BOOK I--THE END OF THE ADVENTURE

I

It is hard to recapture the spirit of that day we entered Lille. Other things since have blurred its fine images.

At the time I tried to put down in words the picture of that scene when, after four years’ slaughter of men, the city, which had seemed a world away, was open to us a few miles beyond the trench-lines; the riven trees, the shell-holes, and the stench of death, and we walked across the canal, over a broken bridge, into that large town where--how wonderful it seemed I--there were roofs on the houses and glass in the windows, and crowds of civilian people waiting for the first glimpse of British khaki.

Even now remembrance brings back to me figures that I saw only for a moment or two, but remain sharply etched in my mind, and people I met in the streets who told me the story of four years in less than four minutes and enough to let me know their bitterness, hatred, humiliations, terrors, in the time of the German occupation.... I have re-read the words I wrote, hastily, on a truculent typewriter which I cursed for its twisted ribbon, while the vision of the day was in my eyes. They are true to the facts and to what we felt about them. Other men felt that sense of exaltation, a kind of mystical union with the spirit of many people who had been delivered from evil powers. It is of those other men that I am now writing, and especially of one who was my friend--Wickham Brand, with the troubled soul, whom I knew in the years of war and afterwards in the peace which was no peace to him.

His, was one of the faces I remember that day, as I had a glimpse of it now and then, among crowds of men and women, young girls and children, who surged about him, kissing his hands and his face when he stooped a little (he was taller than most of them) to meet the wet lips of some half-starved baby held up by a pallid woman of Lille, or to receive the kiss of some old woman who clawed his khaki tunic, or of some girl who hung on to his belt. There was a shining wetness in his eyes, and the hard lines of his face had softened as he laughed at all this turmoil about him, at all these hands robbing him of shoulder-straps and badges, and at all these people telling him a hundred things together--their gratitude to the English, their hatred of the Germans, their abominable memories. His field-cap was pushed back from his high, furrowed forehead from which at the temples the hair had worn thin, owing to worry or a steel hat. His long, lean face, deeply tanned, but powdered with white dust, had an expression of tenderness which gave him a kind of priestly look, though others would have said “knightly” with, perhaps, equal truth. Anyhow, I could see that for a little while Brand was no longer worrying about the casualty lists and the doom of youth, and was giving himself up to an exaltation that was visible and spiritual in Lille in the day of liberation.

The few of us who went first into Lille while our troops were in a wide are round the city, in touch, more or less, with the German rearguards, were quickly separated in the swirl of the crowd that surged about us, greeting us as conquering heroes, though none of us were actual fighting men, being war correspondents, intelligence officers (Wickham Brand and three other officers were there to establish an advanced headquarters), with an American doctor--that amazing fellow “Daddy” Small--and our French _liaison_ officer, Pierre Nesle. Now and again we met in the streets and exchanged words.

I remember the doctor and I drifted together at the end of the Boulevard de la Liberté. A French girl of the middle-class had tucked her hand through his right arm and was talking to him excitedly, volubly. On his other arm leaned an old dame in a black dress and bonnet who was also delivering her soul of its pent-up emotion to a man who did not understand more than a few words of her French. A small boy dressed as a Zouave was walking backwards, waving a long tricolour flag before the little American, and a crowd of people made a close circle about him, keeping pace.

“Assassins, bandits, robbers!” gobbled the old woman. “They stole all our copper, monsieur. The very mattresses off our beds. The wine out of our cellars. They did abominations.”

“Month after month we waited,” said the girl, with her hand through the doctor’s right arm. “All that time the noise of the guns was loud in our ears. It never ceased, monsieur, until to-day. And we used to say: ‘To-morrow the English will come!’ until at last some of us lost heart--not I, no, always I believed in victory!--and said, ‘The English will never come!’ Now you are here, and our hearts are full of joy. It is like a dream. The Germans have gone!”

The doctor patted the girl’s hand and addressed me across the tricolour waved by the small Zouave.

“This is the greatest day of my life! And I am perfectly ashamed of myself. In spite of my beard and my gig-lamps and my anarchical appearance, these dear people take me for an English officer and a fighting hero. And I feel like one. If I saw a German now I truly believe I should cut his throat. Me--a non-combatant and a man of peace! I’m horrified at my own blood-thirstiness. The worst of it is I’m enjoying it. I’m a primitive man for a time, and find it stimulating. To-morrow I shall repent. These people have suffered hell’s torments. I can’t understand a word the little old lady is telling me but I’m sure she’s been through infernal things. And this pretty girl. She’s a peach, though slightly tuberculous, poor child. My God--how they hate! There is a stored-up hatred in this town enough to burn up Germany by mental telepathy. It’s frightening. Hatred and joy, I feel these two passions like a flame about us. It’s spiritual. It’s transcendental. It’s the first time I’ve seen a hundred thousand people drunk with joy and hate. I’m against hate, and yet the sufferings of these people make me see red so that I want to cut a German throat!”

“You’d stitch it up afterwards, doctor,” I said.

He blinked at me through his spectacles and said: “I hope so. I hope my instinct would be as right as that. The world will never get forward till we have killed hatred. That’s my religion.”

“Bandits! Assassins!” grumbled the old lady. “Dirty people!”

“_Vivent les Anglais!_” shouted the crowd, surging about the little man with the beard.

The American doctor spoke in English in a large explanatory way.

“I’m American. Don’t you go making any mistake. I’m an Uncle Sam. The Yankee boys are further south and fighting like hell, poor lads. I don’t deserve any of this ovation, my dears.”

Then in French, with a strong American accent, he shouted: “_Vive la France!_‘Rah! ‘Rah! ‘Rah!”

“_Merci, merci, mon Général!_” said an old woman, making a grab at the little doctor’s Sam Brown belt and kissing him on the beard. The crowd closed round him and bore him away....

I met another of our crowd when I went to a priest’s house in a turning off the Rue Royale. Pierre Nesle, our _liaison_ officer--a nice simple fellow, who had always been very civil to me--was talking to the priest outside his door, and introduced me in a formal way to a tall, patrician-looking old man in a long black gown. It was the Abbé Bourdin, well known in Lille as a good priest and a patriot.

“Come indoors, gentlemen,” said the old man. “I will tell you what happened to us, though it would take four years to tell you all.”

Sitting there in the priest’s room, barely furnished, with a few oak chairs and a writing-desk littered with papers, and a table covered with a tattered cloth of red plush, we listened to a tragic tale, told finely and with emotion by the old man into whose soul it had burned. It was the history of a great population caught by the tide of war before many could escape, and placed under the military law of an enemy who tried to break its spirit. They failed to break it in spite of an iron discipline which denied them all liberty. For any trivial offence by individuals against German rule the whole population was fined or shut up in their houses at three in the afternoon. There were endless fines, unceasing and intolerable robberies under the name of “perquisitions.” That had not broken the people’s spirit. There were worse things to bear--the removal of machinery from the factories, the taking away of the young men and boys for forced labour, and then, the greater infancy of that night when machine-guns were placed at the street corners and German officers ordered each household to assemble at the front door and chose the healthy-looking girls by the pointing of a stick and the word, “You--you!” for slave-labour--it was that--in unknown fields far away.

The priest’s face blanched at the remembrance of that scene. His voice quavered when he spoke of the girls’ screams--one of them had gone raving mad--and of the wailing that rose among their stricken families. For a while he was silent, with lowered head and brooding eyes which stared at a rent in the threadbare carpet, and I noticed the trembling of a pulse on his right temple above the deeply-graven wrinkles of his parchment skin. Then he raised his head and spoke harshly.

“Not even that could break the spirit of my people. They only said, ‘We will never forget and never forgive!’ They were hungry--we did not get much food--but they said, ‘Our sons who are fighting for us are suffering worse things. It is for us to be patient.’ They were surrounded by German spies--the secret police--who listened to their words and haled them off to prison upon any pretext. There is hardly a man among us who has not been in prison. The women were made to do filthy work for German soldiers, to wash their lousy clothes, to scrub their dirty barracks, and they were insulted, humiliated, tempted, by brutal men.”

“Was there much of that brutality?” I asked.

The priest’s eyes grew sombre.

“Many women suffered abominable things. I thank God that so many kept their pride and their honour. There were, no doubt, some bad men and women in the city--disloyal, venal, weak, sinful--may God have mercy on their souls; but I am proud of being a Frenchman when I think of how great was the courage, how patient was the suffering of the people of Lille.”

Pierre Nesle had listened to that monologue with a visible and painful emotion. He became pale and flushed by turns, and when the priest spoke about the forcible recruitment of the women a sweat broke out on his forehead, and he wiped it away with a handkerchief.

I see his face now in profile, sharply outlined against some yellowing folios in a bookcase behind him, a typical Parisian face in its sharpness of outline and pallid skin, with a little black moustache above a thin, sensitive mouth. Before I had seen him mostly in gay moods--though I had wondered sometimes at the sudden silences into which he fell and at a gloom which gave him a melancholy look when he was not talking, or singing, or reciting poetry, or railing against French politicians, or laughing almost hysterically at the satires of Charles Fortune--our “funny man”--when he came to our mess. Now he was suffering, as if the priest’s words had probed a wound--though not the physical wound which had nearly killed him in Souchez Wood.

He stood up from the wooden chair with its widely-curved arms in which he had been sitting stiffly, and spoke to the priest.

“It is not amusing, _mon père_, what you tell us, and what we have all guessed. It is one more chapter of tragedy in the history of our poor France. Pray God the war will soon be over.”

“With victory!” said the old priest. “With an enemy beaten and bleeding beneath our feet. The Germans must be punished for all their crimes, or the justice of God will not be satisfied.”

There was a thrill of passion in the old man’s voice and his nostrils quivered.

“To all Frenchmen that goes without saying,” said Pierre Nesle. “The Germans must be punished, and will be, though no vengeance will repay us for the suffering of our _poilus_--nor for the agony of our women behind the lines, which, perhaps, was the greatest of all.”

The Abbé Bourdin put his claw-like old hands on the young man’s shoulders and drew him closer and kissed his Croix de Guerre.

“You have helped to give victory,” he said. “How many Germans have you killed? How many, eh?”

He spoke eagerly, chuckling with a kind of childish eagerness for good news.

Pierre Nesle drew back a little and a faint touch of colour crept into his face, and then left it whiter.

“I did not count corpses,” he said. He touched his left side and laughed awkwardly. “I remember better that they nearly made a corpse of me.”

There was a moment’s silence, and then my friend spoke in a casual kind of way.

“I suppose, _mon père_, you have not heard of my sister being in Lille by any chance? Her name was Marthe. Marthe Nesle.”

The Abbé Bourdin shook his head.

“I do not know the name. There are many young women in Lille. It is a great city.”

“That is true,” said Pierre Nesle. “There are many.”

He bowed over the priest’s hand, and then saluted.

“_Bon jour, mon père, et merci mille fois_.”

So we left, and the Abbé Bourdin spoke his last words to me: “We owe our liberation to the English. We thank you. But why did you not come sooner? Two years sooner, three years. With your great army?”

“Many of our men died to get here,” I said. “Thousands.”

“That is true. That is true. You failed many times, I know. But you were so close. One big push--eh? One mighty effort? No?”

The priest spoke a thought which I had heard expressed in the crowds. They were grateful for our coming, immensely glad, but could not understand why we had tried their patience so many years. That had been their greatest misery, waiting, waiting.

I spoke to Pierre Nesle on the doorstep of the priest’s house.

“Have you an idea that your sister is in Lille?”

“No,” he said. “No. At least not more than the faintest hope. She is behind the lines somewhere--anywhere. She went away from home before the war--she was a singer--and was caught in the tide.”

“No news at all?” I asked.

“Her last letter was from Lille. Or rather a postcard with the Lille stamp. She said, I am amusing myself well, little brother.’ She and I were good comrades. I look for her face in the crowds. But she may be anywhere--Valenciennes, Maubeuge--God knows!”

A shout of “_Vive la France!_” rose from a crowd of people surging up the street. Pierre Nesle was in the blue uniform of the _chasseurs à pied_, and the people in Lille guessed it was theirs because of its contrast to our khaki, though the “_horizon bleu_” was so different from the uniforms worn by the French army of ‘14. To them now, on the day of liberation, Pierre Nesle, our little _liaison_ officer, stood for the armies of France, the glory of France. Even the sight of our khaki did not fill them with such wild enthusiasm. So I lost him again as I had lost the little American doctor in the surge and whirlpool of the crowd.

II

I was building up in my mind the historic meaning of the day. Before nightfall I should have to get it written--the spirit as well as the facts, if I could--in time for the censors and the despatch-riders. The facts? By many scraps of conversation with men and women in the streets I could already reconstruct pretty well the life of Lille in time of war. I found many of their complaints rather trivial. The Germans had wanted brass and had taken it, down to the taps in the washing-places. Well, I had seen worse horrors than that. They had wanted wool and had taken the mattresses. They had requisitioned all the wine but had paid for it at cheap rates. These were not atrocities. The people of Lille had been short of food, sometimes on the verge of starvation, but not really starved. They complained of having gone without butter, milk, sugar; but even in England these things were hard to get. No, the tragedy of Lille lay deeper than that. A sense of fear that was always with them. “Every time there was a knock at the door,” said one man, “we started up in alarm. It was a knock at our hearts.” At any time of the day or night they were subject to visits from German police, to searches, arrests, or orders to get out of their houses or rooms for German officers or troops. They were denounced by spies, Germans or debased people of their own city, for trying to smuggle letters to their folk in other towns in enemy occupation, for concealing copper in hiding-places, for words of contempt against the Kaiser or the Kommandatur, spoken at a street corner between one friend and another. That consciousness of being watched, overheard, reported and denounced poisoned the very atmosphere of their lives, and the sight of the field-grey men in the streets, the stench of them--the smell was horrible when German troops marched back from the battlefields--produced a soul-sickness worse than physical nausea. I could understand the constant fret at the nerves of these people, the nagging humiliation--they had to doff hats to every German officer who swaggered by--and the slow-burning passion of people, proud by virtue of their race, who found themselves controlled, ordered about, bullied, punished for trivial infractions of military regulations, by German officials of hard, unbending arrogance. That must have been abominable for so long a time; but as yet I heard no charges of definite brutality, or of atrocious actions by individual enemies. The worst I had heard was that levy of the women for forced labour in unknown places. One could imagine the horror of it, the cruelty of it to girls whose nerves were already unstrung by secret fears, dark and horrible imaginings, the beast-like look in the eyes of men who passed them in the streets. Then the long-delayed hope of liberation--year after year--the German boasts of victory, the strength of the German defence that never seemed to weaken, in spite of the desperate attacks of French and British, the preliminary success of their great offensive in March and April, when masses of English prisoners were herded through Lille, dejected, exhausted, hardly able to drag their feet along between their sullen guards--by heaven, these people of Lille had needed much faith to save them from despair! No wonder now that on the first day of liberation some, of them were wet-eyed with joy, and others were lightheaded with liberty.

In the Grande Place below the old balustraded Town Hall I saw young Cyril Clatworthy, one of the Intelligence crowd, surrounded by a group of girls who were stroking his tunic, clasping his hands, pushing each other laughingly to get nearer to him. He was in lively conversation with the prettiest girl, whom he kept in front of him. It was obvious that he was enjoying himself as the central figure of this hero-worship, and as I passed the boy (twenty-four that birthday, he had told me a month before) I marvelled at his ceaseless capacity for amorous adventure, with or without a moment’s notice. A pretty girl, if possible, or a plain one if not, drew him like a magnet, excited all his boyish egotism, called to the faun-spirit that played the pipes of Pan in his heart. It was an amusing game for him, with his curly brown hair and Midshipman Easy type of face. For the French girls whom he had met on his way--little Marcelle on Cassel Hill, Christine at Corbie on the Somme, Marguérite in the hat-shop at Amiens (what became of her, poor kid?)--it was not so amusing when he “blew away,” as he called it, and had a look at life elsewhere.

He winked at me, as I passed, over the heads of the girls.

“The fruits of victory!” he called out. “There is a little Miss Brown-Eyes here who is quite enchanting.”

It was rather caddish of me to say: “Have you forgotten Marguérite Aubigny?”

He thought so, too, and reddened angrily.

“Go to blazes!” he said.

His greatest chum, and one of mine--Charles Fortune--was standing outside a _café_ in the big Place, not far from the Vieille Bourse, with its richly-carved Renaissance front. Here there was a dense crowd, but they kept at a respectful distance from Fortune, who, with his red tabs and red-and-blue arm-band and row of ribbons (all gained by heroic service over a blotting-pad in a Nissen hut) looked to them, no doubt, like a great general. He had his “heroic” face on, rather mystical and saintly. (He had a variety of faces for divers occasions--such as the “sheep’s face” in the presence of generals who disliked brilliant men, the “intelligent” facer-bright and inquiring--for senior officers who liked easy questions to which they could give portentous answers, the “noble” face for the benefit of military chaplains, foreign visitors to the war-zone, and batmen before they discovered his sense of humour; and the “old-English-gentleman” face at times for young Harding, who belonged to a county family with all its traditions, politics, and instincts, and permitted Fortune to pull his leg, to criticise generals, and denounce the British Empire as a licensed jester.)

Fortune was addressing four gentlemen of the Town Council of Lille who stood before him, holding ancient top-hats.

“Gentlemen,” said Charles Fortune in deliberate French, with an exaggerated accent, “I appreciate very much the honour you have just paid me by singing that heroic old song, ‘It’s a long, long way to Tipperary.’ I desire, however, to explain to you that it is not as yet the National Anthem of the British people, and that, personally, I have never been to Tipperary, that I should find some difficulty in finding that place on the map, and that I never want to go there. This, however, is of small importance, except to British generals, to whom all small things are of great importance--revealing, therefore, their minute attention to details, even when it does not matter--which, I may say, is the true test of the military mind which is so gloriously winning the war, after many glorious defeats (I mean victories) and----” (Here Fortune became rather tangled in his French grammar, but rescued himself after a still more heroic look). “And it is with the deepest satisfaction, the most profound emotion, that I find myself in this great city of Lille on the day of liberation, and on behalf of the British Army, of which I am a humble representative, in spite of these ribbons which I wear on my somewhat expansive chest, I thank you from my heart, with the words, ‘_la France!_’”

Here Fortune heaved a deep sigh, and looked like a field marshal while he waited for the roar of cheers which greeted his words. The mystical look on his face became intensified as he stood there, a fine heroic figure (a trifle stout for lack of exercise), until he suddenly caught sight of a nice-looking girl in the crowd nearest to him, and gave her an elaborate wink, as much as to say, “You and I understand each other, my pretty one! Beneath this heroic pose I am really human.”

The effect of that wink was instantaneous. The girl blushed vividly and giggled, while the crowd shouted with laughter.

“_Quel numéro! Quel drôle de type!_” said a man by my side.

Only the four gentlemen of the Town Hall, who had resumed their top-hats, looked perplexed at this grotesque contrast between the heroic speech (it had sounded heroic) and its anti-climax.

Fortune took me by the arm as I edged my way close to him.

“My dear fellow, it was unbelievable when those four old birds sang ‘Tipperary’ with bared heads. I had to stand at the salute while they sang three verses with tears in their eyes. They have been learning it during four years of war. Think of that! And think of what’s happening in Ireland--in Tipperary--now! There’s some paradox here which contains all the comedy and pathos of this war. I must think it out. I can’t quite get at it yet, but I feel it from afar.”

“This is not a day for satire,” I said. “This is a day for sentiment. These people have escaped from frightful things----”

Fortune looked at me with quizzical grey eyes out of his handsome, mask-like face.

“_Et tu, Brute?_ After all our midnight talks, our laughter at the mockery of the gods, our intellectual slaughter of the staff, our tearing down of all the pompous humbug which has bolstered up this silly old war.”

“I know. But to-day we can enjoy the spirit of victory. It’s real, here. We have liberated all these people.”

“We? You mean the young Tommies who lie dead the other side of the canal? We come in and get the kudos. Presently the generals will come and say, ‘We did it! Regard our glory! Fling down your flowers! Cheer us, good people, before we go to lunch.’ They will not see behind them the legions they sent to slaughter by ghastly blunders, colossal stupidity, invincible pomposity.”

Fortune broke into song. It was an old anthem of his:

“_Blear-eyed Bill, the Butcher of the Boche_.”

He had composed it, after a fourth whisky, on a cottage piano in his Nissen hut. In crashing chords he had revealed the soul of a general preparing a plan of battle--over the telephone. It never failed to make me laugh, except that day in Lille when it was out of tune, I thought, with the spirit about us.

“Let’s put the bitter taste out of our mouth to-day,” I said.

Fortune made his sheep-face, saluted behind his ear, and said, “Every inch a soldier--I don’t think!”

III

It was then we bumped straight into Wickham Brand, who was between a small boy and girl, holding his hands, while a tall girl of sixteen or so, with a yellow pig-tail slung over her shoulder, walked alongside, talking vivaciously of family experiences under German rule. Pierre Nesle was on the other side of her.

“In spite of all the fear we had--oh, how frightened we were sometimes!--we used to laugh very much. _Maman_ made a joke of everything--it was the only way. _Maman_ was wonderfully brave, except when she thought that father might have been killed.”

“Where was your father?” asked Brand. “On the French side of the lines?”

“Yes, of course. He was an officer in the artillery. We said good-bye to him on August 2nd of the first year, when he went off to the dépôt at Belfort. We all cried except _maman_--father was crying, too, but _maman_ did not wink away even the tiniest tear until father had gone. Then she broke down, so that we all howled at the sight of her. Even these babies joined in. They were only babies then.”

“Any news of him?” asked Brand.

“Not a word. How could there be? Perhaps in a few days he will walk into Lille. So _maman_ says.”

“That would be splendid!” said Brand. “What is his name?”

“Chéri, M. le Commandant Anatole Chéri, 59th Brigade, _artillerie lourde._”

The girl spoke her father’s name proudly.

I saw a startled look come into the eyes of Pierre Nesle as he heard the name. In English he said to Brand: “I knew him at Verdun. He was killed.”

Wickham Brand drew a sharp breath, and his voice was husky when he spoke, in English, too.

“What cruelty it all is!”

The girl with the pig-tail--a tall young creature with a delicate face and big brown eyes--stared at Pierre Nesle and then at Wickham Brand. She asked an abrupt question of Pierre.

“Is my father dead?”

Pierre Nesle stammered something. He was not sure. He had heard that the Commandant Chéri was wounded at Verdun.

The girl understood perfectly.

“He is dead, then? _Maman_ will be very sorry.”

She did not cry. There was not even a quiver of her lips. She shook hands with Brand and said: “I must go and tell _maman_. Will you come and see us one day?”

“With pleasure,” said Brand.

“Promise?”

The girl laughed as she raised her finger.

“I promise,” said Brand solemnly.

The girl “collected” the small boy and girl, holding their heads close to her waist.

“Is father dead?” said the small boy.

“Perhaps. I believe so,” said the elder sister.

“Then we shan’t get the toys from Paris?” said the small girl.

“I am afraid not, _coquine?_”

“What a pity!” said the boy.

Pierre Nesle took a step forward and saluted.

“I will go with you, if you permit it, mademoiselle. It is perhaps in a little way my duty, as I met your father in the war.”

“Thanks a thousand times,” said the girl. “_Maman_ will be glad to know all you can tell her.”

She waved to Brand a merry _au revoir_.

We stood watching them cross the Grande Place, that tall girl and the two little ones, and Pierre.

Fortune touched Brand on the arm.

“Plucky, that girl,” he said. “Took it without a whimper. I wonder if she cared?”

Brand turned on him rather savagely.

“Cared? Of course she cared. But she had expected it for four years, grown up to the idea. These war children have no illusions about the business. They know that the odds are in favour of death.”

He raised his hands above his head with a sudden passionate gesture.

“Christ God!” he said. “The tragedy of those people! The monstrous cruelty of it all!”

Fortune took his hand and patted it in a funny affectionate way.

“You are too sensitive, Wicky. ‘A sensitive plant in a garden grew’--a war-garden, with its walls blown down, and dead bodies among the little daisies-o. I try to cultivate a sense of humour and a little irony. It’s a funny old war, Wicky, believe me, if you look at it in the right light.”

Wickham groaned.

“I see no humour in it, nor light anywhere.”

Fortune chanted again the beginning of his anthem:

“_Blear-eyed Bill, the Butcher of the Boche_.”

As usual there was a crowd about us, smiling, waving handkerchiefs and small flags, pressing forward to shake hands and to say “_Vivent les Anglais!_”

It was out of that crowd that a girl came and stood in front of us, with a wave of her hand.

“Good morning, British officers! I’m English--or Irish, which is good enough. Welcome to Lille.”

Fortune shook hands with her first and said very formally, in his mocking way: “How do you do? Are you by chance my long-lost sister? Is there a strawberry-mark on your left arm?” She laughed with a big, open-mouthed laugh, on a contralto note that was good to hear.

“I’m everybody’s sister who speaks the English tongue, which is fine to the ears of me after four years in Lille. Eileen O’Connor, by your leave, gentlemen.”

“Not Eileen O’Connor of Tipperary?” asked Fortune gravely. “You know the Long Long Way, of course?”

“Once of Dublin,” said the girl, “and before the war, of Holland Street, Kensington, in the village of London. Oh, to hear the roar of ‘buses in the High Street and to see the glint of sunlight on the Round Pond!”

She was a tall girl, shabbily dressed in an old coat and skirt with a bit of fur round her neck and hat, but with a certain look of elegance in the thin line of her figure and the poise of her head. Real Irish, by the look of her dark eyes and a rather irregular nose and humorous lips. Not pretty in the English way, but spirited, and with some queer charm in her.

Wickham Brand was holding her hand.

“Good Lord! Eileen O’Connor? I used to meet you, years ago, at the Wilmots--those funny tea-parties in Chelsea.”

“With farthing buns and cigarettes, and young boys with big ideas!”

The girl laughed with a kind of wonderment, and stood close to Wickham Brand, holding his Sam Brown belt and staring up into his face.

“Why, you must be--you must be---- you are--the tall boy who used to grow out of his grey suits and wrote mystical verse and read Tolstoy, and growled at civilisation and smoked black pipes, and fell in love with elderly artists’ models. Wickham Brand!”

“That’s right,” said Brand, ignoring the laughter of Fortune and myself. “Then I went to Germany and studied their damned philosophy, and then I became a briefless barrister, and after that took to writing unsuccessful novels. Here I am, after four years of war, ashamed to be alive when all my pals are dead.”

He glanced at Fortune and me, and said, “Or most of ‘em.

“It’s the same Wicky I remember,” said the girl, “and at the sight of you I feel I’ve gone back to myself as a tousled-haired thing in a short frock and long black stockings. The good old days before the war. Before other things and all kinds of things.”

“Why on earth were you in Lille when the war began?” asked Brand.

“It just happened. I taught painting here. Then I was caught with the others. We did not think They would come so soon.”

She used the word “They” as we all did, meaning the grey men.

“It must have been hell,” said Brand.

“Mostly hell,” said Miss O’Connor brightly. “At least, one saw into the gulfs of hell, and devilishness was close at hand. But there were compensations, wee bits of heaven. On the whole I enjoyed myself.”

“Enjoyed yourself?”

Brand was startled by that phrase.

“Oh, it was an adventure. I took risks--and came through. I lived all of it--every minute. It was a touch-and-go game with the devil and death, and I dodged them both. _Dieu soit merci!_” She laughed with a little throw-back of the head, showing a white full throat above the ragged bit of fur. A number of French women pressed about her. Some of them patted her arms, fondled her hands. One woman bent down and kissed her shabby jacket.

“_Elle était merveilleuse, la demoiselle,_” said an old Frenchman by my side. “She was marvellous, sir. All that she did for the wounded, for your prisoners, for many men who owe their lives to her, cannot be told in a little while. They tried to catch her. She was nearly caught. It is a miracle that she was not shot. A miracle, monsieur!”

Other people in the crowd spoke to me about “_la demoiselle_.” They were mysterious. Even now they could not tell me all she had done. But she had risked death every day for four years. Every day. Truly it was a miracle she was not caught.

Listening to them, I missed some of Eileen O’Connor’s own words to Brand, and saw only the wave of her hand as she disappeared into the crowd.

It was Brand who told me that he and I and Fortune had been invited to spend the evening with her, or an “hour or so. I saw that Wicky, as we called him, was startled by the meeting with her, and was glad of it.

“I knew her when we were kids,” he said. “Ten years ago--perhaps more. She used to pull my hair! Extraordinary, coming face to face with her in Lille, on this day of all days.”

He turned to Fortune with a look of command.

“We ought to get busy with that advanced headquarters. There are plenty of big houses in these streets.”

“_Ce qu’on appelle un embarras de choix_,” said Fortune, with his rather comical exaggeration of accent. “And Blear-eyed Bill wants us to go on beating the Boche. I insist on a house with a good piano--German for choice.”

They went off on their quest, and I to my billet, which had been found by the major of ours, where I wrote the story of how we entered Lille on a typewriter with a twisted ribbon, which would not write quickly enough all I wanted to tell the world about a day of history.

IV

I had the luck to be billeted in Lille at the house of Madame Chéri, in the Rue Esquermoise.

This lady was the mother of the girl with the pig-tail and the two children with whom Wickham Brand had made friends on this morning of liberation--the wife of that military officer whom Pierre Nesle had known at Verdun and knew to be killed. It was my luck, because there were children in the house--the pig-tailed girl, Hélène, was more a woman than a child, though only sixteen--and I craved for a touch of home life and children’s company after so long an exile in the war-zone, always among men who talked of war, thought of it, dreamed of it, year in, year out.

Madame Chéri was, I thought, when I saw her first, a beautiful woman, not physically--because she was too white and worn--but spiritually, in courage of soul. Pierre Nesle, our _liaison_ officer, told me how she had received the news of her husband’s death--unflinchingly, without a cry. She knew, she said, in her heart that he was dead. Some queer message had reached her one night during the Verdun battles. It was no ghost, or voice, but only a sudden cold conviction that her man had been killed. For the children’s sake she had pretended that their father might come back. It gave them something to look forward to. The little ones were always harping on the hope that, when peace came, this mysterious and glorious man, whom they remembered only vaguely as one who had played bears with them and had been the provider of all good things, would return with rich presents from Paris--tin soldiers, queen-dolls, mechanical toys. Hélène, the elder girl, was different. She had looked curiously at her mother when the children prattled like that and Madame Chéri had pretended to believe in the father’s homecoming. Once or twice the girl had said, “Papa may be killed,” in a matter-of-fact way. Yet she had been his devoted comrade. They had been such lovers, the father and daughter, that sometimes the mother had been a little jealous, so she said, in her frank way, to Pierre Nesle, smiling as she spoke. The war had made Hélène a realist, like most French girls, to whom the idea of death became commonplace, almost inevitable, as the ceaseless slaughter of men went on. The German losses had taught them that.

I had the colonel’s dressing-room--he had attained the grade of colonel before Verdun, so Pierre told me--and Madame Chéri came in while I was there to see that it was properly arranged for me. Over his iron bedstead (the Germans had taken the woollen mattress, so that it had been replaced by bags of straw) was his portrait as a lieutenant of artillery, as he had been at the time of his marriage. He was a handsome fellow, rather like Hélène, with her delicate profile and brown eyes, though more like, said Madame Chéri, their eldest boy, Edouard.

“Where is he?” I asked, and that was the only time I saw Madame Chéri break down utterly.

She began to tell me that Edouard had been taken away by the Germans, among all the able-bodied men and boys who were sent away from Lille for digging trenches behind the lines, in Easter of ‘16, and that he had gone bravely, with his little pack of clothes over his shoulder, saying, “It is nothing, _maman_. My father taught me the word _courage_. In a little while we shall win, and I shall be back. _Courage, courage!_”

Madame Chéri repeated her son’s words proudly, so that I seemed to see the boy with that pack on his shoulder and a smile on his face. Then, suddenly, she wept bitterly, wildly, her body shaken with a kind of ague, while she sat on the iron bedstead with her face in her hands.

I repeated the boy’s words.

“Courage, courage, madam!”

Proudly she wailed out in broken sentences:--

“He was such a child!... He caught cold so easily!... He was so delicate!... He needed mother-love so much!... For two years no word has come from him!” In a little while she controlled herself and begged me to excuse her. We went down together to the dining-room, where the children were playing and Hélène was reading; and she insisted upon my drinking a glass of wine from the store which she had kept hidden from the Germans in a pit which Edouard had dug in the garden in the first days of the occupation. The children were delighted with that trick, and roared with laughter.

Hélène, with a curl of her lip, spoke bitterly.

“The Boche is a stupid animal. One can dupe him easily.”

“Not always easily,” said Madame Chéri. She opened a secret cupboard behind a bookcase standing against the panelled wall.

“I hid all my brass and copper here. A German police officer came, and said, ‘Have you hidden any copper, madame?’ I said, ‘There is nothing hidden.’ ‘Do you swear it?’ he asked. ‘I swear it,’ I answered very haughtily. He went straight to the bookcase, pushed it on one side, tapped the wall, and opened the secret cupboard’, which was stuffed full of brass and copper. ‘You are a liar, madame,’ he said, ‘like all Frenchwomen.’ ‘And you are an insolent pig, like all Germans,’ I remarked. That cost me a fine of ten thousand francs.”

Madame Chéri saw nothing wrong in swearing falsely to a German. I think she held that nothing was wrong to deceive or to destroy any individual of the German race, and I could understand her point of view when Pierre Nesle told me of one thing that had happened which she never told to me. It was about Hélène.

A German captain was billeted in the house. They ignored his presence, though he tried to ingratiate himself. Hélène hated him with a cold and deadly hatred. She trembled if he passed her on the stairs. His presence in the house, even if she did not see him but only heard him move in his room, made her feel ill. Yet he was very polite to her, and said, “_Guten gnadiges Fràulein_,” whenever they met. To Edouard, also, he was courteous and smiling, though Edouard was sullen. He was a stout little man, with a round rosy face and little bright eyes behind big black-rimmed glasses, an officer in the Kommandantur, and formerly a schoolmaster. Madame Chéri, was polite to him, but cold, cold as ice. After some months, she found him harmless, though objectionable, because German. It did not seem dangerous to leave him in the house one evening when she went to visit a dying friend--Madame Vailly. She was later than she meant to be--so late that she was liable to arrest by the military police if they saw her flit past in the darkness of the unlit streets. When she came home she slipped the latch-key into the door and went quietly into the hall. The children would be in bed and asleep. At the foot of the stairs a noise startled her. It was a curious creaking, shaking noise, as of a door being pushed by some heavy weight, then banged by it. It was the door at the top of the stairs, on the left--Helène’s room.

“_Qu’est-ce que tu fais là?_” said Madame Chéri.

She was very frightened with some unknown fear, and held tight to the banister as she went upstairs. There was a glimmer of light on the landing. It was from a candle which had almost burnt out and was guttering in a candlestick placed on the topmost stair. A grotesque figure was revealed by the light--Schwarz, the German officer, in his pyjamas, with a helmet on his head and unlaced boots on his feet. The loose fat of the man, no longer girded by a belt, made him look like a mass of jelly as he had his shoulder to the door, shoving and grunting as he tried to force it open. He was swearing to himself in German, and, now and then, called out softly in French, in a kind of drunken German-French: “_Ouvrez, kleines Madchen, ma jolie Schatz. Ouvrez donc._”

Madame Chéri was paralysed for a moment by a shock of horror; quite speechless and motionless. Then suddenly she moved forward and spoke in a fierce whisper.

“What are you doing, beast?”

Schwarz gave a queer snort of alarm.

He stood swaying a little, with the helmet on the back of his head. The candlelight gleamed on its golden eagle. His face was hotly flushed and there was a ferocious look in his eyes. Madame Chéri saw that he was drunk.

He spoke to her in horrible French, so Pierre Nesle told me, imitating it savagely, as Madame Chéri had done to him. The man was filthily drunk, and declared that he loved Hélène and would kill her if she did not let him love her. Why did she lock her door like that? He had been kind to her. He had smiled at her. A German officer was a human being, not a monster. Why did they treat him as a monster, draw themselves away when he passed, become silent when he wished to speak with them, stare at him with hate in their eyes? The French people were all devils, proud as devils.

Another figure stood on the landing. It was Edouard--a tall, slim figure, with a white face and burning eyes, in which there was a look of fury.

“What is happening, _maman?_” he said coldly. “What does this animal want?”

Madame Chéri trembled with a new fear. If the boy were to kill that man, he would be shot. She had a vision of him standing against a wall....

“It is nothing,” she said. “This gentleman is ill. Go back to bed, Edouard. I command you.”

The German laughed stupidly.

“To bed, _shafskopf_. I am going to open your sister’s door. She loves me. She calls to me. I hear her whisper, ‘_Ich liebe dich!_’”

Edouard had a stick in his hand. It was a heavy walking-stick which had belonged to his father. Without a word he sprang forward, raised his weapon, and smashed it down on the German’s head. It knocked off Schwarz’s helmet, which rolled from the top to the bottom of the staircase, and hit the man a glancing blow on the temple. He fell like a log. Edouard smiled, and said, “_Très bien._” Then he rattled the lock of his sister’s door and called out to her: “Hélène.... Have no fear. He is dead. I have killed him.”

It was then that Madame Chéri had her greatest fear. There was no sound from Hélène. She did not answer any of their cries. She did not open the door to them. They tried to force the lock, as Schwarz had done, but, though the lock gave at last, the door would not open, kept closed by some barricade behind it. Edouard and his mother went out into the yard, and the boy climbed up to his sister’s window and broke the glass to go through. Hélène was lying in her nightdress on the bedroom floor, unconscious. She had moved a heavy wardrobe in front of the door, by some supernatural strength which came from fear. Then she had fainted.... To his deep regret, Edouard had not killed the German.

Schwarz had crawled back to his bedroom when they went back into the house, and next morning wept to Madame Chéri and implored forgiveness. There had been a little banquet, he said, and he had drunk too much.

Madame Chéri did not forgive. She called at the Kommandantur, where the General saw her and listened to her gravely. He did not waste words.

“The matter will be attended to,” he said.

Captain Schwarz departed that day from the house in the Rue Esquermoise. He was sent to a battalion in the line and was killed somewhere near Ypres.

V

Wickham Brand paid his promised visit to the Chéri family, according to his pledge to Hélène, whom he had met in the street the previous day, and he had to drink some of the hidden wine, as I had done, and heard the story of its concealment and of Madame’s oath about the secret hoard of copper. I think he was more disconcerted than I had been by that avowal, and told me afterwards that he believed no Englishwoman would have sworn to so deliberate a lie.

“That’s because the English are not so logical,” I said, and he puzzled over that.

He was greatly taken with Hélène, as she with him, but he risked their friendship in an awkward moment when he expressed the hope that the German offer of peace (the one before the final surrender) would be accepted.

It was Madame Chéri who took him up on that, sharply, and with a kind of surprised anguish in her voice. She hoped, she said, that no peace would be made with Germany until French and British and American troops had smashed the German armies, crossed the German frontier, and destroyed many German towns and villages. She would not be satisfied with any peace that came before a full vengeance, so that German women would taste the bitterness of war as Frenchwomen had drunk deep of it, and until Germany was heaped with ruins as France had been.

Wickham Brand was sitting with the small boy on his knees, and stroked his hair before answering.

“_Dites, donc!_” said Hélène, who was sitting on the hearthrug, looking up at his powerful profile, which reminded me always of a Norman knight, or, sometimes, of a young monk worried about his soul and the devil.

He had that monkish look now when he answered.

“I don’t know,” he said. “I have felt like that often. But I have come to think that the sooner we get blood out of our eyes the better for all the world. I have seen enough dead Germans--and dead English and dead French--to last a lifetime. Many of the German soldiers hate the war, as I know, and curse the men who drove them on to it. They are trapped. They cannot escape from the thing they curse, because of their discipline, their patriotism----”

“Their patriotism!” said Madame Chéri.

She was really angry with Brand, and I noticed that even Hélène drew back a little from her place on the rug and looked perplexed and disappointed. Madame Chéri ridiculed the idea of German patriotism. They were brutes who liked war except when they feared defeat. They had committed a thousand atrocities out of sheer joy in bestial cruelty. Their idea of patriotism was blood-lust and the oppression of people more civilised than themselves. They hated all people who were not savages like themselves.

Wickham Brand shook his head.

“They’re not all as bad as that. I knew decent people among them before the war. For a time, of course, they went mad. They were poisoned by the damnable philosophy of their leaders and teachers.”

“They liked the poison,” said Madame Chéri. “They lapped it up. It is in their blood and spirits. They are foul through and through.”

“They are devils,” said Hélène. She shuddered as though she felt very cold.

Even the small boy on Brand’s knees said: “_Sales Boches!_”

Brand groaned in a whimsical way.

“I have said all those things a thousand times! They nearly drove me mad. But now it’s time to stop the river of blood--if the German army will acknowledge defeat. I would not go on a day after that, for our own sakes--for the sake of French boys and English. Every day more of war means more dead of ours, more blind, more crippled, and more agony of soul. I want some of our boyhood to be saved.”

Madame Chéri answered coldly.

“Not before the Germans have been punished. Not before that, if we all die.”

Hélène sprang up with a passionate gesture.

“All German babies ought to be strangled in their cradles! Before they grow up to be fat, beastly men.”

She was thinking of Schwarz, I imagine. It was the horror of remembrance which made her so fierce. Then she laughed, and said: “Oh, _là là_, let us be glad because yesterday we were liberated. Do not quarrel with an English officer, _maman_. He helped to save us.”

She put her hands on Wickham Brand’s shoulders and said: “_Merci, mon capitaine!_”

So the conversation turned, and Wickham won them back by his courtesy, and by a tribute to the courage of French civilians behind the lines, of whom he told many haunting stories.

But when I walked round with him to his mess--we were going round later to see Eileen O’Connor--he referred back to the incident.

“Daddy Small is right.” (He referred to the little American doctor.) “The hatred of these people is transcendental. It is like a spiritual flame. It is above all self-interest, kindly, human instincts, life itself. That woman would sacrifice herself, and her children, as quietly as she heard the death of her husband, rather than grant the Germans peace without victory and vengeance. How can there be any peace, whatever treaty is signed? Can Europe ever get peace with all this hatred as a heritage?”

VI

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 K.R.R. 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 at the 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 trendies 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 humorous 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 on which 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.

“An _embusqué_ job!” 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 came 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--a _Feldwebel._ “Aren’t you going to tell your war lords to go to hell and stop all this silly massacre before Germany is _kaput?_”

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, the Press, that most of his fellow officers--apart from 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.

VII

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 whisky, 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 King 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 of war. 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 excellent piano 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’d 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 a la, 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 some rather good portraits of a French family--from the eighteenth century onwards--on the panelled walls. The _concierge_ had told us that it 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 the _Morning 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 be _that_ conflict.... That is a wonderful phrase, ‘the pestilential doctrine of the brotherhood of man.’ I must make a note of it.”

“Shame oh 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, humorous, 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 polished boards 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 the Rhine, 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.

VIII

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 Mother and 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 white _bandeaux,_ 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 trivial meaning. 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 of red 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 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 there was 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 mm 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 French _poilu_ in 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 them together 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.

IX

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 “_Ecole de Jeunes Filles_” (her parents in Kensington had too big a family to keep them all), with lessons twice a week at the convent, and private pupils in her own rooms. She learned to speak French quickly and charmingly, and her gift of humour, her Irish frankness and comradeship made her popular among her pupils, so that she had many invitations to their homes and became well known in the best houses of Lille--mostly belonging to rich manufacturers. A commonplace story till then. But when the Germans occupied Lille this Irish girl became one of the chief characters in a drama that was exciting and fantastic to the point of melodrama. It was she who organised the Lille branch of a secret society of women, with a network all over northern France and Belgium--the world remembers Nurse Cavell at Brussels--for the escape of young civilians of military age and prisoners of war, combining that work (frightfully perilous) with espionage on German movements of troops and other facts that might be of value to the Belgian Army, and through them to England and France. It was out of an old book of Jules Verne called “The Cryptogram” that she copied the cypher in which she wrote her messages (in invisible ink on linen handkerchiefs and rags), and she had an audacity of invention in numberless small tricks and plots which constantly broke through the meshes of the German network of military police.

“She had a contempt for their stupidity,” said the Reverend Mother. “Called them dunderheads, and one strange word of which I do not know the meaning--‘yobs’--and I trembled at the risks she took.”

She lived with one maid in two rooms on the ground floor of a house near the Jardin d’Eté, the rest of the house being used as the headquarters of the German Intelligence Section of the Northern District. All day long officers went in and out, and by day and night there were always sentries at the door. Yet it was there that was established also the headquarters of the Rescue Committee. It was on account of her Irish name and parentage that Eileen O’Connor was permitted to remain in the two rooms to the left of the courtyard, entered by a separate door. The German Kommandant was a man who firmly believed that the Irish nation was ready to break out into revolt against the English, and that all Irish--men and women--hated the British Empire as much as any Prussian. Eileen O’Connor played up to this _idée 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 the _Ecole de Jeunes Filles_. After six months she was permitted to receive private pupils in her two rooms on the ground floor of the Intelligence Headquarters, in the same courtyard, though not in the same building. Her pupils came with drawing-boards and paint-boxes. They were all girls with pigtails and short frocks--not so young as they looked, because three or four at least, including the Baronne de Villers-Auxicourt, were older than schoolgirls. They played the part perfectly, and the sentries smiled at them and said, “_Guten Tag, schönes Fraulein_,” as each one passed. They were the committee of the Rescue Society: Julienne de Quesnoy, Marcelle Barbier, Yvonne Marigny, Marguérite Cléry, and Alice de Taffin, de Villers-Auxicourt.

Eileen O’Connor was the director and leading spirit. It seems to me astonishing that they should have arranged the cypher, practised it, written down military information gathered from German conversations and reported to them by servants and agents under the very noses of the German intelligence officers, who could see into the sitting-room as they passed through French windows and saluted Eileen O’Connor and her young ladies if they happened to meet their eyes. It is more astonishing that, at different times, and one at a time, many fugitives (including five British soldiers who had escaped from the Citadel) slept in the cellar beneath that room, changed into German uniforms belonging to men who had died at the convent hospital--the Reverend Mother did that part of the plot--and walked quietly out in the morning by an underground passage leading to the Jardin d’Eté. The passage had been anciently built but was blocked up at one end by Eileen O’Connor’s cellar, and she and the other women broke the wall, one brick at a time, until after three months the hole was made. Their finger-nails suffered in the process, and they were afraid that the roughness of their hands might be noticed by the officers, but in spite of German spectacles they saw nothing of that. Eileen O’Connor and her friends were in constant touch with the prisoners of the Citadel and smuggled food to them. That was easy. It was done by bribing the German sentries with tobacco and meat-pies. They were also in communication with other branches of the work in Belgium, so that fugitives were passed on from town to town, and house to house. Their success made them confident, after many horrible fears, and for a time they were lulled into a sense of security. That was rudely crashed when Eileen O’Connor, the young Baronne de Villers-Auxicourt, and Marcelle Barbier were arrested one morning in September of ‘17 on a charge of espionage. They were put into separate cells of the civil prison, crowded with the vilest women of the slums and stews, and suffered something like torture because of the foul atmosphere, the lack of sanitation and unspeakable abomination.

“Only the spirit of Christian martyrdom could remain cheerful in such terrible conditions,” said the Reverend Mother. “Our dear Eileen was sustained by a great faith and wonderful gaiety. Her laughter, her jokes, her patience, her courage, were an inspiration even to the poor degraded women who were prisoners with her. They worshipped her. We, her friends, gave her up for lost, though we prayed unceasingly that she might escape death. Then she was brought to trial.”

She stood alone in the court. The young Baronne de Villers-Auxicourt had died in prison owing to the shock of her arrest and a weak heart. A weak heart, though so brave. Eileen was not allowed to see her on her deathbed, but she sent a message almost with her last breath. It was the one word “courage!” Mlle. Marcelle Barbier was released before the trial for lack of direct evidence.

Eileen’s trial was famous in Lille. The court was crowded and the German military tribunal could not suppress the loud expressions of sympathy and admiration which greeted her, nor the angry murmurs which interrupted the prosecuting officer. She stood there, wonderfully calm, between two soldiers with fixed bayonets. She looked very young and innocent between her guards, and it is evident that her appearance made a favourable impression on the court. The President, after peering at her through his horn spectacles, was not so ferocious in his manner as usual when he bade her be seated.

The evidence seemed very strong against her. “She is lost” was the belief of all her friends in court. One of the sentries at the Citadel, jealously savage because another man had received more tobacco than himself--on such a trivial thing did this girl’s life hang--betrayed the system by which the women’s committee sent food to the French and English prisoners. He gave the names of three of the ladies and described Eileen O’Connor as the ringleader. The secret police watched her, and searched her rooms at night. They discovered the cypher and the key, a list of men who had escaped, and three German uniforms in a secret cupboard. They had been aided in their search by Lieutenant Franz von Kreuzenach, of the Intelligence Bureau, who was the chief witness for the prosecution, and whose name was recommended to the court for the vigilance and zeal he had shown in the detection of the conspiracy against the Army and the Fatherland. It was he who had found the secret cupboard and had solved the key to the cypher.

“We will take the lieutenant’s evidence in due course,” said the President. “Does that complete the indictment against this prisoner?”

Apart from a savage elaboration of evidence based upon the facts presented and a demand that the woman’s guilt, if the court were satisfied thereof, should be punished by death, the preliminary indictment by the prosecution ended.

It was a terrible case, and during its revelations the people in court were stricken with dread and pity for the girl who was now sitting between the two soldiers. They were all staring at her, and some at least--the Reverend Mother among them--noticed with surprise that when the officer for the prosecution ended his speech she drew a deep breath, raised her head, as though some weight of fear had been lifted from her, and--laughed.

It was quite a merry laugh, with that full blackbird note of hers, and the sound of it caused a strange sensation in the court. The President blinked repeatedly, like an owl blinded by a ray of sunlight. He addressed the prisoner in heavy, barbarous French.

“You are charged with conspiracy against our German martial law. The punishment is death. It is no laughing matter, Fraulein.”

They were stem words, but there was a touch of pity in that last sentence.

“_Ce riest pas une affaire pour rire, Fràulein._”

Eileen O’Connor, said the Reverend Mother, who was to be called as a witness on her behalf, bowed in a gracious way to the President, but with a look of amusement that was amazing to the German officers assembled for her trial. Some of them scowled, but there were others, the younger men, who whispered, and smiled also with no attempt to disguise their admiration of such courage.

“Perhaps it was only I,” said the Reverend Mother, “who understood the child’s joyous relief which gave her this courage. I had waited with terrible dread for the announcement of the discovery of the secret passage. That it had been discovered I knew, for the German Lieutenant, Franz von Kreuzenach, had come round to me and very sternly questioned me about a case of medicine which he had found there, stamped with the name of our convent.”

“Then,” I said, “this Franz von Kreuzenach must have suppressed some of the evidence. By what motive----”

The Reverend Mother interrupted me, putting her hand on my sleeve with a touch of protest.

“The good God works through strange instruments, and may touch the hardest heart with His grace. It was indeed a miracle.”

I would give much to have been in that Court at Lille when Eileen O’Connor was permitted to question the German lieutenant, who was the chief witness against her.

From what I have heard, not only from the Reverend Mother, but from other people of Lille who were present at the trial, she played with this German officer, making him look very foolish, ridiculing him in a merry, contemptuous way before the court. Indeed, he seemed strangely abashed before her.

“The cypher!... Have you ever been a schoolboy, or were you born a lieutenant in the German Army?”

Franz von Kreuzenach admitted that he had once been a boy--to the amusement of his brother officers.

Had he ever read stories of adventure, fairy tales, romances, or did he spend his childhood in the study of Nietzsche, Haegel, Schopenhauer, Kant, Goethe, von Bemhardi, Karl Marx-------

When she strung off these names--so incongruous in association--even the President permitted a slight smile to twist his thin hard mouth.

Franz von Kreuzenach said that he had read some fairy tales and stories of adventure. Might he ask the _gnadiges Fraulein_----

“Yes,” said the President, “what has this to do with your case, Fràulein? I desire to give you full liberty in your defence, but this is entirely irrelevant to the evidence.”

“It is my case!” cried Miss O’Connor. “Listen to the next question, Herr President. It is the key of my defence.”

Her next question caused laughter in court.

“I ask the Herr Lieutenant whether, as a boy, or a young man, he has read the romances of the French writer, Jules Verne?”

Franz von Kreuzenach looked abashed, and blushed like a schoolboy. His eyes fell before the challenging look of the Irish girl.

“I have read some novels by Jules Verne, in German translations.”

“Oh, in German translations--of course!” said Miss O’Connor. “German boys do not learn French very well.”

“Keep to the case,” said the President. “In heaven’s name, Fraulein, what has this to do with your defence?”

She raised her hand, for patience, and said, “Herr President, my innocence will soon be clear.”

She demanded of the witness for the prosecution whether he had ever read the novel by Jules Verne called “The Cryptogram.” He said that he had read it only a few days ago. He had discovered it in her room.

Eileen O’Connor turned round eagerly to the President.

“I demand the production of that book.”

An orderly was sent to the lieutenant’s rooms to fetch it. It was clear that the President of the Court made a black mark against Franz von Kreuzenach for not having mentioned its discovery to the Court. As yet, however, he could not see the bearing of it on the case.

Then, with the book in her hand, Eileen O’Connor turned to the famous cryptogram, showed how it corresponded exactly with her own cypher, proved that the pieces of paper found in her rooms were copies of the Jules Verne cypher in the handwriting of her pupils.

“You see, Herr President!” she cried eagerly.

The President admitted that this was proved, but, as he asked, leaning forward in his chair, for what purpose had they copied out that cypher? Cyphers were dangerous things to write in time of war. Deadly things. Why did these ladies want to learn the cypher?

It was then that Eileen O’Connor was most brilliant. She described in a simple and girlish way how she and her pupils worked in their little room. While they copied freehand models, one of them read out to the others, books of romance, love, adventure, to forget the gloom of life and the tragedy of war. One of those books was Jules Verne’s “Cryptogram.” It had fascinated them. It had made them forget the misery of war. They were romantic girls, imaginative girls. Out of sheer merriment, to pass the hours, they had tried to work out the cypher. They had written love-letters to imaginary young men in those secret numbers. Here Eileen, smiling ironically, read out specimens of the letters that had been found.

“Come to the corner of the Rue Esquermoise at 9.45. You will know me because I shall be wearing a blue bow in a black hat.”

That was the romantic imagination of the Baronne de Villers-Auxicourt.

“When you see a lady standing outside the Jardin d’Eté, with a little brown dog, speak to her in French and say, ‘_Comme il fait froid aujourd’hui, mademoiselle_.’ If she answers, ‘_Je ne vous comprends pas, monsieur_,’ you will understand that she is to be trusted, and you must follow her.”

That was a romantic idea to which Eileen herself pleaded guilty.

“Herr President,” said Eileen, “you cannot put old heads on young shoulders, even in time of war. A party of girls will let their foolish little minds run upon ideas of love, even when the sound of guns is not far away. You, Herr President, will understand that perfectly.”

Perhaps there was something in the character of the President that made this a chance hit. All the German officers laughed, and the President shifted in his seat and flushed to the top of his bald, vulture-like head.

The possession of those German uniforms was also explained in the prettiest way by Eileen O’Connor. They were uniforms belonging to three handsome young German soldiers who had died in hospital. They had kept them to return to their mothers after the war, those poor German mothers who were weeping for their sons. This part of her defence touched the German officers deeply. One of them had tears in his eyes.

The list of escaped fugitives was harder to explain, but again an Irish imagination succeeded in giving it an innocent significance. It had been compiled by a prisoner in the Citadel and given to Eileen as a proof that his own hope of escape was not in vain, though she had warned him of the fearful risk. “The poor man gave me the list in sheer simplicity, and in innocence I kept it.”

Simply and touchingly she admitted her guilt in smuggling food to French and British prisoners, and to German sentries, and claimed that her fault was only against military regulations, but in humanity was justified.

“I am Irish,” she said. “I have in my heart the remembrance of English crimes to Ireland--old, unforgettable crimes that still cry out for the justice and the liberty which are denied my country.”

Some of the younger German officers shook their heads approvingly. They liked this Irish hatred of England. It was according to their text-books.

“But,” said the Irish girl, “the sufferings of English prisoners--you know here of their misery, their hunger, their weakness in that Citadel where many have died and are dying--stirred my compassion as a woman to whom all cruelty is tragic, and all suffering of men a call to that mother-love which is in the spirit of all their womanhood, as you know by your German women--as I hope you know. Because they were starved I tried to get them food, as I would to starving dogs or any poor creatures caught in the trap of war or of men’s sport. To that I confess guilty, with gladness in my guilt.”

The Reverend Mother, standing there in the whitewashed corridor of the convent, in the flickering light of an oil lantern, which gleamed on the white ruff round her neck and the silver cross on her breast, though her face was shadowed in the cavern of her black headdress, repeated this speech of Eileen O’Connor as though in hearing it first she had learnt it by heart.

“The child was divinely inspired, monsieur. Our Lady stood by her side, prompting her. I am sure of that.”

The trial lengthened out, until it was late in the evening when the judge summed up. He spoke again of the gravity of the accusation, the dread punishment that must befall the prisoner if her guilt were proved, the weight of evidence against her. For a time he seemed to press her guilt heavily, and the court was gloomy. The German officers looked grave. One thing happened in the course of his speech which affected the audience profoundly. It was when he spoke of the romantic explanation that had been offered by the prisoner regarding the secret cypher.

“This lady,” he said, “asks me to believe that she and her companions were playing a simple girlish game of make-believe. Writing imaginary letters to mythical persons. Were these young ladies--nay, is she, herself--so lacking in woman’s charm that she has no living man to love her, and needs must write fictitious notes to nonexistent men?”

The President said these words with portentous solemnity. Perhaps only a German could have spoken them. He paused and blinked at the German officers below him. Suddenly into the silence of the court came a ripple of laughter, clear and full of most mirthful significance.

Eileen O’Connor’s laugh bewitched the crowded court, and there was a roar of laughter, in which all the officers joined. By that laugh more even than by her general gaiety, her courage and eloquence, she won her life.

“I said a decade of the rosary to our Blessed Lady,” said the Reverend Mother, “and thanked God that this dear child’s life would not be taken. I was certain that those men would not condemn her to death. She was acquitted on the charge of espionage, and sentenced to two weeks’ imprisonment for smuggling food to prisoners, by a verdict of seven against three. Only when she left the court did she fall into so deep a swoon that for a little while we thought her dead.”

The Reverend Mother had told her story well. She held me in a deep strained interest. It was rather to myself than to her that I spoke the words which were my comment at the end of this narrative.

“How splendid!... But I am puzzled about that German lieutenant, Franz von Kreuzenach. He kept the real evidence back.”

“That,” said the Reverend Mother solemnly, “was a great mystery, and a miracle.”

Wickham Brand joined us in the passage, with Eileen O’Connor by his side.

“Not gone yet?” said Wickham.

“I have been listening to the tale of a woman’s courage,” I said, and when Eileen gave me her hand, I raised it to my lips, in the French style, though not in gallantry.

“Reverend Mother,” she said, “has been exalting me to the seventh heaven of her dear heart.”

On my way back to Brand’s mess I told him all I had heard about Eileen’s trial, and I remember his enthusiasm.

“Fine! Thank heaven there are women like that in this blood-soaked world. It saves one from absolute despair.”

He made no comment about the suppression of evidence, which was a puzzle to me.

We parted with a “So long, old man,” outside his headquarters, and I did not see him until a few days later.

X

It was Frederick E. Small, the American doctor attached to Brand’s crowd, who was with me on a night in Lille, before the armistice, when by news from the colonel we were stirred by the tremendous hope--almost a certainty--that the end of the war was near. I had been into Courtrai, which the enemy had first evacuated and then was shelling. It was not a joyous entry like that into Lille. Most of the people were still down in their cellars, where for several days they had been herded together until the air became foul. On the outskirts I had passed many groups of peasants with their babies and old people, trudging past our guns, trekking from one village to another in search of greater safety, or standing in the fields where our artillery was getting into action, and where new shell craters should have warned them away, if they had had more knowledge of war. For more than four years I had seen, at different periods, crowds like that, after the first flight of fugitives in August of ‘14, when the world seemed to have been tilted up and great populations in France and Belgium were in panic-stricken retreat from the advancing edge of war. I knew the types, the attitudes, the very shape of the bundles, in these refugee processions, the haggard look of the mothers pushing their perambulators, the bewildered look of old men and women, the tired sleepy look of small boys and girls, the stumbling dead-beat look of old farm horses dragging carts piled high with cottage furniture. As it was at the beginning so it was at the end--for civilians caught in the fires of war. With two other men I went into the heart of Courtrai and found it desolate, and knew the reason why, when, at the corner of the Grande Place, a heavy shell came howling and burst inside a house with frightful explosive noise, followed by a crash of masonry. The people were wise to keep to their cellars. Two girls, not so wise, made a dash from one house to another, and were caught by chunks of steel and killed close to the church of St. Martin, where they lay all crumpled up in a clotted pool of blood. A man came up to me, utterly careless of such risks, and I hated to stand talking to him with the shells coming every half-minute overhead.

There was a fire of passion in his eyes, and at every sentence he spoke to me his voice rose and thrilled as he denounced the German race for all they had done in Courtrai, for their robberies, their imprisonments, their destruction of machinery, their brutality. The last Kommandant of Courtrai was von Richthofen, father of the German aviator, and he was a hard, ruthless man, and kept the city under an iron rule.

“All that, thank God, is finished now,” said the man. “The English have delivered us from the beast!” As he spoke, another monstrous shell came overhead, but he took no notice of it, and said, “We are safe now from the enemy’s evil power!” It seemed to me a comparative kind of safety. I had no confidence in it when I sat in the parlour of an old lady who, like Eileen O’Connor, in Lille, had been an Irish governess in Courtrai, and who now, living in miserable poverty, sat in a bed-sitting-room whose windows and woodwork had been broken by shell-splinters. “Do you mind shutting the door, my dear?” she said. “I can’t bear those nasty bombs.” I realised with a large, experienced knowledge that we might be torn to fragments of flesh at any moment by one of those nasty “bombs,” which were really eight-inch shells; but the old lady did not worry, and felt safe when the door was shut.

Outside Courtrai, when I left, lay some khaki figures in a mush of blood. They were lads whom I had seen unloading ammunition that morning on the bank of the canal. One had asked me for a light, and said, “What’s all this peace talk?... Any chance?” A big chance, I had told him. Home for Christmas, certain sure this time. The boy’s eyes had lighted up for a moment, quicker than the match which he held in the cup of his hands.

“Jesus! Back for good, eh?”

Then the light went out of his eyes as the match flared up.

“We’ve heard that tale a score of times. ‘The Germans are weakening. The Huns ‘ave ‘ad enough!...’ Newspaper talk. A man would be a mug----”

Now the boy lay in the mud, with half his body blown away.... I was glad to get back to Lille for a spell, where there were no dead bodies in the roads. And the colonel’s news, straight from G.H.Q.--which, surely, were not playing up the old false optimism again!--helped one to hope that, perhaps, in a week or two the last boys of our race, the lucky ones, would be reprieved from that kind of bloody death which I had seen so often, so long, so heaped up, in many fields of France and Flanders, where the flower of our youth was killed.

Dr. Small was excited by the hope brought back by Colonel Lavington. He sought me out in my billet, _Madame Chéri_, and begged me to take a walk with him. (It was a moonlight night, but no double throb of a German air-engine came booming over Lille.) He walked at a hard pace, with the collar of his “British warm” tucked up to his ears, and talked in a queer disjointed monologue, emotionally, whimsically. I remember some of his words, more or less--anyhow, the gist of his thoughts, “I’m not worrying any more about how the war will end. We’ve won! Remarkable, that, when one thinks back to the time, less than a year ago, when the best thing seemed a draw. I’m thinking about the future. What’s the world going to be afterwards? That’s my American mind--the next job, so to speak.”

He thought hard while we paced round our side of the Jardin d’Eté, where the moonlight made the bushes glamorous and streaked the tree trunks with a silver line.

“This war is going to have prodigious effects on nations; on individuals, too. I’m scared. We’ve all been screwed up to an intense pitch--every nerve in us is beyond the normal stretch of nature. After the war there will be a sudden relaxing. We shall be like bits of chewed elastic. Rather like people who have drugged themselves to get through some big ordeal. After the ordeal their nerves are all ragged. They crave the old stimulus, though they dread it. They’re depressed--don’t know what’s the matter--get into sudden rages--hysterical--can’t settle to work--go out for gaiety and get bored. I’ve seen it many times in bad cases. Europe--yes, and America, too--is going to be a bad case. A neurotic world--Lord, it’ll take some healing!”

For a time his thoughts wandered round the possible terms of peace and the abasement of Germany. He prophesied the break-up of Germany, the downfall of the Emperor and of other thrones.

“Crowns will be as cheap as twenty cents,” he said. He hoped for the complete overthrow of Junkerdom--“all the dirty dogs,” as he called the Prussian war lords and politicians. But he hoped the Allies would be generous with the enemy peoples--“magnanimous” was the word he used.

“We must help the spirit of democracy to rise among them,” he said. “We must make it easy for them to exorcise the devil. If we press them too hard, put the screw on to the torture of their souls (defeat will be torture to a proud people), they will nourish a hope of vengeance and go back to their devil for hope.”

I asked him whether he thought his President would lead the world to a nobler stage of history.

He hesitated at that, groped a little, I thought, among old memories and prejudices.

“Why,” he said, “Wilson has the biggest chance that ever came to a human being--the biggest chance and the biggest duty. We are rich (too darned rich) and enormously powerful when most other peoples are poor and weak--drained of wealth and blood. That’s our luck, and a little bit, perhaps, our shame, though our boys have done their bit all right and are ready to do more; and it’s not their fault they weren’t here before--but we’re hardly touched by this war as a people, except spiritually. There we’ve been touched by the finger of Fate. (God, if you like that better!) So, with that strength behind him, the President is in a big way of business. He can make his voice heard, stand for a big idea. God, sonny, I hope he’ll do it! For the world’s sake, for the sake of all these suffering people, here in this city of Lille, and in a million little towns where people have been bashed by war.”

I asked him if he doubted Wilson’s greatness, and the question embarrassed him.

“I’m loyal to the man,” he said. “I’ll back him if he plays straight and big. Bigness, that’s what we want. Bigness of heart as well as bigness of brain. Oh, he’s clever, though not wise in making so many enemies. He has fine ideas and can write real words. Things which speak. True things. I’d like to be sure of his character--its breadth and strength, I mean. The world wants a nobleman, bigger than the little gentlemen of politics; a leader calling to the great human heart of our tribes and lifting them, with one grand gesture, out of the mire of old passions and vendettas and jealousies to a higher plane of--common sense. Out of the jungle to the daylight of fellowship. Out of the jungle.”

He repeated those words twice, with a reverent solemnity. He believed that so much emotion had been created in the heart of the world that, when the war ended, anything might happen if a leader came--a new religion of civilisation, any kind of spiritual and social revolution.

“We might kill cruelty,” he said. “My word, what a victory that would be!”

XI

Our conversation was interrupted by a figure that slipped out of the darkness of some doorway, hesitated before us, and then spoke in French.

“You are English officers? May I speak with you?”

It was a girl, whom I could see only vaguely in the darkness--she stood in the shadow of a doorway beyond the moonlight--and I answered her that I was English and my friend American.

“Is there any way,” she asked, “of travelling from Lille, perhaps to Paris? In a motor car, for example? To-night?”

I laughed at this startling request, put so abruptly. It was already nine o’clock at night!

“Not the smallest chance in the world, mademoiselle! Paris is far from Lille.”

“I was stupid,” said the girl. “Not all the way to Paris, but to some town outside Lille. Any town. There are motor cars always passing through the streets. I thought if I could get a little place in one----”

“It is difficult,” I said. “As a matter of fact, it is forbidden for officers to take civilians except in case of saving them from danger--in shelled places.”

She came suddenly out of the shadow into the moonlight, and I saw that she was a girl with red hair and a face strangely white. I knew by the way she spoke--the accent--as well as by the neatness of her dress, that she was not a working-girl. She was trembling painfully, and took hold of my arm with both her hands.

“Monsieur, I beg of you to help me. I beseech you to think of some way in which I may get away from Lille to-night. It is a matter of extreme importance to me.”

A group of young men and women came up the street arm-in-arm, shouting, laughing, singing the “Marseillaise.” They were civilians, with two of our soldiers among them, wearing women’s hats.

Before I could answer the girl’s last words, she made a sudden retreat into the dark doorway, and I could see dimly that she was cowering back.

Dr. Small spoke to me. “That girl is scared of something. The poor child has got the jim-jams.”

I went closer to her and heard her breathing. It was quite loud. It was as though she were panting after hard running.

“Are you ill?” I asked.

She did not answer until the group of civilians had passed. They did not pass at once, but stood for a moment looking up at a light burning in an upper window. One of the men shouted something in a loud voice--some word in _argot_--which I did not understand, and the women screeched with laughter. Then they went on, dancing with linked arms, and our two soldiers in the women’s hats lurched along with them.

“I am afraid!” said the girl.

“Afraid of what?” I asked.

I repeated the question--“Why are you afraid, mademoiselle?”--and she answered by words which I had heard a million times since the war began as an explanation of all trouble, tears, ruin, misery.

“_C’est la guerre!_”

“Look out!” said the little doctor. “She’s fainting.”

She had risen from her cowering position and stood upright for a moment, with her hand against the doorpost. Then she swayed, and would have fallen if the doctor had not caught her. Even then she fell, indeed, though without hurt, because he could not support her sudden weight--though she was of slight build--and they sank together in a kind of huddle on the doorstep.

“For the love of Mike!” said Dr. Small. He was on his knees before her now, chafing her cold hands. She came to in about a minute, and I leaned over her and asked her where she lived, and made out from her faint whisper that she lived in the house to which this doorway belonged, in the upper room where the light was burning. With numbed fingers--“cold as a toad,” said “Daddy” Small--she fumbled at her bodice and drew out a latchkey.

“We had better carry her up,” I said, and the doctor nodded.

The front door opened into a dimly-lit passage, uncarpeted, and with leprous-looking walls. At one end was a staircase with heavy banisters. The doctor and I supported the girl, who was able to walk a little now, and managed to get her to the first landing.

“Where?” I asked, and she said, “Opposite.”

It was the front room looking on to the street. A lamp was burning on the round table in the centre of the room, and I saw by the light of it the poverty of the furniture and its untidiness. At one end of the room was a big iron bedstead with curtains of torn lace, and on the wooden chairs hung some soiled petticoats and blouses. There was a small cooking-stove in a corner, but no charcoal burned in it, and I remember an ebony-framed mirror over the mantelpiece. I remember that mirror vividly. I remember, for instance, that a bit of the ebony had broken off, showing the white plaster underneath, and a crack in the right-hand corner of the looking-glass.

Probably my eyes were attracted to it because of a number of photographs stuck into the framework. They were photographs of a girl in a variety of stage costumes; and glancing at the girl, whom the doctor had put into a low arm-chair, I saw that they were of her. But with all the tragic difference between happiness and misery; worse than that--between unscathed girlhood and haggard womanhood. This girl with red hair and a white waxen face was pretty still. There was something more than prettiness in the broadness of her brow and the long tawny lashes that were now veiling her closed eyes as she sat with her head back against the chair, showing a long white throat. But her face was lined with an imprint of pain, and her mouth, rather long and bow-like, was drawn with a look of misery.

The doctor spoke to me--in English, of course.

“Half-starved, I should say. Or starved.”

He sniffed at the stove and the room generally.

“No sign of recent cooking.”

He opened a cupboard and looked in.

“Nothing in the pantry, sonny. I guess the girl would do with a meal.”

I did not answer him. I was staring at the photographs stuck into the mirror, and saw one that was not a girl’s portrait. It was the photograph of a young French lieutenant. I crossed the room and looked at it closer, and then spoke to the little doctor in a curiously unexcited voice, as one does in moments of living drama.

“This girl is Pierre Nesle’s sister.”

“For the love of Mike!” said the little doctor, for the second time that night.

The girl heard the name of Pierre Nesle and opened her eyes wide, with a wondering look.

“Pierre Nesle? That is my brother. Do you know him?”

I told her that I knew him well and had seen him in Lille, where he was looking for her, two days ago. He was now in the direction of Courtrai.

The girl was painfully agitated and uttered pitiful words.

“Oh, my little brother!” she murmured. “My dear little comrade!” She rose from her chair, steadying herself with one hand on the back of it, and with feverish anxiety said that she must go at once. She must leave Lille.

“Why?” I asked. “Why do you want to leave Lille?”

“I am afraid!” she answered again, and burst into tears.

I turned to the doctor and translated her words.

“I can’t understand this fear of hers--this desire to leave Lille.”

Dr. Small had taken something off the mantelpiece--a glass tube with some tablets--which he put in his pocket.

“Hysteria,” he said. “Starvation, war-strain, and--drugs. There’s a jolly combination for a young lady’s nerves! She’s afraid of herself, old ghosts, the horrors. Wants to run away from it all, forgetting that she carries her poor body and brain with her. I know the symptoms--even in little old New York in time of peace.”

He had his professional manner. I saw the doctor through his soldier’s uniform. He spoke with the authority of the medical man in a patient’s bedroom. He ordered me to go round to my mess and bring back some food, while he boiled up a kettle and got busy. When I returned, after half-an-hour, the girl was more cheerful. Some of the horrors had passed from her in the doctor’s company. She ate some of the food I had brought in a famished way, but after a few mouthfuls sickened at it and would eat no more. But a faint colour had come into her cheeks and gave her face a touch of real beauty. She must have been extraordinarily attractive before the war--as those photographs showed. She spoke of Pierre with adoration. He had been all that was good to her before she left home (she hated her mother!) to sing in cabarets and café concerts.

“I cannot imagine Pierre as a lieutenant!” she remarked, with a queer little laugh.

Dr. Small said he would get some women in the house to look after her in the night, but she seemed hostile to that idea.

“The people here are unkind. They are bad women here. If I died they would not care.”

She promised to stay in the house until we could arrange for Pierre to meet her and take her away to Paris. But I felt the greatest pity for the girl when we left her alone in her miserable room. The scared look had come back to her face. I could see that she was in terror of being alone again.

When we walked back to our billets the doctor spoke of the extraordinary chance of meeting the girl like that--the sister of our _liaison_ officer. The odds were a million to one against such a thing.

“I always feel there’s a direction in these cases,” said Daddy Small. “Some Hand that guides. Maybe you and I were being led to-night. I’d like to save that girl, Marthe.”

“Is that her name?”

“Marthe de Méricourt, she calls herself, as a singing-girl. I guess that’s why Pierre could not hear of her in this town.”

Later on the doctor spoke again.

“That girl is as much a war victim as if she had been shell-shocked on the field of battle. The casualty lists don’t say anything about civilians, not a darned thing about broken hearts, stricken women, diseased babies, infant mortality--all the hell of suffering behind the lines. May God curse all war devils!”

He put his hand on my shoulder and said in a very solemn way: “After this thing is finished--this grisly business--you and I, and all men of goodwill, must put our heads together to prevent it happening again. I dedicate whatever life I have to that.”

He seemed to have a vision of hope.

“There are lots of good fellows in the world. Wickham Brand is one of ‘em. Charles Fortune is another. One finds them everywhere on your side and mine. Surely we can get together when peace comes and make a better System somehow!”

“Not easy, doctor.”

He laughed at me.

“I hate your pessimism!... We must get a message to Pierre Nesle.... Good-night, sonny!”

On the way back to my billet I passed young Clatworthy.

He was too engrossed to see me, having his arm round a girl who was standing with him under an unlighted lamp-post. She was looking up into his face on which the moonlight shone--a pretty creature, I thought.

“_Je t’adore!_” she murmured, as I passed quite close; and Clatworthy kissed her.

I knew the boy’s mother and sisters, and wondered what they would think of him if they saw him now with this little street-walker. To them Cyril was a white knight _sans peur et sans reproche_. The war had not improved him. He was no longer the healthy lad who had been captain of his school, with all his ambition in sport, as I had known him five years before. Sometimes, in spite of his swagger and gallantry, I saw something sinister in his face, the look of a soiled soul. Poor kid! He, too, would have his excuse for all things:

“_C’est la guerre!_”

XII

It was five o’clock on the following evening that I saw the girl Marthe again. The doctor and I had arranged to go round to her lodging after dinner, by which time we hoped to have a letter for her from Pierre, by despatch-rider. But Brand was with me in the afternoon, having looked into my billet with an English conversation-book for Hélène, who was anxious to study our way of speech. Madame Chéri insisted upon giving him a glass of wine, and we stood talking in her drawing-room a while about the certain hope of victory, and then trivial things. Hélène was delighted with her book and Brand had a merry five minutes with her, teaching her to pronounce the words.

“_C’est effroyable!_” cried Hélène. “‘Through’... ‘Tough’ ‘Cough ‘... _Mon Dieu, comme c’est difficile!_ There is no rule in your tongue.”

Madame Chéri spoke of Edouard, her eldest boy, who had disappeared into the great silence, and gave me a photograph of him, in case I should meet him in our advance towards the Rhine. She kissed the photograph before giving it to me, and said a few words which revealed her strong character, her passionate patriotism.

“If he had been four years older he would have been a soldier of France. I should have been happy if he could have fought for his country, and died for it, like my husband.”

Brand and I left the house and went up towards the Grande Place. I was telling him about Pierre Nesle’s sister and our strange meeting with her the night before.

“I’m precious glad,” said Brand, “that no sister of mine was behind German lines. God knows how much they had to endure. Imagine their risks! It was a lucky escape for that girl Hélène. Supposing she had failed to barricade her door?”

When we came into the Grande Place we saw that something was happening. It was almost dark after a shadowy twilight, but we could see a crowd of people surging round some central point of interest. Many of them were laughing loudly. There was some joke in progress. The women’s tongues sounded most loud and shrill.

“They’re getting back to gaiety,” said Brand. “What’s the jest, I wonder?”

A gust of laughter came across the square. Above it was another sound, not so pleasant. It was a woman’s shrieks--shriek after shriek, most blood-curdling, and then becoming faint.

“What the devil----!” said Brand.

We were on the edge of the crowd and I spoke to a man there.

“What’s happening?”

He laughed in a grim way.

“It’s the _coiffure_ of a lady.. They are cutting her hair.”

I was mystified.

“Cutting her hair?”

A woman spoke to me, by way of explanation, laughing like the man.

“Shaving her head, monsieur. She was one of those who were too complaisant with German officers. You understand? There were many of them. They ought to have their heads cut off as well as their hair.”

Another man spoke gruffly.

“There would be a good many headless corpses if that were so. To their shame be it said. It was abominable. No pride. No decency.”

“But the worst will escape,” said another. “In private houses. The well-dressed demoiselles!”

“_Tuez-les!_” cried a woman. “_Tuez-les!_”

It was a cry for killing, such as women had screamed when pretty aristocrats were caught by the mobs of the French Revolution.

“My God!” said Brand.

He shouldered his way through the crowd, and I followed him. The people made a gap for us, seeing our uniforms, and desired us to enjoy the joke. What I saw when I came closer was a group of young men holding a limp figure. One of them was brandishing a large pair of scissors, as large as shears. Another held up a tangled mass of red hair.

“_Regardez!_” he shouted to the crowd, and they cheered and laughed.

I had seen the hair before, as I knew when I saw a girl’s face, dead-white, lifeless, as it seemed, and limp against a man’s shoulder.

“It is Marthe!” I said to Brand. “Pierre Nesle’s sister.”

A curious sense of faintness overcame me, and I felt sick.

Brand did not answer me, but I saw his face pale under its tan. He pushed forward through the crowd and I lost sight of him for a few moments. After that I saw him carrying the girl; above the heads of the people, I saw her head flopping from side to side horribly, a head with close-cropped hair. They had torn her clothes off her shoulders, which were bleeding.

“Help me,” said Brand.

I am not quite clear what happened. I have only a vague remembrance of the crowd making way for us, with murmurs of surprise and some hostile cries of women. I remember helping Brand to carry the girl--enormously heavy she seemed with her dead weight--but how we managed to get her into Dr. Small’s car is to this day a blank in my mind. We must have seen and hailed him at the corner of the Grande Place as he was going back to his billet. I have a distinct recollection of taking off my Burberry and laying it over the girl, who was huddled in the back of the car, and of Brand saying, “Where can we take her?” I also remember trying to light a cigarette and using many matches which went out in the wind. It was Brand’s idea that we should go to Madame Chéri’s house for sanctuary, and by the time we had driven to that place we had left the crowd behind and were not followed.

“You go in and explain things,” said Brand. “Ask Madame to give the girl a refuge.”

I think Madame Chéri was startled by the sight of the car, and perhaps by some queer look I had. I told her what had happened. This girl was the sister of Pierre Nesle, whom Madame Chéri had met. The crowd, for some reason, had cut off her hair. Would Madame save the poor child, who was unconscious?

I shall never forget the face or speech of that lady, whom I had found so kind. She drew herself up very stiffly and a relentless expression hardened her face.

“If you were not English I should say you desired to insult me, sir. The people have cut off the creature’s hair. ‘For some reason,’ you say. There is only one reason. Because she was faithless to her country and to her sex, and was familiar with men who were the enemies of France, the murderers of our men, robbers and assassins. She has been well punished. I would rather burn down my house than give her shelter. If they gave her to the dogs to tear in pieces I would not lift my little finger to save her.”

Hélène came in, and was surprised at the emotion of her mother’s voice.

“What is it, little _maman?_”

Madame Chéri regained control of herself, which for a moment she had lost in a passion that shook her.

“It is a little matter. This officer and I have been talking about vile people who sold themselves to our enemy. He understands perfectly.”

“I understand,” I said gravely. “There is a great deal of cruelty in the world, madame, and less charity than I had hoped.”

“There is, praise be to God, a little justice,” said Madame Chéri very calmly.

“_Au revoir, madame!_”

“_Au revoir, monsieur!_”

“_Au revoir, mademoiselle!_”

I was shocked then at the callousness of the lady. It seemed to me incredible. Now I am no longer shocked, but understand the horror that was hers, the loathing for a daughter of France who had--if the mob were not mistaken--violated the code of honour which enabled the French people to resist German brutality, even German kindness, which they hated worse, with a most proud disdain. That girl outside, bleeding and senseless in the car, had been friendly with German officers, notorious in her company with them. Otherwise she would not have been seized by the crowd and branded for shame. There was a fierce protective instinct which hardened Madame Chéri against charity. Only those who have seen what war means to women close to it, in enemy hands, may truly understand, and, understanding, curse war again for all its destruction of souls and bodies.

XIII

Brand and Dr. Small were both astonished and indignant.

“Do you mean to say she shuts her door against this poor bleeding girl?” said Brand.

The American doctor did not waste words. He only used words when there was no action on hand.

“The next place?” he said. “A hospital?”

I had the idea of the convent where Eileen O’Connor lodged. There was a sanctuary. Those nuns were vowed to Christian charity. They would understand and have pity.

“Yes,” said Brand, and he called to the driver.

We drove hard to the convent, and Brand was out of the car before it stopped, and rang the bell with such a tug that we heard it jangling loudly in the courtyard.

It seemed long before the little wicket opened and a woman’s voice said, “_Qui est la?_”

Brand gave his name and said, “Open quickly, _ma sour_. We have a woman here who is ill.”

The gate was opened, and Brand and I lifted out the girl, who was still unconscious, but moaning slightly, and carried her into the courtyard, and thence inside the convent to the whitewashed passage where I had listened so long to the Reverend Mother telling me of the trial scene.

It was the Reverend Mother who came now, with two of her nuns, while the little portress stood by, clasping her hands.

“An accident?” said the Reverend Mother. “How was the poor child hurt?”

She bent over the girl, Marthe--Pierre Nesle’s sister, as I remembered with an added pity--pulled my Burberry from her face and shoulders and glanced at the bedraggled figure there.

“Her hair has been cut off,” said the old nun. “That is strange! There are the marks of finger-nails on her shoulder. What violence was it, then?”

Brand described the rescue of the girl from the mob, who would have torn her to pieces, and as he spoke I saw a terrible look come into the Reverend Mother’s face.

“I remember--1870,” she said harshly. “They cut the hair of women who had disgraced themselves--and France--by their behaviour with German soldiers. We thought then that it was a light punishment... we think so now, monsieur!”

One of the nuns, a young woman who had been touching the girl’s head, smoothing back her tousled, close-cropped hair, sprang up as though she had touched an evil thing and shrank back.

Another nun spoke to the Reverend Mother.

“This house would be defiled if we took in a creature like that. God forbid, Reverend Mother----”

The old Superior turned to Brand, and I saw how her breast was heaving with emotion.

“It would have been better, sir, if you had left this wretched woman to the people. The voice of the people is sometimes the voice of God. If they knew her guilt their punishment was just. Reflect what it means to us--to all our womanhood. Husbands, fathers, brothers were being killed by these Germans. Our dear France was bleeding to death. Was there any greater crime than that a Frenchwoman should show any weakness, any favour, to one of those men who were helping to cause the agony of France, the martyrdom of our youth?”

Brand stammered out a few words. I remember only two: “Christian charity!”

The American doctor and I stood by silently. Dr. Small was listening with the deepest attention, as though some new truth about human nature were being revealed to him.

It was then that a new voice was raised in that whitewashed corridor. It was Eileen O’Connor’s Irish contralto, and it vibrated with extraordinary passion as she spoke in French.

“Reverend Mother!... I am dismayed by the words you have spoken. I do not believe, though my ears have heard them. No, they are unbelievable! I have seen your holiness, your charity, every day for four years, nursing German prisoners, and English, with equal tenderness, with a great pity. Not shrinking from any horror or the daily sight of death, but offering it all as a sacrifice to God. And now, after our liberation, when we ought to be uplifted by the Divine favour that has come to us, you would turn away that poor child who lies bleeding at our feet, another victim of war’s cruelty. Was it not war that struck her down? This war which has been declared against souls as well as bodies! This war on women, as well as on fighting-men who had less need of courage than some of us! What did our Lord say to a woman who was taken by the mob? ‘He that is without sin among you, let him cast the first stone!’ It was Mary Magdalen who kissed His feet, and wiped them with her hair. This girl has lost her hair, but perhaps Christ has taken it as a precious napkin for His wounds. We who have been lucky in escape from evil--shall we cast her out of the house which has a cross above its roof? I have been lucky above most women in Lille. If all things were known, I might be lying there in that girl’s place, bleeding and senseless, without this hair of mine. Reverend Mother--_remember Franz von Kreuzenach!_”

We--Dr. Small, Brand, and I--were dumbfounded by Eileen O’Connor’s passionate outcry. She was utterly unconscious of us and looked only at the Reverend Mother, with a light in her eyes that was more intensely spiritual than I had seen before in any woman’s face.

The old nun seemed stricken by Eileen’s words. Into her rugged old face, all wrinkled about the eyes, crept an expression of remorse and shame. Once she raised her hands, slowly, as though beseeching the girl to spare her. Then her hands came down again and clasped each other at her breast, and her head bowed so that her chin was dug into her white bib. Tears came into her eyes and fell unheeded down her withered cheeks. I can see now the picture of us all standing there in the whitewashed corridor of the convent, in the dim light of a hanging lantern--we three officers standing together, the huddled figure of Marthe Nesle lying at our feet, half covered with my trench-coat, but with her face lying sideways, white as death under her cropped red hair, and her bare shoulders stained with a streak of blood; opposite, the old Mother, with bowed head and clasped hands; the two young nuns, rigid, motionless, silent; and Eileen O’Connor, with that queer light on her face and her hands stretched out with a gesture of passionate appeal.

The Reverend Mother raised her head and spoke--after what seemed like a long silence, but was only a second or two, I suppose.

“My child, I am an old woman, and have said many prayers. But you have taught me the lesson, which I thought I knew, that the devil does not depart from us until our souls have found eternal peace. I am a wicked old woman, and until you opened my eyes I was forgetful of charity and of our Lord’s most sweet commands.”

She turned to us now with an air of wonderful dignity and graciousness.

“Gentlemen, I pray you to carry this wounded girl to my own cell. To-night I will sleep on bare boards.”

One of the young nuns was weeping bitterly.

So we lifted up Marthe Nesle, and, following the Reverend Mother, carried her to a little white room and laid her on an iron bedstead under a picture of the Madonna below which burned an oil lamp on a wooden table. The American doctor asked Eileen O’Connor to bring him some hot water.

Brand and I went back in the car, and I dined at his mess again.

XIV

Colonel Lavington was discussing the art of the sonnet and the influence of Italian culture in Elizabethan England. From that subject he travelled to the psychology of courage, which in his opinion, for the moment, was founded on vanity.

“Courage,” he said, with that gallant look of his which I had seen with admiration when he walked up the old duckboards beyond Ypres, with a whimsical smile at “crumps” bursting abominably near--he had done bravely in the old days as a battalion commander. “Courage is merely a pose before the mirror of one’s own soul and one’s neighbours. We are all horribly afraid in moments of danger, but some of us have the gift of pretending that we don’t mind. That is vanity. We like to look heroes, even to ourselves. It is good to die with a _beau geste_, though death is damnably unpleasant.”

“I agree, colonel,” said Charles Fortune. “Always the right face for the proper occasion. But it wants a lot of practice.”

He put on his gallant, devil-may-care face, and there was appreciative laughter from his fellow officers.

Harding, the young landowner, was of opinion that courage depended entirely on the liver.

“It is a matter of physical health,” he said. “If I am out-of-sorts, my _moral_ goes down to zero. Not that I’m ever really brave. Anyhow, I hate things that go off. Those loud noises of bursting shells are very objectionable. I shall protest against Christmas crackers after the war.”

Young Clatworthy was in the sulks, and sat very silent during all this badinage.

“What’s the matter?” I asked, and he confided to me his conviction, while he passed the salt, that “life was a rummy game.”

“Hipped?” I said, and his answer was, “Fed up to the back teeth!”

That seemed to me curious, after the glimpse I had had of him with a little lady of Lille. The boy explained himself somewhat under cover of the colonel’s conversation, which was holding the interest of the mess.

“We’re living unnaturally,” he said. “It’s all an abnormal show, and we pretend to be natural and normal when everything that happens round us is fantastic and disorderly.”

“What’s your idea?” I enquired. It was the first time I had heard the boy talk seriously, or with any touch of gravity.

“Hard to explain,” he said. “But, take my case to-day. This morning I went up the line to interrogate the latest batch of P.O.W.’s.” (He meant prisoners of war.) “A five-point-nine burst within ten yards of my car, the other side of Courtrai, killed my driver and missed me by a couple of inches. I felt as sick as a dog when I saw Saunders crumpled over his steering-wheel with blood pouring down his neck. Not that it’s the first time I’ve seen blood!”

He laughed as he gave a glance at his wound-stripe, and I remembered the way in which he had gained his M.C. at Gommecourt--one of three left alive in his company.

“We had been talking, three minutes before, about his next leave. He had been married in ‘16, after the Somme, and hadn’t seen his wife since. Said her letters made him ‘uneasy.’ Thought she was drinking because of the loneliness. Well, there he was--finished--and a nasty sight. I went off to the P.O.W. cage and examined the beggars--one of them, as usual, had been a waiter at the ‘Cecil,’ and said, ‘How’s dear old London?’--and passed the time of day with Bob Mellett--you know, the one-armed lad. He laughed no end when he heard of my narrow squeak. So did I--though it’s hard to see the joke. He lent me his car on the way back, and somewhere outside Courtrai we bumped over a dead body with a queer soft squelch. It was a German--a young ‘un--and Bob Mellett said, ‘_He_ won’t be home for Christmas!’ Do you know Bob?--he used to cry at school when a rat was caught. Queer, isn’t it? Now here I am, sitting at a white table-cloth, listening to the colonel’s talk, and pretending to be interested. I’m not a bit, really. I’m wondering why that bit of shell hit Saunders and not me. Or why I’m not lying in a muddy road as a bit of soft squelch for staff cars to bump over. And on top of that I’m wondering how it will feel to hang up a bowler hat again in a house at Wimbledon, and say, ‘Cheerio, mother!’ to the mater (who will be knitting in the same armchair--chintz-covered--by the piano) and read the evening paper until dinner’s ready, take Ethel to a local dance, and get back into the old rut of home life in a nice family, don’t you know? With all my memories! With the ghosts of _this_ life crowding up! Ugly ghosts, some of ‘em! Dirty ghosts!... It’s inconceivable that we can ever go back to the funny old humdrum! I’m not sure that I want to.”

“You’re hipped,” I told him. “You’ll be glad to get back all right. Wimbledon will be Paradise after what you’ve been through.”

“Oh, Lord, _I’ve_ done nothing,” said the boy. “Fact is, I’ve been talking tripe. Forget it.”

But I did not forget, and remembered every word later, when I heard his laughter on Armistice night.

A despatch-rider stood outside the door in his muddy overalls and Brand went to get his message. It was from Pierre Nesle.

“I am mad with joy that you have found Marthe! Alas! I cannot get back for a week. Tell her that I am still her devoted comrade and loving brother.--Pierre.” Brand handed me the slip and said, “Poor devil!” I went back to my billet in Madame Chéri’s house, and she made no allusion to our conversation in the afternoon, but was anxious, I thought, to assure me of her friendship by special little courtesies, as when she lighted my candle and carried it upstairs before saying good-night. Hélène was learning English fast and furiously, and with her arm round her mother’s waist said, “Sleep well, sir, and very good dreams to you!” which I imagine was a sentence out of her text-book.

XV

They were great days--in the last two weeks before the Armistice! For me, and for many men, they were days of exultation, wild adventure, pity, immense hope, tremendous scenes uplifted by a sense of victory; though for others, the soldiers who did the dirty work, brought up lorry columns through the mud of the old battlefields far behind our new front line, carried on still with the hard old drudgery of war, they were days not marked out by any special jubilation, or variety, or hope, but just like all the others that had gone before since first they came to France.

I remember little scenes and pictures of those last two weeks as they pass through my mind like a him drama; episodes of tragedy or triumph which startled my imagination, a pageantry of men who had victory in their eyes, single figures who spoke to me, told me unforgettable things, and the last dead bodies who fell at the very gate of peace.

One of the last dead bodies I saw in the war was in the city of Valenciennes, which we entered on the morning of November 3rd. Our guns had spared the city which was full of people, but the railway station was an elaborate ruin of twisted iron and broken glass. Rails were torn up and sleepers burnt. Our airmen, flying low day after day during the German retreat, had flung down bombs, which had torn the fronts off the booking-offices and made match-wood of the signal-boxes and sheds. For German soldiers detraining here it had been a hellish place, and the fire of our flying-men had been deadly accurate. I walked through the ruin out into the station square. It was empty of all life, but one human figure was there all alone. It was the dead body of a young German soldier, lying with outstretched arms, on his back, in a pool of blood. His figure formed a cross there on the cobblestones, and seemed to me a symbol of all that youth which had been sacrificed by powers of monstrous evil. His face was still handsome in death, the square, rough-hewn face of a young peasant.

There was the tap-tap-tap of a German machine-gun somewhere on the right of the square. As I walked forward all my senses were alert to the menace of death. It would be foolish, I thought, to be killed at the end of the war--for surely the end was very near? And then I had a sudden sharp thought that perhaps it would be well if this happened. Why should I live when so many had died? The awful job was done, and my small part in it. I had seen it through from start to finish, for it was finished but for a few days of waiting. It might be better to end with it, for all that came afterwards would be anticlimax. I remember raising my head and looking squarely round at that staccato hammering of the German machine-gun, with an intense desire that a bullet might come my way. But I went on untouched into the town.... As in Courtrai, a fury of gun-fire overhead kept the people in their houses. Our field batteries were firing over the city and the enemy was answering. Here and there I saw a face peering out of a broken window, and then a door opened, and a man and woman appeared behind it with two thin children. The woman thrust out a skinny hand and grasped mine, and began to weep. She talked passionately, with a strange mingling of rage and grief.

“Oh, my God!” she said, “those devils have gone at last! What have they not made us suffer! My husband and I had four little houses--we were innkeepers--and last night they sent us to this part of the town and burnt all of them.” She used a queer word in French. “Last night,” she said, “they made a devil’s _charivari_ and set many houses on fire.”

Her husband spoke to me over his wife’s shoulder.

“Sir, they have stolen everything, broken everything, ground us down for four years. They are bandits and robbers.”

“We are hungry,” said the thin girl.

By her side the boy, with a white pinched face, echoed her plaint.

“We have eaten our bread and I am hungry.”

They had some coffee left, and asked me to go inside and drink it with them, but I could not wait.

The woman held my wrist tight in her skinny hands.

“You will come back?” she asked.

“I will try,” I said.

Then she wept again and said: “We are grateful to the English soldiers. It is they who saved us.”

That is one out of a hundred little scenes that I remember in those last two weeks when, not without hard fighting, for the German machine-gun rearguards fought bravely to the end, our troops entered many towns and villages, and liberated many thousands of poor people. I remember the girls of a little town called Bohain who put on their best frocks and clean pinafores to welcome us. It was not until a little while that we found they were starving and had not even a crust of bread in all the town. Then the enemy started shelling, and some of the girls were killed, and many were suffocated by gas shells. That was worse in St. Amand, by Valenciennes, where all the women and children took refuge in the cellars. The German batteries opened fire with yellow cross shell as our guns passed through. Some of our men, and many of their horses, lay dead in the streets as I passed through; but worse things happened in the cellars below the houses. The heavy gas of the yellow cross shells filtered down to where the women and their babies cowered on their mattresses. They began to choke and gasp, and babies died in the arms of dying mothers.... Dr. Small, our American, went with a body of English doctors and nurses to the rescue of St. Amand. “I’ve seen bad things,” he told me. “I am not weak in the stomach--but I saw things in those cellars which nearly made me vomit.”

He put a hand on my shoulder and blinked at me through his glasses.

“It’s no good cursing the Germans. As soon as your troops entered the village they had a right to shell. That’s war. We should do the same. War’s war. I’ve been cursing the Germans in elaborate and eccentric language. It did me good. I feel all the better for it. But all the same I was wrong. It’s war we ought to curse. War which makes these things possible among civilised peoples. It’s just devilry. Civilised people must give up the habit. They must get cured of it. You have heard of typhoid-carriers? They are people infected with the typhoid microbe who spread the disease. When peace comes we must hunt down the war-carriers, isolate them, and, if necessary, kill them.”

He waved his hand to me and went off in an ambulance filled with suffocated women.

I met Brand in Valenciennes five days after our liberation of the city, when our troops were making their formal entry with band and banners. He came up to me and said, “Have you heard the news?” I saw by his face that it was good news, and I felt my heart give a lurch when I answered him.

“Tell me the best.”

“Germany is sending plenipotentiaries, under a white flag, to Foch. They know it is unconditional surrender.... And the Kaiser has abdicated.”

I drew a deep breath. Something seemed to lift from my soul. The sky seemed to become brighter, as though a shadow had passed from the face of the sun.

“Then it’s the end?... The last battle has been fought!”

Brand was staring at a column of troops--all young fellows of the 4th Division. His eyes were glistening, with moisture in them.

“Reprieved!” he said. “The last of our youth is saved!”

He turned to me suddenly, and spoke in the deepest melancholy.

“You and I ought to be dead. So many kids were killed. We’ve no right to be alive.”

“Perhaps there is other work to do,” I answered him, weakly, because I had the same thought.

He did not seem sure of that.

“I wonder!... If we could help to save the next generation.”

In the Place d’Armes of Valenciennes there was a great crowd, and many of our generals and staff officers on the steps and below the steps of the Hôtel de Ville. Brand and I caught a glimpse of Colonel Lavington, looking very gallant and debonair, as usual. Beside him was Charles Fortune, with his air of a staff officer dreadfully overworked in the arrangement of victory, modest in spite of his great achievements, deprecating any public homage that might be paid him. This careful mask of his was slightly disarranged for a moment when he winked at me under the very nose of the great general whom he had set to music--“Blear-eyed Bill, the Butcher of the Boche,” who stood magnificent with his great chest emblazoned with ribbons. The Prince of Wales was there, shifting from one leg to another, chatting gaily with a group of staff officers. A bevy of French girls advanced with enormous bouquets and presented them to the Prince and his fellow officers. The Prince laughed and blushed like a schoolboy, sniffed at the flowers, did not know what to do with them. The other officers held the bouquets with equal embarrassment, with that strange English shyness which not even war could cure.

Some officers close to me were talking of the German plea for armistice.

“It’s abject surrender!” said one of them.

“The end!” said another, very solemnly. “Thank God!”

“The end of a dirty business!” said a young machine-gun officer. I noticed that he had three wound-stripes.

One of them, holding a big bouquet, began to dance, pointing his toes, cutting abbreviated capers in a small space among his comrades.

“Not too quick for me, old dears! Back to peace again!... Back to life! Hooray!”

The colours of many flags fluttered upon the gables of the Place d’Armes, and the balconies were draped with the Tricolour, the Union Jack, and the Stars and Stripes. Old citizens wore tall hats saved up for this day, and girls had taken their lace from hiding-places where the Germans had not found it, and wore it round their necks and wrists for the honour of this day. Old women in black bonnets sat in the centre of window-places and clapped their hands--their wrinkled, hard-working old hands--to every British soldier who passed, and thousands were passing. Nobody heard a word of the speeches spoken from the Town Hall steps, the tribute of the councillors of Valenciennes to the glory of the troops who had rescued their people from servitude under a ruthless enemy, nor the answer of Sir Henry Home, the Army Commander, expressing the pride of his soldiers in the rescue of that fair old city, and their admiration for the courage of its people. Every word was overwhelmed by cheering. Then the pipers of a Highland Division, whose fighting I had recorded through their years of heroic endurance, played a march tune, and the music of those pipes was loud in the square of Valenciennes and in the hearts of its people. The troops marched past, and thousands of bayonets shone above their steel helmets....

XVI

I was in Mons on the day of Armistice, and on the roads outside when I heard the news that the Germans had surrendered to all our terms, and that the “Cease fire” would sound at eleven o’clock. It was a misty morning, with sunlight glinting through the mist and sparkling in the coppery leaves of autumn trees. There was no heavy bombardment in progress round Mons--only now and then the sullen bark of a gun. The roads were crowded with the usual transport of war--endless columns of motor-lorries and horse-wagons, and mule-teams, crawling slowly forward, and infantry battalions trudging alongside with their heavy packs. I stared into the faces of the marching men, expecting to see joy in their eyes, wondering why they were not singing--because to-day the guns would be silent and the fighting finished. Their packs weighed heavy. The mud from passing lorries splashed them with great gobs of filth. Under their steel hats the sweat ran down. They looked dead-beat, and marched in a grim fine of tired men. But I noticed that the transport wagons were decorated with small flags, and these bits of fluttering colour were stuck into the harness of gun horses and mules. From the other way came another tide of traffic--crowds of civilians, who were middle-aged men and boys, and here and there women pushing hand-carts, and straining forward with an eager, homing look. The men and boys were carrying bundles, too heavy for many of them, so that they were bent under their burdens. But each one had added the last straw but one to his weight by fastening a flag to his bundle or his cap. I spoke to some of them, and they told me that they were the civilians from Lille, Valenciennes, and other towns, who had been taken away by the Germans for forced labour behind the lines. Two days ago the Germans had said, “We’ve no more use for you. Get back to your own people. The war is over.”

They looked worn and haggard, like men who had been shipwrecked. Some of the boys were weak and sat down on the roadside with their bundles and could go no farther. Others trudged on gamely, with crooks which they had cut from the hedges, and only stopped to cry, “_Vivent les Anglais!_” as our soldiers passed. I looked into many of their faces, remembering the photograph of Edouard Chéri which had been given to me by his mother. Perhaps he was Somewhere in those troops of homing exiles. But he might have been any one of those lanky boys in ragged jackets and broken boots, and cloth caps pulled down over the ears.

Just outside Mons, at one minute to eleven o’clock, there was a little desultory firing. Then a bugle blew, somewhere in a distant field, one long note. It was the “Cease fire”! A cheer coming faintly over the fields followed the bugle-call. Then there was no other sound where I stood but the scrunching of wheels of gun limbers and transport wagons, the squelch of mud in which horses and mules trudged, and the hard breathing of tired men marching by under their packs. So, with a curious lack of drama, the Great Adventure ended! That bugle had blown the “Cease fire” of a strife which had filled the world with agony and massacre; destroyed millions of men; broken millions of lives; ruined many great cities and thousands of hamlets, and left a long wide belt of country across Europe where no tree remained alive and all the earth was ravaged; crowded the world with maimed men, blind men, mad men, diseased men; flung Empires into anarchy, where hunger killed the children and women had no milk to feed their babies; and bequeathed to all fighting nations a heritage of debt beneath which many would stagger and fall. It was the “Cease fire” of all that reign of death, but sounded very faintly across the fields of France.

In Mons Canadian soldiers were being kissed by French girls. Women were giving them wine in the doorways, and these hard-bitten fellows, tough as leather, reckless of all risk, plastered with mud which had worn into their skins and souls, drank the wine and kissed the women, and lurched laughing down the streets. There would be no strict discipline in Mons that night. They had had enough of discipline in the dirty days. Let it go on the night of Armistice! Already at mid-day some of these soldiers were unable to walk except with an arm round a comrade’s neck, or round the neck of strong peasant girls who screeched with laughter when they side-slipped or staggered. They had been through hell, those men. They had lain in ditches, under frightful fire, among dead men and bleeding men. Who would grudge them their bit of fun on Armistice night? Who would expect saintship of men who had been taught in the school of war, taught to kill quick lest they be killed, to see the worst horrors of the battlefield without going weak, to educate themselves out of the refinements of peaceful life where Christian virtues are easy and not meant for war?

“Come here, lassie. None of your French tricks for me. I’m Canadian-born. It’s a kiss or a clout from me.”

The man grabbed the girl by the arm and drew her into a barn.

On the night of Armistice in Mons, where, at the beginning of the war, the Old Contemptibles had first withstood the shock of German arms (I saw their ghosts there in the market place), there would be the devil to pay--the devil of war, who plays on the passions of men, and sets his trap for women’s souls. But I went away from Mons before nightfall, and travelled back to Lille, in the little old car which had gone to many strange places with me.

How quiet it was in the open countryside when darkness fell! The guns were quiet at last, after four years and more of labour. There were no fires in the sky, no ruddy glow of death. I listened to the silence which followed the going down of the sun, and heard the rustling of the russet leaves and the little sounds of night in peace, and it seemed as though God gave a benediction to the wounded soul of the world. ‘Other sounds rose from the towns and fields in the deepening shadow-world of the day of Armistice. They were sounds of human joy. Men were singing somewhere on the roads, and their voices rang out gladly. Bugles were playing. In villages from which the enemy had gone out that morning round about Mons crowds of figures surged in the narrow streets, and English laughter rose above the chatter of women and children.

XVII

When I came into Lille rockets were rising above the city. English soldiers were firing off Verey lights. Above the houses of the city in darkness rose also gusts of cheering. It is strange that when I heard them I felt like weeping. They sounded rather ghostly, like the voices of all the dead who had fallen before this night of Armistice.

I went to my billet at Madame Chéri’s house, from which I had been absent some days. I had the key of the front door now and let myself into the hall. The diningroom door was open, and I heard the voices of the little French family, laughing, crying, hysterical. Surely hysterical!

“_O mon Dieu! O mon petit Toto! Comme tu es grandi! Comme tu es maigre!_”

I stood outside the door, understanding the thing that had happened.

In the centre of the room stood a tall, gaunt boy in ragged clothes, in the embrace of Madame Chéri, and with one hand clutched by Hélène and the other by the little Madeleine, her sister. It was Edouard who had come back.

He had unloosed a pack from his shoulder, and it lay on the carpet beside him, with a little flag on a broken stick. He was haggard, with high cheek-bones prominent through his white, tightly-drawn skin, and his eyes were sunk in deep sockets. His hair was in a wild mop of black, disordered locks. He stood there, with tears streaming from his eyes, and the only words he said were:

“_Maman! O maman! maman!_”

I went quietly upstairs and changed my clothes, which were all muddy. Presently there was a tap at my door and Hélène stood there, transfigured with joy. She spoke in French.

“Edouard has come back--my brother! He travelled on an English lorry.”

“Thank God for that,” I said. “What gladness for you all!”

“He has grown tall,” said Hélène. She mopped her eyes and laughed and cried at the same time. “Tall as a giant, but oh! so thin! They starved him all the time. He fed only on cabbages. They put him to work digging trenches behind the line--under fire. The brutes! The devils!”

Her eyes were lit up by passion at the thought of this cruelty and her brother’s suffering. Then her expression changed to a look of pride.

“He says he is glad to have been under fire--like father. He hated it, though, at the time, and said he was frightened! I can’t believe that. Edouard was always brave.”

“There’s no courage that takes away the fear of shellfire--as far as I’m concerned,” I told her, but she only laughed and said, “You men make a pose of being afraid.”

She spoke of Edouard again, hugging the “thought of his return.

“If only he were not so thin and so tired! I find him changed. The poor boy cries at the sight of _maman_--like a baby.”

“I don’t wonder,” I said. “I should feel like that if I had been a prisoner of war and was now home again.”

Madame Chéri’s voice called from downstairs: “Hélène! _Où es-tu? Edouard veut te voir!_”

“Edouard wants me,” said Hélène.

She seemed rejoiced at the thought that Edouard had missed her, even for this minute. She took my hand and kissed it, as though wishing me to share her joy and to be part of it, and then ran downstairs.

XVIII

I went out to the officers’ club which had been established in Lille, and found Brand there, and Fortune, and young Clatworthy, who made a place for me at their table.

Two large rooms which had been the dining and drawingrooms of a private mansion were crowded with officers, mostly English, but with here and there a few Americans and French, seated at small tables, waited on by the girls we called Waacs (of the Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps). Two old-fashioned candelabra of cut-glass gave light to each room, and I remember that the walls were panelled with wood painted a greyish-white below a moulding of fruit and flowers. Above the table where my friends sat was the portrait of a French lady of the eighteenth century, in an oval frame of tarnished gilt.

I was late for the meal on Armistice night, and many bottles of champagne had already been opened and drunk. The atmosphere reeked with the smell of food, the fumes of wine and cigarette smoke, and there was the noise of many men talking and laughing. I looked about the tables and saw familiar faces. There were a good many cavalry officers in the room where I sat, and among them officers of the Guards and the Tank Corps, aviators, machine-gunners, staff officers of infantry divisions, French interpreters, American _liaison_ officers, A.P.M.’s, town majors, and others. The lid was off at last. All these men were intoxicated with the thought of the victory we had won--complete, annihilating--and of this Armistice which had ended the war and made them sure of life. Some of them were a little drunk with wine, but not enough at this hour to spoil their sense of joy.

Officers rose at various tables to make speeches, cheered by their own groups, who laughed and shouted and did not listen.

“The good old British Army has done the trick at last----”

“The old Hun is down and out.”

“Gentlemen, it has been a damned tough job----”

Another group had burst into song:

“_Here’s to good old beer, put it down, put it down!_”

“The cavalry came into its own in the last lap. We’ve fought mounted and fought dismounted. We’ve rounded up innumerable Huns. We’ve ridden down machine-guns----”

Another group was singing independently:

“There’s a long, long trail a-winding,

To the land of my dreams.”

A toast was being pledged at the next table by a Tank officer, who stood on a chair with a glass of champagne-raised high above his head: “Gentlemen, I give you the toast of the Tank Corps. This war was won by the Tanks----”

“Pull him down!” shouted two lads at the same table. “Tanks be damned! It was the poor old bloody infantry all the time.”

One of them pulled down the little Tank officer with a crash and stood on his own chair.

“Here’s to the foot-sloggers--the infantry battalions, Tommy Atkins and his company officer, who did all the dirty work and got none of the reward, and did most of the dying.”

A cavalry officer with a monocle immovably screwed in his right eye demanded the attention of the company, and failed to get it.

“We all know what we have done ourselves, and what we failed to do. I give you the toast of our noble Allies, without whom there would be no Armistice to-night. I drink to the glory of France----”

The words were heard at several tables, and for once there was a general acknowledgment of the toast.

“_Vive la France!_”

The shout thundered out from all the tables, so that the candelabra rattled. Five French interpreters in various parts of the room rose to respond.

There were shouts of “The Stars and Stripes--Good old Yanks--Well done, the U.S.A.!” and I was sorry Dr. Small was still at Valenciennes. I should like him to have heard those shouts. An American staff officer was on his feet, raising his glass to “England.”

Charles Fortune stood up at my table. He reminded me exceedingly at that moment of old prints portraying George IV. in his youth--“the First Gentleman of Europe”--slightly flushed, with an air of noble dignity and a roguish eye.

“Go to it, Fortune,” said Brand. “Nobody’s listening, so you can say what you like.”

“Gentlemen,” said Fortune, “I venture to propose the health of our late enemy, the Germans.”

Young Clatworthy gave an hysterical guffaw.

“We owe them a very great debt,” said Fortune.

“But for their simplicity of nature and amiability of character the British Empire--that glorious conglomeration of races upon which the sun utterly declines to set--would have fallen into decay and debility as a second-class Power. Before the war the German Empire was gaining our trade, capturing all the markets of the world, waiting at table in all the best hotels, and providing all the music in the _cafés-chantants_ of the universe.... With that immense unselfishness so characteristic of their race, the Germans threw away these advantages and sacrificed themselves for the benefit of the British. By declaring war they enabled all the ancient virtues of our race to be revived. Generals sprang up in every direction--especially in Whitehall, Boulogne and Rouen. Staff officers multiplied exceedingly. British indigestion--the curse of our race--became subject to a Sam Brown belt. Business men, mostly bankrupt, were enriched enormously. Clergymen thundered joyfully from their pulpits and went back to the Old Testament for that fine old law, ‘An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth.’ Elderly virgins married the youngest subalterns. The youngest flapper caught the eldest and wiliest of bachelors. Our people were revivified, gentlemen--revivified-”

“Go easy,” growled Brand. “This is not a night for irony.”

“Even I,” said Charles Fortune, with a sob of pride in his voice, “even I, a simple piano-tuner, a man of music, a child of peace and melody--Shut up, Brand!--became every inch a soldier!”

He drew himself up in a heroic pose and, raising his glass, cried out: “Here’s to our late enemy--poor old Fritz!”

A number of glasses were raised amidst a roar of laughter.

“Here’s to Fritz--and may the Kaiser roast at Christmas!”

“And they say we haven’t a sense of humour,” said Charles Fortune modestly, and opened a new bottle of champagne.

Brand had a sense of humour, and had laughed dining Fortune’s oration, knowing that beneath its mockery there was no malice. But I noticed that he had no spontaneous gaiety on this night of Armistice and sat rather silent, with a far-away look in his eyes and that hag-ridden melancholy of his.

Young Clatworthy was between me and Brand, drinking too heavily, I thought. Brand thought so too, and gave him a word of caution.

“That champagne is pretty bad. I’d ‘ware headaches, if I were you, young’un.”

“It’s good enough,” said Clatworthy. “Anything to put me in the right spirit.”

There was an unnatural glitter in his eyes, and he laughed too easily at any joke of Fortune’s. Presently he turned his attention to me, and began talking excitedly in a low monologue.

“Funny to think it’s the last night! Can you believe it? It seems a lifetime since I came out in ‘14. I remember the first night, when I was sent up to Ypres to take the place of a subaltern who’d been knocked out. It was Christmas Eve, and my battalion was up in the line round Hooge. I detrained at Vlamertinghe. ‘Can any one tell me the way to Hooge?’ I asked one of the traffic men, just like a country cousin at Piccadilly Circus. He looked at me in a queer way, and said, ‘It’s the same way to hell, sir. Straight on until you get to Ypres, then out of the Menin Gate and along the road to Hell-fire Corner. After that you trust to luck. Some young gentlemen never get no further.’ I damned his impertinence and went on, till I came to the Grande Place in Ypres, where I just missed an eight-inch shell. It knocked out a gun-team. Shocking mess it made. ‘The same way to hell,’ I kept saying, until I fell into a shell-hole along the Menin Road. But, d’you know, the fellow was wrong, after all.”

“How?” I asked.

Young Clatworthy drank up his wine and laughed, as though very much amused.

“Why, _that_ wasn’t the way to hell. It was the other way.”

I was puzzled at his meaning and wondered if he were really drunk.

“What other way?”

“Behind the lines--in the back areas. I should have been all right if I had stuck in the trenches. It was in places like Amiens that I went to the devil.”

“Not as bad as that,” I said.

“Mind you,” he continued, lighting a cigarette and smiling at the flame, “I’ve had pleasant times in this war, between the bad ones, and, afterwards, in this cushy job. Extraordinarily amusing and agreeable along the way to hell. There was little Maiguérite in Amiens--such a kid! Funny as a kitten! She loved me not wisely, but too well. I had just come down from the Somme battles then. That little idyll with Marguérite was like a dream. We two were Babes in the Wood. We plucked the flowers of life and didn’t listen to the howling of the wolves beyond the forest.”

He jerked his head up and listened, and repeated the words:

“The howling of the wolves!”

Somebody was singing “John Peel”:

“D’ye ken John Peel with his coat so gay.

D’ye ken John Peel at the break of day,

D’ye ken John Peel when he’s far, far away.

With, his horn, and his hounds in. the morning?”

Cyril Clatworthy was on his feet, joining in the chorus with a loud joyous voice.

“We’ll follow John Peel through fair and through foul.

If we want a good hunt in the morning!’’

“Bravo! Bravo!”

He laughed as he sat down.

“I used to sing that when I was captain of the school,” he said. “A long time ago, eh? How many centuries?... I was as clean a fellow as you’d meet in those days. Keen as mustard on cricket. Some bat, too! That was before the dirty war, and the stinking trenches, and fever, and lice, and dead bodies, and all that. But I was telling you about Yvonne, wasn’t I?”

“Marguérite,” I reminded him.

“No. Yvonne. I met her at Cassel. A brown-eyed thing. Demure. You know the type?... One of the worst little sluts I ever met. Oh, a wicked little witch... Well, I paid for that affair. That policeman was wrong.”

“What policeman?” I asked.

“The traffic man at Vlamertinghe. ‘It’s the same way to hell,’ he said, meaning Hooge. It was the other way, really. All the same, I’ve had some good hours. And now it’s Armistice night.... Those fellows are getting rather blue, aren’t they? It’s the blinking cavalry who used to get in the way of the infantry, blocking up the roads with their ridiculous horses and their preposterous, lances. Look here, old man, there’s one thing I want to know. Tell me, as a wise owl.”

“What is that?” I asked, laughing at his deference to my wisdom.

“How are we going to get clean enough for peace?”

“Clean enough?”

I could not follow the drift of his question, and he tried to explain himself.

“Oh, I don’t mean the soap and water business. But morally, spiritually, intellectually, and all that? Some of us will want a lot of scrubbing before we sit down in our nice little Christian families, somewhere at Wimbledon or Ealing. Somehow I funk peace. It means getting back again to where one started, and I don’t see how it’s possible.... Good Lord, what tripe I’ve been talking!”

He pulled the bow of one of the “Waacs” and undid her apron.

“_Encore une bouteille de champagne, mademoiselle!_” he said in his best French, and started singing “La Marseillaise.” Some of the officers were dancing the fox trot and the bunny hug.

Brand rose with a smile and a sigh.

“Armistice night!” he said. “Thank God there’s a crowd of fellows left to do the dancing.... I can’t help thinking of the others.”

He touched a glass with his lips to a silent toast, and I saw that he drank to ghosts. Then he put the glass down and laid his hand on Clatworthy’s shoulder.

“Care for a stroll?” he said. “This room is too fuggy.”

“Not I, old lad,” said the boy. “This is Armistice night--and the end of the adventure. See it through!”

Brand shook his head and said he must breathe fresh air. Fortune was playing a Brahms concerto in the style of a German master on the table-cloth.

I followed Brand, and we strolled through the dark streets of Lille and did not talk. In each of our minds was the stupendous thought that it was the last night of the war--the end of the adventure, as young Clatworthy had said. God! It had been a frightful adventure from first to last--a fiery furnace in which youth had been burnt up like grass. How much heroism we had seen, how much human agony, ruin, hate, cruelty, love! There had been comradeship and laughter in queer places and perilous hours. Comradeship, perhaps that was the best of all: the unselfish comradeship of men. But what a waste of life! What a lowering of civilisation! Our heritage--what was it, after victory? Who would heal the wounds of the world?

Brand suddenly spoke, after our long tramp in the darkness, past windows from which came music, and singing, and shouts of laughter. He uttered only one word, but all his soul was in it.

“Peace!”

That night we went to see Eileen O’Connor and to enquire after the girl Marthe. Next day Pierre Nesle was coming to find his sister.

XIX

Eileen O’Connor had gone back from the convent to the rooms she had before her trial and imprisonment. I was glad to see her in a setting less austere than the whitewashed parlour in which she had first received us. There was something of her character in the sitting-room where she had lived so long during the war, and where with her girl friends she had done more dangerous work than studying the elements of drawing and painting. In that setting, too, she looked at home--“The Portrait of a Lady,” by Lavery, as I saw her in my mind’s eye, when she sat in a low armchair by the side of a charcoal stove, with the lamplight on her face and hair and her dress shadowy. She wore a black dress of some kind, with a tiny edge of lace about the neck and a string of coloured beads so long that she twisted it about her fingers in her lap. The room was small, but cosy in the light of a tall lamp on an iron stand shaded with red silk. Like all the rooms I had seen in Lille--not many--this was panelled, with a polished floor, bare except for one rug. On the walls were a few etchings framed in black--London views mostly--and some water-colour drawings of girls’ heads, charmingly done, I thought. They were her own studies of some of her pupils and friends, and one face especially attracted me because of its delicate and spiritual beauty.

“That was my fellow prisoner,” said Eileen O’Connor. “Alice de Villers-Auxicourt. She died before the trial--happily, because she had no fear.”

I noticed one other thing in the room which was pleasant to see--an upright piano, and upon a stool by its side a pile of old songs which I turned over one by one as we sat talking. They were English and Irish, mostly from the seventeenth century onwards, but among them I found some German songs, and on each cover was written the name of Franz von Kreuzenach. At the sight of that name I had a foolish sense of embarrassment and dismay, as though I had discovered a skeleton in the cupboard, and I slipped them hurriedly between other sheets.

Eileen was talking to Wickham Brand. She did not notice my confusion. She was telling him that Marthe, Pierre’s sister, was seriously ill with something like brain-fever. The girl had regained consciousness at times, but was delirious, and kept crying out for her mother and Pierre to save her from some horror that frightened her. The nuns had made enquiries about her through civilians in Lille. Some of them had heard of the girl under her stage name--“Marthe de Méricourt.” She had sung in the _cabarets_ before the war. After the German occupation she had disappeared for a time. Somebody said she had been half-starved and was in a desperate state. What could a singing-girl do in an “occupied” town? She reappeared in a restaurant frequented by German officers and kept up by a woman of bad character. She sang and danced there for a miserable wage, and part of her duty was to induce German officers to drink champagne--the worst brand for the highest price. A horrible degradation for a decent girl! But starvation, so Eileen said, has fierce claws. Imagine what agony, what terror, what despair must have gone before that surrender! To sing and dance before the enemies of your country!

“Frightful!” said Brand. “A girl should prefer death.”

Eileen O’Connor was twisting the coloured beads between her fingers. She looked up at Wickham Brand with a deep thoughtfulness in her dark eyes.

“Most men would say that. And all women beyond the war zone, safe and shielded. But death does not come quickly from half-starvation in a garret without fire, in clothes that are worn threadbare. It is not the quick death of the battlefield. It is just a long-drawn misery.... Then there is loneliness. The loneliness of a woman’s soul. Do you understand that?”

Brand nodded gravely. “I understand the loneliness of a man’s soul. I’ve lived with it.”

“Worse for a woman,” said Eileen. “That singing-girl was lonely in Lille. Her family--with that boy Pierre--were on the other side of the lines. She had no friends here before the Germans came.”

“You mean that afterwards----”

Brand checked the end of his sentence and the line of his mouth hardened.

“Some of the Germans were kind,” said Eileen. “Oh, let us tell the truth about that! They were not all devils.”

“They were our enemies,” said Brand.

Eileen was silent for another moment, staring down at those queer beads of hers in her lap, and before she spoke again I think her mind was going back over many episodes and scenes during the German occupation of Lille.

“It was a long time--four years. A tremendous time for hatred to hold out against civility, kindness, and--human nature.... Human nature is strong; stronger than frontiers, nations, even patriotism.”

Eileen O’Connor flung her beads back, rose from the low chair and turned back her hair with both hands with a kind of impatience.

“I’ve seen the truth of things, pretty close--almost as close as death.”

“Yes,” said Brand in a low voice. “You were pretty close to all that.”

The girl seemed to be anxious to plunge deep into the truth of the things she had seen.

“The Germans--here in Lille--were of all kinds. Everything there was in the war, for them, their emotion, their pride in the first victories, their doubts, fears, boredom, anguish, brutality, sentiment, found a dwelling-place in this city behind the battle-front. Some of them--in the administration--stayed here all the time, billeted in French families. Others came back from the battlefields, horror-stricken, trying to get a little brief happiness--forgetfulness. There were lots of them who pitied the French people and had an immense sympathy with them. They tried to be friends. Tried hard, by every sort of small kindness in their billets.”

“Like Schwarz in Madame Chéri’s house,” said Brand bitterly. It seemed to me curious that he was adopting a mental attitude of unrelenting hatred to the Germans, when, as I knew, and as I have told, he had been of late on the side of toleration. That was how his moods swung when as yet he had no fixed point of view.

“Oh, yes, there were many beasts,” said Eileen quickly.

“But others were different. Beasts or not, they were human. They had eyes to see and to smile, lips to talk and tempt. It was their human nature which broke some of our hatred. There were young men among them, and in Lille girls who could be angry for a time, disdainful longer, and then friendly. I mean lonely, half-starved girls, weak, miserable girls--and others not starved enough to lose their passion and need of love. German boys and French girls--entangled in the net of fate.... God pity them!”

Brand said, “I pity them, too.”

He walked over to the piano and made an abrupt request, as though to change the subject of conversation.

“Sing something... something English!”

Eileen O’Connor sang something Irish first, and I liked her deep voice, so low and sweet.

“There’s one that is pure as an angel

And fair as the flowers of May,

They call her the gentle maiden

Wherever she takes her way.

Her eyes have the glance of sunlight

As it brightens the blue sea-wave,

And more than the deep-sea treasure

The love of her heart I crave.

“Though parted afar from my darling,

I dream of her everywhere;

The sound of her voice is about me,

The spell of her presence there.

And whether my prayer be granted,

Or whether she pass me by,

The face of that gentle maiden

Will follow me till I die.”

Brand was standing by the piano, with the light of the tall lamp on his face, and I saw that there was a wetness in his eyes before the song was ended.

“It is queer to hear that in Lille,” he said. “It’s so long since I heard a woman sing, and it’s like water to a parched soul.”

Eileen O’Connor played the last bars again and, as she played, talked softly.

“To me, the face of that gentle maiden is a friend’s face. Alice de Villers-Auxicourt, who died in prison.”

“And whether my prayer be granted,

Or whether she pass me by,

The face of that gentle maiden

Will follow me till I die.”

Brand turned over the songs, and suddenly I saw his face flush, and I knew the reason. He had come to the German songs on which was written the name of Franz von Kreuzenach.

He turned them over quickly, but Eileen pulled one out--it was a Schubert song--and opened its leaves.

“That was the man who saved my life.”

She spoke without embarrassment, simply.

“Yes,” said Brand. “He suppressed the evidence.”

“Oh, you know?”

I told her that we had heard part of the tale from the Reverend Mother, but not all of it. Not the motive, nor what had really happened.

“But you guessed?”

“No,” I answered sturdily.

She laughed, but in a serious way.

“It is not a hard guess, unless I am older than I feel, and uglier than the mirror tells me. He was in love with me.”

Brand and I looked absurdly embarrassed. Of course we _had_ guessed, but this open confession was startling, and there was something repulsive in the idea to both of us who had come through the war-zone into Lille, and had seen the hatred of the people for the German race, and the fate of Pierre Nesle’s sister.

Eileen O’Connor told us that part of her story which the Reverend Mother had left out. It explained the “miracle” that had saved this girl’s life, though, as the Reverend Mother said, perhaps the grace of God was in it as well. Who knows?

Franz von Kreuzenach was one of the intelligence officers whose headquarters were in that courtyard. After service in the trenches with an infantry battalion he had been stationed since 1915 at Lille until almost the end. He had a lieutenant’s rank, but was Baron in private life, belonging to an old family in Bonn. Not a Prussian, therefore, but a Rhinelander, and without the Prussian arrogance of manner. Just before the war he had been at Oxford--Brasenose College--and spoke English perfectly, and loved England with a strange, deep, unconcealed sentiment.

“Loved England?----” exclaimed Brand at this part of Eileen’s tale.

“Why not?” asked Eileen. “I’m Irish, but I love England, in spite of all her faults and all my grievances! Who can help loving England that has lived with her people?”

This Lieutenant von Kreuzenach was two months in Lille before he spoke a word with Eileen. She passed him often in the courtyard and always he saluted her with great deference. She fancied she noticed a kind of wistfulness in his eyes, as though he would have liked to talk to her. He had blue eyes, sad sometimes, she noticed, and a clean-cut face, rather delicate and pale.

One day she dropped a pile of books in the yard all of a heap as he was passing, and he said, “Allow me,” and helped to pick them up. One of the books was “Puck of Pook’s Hill,” by Kipling, and he smiled as he turned over a page or two.

“I love that book,” he said in perfect English. “There’s so much of the spirit of old England in it. History, too. That’s fine about the Roman wall, where the officers go pig-sticking.”

Eileen O’Connor asked him if he were half English--perhaps he had an English mother?--but he shook his head and said he was wholly German--_echt Deutsch_.

He hesitated for a moment as though he wanted to continue the conversation, but then saluted and passed on.

It was a week or so later when they met again, and it was Eileen O’Connor who said “Good-morning” and made a remark about the weather.

He stopped, and answered with a look of pleasure and boyish surprise.

“It’s jolly to hear you say ‘Good-morning’ in English. Takes me straight back to Oxford before this atrocious war. Besides----”

Here he stopped and blushed.

“Besides what?” asked Eileen.

“Besides, it’s a long time since I talked to a lady. Among officers one hears nothing but war-talk--the last battle, the next battle, technical jargon, ‘shop,’ as the English say. It would be nice to talk about something else--art, music, poetry, ideas.”

She chaffed him a little, irresistibly.

“Oh, but you Germans have the monopoly of all that! Art, music, poetry, they are all absorbed into your _Kultur_--properly Germanised. As for ideas--what is not in German philosophy is not an idea.”

He looked profoundly hurt, said Eileen, “Some Germans are very narrow, very stupid, like some English perhaps. Not all of us believe that German _Kultur_ is the only knowledge in the world.”

“Anyhow,” said Eileen O’Connor, “I’m Irish, so we needn’t argue about the difference between German and English philosophy.” He spoke as if quoting from a text-book.

“The Irish are a very romantic race.”

That, of course, had to be denied by Eileen, who knew her Bernard Shaw.

“Don’t you believe it,” she said. “We’re a hard, logical, relentless people, like all peasant folk of Celtic stock. It’s the English who are romantic and sentimental, like the Germans.”

He was amazed at those words (so Eileen told us) and then laughed heartily in his very boyish way.

“You are pleased to make fun of me. You are pulling my leg, as we said at Oxford.”

So they took to talking for a few minutes in the courtyard when they met, and Eileen noticed that they met more often than before. She suspected him of arranging that, and it amused her. By that time she had a staunch friend in the old Kommandant who believed her to be an enemy of England and an Irish patriot. She was already playing the dangerous game under his very nose, or at least within fifty yards of the blotting-pad over which his nose used to be for many hours of the day in his office.

It was utterly necessary to keep him free from any suspicion. His confidence was her greatest safeguard. It was therefore unwise to refuse him (an honest, stupid old gentleman) when he asked whether now and again he might bring one of his officers and enjoy an hour’s music in her rooms after dinner. He had heard her singing, and it had gone straight to his heart. There was one of his officers, Lieutenant Baron Franz von Kreuzenach, who had a charming voice. They might have a little musical recreation which would be most pleasant and refreshing.

“Bring your Baron,” said Eileen. “I shall not scandalise my neighbours when the courtyard is closed.”

Her girl-friends were scandalised when they heard of these musical evenings--two or three times a month--until she convinced them that it was a service to France, and a life insurance for herself and them. There were times when she had scruples. She was tricking both those men who sat in her room for an hour or two now and then, so polite, so stiffly courteous, so moved with sentiment when she sang old Irish songs and Franz von Kreuzenach sang his German songs. She was a spy, in plain and terrible language, and they were utterly duped. On more than one night while they were there an escaped prisoner was in the cellar below, with a German uniform and cypher message, and all directions for escape across the lines. Though they seldom talked about the war, yet now and again by casual remarks they revealed the intentions of the German army and its _moral_, or lack of _moral_. With the old Kommandant she did not feel so conscience-stricken. To her he was gentle and charming, but to others a bully, and there was in his character the ruthlessness of the Prussian officer on all matters of “duty,” and he hated England ferociously.

With Franz von Kreuzenach it was different. He was a humanitarian, and sensitive to all cruelty in life. He hated, not the English, but the war with real anguish, as she could see by many words he let fall from time to time.

He was, she said, a poet, and could see across the frontiers of hatred to all suffering humanity, and so revolted against the endless, futile massacre and the spiritual degradation of civilised peoples. It was only in a veiled way he could say these things in the presence of his superior officer, but she understood. She understood another thing as time went on--nearly eighteen months all told. She saw quite clearly, as all women must see in such a case, that this young German was in love with her.

“He did not speak any word in that way,” said Eileen when she told us this, frankly, in her straight manner of speech, “but in his eyes, in the touch of his hand, in the tones of his voice, I knew that he loved me, and I was very sorry.”

“It was a bit awkward,” said Brand, speaking with a strained attempt at being casual. I could see that he was very much moved by that part of the story, and that there was a conflict in his mind.

“It made me uneasy and embarrassed,” said Eileen. “I don’t like to be the cause of any man’s suffering, and he was certainly suffering because of me. It was a tragic thing for both of us when I was found out at last.”

“What happened?” asked Brand.

The thing that happened was simple--and horrible. When Eileen and her companions were denounced by the sentry at the Citadel the case was reported to the Kommandant of the Intelligence Office, who was in charge of all anti-espionage business in Lille. He was enormously disturbed by the suspicion directed against Eileen. It seemed to him incredible, at first, that he could have been duped by her. After that, his anger was so violent that he became incapable of any personal action. He ordered Franz von Kreuzenach to arrest Eileen and search her rooms. “If she resist, shoot her at once,” he thundered out.

It was at seven o’clock in the evening when Baron Franz von Kreuzenach appeared at Eileen’s door with two soldiers. He was extremely pale and agitated.

Eileen rose from her little table, where she was having an evening meal of. soup and bread. She knew the moment had come which in imagination she had seen a thousand times.

“Come in, Baron!”

She spoke with an attempt at cheerfulness, but had to hold to the back of her chair to save herself from falling, and she felt her face become white.

He stood for a moment in the room, silently, with the two soldiers behind him, and when he spoke, it was in a low voice, in English. “It is my painful duty to arrest you, Miss O’Connor.”

She pretended to be amazed, incredulous, but it was, as she knew, a feeble mimicry.

“Arrest me? Why, that is--ridiculous! On what charge?”

Franz von Kreuzenach looked at her in a pitiful way.

“A terrible charge: Espionage and conspiracy against German martial law... I would rather have died than do this--duty.”

Eileen told us that he spoke that word “duty” as only a German could--as that law which for a German officer is above all human things, all kindly relationships, all escape. She pitied him then more, she said, than she was afraid for herself, and told him that she was sorry the duty had fallen to him. He made only one other remark before he took her away from her rooms.

“I pray God the evidence will be insufficient.”

There was a military car waiting outside the courtyard, and he opened the door for her to get in and sat opposite to her. The two soldiers sat together next to the driver, squeezed close--they were both stout men--with their rifles between their knees. It was dark in the streets of Lille and in the car. Eileen could only see the officer’s face vaguely and white. He spoke again as they were driven quickly.

“I have to search your rooms to-night. Have you destroyed your papers?”

He seemed to have no doubt about her guilt, but she would not admit it.

“I have no papers of which I am afraid.”

“That is well,” said Franz von Kreuzenach.

He told her that the Baronne de Villers-Auxicourt and Marcelle Barbier had been arrested also, and that news was like a death-blow to the girl. It showed that their conspiracy had been revealed, and she was stricken at the thought of the fate awaiting her friends, those young delicate girls, who had been so brave in taking risks.

Towards the end of the journey, which was not far, Franz von Kreuzenach began speaking in a low, emotional voice.

Whatever happened, he said, he prayed that she might think of him with friendship, not blaming him for that arrest, which was in obedience to orders. He would ever be grateful to her for her kindness, and the songs she had sung. They had been happy evenings to him when he could see her and listen to her voice. He looked forward to them in a hungry way, because of his loneliness.

“He said--other things,” added Eileen, and she did not tell us, though dimly we guessed at the words of that German officer who loved her. At the gate of the prison he delivered her to a group of military police, and then saluted as he swung round on his heel.

The next time she saw him was at her trial. Once only their eyes met, and he became deadly pale and bent his head. During her cross-examination of him he did not look at her, and his embarrassment, his agony--she could see that he was suffering--made an unfavourable impression on the court, who thought he was not sure of his evidence and was making blundering answers when she challenged him. She held him up to ridicule, but all the time was sorry for him, and grateful to him, because she knew how much evidence against her he had concealed.

“He behaved strangely about that evidence,” said Eileen. “What puzzles me still is why he produced so much and yet kept back the rest. You see, he put in the papers he had found in the secret passage, and they were enough to have me shot, yet he hushed up the fact about the passage, which, of course, was utterly damning. It looked as though he wanted to give me a sporting chance. But that was not his character, because he was a simple young man. He could have destroyed the papers as easily as he kept back the fact about the underground passage, but he produced them, and I escaped only by the skin of my teeth. Read me that riddle, Wickham Brand!”

“It’s easy,” said Brand. “The fellow was pulled two ways. By duty and--sentiment.”

“Love,” said Eileen in her candid way.

“Love, if you like... It was a conflict. Probably his sense of duty (I know these German officers!) was strong enough to make him hand up the papers to his superior officers. He couldn’t bring himself to burn them--the fool! Then the other emotion in him----”

“Give it a name,” said Eileen, smiling in her whimsical way.

“That damned love of his,” said Brand, “tugged at him intolerably, and jabbed at his conscience. So he hid the news about the passage and thought what a fine fellow he was. Mr. Facing-Both-Ways. Duty and love, both sacrificed!... He’d have looked pretty sick if you’d been shot, and it wasn’t to his credit that you weren’t.”

Eileen O’Connor was amused with Brand’s refusal to credit Franz von Kreuzenach with any kindness.

“Admit,” she said, “that his suppression of evidence gave me my chance. If all were told, I was lost.”

Brand admitted that.

“Admit also,” said Eileen, “that he behaved like a gentleman.”

Brand admitted it grudgingly.

“A German gentleman.”

Then he realised his meanness, and made amends.

“That’s unfair! He behaved like a good fellow. Probably took big risks. Every one who knows what happened must be grateful to him. If I meet him I’ll thank him.”

Eileen O’Connor held Brand to that promise, and asked him for a favour which made him hesitate.

“When you go on to the Rhine will you take him a letter from me?”

“It’s against the rules,” said Brand rather stiffly.

Eileen pooh-poohed those rules, and said Franz von Kreuzenach had broken his for her sake.

“I’ll take it,” said Brand.

That night when we left Eileen O’Connor’s rooms the Armistice was still being celebrated by British soldiers. Verey lights were rising above the houses, fired off by young officers as symbols of their own soaring spirits. Shadows lurched against us in the dark streets as officers and men went singing to their billets. Some girls of Lille had linked arms with British Tommies and were dancing in the darkness with screams of mirth. In one of the doorways a soldier with his steel hat at the back of his head and his rifle lying at his feet kept shouting one word in a drunken way: “Peace!... Peace!”

Brand had his arm through mine, and when we came to his headquarters he would not let me go.

“Armistice night!” he said. “Don’t let’s sleep just yet. Let’s hug the thought over a glass of whisky. The war is over!... No more blood!... No more of its tragedy!”

Yet we had got no farther than the hall before we knew that tragedy had not ended with the Armistice.

Colonel Lavington met us and spoke to Brand.

“A bad thing has happened. Young Clatworthy has shot himself... upstairs in his room.”

“No!”

Brand started back as if he had been hit. He had been fond of Clatworthy, as he was of all boys, and they had been together for many months. It was to Brand that Clatworthy wrote his last strange note, and the colonel gave it to him then in the hall.

I saw it afterwards, written in a big scrawl--a few lines which now I copy out:--

“_Dear old Brand,--It’s the end of the adventure. Somehow I funk Peace. I don’t see how I can go back to Wimbledon as if nothing had happened to me. None of us are the same as when we left, and I’m quite different. I’m going over to the pals on the other side. They will understand. Cheerio!_

“_Cyril Clatworthy_.”

“I was playing my flute when I heard the shot,” said the colonel.

Brand put the letter in his pocket and made only one comment.

“Another victim of the war-devil.... Poor kid!”

Presently he went up to young Clatworthy’s room, and stayed there a long time.

A few days later we began to move on towards the Rhine by slow stages, giving the German Army time to get back. In Brand’s pocket-book was the letter to Franz von Kreuzenach from Eileen O’Connor.

END OF BOOK I.