IX

Some of our officers stationed in Amiens, and billeted in private

houses, became very friendly with the families who received them.

Young girls of good middle class, the daughters of shopkeepers and

schoolmasters, and merchants in a good way of business, found it

delightful to wait on handsome young Englishmen, to teach them French,

to take walks with them, and to arrange musical evenings with other

girl friends who brought their young officers and sang little old French

songs with them or English songs in the prettiest French accent. These

young officers of ours found the home life very charming. It broke the

monotony of exile and made them forget the evil side of war. They paid

little gallantries to the girls, bought them boxes of chocolate until

fancy chocolate was forbidden in France, and presented flowers to

decorate the table, and wrote amusing verses in their autograph albums

or drew sketches for them. As this went on they gained to the privilege

of brotherhood, and there were kisses before saying “good night” outside

bedroom doors, while the parents downstairs were not too watchful,

knowing the ways of young people, and lenient because of their

happiness. Then a day came in each one of these households when the

officer billeted there was ordered away to some other place. What tears!

What lamentations! And what promises never to forget little Jeanne with

her dark tresses, or Suzanne with the merry eyes! Were they not engaged?

Not formally, perhaps, but in honor and in love. For a time letters

arrived, eagerly waited for by girls with aching hearts. Then picture

post-cards with a line or two of affectionate greeting. Then nothing.

Nothing at all, month after month, in spite of all the letters addressed

with all the queer initials for military units. So it happened again

and again, until bitterness crept into girls' hearts, and hardness and

contempt.

“In my own little circle of friends,” said a lady of Amiens, “I know

eighteen girls who were engaged to English officers and have been

forsaken. It is not fair. It is not good. Your English young men seem

so serious, far more serious than our French boys. They have a look of

shyness which we find delightful. They are timid, at first, and blush

when one pays a pretty compliment. They are a long time before they

take liberties. So we trust them, and take them seriously, and allow

intimacies which we should refuse to French boys unless formally

engaged. But it is all camouflage. At heart your English young men are

just flirts. They play with us, make fools of us, steal our hearts, and

then go away, and often do not send so much as a post-card. Not even one

little post-card to the girls who weep their hearts out for them! You

English are all hypocrites. You boast that you 'play the game.' I know

your phrase. It is untrue.

“You play with good girls as though they were grues, and that no

Frenchman would dare to do. He knows the difference between good girls

and bad girls, and behaves, with reverence to those who are good.

When the English army goes away from France it will leave many bitter

memories because of that.”

X

It was my habit to go out at night for a walk through Amiens before

going to bed, and generally turned river-ward, for even on moonless

nights there was always a luminance over the water and one could see to

walk along the quayside. Northward and eastward the sky was quivering

with flashes of white light, like summer lightning, and now and then

there was a long, vivid glare of red touching the high clouds with rosy

feathers; one of our dumps, or one of the enemy's, had been blown up

by that gun-fire, sullen and menacing, which never ceased for years. In

that quiet half-hour, alone, or with some comrade, like Frederic Palmer

or Beach Thomas, as tired and as thoughtful as oneself after a long

day's journeying in the swirl of war, one's brain roved over the scenes

of battle, visualizing anew, and in imagination, the agony up there, the

death which was being done by those guns, and the stupendous sum of all

this conflict. We saw, after all, only one patch of the battlefields of

the world, and yet were staggered by the immensity of its massacre,

by the endless streams of wounded, and by the growth of those little

forests of white crosses behind the fighting-lines. We knew, and could

see at any moment in the mind's eye--even in the darkness of an Amiens

night--the vastness of the human energy which was in motion along

all the roads to Paris and from Boulogne and Dieppe and Havre to the

fighting-lines, and in every village on the way the long columns of

motor-lorries bringing up food and ammunition, the trains on their

way to the army rail-heads with material of war and more food and more

shells, the Red Cross trains crowded with maimed and injured boys, the

ambulances clearing the casualty stations, the troops marching forward

from back roads to the front, from which many would never come marching

back, the guns and limbers and military transports and spare horses,

along hundreds of miles of roads--all the machinery of slaughter on

the move. It was staggering in its enormity, in its detail, and in its

activity. Yet beyond our sphere in the British section of the western

front there was the French front, larger than ours, stretching right

through France, and all their roads were crowded with the same traffic,

and all their towns and villages were stirred by the same activity and

for the same purpose of death, and all their hospitals were crammed with

the wreckage of youth. On the other side of the lines the Germans were

busy in the same way, as busy as soldier ants, and the roads behind

their front were cumbered by endless columns of transport and marching

men, and guns and ambulances laden with bashed, blinded, and bleeding

boys. So it was in Italy, in Austria, in Saloniki, and Bulgaria, Serbia,

Mesopotamia, Egypt... In the silence of Amiens by night, under the

stars, with a cool breath of the night air on our foreheads, with a

glamour of light over the waters of the Somme, our spirit was stricken

by the thought of this world-tragedy, and cried out in anguish against

this bloody crime in which all humanity was involved. The senselessness

of it! The futility! The waste! The mockery of men's faith in God!...

Often Palmer and I--dear, grave old Palmer, with sphinx-like face and

honest soul--used to trudge along silently, with just a sigh now and

then, or a groan, or a sudden cry of “O God!... O Christ!” It was I,

generally, who spoke those words, and Palmer would say: “Yes... and it's

going to last a long time yet. A long time... It's a question who will

hold out twenty-four hours longer than the other side. France is tired,

more tired than any of us. Will she break first? Somehow I think not.

They are wonderful! Their women have a gallant spirit... How good it is,

the smell of the trees to-night!”

Sometimes we would cross the river and look back at the cathedral, high

and beautiful above the huddle of old, old houses on the quayside,

with a faint light on its pinnacle and buttresses and immense blackness

beyond them.

“Those builders of France loved their work,” said Palmer. “There was

always war about the walls of this cathedral, but they went on with it,

stone by stone, without hurry.”

We stood there in a long silence, not on one night only, but many times,

and out of those little dark streets below the cathedral of Amiens

came the spirit of history to teach our spirit with wonderment at the

nobility and the brutality of men, and their incurable folly, and their

patience with tyranny.

“When is it all going to end, Palmer, old man?”

“The war, or the folly of men?”

“The war. This cursed war. This bloody war.”

“Something will break one day, on our side or the other. Those who hold

out longest and have the best reserves of man-power.”

We were starting early next day--before dawn--to see the beginning of

another battle. We walked slowly over the little iron bridge again,

through the vegetable market, where old men and women were unloading

cabbages from a big wagon, then into the dark tunnel of the rue des

Augustins, and so to the little old mansion of Mme. de la Rochefoucauld

in the rue Amiral Courbet. There was a light burning in the window of

the censor's room. In there the colonel was reading The Times in the

Louis Quinze salon, with a grave pucker on his high, thin forehead. He

could not get any grasp of the world's events. There was an attack on

the censor by Northcliffe. Now what did he mean by that? It was really

very unkind of him, after so much civility to him. Charteris would be

furious. He would bang the telephone--but--dear, dear, why should

people be so violent? War correspondents were violent on the slightest

provocation. The world itself was very violent. And it was all so

dangerous. Don't you think so, Russell?

The cars were ordered for five o'clock. Time for bed.