The quickest way to the cathedral is down a turning on the right-hand
side of the Street of the Three Pebbles. Charlie's bar was on the
left-hand side of the street, always crowded after six o'clock by
officers of every regiment, drinking egg-nogs, Martinis, Bronxes, sherry
cobblers, and other liquids, which helped men marvelously to forget the
beastliness of war, and gave them the gift of laughter, and made
them careless of the battles which would have to be fought. Young
staff-officers were there, explaining carefully how hard worked they
were and how often they went under shell-fire. The fighting officers,
English, Scottish, Irish, Welsh, jeered at them, laughed hugely at the
latest story of mirthful horror, arranged rendezvous at the Godebert
restaurant, where they would see the beautiful Marguerite (until she
transferred to la cathedrale in the same street) and our checks which
Charlie cashed at a discount, with a noble faith in British honesty,
not often, as he told me, being hurt by a “stumor.” Charlie's bar was
wrecked by shell-fire afterward, and he went to Abbeville and set up a
more important establishment, which was wrecked, too, in a fierce air
raid, before the paint was dry on the walls.
The cathedral was a shrine to which many men and women went all through
the war, called into its white halls by the spirit of beauty which dwelt
there, and by its silence and peace. The great west door was screened
from bomb-splinters by sand-bags piled high, and inside there were other
walls of sand-bags closing in the sanctuary and some of the windows.
But these signs of war did not spoil the majesty of the tall columns
and high roof, nor the loveliness of the sculptured flowers below the
clerestory arches, nor the spiritual mystery of those great, dim aisles,
where light flickered and shadows lurked, and the ghosts of history came
out of their tombs to pace these stones again where five, six, seven
centuries before they had walked to worship God, in joy or in despair,
or to show their beauty of young womanhood--peasant girl or princess--to
lovers gazing by the pillars, or to plight their troth as royal brides,
or get a crown for their heads, or mercy for their dead bodies in
velvet-draped coffins.
Our soldiers went in there, as many centuries before other English
soldiers, who came out with Edward the Black Prince, by way of Crecy,
or with Harry the King, through Agincourt. Five hundred years hence,
if Amiens cathedral still stands, undamaged by some new and monstrous
conflict in a world of incurable folly, the generation of that time will
think now and then, perhaps, of the English lads in khaki who tramped
up the highway of this nave with their field-caps under their arms, each
footstep leaving the imprint of a wet boot on the old flagstones, awed
by the silence and the spaciousness, with a sudden heartache for a
closer knowledge, or some knowledge, of the God worshiped there--the
God of Love--while, not far away, men were killing one another by
high explosives, shells, hand-grenades, mines, machine-guns, bayonets,
poison-gas, trench-mortars, tanks, and, in close fighting, with short
daggers like butchers' knives, or clubs with steel knobs. I watched the
faces of the men who entered here. Some of them, like the Australians
and New-Zealanders, unfamiliar with cathedrals, and not religious by
instinct or training, wandered round in a wondering way, with a touch
of scorn, even of hostility, now and then, for these mysteries--the
chanting of the Office, the tinkling of the bells at the high
mass--which were beyond their understanding, and which they could not
link up with any logic of life, as they knew it now, away up by Bapaume
or Bullecourt, where God had nothing to do, seemingly, with a night raid
into Boche lines, when they blew a party of Germans to bits by dropping
Stoke bombs down their dugout, or with the shrieks of German boys, mad
with fear, when the Australians jumped on them in the darkness and made
haste with their killing. All the same, this great church was wonderful,
and the Australians, scrunching their slouch-hats, stared up at the tall
columns to the clerestory arches, and peered through the screen to the
golden sun upon the high-altar, and touched old tombs with their muddy
hands, reading the dates on them--1250, 1155, 1415--with astonishment
at their antiquity. Their clean-cut hatchet faces, sun--baked, tanned
by rain and wind, their simple blue-gray eyes, the fine, strong grace of
their bodies, as they stood at ease in this place of history, struck me
as being wonderfully like all that one imagines of those English knights
and squires--Norman-English--who rode through France with the Black
Prince. It is as though Australia had bred back to the old strain. Our
own English soldiers were less arresting to the eye, more dapper and
neat, not such evident children of nature. Gravely they walked up the
aisles, standing in groups where a service was in progress, watching
the movements of the priests, listening to the choir and organ with
reverent, dreamy eyes. Some of them--country lads--thought back, I
fancy, to some village church in England where they had sung hymns with
mother and sisters in the days before the war. England and that little
church were a long way off now, perhaps all eternity away. I saw one boy
standing quite motionless, with wet eyes, without self-consciousness.
This music, this place of thoughtfulness, had made something break in
his heart... Some of our young officers, but not many, knelt on the cane
chairs and prayed, face in hands. French officers crossed themselves
and their medals tinkled as they walked up the aisles. Always there were
women in black weeds kneeling before the side--altars, praying to the
Virgin for husbands and sons, dead or alive, lighting candles below holy
pictures and statues. Our men tiptoed past them, holding steel hats or
field--caps, and putting their packs against the pillars. On the steps
of the cathedral I heard two officers talking one day.
“How can one reconcile all this with the war?”
“Why not?... I suppose we're fighting for justice and all that. That's
what The Daily Mail tells us.”
“Seriously, old man. Where does Christ come in?”
“He wasn't against righteous force. He chased the money-changers out of
the Temple.”
“Yes, but His whole teaching was love and forgiveness. 'Thou shalt not
kill.' 'Little children, love one another!' 'Turn the other cheek.'. ..
Is it all sheer tosh? If so, why go on pretending?... Take chaplains in
khaki--these lieutenant-colonels with black crosses. They make me sick.
It's either one thing or the other. Brute force or Christianity. I am
harking back to the brute--force theory. But I'm not going to say 'God
is love' one day and then prod a man in the stomach the next. Let's be
consistent.”
“The other fellows asked for it. They attacked first.”
“Yes, but we are all involved. Our diplomacy, our secret treaties, our
philosophical dope over the masses, our imperial egotism, our trade
rivalries--all that was a direct challenge of Might against Right. The
Germans are more efficient and more logical--that's all. They prepared
for the inevitable and struck first. We knew the inevitable was coming,
but didn't prepare, being too damned inefficient... I have a leaning
toward religion. Instinctively I'm for Christ. But it doesn't work in
with efficiency and machine-guns.”
“It belongs to another department, that's all. We're spiritual and
animal at the same time. In one part of my brain I'm a gentleman. In
another, a beast. It's conflict. We can't eliminate the beast, but we
can control it now and then when it gets too obstreperous, and that's
where religion helps. It's the high ideal--otherworldliness.”
“The Germans pray to the same God. Praise Christ and ask for victory.”
“Let them. It may do them a bit of good. It seems to me God is above
all the squabbles of humanity--doesn't care a damn about them!--but
the human soul can get into touch with the infinite and the ideal, even
while he is doing butcher's work, and beastliness. That doesn't matter
very much. It's part of the routine of life.”
“But it does matter. It makes agony and damnation in the world. It
creates cruelty and tyranny, and all bloody things. Surely if we believe
in God--anyhow in Christian ethics--this war is a monstrous crime in
which all humanity is involved.”
“The Hun started it... Let's go and give the glad eye to Marguerite.”
At night, in moonlight, Amiens cathedral was touched with a new
spirituality, a white magic beyond all words of beauty. On many nights
of war I walked round the cathedral square, looking up at that grand
mass of masonry with all its pinnacles and buttresses gleaming like
silver and its sculptured tracery like lacework, and a flood of milky
light glamorous on walls in which every stone was clear-cut beyond a
vast shadow-world. How old it was! How many human eyes through many
centuries had come in the white light of the moon to look at this dream
in stone enshrining the faith of men! The Revolution had surged round
these walls, and the screams of wild women, and their shrill laughter,
and their cries for the blood of aristocrats, had risen from this
square. Pageants of kingship and royal death had passed across these
pavements through the great doors there. Peasant women, in the darkness,
had wept against these walls, praying for God's pity for their hearts.
Now the English officers were lighting cigarettes in the shelter of
a wall, the outline of their features--knightly faces--touched by the
moonlight. There were flashes of gun-fire in the sky beyond the river.
“A good night for a German air raid,” said one of the officers.
“Yes, a lovely night for killing women in their sleep,” said the other
man.
The people of Amiens were sleeping, and no light gleamed through their
shutters.