Folkestone-Boulogne!
It was not three hundred years ago, but only three, that those words,
and that cross-Channel passage, meant the way to roads which began very
pleasantly past green fields and French villages—with roofs on their
cottages, and towers to their churches—through long avenues of poplars
growing tall and straight, past cornfields or ploughed fields,
stretching away, hedgeless, to the horizon line, until presently those
roads became filled with deep holes, and the fields were no longer
green, but bare of vegetation as though blasted by some curse of God,
and the trees were lopped and gashed, and the cottages had become
unroofed, and the churches had lost their towers, and then, at the end
of the roads, no house stood, no wall of any size above a rubble of
bricks and no man walked hand-high above the ground, but all life was
hidden in holes and ditches, and death alone was visible, where unburied
bodies lay beyond a line of sand-bags and twisted wire.
To Bertram, all that seemed, for a few moments, as he stood on the
quayside at Boulogne, three hundred years ago, and then not three years
ago, not three minutes, but still going on.
He was back from seven days’ leave. The purple-faced Major with the
megaphone could assuredly shout out “All officers back from leave to
report to the A.M.L.O.”
Eight hundred soldiers, or more, who had been as sick as dogs, would
stagger down the gangway, with tin hats, rifles, gas-masks, packs,
silent, grim, sullen, because they were going back to the “bloody old
trenches.”
A line of cars would be drawn up for staff officers from G.H.Q. With
luck one might get a lift in one of them part of the way and do some
lorry-jumping for the rest of the way, instead of waiting for the night
train, so cold, and slow, and crowded and dark.
A convoy of ambulances would soon arrive, with the usual crowd of
badly-wounded—the fellows with Blighty wounds—and one would see their
muddy boots, soles outward, when the flaps were drawn back. Surely the
war was going on, for ever, and ever, and ever, as it had seemed to
those who enlisted in 1914 or afterwards. . . .
No, all that was finished! It was merely a dream and a memory. Bertram
saw the last representative of the British Army which had poured out
here in tides—a dapper young sergeant, in khaki, doing some job with
the customs officers or the French police. All else had vanished, even
the A.M.L.O. with his megaphone!
With this realisation, Bertram felt as though he were the sole survivor
of the war, the only man left alive from that great massacre. None of
those people around him had had anything to do with it. In the
smoking-carriage where he took a corner seat, were two
prosperous-looking Jews with big cigars, two American business men, too
old to have been in the last push, an elderly Frenchman, who bought _Le
Matin_ and the _Cri de Paris_.
Along the corridor, and in other carriages were groups of people going
to Paris, or beyond Paris to other parts of Europe, where the sun was
shining and life “gay.” They were “smart” people, still able to afford
the pleasures of life, in spite of the downfall of foreign markets,
stagnant trade, unemployment, high taxes. They had forgotten the war and
its agonies.
No one in his carriage bothered to look out of the window as they neared
Amiens, where one could still see on a far hillside a line of
earthworks, which had been thrown up hurriedly as a last line of defence
after the Germans had broken through on March 21st and come very close
to the old city—as close as Villers Bretonneux on the high ground
outside.
Bertram did not travel as far as Paris, though he was tempted to go as
far, because Joyce was there. It was at Amiens that he left the train,
as the beginning of his wanderings through the old places of war, to
find out what the people there were thinking, how they were living,
according to Bernard Hall’s instructions.
A crowd of ghosts walked with him up the rue des Trois Cailloux—the
Street of the Three Pebbles. They were the Comrades of the Great War,
who had crowded that street when great battles were being fought, year
after year, in the fields of the Somme. He remembered them mostly on
rainy days. It seemed always to be raining in Amiens, in war time. The
officers wore trench-coats plastered with mud and chalk. The men
staggered under their packs. The rain beat down on their tin hats.
French _poilus—Fusiliers Marins, Chasseurs_, infantry of the line,
Zouaves, sloped up and down, staring into the shops, drinking _porto
blanc_ and fouler liquids in little drinking dens strictly against the
law.
English Tommies walked with little French girls down the narrow side
streets, went with them into dark old houses up cut-throat alleys.
Australian soldiers slouched around with hard, lean, leathery faces,
looking for trouble and often finding it.
Crowds of Jocks with muddy knees, wet kilts, tin hats, slanted over
Harry Lauder faces, wandered about in a grim mirthless way.
Staff officers motored into the town from Army Headquarters, or Corps,
or Division.
Cavalry officers rode in and put their horses in the back yard of the
Hotel du Rhin.
Officers of every battalion of the British Army surged along the narrow
street—the Street of the Three Pebbles. They were down from the line,
while their Division was in reserve, or were passing through on their
way to the line. Here, in Amiens, were shops, pretty women, restaurants,
cock-tail bars, civilian people, children, roofed houses,—the last
outpost of civilised life this side of the filthy fields, and lice, and
shell-fire, and sudden death.
Their ghosts walked with Bertram now. He stood at the corner of the rue
Amiral Courbet. It was there that he had stood one night, talking to a
French girl. It was very dark, for there was no lamp allowed after
daylight. She flashed a pocket lamp in his face, and revealed her own,
white, with red lips, and black laughing eyes—a pretty witch for a
young man down from a battlefield for one night of life.
“_Comment ça va, mon chou? La vie est triste, n’cst-ce pas? Il n’y a
qu’une consolation, un seul moyen d’oubli. Un peu de rire, un peu
d’amour! Qu’est-ce-que tu en penses? Veux-tu?_”
A sad life, she said, and only one consolation, one way of
forgetfulness. A little laughter, a little love. What did he think about
it?
He’d thought a lot about it. He was twenty, then, in 1916. A boy, but
doing a man’s job, and with no life insurance for even another week, or
another day, up there, beyond Amiens, this side of Contalmaison still in
German hands. He agreed with this girl who had come up to him out of the
darkness. A little laughter, a little love. Worth having before the next
attack. Worth grabbing at on a rainy night in war-time, and perhaps the
very last night on earth. Who could tell? Yet something had made him
refuse the offer, some fear, or law, or mental prohibition. His mother
had whispered a warning to him about “bad women.” His two sisters,
Dorothy and Susan, adored him in those days, believed him spotless. He
had been brought up in a certain code, which had become part of him,
inescapable without stricken conscience, despite the smashing of mental
and moral foundations by the earthquake of war.
“_Rien à faire!_” he had told the girl, not roughly, poor kid, but
decidedly. Nothing doing.
“_Mais oui, petit officier!_”
She had grabbed his belt, pulled him towards her, kissed his face, wet
in the rain, with her wet lips.
It was here, at this very corner, in July of 1916!
Bertram walked down the next turning to the right, leading to the
Cathedral. On the other side was a gap in a row of houses newly roofed.
It was boarded round. There, in that gap, had been “Charley’s Bar,” the
great cock-tail resort of thousands of young officers who drank quickly
because there might not be much time between them and death.
Some of them were still alive, but not many of those who fought in the
Somme battles. Izzard was one of them still alive, that fellow in the
funny shop at Ottery. He had drunk like a fish in this place before it
was knocked to bits by an air bomb in that March of ’18. Bertram had
drunk with him, eggnogs, and champagne cock-tails. They had both been
thoroughly “blind” on more than one afternoon, and slept themselves
sober in the Hotel du Rhin before dining at the Godebert in the rue des
Jacobins, where Izzard and he had flirted outrageously with the pretty
Marguérite, but without much success as she was coveted by Staff
officers, and Brigadiers, and even a Major-General.
It was to the Hotel du Rhin that Bertram now went, still walking with
ghosts and ancient memories.
The last time he had been there its stairs and passages were strewn with
broken glass, and with several other officers he had sat in a cellar
listening to houses falling with tremendous crashes, while a fleet of
Gothas overhead played merry hell all through a night which was the
blackest in the war.
His machine-gun company had been cut to bits outside Villers Bretonneux.
Christy had been wounded in the lung and taken away by the
stretcher-bearers. The Germans had made a clean break through and there
was very little up the road to bar their way to Amiens. Bertram had been
ordered to join up with another crowd for a last stand somewhere near
Boves. The crowd had gone missing, it was impossible to search for them
at night, and the air-raid over Amiens was the worst thing he’d seen in
that way.
It had begun at seven-thirty in the evening, with two explosions outside
the windows, smashing them, and filling the dancing-room with splinters.
The lady manager was there, doing accounts with a young staff officer.
She had yellow hair, and two bright spots of colour on her cheeks, and
wonderful courage. Her face was pale beneath the bright spots of colour,
but that was her only sign of fear. Joseph, the waiter with the shrill
voice and high-pitched laugh, disappeared in the direction of the
cellar. The other waiter—what was his name?—an old fellow, with
side-whiskers, wandered about cursing the _sales Boches_.
A frightful and fantastic night, with dead men and dead horses in the
street outside. Now like a dream! Since then, Amiens had tidied up its
streets, re-built many of its houses—though not the great gap between
the rue des Trois Cailloux and the rue des Jacobins.
An orchestra was playing in the Hotel du Rhin. American tourists and
French commercial travellers were feeding in the room where Bertram had
sat down on that night of tragedy, with three mayors who had lost their
towns, and officers who had lost their Divisions, wondering how long it
would be before the head of a German column marched into Amiens. An
orchestra fiddling jazz tunes to American tourists!
But there, miracle of miracles, was the lady manager with the yellow
hair, and Joseph, the shrill-voiced waiter, and the old boy with the
side whiskers! Bertram went up to the lady manager, and greeted her with
emotion, as one whom he had known in the wonderful years, and as one who
remembered.
“Still here, Madame! You remember me, perhaps? That night of the
air-raid, and other nights!”
She shook hands with him, and pretended to remember his face, though
thousands of young officers had passed through this hotel in the years
of war.
“What memories, monsieur! Unforgettable to us, though others have
forgotten!”
“Amiens is almost restored,” he said.
“There’s still much to be done.”
“How strange it must be for you, now that there are no British soldiers
in France! This hotel used to be stuffed with officers of ours.”
“We get tourists to see the battlefields. English officers come up like
you, and say ‘Do you remember me, madame?’ Sometimes I’m tempted to say,
‘Do you remember the agony of France in those years of war?’”
“Why that, Madame? We cannot forget.”
She shrugged her shoulders and smiled bitterly.
“Your Lloyd George forgets. He makes friends with the Germans. He wishes
to let them off their punishment. He will let them get strong again, so
that one day they will come back and crush us.”
Bertram laughed.
“He wants peace in Europe. He wants to prevent another war. Anyhow,
England doesn’t forget the heroism of France nor her sufferings.”
“_C’est bien!_”
She bent to her table, and added up a column of figures.
In the yard an American tourist enquired how long it would take to drive
to Château Thierry.
That night Bertram met another woman whom he had known in Amiens in the
years of war. It was the chambermaid, and she remembered him.
“Certainly you were one of the young officers who used to stay here in
the war?”
He shook hands with her, and said, “I’m the officer whose socks you
mended once. You told me about your lover, Jean, who was killed at
Verdun. We talked long that night.”
Yes, she remembered him, his very face, those socks she had mended, that
talk.
“_Tiens! Quel plaisir!_”
She was glad to find that he was still alive. A middle-aged woman of
plain features, she had not been much of a temptation to young officers
down from the line. Yet some of them, deprived of womanhood, for months
on end, had made amorous advances even to her, which she had repulsed
with loud laughter, in a heavy-handed way. She had mothered some of the
younger men, in a peasant way, and had given them good advice about the
girls who lured them in the streets, with their flash lamps, like that
one at the corner of the rue Amiral Courbet. Her lover, Jean, a butcher,
had been killed at Verdun, and she had wept a little in Bertram’s room,
and then laughed, and said she supposed men were made to be killed that
way, like sheep to be eaten. “_C’est la vie._” It was life and war,
which would last as long as the Germans were part of the human race.
Now she leaned on her broom, talking to Bertram about the changes since
the war. Prices were high. It was hard for poor people to live. The
bourgeoisie were making plenty of money, but the Government was ruined,
she was told. The Germans evaded their payments. Anyhow, no German gold
came to the people who were trying to build up their cottages again in
the battlefields. She had a cousin at Lens. A mother of six. They had no
water, no gas, no stone for building, no money for reconstruction. Three
years after war they were still miserable. Victory had not brought
happiness to France, nor safety. The Boches would come back again one
day. It would begin all over again. A pity they weren’t all killed when
the French and English had the chance! Now the English hated the French,
and loved the Germans, for some reason!
“What makes you think that?” asked Bertram.
“It is true, is it not?” asked this woman, Jeanne, quite simply.
She was surprised, and incredulous, when he told her that she was
mistaken, and that the English loved France still, and desired to help
her.
“What gives you the idea that England hates France?”
She said she read _Le Matin_, which told her so. It was the same in the
_Journal d’Amiens_. Everybody spoke about it—especially _les garçons_,
who were always talking politics. She didn’t understand these things,
but she picked up her news from the others. It was public opinion. No
one could go against public opinion. _C’est formidable, l’opinion
publique!_