That was in the last phase of the war, but the Street of the Three
Pebbles had been tramped up and down for two years before then by the
British armies on the Somme, with the French on their right. I was never
tired of watching those crowds and getting into the midst of them, and
studying their types. All the types of young English manhood came down
this street, and some of their faces showed the strain and agony of war,
especially toward the end of the Somme battles, after four months or
more of slaughter. I saw boys with a kind of hunted look in their eyes;
and Death was the hunter. They stared into the shop windows in a dazed
way, or strode along with packs on their backs, looking neither to the
right nor to the left, and white, haggard faces, as expressionless as
masks. Tomorrow or the next day, perhaps, the Hunter would track them
down. Other English officers showed no sign at all of apprehension or
lack of nerve-control, although the psychologist would have detected
disorder of soul in the rather deliberate note of hilarity with which
they greeted their friends, in gusts of laughter, for no apparent cause,
at “Charlie's bar,” where they would drink three cocktails apiece on an
empty stomach, and in their tendency to tell tales of horror as things
that were very funny. They dined and wined in Amiens at the “Rhin,” the
“Godebert,” or the “Cathedrale,” with a kind of spiritual exaltation in
good food and drink, as though subconsciously they believed that this
might be their last dinner in life, with good pals about them. They
wanted to make the best of it--and damn the price. In that spirit many
of them went after other pleasures--down the byways of the city, and
damned the price again, which was a hellish one. Who blames them? It was
war that was to blame, and those who made war possible.
Down the rue des Trois Cailloux, up and down, up and down, went English,
and Scottish, and Irish, and Welsh, and Canadian, and Australian, and
New Zealand fighting--men. In the winter they wore their trench-coats
all splashed and caked up to the shoulders with the white, chalky mud of
the Somme battlefields, and their top--boots and puttees were plastered
with this mud, and their faces were smeared with it after a lorry drive
or a tramp down from the line. The rain beat with a metallic tattoo on
their steel hats. Their packs were all sodden.
French poilus, detrained at Amiens station for a night on their way to
some other part of the front, jostled among British soldiers, and their
packs were a wonder to see. They were like traveling tinkers, with pots
and pans and boots slung about their faded blue coats, and packs bulging
with all the primitive needs of life in the desert of the battlefields
beyond civilization. They were unshaven, and wore their steel casques
low over their foreheads, without gaiety, without the means of buying
a little false hilarity, but grim and sullen--looking and resentful of
English soldiers walking or talking with French cocottes.