Chapter III: Book I: The End of the Adventure (3)

It was Frederick E. Small, the American doctor attached to Brand’s crowd, who was with me on a night in Lille, before the armistice, when by news from the colonel we were stirred by the tremendous hope--almost a certainty--that the end of the war was near. I had been into Courtrai, which the enemy had first evacuated and then was shelling. It was not a joyous entry like that into Lille. Most of the people were still down in their cellars, where for several days they had been herded together until the air became foul. On the outskirts I had passed many groups of peasants with their babies and old people, trudging past our guns, trekking from one village to another in search of greater safety, or standing in the fields where our artillery was getting into action, and where new shell craters should have warned them away, if they had had more knowledge of war. For more than four years I had seen, at different periods, crowds like that, after the first flight of fugitives in August of ‘14, when the world seemed to have been tilted up and great populations in France and Belgium were in panic-stricken retreat from the advancing edge of war. I knew the types, the attitudes, the very shape of the bundles, in these refugee processions, the haggard look of the mothers pushing their perambulators, the bewildered look of old men and women, the tired sleepy look of small boys and girls, the stumbling dead-beat look of old farm horses dragging carts piled high with cottage furniture. As it was at the beginning so it was at the end--for civilians caught in the fires of war. With two other men I went into the heart of Courtrai and found it desolate, and knew the reason why, when, at the corner of the Grande Place, a heavy shell came howling and burst inside a house with frightful explosive noise, followed by a crash of masonry. The people were wise to keep to their cellars. Two girls, not so wise, made a dash from one house to another, and were caught by chunks of steel and killed close to the church of St. Martin, where they lay all crumpled up in a clotted pool of blood. A man came up to me, utterly careless of such risks, and I hated to stand talking to him with the shells coming every half-minute overhead.

There was a fire of passion in his eyes, and at every sentence he spoke to me his voice rose and thrilled as he denounced the German race for all they had done in Courtrai, for their robberies, their imprisonments, their destruction of machinery, their brutality. The last Kommandant of Courtrai was von Richthofen, father of the German aviator, and he was a hard, ruthless man, and kept the city under an iron rule.

“All that, thank God, is finished now,” said the man. “The English have delivered us from the beast!” As he spoke, another monstrous shell came overhead, but he took no notice of it, and said, “We are safe now from the enemy’s evil power!” It seemed to me a comparative kind of safety. I had no confidence in it when I sat in the parlour of an old lady who, like Eileen O’Connor, in Lille, had been an Irish governess in Courtrai, and who now, living in miserable poverty, sat in a bed-sitting-room whose windows and woodwork had been broken by shell-splinters. “Do you mind shutting the door, my dear?” she said. “I can’t bear those nasty bombs.” I realised with a large, experienced knowledge that we might be torn to fragments of flesh at any moment by one of those nasty “bombs,” which were really eight-inch shells; but the old lady did not worry, and felt safe when the door was shut.

Outside Courtrai, when I left, lay some khaki figures in a mush of blood. They were lads whom I had seen unloading ammunition that morning on the bank of the canal. One had asked me for a light, and said, “What’s all this peace talk?... Any chance?” A big chance, I had told him. Home for Christmas, certain sure this time. The boy’s eyes had lighted up for a moment, quicker than the match which he held in the cup of his hands.

“Jesus! Back for good, eh?”

Then the light went out of his eyes as the match flared up.

“We’ve heard that tale a score of times. ‘The Germans are weakening. The Huns ‘ave ‘ad enough!...’ Newspaper talk. A man would be a mug----”

Now the boy lay in the mud, with half his body blown away.... I was glad to get back to Lille for a spell, where there were no dead bodies in the roads. And the colonel’s news, straight from G.H.Q.--which, surely, were not playing up the old false optimism again!--helped one to hope that, perhaps, in a week or two the last boys of our race, the lucky ones, would be reprieved from that kind of bloody death which I had seen so often, so long, so heaped up, in many fields of France and Flanders, where the flower of our youth was killed.

Dr. Small was excited by the hope brought back by Colonel Lavington. He sought me out in my billet, _Madame Chéri_, and begged me to take a walk with him. (It was a moonlight night, but no double throb of a German air-engine came booming over Lille.) He walked at a hard pace, with the collar of his “British warm” tucked up to his ears, and talked in a queer disjointed monologue, emotionally, whimsically. I remember some of his words, more or less--anyhow, the gist of his thoughts, “I’m not worrying any more about how the war will end. We’ve won! Remarkable, that, when one thinks back to the time, less than a year ago, when the best thing seemed a draw. I’m thinking about the future. What’s the world going to be afterwards? That’s my American mind--the next job, so to speak.”

He thought hard while we paced round our side of the Jardin d’Eté, where the moonlight made the bushes glamorous and streaked the tree trunks with a silver line.

“This war is going to have prodigious effects on nations; on individuals, too. I’m scared. We’ve all been screwed up to an intense pitch--every nerve in us is beyond the normal stretch of nature. After the war there will be a sudden relaxing. We shall be like bits of chewed elastic. Rather like people who have drugged themselves to get through some big ordeal. After the ordeal their nerves are all ragged. They crave the old stimulus, though they dread it. They’re depressed--don’t know what’s the matter--get into sudden rages--hysterical--can’t settle to work--go out for gaiety and get bored. I’ve seen it many times in bad cases. Europe--yes, and America, too--is going to be a bad case. A neurotic world--Lord, it’ll take some healing!”

For a time his thoughts wandered round the possible terms of peace and the abasement of Germany. He prophesied the break-up of Germany, the downfall of the Emperor and of other thrones.

“Crowns will be as cheap as twenty cents,” he said. He hoped for the complete overthrow of Junkerdom--“all the dirty dogs,” as he called the Prussian war lords and politicians. But he hoped the Allies would be generous with the enemy peoples--“magnanimous” was the word he used.

“We must help the spirit of democracy to rise among them,” he said. “We must make it easy for them to exorcise the devil. If we press them too hard, put the screw on to the torture of their souls (defeat will be torture to a proud people), they will nourish a hope of vengeance and go back to their devil for hope.”

I asked him whether he thought his President would lead the world to a nobler stage of history.

He hesitated at that, groped a little, I thought, among old memories and prejudices.

“Why,” he said, “Wilson has the biggest chance that ever came to a human being--the biggest chance and the biggest duty. We are rich (too darned rich) and enormously powerful when most other peoples are poor and weak--drained of wealth and blood. That’s our luck, and a little bit, perhaps, our shame, though our boys have done their bit all right and are ready to do more; and it’s not their fault they weren’t here before--but we’re hardly touched by this war as a people, except spiritually. There we’ve been touched by the finger of Fate. (God, if you like that better!) So, with that strength behind him, the President is in a big way of business. He can make his voice heard, stand for a big idea. God, sonny, I hope he’ll do it! For the world’s sake, for the sake of all these suffering people, here in this city of Lille, and in a million little towns where people have been bashed by war.”

I asked him if he doubted Wilson’s greatness, and the question embarrassed him.

“I’m loyal to the man,” he said. “I’ll back him if he plays straight and big. Bigness, that’s what we want. Bigness of heart as well as bigness of brain. Oh, he’s clever, though not wise in making so many enemies. He has fine ideas and can write real words. Things which speak. True things. I’d like to be sure of his character--its breadth and strength, I mean. The world wants a nobleman, bigger than the little gentlemen of politics; a leader calling to the great human heart of our tribes and lifting them, with one grand gesture, out of the mire of old passions and vendettas and jealousies to a higher plane of--common sense. Out of the jungle to the daylight of fellowship. Out of the jungle.”

He repeated those words twice, with a reverent solemnity. He believed that so much emotion had been created in the heart of the world that, when the war ended, anything might happen if a leader came--a new religion of civilisation, any kind of spiritual and social revolution.

“We might kill cruelty,” he said. “My word, what a victory that would be!”

XI

Our conversation was interrupted by a figure that slipped out of the darkness of some doorway, hesitated before us, and then spoke in French.

“You are English officers? May I speak with you?”

It was a girl, whom I could see only vaguely in the darkness--she stood in the shadow of a doorway beyond the moonlight--and I answered her that I was English and my friend American.

“Is there any way,” she asked, “of travelling from Lille, perhaps to Paris? In a motor car, for example? To-night?”

I laughed at this startling request, put so abruptly. It was already nine o’clock at night!

“Not the smallest chance in the world, mademoiselle! Paris is far from Lille.”

“I was stupid,” said the girl. “Not all the way to Paris, but to some town outside Lille. Any town. There are motor cars always passing through the streets. I thought if I could get a little place in one----”

“It is difficult,” I said. “As a matter of fact, it is forbidden for officers to take civilians except in case of saving them from danger--in shelled places.”

She came suddenly out of the shadow into the moonlight, and I saw that she was a girl with red hair and a face strangely white. I knew by the way she spoke--the accent--as well as by the neatness of her dress, that she was not a working-girl. She was trembling painfully, and took hold of my arm with both her hands.

“Monsieur, I beg of you to help me. I beseech you to think of some way in which I may get away from Lille to-night. It is a matter of extreme importance to me.”

A group of young men and women came up the street arm-in-arm, shouting, laughing, singing the “Marseillaise.” They were civilians, with two of our soldiers among them, wearing women’s hats.

Before I could answer the girl’s last words, she made a sudden retreat into the dark doorway, and I could see dimly that she was cowering back.

Dr. Small spoke to me. “That girl is scared of something. The poor child has got the jim-jams.”

I went closer to her and heard her breathing. It was quite loud. It was as though she were panting after hard running.

“Are you ill?” I asked.

She did not answer until the group of civilians had passed. They did not pass at once, but stood for a moment looking up at a light burning in an upper window. One of the men shouted something in a loud voice--some word in _argot_--which I did not understand, and the women screeched with laughter. Then they went on, dancing with linked arms, and our two soldiers in the women’s hats lurched along with them.

“I am afraid!” said the girl.

“Afraid of what?” I asked.

I repeated the question--“Why are you afraid, mademoiselle?”--and she answered by words which I had heard a million times since the war began as an explanation of all trouble, tears, ruin, misery.

“_C’est la guerre!_”

“Look out!” said the little doctor. “She’s fainting.”

She had risen from her cowering position and stood upright for a moment, with her hand against the doorpost. Then she swayed, and would have fallen if the doctor had not caught her. Even then she fell, indeed, though without hurt, because he could not support her sudden weight--though she was of slight build--and they sank together in a kind of huddle on the doorstep.

“For the love of Mike!” said Dr. Small. He was on his knees before her now, chafing her cold hands. She came to in about a minute, and I leaned over her and asked her where she lived, and made out from her faint whisper that she lived in the house to which this doorway belonged, in the upper room where the light was burning. With numbed fingers--“cold as a toad,” said “Daddy” Small--she fumbled at her bodice and drew out a latchkey.

“We had better carry her up,” I said, and the doctor nodded.

The front door opened into a dimly-lit passage, uncarpeted, and with leprous-looking walls. At one end was a staircase with heavy banisters. The doctor and I supported the girl, who was able to walk a little now, and managed to get her to the first landing.

“Where?” I asked, and she said, “Opposite.”

It was the front room looking on to the street. A lamp was burning on the round table in the centre of the room, and I saw by the light of it the poverty of the furniture and its untidiness. At one end of the room was a big iron bedstead with curtains of torn lace, and on the wooden chairs hung some soiled petticoats and blouses. There was a small cooking-stove in a corner, but no charcoal burned in it, and I remember an ebony-framed mirror over the mantelpiece. I remember that mirror vividly. I remember, for instance, that a bit of the ebony had broken off, showing the white plaster underneath, and a crack in the right-hand corner of the looking-glass.

Probably my eyes were attracted to it because of a number of photographs stuck into the framework. They were photographs of a girl in a variety of stage costumes; and glancing at the girl, whom the doctor had put into a low arm-chair, I saw that they were of her. But with all the tragic difference between happiness and misery; worse than that--between unscathed girlhood and haggard womanhood. This girl with red hair and a white waxen face was pretty still. There was something more than prettiness in the broadness of her brow and the long tawny lashes that were now veiling her closed eyes as she sat with her head back against the chair, showing a long white throat. But her face was lined with an imprint of pain, and her mouth, rather long and bow-like, was drawn with a look of misery.

The doctor spoke to me--in English, of course.

“Half-starved, I should say. Or starved.”

He sniffed at the stove and the room generally.

“No sign of recent cooking.”

He opened a cupboard and looked in.

“Nothing in the pantry, sonny. I guess the girl would do with a meal.”

I did not answer him. I was staring at the photographs stuck into the mirror, and saw one that was not a girl’s portrait. It was the photograph of a young French lieutenant. I crossed the room and looked at it closer, and then spoke to the little doctor in a curiously unexcited voice, as one does in moments of living drama.

“This girl is Pierre Nesle’s sister.”

“For the love of Mike!” said the little doctor, for the second time that night.

The girl heard the name of Pierre Nesle and opened her eyes wide, with a wondering look.

“Pierre Nesle? That is my brother. Do you know him?”

I told her that I knew him well and had seen him in Lille, where he was looking for her, two days ago. He was now in the direction of Courtrai.

The girl was painfully agitated and uttered pitiful words.

“Oh, my little brother!” she murmured. “My dear little comrade!” She rose from her chair, steadying herself with one hand on the back of it, and with feverish anxiety said that she must go at once. She must leave Lille.

“Why?” I asked. “Why do you want to leave Lille?”

“I am afraid!” she answered again, and burst into tears.

I turned to the doctor and translated her words.

“I can’t understand this fear of hers--this desire to leave Lille.”

Dr. Small had taken something off the mantelpiece--a glass tube with some tablets--which he put in his pocket.

“Hysteria,” he said. “Starvation, war-strain, and--drugs. There’s a jolly combination for a young lady’s nerves! She’s afraid of herself, old ghosts, the horrors. Wants to run away from it all, forgetting that she carries her poor body and brain with her. I know the symptoms--even in little old New York in time of peace.”

He had his professional manner. I saw the doctor through his soldier’s uniform. He spoke with the authority of the medical man in a patient’s bedroom. He ordered me to go round to my mess and bring back some food, while he boiled up a kettle and got busy. When I returned, after half-an-hour, the girl was more cheerful. Some of the horrors had passed from her in the doctor’s company. She ate some of the food I had brought in a famished way, but after a few mouthfuls sickened at it and would eat no more. But a faint colour had come into her cheeks and gave her face a touch of real beauty. She must have been extraordinarily attractive before the war--as those photographs showed. She spoke of Pierre with adoration. He had been all that was good to her before she left home (she hated her mother!) to sing in cabarets and café concerts.

“I cannot imagine Pierre as a lieutenant!” she remarked, with a queer little laugh.

Dr. Small said he would get some women in the house to look after her in the night, but she seemed hostile to that idea.

“The people here are unkind. They are bad women here. If I died they would not care.”

She promised to stay in the house until we could arrange for Pierre to meet her and take her away to Paris. But I felt the greatest pity for the girl when we left her alone in her miserable room. The scared look had come back to her face. I could see that she was in terror of being alone again.

When we walked back to our billets the doctor spoke of the extraordinary chance of meeting the girl like that--the sister of our _liaison_ officer. The odds were a million to one against such a thing.

“I always feel there’s a direction in these cases,” said Daddy Small. “Some Hand that guides. Maybe you and I were being led to-night. I’d like to save that girl, Marthe.”

“Is that her name?”

“Marthe de Méricourt, she calls herself, as a singing-girl. I guess that’s why Pierre could not hear of her in this town.”

Later on the doctor spoke again.

“That girl is as much a war victim as if she had been shell-shocked on the field of battle. The casualty lists don’t say anything about civilians, not a darned thing about broken hearts, stricken women, diseased babies, infant mortality--all the hell of suffering behind the lines. May God curse all war devils!”

He put his hand on my shoulder and said in a very solemn way: “After this thing is finished--this grisly business--you and I, and all men of goodwill, must put our heads together to prevent it happening again. I dedicate whatever life I have to that.”

He seemed to have a vision of hope.

“There are lots of good fellows in the world. Wickham Brand is one of ‘em. Charles Fortune is another. One finds them everywhere on your side and mine. Surely we can get together when peace comes and make a better System somehow!”

“Not easy, doctor.”

He laughed at me.

“I hate your pessimism!... We must get a message to Pierre Nesle.... Good-night, sonny!”

On the way back to my billet I passed young Clatworthy.

He was too engrossed to see me, having his arm round a girl who was standing with him under an unlighted lamp-post. She was looking up into his face on which the moonlight shone--a pretty creature, I thought.

“_Je t’adore!_” she murmured, as I passed quite close; and Clatworthy kissed her.

I knew the boy’s mother and sisters, and wondered what they would think of him if they saw him now with this little street-walker. To them Cyril was a white knight _sans peur et sans reproche_. The war had not improved him. He was no longer the healthy lad who had been captain of his school, with all his ambition in sport, as I had known him five years before. Sometimes, in spite of his swagger and gallantry, I saw something sinister in his face, the look of a soiled soul. Poor kid! He, too, would have his excuse for all things:

“_C’est la guerre!_”

XII

It was five o’clock on the following evening that I saw the girl Marthe again. The doctor and I had arranged to go round to her lodging after dinner, by which time we hoped to have a letter for her from Pierre, by despatch-rider. But Brand was with me in the afternoon, having looked into my billet with an English conversation-book for Hélène, who was anxious to study our way of speech. Madame Chéri insisted upon giving him a glass of wine, and we stood talking in her drawing-room a while about the certain hope of victory, and then trivial things. Hélène was delighted with her book and Brand had a merry five minutes with her, teaching her to pronounce the words.

“_C’est effroyable!_” cried Hélène. “‘Through’... ‘Tough’ ‘Cough ‘... _Mon Dieu, comme c’est difficile!_ There is no rule in your tongue.”

Madame Chéri spoke of Edouard, her eldest boy, who had disappeared into the great silence, and gave me a photograph of him, in case I should meet him in our advance towards the Rhine. She kissed the photograph before giving it to me, and said a few words which revealed her strong character, her passionate patriotism.

“If he had been four years older he would have been a soldier of France. I should have been happy if he could have fought for his country, and died for it, like my husband.”

Brand and I left the house and went up towards the Grande Place. I was telling him about Pierre Nesle’s sister and our strange meeting with her the night before.

“I’m precious glad,” said Brand, “that no sister of mine was behind German lines. God knows how much they had to endure. Imagine their risks! It was a lucky escape for that girl Hélène. Supposing she had failed to barricade her door?”

When we came into the Grande Place we saw that something was happening. It was almost dark after a shadowy twilight, but we could see a crowd of people surging round some central point of interest. Many of them were laughing loudly. There was some joke in progress. The women’s tongues sounded most loud and shrill.

“They’re getting back to gaiety,” said Brand. “What’s the jest, I wonder?”

A gust of laughter came across the square. Above it was another sound, not so pleasant. It was a woman’s shrieks--shriek after shriek, most blood-curdling, and then becoming faint.

“What the devil----!” said Brand.

We were on the edge of the crowd and I spoke to a man there.

“What’s happening?”

He laughed in a grim way.

“It’s the _coiffure_ of a lady.. They are cutting her hair.”

I was mystified.

“Cutting her hair?”

A woman spoke to me, by way of explanation, laughing like the man.

“Shaving her head, monsieur. She was one of those who were too complaisant with German officers. You understand? There were many of them. They ought to have their heads cut off as well as their hair.”

Another man spoke gruffly.

“There would be a good many headless corpses if that were so. To their shame be it said. It was abominable. No pride. No decency.”

“But the worst will escape,” said another. “In private houses. The well-dressed demoiselles!”

“_Tuez-les!_” cried a woman. “_Tuez-les!_”

It was a cry for killing, such as women had screamed when pretty aristocrats were caught by the mobs of the French Revolution.

“My God!” said Brand.

He shouldered his way through the crowd, and I followed him. The people made a gap for us, seeing our uniforms, and desired us to enjoy the joke. What I saw when I came closer was a group of young men holding a limp figure. One of them was brandishing a large pair of scissors, as large as shears. Another held up a tangled mass of red hair.

“_Regardez!_” he shouted to the crowd, and they cheered and laughed.

I had seen the hair before, as I knew when I saw a girl’s face, dead-white, lifeless, as it seemed, and limp against a man’s shoulder.

“It is Marthe!” I said to Brand. “Pierre Nesle’s sister.”

A curious sense of faintness overcame me, and I felt sick.

Brand did not answer me, but I saw his face pale under its tan. He pushed forward through the crowd and I lost sight of him for a few moments. After that I saw him carrying the girl; above the heads of the people, I saw her head flopping from side to side horribly, a head with close-cropped hair. They had torn her clothes off her shoulders, which were bleeding.

“Help me,” said Brand.

I am not quite clear what happened. I have only a vague remembrance of the crowd making way for us, with murmurs of surprise and some hostile cries of women. I remember helping Brand to carry the girl--enormously heavy she seemed with her dead weight--but how we managed to get her into Dr. Small’s car is to this day a blank in my mind. We must have seen and hailed him at the corner of the Grande Place as he was going back to his billet. I have a distinct recollection of taking off my Burberry and laying it over the girl, who was huddled in the back of the car, and of Brand saying, “Where can we take her?” I also remember trying to light a cigarette and using many matches which went out in the wind. It was Brand’s idea that we should go to Madame Chéri’s house for sanctuary, and by the time we had driven to that place we had left the crowd behind and were not followed.

“You go in and explain things,” said Brand. “Ask Madame to give the girl a refuge.”

I think Madame Chéri was startled by the sight of the car, and perhaps by some queer look I had. I told her what had happened. This girl was the sister of Pierre Nesle, whom Madame Chéri had met. The crowd, for some reason, had cut off her hair. Would Madame save the poor child, who was unconscious?

I shall never forget the face or speech of that lady, whom I had found so kind. She drew herself up very stiffly and a relentless expression hardened her face.

“If you were not English I should say you desired to insult me, sir. The people have cut off the creature’s hair. ‘For some reason,’ you say. There is only one reason. Because she was faithless to her country and to her sex, and was familiar with men who were the enemies of France, the murderers of our men, robbers and assassins. She has been well punished. I would rather burn down my house than give her shelter. If they gave her to the dogs to tear in pieces I would not lift my little finger to save her.”

Hélène came in, and was surprised at the emotion of her mother’s voice.

“What is it, little _maman?_”

Madame Chéri regained control of herself, which for a moment she had lost in a passion that shook her.

“It is a little matter. This officer and I have been talking about vile people who sold themselves to our enemy. He understands perfectly.”

“I understand,” I said gravely. “There is a great deal of cruelty in the world, madame, and less charity than I had hoped.”

“There is, praise be to God, a little justice,” said Madame Chéri very calmly.

“_Au revoir, madame!_”

“_Au revoir, monsieur!_”

“_Au revoir, mademoiselle!_”

I was shocked then at the callousness of the lady. It seemed to me incredible. Now I am no longer shocked, but understand the horror that was hers, the loathing for a daughter of France who had--if the mob were not mistaken--violated the code of honour which enabled the French people to resist German brutality, even German kindness, which they hated worse, with a most proud disdain. That girl outside, bleeding and senseless in the car, had been friendly with German officers, notorious in her company with them. Otherwise she would not have been seized by the crowd and branded for shame. There was a fierce protective instinct which hardened Madame Chéri against charity. Only those who have seen what war means to women close to it, in enemy hands, may truly understand, and, understanding, curse war again for all its destruction of souls and bodies.

XIII

Brand and Dr. Small were both astonished and indignant.

“Do you mean to say she shuts her door against this poor bleeding girl?” said Brand.

The American doctor did not waste words. He only used words when there was no action on hand.

“The next place?” he said. “A hospital?”

I had the idea of the convent where Eileen O’Connor lodged. There was a sanctuary. Those nuns were vowed to Christian charity. They would understand and have pity.

“Yes,” said Brand, and he called to the driver.

We drove hard to the convent, and Brand was out of the car before it stopped, and rang the bell with such a tug that we heard it jangling loudly in the courtyard.

It seemed long before the little wicket opened and a woman’s voice said, “_Qui est la?_”

Brand gave his name and said, “Open quickly, _ma sour_. We have a woman here who is ill.”

The gate was opened, and Brand and I lifted out the girl, who was still unconscious, but moaning slightly, and carried her into the courtyard, and thence inside the convent to the whitewashed passage where I had listened so long to the Reverend Mother telling me of the trial scene.

It was the Reverend Mother who came now, with two of her nuns, while the little portress stood by, clasping her hands.

“An accident?” said the Reverend Mother. “How was the poor child hurt?”

She bent over the girl, Marthe--Pierre Nesle’s sister, as I remembered with an added pity--pulled my Burberry from her face and shoulders and glanced at the bedraggled figure there.

“Her hair has been cut off,” said the old nun. “That is strange! There are the marks of finger-nails on her shoulder. What violence was it, then?”

Brand described the rescue of the girl from the mob, who would have torn her to pieces, and as he spoke I saw a terrible look come into the Reverend Mother’s face.

“I remember--1870,” she said harshly. “They cut the hair of women who had disgraced themselves--and France--by their behaviour with German soldiers. We thought then that it was a light punishment... we think so now, monsieur!”

One of the nuns, a young woman who had been touching the girl’s head, smoothing back her tousled, close-cropped hair, sprang up as though she had touched an evil thing and shrank back.

Another nun spoke to the Reverend Mother.

“This house would be defiled if we took in a creature like that. God forbid, Reverend Mother----”

The old Superior turned to Brand, and I saw how her breast was heaving with emotion.

“It would have been better, sir, if you had left this wretched woman to the people. The voice of the people is sometimes the voice of God. If they knew her guilt their punishment was just. Reflect what it means to us--to all our womanhood. Husbands, fathers, brothers were being killed by these Germans. Our dear France was bleeding to death. Was there any greater crime than that a Frenchwoman should show any weakness, any favour, to one of those men who were helping to cause the agony of France, the martyrdom of our youth?”

Brand stammered out a few words. I remember only two: “Christian charity!”

The American doctor and I stood by silently. Dr. Small was listening with the deepest attention, as though some new truth about human nature were being revealed to him.

It was then that a new voice was raised in that whitewashed corridor. It was Eileen O’Connor’s Irish contralto, and it vibrated with extraordinary passion as she spoke in French.

“Reverend Mother!... I am dismayed by the words you have spoken. I do not believe, though my ears have heard them. No, they are unbelievable! I have seen your holiness, your charity, every day for four years, nursing German prisoners, and English, with equal tenderness, with a great pity. Not shrinking from any horror or the daily sight of death, but offering it all as a sacrifice to God. And now, after our liberation, when we ought to be uplifted by the Divine favour that has come to us, you would turn away that poor child who lies bleeding at our feet, another victim of war’s cruelty. Was it not war that struck her down? This war which has been declared against souls as well as bodies! This war on women, as well as on fighting-men who had less need of courage than some of us! What did our Lord say to a woman who was taken by the mob? ‘He that is without sin among you, let him cast the first stone!’ It was Mary Magdalen who kissed His feet, and wiped them with her hair. This girl has lost her hair, but perhaps Christ has taken it as a precious napkin for His wounds. We who have been lucky in escape from evil--shall we cast her out of the house which has a cross above its roof? I have been lucky above most women in Lille. If all things were known, I might be lying there in that girl’s place, bleeding and senseless, without this hair of mine. Reverend Mother--_remember Franz von Kreuzenach!_”

We--Dr. Small, Brand, and I--were dumbfounded by Eileen O’Connor’s passionate outcry. She was utterly unconscious of us and looked only at the Reverend Mother, with a light in her eyes that was more intensely spiritual than I had seen before in any woman’s face.

The old nun seemed stricken by Eileen’s words. Into her rugged old face, all wrinkled about the eyes, crept an expression of remorse and shame. Once she raised her hands, slowly, as though beseeching the girl to spare her. Then her hands came down again and clasped each other at her breast, and her head bowed so that her chin was dug into her white bib. Tears came into her eyes and fell unheeded down her withered cheeks. I can see now the picture of us all standing there in the whitewashed corridor of the convent, in the dim light of a hanging lantern--we three officers standing together, the huddled figure of Marthe Nesle lying at our feet, half covered with my trench-coat, but with her face lying sideways, white as death under her cropped red hair, and her bare shoulders stained with a streak of blood; opposite, the old Mother, with bowed head and clasped hands; the two young nuns, rigid, motionless, silent; and Eileen O’Connor, with that queer light on her face and her hands stretched out with a gesture of passionate appeal.

The Reverend Mother raised her head and spoke--after what seemed like a long silence, but was only a second or two, I suppose.

“My child, I am an old woman, and have said many prayers. But you have taught me the lesson, which I thought I knew, that the devil does not depart from us until our souls have found eternal peace. I am a wicked old woman, and until you opened my eyes I was forgetful of charity and of our Lord’s most sweet commands.”

She turned to us now with an air of wonderful dignity and graciousness.

“Gentlemen, I pray you to carry this wounded girl to my own cell. To-night I will sleep on bare boards.”

One of the young nuns was weeping bitterly.

So we lifted up Marthe Nesle, and, following the Reverend Mother, carried her to a little white room and laid her on an iron bedstead under a picture of the Madonna below which burned an oil lamp on a wooden table. The American doctor asked Eileen O’Connor to bring him some hot water.

Brand and I went back in the car, and I dined at his mess again.

XIV

Colonel Lavington was discussing the art of the sonnet and the influence of Italian culture in Elizabethan England. From that subject he travelled to the psychology of courage, which in his opinion, for the moment, was founded on vanity.

“Courage,” he said, with that gallant look of his which I had seen with admiration when he walked up the old duckboards beyond Ypres, with a whimsical smile at “crumps” bursting abominably near--he had done bravely in the old days as a battalion commander. “Courage is merely a pose before the mirror of one’s own soul and one’s neighbours. We are all horribly afraid in moments of danger, but some of us have the gift of pretending that we don’t mind. That is vanity. We like to look heroes, even to ourselves. It is good to die with a _beau geste_, though death is damnably unpleasant.”

“I agree, colonel,” said Charles Fortune. “Always the right face for the proper occasion. But it wants a lot of practice.”

He put on his gallant, devil-may-care face, and there was appreciative laughter from his fellow officers.

Harding, the young landowner, was of opinion that courage depended entirely on the liver.

“It is a matter of physical health,” he said. “If I am out-of-sorts, my _moral_ goes down to zero. Not that I’m ever really brave. Anyhow, I hate things that go off. Those loud noises of bursting shells are very objectionable. I shall protest against Christmas crackers after the war.”

Young Clatworthy was in the sulks, and sat very silent during all this badinage.

“What’s the matter?” I asked, and he confided to me his conviction, while he passed the salt, that “life was a rummy game.”

“Hipped?” I said, and his answer was, “Fed up to the back teeth!”

That seemed to me curious, after the glimpse I had had of him with a little lady of Lille. The boy explained himself somewhat under cover of the colonel’s conversation, which was holding the interest of the mess.

“We’re living unnaturally,” he said. “It’s all an abnormal show, and we pretend to be natural and normal when everything that happens round us is fantastic and disorderly.”

“What’s your idea?” I enquired. It was the first time I had heard the boy talk seriously, or with any touch of gravity.

“Hard to explain,” he said. “But, take my case to-day. This morning I went up the line to interrogate the latest batch of P.O.W.’s.” (He meant prisoners of war.) “A five-point-nine burst within ten yards of my car, the other side of Courtrai, killed my driver and missed me by a couple of inches. I felt as sick as a dog when I saw Saunders crumpled over his steering-wheel with blood pouring down his neck. Not that it’s the first time I’ve seen blood!”

He laughed as he gave a glance at his wound-stripe, and I remembered the way in which he had gained his M.C. at Gommecourt--one of three left alive in his company.

“We had been talking, three minutes before, about his next leave. He had been married in ‘16, after the Somme, and hadn’t seen his wife since. Said her letters made him ‘uneasy.’ Thought she was drinking because of the loneliness. Well, there he was--finished--and a nasty sight. I went off to the P.O.W. cage and examined the beggars--one of them, as usual, had been a waiter at the ‘Cecil,’ and said, ‘How’s dear old London?’--and passed the time of day with Bob Mellett--you know, the one-armed lad. He laughed no end when he heard of my narrow squeak. So did I--though it’s hard to see the joke. He lent me his car on the way back, and somewhere outside Courtrai we bumped over a dead body with a queer soft squelch. It was a German--a young ‘un--and Bob Mellett said, ‘_He_ won’t be home for Christmas!’ Do you know Bob?--he used to cry at school when a rat was caught. Queer, isn’t it? Now here I am, sitting at a white table-cloth, listening to the colonel’s talk, and pretending to be interested. I’m not a bit, really. I’m wondering why that bit of shell hit Saunders and not me. Or why I’m not lying in a muddy road as a bit of soft squelch for staff cars to bump over. And on top of that I’m wondering how it will feel to hang up a bowler hat again in a house at Wimbledon, and say, ‘Cheerio, mother!’ to the mater (who will be knitting in the same armchair--chintz-covered--by the piano) and read the evening paper until dinner’s ready, take Ethel to a local dance, and get back into the old rut of home life in a nice family, don’t you know? With all my memories! With the ghosts of _this_ life crowding up! Ugly ghosts, some of ‘em! Dirty ghosts!... It’s inconceivable that we can ever go back to the funny old humdrum! I’m not sure that I want to.”

“You’re hipped,” I told him. “You’ll be glad to get back all right. Wimbledon will be Paradise after what you’ve been through.”

“Oh, Lord, _I’ve_ done nothing,” said the boy. “Fact is, I’ve been talking tripe. Forget it.”

But I did not forget, and remembered every word later, when I heard his laughter on Armistice night.

A despatch-rider stood outside the door in his muddy overalls and Brand went to get his message. It was from Pierre Nesle.

“I am mad with joy that you have found Marthe! Alas! I cannot get back for a week. Tell her that I am still her devoted comrade and loving brother.--Pierre.” Brand handed me the slip and said, “Poor devil!” I went back to my billet in Madame Chéri’s house, and she made no allusion to our conversation in the afternoon, but was anxious, I thought, to assure me of her friendship by special little courtesies, as when she lighted my candle and carried it upstairs before saying good-night. Hélène was learning English fast and furiously, and with her arm round her mother’s waist said, “Sleep well, sir, and very good dreams to you!” which I imagine was a sentence out of her text-book.

XV

They were great days--in the last two weeks before the Armistice! For me, and for many men, they were days of exultation, wild adventure, pity, immense hope, tremendous scenes uplifted by a sense of victory; though for others, the soldiers who did the dirty work, brought up lorry columns through the mud of the old battlefields far behind our new front line, carried on still with the hard old drudgery of war, they were days not marked out by any special jubilation, or variety, or hope, but just like all the others that had gone before since first they came to France.

I remember little scenes and pictures of those last two weeks as they pass through my mind like a him drama; episodes of tragedy or triumph which startled my imagination, a pageantry of men who had victory in their eyes, single figures who spoke to me, told me unforgettable things, and the last dead bodies who fell at the very gate of peace.

One of the last dead bodies I saw in the war was in the city of Valenciennes, which we entered on the morning of November 3rd. Our guns had spared the city which was full of people, but the railway station was an elaborate ruin of twisted iron and broken glass. Rails were torn up and sleepers burnt. Our airmen, flying low day after day during the German retreat, had flung down bombs, which had torn the fronts off the booking-offices and made match-wood of the signal-boxes and sheds. For German soldiers detraining here it had been a hellish place, and the fire of our flying-men had been deadly accurate. I walked through the ruin out into the station square. It was empty of all life, but one human figure was there all alone. It was the dead body of a young German soldier, lying with outstretched arms, on his back, in a pool of blood. His figure formed a cross there on the cobblestones, and seemed to me a symbol of all that youth which had been sacrificed by powers of monstrous evil. His face was still handsome in death, the square, rough-hewn face of a young peasant.

There was the tap-tap-tap of a German machine-gun somewhere on the right of the square. As I walked forward all my senses were alert to the menace of death. It would be foolish, I thought, to be killed at the end of the war--for surely the end was very near? And then I had a sudden sharp thought that perhaps it would be well if this happened. Why should I live when so many had died? The awful job was done, and my small part in it. I had seen it through from start to finish, for it was finished but for a few days of waiting. It might be better to end with it, for all that came afterwards would be anticlimax. I remember raising my head and looking squarely round at that staccato hammering of the German machine-gun, with an intense desire that a bullet might come my way. But I went on untouched into the town.... As in Courtrai, a fury of gun-fire overhead kept the people in their houses. Our field batteries were firing over the city and the enemy was answering. Here and there I saw a face peering out of a broken window, and then a door opened, and a man and woman appeared behind it with two thin children. The woman thrust out a skinny hand and grasped mine, and began to weep. She talked passionately, with a strange mingling of rage and grief.

“Oh, my God!” she said, “those devils have gone at last! What have they not made us suffer! My husband and I had four little houses--we were innkeepers--and last night they sent us to this part of the town and burnt all of them.” She used a queer word in French. “Last night,” she said, “they made a devil’s _charivari_ and set many houses on fire.”

Her husband spoke to me over his wife’s shoulder.

“Sir, they have stolen everything, broken everything, ground us down for four years. They are bandits and robbers.”

“We are hungry,” said the thin girl.

By her side the boy, with a white pinched face, echoed her plaint.

“We have eaten our bread and I am hungry.”

They had some coffee left, and asked me to go inside and drink it with them, but I could not wait.

The woman held my wrist tight in her skinny hands.

“You will come back?” she asked.

“I will try,” I said.

Then she wept again and said: “We are grateful to the English soldiers. It is they who saved us.”

That is one out of a hundred little scenes that I remember in those last two weeks when, not without hard fighting, for the German machine-gun rearguards fought bravely to the end, our troops entered many towns and villages, and liberated many thousands of poor people. I remember the girls of a little town called Bohain who put on their best frocks and clean pinafores to welcome us. It was not until a little while that we found they were starving and had not even a crust of bread in all the town. Then the enemy started shelling, and some of the girls were killed, and many were suffocated by gas shells. That was worse in St. Amand, by Valenciennes, where all the women and children took refuge in the cellars. The German batteries opened fire with yellow cross shell as our guns passed through. Some of our men, and many of their horses, lay dead in the streets as I passed through; but worse things happened in the cellars below the houses. The heavy gas of the yellow cross shells filtered down to where the women and their babies cowered on their mattresses. They began to choke and gasp, and babies died in the arms of dying mothers.... Dr. Small, our American, went with a body of English doctors and nurses to the rescue of St. Amand. “I’ve seen bad things,” he told me. “I am not weak in the stomach--but I saw things in those cellars which nearly made me vomit.”

He put a hand on my shoulder and blinked at me through his glasses.

“It’s no good cursing the Germans. As soon as your troops entered the village they had a right to shell. That’s war. We should do the same. War’s war. I’ve been cursing the Germans in elaborate and eccentric language. It did me good. I feel all the better for it. But all the same I was wrong. It’s war we ought to curse. War which makes these things possible among civilised peoples. It’s just devilry. Civilised people must give up the habit. They must get cured of it. You have heard of typhoid-carriers? They are people infected with the typhoid microbe who spread the disease. When peace comes we must hunt down the war-carriers, isolate them, and, if necessary, kill them.”

He waved his hand to me and went off in an ambulance filled with suffocated women.

I met Brand in Valenciennes five days after our liberation of the city, when our troops were making their formal entry with band and banners. He came up to me and said, “Have you heard the news?” I saw by his face that it was good news, and I felt my heart give a lurch when I answered him.

“Tell me the best.”

“Germany is sending plenipotentiaries, under a white flag, to Foch. They know it is unconditional surrender.... And the Kaiser has abdicated.”

I drew a deep breath. Something seemed to lift from my soul. The sky seemed to become brighter, as though a shadow had passed from the face of the sun.

“Then it’s the end?... The last battle has been fought!”

Brand was staring at a column of troops--all young fellows of the 4th Division. His eyes were glistening, with moisture in them.

“Reprieved!” he said. “The last of our youth is saved!”

He turned to me suddenly, and spoke in the deepest melancholy.

“You and I ought to be dead. So many kids were killed. We’ve no right to be alive.”

“Perhaps there is other work to do,” I answered him, weakly, because I had the same thought.

He did not seem sure of that.

“I wonder!... If we could help to save the next generation.”