10 
LAND & WATER 
No Man's Land 
By Centurion 
DerenibfV 28, 191G 
THIS slow Was told me by Kenned\- a> wc sat 
OIK' niKht over the fire in my billet in I'rance 
in a little town which serves as the Head- 
quarters of the Second Echelon. ^■ou can 
make of it what you please. Oni\- let me tell you 
that Kennedy is not an impressionable man— but neither 
i5 he obtuse. He has read much and thought more. 
He is forty, an age at which a man is either a fool or 
a philosopher. Kennedy is not a fool. And philosophy, 
as a wise man has remarked, begins in wiunlii. He 
might have added that it also ends there. 
I had read out an announcement on the front page, of 
the Tinics, which told us for the fust time that a friend, 
whose fate had long been the subject of painful speculation 
to US both, was " Reported Missing. Bclie\ed killed." 
It reminded me, and I reminded Kennedy, of the story 
of an old '^ramimcrc 1 had met in one of my billets whose 
only son had been reported " missing " at (ira\-elotte in 
1870, and who still, in this year of grace 1016, watched 
and waited, as for forty-six years she had waited and 
watched, for his rcrturn. 
" Mad, of course, poor thing," I had added, as I fmished 
my story. 
"" Don't be so sure of that," retorted Kennedy, and 
then, seeing my look of surprise, he said quiet!}' ; ",\\'Iio 
knows ? He niay still be in No Man's Land. No ! It's 
a land you'll never find on any Staff Map. But I s:;e 
you think I'm talking in riddles. Well, you've told me 
a storv, I'll tell vou one." 
"It" was at my billet at , the H.O. of the.— th 
Corps. About a month ago before I was shifted here. 
The house has a good deal to do with the story ; so I'll 
have to begin with that. I'd been home on sick leave, 
having been knocked out on the Somme by a H.E. shell, 
and they'd giv«n me a staff job in the '"I* branch. I 
arri\ed "late at night, the leave-boat having been held 
up while the mine-sweepers were out, and the first thing 
I did was to make tracks tor the Camp Commandant's, 
of course, to get the usual billet do logement ; on it was 
described the name of a Madame Doutrepont, ^i rue 
Koyer-Collard. He told off an orderly to show me the 
way — it was a perfect rabbit warren o\ a place and dark 
at that. A I'rench town under etat dc sii'nc is none too 
well lighted. We went stumbling along o\ cr the cobbles, 
and, after what seemed an interminable jouiiiey, in the 
course of which we met nothing but wailing cats— we 
found ourselves in a kind of ciU-de-sac and at the end of 
it was a blind wall with one of those huge double doors 
like the ' Gate ' of an O.xford College ; it had a kind of 
wicket in it. • 
" It was black as pitch and I had to pass my hands over 
the door like u blind man feeling the contours of sonic- 
b(^dy's face uctil I found a bell-pull. As I pulled it there 
came from f?.r away a long echoing sound like a bell at 
the botttom of the sea. The wicket door opened noise- 
lessly in rcsf Kjnse — so noiselessly that I fell over the thresh- 
old as I leaned against it. Odd,' isn't it, the way those 
French doors open aatomatically ? I nc\er quite get 
over the -surprise of finding no one behind them. Well, 
we found ourselves in a kind of covered courtyard which 
was even darker, if anything, than the street outside, and 
then an inner door opened and I saw a woman standing 
in the dciorway holding a lamp in her hand. 
" ' Qu 'cst-cc Id ? she called out in a startled \oice. 
But hav alarm changed to irritation when I tendered her 
my biFleting paper. She scrutinized it closely and then 
lookeii long at me, holding the lamp above her head so 
that its hght fell full upon my face while her own re- 
maicied in darkness. A 'dog "barked furiously at his 
chain on the farther side of the courtyard. 
'>' Tiens,'. slie said to him angrily, and then tome ' C'csl 
la gucrye'," as she motioned us in. 
•' That was all the welcome I got. Still what can one ex- 
pect ? I always feel like a beastly bailiff when I quarter 
myself uninvited upon a woman ' amlwmemcnt a lo lai.' 
as the billeting paper puts it And they only get half 
a franc a night Sbr it. It's treating their place like a doss 
house. 
" As she put down the light in the hall I saw that she 
was a tall sallow woman of meagre figure, but with abim- 
dant thi'k black hair done up in heavy folds. Her face 
wore a curious apathetic expression and her eyes liad an 
introspective look as though her mind dwelt wholly in 
the pa.st. 
" She conducted me upstairs, the orderly thumping 
after us with my valise on his shoulder and making the 
shadow a hunchback on the wall in the flickering 
candle-light, imtil we had mounted four long Mights of 
stairs and got to the \ery top of the house. She threw open 
the door of a room without a word. It had rather a 
musty smell as though it had been long disused and there 
was rio window in it, which was pretty 1 e;istly, but opening 
out of it was a kind of small dressing room. The dressing 
room did ha\e a window, fortunately shut, of course. 
IIa\ing thanked the lady and dismissed the orderly I 
unpacked my valise. After some troubte I succeeded 
in unscrewing the window-bolt and getting a little clean 
air into the room. Then I looked round. In the wall 
of the dressing-room on the far side, opposite the folding 
doors and commanded by my bed in the other room, 
was a big cupboard reaching from the floor to the ceiling ; 
it was locked. The only furniture of the room was a tabli- 
and chair. I looked out of the window but could see 
nothing. The air of the courtyard had a curious smell, 
pungent but not unpleasant. And there was a continuous 
sound of running water. 
" I slept soundly that night for I was tired. In the 
morning, as I was "going out to breakfast at the mess, 1 
met Madame Doutrepont and passed the .'ime of da\'. 
She was a trifle more gracious than the night before 
and volunteered the information that her husband was at 
the war, at Verdun, that she lived all alone except for a 
bonne who came in every day to clean up, and that she , 
managed her husband's business in his absence. The 
business was a tannery, it adjoined the courtyard and 
was worked by a water-mill. I tried to make friends with 
the dog as I passed out, but he only snarled and crept 
into his kennel. So much for the house. Altogether 
it seemed to me that the atmosphere of No. 21 was not 
exactly sociable. 
" I put in a hard day's work over the maps and things, 
and after dinner in the mess I decided to take my work 
home to my billet. It was like all ' !»' work, highly 
confidential, and the things I took with me were 
worth their weight in gold to a spy. I had a staff-map 
showing our new lines, a large scale oil-paper tracing of 
the positions held by the — th Di\iMon. two or three of 
those buff manuals issued from Cj.H.Q. and marked 
' not to be taken into the trenches.' and so on. 
" I sat up working until after midnight with my maps 
spread over the table in the dressing ro^m and about 12. jo 
a.m. I extinguished the candle and went to bed, leaving 
the folding doors of the dressing-room wide open. In 
five minutes I was asleep. How long I slept I don't 
know, but I was suddenly awakened by the sound of 
footsteps in the dressing-room. They seemed to come 
from the window. I lay awake listening, being in some 
doubt whether I was not still asleep, and watching the 
dressing-room, the floor of which was plainly visible from 
my bed as it was now moonlight. 
"Nowthedressing-room was very small and its window, 
which was on the left, disproportionately large, and the 
shape of the window was clearly silhouetted in a pattern 
iiix)ii the floor. And it struck me I must be asleep after 
all, and dreaming, because nothing obscured the squares 
of pale light upon the boards. Yet all the time there seemct I 
to be feet shuffling across it in a curious uncertain way. 
I was still stupidly pondering this when the footsteps 
stopped— apparently by the cupboard, and I heard a 
scratching sound — it was jUst as if someone was passing 
their fingers over the panels in the dark. Only it wasn't 
dark. I could see the cupboard in the moonlight almost 
as plainly as I can see you. I raised myself in bed and 
stared hard, but I could see nothing. .And vet by this 
time I felt certain there wiis someone in that room. I 
felt sure of it with the assurance that you feel someone 
