Now It Can Be Told Part 32

I

During the battles of the Somme in 1916, and afterward in periods of progress and retreat over the abominable fields, the city of Amiens was the capital of the British army. When the battles began in July of that year it was only a short distance away from the fighting-lines; near enough to hear the incessant roar of gun-fire on the French front and ours, and near enough to get, by motor-car or lorry, in less than thirty minutes, to places where men were being killed or maimed or blinded in the routine of the day's work. One went out past Amiens station and across a little stone bridge which afterward, in the enemy's advance of 1918, became the mark for German high velocities along the road to Querrieux, where Rawlinson had his headquarters of the Fourth Army in an old chateau with pleasant meadows round it and a stream meandering through fields of b.u.t.tercups in summer-time. Beyond the dusty village of Querrieux with its white cottages, from which the plaster fell off in blotches as the war went on, we went along the straight highroad to Albert, through the long and straggling village of Lahoussoye, where Scottish soldiers in reserve lounged about among frowsy peasant women and played solemn games with "the bairns"; and so, past camps and hutments on each side of the road, to the ugly red-brick town where the Golden Virgin hung head downward from the broken tower of the church with her Babe outstretched above the fields of death as though as a peace-offering to this world at war.

One could be killed any day in Albert. I saw men blown to bits there the clay after the battles of the Somme began. It was in the road that turned to the right, past the square to go to Meaulte and on to Fricourt. There was a tide of gun transport swirling down the road, bringing up new ammunition for the guns that were firing without a pause over Fricourt and Mametz. The high scream of a sh.e.l.l came through a blue sky and ended on its downward note with a sharp crash. For a few minutes the transport column was held up while a ma.s.s of raw flesh which a second before had been two living men and their horses was cleared out of the way. Then the gun wagons went at a harder pace down the road, raising a cloud of white dust out of which I heard the curses of the drivers, swearing in a foul way to disguise their fear.

I went through Albert many scores of times to the battlefields beyond, and watched its process of disintegration through those years, until it was nothing but a wild sc.r.a.p heap of read brick and twisted iron, and, in the last phase, even the Golden Virgin and her Babe, which had seemed to escape all sh.e.l.l-fire by miraculous powers, lay buried beneath a ma.s.s of masonry. Beyond were the battlefields of the Somme where every yard of ground is part of the great graveyard of our youth.

So Amiens, as I have said, was not far away from the red heart of war, and was clear enough to the lines to be crowded always with officers and men who came out between one battle and another, and by "lorry-jumping" could reach this city for a few hours of civilized life, according to their views of civilization. To these men-boys, mostly-who had been living in lousy ditches under h.e.l.l fire, Amiens was Paradise, with little h.e.l.ls for those who liked them. There were hotels in which they could go get a bath, if they waited long enough or had the luck to be early on the list. There were streets of shops with plate-gla.s.s windows unbroken, s.h.i.+ning, beautiful. There were well-dressed women walking about, with kind eyes, and children as dainty, some of them, as in High Street, Kensington, or Prince's Street, Edinburgh. Young officers, who had plenty of money to spend-because there was no chance of spending money between a row of blasted trees and a ditch in which bits of dead men were plastered into the parapet-invaded the shops and bought fancy soaps, razors, hair-oil, stationery, pocketbooks, knives, flash-lamps, top-boots (at a fabulous price), khaki s.h.i.+rts and collars, gramophone records, and the latest set of Kirchner prints. It was the delight of spending, rather than the joy of possessing, which made them go from one shop to another in search of things they could carry hack to the line-that and the lure of girls behind the counters, laughing, bright-eyed girls who understood their execrable French, even English spoken with a Glasgow accent, and were pleased to flirt for five minutes with any group of young fighting-men-who broke into roars of laughter at the gallantry of some Don Juan among them with the gift of audacity, and paid outrageous prices for the privilege of stammering out some foolish sentiment in broken French, blus.h.i.+ng to the roots of their hair (though captains and heroes) at their own temerity with a girl who, in another five minutes, would play the same part in the same scene with a different group of boys.

I used to marvel at the patience of these girls. How bored they must have been with all this flirtation, which led to nothing except, perhaps, the purchase of a bit of soap at twice its proper price! They knew that these boys would leave to go back to the trenches in a few hours and that some of them would certainly be dead in a few days. There could be no romantic episode, save of a transient kind, between them and these good-looking lads in whose eyes there were desire and hunger, because to them the plainest girl was Womanhood, the sweet, gentle, and feminine side of life, as opposed to the cruelty, brutality, and ugliness of war and death. The shopgirls of Amiens had no illusions. They had lived too long in war not to know the realities. They knew the risks of transient love and they were not taking them-unless conditions were very favorable. They attended strictly to business and hoped to make a lot of money in the shop, and were, I think, mostly good girls-as virtuous as life in war-time may let girls be-wise beyond their years, and with pity behind their laughter for these soldiers who tried to touch their hands over the counters, knowing that many of them were doomed to die for France and England. They had their own lovers-boys in blue somewhere between Vaux-sur-Somme and Hartmanns-weilerkopf-and apart from occasional intimacies with English officers quartered in Amiens for long spells, left the traffic of pa.s.sion to other women who walked the streets.

II

The Street of the Three Pebbles-la rue des Trois Cailloux-which goes up from the station through the heart of Amiens, was the crowded highway. Here were the best shops-the hairdresser, at the left-hand side, where all day long officers down from the line came in to have elaborate luxury in the way of close crops with friction d'eau de quinine, shampooing, singeing, oiling, not because of vanity, but because of the joyous sense of cleanliness and perfume after the filth and stench of life in the desolate fields; then the booksellers' (Madame Carpentier et fille) on the right-hand side, which was not only the rendezvous of the miscellaneous crowd buying stationery and La Vie Parisienne, but of the intellectuals who spoke good French and bought good books and liked ten minutes' chat with the mother and daughter. (Madame was an Alsatian lady with vivid memories of 1870, when, as a child, she had first learned to hate Germans.) She hated them now with a fresh, vital hatred, and would have seen her own son dead a hundred times-he was a soldier in Saloniki-rather than that France should make a compromise peace with the enemy. She had been in Amiens, as I was, on a dreadful night of August of 1914, when the French army pa.s.sed through in retreat from Bapaume, and she and the people of her city knew for the first time that the Germans were close upon them. She stood in the crowd as I did-in the darkness, watching that French column pa.s.s with their transport, and their wounded lying on the baggage wagons, men of many regiments mixed up, the light of the street lamps s.h.i.+ning on the casques of cuira.s.siers with their long horsehair tails, leading their stumbling horses, and foot soldiers, hunched under their packs, marching silently with dragging steps. Once in a while one of the soldiers left the ranks and came on to the sidewalk, whispering to a group of dark shadows. The crowds watched silently, in a curious, dreadful silence, as though stunned. A woman near me spoke in a low voice, and said, "Nous sommes perdus!" Those were the only words I heard or remembered.

That night in the station of Amiens the boys of a new cla.s.s were being hurried away in truck trains, and while their army was in retreat sang "La Ma.r.s.eillaise," as though victory were in their hearts. Next day the German army under von Kluck entered Amiens, and ten days afterward pa.s.sed through it on the way to Paris. Madame Carpentier told me of the first terror of the people when the field-gray men came down the Street of the Three Pebbles and entered their shops. A boy selling oranges fainted when a German stretched out his hand to buy some. Women hid behind their counters when German boots stamped into their shops. But Madame Carpentier was not afraid. She knew the Germans and their language. She spoke frank words to German officers, who saluted her respectfully enough. "You will never get to Paris... France and England will be too strong for you... Germany will be destroyed before this war ends." They laughed at her and said: "We shall be in Paris in a week from now. Have you a little diary, Madame?" Madame Carpentier was haughty with them. Some women of Amiens-poor drabs-did not show any haughtiness, nor any pride, with the enemy who crowded into the city on their way toward Paris. A girl told me that she was looking through the window of a house that faced the Place de la Gare, and saw a number of German soldiers dancing round a piano-organ which was playing to them. They were dancing with women of the town, who were laughing and screeching in the embrace of big, blond Germans. The girl who was watching was only a schoolgirl then. She knew very little of the evil of life, but enough to know that there was something in this scene degrading to womanhood and to France. She turned from the window and flung herself on her bed and wept bitterly...

I used to call in at the bookshop for a chat now and then with Madame and Mademoiselle Carpentier, while a crowd of officers came in and out. Madame was always merry and bright in spite of her denunciations of the "Sale Boches-les brigands, les bandits!" and Mademoiselle put my knowledge of French to a severe but pleasant test. She spoke with alarming rapidity, her words tumbling over one another in a cascade of volubility delightful to hear but difficult to follow. She had a strong mind-masterly in her methods of business-so that she could serve six customers at once and make each one think that her attention was entirely devoted to his needs-and a very shrewd and critical idea of military strategy and organization. She had but a poor opinion of British generals and generals.h.i.+p, although a wholehearted admiration for the gallantry of British officers and men; and she had an intimate knowledge of our preparations, plans, failures, and losses. French liaison-officers confided to her the secrets of the British army; and English officers trusted her with many revelations of things "in the wind." But Mademoiselle Carpentier had discretion and loyalty and did not repeat these things to people who had no right to know. She would have been far more efficient as a staff officer than many of the young gentlemen with red tabs on their tunics who came into the shop, flipping beautiful top-boots with riding-crops, sitting on the counter, and turning over the pages of La Vie for the latest convention in ladies' legs.

Mademoiselle was a serious musician, so her mother told me, but her musical studies were seriously interrupted by business and air raids, which one day ceased in Amiens altogether after a night of horror, when hundreds of houses were smashed to dust and many people killed, and the Germans brought their guns close to the city-close enough to scatter high velocities about its streets-and the population came up out of their cellars, shaken by the terror of the night, and fled. I pa.s.sed the bookshop where Mademoiselle was locking up the door of this house which had escaped by greater luck than its neighbors. She turned as I pa.s.sed and raised her hand with a grave gesture of resignation and courage. "Ils ne pa.s.seront pas!" she said. It was the spirit of the courage of French womanhood which spoke in those words.

III

That was in the last phase of the war, but the Street of the Three Pebbles had been tramped up and down for two years before then by the British armies on the Somme, with the French on their right. I was never tired of watching those crowds and getting into the midst of them, and studying their types. All the types of young English manhood came down this street, and some of their faces showed the strain and agony of war, especially toward the end of the Somme battles, after four months or more of slaughter. I saw boys with a kind of hunted look in their eyes; and Death was the hunter. They stared into the shop windows in a dazed way, or strode along with packs on their backs, looking neither to the right nor to the left, and white, haggard faces, as expressionless as masks. Tomorrow or the next day, perhaps, the Hunter would track them down. Other English officers showed no sign at all of apprehension or lack of nerve-control, although the psychologist would have detected disorder of soul in the rather deliberate note of hilarity with which they greeted their friends, in gusts of laughter, for no apparent cause, at "Charlie's bar," where they would drink three c.o.c.ktails apiece on an empty stomach, and in their tendency to tell tales of horror as things that were very funny. They dined and wined in Amiens at the "Rhin," the "G.o.debert," or the "Cathedrale," with a kind of spiritual exaltation in good food and drink, as though subconsciously they believed that this might be their last dinner in life, with good pals about them. They wanted to make the best of it-and d.a.m.n the price. In that spirit many of them went after other pleasures-down the byways of the city, and d.a.m.ned the price again, which was a h.e.l.lish one. Who blames them? It was war that was to blame, and those who made war possible.

Down the rue des Trois Cailloux, up and down, up and down, went English, and Scottish, and Irish, and Welsh, and Canadian, and Australian, and New Zealand fighting-men. In the winter they wore their trench-coats all splashed and caked up to the shoulders with the white, chalky mud of the Somme battlefields, and their top-boots and puttees were plastered with this mud, and their faces were smeared with it after a lorry drive or a tramp down from the line. The rain beat with a metallic tattoo on their steel hats. Their packs were all sodden.

French poilus, detrained at Amiens station for a night on their way to some other part of the front, jostled among British soldiers, and their packs were a wonder to see. They were like traveling tinkers, with pots and pans and boots slung about their faded blue coats, and packs bulging with all the primitive needs of life in the desert of the battlefields beyond civilization. They were unshaven, and wore their steel casques low over their foreheads, without gaiety, without the means of buying a little false hilarity, but grim and sullen-looking and resentful of English soldiers walking or talking with French cocottes.

IV

I saw a scene with a French poilu one day in the Street of the Three Pebbles, during those battles of the Somme, when the French troops were fighting on our right from Maricourt southward toward Roye. It was like a scene from "Gaspard." The poilu was a middle-aged man, and very drunk on some foul spirit which he had bought in a low cafe down by the river. In the High Street he was noisy, and cursed G.o.d for having allowed the war to happen, and the French government for having sentenced him and all poor sacre poilus to rot to death in the trenches, away from their wives and children, without a thought for them; and nothing but treachery in Paris:

"Nous sommes trahis!" said the man, raising his arms. "For the hundredth time France is betrayed."

A crowd gathered round him, listening to his drunken denunciations. No one laughed. They stared at him with a kind of pitying wonderment. An agent de police pushed his way between the people and caught hold of the soldier by the wrist and tried to drag him away. The crowd murmured a protest, and then suddenly the poilu, finding himself in the hands of the police, on this one day out of the trenches-after five months-flung himself on the pavement in a pa.s.sion of tears and supplication.

"Je suis pere de famille!... Je suis un soldat de France!... Dans les tranchees pour cinq mois!... Qu'est-ce que mes camarades vont dire, 'cre nom de Dieu? et mon capitaine? C'est emmordant apres toute ma service comme brave soldat. Mais, quoi donc, mon vieux!"

"Viens donc, saligaud," growled the agent de police.

The crowd was against the policeman. Their murmurs rose to violent protest on behalf of the poilu.

"C'est un heros, tout de meme. Cinq mois dans les tranches! C'est affreux! Mais oui, il est soul, mais pour-quoi pas! Apres cinq mois sur le front qu'est-ce que cela signifie? Ca n'a aucune importance!"

A dandy French officer of Cha.s.seurs Alpins stepped into the center of the scene and tapped the policeman on the shoulder.

"Leave him alone. Don't you see he is a soldier? Sacred name of G.o.d, don't you know that a man like this has helped to save France, while you pigs stand at street corners watching petticoats?"

He stooped to the fallen man and helped him to stand straight.

"Be off with you, mon brave, or there will be trouble for you."

He beckoned to two of his own Cha.s.seurs and said:

"Look after that poor comrade yonder. He is un peu etoile."

The crowd applauded. Their sympathy was all for the drunken soldier of France.

V

Into a small estaminet at the end of the rue des Trois Cailloux, beyond the Hotel de Ville, came one day during the battles of the Somme two poilus, grizzled, heavy men, deeply bronzed, with white dust in their wrinkles, and the earth of the battlefields ingrained in the skin of their big, coa.r.s.e hands. They ordered two "little gla.s.ses" and drank them at one gulp. Then two more.

"See what I have got, my little cabbage," said one of them, stooping to the heavy pack which he had s.h.i.+fted from his shoulders to the other seat beside him. "It is something to make you laugh."

"And what is that, my old one?" said a woman sitting on the other side of the marble-topped table, with another woman of her own cla.s.s, from the market nearby.

The man did not answer the question, but fumbled into his pack, laughing a little in a self-satisfied way.

"I killed a German to get it," he said. "He was a pig of an officer, a dirty Boche. Very chic, too, and young like a schoolboy."

One of the women patted him on the shoulder. Her eyes glistened.

"Did you slit his throat, the dirty dog? Eh, I'd like to get my fingers round the neck of a dirty Boche!"

"I finished him with a grenade," said the poilu. "It was good enough. It knocked a hole in him as large as a cemetery. See then, my cabbage. It will make you smile. It is a funny kind of mascot, eh?"

He put on the table a small leather pouch stained with a blotch of reddish brown. His big, clumsy fingers could hardly undo the little clasp.

"He wore this next his heart," said the man. "Perhaps he thought it would bring him luck. But I killed him all the same! 'Cre nom de Dieu!"

He undid the clasp, and his big fingers poked inside the flap of the pouch.