She gave a little tug to my sleeve, and spoke in a kind of coaxing
whisper.
“Be cruel to them, _mon lieutenant_! Be hard and ruthless. Make them
suffer as we have suffered. Tread on their necks, so that they squeal.
_Soyez cruel._”
Her face and part of her figure were in the glow from the charcoal fire
of the transport men, and I saw that she was a little woman, neatly
dressed, with a thin, gentle, rather worn-looking face. Those words,
“_Soyez cruel!_” gave me a moment’s shock, especially because of the
soft, wheedling tone of her voice.
“What would you do,” I asked in a laughing way, “if you were in my
place?”
“I dream at nights of what I would like to do. There are so many things
I would like to do, for vengeance. I think all German women should be
killed, to stop them breeding. That is one thing.”
“And the next?” I asked.
“It would be well to kill all German babies. Perhaps the good God will
do it in His infinite wisdom.”
“You are religious, madam?”
“We had only our prayers,” she said, with piety.
A band of dancing people bore down upon us and swept us apart. From
a high balcony an Italian who had been a prisoner of war sang “_La
Marseillaise_,” and though these people’s ears had been dinned with
it all day, though their throats were hoarse with singing it, they
listened to it now, again, as though it were a new revelation. The
man sang with passion in his voice, as powerful as a trumpet, more
thrilling than that. The passion of four years’ agony in some foul
prison-camp inspired him now, as he sang that song of liberty and
triumph.
“_Allons, Enfants de la patrie!_
_Le jour de gloire est arrivé!_”
The crowd took up the song again, and it roared across the square of
Verviers until another kind of music met, and clashed with it, and
overwhelmed it with brazen notes. It was the Town-Band of Verviers,
composed of twenty-five citizens, mostly middle-aged and portly--some
old and scraggy, in long frock-coats and tall pot-hats. Solemnly, with
puffed cheeks, they marched along, parting the waves of people as they
went, as it seemed, by the power of their blasts. They were playing
an old tune called _Madelon_--its refrain comes back to me now with
the picture of that Carnival in Verviers, with all those faces, all
that human pressure and emotion,--and behind them, as though following
the Pied Piper (twenty-five Pied Pipers!) came dancing at least a
thousand people, eight abreast, with linked arms, or linked hands.
They were young Belgian boys and girls, old Belgian men and women,
children, British soldiers, American soldiers, English, Scottish,
Irish, Canadian, Australian, Russian, and Italian ex-prisoners of war,
just liberated from their prison-camps, new to liberty. They were all
singing that old song of “_Madelon_,” and all dancing in a kind of jig.
Other crowds dancing and singing came out of side-streets into the wide
Grande Place, mingled, like human waves meeting, swirled in wild,
laughing eddies. Carnival after the long fasting.
Brand clutched me by the arm and laughed in his deep hollow voice.
“Look at that old satyr!... I believe ‘Daddy’ Small is Pan himself!”
It was the little American doctor. He was in the centre of a row of
eight in the vanguard of a dancing column. A girl of the _midinette_
type--pretty, impudent, wild-eyed, with a strand of fair hair blowing
loose from her little fur cap--was clinging to his arm on one side,
while on the other was a stout middle-aged woman with a cheerful
Flemish face and mirth-filled eyes. Linked up with the others they
jigged behind the town band. Dr. Small’s little grey beard had a
raffish look. His field-cap was tilted back from his bony forehead. His
spectacles were askew. He had the happy look of careless boyhood. He
did not see us then, but later in the evening detached himself from the
stout Flemish lady who kissed him on both cheeks, and made his way to
where Brand and I stood under the portico of a hotel.
“Fie, doctor!” said Brand. “What would your old patients in New York
say to this Bacchanalian orgy?”
“Sonny,” said the doctor, “they wouldn’t believe it! It’s incredible.”
He wiped the perspiration from his brow, threaded his fingers through
his grey beard, and laughed in that shrill way which was his habit when
excited.
“My word, it was good fun! I became part of a people’s joy. I had their
sense of escape from frightful things. Youth came back to me. Their
songs danced in my blood. In spite of my goggles and my grey beard that
buxom lady adored me as though I were the young Adonis. The little girl
clasped my hand as though I were her younger brother. Time rolled back
from the world. Old age was touched with the divine elixir. In that
crowd there is the springtime of life, when Pan played on his pipes
through pagan woods. I wouldn’t have missed it for a million dollars!”
That night Brand and I and some others (Charles Fortune among them)
were billeted in a small hotel which had been a German headquarters a
few days before. There was a piano in the billiard room, and Fortune
touched its keys. Several notes were broken, but he skipped them deftly
and improvised a musical caricature of “Daddy” Small dancing in the
Carnival. He too had seen that astonishing vision, and it inspired him
to grotesque fantasies. In his imagination he brought a great general
to Verviers--“Blear-eyed Bill, the Butcher of the Boche”--and gave him
a _pas seul_ in the Grande Place, like an elephant gambolling in green
fields, and trumpeting his joy.
Young Harding was moody, and confided to me that he did not like the
idea of crossing the German frontier and going to Cologne.
“There will be dirty work,” he said, “as sure as fate. The Huns will
begin sniping, and then we shall have to start reprisals. Well, if they
ask for it I hope we shall give it to them. Without mercy, after all
they have done. At the first sign of treachery I hope the machine-guns
will begin to play. Every time I see a Hun I shall feel like slitting
his throat.”
“Well, you’ll get into a murderous state of mind,” I answered him.
“We shall see plenty, and live among them. I expect they will be tame
enough.”
“Some poor devils of ours will be murdered in their beds,” said
Harding. “It makes my blood boil to think of it. I only hope we shan’t
stand any nonsense. I’d like to see Cologne Cathedral go up in flames.
That would be a consolation.”
Charles Fortune broke away from his musical fantasy of “Blear-eyed
Bill” and played a bar or two of the _Marseillaise_ in rag-time. It was
a greeting to Pierre Nesle, who came into the room quietly, in his képi
and heavy motor-coat, with a salute to the company.
“_Bon soir, petit Pierre!_” said Fortune. “_Qu’est-ce-qu’il y a,
donc-quoi?-avec ta figure si sombre, si mélancolique, d’une tristesse
pitoyable_----”
Pierre Nesle inspired him to sing a little old French chanson of
Pierrot disconsolate.
Pierre had just motored down from Lille--a long journey--and was
blue with cold, as he said, warming his hands at the charcoal stove.
He laughed at Fortune’s jesting, begged a cigarette from Harding,
apologised for keeping on his “stink-coat” for a while until he had
thawed out--and I admired the boy’s pluck and self-control. It was the
first time I had seen him since he had gone to Lille to see his sister.
I knew by the new lines about his eyes and mouth, by a haggard, older
look he had that he had seen that sister of his--Marthe--and knew her
tragedy.
It was to Brand’s room that he went after midnight, and from Brand,
a day later, I heard what had happened. Lie had begun by thanking
Brand for that rescue of his sister in Lille, in a most composed and
courteous way. Then suddenly that mask fell from him, and he sat down
heavily in a chair, put his head down on his arms upon the table,
and wept like a child, in uncontrollable grief. Brand was immensely
distressed and could not think of any word to comfort him. He kept
saying, “Courage! Courage!” as I had said to Madame Chéri when she
broke down about her boy Edouard, as the young Baronne had sent word to
Eileen from her prison death-bed, and as so many men and women had said
to others who had been stricken by the cruelties of war.
“The boy was down and out,” said Brand. “What could I say? It is one of
those miseries for which there is no cure. He began to talk about his
sister when they had been together at home, in Paris, before the war.
She had been so gay, so comradely, so full of adventure. Then he began
to curse God for having allowed so much cruelty and men for being such
devils. He cursed the Germans, but then, in most frightful language,
most bitterly of all he cursed the people of Lille for having tortured
a woman who had been starved into weakness, and had sinned to save her
life. He contradicted himself then, violently, and said ‘It was no sin.
My sister was a loyal girl to France. In her soul she was loyal. So she
swore to me on her crucifix. I would have killed her if she had been
disloyal.’ ... So there you are! Pierre Nesle is broken on the wheel of
war, like so many others. What’s the cure?”
“None,” I said, “for his generation. One can’t undo the things that are
done.”
Brand was pacing up and down his bedroom, where he had been telling me
these things, and now, at my words, he stopped and stared at me before
answering.
“No. I think you’re right. This generation has been hard-hit, and
we shall go about with unhealed wounds. But the next generation?...
Let’s try to save it from all this horror! If the world will only
understand----”
The next day we left Verviers, and crossed the German frontier on the
way to the Rhine.