I was billeted for a time with other war correspondents in an old house
in the rue Amiral Courbet, on the way to the river Somme from the Street
of the Three Pebbles, and with a view of the spire of the cathedral, a
wonderful thing of delicate lines and tracery, graven with love in every
line, by Muirhead Bone, and from my dormer window. It was the house of
Mme. de la Rochefoucauld, who lived farther out of the town, but drove
in now and then to look at this little mansion of hers at the end of a
courtyard behind wrought-iron gates. It was built in the days before
the Revolution, when it was dangerous to be a fine lady with the name
of Rochefoucauld. The furniture was rather scanty, and was of the Louis
Quinze and Empire periods. Some portraits of old gentlemen and ladies of
France, with one young fellow in a scarlet coat, who might have been
in the King's Company of the Guard about the time when Wolfe scaled the
Heights of Abraham, summoned up the ghosts of the house, and I liked to
think of them in these rooms and going in their sedan-chairs across the
little courtyard to high mass at the cathedral or to a game of bezique
in some other mansion, still standing in the quiet streets of Amiens,
unless in a day in March of 1918 they were destroyed with many hundreds
of houses by bombs and gun-fire. My little room was on the floor below
the garret, and here at night, after a long day in the fields up by
Pozieres or Martinpuich or beyond, by Ligny-Tilloy, on the way to
Bapaume, in the long struggle and slaughter over every inch of ground, I
used to write my day's despatch, to be taken next day (it was before we
were allowed to use the military wires) by King's Messenger to England.
Those articles, written at high speed, with an impressionism born out
of many new memories of tragic and heroic scenes, were interrupted
sometimes by air-bombardments. Hostile airmen came often to Amiens
during the Somme fighting, to unload their bombs as near to the station
as they could guess, which was not often very near. Generally they
killed a few women and children and knocked a few poor houses and a shop
or two into a wild rubbish heap of bricks and timber. While I wrote,
listening to the crashing of glass and the anti-aircraft fire of French
guns from the citadel, I used to wonder subconsciously whether I should
suddenly be hurled into chaos at the end of an unfinished sentence,
and now and again in spite of my desperate conflict with time to get my
message done (the censors were waiting for it downstairs) I had to get
up and walk into the passage to listen to the infernal noise in the
dark city of Amiens. But I went back again and bent over my paper,
concentrating on the picture of war which I was trying to set down so
that the world might see and understand, until once again, ten minutes
later or so, my will-power would weaken and the little devil of fear
would creep up to my heart and I would go uneasily to the door again to
listen. Then once more to my writing... Nothing touched the house in the
rue Amiral Courbet while we were there. But it was into my bedroom that
a shell went crashing after that night in March when Amiens was badly
wrecked, and we listened to the noise of destruction all around us from
a room in the Hotel du Rhin on the other side of the way. I should have
been sleeping still if I had slept that night in my little old bedroom
when the shell paid a visit.
There were no lights allowed at night in Amiens, and when I think of
darkness I think of that city in time of war, when all the streets
were black tunnels and one fumbled one's way timidly, if one had no
flash-lamp, between the old houses with their pointed gables, coming
into sharp collision sometimes with other wayfarers. But up to midnight
there were little lights flashing for a second and then going out, along
the Street of the Three Pebbles and in the dark corners of side-streets.
They were carried by girls seeking to entice English officers on their
way to their billets, and they clustered like glowworms about the side
door of the Hotel du Rhin after nine o'clock, and outside the railings
of the public gardens. As one passed, the bright bull's-eye from a
pocket torch flashed in one's eyes, and in the radiance of it one saw
a girl's face, laughing, coming very close, while her fingers felt for
one's badge.
“How dark it is to-night, little captain! Are you not afraid of
darkness? I am full of fear. It is so sad, this war, so dismal! It is
comradeship that helps one now!... A little love... a little laughter,
and then--who knows?”
A little love... a little laughter--alluring words to boys out of one
battle, expecting another, hating it all, lonely in their souls because
of the thought of death, in exile from their own folk, in exile from
all womanhood and tender, feminine things, up there in the ditches
and shellcraters of the desert fields, or in the huts of headquarters
staffs, or in reserve camps behind the fighting-line. A little love, a
little laughter, and then--who knows? The sirens had whispered their own
thoughts. They had translated into pretty French the temptation of all
the little devils in their souls.
“Un peu d'amour-”
One flash-lamp was enough for two down a narrow street toward the
riverside, and then up a little dark stairway to a lamp-lit room...
Presently this poor boy would be stricken with disease and wish himself
dead.