HE WHITE CAT OF MOULENSTRAAT
By CLatuJe V While. Lt,M.G.C. Illustrated by W. Cecil Dunford
The Ypres Times.
63
Dedicated to 2nd-Lieut. DAVID W. JACQUES, killed in action December 1st, 1916.
THE following narrative was written under
orders. The author, being in the trenches
at the time, was notified that his rest in
billet would take place during Christmas week,
and that it had been arranged to hold an Arabian
Nights entertainment, each officer being called
upon to tell a story in the mess on Christmas
night. The writer was loath to expose his
creation to the criticism of his ruthless brother
officers, but the C.O. ordered the MSS. to be
produced in a tone of voice which caused the
feet of the orderly to hurry to a wayside cottage,
where the story was unearthed from a heap of
maps, and brought into the mess on a salver of a
tin lid with a piece of white paper neatly coiled
upon the. copy.
The mess cook's joke of the cat's tail was care
fully removed, the offending pages opened, while
glasses were charged, and the nervous writer rose,
and recited the following story. It must be noted
that there are many wild cats still about the ruined
buildings in the line (January, 1917), and this
narrative, having found its way into duckboard
gossip, men scatter quickly when they see a white
animal, fearing that it is the ill-fated cat of
Moulenstraat.*
I have been a man of dreams, whose weird
imaginings have made havoc of all the resta
being in close communion with the nether world,
and whose very woods and dells have been
inhabited by elves and gnomes. Such were the
idiosyncrasies of my humour that the darkness
always brought its horrors, and I trod fearful as a
child, subconscious that some calamity would
come upon me. The broad light of day would
frequently fill my soul with laughter at the vain
tremblings of the night. But as the sun hours
waned, my spirits fell, for I felt that each day was
only given me to muster strength for a night of
trembling. As I grew older I became more master
of myself, and threw off this skein of mystery
which had enveloped me in my days of youth.
Dreams I still experienced, the fear of darkness
was still with mein short, I had all my old
humours, but in a highly restrained degree. Age
brought discretion, which counselled me to over
come the coward in my heartthat is, if a soul's
weird fancies could be described as cowardice.
The psychology of this fear was difficult of
accurate record it was delicate in its nicety, since
it was not born of physical pain, but of something
supernatural and unknown.
Destiny guides the feet of man in strange places,
and, in obedience to one of her laws, I found
myself in the fields of Flanders, taking part in a
catastrophe of nations. The crude barbarities of
living, and the truly unhappy nature of the abodes
of earth which military tactics necessitated were
overcome, at least by me, by the extraordinary
atmosphere and environment in which one found
oneself. Here were long, narrow windings in the
earth through hill and dale, into little copses, dark
forestsplaces hitherto untrodden by man.
Duty compelled me to enter, in spite of fore
bodings in my soul, into, it seemed, all the dark
corners of the earth, where I occasionally en
countered, or imagined that I encountered,
peculiar phenomena.
But, forsooth never was it a physical enemy
of which I was afraid, but the old terrible creations
of my youth's imaginings.
In the calm of one December evening I was
standing near the parapet of my sand-bagged
fortress (Fort Toronto), and from my position I
commanded a view of the Flemish village of
Moulenstraat. The heavens were streaked with
red, as if the finger of God, dripping with blood,
had written a record of the day's slaughter on the
skies. The evening glow shone through the
breaches in the broken dwellings, showing distorted
skeletons of places which once were the happy
homes of men. So many shells had fallen almost
daily for months and months that I truly mar
velled how one brick could be left upon another.
Human life had long since deserted it as a useless
target for a tireless enemy. Not one of God's
most hopeless creatures would make an abode in
such a place at such a time," I whispered to my
self, as I recalled the heavy shelling it had only
recently suffered that day. Scarcely had I
whispered the words when I saw something white
coming leisurely out of the ruins down a thin
ribbon of a road, which ran near my sand-bagged
fortress.
It came nearer and nearer, yet for the life of me
I could not discern what it was. It had a most
^Moulenstraat was the fictitious name given to Vierstraat, the village on the ridge opposite Wytschaete.
