I
During the battles of the Somme in 1916, and afterward in periods of
progress and retreat over the abominable fields, the city of Amiens was
the capital of the British army. When the battles began in July of that
year it was only a short distance away from the fighting-lines; near
enough to hear the incessant roar of gun-fire on the French front and
ours, and near enough to get, by motor-car or lorry, in less than thirty
minutes, to places where men were being killed or maimed or blinded
in the routine of the day's work. One went out past Amiens station and
across a little stone bridge which afterward, in the enemy's advance
of 1918, became the mark for German high velocities along the road to
Querrieux, where Rawlinson had his headquarters of the Fourth Army in
an old chateau with pleasant meadows round it and a stream meandering
through fields of buttercups in summer-time. Beyond the dusty village
of Querrieux with its white cottages, from which the plaster fell off
in blotches as the war went on, we went along the straight highroad to
Albert, through the long and straggling village of Lahoussoye, where
Scottish soldiers in reserve lounged about among frowsy peasant women
and played solemn games with “the bairns”; and so, past camps and
hutments on each side of the road, to the ugly red-brick town where the
Golden Virgin hung head downward from the broken tower of the church
with her Babe outstretched above the fields of death as though as a
peace-offering to this world at war.
One could be killed any day in Albert. I saw men blown to bits there
the clay after the battles of the Somme began. It was in the road
that turned to the right, past the square to go to Meaulte and on to
Fricourt. There was a tide of gun transport swirling down the road,
bringing up new ammunition for the guns that were firing without a pause
over Fricourt and Mametz. The high scream of a shell came through a blue
sky and ended on its downward note with a sharp crash. For a few minutes
the transport column was held up while a mass of raw flesh which a
second before had been two living men and their horses was cleared out
of the way. Then the gun wagons went at a harder pace down the road,
raising a cloud of white dust out of which I heard the curses of the
drivers, swearing in a foul way to disguise their fear.
I went through Albert many scores of times to the battlefields beyond,
and watched its process of disintegration through those years, until it
was nothing but a wild scrap heap of read brick and twisted iron, and,
in the last phase, even the Golden Virgin and her Babe, which had seemed
to escape all shell-fire by miraculous powers, lay buried beneath a mass
of masonry. Beyond were the battlefields of the Somme where every yard
of ground is part of the great graveyard of our youth.
So Amiens, as I have said, was not far away from the red heart of war,
and was clear enough to the lines to be crowded always with officers and
men who came out between one battle and another, and by “lorry-jumping”
could reach this city for a few hours of civilized life, according to
their views of civilization. To these men--boys, mostly--who had been
living in lousy ditches under hell fire, Amiens was Paradise, with
little hells for those who liked them. There were hotels in which they
could go get a bath, if they waited long enough or had the luck to be
early on the list. There were streets of shops with plate-glass windows
unbroken, shining, beautiful. There were well-dressed women walking
about, with kind eyes, and children as dainty, some of them, as in High
Street, Kensington, or Prince's Street, Edinburgh. Young officers, who
had plenty of money to spend--because there was no chance of spending
money between a row of blasted trees and a ditch in which bits of dead
men were plastered into the parapet--invaded the shops and bought fancy
soaps, razors, hair-oil, stationery, pocketbooks, knives, flash-lamps,
top-boots (at a fabulous price), khaki shirts and collars, gramophone
records, and the latest set of Kirchner prints. It was the delight of
spending, rather than the joy of possessing, which made them go from
one shop to another in search of things they could carry hack to
the line--that and the lure of girls behind the counters, laughing,
bright-eyed girls who understood their execrable French, even English
spoken with a Glasgow accent, and were pleased to flirt for five minutes
with any group of young fighting-men--who broke into roars of laughter
at the gallantry of some Don Juan among them with the gift of audacity,
and paid outrageous prices for the privilege of stammering out some
foolish sentiment in broken French, blushing to the roots of their hair
(though captains and heroes) at their own temerity with a girl who, in
another five minutes, would play the same part in the same scene with a
different group of boys.
I used to marvel at the patience of these girls. How bored they must
have been with all this flirtation, which led to nothing except,
perhaps, the purchase of a bit of soap at twice its proper price! They
knew that these boys would leave to go back to the trenches in a few
hours and that some of them would certainly be dead in a few days. There
could be no romantic episode, save of a transient kind, between them
and these good-looking lads in whose eyes there were desire and hunger,
because to them the plainest girl was Womanhood, the sweet, gentle,
and feminine side of life, as opposed to the cruelty, brutality, and
ugliness of war and death. The shopgirls of Amiens had no illusions.
They had lived too long in war not to know the realities. They knew the
risks of transient love and they were not taking them--unless conditions
were very favorable. They attended strictly to business and hoped
to make a lot of money in the shop, and were, I think, mostly good
girls--as virtuous as life in war-time may let girls be--wise beyond
their years, and with pity behind their laughter for these soldiers who
tried to touch their hands over the counters, knowing that many of
them were doomed to die for France and England. They had their
own lovers--boys in blue somewhere between Vaux-sur-Somme and
Hartmanns--weilerkopf--and apart from occasional intimacies with English
officers quartered in Amiens for long spells, left the traffic of
passion to other women who walked the streets.