For several weeks Bertram wandered about the old places, mostly a-foot,
or getting lifts in country carts, once or twice taking a train which
crawled from Arras to Lens, and from Bapaume to Péronne.
He had wayside conversations with peasant men and women, young farmers
who had been _poilus_, commercial travellers from Paris and Lille,
mayors of towns wiped off the map, but now on the sites of their old
_mairies_ in wooden huts, superintending _la reconstruction_ which, so
far, didn’t seem to amount to very much.
He passed the night in wooden _estaminets_ in fields where once British
youth had been swept with fire year after year—Ypres, Hooge, St.
Julien, Dickebusch, Souchez, Neuville Vitesse, many other places haunted
surely by boys he had passed along the roads.
The trenches had silted in. He wandered about, and poked about with his
stick, trying to find some of his old dug-outs, and though he had known
every inch of this ground, every hummock and hollow, could not find
them, for the most part, only one, indeed.
He found a dug-out in which he had lived, not far from Bourlon Wood, by
the ruins of Havrincourt Château. The earth had silted there too, but he
borrowed a spade from a friendly young farmer near by, and unearthed the
wooden steps, and cleared out the entrance, and went inside. The farmer
gave him a bit of candle, and would have come inside with him, unless
Bertram had said, “Wait a few minutes. I want to be in here alone!” The
man understood with the quick sympathy of the French for sentiment like
that.
It _was_ sentiment, but also more than that. This was a ghost chamber of
tragic memories, the unburying of the dead past. The candle burned
straight with a thin flame. By its light Bertram found a wooden table,
and two chairs, made out of boxes. It was Bill Huggett, who had knocked
them together. On the table were things which had belonged to
Bertram—an empty tin of John Cotton tobacco which Joyce had sent him, a
cracked mug which he had found in Havrincourt Wood, an old envelope
addressed to him.
“Major Bertram Pollard, D.S.O., M.C.
Machine Gun Corps, B.E.F.”
It was in Joyce’s handwriting. Good God! Fancy finding it here again,
moist and muddy as the walls had oozed about it and earth had dropped!
How eagerly he must have opened it when it came! Certainly he had kissed
it before opening it. Now Joyce was his wife, away in Paris or
somewhere, without him.
He sat very still on one of the boxes, with his elbows on the table, as
often he had sat in this hole at the end of ’17. Christy had come down
the steps to report the state of things outside. Old Fritz was putting
up a bit of a barrage. Bourlon Wood was soaked with gas. He had told the
men to keep their masks handy. A counter-attack was expected within the
next twelve hours. A man had just had his leg blown off in Beer Alley.
Bertram’s soul lived again in that time. The smell of the dug-out, that
thin candle flame, these oozy walls, this table, were no more real than
that dead past, yet as real. The past was present. The present was past.
There was no difference. All that he had seen in war, the death of many
good men, the agony of the wounded, the stench of death, the comradeship
of young officers, their laughter, Christy’s tears when his nerve broke,
his own fears of fear, the heroism of common men, the endless slaughter,
the waste of youth and life, came back to his mind, as drowning men are
said to see all their life as in a mirror. Was it all going to happen
again? Bernard Hall thought so, unless some divine change happened in
human nature by “intensive education”! Jeanne, the chambermaid, thought
so! Nearly all those French people with whom he had talked along the
wayside believed that after a few years, fifteen, twenty, twenty-five,
_les Boches_ would come back again for vengeance.
As the candle flickered and shortened in a pool of wax on the table,
Bertram, sitting there with its feeble light surrounded by darkness,
heard a voice speak to his soul, very clearly, as once before. They were
the words his mother had spoken on her death-bed. “Bertram, work for
Peace. Promise me—”
He raised his head sharply. Had he heard those words only in
imagination, or had they been spoken to him? He had heard them clearly,
with distinct utterance, yet it must have been only one of the memories
brought back in that dug-out.
Yes, he would work for peace, so that boys now young needn’t live in
holes like this until they were gassed to death or blown to bits, or
buried alive. He would work for Peace, as far as he could understand the
chaos of life, as far as he could write words of warning, and
conciliation, and commonsense, and truth anyhow.
The candle guttered out. He struck a match, picked up the envelope in
Joyce’s handwriting, and groped his way up, and out.
The young farmer was waiting for him, and stared at him a moment, with a
queer smile in his eyes.
“A droll life in those days. With good moments, and many sad, eh? Sacred
Name! I laugh sometimes when I think of the blood, the death, the lice,
the mud, the _ordure_ of it all.”
“Would you go through it again?”
The man shrugged his shoulders.
“To save France one would go through it again. Not willingly. But what
else? When the Germans attack again, France will fight again.”
“You think they will attack again?”
“Naturally. They will want revenge. When they have renewed their
strength, they will come back. It is human nature, monsieur.”
“Can France stand another war?”
The young peasant farmer stared across the field to Bourlon Wood, so
quiet now, so safe.
“Not alone. But we have Poland, Serbia, Czecho-Slovakia.”
“England?”
The man looked uncertainly at Bertram.
“Monsieur can tell me, perhaps.”
“What do you think?”
The young Frenchman shrugged his shoulders again.
“England does what pays her best. Industry, commerce, count with her
most. It’s the English character. Hard bargaining, eh?”
Bertram reminded him how many men Britain had sent to France, in time of
war, how many bodies of her youth lay still in French soil. Was that
hard bargaining? Or self-sacrifice, for honour’s sake?
“The _Boches_ were England’s trade rivals. Their Fleet was a menace to
_Grande Bretagne_. Is it not so, Monsieur.”
Bertram sat with him on a hummock of earth, shared some sandwiches with
him, and tried, in simple phrases, with an emotion that he felt, to
assure this peasant who had been a _poilu_ of France, that England had a
soul above shop-keeping, that her share in the war had been not only
enormous in sacrifice, but heroic in ideal.
The man listened to him with patience, but also with amusement.
“Monsieur is an idealist! After experience of war?” That was strange. He
himself was a realist. Nations, like individuals, would fight for
self-interest, to save their skins, their land, their women. They would
fight to get revenge, to kill people they hated, because of pride, and
more because of injury, to capture their trade, or their territory. It
was natural. It had always been like that. It would never change.
Bertram saw in this young farmer the type of French manhood, the very
soul of France. Through centuries of history, men like this, on this
soil, had fought for their land and their women, for conquests, for
pride in France. They had been invaded, harassed, and ravaged. They had
lived always between the plough and the sword, first one, then the
other, turn and turn about. Peace was only an interlude, either when
France was weak, in defence, or when France was strong, in aggression,
in contraction or expansion, as an Empire or Republic.
The French mother rocking her babe in the cradle knew in her heart that
one day this man-child would march away to battle. It was in the songs
she sang to send it to sleep. The boy knew that when manhood came he
would leave home for the barracks, to learn soldiering as he had learnt
farming. So it had been in the time of the Valois, in the reign of Henri
IV., before Burgundy was France, before the Revolution, all through the
Napoleonic era, ever afterwards, till 1918, with brief spells for
recovery, the binding of wounds, the growing of another generation of
boys. “_C’etait toujours comme ça. Ça ne changera jamais._” It was
always like that. It would never change.
Bertram glanced sideways at the man; thirty-five, perhaps, with a
strong, hard profile, ruddy skin, fair moustache. A Frank of northern
stock. Teutonic rather than Latin, though, perhaps, with a strain of
Latin blood. The typical _poilu_ of Picardy, Normandy, Artois.
“France cannot afford another war,” Bertram said; “it would bleed her to
death. Must there always be conflict? Why not make friends with the
Germans?”
The young farmer laughed loudly, and spat.
“Friends with the _Boches_? Does one make friends with a hungry tiger?
If one can’t kill it at once, one digs a ditch round one’s house and
keeps one’s gun ready. So I have heard! There’s still another way to
treat a tiger. Cut its claws and cage it. That is our way with Germany
now.”
“If the tiger escapes and grows its claws?”
“There is still the gun.”
“If the gun gets rusty?”
“Then the tiger gets its meal. He’s a fool who lets his gun get rusty.”
“If it breaks, and he has not money to buy another?”
“That is unfortunate! The tiger wins.”
He was a fatalist. Also he assumed that the German by nature was a
tiger. Was that true? Bertram thought of all the German prisoners he’d
seen in time of war, some he had helped to capture—simple, straw-haired
young peasants, who hated war, and loved peace, and the arts and crafts
and labours of peace, not soldiers by instinct and passion, like the
French, but soldiers by coercion, by discipline, by sentiment; brave,
efficient, obedient, but without fire. They were not “tigers,” as far as
he had seen them, but rather sheepish fellows. It was not utterly
impossible that they might abandon the hope of revenge against France,
if France would abandon her passion of hate, her uttermost demands of
punishment and payment, her pound of flesh.
It was useless to argue with this peasant-farmer, though he had a clear
intelligence, and, like most Frenchmen of his class, a surprising gift
of words.
“England is a good friend,” he said, at the end of this conversation.
“There must never be cause of quarrel between England and France. The
very dead would rise out of these fields to protest.”
It was here, by Havrincourt Château that English and Scots had advanced
on a day of November in 1917, with Tanks leading the way towards
Cambrai. Now it was quiet in the fields, and birds were singing, and no
smoke clouds burst in Bourlon Wood.
The young Frenchman shook hands with him and smiled.
“_Au revoir, mon camarade! Comme vous-même, je n’aime pas la guerre.
Mais, que voulez-vous? Il vient quand il vient!_”
He had no love for war, but when it came, it came! Terrible philosophy,
upon which no peace could be built, no forward step taken by educated
humanity. To this peasant, perhaps to all his kind, war was as
inevitable as natural calamities, like rains and droughts, earthquakes,
and thunderbolts. And the German was still the German—the Blonde Beast.
_Les sales Boches!_