Ihad the luck to be billeted in Lille at the house of Madame Chéri, in the Rue Esquermoise.
This lady was the mother of the girl with the pig-tail and the two children with whom Wickham Brand had made friends on this morning of liberation—the wife of that military officer whom Pierre Nesle had known at Verdun and knew to be killed. It was my luck, because there were children in the house—the pig-tailed girl, Hélène, was more a woman than a child, though only sixteen—and I craved for a touch of home life and children’s company after so long an exile in the war-zone, always among men who talked of war, thought of it, dreamed of it, year in, year out.
Madame Chéri was, I thought, when I saw her first, a beautiful woman, not physically—because she was too white and worn—but spiritually, in courage of soul. Pierre Nesle, ourliaisonofficer, told me how she had received the news of her husband’s death—unflinchingly, without a cry. She knew, she said, in her heart that he was dead. Some queer message had reached her one night during the Verdun battles. It was no ghost, or voice, but only a sudden cold conviction that her man had been killed. For the children’s sake she had pretended that their father might come back. It gave them something to look forward to. The little ones were always harping on the hope that, when peace came, this mysterious and glorious man, whom they remembered only vaguely as one who had played bears with them and had been the provider of all good things, would return with rich presents from Paris—tin soldiers, queen-dolls, mechanical toys. Hélène, the elder girl, was different. She had looked curiously at her mother when the children prattled like that and Madame Chéri had pretended to believe in the father’s homecoming. Once or twice the girl had said, “Papa may be killed,” in a matter-of-fact way. Yet she had been his devoted comrade. They had been such lovers, the father and daughter, that sometimes the mother had been a little jealous, so she said, in her frank way, to Pierre Nesle, smiling as she spoke. The war had made Hélène a realist, like most French girls, to whom the idea of death became commonplace, almost inevitable, as the ceaseless slaughter of men went on. The German losses had taught them that.
I had the colonel’s dressing-room—he had attained the grade of colonel before Verdun, so Pierre told me—and Madame Chéri came in while I was there to see that it was properly arranged for me. Over his iron bedstead (the Germans had taken the woollen mattress, so that it had been replaced by bags of straw) was his portrait as a lieutenant of artillery, as he had been at the time of his marriage. He was a handsome fellow, rather like Hélène, with her delicate profile and brown eyes, though more like, said Madame Chéri, their eldest boy, Edouard.
“Where is he?” I asked, and that was the only time I saw Madame Chéri break down utterly.
She began to tell me that Edouard had been taken away by the Germans, among all the able-bodied men and boys who were sent away from Lille for digging trenches behind the lines, in Easter of ‘16, and that he had gone bravely, with his little pack of clothes over his shoulder, saying, “It is nothing,maman. My father taught me the wordcourage. In a little while we shall win, and I shall be back.Courage, courage!”
Madame Chéri repeated her son’s words proudly, so that I seemed to see the boy with that pack on his shoulder and a smile on his face. Then, suddenly, she wept bitterly, wildly, her body shaken with a kind of ague, while she sat on the iron bedstead with her face in her hands.
I repeated the boy’s words.
“Courage, courage, madam!”
Proudly she wailed out in broken sentences:—
“He was such a child!... He caught cold so easily!... He was so delicate!... He needed mother-love so much!... For two years no word has come from him!” In a little while she controlled herself and begged me to excuse her. We went down together to the dining-room, where the children were playing and Hélène was reading; and she insisted upon my drinking a glass of wine from the store which she had kept hidden from the Germans in a pit which Edouard had dug in the garden in the first days of the occupation. The children were delighted with that trick, and roared with laughter.
Hélène, with a curl of her lip, spoke bitterly.
“The Boche is a stupid animal. One can dupe him easily.”
“Not always easily,” said Madame Chéri. She opened a secret cupboard behind a bookcase standing against the panelled wall.
“I hid all my brass and copper here. A German police officer came, and said, ‘Have you hidden any copper, madame?’ I said, ‘There is nothing hidden.’ ‘Do you swear it?’ he asked. ‘I swear it,’ I answered very haughtily. He went straight to the bookcase, pushed it on one side, tapped the wall, and opened the secret cupboard’, which was stuffed full of brass and copper. ‘You are a liar, madame,’ he said, ‘like all Frenchwomen.’ ‘And you are an insolent pig, like all Germans,’ I remarked. That cost me a fine of ten thousand francs.”
Madame Chéri saw nothing wrong in swearing falsely to a German. I think she held that nothing was wrong to deceive or to destroy any individual of the German race, and I could understand her point of view when Pierre Nesle told me of one thing that had happened which she never told to me. It was about Hélène.
A German captain was billeted in the house. They ignored his presence, though he tried to ingratiate himself. Hélène hated him with a cold and deadly hatred. She trembled if he passed her on the stairs. His presence in the house, even if she did not see him but only heard him move in his room, made her feel ill. Yet he was very polite to her, and said, “Guten gnadiges Fràulein,” whenever they met. To Edouard, also, he was courteous and smiling, though Edouard was sullen. He was a stout little man, with a round rosy face and little bright eyes behind big black-rimmed glasses, an officer in the Kommandantur, and formerly a schoolmaster. Madame Chéri, was polite to him, but cold, cold as ice. After some months, she found him harmless, though objectionable, because German. It did not seem dangerous to leave him in the house one evening when she went to visit a dying friend—Madame Vailly. She was later than she meant to be—so late that she was liable to arrest by the military police if they saw her flit past in the darkness of the unlit streets. When she came home she slipped the latch-key into the door and went quietly into the hall. The children would be in bed and asleep. At the foot of the stairs a noise startled her. It was a curious creaking, shaking noise, as of a door being pushed by some heavy weight, then banged by it. It was the door at the top of the stairs, on the left—Helène’s room.
“Qu’est-ce que tu fais là?” said Madame Chéri.
She was very frightened with some unknown fear, and held tight to the banister as she went upstairs. There was a glimmer of light on the landing. It was from a candle which had almost burnt out and was guttering in a candlestick placed on the topmost stair. A grotesque figure was revealed by the light—Schwarz, the German officer, in his pyjamas, with a helmet on his head and unlaced boots on his feet. The loose fat of the man, no longer girded by a belt, made him look like a mass of jelly as he had his shoulder to the door, shoving and grunting as he tried to force it open. He was swearing to himself in German, and, now and then, called out softly in French, in a kind of drunken German-French: “Ouvrez, kleines Madchen, ma jolie Schatz. Ouvrez donc.”
Madame Chéri was paralysed for a moment by a shock of horror; quite speechless and motionless. Then suddenly she moved forward and spoke in a fierce whisper.
“What are you doing, beast?”
Schwarz gave a queer snort of alarm.
He stood swaying a little, with the helmet on the back of his head. The candlelight gleamed on its golden eagle. His face was hotly flushed and there was a ferocious look in his eyes. Madame Chéri saw that he was drunk.
He spoke to her in horrible French, so Pierre Nesle told me, imitating it savagely, as Madame Chéri had done to him. The man was filthily drunk, and declared that he loved Hélène and would kill her if she did not let him love her. Why did she lock her door like that? He had been kind to her. He had smiled at her. A German officer was a human being, not a monster. Why did they treat him as a monster, draw themselves away when he passed, become silent when he wished to speak with them, stare at him with hate in their eyes? The French people were all devils, proud as devils.
Another figure stood on the landing. It was Edouard—a tall, slim figure, with a white face and burning eyes, in which there was a look of fury.
“What is happening,maman?” he said coldly. “What does this animal want?”
Madame Chéri trembled with a new fear. If the boy were to kill that man, he would be shot. She had a vision of him standing against a wall....
“It is nothing,” she said. “This gentleman is ill. Go back to bed, Edouard. I command you.”
The German laughed stupidly.
“To bed,shafskopf. I am going to open your sister’s door. She loves me. She calls to me. I hear her whisper, ‘Ich liebe dich!’”
Edouard had a stick in his hand. It was a heavy walking-stick which had belonged to his father. Without a word he sprang forward, raised his weapon, and smashed it down on the German’s head. It knocked off Schwarz’s helmet, which rolled from the top to the bottom of the staircase, and hit the man a glancing blow on the temple. He fell like a log. Edouard smiled, and said, “Très bien.” Then he rattled the lock of his sister’s door and called out to her: “Hélène.... Have no fear. He is dead. I have killed him.”
It was then that Madame Chéri had her greatest fear. There was no sound from Hélène. She did not answer any of their cries. She did not open the door to them. They tried to force the lock, as Schwarz had done, but, though the lock gave at last, the door would not open, kept closed by some barricade behind it. Edouard and his mother went out into the yard, and the boy climbed up to his sister’s window and broke the glass to go through. Hélène was lying in her nightdress on the bedroom floor, unconscious. She had moved a heavy wardrobe in front of the door, by some supernatural strength which came from fear. Then she had fainted.... To his deep regret, Edouard had not killed the German.
Schwarz had crawled back to his bedroom when they went back into the house, and next morning wept to Madame Chéri and implored forgiveness. There had been a little banquet, he said, and he had drunk too much.
Madame Chéri did not forgive. She called at the Kommandantur, where the General saw her and listened to her gravely. He did not waste words.
“The matter will be attended to,” he said.
Captain Schwarz departed that day from the house in the Rue Esquermoise. He was sent to a battalion in the line and was killed somewhere near Ypres.
Wickham Brand paid his promised visit to the Chéri family, according to his pledge to Hélène, whom he had met in the street the previous day, and he had to drink some of the hidden wine, as I had done, and heard the story of its concealment and of Madame’s oath about the secret hoard of copper. I think he was more disconcerted than I had been by that avowal, and told me afterwards that he believed no Englishwoman would have sworn to so deliberate a lie.
“That’s because the English are not so logical,” I said, and he puzzled over that.
He was greatly taken with Hélène, as she with him, but he risked their friendship in an awkward moment when he expressed the hope that the German offer of peace (the one before the final surrender) would be accepted.
It was Madame Chéri who took him up on that, sharply, and with a kind of surprised anguish in her voice. She hoped, she said, that no peace would be made with Germany until French and British and American troops had smashed the German armies, crossed the German frontier, and destroyed many German towns and villages. She would not be satisfied with any peace that came before a full vengeance, so that German women would taste the bitterness of war as Frenchwomen had drunk deep of it, and until Germany was heaped with ruins as France had been.
Wickham Brand was sitting with the small boy on his knees, and stroked his hair before answering.
“Dites, donc!” said Hélène, who was sitting on the hearthrug, looking up at his powerful profile, which reminded me always of a Norman knight, or, sometimes, of a young monk worried about his soul and the devil.
He had that monkish look now when he answered.
“I don’t know,” he said. “I have felt like that often. But I have come to think that the sooner we get blood out of our eyes the better for all the world. I have seen enough dead Germans—and dead English and dead French—to last a lifetime. Many of the German soldiers hate the war, as I know, and curse the men who drove them on to it. They are trapped. They cannot escape from the thing they curse, because of their discipline, their patriotism——”
“Their patriotism!” said Madame Chéri.
She was really angry with Brand, and I noticed that even Hélène drew back a little from her place on the rug and looked perplexed and disappointed. Madame Chéri ridiculed the idea of German patriotism. They were brutes who liked war except when they feared defeat. They had committed a thousand atrocities out of sheer joy in bestial cruelty. Their idea of patriotism was blood-lust and the oppression of people more civilised than themselves. They hated all people who were not savages like themselves.
Wickham Brand shook his head.
“They’re not all as bad as that. I knew decent people among them before the war. For a time, of course, they went mad. They were poisoned by the damnable philosophy of their leaders and teachers.”
“They liked the poison,” said Madame Chéri. “They lapped it up. It is in their blood and spirits. They are foul through and through.”
“They are devils,” said Hélène. She shuddered as though she felt very cold.
Even the small boy on Brand’s knees said: “Sales Boches!”
Brand groaned in a whimsical way.
“I have said all those things a thousand times! They nearly drove me mad. But now it’s time to stop the river of blood—if the German army will acknowledge defeat. I would not go on a day after that, for our own sakes—for the sake of French boys and English. Every day more of war means more dead of ours, more blind, more crippled, and more agony of soul. I want some of our boyhood to be saved.”
Madame Chéri answered coldly.
“Not before the Germans have been punished. Not before that, if we all die.”
Hélène sprang up with a passionate gesture.
“All German babies ought to be strangled in their cradles! Before they grow up to be fat, beastly men.”
She was thinking of Schwarz, I imagine. It was the horror of remembrance which made her so fierce. Then she laughed, and said: “Oh,là là, let us be glad because yesterday we were liberated. Do not quarrel with an English officer,maman. He helped to save us.”
She put her hands on Wickham Brand’s shoulders and said: “Merci, mon capitaine!”
So the conversation turned, and Wickham won them back by his courtesy, and by a tribute to the courage of French civilians behind the lines, of whom he told many haunting stories.
But when I walked round with him to his mess—we were going round later to see Eileen O’Connor—he referred back to the incident.
“Daddy Small is right.” (He referred to the little American doctor.) “The hatred of these people is transcendental. It is like a spiritual flame. It is above all self-interest, kindly, human instincts, life itself. That woman would sacrifice herself, and her children, as quietly as she heard the death of her husband, rather than grant the Germans peace without victory and vengeance. How can there be any peace, whatever treaty is signed? Can Europe ever get peace with all this hatred as a heritage?”
We walked silently towards the Boulevard de la Liberté, where Brand’s little crowd had established their headquarters.
“Perhaps they’re right,” he said presently. “Perhaps the hatred is divine.... I may be weakening, because of all the horror.”
Then he was silent again, and while I walked by his side I thought back to his career as I had known it in the war, rather well. He had always been tortured by agonised perplexities. I had guessed that by the look of the man and some of his odd phrases, and his restlessness and foolhardiness. It was in the trenches by Fricourt that I had first seen him—long before the battles of the Somme. He was sitting motionless on a wooden box, staring through a periscope towards the mine craters and the Bois Français in No Man’s Land. The fine hardness of his profile, the strength of his jaw—not massive, but with one clean line from ear to chin—and something in the utter intensity of his attitude, attracted my attention, and I asked the colonel about him.
“Who is that fellow—like a Norman knight?”
The colonel of the K.R.R. laughed as we went round the next bay, ducking our heads where the sandbags had slipped down.
“Further back than Norman,” he said. “He’s the primitive man.”
He told me that Wickham Brand—a lieutenant then—was a young barrister who had joined the battalion at the beginning of ‘15. He had taken up sniping and made himself a dead shot. He had the hunter’s instinct and would wait hours behind the sandbags for the sight of a German head in the trendies opposite. He seldom missed his man, or that part of his body which showed for a second. Lately he had taken to the habit of crawling out into No Man’s Land and waiting in some shell-hole for the dawn, when Germans came out to mend their wire or drag in a dead body. He generally left another dead man as a bait for the living. Then he would come back with a grim smile and eat his breakfast wolfishly, after cutting a notch in one of the beams of his dug-out.
“He’s a Hun-hater, body and soul,” said the colonel. “We want more of ‘em. All the same, Brand makes me feel queer by his ferocity. I like a humorous fellow who does his killing cheerfully.”
After that I met Brand and took a drink with him in his dug-out. He answered my remarks gruffly for a time.
“I hear you go in for sniping a good deal,” I said, by way of conversation.
“Yes. It’s murder made easy.”
“Do you get many targets?”
“It’s a waiting game. Sometimes they get careless.” He puffed at a black old pipe, quite silent for a time. Presently he told me about a “young ‘un” who popped his head over the parapet twice to stare at something on the edge of the mine crater.
“I spared him twice. The third time I said, ‘Better dead,’ and let go at him. The kid was too easy to miss.” Something in the tone of his voice told me that he hated himself for that.
“Rather a pity,” I mumbled.
“War,” he said. “Bloody war.”
There was a candle burning on the wooden bench on which he leaned his elbow, and by the light of it I saw that his eyes were bloodshot. There was a haggard look on his face.
“It must need some nerve,” I said awkwardly, “to go out so often in No Man’s Land. Real pluck.”
He stared at me as though surprised, and then laughed harshly.
“Pluck? What’s that? I’m scared stiff half the time. Do you think I like it?”
He seemed to get angry, was angry, I think.
“Do any of us like it? These damn things that blow men to bits, make rags of them, tear their bowels out, and their eyes? Or to live on top of a mine crater, as we are now, never knowing when you’re going up in smoke and flame? If you like that sort of thing yourself you can take my share. I have never met a man who did.”
Yet when Brand was taken out of the trenches—by a word spoken over the telephone from corps headquarters—because of his knowledge of German and his cousinship to a lady who was a friend of the corps commander’s niece, he was miserable and savage. I met him many times after that as an intelligence officer at the corps cages, examining prisoners on days of battle.
“Anembusquéjob!” he said. “I’m saving my skin while the youngsters die.”
He stood outside his hut one day on a morning of battle in the Somme fields—up by Pozières. No prisoners had yet come down. He forgot my presence and stood listening to the fury of gun-fire and watching the smoke and flame away there on the ridge.
“Christ!” he cried. “Why am I here? Why aren’t I with my pals up there, getting blown to blood and pulp? Blood and pulp! Blood and pulp!”
Then he remembered me, and turned in a shamefaced way and said, “Sorry!... I feel rather hipped to-day.”
I was present sometimes at his examination of prisoners—those poor, grey, muddy wretches who came dazed out of the slime and shambles. Sometimes he bullied them harshly, in fluent German, and they trembled at his ferocity of speech, even whimpered now and then. But once or twice he was in quite a different mood with them and spoke gently, assenting when they cursed the war and its misery and said that all they wanted was peace and home again.
“Aren’t you fellows going to revolt?” he asked one man—aFeldwebel.“Aren’t you going to tell your war lords to go to hell and stop all this silly massacre before Germany iskaput?”
The German shrugged his shoulders.
“We would if we could. It is impossible. Discipline is too strong for us. It has enslaved us.”
“That’s true,” said Brand. “You are slaves of a system.”
He spoke a strange sentence in English as he glanced over to me.
“I am beginning to think we are all slaves of a system. None of us can break the chains.”
It was after that day that Brand took a fancy to me, for some reason, inviting me to his mess, where I met Charles Fortune and others, and it was there that I heard amazing discussions about the philosophy of war, German psychology, the object of life, the relation of Christianity to war, and the decadence of Europe. Brand himself sometimes led these discussions, with a savage humour which delighted Charles Fortune, who egged him on. He was always pessimistic, sceptical, challenging, bitter, and now and then so violent in his criticisms of England, the Government, the Army Council, the Staff, and above all, the Press, that most of his fellow officers—apart from Fortune—thought he went “a bit too far.”
Dear old Harding, who was Tory to the backbone, with a deep respect for all in authority, accused him of being a “damned revolutionary,” and for a moment it looked as though there would be hot words, until Brand laughed in a good-natured way and said, “My dear fellow, I’m only talking academic rot. I haven’t a conviction. Ever since the war began I have been trying to make head or tail of things in a sea-fog of doubt. All I know is that I want the bloody orgy to end, somehow and anyhow.”
“With victory,” said Harding solemnly.
“With the destruction of Prussian philosophy everywhere,” said Brand.
They agreed on that, but I could see that Brand was on shifting ground and I knew, as our friendship deepened; that he was getting beyond a religion of mere hate, and was looking for some other kind of faith. Occasionally he harked back, as on the day in Lille when I walked by his side.
Idined with him in his mess that evening, before going on with him to spend an hour or two with Eileen O’Connor, who had a room in some convent on the outskirts of Lille. The advanced headquarters of this little group of officers had been established in one of those big private houses which belong to the rich manufacturers and business people of Lille (rich before the war, but with desolate factories stripped of all machinery during the German occupation and afterwards), with large, heavily-furnished rooms built round a courtyard and barred off from the street by the big front door. There was a motor lorry inside the door, which was wide open, and some orderlies were unloading camp-beds, boxes of maps, officers’ kit, a mahogany gramophone, and other paraphernalia, under the direction of a young cockney sergeant, who wanted to know why the blazes they didn’t look slippy.
“Don’t you know there’s a war on?” he asked a stolid old soldier—one of the heroes of Mons—who was sitting on a case of whisky, with a wistful look, as though reflecting on the unfair privileges of officers with so much wealth of drink.
“War’s all right if you’re not too close to it,” said the Mons hero. “I’ve seen enough. I’ve done my bleeding bit for King and country. South Africa, Egypt——”
“Shut your jaw,” said the sergeant. “And down that blarsted gramophone.”
“Ah!” said the Mons hero. “We didn’t ‘ave no blarsted gramophones in South Africa. This is a different kind of war. More comfort about it, if you’re not in the trenches.”
Wickham Brand took me through the courtyard and mentioned that the colonel had come up from St. Omer.
“Now we’re sure to beat the Boche,” he said. “Listen!”
From a room to the left of the courtyard came the sound of a flute playing one of Bach’s minuets, very sweetly, with an old-fashioned grace.
“A wonderful army of ours!” said Brand. “I can’t imagine a German colonel of the Staff playing seventeenth century music on a bit of ivory while the enemy is fighting like a tiger at bay.”
“Perhaps that’s our strength,” I answered. “Our amateurs refuse to take the war too seriously. I know a young gunner major who travels a banjo in his limber, and at Cambrai I saw fellows playing chuck-penny within ten yards of their pals’ dead bodies—a pile of them.”
The colonel saw us through his window and waved his flute at us. When I went into the room, after a salute at the doorway, I saw that he had already littered it with artistic untidiness—sheets of torn music, water-colour sketches, books of poetry, and an array of splendid shining boots, of which a pair stood on the mahogany sideboard.
“A beautiful little passage this,” said Colonel Lavington, smiling at me over the flute, which he put to his lips again. He played a bar or two of old-world melody, and said, “Isn’t that perfect? Can’t you see the little ladies in their ^puffed brocades and high-heeled shoes!”
He had his faun-like look, his clean-shaven face with long nose and thin, humorous mouth, lighted up by his dark smiling eyes.
“Not a bad headquarters,” he said, putting down the flute again. “If we can only stay here a little while, instead of having to jog on again. There’s an excellent piano in the dining-room, German, thank goodness—and Charles Fortune and I can really get down to some serious music.”
“How’s the war?” I asked.
“War?” he said absent-mindedly. “Oh, yes, the war! That’s going on all right. They’d be out of Tournai in a few days. Perhaps out of Maubeuge and Mons. Oh, the game’s up! Very soon the intellectuals will be looking round for a living in dear old London. My goodness, some of us will find peace a difficult job! I can see Boredom approaching with its colossal shadow.... After all, it has been a great game, on the whole.”
I laughed, but something stuck in my throat. Colonel Lavington played the flute, but he knew his job, and was in touch with General Headquarters and all its secret information. It was obvious that he believed the war was going to end—soon. Soon, O Lord, after all the years of massacre.
I blurted out a straight question.
“Do you think there’s a real chance of peace?”
The colonel was reading a piece of music, humming it with a la, la, la.
“Another month and our job’s done,” he said. “Have you heard that bit of Gluck? It’s delicious.”
I stayed with him a little while and did not follow a note of his music. I was excited by the supreme hope he had given me. So there was to be an end of massacre, and my own hopes had not been false.
At the mess table that night Charles Fortune was in good form. We sat in a room which was rather handsomely furnished, in a heavy way, with big bronzes on the mantelpiece (ticketed for exemption from requisition as family heirlooms), and some rather good portraits of a French family—from the eighteenth century onwards—on the panelled walls. Theconciergehad told us that it had been the mess of a German headquarters and this gave Fortune his cue, and he entertained us with some caricatures of German generals and officers, amazingly comic. He drank his soup in the style of a German general and ate his potato pie as a German intelligence officer, who had once been a professor of psychology at Heidelberg.
The little American doctor, “Daddy” Small, as we called him, had been made an honorary member of the mess, and he smiled at Fortune through his spectacles, with an air of delighted surprise that such things should be.
“You English,” he said in his solemn way, “are the most baffling people in the world. I have been studying you since I came to France, and all my preconceived ideas have been knocked on the head. We Americans think you are a hard, arrogant, selfish people, without humour or sympathy, made in set moulds, turned out as types from your university and public schools. That is all wrong. I am beginning to see that you are more human, more various, more whimsical than any race in the world. You decline to take life seriously. You won’t take even death seriously. This war—you make a joke of it. The Germans—you kill them in great numbers, but you have a secret liking for them. Fortune’s caricatures are very comical—but not unkind. I believe Fortune is a pro-German. You cannot laugh at the people you hate. I believe England will forgive Germany quicker than any other nation—far quicker than the Americans. France, of course, will never forgive.”
“No,” said Pierre Nesle, who was at the end of the table. “France will never forgive.”
“We are an illogical people,” said the colonel. “It is only logical people who can go on hating. Besides, German music is so-good! So good!”
Harding, who read no paper but theMorning Post, said that as far as he was concerned he would never speak to a German again in his life. He would like to see the whole race exterminated. But he was afraid of the Socialists with their pestilential doctrine of “brotherhood of man.” Lloyd George also filled him with the gravest misgivings.
Dr. Small’s eyes twinkled at him: “There is the old caste that speaks. Tradition against the new world of ideas. Of course there will always bethatconflict.... That is a wonderful phrase, ‘the pestilential doctrine of the brotherhood of man.’ I must make a note of it.”
“Shame oh you, doctor,” said Fortune. “You are always jotting down notes about us. I shall find myself docketed as ‘English gentleman, grade 3; full-blooded, inclined to obesity, humorous, strain of insanity due to in-breeding, rare.’”
Dr. Small laughed in a high treble, and then was serious.
“I’m noting down everything. My own psychology, which alarms me; facts, anecdotes, scenes, words. I want to find a law somewhere, the essential thing in human nature. After the war—if there is any afterwards—I want to search for a way out of the jungle. This jungle civilisation. There must be daylight somewhere for the human race.”
“If you find it,” said Brand earnestly, “tell me, doctor.”
“I will,” said Dr. Small, and I remembered that pledge afterwards, when he and Brand were together in a doomed city, trying to avert the doom, because of that impulse which urged them to find a little daylight beyond the darkness.
Young Clatworthy jerked his chair on the polished boards and looked anxiously at the Colonel, who was discoursing on the origins of art, religion, sex, the perception of form.
Colonel Lavington grinned at him.
“All right, Cyril. I know you have got a rendezvous with some girl. Don’t let us keep you from your career of infamy.”
“As a matter of fact, sir, I met a sweet little thing yesterday——” Clatworthy knew that his reputation as an amorist did not displease the colonel, who was a romantic and loved youth.
In a gust of laughter the mess broke up. Charles Fortune and the colonel prepared for an orgy of Bach over the piano in the drawing-room of that house in Lille. Those who cared to listen might—or not, as they pleased. Brand and I went out into the streets, pitch-dark now, unlit by any glimmer of gas, and made our way to the convent where the girl Eileen O’Connor lodged. We passed a number of British soldiers in the Boulevard de la Liberté, wearing their steel hats and carrying their packs.
A group of them stopped under a doorway to light cigarettes. One of them spoke to his pals.
“They tell me there’s some bonny wenches in this town.”
“Ay,” said another, “an’ I could do wi’ some hugging in a cosy billet.”
“Cosy billet!” said the third, with a cockney voice. “Town or trenches, the poor bloody soldier gets it in the neck. Curse this pack! I’m fed up with the whole damn show. I want peace.”
A hoarse laugh answered him.
“Peace! You don’t believe that fool’s talk in the papers, chum? It’s a hell of a long way to the Rhine, and you and I’ll be dead before we get there.”
They slouched off into the darkness, three points of light where their cigarettes glowed.
“Poor lads!” said Brand.
We fumbled our way to a street on the edge of the canal, according to Brand’s uncanny sense of direction and his remembrance of what the Irish girl had told him. There we found the convent, a square box-like building behind big gates. We pulled a bell which jangled loudly, and presently the gate opened an inch, letting through the light of a lantern which revealed the black-and-white coif of a nun.
“Qui va là?”
Brand told her that we had come to see Miss O’Connor, and the gate was opened wider and we went into the courtyard, where a young nun stood smiling. She spoke in English.
“We were always frightened when the bell rang during the German occupation. One never knew what might happen. And we were afraid for Miss O’Connor’s sake.”
“Why?” asked Brand.
The little nun laughed.
“She did dangerous work. They suspected her. She came here after her arrest. Before then she had rooms of her own. Oh,messieurs, her courage, her devotion! Truly, she was heroic!”
She led us into a long corridor with doors on each side, and out of one door came a little group of nuns with Eileen O’Connor.
The Irish girl came towards us with outstretched hands which she gave first to Brand. She seemed excited at our coming and explained that the Reverend Mother and all the nuns wanted to see us to thank England by means of us, to hear something about the war and the chance of victory from the first English officers they had seen.
Brand was presented to the Reverend Mother, a massive old lady with a slight moustache on the upper lip and dark luminous eyes, reminding me of the portrait of Savonarola at Florence. The other nuns crowded round us, eager to ask questions, still more eager to talk. Some of them were quite young and pretty, though all rather white and fragile, and they had a vivacious gaiety so that the building resounded with laughter. It was Eileen O’Connor who made them laugh by her reminiscences of girlhood when she and Brand were “enfants terribles,” when she used to pull Brand’s hair and hide the pipe he smoked too soon. She asked him to take off his field-cap so that she might see whether the same old unruly tuft still stuck up at the back of his head, and she and all the nuns clapped hands when she found it was so, in spite of war-worry and steel hats. All this had to be translated into French for the benefit of those who could not understand such rapid English.
“I believe you would like to give it a tug now,” said Brand, bending his head down, and Eileen O’Connor agreed.
“And indeed I would, but for scandalising a whole community of nuns, to say nothing of Reverend Mother.”
The Reverend Mother laughed in a curiously deep voice, and a crowd of little wrinkles puckered at her eyes. She told Miss O’Connor that even her Irish audacity would not go as far as that, which was a challenge accepted on the instant.
“One little tug, for old times’ sake,” said the girl, and Brand yelped with pretended pain at the vigour of her pull, while all the nuns screamed with delight.
Then a clock struck and the Reverend Mother touched Eileen (as afterwards I called her) on the arm and said she would leave her with her friends. One by one the nuns bowed to us, all smiling under their whitebandeaux,and then went down the corridor through an open door which led into a chapel, as we could see by twinkling candlelight. Presently the music of an organ and of women’s voices came through the closed doors.
Eileen O’Connor took us into a little parlour where there were just four rush chairs and a table, and on the clean whitewashed walls a crucifix.
Brand took a chair by the table, rather awkwardly, I thought.
“How gay they are!” he said. “They do not seem to have been touched by the horrors of war.”
“It is the gaiety of faith,” said Eileen. “How else could they have survived the work they have done, the things they have seen? This convent was a shambles for more than three years. These rooms were filled with wounded, German wounded, and often English wounded, who were prisoners. They were the worst cases for amputation and butcher’s work, and the nuns did all the nursing. They know all there is to know of suffering and death.”
“Yet they have not forgotten how to laugh!” said Brand. “That is wonderful. It is a mystery to me.”
“You must have seen bad things,” said Eileen. “Have you lost the gift of laughter?”
“Almost,” said Brand, “and once for a long time.”
Eileen put her hands to her breast.
“Oh, learn it again,” she said. “If we cannot laugh we cannot work. Why, I owe my life to a sense of humour.”
She spoke the last words with more than a trivial meaning. They seemed to tell of some singular episode, and Brand asked her to explain.
She did not explain then. She only said some vague things about laughing herself out of prison and stopping a German bullet with a smile.
“Why did the devils put you in prison?” asked Brand.
She shrugged her shoulders.
“In Lille it was bad form if one had not been arrested once at least. I was three weeks in a cell half the size of this, and twenty women were with me there. There was very little elbow-room!”
She proved her sense of humour then by that deep-throated laugh of hers, but I noticed that just for a second behind the smile in her eyes there crept a shadow as at the remembrance of some horror, and that she shivered a little, as though some coldness had touched her.
“It must have been like the Black Hole of Calcutta,” said Brand, measuring the space with his eyes. “Twenty women herded in a room like that!”
“With me for twenty-one,” said Eileen. “We had no means of washing.”
She used an awful phrase.
“We were a living stench.”
“Good God!” said Brand.
Eileen O’Connor waved back the remembrance. “Tell me of England and of Ireland. How’s the little Green Isle? Has it done well in the war?”
“The Irish troops fought like heroes,” said Brand.
“But there were not enough of them. Recruiting was slow, and there was—some trouble.”
He did not speak about the Irish Rebellion.
“I heard about it vaguely, from prisoners,” said the girl. “It was England’s fault, I expect. Dear old blundering, muddle-headed England, who is a tyrant through fear, and twists Irish loyalty into treason by ropes of red tape in which the Irish mind gets strangled and awry. Well, there’s another subject to avoid. I want to hear only good things to-night. Tell me of London, of Kensington Gardens, of the way from Strand to Temple Bar, of the lights that gleam along the Embankment when lovers go hand-in-hand and see stars in the old black river. Are they all there?”
“They are all changed,” said Brand. “It is a place of gloom. There are no lights along the embankment. They have dowsed their glims for fear of air-raids. There are few lovers hand-in-hand. Some of the boys lie dead round Ypres, or somewhere on the Somme, or weep out of blind eyes, or gibber in shell-shock homes, or try to hop on one leg—while waiting for artificial limbs—or trudge on, to-night, towards Maubeuge, where German machine-guns wait for them behind the ditches. Along the Strand goes the painted flapper, luring men to hell. In Kensington Gardens there are training camps for more boys ear-marked for the shambles, and here and there among the trees young mothers who are widows before they knew their wifehood. There is vice, the gaiety of madness, the unspeakable callousness of people who get rich on war, or earn fat wages, and in small stricken homes a world of secret grief. That is London in time of war. I hate it.”
Brand spoke with bitterness and a melancholy that startled the girl who sat with folded hands below the crucifix on the whitewashed wall behind her.
“Dear God! Is it like that?”
She stared at the wall opposite as though it were a window through which she saw London.
“Yes, of course it is like that. Here in Lille we thought we were suffering more than anybody in the world. That was our egotism. We did not realise—not in our souls—that everywhere in the world of war there was equal suffering, the same cruelty, perhaps the same temptation to despair.”
Brand repented, I think, of having led the conversation into such abysmal gloom. He switched off to more cheerful things and gave some elaborate sketches of soldiers he knew, to which Eileen played up with anecdotes of rare comedy about the nuns—the fat nun who under the rigour of war rations became as slim as a willow and was vain of her new grace; the little French mm who had no fear of German officers and dared their fury by prophecies of defeat—but was terrified of a mouse in the refectory; the Reverend Mother, who borrowed a safety-razor from an English Tommy—he had hidden it in his shirt—to shave her upper lip, lest the Germans should think her a Frenchpoiluin disguise.
More interesting to me than anything that was said were the things unspoken by Eileen and Brand. In spite of the girl’s easy way of laughter, her quick wit, her avoidance, if possible, of any reference to her own suffering, I seemed to see in her eyes and in her face the strain of a long ordeal, some frightful adventure of life in which she had taken great hazards—the people had told me she had risked her life often—and a woman’s courage which had been tested by that experience and had not failed, though perhaps at breaking-point in the worst hours. I supposed her age was twenty-six or so (I guessed it right this side of a year), but there was already a streak of grey in her dark hair, and her eyes, so smiling as a rule, looked as if they had often wept. I think the presence of Brand was a great pleasure to her—bringing to Lille a link with her childhood—and I saw that she was studying the personality of this newly-found friend of hers, and the strong character of his face, not unscathed by the touch of war, with curious, penetrating interest. I felt in the way, and left them together with a fair excuse—I had always work to do—and I was pleased that I did so, they were so obviously glad to have a more intimate talk about old friends and old times.