necessary evidence was presented to the court. She defended herself as well as she could before judges who were in several cases fast asleep. But she refused to give any evidence that might betray her former colleagues, and finally her sentence was pronounced: "Louise de Bettignies condemned to death at Brussels, 16th March 1916." The death sentence was also pronounced on Léonie. Alice " then came forward, and, speaking quietly in German, said I beg you not to shoot my friend. She is young, and I appeal for mercy for her. As for me, I am quite willing to die." She also appealed to the court for mercy for a Flemish peasant who had been condemned to death, saying "I beg you to set this poor man at liberty. He has done nothing, and does not understand why he is here. Think of his nine children who have such need of him." Her appeal was listened to, and some weeks later the peasant was released. Whereupon he returned to his former task of helping his fellowcountrymen to escape into Holland, until one evening in the following year, when he was acting as guide to a party crossing the frontier, he was killed by a chance shot fired by one of the sentries. When the court rose," Alice " and Léonie were allowed to meet, and were taken back to prison in an open Victoria. They begged the escort to allow them to drive through the city, saying "For six months we have had no chance of enjoying the fresh air. Don't, please, take us straight back to prison." One of the soldiers, touched by their distress, nodded to the coachman to take them for a drive down the Boulevard de Bruxelles before they returned to St Gilles. The next day they were ordered out of their cells at nine o'clock, and taken to the Kommandantur in order to hear the sentences pronounced by the Governor-General after he had studied the verdict of the court. Stoëber read out that the sentence on Louise de Bettignies was death, but that Léonie's sentence had been amended to fifteen years' hard labour. "Alice "accepted it calmly, and waited for the sentence to be carried out. At last, towards the end of the month, she was told that the sentence of death had been commuted, and that she was to be sent to Germany to be imprisoned for the rest of her life. On 24th March she was taken by train to the prison of Siegburg, where a number of other women condemned for similar offences were imprisoned. oned. Among these was the Countess de Belleville, who had been condemned to death with Edith Cavell. This noble woman spent her time during captivity trying to help her various garments. As the weather improved, her fever disappeared, and, although very weak, she spent the whole of the summer of 1917 doing embroidery work. As the Germans were now less confident of victory, conditions improved for every one. There is available a very extensive amount of evidence as to the suffering of these women, for those who survived have naturally told their story at great length. "Alice" was already a sick person when she entered the prison, for When the colder weather the perils surmounted, the pro- came again a small gland aptracted strain, and the ex- peared on her chest. She posure had told upon her health refused, however, at first to and her nervous strength. The see a doctor, and only when prison food and treatment the growth was septic did she undermined her strength still inform the prison authorities. more, but, in spite of her grow- It was then found to be an ing weakness, she fought des- abscess. The woman governor perately on behalf of her coun- of the prison, Frau Rouge, try. As an example, on one acted most humanely, trying occasion the prisoners were to do her best for the poor asked to help in the manu- woman, and in the prison facture of munitions, and one hospital an operation took place and all, led by "Alice," re- which lasted for nearly four belled against it, and by demon- hours. Gradually she recovered strations in the chapel and from this, and her friends elsewhere, succeeded in obtain- hoped that she might live ing the withdrawal of such war when, in the spring of 1918, work. But it was a desperately the weather was warmer and cold winter, and the conditions she was at last convalescent. were extremely offensive to offensive to An effort was made to secure any well-bred girl. For the part she took in the protest against making munitions, she was condemned to solitary confinement in a tiny cell, with two planks on the floor as a bed and no table or chair. As a result of this, she had for a whole month a very high temperature, but no medical treatment of any kind was given her, and only on the intervention of the Spanish Ambassador, as a result of appeals made by her friends, was she provided with warm VOL. CCXX.-NO. MCCCXXXII. her release, but all appeals, even from the Pope and the King of Spain, were refused. Nevertheless, at last it became only too obvious that she could never recover, and on 24th July she was sent to the hospital of a convent at Cologne. She lingered on for some weeks, watched over by the sisters, and much helped by a Jesuit priest, Père Cadow. She died on 27th September 1918. A cross of white wood was placed over her grave, on which were written these simple S words, like those of a fallen of the British Empire, the soldier : LOUISE DE BETTIGNIES, GEST. 27.9.18 Over a year later he highest military honours were given her when her body was taken back to her native town of Lille, where she now lies with her own family in the little cemetery of Saint Amand. Generals Degoutte and Simon of the French Army, and MajorGeneral Fuller representing Sir William Robertson, followed her through the streets of Cologne. A soldier carried the four medals that had been given her after her deaththe British War Medal and the Cross of Officer of the Order Legion of of Honour and the French Croix de Guerre. This is the citation from the French Army Orders : "S'est volontairement dévouée pendant plusieurs mois, animée uniquement par le sentiment patriotique le plus élevé, pour rendre à son pays un service des plus importants pour la défense nationale. A affronté avec un courage inflexible toutes les difficultés perilleuses de sa tâche patriotique. A surmonté pendant longtemps ces difficultés grâce à ses capacités et à son dévouement, risquant sa vie en plusieurs occasions, assumant les plus graves responsabilités, déployant, en un mot, un héroisme qui a été rarement surpassé." GUNGA DIN. BY MAJOR G. H. BELL. BIR SINGH was an ex-soldier My bills were reduced to next of the 1/3rd Gurkhas, some time an officer's orderly. After completing his service with the Colours he took his discharge, and it was then that he came to me as a shikari. I was in the hills-at Ranikhet-at the time, and we tied up goats as bait for the lukrabuger (panther) without end and without success. We plodded the khuds from Khirna to Dawarahat and to the snows north of the Pindri, with a bag of nothing more than a barking deer and a poor specimen of a ghural; and I well remember arriving back in the forest bungalow at Tarikhet with only one chicaw, after an expensive and thirsty day in which some fifty beaters had been employed. It was not, therefore, his ability as a shikari nor my skill as a shot that endeared us one to another, but apparently we each saw the other's good points; and when one day I flung my -nth bearer out of my bungalow, I shouted, "Oh, Bir Singh, will you be my bearer and give me peace from these badmashes (scoundrels) ? He said he would, and I never regretted it. He was in no sense the conventional bearer, but within two days all the other servants had been dealt with so thoroughly that they feared even to complain, and I had peace. to nothing, and once when I took him with me to Benares, his account of expenditure did not even show his own fare. I mentioned the fact, but his reply was, "I am the Sahib's bearer-who should ask me for a ticket?" 66 At Ranikhet one day Bir Singh asked permission to visit hamara bhai (my brother every Indian appears to have a convenient brother), who was with a detachment of the 1/3rd Gurkhas some thirty miles away. He only asked for three days-a day there, a day with his brother, and a day back. I gave him leave, and off he started at daybreak. In his absence the chokra was to look after me. At about eight o'clock the same evening I returned to my bungalow from the club to change for dinner. I had had my bath, and was just about to put on a shirt when the chokra gravely informed me that the cuff-links were missing, and that search as he would he could not find them. I muttered curses on the carelessness of some people, and proceeded to tuck my linkless cuffs down the sleeves of my mess jacket. I had just had a final look in the mirror to see that all was in order, when there was a rush up the path to the bungalow, and Bir Singh flung himself into the room. He was literally "sweating blood," and in his outstretched hand were my cuff links. His story was quickly sobbed out. Arrived at his brother's camp, he found that he had my links in his pouch. He had done thirty miles on foot over khud and nullah, but back he turned at once, and after sixty miles in the day through some of the hardest country in the world, he gave me my links in time for mess. Such a man was Bir Singh the Gurkha, and such another man was Mamadu Bambara, late of the 2nd Regiment of the Senegalese Infantry, about whom the tale is now to be told. It was near the Obuasi mines in the Gold Coast Colony that I first met Mamadu. The magic of gold attracts to the mines a cosmopolitan crowd from all parts of West Africa and the interior. There are the born thieves, who always sense a haul in the vicinity of a mine; there are the more adventurous spirits among the labouring classes, who rather than work in the fields or carry loads think they will try their luck at the mines; and lastly, there are discharged native soldiers, whose training has fitted them to act as headmen and overseers. To this last class belonged Mamadu, but he was like a fish out of water in the mines. He came from the high, dry, open country of the Western Soudan, and his spirit rebelled at work in the damp underground galleries away from the sun. And so it was that one day he said good-bye to the mines, and came out to my survey camp to ask for work as a carrier. My headman reported, "He be good man, he come from far place, far side Timbuktu." And as we were short of carriers, he was engaged. From the first he struck me as being an odd sort of fellow. He was most unsociable as far as his fellow-carriers were concerned; in fact, he lived apart, and seemed to regard the others with complete and silent contempt, and indeed, for quite a long time, I never heard him utter a word. One particularly still evening in the bush, however, when sitting outside my tent, a sound caught my ear-a distant surging sound like the beat of the surf on the shorefalling away and then increasing in intensity. Qu'est-ce que c'est ?" said I, thinking aloud and using an expression which remains with most of us from school days. "C'est le bruit des mines," came a reply out of the darkness. "Qui est ça?" I queried. I queried. "C'est moi, Mamadu-Mamadu Bambara." And this strange, silent, black man stepped into the light of my lamp. He had been detailed as night watchman, and this was our first acquaintanceship on a conversational basis. He was quite right-it was the sound of the mines at Obuasi-the rhythmic rise and |
