THE LIBERATION OF LILLE
From the Boulevard des Capucines to the Avenue de l'Opéra there is a
convenient short-cut through the Rue Daunou. Newspaper men and other
Americans do not always use the Rue Daunou for the short-cut. It is
better known as the way to the Chatham bar. I ought to know nothing
about the Chatham bar. My acquaintance with that corner should be
limited to the Restaurant Volney and ladies' days at my husband's club
opposite. But I do know the Chatham bar and for a perfectly respectable
reason. It is where my old uncle used to be found when the clerk at his
hotel said that he was not in. The uncle makes me think of a friend of
his and a table with a little brass disk in the center of it to
commemorate assiduous attendance through a long period of years in the
Chatham bar. And the uncle's friend makes me think of the liberation of
Lille. Association of ideas is a strange thing.
Herbert and I sat one evening in the autumn of 1915 before a big map
with my uncle's friend. His fingers lay upon the Flanders portion of
what we had come to call "the front." Bubbling over with excitement, he
exclaimed,
"They have broken through here, I tell you, day before yesterday. I
always knew that when Kitchener's army was ready the trick would be
turned. Of course the censorship is holding up the news, but everybody
knows it. A sharp bombardment that overwhelmed the Boches, and then the
break through. The Boches were routed. Talk about not being able to
storm trenches! The cavalry has passed Lille. At this moment Lille is
liberated. The British must be there in force."
"But," objected my husband, "this is too good to be true. They could not
hold back news like that, you know. If the British are in Lille, the war
is over."
"Of course it is over," insisted my uncle's friend. "We shall have peace
by Christmas."
Mr.--well I won't tell you his name--let us say Mr. Smith, was hardly to
blame for taking the wish for the fact. The rumor of a big break through
the Flanders front was everywhere in Paris. Fourteen months of war had
been enough. The French had waited a year for the British to form an
army. Why shouldn't it be true that now the end had come?
Alas! we were to wait three years more before the lines in Flanders were
crossed; we were to have many costly disappointments like that of
Neuve-Chapelle. But when the moment finally did come, the liberation of
Lille was to mean the beginning of the end.
In October, 1919, when I came back to Paris from the Little Gray Home, I
returned to a city where there was a feeling of victory in the air. The
most conservative had lost their habitual pessimism. The most resigned,
who had come to accept the war as a fatality that would never end as
long as there were men to fight, began to revise their opinions. The
most suspicious, who wagged their heads over _communiqués_ no matter
what the authorities said, felt that after all we were making "some
progress." Each day the list of liberated communes grew longer. But
until some big city was abandoned, Parisians were afraid of having to
pay too big a price to break down the Boche resistance. After all, they
had proved themselves stubborn fighters. They might elect to make a long
"last ditch" combat on lines of which we did not know the existence. But
if they abandoned Lille, that would mean the intention of falling back
to the Meuse. Genuine optimism is as hard to instil as it is to dispel.
In retrospect, many writers are now asserting that Parisians knew the
Boches were beaten after the failure of their last July offensive from
the Vesle to the Marne. But this is not true. Relief over the failure to
reach Paris did not mean certainty of the imminent collapse of
Ludendorf's war machine.
When summertime was over, and darkness came suddenly from one day to
the next, Herbert and I resumed our walks at nightfall. During the war
we had lost our interest in buildings as memorials of the past.
Contemporary history had crowded out ante-bellum associations. The
Eiffel Tower was not a gigantic monstrosity, a relic of the Exposition.
It was a wireless-telegraphy station, the ear, the eye, the voice of
Paris. Tramping by the Champs de Mars, we saw the sentinels in their
faded blue coats of the fifth year and felt sorry for the men up there
always listening in the pitiless cold. Crossing the Pont Alexandre III,
we forgot the splendor of the Czars and thought of Nicholas in the hands
of the Bolsheviki. The Grand Palais no longer recalled brilliant Salons.
We thought of the blind in the hospital there and of the re-education of
mutilated _poilus_. The picture inside was a one-armed soldier learning
to run a typewriter, and a man with both legs amputated sitting on a low
bench, the light of renewed hope in his eyes: for he had found out that
he could still do a man's work in the world by becoming a cobbler. The
newspaper building, whose cellar windows used to fascinate us, was the
place where we waited for the posting of the _communiqué_. The Invalides
was no longer just Napoleon's tomb. It was the place where you went to
see your friends decorated and where you strolled about the central
court to show your children aeroplanes and cannon captured from the
Germans. And you were saddened by the thought that when the last
veterans of the Crimea and Soixante-Dix and colonial wars disappeared,
there would be thousands of others to take the vacant places.
October is chestnut month. From some mysterious source the venders drew
their supply of charcoal when we could not get it. But we were glad of
their luck. Autumn walks would not be complete without the bag of
roasted chestnuts which I could fish out of Herbert's overcoat pocket.
We were going down the Rue de Rennes one night and stopped to get our
chestnuts from the man at the corner of the Rue Sainte-Placide. Herbert
was fumbling for coppers. A boy thrust a newspaper under his nose.
"The Liberation of Lille!" he cried.
We hailed a taxi and made for the Chatham bar. Everything comes to him
who waits. Uncle Alex's friend was waiting.