The Love of Ulrich Nebendahl | Page 3

off. He had
been walking all the day. Towards evening, passing the outskirts of a
wood, a feeble cry for help, sounding from the shadows, fell upon his
ear. Ulrich paused, and again from the sombre wood crept that weary
cry of pain. Ulrich ran and came at last to where, among the wild
flowers and the grass, lay prone five human figures. Two of them were
of the German Landwehr, the other three Frenchmen in the hated
uniform of Napoleon's famous scouts. It had been some unimportant
"affair of outposts," one of those common incidents of warfare that are
never recorded--never remembered save here and there by some sad
face unnoticed in the crowd. Four of the men were dead; one, a
Frenchman was still alive, though bleeding copiously from a deep
wound in the chest that with a handful of dank grass he was trying to
staunch.
Ulrich raised him in his arms. The man spoke no German, and Ulrich
knew but his mother tongue; but when the man, turning towards the
neighbouring village with a look of terror in his half-glazed eyes,
pleaded with his hands, Ulrich understood, and lifting him gently
carried him further into the wood.
He found a small deserted shelter that had been made by
charcoal-burners, and there on a bed of grass and leaves Ulrich laid him;
and there for a week all but a day Ulrich tended him and nursed him
back to life, coming and going stealthily like a thief in the darkness.

Then Ulrich, who had thought his one desire in life to be to kill all
Frenchmen, put food and drink into the Frenchman's knapsack and
guided him half through the night and took his hand; and so they
parted.
Ulrich did not return to Alt Waldnitz, that lies hidden in the forest
beside the murmuring Muhlde. They would think he had gone to the
war; he would let them think so. He was too great a coward to go back
to them and tell them that he no longer wanted to fight; that the sound
of the drum brought to him only the thought of trampled grass where
dead men lay with curses in their eyes.
So, with head bowed down in shame, to and fro about the moaning land,
Ulrich of the dreamy eyes came and went, guiding his solitary footsteps
by the sounds of sorrow, driving away the things of evil where they
crawled among the wounded, making his way swiftly to the side of
pain, heedless of the uniform.
Thus one day he found himself by chance near again to forest-girdled
Waldnitz. He would push his way across the hills, wander through its
quiet ways in the moonlight while the good folks all lay sleeping. His
foot-steps quickened as he drew nearer. Where the trees broke he
would be able to look down upon it, see every roof he knew so
well--the church, the mill, the winding Muhlde--the green, worn grey
with dancing feet, where, when the hateful war was over, would be
heard again the Saxon folk-songs.
Another was there, where the forest halts on the brow of the hill--a
figure kneeling on the ground with his face towards the village. Ulrich
stole closer. It was the Herr Pfarrer, praying volubly but inaudibly. He
scrambled to his feet as Ulrich touched him, and his first astonishment
over, poured forth his tale of woe.
There had been trouble since Ulrich's departure. A French corps of
observation had been camped upon the hill, and twice within the month
had a French soldier been found murdered in the woods. Heavy had
been the penalties exacted from the village, and terrible had been the
Colonel's threats of vengeance. Now, for a third time, a soldier stabbed

in the back had been borne into camp by his raging comrades, and this
very afternoon the Colonel had sworn that if the murderer were not
handed over to him within an hour from dawn, when the camp was to
break up, he would before marching burn the village to the ground. The
Herr Pfarrer was on his way back from the camp where he had been to
plead for mercy, but it had been in vain.
"Such are foul deeds!" said Ulrich.
"The people are mad with hatred of the French," answered the Herr
Pastor. "It may be one, it may be a dozen who have taken vengeance
into their own hands. May God forgive them."
"They will not come forward--not to save the village?"
"Can you expect it of them! There is no hope for us; the village will
burn as a hundred others have burned."
Aye, that was true; Ulrich had seen their blackened ruins; the old sitting
with white faces among the wreckage of their homes, the little children