Now It Can Be Told Part 36

"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 'G.o.d 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 ma.s.ses, 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 d.a.m.ned 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 G.o.d. Praise Christ and ask for victory."

"Let them. It may do them a bit of good. It seems to me G.o.d is above all the squabbles of humanity-doesn't care a d.a.m.n 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 d.a.m.nation in the world. It creates cruelty and tyranny, and all b.l.o.o.d.y things. Surely if we believe in G.o.d-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 ma.s.s of masonry with all its pinnacles and b.u.t.tresses 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 pa.s.sed across these pavements through the great doors there. Peasant women, in the darkness, had wept against these walls, praying for G.o.d'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.

XIII

Coming away from the cathedral through a side-street going into the rue des Trois Cailloux, I used to pa.s.s the Palais de Justice-a big, grim building, with a long flight of steps leading up to its doorways, and above the portico the figure of Justice, blind, holding her scales. There was no justice there during the war, but rooms full of French soldiers with smashed faces, blind, many of them, like that woman in stone. They used to sit, on fine days, on the flight of steps, a tragic exhibition of war for pa.s.sers-by to see. Many of them revealed no faces, but were white masks of cotton-wool, bandaged round their heads. Others showed only the upper parts of their faces, and the places where their jaws had been were tied up with white rags. There were men without noses, and men with half their scalps torn away. French children used to stare through the railings at them, gravely, with childish curiosity, without pity. English soldiers gave them a pa.s.sing glance, and went on to places where they might be made like this, without faces, or jaws, or noses, or eyes. By their uniforms I saw that there were Cha.s.seurs Alpins, and Cha.s.seurs d'Afrique, and young infantrymen of the line, and gunners. They sat, without restlessness, watching the pa.s.sers-by if they had eyes to see, or, if blind, feeling the breeze about them, and listening to the sound of pa.s.sing feet.

XIV

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 h.e.l.l 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 h.e.l.l, 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 pa.s.sed 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! a.s.sa.s.sins!"

"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."

XV

There was a big hospital in Amiens, close to the railway station, organized by New Zealand doctors and nurses. I went there one day in the autumn of 1914, when the army of von Kluck had pa.s.sed through the city and gone beyond. The German doctors had left behind the instruments abandoned by an English unit sharing the retreat. The French doctor who took me round told me the enemy had behaved well in Amiens. At least he had refrained from atrocities. As I went through the long wards I did not guess that one day I should be a patient there. That was two years later, at the end of the Somme battles. I was worn out and bloodless after five months of hard strain and nervous wear and tear. Some bug had bitten me up in the fields where lay the unburied dead.

"Trench fever," said the doctor.

"You look in need of a rest," said the matron. "My word, how white you are! Had a hard time, eh, like the rest of them?"

I lay in bed at the end of the officers' ward, with only one other bed between me and the wall. That was occupied by the gunner-general of the New Zealand Division. Opposite was another row of beds in which officers lay sleeping, or reading, or lying still with wistful eyes.

"That's all right. You're going to die!" said a rosy-cheeked young orderly, after taking my temperature and feeling my pulse. It was his way of cheering a patient up. He told me how he had been torpedoed in the Dardanelles while he was ill with dysentery. He indulged in reminiscences with the New Zealand general who had a grim gift of silence, but glinting eyes. In the bed on my left was a handsome boy with a fine, delicate face, a subaltern in the Coldstream Guards, with a pile of books at his elbow-all by Anatole France. It was the first time I had ever laid in hospital, and I felt amazingly weak and helpless, but interested in my surroundings. The day nurse, a tall, buxom New Zealand girl whom the general chaffed with sarcastic humor, and who gave back more than she got, went off duty with a cheery, "Good night, all!" and the night nurse took her place, and made a first visit to each bed. She was a dainty little woman with the complexion of a delicate rose and large, luminous eyes. She had a nunlike look, utterly pure, but with a spiritual fire in those shining eyes of hers for all these men, who were like children in her hands. They seemed glad at her coming.

"Good evening, sister!" said one man after another, even one who had laid with his eyes closed for an hour or more, with a look of death on his face.

She knelt down beside each one, saying, "How are you to-night?" and chatting in a low voice, inaudible to the bed beyond. From one bed I heard a boy's voice say: "Oh, don't go yet, sister! You have only given me two minutes, and I want ten, at least. I am pa.s.sionately in love with you, you know, and I have been waiting all day for your beauty!"

There was a gust of laughter in the ward.