Books: Now It Can Be Told

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"That is what the war has done to me," she said again, picking up the
photograph of the girl in the evening frock with a little curl on each
cheek.

"C'est triste, Madame!"

"Oui, c'est triste, Monsieur!"

But it was not war that had caused her tragedy, except that it had
unloosened the roots of her family life. Guy de Maupassant would have
given just such an ending to his story.

IX

Some of our officers stationed in Amiens, and billeted in private
houses, became very friendly with the families who received them.
Young girls of good middle class, the daughters of shopkeepers and
schoolmasters, and merchants in a good way of business, found it
delightful to wait on handsome young Englishmen, to teach them French,
to take walks with them, and to arrange musical evenings with other
girl friends who brought their young officers and sang little old
French songs with them or English songs in the prettiest French
accent. These young officers of ours found the home life very
charming. It broke the monotony of exile and made them forget the evil
side of war. They paid little gallantries to the girls, bought them
boxes of chocolate until fancy chocolate was forbidden in France, and
presented flowers to decorate the table, and wrote amusing verses in
their autograph albums or drew sketches for them. As this went on they
gained to the privilege of brotherhood, and there were kisses before
saying "good night" outside bedroom doors, while the parents
downstairs were not too watchful, knowing the ways of young people,
and lenient because of their happiness. Then a day came in each one of
these households when the officer billeted there was ordered away to
some other place. What tears! What lamentations! And what promises
never to forget little Jeanne with her dark tresses, or Suzanne with
the merry eyes! Were they not engaged? Not formally, perhaps, but in
honor and in love. For a time letters arrived, eagerly waited for by
girls with aching hearts. Then picture post-cards with a line or two
of affectionate greeting. Then nothing. Nothing at all, month after
month, in spite of all the letters addressed with all the queer
initials for military units. So it happened again and again, until
bitterness crept into girls' hearts, and hardness and contempt.

"In my own little circle of friends," said a lady of Amiens, "I know
eighteen girls who were engaged to English officers and have been
forsaken. It is not fair. It is not good. Your English young men seem
so serious, far more serious than our French boys. They have a look of
shyness which we find delightful. They are timid, at first, and blush
when one pays a pretty compliment. They are a long time before they
take liberties. So we trust them, and take them seriously, and allow
intimacies which we should refuse to French boys unless formally
engaged. But it is all camouflage. At heart your English young men are
just flirts. They play with us, make fools of us, steal our hearts,
and then go away, and often do not send so much as a post-card. Not
even one little post-card to the girls who weep their hearts out for
them! You English are all hypocrites. You boast that you 'play the
game.' I know your phrase. It is untrue.

You play with good girls as though they were grues, and that no
Frenchman would dare to do. He knows the difference between good girls
and bad girls, and behaves, with reverence to those who are good. When
the English army goes away from France it will leave many bitter
memories because of that."

X

It was my habit to go out at night for a walk through Amiens before
going to bed, and generally turned river-ward, for even on moonless
nights there was always a luminance over the water and one could see
to walk along the quayside. Northward and eastward the sky was
quivering with flashes of white light, like summer lightning, and now
and then there was a long, vivid glare of red touching the high clouds
with rosy feathers; one of our dumps, or one of the enemy's, had been
blown up by that gun-fire, sullen and menacing, which never ceased for
years. In that quiet half-hour, alone, or with some comrade, like
Frederic Palmer or Beach Thomas, as tired and as thoughtful as oneself
after a long day's journeying in the swirl of war, one's brain roved
over the scenes of battle, visualizing anew, and in imagination, the
agony up there, the death which was being done by those guns, and the
stupendous sum of all this conflict. We saw, after all, only one patch
of the battlefields of the world, and yet were staggered by the
immensity of its massacre, by the endless streams of wounded, and by
the growth of those little forests of white crosses behind the
fighting-lines. We knew, and could see at any moment in the mind's
eye--even in the darkness of an Amiens night--the vastness of the
human energy which was in motion along all the roads to Paris and from
Boulogne and Dieppe and Havre to the fighting-lines, and in every
village on the way the long columns of motor-lorries bringing up food
and ammunition, the trains on their way to the army rail-heads with
material of war and more food and more shells, the Red Cross trains
crowded with maimed and injured boys, the ambulances clearing the
casualty stations, the troops marching forward from back roads to the
front, from which many would never come marching back, the guns and
limbers and military transports and spare horses, along hundreds of
miles of roads--all the machinery of slaughter on the move. It was
staggering in its enormity, in its detail, and in its activity. Yet
beyond our sphere in the British section of the western front there
was the French front, larger than ours, stretching right through
France, and all their roads were crowded with the same traffic, and
all their towns and villages were stirred by the same activity and for
the same purpose of death, and all their hospitals were crammed with
the wreckage of youth. On the other side of the lines the Germans were
busy in the same way, as busy as soldier ants, and the roads behind
their front were cumbered by endless columns of transport and marching
men, and guns and ambulances laden with bashed, blinded, and bleeding
boys. So it was in Italy, in Austria, in Saloniki, and Bulgaria,
Serbia, Mesopotamia, Egypt. . . In the silence of Amiens by night,
under the stars, with a cool breath of the night air on our foreheads,
with a glamour of light over the waters of the Somme, our spirit was
stricken by the thought of this world-tragedy, and cried out in
anguish against this bloody crime in which all humanity was involved.
The senselessness of it! The futility! The waste! The mockery of men's
faith in God! . . .

Often Palmer and I--dear, grave old Palmer, with sphinx-like face and
honest soul--used to trudge along silently, with just a sigh now and
then, or a groan, or a sudden cry of "O God! . . . O Christ!" It was
I, generally, who spoke those words, and Palmer would say: "Yes . . .
and it's going to last a long time yet. A long time. . . It's a
question who will hold out twenty-four hours longer than the other
side. France is tired, more tired than any of us. Will she break
first? Somehow I think not. They are wonderful! Their women have a
gallant spirit. . . How good it is, the smell of the trees to-night!"

Sometimes we would cross the river and look back at the cathedral,
high and beautiful above the huddle of old, old houses on the
quayside, with a faint light on its pinnacle and buttresses and
immense blackness beyond them.

"Those builders of France loved their work," said Palmer. "There was
always war about the walls of this cathedral, but they went on with
it, stone by stone, without hurry."

We stood there in a long silence, not on one night only, but many
times, and out of those little dark streets below the cathedral of
Amiens came the spirit of history to teach our spirit with wonderment
at the nobility and the brutality of men, and their incurable folly,
and their patience with tyranny.

"When is it all going to end, Palmer, old man?"

"The war, or the folly of men?"

"The war. This cursed war. This bloody war."

"Something will break one day, on our side or the other. Those who
hold out longest and have the best reserves of man-power."

We were starting early next day--before dawn--to see the beginning of
another battle. We walked slowly over the little iron bridge again,
through the vegetable market, where old men and women were unloading
cabbages from a big wagon, then into the dark tunnel of the rue des
Augustins, and so to the little old mansion of Mme. de la
Rochefoucauld in the rue Amiral Courbet. There was a light burning in
the window of the censor's room. In there the colonel was reading The
Times in the Louis Quinze salon, with a grave pucker on his high, thin
forehead. He could not get any grasp of the world's events. There was
an attack on the censor by Northcliffe. Now what did he mean by that?
It was really very unkind of him, after so much civility to him.
Charteris would be furious. He would bang the telephone--but--dear,
dear, why should people be so violent? War correspondents were violent
on the slightest provocation. The world itself was very violent. And
it was all so dangerous. Don't you think so, Russell?

The cars were ordered for five o'clock. Time for bed.

XI

The night in Amiens was dark and sinister when rain fell heavily out
of a moonless sky. Hardly a torch-lamp flashed out except where a
solitary woman scurried down the wet streets to lonely rooms. There
were no British officers strolling about. They had turned in early, to
hot baths and unaccustomed beds, except for one or two, with their
burberries buttoned tight at the throat, and sopping field-caps pulled
down about the ears, and top--boots which went splash, splash through
deep puddles as they staggered a little uncertainly and peered up at
dark corners to find their whereabouts, by a dim sense of locality and
the shapes of the houses. The rain pattered sharply on the pavements
and beat a tattoo on leaden gutters and slate roofs. Every window was
shuttered and no light gleamed through.

On such a night I went out with Beach Thomas, as often before, wet or
fine, after hard writing.

"A foul night," said Thomas, setting off in his quick, jerky step. "I
like to feel the rain on my face."

We turned down as usual to the river. It was very dark--the rain was
heavy on the quayside, where there was a group of people bareheaded in
the rain and chattering in French, with gusts of laughter.

"Une bouteille de champagne!" The words were spoken in a clear boy's
voice, with an elaborate caricature of French accent, in musical
cadence, but unmistakably English.

"A drunken officer," said Thomas.

"Poor devil!"

We drew near among the people and saw a young officer arm in arm with
a French peasant--one of the market porters--telling a tale in broken
French to the audience about him, with comic gesticulations and
extraordinary volubility.

A woman put her hand on my shoulder and spoke in French.

"He has drunk too much bad wine. His legs walk away from him. He will
be in trouble, Monsieur. And a child--no older than my own boy who is
fighting in the Argonne."

"Apportez-moi une bouteille de champagne, vite! . . ." said the young
officer. Then he waved his arm and said: "J'ai perdu mon cheval" ("A
kingdom for a bloody horse!"), "as Shakespeare said. Y a-t'il
quelqu'un qui a vu mon sacre cheval? In other words, if I don't find
that four-legged beast which led to my damnation I shall be shot at
dawn. Fusille, comprenez? On va me fusiller par un mur blanc--or is it
une mure blanche? quand l'aurore se leve avec les couleurs d'une rose
et l'odeur d'une jeune fille lavee et parfumee. Pretty good that, eh,
what? But the fact remains that unless I find my steed, my charger, my
war-horse, which in reality does not belong to me at all, because I
pinched it from the colonel, I shall be shot as sure as fate, and,
alas! I do not want to die. I am too young to die, and meanwhile I
desire encore une bouteille de champagne!"

The little crowd of citizens found a grim humor in this speech, one-
third of which they understood. They laughed coarsely, and a man said:

"Quel drole de type! Quel numero!"

But the woman who had touched me on the sleeve spoke to me again.

"He says he has lost his horse and will be shot as a deserter. Those
things happen. My boy in the Argonne tells me that a comrade of his
was shot for hiding five days with his young woman. It would be sad if
this poor child should be condemned to death."

I pushed my way through the crowd and went up to the officer.

"Can I help at all?"

He greeted me warmly, as though he had known me for years.

"My dear old pal, you can indeed! First of all I want a bottle of
champagne-une bouteille de champagne-" it was wonderful how much music
he put into those words--"and after that I want my runaway horse, as I
have explained to these good people who do not understand a bloody
word, in spite of my excellent French accent. I stole the colonel's
horse to come for a joy-ride to Amiens. the colonel is one of the best
of men, but very touchy, very touchy indeed. You would be surprised.
He also has the worst horse in the world, or did, until it ran away
half an hour ago into the blackness of this hell which men call
Amiens. It is quite certain that if I go back without that horse most
unpleasant things will happen to a gallant young British officer,
meaning myself, who with most innocent intentions of cleansing his
soul from the filth of battle, from the horror of battle, from the
disgusting fear of battle--oh yes, I've been afraid all right, and so
have you unless you're a damned hero or a damned liar--desired to get
as far as this beautiful city (so fair without, so foul within!) in
order to drink a bottle, or even two or three, of rich, sparkling
wine, to see the loveliness of women as they trip about these
pestilential streets, to say a little prayer in la cathedrale, and
then to ride back, refreshed, virtuous, knightly, all through the
quiet night, to deliver up the horse whence I had pinched it, and
nobody any the wiser in the dewy morn. You see, it was a good scheme."

"What happened?" I asked.

"It happened thuswise," he answered, breaking out into fresh
eloquence, with fantastic similes and expressions of which I can give
only the spirit. "Leaving a Pozieres, which, as you doubtless know,
unless you are a bloody staff-officer, is a place where the devil goes
about like a roaring lion seeking whom he may devour, where he leaves
his victims' entrails hanging on to barbed wire, and where the bodies
of your friends and mine lie decomposing in muddy holes--you know the
place?--I put my legs across the colonel's horse, which was in the
wagonlines, and set forth for Amiens. That horse knew that I had
pinched him--forgive my slang. I should have said it in the French
language, vole--and resented me. Thrice was I nearly thrown from his
back. Twice did he entangle himself in barbed wire deliberately. Once
did I have to coerce him with many stripes to pass a tank. Then the
heavens opened upon us and it rained. It rained until I was wet to the
skin, in spite of sheltering beneath a tree, one branch of which,
owing to the stubborn temper of my steed, struck me a stinging blow
across the face. So in no joyful spirit I came at last to Amiens, this
whited sepulcher, this Circe's capital, this den of thieves, this home
of vampires. There I dined, not wisely, but too well. I drank of the
flowing cup--une bouteille de champagne--and I met a maiden as ugly as
sin, but beautiful in my eyes after Pozieres--you understand--and
accompanied her to her poor lodging--in a most verminous place, sir--
where we discoursed upon the problems of life and love. O youth! O
war! O hell! . . . My horse, that brute who resented me, was in charge
of an 'ostler, whom I believe verily is a limb of Satan, in the yard
without. It was late when I left that lair of Circe, where young
British officers, even as myself, are turned into swine. It was late
and dark, and I was drunk. Even now I am very drunk. I may say that I
am becoming drunker and drunker."

It was true. The fumes of bad champagne were working in the boy's
brain, and he leaned heavily against me.

"It was then that that happened which will undoubtedly lead to my
undoing, and blast my career as I have blasted my soul. The horse was
there in the yard, but without saddle or bridle.

"'Where is my saddle and where is my bridle, oh, naughty 'ostler?' I
shouted, in dismay.

"The 'ostler, who, as I informed you, is one of Satan's imps, answered
in incomprehensible French, led the horse forth from the yard, and,
giving it a mighty blow on the rump, sent it clattering forth into the
outer darkness. In my fear of losing it--for I must be at Pozieres at
dawn--I ran after it, but it ran too fast in the darkness, and I
stopped and tried to grope my way back to the stableyard to kill that
'ostler, thereby serving God, and other British officers, for he was
the devil's agent. But I could not find the yard again. It had
disappeared! It was swallowed up in Cimmerian gloom. So I was without
revenge and without horse, and, as you will perceive, sir--unless you
are a bloody staff-officer who doesn't perceive anything--I am utterly
undone. I am also horribly drunk, and I must apologize for leaning so
heavily on your arm. It's awfully good of you, anyway, old man."

The crowd was mostly moving, driven indoors by the rain. The woman who
had spoken to me said, "I heard a horse's hoofs upon the bridge, la-
bas."

Then she went away with her apron over her head.

Thomas and I walked each side of the officer, giving him an arm. He
could not walk straight, and his legs played freakish tricks with him.
All the while he talked in a strain of high comedy interlarded with
grim little phrases, revealing an underlying sense of tragedy and
despair, until his speech thickened and he became less fluent. We
spent a fantastic hour searching for his horse. It was like a
nightmare in the darkness and rain. Every now and then we heard,
distinctly, the klip-klop of a horse's hoofs, and went off in that
direction, only to be baffled by dead silence, with no sign of the
animal. Then again, as we stood listening, we heard the beat of hoofs
on hard pavements, in the opposite direction, and walked that way,
dragging the boy, who was getting more and more incapable of walking
upright. At last we gave up hope of finding the horse, though the
young officer kept assuring us that he must find it at all costs.
"It's a point of honor," he said, thickly. "Not my horse, you know
Doctor's horse. Devil to pay to-morrow."

He laughed foolishly and said:

"Always devil to pay in morning."

We were soaked to the skin.

"Come home with me," I said. "We can give you a shake-down."

"Frightfully good, old man. Awfully sorry, you know, and all that. Are
you a blooming general, or something? But I must find horse."

By some means we succeeded in persuading him that the chase was
useless and that it would be better for him to get into our billet and
start out next morning, early. We dragged him up the rue des
Augustins, to the rue Amiral Courbet. Outside the iron gates I spoke
to him warningly:

"You've got to be quiet. There are staff-officers inside . . ."

"What? . . . Staff officers? . . . Oh, my God!"

The boy was dismayed. The thought of facing staff-officers almost
sobered him; did, indeed, sober his brain for a moment, though not his
legs.

"It's all right," I said. "Go quietly, and I will get you upstairs
safely."

It was astonishing how quietly he went, hanging on to me. The little
colonel was reading The Times in the salon. We passed the open door,
and saw over the paper his high forehead puckered with perplexity as
to the ways of the world. But he did not raise his head or drop The
Times at the sound of our entry. I took the boy upstairs to my room
and guided him inside. He said, "Thanks awfully," and then lay down on
the floor and fell into so deep a sleep that I was scared and thought
for a moment he might be dead. I went downstairs to chat with the
little colonel and form an alibi in case of trouble. An hour later,
when I went into my room, I found the boy still lying as I had left
him, without having stirred a limb. He was a handsome fellow, with his
head hanging limply across his right arm and a lock of damp hair
falling across his forehead. I thought of a son of mine, who in a few
years would be as old as he, and I prayed God mine might be spared
this boy's tragedy. . . Through the night he slept in a drugged way,
but just at dawn he woke up and stretched himself, with a queer little
moan. Then he sat up and said:

"Where am I?"

"In a billet at Amiens. You lost your horse last night and I brought
you here."

Remembrance came into his eyes and his face was swept with a sudden
flush of shame and agony.

"Yes . . . I made a fool of myself. The worst possible. How can I get
back to Pozieres?"

"You could jump a lorry with luck."

"I must. It's serious if I don't get back in time. In any case, the
loss of that horse--"

He thought deeply for a moment, and I could see that his head was
aching to the beat of sledge-hammers.

"Can I wash anywhere?"

I pointed to a jug and basin, and he said, "Thanks, enormously."

He washed hurriedly, and then stared down with a shamed look at his
muddy uniform, all creased and bedraggled. After that he asked if he
could get out downstairs, and I told him the door was unlocked.

He hesitated for a moment before leaving my room.

"I am sorry to have given you all this trouble. It was very decent of
you. Many thanks."

The boy was a gentleman when sober. I wonder if he died at Pozieres,
or farther on by the Butte de Warlencourt. . . A week later I saw an
advertisement in an Amiens paper: "Horse found. Brown, with white sock
on right foreleg. Apply--"

I have a fancy it was the horse for which we had searched in the rain.

XII

The quickest way to the cathedral is down a turning on the right-hand
side of the Street of the Three Pebbles. Charlie's bar was on the
left-hand side of the street, always crowded after six o'clock by
officers of every regiment, drinking egg-nogs, Martinis, Bronxes,
sherry cobblers, and other liquids, which helped men marvelously to
forget the beastliness of war, and gave them the gift of laughter, and
made them careless of the battles which would have to be fought. Young
staff-officers were there, explaining carefully how hard worked they
were and how often they went under shell-fire. The fighting officers,
English, Scottish, Irish, Welsh, jeered at them, laughed hugely at the
latest story of mirthful horror, arranged rendezvous at the Godebert
restaurant, where they would see the beautiful Marguerite (until she
transferred to la cathedrale in the same street) and our checks which
Charlie cashed at a discount, with a noble faith in British honesty,
not often, as he told me, being hurt by a "stumor." Charlie's bar was
wrecked by shell-fire afterward, and he went to Abbeville and set up a
more important establishment, which was wrecked, too, in a fierce air
raid, before the paint was dry on the walls.

The cathedral was a shrine to which many men and women went all
through the war, called into its white halls by the spirit of beauty
which dwelt there, and by its silence and peace. The great west door
was screened from bomb-splinters by sand-bags piled high, and inside
there were other walls of sand-bags closing in the sanctuary and some
of the windows. But these signs of war did not spoil the majesty of
the tall columns and high roof, nor the loveliness of the sculptured
flowers below the clerestory arches, nor the spiritual mystery of
those great, dim aisles, where light flickered and shadows lurked, and
the ghosts of history came out of their tombs to pace these stones
again where five, six, seven centuries before they had walked to
worship God, in joy or in despair, or to show their beauty of young
womanhood--peasant girl or princess--to lovers gazing by the pillars,
or to plight their troth as royal brides, or get a crown for their
heads, or mercy for their dead bodies in velvet-draped coffins.

Our soldiers went in there, as many centuries before other English
soldiers, who came out with Edward the Black Prince, by way of Crecy,
or with Harry the King, through Agincourt. Five hundred years hence,
if Amiens cathedral still stands, undamaged by some new and monstrous
conflict in a world of incurable folly, the generation of that time
will think now and then, perhaps, of the English lads in khaki who
tramped up the highway of this nave with their field-caps under their
arms, each footstep leaving the imprint of a wet boot on the old
flagstones, awed by the silence and the spaciousness, with a sudden
heartache for a closer knowledge, or some knowledge, of the God
worshiped there--the God of Love--while, not far away, men were
killing one another by high explosives, shells, hand-grenades, mines,
machine-guns, bayonets, poison-gas, trench-mortars, tanks, and, in
close fighting, with short daggers like butchers' knives, or clubs
with steel knobs. I watched the faces of the men who entered here.
Some of them, like the Australians and New-Zealanders, unfamiliar with
cathedrals, and not religious by instinct or training, wandered round
in a wondering way, with a touch of scorn, even of hostility, now and
then, for these mysteries--the chanting of the Office, the tinkling of
the bells at the high mass--which were beyond their understanding, and
which they could not link up with any logic of life, as they knew it
now, away up by Bapaume or Bullecourt, where God had nothing to do,
seemingly, with a night raid into Boche lines, when they blew a party
of Germans to bits by dropping Stoke bombs down their dugout, or with
the shrieks of German boys, mad with fear, when the Australians jumped
on them in the darkness and made haste with their killing. All the
same, this great church was wonderful, and the Australians, scrunching
their slouch-hats, stared up at the tall columns to the clerestory
arches, and peered through the screen to the golden sun upon the high-
altar, and touched old tombs with their muddy hands, reading the dates
on them--1250, 1155, 1415--with astonishment at their antiquity. Their
clean-cut hatchet faces, sun--baked, tanned by rain and wind, their
simple blue-gray eyes, the fine, strong grace of their bodies, as they
stood at ease in this place of history, struck me as being wonderfully
like all that one imagines of those English knights and squires--
Norman-English--who rode through France with the Black Prince. It is
as though Australia had bred back to the old strain. Our own English
soldiers were less arresting to the eye, more dapper and neat, not
such evident children of nature. Gravely they walked up the aisles,
standing in groups where a service was in progress, watching the
movements of the priests, listening to the choir and organ with
reverent, dreamy eyes. Some of them--country lads--thought back, I
fancy, to some village church in England where they had sung hymns
with mother and sisters in the days before the war. England and that
little church were a long way off now, perhaps all eternity away. I
saw one boy standing quite motionless, with wet eyes, without self-
consciousness. This music, this place of thoughtfulness, had made
something break in his heart. . . Some of our young officers, but not
many, knelt on the cane chairs and prayed, face in hands. French
officers crossed themselves and their medals tinkled as they walked up
the aisles. Always there were women in black weeds kneeling before the
side--altars, praying to the Virgin for husbands and sons, dead or
alive, lighting candles below holy pictures and statues. Our men
tiptoed past them, holding steel hats or field--caps, and putting
their packs against the pillars. On the steps of the cathedral I heard
two officers talking one day.