There were shrill voices one morning outside the gate of our
quarters--women's voices, excited, angry, passionate. An orderly came
into the mess--we were at breakfast--and explained the meaning of
the clamor, which by some intuition and a quick ear for French he had
gathered from all this confusion of tongues.
“There's a soldier up the road, drunk or mad. He has been attacking a
girl. The villagers want an officer to arrest him.”
The colonel sliced off the top of his egg and then rose. “Tell three
orderlies to follow me.”
We went into the roadway, and twenty women crowded round us with a
story of attempted violence against an innocent girl. The man had been
drinking last night at the estaminet up there. Then he had followed
the girl, trying to make love to her. She had barricaded herself in the
room, when he tried to climb through the window.
“If you don't come out I'll get in and kill you,” he said, according to
the women.
But she had kept him out, though he prowled round all night. Now he was
hiding in an outhouse. The brute! The pig!
When we went up the road the man was standing in the center of it, with
a sullen look.
“What's the trouble?” he asked. “It looks as if all France were out to
grab me.”
He glanced sideways over the field, as though reckoning his chance of
escape. There was no chance.
The colonel placed him under arrest and he marched back between the
orderlies, with an old soldier of the Contemptibles behind him.
Later in the day he was lined up for identification by the girl, among a
crowd of other men.
The girl looked down the line, and we watched her curiously--a slim
creature with dark hair neatly coiled.
She stretched out her right hand with a pointing finger.
“Le voila!... c'est l'homme.”
There was no mistake about it, and the man looked sheepishly at her, not
denying. He was sent off under escort to the military prison in St. Omer
for court-martial.
“What's the punishment--if guilty?” I asked.
“Death,” said the colonel, resuming his egg.
He was a fine-looking fellow, the prisoner. He had answered the call for
king and country without delay. In the estaminet, after coming down from
the salient for a machine-gun course, he had drunk more beer than was
good for him, and the face of a pretty girl had bewitched him, stirring
up desire. He wanted to kiss her lips... There were no women in the
Ypres salient. Nothing pretty or soft. It was hell up there, and this
girl was a pretty witch, bringing back thoughts of the other side--for
life, womanhood, love, caresses which were good for the souls and bodies
of men. It was a starved life up there in the salient... Why shouldn't
she give him her lips? Wasn't he fighting for France? Wasn't he a
tall and proper lad? Curse the girl for being so sulky to an English
soldier!... And now, if those other women, those old hags, were to swear
against him things he had never said, things he had never done, unless
drink had made him forget--by God! supposing drink had made him forget?
He would be shot against a white wall. Shot dead, disgracefully,
shamefully, by his own comrades! O Christ! and the little mother in a
Sussex cottage!...