The town of Bethune was the capital of our army in the Black Country of
the French coal-fields. It was not much shelled in those days, though
afterward--years afterward--it was badly damaged by long-range guns, so
that its people fled, at last, after living so long on the edge of war.
Its people were friendly to our men, and did not raise their prices
exorbitantly. There were good shops in the town--“as good as Paris,”
said soldiers who had never been to Paris, but found these plate-glass
windows dazzling, after trench life, and loved to see the “mamzelles”
behind the counters and walking out smartly, with little high-heeled
shoes. There were tea-shops, crowded always with officers on their way
to the line or just out of it, and they liked to speak French with the
girls who served them. Those girls saw the hunger in those men's eyes,
who watched every movement they made, who tried to touch their hands and
their frocks in passing. They knew they were desired, as daughters of
Eve, by boys who were starved of love. They took that as part of their
business, distributing cakes and buns without favor, with laughter
in their eyes, and a merry word or two. Now and then, when they had
leisure, they retired to inner rooms, divided by curtains from the shop,
and sat on the knees of young British officers, while others played
ragtime or sentimental ballads on untuned pianos. There was champagne as
well as tea to be had in these bun--shops, but the A. P. M. was down on
disorder or riotous gaiety, and there were no orgies. “Pas d'orgies,”
said the young ladies severely when things were getting a little too
lively. They had to think of their business.
Down side-streets here and there were houses where other women lived,
not so severe in their point of view. Their business, indeed, did not
permit of severity, and they catered for the hunger of men exiled year
after year from their own home-life and from decent womanhood. They gave
the base counterfeit of love in return for a few francs, and there were
long lines of men--English, Irish, and Scottish soldiers--who waited
their turn to get that vile imitation of life's romance from women who
were bought and paid for. Our men paid a higher price than a few francs
for the Circe's cup of pleasure, which changed them into swine for a
while, until the spell passed, and would have blasted their souls if God
were not understanding of human weakness and of war. They paid in their
bodies, if not in their souls, those boys of ours who loved life and
beauty and gentle things, and lived in filth and shell-fire, and were
trained to kill, and knew that death was hunting for them and had all
the odds of luck. Their children and their children's children will
pay also for the sins of their fathers, by rickety limbs and
water--on-the-brain, and madness, and tuberculosis, and other evils
which are the wages of sin, which flourished most rankly behind the
fields of war.
The inhabitants of Bethune--the shopkeepers, and brave little families
of France, and bright-eyed girls, and frowzy women, and heroines,
and harlots--came out into the streets before the battle of Loos, and
watched the British army pouring through--battalions of Londoners and
Scots, in full fighting-kit, with hot sweat on their faces, and
grim eyes, and endless columns of field-guns and limbers, drawn by
hard-mouthed mules cursed and thrashed by their drivers, and ambulances,
empty now, and wagons, and motor-lorries, hour after hour, day after
day.
“Bonne chance!” cried the women, waving hands and handkerchiefs.
“Les pauvres enfants!” said the old women, wiping their eyes on dirty
aprons. “We know how it is. They will be shot to pieces. It is always
like that, in this sacred war. Oh, those sacred pigs of Germans! Those
dirty Boches! Those sacred bandits!”
“They are going to give the Boches a hard knock,” said grizzled men, who
remembered in their boyhood another war. “The English army is ready. How
splendid they are, those boys! And ours are on the right of them. This
time--!”
“Mother of God, hark at the guns!”
At night, as dark fell, the people of Bethune gathered in the great
square by the Hotel de Ville, which afterward was smashed, and listened
to the laboring of the guns over there by Vermelles and Noeux-les-Mines,
and Grenay, and beyond Notre Dame de Lorette, where the French guns were
at work. There were loud, earth--shaking rumblings, and now and then
enormous concussions. In the night sky lights rose in long, spreading
bars of ruddy luminance, in single flashes, in sudden torches of scarlet
flame rising to the clouds and touching them with rosy feathers.
“'Cre nom de Dieu!” said French peasants, on the edge of all that,
in villages like Gouy, Servins, Heuchin, Houdain, Grenay, Bruay, and
Pernes. “The caldron is boiling up... There will be a fine pot-au-feu.”
They wondered if their own sons would be in the broth. Some of them
knew, and crossed themselves by wayside shrines for the sake of their
sons' souls, or in their estaminets cursed the Germans with the same old
curses for having brought all this woe into the world.