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.