The prettiest view of Amiens was from the banks of the Somme outside
the city, on the east side, and there was a charming walk along the
tow-path, past market-gardens going down to the river on the opposite
bank, and past the gardens of little chalets built for love-in-idleness
in days of peace. They were of fantastic architecture--these Cottages
where well-to-do citizens of Amiens used to come for week-ends of
boating and fishing--and their garden gates at the end of wooden bridges
over back-waters were of iron twisted into the shapes of swans or
flowers, and there were snails of terra-cotta on the chimney-pots,
and painted woodwork on the walls, in the worst taste, yet amusing and
pleasing to the eye in their green bowers. I remember one called Mon
Idee, and wondered that any man should be proud of such a freakish
conception of a country house. They were abandoned during the war,
except one or two used for casual rendezvous between French officers and
their light o' loves, and the tow-path was used only by stray couples
who came out for loneliness, and British soldiers walking out with
French girls. The market-gardeners punted down the river in long,
shallow boats, like gondolas, laden high with cabbages, cauliflowers,
and asparagus, and farther up-stream there was a boat-house where
orderlies from the New Zealand hospital in Amiens used to get skiffs for
an hour's rowing, leaning on their oars to look at the picture of the
cathedral rising like a mirage beyond the willows and the encircling
water, with fleecy clouds above its glittering roof, or lurid
storm-clouds with the red glow of sunset beneath their wings. In
the dusk or the darkness there was silence along the banks but for a
ceaseless throbbing of distant gun-fire, rising sometimes to a fury of
drumming when the French soixante-quinze was at work, outside Roye and
the lines beyond Suzanne. It was what the French call la rafale des
tambours de la mort--the ruffle of the drums of death. The winding
waters of the Somme flowed in higher reaches through the hell of war by
Biaches and St.-Christ, this side of Peronne, where dead bodies floated
in slime and blood, and there was a litter of broken bridges and barges,
and dead trees, and ammunition-boxes. The river itself was a highway
into hell, and there came back upon its tide in slow-moving barges the
wreckage of human life, fresh from the torturers. These barges used to
unload their cargoes of maimed men at a carpenter's yard just below the
bridge, outside the city, and often as I passed I saw human bodies being
lifted out and carried on stretchers into the wooden sheds. They were
the bad cases--French boys wounded in the abdomen or lungs, or with
their limbs torn off, or hopelessly shattered. It was an agony for them
to be moved, even on the stretchers. Some of them cried out in fearful
anguish, or moaned like wounded animals, again and again. Those sounds
spoiled the music of the lapping water and the whispering of the willows
and the song of birds. The sight of these tortured boys, made useless
in life, took the color out of the flowers and the beauty out of that
vision of the great cathedral, splendid above the river. Women watched
them from the bridge, straining their eyes as the bodies were carried
to the bank. I think some of them looked for their own men. One of them
spoke to me one day.
“That is what the Germans do to our sons. Bandits! Assassins!”
“Yes. That is war, Madame.”
She put a skinny hand on my arm.
“Will it go on forever, this war? Until all the men are killed?”
“Not so long as that, Madame. Some men will be left alive. The very old
and the very young, and the lucky ones, and those behind the lines.”
“The Germans are losing many men, Monsieur?”
“Heaps, Madame. I have seen their bodies strewn about the fields.”
“Ah, that is good! I hope all German women will lose their sons, as I
have lost mine.”
“Where was that, Madame?”
“Over there.”
She pointed up the Somme.
“He was a good son. A fine boy. It seems only yesterday he lay at my
breast. My man weeps for him. They were good comrades.”
“It is sad, Madame.”
“Ah, but yes. It is sad! Au revoir, Monsieur.”
“Au revoir, Madame.”