Books: Now It Can Be Told

P >> Philip Gibbs >> Now It Can Be Told

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Mademoiselle was a serious musician, so her mother told me, but her
musical studies were seriously interrupted by business and air raids,
which one day ceased in Amiens altogether after a night of horror,
when hundreds of houses were smashed to dust and many people killed,
and the Germans brought their guns close to the city--close enough to
scatter high velocities about its streets--and the population came up
out of their cellars, shaken by the terror of the night, and fled. I
passed the bookshop where Mademoiselle was locking up the door of this
house which had escaped by greater luck than its neighbors. She turned
as I passed and raised her hand with a grave gesture of resignation
and courage. "Ils ne passeront pas!" she said. It was the spirit of
the courage of French womanhood which spoke in those words.

III

That was in the last phase of the war, but the Street of the Three
Pebbles had been tramped up and down for two years before then by the
British armies on the Somme, with the French on their right. I was
never tired of watching those crowds and getting into the midst of
them, and studying their types. All the types of young English manhood
came down this street, and some of their faces showed the strain and
agony of war, especially toward the end of the Somme battles, after
four months or more of slaughter. I saw boys with a kind of hunted
look in their eyes; and Death was the hunter. They stared into the
shop windows in a dazed way, or strode along with packs on their
backs, looking neither to the right nor to the left, and white,
haggard faces, as expressionless as masks. Tomorrow or the next day,
perhaps, the Hunter would track them down. Other English officers
showed no sign at all of apprehension or lack of nerve-control,
although the psychologist would have detected disorder of soul in the
rather deliberate note of hilarity with which they greeted their
friends, in gusts of laughter, for no apparent cause, at "Charlie's
bar," where they would drink three cocktails apiece on an empty
stomach, and in their tendency to tell tales of horror as things that
were very funny. They dined and wined in Amiens at the "Rhin," the
"Godebert," or the "Cathedrale," with a kind of spiritual exaltation
in good food and drink, as though subconsciously they believed that
this might be their last dinner in life, with good pals about them.
They wanted to make the best of it--and damn the price. In that spirit
many of them went after other pleasures--down the byways of the city,
and damned the price again, which was a hellish one. Who blames them?
It was war that was to blame, and those who made war possible.

Down the rue des Trois Cailloux, up and down, up and down, went
English, and Scottish, and Irish, and Welsh, and Canadian, and
Australian, and New Zealand fighting--men. In the winter they wore
their trench-coats all splashed and caked up to the shoulders with the
white, chalky mud of the Somme battlefields, and their top--boots and
puttees were plastered with this mud, and their faces were smeared
with it after a lorry drive or a tramp down from the line. The rain
beat with a metallic tattoo on their steel hats. Their packs were all
sodden.

French poilus, detrained at Amiens station for a night on their way to
some other part of the front, jostled among British soldiers, and
their packs were a wonder to see. They were like traveling tinkers,
with pots and pans and boots slung about their faded blue coats, and
packs bulging with all the primitive needs of life in the desert of
the battlefields beyond civilization. They were unshaven, and wore
their steel casques low over their foreheads, without gaiety, without
the means of buying a little false hilarity, but grim and sullen--
looking and resentful of English soldiers walking or talking with
French cocottes.

IV

I saw a scene with a French poilu one day in the Street of the Three
Pebbles, during those battles of the Somme, when the French troops
were fighting on our right from Maricourt southward toward Roye. It
was like a scene from "Gaspard." The poilu was a middle-aged man, and
very drunk on some foul spirit which he had bought in a low cafe down
by the river. In the High Street he was noisy, and cursed God for
having allowed the war to happen, and the French government for having
sentenced him and all poor sacre poilus to rot to death in the
trenches, away from their wives and children, without a thought for
them; and nothing but treachery in Paris:

"Nous sommes trahis!" said the man, raising his arms. "For the
hundredth time France is betrayed."

A crowd gathered round him, listening to his drunken denunciations. No
one laughed. They stared at him with a kind of pitying wonderment. An
agent de police pushed his way between the people and caught hold of
the soldier by the wrist and tried to drag him away. The crowd
murmured a protest, and then suddenly the poilu, finding himself in
the hands of the police, on this one day out of the trenches--after
five months--flung himself on the pavement in a passion of tears and
supplication.

"Je suis pere de famille! . . . Je suis un soldat de France! . . .
Dans les tranchees pour cinq mois! . . . Qu'est-ce que mes camarades
vont dire, 'cre nom de Dieu? et mon capitaine? C'est emmordant apres
toute ma service comme brave soldat. Mais, quoi donc, mon vieux!"

"Viens donc, saligaud," growled the agent de police.

The crowd was against the policeman. Their murmurs rose to violent
protest on behalf of the poilu.

"C'est un heros, tout de meme. Cinq mois dans les tranches! C'est
affreux! Mais oui, il est soul, mais pour--quoi pas! Apres cinq mois
sur le front qu'est-ce que cela signifie? Ca n'a aucune importance!"

A dandy French officer of Chasseurs Alpins stepped into the center of
the scene and tapped the policeman on the shoulder.

"Leave him alone. Don't you see he is a soldier? Sacred name of God,
don't you know that a man like this has helped to save France, while
you pigs stand at street corners watching petticoats?"

He stooped to the fallen man and helped him to stand straight.

"Be off with you, mon brave, or there will be trouble for you."

He beckoned to two of his own Chasseurs and said:

"Look after that poor comrade yonder. He is un peu etoile."

The crowd applauded. Their sympathy was all for the drunken soldier of
France.

V

Into a small estaminet at the end of the rue des Trois Cailloux,
beyond the Hotel de Ville, came one day during the battles of the
Somme two poilus, grizzled, heavy men, deeply bronzed, with white dust
in their wrinkles, and the earth of the battlefields ingrained in the
skin of their big, coarse hands. They ordered two "little glasses" and
drank them at one gulp. Then two more.

"See what I have got, my little cabbage," said one of them, stooping
to the heavy pack which he had shifted from his shoulders to the other
seat beside him. "It is something to make you laugh."

"And what is that, my old one?" said a woman sitting on the other side
of the marble-topped table, with another woman of her own class, from
the market nearby.

The man did not answer the question, but fumbled into his pack,
laughing a little in a self-satisfied way.

"I killed a German to get it," he said. "He was a pig of an officer, a
dirty Boche. Very chic, too, and young like a schoolboy."

One of the women patted him on the shoulder. Her eyes glistened.

"Did you slit his throat, the dirty dog? Eh, I'd like to get my
fingers round the neck of a dirty Boche!"

"I finished him with a grenade," said the poilu. "It was good enough.
It knocked a hole in him as large as a cemetery. See then, my cabbage.
It will make you smile. It is a funny kind of mascot, eh?"

He put on the table a small leather pouch stained with a blotch of
reddish brown. His big, clumsy fingers could hardly undo the little
clasp.

"He wore this next his heart," said the man. "Perhaps he thought it
would bring him luck. But I killed him all the same! 'Cre nom de
Dieu!"

He undid the clasp, and his big fingers poked inside the flap of the
pouch.

"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 slut.

"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 hell 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 damned 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 hell. 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 sturdy 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
glasses of porto, for which they had paid twenty centimes each, and
drank them. They then ordered five more glasses 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 glasses 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 glasses 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 hell."

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
bloody injustice."

The five Australians drank the five glasses 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 glasses, 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 passers-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 mass 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 glass 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 passage 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 shell 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 shell 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 clustered 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 passed, 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 shellcraters 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

In the Street of the Three Pebbles there was a small estaminet into
which I went one morning for a cup of coffee, while I read an Amiens
news-sheet made up mostly of extracts translated from the leading
articles of English papers. (There was never any news of French
fighting beyond the official communique and imaginary articles of a
romantic kind written by French journalists in Paris about episodes of
war.) In one corner of the estaminet was a group of bourgeois
gentlemen talking business for a time, and then listening to a
monologue from the woman behind the counter. I could not catch many
words of the conversation, owing to the general chatter, but when the
man went out the woman and I were left alone together, and she came
over to me and put a photograph down on the table before me, and, as
though carrying on her previous train of thought, said, in French, of
course:

"Yes, that is what the war has done to me."

I could not guess her meaning. Looking at the photograph, I saw it was
of a young girl in evening dress with her hair coiled in an artistic
way and a little curl on each cheek. Madame's daughter, I thought,
looking up at the woman standing in front of me in a grubby bodice and
tousled hair. She looked a woman of about forty, with a wan face and
beaten eyes.

"A charming young lady," I said, glancing again at the portrait.

The woman repeated her last sentence, word for word.

"Yes . . . that is what the war has done to me."

I looked up at her again and saw that she had the face of the young
girl in the photograph, but coarsened, aged, raddled, by the passing
years and perhaps by tragedy.

"It is you?" I asked.

"Yes, in 1913, before the war. I have changed since then--n'est-ce
pas, Monsieur?"

"There is a change," I said. I tried not to express my thought of how
much change.

"You have suffered in the war--more than most people?"

"Ah, I have suffered!"

She told me her story, and word for word, if I could have written it
down then, it would have read like a little novel by Guy de
Maupassant. She was the daughter of people in Lille, well-to-do
merchants, and before the war married a young man of the same town,
the son of other manufacturers. They had two children and were very
happy. Then the war came. The enemy drove down through Belgium, and
one day drew near and threatened Lille. The parents of the young
couple said: "We will stay. We are too old to leave our home, and it
is better to keep watch over the factory. You must go, with the little
ones, and there is no time to lose."

There was no time to lose. The trains were crowded with fugitives and
soldiers--mostly soldiers. It was necessary to walk. Weeping, the
young husband and wife said farewell to their parents and set out on
the long trail, with the two babies in a perambulator, under a load of
bread and wine, and a little maid carrying some clothes in a bundle.
For days they tramped the roads until they were all dusty and
bedraggled and footsore, but glad to be getting farther away from that
tide of field-gray men which had now swamped over Lille. The young
husband comforted his wife. "Courage!" he said. "I have money enough
to carry us through the war. We will set up a little shop somewhere."
The maid wept bitterly now and then, but the young husband said: "We
will take care of you, Margot. There is nothing to fear. We are lucky
in our escape." He was a delicate fellow, rejected for military
service, but brave. They came to Amiens, and hired the estaminet and
set up business. There was a heavy debt to work off for capital and
expenses before they would make money, but they were doing well. The
mother was happy with her children, and the little maid had dried her
tears. Then one day the young husband went away with the little maid
and all the money, leaving his wife in the estaminet with a big debt
to pay and a broken heart.