I
It is hard to recapture the spirit of that day we entered Lille.
Other things, since, have blurred its fine images. At the time, I
tried to put down in words the picture of that scene when, after four
years’ slaughter of men, the city, which had seemed a world away, was
open to us a few miles beyond the trenchlines, the riven trees, the
shell-holes, and the stench of death, and we walked across the canal,
over a broken bridge, into that large town where--how wonderful it
seemed!--there were roofs on the houses, and glass in the windows and
crowds of civilian people waiting for the first glimpse of British
khaki.
Even now remembrance brings back to me figures that I saw only for
a moment or two but remain sharply etched in my mind, and people I
met in the streets who told me the story of four years in less than
four minutes and enough to let me know their bitterness, hatred,
humiliations, terrors, in the time of the German occupation.... I have
re-read the words I wrote, hastily, on a truculent typewriter which I
cursed for its twisted ribbon, while the vision of the day was in my
eyes. They are true to the facts and to what we felt about them. Other
men felt that sense of exaltation, a kind of mystical union with the
spirit of many people who had been delivered from evil powers. It is of
those other men that I am now writing, and especially of one who was my
friend--Wickham Brand, with the troubled soul, whom I knew in the years
of war and afterwards in the peace which was no peace to him.
His was one of the faces I remember that day, as I had a glimpse of it
now and then, among crowds of men and women, young girls and children,
who surged about him, kissing his hands, and his face when he stooped a
little (he was taller than most of them) to meet the wet lips of some
half-starved baby held up by a pallid woman of Lille, or to receive
the kiss of some old woman who clawed his khaki tunic, or of some girl
who hung on to his belt. There was a shining wetness in his eyes, and
the hard lines of his face had softened as he laughed at all this
turmoil about him, at all these hands robbing him of shoulder-straps
and badges, and at all these people telling him a hundred things
together--their gratitude to the English, their hatred of the Germans,
their abominable memories. His field-cap was pushed back from his high
furrowed forehead from which at the temples the hair had worn thin,
owing to worry or a steelhat. His long lean face deeply tanned, but
powdered with white dust, had an expression of tenderness which gave
him a kind of priestly look, though others would have said “knightly”
with perhaps equal truth. Anyhow I could see that for a little while
Brand was no longer worrying about the casualty-lists and the doom of
youth and was giving himself up to an exultation that was visible and
spiritual in Lille in the day of liberation.
The few of us who went first into Lille while our troops were in a wide
arc round the city, in touch more or less with the German rearguards,
were quickly separated in the swirl of the crowd that surged about
us, greeting us as conquering heroes, though none of us were actual
fighting-men, being war-correspondents, Intelligence officers (Wickham
Brand and three other officers were there to establish an advanced
headquarters), with an American doctor--that amazing fellow “Daddy”
Small--and our French liaison officer, Pierre Nesle. Now and again we
met in the streets and exchanged words.
I remember the Doctor and I drifted together at the end of the
Boulevard de la Liberté. A French girl of the middle-class had tucked
her hand through his right arm and was talking to him excitedly,
volubly. On his other arm leaned an old dame in a black dress and
bonnet who was also delivering her soul of its pent-up emotion to a man
who did not understand more than a few words of her French. A small boy
dressed as a Zouave was walking backwards, waving a long tricolour flag
before the little American, and a crowd of people made a close circle
about him, keeping pace.
“Assassins, bandits, robbers!” gobbled the old woman. “They stole all
our copper, monsieur. The very mattresses off our beds. The wine out of
our cellars. They did abominations.”
“Month after month we waited,” said the girl with her hand through
the Doctor’s right arm. “All that time the noise of the guns was loud
in our ears. It never ceased, monsieur, until to-day. And we used to
say, ‘To-morrow the English will come!’ until at last some of us lost
heart--not I, no, always I believed in victory!--and said, ‘The English
will never come.’ Now you are here, and our hearts are full of joy. It
is like a dream. The Germans have gone!”
The Doctor patted the girl’s hand, and addressed me across the
tricolour waved by the small Zouave.
“This is the greatest day of my life! And I am perfectly ashamed
of myself. In spite of my beard and my gig-lamps and my anarchical
appearance, these dear people take me for an English officer and a
fighting hero! And I feel like one. If I saw a German now I truly
believe I should cut his throat. Me--a noncombatant and a man of peace!
I’m horrified at my own bloodthirstiness. The worst of it is I’m
enjoying it. I’m a primitive man for a time, and find it stimulating.
To-morrow I shall repent. These people have suffered hell’s torments.
I can’t understand a word the little old lady is telling me, but I’m
sure she’s been through infernal things. And this pretty girl. She’s a
peach, though slightly tuberculous, poor child. My God--how they hate!
There is a stored-up hatred in this town enough to burn up Germany by
mental telepathy. It’s frightening. Hatred and joy, I feel these two
passions like a flame about us. It’s spiritual. It’s transcendental.
It’s the first time I’ve seen a hundred thousand people drunk with joy
and hate. I’m against hate, and yet the sufferings of these people make
me see red so that I want to cut a German throat!”
“You’d stitch it up afterwards, Doctor,” I said.
He blinked at me through his spectacles, and said:
“I hope so. I hope my instinct would be as right as that. The world
will never get forward till we have killed hatred. That’s my religion.”
“Bandits! assassins!” grumbled the old lady. “Dirty people!”
“_Vivent les Anglais!_” shouted the crowd, surging about the little man
with the beard.
The American doctor spoke in English in a large explanatory way.
“I’m American. Don’t you go making any mistake. I’m an Uncle Sam. The
Yankee boys are further south and fighting like hell, poor lads. I
don’t deserve any of this ovation, my dears.”
Then in French, with a strong American accent, he shouted:
“_Vive la France!_ ’Rah!’Rah!’Rah!”
“_Merci, merci, mon Général!_” said an old woman, making a grab at the
little doctor’s Sam Brown belt and kissing him on the beard. The crowd
closed round him and bore him away....
I met another of our crowd when I went to a priest’s house in a
turning off the Rue Royale. Pierre Nesle, our liaison officer--a nice
simple fellow who had always been very civil to me--was talking to
the priest outside his door, and introduced me in a formal way to a
tall patrician-looking old man in a long black gown. It was the Abbé
Bourdin, well known in Lille as a good priest and a patriot.
“Come indoors, gentlemen,” said the old man. “I will tell you what
happened to us, though it would take four years to tell you all.”
Sitting there in the priest’s room, barely furnished, with a few oak
chairs and a writing-desk littered with papers, and a table covered
with a tattered cloth of red plush, we listened to a tragic tale, told
finely and with emotion by the old man into whose soul it had burned.
It was the history of a great population caught by the tide of war
before many could escape, and placed under the military law of an
enemy who tried to break his spirit. They failed to break it, in spite
of an iron discipline which denied them all liberty. For any trivial
offence by individuals against German rule the whole population was
fined or shut up in their houses at three in the afternoon. There were
endless fines, unceasing and intolerable robberies under the name of
“perquisitions.” That had not broken the people’s spirit. There were
worse things to bear--the removal of machinery from the factories, the
taking away of the young men and boys for forced labour, and, then,
the greater infamy of that night when machine-guns were placed at the
street corners and German officers ordered each household to assemble
at the front door and chose the healthy-looking girls by the pointing
of a stick and the word, “You!--you!--” for slave-labour--it was
that--in unknown fields far away.
The priest’s face blanched at the remembrance of that scene. His voice
quavered when he spoke of the girls’ screams--one of them had gone
raving mad--and of the wailing that rose among their stricken families.
For a while he was silent, with lowered head and brooding eyes which
stared at a rent in the threadbare carpet, and I noticed the trembling
of a pulse on his right temple above the deeply-graven wrinkles of his
parchment skin. Then he raised his head and spoke harshly.
“Not even that could break the spirit of my people. They only said,
‘We will never forget, and never forgive!’ They were hungry--we did
not get much food--but they said, ‘Our sons who are fighting for us
are suffering worse things. It is for us to be patient.’ They were
surrounded by German spies--the secret police--who listened to their
words and haled them off to prison upon any pretext. There is hardly
a man among us who has not been in prison. The women were made to do
filthy work for German soldiers, to wash their lousy clothes, to scrub
their dirty barracks, and they were insulted, humiliated, tempted, by
brutal men.”
“Was there much of that brutality?” I asked.
The priest’s eyes grew sombre.
“Many women suffered abominable things. I thank God that so many kept
their pride, and their honour. There were, no doubt, some bad men and
women in the city--disloyal, venal, weak, sinful--may God have mercy
on their souls--but I am proud of being a Frenchman when I think of how
great was the courage, how patient was the suffering of the people of
Lille.”
Pierre Nesle had listened to that monologue with a visible and painful
emotion. He became pale and flushed by turns, and when the priest
spoke about the forcible recruitment of the women a sweat broke out
on his forehead, and he wiped it away with a handkerchief. I see his
face now in profile, sharply outlined against some yellowing folios
in a bookcase behind him, a typical Parisian face in its sharpness of
outline and pallid skin, with a little black moustache above a thin,
sensitive mouth. Before I had seen him mostly in gay moods--though I
had wondered sometimes at the sudden silences into which he fell and at
a gloom which gave him a melancholy look when he was not talking, or
singing, or reciting poetry, or railing against French politicians, or
laughing, almost hysterically, at the satires of Charles Fortune--our
“funny man”--when he came to our mess. Now he was suffering as if the
priest’s words had probed a wound--though not the physical wound which
had nearly killed him in Souchez Wood.
He stood up from the wooden chair with its widely-curved arms in which
he had been sitting stiffly, and spoke to the priest.
“It is not amusing, _mon père_, what you tell us, and what we have all
guessed. It is one more chapter of tragedy in the history of our poor
France. Pray God the war will soon be over.”
“With victory!” said the old priest. “With an enemy beaten and bleeding
beneath our feet. The Germans must be punished for all their crimes, or
the justice of God will not be satisfied.”
There was a thrill of passion in the old man’s voice and his nostrils
quivered.
“To all Frenchmen that goes without saying,” said Pierre Nesle. “The
Germans must be punished, and will be, though no vengeance will repay
us for the suffering of our _poilus_--nor for the agony of our women
behind the lines, which perhaps was the greatest of all.”
The Abbé Bourdin put his claw-like old hands on the young man’s
shoulders and drew him closer and kissed his Croix de Guerre.
“You have helped to give victory,” he said. “How many Germans have you
killed? How many, eh?”
He spoke eagerly, chuckling, with a kind of childish eagerness for good
news.
Pierre Nesle drew back a little and a faint touch of colour crept into
his face, and then left it whiter.
“I did not count corpses,” he said. He touched his left side and
laughed awkwardly. “I remember better that they nearly made a corpse of
me.”
There was a moment’s silence, and then my friend spoke in a casual kind
of way.
“I suppose, _mon père_, you have not heard of my sister being in Lille?
By any chance? Her name was Marthe. Marthe Nesle.”
The Abbé Bourdin shook his head.
“I do not know the name. There are many young women in Lille. It is a
great city.”
“That is true,” said Pierre Nesle. “There are many.” He bowed over the
priest’s hand, and then saluted.
“_Bon jour, mon père, et merci mille fois._”
So we left, and the Abbé Bourdin spoke his last words to me:
“We owe our liberation to the English. We thank you. But why did you
not come sooner? Two years sooner, three years. With your great army?”
“Many of our men died to get here,” I said. “Thousands.”
“That is true. That is true. You failed many times, I know. But you
were so close. One big push--eh? One mighty effort? No?”
The priest spoke a thought which I had heard expressed in the crowds.
They were grateful for our coming, immensely glad, but could not
understand why we had tried their patience so many years. That had been
their greatest misery, waiting, waiting.