“Do you think there’s a real chance of Peace?”
The Colonel was reading a piece of music, humming it with a _la_, _la_,
_la_.
“Another month, and our job’s done,” he said. “Have you heard that bit
of Gluck? It’s delicious.”
I stayed with him a little while and did not follow a note of his
music. I was excited by the supreme hope he had given me. So there was
to be an end of massacre, and my own hopes had not been false.
At the mess table that night, Charles Fortune was in good form. We
sat in a room which was rather handsomely furnished, in a heavy way,
with big bronzes on the mantelpiece (ticketed for exemption from
requisition as family heirlooms), and even rather good portraits of a
French family--from the eighteenth century onwards--on the panelled
walls. The concierge had told us that it had been the mess of a German
headquarters and this gave Fortune his cue, and he entertained us with
some caricatures of German generals and officers, amazingly comic. He
drank his soup in the style of a German general and ate his potato
pie as a German Intelligence officer who had once been a professor of
psychology at Heidelberg.
The little American doctor, “Daddy” Small as we called him, had been
made an honorary member of the mess, and he smiled at Fortune through
his spectacles with an air of delighted surprise that such things
should be.
“You English,” he said in his solemn way, “are the most baffling people
in the world. I have been studying you since I came to France, and all
my preconceived ideas have been knocked on the head. We Americans think
you are a hard, arrogant, selfish people, without humour or sympathy,
made in set moulds, turned out as types from your University and public
schools. That is all wrong. I am beginning to see that you are more
human, more various, more whimsical than any race in the world. You
decline to take life seriously. You won’t take even death seriously.
This war--you make a joke of it. The Germans--you kill them in great
numbers, but you have a secret liking for them. Fortune’s caricatures
are very comical--but not unkind. I believe Fortune is a pro-German.
You cannot laugh at the people you hate. I believe England will forgive
Germany quicker than any other nation--far quicker than the Americans.
France, of course, will never forgive.”
“No,” said Pierre Nesle, who was at the end of the table. “France will
never forgive.”
“We are an illogical people,” said the Colonel. “It is only logical
people who can go on hating. Besides, German music is so good! So
good!”
Harding, who read no paper but the _Morning Post_, said that as far as
he was concerned he would never speak to a German again in his life. He
would like to see the whole race exterminated. But he was afraid of the
Socialists with their pestilential doctrine of “brotherhood of man.”
Lloyd George also filled him with the gravest misgivings.
Dr. Small’s eyes twinkled at him.
“There is the old caste that speaks. Tradition against the new world
of ideas. Of course there will always be _that_ conflict.... That is
a wonderful phrase, ‘the pestilential doctrine of the brotherhood of
man.’ I must make a note of it.”
“Shame on you, Doctor,” said Fortune. “You are always jotting down
notes about us. I shall find myself docketed as ‘English gentleman
grade 3; full-blooded, inclined to obesity, humourous, strain of
insanity due to in-breeding, rare.’”
Dr. Small laughed in a high treble, and then was serious.
“I’m noting down everything. My own psychology, which alarms me; facts,
anecdotes, scenes, words. I want to find a law somewhere, the essential
thing in human nature. After the war--if there is any afterwards--I
want to search for a way out of the jungle. This jungle civilisation.
There must be daylight somewhere for the human race.”
“If you find it,” said Brand, earnestly, “tell me, Doctor.”
“I will,” said Dr. Small, and I remembered that pledge afterwards, when
he and Brand were together in a doomed city, trying to avert the doom,
because of that impulse which urged them to find a little daylight
beyond the darkness.
Young Clatworthy jerked his chair on the polished boards and looked
anxiously at the Colonel, who was discoursing on the origins of art,
religion, sex, the perception of form.
Colonel Lavington grinned at him.
“All right, Cyril. I know you have got a rendezvous with some girl.
Don’t let us keep you from your career of infamy.”
“As a matter of fact, sir, I met a sweet little thing yesterday----”
Clatworthy knew that his reputation as an amorist did not displease the
Colonel, who was a romantic, and loved youth.
In a gust of laughter the mess broke up. Charles Fortune and the
Colonel prepared for an orgy of Bach over the piano in the drawing-room
of that house in Lille. Those who cared to listen might--or not, as
they pleased. Brand and I went out into the streets, pitch-dark now,
unlit by any glimmer of gas, and made our way to the convent where the
girl Eileen O’Connor lodged. We passed a number of British soldiers
in the Boulevard de la Liberté, wearing their steel hats and carrying
their packs.
A group of them stopped under a doorway to light cigarettes. One of
them spoke to his pals.
“They tell me there’s some bonny wenches in this town.”
“Ay,” said another, “an’ I could do wi’ some hugging in a cosy billet.”
“Cosy billet!” said the third, with a cockney voice. “Town or trenches,
the poor bloody soldier gets it in the neck. Curse this pack! I’m fed
up with the whole damn show. I want Peace.”
A hoarse laugh answered him.
“Peace! You don’t believe that fool’s talk in the papers, chum? It’s a
hell of a long way to the Rhine, and you and I’ll be dead before we
get there.”
They slouched off into the darkness, three points of light where their
cigarettes glowed.
“Poor lads!” said Brand.