Igained by my unselfishness (I did not want to go), for the Reverend Mother met me in the corridor and stood talking, to me about Eileen O’Connor, and told me part of the girl’s story, which I found strange in its drama, though she left out the scene of greatest interest, as I heard later from Eileen herself.
The girl had come to Lille just before the war, as an art mistress in an “Ecole de Jeunes Filles” (her parents in Kensington had too big a family to keep them all), with lessons twice a week at the convent, and private pupils in her own rooms. She learned to speak French quickly and charmingly, and her gift of humour, her Irish frankness and comradeship made her popular among her pupils, so that she had many invitations to their homes and became well known in the best houses of Lille—mostly belonging to rich manufacturers. A commonplace story till then. But when the Germans occupied Lille this Irish girl became one of the chief characters in a drama that was exciting and fantastic to the point of melodrama. It was she who organised the Lille branch of a secret society of women, with a network all over northern France and Belgium—the world remembers Nurse Cavell at Brussels—for the escape of young civilians of military age and prisoners of war, combining that work (frightfully perilous) with espionage on German movements of troops and other facts that might be of value to the Belgian Army, and through them to England and France. It was out of an old book of Jules Verne called “The Cryptogram” that she copied the cypher in which she wrote her messages (in invisible ink on linen handkerchiefs and rags), and she had an audacity of invention in numberless small tricks and plots which constantly broke through the meshes of the German network of military police.
“She had a contempt for their stupidity,” said the Reverend Mother. “Called them dunderheads, and one strange word of which I do not know the meaning—‘yobs’—and I trembled at the risks she took.”
She lived with one maid in two rooms on the ground floor of a house near the Jardin d’Eté, the rest of the house being used as the headquarters of the German Intelligence Section of the Northern District. All day long officers went in and out, and by day and night there were always sentries at the door. Yet it was there that was established also the headquarters of the Rescue Committee. It was on account of her Irish name and parentage that Eileen O’Connor was permitted to remain in the two rooms to the left of the courtyard, entered by a separate door. The German Kommandant was a man who firmly believed that the Irish nation was ready to break out into revolt against the English, and that all Irish—men and women—hated the British Empire as much as any Prussian. Eileen O’Connor played up to thisidée fixe, saw the value of it as a wonderful means of camouflage, lent the Kommandant books on Irish history dealing with the injustice of England to Ireland (in which she firmly believed as a staunch Nationalist), and educated him so completely to the belief that she was anti-English (as she was in politics, though not in war) that he had no doubt of her.
Here the Reverend Mother made a remark which seemed to illuminate Eileen O’Connor’s story, as well as her own knowledge of human nature.
“The child has beautiful eyes and a most sweet grace. Irish history may not account for all.”
“This German Kommandant,” I asked, “what sort of a man was he?”
“For a German not altogether bad,” said the Reverend Mother. “Severe and ruthless like them all, but polite when there was no occasion to be violent. He was of good family, as far as there are such things in Germany. A man of sixty.”
Eileen O’Connor, with German permission, continued her work as art mistress at theEcole de Jeunes Filles. After six months she was permitted to receive private pupils in her two rooms on the ground floor of the Intelligence Headquarters, in the same courtyard, though not in the same building. Her pupils came with drawing-boards and paint-boxes. They were all girls with pigtails and short frocks—not so young as they looked, because three or four at least, including the Baronne de Villers-Auxicourt, were older than schoolgirls. They played the part perfectly, and the sentries smiled at them and said, “Guten Tag, schönes Fraulein,” as each one passed. They were the committee of the Rescue Society: Julienne de Quesnoy, Marcelle Barbier, Yvonne Marigny, Marguérite Cléry, and Alice de Taffin, de Villers-Auxicourt.
Eileen O’Connor was the director and leading spirit. It seems to me astonishing that they should have arranged the cypher, practised it, written down military information gathered from German conversations and reported to them by servants and agents under the very noses of the German intelligence officers, who could see into the sitting-room as they passed through French windows and saluted Eileen O’Connor and her young ladies if they happened to meet their eyes. It is more astonishing that, at different times, and one at a time, many fugitives (including five British soldiers who had escaped from the Citadel) slept in the cellar beneath that room, changed into German uniforms belonging to men who had died at the convent hospital—the Reverend Mother did that part of the plot—and walked quietly out in the morning by an underground passage leading to the Jardin d’Eté. The passage had been anciently built but was blocked up at one end by Eileen O’Connor’s cellar, and she and the other women broke the wall, one brick at a time, until after three months the hole was made. Their finger-nails suffered in the process, and they were afraid that the roughness of their hands might be noticed by the officers, but in spite of German spectacles they saw nothing of that. Eileen O’Connor and her friends were in constant touch with the prisoners of the Citadel and smuggled food to them. That was easy. It was done by bribing the German sentries with tobacco and meat-pies. They were also in communication with other branches of the work in Belgium, so that fugitives were passed on from town to town, and house to house. Their success made them confident, after many horrible fears, and for a time they were lulled into a sense of security. That was rudely crashed when Eileen O’Connor, the young Baronne de Villers-Auxicourt, and Marcelle Barbier were arrested one morning in September of ‘17 on a charge of espionage. They were put into separate cells of the civil prison, crowded with the vilest women of the slums and stews, and suffered something like torture because of the foul atmosphere, the lack of sanitation and unspeakable abomination.
“Only the spirit of Christian martyrdom could remain cheerful in such terrible conditions,” said the Reverend Mother. “Our dear Eileen was sustained by a great faith and wonderful gaiety. Her laughter, her jokes, her patience, her courage, were an inspiration even to the poor degraded women who were prisoners with her. They worshipped her. We, her friends, gave her up for lost, though we prayed unceasingly that she might escape death. Then she was brought to trial.”
She stood alone in the court. The young Baronne de Villers-Auxicourt had died in prison owing to the shock of her arrest and a weak heart. A weak heart, though so brave. Eileen was not allowed to see her on her deathbed, but she sent a message almost with her last breath. It was the one word “courage!” Mlle. Marcelle Barbier was released before the trial for lack of direct evidence.
Eileen’s trial was famous in Lille. The court was crowded and the German military tribunal could not suppress the loud expressions of sympathy and admiration which greeted her, nor the angry murmurs which interrupted the prosecuting officer. She stood there, wonderfully calm, between two soldiers with fixed bayonets. She looked very young and innocent between her guards, and it is evident that her appearance made a favourable impression on the court. The President, after peering at her through his horn spectacles, was not so ferocious in his manner as usual when he bade her be seated.
The evidence seemed very strong against her. “She is lost” was the belief of all her friends in court. One of the sentries at the Citadel, jealously savage because another man had received more tobacco than himself—on such a trivial thing did this girl’s life hang—betrayed the system by which the women’s committee sent food to the French and English prisoners. He gave the names of three of the ladies and described Eileen O’Connor as the ringleader. The secret police watched her, and searched her rooms at night. They discovered the cypher and the key, a list of men who had escaped, and three German uniforms in a secret cupboard. They had been aided in their search by Lieutenant Franz von Kreuzenach, of the Intelligence Bureau, who was the chief witness for the prosecution, and whose name was recommended to the court for the vigilance and zeal he had shown in the detection of the conspiracy against the Army and the Fatherland. It was he who had found the secret cupboard and had solved the key to the cypher.
“We will take the lieutenant’s evidence in due course,” said the President. “Does that complete the indictment against this prisoner?”
Apart from a savage elaboration of evidence based upon the facts presented and a demand that the woman’s guilt, if the court were satisfied thereof, should be punished by death, the preliminary indictment by the prosecution ended.
It was a terrible case, and during its revelations the people in court were stricken with dread and pity for the girl who was now sitting between the two soldiers. They were all staring at her, and some at least—the Reverend Mother among them—noticed with surprise that when the officer for the prosecution ended his speech she drew a deep breath, raised her head, as though some weight of fear had been lifted from her, and—laughed.
It was quite a merry laugh, with that full blackbird note of hers, and the sound of it caused a strange sensation in the court. The President blinked repeatedly, like an owl blinded by a ray of sunlight. He addressed the prisoner in heavy, barbarous French.
“You are charged with conspiracy against our German martial law. The punishment is death. It is no laughing matter, Fraulein.”
They were stem words, but there was a touch of pity in that last sentence.
“Ce riest pas une affaire pour rire, Fràulein.”
Eileen O’Connor, said the Reverend Mother, who was to be called as a witness on her behalf, bowed in a gracious way to the President, but with a look of amusement that was amazing to the German officers assembled for her trial. Some of them scowled, but there were others, the younger men, who whispered, and smiled also with no attempt to disguise their admiration of such courage.
“Perhaps it was only I,” said the Reverend Mother, “who understood the child’s joyous relief which gave her this courage. I had waited with terrible dread for the announcement of the discovery of the secret passage. That it had been discovered I knew, for the German Lieutenant, Franz von Kreuzenach, had come round to me and very sternly questioned me about a case of medicine which he had found there, stamped with the name of our convent.”
“Then,” I said, “this Franz von Kreuzenach must have suppressed some of the evidence. By what motive——”
The Reverend Mother interrupted me, putting her hand on my sleeve with a touch of protest.
“The good God works through strange instruments, and may touch the hardest heart with His grace. It was indeed a miracle.”
I would give much to have been in that Court at Lille when Eileen O’Connor was permitted to question the German lieutenant, who was the chief witness against her.
From what I have heard, not only from the Reverend Mother, but from other people of Lille who were present at the trial, she played with this German officer, making him look very foolish, ridiculing him in a merry, contemptuous way before the court. Indeed, he seemed strangely abashed before her.
“The cypher!... Have you ever been a schoolboy, or were you born a lieutenant in the German Army?”
Franz von Kreuzenach admitted that he had once been a boy—to the amusement of his brother officers.
Had he ever read stories of adventure, fairy tales, romances, or did he spend his childhood in the study of Nietzsche, Haegel, Schopenhauer, Kant, Goethe, von Bemhardi, Karl Marx———-
When she strung off these names—so incongruous in association—even the President permitted a slight smile to twist his thin hard mouth.
Franz von Kreuzenach said that he had read some fairy tales and stories of adventure. Might he ask thegnadiges Fraulein——
“Yes,” said the President, “what has this to do with your case, Fràulein? I desire to give you full liberty in your defence, but this is entirely irrelevant to the evidence.”
“It is my case!” cried Miss O’Connor. “Listen to the next question, Herr President. It is the key of my defence.”
Her next question caused laughter in court.
“I ask the Herr Lieutenant whether, as a boy, or a young man, he has read the romances of the French writer, Jules Verne?”
Franz von Kreuzenach looked abashed, and blushed like a schoolboy. His eyes fell before the challenging look of the Irish girl.
“I have read some novels by Jules Verne, in German translations.”
“Oh, in German translations—of course!” said Miss O’Connor. “German boys do not learn French very well.”
“Keep to the case,” said the President. “In heaven’s name, Fraulein, what has this to do with your defence?”
She raised her hand, for patience, and said, “Herr President, my innocence will soon be clear.”
She demanded of the witness for the prosecution whether he had ever read the novel by Jules Verne called “The Cryptogram.” He said that he had read it only a few days ago. He had discovered it in her room.
Eileen O’Connor turned round eagerly to the President.
“I demand the production of that book.”
An orderly was sent to the lieutenant’s rooms to fetch it. It was clear that the President of the Court made a black mark against Franz von Kreuzenach for not having mentioned its discovery to the Court. As yet, however, he could not see the bearing of it on the case.
Then, with the book in her hand, Eileen O’Connor turned to the famous cryptogram, showed how it corresponded exactly with her own cypher, proved that the pieces of paper found in her rooms were copies of the Jules Verne cypher in the handwriting of her pupils.
“You see, Herr President!” she cried eagerly.
The President admitted that this was proved, but, as he asked, leaning forward in his chair, for what purpose had they copied out that cypher? Cyphers were dangerous things to write in time of war. Deadly things. Why did these ladies want to learn the cypher?
It was then that Eileen O’Connor was most brilliant. She described in a simple and girlish way how she and her pupils worked in their little room. While they copied freehand models, one of them read out to the others, books of romance, love, adventure, to forget the gloom of life and the tragedy of war. One of those books was Jules Verne’s “Cryptogram.” It had fascinated them. It had made them forget the misery of war. They were romantic girls, imaginative girls. Out of sheer merriment, to pass the hours, they had tried to work out the cypher. They had written love-letters to imaginary young men in those secret numbers. Here Eileen, smiling ironically, read out specimens of the letters that had been found.
“Come to the corner of the Rue Esquermoise at 9.45. You will know me because I shall be wearing a blue bow in a black hat.”
That was the romantic imagination of the Baronne de Villers-Auxicourt.
“When you see a lady standing outside the Jardin d’Eté, with a little brown dog, speak to her in French and say, ‘Comme il fait froid aujourd’hui, mademoiselle.’ If she answers, ‘Je ne vous comprends pas, monsieur,’ you will understand that she is to be trusted, and you must follow her.”
That was a romantic idea to which Eileen herself pleaded guilty.
“Herr President,” said Eileen, “you cannot put old heads on young shoulders, even in time of war. A party of girls will let their foolish little minds run upon ideas of love, even when the sound of guns is not far away. You, Herr President, will understand that perfectly.”
Perhaps there was something in the character of the President that made this a chance hit. All the German officers laughed, and the President shifted in his seat and flushed to the top of his bald, vulture-like head.
The possession of those German uniforms was also explained in the prettiest way by Eileen O’Connor. They were uniforms belonging to three handsome young German soldiers who had died in hospital. They had kept them to return to their mothers after the war, those poor German mothers who were weeping for their sons. This part of her defence touched the German officers deeply. One of them had tears in his eyes.
The list of escaped fugitives was harder to explain, but again an Irish imagination succeeded in giving it an innocent significance. It had been compiled by a prisoner in the Citadel and given to Eileen as a proof that his own hope of escape was not in vain, though she had warned him of the fearful risk. “The poor man gave me the list in sheer simplicity, and in innocence I kept it.”
Simply and touchingly she admitted her guilt in smuggling food to French and British prisoners, and to German sentries, and claimed that her fault was only against military regulations, but in humanity was justified.
“I am Irish,” she said. “I have in my heart the remembrance of English crimes to Ireland—old, unforgettable crimes that still cry out for the justice and the liberty which are denied my country.”
Some of the younger German officers shook their heads approvingly. They liked this Irish hatred of England. It was according to their text-books.
“But,” said the Irish girl, “the sufferings of English prisoners—you know here of their misery, their hunger, their weakness in that Citadel where many have died and are dying—stirred my compassion as a woman to whom all cruelty is tragic, and all suffering of men a call to that mother-love which is in the spirit of all their womanhood, as you know by your German women—as I hope you know. Because they were starved I tried to get them food, as I would to starving dogs or any poor creatures caught in the trap of war or of men’s sport. To that I confess guilty, with gladness in my guilt.”
The Reverend Mother, standing there in the whitewashed corridor of the convent, in the flickering light of an oil lantern, which gleamed on the white ruff round her neck and the silver cross on her breast, though her face was shadowed in the cavern of her black headdress, repeated this speech of Eileen O’Connor as though in hearing it first she had learnt it by heart.
“The child was divinely inspired, monsieur. Our Lady stood by her side, prompting her. I am sure of that.”
The trial lengthened out, until it was late in the evening when the judge summed up. He spoke again of the gravity of the accusation, the dread punishment that must befall the prisoner if her guilt were proved, the weight of evidence against her. For a time he seemed to press her guilt heavily, and the court was gloomy. The German officers looked grave. One thing happened in the course of his speech which affected the audience profoundly. It was when he spoke of the romantic explanation that had been offered by the prisoner regarding the secret cypher.
“This lady,” he said, “asks me to believe that she and her companions were playing a simple girlish game of make-believe. Writing imaginary letters to mythical persons. Were these young ladies—nay, is she, herself—so lacking in woman’s charm that she has no living man to love her, and needs must write fictitious notes to nonexistent men?”
The President said these words with portentous solemnity. Perhaps only a German could have spoken them. He paused and blinked at the German officers below him. Suddenly into the silence of the court came a ripple of laughter, clear and full of most mirthful significance.
Eileen O’Connor’s laugh bewitched the crowded court, and there was a roar of laughter, in which all the officers joined. By that laugh more even than by her general gaiety, her courage and eloquence, she won her life.
“I said a decade of the rosary to our Blessed Lady,” said the Reverend Mother, “and thanked God that this dear child’s life would not be taken. I was certain that those men would not condemn her to death. She was acquitted on the charge of espionage, and sentenced to two weeks’ imprisonment for smuggling food to prisoners, by a verdict of seven against three. Only when she left the court did she fall into so deep a swoon that for a little while we thought her dead.”
The Reverend Mother had told her story well. She held me in a deep strained interest. It was rather to myself than to her that I spoke the words which were my comment at the end of this narrative.
“How splendid!... But I am puzzled about that German lieutenant, Franz von Kreuzenach. He kept the real evidence back.”
“That,” said the Reverend Mother solemnly, “was a great mystery, and a miracle.”
Wickham Brand joined us in the passage, with Eileen O’Connor by his side.
“Not gone yet?” said Wickham.
“I have been listening to the tale of a woman’s courage,” I said, and when Eileen gave me her hand, I raised it to my lips, in the French style, though not in gallantry.
“Reverend Mother,” she said, “has been exalting me to the seventh heaven of her dear heart.”
On my way back to Brand’s mess I told him all I had heard about Eileen’s trial, and I remember his enthusiasm.
“Fine! Thank heaven there are women like that in this blood-soaked world. It saves one from absolute despair.”
He made no comment about the suppression of evidence, which was a puzzle to me.
We parted with a “So long, old man,” outside his headquarters, and I did not see him until a few days later.
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!”
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 inargot—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 ourliaisonofficer. 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 knightsans 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!”