Back to Life

XIX XIX E ileen 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. BOOK II—THROUGH HOSTILE GATES I T he advance of the Allied Armies towards the Rhine was by definite, slow stages, enabling the German Army to withdraw in advance of us with as much material of war as was left to them by the conditions of the Armistice. On that retreat of theirs they abandoned so much that it was clearly impossible for them to resist our demands by fighting again, however hard might be the peace terms. Their acceptance of the Armistice drawn up by Marshal Foch with a relentless severity in every clause, so that the whole document was a sentence of death to the German military system, proved that they had no more “fight” in them. It was the most abject and humiliating surrender ever made by a great nation in the hour of defeat, and an acknowledgment before the whole world that their armies had broken to bits, in organisation and in spirit. On the roads for hundreds of kilometres out from Mons and Le Cateau, past Brussels and Liège and Namur, was the visible proof of the disintegration and downfall of what had been the greatest military machine in the world. Mile after mile and score after score of miles, on each side of the long straight roads, down which, four years before, the first German Armies had marched in endless columns after the first brief check at Liège, with absolute faith in victory, there lay now abandoned guns, trench mortars, aeroplanes, motor lorries, motor cars and transport wagons. Those monstrous guns which had pounded so much of our young flesh to pulp, year after year, were now tossed into the ditches, or overturned in the wayside fields, with broken breech-blocks or without their sights. It was good to see them there. Field-guns, upturned, thrust their muzzles into the mud, and Belgian peasant-, boys made cock-shies of them. I liked to see them at that game. Here also was the spectacle of a war machine which had worn out until, like the “one-hoss shay,” it had fallen to pieces. Those motor lorries, motor cars, and transport wagons were in the last stage of decrepitude, their axles and spokes all rusty, their woodwork cracked, their wheels tied round with bits of iron in the place of tyres. Everywhere were dead horses worn to skin and bones before they had fallen. For lack of food and fats and rubber and labour the German material of war was in a sorry state before the failure of their man-power in the fighting fields after those years of massacre brought home to them the awful fact that they had no more strength to resist our onslaughts. One of those who pointed the moral of all this was the little American doctor, Edward Small, and he found an immense satisfaction in the sight of those derelict wrecks of the German war-devils. He and I travelled together for some time, meeting Brand, Harding, and other friends, in towns like Liège and Namur. I remember him now, standing by a German howitzer—a colossus—sprawling out of a ditch. He chuckled in a goblin way, with his little grey beard thrust up by a muffler which he had tied over his field-cap and under his chin. (It was cold, with a white mist which clung damply to our faces.) He went so far in his pleasure as to pick up a big stone (like those Belgian boys) and heave it at the monster. “Fine!” he said. “That devil will never again vomit out death upon men crouching low in ditches—fifteen miles away. Never again will it smash through the roofs of farmhouses where people desired to live in peace, or bash big holes in little old churches where folk worshipped through the centuries—a loving God!... Sonny, this damned thing is symbolical. Its overthrow means the downfall of all the machinery of slaughter which has been accumulated by civilised peoples afraid of each other. In a little while, if there’s any sense in humanity after this fearful lesson, we shall put all our guns on to the scrap-heap and start a new era of reasonable intercourse between the peoples of the world.” “Doctor,” I answered, “there’s a mighty big ‘If’ in that long sentence of yours.” He blinked at me with beads of mist on his lashes. “Don’t you go wet-blanketing my faith in a step-up for the human race! During the next few months we’re going to re-arrange life. We are going to give Fear the knock-out blow.... It was Fear that was the cause of all this horrible insanity and all this need of sacrifice. Germany was afraid of being ‘hemmed in’ by England, France and Russia. Fear, more than the lust of power, was at the back of her big armies. France was afraid of Germany trampling over her frontiers again. Russian Czardom was afraid of revolution within her own borders and looked to war as a safety-valve. England was afraid of the German Navy and afraid of Germans at Calais and Dunkirk. All the little Powers were afraid of the big Powers and made their beastly little alliances as a life insurance against the time when they would be dragged into the dog-fight. Now, with the German bogey killed—the most formidable and frightful bogey—Austria disintegrated, Russia groping her way with bloodshot eyes to a new democracy, a complete set of fears has been removed. The spirits of the peoples will be uplifted, the darkness of fear having passed from them. We are coming out into the broad sunlight of sanity, and mankind will march to better conquests than those of conscript armies. Thank God, the United States of America (and don’t you forget it!) will play a part in this advance to another New World.” It was absurd to argue with the little man in a sodden field on the road to Liège. Besides, though I saw weak links in his chain of reasoning, I did not want to argue. I wanted to believe also that our victory would not be a mere vulgar triumph of the old kind, one military power rising upon the ruins of its rival, one great yell (or many) of “Yah—we told you so!” but that it would be a victory for all humanity, shamed by the degradation of its orgy of blood, in spite of all pride in long-enduring manhood, and that the peoples of the world, with one common, enormous, generous instinct, would cry out, “The horror has passed! Never again shall it come upon us.... Let us pay back to the dead by contriving a better way of life for those who follow!” The chance of that lay with living youth, if they would not allow themselves to be betrayed by their old men. That also was a mighty “If,” but I clung to the hope with as passionate a faith as that of the little American doctor.... The way to the Rhine lay through many cities liberated from hostile rule, through many wonderful scenes in which, emotion surged like a white flame above great crowds. There was a pageantry of life which I had never before seen in war or in peace, and those of us who went that way became dazed by the endless riot of colour, and our ears were tired by a tumult of joyous sound. In Brussels, Bruges, Ghent, Liège, Namur, Venders, banners waved above every house. Flags—flags—flags of many nations and designs, decorated the house-fronts, were draped on the balconies, were entwined in the windows, came like flames above the heads of marching crowds. Everywhere there was the sound of singing by multitudes, and through those weeks one song was always in the air, triumphant, exultant, intoxicating, almost maddening in its effect upon crowds and individuals—the old song of liberty and revolt: “La Marseillaise.” With it, not so universal, but haunting in constant refrain between the outbursts of that other tune, they sang “La Brabançonne” of Belgium and quaint old folk-songs that came to life again with the spirit of the people. Bells pealed from churches in which the Germans had left them by special favour. The belfry of Bruges had not lost its carillon. In Ghent, when the King of the Belgians rode in along flower-strewn ways, under banners that made one great canopy, while cheers swept up and around him to his grave, tanned, melancholy face, unchanged by victory—so I had seen him in his ruined towns among his dead—I heard the great boom of the cathedral bell. In Brussels, when he rode in later, there were many bells ringing and clashing, and wild cheering, which to me, lying in an upper room after a smash on the Field of Waterloo, seemed uncanny and inhuman, like the murmur of innumerable ghost-voices. Into these towns, and along the roads through Belgium to the Meuse, bands were playing and soldiers singing, and on each man’s rifle was a flag or a flower. In every city there was carnival. It was the carnival of human joy after long fasting from the pleasure of life. Soldiers and civilians, men and women, sang together, linked arms, danced together through many streets, in many towns. In the darkness of those nights of Armistice one saw the eyes of people sparkling, laughing, burning; the eyes of girls lit up by inner fires, eager, roving, alluring, untamed; and the eyes of soldiers, surprised, amused, adventurous, drunken, ready for any kind of fun; and sometimes in those crowds, dead eyes, or tortured eyes, staring inwards and not outwards, because of some remembrance which came like a ghost between them and carnival. In Ghent there were other sounds besides music and laughter, and illuminations too fierce and ruddy in their glow to give me pleasure. At night I heard the screams of women. I had no need to ask the meaning of them. I had heard such screams before, when Pierre Nesle’s sister Marthe was in the hands of the mob. But one man told me, as though I did not know. “They are cutting off some ladies’ hair. Six of them—the hussies! They were too friendly with the Germans, you understand? Now they are being stripped, for shame. There are others, monsieur. Many, many, if one only knew. Hark at their howling!” He laughed heartily, without any touch of pity. I tried to push my way nearer to try by some word of protest to stop that merry sport with hunted women. The crowds were too dense, the women too far away. In any case no word of mine would have had effect. I went into a restaurant and ordered dinner, though not hungry. Brand was there, sitting alone till I joined him. The place was filled with French and Belgian officers and womenfolk. The swing-door opened and another woman came in and sat a few tables away from ours. She was a tall girl, rather handsome, and better dressed than the ordinary bourgeoisie of Ghent. At least, so it seemed to me when she hung up some heavy furs on the peg above her chair. A waiter advanced towards her, and then, standing stock-still, began to shout, with a thrill of fury in his voice. He shouted frightful words in French, and one sentence which I remember now. “A week ago you sat here with a German officer!” The Belgian officers were listening gravely. One of them half-rose from his chair with a flushed, wolfish face. I was staring at the girl. She was white to the lips, and held on to a brass rail as though about to faint. Then, controlling herself instantly, she fumbled at the peg, pulled down her furs and fled through the swing-door... She was another Marthe. Somebody laughed in the restaurant, but only one voice. For a moment there was silence, then conversation was resumed, as though no figure of tragedy had passed. The waiter who had denounced the woman swept some crumbs off a table and went to fetch some soup. Brand did not touch his food. “I feel sick,” he said. He pushed his plate away and paid the bill. “Let’s go.” He forgot to ask whether I wanted to eat—he was absent-minded in that way—but I felt like him, and avoiding the Grande Place we walked by hazard to a part of the city where some fires were burning. The sky was reddened and we smelt smoke, and presently felt the heat of flames. “What new devilry?” asked Brand. “Can’t these people enjoy peace? Hasn’t there been enough violence?” “Possibly a bonfire,” I said, “symbolical of joy and warmth after cold years!” Coming closer, I saw that Brand was right. Black figures like dancing devils were in the ruddy glare of a savage fire up a side street of Ghent. In other streets were other fires. Close to where we stood was an old inn, called the Hotel de la Demie-Lune—the Hotel of the Half-Moon—and its windows had been heaved out, and inside the rooms Belgian soldiers and citizens were flinging out tables and chairs and planks and wainscoting to feed the bonfire below, and every time the flames licked up to the new fuel there were shouts of joy from the crowd. “What does it mean?” asked Brand, and a man in the crowd told us that the house had been used as the headquarters of a German organisation for “Flemish Activists”—or Flamagands, as they were called—whose object was to divide the Walloons, or French-speaking Belgians, from the Flemings, in the interests of Germany. “It is the people’s revenge for those who have tried to sow seeds of hatred among-them,” said the man. Other people standing by spoke disapprovingly of the scene. “The Germans have made too many fires in this war,” said an elderly man in a black hat with a high crown and broad brim, like a portrait by Franz Hals. “We don’t want to destroy our own houses now the enemy has gone. That is madness.” “It seems unnecessary!” said Brand. As we made our way back we saw the light of other fires, and heard the noise of smashing glass and a splintering of woodwork. The mob was sacking shops which had traded notoriously with the Germans. Out of one alley a man came running like a hunted animal. We heard his breath panting as he passed. A shout of “Flamagand! Flamagand!” followed him, and in another second a mob had caught him. We heard his death-cry before they killed him like a rat. Never before in the history of the world had such crowds gathered together as now in Brussels, Ghent or Liège. French and English soldiers walked the same streets, khaki and sky-blue mingling. These two races had met before, not as friends, in some of these towns—five centuries and more before in history. But here also were men from Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, and the new world which had come to the old world on this adventure, paying back something to the old blood and the old ghosts because of their heritage, yet strangely aloof on the whole from these continental peoples, not understanding them, despising them. The English soldier took it all as it came, with that queer adaptability of his to any environment or any adventure, with his simple human touch. “Better than the old Ypres salient,” said one of them, grinning at me after a game of kiss-in-the-ring at Venders. He wiped the sweat from his face and neck, and as he raised his arm I saw by his gold stripes that he had been three times wounded. Yes, that was better than the old hell. He roared with laughter when one of his comrades went into the ring with a buxom girl while the crowd danced round him, holding hands, singing, laughing, pulling him this side and that. The man who had just left the ring spoke to me again in a confidential way. “My wife wouldn’t like it if she’d seen me just then. I shan’t tell ‘er. She wouldn’t understand. Nobody can understand the things we’ve done, the things we’ve thought, nor the things we’ve seen, unless they’ve been through with us... and we don’t understand, neither!” “Who does?” I asked, to express agreement with him, but he took my words as a question to be answered. “P’raps Gord knows. If so, ‘E’s a clever One, ‘E is!... I wish I ‘ad ‘alf ‘Is sense.” He drifted away from me with a gurgle of laughter at a girl who pushed his cap on one side. Along the kerbstone of the market-place some transport wagons were halted, and the drivers were cooking their evening meal over a charcoal stove, as though on one of the roads of war, while a crowd of Belgians roared with laughter at their by-play with clasp-knives, leaden spoons, and dixies. One of them was a cockney humorist—his type was always to be found in any group of English soldiers—and was performing a pantomime for the edification of the onlookers and his own pleasure. A woman standing on the edge of this scene touched me on the sleeve. “Are you going forward to the Rhine, mon lieutenant? ” I told her “yes,” and that I should soon be among the Germans. She gave a little tug to my sleeve, and spoke in a kind of coaxing whisper. “Be cruel to them, mon lieutenant! Be hard and ruthless. Make them suffer as we have suffered. Tread on their necks so that they squeal. Soyez cruel. ” Her face and part of her figure were in the glow from the charcoal fire of the transport men, and I saw that she was a little woman, neatly dressed, with a thin, gentle, rather worn-looking face. Those words, “ Soyez cruel! ” gave me a moment’s shock, especially because of the soft, wheedling tone of her voice. “What would you do,” I asked in a laughing way, “if you were in my place?” “I dream at nights of what I would like to do. There are so many things I would like to do for vengeance. I think all German women should be killed to stop them breeding. That is one thing.” “And the next?” I asked. “It would be well to kill all German babies. Perhaps the good God will do it in His infinite wisdom.” “You are religious, madame?” “We had only our prayers,” she said, with piety. A band of dancing people bore down upon us and swept us apart. From a high balcony an Italian who had been a prisoner of war sang “La Marseillaise,” and though these people’s ears had been dinned with it all day, though their throats were hoarse with singing it, they listened to it now, again, as though it were a new revelation. The man sang with passion in his voice, as powerful as a trumpet, more thrilling than that. The passion of four years’ agony in some foul prison-camp inspired him now, as he sang that song of liberty and triumph. “Allons, Enfants de la patrie! Le jour de gloire est arrivé!” The crowd took up the song again, and it roared across the square of Venders until another kind of music met and clashed with it, and overwhelmed it with brazen notes. It was the town band of Venders, composed of twenty-five citizens, mostly middle-aged and portly—some old and scraggy, in long frock-coats and tall pot-hats. Solemnly, with puffed cheeks, they marched along, parting the waves of people as they went, as it seemed, by the power of their blasts. They were playing an old tune called “Madelon”—its refrain comes back to me now with the picture of that carnival in Venders, with all those faces, all that human pressure and emotion—and behind them, as though following the Pied Piper (twenty-five pied pipers!) came dancing at least a thousand people, eight abreast, with linked arms or linked hands. They were young Belgian boys and girls, old Belgian men and women, children, British soldiers, American soldiers, English, Scottish, Irish, Canadian, Australian, Russian, and Italian ex-prisoners of war just liberated from their prison-camps, new to liberty. They were all singing that old song of “Madelon,” and all dancing in a kind of jig. Other crowds, dancing and singing, came out of side-streets into the wide Grande Place, mingled, like human waves meeting, swirled in wild, laughing eddies. Carnival after the long fasting. Brand clutched me by the arm and laughed in his deep, hollow voice. “Look at that old satyr!... I believe Daddy Small is Pan himself!” It was the little American doctor. He was in the centre of a row of eight in the vanguard of a dancing column. A girl of the midinette type—pretty, impudent, wild-eyed, with a strand of fair hair blowing loose from her little fur cap—was clinging to his arm on one side, while on the other was a stout, middle-aged woman with a cheerful Flemish face and mirth-filled eyes. Linked up with the others they jigged behind the town band. Dr. Small’s little grey beard had a raffish look. His field cap was tilted back from his bony forehead. His spectacles were askew. He had the happy look of careless boyhood. He did not see us then, but later in the evening detached himself from the stout Flemish lady, who kissed him on both cheeks, and made his way to where Brand and I stood under the portico of a hotel. “Fie, doctor!” said Brand. “What would your old patients in New York say to this Bacchanalian orgy?” “Sonny,” said the doctor, “they wouldn’t believe it. It’s incredible!” He wiped the perspiration from his brow, threaded his fingers through his grey beard, and laughed in that shrill way which was his habit when excited. “My word, it was good fun! I became part of a people’s joy. I had their sense of escape from frightful things. Youth came back to me. Their songs danced in my blood. In spite of my goggles and my grey beard that buxom lady adored me as though I were the young Adonis. The little girl clasped my hand as though I were her younger brother. Time rolled back from the world. Old age was touched with the divine elixir. In that crowd there is the springtime of life, when Pan played on his pipes through pagan woods. I wouldn’t have missed it for a million dollars!” That night Brand and I and some others (Charles Fortune among them) were billeted in a small hotel which had been a German headquarters a few days before. There was a piano in the billiard room, and Fortune touched its keys. Several notes were broken but he skipped them deftly and improvised a musical caricature of “Daddy” Small dancing in the carnival. He, too, had seen that astonishing vision, and it inspired him to grotesque fantasies. In his imagination he brought a great general to Venders—“Blear-eyed Bill, the Butcher of the Boche”—and gave him a pas seul in the Grande Place, like an elephant gambolling in green fields and trumpeting his joy. Young Harding was moody, and confided to me that he did not like the idea of crossing the German frontier and going to Cologne. “There will be dirty work,” he said, “as sure as fate. The Huns will begin sniping and then we shall have to start reprisals. Well, if they ask for it I hope we shall give it them. Without mercy, after all they have done. At the first sign of treachery I hope the machine-guns will begin to play. Every time I see a Hun I shall feel like slitting his throat.” “Well, you’ll get into a murderous state of mind,” I answered him. “We shall see plenty, and live among them. I expect they will be tame enough.” “Some poor devils of ours will be murdered in their beds,” said Harding. “It makes my blood boil to think of it. I only hope we shan’t stand any nonsense. I’d like to see Cologne Cathedral go up in flames. That would be a consolation.” Charles Fortune broke away from his musical fantasy of “Blear-eyed Bill” and played a bar or two of the “Marseillaise” in ragtime. It was a greeting to Pierre Nesle, who came into the room quietly in his képi and heavy motor-coat, with a salute to the company. “ Bon soir, petit Pierre! ” said Fortune, “ qu’il y a, done—quoi?—avec ta figure si sombre, si mélancolique, d’une tristesse pitoyable ——” Pierre Nesle inspired him to sing a little old French chanson of Pierrot disconsolate. Pierre had just motored down from Lille—a long journey—and was blue with cold, as he said, warming his hands at the charcoal stove. He laughed at Fortune’s jesting, begged a cigarette from Harding, apologised for keeping on his “stink-coat” for a while until he had thawed out—and I admired the boy’s pluck and self-control. It was the first time I had seen him since he had gone to Lille to see his sister. I knew by the new lines about his eyes and mouth, by a haggard, older look he had that he had seen that sister of his—Marthe—and knew her tragedy. It was to Brand’s room that he went after midnight, and from Brand, a day later, I heard what had happened. He had begun by thanking Brand for that rescue of his sister in Lille, in a most composed and courteous way. Then suddenly that mask fell from him and he sat down heavily in a chair, put his head down on his arms upon the table and wept like a child in uncontrollable grief. Brand was immensely distressed and could not think of any word to comfort him. He kept saying, “Courage! Courage!” as I had said to Madame Chéri when she broke down about her boy Edouard, as the young Baronne had sent word to Eileen from her prison death-bed, and as so many men and women had said to others who had been stricken by the cruelties of war. “The boy was down and out,” said Brand. “What could I say? It is one of those miseries for which there is no cure. He began to talk about his sister when they had been together at home, in Paris before the war. She had been so gay, so comradely, so full of adventure. Then he began to curse God for having allowed so much cruelty and men for being such devils. He cursed the Germans, but then, in most frightful language, most bitterly of all he cursed the people of Lille for having tortured a woman who had been starved into weakness, and had sinned to save her life. He contradicted himself then, violently, and said, ‘It was no sin. My sister was a loyal girl to France. In her soul she was loyal. So she swore to me on her crucifix. I would have killed her if she had been disloyal.’... So there you are! Pierre Nesle is broken on the wheel of war, like so many others. What’s the cure?” “None,” I said, “for his generation. One can’t undo the things that are done.” Brand was pacing up and down his bedroom, where he had been telling me these things, and now, at my words, he stopped and stared at me before answering. “No. I think you’re right. This generation has been hard hit, and we shall go about with unhealed wounds. But the next generation?... Let’s try to save it from all this horror! If the world will only understand——” The next day we left Venders and crossed the German frontier on the way to the Rhine.

Related documents

• Return to Gone-Away#61678
• The House of Life#31950
• Back to the self and the future#700162
• The fire of life#207285
• Life and destiny#57540