“Courage, courage, madame!”
Proudly she wailed out in broken sentences:
“He was such a child!... He caught cold so easily!... He was so
delicate!... He needed mother-love so much!... For two years no word
has come from him!”
In a little while she controlled herself and begged me to excuse her.
We went down together to the dining-room, where the children were
playing, and Hélène was reading; and she insisted upon my drinking a
glass of wine from the store which she had kept hidden from the Germans
in a pit which Edouard had dug in the garden, in the first days of the
occupation. The children were delighted with that trick and roared with
laughter.
Hélène, with a curl of her lip, spoke bitterly.
“The Boche is a stupid animal. One can dupe him easily.”
“Not always easily,” said Madame Chéri. She opened a secret cupboard
behind a bookcase standing against the panelled wall.
“I hid all my brass and copper here. A German police officer came and
said, ‘Have you hidden any copper, madame?’ I said, ‘There is nothing
hidden.’ ‘Do you swear it?’ he asked. ‘I swear it,’ I answered very
haughtily. He went straight to the bookcase, pushed it on one side,
tapped the wall, and opened the secret cupboard, which was stuffed
full of brass and copper. ‘You are a liar, madame,’ he said, ‘like
all Frenchwomen.’ ‘And you are an insolent pig, like all Germans,’ I
remarked. That cost me a fine of ten thousand francs.”
Madame Chéri saw nothing wrong in swearing falsely to a German. I think
she held that nothing was wrong to deceive or to destroy any individual
of the German race, and I could understand her point of view when
Pierre Nesle told me of one thing that had happened which she never
told to me. It was about Hélène.
A German captain was billeted in the house. They ignored his presence,
though he tried to ingratiate himself. Hélène hated him with a cold
and deadly hatred. She trembled if he passed her on the stairs. His
presence in the house, even if she did not see him, but only heard him
move in his room, made her feel ill. Yet he was very polite to her and
said, “_Guten Tag, gnädiges Fräulein_” whenever they met. To Edouard
also he was courteous and smiling, though Edouard was sullen. He was a
stout little man with a round rosy face and little bright eyes behind
big black-rimmed glasses, an officer in the Kommandantur, and formerly
a schoolmaster. Madame Chéri was polite to him but cold, cold as ice.
After some months she found him harmless, though objectionable because
German. It did not seem dangerous to leave him in the house one evening
when she went to visit a dying friend--Madame Vailly. She was later
than she meant to be--so late that she was liable to arrest by the
military police if they saw her slip past in the darkness of the unlit
streets. When she came home she slipped the latch-key into the door and
went quietly into the hall. The children would be in bed and asleep. At
the foot of the stairs a noise startled her. It was a curious creaking,
shaking noise as of a door being pushed by some heavy weight, then
banged by it. It was the door at the top of the stairs, on the left.
Hélène’s room.
“_Qu’est-ce que tu fais là?_” said Madame Chéri.
She was very frightened with some unknown fear, and held tight to the
bannister, as she went upstairs. There was a glimmer of light on the
landing. It was from a candle which had almost burnt out, and was
guttering in a candlestick placed on the topmost stair. A grotesque
figure was revealed by the light--Schwarz, the German officer, in his
pyjamas, with a helmet on his head and unlaced boots on his feet. The
loose fat of the man no longer girded by a belt made him look like a
mass of jelly, as he had his shoulder to the door, shoving and grunting
as he tried to force it open. He was swearing to himself in German,
and now and then called out softly in French, in a kind of drunken
German-French:
“_Ouvrez, kleines Mädchen, ma jolie Schatz. Ouvrez donc._”
Madame Chéri was paralysed for a moment by a shock of horror; quite
speechless and motionless. Then suddenly she moved forward and spoke in
a fierce whisper.
“What are you doing, beast?”
Schwarz gave a queer snort of alarm.
He stood swaying a little, with the helmet on the back of his head. The
candlelight gleamed on its golden eagle. His face was hotly flushed,
and there was a ferocious look in his eyes. Madame Chéri saw that he
was drunk.
He spoke to her in horrible French, so Pierre Nesle told me, imitating
it savagely, as Madame Chéri had done to him. The man was filthily
drunk and declared that he loved Hélène and would kill her if she did
not let him love her. Why did she lock her door like that? He had been
kind to her. He had smiled at her. A German officer was a human being,
not a monster. Why did they treat him as a monster, draw themselves
away when he passed, become silent when he wished to speak with them,
stare at him with hate in their eyes? The French people were all
devils, proud as devils.
Another figure stood on the landing. It was Edouard--a tall, slim
figure with a white face and burning eyes, in which there was a look of
fury.
“What is happening, _maman_?” he said coldly. “What does this animal
want?”
Madame Chéri trembled with a new fear. If the boy were to kill that
man, he would be shot. She had a vision of him standing against a
wall....
“It is nothing,” she said. “This gentleman is ill. Go back to bed,
Edouard. I command you.”
The German laughed, stupidly.
“To bed, _shafskopf_. I am going to open your sister’s door. She loves
me. She calls to me. I hear her whisper, ‘_Ich liebe dich!_’”
Edouard had a stick in his hand. It was a heavy walking-stick which
had belonged to his father. Without a word he sprang forward, raised
his weapon, and smashed it down on the German’s head. It knocked off
Schwarz’s helmet, which rolled from the top to the bottom of the
staircase, and hit the man a glancing blow on the temple. He fell like
a log. Edouard smiled and said, “_Très bien_.” Then he rattled the lock
of his sister’s door and called out to her:
“Hélène.... Have no fear. He is dead. I have killed him.”
It was then that Madame Chéri had her greatest fear. There was no sound
from Hélène. She did not answer any of their cries. She did not open
the door to them. They tried to force the lock, as Schwarz had done,
but though the lock gave at last the door would not open, kept closed
by some barricade behind it. Edouard and his mother went out into the
yard and the boy climbed up to his sister’s window and broke the glass
to go through. Hélène was lying in her nightdress on the bedroom
floor, unconscious. She had moved a heavy wardrobe in front of the
door, by some supernatural strength which came from fear. Then she had
fainted. To his deep regret Edouard had not killed the German.
Schwarz had crawled back to his bedroom when they went back into the
house, and next morning wept to Madame Chéri, and implored forgiveness.
There had been a little banquet, he said, and he had drunk too much.
Madame Chéri did not forgive. She called at the Kommandantur where the
General saw her, and listened to her gravely. He did not waste words.
“The matter will be attended to,” he said.
Captain Schwarz departed that day from the house in the rue
Esquermoise. He was sent to a battalion in the line and was killed
somewhere near Ypres.
V
Wickham Brand paid his promised visit to the Chéri family, according to
his pledge to Hélène, whom he had met in the street the previous day,
and he had to drink some of the hidden wine, as I had done, and heard
the story of its concealment and of Madame’s oath about the secret
hoard of copper. I think he was more disconcerted than I had been by
that avowal and told me afterwards that he believed no Englishwoman
would have sworn to so deliberate a lie.
“That’s because the English are not so logical,” I said and he puzzled
over that.
He was greatly taken with Hélène, as she with him, but he risked their
friendship in an awkward moment when he expressed the hope that the
German offer of peace (the one before the final surrender) would be
accepted.
It was Madame Chéri who took him up on that, sharply, and with a kind
of surprised anguish in her voice. She hoped, she said, that no peace
would be made with Germany until French and British and American
troops had smashed the German armies, crossed the German frontier, and
destroyed many German towns and villages. She would not be satisfied
with any peace that came before a full vengeance, so that German women
would taste the bitterness of war as Frenchwomen had drunk deep of it,
and until Germany was heaped with ruins as France had been.
Wickham Brand was sitting with the small boy on his knees, and stroked
his hair before answering.
“_Dites, donc!_” said Hélène, who was sitting on the hearthrug looking
up at his powerful profile, which reminded me always of a Norman
knight, or, sometimes, of a young monk worried about his soul and the
Devil.
He had that monkish look now when he answered.
“I don’t know,” he said. “I have felt like that often. But I have come
to think that the sooner we get blood out of our eyes the better for
all the world. I have seen enough dead Germans--and dead English and
dead French--to last a lifetime. Many of the German soldiers hate the
war, as I know, and curse the men who drove them on to it. They are
trapped. They cannot escape from the thing they curse, because of their
discipline, their patriotism----”
“Their patriotism!” said Madame Chéri.
She was really angry with Brand, and I noticed that even Hélène drew
back a little from her place on the rug and looked perplexed and
disappointed. Madame Chéri ridiculed the idea of German patriotism.
They were brutes who liked war except when they feared defeat. They had
committed a thousand atrocities out of sheer joy in bestial cruelty.
Their idea of patriotism was blood-lust and the oppression of people
more civilised than themselves. They hated all people who were not
savages like themselves.
Wickham Brand shook his head.
“They’re not all as bad as that. I knew decent people among them before
the war. For a time, of course, they went mad. They were poisoned by
the damnable philosophy of their leaders and teachers.”
“They liked the poison,” said Madame Chéri. “They lapped it up. It is
in their blood and spirits. They are foul through and through.”
“They are devils,” said Hélène. She shuddered as though she felt very
cold.
Even the small boy on Brand’s knees said:
“_Sales Boches!_”
Brand groaned, in a whimsical way.
“I have said all those things a thousand times! They nearly drove me
mad. But now it’s time to stop the river of blood--if the German army
will acknowledge defeat. I would not go on a day after that, for our
own sakes--for the sake of French boys and English. Every day more of
war means more dead of ours, more blind, more crippled, and more agony
of soul. I want some of our boyhood to be saved.”
Madame Chéri answered coldly.
“Not before the Germans have been punished. Not before that, if we all
die.”
Hélène sprang up with a passionate gesture.
“All German babies ought to be strangled in their cradles! Before they
grow up to be fat, beastly men.”
She was thinking of Schwarz, I imagine. It was the horror of
remembrance which made her so fierce. Then she laughed, and said:
“O là là, let us be glad because yesterday we were liberated. Do not
quarrel with an English officer, _maman_. He helped to save us.”
She put her hands on Wickham Brand’s shoulders and said:
“_Merci, mon capitaine!_”
So the conversation turned and Wickham won them back by his courtesy,
and by a tribute to the courage of French civilians behind the lines,
of whom he told many haunting stories.
But when I walked round with him to his mess--we were going round later
to see Eileen O’Connor--he referred back to the incident.
“Daddy Small is right.” (He referred to the little American doctor.)
“The hatred of these people is transcendental. It is like a spiritual
flame. It is above all self-interest, kindly, human instincts, life
itself. That woman would sacrifice herself, and her children, as
quietly as she heard the death of her husband, rather than grant the
Germans peace without victory and vengeance. How can there be any
peace, whatever treaty is signed? Can Europe ever get peace, with all
this hatred as a heritage?”