Now It Can Be Told Part 33

"It was from his woman, his German grue. Perhaps even now she doesn't know he's dead. She thinks of him wearing this next to his heart. 'Cre nom de Dieu! It was I that killed him a week ago!"

He held up something in his hand, and the light through the estaminet window gleamed on it. It was a woman's lock of hair, like fine-spun gold.

The two women gave a shrill cry of surprise, and then screamed with laughter. One of them tried to grab the hair, but the poilu held it high, beyond her reach, with a gruff command of, "Hands off!" Other soldiers and women in the estaminet gathered round staring at the yellow tress, laughing, making ribald conjectures as to the character of the woman from whose head it had come. They agreed that she was fat and ugly, like all German women, and a foul s.l.u.t.

"She'll never kiss that fellow again," said one man. "Our old one has cut the throat of that pig of a Boche!"

"I'd like to cut off all her hair and tear the clothes off her back," said one of the women. "The dirty drab with yellow hair! They ought to be killed, every one of them, so that the human race should by rid of them!"

"Her lover is a bit of clay, anyhow," said the other woman. "A bit of dirt, as our poilus will do for all of them."

The soldier with the woman's hair in his hand stroked it across his forefinger.

"All the same it is pretty. Like gold, eh? I think of the woman, sometimes. With blue eyes, like a German girl I kissed in Paris-a dancing-girl!"

There was a howl of laughter from the two women.

"The old one is drunk. He is amorous with the German cow!"

"I will keep it as a mascot," said the poilu, scrunching it up and thrusting it into his pouch. "It'll keep me in mind of that saligaud of a German officer I killed. He was a chic fellow, tout de meme. A boy."

VI

Australians slouched up the Street of the Three Pebbles with a grim look under their wide-brimmed hats, having come down from Pozieres, where it was always h.e.l.l in the days of the Somme fighting. I liked the look of them, dusty up to the eyes in summer, muddy up to their eyes in winter-these gipsy fellows, scornful of discipline for discipline's sake, but desperate fighters, as simple as children in their ways of thought and speech (except for frightful oaths), and looking at life, this life of war and this life in Amiens, with frank, curious eyes, and a kind of humorous contempt for death, and disease, and English Tommies, and French girls, and "the whole d.a.m.ned show," as they called it. They were lawless except for the laws to which their souls gave allegiance. They behaved as the equals of all men, giving no respect to generals or staff-officers or the devils of h.e.l.l. There was a primitive spirit of manhood in them, and they took what they wanted, and were ready to pay for it in coin or in disease or in wounds. They had no conceit of themselves in a little, vain way, but they reckoned themselves the only fighting-men, simply, and without boasting. They were hard as steel, and finely tempered. Some of them were ruffians, but most of them were, I imagine, like those English yeomen who came into France with the Black Prince, men who lived "rough," close to nature, of st.u.r.dy independence, good-humored, though fierce in a fight, and ruthless. That is how they seemed to me, in a general way, though among them were boys of a more delicate fiber, and sensitive, if one might judge by their clear-cut features and wistful eyes. They had money to spend beyond the dreams of our poor Tommy. Six shillings and sixpence a day and remittances from home. So they pushed open the doors of any restaurant in Amiens and sat down to table next to English officers, not abashed, and ordered anything that pleased their taste, and wine in plenty.

In that High Street of Amiens one day I saw a crowd gathered round an Australian, so tall that he towered over all other heads. It was at the corner of the rue de Corps Nu sans Teste, the Street of the Naked Body without a Head, and I suspected trouble. As I pressed on the edge of the crowd I heard the Australian ask, in a loud, slow drawl, whether there was any officer about who could speak French. He asked the question gravely, but without anxiety. I pushed through the crowd and said:

"I speak French. What's the trouble?"

I saw then that, like the French poilu I have described, this tall Australian was in the grasp of a French agent de police, a small man of whom he took no more notice than if a fly had settled on his wrist. The Australian was not drunk. I could see that he had just drunk enough to make his brain very clear and solemn. He explained the matter deliberately, with a slow choice of words, as though giving evidence of high matters before a court. It appeared that he had gone into the estaminet opposite with four friends. They had ordered five gla.s.ses of porto, for which they had paid twenty centimes each, and drank them. They then ordered five more gla.s.ses of porto and paid the same price, and drank them. After this they took a stroll up and down the street, and were bored, and went into the estaminet again, and ordered five more gla.s.ses of porto. It was then the trouble began. But it was not the Australian who began it. It was the woman behind the bar. She served five gla.s.ses more of porto and asked for thirty centimes each.

"Twenty centimes," said the Australian. "Vingt, Madame."

"Mais non! Trente centimes, chaque verre! Thirty, my old one. Six sous, comprenez?"

"No comprennye," said the Australian. "Vingt centimes, or go to h.e.l.l."

The woman demanded the thirty centimes; kept on demanding with a voice more shrill.

"It was her voice that vexed me," said the Australian. "That and the b.l.o.o.d.y injustice."

The five Australians drank the five gla.s.ses of porto, and the tall Australian paid the thirty centimes each without further argument. Life is too short for argument. Then, without words, he took each of the five gla.s.ses, broke it at the stem, and dropped it over the counter.

"You will see, sir," he said, gravely, "the justice of the matter on my side."

But when they left the estaminet the woman came shrieking into the street after them. Hence the agent de police and the grasp on the Australian's wrist.

"I should be glad if you would explain the case to this little Frenchman," said the soldier. "If he does not take his hand off my wrist I shall have to kill him."

"Perhaps a little explanation might serve," I said.

I spoke to the agent de police at some length, describing the incident in the cafe. I took the view that the lady was wrong in increasing the price so rapidly. The agent agreed gravely. I then pointed out that the Australian was a very large-sized man, and that in spite of his quietude he was a man in the habit of killing Germans. He also had a curious dislike of policemen.

"It appears to me," I said, politely, "that for the sake of your health the other end of the street is better than this."

The agent de police released his grip from the Australian's wrist and saluted me.

"Vous avez raison, monsieur. Je vous remercie. Ces Australiens sont vraiment formidables, n'est-ce pas?"

He disappeared through the crowd, who were smiling with a keen sense of understanding. Only the lady of the estaminet was unappeased.

"They are bandits, these Australians!" she said to the world about her.

The tall Australian shook hands with me in a comradely way.

"Thanks for your trouble," he said. "It was the injustice I couldn't stick. I always pay the right price. I come from Australia."

I watched him go slouching down the rue des Trois Cailloux, head above all the pa.s.sers-by. He would be at Pozieres again next day.

VII

I was billeted for a time with other war correspondents in an old house in the rue Amiral Courbet, on the way to the river Somme from the Street of the Three Pebbles, and with a view of the spire of the cathedral, a wonderful thing of delicate lines and tracery, graven with love in every line, by Muirhead Bone, and from my dormer window. It was the house of Mme. de la Rochefoucauld, who lived farther out of the town, but drove in now and then to look at this little mansion of hers at the end of a courtyard behind wrought-iron gates. It was built in the days before the Revolution, when it was dangerous to be a fine lady with the name of Rochefoucauld. The furniture was rather scanty, and was of the Louis Quinze and Empire periods. Some portraits of old gentlemen and ladies of France, with one young fellow in a scarlet coat, who might have been in the King's Company of the Guard about the time when Wolfe scaled the Heights of Abraham, summoned up the ghosts of the house, and I liked to think of them in these rooms and going in their sedan-chairs across the little courtyard to high ma.s.s at the cathedral or to a game of bezique in some other mansion, still standing in the quiet streets of Amiens, unless in a day in March of 1918 they were destroyed with many hundreds of houses by bombs and gun-fire. My little room was on the floor below the garret, and here at night, after a long day in the fields up by Pozieres or Martinpuich or beyond, by Ligny-Tilloy, on the way to Bapaume, in the long struggle and slaughter over every inch of ground, I used to write my day's despatch, to be taken next day (it was before we were allowed to use the military wires) by King's Messenger to England.

Those articles, written at high speed, with an impressionism born out of many new memories of tragic and heroic scenes, were interrupted sometimes by air-bombardments. Hostile airmen came often to Amiens during the Somme fighting, to unload their bombs as near to the station as they could guess, which was not often very near. Generally they killed a few women and children and knocked a few poor houses and a shop or two into a wild rubbish heap of bricks and timber. While I wrote, listening to the crashing of gla.s.s and the anti-aircraft fire of French guns from the citadel, I used to wonder subconsciously whether I should suddenly be hurled into chaos at the end of an unfinished sentence, and now and again in spite of my desperate conflict with time to get my message done (the censors were waiting for it downstairs) I had to get up and walk into the pa.s.sage to listen to the infernal noise in the dark city of Amiens. But I went back again and bent over my paper, concentrating on the picture of war which I was trying to set down so that the world might see and understand, until once again, ten minutes later or so, my will-power would weaken and the little devil of fear would creep up to my heart and I would go uneasily to the door again to listen. Then once more to my writing... Nothing touched the house in the rue Amiral Courbet while we were there. But it was into my bedroom that a sh.e.l.l went crashing after that night in March when Amiens was badly wrecked, and we listened to the noise of destruction all around us from a room in the Hotel du Rhin on the other side of the way. I should have been sleeping still if I had slept that night in my little old bedroom when the sh.e.l.l paid a visit.

There were no lights allowed at night in Amiens, and when I think of darkness I think of that city in time of war, when all the streets were black tunnels and one fumbled one's way timidly, if one had no flash-lamp, between the old houses with their pointed gables, coming into sharp collision sometimes with other wayfarers. But up to midnight there were little lights flashing for a second and then going out, along the Street of the Three Pebbles and in the dark corners of side-streets. They were carried by girls seeking to entice English officers on their way to their billets, and they cl.u.s.tered like glowworms about the side door of the Hotel du Rhin after nine o'clock, and outside the railings of the public gardens. As one pa.s.sed, the bright bull's-eye from a pocket torch flashed in one's eyes, and in the radiance of it one saw a girl's face, laughing, coming very close, while her fingers felt for one's badge.

"How dark it is to-night, little captain! Are you not afraid of darkness? I am full of fear. It is so sad, this war, so dismal! It is comradeship that helps one now!... A little love... a little laughter, and then-who knows?"

A little love... a little laughter-alluring words to boys out of one battle, expecting another, hating it all, lonely in their souls because of the thought of death, in exile from their own folk, in exile from all womanhood and tender, feminine things, up there in the ditches and sh.e.l.lcraters of the desert fields, or in the huts of headquarters staffs, or in reserve camps behind the fighting-line. A little love, a little laughter, and then-who knows? The sirens had whispered their own thoughts. They had translated into pretty French the temptation of all the little devils in their souls.

"Un peu d'amour-"

One flash-lamp was enough for two down a narrow street toward the riverside, and then up a little dark stairway to a lamp-lit room... Presently this poor boy would be stricken with disease and wish himself dead.

VIII