I had the luck to be billeted in Lille at the house of Madame Chéri, in
the rue Esquermoise.
This lady was the mother of the girl with the pig-tail and the two
children with whom Wickham Brand had made friends on this morning of
liberation--the wife of that military officer whom Pierre Nesle had
known at Verdun and knew to be killed. It was my luck, because there
were children in the house--the pig-tailed girl, Hélène, was more a
woman than a child, though only sixteen--and I craved for a touch
of home-life and children’s company, after so long an exile in the
war-zone always among men who talked of war, thought of it, dreamed of
it, year in, year out.
Madame Chéri was, I thought when I saw her first, a beautiful woman,
not physically--because she was too white and worn--but spiritually,
in courage of soul. Pierre Nesle, our liaison officer, told me how she
had received the news of her husband’s death--unflinchingly, without
a cry. She knew, she said, in her heart, that he was dead. Some queer
message had reached her one night during the Verdun battles. It was
no ghost, or voice, but only a sudden cold conviction that her man
had been killed. For the children’s sake she had pretended that their
father might come back. It gave them something to look forward to. The
little ones were always harping on the hope that when peace came this
mysterious and glorious man whom they remembered only vaguely as one
who had played bears with them, and had been the provider of all good
things, would return with rich presents from Paris--tin soldiers,
Queen-dolls, mechanical toys. Hélène, the elder girl, was different.
She had looked curiously at her mother when the children prattled
like that, and Madame Chéri had pretended to believe in the father’s
home-coming. Once or twice the girl had said, “Papa may be killed,” in
a matter-of-fact way. Yet she had been his devoted comrade. They had
been such lovers, the father and daughter, that sometimes the mother
had been a little jealous, so she said in her frank way to Pierre
Nesle, smiling as she spoke. The war had made Hélène a realist, like
most French girls to whom the idea of death became commonplace, almost
inevitable, as the ceaseless slaughter of men went on. The German
losses had taught them that.
I had the Colonel’s dressing-room--he had attained the grade of Colonel
before Verdun, so Pierre told me--and Madame Chéri came in while I
was there to see that it was properly arranged for me. Over his iron
bedstead (the Germans had taken the woollen mattress, so that it had
been replaced by bags of straw) was his portrait as a lieutenant
of artillery, as he had been at the time of his marriage. He was a
handsome fellow, rather like Hélène, with her delicate profile and
brown eyes, though more like, said Madame Chéri, their eldest boy
Edouard.
“Where is he?” I asked, and that was the only time I saw Madame Chéri
break down, utterly.
She began to tell me that Edouard had been taken away by the Germans
among all the able-bodied men and boys who were sent away from Lille
for digging trenches behind the lines, in Easter of ’16, and that he
had gone bravely, with his little pack of clothes over his shoulder,
saying, “It is nothing, maman. My Father taught me the word _courage_.
In a little while we shall win, and I shall be back. Courage, courage!”
Madame Chéri repeated her son’s words proudly, so that I seemed to see
the boy with that pack on his shoulder, and a smile on his face. Then
suddenly she wept bitterly, wildly, her body shaken with a kind of
ague, while she sat on the iron bedstead with her face in her hands.