We walked silently towards the Boulevard de la Liberté, where Brand’s little crowd had established their headquarters.
“Perhaps they’re right,” he said presently. “Perhaps the hatred is divine.... I may be weakening, because of all the horror.”
Then he was silent again, and while I walked by his side I thought back to his career as I had known it in the war, rather well. He had always been tortured by agonised perplexities. I had guessed that by the look of the man and some of his odd phrases, and his restlessness and foolhardiness. It was in the trenches by Fricourt that I had first seen him—long before the battles of the Somme. He was sitting motionless on a wooden box, staring through a periscope towards the mine craters and the Bois Français in No Man’s Land. The fine hardness of his profile, the strength of his jaw, not massive, but with one clean line from ear to chin, and something in the utter intensity of his attitude, attracted my attention, and I asked the Colonel about him.
“Who is that fellow—like a Norman knight?”
The Colonel of the King’s Royal Rifles laughed as we went round the next bay, ducking our heads where the sandbags had slipped down.
“Further back than Norman,” he said. “He’s the primitive man.”
He told me that Wickham Brand—a lieutenant then—was a young barrister who had joined the battalion atthe beginning of ’15. He had taken up sniping and made himself a dead shot. He had the hunter’s instinct and would wait hours behind the sandbags for the sight of a German head in the trenches opposite. He seldom missed his man, or that part of his body which showed for a second. Lately he had taken to the habit of crawling out into No Man’s Land and waiting in some shell-hole for the dawn, when Germans came out to mend their wire or drag in a dead body. He generally left another dead man as a bait for the living. Then he would come back with a grim smile and eat his breakfast wolfishly, after cutting a notch in one of the beams of his dug-out.
“He’s a Hun-hater, body and soul,” said the Colonel. “We want more of ’em. All the same, Brand makes me feel queer by his ferocity. I like a humourous fellow who does his killing cheerfully.”
After that I met Brand and took a drink with him in his dug-out. He answered my remarks gruffly for a time.
“I hear you go in for sniping a good deal,” I said, by way of conversation.
“Yes. It’s murder made easy.”
“Do you get many targets?”
“It’s a waiting game. Sometimes they get careless.”
He puffed at a black old pipe, quite silent for a time. Presently he told me about a “young’un” who popped his head over the parapet, twice, to stare at something on the edge of the mine-crater.
“I spared him twice. The third time I said, ‘Better dead,’ and let go at him. The kid was too easy to miss.”
Something in the tone of his voice told me that he hated himself for that.
“Rather a pity,” I mumbled.
“War,” he said. “Bloody war.”
There was a candle burning on the wooden bench onwhich he leaned his elbow, and by the light of it I saw that his eyes were bloodshot. There was a haggard look on his face.
“It must need some nerve,” I said, awkwardly, “to go out so often in No Man’s Land. Real pluck.”
He stared at me, as though surprised, and then laughed harshly.
“Pluck? What’s that? I’m scared stiff, half the time. Do you think I like it?”
He seemed to get angry, was angry, I think.
“Do any of us like it? These damn things that blow men to bits, make rags of them, tear their bowels out, and their eyes? Or to live on top of a mine-crater, as we are now, never knowing when you’re going up in smoke and flame? If you like that sort of thing yourself you can take my share. I have never met a man who did.”
Yet when Brand was taken out of the trenches—by a word spoken over the telephone from corps Headquarters—because of his knowledge of German and his cousinship to a lady who was a friend of the Corps Commander’s niece, he was miserable and savage. I met him many times after that as an Intelligence officer at the corps cages, examining prisoners on days of battle.
“Anembusquéjob!” he said. “I’m saving my skin while the youngsters die.”
He stood outside his hut one day on a morning of battle in the Somme fields—up by Pozières. No prisoners had yet come down. He forgot my presence and stood listening to the fury of gun-fire and watching the smoke and flame away there on the ridge.
“Christ!” he cried. “Why am I here? Why aren’t I with my pals up there, getting blown to blood and pulp? Blood and pulp! Blood and pulp!”
Then he remembered me, and turned in a shamefaced way, and said, “Sorry!... I feel rather hipped to-day.”
I was present sometimes at his examination of prisoners—those poor grey muddy wretches who come dazed out of the slime and shambles. Sometimes he bullied them harshly, in fluent German, and they trembled at his ferocity of speech, even whimpered now and then. But once or twice he was in quite a different mood with them and spoke gently, assenting when they cursed the war and its misery and said that all they wanted was peace and home again.
“Aren’t you fellows going to revolt?” he asked one man—aFeldwebel. “Aren’t you going to tell your war lords to go to Hell and stop all this silly massacre before Germany iskaput?”
The German shrugged his shoulders.
“We would if we could. It is impossible. Discipline is too strong for us. It has enslaved us.”
“That’s true,” said Brand. “You are slaves of a system.”
He spoke a strange sentence in English as he glanced over to me.
“I am beginning to think we are all slaves of a system. None of us can break the chains.”
It was after that day that Brand took a fancy to me, for some reason, inviting me to his mess, where I met Charles Fortune and others, and it was there that I heard amazing discussions about the philosophy of war, German psychology, the object of life, the relation of Christianity to war, and the decadence of Europe. Brand himself sometimes led these discussions, with a savage humour which delighted Charles Fortune, who egged him on. He was always pessimistic, sceptical, challenging, bitter, and now and then so violent in his criticisms of England, the Government, the Army Council, the Staff, and above all of the Press, that most of his fellow-officers—apartfrom Fortune—thought he went “a bit too far.”
Dear old Harding, who was Tory to the backbone, with a deep respect for all in authority, accused him of being a “damned revolutionary” and for a moment it looked as though there would be hot words, until Brand laughed in a good-natured way and said, “My dear fellow, I’m only talking academic rot. I haven’t a conviction. Ever since the war began I have been trying to make head or tail of things in a sea-fog of doubt. All I know is that I want the bloody orgy to end; somehow and anyhow.”
“With victory,” said Harding solemnly.
“With the destruction of Prussian philosophy everywhere,” said Brand.
They agreed on that, but I could see that Brand was on shifting ground and I knew, as our friendship deepened, that he was getting beyond a religion of mere hate, and was looking for some other kind of faith. Occasionally he harked back, as on the day in Lille when I walked by his side.
I dined with him in his mess that evening, before going on with him to spend an hour or two with Eileen O’Connor, who had a room in some convent on the outskirts of Lille. The advanced headquarters of this little group of officers had been established in one of those big private houses which belong to the rich manufacturers and business people of Lille (rich before the war, but with desolate factories stripped of all machinery during the German occupation, and afterwards), with large, heavily-furnished rooms built round a courtyard and barred off from the street by the big front door. There was a motor lorry inside the door, which was wide open, and some orderlies were unloading camp-beds, boxes of maps, officers’ kit, a mahogany gramophone, and other paraphernalia, under the direction of a young Cockney sergeant who wanted to know why the blazes they didn’t look slippy.
“Don’t you know there’s a war on?” he asked a stolid old soldier—one of the heroes of Mons—who was sitting on a case of whiskey, with a wistful look, as though reflecting on the unfair privileges of officers with so much wealth of drink.
“War’s all right if you’re not too close to it,” said the Mons hero. “I’ve seen enough. I’ve done my bleeding bit for Kin and Country. South Africa, Egypt——”
“Shut your jaw,” said the sergeant. “’And down that blarsted gramophone.”
“Ah!” said the Mons hero. “We didn’t ’ave no blarsted gramophones in South Africa. This is a different kind ofwar. More comfort about it, if you’re not in the trenches.”
Wickham Brand took me through the courtyard and mentioned that the Colonel had come up from St. Omer.
“Now we’re sure to beat the Boche,” he said. “Listen!”
From a room to the left of the courtyard came the sound of a flute playing one of Bach’s minuets, very sweetly, with an old-fashioned grace.
“A wonderful Army of ours!” said Brand. “I can’t imagine a German colonel of the Staff playing seventeenth-century music on a bit of ivory, while the enemy is fighting like a tiger at bay.”
“Perhaps that’s our strength,” I answered. “Our amateurs refuse to take the war too seriously. I know a young Gunner Major who travels a banjo in his limber, and at Cambrai I saw fellows playing chuck-penny within ten yards of their pals’ dead bodies—a pile of them.”
The Colonel saw us through his window and waved his flute at us. When I went into the room, after a salute at the doorway, I saw that he had already littered it with artistic untidiness—sheets of torn music, water-colour sketches, books of poetry, and an array of splendid shining boots; of which a pair stood on the mahogany sideboard.
“A beautiful little passage this,” said Colonel Lavington, smiling at me over the flute, which he put to his lips again. He played a bar or two of old world melody, and said, “Isn’t that perfect? Can’t you see the little ladies in their puffed brocades and high-heeled shoes!”
He had his faun-like look, his clean-shaven face with long nose and thin, humorous mouth, lighted up by his dark smiling eyes.
“Not a bad headquarters,” he said, putting down the flute again. “If we can only stay here a little while, instead of having to jog on again. There’s an excellentpiano in the dining-room—German, thank goodness—and Charles Fortune and I can really get down to some serious music.”
“How’s the war?” I asked.
“War?” he said, absent-mindedly. “Oh, yes, the war! That’s going on all right. They’ll be out of Tournai in a few days. Perhaps out of Maubeuge and Mons. Oh, the game’s up! Very soon the Intellectuals will be looking round for a living in dear old London. My goodness, some of us will find peace a difficult job! I can see Boredom approaching with its colossal shadow.... After all, it has been a great game, on the whole.”
I laughed, but something stuck in my throat. Colonel Lavington played the flute, but he knew his job, and was in touch with General Headquarters and all its secret information. It was obvious that he believed the war was going to end—soon. Soon, O Lord, after all the years of massacre.
I blurted out a straight question.
“Do you think there’s a real chance of Peace?”
The Colonel was reading a piece of music, humming it with ala,la,la.
“Another month, and our job’s done,” he said. “Have you heard that bit of Gluck? It’s delicious.”
I stayed with him a little while and did not follow a note of his music. I was excited by the supreme hope he had given me. So there was to be an end of massacre, and my own hopes had not been false.
At the mess table that night, Charles Fortune was in good form. We sat in a room which was rather handsomely furnished, in a heavy way, with big bronzes on the mantelpiece (ticketed for exemption from requisition as family heirlooms), and even rather good portraits of a French family—from the eighteenth century onwards—on the panelled walls. The concierge had told us thatit had been the mess of a German headquarters and this gave Fortune his cue, and he entertained us with some caricatures of German generals and officers, amazingly comic. He drank his soup in the style of a German general and ate his potato pie as a German Intelligence officer who had once been a professor of psychology at Heidelberg.
The little American doctor, “Daddy” Small as we called him, had been made an honorary member of the mess, and he smiled at Fortune through his spectacles with an air of delighted surprise that such things should be.
“You English,” he said in his solemn way, “are the most baffling people in the world. I have been studying you since I came to France, and all my preconceived ideas have been knocked on the head. We Americans think you are a hard, arrogant, selfish people, without humour or sympathy, made in set moulds, turned out as types from your University and public schools. That is all wrong. I am beginning to see that you are more human, more various, more whimsical than any race in the world. You decline to take life seriously. You won’t take even death seriously. This war—you make a joke of it. The Germans—you kill them in great numbers, but you have a secret liking for them. Fortune’s caricatures are very comical—but not unkind. I believe Fortune is a pro-German. You cannot laugh at the people you hate. I believe England will forgive Germany quicker than any other nation—far quicker than the Americans. France, of course, will never forgive.”
“No,” said Pierre Nesle, who was at the end of the table. “France will never forgive.”
“We are an illogical people,” said the Colonel. “It is only logical people who can go on hating. Besides, German music is so good! So good!”
Harding, who read no paper but theMorning Post, said that as far as he was concerned he would never speak to a German again in his life. He would like to see the whole race exterminated. But he was afraid of the Socialists with their pestilential doctrine of “brotherhood of man.” Lloyd George also filled him with the gravest misgivings.
Dr. Small’s eyes twinkled at him.
“There is the old caste that speaks. Tradition against the new world of ideas. Of course there will always bethatconflict.... That is a wonderful phrase, ‘the pestilential doctrine of the brotherhood of man.’ I must make a note of it.”
“Shame on you, Doctor,” said Fortune. “You are always jotting down notes about us. I shall find myself docketed as ‘English gentleman grade 3; full-blooded, inclined to obesity, humourous, strain of insanity due to in-breeding, rare.’”
Dr. Small laughed in a high treble, and then was serious.
“I’m noting down everything. My own psychology, which alarms me; facts, anecdotes, scenes, words. I want to find a law somewhere, the essential thing in human nature. After the war—if there is any afterwards—I want to search for a way out of the jungle. This jungle civilisation. There must be daylight somewhere for the human race.”
“If you find it,” said Brand, earnestly, “tell me, Doctor.”
“I will,” said Dr. Small, and I remembered that pledge afterwards, when he and Brand were together in a doomed city, trying to avert the doom, because of that impulse which urged them to find a little daylight beyond the darkness.
Young Clatworthy jerked his chair on the polishedboards and looked anxiously at the Colonel, who was discoursing on the origins of art, religion, sex, the perception of form.
Colonel Lavington grinned at him.
“All right, Cyril. I know you have got a rendezvous with some girl. Don’t let us keep you from your career of infamy.”
“As a matter of fact, sir, I met a sweet little thing yesterday——” Clatworthy knew that his reputation as an amorist did not displease the Colonel, who was a romantic, and loved youth.
In a gust of laughter the mess broke up. Charles Fortune and the Colonel prepared for an orgy of Bach over the piano in the drawing-room of that house in Lille. Those who cared to listen might—or not, as they pleased. Brand and I went out into the streets, pitch-dark now, unlit by any glimmer of gas, and made our way to the convent where the girl Eileen O’Connor lodged. We passed a number of British soldiers in the Boulevard de la Liberté, wearing their steel hats and carrying their packs.
A group of them stopped under a doorway to light cigarettes. One of them spoke to his pals.
“They tell me there’s some bonny wenches in this town.”
“Ay,” said another, “an’ I could do wi’ some hugging in a cosy billet.”
“Cosy billet!” said the third, with a cockney voice. “Town or trenches, the poor bloody soldier gets it in the neck. Curse this pack! I’m fed up with the whole damn show. I want Peace.”
A hoarse laugh answered him.
“Peace! You don’t believe that fool’s talk in the papers, chum? It’s a hell of a long way to theRhine, and you and I’ll be dead before we get there.”
They slouched off into the darkness, three points of light where their cigarettes glowed.
“Poor lads!” said Brand.
We fumbled our way to a street on the edge of the canal, according to Brand’s uncanny sense of direction and his remembrance of what the Irish girl had told him. There we found the convent, a square box-like building behind big gates. We pulled a bell which jangled loudly, and presently the gate opened an inch, letting through the light of a lantern which revealed the black-and-white coif of a nun.
“Qui va là?”
Brand told her that we had come to see Miss O’Connor, and the gate was opened wider and we went into the courtyard, where a young nun stood smiling. She spoke in English.
“We were always frightened when the bell rang during the German occupation. One never knew what might happen. And we were afraid for Miss O’Connor’s sake.”
“Why?” asked Brand.
The little nun laughed.
“She did dangerous work. They suspected her. She came here after her arrest. Before then she had rooms of her own. Oh, messieurs, her courage, her devotion! Truly she was heroic!”
She led us into a long corridor with doors on each side, and out of one door came a little group of nuns with Eileen O’Connor.
The Irish girl came towards us with outstretched hands which she gave first to Brand. She seemed excited at our coming and explained that the Reverend Motherand all the nuns wanted to see us, to thank England by means of us, to hear something about the war and the chance of victory from the first English officers they had seen.
Brand was presented to the Reverend Mother, a massive old lady with a slight moustache on the upper lip and dark luminous eyes, reminding me of the portrait of Savonarola at Florence. The other nuns crowded round us, eager to ask questions, still more eager to talk. Some of them were quite young and pretty, though all rather white and fragile, and they had a vivacious gaiety, so that the building resounded with laughter. It was Eileen O’Connor who made them laugh by her reminiscences of girlhood when she and Brand were “enfants terribles,” when she used to pull Brand’s hair and hide the pipe he smoked too soon. She asked him to take off his field-cap so that she might see whether the same old unruly tuft still stuck up at the back of his head, and she and all the nuns clapped hands when she found it was so, in spite of war-worry and steel hats. All this had to be translated into French for the benefit of those who could not understand such rapid English.
“I believe you would like to give it a tug now,” said Brand, bending his head down, and Eileen O’Connor agreed.
“And indeed I would, but for scandalising a whole community of nuns, to say nothing of Reverend Mother.”
The Reverend Mother laughed in a curiously deep voice, and a crowd of little wrinkles puckered at her eyes. She told Miss O’Connor that even her Irish audacity would not go as far as that, which was a challenge accepted on the instant.
“One little tug, for old times’ sake,” said the girl, and Brand yelped with pretended pain at the vigour of her pull, while all the nuns screamed with delight.
Then a clock struck and the Reverend Mother touched Eileen (as afterwards I called her) on the arm and said she would leave her with her friends. One by one the nuns bowed to us, all smiling under their whitebandeaux, and then went down the corridor through an open door which led into a chapel, as we could see by twinkling candlelight. Presently the music of an organ and of women’s voices came through the closed doors.
Eileen O’Connor took us into a little parlour where there were just four rush-chairs and a table, and on the clean whitewashed walls a crucifix.
Brand took a chair by the table, rather awkwardly, I thought.
“How gay they are!” he said. “They do not seem to have been touched by the horrors of war.”
“It is the gaiety of faith,” said Eileen. “How else could they have survived the work they have done, the things they have seen? This convent was a shambles for more than three years. These rooms were filled with wounded, German wounded, and often English wounded, who were prisoners. They were the worst cases for amputation, and butcher’s work, and the nuns did all the nursing. They know all there is to know of suffering and death.”
“Yet they have not forgotten how to laugh!” said Brand. “That is wonderful. It is a mystery to me.”
“You must have seen bad things,” said Eileen. “Have you lost the gift of laughter?”
“Almost,” said Brand, “and once for a long time.”
Eileen put her hands to her breast.
“Oh, learn it again,” she said. “If we cannot laugh we cannot work. Why, I owe my life to a sense of humour.”
She spoke the last words with more than a trivialmeaning. They seemed to tell of some singular episode, and Brand asked her to explain.
She did not explain then. She only said some vague things about laughing herself out of prison and stopping a German bullet with a smile.
“Why did the devils put you in prison?” asked Brand.
She shrugged her shoulders.
“In Lille it was bad form if one had not been arrested once at least. I was three weeks in a cell half the size of this, and twenty women were with me there. There was very little elbow-room!”
She proved her sense of humour then by that deep-throated laugh of hers, but I noticed that just for a second behind the smile in her eyes there crept a shadow as at the remembrance of some horror, and that she shivered a little, as though some coldness had touched her.
“It must have been like the Black Hole of Calcutta,” said Brand, measuring the space with his eyes. “Twenty women herded in a room like that!”
“With me for twenty-one,” said Eileen. “We had no means of washing.”
She used an awful phrase.
“We were a living stench.”
“Good God!” said Brand.
Eileen O’Connor waved back the remembrance. “Tell me of England and of Ireland. How’s the little green isle? Has it done well in the war?”
“The Irish troops fought like heroes,” said Brand. “But there were not enough of them. Recruiting was slow, and there was—some trouble.”
He did not speak about the Irish Rebellion.
“I heard about it vaguely, from prisoners,” said the girl. “It was England’s fault, I expect. Dear old blundering, muddle-headed England, who is a tyrant through fear, and twists Irish loyalty into treason by ropes ofred-tape in which the Irish mind gets strangled and awry. Well, there’s another subject to avoid. I want to hear only good things to-night. Tell me of London, of Kensington Gardens, of the way from the Strand to Temple Bar, of the lights that gleam along the Embankment when lovers go hand-in-hand and see stars in the old black river. Are they all there?”
“They are all changed,” said Brand. “It is a place of gloom. There are no lights along the Embankment. They have dowsed their glims for fear of air-raids. There are few lovers hand-in-hand. Some of the boys lie dead round Ypres, or somewhere on the Somme, or weep out of blind eyes, or gibber in shell-shock homes, or try to hop on one leg—while waiting for artificial limbs,—or trudge on, to-night, towards Maubeuge, where German machine-guns wait for them behind the ditches. Along the Strand goes the Painted Flapper, luring men to hell. In Kensington Gardens there are training camps for more boys ear-marked for the shambles, and here and there among the trees young mothers who are widows before they knew their wifehood. There is vice, the gaiety of madness, the unspeakable callousness of people who get rich on war, or earn fat wages, and in small stricken homes a world of secret grief. That is London in time of war. I hate it.”
Brand spoke with bitterness and a melancholy that startled the girl who sat with folded hands below the crucifix on the whitewashed wall behind her.
“Dear God! Is it like that?”
She stared at the wall opposite as though it were a window through which she saw London.
“Yes, of course it is like that. Here in Lille we thought we were suffering more than anybody in the world. That was our egotism. We did not realise—not in our souls—that everywhere in the world of war therewas equal suffering, the same cruelty, perhaps the same temptation to despair.”
Brand repented, I think, of having led the conversation into such abysmal gloom. He switched off to more cheerful things and gave some elaborate sketches of soldiers he knew, to which Eileen played up with anecdotes of rare comedy about the nuns—the fat nun who under the rigour of war rations became as slim as a willow and was vain of her new grace; the little French nun who had no fear of German officers and dared their fury by prophecies of defeat—but was terrified of a mouse in the refectory; the Reverend Mother, who borrowed a safety-razor from an English Tommy—he had hidden it in his shirt—to shave her upper lip, lest the Germans should think her a Frenchpoiluin disguise.
More interesting to me than anything that was said were the things unspoken by Eileen and Brand. In spite of the girl’s easy way of laughter, her quick wit, her avoidance, if possible, of any reference to her own suffering, I seemed to see in her eyes and in her face the strain of a long ordeal, some frightful adventure of life in which she had taken great hazards—the people had told me she had risked her life, often—and a woman’s courage which had been tested by that experience and had not failed, though perhaps at breaking-point in the worst hours. I supposed her age was twenty-six or so (I guessed it right this side of a year), but there was already a streak of grey in her dark hair, and her eyes, so smiling as a rule, looked as if they had often wept. I think the presence of Brand was a great pleasure to her—bringing to Lille a link with her childhood—and I saw that she was studying the personality of this newly-found friend of hers, and the strong character of his face, not unscathed by the touch of war, with curious, penetrating interest. I felt in the way, and left themtogether with a fair excuse—I had always work to do—and I was pleased that I did so, they were so obviously glad to have a more intimate talk about old friends and old times.
I gained by my unselfishness (I did not want to go), for the Reverend Mother met me in the corridor and stood talking to me about Eileen O’Connor, and told me part of the girl’s story, which I found strange in its drama, though she left out the scene of greatest interest, as I heard later from Eileen herself.
The girl had come to Lille just before the war, as an art-mistress in an “École de Jeunes Filles” (her parents in Kensington had too big a family to keep them all), with lessons twice a week at the convent, and private pupils in her own rooms. She learned to speak French quickly and charmingly, and her gift of humour, her Irish frankness and comradeship made her popular among her pupils, so that she had many invitations to their homes and became well known in the best houses of Lille—mostly belonging to rich manufacturers. A commonplace story till then! But when the Germans occupied Lille this Irish girl became one of the chief characters in a drama that was exciting and fantastic to the point of melodrama. It was she who organised the Lille branch of a secret society of women, with a network all over northern France and Belgium—the world remembers Nurse Cavell at Brussels—for the escape of young civilians of military age and prisoners of war, combining that work (frightfully perilous) with espionage on German movements of troops and knowledge that might be of value to the Belgian Army, and through them to England and France. It was out of an old book ofJules Verne called “The Cryptogram” that she copied the cypher in which she wrote her messages (in invisible ink on linen handkerchiefs and rags), and she had an audacity of invention in numberless small tricks and plots which constantly broke through the meshes of the German network of military police.
“She had a contempt for their stupidity,” said the Reverend Mother. “Called them dunderheads, and one strange word of which I do not know the meaning—‘yobs’—and I trembled at the risks she took.”
She lived with one maid in two rooms on the ground floor of a house near the Jardin d’Eté, the rest of the house being used as the headquarters of the German Intelligence Section of the Northern District. All day long officers went in and out, and by day and night there were always sentries at the door. Yet it was there that was established also the headquarters of the Rescue Committee. It was on account of her Irish name and parentage that Eileen O’Connor was permitted to remain in the two rooms to the left of the courtyard, entered by a separate door. The German Kommandant was a man who firmly believed that the Irish nation was ready to break out into revolt against the English, and that all Irish—men and women—hated the British Empire as much as any Prussian. Eileen O’Connor played up to thisidée fixe, saw the value of it as a wonderful means of camouflage, lent the Kommandant books on Irish history dealing with the injustice of England to Ireland (in which she firmly believed as a staunch Nationalist), and educated him so completely to the belief that she was anti-English (as she was in politics, though not in war) that he had no doubt of her.
Here the Reverend Mother made a remark which seemed to illuminate Eileen O’Connor’s story, as well as her own knowledge of human nature.
“The child has beautiful eyes and a most sweet grace. Irish history may not account for all.”
“This German Kommandant——” I asked, “what sort of a man was he?”
“For a German not altogether bad,” said the Reverend Mother. “Severe and ruthless, like them all, but polite when there was no occasion to be violent. He was of good family, as far as there are such things in Germany. A man of sixty.”
Eileen O’Connor, with German permission, continued her work as art-mistress at theÉcole de Jeunes Filles. After six months she was permitted to receive private pupils in her two rooms on the ground floor of the Intelligence headquarters, in the same courtyard though not in the same building. Her pupils came with drawing-boards and paint-boxes. They were all girls with pig-tails and short frocks—not so young as they looked, because three or four at least, including the Baronne de Villers-Auxicourt, were older than schoolgirls. They played the part perfectly, and the sentries smiled at them and said “Guten Tag, schönes Fräulein,” as each one passed. They were the committee of the Rescue Society:
Julienne de Quesnoy,
Marcelle Barbier,
Yvonne Marigny,
Marguérite Cléry, and Alice de Taffin, de Villers-Auxicourt.
Eileen O’Connor was the director and leading spirit. It seems to me astonishing that they should have arranged the cypher, practised it, written down military information gathered from German conversations and reported to them by servants and agents under the very noses of the German Intelligence officers, who could see into the sitting-room as they passed through French windows and saluted Eileen O’Connor and her young ladiesif they happened to meet their eyes. It is more astonishing that, at different times, and one at a time, many fugitives (including five British soldiers who had escaped from the citadel) slept in the cellar beneath that room, changed into German uniforms belonging to men who had died at the convent hospital—the Reverend Mother did that part of the plot—and walked quietly out in the morning by an underground passage leading to the Jardin d’Eté. The passage had been anciently built but was blocked up at one end by Eileen O’Connor’s cellar, and she and the other women broke the wall, one brick at a time, until after three months the hole was made. Their finger-nails suffered in the process, and they were afraid that the roughness of their hands might be noticed by the officers, but in spite of German spectacles they saw nothing of that. Eileen O’Connor and her friends were in constant touch with the prisoners of the Citadel and smuggled food to them. That was easy. It was done by bribing the German sentries with tobacco and meat-pies. They were also in communication with other branches of the work in Belgium, so that fugitives were passed on from town to town, and house to house. Their success made them confident, after many horrible fears, and for a time they were lulled into a sense of security. That was rudely crashed when Eileen O’Connor, the young Baronne de Villers-Auxicourt, and Marcelle Barbier were arrested one morning in September of ’17, on a charge of espionage. They were put into separate cells of the civil prison, crowded with the vilest women of the slums and stews, and suffered something like torture because of the foul atmosphere, the lack of sanitation, and unspeakable abomination.
“Only the spirit of Christian martyrdom could remain cheerful in such terrible conditions,” said the Reverend Mother. “Our dear Eileen was sustained by a greatfaith and wonderful gaiety. Her laughter, her jokes, her patience, her courage, were an inspiration even to the poor degraded women who were prisoners with her. They worshipped her. We, her friends, gave her up for lost, though we prayed unceasingly that she might escape death. Then she was brought to trial.”
She stood alone in the court. The young Baronne de Villers-Auxicourt had died in prison owing to the shock of her arrest and a weak heart. A weak heart, though so brave. Eileen was not allowed to see her on her death-bed, but she sent a message almost with her last breath. It was the one word “courage!” Mlle. Marcelle Barbier was released before the trial, for lack of direct evidence.
Eileen’s trial was famous in Lille. The court was crowded and the German military tribunal could not suppress the loud expressions of sympathy and admiration which greeted her, nor the angry murmurs which interrupted the prosecuting officer. She stood there, wonderfully calm, between two soldiers with fixed bayonets. She looked very young and innocent between her guards, and it is evident that her appearance made a favourable impression on the court. The President, after peering at her through his horn spectacles, was not so ferocious in his manner as usual when he bade her be seated.
The evidence seemed very strong against her. “She is lost” was the belief of all her friends in court. One of the sentries at the Citadel, jealously savage because another man had received more tobacco than himself—on such a trivial thing did this girl’s life hang!—betrayed the system by which the women’s committee sent food to the French and English prisoners. He gave the names of three of the ladies and described Eileen O’Connor as the ringleader. The secret police watched her, and searched her rooms at night. They discovered the cypher and the key, a list of men who had escaped, and threeGerman uniforms in a secret cupboard. They had been aided in their search by Lieutenant Franz von Kreuzenach of the Intelligence Bureau, who was the chief witness of the prosecution, and whose name was recommended to the Court for the vigilance and zeal he had shown in the detection of the conspiracy against the Army and the Fatherland. It was he who had found the secret cupboard and had solved the key to the cypher.
“We will take the lieutenant’s evidence in due course,” said the President. “Does that complete the indictment against this prisoner?”
Apart from a savage elaboration of evidence based upon the facts presented and a demand that the woman’s guilt, if the Court were satisfied thereon, should be punished by death, the preliminary indictment by the prosecution ended.
It was a terrible case, and during its revelations the people in court were stricken with dread and pity for the girl who was now sitting between the two soldiers. They were all staring at her, and some at least—the Reverend Mother among them—noticed with surprise that when the officer for the prosecution ended his speech she drew a deep breath, raised her head, as though some weight of fear had been lifted from her, and—laughed.
It was quite a merry laugh, with that full blackbird note of hers, and the sound of it caused a strange sensation in the court. The President blinked repeatedly, like an owl blinded by a ray of sunlight. He addressed the prisoner in heavy, barbarous French.
“You are charged with conspiracy against our German martial law. The punishment is death. It is no laughing matter, Fräulein.”
They were stern words, but there was a touch of pity in that last sentence.
“Ce n’est pas une affaire pour rire, Fräulein.”
Eileen O’Connor, said the Reverend Mother, who was to be called as a witness on her behalf, bowed in a gracious way to the President, but with a look of amusement that was amazing to the German officers assembled for her trial. Some of them scowled, but there were others, the younger men, who whispered, and smiled also with no attempt to disguise their admiration of such courage.
“Perhaps it was only I,” said the Reverend Mother, “who understood the child’s joyous relief which gave her this courage. I had waited with terrible dread for the announcement of the discovery of the secret passage. That it had been discovered I knew, for the German lieutenant, Franz von Kreuzenach, had come round to me and very sternly questioned me about a case of medicine which he had found there, stamped with the name of our convent.”
“Then,” I said, “this Franz von Kreuzenach must have suppressed some of the evidence. By what motive——”
The Reverend Mother interrupted me, putting her hand on my sleeve with a touch of protest.
“The good God works through strange instruments, and may touch the hardest heart with His grace. It was indeed a miracle.”
I would give much to have been in that court at Lille when Eileen O’Connor was permitted to question the German lieutenant who was the chief witness against her.
From what I have heard, not only from the Reverend Mother, but from other people of Lille who were present at the trial, she played with this German officer, making him look very foolish, ridiculing him in a merry, contemptuous way before the Court. Indeed he seemed strangely abashed before her.
“The cypher!... Have you ever been a schoolboy, or were you born a lieutenant in the German Army?”
Franz von Kreuzenach admitted that he had once been a boy—to the amusement of his brother-officers.
Had he ever read stories of adventure, fairy-tales, romances, or did he spend his childhood in the study of Nietzsche, Hegel, Schopenhauer, Kant, Goethe, von Bernhardi, Karl Marx——
When she strung off these names—so incongruous in association—even the President permitted a slight smile to twist his thin hard mouth.
Franz von Kreuzenach said that he had read some fairy-tales and stories of adventure. Might he ask thegnädiges Fräulein——
“Yes,” said the President, “what has this to do with your case, Fräulein? I desire to give you full liberty in your defence but this is entirely irrelevant to the evidence.”
“It is my case!” cried Miss O’Connor. “Listen to the next question, Herr President. It is the key of my defence.”
Her next question caused laughter in court.
“I ask the Herr Lieutenant whether, as a boy, or a young man, he has read the romances of the French writer, Jules Verne?”
Franz von Kreuzenach looked abashed, and blushed like a schoolboy. His eyes fell before the challenging look of the Irish girl.
“I have read some novels by Jules Verne, in German translations.”
“Oh, in German translations—of course!” said Miss O’Connor. “German boys do not learn French very well.”
“Keep to the case,” said the President. “In Heaven’s name, Fräulein, what has this to do with your defence?”
She raised her hand, for patience, and said, “Herr President, my innocence will soon be clear.”
She demanded of the witness for the prosecution whether he had ever read the novel by Jules Verne called “The Cryptogram.” He said that he had read it only a few days ago. He had discovered it in her room.
Eileen O’Connor turned round eagerly to the President.
“I demand the production of that book.”
An orderly was sent to the lieutenant’s rooms to fetch it. It was clear that the President of the Court made a black mark against Franz von Kreuzenach for not having mentioned its discovery to the Court. As yet, however, he could not see the bearing of it on the case.
Then, with the book in her hand, Eileen O’Connor turned to the famous cryptogram, showed how it corresponded exactly with her own cypher, proved that the pieces of paper found in her rooms were copies of the Jules Verne cypher in the handwriting of her pupils.
“You see, Herr President!” she cried eagerly.
The President admitted that this was proved, but, as he asked, leaning forward in his chair, for what purpose had they copied out that cypher? Cyphers were dangerous things to write in time of war. Deadly things. Why did these ladies want to learn the cypher?
It was then that Eileen O’Connor was most brilliant. She described in a simple and girlish way how she and her pupils worked in their little room. While they copied freehand models, one of them read out to the others, books of romance, love, adventure, to forget the gloom of life and the tragedy of war. One of those books was Jules Verne’s “Cryptogram.” It had fascinated them. It had made them forget the misery of war. They were romantic girls, imaginative girls. Out of sheer merriment, to pass the hours, they had tried to work out the cypher. They had written love-letters to imaginary young men in those secret numbers. Here Eileen, smilingironically, read out specimens of the letters that had been found.
“Come to the corner of the rue Esquermoise at 9:45. You will know me because I shall be wearing a blue bow in a black hat.”
That was the romantic imagination of the Baronne de Villers-Auxicourt.
“When you see a lady standing outside the Jardin d’Eté, with a little brown dog, speak to her in French and say, ‘Comme il fait froid aujourd’hui, mademoiselle.’ If she answers, ‘Je ne vous comprends pas, monsieur,’ you will understand that she is to be trusted, and you must follow her.”
That was a romantic idea to which Eileen herself pleaded guilty.
“Herr President,” said Eileen, “you cannot put old heads on young shoulders, even in time of war. A party of girls will let their foolish little minds run upon ideas of love, even when the sound of guns is not far away. You, Herr President, will understand that perfectly.”
Perhaps there was something in the character of the President that made this a chance hit. All the German officers laughed, and the President shifted in his seat and flushed to the top of his bald, vulture-like head.
The possession of those German uniforms was also explained in the prettiest way by Eileen O’Connor. They were uniforms belonging to three handsome young German soldiers who had died in hospital. They had kept them to return to their mothers after the war, those poor German mothers who were weeping for their sons.... This part of her defence touched the German officers deeply. One of them had tears in his eyes.
The list of escaped fugitives was harder to explain, but again an Irish imagination succeeded in giving it an innocent significance. It had been compiled by a prisonerin the Citadel and given to Eileen as a proof that his own hope of escape was not in vain, though she had warned him of the fearful risk. “The poor man gave me the list in sheer simplicity, and in innocence I kept it.”
Simply and touchingly she admitted her guilt in smuggling food to French and British prisoners and to German sentries, and claimed that her fault was only against military regulations, but in humanity was justified.
“I am Irish,” she said. “I have in my heart the remembrance of English crimes to Ireland—old, unforgettable crimes that still cry out for the justice and the liberty which are denied my country.”
Some of the younger German officers shook their heads approvingly. They liked this Irish hatred of England. It was according to their text-books.
“But,” said the Irish girl, “the sufferings of English prisoners—you know here of their misery, their hunger, their weakness in that Citadel where many have died and are dying—stirred my compassion as a woman to whom all cruelty is tragic, and all suffering of men a call to that mother-love which is in the spirit of all their womanhood, as you know by your German women—as I hope you know. Because they were starved I tried to get them food, as I would to starving dogs or any poor creatures caught in the trap of war, or of men’s sport. To that I confess guilty, with gladness in my guilt.”
The Reverend Mother, standing there in the whitewashed corridor of the convent, in the flickering light of an oil lantern which gleamed on the white ruff round her neck and the silver cross on her breast, though her face was shadowed in the cavern of her black headdress, repeated this speech of Eileen O’Connor as though in hearing it first she had learnt it by heart.
“The child was divinely inspired, monsieur. Our Lady stood by her side, prompting her. I am sure of that.”
The trial lengthened out, until it was late in the evening when the Judge summed up. He spoke again of the gravity of the accusation, the dread punishment that must befall the prisoner if her guilt were proved, the weight of evidence against her. For a time he seemed to press her guilt heavily, and the Court was gloomy. The German officers looked grave. One thing happened in the course of his speech which affected the audience profoundly. It was when he spoke of the romantic explanation that had been offered by the prisoner regarding the secret cypher.
“This lady,” he said, “asks me to believe that she and her companions were playing a simple girlish game of make-believe. Writing imaginary letters to mythical persons. Were these young ladies—nay, is she—herself—so lacking in woman’s charm that she has no living man to love her and needs must write fictitious notes to nonexistent men?”
The President said these words with portentous solemnity. Perhaps only a German could have spoken them. He paused and blinked at the German officers below him. Suddenly into the silence of the court came a ripple of laughter, clear and full of most mirthful significance.
Eileen O’Connor’s laugh bewitched the crowded court and there was a roar of laughter in which all the officers joined. By that laugh more even than by her general gaiety, her courage and eloquence, she won her life.
“I said a decade of the rosary to our Blessed Lady,” said the Reverend Mother, “and thanked God that this dear child’s life would not be taken. I was certain that those men would not condemn her to death. She was acquitted on the charge of espionage, and sentenced to two weeks’ imprisonment for smuggling food to prisoners, by a verdict of seven against three. Only when sheleft the court did she fall into so deep a swoon that for a little while we thought her dead.”
The Reverend Mother had told her story well. She held me in a deep strained interest. It was rather to myself than to her that I spoke the words which were my comment at the end of this narrative.
“How splendid!... But I am puzzled about that German lieutenant, Franz von Kreuzenach. He kept the real evidence back.”
“That,” said the Reverend Mother solemnly, “was a great mystery and a miracle.”
Wickham Brand joined us in the passage, with Eileen O’Connor by his side.
“Not gone yet?” said Wickham.
“I have been listening to the tale of a woman’s courage,” I said, and when Eileen gave me her hand, I raised it to my lips, in the French style, though not in gallantry.
“Reverend Mother,” she said, “has been exalting me to the Seventh Heaven of her dear heart.”
On my way back to Brand’s mess I told him all I had heard about Eileen’s trial, and I remember his enthusiasm.
“Fine! Thank heaven there are women like that in this blood-soaked world. It saves one from absolute despair.”
He made no comment about the suppression of evidence, which was a puzzle to me.
We parted with a “So long, old man,” outside his headquarters, and I did not see him until a few days later.
It was Frederick E. Small, the American doctor, attached to Brand’s crowd, who was with me on a night in Lille before the Armistice, when by news from the Colonel we were stirred by the tremendous hope—almost a certainty—that the end of the war was near. I had been into Courtrai, which the enemy had first evacuated and then was shelling. It was not a joyous entry like that into Lille. Most of the people were still down in their cellars, where for several days they had been herded together until the air became foul. On the outskirts I had passed many groups of peasants with their babies and old people, trudging past our guns, trekking from one village to another in search of greater safety, or standing in the fields where our artillery was getting into action, and where new shell craters should have warned them away, if they had had more knowledge of war. For more than four years I had seen, at different periods, crowds like that—after the first flight of fugitives in August of ’14, when the world seemed to have been tilted up and great populations in France and Belgium were in panic-stricken retreat from the advancing edge of war. I knew the types, the attitudes, the very shape of the bundles, in these refugee processions, the haggard look of the mothers pushing their perambulators, the bewildered look of old men and women, the tired sleepy look of small boys and girls, the stumbling dead-beat look of old farm-horses dragging carts piled high with cottage furniture. As it was at the beginning so it was at theend—for civilians caught in the fires of war. With two other men I went into the heart of Courtrai and found it desolate, and knew the reason why when, at the corner of the Grande Place, a heavy shell came howling and burst inside a house with frightful explosive noise followed by a crash of masonry. The people were wise to keep to their cellars. Two girls not so wise made a dash from one house to another and were caught by chunks of steel and killed close to the church of St. Martin, where they lay all crumpled up in a clotted pool of blood. A man came up to me, utterly careless of such risks, and I hated to stand talking to him with the shells coming every half-minute overhead.
There was a fire of passion in his eyes, and at every sentence he spoke to me his voice rose and thrilled as he denounced the German race for all they had done in Courtrai, for their robberies, their imprisonments, their destruction of machinery, their brutality. The last Commandant of Courtrai was von Richthofen, father of the German aviator, and he was a hard, ruthless man and kept the city under an iron rule.
“All that, thank God, is finished now,” said the man. “The English have delivered us from the Beast!” As he spoke another monstrous shell came overhead, but he took no notice of it, and said, “We are safe now from the enemy’s evil power!” It seemed to me a comparative kind of safety. I had no confidence in it when I sat in the parlour of an old lady who, like Eileen O’Connor in Lille, had been an Irish governess in Courtrai, and who now, living in miserable poverty, sat in a bed-sitting room whose windows and woodwork had been broken by shell-splinters. “Do you mind shutting the door, my dear?” she said. “I can’t bear those nasty bombs.” I realised with a large, experienced knowledge that we might be torn to fragments of flesh, at any moment, byone of those nasty “bombs,” which were really eight-inch shells, but the old lady did not worry, and felt safe when the door was shut.
Outside Courtrai, when I left, lay some khaki figures in a mush of blood. They were lads whom I had seen unloading ammunition that morning on the bank of the canal. One had asked me for a light, and said, “What’s all this peace-talk?... Any chance?” A big chance, I had told him. Home for Christmas, certain sure this time. The boy’s eyes had lighted up for a moment, quicker than the match which he held in the cup of his hands.
“Jesus! Back for good; eh?”
Then the light went out of his eyes as the match flared up.
“We’ve heard that tale, a score of times. ‘The Germans are weakening. The Huns ’ave ’ad enough!...’ Newspaper talk. A man would be a mug——”
Now the boy lay in the mud, with half his body blown away.... I was glad to get back to Lille for a spell, where there were no dead bodies in the roads. And the Colonel’s news, straight from G.H.Q., which—surely—were not playing up the old false optimism again!—helped one to hope that perhaps in a week or two the last boys of our race, the lucky ones, would be reprieved from that kind of bloody death, which I had seen so often, so long, so heaped up in many fields of France and Flanders, where the flower of our youth was killed.
Dr. Small was excited by the hope brought back by Colonel Lavington. He sought me out in my billet,chez Madame Chéri, and begged me to take a walk with him. It was a moonlight night, but no double throb of a German air-engine came booming over Lille. He walked at a hard pace, with the collar of his “British warm” tucked up to his ears, and talked in a queer disjointedmonologue, emotionally, whimsically. I remember some of his words, more or less—anyhow the gist of his thoughts.
“I’m not worrying any more about how the war will end. We’ve won! Remarkable that when one thinks back to the time, less than a year ago, when the best thing seemed a draw. I’m thinking about the future. What’s the world going to be afterwards? That’s my American mind—the next job, so to speak.”
He thought hard while we paced round our side of the Jardin d’Eté where the moonlight made the bushes glamourous, and streaked the tree-trunks with a silver line.
“This war is going to have prodigious effect on nations. On individuals, too. I’m scared. We’ve all been screwed up to an intense pitch—every nerve in us is beyond the normal stretch of nature. After the war there will be a sudden relaxing. We shall be like bits of chewed elastic. Rather like people who have drugged themselves to get through some big ordeal. After the ordeal their nerves are all ragged. They crave the old stimulus though they dread it. They’re depressed—don’t know what’s the matter—get into sudden rages—hysterical—can’t settle to work—go out for gaiety and get bored. I’ve seen it many times in bad cases. Europe—yes and America too—is going to be a bad case. A neurotic world—Lord, it’ll take some healing!”
For a time his thoughts wandered round the possible terms of peace and the abasement of Germany. He prophesied the break-up of Germany, the downfall of the Emperor and of other thrones.
“Crowns will be as cheap as twenty cents,” he said. He hoped for the complete overthrow of Junkerdom—“all the dirty dogs,” as he called the Prussian war-lords and politicians. But he hoped the Allies would be generous with the enemy peoples—“magnanimous” was the word he used.
“We must help the spirit of democracy to rise among them,” he said. “We must make it easy for them to exorcise the devil. If we press them too hard, put the screw on to the torture of their souls (defeat will be torture to a proud people), they will nourish a hope of vengeance and go back to their devil for hope.”
I asked him whether he thought his President would lead the world to a nobler stage of history.
He hesitated at that, groped a little, I thought, among old memories and prejudices.
“Why,” he said, “Wilson has the biggest chance that ever came to a human being—the biggest chance and the biggest duty. We are rich (too darned rich) and enormously powerful when most other peoples are poor and weak—drained of wealth and blood. That’s our luck, and a little bit perhaps our shame, though our boys have done their bit all right and are ready to do more, and it’s not their fault they weren’t here before—but we’re hardly touched by this war as a people, except spiritually. There we’ve been touched by the finger of Fate. (God, if you like that better!) So with that strength behind him the President is in a big way of business. He can make his voice heard, stand for a big idea. God, sonny, I hope he’ll do it! For the world’s sake, for the sake of all these suffering people, here in this city of Lille and in a million little towns where people have been bashed by war.”
I asked him if he doubted Wilson’s greatness, and the question embarrassed him.
“I’m loyal to the man,” he said. “I’ll back him if he plays straight and big. Bigness, that’s what we want. Bigness of heart as well as bigness of brain. Oh, he’s clever, though not wise in making so many enemies. He has fine ideas and can write real words. Things which speak. True things. I’d like to be sure of his character—its breadth and strength, I mean. The world wants a Nobleman, bigger than the little gentlemen of politics; a Leader calling to the great human heart of our tribes, and lifting them with one grand gesture out of the mire of old passions and vendettas and jealousies to a higher plane of—commonsense. Out of the jungle, to the daylight of fellowship. Out of the jungle.”
He repeated those words twice, with a reverent solemnity. He believed that so much emotion had been created in the heart of the world that when the war ended anything might happen if a Leader came—a new religion of civilisation, any kind of spiritual and social revolution.
“We might kill cruelty,” he said. “My word, what a victory that would be!”