Now It Can Be Told Part 34

In the Street of the Three Pebbles there was a small estaminet into which I went one morning for a cup of coffee, while I read an Amiens news-sheet made up mostly of extracts translated from the leading articles of English papers. (There was never any news of French fighting beyond the official communique and imaginary articles of a romantic kind written by French journalists in Paris about episodes of war.) In one corner of the estaminet was a group of bourgeois gentlemen talking business for a time, and then listening to a monologue from the woman behind the counter. I could not catch many words of the conversation, owing to the general chatter, but when the man went out the woman and I were left alone together, and she came over to me and put a photograph down on the table before me, and, as though carrying on her previous train of thought, said, in French, of course:

"Yes, that is what the war has done to me."

I could not guess her meaning. Looking at the photograph, I saw it was of a young girl in evening dress with her hair coiled in an artistic way and a little curl on each cheek. Madame's daughter, I thought, looking up at the woman standing in front of me in a grubby bodice and tousled hair. She looked a woman of about forty, with a wan face and beaten eyes.

"A charming young lady," I said, glancing again at the portrait.

The woman repeated her last sentence, word for word.

"Yes... that is what the war has done to me."

I looked up at her again and saw that she had the face of the young girl in the photograph, but coa.r.s.ened, aged, raddled, by the pa.s.sing years and perhaps by tragedy.

"It is you?" I asked.

"Yes, in 1913, before the war. I have changed since then-n'est-ce pas, Monsieur?"

"There is a change," I said. I tried not to express my thought of how much change.

"You have suffered in the war-more than most people?"

"Ah, I have suffered!"

She told me her story, and word for word, if I could have written it down then, it would have read like a little novel by Guy de Maupa.s.sant. She was the daughter of people in Lille, well-to-do merchants, and before the war married a young man of the same town, the son of other manufacturers. They had two children and were very happy. Then the war came. The enemy drove down through Belgium, and one day drew near and threatened Lille. The parents of the young couple said: "We will stay. We are too old to leave our home, and it is better to keep watch over the factory. You must go, with the little ones, and there is no time to lose."

There was no time to lose. The trains were crowded with fugitives and soldiers-mostly soldiers. It was necessary to walk. Weeping, the young husband and wife said farewell to their parents and set out on the long trail, with the two babies in a perambulator, under a load of bread and wine, and a little maid carrying some clothes in a bundle. For days they tramped the roads until they were all dusty and bedraggled and footsore, but glad to be getting farther away from that tide of field-gray men which had now swamped over Lille. The young husband comforted his wife. "Courage!" he said. "I have money enough to carry us through the war. We will set up a little shop somewhere." The maid wept bitterly now and then, but the young husband said: "We will take care of you, Margot. There is nothing to fear. We are lucky in our escape." He was a delicate fellow, rejected for military service, but brave. They came to Amiens, and hired the estaminet and set up business. There was a heavy debt to work off for capital and expenses before they would make money, but they were doing well. The mother was happy with her children, and the little maid had dried her tears. Then one day the young husband went away with the little maid and all the money, leaving his wife in the estaminet with a big debt to pay and a broken heart.

"That is what the war has done to me," she said again, picking up the photograph of the girl in the evening frock with a little curl on each cheek.

"C'est triste, Madame!"

"Oui, c'est triste, Monsieur!"

But it was not war that had caused her tragedy, except that it had unloosened the roots of her family life. Guy de Maupa.s.sant would have given just such an ending to his story.

IX

Some of our officers stationed in Amiens, and billeted in private houses, became very friendly with the families who received them. Young girls of good middle cla.s.s, the daughters of shopkeepers and schoolmasters, and merchants in a good way of business, found it delightful to wait on handsome young Englishmen, to teach them French, to take walks with them, and to arrange musical evenings with other girl friends who brought their young officers and sang little old French songs with them or English songs in the prettiest French accent. These young officers of ours found the home life very charming. It broke the monotony of exile and made them forget the evil side of war. They paid little gallantries to the girls, bought them boxes of chocolate until fancy chocolate was forbidden in France, and presented flowers to decorate the table, and wrote amusing verses in their autograph alb.u.ms or drew sketches for them. As this went on they gained to the privilege of brotherhood, and there were kisses before saying "good night" outside bedroom doors, while the parents downstairs were not too watchful, knowing the ways of young people, and lenient because of their happiness. Then a day came in each one of these households when the officer billeted there was ordered away to some other place. What tears! What lamentations! And what promises never to forget little Jeanne with her dark tresses, or Suzanne with the merry eyes! Were they not engaged? Not formally, perhaps, but in honor and in love. For a time letters arrived, eagerly waited for by girls with aching hearts. Then picture post-cards with a line or two of affectionate greeting. Then nothing. Nothing at all, month after month, in spite of all the letters addressed with all the queer initials for military units. So it happened again and again, until bitterness crept into girls' hearts, and hardness and contempt.

"In my own little circle of friends," said a lady of Amiens, "I know eighteen girls who were engaged to English officers and have been forsaken. It is not fair. It is not good. Your English young men seem so serious, far more serious than our French boys. They have a look of shyness which we find delightful. They are timid, at first, and blush when one pays a pretty compliment. They are a long time before they take liberties. So we trust them, and take them seriously, and allow intimacies which we should refuse to French boys unless formally engaged. But it is all camouflage. At heart your English young men are just flirts. They play with us, make fools of us, steal our hearts, and then go away, and often do not send so much as a post-card. Not even one little post-card to the girls who weep their hearts out for them! You English are all hypocrites. You boast that you 'play the game.' I know your phrase. It is untrue.

"You play with good girls as though they were grues, and that no Frenchman would dare to do. He knows the difference between good girls and bad girls, and behaves, with reverence to those who are good. When the English army goes away from France it will leave many bitter memories because of that."

X

It was my habit to go out at night for a walk through Amiens before going to bed, and generally turned river-ward, for even on moonless nights there was always a luminance over the water and one could see to walk along the quayside. Northward and eastward the sky was quivering with flashes of white light, like summer lightning, and now and then there was a long, vivid glare of red touching the high clouds with rosy feathers; one of our dumps, or one of the enemy's, had been blown up by that gun-fire, sullen and menacing, which never ceased for years. In that quiet half-hour, alone, or with some comrade, like Frederic Palmer or Beach Thomas, as tired and as thoughtful as oneself after a long day's journeying in the swirl of war, one's brain roved over the scenes of battle, visualizing anew, and in imagination, the agony up there, the death which was being done by those guns, and the stupendous sum of all this conflict. We saw, after all, only one patch of the battlefields of the world, and yet were staggered by the immensity of its ma.s.sacre, by the endless streams of wounded, and by the growth of those little forests of white crosses behind the fighting-lines. We knew, and could see at any moment in the mind's eye-even in the darkness of an Amiens night-the vastness of the human energy which was in motion along all the roads to Paris and from Boulogne and Dieppe and Havre to the fighting-lines, and in every village on the way the long columns of motor-lorries bringing up food and ammunition, the trains on their way to the army rail-heads with material of war and more food and more sh.e.l.ls, the Red Cross trains crowded with maimed and injured boys, the ambulances clearing the casualty stations, the troops marching forward from back roads to the front, from which many would never come marching back, the guns and limbers and military transports and spare horses, along hundreds of miles of roads-all the machinery of slaughter on the move. It was staggering in its enormity, in its detail, and in its activity. Yet beyond our sphere in the British section of the western front there was the French front, larger than ours, stretching right through France, and all their roads were crowded with the same traffic, and all their towns and villages were stirred by the same activity and for the same purpose of death, and all their hospitals were crammed with the wreckage of youth. On the other side of the lines the Germans were busy in the same way, as busy as soldier ants, and the roads behind their front were c.u.mbered by endless columns of transport and marching men, and guns and ambulances laden with bashed, blinded, and bleeding boys. So it was in Italy, in Austria, in Saloniki, and Bulgaria, Serbia, Mesopotamia, Egypt... In the silence of Amiens by night, under the stars, with a cool breath of the night air on our foreheads, with a glamour of light over the waters of the Somme, our spirit was stricken by the thought of this world-tragedy, and cried out in anguish against this b.l.o.o.d.y crime in which all humanity was involved. The senselessness of it! The futility! The waste! The mockery of men's faith in G.o.d!...

Often Palmer and I-dear, grave old Palmer, with sphinx-like face and honest soul-used to trudge along silently, with just a sigh now and then, or a groan, or a sudden cry of "O G.o.d!... O Christ!" It was I, generally, who spoke those words, and Palmer would say: "Yes... and it's going to last a long time yet. A long time... It's a question who will hold out twenty-four hours longer than the other side. France is tired, more tired than any of us. Will she break first? Somehow I think not. They are wonderful! Their women have a gallant spirit... How good it is, the smell of the trees to-night!"

Sometimes we would cross the river and look back at the cathedral, high and beautiful above the huddle of old, old houses on the quayside, with a faint light on its pinnacle and b.u.t.tresses and immense blackness beyond them.

"Those builders of France loved their work," said Palmer. "There was always war about the walls of this cathedral, but they went on with it, stone by stone, without hurry."

We stood there in a long silence, not on one night only, but many times, and out of those little dark streets below the cathedral of Amiens came the spirit of history to teach our spirit with wonderment at the n.o.bility and the brutality of men, and their incurable folly, and their patience with tyranny.

"When is it all going to end, Palmer, old man?"

"The war, or the folly of men?"

"The war. This cursed war. This b.l.o.o.d.y war."

"Something will break one day, on our side or the other. Those who hold out longest and have the best reserves of man-power."

We were starting early next day-before dawn-to see the beginning of another battle. We walked slowly over the little iron bridge again, through the vegetable market, where old men and women were unloading cabbages from a big wagon, then into the dark tunnel of the rue des Augustins, and so to the little old mansion of Mme. de la Rochefoucauld in the rue Amiral Courbet. There was a light burning in the window of the censor's room. In there the colonel was reading The Times in the Louis Quinze salon, with a grave pucker on his high, thin forehead. He could not get any grasp of the world's events. There was an attack on the censor by Northcliffe. Now what did he mean by that? It was really very unkind of him, after so much civility to him. Charteris would be furious. He would bang the telephone-but-dear, dear, why should people be so violent? War correspondents were violent on the slightest provocation. The world itself was very violent. And it was all so dangerous. Don't you think so, Russell?

The cars were ordered for five o'clock. Time for bed.

XI

The night in Amiens was dark and sinister when rain fell heavily out of a moonless sky. Hardly a torch-lamp flashed out except where a solitary woman scurried down the wet streets to lonely rooms. There were no British officers strolling about. They had turned in early, to hot baths and unaccustomed beds, except for one or two, with their burberries b.u.t.toned tight at the throat, and sopping field-caps pulled down about the ears, and top-boots which went splash, splash through deep puddles as they staggered a little uncertainly and peered up at dark corners to find their whereabouts, by a dim sense of locality and the shapes of the houses. The rain pattered sharply on the pavements and beat a tattoo on leaden gutters and slate roofs. Every window was shuttered and no light gleamed through.

On such a night I went out with Beach Thomas, as often before, wet or fine, after hard writing.

"A foul night," said Thomas, setting off in his quick, jerky step. "I like to feel the rain on my face."

We turned down as usual to the river. It was very dark-the rain was heavy on the quayside, where there was a group of people bareheaded in the rain and chattering in French, with gusts of laughter.

"Une bouteille de champagne!" The words were spoken in a clear boy's voice, with an elaborate caricature of French accent, in musical cadence, but unmistakably English.

"A drunken officer," said Thomas.

"Poor devil!"

We drew near among the people and saw a young officer arm in arm with a French peasant-one of the market porters-telling a tale in broken French to the audience about him, with comic gesticulations and extraordinary volubility.

A woman put her hand on my shoulder and spoke in French.