“All that, thank God, is finished now,” said the man. “The English have

delivered us from the beast!” As he spoke, another monstrous shell came

overhead, but he took no notice of it, and said, “We are safe now from

the enemy’s evil power!” It seemed to me a comparative kind of safety.

I had no confidence in it when I sat in the parlour of an old lady who,

like Eileen O’Connor, in Lille, had been an Irish governess in Courtrai,

and who now, living in miserable poverty, sat in a bed-sitting-room

whose windows and woodwork had been broken by shell-splinters. “Do you

mind shutting the door, my dear?” she said. “I can’t bear those nasty

bombs.” I realised with a large, experienced knowledge that we might be

torn to fragments of flesh at any moment by one of those nasty “bombs,”

which were really eight-inch shells; but the old lady did not worry, and

felt safe when the door was shut.

Outside Courtrai, when I left, lay some khaki figures in a mush of

blood. They were lads whom I had seen unloading ammunition that morning

on the bank of the canal. One had asked me for a light, and said,

“What’s all this peace talk?... Any chance?” A big chance, I had told

him. Home for Christmas, certain sure this time. The boy’s eyes had

lighted up for a moment, quicker than the match which he held in the cup

of his hands.

“Jesus! Back for good, eh?”

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

“We’ve heard that tale a score of times. ‘The Germans are weakening. The

Huns ‘ave ‘ad enough!...’ Newspaper talk. A man would be a mug----”

Now the boy lay in the mud, with half his body blown away.... I was glad

to get back to Lille for a spell, where there were no dead bodies in the

roads. And the colonel’s news, straight from G.H.Q.--which, surely, were

not playing up the old false optimism again!--helped one to hope that,

perhaps, in a week or two the last boys of our race, the lucky ones,

would be reprieved from that kind of bloody death which I had seen so

often, so long, so heaped up, in many fields of France and Flanders,

where the flower of our youth was killed.

Dr. Small was excited by the hope brought back by Colonel Lavington. He

sought me out in my billet, _Madame Chéri_, and begged me to take a walk

with him. (It was a moonlight night, but no double throb of a German

air-engine came booming over Lille.) He walked at a hard pace, with

the collar of his “British warm” tucked up to his ears, and talked in a

queer disjointed monologue, emotionally, whimsically. I remember some

of his words, more or less--anyhow, the gist of his thoughts, “I’m not

worrying any more about how the war will end. We’ve won! Remarkable,

that, when one thinks back to the time, less than a year ago, when the

best thing seemed a draw. I’m thinking about the future. What’s the

world going to be afterwards? That’s my American mind--the next job, so

to speak.”

He thought hard while we paced round our side of the Jardin d’Eté, where

the moonlight made the bushes glamorous and streaked the tree trunks

with a silver line.

“This war is going to have prodigious effects on nations; on

individuals, too. I’m scared. We’ve all been screwed up to an intense

pitch--every nerve in us is beyond the normal stretch of nature. After

the war there will be a sudden relaxing. We shall be like bits of chewed

elastic. Rather like people who have drugged themselves to get through

some big ordeal. After the ordeal their nerves are all ragged. They

crave the old stimulus, though they dread it. They’re depressed--don’t

know what’s the matter--get into sudden rages--hysterical--can’t settle

to work--go out for gaiety and get bored. I’ve seen it many times in

bad cases. Europe--yes, and America, too--is going to be a bad case. A

neurotic world--Lord, it’ll take some healing!”

For a time his thoughts wandered round the possible terms of peace and

the abasement of Germany. He prophesied the break-up of Germany, the

downfall of the Emperor and of other thrones.

“Crowns will be as cheap as twenty cents,” he said. He hoped for the

complete overthrow of Junkerdom--“all the dirty dogs,” as he called the

Prussian war lords and politicians. But he hoped the Allies would be

generous with the enemy peoples--“magnanimous” was the word he used.

“We must help the spirit of democracy to rise among them,” he said. “We

must make it easy for them to exorcise the devil. If we press them too

hard, put the screw on to the torture of their souls (defeat will be

torture to a proud people), they will nourish a hope of vengeance and go

back to their devil for hope.”

I asked him whether he thought his President would lead the world to a

nobler stage of history.

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

prejudices.

“Why,” he said, “Wilson has the biggest chance that ever came to a human

being--the biggest chance and the biggest duty. We are rich (too darned

rich) and enormously powerful when most other peoples are poor and

weak--drained of wealth and blood. That’s our luck, and a little bit,

perhaps, our shame, though our boys have done their bit all right

and are ready to do more; and it’s not their fault they weren’t here

before--but we’re hardly touched by this war as a people, except

spiritually. There we’ve been touched by the finger of Fate. (God, if

you like that better!) So, with that strength behind him, the President

is in a big way of business. He can make his voice heard, stand for a

big idea. God, sonny, I hope he’ll do it! For the world’s sake, for the

sake of all these suffering people, here in this city of Lille, and in a

million little towns where people have been bashed by war.”

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

embarrassed him.

“I’m loyal to the man,” he said. “I’ll back him if he plays straight and

big. Bigness, that’s what we want. Bigness of heart as well as bigness

of brain. Oh, he’s clever, though not wise in making so many enemies.

He has fine ideas and can write real words. Things which speak. True

things. I’d like to be sure of his character--its breadth and strength,

I mean. The world wants a nobleman, bigger than the little gentlemen of

politics; a leader calling to the great human heart of our tribes and

lifting them, with one grand gesture, out of the mire of old passions

and vendettas and jealousies to a higher plane of--common sense. Out of

the jungle to the daylight of fellowship. Out of the jungle.”

He repeated those words twice, with a reverent solemnity. He believed

that so much emotion had been created in the heart of the world that,

when the war ended, anything might happen if a leader came--a new

religion of civilisation, any kind of spiritual and social revolution.

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

be!”

XI

Our conversation was interrupted by a figure that slipped out of the

darkness of some doorway, hesitated before us, and then spoke in French.

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

It was a girl, whom I could see only vaguely in the darkness--she stood

in the shadow of a doorway beyond the moonlight--and I answered her that

I was English and my friend American.

“Is there any way,” she asked, “of travelling from Lille, perhaps to

Paris? In a motor car, for example? To-night?”

I laughed at this startling request, put so abruptly. It was already

nine o’clock at night!

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

Lille.”

“I was stupid,” said the girl. “Not all the way to Paris, but to some

town outside Lille. Any town. There are motor cars always passing

through the streets. I thought if I could get a little place in one----”

“It is difficult,” I said. “As a matter of fact, it is forbidden for

officers to take civilians except in case of saving them from danger--in

shelled places.”

She came suddenly out of the shadow into the moonlight, and I saw that

she was a girl with red hair and a face strangely white. I knew by the

way she spoke--the accent--as well as by the neatness of her dress, that

she was not a working-girl. She was trembling painfully, and took hold

of my arm with both her hands.

“Monsieur, I beg of you to help me. I beseech you to think of some way

in which I may get away from Lille to-night. It is a matter of extreme

importance to me.”

A group of young men and women came up the street arm-in-arm, shouting,

laughing, singing the “Marseillaise.” They were civilians, with two of

our soldiers among them, wearing women’s hats.

Before I could answer the girl’s last words, she made a sudden retreat

into the dark doorway, and I could see dimly that she was cowering back.

Dr. Small spoke to me. “That girl is scared of something. The poor child

has got the jim-jams.”

I went closer to her and heard her breathing. It was quite loud. It was

as though she were panting after hard running.

“Are you ill?” I asked.

She did not answer until the group of civilians had passed. They did not

pass at once, but stood for a moment looking up at a light burning in

an upper window. One of the men shouted something in a loud voice--some

word in _argot_--which I did not understand, and the women screeched

with laughter. Then they went on, dancing with linked arms, and our two

soldiers in the women’s hats lurched along with them.

“I am afraid!” said the girl.

“Afraid of what?” I asked.

I repeated the question--“Why are you afraid, mademoiselle?”--and she

answered by words which I had heard a million times since the war began

as an explanation of all trouble, tears, ruin, misery.

“_C’est la guerre!_”

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

She had risen from her cowering position and stood upright for a moment,

with her hand against the doorpost. Then she swayed, and would have

fallen if the doctor had not caught her. Even then she fell,

indeed, though without hurt, because he could not support her sudden

weight--though she was of slight build--and they sank together in a kind

of huddle on the doorstep.

“For the love of Mike!” said Dr. Small. He was on his knees before her

now, chafing her cold hands. She came to in about a minute, and I leaned

over her and asked her where she lived, and made out from her faint

whisper that she lived in the house to which this doorway belonged, in

the upper room where the light was burning. With numbed fingers--“cold

as a toad,” said “Daddy” Small--she fumbled at her bodice and drew out a

latchkey.

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

The front door opened into a dimly-lit passage, uncarpeted, and with

leprous-looking walls. At one end was a staircase with heavy banisters.

The doctor and I supported the girl, who was able to walk a little now,

and managed to get her to the first landing.

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

It was the front room looking on to the street. A lamp was burning on

the round table in the centre of the room, and I saw by the light of it

the poverty of the furniture and its untidiness. At one end of the room

was a big iron bedstead with curtains of torn lace, and on the wooden

chairs hung some soiled petticoats and blouses. There was a small

cooking-stove in a corner, but no charcoal burned in it, and I remember

an ebony-framed mirror over the mantelpiece. I remember that mirror

vividly. I remember, for instance, that a bit of the ebony had broken

off, showing the white plaster underneath, and a crack in the right-hand

corner of the looking-glass.

Probably my eyes were attracted to it because of a number of photographs

stuck into the framework. They were photographs of a girl in a variety

of stage costumes; and glancing at the girl, whom the doctor had put

into a low arm-chair, I saw that they were of her. But with all the

tragic difference between happiness and misery; worse than that--between

unscathed girlhood and haggard womanhood. This girl with red hair and

a white waxen face was pretty still. There was something more than

prettiness in the broadness of her brow and the long tawny lashes that

were now veiling her closed eyes as she sat with her head back against

the chair, showing a long white throat. But her face was lined with an

imprint of pain, and her mouth, rather long and bow-like, was drawn with

a look of misery.

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

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

He sniffed at the stove and the room generally.

“No sign of recent cooking.”

He opened a cupboard and looked in.

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

I did not answer him. I was staring at the photographs stuck into

the mirror, and saw one that was not a girl’s portrait. It was the

photograph of a young French lieutenant. I crossed the room and looked

at it closer, and then spoke to the little doctor in a curiously

unexcited voice, as one does in moments of living drama.

“This girl is Pierre Nesle’s sister.”

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

night.

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

wondering look.

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

I told her that I knew him well and had seen him in Lille, where he was

looking for her, two days ago. He was now in the direction of Courtrai.

The girl was painfully agitated and uttered pitiful words.

“Oh, my little brother!” she murmured. “My dear little comrade!” She

rose from her chair, steadying herself with one hand on the back of it,

and with feverish anxiety said that she must go at once. She must leave

Lille.

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

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

I turned to the doctor and translated her words.

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

Dr. Small had taken something off the mantelpiece--a glass tube with

some tablets--which he put in his pocket.

“Hysteria,” he said. “Starvation, war-strain, and--drugs. There’s a

jolly combination for a young lady’s nerves! She’s afraid of herself,

old ghosts, the horrors. Wants to run away from it all, forgetting that

she carries her poor body and brain with her. I know the symptoms--even

in little old New York in time of peace.”

He had his professional manner. I saw the doctor through his soldier’s

uniform. He spoke with the authority of the medical man in a patient’s

bedroom. He ordered me to go round to my mess and bring back some

food, while he boiled up a kettle and got busy. When I returned, after

half-an-hour, the girl was more cheerful. Some of the horrors had passed

from her in the doctor’s company. She ate some of the food I had brought

in a famished way, but after a few mouthfuls sickened at it and would

eat no more. But a faint colour had come into her cheeks and gave

her face a touch of real beauty. She must have been extraordinarily

attractive before the war--as those photographs showed. She spoke of

Pierre with adoration. He had been all that was good to her before she

left home (she hated her mother!) to sing in cabarets and café concerts.

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

little laugh.

Dr. Small said he would get some women in the house to look after her in

the night, but she seemed hostile to that idea.

“The people here are unkind. They are bad women here. If I died they

would not care.”

She promised to stay in the house until we could arrange for Pierre to

meet her and take her away to Paris. But I felt the greatest pity for

the girl when we left her alone in her miserable room. The scared look

had come back to her face. I could see that she was in terror of being

alone again.

When we walked back to our billets the doctor spoke of the extraordinary

chance of meeting the girl like that--the sister of our _liaison_

officer. The odds were a million to one against such a thing.

“I always feel there’s a direction in these cases,” said Daddy Small.

“Some Hand that guides. Maybe you and I were being led to-night. I’d

like to save that girl, Marthe.”

“Is that her name?”

“Marthe de Méricourt, she calls herself, as a singing-girl. I guess

that’s why Pierre could not hear of her in this town.”

Later on the doctor spoke again.

“That girl is as much a war victim as if she had been shell-shocked

on the field of battle. The casualty lists don’t say anything about

civilians, not a darned thing about broken hearts, stricken women,

diseased babies, infant mortality--all the hell of suffering behind the

lines. May God curse all war devils!”

He put his hand on my shoulder and said in a very solemn way: “After

this thing is finished--this grisly business--you and I, and all men of

goodwill, must put our heads together to prevent it happening again. I

dedicate whatever life I have to that.”

He seemed to have a vision of hope.

“There are lots of good fellows in the world. Wickham Brand is one

of ‘em. Charles Fortune is another. One finds them everywhere on your

side and mine. Surely we can get together when peace comes and make a

better System somehow!”

“Not easy, doctor.”

He laughed at me.

“I hate your pessimism!... We must get a message to Pierre Nesle....

Good-night, sonny!”

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

He was too engrossed to see me, having his arm round a girl who was

standing with him under an unlighted lamp-post. She was looking up into

his face on which the moonlight shone--a pretty creature, I thought.

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

kissed her.

I knew the boy’s mother and sisters, and wondered what they would think

of him if they saw him now with this little street-walker. To them

Cyril was a white knight _sans peur et sans reproche_. The war had not

improved him. He was no longer the healthy lad who had been captain

of his school, with all his ambition in sport, as I had known him five

years before. Sometimes, in spite of his swagger and gallantry, I saw

something sinister in his face, the look of a soiled soul. Poor kid! He,

too, would have his excuse for all things:

“_C’est la guerre!_”

XII

It was five o’clock on the following evening that I saw the girl Marthe

again. The doctor and I had arranged to go round to her lodging after

dinner, by which time we hoped to have a letter for her from Pierre, by

despatch-rider. But Brand was with me in the afternoon, having looked

into my billet with an English conversation-book for Hélène, who was

anxious to study our way of speech. Madame Chéri insisted upon giving

him a glass of wine, and we stood talking in her drawing-room a while

about the certain hope of victory, and then trivial things. Hélène was

delighted with her book and Brand had a merry five minutes with her,

teaching her to pronounce the words.

“_C’est effroyable!_” cried Hélène. “‘Through’... ‘Tough’ ‘Cough ‘...

_Mon Dieu, comme c’est difficile!_ There is no rule in your tongue.”

Madame Chéri spoke of Edouard, her eldest boy, who had disappeared into

the great silence, and gave me a photograph of him, in case I should

meet him in our advance towards the Rhine. She kissed the photograph

before giving it to me, and said a few words which revealed her strong

character, her passionate patriotism.

“If he had been four years older he would have been a soldier of France.

I should have been happy if he could have fought for his country, and

died for it, like my husband.”

Brand and I left the house and went up towards the Grande Place. I was

telling him about Pierre Nesle’s sister and our strange meeting with her

the night before.

“I’m precious glad,” said Brand, “that no sister of mine was behind

German lines. God knows how much they had to endure. Imagine their

risks! It was a lucky escape for that girl Hélène. Supposing she had

failed to barricade her door?”

When we came into the Grande Place we saw that something was happening.

It was almost dark after a shadowy twilight, but we could see a crowd of

people surging round some central point of interest. Many of them were

laughing loudly. There was some joke in progress. The women’s tongues

sounded most loud and shrill.

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

wonder?”

A gust of laughter came across the square. Above it was another sound,

not so pleasant. It was a woman’s shrieks--shriek after shriek, most

blood-curdling, and then becoming faint.

“What the devil----!” said Brand.

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

“What’s happening?”

He laughed in a grim way.

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

I was mystified.

“Cutting her hair?”

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

“Shaving her head, monsieur. She was one of those who were too

complaisant with German officers. You understand? There were many of

them. They ought to have their heads cut off as well as their hair.”

Another man spoke gruffly.

“There would be a good many headless corpses if that were so. To their

shame be it said. It was abominable. No pride. No decency.”

“But the worst will escape,” said another. “In private houses. The

well-dressed demoiselles!”

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

It was a cry for killing, such as women had screamed when pretty

aristocrats were caught by the mobs of the French Revolution.

“My God!” said Brand.

He shouldered his way through the crowd, and I followed him. The people

made a gap for us, seeing our uniforms, and desired us to enjoy the

joke. What I saw when I came closer was a group of young men holding a

limp figure. One of them was brandishing a large pair of scissors, as

large as shears. Another held up a tangled mass of red hair.

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

I had seen the hair before, as I knew when I saw a girl’s face,

dead-white, lifeless, as it seemed, and limp against a man’s shoulder.

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

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

Brand did not answer me, but I saw his face pale under its tan. He

pushed forward through the crowd and I lost sight of him for a few

moments. After that I saw him carrying the girl; above the heads of the

people, I saw her head flopping from side to side horribly, a head with

close-cropped hair. They had torn her clothes off her shoulders, which

were bleeding.

“Help me,” said Brand.

I am not quite clear what happened. I have only a vague remembrance of

the crowd making way for us, with murmurs of surprise and some hostile

cries of women. I remember helping Brand to carry the girl--enormously

heavy she seemed with her dead weight--but how we managed to get her

into Dr. Small’s car is to this day a blank in my mind. We must have

seen and hailed him at the corner of the Grande Place as he was going

back to his billet. I have a distinct recollection of taking off my

Burberry and laying it over the girl, who was huddled in the back of

the car, and of Brand saying, “Where can we take her?” I also remember

trying to light a cigarette and using many matches which went out in the

wind. It was Brand’s idea that we should go to Madame Chéri’s house for

sanctuary, and by the time we had driven to that place we had left the

crowd behind and were not followed.

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

a refuge.”

I think Madame Chéri was startled by the sight of the car, and perhaps

by some queer look I had. I told her what had happened. This girl was

the sister of Pierre Nesle, whom Madame Chéri had met. The crowd, for

some reason, had cut off her hair. Would Madame save the poor child, who

was unconscious?

I shall never forget the face or speech of that lady, whom I had found

so kind. She drew herself up very stiffly and a relentless expression

hardened her face.

“If you were not English I should say you desired to insult me, sir.

The people have cut off the creature’s hair. ‘For some reason,’ you say.

There is only one reason. Because she was faithless to her country and

to her sex, and was familiar with men who were the enemies of France,

the murderers of our men, robbers and assassins. She has been well

punished. I would rather burn down my house than give her shelter. If

they gave her to the dogs to tear in pieces I would not lift my little

finger to save her.”

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

“What is it, little _maman?_”

Madame Chéri regained control of herself, which for a moment she had

lost in a passion that shook her.

“It is a little matter. This officer and I have been talking about vile

people who sold themselves to our enemy. He understands perfectly.”

“I understand,” I said gravely. “There is a great deal of cruelty in the

world, madame, and less charity than I had hoped.”

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

calmly.

“_Au revoir, madame!_”

“_Au revoir, monsieur!_”

“_Au revoir, mademoiselle!_”

I was shocked then at the callousness of the lady. It seemed to me

incredible. Now I am no longer shocked, but understand the horror that

was hers, the loathing for a daughter of France who had--if the mob

were not mistaken--violated the code of honour which enabled the French

people to resist German brutality, even German kindness, which they

hated worse, with a most proud disdain. That girl outside, bleeding and

senseless in the car, had been friendly with German officers, notorious

in her company with them. Otherwise she would not have been seized by

the crowd and branded for shame. There was a fierce protective instinct

which hardened Madame Chéri against charity. Only those who have

seen what war means to women close to it, in enemy hands, may truly

understand, and, understanding, curse war again for all its destruction

of souls and bodies.

XIII

Brand and Dr. Small were both astonished and indignant.

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

said Brand.

The American doctor did not waste words. He only used words when there

was no action on hand.

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

I had the idea of the convent where Eileen O’Connor lodged. There was

a sanctuary. Those nuns were vowed to Christian charity. They would

understand and have pity.

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

We drove hard to the convent, and Brand was out of the car before it

stopped, and rang the bell with such a tug that we heard it jangling

loudly in the courtyard.

It seemed long before the little wicket opened and a woman’s voice said,

“_Qui est la?_”

Brand gave his name and said, “Open quickly, _ma sour_. We have a woman

here who is ill.”

The gate was opened, and Brand and I lifted out the girl, who was still

unconscious, but moaning slightly, and carried her into the courtyard,

and thence inside the convent to the whitewashed passage where I had

listened so long to the Reverend Mother telling me of the trial scene.

It was the Reverend Mother who came now, with two of her nuns, while the

little portress stood by, clasping her hands.

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

She bent over the girl, Marthe--Pierre Nesle’s sister, as I remembered

with an added pity--pulled my Burberry from her face and shoulders and

glanced at the bedraggled figure there.

“Her hair has been cut off,” said the old nun. “That is strange! There

are the marks of finger-nails on her shoulder. What violence was it,

then?”

Brand described the rescue of the girl from the mob, who would have

torn her to pieces, and as he spoke I saw a terrible look come into the

Reverend Mother’s face.

“I remember--1870,” she said harshly. “They cut the hair of women who

had disgraced themselves--and France--by their behaviour with German

soldiers. We thought then that it was a light punishment... we think so

now, monsieur!”

One of the nuns, a young woman who had been touching the girl’s head,

smoothing back her tousled, close-cropped hair, sprang up as though she

had touched an evil thing and shrank back.

Another nun spoke to the Reverend Mother.

“This house would be defiled if we took in a creature like that. God

forbid, Reverend Mother----”

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

with emotion.

“It would have been better, sir, if you had left this wretched woman to

the people. The voice of the people is sometimes the voice of God. If

they knew her guilt their punishment was just. Reflect what it means to

us--to all our womanhood. Husbands, fathers, brothers were being killed

by these Germans. Our dear France was bleeding to death. Was there any

greater crime than that a Frenchwoman should show any weakness, any

favour, to one of those men who were helping to cause the agony of

France, the martyrdom of our youth?”

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

charity!”

The American doctor and I stood by silently. Dr. Small was listening

with the deepest attention, as though some new truth about human nature

were being revealed to him.

It was then that a new voice was raised in that whitewashed corridor.

It was Eileen O’Connor’s Irish contralto, and it vibrated with

extraordinary passion as she spoke in French.

“Reverend Mother!... I am dismayed by the words you have spoken. I do

not believe, though my ears have heard them. No, they are unbelievable!

I have seen your holiness, your charity, every day for four years,

nursing German prisoners, and English, with equal tenderness, with a

great pity. Not shrinking from any horror or the daily sight of

death, but offering it all as a sacrifice to God. And now, after our

liberation, when we ought to be uplifted by the Divine favour that has

come to us, you would turn away that poor child who lies bleeding at our

feet, another victim of war’s cruelty. Was it not war that struck her

down? This war which has been declared against souls as well as bodies!

This war on women, as well as on fighting-men who had less need of

courage than some of us! What did our Lord say to a woman who was taken

by the mob? ‘He that is without sin among you, let him cast the first

stone!’ It was Mary Magdalen who kissed His feet, and wiped them with

her hair. This girl has lost her hair, but perhaps Christ has taken it

as a precious napkin for His wounds. We who have been lucky in escape

from evil--shall we cast her out of the house which has a cross above

its roof? I have been lucky above most women in Lille. If all things

were known, I might be lying there in that girl’s place, bleeding and

senseless, without this hair of mine. Reverend Mother--_remember Franz

von Kreuzenach!_”

We--Dr. Small, Brand, and I--were dumbfounded by Eileen O’Connor’s

passionate outcry. She was utterly unconscious of us and looked only at

the Reverend Mother, with a light in her eyes that was more intensely

spiritual than I had seen before in any woman’s face.

The old nun seemed stricken by Eileen’s words. Into her rugged old face,

all wrinkled about the eyes, crept an expression of remorse and shame.

Once she raised her hands, slowly, as though beseeching the girl to

spare her. Then her hands came down again and clasped each other at her

breast, and her head bowed so that her chin was dug into her white bib.

Tears came into her eyes and fell unheeded down her withered cheeks.

I can see now the picture of us all standing there in the whitewashed

corridor of the convent, in the dim light of a hanging lantern--we three

officers standing together, the huddled figure of Marthe Nesle lying

at our feet, half covered with my trench-coat, but with her face lying

sideways, white as death under her cropped red hair, and her bare

shoulders stained with a streak of blood; opposite, the old Mother, with

bowed head and clasped hands; the two young nuns, rigid, motionless,

silent; and Eileen O’Connor, with that queer light on her face and her

hands stretched out with a gesture of passionate appeal.

The Reverend Mother raised her head and spoke--after what seemed like a

long silence, but was only a second or two, I suppose.

“My child, I am an old woman, and have said many prayers. But you have

taught me the lesson, which I thought I knew, that the devil does not

depart from us until our souls have found eternal peace. I am a wicked

old woman, and until you opened my eyes I was forgetful of charity and

of our Lord’s most sweet commands.”

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

“Gentlemen, I pray you to carry this wounded girl to my own cell.

To-night I will sleep on bare boards.”

One of the young nuns was weeping bitterly.

So we lifted up Marthe Nesle, and, following the Reverend Mother,

carried her to a little white room and laid her on an iron bedstead

under a picture of the Madonna below which burned an oil lamp on a

wooden table. The American doctor asked Eileen O’Connor to bring him

some hot water.

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

XIV

Colonel Lavington was discussing the art of the sonnet and the

influence of Italian culture in Elizabethan England. From that subject

he travelled to the psychology of courage, which in his opinion, for the

moment, was founded on vanity.

“Courage,” he said, with that gallant look of his which I had seen with

admiration when he walked up the old duckboards beyond Ypres, with

a whimsical smile at “crumps” bursting abominably near--he had done

bravely in the old days as a battalion commander. “Courage is merely a

pose before the mirror of one’s own soul and one’s neighbours. We are

all horribly afraid in moments of danger, but some of us have the

gift of pretending that we don’t mind. That is vanity. We like to look

heroes, even to ourselves. It is good to die with a _beau geste_, though

death is damnably unpleasant.”

“I agree, colonel,” said Charles Fortune. “Always the right face for the

proper occasion. But it wants a lot of practice.”

He put on his gallant, devil-may-care face, and there was appreciative

laughter from his fellow officers.

Harding, the young landowner, was of opinion that courage depended

entirely on the liver.

“It is a matter of physical health,” he said. “If I am out-of-sorts,

my _moral_ goes down to zero. Not that I’m ever really brave. Anyhow, I

hate things that go off. Those loud noises of bursting shells are very

objectionable. I shall protest against Christmas crackers after the

war.”

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

badinage.

“What’s the matter?” I asked, and he confided to me his conviction,

while he passed the salt, that “life was a rummy game.”

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

That seemed to me curious, after the glimpse I had had of him with a

little lady of Lille. The boy explained himself somewhat under cover of

the colonel’s conversation, which was holding the interest of the mess.

“We’re living unnaturally,” he said. “It’s all an abnormal show, and we

pretend to be natural and normal when everything that happens round us

is fantastic and disorderly.”

“What’s your idea?” I enquired. It was the first time I had heard the

boy talk seriously, or with any touch of gravity.

“Hard to explain,” he said. “But, take my case to-day. This morning I

went up the line to interrogate the latest batch of P.O.W.’s.” (He meant

prisoners of war.) “A five-point-nine burst within ten yards of my car,

the other side of Courtrai, killed my driver and missed me by a couple

of inches. I felt as sick as a dog when I saw Saunders crumpled over his

steering-wheel with blood pouring down his neck. Not that it’s the first

time I’ve seen blood!”

He laughed as he gave a glance at his wound-stripe, and I remembered

the way in which he had gained his M.C. at Gommecourt--one of three left

alive in his company.

“We had been talking, three minutes before, about his next leave. He had

been married in ‘16, after the Somme, and hadn’t seen his wife since.

Said her letters made him ‘uneasy.’ Thought she was drinking because of

the loneliness. Well, there he was--finished--and a nasty sight. I went

off to the P.O.W. cage and examined the beggars--one of them, as

usual, had been a waiter at the ‘Cecil,’ and said, ‘How’s dear old

London?’--and passed the time of day with Bob Mellett--you know, the

one-armed lad. He laughed no end when he heard of my narrow squeak. So

did I--though it’s hard to see the joke. He lent me his car on the way

back, and somewhere outside Courtrai we bumped over a dead body with a

queer soft squelch. It was a German--a young ‘un--and Bob Mellett said,

‘_He_ won’t be home for Christmas!’ Do you know Bob?--he used to cry at

school when a rat was caught. Queer, isn’t it? Now here I am, sitting at

a white table-cloth, listening to the colonel’s talk, and pretending

to be interested. I’m not a bit, really. I’m wondering why that bit of

shell hit Saunders and not me. Or why I’m not lying in a muddy road as a

bit of soft squelch for staff cars to bump over. And on top of that I’m

wondering how it will feel to hang up a bowler hat again in a house

at Wimbledon, and say, ‘Cheerio, mother!’ to the mater (who will be

knitting in the same armchair--chintz-covered--by the piano) and read

the evening paper until dinner’s ready, take Ethel to a local dance, and

get back into the old rut of home life in a nice family, don’t you know?

With all my memories! With the ghosts of _this_ life crowding up! Ugly

ghosts, some of ‘em! Dirty ghosts!... It’s inconceivable that we can

ever go back to the funny old humdrum! I’m not sure that I want to.”

“You’re hipped,” I told him. “You’ll be glad to get back all right.

Wimbledon will be Paradise after what you’ve been through.”

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

talking tripe. Forget it.”

But I did not forget, and remembered every word later, when I heard his

laughter on Armistice night.

A despatch-rider stood outside the door in his muddy overalls and Brand

went to get his message. It was from Pierre Nesle.

“I am mad with joy that you have found Marthe! Alas! I cannot get back

for a week. Tell her that I am still her devoted comrade and loving

brother.--Pierre.” Brand handed me the slip and said, “Poor devil!” I

went back to my billet in Madame Chéri’s house, and she made no allusion

to our conversation in the afternoon, but was anxious, I thought, to

assure me of her friendship by special little courtesies, as when she

lighted my candle and carried it upstairs before saying good-night.

Hélène was learning English fast and furiously, and with her arm round

her mother’s waist said, “Sleep well, sir, and very good dreams to you!”

which I imagine was a sentence out of her text-book.

XV

They were great days--in the last two weeks before the Armistice! For

me, and for many men, they were days of exultation, wild adventure,

pity, immense hope, tremendous scenes uplifted by a sense of victory;

though for others, the soldiers who did the dirty work, brought up lorry

columns through the mud of the old battlefields far behind our new front

line, carried on still with the hard old drudgery of war, they were days

not marked out by any special jubilation, or variety, or hope, but

just like all the others that had gone before since first they came to

France.

I remember little scenes and pictures of those last two weeks as they

pass through my mind like a him drama; episodes of tragedy or triumph

which startled my imagination, a pageantry of men who had victory

in their eyes, single figures who spoke to me, told me unforgettable

things, and the last dead bodies who fell at the very gate of peace.

One of the last dead bodies I saw in the war was in the city of

Valenciennes, which we entered on the morning of November 3rd. Our guns

had spared the city which was full of people, but the railway station

was an elaborate ruin of twisted iron and broken glass. Rails were torn

up and sleepers burnt. Our airmen, flying low day after day during the

German retreat, had flung down bombs, which had torn the fronts off the

booking-offices and made match-wood of the signal-boxes and sheds. For

German soldiers detraining here it had been a hellish place, and the

fire of our flying-men had been deadly accurate. I walked through the

ruin out into the station square. It was empty of all life, but one

human figure was there all alone. It was the dead body of a young German

soldier, lying with outstretched arms, on his back, in a pool of blood.

His figure formed a cross there on the cobblestones, and seemed to me

a symbol of all that youth which had been sacrificed by powers of

monstrous evil. His face was still handsome in death, the square,

rough-hewn face of a young peasant.

There was the tap-tap-tap of a German machine-gun somewhere on the

right of the square. As I walked forward all my senses were alert to the

menace of death. It would be foolish, I thought, to be killed at the end

of the war--for surely the end was very near? And then I had a sudden

sharp thought that perhaps it would be well if this happened. Why should

I live when so many had died? The awful job was done, and my small part

in it. I had seen it through from start to finish, for it was finished

but for a few days of waiting. It might be better to end with it, for

all that came afterwards would be anticlimax. I remember raising my

head and looking squarely round at that staccato hammering of the German

machine-gun, with an intense desire that a bullet might come my way. But

I went on untouched into the town.... As in Courtrai, a fury of gun-fire

overhead kept the people in their houses. Our field batteries were

firing over the city and the enemy was answering. Here and there I saw

a face peering out of a broken window, and then a door opened, and a man

and woman appeared behind it with two thin children. The woman thrust

out a skinny hand and grasped mine, and began to weep. She talked

passionately, with a strange mingling of rage and grief.

“Oh, my God!” she said, “those devils have gone at last! What have they

not made us suffer! My husband and I had four little houses--we were

innkeepers--and last night they sent us to this part of the town and

burnt all of them.” She used a queer word in French. “Last night,” she

said, “they made a devil’s _charivari_ and set many houses on fire.”

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

“Sir, they have stolen everything, broken everything, ground us down for

four years. They are bandits and robbers.”

“We are hungry,” said the thin girl.

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

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

They had some coffee left, and asked me to go inside and drink it with

them, but I could not wait.

The woman held my wrist tight in her skinny hands.

“You will come back?” she asked.

“I will try,” I said.

Then she wept again and said: “We are grateful to the English soldiers.

It is they who saved us.”

That is one out of a hundred little scenes that I remember in those last

two weeks when, not without hard fighting, for the German machine-gun

rearguards fought bravely to the end, our troops entered many towns and

villages, and liberated many thousands of poor people. I remember the

girls of a little town called Bohain who put on their best frocks and

clean pinafores to welcome us. It was not until a little while that we

found they were starving and had not even a crust of bread in all

the town. Then the enemy started shelling, and some of the girls were

killed, and many were suffocated by gas shells. That was worse in St.

Amand, by Valenciennes, where all the women and children took refuge in

the cellars. The German batteries opened fire with yellow cross shell as

our guns passed through. Some of our men, and many of their horses, lay

dead in the streets as I passed through; but worse things happened in

the cellars below the houses. The heavy gas of the yellow cross shells

filtered down to where the women and their babies cowered on their

mattresses. They began to choke and gasp, and babies died in the arms of

dying mothers.... Dr. Small, our American, went with a body of English

doctors and nurses to the rescue of St. Amand. “I’ve seen bad things,”

he told me. “I am not weak in the stomach--but I saw things in those

cellars which nearly made me vomit.”

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

“It’s no good cursing the Germans. As soon as your troops entered the

village they had a right to shell. That’s war. We should do the same.

War’s war. I’ve been cursing the Germans in elaborate and eccentric

language. It did me good. I feel all the better for it. But all the same

I was wrong. It’s war we ought to curse. War which makes these things

possible among civilised peoples. It’s just devilry. Civilised people

must give up the habit. They must get cured of it. You have heard of

typhoid-carriers? They are people infected with the typhoid microbe who

spread the disease. When peace comes we must hunt down the war-carriers,

isolate them, and, if necessary, kill them.”

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

suffocated women.

I met Brand in Valenciennes five days after our liberation of the city,

when our troops were making their formal entry with band and banners.

He came up to me and said, “Have you heard the news?” I saw by his face

that it was good news, and I felt my heart give a lurch when I answered

him.

“Tell me the best.”

“Germany is sending plenipotentiaries, under a white flag, to Foch. They

know it is unconditional surrender.... And the Kaiser has abdicated.”

I drew a deep breath. Something seemed to lift from my soul. The sky

seemed to become brighter, as though a shadow had passed from the face

of the sun.

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

Brand was staring at a column of troops--all young fellows of the 4th

Division. His eyes were glistening, with moisture in them.

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

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

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

be alive.”

“Perhaps there is other work to do,” I answered him, weakly, because I

had the same thought.

He did not seem sure of that.

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

In the Place d’Armes of Valenciennes there was a great crowd, and many

of our generals and staff officers on the steps and below the steps of

the Hôtel de Ville. Brand and I caught a glimpse of Colonel Lavington,

looking very gallant and debonair, as usual. Beside him was Charles

Fortune, with his air of a staff officer dreadfully overworked in the

arrangement of victory, modest in spite of his great achievements,

deprecating any public homage that might be paid him. This careful mask

of his was slightly disarranged for a moment when he winked at me under

the very nose of the great general whom he had set to music--“Blear-eyed

Bill, the Butcher of the Boche,” who stood magnificent with his great

chest emblazoned with ribbons. The Prince of Wales was there, shifting

from one leg to another, chatting gaily with a group of staff officers.

A bevy of French girls advanced with enormous bouquets and presented

them to the Prince and his fellow officers. The Prince laughed and

blushed like a schoolboy, sniffed at the flowers, did not know what

to do with them. The other officers held the bouquets with equal

embarrassment, with that strange English shyness which not even war

could cure.

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

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

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

“The end of a dirty business!” said a young machine-gun officer. I

noticed that he had three wound-stripes.

One of them, holding a big bouquet, began to dance, pointing his toes,

cutting abbreviated capers in a small space among his comrades.

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

Hooray!”

The colours of many flags fluttered upon the gables of the Place

d’Armes, and the balconies were draped with the Tricolour, the Union

Jack, and the Stars and Stripes. Old citizens wore tall hats saved up

for this day, and girls had taken their lace from hiding-places where

the Germans had not found it, and wore it round their necks and wrists

for the honour of this day. Old women in black bonnets sat in the centre

of window-places and clapped their hands--their wrinkled, hard-working

old hands--to every British soldier who passed, and thousands were

passing. Nobody heard a word of the speeches spoken from the Town Hall

steps, the tribute of the councillors of Valenciennes to the glory of

the troops who had rescued their people from servitude under a ruthless

enemy, nor the answer of Sir Henry Home, the Army Commander, expressing

the pride of his soldiers in the rescue of that fair old city, and their

admiration for the courage of its people. Every word was overwhelmed by

cheering. Then the pipers of a Highland Division, whose fighting I had

recorded through their years of heroic endurance, played a march tune,

and the music of those pipes was loud in the square of Valenciennes and

in the hearts of its people. The troops marched past, and thousands of

bayonets shone above their steel helmets....

XVI

I was in Mons on the day of Armistice, and on the roads outside when

I heard the news that the Germans had surrendered to all our terms,

and that the “Cease fire” would sound at eleven o’clock. It was a misty

morning, with sunlight glinting through the mist and sparkling in

the coppery leaves of autumn trees. There was no heavy bombardment in

progress round Mons--only now and then the sullen bark of a gun. The

roads were crowded with the usual transport of war--endless columns of

motor-lorries and horse-wagons, and mule-teams, crawling slowly forward,

and infantry battalions trudging alongside with their heavy packs. I

stared into the faces of the marching men, expecting to see joy in their

eyes, wondering why they were not singing--because to-day the guns would

be silent and the fighting finished. Their packs weighed heavy. The mud

from passing lorries splashed them with great gobs of filth. Under their

steel hats the sweat ran down. They looked dead-beat, and marched in

a grim fine of tired men. But I noticed that the transport wagons were

decorated with small flags, and these bits of fluttering colour were

stuck into the harness of gun horses and mules. From the other way came

another tide of traffic--crowds of civilians, who were middle-aged men

and boys, and here and there women pushing hand-carts, and straining

forward with an eager, homing look. The men and boys were carrying

bundles, too heavy for many of them, so that they were bent under their

burdens. But each one had added the last straw but one to his weight by

fastening a flag to his bundle or his cap. I spoke to some of them, and

they told me that they were the civilians from Lille, Valenciennes, and

other towns, who had been taken away by the Germans for forced labour

behind the lines. Two days ago the Germans had said, “We’ve no more use

for you. Get back to your own people. The war is over.”

They looked worn and haggard, like men who had been shipwrecked. Some of

the boys were weak and sat down on the roadside with their bundles and

could go no farther. Others trudged on gamely, with crooks which

they had cut from the hedges, and only stopped to cry, “_Vivent les

Anglais!_” as our soldiers passed. I looked into many of their faces,

remembering the photograph of Edouard Chéri which had been given to

me by his mother. Perhaps he was Somewhere in those troops of homing

exiles. But he might have been any one of those lanky boys in ragged

jackets and broken boots, and cloth caps pulled down over the ears.

Just outside Mons, at one minute to eleven o’clock, there was a little

desultory firing. Then a bugle blew, somewhere in a distant field, one

long note. It was the “Cease fire”! A cheer coming faintly over the

fields followed the bugle-call. Then there was no other sound where I

stood but the scrunching of wheels of gun limbers and transport wagons,

the squelch of mud in which horses and mules trudged, and the hard

breathing of tired men marching by under their packs. So, with a curious

lack of drama, the Great Adventure ended! That bugle had blown the

“Cease fire” of a strife which had filled the world with agony and

massacre; destroyed millions of men; broken millions of lives; ruined

many great cities and thousands of hamlets, and left a long wide belt of

country across Europe where no tree remained alive and all the earth was

ravaged; crowded the world with maimed men, blind men, mad men, diseased

men; flung Empires into anarchy, where hunger killed the children and

women had no milk to feed their babies; and bequeathed to all fighting

nations a heritage of debt beneath which many would stagger and fall.

It was the “Cease fire” of all that reign of death, but sounded very

faintly across the fields of France.

In Mons Canadian soldiers were being kissed by French girls. Women were

giving them wine in the doorways, and these hard-bitten fellows, tough

as leather, reckless of all risk, plastered with mud which had worn into

their skins and souls, drank the wine and kissed the women, and lurched

laughing down the streets. There would be no strict discipline in Mons

that night. They had had enough of discipline in the dirty days. Let it

go on the night of Armistice! Already at mid-day some of these soldiers

were unable to walk except with an arm round a comrade’s neck, or round

the neck of strong peasant girls who screeched with laughter when they

side-slipped or staggered. They had been through hell, those men. They

had lain in ditches, under frightful fire, among dead men and bleeding

men. Who would grudge them their bit of fun on Armistice night? Who

would expect saintship of men who had been taught in the school of war,

taught to kill quick lest they be killed, to see the worst horrors of

the battlefield without going weak, to educate themselves out of the

refinements of peaceful life where Christian virtues are easy and not

meant for war?

“Come here, lassie. None of your French tricks for me. I’m

Canadian-born. It’s a kiss or a clout from me.”

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

On the night of Armistice in Mons, where, at the beginning of the war,

the Old Contemptibles had first withstood the shock of German arms (I

saw their ghosts there in the market place), there would be the devil

to pay--the devil of war, who plays on the passions of men, and sets his

trap for women’s souls. But I went away from Mons before nightfall, and

travelled back to Lille, in the little old car which had gone to many

strange places with me.

How quiet it was in the open countryside when darkness fell! The guns

were quiet at last, after four years and more of labour. There were

no fires in the sky, no ruddy glow of death. I listened to the silence

which followed the going down of the sun, and heard the rustling of the

russet leaves and the little sounds of night in peace, and it seemed as

though God gave a benediction to the wounded soul of the world. ‘Other

sounds rose from the towns and fields in the deepening shadow-world of

the day of Armistice. They were sounds of human joy. Men were singing

somewhere on the roads, and their voices rang out gladly. Bugles were

playing. In villages from which the enemy had gone out that morning

round about Mons crowds of figures surged in the narrow streets, and

English laughter rose above the chatter of women and children.

XVII

When I came into Lille rockets were rising above the city. English

soldiers were firing off Verey lights. Above the houses of the city in

darkness rose also gusts of cheering. It is strange that when I heard

them I felt like weeping. They sounded rather ghostly, like the voices

of all the dead who had fallen before this night of Armistice.

I went to my billet at Madame Chéri’s house, from which I had been

absent some days. I had the key of the front door now and let myself

into the hall. The diningroom door was open, and I heard the voices

of the little French family, laughing, crying, hysterical. Surely

hysterical!

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

maigre!_”

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

In the centre of the room stood a tall, gaunt boy in ragged clothes, in

the embrace of Madame Chéri, and with one hand clutched by Hélène and

the other by the little Madeleine, her sister. It was Edouard who had

come back.

He had unloosed a pack from his shoulder, and it lay on the carpet

beside him, with a little flag on a broken stick. He was haggard, with

high cheek-bones prominent through his white, tightly-drawn skin, and

his eyes were sunk in deep sockets. His hair was in a wild mop of black,

disordered locks. He stood there, with tears streaming from his eyes,

and the only words he said were:

“_Maman! O maman! maman!_”

I went quietly upstairs and changed my clothes, which were all

muddy. Presently there was a tap at my door and Hélène stood there,

transfigured with joy. She spoke in French.

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

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

“He has grown tall,” said Hélène. She mopped her eyes and laughed and

cried at the same time. “Tall as a giant, but oh! so thin! They starved

him all the time. He fed only on cabbages. They put him to work digging

trenches behind the line--under fire. The brutes! The devils!”

Her eyes were lit up by passion at the thought of this cruelty and her

brother’s suffering. Then her expression changed to a look of pride.

“He says he is glad to have been under fire--like father. He hated it,

though, at the time, and said he was frightened! I can’t believe that.

Edouard was always brave.”

“There’s no courage that takes away the fear of shellfire--as far as I’m

concerned,” I told her, but she only laughed and said, “You men make a

pose of being afraid.”

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

“If only he were not so thin and so tired! I find him changed. The poor

boy cries at the sight of _maman_--like a baby.”

“I don’t wonder,” I said. “I should feel like that if I had been a

prisoner of war and was now home again.”

Madame Chéri’s voice called from downstairs: “Hélène! _Où es-tu? Edouard

veut te voir!_”

“Edouard wants me,” said Hélène.

She seemed rejoiced at the thought that Edouard had missed her, even

for this minute. She took my hand and kissed it, as though wishing me to

share her joy and to be part of it, and then ran downstairs.

XVIII

I went out to the officers’ club which had been established in Lille,

and found Brand there, and Fortune, and young Clatworthy, who made a

place for me at their table.

Two large rooms which had been the dining and drawingrooms of a private

mansion were crowded with officers, mostly English, but with here and

there a few Americans and French, seated at small tables, waited on by

the girls we called Waacs (of the Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps). Two

old-fashioned candelabra of cut-glass gave light to each room, and I

remember that the walls were panelled with wood painted a greyish-white

below a moulding of fruit and flowers. Above the table where my friends

sat was the portrait of a French lady of the eighteenth century, in an

oval frame of tarnished gilt.

I was late for the meal on Armistice night, and many bottles of

champagne had already been opened and drunk. The atmosphere reeked with

the smell of food, the fumes of wine and cigarette smoke, and there was

the noise of many men talking and laughing. I looked about the tables

and saw familiar faces. There were a good many cavalry officers in the

room where I sat, and among them officers of the Guards and the Tank

Corps, aviators, machine-gunners, staff officers of infantry divisions,

French interpreters, American _liaison_ officers, A.P.M.’s, town

majors, and others. The lid was off at last. All these men were

intoxicated with the thought of the victory we had won--complete,

annihilating--and of this Armistice which had ended the war and made

them sure of life. Some of them were a little drunk with wine, but not

enough at this hour to spoil their sense of joy.

Officers rose at various tables to make speeches, cheered by their own

groups, who laughed and shouted and did not listen.

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

“The old Hun is down and out.”

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

Another group had burst into song:

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

“The cavalry came into its own in the last lap. We’ve fought mounted and

fought dismounted. We’ve rounded up innumerable Huns. We’ve ridden down

machine-guns----”

Another group was singing independently:

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

To the land of my dreams.”

A toast was being pledged at the next table by a Tank officer, who

stood on a chair with a glass of champagne-raised high above his head:

“Gentlemen, I give you the toast of the Tank Corps. This war was won by

the Tanks----”

“Pull him down!” shouted two lads at the same table. “Tanks be damned!

It was the poor old bloody infantry all the time.”

One of them pulled down the little Tank officer with a crash and stood

on his own chair.

“Here’s to the foot-sloggers--the infantry battalions, Tommy Atkins and

his company officer, who did all the dirty work and got none of the

reward, and did most of the dying.”

A cavalry officer with a monocle immovably screwed in his right eye

demanded the attention of the company, and failed to get it.

“We all know what we have done ourselves, and what we failed to do. I

give you the toast of our noble Allies, without whom there would be no

Armistice to-night. I drink to the glory of France----”

The words were heard at several tables, and for once there was a general

acknowledgment of the toast.

“_Vive la France!_”

The shout thundered out from all the tables, so that the candelabra

rattled. Five French interpreters in various parts of the room rose to

respond.

There were shouts of “The Stars and Stripes--Good old Yanks--Well done,

the U.S.A.!” and I was sorry Dr. Small was still at Valenciennes. I

should like him to have heard those shouts. An American staff officer

was on his feet, raising his glass to “England.”

Charles Fortune stood up at my table. He reminded me exceedingly at

that moment of old prints portraying George IV. in his youth--“the First

Gentleman of Europe”--slightly flushed, with an air of noble dignity and

a roguish eye.

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

what you like.”

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

enemy, the Germans.”

Young Clatworthy gave an hysterical guffaw.

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

“But for their simplicity of nature and amiability of character the

British Empire--that glorious conglomeration of races upon which the sun

utterly declines to set--would have fallen into decay and debility as

a second-class Power. Before the war the German Empire was gaining our

trade, capturing all the markets of the world, waiting at table in all

the best hotels, and providing all the music in the _cafés-chantants_

of the universe.... With that immense unselfishness so characteristic

of their race, the Germans threw away these advantages and sacrificed

themselves for the benefit of the British. By declaring war they enabled

all the ancient virtues of our race to be revived. Generals sprang up

in every direction--especially in Whitehall, Boulogne and Rouen. Staff

officers multiplied exceedingly. British indigestion--the curse of our

race--became subject to a Sam Brown belt. Business men, mostly bankrupt,

were enriched enormously. Clergymen thundered joyfully from their

pulpits and went back to the Old Testament for that fine old law,

‘An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth.’ Elderly virgins married the

youngest subalterns. The youngest flapper caught the eldest and wiliest

of bachelors. Our people were revivified, gentlemen--revivified-”

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

“Even I,” said Charles Fortune, with a sob of pride in his voice,

“even I, a simple piano-tuner, a man of music, a child of peace and

melody--Shut up, Brand!--became every inch a soldier!”

He drew himself up in a heroic pose and, raising his glass, cried out:

“Here’s to our late enemy--poor old Fritz!”

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

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

“And they say we haven’t a sense of humour,” said Charles Fortune

modestly, and opened a new bottle of champagne.

Brand had a sense of humour, and had laughed dining Fortune’s oration,

knowing that beneath its mockery there was no malice. But I noticed that

he had no spontaneous gaiety on this night of Armistice and sat rather

silent, with a far-away look in his eyes and that hag-ridden melancholy

of his.

Young Clatworthy was between me and Brand, drinking too heavily, I

thought. Brand thought so too, and gave him a word of caution.

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

young’un.”

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

spirit.”

There was an unnatural glitter in his eyes, and he laughed too easily

at any joke of Fortune’s. Presently he turned his attention to me, and

began talking excitedly in a low monologue.

“Funny to think it’s the last night! Can you believe it? It seems a

lifetime since I came out in ‘14. I remember the first night, when I

was sent up to Ypres to take the place of a subaltern who’d been knocked

out. It was Christmas Eve, and my battalion was up in the line round

Hooge. I detrained at Vlamertinghe. ‘Can any one tell me the way to

Hooge?’ I asked one of the traffic men, just like a country cousin at

Piccadilly Circus. He looked at me in a queer way, and said, ‘It’s the

same way to hell, sir. Straight on until you get to Ypres, then out of

the Menin Gate and along the road to Hell-fire Corner. After that you

trust to luck. Some young gentlemen never get no further.’ I damned

his impertinence and went on, till I came to the Grande Place in Ypres,

where I just missed an eight-inch shell. It knocked out a gun-team.

Shocking mess it made. ‘The same way to hell,’ I kept saying, until I

fell into a shell-hole along the Menin Road. But, d’you know, the fellow

was wrong, after all.”

“How?” I asked.

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

amused.

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

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

“What other way?”

“Behind the lines--in the back areas. I should have been all right if I

had stuck in the trenches. It was in places like Amiens that I went to

the devil.”

“Not as bad as that,” I said.

“Mind you,” he continued, lighting a cigarette and smiling at the

flame, “I’ve had pleasant times in this war, between the bad ones, and,

afterwards, in this cushy job. Extraordinarily amusing and agreeable

along the way to hell. There was little Maiguérite in Amiens--such a

kid! Funny as a kitten! She loved me not wisely, but too well. I had

just come down from the Somme battles then. That little idyll with

Marguérite was like a dream. We two were Babes in the Wood. We plucked

the flowers of life and didn’t listen to the howling of the wolves

beyond the forest.”

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

“The howling of the wolves!”

Somebody was singing “John Peel”:

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

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

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

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

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

joyous voice.

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

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

“Bravo! Bravo!”

He laughed as he sat down.

“I used to sing that when I was captain of the school,” he said. “A long

time ago, eh? How many centuries?... I was as clean a fellow as you’d

meet in those days. Keen as mustard on cricket. Some bat, too! That was

before the dirty war, and the stinking trenches, and fever, and lice,

and dead bodies, and all that. But I was telling you about Yvonne,

wasn’t I?”

“Marguérite,” I reminded him.

“No. Yvonne. I met her at Cassel. A brown-eyed thing. Demure. You know

the type?... One of the worst little sluts I ever met. Oh, a wicked

little witch... Well, I paid for that affair. That policeman was wrong.”

“What policeman?” I asked.

“The traffic man at Vlamertinghe. ‘It’s the same way to hell,’ he said,

meaning Hooge. It was the other way, really. All the same, I’ve had some

good hours. And now it’s Armistice night.... Those fellows are getting

rather blue, aren’t they? It’s the blinking cavalry who used to get in

the way of the infantry, blocking up the roads with their ridiculous

horses and their preposterous, lances. Look here, old man, there’s one

thing I want to know. Tell me, as a wise owl.”

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

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

“Clean enough?”

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

himself.

“Oh, I don’t mean the soap and water business. But morally, spiritually,

intellectually, and all that? Some of us will want a lot of scrubbing

before we sit down in our nice little Christian families, somewhere at

Wimbledon or Ealing. Somehow I funk peace. It means getting back again

to where one started, and I don’t see how it’s possible.... Good Lord,

what tripe I’ve been talking!”

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

“_Encore une bouteille de champagne, mademoiselle!_” he said in his best

French, and started singing “La Marseillaise.” Some of the officers were

dancing the fox trot and the bunny hug.

Brand rose with a smile and a sigh.

“Armistice night!” he said. “Thank God there’s a crowd of fellows left

to do the dancing.... I can’t help thinking of the others.”

He touched a glass with his lips to a silent toast, and I saw that

he drank to ghosts. Then he put the glass down and laid his hand on

Clatworthy’s shoulder.

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

“Not I, old lad,” said the boy. “This is Armistice night--and the end of

the adventure. See it through!”

Brand shook his head and said he must breathe fresh air. Fortune

was playing a Brahms concerto in the style of a German master on the

table-cloth.

I followed Brand, and we strolled through the dark streets of Lille and

did not talk. In each of our minds was the stupendous thought that

it was the last night of the war--the end of the adventure, as young

Clatworthy had said. God! It had been a frightful adventure from first

to last--a fiery furnace in which youth had been burnt up like grass.

How much heroism we had seen, how much human agony, ruin, hate, cruelty,

love! There had been comradeship and laughter in queer places and

perilous hours. Comradeship, perhaps that was the best of all: the

unselfish comradeship of men. But what a waste of life! What a lowering

of civilisation! Our heritage--what was it, after victory? Who would

heal the wounds of the world?

Brand suddenly spoke, after our long tramp in the darkness, past windows

from which came music, and singing, and shouts of laughter. He uttered

only one word, but all his soul was in it.

“Peace!”

That night we went to see Eileen O’Connor and to enquire after the girl

Marthe. Next day Pierre Nesle was coming to find his sister.

XIX

Eileen O’Connor had gone back from the convent to the rooms she had

before her trial and imprisonment. I was glad to see her in a setting

less austere than the whitewashed parlour in which she had first

received us. There was something of her character in the sitting-room

where she had lived so long during the war, and where with her girl

friends she had done more dangerous work than studying the elements of

drawing and painting. In that setting, too, she looked at home--“The

Portrait of a Lady,” by Lavery, as I saw her in my mind’s eye, when

she sat in a low armchair by the side of a charcoal stove, with the

lamplight on her face and hair and her dress shadowy. She wore a black

dress of some kind, with a tiny edge of lace about the neck and a string

of coloured beads so long that she twisted it about her fingers in her

lap. The room was small, but cosy in the light of a tall lamp on an iron

stand shaded with red silk. Like all the rooms I had seen in Lille--not

many--this was panelled, with a polished floor, bare except for one

rug. On the walls were a few etchings framed in black--London views

mostly--and some water-colour drawings of girls’ heads, charmingly done,

I thought. They were her own studies of some of her pupils and friends,

and one face especially attracted me because of its delicate and

spiritual beauty.

“That was my fellow prisoner,” said Eileen O’Connor. “Alice de

Villers-Auxicourt. She died before the trial--happily, because she had

no fear.”

I noticed one other thing in the room which was pleasant to see--an

upright piano, and upon a stool by its side a pile of old songs which I

turned over one by one as we sat talking. They were English and Irish,

mostly from the seventeenth century onwards, but among them I found

some German songs, and on each cover was written the name of Franz

von Kreuzenach. At the sight of that name I had a foolish sense of

embarrassment and dismay, as though I had discovered a skeleton in the

cupboard, and I slipped them hurriedly between other sheets.

Eileen was talking to Wickham Brand. She did not notice my confusion.

She was telling him that Marthe, Pierre’s sister, was seriously ill

with something like brain-fever. The girl had regained consciousness at

times, but was delirious, and kept crying out for her mother and Pierre

to save her from some horror that frightened her. The nuns had made

enquiries about her through civilians in Lille. Some of them had heard

of the girl under her stage name--“Marthe de Méricourt.” She had sung

in the _cabarets_ before the war. After the German occupation she had

disappeared for a time. Somebody said she had been half-starved and

was in a desperate state. What could a singing-girl do in an “occupied”

town? She reappeared in a restaurant frequented by German officers and

kept up by a woman of bad character. She sang and danced there for a

miserable wage, and part of her duty was to induce German officers

to drink champagne--the worst brand for the highest price. A horrible

degradation for a decent girl! But starvation, so Eileen said, has

fierce claws. Imagine what agony, what terror, what despair must have

gone before that surrender! To sing and dance before the enemies of your

country!

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

Eileen O’Connor was twisting the coloured beads between her fingers. She

looked up at Wickham Brand with a deep thoughtfulness in her dark eyes.

“Most men would say that. And all women beyond the war zone, safe and

shielded. But death does not come quickly from half-starvation in a

garret without fire, in clothes that are worn threadbare. It is not the

quick death of the battlefield. It is just a long-drawn misery.... Then

there is loneliness. The loneliness of a woman’s soul. Do you understand

that?”

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

lived with it.”

“Worse for a woman,” said Eileen. “That singing-girl was lonely in

Lille. Her family--with that boy Pierre--were on the other side of the

lines. She had no friends here before the Germans came.”

“You mean that afterwards----”

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

hardened.

“Some of the Germans were kind,” said Eileen. “Oh, let us tell the truth

about that! They were not all devils.”

“They were our enemies,” said Brand.

Eileen was silent for another moment, staring down at those queer beads

of hers in her lap, and before she spoke again I think her mind was

going back over many episodes and scenes during the German occupation of

Lille.

“It was a long time--four years. A tremendous time for hatred to hold

out against civility, kindness, and--human nature.... Human nature is

strong; stronger than frontiers, nations, even patriotism.”

Eileen O’Connor flung her beads back, rose from the low chair and turned

back her hair with both hands with a kind of impatience.

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

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

The girl seemed to be anxious to plunge deep into the truth of the

things she had seen.

“The Germans--here in Lille--were of all kinds. Everything there was in

the war, for them, their emotion, their pride in the first victories,

their doubts, fears, boredom, anguish, brutality, sentiment, found a

dwelling-place in this city behind the battle-front. Some of them--in

the administration--stayed here all the time, billeted in French

families. Others came back from the battlefields, horror-stricken,

trying to get a little brief happiness--forgetfulness. There were lots

of them who pitied the French people and had an immense sympathy with

them. They tried to be friends. Tried hard, by every sort of small

kindness in their billets.”

“Like Schwarz in Madame Chéri’s house,” said Brand bitterly. It seemed

to me curious that he was adopting a mental attitude of unrelenting

hatred to the Germans, when, as I knew, and as I have told, he had been

of late on the side of toleration. That was how his moods swung when as

yet he had no fixed point of view.

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

“But others were different. Beasts or not, they were human. They had

eyes to see and to smile, lips to talk and tempt. It was their human

nature which broke some of our hatred. There were young men among them,

and in Lille girls who could be angry for a time, disdainful longer,

and then friendly. I mean lonely, half-starved girls, weak, miserable

girls--and others not starved enough to lose their passion and need of

love. German boys and French girls--entangled in the net of fate.... God

pity them!”

Brand said, “I pity them, too.”

He walked over to the piano and made an abrupt request, as though to

change the subject of conversation.

“Sing something... something English!”

Eileen O’Connor sang something Irish first, and I liked her deep voice,

so low and sweet.

“There’s one that is pure as an angel

And fair as the flowers of May,

They call her the gentle maiden

Wherever she takes her way.

Her eyes have the glance of sunlight

As it brightens the blue sea-wave,

And more than the deep-sea treasure

The love of her heart I crave.

“Though parted afar from my darling,

I dream of her everywhere;

The sound of her voice is about me,

The spell of her presence there.

And whether my prayer be granted,

Or whether she pass me by,

The face of that gentle maiden

Will follow me till I die.”

Brand was standing by the piano, with the light of the tall lamp on his

face, and I saw that there was a wetness in his eyes before the song was

ended.

“It is queer to hear that in Lille,” he said. “It’s so long since I

heard a woman sing, and it’s like water to a parched soul.”

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

softly.

“To me, the face of that gentle maiden is a friend’s face. Alice de

Villers-Auxicourt, who died in prison.”

“And whether my prayer be granted,

Or whether she pass me by,

The face of that gentle maiden

Will follow me till I die.”

Brand turned over the songs, and suddenly I saw his face flush, and I

knew the reason. He had come to the German songs on which was written

the name of Franz von Kreuzenach.

He turned them over quickly, but Eileen pulled one out--it was a

Schubert song--and opened its leaves.

“That was the man who saved my life.”

She spoke without embarrassment, simply.

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

“Oh, you know?”

I told her that we had heard part of the tale from the Reverend Mother,

but not all of it. Not the motive, nor what had really happened.

“But you guessed?”

“No,” I answered sturdily.

She laughed, but in a serious way.

“It is not a hard guess, unless I am older than I feel, and uglier than

the mirror tells me. He was in love with me.”

Brand and I looked absurdly embarrassed. Of course we _had_ guessed, but

this open confession was startling, and there was something repulsive in

the idea to both of us who had come through the war-zone into Lille, and

had seen the hatred of the people for the German race, and the fate of

Pierre Nesle’s sister.

Eileen O’Connor told us that part of her story which the Reverend Mother

had left out. It explained the “miracle” that had saved this girl’s

life, though, as the Reverend Mother said, perhaps the grace of God was

in it as well. Who knows?

Franz von Kreuzenach was one of the intelligence officers whose

headquarters were in that courtyard. After service in the trenches with

an infantry battalion he had been stationed since 1915 at Lille until

almost the end. He had a lieutenant’s rank, but was Baron in private

life, belonging to an old family in Bonn. Not a Prussian, therefore, but

a Rhinelander, and without the Prussian arrogance of manner. Just before

the war he had been at Oxford--Brasenose College--and spoke English

perfectly, and loved England with a strange, deep, unconcealed

sentiment.

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

“Why not?” asked Eileen. “I’m Irish, but I love England, in spite of all

her faults and all my grievances! Who can help loving England that has

lived with her people?”

This Lieutenant von Kreuzenach was two months in Lille before he spoke

a word with Eileen. She passed him often in the courtyard and always

he saluted her with great deference. She fancied she noticed a kind of

wistfulness in his eyes, as though he would have liked to talk to her.

He had blue eyes, sad sometimes, she noticed, and a clean-cut face,

rather delicate and pale.

One day she dropped a pile of books in the yard all of a heap as he was

passing, and he said, “Allow me,” and helped to pick them up. One of the

books was “Puck of Pook’s Hill,” by Kipling, and he smiled as he turned

over a page or two.

“I love that book,” he said in perfect English. “There’s so much of the

spirit of old England in it. History, too. That’s fine about the Roman

wall, where the officers go pig-sticking.”

Eileen O’Connor asked him if he were half English--perhaps he had

an English mother?--but he shook his head and said he was wholly

German--_echt Deutsch_.

He hesitated for a moment as though he wanted to continue the

conversation, but then saluted and passed on.

It was a week or so later when they met again, and it was Eileen

O’Connor who said “Good-morning” and made a remark about the weather.

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

“It’s jolly to hear you say ‘Good-morning’ in English. Takes me straight

back to Oxford before this atrocious war. Besides----”

Here he stopped and blushed.

“Besides what?” asked Eileen.

“Besides, it’s a long time since I talked to a lady. Among officers one

hears nothing but war-talk--the last battle, the next battle, technical

jargon, ‘shop,’ as the English say. It would be nice to talk about

something else--art, music, poetry, ideas.”

She chaffed him a little, irresistibly.

“Oh, but you Germans have the monopoly of all that! Art, music, poetry,

they are all absorbed into your _Kultur_--properly Germanised. As for

ideas--what is not in German philosophy is not an idea.”

He looked profoundly hurt, said Eileen, “Some Germans are very narrow,

very stupid, like some English perhaps. Not all of us believe that

German _Kultur_ is the only knowledge in the world.”

“Anyhow,” said Eileen O’Connor, “I’m Irish, so we needn’t argue about

the difference between German and English philosophy.” He spoke as if

quoting from a text-book.

“The Irish are a very romantic race.”

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

“Don’t you believe it,” she said. “We’re a hard, logical, relentless

people, like all peasant folk of Celtic stock. It’s the English who are

romantic and sentimental, like the Germans.”

He was amazed at those words (so Eileen told us) and then laughed

heartily in his very boyish way.

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

at Oxford.”

So they took to talking for a few minutes in the courtyard when they

met, and Eileen noticed that they met more often than before. She

suspected him of arranging that, and it amused her. By that time she had

a staunch friend in the old Kommandant who believed her to be an enemy

of England and an Irish patriot. She was already playing the dangerous

game under his very nose, or at least within fifty yards of the

blotting-pad over which his nose used to be for many hours of the day in

his office.

It was utterly necessary to keep him free from any suspicion. His

confidence was her greatest safeguard. It was therefore unwise to refuse

him (an honest, stupid old gentleman) when he asked whether now and

again he might bring one of his officers and enjoy an hour’s music

in her rooms after dinner. He had heard her singing, and it had gone

straight to his heart. There was one of his officers, Lieutenant Baron

Franz von Kreuzenach, who had a charming voice. They might have a little

musical recreation which would be most pleasant and refreshing.

“Bring your Baron,” said Eileen. “I shall not scandalise my neighbours

when the courtyard is closed.”

Her girl-friends were scandalised when they heard of these musical

evenings--two or three times a month--until she convinced them that

it was a service to France, and a life insurance for herself and them.

There were times when she had scruples. She was tricking both those

men who sat in her room for an hour or two now and then, so polite, so

stiffly courteous, so moved with sentiment when she sang old Irish songs

and Franz von Kreuzenach sang his German songs. She was a spy, in plain

and terrible language, and they were utterly duped. On more than one

night while they were there an escaped prisoner was in the cellar below,

with a German uniform and cypher message, and all directions for escape

across the lines. Though they seldom talked about the war, yet now and

again by casual remarks they revealed the intentions of the German army

and its _moral_, or lack of _moral_. With the old Kommandant she did not

feel so conscience-stricken. To her he was gentle and charming, but to

others a bully, and there was in his character the ruthlessness of

the Prussian officer on all matters of “duty,” and he hated England

ferociously.

With Franz von Kreuzenach it was different. He was a humanitarian, and

sensitive to all cruelty in life. He hated, not the English, but the war

with real anguish, as she could see by many words he let fall from time

to time.

He was, she said, a poet, and could see across the frontiers of hatred

to all suffering humanity, and so revolted against the endless, futile

massacre and the spiritual degradation of civilised peoples. It was

only in a veiled way he could say these things in the presence of his

superior officer, but she understood. She understood another thing as

time went on--nearly eighteen months all told. She saw quite clearly,

as all women must see in such a case, that this young German was in love

with her.

“He did not speak any word in that way,” said Eileen when she told us

this, frankly, in her straight manner of speech, “but in his eyes, in

the touch of his hand, in the tones of his voice, I knew that he loved

me, and I was very sorry.”

“It was a bit awkward,” said Brand, speaking with a strained attempt at

being casual. I could see that he was very much moved by that part of

the story, and that there was a conflict in his mind.

“It made me uneasy and embarrassed,” said Eileen. “I don’t like to be

the cause of any man’s suffering, and he was certainly suffering because

of me. It was a tragic thing for both of us when I was found out at

last.”

“What happened?” asked Brand.

The thing that happened was simple--and horrible. When Eileen and her

companions were denounced by the sentry at the Citadel the case was

reported to the Kommandant of the Intelligence Office, who was in charge

of all anti-espionage business in Lille. He was enormously disturbed by

the suspicion directed against Eileen. It seemed to him incredible, at

first, that he could have been duped by her. After that, his anger was

so violent that he became incapable of any personal action. He ordered

Franz von Kreuzenach to arrest Eileen and search her rooms. “If she

resist, shoot her at once,” he thundered out.

It was at seven o’clock in the evening when Baron Franz von Kreuzenach

appeared at Eileen’s door with two soldiers. He was extremely pale and

agitated.

Eileen rose from her little table, where she was having an evening meal

of. soup and bread. She knew the moment had come which in imagination

she had seen a thousand times.

“Come in, Baron!”

She spoke with an attempt at cheerfulness, but had to hold to the back

of her chair to save herself from falling, and she felt her face become

white.

He stood for a moment in the room, silently, with the two soldiers

behind him, and when he spoke, it was in a low voice, in English. “It is

my painful duty to arrest you, Miss O’Connor.”

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

feeble mimicry.

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

Franz von Kreuzenach looked at her in a pitiful way.

“A terrible charge: Espionage and conspiracy against German martial

law... I would rather have died than do this--duty.”

Eileen told us that he spoke that word “duty” as only a German could--as

that law which for a German officer is above all human things, all

kindly relationships, all escape. She pitied him then more, she said,

than she was afraid for herself, and told him that she was sorry the

duty had fallen to him. He made only one other remark before he took her

away from her rooms.

“I pray God the evidence will be insufficient.”

There was a military car waiting outside the courtyard, and he opened

the door for her to get in and sat opposite to her. The two soldiers

sat together next to the driver, squeezed close--they were both stout

men--with their rifles between their knees. It was dark in the streets

of Lille and in the car. Eileen could only see the officer’s face

vaguely and white. He spoke again as they were driven quickly.

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

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

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

“That is well,” said Franz von Kreuzenach.

He told her that the Baronne de Villers-Auxicourt and Marcelle Barbier

had been arrested also, and that news was like a death-blow to the girl.

It showed that their conspiracy had been revealed, and she was stricken

at the thought of the fate awaiting her friends, those young delicate

girls, who had been so brave in taking risks.

Towards the end of the journey, which was not far, Franz von Kreuzenach

began speaking in a low, emotional voice.

Whatever happened, he said, he prayed that she might think of him with

friendship, not blaming him for that arrest, which was in obedience to

orders. He would ever be grateful to her for her kindness, and the songs

she had sung. They had been happy evenings to him when he could see

her and listen to her voice. He looked forward to them in a hungry way,

because of his loneliness.

“He said--other things,” added Eileen, and she did not tell us, though

dimly we guessed at the words of that German officer who loved her. At

the gate of the prison he delivered her to a group of military police,

and then saluted as he swung round on his heel.

The next time she saw him was at her trial. Once only their eyes

met, and he became deadly pale and bent his head. During her

cross-examination of him he did not look at her, and his embarrassment,

his agony--she could see that he was suffering--made an unfavourable

impression on the court, who thought he was not sure of his evidence and

was making blundering answers when she challenged him. She held him up

to ridicule, but all the time was sorry for him, and grateful to him,

because she knew how much evidence against her he had concealed.

“He behaved strangely about that evidence,” said Eileen. “What puzzles

me still is why he produced so much and yet kept back the rest. You see,

he put in the papers he had found in the secret passage, and they were

enough to have me shot, yet he hushed up the fact about the passage,

which, of course, was utterly damning. It looked as though he wanted to

give me a sporting chance. But that was not his character, because he

was a simple young man. He could have destroyed the papers as easily

as he kept back the fact about the underground passage, but he produced

them, and I escaped only by the skin of my teeth. Read me that riddle,

Wickham Brand!”

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

and--sentiment.”

“Love,” said Eileen in her candid way.

“Love, if you like... It was a conflict. Probably his sense of duty (I

know these German officers!) was strong enough to make him hand up

the papers to his superior officers. He couldn’t bring himself to burn

them--the fool! Then the other emotion in him----”

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

“That damned love of his,” said Brand, “tugged at him intolerably,

and jabbed at his conscience. So he hid the news about the passage and

thought what a fine fellow he was. Mr. Facing-Both-Ways. Duty and love,

both sacrificed!... He’d have looked pretty sick if you’d been shot, and

it wasn’t to his credit that you weren’t.”

Eileen O’Connor was amused with Brand’s refusal to credit Franz von

Kreuzenach with any kindness.

“Admit,” she said, “that his suppression of evidence gave me my chance.

If all were told, I was lost.”

Brand admitted that.

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

Brand admitted it grudgingly.

“A German gentleman.”

Then he realised his meanness, and made amends.

“That’s unfair! He behaved like a good fellow. Probably took big risks.

Every one who knows what happened must be grateful to him. If I meet him

I’ll thank him.”

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

which made him hesitate.

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

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

Eileen pooh-poohed those rules, and said Franz von Kreuzenach had broken

his for her sake.

“I’ll take it,” said Brand.

That night when we left Eileen O’Connor’s rooms the Armistice was still

being celebrated by British soldiers. Verey lights were rising above

the houses, fired off by young officers as symbols of their own soaring

spirits. Shadows lurched against us in the dark streets as officers and

men went singing to their billets. Some girls of Lille had linked arms

with British Tommies and were dancing in the darkness with screams of

mirth. In one of the doorways a soldier with his steel hat at the back

of his head and his rifle lying at his feet kept shouting one word in a

drunken way: “Peace!... Peace!”

Brand had his arm through mine, and when we came to his headquarters he

would not let me go.

“Armistice night!” he said. “Don’t let’s sleep just yet. Let’s hug the

thought over a glass of whisky. The war is over!... No more blood!... No

more of its tragedy!”

Yet we had got no farther than the hall before we knew that tragedy had

not ended with the Armistice.

Colonel Lavington met us and spoke to Brand.

“A bad thing has happened. Young Clatworthy has shot himself... upstairs

in his room.”

“No!”

Brand started back as if he had been hit. He had been fond of

Clatworthy, as he was of all boys, and they had been together for many

months. It was to Brand that Clatworthy wrote his last strange note, and

the colonel gave it to him then in the hall.

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

copy out:--

“_Dear old Brand,--It’s the end of the adventure. Somehow I funk Peace.

I don’t see how I can go back to Wimbledon as if nothing had happened

to me. None of us are the same as when we left, and I’m quite different.

I’m going over to the pals on the other side. They will understand.

Cheerio!_

“_Cyril Clatworthy_.”

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

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

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

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

time.

A few days later we began to move on towards the Rhine by slow stages,

giving the German Army time to get back. In Brand’s pocket-book was the

letter to Franz von Kreuzenach from Eileen O’Connor.

END OF BOOK I.