When I came into Lille rockets were rising above the city. English soldiers were firing off Verey lights. Above the houses of the city in darkness rose also gusts of cheering. It is strange that when I heard them I felt like weeping. They sounded rather ghostly, like the voices of all the dead who had fallen before this night of Armistice.
I went to my billet at Madame Chéri’s house, from which I had been absent some days. I had the key of the front door now and let myself into the hall. The diningroom door was open, and I heard the voices of the little French family, laughing, crying, hysterical. Surely hysterical!
“O mon Dieu! O mon petit Toto! Comme tu es grandi! Comme tu es maigre!”
I stood outside the door, understanding the thing that had happened.
In the centre of the room stood a tall, gaunt boy in ragged clothes, in the embrace of Madame Chéri, and with one hand clutched by Hélène and the other by the little Madeleine, her sister. It was Edouard who had come back.
He had unloosed a pack from his shoulder, and it lay on the carpet beside him, with a little flag on a broken stick. He was haggard, with high cheek-bones prominent through his white, tightly-drawn skin, and his eyes were sunk in deep sockets. His hair was in a wild mop of black, disordered locks. He stood there, with tears streaming from his eyes, and the only words he said were:
“Maman! O maman! maman!”
I went quietly upstairs and changed my clothes, which were all muddy. Presently there was a tap at my door and Hélène stood there, transfigured with joy. She spoke in French.
“Edouard has come back—my brother! He travelled on an English lorry.”
“Thank God for that,” I said. “What gladness for you all!”
“He has grown tall,” said Hélène. She mopped her eyes and laughed and cried at the same time. “Tall as a giant, but oh! so thin! They starved him all the time. He fed only on cabbages. They put him to work digging trenches behind the line—under fire. The brutes! The devils!”
Her eyes were lit up by passion at the thought of this cruelty and her brother’s suffering. Then her expression changed to a look of pride.
“He says he is glad to have been under fire—like father. He hated it, though, at the time, and said he was frightened! I can’t believe that. Edouard was always brave.”
“There’s no courage that takes away the fear of shellfire—as far as I’m concerned,” I told her, but she only laughed and said, “You men make a pose of being afraid.”
She spoke of Edouard again, hugging the “thought of his return.
“If only he were not so thin and so tired! I find him changed. The poor boy cries at the sight ofmaman—like a baby.”
“I don’t wonder,” I said. “I should feel like that if I had been a prisoner of war and was now home again.”
Madame Chéri’s voice called from downstairs: “Hélène!Où es-tu? Edouard veut te voir!”
“Edouard wants me,” said Hélène.
She seemed rejoiced at the thought that Edouard had missed her, even for this minute. She took my hand and kissed it, as though wishing me to share her joy and to be part of it, and then ran downstairs.
Iwent out to the officers’ club which had been established in Lille, and found Brand there, and Fortune, and young Clatworthy, who made a place for me at their table.
Two large rooms which had been the dining and drawingrooms of a private mansion were crowded with officers, mostly English, but with here and there a few Americans and French, seated at small tables, waited on by the girls we called Waacs (of the Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps). Two old-fashioned candelabra of cut-glass gave light to each room, and I remember that the walls were panelled with wood painted a greyish-white below a moulding of fruit and flowers. Above the table where my friends sat was the portrait of a French lady of the eighteenth century, in an oval frame of tarnished gilt.
I was late for the meal on Armistice night, and many bottles of champagne had already been opened and drunk. The atmosphere reeked with the smell of food, the fumes of wine and cigarette smoke, and there was the noise of many men talking and laughing. I looked about the tables and saw familiar faces. There were a good many cavalry officers in the room where I sat, and among them officers of the Guards and the Tank Corps, aviators, machine-gunners, staff officers of infantry divisions, French interpreters, Americanliaisonofficers, A.P.M.‘s, town majors, and others. The lid was off at last. All these men were intoxicated with the thought of the victory we had won—complete, annihilating—and of this Armistice which had ended the war and made them sure of life. Some of them were a little drunk with wine, but not enough at this hour to spoil their sense of joy.
Officers rose at various tables to make speeches, cheered by their own groups, who laughed and shouted and did not listen.
“The good old British Army has done the trick at last——”
“The old Hun is down and out.”
“Gentlemen, it has been a damned tough job——”
Another group had burst into song:
“Here’s to good old beer, put it down, put it down!”
“The cavalry came into its own in the last lap. We’ve fought mounted and fought dismounted. We’ve rounded up innumerable Huns. We’ve ridden down machine-guns——”
Another group was singing independently:
“There’s a long, long trail a-winding,
To the land of my dreams.”
A toast was being pledged at the next table by a Tank officer, who stood on a chair with a glass of champagne-raised high above his head: “Gentlemen, I give you the toast of the Tank Corps. This war was won by the Tanks——”
“Pull him down!” shouted two lads at the same table. “Tanks be damned! It was the poor old bloody infantry all the time.”
One of them pulled down the little Tank officer with a crash and stood on his own chair.
“Here’s to the foot-sloggers—the infantry battalions, Tommy Atkins and his company officer, who did all the dirty work and got none of the reward, and did most of the dying.”
A cavalry officer with a monocle immovably screwed in his right eye demanded the attention of the company, and failed to get it.
“We all know what we have done ourselves, and what we failed to do. I give you the toast of our noble Allies, without whom there would be no Armistice to-night. I drink to the glory of France——”
The words were heard at several tables, and for once there was a general acknowledgment of the toast.
“Vive la France!”
The shout thundered out from all the tables, so that the candelabra rattled. Five French interpreters in various parts of the room rose to respond.
There were shouts of “The Stars and Stripes—Good old Yanks—Well done, the U.S.A.!” and I was sorry Dr. Small was still at Valenciennes. I should like him to have heard those shouts. An American staff officer was on his feet, raising his glass to “England.”
Charles Fortune stood up at my table. He reminded me exceedingly at that moment of old prints portraying George IV. in his youth—“the First Gentleman of Europe”—slightly flushed, with an air of noble dignity and a roguish eye.
“Go to it, Fortune,” said Brand. “Nobody’s listening, so you can say what you like.”
“Gentlemen,” said Fortune, “I venture to propose the health of our late enemy, the Germans.”
Young Clatworthy gave an hysterical guffaw.
“We owe them a very great debt,” said Fortune.
“But for their simplicity of nature and amiability of character the British Empire—that glorious conglomeration of races upon which the sun utterly declines to set—would have fallen into decay and debility as a second-class Power. Before the war the German Empire was gaining our trade, capturing all the markets of the world, waiting at table in all the best hotels, and providing all the music in thecafés-chantantsof the universe.... With that immense unselfishness so characteristic of their race, the Germans threw away these advantages and sacrificed themselves for the benefit of the British. By declaring war they enabled all the ancient virtues of our race to be revived. Generals sprang up in every direction—especially in Whitehall, Boulogne and Rouen. Staff officers multiplied exceedingly. British indigestion—the curse of our race—became subject to a Sam Brown belt. Business men, mostly bankrupt, were enriched enormously. Clergymen thundered joyfully from their pulpits and went back to the Old Testament for that fine old law, ‘An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth.’ Elderly virgins married the youngest subalterns. The youngest flapper caught the eldest and wiliest of bachelors. Our people were revivified, gentlemen—revivified-”
“Go easy,” growled Brand. “This is not a night for irony.”
“Even I,” said Charles Fortune, with a sob of pride in his voice, “even I, a simple piano-tuner, a man of music, a child of peace and melody—Shut up, Brand!—became every inch a soldier!”
He drew himself up in a heroic pose and, raising his glass, cried out: “Here’s to our late enemy—poor old Fritz!”
A number of glasses were raised amidst a roar of laughter.
“Here’s to Fritz—and may the Kaiser roast at Christmas!”
“And they say we haven’t a sense of humour,” said Charles Fortune modestly, and opened a new bottle of champagne.
Brand had a sense of humour, and had laughed dining Fortune’s oration, knowing that beneath its mockery there was no malice. But I noticed that he had no spontaneous gaiety on this night of Armistice and sat rather silent, with a far-away look in his eyes and that hag-ridden melancholy of his.
Young Clatworthy was between me and Brand, drinking too heavily, I thought. Brand thought so too, and gave him a word of caution.
“That champagne is pretty bad. I’d ‘ware headaches, if I were you, young’un.”
“It’s good enough,” said Clatworthy. “Anything to put me in the right spirit.”
There was an unnatural glitter in his eyes, and he laughed too easily at any joke of Fortune’s. Presently he turned his attention to me, and began talking excitedly in a low monologue.
“Funny to think it’s the last night! Can you believe it? It seems a lifetime since I came out in ‘14. I remember the first night, when I was sent up to Ypres to take the place of a subaltern who’d been knocked out. It was Christmas Eve, and my battalion was up in the line round Hooge. I detrained at Vlamertinghe. ‘Can any one tell me the way to Hooge?’ I asked one of the traffic men, just like a country cousin at Piccadilly Circus. He looked at me in a queer way, and said, ‘It’s the same way to hell, sir. Straight on until you get to Ypres, then out of the Menin Gate and along the road to Hell-fire Corner. After that you trust to luck. Some young gentlemen never get no further.’ I damned his impertinence and went on, till I came to the Grande Place in Ypres, where I just missed an eight-inch shell. It knocked out a gun-team. Shocking mess it made. ‘The same way to hell,’ I kept saying, until I fell into a shell-hole along the Menin Road. But, d’you know, the fellow was wrong, after all.”
“How?” I asked.
Young Clatworthy drank up his wine and laughed, as though very much amused.
“Why,thatwasn’t the way to hell. It was the other way.”
I was puzzled at his meaning and wondered if he were really drunk.
“What other way?”
“Behind the lines—in the back areas. I should have been all right if I had stuck in the trenches. It was in places like Amiens that I went to the devil.”
“Not as bad as that,” I said.
“Mind you,” he continued, lighting a cigarette and smiling at the flame, “I’ve had pleasant times in this war, between the bad ones, and, afterwards, in this cushy job. Extraordinarily amusing and agreeable along the way to hell. There was little Maiguérite in Amiens—such a kid! Funny as a kitten! She loved me not wisely, but too well. I had just come down from the Somme battles then. That little idyll with Marguérite was like a dream. We two were Babes in the Wood. We plucked the flowers of life and didn’t listen to the howling of the wolves beyond the forest.”
He jerked his head up and listened, and repeated the words:
“The howling of the wolves!”
Somebody was singing “John Peel”:
“D’ye ken John Peel with his coat so gay.
D’ye ken John Peel at the break of day,
D’ye ken John Peel when he’s far, far away.
With, his horn, and his hounds in. the morning?”
Cyril Clatworthy was on his feet, joining in the chorus with a loud joyous voice.
“We’ll follow John Peel through fair and through foul.
If we want a good hunt in the morning!’’
“Bravo! Bravo!”
He laughed as he sat down.
“I used to sing that when I was captain of the school,” he said. “A long time ago, eh? How many centuries?... I was as clean a fellow as you’d meet in those days. Keen as mustard on cricket. Some bat, too! That was before the dirty war, and the stinking trenches, and fever, and lice, and dead bodies, and all that. But I was telling you about Yvonne, wasn’t I?”
“Marguérite,” I reminded him.
“No. Yvonne. I met her at Cassel. A brown-eyed thing. Demure. You know the type?... One of the worst little sluts I ever met. Oh, a wicked little witch... Well, I paid for that affair. That policeman was wrong.”
“What policeman?” I asked.
“The traffic man at Vlamertinghe. ‘It’s the same way to hell,’ he said, meaning Hooge. It was the other way, really. All the same, I’ve had some good hours. And now it’s Armistice night.... Those fellows are getting rather blue, aren’t they? It’s the blinking cavalry who used to get in the way of the infantry, blocking up the roads with their ridiculous horses and their preposterous, lances. Look here, old man, there’s one thing I want to know. Tell me, as a wise owl.”
“What is that?” I asked, laughing at his deference to my wisdom.
“How are we going to get clean enough for peace?”
“Clean enough?”
I could not follow the drift of his question, and he tried to explain himself.
“Oh, I don’t mean the soap and water business. But morally, spiritually, intellectually, and all that? Some of us will want a lot of scrubbing before we sit down in our nice little Christian families, somewhere at Wimbledon or Ealing. Somehow I funk peace. It means getting back again to where one started, and I don’t see how it’s possible.... Good Lord, what tripe I’ve been talking!”
He pulled the bow of one of the “Waacs” and undid her apron.
“Encore une bouteille de champagne, mademoiselle!” he said in his best French, and started singing “La Marseillaise.” Some of the officers were dancing the fox trot and the bunny hug.
Brand rose with a smile and a sigh.
“Armistice night!” he said. “Thank God there’s a crowd of fellows left to do the dancing.... I can’t help thinking of the others.”
He touched a glass with his lips to a silent toast, and I saw that he drank to ghosts. Then he put the glass down and laid his hand on Clatworthy’s shoulder.
“Care for a stroll?” he said. “This room is too fuggy.”
“Not I, old lad,” said the boy. “This is Armistice night—and the end of the adventure. See it through!”
Brand shook his head and said he must breathe fresh air. Fortune was playing a Brahms concerto in the style of a German master on the table-cloth.
I followed Brand, and we strolled through the dark streets of Lille and did not talk. In each of our minds was the stupendous thought that it was the last night of the war—the end of the adventure, as young Clatworthy had said. God! It had been a frightful adventure from first to last—a fiery furnace in which youth had been burnt up like grass. How much heroism we had seen, how much human agony, ruin, hate, cruelty, love! There had been comradeship and laughter in queer places and perilous hours. Comradeship, perhaps that was the best of all: the unselfish comradeship of men. But what a waste of life! What a lowering of civilisation! Our heritage—what was it, after victory? Who would heal the wounds of the world?
Brand suddenly spoke, after our long tramp in the darkness, past windows from which came music, and singing, and shouts of laughter. He uttered only one word, but all his soul was in it.
“Peace!”
That night we went to see Eileen O’Connor and to enquire after the girl Marthe. Next day Pierre Nesle was coming to find his sister.
Eileen O’Connor had gone back from the convent to the rooms she had before her trial and imprisonment. I was glad to see her in a setting less austere than the whitewashed parlour in which she had first received us. There was something of her character in the sitting-room where she had lived so long during the war, and where with her girl friends she had done more dangerous work than studying the elements of drawing and painting. In that setting, too, she looked at home—“The Portrait of a Lady,” by Lavery, as I saw her in my mind’s eye, when she sat in a low armchair by the side of a charcoal stove, with the lamplight on her face and hair and her dress shadowy. She wore a black dress of some kind, with a tiny edge of lace about the neck and a string of coloured beads so long that she twisted it about her fingers in her lap. The room was small, but cosy in the light of a tall lamp on an iron stand shaded with red silk. Like all the rooms I had seen in Lille—not many—this was panelled, with a polished floor, bare except for one rug. On the walls were a few etchings framed in black—London views mostly—and some water-colour drawings of girls’ heads, charmingly done, I thought. They were her own studies of some of her pupils and friends, and one face especially attracted me because of its delicate and spiritual beauty.
“That was my fellow prisoner,” said Eileen O’Connor. “Alice de Villers-Auxicourt. She died before the trial—happily, because she had no fear.”
I noticed one other thing in the room which was pleasant to see—an upright piano, and upon a stool by its side a pile of old songs which I turned over one by one as we sat talking. They were English and Irish, mostly from the seventeenth century onwards, but among them I found some German songs, and on each cover was written the name of Franz von Kreuzenach. At the sight of that name I had a foolish sense of embarrassment and dismay, as though I had discovered a skeleton in the cupboard, and I slipped them hurriedly between other sheets.
Eileen was talking to Wickham Brand. She did not notice my confusion. She was telling him that Marthe, Pierre’s sister, was seriously ill with something like brain-fever. The girl had regained consciousness at times, but was delirious, and kept crying out for her mother and Pierre to save her from some horror that frightened her. The nuns had made enquiries about her through civilians in Lille. Some of them had heard of the girl under her stage name—“Marthe de Méricourt.” She had sung in thecabaretsbefore the war. After the German occupation she had disappeared for a time. Somebody said she had been half-starved and was in a desperate state. What could a singing-girl do in an “occupied” town? She reappeared in a restaurant frequented by German officers and kept up by a woman of bad character. She sang and danced there for a miserable wage, and part of her duty was to induce German officers to drink champagne—the worst brand for the highest price. A horrible degradation for a decent girl! But starvation, so Eileen said, has fierce claws. Imagine what agony, what terror, what despair must have gone before that surrender! To sing and dance before the enemies of your country!
“Frightful!” said Brand. “A girl should prefer death.”
Eileen O’Connor was twisting the coloured beads between her fingers. She looked up at Wickham Brand with a deep thoughtfulness in her dark eyes.
“Most men would say that. And all women beyond the war zone, safe and shielded. But death does not come quickly from half-starvation in a garret without fire, in clothes that are worn threadbare. It is not the quick death of the battlefield. It is just a long-drawn misery.... Then there is loneliness. The loneliness of a woman’s soul. Do you understand that?”
Brand nodded gravely. “I understand the loneliness of a man’s soul. I’ve lived with it.”
“Worse for a woman,” said Eileen. “That singing-girl was lonely in Lille. Her family—with that boy Pierre—were on the other side of the lines. She had no friends here before the Germans came.”
“You mean that afterwards——”
Brand checked the end of his sentence and the line of his mouth hardened.
“Some of the Germans were kind,” said Eileen. “Oh, let us tell the truth about that! They were not all devils.”
“They were our enemies,” said Brand.
Eileen was silent for another moment, staring down at those queer beads of hers in her lap, and before she spoke again I think her mind was going back over many episodes and scenes during the German occupation of Lille.
“It was a long time—four years. A tremendous time for hatred to hold out against civility, kindness, and—human nature.... Human nature is strong; stronger than frontiers, nations, even patriotism.”
Eileen O’Connor flung her beads back, rose from the low chair and turned back her hair with both hands with a kind of impatience.
“I’ve seen the truth of things, pretty close—almost as close as death.”
“Yes,” said Brand in a low voice. “You were pretty close to all that.”
The girl seemed to be anxious to plunge deep into the truth of the things she had seen.
“The Germans—here in Lille—were of all kinds. Everything there was in the war, for them, their emotion, their pride in the first victories, their doubts, fears, boredom, anguish, brutality, sentiment, found a dwelling-place in this city behind the battle-front. Some of them—in the administration—stayed here all the time, billeted in French families. Others came back from the battlefields, horror-stricken, trying to get a little brief happiness—forgetfulness. There were lots of them who pitied the French people and had an immense sympathy with them. They tried to be friends. Tried hard, by every sort of small kindness in their billets.”
“Like Schwarz in Madame Chéri’s house,” said Brand bitterly. It seemed to me curious that he was adopting a mental attitude of unrelenting hatred to the Germans, when, as I knew, and as I have told, he had been of late on the side of toleration. That was how his moods swung when as yet he had no fixed point of view.
“Oh, yes, there were many beasts,” said Eileen quickly.
“But others were different. Beasts or not, they were human. They had eyes to see and to smile, lips to talk and tempt. It was their human nature which broke some of our hatred. There were young men among them, and in Lille girls who could be angry for a time, disdainful longer, and then friendly. I mean lonely, half-starved girls, weak, miserable girls—and others not starved enough to lose their passion and need of love. German boys and French girls—entangled in the net of fate.... God pity them!”
Brand said, “I pity them, too.”
He walked over to the piano and made an abrupt request, as though to change the subject of conversation.
“Sing something... something English!”
Eileen O’Connor sang something Irish first, and I liked her deep voice, so low and sweet.
“There’s one that is pure as an angel
And fair as the flowers of May,
They call her the gentle maiden
Wherever she takes her way.
Her eyes have the glance of sunlight
As it brightens the blue sea-wave,
And more than the deep-sea treasure
The love of her heart I crave.
“Though parted afar from my darling,
I dream of her everywhere;
The sound of her voice is about me,
The spell of her presence there.
And whether my prayer be granted,
Or whether she pass me by,
The face of that gentle maiden
Will follow me till I die.”
Brand was standing by the piano, with the light of the tall lamp on his face, and I saw that there was a wetness in his eyes before the song was ended.
“It is queer to hear that in Lille,” he said. “It’s so long since I heard a woman sing, and it’s like water to a parched soul.”
Eileen O’Connor played the last bars again and, as she played, talked softly.
“To me, the face of that gentle maiden is a friend’s face. Alice de Villers-Auxicourt, who died in prison.”
“And whether my prayer be granted,
Or whether she pass me by,
The face of that gentle maiden
Will follow me till I die.”
Brand turned over the songs, and suddenly I saw his face flush, and I knew the reason. He had come to the German songs on which was written the name of Franz von Kreuzenach.
He turned them over quickly, but Eileen pulled one out—it was a Schubert song—and opened its leaves.
“That was the man who saved my life.”
She spoke without embarrassment, simply.
“Yes,” said Brand. “He suppressed the evidence.”
“Oh, you know?”
I told her that we had heard part of the tale from the Reverend Mother, but not all of it. Not the motive, nor what had really happened.
“But you guessed?”
“No,” I answered sturdily.
She laughed, but in a serious way.
“It is not a hard guess, unless I am older than I feel, and uglier than the mirror tells me. He was in love with me.”
Brand and I looked absurdly embarrassed. Of course wehadguessed, but this open confession was startling, and there was something repulsive in the idea to both of us who had come through the war-zone into Lille, and had seen the hatred of the people for the German race, and the fate of Pierre Nesle’s sister.
Eileen O’Connor told us that part of her story which the Reverend Mother had left out. It explained the “miracle” that had saved this girl’s life, though, as the Reverend Mother said, perhaps the grace of God was in it as well. Who knows?
Franz von Kreuzenach was one of the intelligence officers whose headquarters were in that courtyard. After service in the trenches with an infantry battalion he had been stationed since 1915 at Lille until almost the end. He had a lieutenant’s rank, but was Baron in private life, belonging to an old family in Bonn. Not a Prussian, therefore, but a Rhinelander, and without the Prussian arrogance of manner. Just before the war he had been at Oxford—Brasenose College—and spoke English perfectly, and loved England with a strange, deep, unconcealed sentiment.
“Loved England?——” exclaimed Brand at this part of Eileen’s tale.
“Why not?” asked Eileen. “I’m Irish, but I love England, in spite of all her faults and all my grievances! Who can help loving England that has lived with her people?”
This Lieutenant von Kreuzenach was two months in Lille before he spoke a word with Eileen. She passed him often in the courtyard and always he saluted her with great deference. She fancied she noticed a kind of wistfulness in his eyes, as though he would have liked to talk to her. He had blue eyes, sad sometimes, she noticed, and a clean-cut face, rather delicate and pale.
One day she dropped a pile of books in the yard all of a heap as he was passing, and he said, “Allow me,” and helped to pick them up. One of the books was “Puck of Pook’s Hill,” by Kipling, and he smiled as he turned over a page or two.
“I love that book,” he said in perfect English. “There’s so much of the spirit of old England in it. History, too. That’s fine about the Roman wall, where the officers go pig-sticking.”
Eileen O’Connor asked him if he were half English—perhaps he had an English mother?—but he shook his head and said he was wholly German—echt Deutsch.
He hesitated for a moment as though he wanted to continue the conversation, but then saluted and passed on.
It was a week or so later when they met again, and it was Eileen O’Connor who said “Good-morning” and made a remark about the weather.
He stopped, and answered with a look of pleasure and boyish surprise.
“It’s jolly to hear you say ‘Good-morning’ in English. Takes me straight back to Oxford before this atrocious war. Besides——”
Here he stopped and blushed.
“Besides what?” asked Eileen.
“Besides, it’s a long time since I talked to a lady. Among officers one hears nothing but war-talk—the last battle, the next battle, technical jargon, ‘shop,’ as the English say. It would be nice to talk about something else—art, music, poetry, ideas.”
She chaffed him a little, irresistibly.
“Oh, but you Germans have the monopoly of all that! Art, music, poetry, they are all absorbed into yourKultur—properly Germanised. As for ideas—what is not in German philosophy is not an idea.”
He looked profoundly hurt, said Eileen, “Some Germans are very narrow, very stupid, like some English perhaps. Not all of us believe that GermanKulturis the only knowledge in the world.”
“Anyhow,” said Eileen O’Connor, “I’m Irish, so we needn’t argue about the difference between German and English philosophy.” He spoke as if quoting from a text-book.
“The Irish are a very romantic race.”
That, of course, had to be denied by Eileen, who knew her Bernard Shaw.
“Don’t you believe it,” she said. “We’re a hard, logical, relentless people, like all peasant folk of Celtic stock. It’s the English who are romantic and sentimental, like the Germans.”
He was amazed at those words (so Eileen told us) and then laughed heartily in his very boyish way.
“You are pleased to make fun of me. You are pulling my leg, as we said at Oxford.”
So they took to talking for a few minutes in the courtyard when they met, and Eileen noticed that they met more often than before. She suspected him of arranging that, and it amused her. By that time she had a staunch friend in the old Kommandant who believed her to be an enemy of England and an Irish patriot. She was already playing the dangerous game under his very nose, or at least within fifty yards of the blotting-pad over which his nose used to be for many hours of the day in his office.
It was utterly necessary to keep him free from any suspicion. His confidence was her greatest safeguard. It was therefore unwise to refuse him (an honest, stupid old gentleman) when he asked whether now and again he might bring one of his officers and enjoy an hour’s music in her rooms after dinner. He had heard her singing, and it had gone straight to his heart. There was one of his officers, Lieutenant Baron Franz von Kreuzenach, who had a charming voice. They might have a little musical recreation which would be most pleasant and refreshing.
“Bring your Baron,” said Eileen. “I shall not scandalise my neighbours when the courtyard is closed.”
Her girl-friends were scandalised when they heard of these musical evenings—two or three times a month—until she convinced them that it was a service to France, and a life insurance for herself and them. There were times when she had scruples. She was tricking both those men who sat in her room for an hour or two now and then, so polite, so stiffly courteous, so moved with sentiment when she sang old Irish songs and Franz von Kreuzenach sang his German songs. She was a spy, in plain and terrible language, and they were utterly duped. On more than one night while they were there an escaped prisoner was in the cellar below, with a German uniform and cypher message, and all directions for escape across the lines. Though they seldom talked about the war, yet now and again by casual remarks they revealed the intentions of the German army and itsmoral, or lack ofmoral. With the old Kommandant she did not feel so conscience-stricken. To her he was gentle and charming, but to others a bully, and there was in his character the ruthlessness of the Prussian officer on all matters of “duty,” and he hated England ferociously.
With Franz von Kreuzenach it was different. He was a humanitarian, and sensitive to all cruelty in life. He hated, not the English, but the war with real anguish, as she could see by many words he let fall from time to time.
He was, she said, a poet, and could see across the frontiers of hatred to all suffering humanity, and so revolted against the endless, futile massacre and the spiritual degradation of civilised peoples. It was only in a veiled way he could say these things in the presence of his superior officer, but she understood. She understood another thing as time went on—nearly eighteen months all told. She saw quite clearly, as all women must see in such a case, that this young German was in love with her.
“He did not speak any word in that way,” said Eileen when she told us this, frankly, in her straight manner of speech, “but in his eyes, in the touch of his hand, in the tones of his voice, I knew that he loved me, and I was very sorry.”
“It was a bit awkward,” said Brand, speaking with a strained attempt at being casual. I could see that he was very much moved by that part of the story, and that there was a conflict in his mind.
“It made me uneasy and embarrassed,” said Eileen. “I don’t like to be the cause of any man’s suffering, and he was certainly suffering because of me. It was a tragic thing for both of us when I was found out at last.”
“What happened?” asked Brand.
The thing that happened was simple—and horrible. When Eileen and her companions were denounced by the sentry at the Citadel the case was reported to the Kommandant of the Intelligence Office, who was in charge of all anti-espionage business in Lille. He was enormously disturbed by the suspicion directed against Eileen. It seemed to him incredible, at first, that he could have been duped by her. After that, his anger was so violent that he became incapable of any personal action. He ordered Franz von Kreuzenach to arrest Eileen and search her rooms. “If she resist, shoot her at once,” he thundered out.
It was at seven o’clock in the evening when Baron Franz von Kreuzenach appeared at Eileen’s door with two soldiers. He was extremely pale and agitated.
Eileen rose from her little table, where she was having an evening meal of. soup and bread. She knew the moment had come which in imagination she had seen a thousand times.
“Come in, Baron!”
She spoke with an attempt at cheerfulness, but had to hold to the back of her chair to save herself from falling, and she felt her face become white.
He stood for a moment in the room, silently, with the two soldiers behind him, and when he spoke, it was in a low voice, in English. “It is my painful duty to arrest you, Miss O’Connor.”
She pretended to be amazed, incredulous, but it was, as she knew, a feeble mimicry.
“Arrest me? Why, that is—ridiculous! On what charge?”
Franz von Kreuzenach looked at her in a pitiful way.
“A terrible charge: Espionage and conspiracy against German martial law... I would rather have died than do this—duty.”
Eileen told us that he spoke that word “duty” as only a German could—as that law which for a German officer is above all human things, all kindly relationships, all escape. She pitied him then more, she said, than she was afraid for herself, and told him that she was sorry the duty had fallen to him. He made only one other remark before he took her away from her rooms.
“I pray God the evidence will be insufficient.”
There was a military car waiting outside the courtyard, and he opened the door for her to get in and sat opposite to her. The two soldiers sat together next to the driver, squeezed close—they were both stout men—with their rifles between their knees. It was dark in the streets of Lille and in the car. Eileen could only see the officer’s face vaguely and white. He spoke again as they were driven quickly.
“I have to search your rooms to-night. Have you destroyed your papers?”
He seemed to have no doubt about her guilt, but she would not admit it.
“I have no papers of which I am afraid.”
“That is well,” said Franz von Kreuzenach.
He told her that the Baronne de Villers-Auxicourt and Marcelle Barbier had been arrested also, and that news was like a death-blow to the girl. It showed that their conspiracy had been revealed, and she was stricken at the thought of the fate awaiting her friends, those young delicate girls, who had been so brave in taking risks.
Towards the end of the journey, which was not far, Franz von Kreuzenach began speaking in a low, emotional voice.
Whatever happened, he said, he prayed that she might think of him with friendship, not blaming him for that arrest, which was in obedience to orders. He would ever be grateful to her for her kindness, and the songs she had sung. They had been happy evenings to him when he could see her and listen to her voice. He looked forward to them in a hungry way, because of his loneliness.
“He said—other things,” added Eileen, and she did not tell us, though dimly we guessed at the words of that German officer who loved her. At the gate of the prison he delivered her to a group of military police, and then saluted as he swung round on his heel.
The next time she saw him was at her trial. Once only their eyes met, and he became deadly pale and bent his head. During her cross-examination of him he did not look at her, and his embarrassment, his agony—she could see that he was suffering—made an unfavourable impression on the court, who thought he was not sure of his evidence and was making blundering answers when she challenged him. She held him up to ridicule, but all the time was sorry for him, and grateful to him, because she knew how much evidence against her he had concealed.
“He behaved strangely about that evidence,” said Eileen. “What puzzles me still is why he produced so much and yet kept back the rest. You see, he put in the papers he had found in the secret passage, and they were enough to have me shot, yet he hushed up the fact about the passage, which, of course, was utterly damning. It looked as though he wanted to give me a sporting chance. But that was not his character, because he was a simple young man. He could have destroyed the papers as easily as he kept back the fact about the underground passage, but he produced them, and I escaped only by the skin of my teeth. Read me that riddle, Wickham Brand!”
“It’s easy,” said Brand. “The fellow was pulled two ways. By duty and—sentiment.”
“Love,” said Eileen in her candid way.
“Love, if you like... It was a conflict. Probably his sense of duty (I know these German officers!) was strong enough to make him hand up the papers to his superior officers. He couldn’t bring himself to burn them—the fool! Then the other emotion in him——”
“Give it a name,” said Eileen, smiling in her whimsical way.
“That damned love of his,” said Brand, “tugged at him intolerably, and jabbed at his conscience. So he hid the news about the passage and thought what a fine fellow he was. Mr. Facing-Both-Ways. Duty and love, both sacrificed!... He’d have looked pretty sick if you’d been shot, and it wasn’t to his credit that you weren’t.”
Eileen O’Connor was amused with Brand’s refusal to credit Franz von Kreuzenach with any kindness.
“Admit,” she said, “that his suppression of evidence gave me my chance. If all were told, I was lost.”
Brand admitted that.
“Admit also,” said Eileen, “that he behaved like a gentleman.”
Brand admitted it grudgingly.
“A German gentleman.”
Then he realised his meanness, and made amends.
“That’s unfair! He behaved like a good fellow. Probably took big risks. Every one who knows what happened must be grateful to him. If I meet him I’ll thank him.”
Eileen O’Connor held Brand to that promise, and asked him for a favour which made him hesitate.
“When you go on to the Rhine will you take him a letter from me?”
“It’s against the rules,” said Brand rather stiffly.
Eileen pooh-poohed those rules, and said Franz von Kreuzenach had broken his for her sake.
“I’ll take it,” said Brand.
That night when we left Eileen O’Connor’s rooms the Armistice was still being celebrated by British soldiers. Verey lights were rising above the houses, fired off by young officers as symbols of their own soaring spirits. Shadows lurched against us in the dark streets as officers and men went singing to their billets. Some girls of Lille had linked arms with British Tommies and were dancing in the darkness with screams of mirth. In one of the doorways a soldier with his steel hat at the back of his head and his rifle lying at his feet kept shouting one word in a drunken way: “Peace!... Peace!”
Brand had his arm through mine, and when we came to his headquarters he would not let me go.
“Armistice night!” he said. “Don’t let’s sleep just yet. Let’s hug the thought over a glass of whisky. The war is over!... No more blood!... No more of its tragedy!”
Yet we had got no farther than the hall before we knew that tragedy had not ended with the Armistice.
Colonel Lavington met us and spoke to Brand.
“A bad thing has happened. Young Clatworthy has shot himself... upstairs in his room.”
“No!”
Brand started back as if he had been hit. He had been fond of Clatworthy, as he was of all boys, and they had been together for many months. It was to Brand that Clatworthy wrote his last strange note, and the colonel gave it to him then in the hall.
I saw it afterwards, written in a big scrawl—a few lines which now I copy out:—
“Dear old Brand,—It’s the end of the adventure. Somehow I funk Peace. I don’t see how I can go back to Wimbledon as if nothing had happened to me. None of us are the same as when we left, and I’m quite different. I’m going over to the pals on the other side. They will understand. Cheerio!
“Cyril Clatworthy.”
“I was playing my flute when I heard the shot,” said the colonel.
Brand put the letter in his pocket and made only one comment.
“Another victim of the war-devil.... Poor kid!”
Presently he went up to young Clatworthy’s room, and stayed there a long time.
A few days later we began to move on towards the Rhine by slow stages, giving the German Army time to get back. In Brand’s pocket-book was the letter to Franz von Kreuzenach from Eileen O’Connor.