The winter of discontent had passed. Summer had come with a wealth of beauty in the fields of France this side the belt of blasted earth. The grass was a tapestry of flowers, and tits and warblers and the golden oriole were making music in the woods. At dusk the nightingale sang as though no war were near its love, and at broad noonday a million larks rose above the tall wheat with a great high chorus of glad notes.
Among the British armies there was hope again, immense faith that believed once more in an ending to the war. Verdun had been saved. The enemy had been slaughtered. His reserves were thin and hard to get (so said Intelligence) and the British, stronger than they had ever been, in men, and guns, and shells, and aircraft, and all material of war, were going to be launched in a great offensive. No more trench warfare. No more dying in ditches. Out into the open, with an Army of Pursuit (Rawlinson's) and a quick break-through. It was to be “The Great Push.” The last battles were to be fought before the year died again, though many men would die before that time.
Up in the salient something happened to make men question the weakness of the enemy, but the news did not spread very far and there was a lot to do elsewhere, on the Somme, where the salient seemed a long way off. It was the Canadians to whom it happened, and it was an ugly thing.
On June 2d a flame of fire from many batteries opened upon their lines in Sanctuary Wood and Maple Copse, beyond the lines of Ypres, and tragedy befell them. I went to see those who lived through it and stood in the presence of men who had escaped from the very pits of that hell which had been invented by human beings out of the earth's chemistry, and yet had kept their reason.
The enemy's bombardment began suddenly, with one great crash of guns, at half past eight on Friday morning. Generals Mercer and Williams had gone up to inspect the trenches at six o'clock in the morning.
It had been almost silent along the lines when the enemy's batteries opened fire with one enormous thunderstroke, which was followed by continuous salvos. The shells came from nearly every point of the compass—north, east, and south. The evil spell of the salient was over our men again.
In the trenches just south of Hooge were the Princess Patricia's Light Infantry, with some battalions of the Royal Canadian Regiment south of them, and some of the Canadian Mounted Rifles (who had long been dismounted), and units from another Canadian division at the extreme end of their line of front. It was those men who had to suffer the tempest of the enemy's shells.
Earth below them opened up into great craters as high-explosive shells burst continually, flinging up masses of soil, flattening out breastworks and scattering sand-bags into dust.
Canadians in the front trenches held on in the midst of this uproar. “They took it all,” said one of the officers, and in that phrase, spoken simply by a man who was there, too, lies the spirit of pride and sacrifice. “They took it all” and did not budge, though the sky seemed to be opening above them and the earth below them.
The bombardment continued without a pause for five hours, by which time most of our front trenches had been annihilated. At about a quarter past one the enemy's guns lifted a little, and through the dense smoke-clouds which made a solid bar across No Man's Land appeared a mass of German infantry. They wore their packs and full field-kit, as though they had come to stay.
Perhaps they expected that no one lived in the British trenches, and it was a reasonable idea, but wrong. There were brave men remaining there, alive and determined to fight. Although the order for retirement had been given, single figures here and there were seen to get over the broken parapets and go forward to meet the enemy halfway. They died to a man, fighting. It seemed to me one of the most pitiful and heroic things of this war, that little crowd of men, many of them wounded, some of them dazed and deaf, stumbling forward to their certain death to oppose the enemy's advance.
From the network of trenches behind, not altogether smashed, there was time for men to retire to a second line of defense, if they were still unwounded and had strength to go. An officer—Captain Crossman—in command of one of these support companies, brought several men out of a trench, but did not follow on. He turned again, facing the enemy, and was last seen—“a big, husky man,” says one of his comrades—as he fired his revolver and then flung it into a German's face.
Colonel Shaw of the 1st Battalion, C.M.R., rallied eighty men out of the Cumberland dugouts, and died fighting. The Germans were kept at bay for some time, but they flung their bombs into the square of men, so that very few remained alive. When only eight were still fighting among the bodies of their comrades these tattered and blood-splashed men, standing there fiercely contemptuous of the enemy and death, were ordered to retire by Major Palmer, the last officer among them.
Meanwhile the battalions in support were holding firm in spite of the shell-fire, which raged above them also, and it was against this second line of Canadians that the German infantry came up—and broke.
In the center the German thrust was hard toward Zillebeke Lake. Here some of the Canadian Rifles were in support, and as soon as the infantry attack began they were ordered forward to meet and check the enemy. An officer in command of one of their battalions afterward told me that he led his men across country to Maple Copse under such a fire as he had never seen. Because of the comrades in front, in dire need of help, no notice was taken as the wounded fell, but the others pressed on as fast as they could go.
Maple Copse was reached, and here the men halted and awaited the enemy with another battalion who were already holding this wood of six or seven acres. When the German troops arrived they may have expected to meet no great resistance. They met a withering fire, which caused them bloody losses. The Canadians had assembled at various points, which became strongholds of defense with machine-guns and bomb stores, and the men held their fire until the enemy was within close range, so that they worked havoc among them. But the German guns never ceased and many Canadians fell. Col. E. H. Baker, a member of the Canadian Parliament, fell with a piece of shell in his lung.
Hour after hour our gunners fed their breeches and poured out shells. The edge of the salient was swept with fire, and, though the Canadian losses were frightful, the Germans suffered also, so that the battlefield was one great shambles. Our own wounded, who were brought back, owe their lives to the stretcher-bearers, who were supreme in devotion. They worked in and out across that shell-swept ground hour after hour through the day and night, rescuing many stricken men at a great cost in life to themselves. Out of one party of twenty only five remained alive. “No one can say,” said one of their officers, “that the Canadians do not know how to die.”
No one would deny that.
Out of three thousand men in the Canadian 8th Brigade their casualties were twenty-two hundred.
There were 151 survivors from the 1st Battalion Canadian Mounted Rifles, 130 from the 4th Battalion, 350 from the 5th, 520 from the 2nd. Those are the figures of massacre.
Eleven days later the Canadians took their revenge. Their own guns were but a small part of the huge orchestra of “heavies” and field batteries which played the devil's tattoo upon the German positions in our old trenches. It was annihilating, and the German soldiers had to endure the same experience as their guns had given to Canadian troops on the same ground. Trenches already battered were smashed again. The earth, which was plowed with shells in their own attack, was flung up again by our shells. It was hell again for poor human wretches.
The Canadian troops charged at two o'clock in the morning. Their attack was directed to the part of the line from the southern end of Sanctuary Wood to Mount Gorst, about a mile, which included Armagh Wood, Observatory Hill, and Mount Gorst itself.
The attack went quickly and the men expected greater trouble. The enemy's shell-fire was heavy, but the Canadians got through under cover of their own guns, which had lengthened their fuses a little and continued an intense bombardment behind the enemy's first line. The men advanced in open order and worked downward and southward into their old positions.
In one place of attack about forty Germans, who fought desperately, were killed almost to a man, just as Colonel Shaw had died on June 2d with his party of eighty men who had rallied round him. It was one shambles for another, and the Germans were not less brave, it seems.
One officer and one hundred and thirteen men surrendered. The officer was glad to escape from the death to which he had resigned himself when our bombardment began.
“I knew how it would be,” he said. “We had orders to take this ground, and took it; but we knew you would come back again. You had to do so. So here I am.”
Parts of the line were deserted, except by the dead. In one place the stores which had been buried by the Canadians before they left were still there, untouched by the enemy. Our bombardment had made it impossible for his troops to consolidate their position and to hold the line steady.
They had just taken cover in the old bits of trench, in shell-holes and craters, and behind scattered sand-bags, and had been pounded there. The Canadians were back again.
During the battles of the Somme in 1916, and afterward in periods of progress and retreat over the abominable fields, the city of Amiens was the capital of the British army. When the battles began in July of that year it was only a short distance away from the fighting-lines; near enough to hear the incessant roar of gun-fire on the French front and ours, and near enough to get, by motor-car or lorry, in less than thirty minutes, to places where men were being killed or maimed or blinded in the routine of the day's work. One went out past Amiens station and across a little stone bridge which afterward, in the enemy's advance of 1918, became the mark for German high velocities along the road to Querrieux, where Rawlinson had his headquarters of the Fourth Army in an old chateau with pleasant meadows round it and a stream meandering through fields of buttercups in summer-time. Beyond the dusty village of Querrieux with its white cottages, from which the plaster fell off in blotches as the war went on, we went along the straight highroad to Albert, through the long and straggling village of Lahoussoye, where Scottish soldiers in reserve lounged about among frowsy peasant women and played solemn games with “the bairns”; and so, past camps and hutments on each side of the road, to the ugly red-brick town where the Golden Virgin hung head downward from the broken tower of the church with her Babe outstretched above the fields of death as though as a peace-offering to this world at war.
One could be killed any day in Albert. I saw men blown to bits there the clay after the battles of the Somme began. It was in the road that turned to the right, past the square to go to Meaulte and on to Fricourt. There was a tide of gun transport swirling down the road, bringing up new ammunition for the guns that were firing without a pause over Fricourt and Mametz. The high scream of a shell came through a blue sky and ended on its downward note with a sharp crash. For a few minutes the transport column was held up while a mass of raw flesh which a second before had been two living men and their horses was cleared out of the way. Then the gun wagons went at a harder pace down the road, raising a cloud of white dust out of which I heard the curses of the drivers, swearing in a foul way to disguise their fear.
I went through Albert many scores of times to the battlefields beyond, and watched its process of disintegration through those years, until it was nothing but a wild scrap heap of read brick and twisted iron, and, in the last phase, even the Golden Virgin and her Babe, which had seemed to escape all shell-fire by miraculous powers, lay buried beneath a mass of masonry. Beyond were the battlefields of the Somme where every yard of ground is part of the great graveyard of our youth.
So Amiens, as I have said, was not far away from the red heart of war, and was clear enough to the lines to be crowded always with officers and men who came out between one battle and another, and by “lorry-jumping” could reach this city for a few hours of civilized life, according to their views of civilization. To these men—boys, mostly—who had been living in lousy ditches under hell fire, Amiens was Paradise, with little hells for those who liked them. There were hotels in which they could go get a bath, if they waited long enough or had the luck to be early on the list. There were streets of shops with plate-glass windows unbroken, shining, beautiful. There were well-dressed women walking about, with kind eyes, and children as dainty, some of them, as in High Street, Kensington, or Prince's Street, Edinburgh. Young officers, who had plenty of money to spend—because there was no chance of spending money between a row of blasted trees and a ditch in which bits of dead men were plastered into the parapet—invaded the shops and bought fancy soaps, razors, hair-oil, stationery, pocketbooks, knives, flash-lamps, top-boots (at a fabulous price), khaki shirts and collars, gramophone records, and the latest set of Kirchner prints. It was the delight of spending, rather than the joy of possessing, which made them go from one shop to another in search of things they could carry hack to the line—that and the lure of girls behind the counters, laughing, bright-eyed girls who understood their execrable French, even English spoken with a Glasgow accent, and were pleased to flirt for five minutes with any group of young fighting-men—who broke into roars of laughter at the gallantry of some Don Juan among them with the gift of audacity, and paid outrageous prices for the privilege of stammering out some foolish sentiment in broken French, blushing to the roots of their hair (though captains and heroes) at their own temerity with a girl who, in another five minutes, would play the same part in the same scene with a different group of boys.
I used to marvel at the patience of these girls. How bored they must have been with all this flirtation, which led to nothing except, perhaps, the purchase of a bit of soap at twice its proper price! They knew that these boys would leave to go back to the trenches in a few hours and that some of them would certainly be dead in a few days. There could be no romantic episode, save of a transient kind, between them and these good-looking lads in whose eyes there were desire and hunger, because to them the plainest girl was Womanhood, the sweet, gentle, and feminine side of life, as opposed to the cruelty, brutality, and ugliness of war and death. The shopgirls of Amiens had no illusions. They had lived too long in war not to know the realities. They knew the risks of transient love and they were not taking them—unless conditions were very favorable. They attended strictly to business and hoped to make a lot of money in the shop, and were, I think, mostly good girls—as virtuous as life in war-time may let girls be—wise beyond their years, and with pity behind their laughter for these soldiers who tried to touch their hands over the counters, knowing that many of them were doomed to die for France and England. They had their own lovers—boys in blue somewhere between Vaux-sur-Somme and Hartmanns—weilerkopf—and apart from occasional intimacies with English officers quartered in Amiens for long spells, left the traffic of passion to other women who walked the streets.
The Street of the Three Pebbles—la rue des Trois Cailloux—which goes up from the station through the heart of Amiens, was the crowded highway. Here were the best shops—the hairdresser, at the left-hand side, where all day long officers down from the line came in to have elaborate luxury in the way of close crops with friction d'eau de quinine, shampooing, singeing, oiling, not because of vanity, but because of the joyous sense of cleanliness and perfume after the filth and stench of life in the desolate fields; then the booksellers' (Madame Carpentier et fille) on the right-hand side, which was not only the rendezvous of the miscellaneous crowd buying stationery and La Vie Parisienne, but of the intellectuals who spoke good French and bought good books and liked ten minutes' chat with the mother and daughter. (Madame was an Alsatian lady with vivid memories of 1870, when, as a child, she had first learned to hate Germans.) She hated them now with a fresh, vital hatred, and would have seen her own son dead a hundred times—he was a soldier in Saloniki—rather than that France should make a compromise peace with the enemy. She had been in Amiens, as I was, on a dreadful night of August of 1914, when the French army passed through in retreat from Bapaume, and she and the people of her city knew for the first time that the Germans were close upon them. She stood in the crowd as I did—in the darkness, watching that French column pass with their transport, and their wounded lying on the baggage wagons, men of many regiments mixed up, the light of the street lamps shining on the casques of cuirassiers with their long horsehair tails, leading their stumbling horses, and foot soldiers, hunched under their packs, marching silently with dragging steps. Once in a while one of the soldiers left the ranks and came on to the sidewalk, whispering to a group of dark shadows. The crowds watched silently, in a curious, dreadful silence, as though stunned. A woman near me spoke in a low voice, and said, “Nous sommes perdus!” Those were the only words I heard or remembered.
That night in the station of Amiens the boys of a new class were being hurried away in truck trains, and while their army was in retreat sang “La Marseillaise,” as though victory were in their hearts. Next day the German army under von Kluck entered Amiens, and ten days afterward passed through it on the way to Paris. Madame Carpentier told me of the first terror of the people when the field-gray men came down the Street of the Three Pebbles and entered their shops. A boy selling oranges fainted when a German stretched out his hand to buy some. Women hid behind their counters when German boots stamped into their shops. But Madame Carpentier was not afraid. She knew the Germans and their language. She spoke frank words to German officers, who saluted her respectfully enough. “You will never get to Paris... France and England will be too strong for you... Germany will be destroyed before this war ends.” They laughed at her and said: “We shall be in Paris in a week from now. Have you a little diary, Madame?” Madame Carpentier was haughty with them. Some women of Amiens—poor drabs—did not show any haughtiness, nor any pride, with the enemy who crowded into the city on their way toward Paris. A girl told me that she was looking through the window of a house that faced the Place de la Gare, and saw a number of German soldiers dancing round a piano-organ which was playing to them. They were dancing with women of the town, who were laughing and screeching in the embrace of big, blond Germans. The girl who was watching was only a schoolgirl then. She knew very little of the evil of life, but enough to know that there was something in this scene degrading to womanhood and to France. She turned from the window and flung herself on her bed and wept bitterly...
I used to call in at the bookshop for a chat now and then with Madame and Mademoiselle Carpentier, while a crowd of officers came in and out. Madame was always merry and bright in spite of her denunciations of the “Sale Boches—les brigands, les bandits!” and Mademoiselle put my knowledge of French to a severe but pleasant test. She spoke with alarming rapidity, her words tumbling over one another in a cascade of volubility delightful to hear but difficult to follow. She had a strong mind—masterly in her methods of business—so that she could serve six customers at once and make each one think that her attention was entirely devoted to his needs—and a very shrewd and critical idea of military strategy and organization. She had but a poor opinion of British generals and generalship, although a wholehearted admiration for the gallantry of British officers and men; and she had an intimate knowledge of our preparations, plans, failures, and losses. French liaison-officers confided to her the secrets of the British army; and English officers trusted her with many revelations of things “in the wind.” But Mademoiselle Carpentier had discretion and loyalty and did not repeat these things to people who had no right to know. She would have been far more efficient as a staff officer than many of the young gentlemen with red tabs on their tunics who came into the shop, flipping beautiful top-boots with riding-crops, sitting on the counter, and turning over the pages of La Vie for the latest convention in ladies' legs.
Mademoiselle was a serious musician, so her mother told me, but her musical studies were seriously interrupted by business and air raids, which one day ceased in Amiens altogether after a night of horror, when hundreds of houses were smashed to dust and many people killed, and the Germans brought their guns close to the city—close enough to scatter high velocities about its streets—and the population came up out of their cellars, shaken by the terror of the night, and fled. I passed the bookshop where Mademoiselle was locking up the door of this house which had escaped by greater luck than its neighbors. She turned as I passed and raised her hand with a grave gesture of resignation and courage. “Ils ne passeront pas!” she said. It was the spirit of the courage of French womanhood which spoke in those words.
That was in the last phase of the war, but the Street of the Three Pebbles had been tramped up and down for two years before then by the British armies on the Somme, with the French on their right. I was never tired of watching those crowds and getting into the midst of them, and studying their types. All the types of young English manhood came down this street, and some of their faces showed the strain and agony of war, especially toward the end of the Somme battles, after four months or more of slaughter. I saw boys with a kind of hunted look in their eyes; and Death was the hunter. They stared into the shop windows in a dazed way, or strode along with packs on their backs, looking neither to the right nor to the left, and white, haggard faces, as expressionless as masks. Tomorrow or the next day, perhaps, the Hunter would track them down. Other English officers showed no sign at all of apprehension or lack of nerve-control, although the psychologist would have detected disorder of soul in the rather deliberate note of hilarity with which they greeted their friends, in gusts of laughter, for no apparent cause, at “Charlie's bar,” where they would drink three cocktails apiece on an empty stomach, and in their tendency to tell tales of horror as things that were very funny. They dined and wined in Amiens at the “Rhin,” the “Godebert,” or the “Cathedrale,” with a kind of spiritual exaltation in good food and drink, as though subconsciously they believed that this might be their last dinner in life, with good pals about them. They wanted to make the best of it—and damn the price. In that spirit many of them went after other pleasures—down the byways of the city, and damned the price again, which was a hellish one. Who blames them? It was war that was to blame, and those who made war possible.
Down the rue des Trois Cailloux, up and down, up and down, went English, and Scottish, and Irish, and Welsh, and Canadian, and Australian, and New Zealand fighting—men. In the winter they wore their trench-coats all splashed and caked up to the shoulders with the white, chalky mud of the Somme battlefields, and their top—boots and puttees were plastered with this mud, and their faces were smeared with it after a lorry drive or a tramp down from the line. The rain beat with a metallic tattoo on their steel hats. Their packs were all sodden.
French poilus, detrained at Amiens station for a night on their way to some other part of the front, jostled among British soldiers, and their packs were a wonder to see. They were like traveling tinkers, with pots and pans and boots slung about their faded blue coats, and packs bulging with all the primitive needs of life in the desert of the battlefields beyond civilization. They were unshaven, and wore their steel casques low over their foreheads, without gaiety, without the means of buying a little false hilarity, but grim and sullen—looking and resentful of English soldiers walking or talking with French cocottes.
I saw a scene with a French poilu one day in the Street of the Three Pebbles, during those battles of the Somme, when the French troops were fighting on our right from Maricourt southward toward Roye. It was like a scene from “Gaspard.” The poilu was a middle-aged man, and very drunk on some foul spirit which he had bought in a low cafe down by the river. In the High Street he was noisy, and cursed God for having allowed the war to happen, and the French government for having sentenced him and all poor sacre poilus to rot to death in the trenches, away from their wives and children, without a thought for them; and nothing but treachery in Paris:
“Nous sommes trahis!” said the man, raising his arms. “For the hundredth time France is betrayed.”
A crowd gathered round him, listening to his drunken denunciations. No one laughed. They stared at him with a kind of pitying wonderment. An agent de police pushed his way between the people and caught hold of the soldier by the wrist and tried to drag him away. The crowd murmured a protest, and then suddenly the poilu, finding himself in the hands of the police, on this one day out of the trenches—after five months—flung himself on the pavement in a passion of tears and supplication.
“Je suis pere de famille!... Je suis un soldat de France!... Dans les tranchees pour cinq mois!... Qu'est-ce que mes camarades vont dire, 'cre nom de Dieu? et mon capitaine? C'est emmordant apres toute ma service comme brave soldat. Mais, quoi donc, mon vieux!”
“Viens donc, saligaud,” growled the agent de police.
The crowd was against the policeman. Their murmurs rose to violent protest on behalf of the poilu.
“C'est un heros, tout de meme. Cinq mois dans les tranches! C'est affreux! Mais oui, il est soul, mais pour—quoi pas! Apres cinq mois sur le front qu'est-ce que cela signifie? Ca n'a aucune importance!”
A dandy French officer of Chasseurs Alpins stepped into the center of the scene and tapped the policeman on the shoulder.
“Leave him alone. Don't you see he is a soldier? Sacred name of God, don't you know that a man like this has helped to save France, while you pigs stand at street corners watching petticoats?”
He stooped to the fallen man and helped him to stand straight.
“Be off with you, mon brave, or there will be trouble for you.”
He beckoned to two of his own Chasseurs and said:
“Look after that poor comrade yonder. He is un peu etoile.”
The crowd applauded. Their sympathy was all for the drunken soldier of France.
Into a small estaminet at the end of the rue des Trois Cailloux, beyond the Hotel de Ville, came one day during the battles of the Somme two poilus, grizzled, heavy men, deeply bronzed, with white dust in their wrinkles, and the earth of the battlefields ingrained in the skin of their big, coarse hands. They ordered two “little glasses” and drank them at one gulp. Then two more.
“See what I have got, my little cabbage,” said one of them, stooping to the heavy pack which he had shifted from his shoulders to the other seat beside him. “It is something to make you laugh.”
“And what is that, my old one?” said a woman sitting on the other side of the marble-topped table, with another woman of her own class, from the market nearby.
The man did not answer the question, but fumbled into his pack, laughing a little in a self-satisfied way.
“I killed a German to get it,” he said. “He was a pig of an officer, a dirty Boche. Very chic, too, and young like a schoolboy.”
One of the women patted him on the shoulder. Her eyes glistened.
“Did you slit his throat, the dirty dog? Eh, I'd like to get my fingers round the neck of a dirty Boche!”
“I finished him with a grenade,” said the poilu. “It was good enough. It knocked a hole in him as large as a cemetery. See then, my cabbage. It will make you smile. It is a funny kind of mascot, eh?”
He put on the table a small leather pouch stained with a blotch of reddish brown. His big, clumsy fingers could hardly undo the little clasp.
“He wore this next his heart,” said the man. “Perhaps he thought it would bring him luck. But I killed him all the same! 'Cre nom de Dieu!”
He undid the clasp, and his big fingers poked inside the flap of the pouch.
“It was from his woman, his German grue. Perhaps even now she doesn't know he's dead. She thinks of him wearing this next to his heart. 'Cre nom de Dieu! It was I that killed him a week ago!”
He held up something in his hand, and the light through the estaminet window gleamed on it. It was a woman's lock of hair, like fine-spun gold.
The two women gave a shrill cry of surprise, and then screamed with laughter. One of them tried to grab the hair, but the poilu held it high, beyond her reach, with a gruff command of, “Hands off!” Other soldiers and women in the estaminet gathered round staring at the yellow tress, laughing, making ribald conjectures as to the character of the woman from whose head it had come. They agreed that she was fat and ugly, like all German women, and a foul slut.
“She'll never kiss that fellow again,” said one man. “Our old one has cut the throat of that pig of a Boche!”
“I'd like to cut off all her hair and tear the clothes off her back,” said one of the women. “The dirty drab with yellow hair! They ought to be killed, every one of them, so that the human race should by rid of them!”
“Her lover is a bit of clay, anyhow,” said the other woman. “A bit of dirt, as our poilus will do for all of them.”
The soldier with the woman's hair in his hand stroked it across his forefinger.
“All the same it is pretty. Like gold, eh? I think of the woman, sometimes. With blue eyes, like a German girl I kissed in Paris-a dancing-girl!”
There was a howl of laughter from the two women.
“The old one is drunk. He is amorous with the German cow!”
“I will keep it as a mascot,” said the poilu, scrunching it up and thrusting it into his pouch. “It'll keep me in mind of that saligaud of a German officer I killed. He was a chic fellow, tout de meme. A boy.”
Australians slouched up the Street of the Three Pebbles with a grim look under their wide-brimmed hats, having come down from Pozieres, where it was always hell in the days of the Somme fighting. I liked the look of them, dusty up to the eyes in summer, muddy up to their eyes in winter—these gipsy fellows, scornful of discipline for discipline's sake, but desperate fighters, as simple as children in their ways of thought and speech (except for frightful oaths), and looking at life, this life of war and this life in Amiens, with frank, curious eyes, and a kind of humorous contempt for death, and disease, and English Tommies, and French girls, and “the whole damned show,” as they called it. They were lawless except for the laws to which their souls gave allegiance. They behaved as the equals of all men, giving no respect to generals or staff-officers or the devils of hell. There was a primitive spirit of manhood in them, and they took what they wanted, and were ready to pay for it in coin or in disease or in wounds. They had no conceit of themselves in a little, vain way, but they reckoned themselves the only fighting-men, simply, and without boasting. They were hard as steel, and finely tempered. Some of them were ruffians, but most of them were, I imagine, like those English yeomen who came into France with the Black Prince, men who lived “rough,” close to nature, of sturdy independence, good-humored, though fierce in a fight, and ruthless. That is how they seemed to me, in a general way, though among them were boys of a more delicate fiber, and sensitive, if one might judge by their clear-cut features and wistful eyes. They had money to spend beyond the dreams of our poor Tommy. Six shillings and sixpence a day and remittances from home. So they pushed open the doors of any restaurant in Amiens and sat down to table next to English officers, not abashed, and ordered anything that pleased their taste, and wine in plenty.
In that High Street of Amiens one day I saw a crowd gathered round an Australian, so tall that he towered over all other heads. It was at the corner of the rue de Corps Nu sans Teste, the Street of the Naked Body without a Head, and I suspected trouble. As I pressed on the edge of the crowd I heard the Australian ask, in a loud, slow drawl, whether there was any officer about who could speak French. He asked the question gravely, but without anxiety. I pushed through the crowd and said:
“I speak French. What's the trouble?”
I saw then that, like the French poilu I have described, this tall Australian was in the grasp of a French agent de police, a small man of whom he took no more notice than if a fly had settled on his wrist. The Australian was not drunk. I could see that he had just drunk enough to make his brain very clear and solemn. He explained the matter deliberately, with a slow choice of words, as though giving evidence of high matters before a court. It appeared that he had gone into the estaminet opposite with four friends. They had ordered five glasses of porto, for which they had paid twenty centimes each, and drank them. They then ordered five more glasses of porto and paid the same price, and drank them. After this they took a stroll up and down the street, and were bored, and went into the estaminet again, and ordered five more glasses of porto. It was then the trouble began. But it was not the Australian who began it. It was the woman behind the bar. She served five glasses more of porto and asked for thirty centimes each.
“Twenty centimes,” said the Australian. “Vingt, Madame.”
“Mais non! Trente centimes, chaque verre! Thirty, my old one. Six sous, comprenez?”
“No comprennye,” said the Australian. “Vingt centimes, or go to hell.”
The woman demanded the thirty centimes; kept on demanding with a voice more shrill.
“It was her voice that vexed me,” said the Australian. “That and the bloody injustice.”
The five Australians drank the five glasses of porto, and the tall Australian paid the thirty centimes each without further argument. Life is too short for argument. Then, without words, he took each of the five glasses, broke it at the stem, and dropped it over the counter.
“You will see, sir,” he said, gravely, “the justice of the matter on my side.”
But when they left the estaminet the woman came shrieking into the street after them. Hence the agent de police and the grasp on the Australian's wrist.
“I should be glad if you would explain the case to this little Frenchman,” said the soldier. “If he does not take his hand off my wrist I shall have to kill him.”
“Perhaps a little explanation might serve,” I said.
I spoke to the agent de police at some length, describing the incident in the cafe. I took the view that the lady was wrong in increasing the price so rapidly. The agent agreed gravely. I then pointed out that the Australian was a very large-sized man, and that in spite of his quietude he was a man in the habit of killing Germans. He also had a curious dislike of policemen.
“It appears to me,” I said, politely, “that for the sake of your health the other end of the street is better than this.”
The agent de police released his grip from the Australian's wrist and saluted me.
“Vous avez raison, monsieur. Je vous remercie. Ces Australiens sont vraiment formidables, n'est-ce pas?”
He disappeared through the crowd, who were smiling with a keen sense of understanding. Only the lady of the estaminet was unappeased.
“They are bandits, these Australians!” she said to the world about her.
The tall Australian shook hands with me in a comradely way.
“Thanks for your trouble,” he said. “It was the injustice I couldn't stick. I always pay the right price. I come from Australia.”
I watched him go slouching down the rue des Trois Cailloux, head above all the passers-by. He would be at Pozieres again next day.
I was billeted for a time with other war correspondents in an old house in the rue Amiral Courbet, on the way to the river Somme from the Street of the Three Pebbles, and with a view of the spire of the cathedral, a wonderful thing of delicate lines and tracery, graven with love in every line, by Muirhead Bone, and from my dormer window. It was the house of Mme. de la Rochefoucauld, who lived farther out of the town, but drove in now and then to look at this little mansion of hers at the end of a courtyard behind wrought-iron gates. It was built in the days before the Revolution, when it was dangerous to be a fine lady with the name of Rochefoucauld. The furniture was rather scanty, and was of the Louis Quinze and Empire periods. Some portraits of old gentlemen and ladies of France, with one young fellow in a scarlet coat, who might have been in the King's Company of the Guard about the time when Wolfe scaled the Heights of Abraham, summoned up the ghosts of the house, and I liked to think of them in these rooms and going in their sedan-chairs across the little courtyard to high mass at the cathedral or to a game of bezique in some other mansion, still standing in the quiet streets of Amiens, unless in a day in March of 1918 they were destroyed with many hundreds of houses by bombs and gun-fire. My little room was on the floor below the garret, and here at night, after a long day in the fields up by Pozieres or Martinpuich or beyond, by Ligny-Tilloy, on the way to Bapaume, in the long struggle and slaughter over every inch of ground, I used to write my day's despatch, to be taken next day (it was before we were allowed to use the military wires) by King's Messenger to England.
Those articles, written at high speed, with an impressionism born out of many new memories of tragic and heroic scenes, were interrupted sometimes by air-bombardments. Hostile airmen came often to Amiens during the Somme fighting, to unload their bombs as near to the station as they could guess, which was not often very near. Generally they killed a few women and children and knocked a few poor houses and a shop or two into a wild rubbish heap of bricks and timber. While I wrote, listening to the crashing of glass and the anti-aircraft fire of French guns from the citadel, I used to wonder subconsciously whether I should suddenly be hurled into chaos at the end of an unfinished sentence, and now and again in spite of my desperate conflict with time to get my message done (the censors were waiting for it downstairs) I had to get up and walk into the passage to listen to the infernal noise in the dark city of Amiens. But I went back again and bent over my paper, concentrating on the picture of war which I was trying to set down so that the world might see and understand, until once again, ten minutes later or so, my will-power would weaken and the little devil of fear would creep up to my heart and I would go uneasily to the door again to listen. Then once more to my writing... Nothing touched the house in the rue Amiral Courbet while we were there. But it was into my bedroom that a shell went crashing after that night in March when Amiens was badly wrecked, and we listened to the noise of destruction all around us from a room in the Hotel du Rhin on the other side of the way. I should have been sleeping still if I had slept that night in my little old bedroom when the shell paid a visit.
There were no lights allowed at night in Amiens, and when I think of darkness I think of that city in time of war, when all the streets were black tunnels and one fumbled one's way timidly, if one had no flash-lamp, between the old houses with their pointed gables, coming into sharp collision sometimes with other wayfarers. But up to midnight there were little lights flashing for a second and then going out, along the Street of the Three Pebbles and in the dark corners of side-streets. They were carried by girls seeking to entice English officers on their way to their billets, and they clustered like glowworms about the side door of the Hotel du Rhin after nine o'clock, and outside the railings of the public gardens. As one passed, the bright bull's-eye from a pocket torch flashed in one's eyes, and in the radiance of it one saw a girl's face, laughing, coming very close, while her fingers felt for one's badge.
“How dark it is to-night, little captain! Are you not afraid of darkness? I am full of fear. It is so sad, this war, so dismal! It is comradeship that helps one now!... A little love... a little laughter, and then—who knows?”
A little love... a little laughter—alluring words to boys out of one battle, expecting another, hating it all, lonely in their souls because of the thought of death, in exile from their own folk, in exile from all womanhood and tender, feminine things, up there in the ditches and shellcraters of the desert fields, or in the huts of headquarters staffs, or in reserve camps behind the fighting-line. A little love, a little laughter, and then—who knows? The sirens had whispered their own thoughts. They had translated into pretty French the temptation of all the little devils in their souls.
“Un peu d'amour-”
One flash-lamp was enough for two down a narrow street toward the riverside, and then up a little dark stairway to a lamp-lit room... Presently this poor boy would be stricken with disease and wish himself dead.