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 thecoiffureof 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, littlemaman?”
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.
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.
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 abeau 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, mymoralgoes 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, ‘Hewon’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 ofthislife 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’vedone 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.
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’scharivariand 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.”
In the Place d’Armes of Valenciennes there was a great crowd, and many of our generals and staff officers on the steps and below the steps of the Hôtel de Ville. Brand and I caught a glimpse of Colonel Lavington, looking very gallant and debonair, as usual. Beside him was Charles Fortune, with his air of a staff officer dreadfully overworked in the arrangement of victory, modest in spite of his great achievements, deprecating any public homage that might be paid him. This careful mask of his was slightly disarranged for a moment when he winked at me under the very nose of the great general whom he had set to music—“Blear-eyed Bill, the Butcher of the Boche,” who stood magnificent with his great chest emblazoned with ribbons. The Prince of Wales was there, shifting from one leg to another, chatting gaily with a group of staff officers. A bevy of French girls advanced with enormous bouquets and presented them to the Prince and his fellow officers. The Prince laughed and blushed like a schoolboy, sniffed at the flowers, did not know what to do with them. The other officers held the bouquets with equal embarrassment, with that strange English shyness which not even war could cure.
Some officers close to me were talking of the German plea for armistice.
“It’s abject surrender!” said one of them.
“The end!” said another, very solemnly. “Thank God!”
“The end of a dirty business!” said a young machine-gun officer. I noticed that he had three wound-stripes.
One of them, holding a big bouquet, began to dance, pointing his toes, cutting abbreviated capers in a small space among his comrades.
“Not too quick for me, old dears! Back to peace again!... Back to life! Hooray!”
The colours of many flags fluttered upon the gables of the Place d’Armes, and the balconies were draped with the Tricolour, the Union Jack, and the Stars and Stripes. Old citizens wore tall hats saved up for this day, and girls had taken their lace from hiding-places where the Germans had not found it, and wore it round their necks and wrists for the honour of this day. Old women in black bonnets sat in the centre of window-places and clapped their hands—their wrinkled, hard-working old hands—to every British soldier who passed, and thousands were passing. Nobody heard a word of the speeches spoken from the Town Hall steps, the tribute of the councillors of Valenciennes to the glory of the troops who had rescued their people from servitude under a ruthless enemy, nor the answer of Sir Henry Home, the Army Commander, expressing the pride of his soldiers in the rescue of that fair old city, and their admiration for the courage of its people. Every word was overwhelmed by cheering. Then the pipers of a Highland Division, whose fighting I had recorded through their years of heroic endurance, played a march tune, and the music of those pipes was loud in the square of Valenciennes and in the hearts of its people. The troops marched past, and thousands of bayonets shone above their steel helmets....
Iwas in Mons on the day of Armistice, and on the roads outside when I heard the news that the Germans had surrendered to all our terms, and that the “Cease fire” would sound at eleven o’clock. It was a misty morning, with sunlight glinting through the mist and sparkling in the coppery leaves of autumn trees. There was no heavy bombardment in progress round Mons—only now and then the sullen bark of a gun. The roads were crowded with the usual transport of war—endless columns of motor-lorries and horse-wagons, and mule-teams, crawling slowly forward, and infantry battalions trudging alongside with their heavy packs. I stared into the faces of the marching men, expecting to see joy in their eyes, wondering why they were not singing—because to-day the guns would be silent and the fighting finished. Their packs weighed heavy. The mud from passing lorries splashed them with great gobs of filth. Under their steel hats the sweat ran down. They looked dead-beat, and marched in a grim fine of tired men. But I noticed that the transport wagons were decorated with small flags, and these bits of fluttering colour were stuck into the harness of gun horses and mules. From the other way came another tide of traffic—crowds of civilians, who were middle-aged men and boys, and here and there women pushing hand-carts, and straining forward with an eager, homing look. The men and boys were carrying bundles, too heavy for many of them, so that they were bent under their burdens. But each one had added the last straw but one to his weight by fastening a flag to his bundle or his cap. I spoke to some of them, and they told me that they were the civilians from Lille, Valenciennes, and other towns, who had been taken away by the Germans for forced labour behind the lines. Two days ago the Germans had said, “We’ve no more use for you. Get back to your own people. The war is over.”
They looked worn and haggard, like men who had been shipwrecked. Some of the boys were weak and sat down on the roadside with their bundles and could go no farther. Others trudged on gamely, with crooks which they had cut from the hedges, and only stopped to cry, “Vivent les Anglais!” as our soldiers passed. I looked into many of their faces, remembering the photograph of Edouard Chéri which had been given to me by his mother. Perhaps he was Somewhere in those troops of homing exiles. But he might have been any one of those lanky boys in ragged jackets and broken boots, and cloth caps pulled down over the ears.
Just outside Mons, at one minute to eleven o’clock, there was a little desultory firing. Then a bugle blew, somewhere in a distant field, one long note. It was the “Cease fire”! A cheer coming faintly over the fields followed the bugle-call. Then there was no other sound where I stood but the scrunching of wheels of gun limbers and transport wagons, the squelch of mud in which horses and mules trudged, and the hard breathing of tired men marching by under their packs. So, with a curious lack of drama, the Great Adventure ended! That bugle had blown the “Cease fire” of a strife which had filled the world with agony and massacre; destroyed millions of men; broken millions of lives; ruined many great cities and thousands of hamlets, and left a long wide belt of country across Europe where no tree remained alive and all the earth was ravaged; crowded the world with maimed men, blind men, mad men, diseased men; flung Empires into anarchy, where hunger killed the children and women had no milk to feed their babies; and bequeathed to all fighting nations a heritage of debt beneath which many would stagger and fall. It was the “Cease fire” of all that reign of death, but sounded very faintly across the fields of France.
In Mons Canadian soldiers were being kissed by French girls. Women were giving them wine in the doorways, and these hard-bitten fellows, tough as leather, reckless of all risk, plastered with mud which had worn into their skins and souls, drank the wine and kissed the women, and lurched laughing down the streets. There would be no strict discipline in Mons that night. They had had enough of discipline in the dirty days. Let it go on the night of Armistice! Already at mid-day some of these soldiers were unable to walk except with an arm round a comrade’s neck, or round the neck of strong peasant girls who screeched with laughter when they side-slipped or staggered. They had been through hell, those men. They had lain in ditches, under frightful fire, among dead men and bleeding men. Who would grudge them their bit of fun on Armistice night? Who would expect saintship of men who had been taught in the school of war, taught to kill quick lest they be killed, to see the worst horrors of the battlefield without going weak, to educate themselves out of the refinements of peaceful life where Christian virtues are easy and not meant for war?
“Come here, lassie. None of your French tricks for me. I’m Canadian-born. It’s a kiss or a clout from me.”
The man grabbed the girl by the arm and drew her into a barn.
On the night of Armistice in Mons, where, at the beginning of the war, the Old Contemptibles had first withstood the shock of German arms (I saw their ghosts there in the market place), there would be the devil to pay—the devil of war, who plays on the passions of men, and sets his trap for women’s souls. But I went away from Mons before nightfall, and travelled back to Lille, in the little old car which had gone to many strange places with me.
How quiet it was in the open countryside when darkness fell! The guns were quiet at last, after four years and more of labour. There were no fires in the sky, no ruddy glow of death. I listened to the silence which followed the going down of the sun, and heard the rustling of the russet leaves and the little sounds of night in peace, and it seemed as though God gave a benediction to the wounded soul of the world. ‘Other sounds rose from the towns and fields in the deepening shadow-world of the day of Armistice. They were sounds of human joy. Men were singing somewhere on the roads, and their voices rang out gladly. Bugles were playing. In villages from which the enemy had gone out that morning round about Mons crowds of figures surged in the narrow streets, and English laughter rose above the chatter of women and children.