Part 19

French _poilus—Fusiliers Marins, Chasseurs_, infantry of the line, Zouaves, sloped up and down, staring into the shops, drinking _porto blanc_ and fouler liquids in little drinking dens strictly against the law.

English Tommies walked with little French girls down the narrow side streets, went with them into dark old houses up cut-throat alleys.

Australian soldiers slouched around with hard, lean, leathery faces, looking for trouble and often finding it.

Crowds of Jocks with muddy knees, wet kilts, tin hats, slanted over Harry Lauder faces, wandered about in a grim mirthless way.

Staff officers motored into the town from Army Headquarters, or Corps, or Division.

Cavalry officers rode in and put their horses in the back yard of the Hotel du Rhin.

Officers of every battalion of the British Army surged along the narrow street—the Street of the Three Pebbles. They were down from the line, while their Division was in reserve, or were passing through on their way to the line. Here, in Amiens, were shops, pretty women, restaurants, cock-tail bars, civilian people, children, roofed houses,—the last outpost of civilised life this side of the filthy fields, and lice, and shell-fire, and sudden death.

Their ghosts walked with Bertram now. He stood at the corner of the rue Amiral Courbet. It was there that he had stood one night, talking to a French girl. It was very dark, for there was no lamp allowed after daylight. She flashed a pocket lamp in his face, and revealed her own, white, with red lips, and black laughing eyes—a pretty witch for a young man down from a battlefield for one night of life.

“_Comment ça va, mon chou? La vie est triste, n’cst-ce pas? Il n’y a qu’une consolation, un seul moyen d’oubli. Un peu de rire, un peu d’amour! Qu’est-ce-que tu en penses? Veux-tu?_”

A sad life, she said, and only one consolation, one way of forgetfulness. A little laughter, a little love. What did he think about it?

He’d thought a lot about it. He was twenty, then, in 1916. A boy, but doing a man’s job, and with no life insurance for even another week, or another day, up there, beyond Amiens, this side of Contalmaison still in German hands. He agreed with this girl who had come up to him out of the darkness. A little laughter, a little love. Worth having before the next attack. Worth grabbing at on a rainy night in war-time, and perhaps the very last night on earth. Who could tell? Yet something had made him refuse the offer, some fear, or law, or mental prohibition. His mother had whispered a warning to him about “bad women.” His two sisters, Dorothy and Susan, adored him in those days, believed him spotless. He had been brought up in a certain code, which had become part of him, inescapable without stricken conscience, despite the smashing of mental and moral foundations by the earthquake of war.

“_Rien à faire!_” he had told the girl, not roughly, poor kid, but decidedly. Nothing doing.

“_Mais oui, petit officier!_”

She had grabbed his belt, pulled him towards her, kissed his face, wet in the rain, with her wet lips.

It was here, at this very corner, in July of 1916!

Bertram walked down the next turning to the right, leading to the Cathedral. On the other side was a gap in a row of houses newly roofed. It was boarded round. There, in that gap, had been “Charley’s Bar,” the great cock-tail resort of thousands of young officers who drank quickly because there might not be much time between them and death.

Some of them were still alive, but not many of those who fought in the Somme battles. Izzard was one of them still alive, that fellow in the funny shop at Ottery. He had drunk like a fish in this place before it was knocked to bits by an air bomb in that March of ’18. Bertram had drunk with him, eggnogs, and champagne cock-tails. They had both been thoroughly “blind” on more than one afternoon, and slept themselves sober in the Hotel du Rhin before dining at the Godebert in the rue des Jacobins, where Izzard and he had flirted outrageously with the pretty Marguérite, but without much success as she was coveted by Staff officers, and Brigadiers, and even a Major-General.

It was to the Hotel du Rhin that Bertram now went, still walking with ghosts and ancient memories.

The last time he had been there its stairs and passages were strewn with broken glass, and with several other officers he had sat in a cellar listening to houses falling with tremendous crashes, while a fleet of Gothas overhead played merry hell all through a night which was the blackest in the war.

His machine-gun company had been cut to bits outside Villers Bretonneux. Christy had been wounded in the lung and taken away by the stretcher-bearers. The Germans had made a clean break through and there was very little up the road to bar their way to Amiens. Bertram had been ordered to join up with another crowd for a last stand somewhere near Boves. The crowd had gone missing, it was impossible to search for them at night, and the air-raid over Amiens was the worst thing he’d seen in that way.

It had begun at seven-thirty in the evening, with two explosions outside the windows, smashing them, and filling the dancing-room with splinters. The lady manager was there, doing accounts with a young staff officer. She had yellow hair, and two bright spots of colour on her cheeks, and wonderful courage. Her face was pale beneath the bright spots of colour, but that was her only sign of fear. Joseph, the waiter with the shrill voice and high-pitched laugh, disappeared in the direction of the cellar. The other waiter—what was his name?—an old fellow, with side-whiskers, wandered about cursing the _sales Boches_.

A frightful and fantastic night, with dead men and dead horses in the street outside. Now like a dream! Since then, Amiens had tidied up its streets, re-built many of its houses—though not the great gap between the rue des Trois Cailloux and the rue des Jacobins.

An orchestra was playing in the Hotel du Rhin. American tourists and French commercial travellers were feeding in the room where Bertram had sat down on that night of tragedy, with three mayors who had lost their towns, and officers who had lost their Divisions, wondering how long it would be before the head of a German column marched into Amiens. An orchestra fiddling jazz tunes to American tourists!

But there, miracle of miracles, was the lady manager with the yellow hair, and Joseph, the shrill-voiced waiter, and the old boy with the side whiskers! Bertram went up to the lady manager, and greeted her with emotion, as one whom he had known in the wonderful years, and as one who remembered.

“Still here, Madame! You remember me, perhaps? That night of the air-raid, and other nights!”

She shook hands with him, and pretended to remember his face, though thousands of young officers had passed through this hotel in the years of war.

“What memories, monsieur! Unforgettable to us, though others have forgotten!”

“Amiens is almost restored,” he said.

“There’s still much to be done.”

“How strange it must be for you, now that there are no British soldiers in France! This hotel used to be stuffed with officers of ours.”

“We get tourists to see the battlefields. English officers come up like you, and say ‘Do you remember me, madame?’ Sometimes I’m tempted to say, ‘Do you remember the agony of France in those years of war?’”

“Why that, Madame? We cannot forget.”

She shrugged her shoulders and smiled bitterly.

“Your Lloyd George forgets. He makes friends with the Germans. He wishes to let them off their punishment. He will let them get strong again, so that one day they will come back and crush us.”

Bertram laughed.

“He wants peace in Europe. He wants to prevent another war. Anyhow, England doesn’t forget the heroism of France nor her sufferings.”

“_C’est bien!_”

She bent to her table, and added up a column of figures.

In the yard an American tourist enquired how long it would take to drive to Château Thierry.

That night Bertram met another woman whom he had known in Amiens in the years of war. It was the chambermaid, and she remembered him.

“Certainly you were one of the young officers who used to stay here in the war?”

He shook hands with her, and said, “I’m the officer whose socks you mended once. You told me about your lover, Jean, who was killed at Verdun. We talked long that night.”

Yes, she remembered him, his very face, those socks she had mended, that talk.

“_Tiens! Quel plaisir!_”

She was glad to find that he was still alive. A middle-aged woman of plain features, she had not been much of a temptation to young officers down from the line. Yet some of them, deprived of womanhood, for months on end, had made amorous advances even to her, which she had repulsed with loud laughter, in a heavy-handed way. She had mothered some of the younger men, in a peasant way, and had given them good advice about the girls who lured them in the streets, with their flash lamps, like that one at the corner of the rue Amiral Courbet. Her lover, Jean, a butcher, had been killed at Verdun, and she had wept a little in Bertram’s room, and then laughed, and said she supposed men were made to be killed that way, like sheep to be eaten. “_C’est la vie._” It was life and war, which would last as long as the Germans were part of the human race.

Now she leaned on her broom, talking to Bertram about the changes since the war. Prices were high. It was hard for poor people to live. The bourgeoisie were making plenty of money, but the Government was ruined, she was told. The Germans evaded their payments. Anyhow, no German gold came to the people who were trying to build up their cottages again in the battlefields. She had a cousin at Lens. A mother of six. They had no water, no gas, no stone for building, no money for reconstruction. Three years after war they were still miserable. Victory had not brought happiness to France, nor safety. The Boches would come back again one day. It would begin all over again. A pity they weren’t all killed when the French and English had the chance! Now the English hated the French, and loved the Germans, for some reason!

“What makes you think that?” asked Bertram.

“It is true, is it not?” asked this woman, Jeanne, quite simply.

She was surprised, and incredulous, when he told her that she was mistaken, and that the English loved France still, and desired to help her.

“What gives you the idea that England hates France?”

She said she read _Le Matin_, which told her so. It was the same in the _Journal d’Amiens_. Everybody spoke about it—especially _les garçons_, who were always talking politics. She didn’t understand these things, but she picked up her news from the others. It was public opinion. No one could go against public opinion. _C’est formidable, l’opinion publique!_

XXXIX

For several weeks Bertram wandered about the old places, mostly a-foot, or getting lifts in country carts, once or twice taking a train which crawled from Arras to Lens, and from Bapaume to Péronne.

He had wayside conversations with peasant men and women, young farmers who had been _poilus_, commercial travellers from Paris and Lille, mayors of towns wiped off the map, but now on the sites of their old _mairies_ in wooden huts, superintending _la reconstruction_ which, so far, didn’t seem to amount to very much.

He passed the night in wooden _estaminets_ in fields where once British youth had been swept with fire year after year—Ypres, Hooge, St. Julien, Dickebusch, Souchez, Neuville Vitesse, many other places haunted surely by boys he had passed along the roads.

The trenches had silted in. He wandered about, and poked about with his stick, trying to find some of his old dug-outs, and though he had known every inch of this ground, every hummock and hollow, could not find them, for the most part, only one, indeed.

He found a dug-out in which he had lived, not far from Bourlon Wood, by the ruins of Havrincourt Château. The earth had silted there too, but he borrowed a spade from a friendly young farmer near by, and unearthed the wooden steps, and cleared out the entrance, and went inside. The farmer gave him a bit of candle, and would have come inside with him, unless Bertram had said, “Wait a few minutes. I want to be in here alone!” The man understood with the quick sympathy of the French for sentiment like that.

It _was_ sentiment, but also more than that. This was a ghost chamber of tragic memories, the unburying of the dead past. The candle burned straight with a thin flame. By its light Bertram found a wooden table, and two chairs, made out of boxes. It was Bill Huggett, who had knocked them together. On the table were things which had belonged to Bertram—an empty tin of John Cotton tobacco which Joyce had sent him, a cracked mug which he had found in Havrincourt Wood, an old envelope addressed to him.

“Major Bertram Pollard, D.S.O., M.C. Machine Gun Corps, B.E.F.”

It was in Joyce’s handwriting. Good God! Fancy finding it here again, moist and muddy as the walls had oozed about it and earth had dropped! How eagerly he must have opened it when it came! Certainly he had kissed it before opening it. Now Joyce was his wife, away in Paris or somewhere, without him.

He sat very still on one of the boxes, with his elbows on the table, as often he had sat in this hole at the end of ’17. Christy had come down the steps to report the state of things outside. Old Fritz was putting up a bit of a barrage. Bourlon Wood was soaked with gas. He had told the men to keep their masks handy. A counter-attack was expected within the next twelve hours. A man had just had his leg blown off in Beer Alley.

Bertram’s soul lived again in that time. The smell of the dug-out, that thin candle flame, these oozy walls, this table, were no more real than that dead past, yet as real. The past was present. The present was past. There was no difference. All that he had seen in war, the death of many good men, the agony of the wounded, the stench of death, the comradeship of young officers, their laughter, Christy’s tears when his nerve broke, his own fears of fear, the heroism of common men, the endless slaughter, the waste of youth and life, came back to his mind, as drowning men are said to see all their life as in a mirror. Was it all going to happen again? Bernard Hall thought so, unless some divine change happened in human nature by “intensive education”! Jeanne, the chambermaid, thought so! Nearly all those French people with whom he had talked along the wayside believed that after a few years, fifteen, twenty, twenty-five, _les Boches_ would come back again for vengeance.

As the candle flickered and shortened in a pool of wax on the table, Bertram, sitting there with its feeble light surrounded by darkness, heard a voice speak to his soul, very clearly, as once before. They were the words his mother had spoken on her death-bed. “Bertram, work for Peace. Promise me—”

He raised his head sharply. Had he heard those words only in imagination, or had they been spoken to him? He had heard them clearly, with distinct utterance, yet it must have been only one of the memories brought back in that dug-out.

Yes, he would work for peace, so that boys now young needn’t live in holes like this until they were gassed to death or blown to bits, or buried alive. He would work for Peace, as far as he could understand the chaos of life, as far as he could write words of warning, and conciliation, and commonsense, and truth anyhow.

The candle guttered out. He struck a match, picked up the envelope in Joyce’s handwriting, and groped his way up, and out.

The young farmer was waiting for him, and stared at him a moment, with a queer smile in his eyes.

“A droll life in those days. With good moments, and many sad, eh? Sacred Name! I laugh sometimes when I think of the blood, the death, the lice, the mud, the _ordure_ of it all.”

“Would you go through it again?”

The man shrugged his shoulders.

“To save France one would go through it again. Not willingly. But what else? When the Germans attack again, France will fight again.”

“You think they will attack again?”

“Naturally. They will want revenge. When they have renewed their strength, they will come back. It is human nature, monsieur.”

“Can France stand another war?”

The young peasant farmer stared across the field to Bourlon Wood, so quiet now, so safe.

“Not alone. But we have Poland, Serbia, Czecho-Slovakia.”

“England?”

The man looked uncertainly at Bertram.

“Monsieur can tell me, perhaps.”

“What do you think?”

The young Frenchman shrugged his shoulders again.

“England does what pays her best. Industry, commerce, count with her most. It’s the English character. Hard bargaining, eh?”

Bertram reminded him how many men Britain had sent to France, in time of war, how many bodies of her youth lay still in French soil. Was that hard bargaining? Or self-sacrifice, for honour’s sake?

“The _Boches_ were England’s trade rivals. Their Fleet was a menace to _Grande Bretagne_. Is it not so, Monsieur.”

Bertram sat with him on a hummock of earth, shared some sandwiches with him, and tried, in simple phrases, with an emotion that he felt, to assure this peasant who had been a _poilu_ of France, that England had a soul above shop-keeping, that her share in the war had been not only enormous in sacrifice, but heroic in ideal.

The man listened to him with patience, but also with amusement.

“Monsieur is an idealist! After experience of war?” That was strange. He himself was a realist. Nations, like individuals, would fight for self-interest, to save their skins, their land, their women. They would fight to get revenge, to kill people they hated, because of pride, and more because of injury, to capture their trade, or their territory. It was natural. It had always been like that. It would never change.

Bertram saw in this young farmer the type of French manhood, the very soul of France. Through centuries of history, men like this, on this soil, had fought for their land and their women, for conquests, for pride in France. They had been invaded, harassed, and ravaged. They had lived always between the plough and the sword, first one, then the other, turn and turn about. Peace was only an interlude, either when France was weak, in defence, or when France was strong, in aggression, in contraction or expansion, as an Empire or Republic.

The French mother rocking her babe in the cradle knew in her heart that one day this man-child would march away to battle. It was in the songs she sang to send it to sleep. The boy knew that when manhood came he would leave home for the barracks, to learn soldiering as he had learnt farming. So it had been in the time of the Valois, in the reign of Henri IV., before Burgundy was France, before the Revolution, all through the Napoleonic era, ever afterwards, till 1918, with brief spells for recovery, the binding of wounds, the growing of another generation of boys. “_C’etait toujours comme ça. Ça ne changera jamais._” It was always like that. It would never change.

Bertram glanced sideways at the man; thirty-five, perhaps, with a strong, hard profile, ruddy skin, fair moustache. A Frank of northern stock. Teutonic rather than Latin, though, perhaps, with a strain of Latin blood. The typical _poilu_ of Picardy, Normandy, Artois.

“France cannot afford another war,” Bertram said; “it would bleed her to death. Must there always be conflict? Why not make friends with the Germans?”

The young farmer laughed loudly, and spat.

“Friends with the _Boches_? Does one make friends with a hungry tiger? If one can’t kill it at once, one digs a ditch round one’s house and keeps one’s gun ready. So I have heard! There’s still another way to treat a tiger. Cut its claws and cage it. That is our way with Germany now.”

“If the tiger escapes and grows its claws?”

“There is still the gun.”

“If the gun gets rusty?”

“Then the tiger gets its meal. He’s a fool who lets his gun get rusty.”

“If it breaks, and he has not money to buy another?”

“That is unfortunate! The tiger wins.”

He was a fatalist. Also he assumed that the German by nature was a tiger. Was that true? Bertram thought of all the German prisoners he’d seen in time of war, some he had helped to capture—simple, straw-haired young peasants, who hated war, and loved peace, and the arts and crafts and labours of peace, not soldiers by instinct and passion, like the French, but soldiers by coercion, by discipline, by sentiment; brave, efficient, obedient, but without fire. They were not “tigers,” as far as he had seen them, but rather sheepish fellows. It was not utterly impossible that they might abandon the hope of revenge against France, if France would abandon her passion of hate, her uttermost demands of punishment and payment, her pound of flesh.

It was useless to argue with this peasant-farmer, though he had a clear intelligence, and, like most Frenchmen of his class, a surprising gift of words.

“England is a good friend,” he said, at the end of this conversation. “There must never be cause of quarrel between England and France. The very dead would rise out of these fields to protest.”

It was here, by Havrincourt Château that English and Scots had advanced on a day of November in 1917, with Tanks leading the way towards Cambrai. Now it was quiet in the fields, and birds were singing, and no smoke clouds burst in Bourlon Wood.

The young Frenchman shook hands with him and smiled.

“_Au revoir, mon camarade! Comme vous-même, je n’aime pas la guerre. Mais, que voulez-vous? Il vient quand il vient!_”

He had no love for war, but when it came, it came! Terrible philosophy, upon which no peace could be built, no forward step taken by educated humanity. To this peasant, perhaps to all his kind, war was as inevitable as natural calamities, like rains and droughts, earthquakes, and thunderbolts. And the German was still the German—the Blonde Beast. _Les sales Boches!_

XL

The hostility—suspicion, even,—of the French people regarding England was to Bertram terrible. They were very friendly to him, all those people whom he visited in their huts or walked with over old battlefields. Some of them were even emotional, as one old woman in an _estaminet_ along the Arras-Doullens road with whom he had been billeted for a time, and who flung her arms about him and kissed him on both cheeks, and wept a little, and laughed, and cooked a chicken for him. But when they spoke about England, it was with doubt, or resentment, or anger; now and then with passion.

He couldn’t get to the root of their grievances. They talked vaguely of England crossing the path of France in Syria. In what way? They didn’t know, but said: “_On dit dans les journaux_—” It is said in the papers!

They believed, many of them, that the value of the franc was deliberately made low by the artful jugglings of British financiers. They were certain that “Loy-Zhorzhe” was pro-German for corrupt and sinister motives, that British diplomacy was jealous of French victory, and intrigued everywhere to secure a new balance of power in Europe, so that French supremacy should be weighted down by the restoration of Germany.

In any case, England desired to thwart France of the fruits of victory, and was always manœuvring to let Germany off her debts, to prevent France from seizing German industrial cities if Germany defaulted in her payments.

It was idle for Bertram to argue that Lloyd George and the British people were afraid that if Germany were pressed too hard, beyond her power to pay, beyond human nature, she would seek to escape by force, would nourish desires for revenge which would lead ultimately and inevitably to another war. Germany would form an alliance with Russia, or break into such revolutionary chaos that the peace and recovery of Europe would be retarded for more than another generation.