said, "A little bay rum on my chin, please."

The barber seemed surprised at this whim, but nodded his head and got
the bay rum; he never argued, and liked to leave information to come of
its own accord. He put down the razor and shaving brush and came back
with the bottle of bay rum. Then Srebnitz said: "I have come with a
message from Hlaka."

And he lifted the apron with his left hand and stabbed the barber to
the heart.

He replaced the knife and wiped his hand on the apron, and went to the
door, leaving the barber dead. The lower part of the glass in the door
was frosted, but the upper part was clear, and by standing on tiptoe
Srebnitz could see the street. There was nobody passing. The door was
latched on the inside, and he drew back the latch and opened the door
and slipped through and closed it, and the latch fell back so that it
could not be opened from the outside.

Then he sauntered away down the street in the opposite direction from
the one from which he had come, so as not to pass the man who had seen
him enter the barber's shop, for he was not yet properly shaved. On the
other side there was another watcher, but he crossed the street as he
came to him and contrived to turn much of his face away.

Taking the first turning out of that street to his right he much
increased his pace and, turning to his right again, was on his way
back to the Mountain, though long streets had yet to be traversed
before he was out of the town. He slouched as he went, not with the
tread of an armed man or a mountaineer, and he hung his head as
though he were resident in that town and the tyranny of the last
week had sunk into him.

He did not expect any of the barber's household to go into the front
part of his shop during his working hours and he did not fear that the
door would be forced from the street or its pane of glass broken for
some while. Men would not do that for the sake of a shave. But at any
moment the Gestapo might come, as the barber had feared, and they would
as soon break the glass as open the door, even if the latch were
unfastened. So he walked as fast as he could, without making any
movement that was likely to attract curiosity, or daring a pace that
might be suggestive of flight.

Walking thus he passed unnoticed, wearing an abject air, utterly
devoid of interest, which seemed not to attract the interest of
others. Intuitively he knew that, even had he let his eyes rest upon
any object as he walked, somebody would have noticed what he was
looking at, then wondered why he looked, and from that would have
come to wonder who the man was. After that he might have been
questioned, and he would have been very near to prison then. He had
not yet wiped the blood off his knife, though the barber's apron had
protected his clothes, except for the right sleeve, at which he now
glanced, and there certainly were a few spots on it.

And now he came to a street that ran to the open country. He had come
into the town by that very street; but it is one thing to enter a town,
and another to leave it. All the world has business in a town, and any
man may have reason to enter it; but what reason could a man have for
going from the town into the wild open country? There might be several
reasons, but the question would be asked in an observer's mind, whereas
no townsman would ever ask why a man entered the town. He must leave the
street unobserved. But there were people in it, so he turned listlessly
out of the street to his left, and turned again to his right into
another street running towards open country. Here also there were
people. He tried a third street parallel to the two others, and here
there were people too, and he realised that he was not likely to find an
empty street in the capital in broad daylight.

He walked very slowly and very listlessly up the street towards the
Mountain, wondering if he dare walk boldly into the open fields alone.
And something told him that, with the edge that these intense days put
upon curiosity, he could not do it. He could not look carefully at
anyone, without being looked at carefully in return, either by that
person or by another, but a glance or two that he did cast did not
entirely satisfy him that no member of the Gestapo was among the
passers-by. A cataract of wisteria poured over a garden-wall, flowering
in its full beauty; all who came near it looked at the splendid mass of
bloom, or at least glanced at it, but one man looked at it with an
especial enquiry, as though estimating the number of blossoms and
particularly admiring their shape and noting the earliness or the
lateness of their flowering: so obviously was all of this interest
assumed that the cold falsity of the man's heart seemed almost to freeze
the beauty of the flowers and wither the image of them in other minds.
Srebnitz slouched on: he dared not turn back now, and yet he dared not
walk out to the open fields.

A girl was coming towards him on the opposite side of the street: he
walked straight over to her and, as they met, said in a low voice to
her, "It is for The Land."

She looked at him and did not speak, and Srebnitz looked at her. In
times of peace and security some explanation would have been needed, or
at any rate words instead of it, but in these days fewer explanations
were given. Her look at him satisfied her, and when he saw that she
trusted him he indicated with a slight wave of his head that he
wished her to walk the way that he was going. From the bare words it
may seem an insufficient indication, but dogs make such signs every
day, when one of them takes another dog hunting; and, when the need
arises, men and women can do as much as dogs can do. She turned and
walked with him towards the end of the street, which was now not far
away: beyond lay the open country.

"I have business in the Mountain," said Srebnitz as they walked
together. "If I go alone the Gestapo will come after me and shoot me."

"Why?" asked the girl.

"Because they will think I am one of those who have killed some of
Hitler's men," he said.

"And have you?" asked the girl.

"Yes," said Srebnitz.

"Then I will come with you," she said.

Srebnitz changed his slouching air for the air of a man who took a girl
out to the fields beyond the town on a spring morning. And now there was
no longer anyone in the street in front of them. Who were behind, and
whether or not they followed, Srebnitz did not know, for he never looked
round. He drew himself up and strutted slowly and twirled an end of his
moustache as he went: looked at in front, the end of his moustache was
not long enough to be twirled, but this was what the attitude of his
elbow suggested seen from behind. Windows watched them, but Srebnitz had
no fear of windows, only of men that lurked in the street. Unquestioned
they reached the end of it, and came to the green fields in which
anemones twinkled, an idyllic pair. But Srebnitz gazed at the Mountain
rather than at the girl's blue eyes, as though he saw Liberty pacing the
grey crags; and the girl saw that look and was content. For, though she
knew that that gaze of Srebnitz would scarcely turn to her, yet she also
had a vision of Liberty in the Mountain, who would one day return to the
city which she had known for so long.

They walked slowly, and no one followed. And there was no sound of any
alarm in the town. Perhaps they had discovered the dead barber, and
perhaps decided that he was only a barber and that the matter could
wait: it was not as when Srebnitz had killed a sentry. Even though the
barber was one of their spies, he was now only a broken implement,
scarcely even a weapon; and unhappily Europe had many more, even though
they were rare in The Land.

Talk between Srebnitz and the girl was not embarrassing, as it might
have been to people acting such close acquaintance who did not even know
each other's names. But both had a love of The Land that had grown so
ardently now that The Land needed it so much, that they seemed almost of
one family. She told him her name was Marya, and told a little of life
in the town under the Germans; but mostly she spoke of the future,
asking Srebnitz when The Land would be free. Srebnitz gave her some of
the hope that he drew from its mighty source in the heart of Hlaka, who
with his gaze fixed on the future saw so clearly The Land free, that his
faith became to his men as sure as a page of history. What can fifty or
a hundred men do against five thousand, with five million more if
needed? thought the Germans. What can all Germany do against our sure
knowledge of victory some day? thought Hlaka and all his men.




XXIII


As Srebnitz and Marya came to the slope of the Mountain an untidiness
left the fields and a carelessness took its place; or the carelessness
of men gave place to the carelessness of the Mountain. One was a
niggardly uselessness, with rusty tins and dirty bits of paper and many
ravelled foot-tracks, the other was the carelessness of a jovial giant,
losing rocks from the crags and leaving them scattered, among them more
delicate tracks of the things that are wilder than man, and the roads by
which streams marched to find the sea. Not only was untidiness gone, but
orderliness also: nothing was square any longer; no lines were straight,
and the heave of the slopes was of a grander design than the designs
that are planned in cities.

They came to a myrtle bush, like something strayed from the wild to peer
curiously at the work of men; and then they came to a great many more
bushes, and Srebnitz noticed all at once that there was cover enough for
him to go on alone: he had but to stoop and go forward a few paces, and
he was a mountaineer again, invisible to any that might hunt him, and
able to remain so; thus he could pass in a moment now from the
comradeship of those who trod pavements to the society of those that
were free from all that oppresses cities.

He paused to thank and say farewell to Marya. And as she gazed at the
dark of the myrtle, shadowed now by the Mountain that had already hidden
the sun, she heard a sound from the strings of an instrument that they
play in those lands, and a song rose to accompany it, which was one of
the songs that the ages had drifted against that mountain, up from whose
slopes it rose on many an evening from many a goatherd and many a
shepherd-boy, a song that sounded too light to have come down so many
ages. And yet, if it had been made of weightier things, the breath of
men singing in idle hours might not with such ease have supported it,
and it might have sunk among grave arguments and old policies, and
never have come so far. Nor, if it had, would Marya have listened to
it as she was listening now. For a moment Srebnitz listened too, then
said: "It is only Iskander."

Still Marya listened, standing still.

"He is one of our men," explained Srebnitz.

But to Marya it was as though the Mountain spoke. So perhaps it was to
Srebnitz, coming home again after the regular streets and the regulated
ways of the city, which he had now abjured. Yet, if he thought of
Iskander's song as the voice of the Mountain, he only thought, "Why
should the Mountain not speak like this?" There was nothing magical
about Iskander; certainly nothing new in the song, which was sung today
by hundreds of others, and had been sung for thousands of years.

But to Marya this voice of the Mountain coming down the ages was
magical. A man might sing a song that was made last week, but the
song of the Mountain might be two thousands years old and yet seem
fresh and new among those ancient rocks: in another two thousand
years no doubt the Mountain would have another thought, and another
song would ring along its valleys at evening. The mood of a mountain
would not change oftener than that.

But what had all this to do with Iskander? No more than the evening had,
nor the pale moon, nor the myrtle on the slopes of the mountain. And yet
Marya in some way confused all these things with him, as she saw him
coming through the myrtles now down the slope to meet Srebnitz. Some
similar mistake Iskander made as he saw the girl's blue eyes gaze at
him, vaguely classing her with all that was beautiful in the evening
upon the Mountain, as though she were somehow kin to eternal things.

Iskander had come down the Mountain to meet Srebnitz because of his
own anxiety for Srebnitz's safety, and because of Hlaka's anxiety as
to what had become of the barber, for he feared that at any moment
the man would betray him.

"And the barber?" were Iskander's first words.

Srebnitz pointed to his own face, only partly shaved. "He will shave no
more," said Srebnitz.

"Then I must light a fire to let Hlaka know," said Iskander.

Then he looked towards Marya again. And Srebnitz told Iskander how she
had helped him.

"The Germans will come to look at the fire," said Iskander to her, "and
we must give you time to get well away from it."

"I can move faster down the slope than you can move up," said Marya.

"We shall be hidden before we have gone five yards," said Iskander.

And then he walked with Marya a little way down the slope. And when
they had gone a little way they parted, and Iskander returned to the
spot at which he had prepared some twigs for the fire. But before
they parted, Marya had said some few words about his song. And
Iskander had said: "I will sing it for you again if you will listen,
when I get back to cover."

And she had said she would listen. Iskander sent Srebnitz on up the
slope, and then lit his pile of brush-wood and ran up the slope through
the myrtles, and soon saw Srebnitz again. And a column of smoke went up,
and Hlaka watching from a crag knew that it was the funeral pyre of the
barber. If an eagle regrets the death of a grouse or a lamb that his
talons have seized, Hlaka regretted the barber. But not otherwise. As
Fate has made all eagles prey upon small beasts and birds, so the tide
and the trend of history, which are surely but moods of Fate, had made
this man Hlaka prey upon Germans and traitors; and every day the method
of his strokes was becoming more natural to him, till the stroke of the
talon had barely been made by the ages more natural to the eagle. There
were so few traitors in all The Land that the death of the barber would
be an appreciable loss to them, and it won a smile from Hlaka.

Iskander moved as fast as he could up the slope away from the fire, and
urged Srebnitz, who was a little more tired than Iskander, to travel as
fast as he did. Srebnitz was running, in spite of the slope, through the
myrtle, when he noticed that Iskander was lagging behind. Then Iskander
stopped altogether, and sitting down where a myrtle grew between him and
the city, sang the song of the Mountain again, while his fingers played
on the strings of his rustic instrument. The song was of a breeze that
had risen up from the sea and gone inland and come to the Mountain, and
that was lost in one of its valleys, and was repeatedly asking its way
of an echo that it met with among the rocks. And the echo's words made
no particular sense, nor did the whole story. And yet he sang it, and
yet Marya listened, and it had been sung for a thousand years.

Srebnitz waited, hidden, and he waited with some impatience, for he
expected the Germans at any moment to come out to look at the fire, and
the two men were not yet very far from it, and still Iskander sang on.
How differently time passed for those two men, every moment full of
danger for Srebnitz, that most annoying kind of danger that is incurred
for no cause, while for Iskander time did not seem to be passing at all.
Whether music can thus enchant time, so that it can stop for a while
some tributary stream of it while the main current flows on, one does
not know enough about time or music to say.




XXIV


Iskander did not dally long, singing his song in the myrtles; and,
before any Germans came out to look at the fire, the two young soldiers
of Hlaka were far up the Mountain. The Germans that first saw it
reported upon it by telephone, and waited to receive orders, then went
to examine it, and returned and reported again; but they did not see
Srebnitz or Iskander, and Marya got safely back to the sad town. In
twilight they returned to the height where Hlaka was, with all his plans
made for the next day, on which he believed that the Germans would
attack as the spy had said. For spies speak the truth at times, as rich
men pay out copper coins, not valuing them much, but using them as
required; even so a spy uses truth. First Srebnitz went to Hlaka to
report that the spy was dead. "He died while shaving me," said Srebnitz.

"That is well," said Hlaka. "He would have betrayed us."

Then he showed Srebnitz a rock on the steep slope facing the town,
behind which Srebnitz was to wait next day for the Germans, a rock that
would shelter him against artillery; and if aeroplanes came he was to
hang a blanket from the top of the rock and conceal himself under that;
and he told him to prepare the blanket the next morning as the other men
would do: this was by daubing it with dampened handfuls of crumbled
rock, in patches. Hlaka did not command men without knowing something of
the ways of men, and he knew that the spy would have information
accessible to him, and that he was speaking the truth at the time that
he passed it on to Hlaka.

As Srebnitz listened to Hlaka he saw the dark shape of the Bishop coming
down the grey rocks towards them. So calm he seemed, so remote from the
violence of war, and that grim branch of it that is named guerrilla,
that Srebnitz felt a qualm as a new thought troubled him. For the first
time came the thought, had he murdered the barber? He glanced at the
Bishop, then turned to Hlaka. "Perhaps I have done wrong," he said.

"When?" asked Hlaka.

"When I killed Trigoloutros," said Srebnitz.

"On this mountain," said Hlaka, "and throughout The Land till our king
returns, you will obey me. Our old laws are broken by the Germans.
Broken like the tablets of Moses. I make the new laws. Obey them."

Srebnitz was silent before the wrath of Hlaka, who would not have his
orders questioned even though they had been obeyed; he was silenced
too by the serenity of the Bishop coming towards him where he stood
with a blood-stained sleeve. But Hlaka called out to the Bishop,
while he pointed an arm at Srebnitz, "Is he right to obey my orders,
your Beatitude?"

"Till The Land is free again," said the Bishop.

Then he saw Srebnitz standing still, saying nothing, as though yet a
little puzzled. He may even have seen Srebnitz's eyes glance at his
freshly stained right sleeve. And he said to Hlaka: "If you give any
order without clear conscience, and he obeys you, the sin is yours."

"I gave the order with a clear conscience," said Hlaka.

Whatever weight lay for those few moments on Srebnitz's mind fell off
from it now before the face of the Bishop. Srebnitz saw that he would
not hesitate to condemn even Hlaka, and even though Hlaka had just saved
his life, if he decided that Hlaka had sinned; but he felt now that
Hlaka's authority was sanctified, and had no more qualms about his own
obedience. The Bishop had walked that short way down the slope to say
good-bye to Hlaka and to thank him, for he was about to ride all night
to the north on a mule, with an escort of three men. At first the Bishop
had refused to take any men for an escort, but Hlaka had explained that
his army was actually strengthened by the weeding out of those who had
not yet been trained to hit a fair-sized pebble with moderate certainty
at seventy yards and to keep hidden while doing so. The three men to
ride with the Bishop were the least advanced in their training, leaving
a force that he could more easily handle.

There was a monastery on a mountain peak that Hlaka's men could see from
where they were, sufficiently to be able to distinguish it from sky,
though they could not see the monastery even as a speck on the pale blue
of the peak. Thither the Bishop was to go, to live amongst the monks of
the monastery, disguised as one of them, till Europe should have other
laws again than the whim of Hitler. All night he would have to ride,
then hide in a house all day and ride all the next night, and that
should bring him to the monastery, and to calm that would be greater
than any he had known since he became bishop. Not that his work as a
bishop much ruffled the calm that he clung to in spite of the stress of
daily work, and succeeded in holding, and then held next day against
whatever cares might come, and the day after; but in the monastery all
about him would be devoted to calm: there would be no need to hold out
any longer; all would be peace.

But he had come to thank Hlaka, and to say farewell to him. He had not
thought to have to thank any man for saving him from execution, and no
phrases were lying ready in his mind for such an event, though his
gratitude was sincere. Tennyson wrote:

    "Not wholly in the busy world nor quite
    Beyond it blooms the garden that I love."

As it were through such a garden lay the equable way of the life of the
Bishop hitherto. Then in a day the garden was overrun, and a few days
later he went from it to the moonlit pine-wood and the execution-wall;
what to many was the real world was to him a wild strange scene which he
was very glad to have viewed, though he did not associate it with
reality; rather it was like some panorama, such as used to be shown
at exhibitions, which he had come from his own real world to peep at
for a little while. To him the master of this strange show was Hlaka,
and he came to thank him.

"Thank you," the Bishop began, "thank you."

But Hlaka saw the difficulty he felt in putting his gratitude into
words, and interrupted the Bishop by saying: "It is time to start down
the Mountain, so as to have the whole night for riding."

The Bishop nodded his head, and Hlaka led him up over the crest and a
little way down the other side, to where the three men of the escort
were waiting. And there they shook hands and parted, and in the end
neither of them said anything. All the mountaineers, unbidden by Hlaka,
went down the slope to take their own farewell of the Bishop; and some
way down it he blessed them among the myrtle, just as stars began to
appear. Then all except the three that were to go on the long ride with
the Bishop returned to the peaks, where Hlaka sat in his cave, alone,
meditating his plans, and the Bishop and his escort went on in the dark
down the Mountain, and found the four mules that were waiting; and the
four men that held them came up the slope to join Hlaka.

To Hlaka, meditating his plans, it was clear that water and time were
against him, and that he could not stay long in the Mountain; numbers
meant little to him, nor have they meant a great deal all through
history; about fighting with rifles he felt confident, nor did he bother
much about artillery, for he believed that his men could shelter among
the rocks, if they had to be out in the storm at all, and when the
hottest fighting began there was likely to be no artillery, because the
German infantry would be too close.

During the early bombardment that he expected, his men would be in the
caves. But everything was not as easy as that, and Hlaka was troubled
with the thought of Stukas. If a hundred or two hundred of these came
over, it seemed to him that they would be able to pin his men to their
caves until the German infantry were so close that his men could not
get to their places among the rocks without suffering severe
casualties; and waste of life he could ill afford, when he could
scarcely even afford waste of bullets.

Had it only been the days of his father, thought Hlaka, he could have
held the Mountain for ever, unseen and almost invulnerable, a home of
free men, a very garden of Liberty. But aeroplanes spoiled all that
dream. However attractive it was to dream of the past, Hlaka was too
much of a soldier to waste more moments regretting that it was not forty
years ago: and he never made vague plans to suit conditions that might
be, but only adapted his plans to the actual shape of the ground that he
saw before him. The most unexpected things found their places in Hlaka's
plans, trifles that could not be foreseen; yet any plans that neglected
them would have been vague, and Hlaka's thoughts never neglected one of
such material details.

He looked now to a difficult fight, in which aeroplanes in great numbers
might enable the German infantry to come up the Mountain unopposed until
they were closer than he wished, as close, in fact, as their own bombs
would permit.

None of these troubles perplexed Hlaka's men; they were only
concerned with what was to be, which they looked on as something
coming direct from Fate; only to Hlaka did the future seem something
within reach, something that he might have a share in controlling. Or
were all things, present and future, including the plans of Hlaka,
solely moved by the hand of Fate?

Sometimes Hlaka made such reflections as this, as sometimes in the night
he gazed up at the concourse of stars; but further than such
reflections, if there be a way further, he did not go, and even made his
plans for defending the Mountain while actually pondering some such
fancy, as he made his plans while gazing at the stars, without even
trying to guess whether what lay beyond them, beyond the Milky Way, was
infinite emptiness or infinite stars.




XXV


Not only did the mountaineers have their supper that night by a fire,
but Hlaka lit many fires, mostly along the heathy ridge to the west.
A few were shelled for a while, but not the one that glowed near the
caves where Hlaka's men were.

When supper was ended and the men sat still by the embers, while
Iskander played his instrument and sang, the sentry at the earphones
called to Hlaka that an aeroplane was coming, and presently they all
heard the throb of it coming their way. But the damp blanket was not yet
thrown over the remains of the fire, when the bright red burst of a
shell was seen among the stars, and then there was a red row of them up
there, searching for the aeroplane, and some ruby stars began to climb
towards it, slowly, as it seemed to the watchers. What then was the
aeroplane at which the Germans fired? For no one in The Land had
artillery. It was moving northwest, this lonely pursued stranger. They
heard it, and could see the pursuing shells breaking in upon the calm of
the stars. Who was he that went over them in the night? And at the same
moment it seemed to occur to them all--an Englishman.

They cheered as the throb of his engines died away to the north and the
bright shells burst no more. Their cheer was soon lost in the night and
could never have reached him: he too disappeared in the night. But he
cheered them with thoughts of England, the old land of King Ethelred,
whose policy still survived, right down to 1939; and yet the land is a
rock on which tyranny always breaks.

Preparedness is a matter of months, but the quality that breaks tyranny
is a quality that it takes the ages to harden. After all, no country
except Germany is ever prepared for war to the last button. The French
army in 1870 was ready, as reported to their emperor, to the last
gaiter-button, but the fuses for shells that should have burst between
three thousand and four thousand yards were not ready. Europe, outside
Germany, is indeed an empire of King Ethelred; but something other than
readiness seems to be required to win wars: mere readiness has been
tried twice in this century and has failed.

But it was not of her armaments they thought when they thought of
England, but rather they had some sort of picture in their minds of an
island with white cliffs, against which great seas broke vainly, for
they pictured very stormy weather round England; and within the island,
flourishing together, all the theories and policies that ever grew in
Europe, like flowers and docks in a garden that nobody weeded, until one
weed grew too strong. And of these dim pictures all were probably
different, for none of them had seen England, but the thoughts of all of
them turned that way, northwest where the airman had flown, whenever
they hoped for liberty; as Mahometans turn to Mecca when they pray. Not
that England was quite to them what Mecca is to Islam, an original
source of the faith, for they did not forget that they were older than
England; and their hearts boasted, though not their courteous lips, that
they had served Liberty before England had shaken off the Romans.

When silence returned to the Mountain and calm to the stars, the wine of
that land and of islands near it was passed from hand to hand among
those that sat round the fire, and a hum of talk arose, full of
speculations and hopes about the battle that they expected the
following day. Then Iskander touched his strings and the talk lulled
and died away altogether, as the mountaineers felt that Iskander's
gourd-like instrument said something that lay too deep for them to
say, and they turned from their weak guesses about the future to
those tunes of Iskander's, that had once drawn strength from the
mountains which had enabled them to fly down so many ages. Hlaka
retired early to his cave to sleep, and the rest of the mountaineers
soon followed his example, all but the sentry.

Dawn woke the mountaineers; Aurora called them again; but she herself
was saluted by the roar of a hundred guns. They fired all together from
the south of the Mountain, outside the town, and a few fired from the
north, two batteries that had come over the plain in the night. All the
grey peaks responded, with gravity in their tremendous voices, as
though they had all of them spoken of old with the gods, and slept for a
long while and now spoke again, from peak to peak, and repeated the
words of their tremendous lore, and muttered them over and over to
themselves and once more went to sleep. At once they woke again, and
this time remained long awake, vociferous and all angry, ancient voices
awakened by man, as a sleeping giant may be wakened by a gnat.

Hlaka rightly decided that the Germans were a great and terrible power,
and desired to show it; and he sent out only two men to watch, and kept
the rest in the caves. Silence was now gone from the Mountain, utterly
outcast from the calm peaks and the sky, and, as the bombardment raged
on, the mountaineers began to feel a yearning for silence, as though it
were a positive thing, some cloak that the Mountain wore and which
sheltered themselves, till something seemed to have gone out of their
lives, driven far away by guns and shells and echoes.

For an hour there was no silence in any second. Then the guns ceased all
together, and a little while after that no more shells burst on the
Mountain, the air screamed no more, and the grey peaks mumbled
together, as though they talked over all they had seen that morning:
at last they too ceased to speak, and back to the high bare slopes,
as from far away, came silence. And in the silence Hlaka's man at the
earphones reported a great number of planes.

This was the attack that Hlaka feared. He looked out over the
Mountain before the planes were in sight, and saw the German infantry
all round him, but far away, not even visible through glasses, as a
line surrounding the Mountain. But glasses showed by a movement here
and there, or a flash of light from something unwisely allowed to
shine, that there was actually a line of men on both sides of the
Mountain; and Hlaka estimated the position and even the numbers of
the line that he could not see, for he was a hunter at heart and knew
that nothing in nature was in the least like what it would appear if
stuffed and in a glass case, and had learned to know what a brown
patch or a grey patch signified.

Then the aeroplanes came in sight, and the infantry began to advance up
the slope. Hlaka had only planned to hold out till nightfall and had
ample cover for his men among that great abundance of rocks against
almost any number of infantry, but no rock gave perfect cover against a
bomb from the air, nor was there any lore in Hlaka's blood, that the
mountains could have taught his race through the ages, that could tell
him how to fight against this new thing.

There must have been more than fifty planes now in sight, and Hlaka
watched them uneasily, and yet with a trust which was natural to him
that no difficulty would arise that he would not be able to deal with
when it came: perhaps Hitler has the same feeling rising from some
great store of confidence within himself, which may some day be all
used up; but with Hlaka it arose from the cause for which he fought,
or, if it came to him from his own confidence, that confidence was
continually replenished by the cause, which was to Hlaka like an
inexhaustible spring from the deep heart of the Mountain. And now
bombs fell on the eastern end of the Mountain, and again the peaks
spoke out with indignant voices.

Hlaka's men were still in the caves, but the German infantry were still
advancing, and soon he would have to bring out his little force, to whom
losses would mean so much, and he knew not how to protect them.

Had it not been for one thing Hlaka would have believed that he and all
his men were lost, but he could not believe it possible that Liberty
should be driven out of The Land. His belief, and more than a belief,
his practical policy, was the same as the theory that Srebnitz's old
father had had, that after three thousand years of liberty it could not
be lost to The Land. Logically no argument could justify such a belief,
but intuitions, looking deeper than logic, dimly but rightly saw some
qualities in the race that had been bred in those plains and mountains,
and some aid that the mountains gave them, that could no more be broken
by tyranny than a diamond scratched by a sword.

And still the planes came nearer. He guessed that there were about a
hundred now. Suddenly in the clear blue sky, like a white rose
unfolding, a shell burst near to the planes. Another began to unfold,
then more and more, and there came the sound of guns firing and,
after a while, the sound of the shells. And then the crags spoke,
again with deep troubled voices, and the aeroplanes that had been
sailing towards him like great flocks of geese began to dart about
like the flies that dance above water.

Then Hlaka saw that into his plan of battle had come something of which
he had not even dreamed. The bombs that had just fallen were not like
the first ones, methodically bombing the ridge: they were jettisoned
bombs; the Stukas were being attacked. The white puffs in the sky were
shells fired at the attackers by German batteries outside the town,
and had had no effect. As the Stukas came over Hlaka they were
looking for his men no longer, but were fighting for their own lives.
The long growl of cannon-fire broke out as other planes dived at
them, and swept past and flew on, as a bird will fly on that has
missed a butterfly. And still the white puffs pursued, adding a sound
to the fire of machine-gun and cannon, as though all the sky were of
wood and a great fist knocked on it. Then to the roar of these noises
a new sound came, a long and wailing scream, growing louder and
louder, as a German plane dived headlong, and struck the Mountain,
and the slope reverberated with a metallic blow.

Probably as many as sixty-four of the planes were German, and there were
less than fifty English, but still the Germans were being pursued as
they swept over the Mountain westwards. A long burst of machine-gun fire
sounded straight overhead, and another plane came screaming out of the
sky. Then the flash of a shell shone brightly beside another, and it
also came down headlong. A round white object shone above it like a
light in the sky and descended slowly, a parachute in the sunlight.
Cannon, machine-guns and shells moved away to the west, and grey crags
muttered and resumed their silence and all was still again all over the
Mountain. Hlaka jerked his head towards where the parachute had come
down on the northern slope, and two men went down with their rifles.

The German infantry had stopped their advance when the air-battle began.
The two men were Iskander and Srebnitz, and they hurried to get to the
airman before he should reach the infantry. While he got to his feet and
freed himself from his parachute Iskander and Srebnitz ran over a
hundred yards, and were still out of shot of the infantry. When he did
get clear of his parachute he came up the slope, instead of going the
way they expected, and very soon they were certain of meeting him before
any accurate fire could be brought on them from below.

"Hlaka does not want prisoners," said Iskander, and knelt down to get a
steady shot.

But the airman shouted to him "English, _Anglais_," and a few other
names by which he supposed Englishmen to be known in Europe; and some of
them were accurate, but for the accent; and one of them was near enough
to what Iskander and Srebnitz themselves called his people. And Iskander
ceased to aim, but still kept him covered.

"Look here," said the airman, "you don't understand. _Ne comprenez pas._
I am British. _Anglais._ You see?"

And something in his attitude towards them persuaded Iskander and
Srebnitz that he was what he said, though they did not understand a
word of English or French, and they gradually abandoned the idea that he
was a German, which they had because they had not yet imagined any other
people coming to the Mountain besides their own and the Germans.

"Churchill," said Iskander by way of greeting.

Srebnitz repeated it after him, and the Englishman said, "_Bonjour_, my
boyos."

And so they were introduced. Still not a move came from the Germans
below, on either side of the Mountain. Their orders had been to wait for
the peaks to be bombed, and they were waiting for the return of their
air-force. The Englishman continued to talk to the mountaineers. When he
spoke English they sometimes understood him, because he understood what
he was saying himself, and that somehow conveyed to them a part of his
meaning; but sometimes he spoke French, perhaps because he did not
understand it, and felt that people who did not understand English must
understand what an Englishman did not understand; but indefinite
thoughts are hard to analyse and he may merely have felt that whereas no
English words were like any that these people spoke, the French, being
nearer to them, might have some words that were the same, and he might
chance on one of them while he spoke.

"Your name, old boy," he said after a while, pointing his finger at
Srebnitz. "_Nom_, _nombre_, _nomen_; N or M, you know." And one of these
words reached Srebnitz's understanding and he told his name, and the
Englishman did to his name what his countrymen have done to pneumonia
and to Lake Tsana, finding too many letters in them and discarding one,
and ever afterwards called him Rebnitz. Then he pointed similarly at
Iskander saying "_Et votre nom_, my fine fellow?" And he got the name of
Iskander, which had already been passed on from man to man through many
centuries, losing a syllable here and a letter there on the way, and had
once been Alexander. Then he stopped and pointed vigorously at himself,
saying "_Moi, je suis Malone._"

And they understood him.

"Strictly speaking," he said, "I'm neutral. _Irlandais_, you know.
But those blighters down at the guns didn't seem to understand that."

"Churchill," said the two men.

Then Hlaka came down the slope towards them smiling; for he knew that
his men would not dare to bring him a prisoner, and that therefore
the stranger was British. And the Briton saluted and said,
"_Bonjour_, Chief." For no deep insight was needed to see that
Hlaka was master here.

"I am Hlaka," he said.

"Lanker, eh?" said the Briton, doing what most Englishmen have done to
Hlangwani. "_Moi, je suis Malone._"




XXVI


A little later Malone sat in a cave, deep in conversation with Hlaka.
Two interpreters had been found, the cook and Gregor. And between them
they explained Hlaka and Malone to each other.

"You can't stay here, you know," said Malone. "Not if the Germans keep
on at you. What you want to do is to get away to the north. There's
plenty of room for you in the mountains over there."

What Malone felt was that the British Empire was the leader of the free
nations, and that, as he was the only Briton present, he must obviously
do the best he could to represent the empire in a humble way, and
therefore to lead. So he explained to Hlaka what he ought to do, and the
grim old chieftain listened.

"The Germans won't attack yet awhile," said Malone. "They'll come up
later in the afternoon."

"How do you know that?" asked Hlaka, when it was interpreted to him.

"I had a good deal to do with horses," said Malone, "before I joined my
present outfit, and vicious ones among 'em. And, you see, I always had
to know beforehand what a vicious horse was going to do, or he'd get me
down. So I suppose I developed the knack. Anyway, I usually know what
the Germans are going to do."

Hlaka pondered on this, and it took some pondering, even in the
original. It was a very mysterious statement by the time the cook and
Gregor had done with it; and the mystery attracted Hlaka. And there was
a certain downrightness in Malone, such as had won the Battle of
Britain. And there were not only the qualities that our airmen showed
in that fight, nor the humble home-guard down below, and the A.R.P.
wardens and fire-guards, but a certain doggedness that was shown in
battle by the charwomen of London, and many another body that had no
regimental badge, and whose work cannot possibly be argued to have won a
battle. And yet the battle was won, and could not have been won without
them. What quality these possessed and how it won the battle is beyond
the power of definition; but, whatever it is, Hlaka recognized it in
Malone, and seemed to see in it a lure for the winged Victory, whom the
London charwomen had already lured from the sky.

"You'll be all right when you get to those mountains to the north,"
Malone went on. "You'll find some of our men there. Some of them got cut
off, and they're there yet. And there's a lot of your own people up
there too with them. You'll be all right when you get there, right as
rain. _Trs bon comme la pluie._"

"It's a hundred miles to those mountains," said Hlaka.

"That's the trouble," said Malone. "_Quelle domage_, I mean. And there's
Germans all the way, dotted over the plains like fleas in a dog's hair.
Did you ever have a dog, Chief, that was bad with fleas? I tell you it's
the devil. Well, the Germans are like that. You'd better go by night."

"It's a hundred miles," said Hlaka again.

"Yes, I know," said Malone. "What you want is a lift. A Sunderland
flying-boat could take fifty of your men and get you there in about
half an hour. I must call up one of them for you. But the trouble is
the damned thing can't land. There's a river running out of those
mountains that would be just big enough for it, but there's no water
that I know of at this end."

"There's the sea," said Hlaka.

"You couldn't get to it," said Malone. "Fleas too thick in that
direction. No, you'll have to keep north. There's a lake in that
direction, a lake that would do nicely, but it's forty miles away.
Can you do forty miles in a night?"

Forty miles in a night was a remark easily made by a man who was used
to flying four hundred in an hour, but it was scarcely a remark to
make to infantry.

"Yes," said Hlaka.

The cook and Gregor wondered. But Malone knew men better than he knew
foreign languages and saw that Hlaka meant what he said, and so bothered
no more about it.

"Very well," said Malone. "If you can get to the lake in the night a
Sunderland will come for you just before dawn, if I can whistle it up.
That's better than flying all the way in the dark. Have you got a
sending-set? A wireless that can send out messages?"

"No," said Hlaka.

"Well, plenty of your people have," said Malone. "We must get in touch
with them. But you want to watch those Germans, you know. They'll be
doing a bit of mountaineering soon."

He knew that Hlaka was well prepared, but felt that, in his capacity of
sole representative on this mountain of the empire that was organizing
most things, he ought to remind Hlaka of anything that needed to be
borne in mind.

"I have sixty-two men waiting for them," said Hlaka, "and rifles for
four more when they come."

"Then perhaps you could give me one of the rifles," said Malone, "and
I'll do a bit of shooting when the time comes."

Much of this conversation was helped out by signs, and Malone now went
through the motions of aiming with a rifle, and pointing to himself and
said, "_Pour moi._"

Hlaka called, and a rifle was brought, which he gave to Malone, who
looked it all over and said: "I can have a fine time with this."

Hlaka explained his theory of only firing at under a hundred yards,
so as to preserve ammunition. But Malone said lightly: "Oh, we can
send you plenty of that."

It was a long while since anyone else had brushed aside Hlaka's words,
but Malone's casual remark lighted new hopes in Hlaka. If the English
could replenish his ammunition like that he could go on fighting until
Hitler was tired.

"Well, what you want is a Sunderland," said Malone. "Can you get in
touch with any of your boys who could send a message for me by wireless?"

"I can send messages all over The Land," said Hlaka, "but even I do not
know where the wireless transmitters are. Of course it is death to be
found with one."

"Then can you send a message that will be passed on to one of them?"
asked Malone.

"Yes, I can do that," said Hlaka.

"What code do you use?" Malone asked him.

"I have a code that I use in the town," said Hlaka, "but there's no one
with a transmitter there, because the Germans would locate it at once.
And nobody to the north has the key-word. So I shall have to send a
messenger."

"Too slow," said Malone. "You should keep pigeons. But never mind. I can
send a message in plain, if you can get it passed on to him. I've no
key-word either."

"I can send it by helio," said Hlaka, "and it will be spread over the
country till it reaches the man with the sending-set."

All this conversation took some time; especially as the two interpreters
did not always agree. Complicated technical terms about wireless were
the easiest, because in many cases the English word for it was used in
that Near Eastern land. Then Malone wrote out his message, addressed to
the number of an aerodrome in Egypt, which simply said: "Look for fifty
men fishing for carp. If you're waking call them, mother dear. Dick."

Hlaka looked gravely at it when Malone gave it to him, and then handed
it on to Gregor and the cook. It did not seem very plain to any of them,
but it might be to the Germans, and this had to be considered with
every message.

"Will the Germans understand it?" he asked.

"Yes," said Malone, "in a hundred years. They'll work it out and get the
right answer; but we'll be gone by then. The second part of it is taken
from a poem known to almost every Englishman, and is about early
tomorrow morning. That of course will mean dawn to them. The Germans
know well enough what books Englishmen read and which poems are popular
with us, but all their things are docketed and put away in drawers, and
it will take them a little while to find them, before they begin to work
it out. The other part is simple enough, or will be to the Sunderland
people: they are always thinking about water, because they can't come
down anywhere else; and fishing rather implies water. They know where I
am, because some of them will have seen me shot down, and there are only
two bits of water anywhere near here, and carp suggests fresh water; so
it must be that lake. They'll work that out all right, and so will the
Germans in a hundred years."

So Hlaka helioed the message over the plain to the north, repeating it
again and again. And the Germans carefully took it down and translated
it and worked it out, and got at the meaning sooner than Malone had
said, but not that day nor that night. And the message, like all Hlaka's
messages, went over The Land, and came that afternoon to the men who had
a hidden transmitting set, and a minute or two after that it was
arriving in Egypt, and the C.O. of the crew of a Sunderland knew that
Dick Malone was alive in the Mountain and that he wanted fifty men to be
picked up and taken somewhere.

"What are you going to do about tanks?" asked Malone.

But a report had just come to Hlaka that the Germans were moving again,
and this aroused the old chieftain, so that some of the awe fell from
him which he had felt for his liaison with England that had been brought
to him by Malone, and now he pointed to Srebnitz's air-gun leaning
against a wall of the cave, and said: "I will shoot them with that."

And Malone, seeing that his question had been a little too childish, and
that the old chieftain would be questioned by him no more, replied: "And
just the thing for them."




XXVII


The Germans were now coming up the Mountain on both sides, and had
already climbed up at the western end, where none of Hlaka's men
were, and were moving along the ridge. At the same time a tank came
up the road, from the end of which it would be able to sweep the
rocks of the crags with an enfilading fire at men facing southwards.
In under two minutes each of Hlaka's men had gone to the rock from
which he was going to fight.

More shells came up from the town and from the plain to the north, but
ceased even before any Germans came within the distance at which Hlaka
allowed his men to fire. Malone was firing away long before the Germans
came within the range that Hlaka allowed to the rest, with the disregard
for ammunition such as came natural to a man accustomed to firing with
eight machine-guns, and with some success too. But Hlaka did not check
this representative of England, for he had been much impressed by
Malone's easy assurance that plenty more ammunition would be sent him.

The Germans were closing in towards the same point, evidently knowing
accurately where Hlaka's men were. Then the air over the Mountain shook
with a blow that even the Mountain itself seemed to feel, and air and
Mountain seemed to shudder a second time, and then, more lightly, a
third, and then a fourth; and far peaks shuddered too, and roared with
their great voices. It was the German tank, and the culvert, and several
yards of the road, going up in an explosion of guncotton. The broken
culvert and the wreck of the tank, lying across the wreck of the road,
would prevent any more tanks coming up the Mountain that day. The man
who exploded the mine never got back to the rest: Germans were close in
front of him, and on two sides, by the time he fired it: he shot five of
them, and was bayoneted.

And then the line of Germans on the northern slope came close to the
mountaineers, and just outside the ordinary range of hand-grenades
Hlaka's men began to fire. The Germans could not see them, and could not
rush their positions, because the slope was much too steep. And they
were too much out of breath after their climb, to make accurate shooting
even when they had anything to fire at, while Hlaka's men were lying
still. About the same time, or very soon after, the men coming up from
the slope on the other side came under fire.

Hlaka's men were completely surrounded by about eighty times their
numbers, but the odds were all in their favour. The Germans were too
close for the artillery to give them any more help, and their aeroplanes
seemed to have been hunted away. Among the first five shots that each of
Hlaka's sixty men fired there were very few misses, not counting the
shots of Malone, who was more prodigal with bullets. Such losses as that
could not go on for long without destroying much of the German line.
Nowhere was the slope in that part of the Mountain easy enough for them
to do that last eighty or ninety yards while the defenders reloaded
their magazines, and they soon lay down behind rocks, as the
mountaineers were doing, and began to fire more steadily than they had
done hitherto, but still with very rarely a visible mark to fire at.

As they heard the long roll of their own fire, duplicated by
mountain-echoes, they felt they were doing some good, but they were
unable to cross the steep and rocky space between them and their
opponents. This firing went on for a long time, while Hlaka's men
continued to fire only when they saw a German, or some part of him, who
had not been able to conceal himself. Sometimes during a lull in the
mountaineer's firing, or when it had ceased altogether, owing to there
being no more visible targets among the Germans, a few Germans would
crawl forward; and these were invariably killed.

When Malone, who was above the rest of them, could see nothing more to
fire at within three hundred yards on the northern slope, he crawled a
few yards through the rocks and looked down on the other side, and did
some shooting in that direction.

At last the German fire lulled, not because they had not plenty of
ammunition, which Hlaka greatly envied them, but because they had been
ordered to cease fire; and Hlaka saw that whoever commanded them had a
new plan, the first one having broken down. Hlaka was glad that they had
ceased fire, and for a very curious reason. But the reason was simple
enough: the Germans were his sole source of ammunition, and he did not
like to see them wasting it.

As the day wore on and the Germans neither advanced nor retired, Hlaka
soon saw what the new plan was: the steep slope that the Germans could
not climb with unseen marksmen opposing them would not be at all the
same obstacle at night, when both sides would be invisible; they would
lose many more men when they left their shelters, even by night; but
what was left of them would, with such numbers in darkness, be able to
overcome the mountaineers, even if they used no more than their bare
hands. There would be a moon, but that would not show the sights of a
rifle; even late twilight gave insufficient light for accurate shooting.
And the day was wearing away. Already splendid colours shone low in the
western sky. The Germans were lying perfectly still, and waiting.

Hlaka knew they would move soon after nightfall, but did not expect them
to attack at once; he expected them rather to move their entire force
first, up to where their front line lay about a hundred yards from his
own men, so that the attack when it came would be in the great mass that
the Germans love. His own plan was to break through their line after
dark and before it was strengthened, on the northern slope below the
precipice, where they would least expect him. There would not be much
time to spare, unless he relied on the Germans not to attack till late
in the night, and that would be to lean too heavily upon Fortune.

So, as the brief twilight faded, he began gradually to withdraw several
of his men to the edge of the small precipice, which they did by
crawling in the dim light among the rocks, more and more as the light
grew dimmer. Among these was Srebnitz. There was no firing now and
Srebnitz saw a German officer standing up and looking towards them with
his field-glasses. Every question that arises in the kind of war in
which Hlaka's men were engaged has to be answered; and, as no man can
know everything, guesses are of value, and an actual part of such
warfare. Srebnitz guessed that in bad light a man can still see through
field-glasses, and he guessed rightly.

He was about to crawl to Hlaka to tell him that the movement towards the
precipice was being observed by this German, when something struck him
about the man's figure. He was well over the distance at which Hlaka
allowed men to fire, even in good light. Srebnitz took another look at
him, but in that light could make out nothing for certain. He crawled to
Hlaka, who was only a little way off, and told him they were being
observed. But there was something more than that, and he asked Hlaka if
he might look through the field-glasses which the chieftain always
carried. Hlaka handed the glasses to him and Srebnitz put up his head
and looked, and the late evening seemed to brighten a little bit, and he
saw clearly the German officer's heavy figure, and at that moment the
German's glasses went down and he saw the red face and cruel eyes of von
Wald. He turned suddenly to Hlaka.

"May I shoot?" he said.

Hlaka shook his head.

"But it is Major von Wald," said Srebnitz.

Hlaka reflected a moment. He had two machine-guns, but he looked on
them as a careful man looks on spendthrifts, and he had not used them
yet: in a few minutes they would have fired away all the ammunition
he had. But von Wald's name was in the book; it was a case for the
machine-gun. So Hlaka sent a message along his line of men to the man
who had charge of it, and he crawled up with the machine-gun, and
Major von Wald was still there.

Hlaka gave Srebnitz permission also to fire his rifle, although the
distance was quite a hundred and fifty yards, but not to fire it until
the machine-gun had begun to fire. And he himself came with the two men
to the rocks from which they took aim. Then von Wald sat down behind a
rock and was out of sight, while all three men watched the rock with
their weapons ready. Time seemed to pass slowly in the still evening,
and still the light faded.

Once more von Wald stood up and raised his field-glasses. Srebnitz
could only just see anything of the foresight when he had the whole of
it in view. Knowing that the sight he took would make the bullet go far
too high, he aimed below the major's knees. Suddenly the machine-gun
began roaring in his right ear and he fired, and unheard by him Hlaka
fired too. The major went down. Srebnitz could not be sure whether he
was hit or not, till he heard Hlaka say to one of his men: "Scratch his
name out of the book."




XXVIII


A planet shone, and soon the stars came out. Hlaka, interpreting the few
sounds he heard, coming up the slope through the hush, knew that the
Germans were closing in all round from below, but there was no movement
yet from their firing-line.

As soon as it was possible to move his men unseen at a hundred yards he
moved them towards the edge of the small precipice, walking now, though
stooping, and taking as much care to go unheard as lately they had taken
to go unseen. No moonlight showed as yet on the northern slope, and the
precipice showed black. There Hlaka waited a few minutes, then had the
ropes quietly let down and sent his men down them, two or three on a
rope at a time, while several hands above took the strain off the roots
of the trees to which the ropes were fastened.

Srebnitz was among the first of those to go down, with his rifle slung
from his shoulder and various provisions strapped about him. The dark
and the emptiness seemed cold to him. Then the rope nearly burned his
leg; and sooner than he expected he touched the ground among myrtles.
The noise that he made, and that his comrades made, seemed to him to be
certain to be heard by the Germans, if they were only eighty yards away,
but no shot came from them.

At the foot of the precipice he waited anxiously, with a few others, to
protect the men on the ropes if the Germans should move. But still no
sound came from the Germans, and more and more mountaineers came down
the ropes and Srebnitz soon felt the confidence that is given by
numbers. This was the thinnest part of the German line, for the
precipice was unclimbable, and most of the Germans had moved away from
it either to left or right, and most of those that did approach it had
been easily seen from the high edge and shot, but Hlaka expected to meet
with supports and reserves as he went down their slope.

He drew up his men in two ranks, shoulder to shoulder, and led them
straight down through the myrtles. They met only two Germans: a few
shots were fired, and they were through the line; and that was two more
rifles for Hlaka's men. Half a dozen shots did not entirely give away
Hlaka's plan, but he hurried for fear that the Germans should find it
out. Two hundred yards further down he met more Germans, men coming up
the Mountain to strengthen the line that had surrounded him, and he
went straight through them with a burst of firing on both sides. He
lost one man here, killed or wounded; there was no time to see which.
Indeed, like Napoleon in Egypt, and, as they say, some German
field-marshals, wounded men on either side were details that did not
fit into Hlaka's plan; his own wounded were a sacrifice that the
sacred cause for which he fought might well demand, as he saw it, and
the German wounded were something he never spoke about, and about
which his men never troubled him.

The second burst of firing must have shown clearly the way that Hlaka
was taking, but he moved his men over the ground with the speed of
mountaineers, which he hoped would outdistance the Germans, quite
unfamiliar with his native mountains. Not all his men were mountaineers,
and several had joined him only the day before; but Hlaka's pace was the
pace of the fastest, and he left the slowest to make themselves his
rearguard, and to follow as they could. Very lights were fired,
turning the night to a queer green, full of flickering shadows, but
they did not discover Hlaka's men. And they came to good oak-scrub
and felt they were safe. The line closing in on the peaks was now
wholly behind them, and no Germans were likely to be ahead of them
any longer, except the men with the batteries in the plain. But Hlaka
knew exactly where these were.

They went on unmolested and the slope became gentler, and the dark bulk
of the Mountain rose behind them, and before them were all the stars.
While Very lights still soared and flickered vainly behind they came to
the last sweep of the slopes that draped the Mountain. Then Srebnitz
heard a voice saying in words with no meaning to him, for they were in a
foreign language: "Well done, Chief. You've come to a road."

And sure enough their feet touched a road, which is always a strange and
welcome thing to men who have been for a time in the wilds. It was not
long since Srebnitz had seen a road, and yet even he felt the thrill of
it. Travel for a time in the wilds, and you will perhaps meet no more
thrilling thing as you come away. What a wonderful thing a desert would
be in a city. How children would play in its sand, how young men fare
out into it from the last street. Think of the camels waiting where the
buses end their journeys. The noise and the smoke behind, the quiet and
the mirage before. As strange as that is a road to the men of the wilds.

Even there Hlaka did not wait for his rearguard, but dropped connecting
files to keep in touch with them, and got his men into fours and marched
them down the road at a pace of five miles an hour.

"How are you going to do the forty miles tonight, Chief?" asked Malone.

Hlaka beckoned up Gregor, who interpreted, and Hlaka told Malone his
plan, a plan that had been in his mind ever since the time when he had
briefly said that men could do what wild sheep had done. Men had not the
strength nor the speed of the wild sheep, but man's brains made up for
that. Whether he has used his brains wisely, who can say? But his brains
have certainly achieved wonderful things, and a motor's engine is one of
them. From one of the farms that supplied Hlaka's needs, as all the
farms in The Land were willing to do when they could, Hlaka had obtained
a lorry, which was not far away on the road along which they marched. It
was a small lorry and could not hold more than twelve men with their
rifles and few provisions; but Hlaka's plan which he now told to Malone,
with the help of Gregor, was that the lorry should pick up the last
twelve men, and take them twenty miles and then return for the last
twelve again, and take them twenty miles also, again returning.

Hlaka had calculated that during the night there would be time for the
lorry to take all his men on one journey, they would rest in the lorry
and continue to march when set down. He calculated that his men could
easily march twenty miles in the night, in addition to which each man
would do twenty miles by lorry.

"A simple sum, Chief," said Malone as soon as he understood Gregor's
interpretation. "Forty miles."

Malone approved the simple arrangement and felt that, as the only Briton
present, he should express that approval. "Very good, Chief," he said.

And very soon the lorry passed them, going without lights, to pick up
Hlaka's rearguard.

All that night Hlaka's men marched or sat in the lorry; marching, after
the first half-hour, at an easier pace. Hlaka did not expect to meet any
Germans, as they were all concentrated on the Mountain; and he was not
molested during his night-march. Once the lorry met a cycling patrol,
consisting of a German corporal and two men, and they were all shot by
the men in the lorry. One of the bicycles was damaged; the other two
were taken by Hlaka's infantry. Sometimes the men that marched rested
briefly beside the road; but none of them rested long, except in the
lorry, and before dawn they saw the pale cold gleam of the lake to
which Hlaka had said he would come, forty miles away from the
Mountain. There they waited, while time dragged slowly. But, however
slowly time passed over the waiting men, dawn seemed to be coming
swiftly, and there was no sign of the Sunderland.

Hlaka looked towards Malone, and Malone was uneasy, but he smiled
confidently; and Hlaka saw his uneasiness under the smile and said
nothing.

Hlaka cast his eyes about the countryside now emerging from night,
trying to find some place where his men might hide and rest during the
day. For a lorry could not go down the road by day unobserved by the
Germans, and his men would have had to have fought one of those battles
that he avoided, a battle in the open such as history notices; nor could
they have marched another twenty miles at all without rest. More and
more of the country came out of the darkness, while Hlaka observed its
crops, its rocks and its bushes, planning where he would put his men if
the Sunderland did not come.

Hlaka sent the lorry into a grove of trees that was not far from the
road. Day was coming up rapidly. The men looked at each other; there was
light on their faces, and the night that had covered them was all gone.
A flash came over a low hill to the right, that was from a cloud
immediately over the sun, and Hlaka decided to take his men from the
lake to hide them as well as he could.

At that moment there came a hum like the sound of the pulse in one's
ears. Hlaka listened, and all his men. The sound grew. All of them
turned their eyes to the south, from which the sound was humming, and
there came the Sunderland. In barely a minute it had come down to the
lake and its floats plunged into the water, and Malone was smiling a
perfectly genuine smile. Hlaka looked at him, and Malone knew without an
interpreter what Hlaka wished to say.

"She doesn't ride very deep," said Malone. "We can all walk out to her."

It was a chilly morning on that grey lake; but there was no other way.




XXIX


"Tell him where you want to go, Chief," said Malone. For the pilot was
standing at an open door above a little flight of steps.

And Hlaka spoke to Gregor, who called out to the pilot telling him of
the Blue Mountains and the river. The pilot nodded, and Hlaka's men
began to walk through the reeds, and walked on through open water
holding their rifles over their heads, while the crew of the Sunderland
refuelled it from the great number of petrol-tins that were piled up
where passengers usually sit.

"Have any trouble coming here?" shouted Malone to the pilot.

"No," said the pilot. "We've a few fighters watching over their
aerodrome. But we'd better get off quick. Fifty men, please. All
standing."

"Hope my message explained itself," said Malone.

"Not very well," said the pilot. "Why didn't you go on with the
quotation and say something about the brightest day in all the glad
what-do-you-call-it? That would have clearly indicated tomorrow."

"Well," said Malone, "I thought of it, but that might have meant the
first of May, and as the first of May is so damned close I didn't like
to risk it."

"I see," said the pilot. "Perhaps you were right. Well, get them in as
fast as you can."

And the dripping men climbed in. Hlaka had lost altogether five men in
the fight and, when the Sunderland was full, only six were left by the
road. The two that had bicycles Hlaka told to hide by day and come on at
night, all the way to the Blue Mountains, and the other four were to
come by night as far as they could in the lorry, and to leave it and
come through the country as they could, if they felt unable to get the
lorry through. Then the door was shut and the propellers started just
as the sun came over the hills to their right, and a golden curtain of
spray waved past the windows, a curtain that seemed to be caught in a
raging tempest, which suddenly dropped away and they floated in air.

Earth looked beautiful, just awaking from sleep and casting off gauze
wraps, as the mist appeared, thickened here and there by early fires
from chimneys of cottages and from little encampments, which a breeze
drew gently away. Dark mauve lay the shadows of clouds on the green of
the land that the fifty men had fought for, and in a few minutes they
saw all its mountains. Then the soaring plane went into the skirts of
the clouds, and nothing was to be seen for a while from the windows
except these light-grey shapes.

Thence they came out into unshadowed sunshine, into a world such as
they had never seen before, a world of white plains with white peaks
rising amongst them, and steel white islands drifting in bright blue.
They had not looked long at this serene white world, when again a
mist closed round them, and the shapes of clouds went wildly raging
past, and earth appeared again, and the mountains quite close. A
river gleamed ahead of them, the earth slanted, and soon two waves
of spray were rushing past the windows.

Malone was delighted; he had moved an army without a casualty; there was
plenty of cover along the banks of the river for fifty men to hide till
nightfall; and the Blue Mountains were only five miles away. But no
smile lit the brooding face of Hlaka.

"You're all right now, Chief," said Malone. "Plenty of cover here, and
even a house over there, and the mountains barely five miles away."

Gregor translated, but Hlaka made no reply.

"There's plenty of your own people there, Chief," said Malone. "More
than you think, and some of our people too. And all well armed."

But this good news brought no gleam of a smile to Hlaka.

And then he spoke: "My daughter and two sisters are in that house," he
said. "And the Germans are looking for them."

"It would be hard living for women in the Blue Mountains," said Malone
thoughtfully.

"Yes," said Hlaka.

And then a thought came to Malone. "We can't wait here long, you know,"
he said. "But that house is little more than a mile away. We could wait
half an hour. If you could get them here, we could do something better
for them than that." And he pointed to the Blue Mountains.

Hlaka thought for a moment. "Egypt?" he said.

"Yes," said Malone. "And worth seeing. But we could find a better
climate for them than that. The _khamseen_ can be a bit of a curse, you
know. These Sunderlands run to Natal and, any time there was room, we
might take them. We've every kind of climate in our bit of an empire,
and they'd do grand in Natal."

Hlaka thought. Natal. A land where there were no Germans. Then he nodded
his head.

"Well, send some young fellow to get them, Chief," said Malone. "And
make him run."

Hlaka nodded again, and beckoned to Srebnitz and pointed out the house
to him. "I sent my daughter and sisters there," he said. "Bring them
here quickly. Give me your rifle."

Srebnitz paused to say something; he did not know what, for a great
flight of thoughts was rising up in his mind.

"Quickly," said Hlaka.

So Srebnitz turned and ran, and reached the house in ten minutes. To see
Sophia again! He was out of breath, and a little bit out of his mind, or
at any rate his mind was too much dominated by thoughts of Sophia to be
able to function in the way that uninspired, unstimulated, dull minds
function. His mind was irradiated by visions of her, and immediately
darkened by fears that she might not have reached the house, or might
have left it, or even might be dead, and then irradiated again by
memories of her smiles. Amongst these hurrying moods Srebnitz knocked at
the door of the farmhouse, and it was opened by Sophia herself. And her
two aunts sat inside, calm as ever. Others were there, whom Srebnitz
scarcely saw. But beyond Sophia's face and around it he saw a large
room, rather dim, full of many things that helped to hold back the
light, but which somehow seemed to strengthen the feeling of home, that
hung all over the room, as though chairs and tables and curtains and one
or two barrels, and many odds and ends of a southern farm, were those
little lesser gods that the Romans knew by the name of lares and
penates, gathered about the altar of the great fireplace. Amongst all
these Srebnitz saw in a single flash the elderly farmer who was
evidently master of the house, and his wife and three or four cats and
two dogs.

"Sophia," he said.

She smiled at Srebnitz, then turned to introduce him to the master of
the house.

"My uncle," said Sophia.

But there was no time.

"The Chieftain says you must come to the river at once," he said.
"There's an aeroplane there."

Isabella and Angelica looked up.

"He says the Germans know you are his sisters," continued Srebnitz.
"He wants you to come at once."

Isabella never even spoke. She went straight out of the room to
gather up her belongings, and one glance at Angelica as she went
brought her too.

"The plane cannot wait long," Srebnitz called to them.

"Then I'll get ready too," said Sophia, and ran out of the room.

There had been no argument or discussion where Hlaka's words were
concerned.

"Come in," said the farmer.

But Srebnitz stood at the door, not daring to waste even a few moments
on receiving hospitality.

"You fight with Hlaka?" asked the farmer.

"Yes," said Srebnitz.

"He married my sister," said the farmer.

"Yes," said his wife, "she came from here."

So that accounted for Sophia having come to this house.

"We are going into the mountains," said Srebnitz.

"You'll find plenty more up there," said the farmer, "all well armed.
The Germans will never get you out of it. And you'll get all the
provisions you want. We all of us send them up to the men in the
mountains."

"Are there any Germans between us and the mountains?" asked Srebnitz.

"Sometimes there are a few," said the farmer. "But they are very
cautious, and, if you meet them and start a fight, the men in the
mountains will come down to help you."

"We must go quickly," said Srebnitz, for those were his orders from
Hlaka.

But at this moment Sophia returned, and her two aunts followed her.
They had brought few enough possessions to this house, and they soon
gathered them up. Farewells took up some time, and Srebnitz drew back
from the door so as to make no leave-taking, which would have added
many more seconds to the delay, and the farmer came too, carrying
bundles for Sophia's aunts.

Srebnitz ran with Sophia, in order to encourage Isabella and Angelica
to go their utmost pace. But, when they were moving as fast as they
could, he dropped behind with Sophia, knowing that it would be no use
to the waiting plane if he got there five minutes before they did.
Confident that he and Sophia could overtake the aunts when they
chose, he dropped back with her.

And that short walk, with no time to spare for loitering, was the
idyllic time of their lives, the time to which they would long look
back, with the scene that was now about them undimmed by the years; the
rocky land, the green maize growing in fields, and, shining upon the
wilder land, the anemones. Words said by Srebnitz too, and Sophia's
answers, echoed on in his memory, to linger there probably when old age
shall have come to him, and when he has learned a graver way of talking,
outlasting there the pronouncements of statesmen, the inventions of
savants, the sayings of wise men, and even the words of songs. And no
less clearly these words in Sophia's memory rang on with undying echoes,
echoes that always heartened her in the long days of waiting for The
Land to be free. And one could record here these memorable words, but
that they were too trivial, and would never gather about them in cold
print the magic with which they were all enchanted, a magic that seemed
to Srebnitz to come from the hills and anemones, and butterflies and the
light of the sky, and scores of other ingredients out of which Love
brews his charms. But the general purport of their talk was that they
would remember each other for ever, and that they would be married as
soon as The Land should be free.




XXX


Farewells were brief at the river-bank. If a wandering Stuka came by
there would be no concealing the Sunderland, and it had not the speed
to escape. So every minute brought risk.

"Well, Chief," Malone called out from the plane, "let us know anything
you want. We'll send you a wireless transmitting set, and all you'll
have to do is to ask."

Before his words could be translated he was back inside the plane, to
allow Isabella and Angelica to come in, whom two men had carried from
the river. Srebnitz carried Sophia. And that was a memory that Srebnitz
treasured for two years in the Blue Mountains.

The moment the three ladies were on board the engines started, and
Hlaka's men waved their hats and gave a cheer for the victory that they
knew in their hearts they would win, to hearten the ladies as they left
their native land; not that they heard it above the roar of the engines,
but they saw by the faces of the men that they were cheering and that
they saw victory shining through the mist of the years to be.

Then the curtain of foaming water hid everything for a while, and when
it fell away Isabella, Angelica and Sophia saw come true a dream with
which they were all familiar, for the poets of their country had dreamed
it for three thousand years, and taught the dream to others, until the
scientists dreamed it, and then the workers; and at last man flew. They
saw their loved Land below them with all its colours and shapes, and
every detail except altitude, so that they could not always distinguish
between bushes and trees, or between mounds and mountains.

Soon, like sheep-dogs about a lonely sheep, to fit one metaphor to
their purpose, or like gnats in summer above a horse's head, if a
metaphor is chosen to fit the eye, there appeared an escort of Spitfires
to see the Sunderland past the German aerodrome near the city, and
safely out to sea. So small and high they were that the three ladies
never noticed them; and Malone, who stood beside them, did not point
them out, seeing no reason to inform them of details of the protection
of the British Empire, letting it suffice that that protection was over
them like a shield. A few more minutes and there came into sight the
deep-blue Mediterranean. Soon The Land lay behind them and the three
ladies who saw the dreams of old poets come true now saw, just as
Shelley had seen it, either with his two eyes from some high cliff or
from some airy height to which his genius had soared:

    "The blue Mediterranean, where he lay,
    Lulled by the coil of his crystalline streams."

For strange streams slept along the floor of the sea, wrapped round by
purple seaweeds, which, from the height at which they were, showed as
clearly among the greens and the blues as they could have been seen by a
diver. What they were none of the ladies knew, nor could Malone tell
them. Perhaps they were inland rivers far out to sea, and cutting their
beds through the floor of it and heaping those beds with seaweed, as
silks and satins are brought to adorn men's houses. Or they may have
been tracks of old storms that have long since rested, leaving the
weeds where they had led them on their wild adventure.

Sophia was satisfied with the sheer beauty of the sea, but Isabella
wanted to hear something of the cause of these purple streams that ran
amongst cobalt green, and turned to enquire of Malone; but Malone had
gone away to wring out his wet shirt.

They went through the morning over the inland sea, and at noon saw the
square white shapes of the houses of Alexandria, and crossed the Nile's
greatest luxuriance, till the pyramids came in view; things older than
The Land, older than its whole story. There was something breathtaking
in that, something inspiring awe, as does a great precipice. Sophia and
her aunts saw no especial beauty in them, but they were like precipices
among the ages, looking sheer on abysses of time.

A few miles from these stupendous monuments they alighted on the water.
There in Cairo they were cared for with many of their compatriots, whose
men repaid the debt by fighting in the desert. In those days all the
jacaranda was blooming, beautifying Cairo with its great masses of
mauve-tinted blue. They went right up to the pyramids, to see their
mystery closer. And there they stood, the memorials of one of those
great struggles that a man makes every now and then, out of bravado,
ambition or any other whim, against the things that threaten him; Cheops
against oblivion, Hitler against liberty; both of them winning at first,
both of them holding out still. And then they went to the Sphinx and
tried to make out what she seemed to be saying to the dawn. So old she
is that the dawn has grown weary of her at last and has moved a little
away from the spot at which on midsummer's day she used to smile in
front of the face of the Sphinx. And when the bloom of the jacaranda
fell, and the scarlet began to flash upon the flamboyants, places were
found for them on one of the Sunderlands that was to fly to Natal.
Malone came with an interpreter to say good-bye to them.

"Tell them," he said to the interpreter, "that they'll be right as rain
in Natal. No Boches there to bother them, and we'll bring them back as
soon as we've driven the heilhitlers out of The Land. And tell them that
the Chieftain will be all right. There are lots of men with him, and
we'll keep them well supplied. And men like him and them will be about
the only people that will be able to manage those mountains; the Germans
won't have a chance. And, well, that is about all."

And next day Sophia and her aunts started south in another Sunderland.
Again they followed the Nile, and, stranger than a strip of carpet from
a house-door across a London pavement, stranger than one strip of carpet
going the whole way through a great city, went the green strip of
cultivation beside the Nile, sheer through the desert for hundreds and
hundreds of miles; till they lost sight of the Nile and crossed wild
desert, where mountains were, with streams in all their valleys,
widening as they went downwards, and meeting tributaries on their way,
golden streams only of sand, such as Death might drink at a banquet
given at noon in that land to the powers that hated man.

They came to the Nile again, and saw upon the Nile's right bank the four
great images guarding the door into the hill that was hollowed to make a
temple, when dawn was a little south of where it is now. Green palms
appeared and they came to Wady Halfa, and rested there that night, and
went on at dawn over that tremendous desert, and crossed the Nile on the
way and found it again at Khartoum, flying low enough, where the Blue
and the White Nile meet, to see the colours of the two rivers.

Two hundred miles more of desert, and life began to appear, scanty and
sere at first, as though awed by the nearness of Death in his vast realm
of Sahara. They passed by Abyssinia on their left, undisturbed by any
enemy, for the Italian empire in Africa was at that time crumbling away.
They came to Malakal, and there a deadlier enemy than Italy lurked, the
Yellow Fever, but it did not harm them. Next day they came to Uganda.
There was no memory of any desert there, and grasses in the marshes of
the Nile grew tall enough to hide elephants.

And then the herds of animals appeared, that still roam Africa, though
every year the frontier of their wild lands recedes further; warthogs
with tails straight up galloped through grasses, and herds of elephants
stood with their great ears stretched to listen, and their tusks
shining; and crocodiles lay motionless on the mud of the river with
their upper jaws lifted up, while hundreds of hippopotamuses made
life one endless bath. None of these animals had ever been seen
before by any of the three ladies, and one of the officers of the
Sunderland, who knew something of their language, wondered what they
would make of so strange a scene.

"You wouldn't stand much chance down there," he said to Isabella,
pointing down to the elephants, and to a pair of rhinoceroses that had
just come out from the reeds where the crocodiles lay.

"I expect I could manage," said Isabella. "I have lived amongst
Prussians."

They saw the Nile foam over the Murchison Falls. They saw their shadow
trailing across Africa, sometimes upon the earth and sometimes on
clouds, surrounded by a rainbow; but it always came with them. They came
down on the Great Lake among blue water-lilies, and crossed it and
rested at Kisumu among frangipani trees, and went next day over Kenya at
fifteen thousand feet, where mountains give to the air some of their
rugged quality, so that their way lay over invisible obstacles. They saw
at a long distance the great head of Kilimanjaro, which appeared a black
head streaked with grey, for the mass of snow that crowns him was
somehow lost in the sky. They came down out of the cold, suddenly into
great heat, and were at Mombasa. Thence they crossed Zanzibar and came
to Dar-es-Salaam, and walked in its tree-lined streets and went on
again, and flew low across the Rufigi river; and in the river lay like a
dead monster the German cruiser, the _Koenigsberg_. The officer that
knew the language of Sophia and her aunts said nothing, and none of the
others even pointed; they merely flew the Sunderland low, and the three
ladies, exiled from their Land by the vast might of Germany, could see
the great ship with shell-holes in her side, lying there lost in Africa.

At Lindi they came down again among blue water-lilies, and rose and
crossed the Ruvuma, and so left the British Empire and came to
Mozambique. Next day they crossed the country of Mozambique and were in
the Empire again, sailing over Zululand. For the last thousand miles and
more they had moved over forest, with small round clearings in it, and
in the clearings groups of little thatched huts.

And so they came to Durban, a city of splendid trees, planted in
orderly rows along its streets, and wild patches of African forest
still preserved, which were there long before the oldest house in the
city; and behind it to the west its suburbs rising, garden by garden,
over all the hills.

And here they waited, and are waiting yet, for the storm to abate which
has driven Liberty so far from what to them is her natural home. And
their waiting is cheered, and their exile mitigated, by the hospitality
of Natal. And yet they live for only one thing; and no grandeur of
scenery or beauty of flowers that Natal has to show can ever draw them
away from the news at the hour at which they are accustomed to listen.
And as great birds in this very Africa wait, motionless in their
patience, for the death of some large beast of prey, so Isabella and
Angelica wait for the end of Hitler; and of late they see many signs
that that is near, and with these signs they comfort Sophia.

Meanwhile Srebnitz with Hlaka in the Blue Mountains, and men of an
army far better equipped than the one that he first joined, lives in
a great cave, of which there is a tradition passed down from man to
man, like traditions we have of old houses in England, saying that
Queen Elizabeth slept there; but this is an older Land, and tells not
of a queen but a god, and says that therein lived Pan. And there
Iskander sings to Marya a hundred miles away, since love can use new
inventions as well as dream old dreams. For Malone has kept his
promise and sent a transmitting-set to Hlaka, and a message has been
sent to Marya to tell her when to listen.

Against these mountains the Germans can make no headway. Sometimes they
send Bulgarians and Italians to try their hands, but they do no better;
the mountains are too steep, and Hlaka's marksmen grow better as the
months go by, until he has let them fire at over two hundred yards. And
remnants of English and New Zealand regiments that are still up there
sum up the situation, when they say of the Germans: "They haven't a
dog's chance." And some of them try to translate that into French,
believing it to be nearer to Hlaka's language than their own.

There they wait with the past behind them, safe with all its glories in
the great cave of Pan, and before them the future, lit by the wings of
victory flashing in each man's dreams, or, in visions that hope often
brings them, spreading like golden meteors across the sky of The Land.




Transcriber's Notes:

Inconsistencies in hyphenation retained. (gun-cotton, guncotton;
sky-line, skyline; pine-wood, pinewood)

Page 18, "exclained" changed to "exclaimed". (that!" he exclaimed.)

Page 49, "Montague" changed to "Montagne". (Good evening, Monsieur de la
Montagne)

Page 208, "land" changed to "hand". (hand of fate)

[End of _Guerrilla_ by Lord Dunsany]