The Red Cross Girl
R >>
Richard Harding Davis >> The Red Cross Girl
Pages:
1 |
2 |
3 |
4 |
5 |
6 | 7 |
8 |
9 |
10 |
11 |
12 |
13 |
14 |
15
"Yes, sir," the policeman assured him promptly; "I saw them.
It's manoeuvres, sir. Territorials."
"They didn't look like Territorials," objected the chauffeur.
"They looked like Germans."
Protected by the deepening dusk, the constable made no effort
to conceal a grin.
"Just Territorials, sir," he protested soothingly;
"skylarking maybe, but meaning no harm. Still, I'll have a
look round, and warn 'em."
A voice from beneath the canvas broke in angrily:
"I tell you, they were Germans. It's either a silly joke, or
it's serious, and you ought to report it. It's your duty to
warn the Coast Guard."
The constable considered deeply.
"I wouldn't take it on myself to wake the Coast Guard," he
protested; "not at this time of the night. But if any
Germans' been annoying you, gentlemen, and you wish to lodge
a complaint against them, you give me your cards--"
"Ye gods!" cried the man in the rear of the car. "Go on!" he
commanded.
As the car sped out of Stiffkey, Herbert exclaimed with
disgust:
"What's the use!" he protested. "You couldn't wake these
people with dynamite! I vote we chuck it and go home."
"They little know of England who only Stiffkey know," chanted
the chauffeur reprovingly. "Why, we haven't begun yet. Wait
till we meet a live wire!"
Two miles farther along the road to Cromer, young Bradshaw,
the job-master's son at Blakeney, was leading his bicycle up
the hill. Ahead of him something heavy flopped from the bank
into the road--and in the light of his acetylene lamp he saw
a soldier. The soldier dodged across the road and scrambled
through the hedge on the bank opposite. He was followed by
another soldier, and then by a third. The last man halted.
"Put out that light," he commanded. " Go to your home and
tell no one what you have seen. If you attempt to give an
alarm you will be shot. Our sentries are placed every fifty
yards along this road."
The soldier disappeared from in front of the ray of light and
followed his comrades, and an instant later young Bradshaw
heard them sliding over the cliff's edge and the pebbles
clattering to the beach below. Young Bradshaw stood quite
still. In his heart was much fear--fear of laughter, of
ridicule, of failure. But of no other kind of fear. Softly,
silently he turned his bicycle so that it faced down the long
hill he had just climbed. Then he snapped off the light. He
had been reliably informed that in ambush at every fifty
yards along the road to Blakeney, sentries were waiting to
fire on him. And he proposed to run the gauntlet. He saw that
it was for this moment that, first as a volunteer and later
as a Territorial, he had drilled in the town hall, practiced
on the rifle range, and in mixed manoeuvres slept in six
inches of mud. As he threw his leg across his bicycle,
Herbert, from the motor-car farther up the hill, fired two
shots over his head. These, he explained to Ford, were
intended to give " verisimilitude to an otherwise bald and
unconvincing narrative." And the sighing of the bullets gave
young Bradshaw exactly what he wanted--the assurance that he
was not the victim of a practical joke. He threw his weight
forward and, lifting his feet, coasted downhill at forty
miles an hour into the main street of Blakeney. Ten minutes
later, when the car followed, a mob of men so completely
blocked the water-front that Ford was forced to stop. His
head-lights illuminated hundreds of faces, anxious,
sceptical, eager. A gentleman with a white mustache and a
look of a retired army officer pushed his way toward Ford,
the crowd making room for him, and then closing in his wake.
"Have you seen any--any soldiers?" he demanded.
"German soldiers!" Ford answered. "They tried to catch us,
but when I saw who they were, I ran through them to warn you.
They fired and--"
"How many--and where?"
"A half-company at Stiffkey and a half-mile farther on a
regiment. We didn't know then they were Germans, not until
they stopped us. You'd better telephone the garrison, and--"
"Thank you!" snapped the elderly gentleman. "I happen to be
in command of this district. What are your names?"
Ford pushed the car forward, parting the crowd.
"I've no time for that!" he called. "We've got to warn every
coast town in Norfolk. You take my tip and get London on the
long distance!"
As they ran through the night Ford spoke over his shoulder.
"We've got them guessing," he said. "Now, what we want is a
live wire, some one with imagination, some one with authority
who will wake the countryside."
"Looks ahead there," said Birrell, "as though it hadn't gone
to bed."
Before them, as on a Mafeking night, every window in Cley
shone with lights. In the main street were fishermen,
shopkeepers, "trippers" in flannels, summer residents. The
women had turned out as though to witness a display of
fireworks. Girls were clinging to the arms of their escorts,
shivering in delighted terror. The proprietor of the Red Lion
sprang in front of the car and waved his arms.
"What's this tale about Germans?" he demanded jocularly.
"You can see their lights from the beach," said Ford.
"They've landed two regiments between here and Wells.
Stiffkey is taken, and they've cut all the wires south."
The proprietor refused to be "had."
"Let 'em all come!" he mocked.
"All right," returned Ford. "Let 'em come, but don't take it
lying down! Get those women off the streets, and go down to
the beach, and drive the Germans back! Gangway," he shouted,
and the car shot forward. "We warned you," he called, "And
it's up to you to--"
His words were lost in the distance. But behind him a man's
voice rose with a roar like a rocket and was met with a
savage, deep-throated cheer.
Outside the village Ford brought the car to a halt and swung
in his seat.
"This thing is going to fail!" he cried petulantly. "They
don't believe us. We've got to show ourselves--many times--
in a dozen places."
"The British mind moves slowly," said Birrell, the Irishman.
"Now, if this had happened in my native land--"
He was interrupted by the screech of a siren, and a demon car
that spurned the road, that splattered them with pebbles,
tore past and disappeared in the darkness. As it fled down
the lane of their head-lights, they saw that men in khaki
clung to its sides, were packed in its tonneau, were swaying
from its running boards. Before they could find their voices
a motor cycle, driven as though the angel of death were at
the wheel, shaved their mud-guard and, in its turn, vanished
into the night.
"Things are looking up!" said Ford. "Where is our next stop?
As I said before, what we want is a live one."
Herbert pressed his electric torch against his road map.
"We are next billed to appear," he said, "about a quarter of
a mile from here, at the signal-tower of the Great Eastern
Railroad, where we visit the night telegraph operator and
give him the surprise party of his life."
The three men had mounted the steps of the signal-tower so
quietly that, when the operator heard them, they already
surrounded him. He saw three German soldiers with fierce
upturned mustaches, with flat, squat helmets, with long brown
rifles. They saw an anĉmic, pale-faced youth without a coat
or collar, for the night was warm, who sank back limply in
his chair and gazed speechless with wide-bulging eyes.
In harsh, guttural tones Ford addressed him. "You are a
prisoner," he said. "We take over this office in the name of
the German Emperor. Get out!"
As though instinctively seeking his only weapon of defence,
the hand of the boy operator moved across the table to the
key of his instrument. Ford flung his rifle upon it.
"No, you don't!" he growled. "Get out!"
With eyes still bulging, the boy lifted himself into a
sitting posture.
"My pay--my month's pay?" he stammered. "Can I take It?"
The expression on the face of the conqueror relaxed.
"Take it and get out," Ford commanded.
With eyes still fixed in fascinated terror upon the invader,
the boy pulled open the drawer of the table before him and
fumbled with the papers inside.
"Quick!" cried Ford.
The boy was very quick. His hand leaped from the drawer like
a snake, and Ford found himself looking into a revolver of
the largest calibre issued by a civilized people. Birrell
fell upon the boy's shoulders, Herbert twisted the gun from
his fingers and hurled it through the window, and almost as
quickly hurled himself down the steps of the tower. Birrell
leaped after him. Ford remained only long enough to shout:
"Don't touch that instrument! If you attempt to send a
message through, we will shoot. We go to cut the wires!"
For a minute, the boy in the tower sat rigid, his ears
strained, his heart beating in sharp, suffocating stabs.
Then, with his left arm raised to guard his face, he sank to
his knees and, leaning forward across the table, inviting as
he believed his death, he opened the circuit and through the
night flashed out a warning to his people.
When they had taken their places in the car, Herbert touched
Ford on the shoulder.
"Your last remark," he said, " was that what we wanted was a
live one."
"Don't mention it!" said Ford. "He jammed that gun half down
my throat. I can taste it still. Where do we go from here?"
"According to the route we mapped out this afternoon," said
Herbert, "We are now scheduled to give exhibitions at the
coast towns of Salthouse and Weybourne, but--"
"Not with me!" exclaimed Birrell fiercely. "Those towns have
been tipped off by now by Blakeney and Cley, and the Boy
Scouts would club us to death. I vote we take the back roads
to Morston, and drop in on a lonely Coast Guard. If a Coast
Guard sees us, the authorities will have to believe him, and
they'll call out the navy."
Herbert consulted his map.
"There is a Coast Guard," he said, "stationed just the other
side of Morston. And," he added fervently, "let us hope he's
lonely."
They lost their way in the back roads, and when they again
reached the coast an hour had passed. It was now quite dark.
There were no stars, nor moon, but after they had left the
car in a side lane and had stepped out upon the cliff, they
saw for miles along the coast great beacon fires burning
fiercely.
Herbert came to an abrupt halt.
"Since seeing those fires," he explained, "I feel a strange
reluctance about showing myself in this uniform to a Coast
Guard."
"Coast Guards don't shoot!" mocked Birrell. "They only look
at the clouds through a telescope. Three Germans with rifles
ought to be able to frighten one Coast Guard with a
telescope."
The whitewashed cabin of the Coast Guard was perched on the
edge of the cliff. Behind it the downs ran back to meet the
road. The door of the cabin was open and from it a shaft of
light cut across a tiny garden and showed the white fence and
the walk of shells. v
"We must pass in single file in front of that light,"
whispered Ford, "And then, after we are sure he has seen us,
we must run like the devil!"
"I'm on in that last scene," growled Herbert.
"Only," repeated Ford with emphasis, "We must be sure he has
seen us."
Not twenty feet from them came a bursting roar, a flash, many
roars, many flashes, many bullets.
"He's seen us!" yelled Birrell.
After the light from his open door had shown him one German
soldier fully armed, the Coast Guard had seen nothing
further. But judging from the shrieks of terror and the
sounds of falling bodies that followed his first shot, he was
convinced he was hemmed in by an army, and he proceeded to
sell his life dearly. Clip after clip of cartridges he
emptied into the night, now to the front, now to the rear,
now out to sea, now at his own shadow in the lamp-light. To
the people a quarter of a mile away at Morston it sounded
like a battle.
After running half a mile, Ford, bruised and breathless, fell
at full length on the grass beside the car. Near it, tearing
from his person the last vestiges of a German uniform, he
found Birrell. He also was puffing painfully.
"What happened to Herbert?" panted Ford.
"I don't know," gasped Birrell, "When I saw him last he was
diving over the cliff into the sea. How many times did you
die?"
"About twenty!" groaned the American, "And, besides being
dead, I am severely wounded. Every time he fired, I fell on
my face, and each time I hit a rock!"
A scarecrow of a figure appeared suddenly in the rays of the
head-lights. It was Herbert, scratched, bleeding, dripping
with water, and clad simply in a shirt and trousers. He
dragged out his kit bag and fell into his golf clothes.
"Anybody who wants a perfectly good German uniform," he
cried, "can have mine. I left it in the first row of
breakers. It didn't fit me, anyway."
The other two uniforms were hidden in the seat of the car.
The rifles and helmets, to lend color to the invasion, were
dropped in the open road, and five minutes later three
gentlemen in inconspicuous Harris tweeds, and with golf clubs
protruding from every part of their car, turned into the
shore road to Cromer. What they saw brought swift terror to
their guilty souls and the car to an abrupt halt. Before them
was a regiment of regulars advancing in column of fours, at
the " double." An officer sprang to the front of the car and
seated himself beside Ford.
"I'll have to commandeer this," he said. "Run back to
Cromer. Don't crush my men, but go like the devil!"
"We heard firing here," explained the officer " at the Coast
Guard station. The Guard drove them back to the sea. He
counted over a dozen. They made pretty poor practice, for he
isn't wounded, but his gravel walk looks as though some one
had drawn a harrow over it. I wonder," exclaimed the officer
suddenly, "if you are the three gentlemen who first gave the
alarm to Colonel Raglan and then went on to warn the other
coast towns. Because, if you are, he wants your names."
Ford considered rapidly. If he gave false names and that fact
were discovered, they would be suspected and investigated,
and the worst might happen. So he replied that his friends
and himself probably were the men to whom the officer
referred. He explained they had been returning from Cromer,
where they had gone to play golf, when they had been held up
by the Germans.
"You were lucky to escape," said the officer "And in keeping
on to give warning you were taking chances. If I may say so,
we think you behaved extremely well."
Ford could not answer. His guilty conscience shamed him into
silence. With his siren shrieking and his horn tooting, he
was forcing the car through lanes of armed men. They packed
each side of the road. They were banked behind the hedges.
Their camp-fires blazed from every hill-top.
"Your regiment seems to have turned out to a man!" exclaimed
Ford admiringly.
"MY regiment!" snorted the officer. "You've passed through
five regiments already, and there are as many more in the
dark places. They're everywhere!" he cried jubilantly.
"And I thought they were only where you see the camp-fires,"
exclaimed Ford.
"That's what the Germans think," said the officer. "It's
working like a clock," he cried happily. "There hasn't been a
hitch. As soon as they got your warning to Colonel Raglan,
they came down to the coast like a wave, on foot, by trains,
by motors, and at nine o'clock the Government took over all
the railroads. The county regiments, regulars, yeomanry,
territorials, have been spread along this shore for thirty
miles. Down in London the Guards started to Dover and
Brighton two hours ago. The Automobile Club in the first hour
collected two hundred cars and turned them over to the Guards
in Bird Cage Walk. Cody and Grahame-White and eight of his
air men left Hendon an hour ago to reconnoitre the south
coast. Admiral Beatty has started with the Channel Squadron
to head off the German convoy in the North Sea, and the
torpedo destroyers have been sent to lie outside of
Heligoland. We'll get that back by daylight. And on land
every one of the three services is under arms. On this coast
alone before sunrise we'll have one hundred thousand men, and
from Colchester the brigade division of artillery, from
Ipswich the R. H. A.'s with siege-guns, field-guns, quick-
firing-guns, all kinds of guns spread out over every foot of
ground from here to Hunstanton. They thought they'd give us a
surprise party. They will never give us another surprise
party!"
On the top of the hill at Overstrand, the headwaiter of the
East Cliff Hotel and the bearded German stood in the garden
back of the house with the forbidding walls. From the road in
front came unceasingly the tramp and shuffle of thousands of
marching feet, the rumble of heavy cannon, the clanking of
their chains, the voices of men trained to command raised in
sharp, confident orders. The sky was illuminated by countless
fires. Every window of every cottage and hotel blazed with
lights. The night had been turned into day. The eyes of the
two Germans were like the eyes of those who had passed
through an earthquake, of those who looked upon the burning
of San Francisco, upon the destruction of Messina.
"We were betrayed, general," whispered the head-waiter.
"We were betrayed, baron," replied the bearded one.
"But you were in time to warn the flotilla."
With a sigh, the older man nodded.
"The last message I received over the wireless," he said,
"before I destroyed it, read, 'Your message understood. We
are returning. Our movements will be explained as manoeuvres.
And," added the general, "The English, having driven us back,
will be willing to officially accept that explanation. As
manoeuvres, this night will go down into history. Return to
the hotel," he commanded, "And in two months you can rejoin
your regiment."
On the morning after the invasion the New York Republic
published a map of Great Britain that covered three columns
and a wood-cut of Ford that was spread over five. Beneath it
was printed: "Lester Ford, our London correspondent, captured
by the Germans; he escapes and is the first to warn the
English people."
On the same morning, In an editorial in The Times of London,
appeared this paragraph:
"The Germans were first seen by the Hon. Arthur Herbert, the
eldest son of Lord Cinaris; Mr. Patrick Headford Birrell--
both of Balliol College, Oxford; and Mr. Lester Ford, the
correspondent of the New York Republic. These gentlemen
escaped from the landing party that tried to make them
prisoners, and at great risk proceeded in their motor-car
over roads infested by the Germans to all the coast towns of
Norfolk, warning the authorities. Should the war office fail
to recognize their services, the people of Great Britain will
prove that they are not ungrateful."
A week later three young men sat at dinner on the terrace of
the Savoy.
"Shall we, or shall we not," asked Herbert, "tell my uncle
that we three, and we three alone, were the invaders?"
"That's hardly correct," said Ford, "as we now know there
were two hundred thousand invaders. We were the only three
who got ashore."
"I vote we don't tell him," said Birrell. "Let him think with
everybody else that the Germans blundered; that an advance
party landed too soon and gave the show away. If we talk," he
argued, "We'll get credit for a successful hoax. If we keep
quiet, everybody will continue to think we saved England. I'm
content to let it go at that."
Chapter 4. BLOOD WILL TELL
David Greene was an employee of the Burdett Automatic Punch
Company. The manufacturing plant of the company was at
Bridgeport, but in the New York offices there were working
samples of all the punches, from the little nickel-plated hand
punch with which conductors squeezed holes in railroad tickets,
to the big punch that could bite into an iron plate as easily as
into a piece of pie. David's duty was to explain these different
punches, and accordingly when Burdett Senior or one of the sons
turned a customer over to David he spoke of him as a salesman.
But David called himself a "demonstrator." For a short time he
even succeeded in persuading the other salesmen to speak of
themselves as demonstrators, but the shipping clerks and
bookkeepers laughed them out of it. They could not laugh David
out of it. This was so, partly because he had no sense of humor,
and partly because he had a great-great-grandfather. Among the
salesmen on lower Broadway, to possess a great-great-grandfather
is unusual, even a great-grandfather is a rarity, and either is
considered superfluous. But to David the possession of a
great-great-grandfather was a precious and open delight. He had
possessed him only for a short time. Undoubtedly he always had
existed, but it was not until David's sister Anne married a
doctor in Bordentown, New Jersey, and became socially ambitious,
that David emerged as a Son of Washington.
It was sister Anne, anxious to "get in" as a "Daughter" and wear
a distaff pin in her shirtwaist, who discovered the revolutionary
ancestor. She unearthed him, or rather ran him to earth, in the
graveyard of the Presbyterian church at Bordentown. He was no
less a person than General Hiram Greene, and he had fought with
Washington at Trenton and at Princeton. Of this there was no
doubt. That, later, on moving to New York, his descendants became
peace-loving salesmen did not affect his record. To enter a
society founded on heredity, the important thing is first to
catch your ancestor, and having made sure of him, David entered
the Society of the Sons of Washington with flying colors. He was
not unlike the man who had been speaking prose for forty years
without knowing it. He was not unlike the other man who woke to
find himself famous. He had gone to bed a timid, near-sighted,
underpaid salesman without a relative in the world, except a
married sister in Bordentown, and he awoke to find he was a
direct descendant of "Neck or Nothing" Greene, a revolutionary
hero, a friend of Washington, a man whose portrait hung in the
State House at Trenton. David's life had lacked color. The day he
carried his certificate of membership to the big jewelry store
uptown and purchased two rosettes, one for each of his two coats,
was the proudest of his life.
The other men in the Broadway office took a different view. As
Wyckoff, one of Burdett's flying squadron of travelling salesmen,
said, "All grandfathers look alike to me, whether they're great,
or great-great-great. Each one is as dead as the other. I'd
rather have a live cousin who could loan me a five, or slip me a
drink. What did your great-great dad ever do for you?"
"Well, for one thing," said David stiffly, "he fought in the War
of the Revolution. He saved us from the shackles of monarchical
England; he made it possible for me and you to enjoy the
liberties of a free republic."
"Don't try to tell me your grandfather did all that," protested
Wyckoff, "because I know better. There were a lot of others
helped. I read about it in a book."
"I am not grudging glory to others," returned David; "I am only
saying I am proud that I am a descendant of a revolutionist."
Wyckoff dived into his inner pocket and produced a leather
photograph frame that folded like a concertina.
"I don't want to be a descendant," he said; "I'd rather be an
ancestor. Look at those." Proudly he exhibited photographs of
Mrs. Wyckoff with the baby and of three other little Wyckoffs.
David looked with envy at the children.
"When I'm married," he stammered, and at the words he blushed, "I
hope to be an ancestor."
"If you're thinking of getting married," said Wyckoff, "you'd
better hope for a raise in salary."
The other clerks were as unsympathetic as Wyckoff. At first when
David showed them his parchment certificate, and his silver gilt
insignia with on one side a portrait of Washington, and on the
other a Continental soldier, they admitted it was dead swell.
They even envied him, not the grandfather, but the fact that
owing to that distinguished relative David was constantly
receiving beautifully engraved invitations to attend the monthly
meetings of the society; to subscribe to a fund to erect
monuments on battle-fields to mark neglected graves; to join in
joyous excursions to the tomb of Washington or of John Paul
Jones; to inspect West Point, Annapolis, and Bunker Hill; to be
among those present at the annual "banquet" at Delmonico's. In
order that when he opened these letters he might have an
audience, he had given the society his office address.
In these communications he was always addressed as "Dear
Compatriot," and never did the words fail to give him a thrill.
They seemed to lift him out of Burdett's salesrooms and Broadway,
and place him next to things uncommercial, untainted, high, and
noble. He did not quite know what an aristocrat was, but be
believed being a compatriot made him an aristocrat. When
customers were rude, when Mr. John or Mr. Robert was overbearing,
this idea enabled David to rise above their ill-temper, and he
would smile and say to himself: "If they knew the meaning of the
blue rosette in my button-hole, how differently they would treat
me! How easily with a word could I crush them!"
Pages:
1 |
2 |
3 |
4 |
5 |
6 | 7 |
8 |
9 |
10 |
11 |
12 |
13 |
14 |
15