XXXVIII
Folkestone-Boulogne!
It was not three hundred years ago, but only three, that those words, and that cross-Channel passage, meant the way to roads which began very pleasantly past green fields and French villages—with roofs on their cottages, and towers to their churches—through long avenues of poplars growing tall and straight, past cornfields or ploughed fields, stretching away, hedgeless, to the horizon line, until presently those roads became filled with deep holes, and the fields were no longer green, but bare of vegetation as though blasted by some curse of God, and the trees were lopped and gashed, and the cottages had become unroofed, and the churches had lost their towers, and then, at the end of the roads, no house stood, no wall of any size above a rubble of bricks and no man walked hand-high above the ground, but all life was hidden in holes and ditches, and death alone was visible, where unburied bodies lay beyond a line of sand-bags and twisted wire.
To Bertram, all that seemed, for a few moments, as he stood on the quayside at Boulogne, three hundred years ago, and then not three years ago, not three minutes, but still going on.
He was back from seven days’ leave. The purple-faced Major with the megaphone could assuredly shout out “All officers back from leave to report to the A.M.L.O.”
Eight hundred soldiers, or more, who had been as sick as dogs, would stagger down the gangway, with tin hats, rifles, gas-masks, packs, silent, grim, sullen, because they were going back to the “bloody old trenches.”
A line of cars would be drawn up for staff officers from G.H.Q. With luck one might get a lift in one of them part of the way and do some lorry-jumping for the rest of the way, instead of waiting for the night train, so cold, and slow, and crowded and dark.
A convoy of ambulances would soon arrive, with the usual crowd of badly-wounded—the fellows with Blighty wounds—and one would see their muddy boots, soles outward, when the flaps were drawn back. Surely the war was going on, for ever, and ever, and ever, as it had seemed to those who enlisted in 1914 or afterwards. . . .
No, all that was finished! It was merely a dream and a memory. Bertram saw the last representative of the British Army which had poured out here in tides—a dapper young sergeant, in khaki, doing some job with the customs officers or the French police. All else had vanished, even the A.M.L.O. with his megaphone!
With this realisation, Bertram felt as though he were the sole survivor of the war, the only man left alive from that great massacre. None of those people around him had had anything to do with it. In the smoking-carriage where he took a corner seat, were two prosperous-looking Jews with big cigars, two American business men, too old to have been in the last push, an elderly Frenchman, who bought Le Matin and the Cri de Paris.
Along the corridor, and in other carriages were groups of people going to Paris, or beyond Paris to other parts of Europe, where the sun was shining and life “gay.” They were “smart” people, still able to afford the pleasures of life, in spite of the downfall of foreign markets, stagnant trade, unemployment, high taxes. They had forgotten the war and its agonies.
No one in his carriage bothered to look out of the window as they neared Amiens, where one could still see on a far hillside a line of earthworks, which had been thrown up hurriedly as a last line of defence after the Germans had broken through on March 21st and come very close to the old city—as close as Villers Bretonneux on the high ground outside.
Bertram did not travel as far as Paris, though he was tempted to go as far, because Joyce was there. It was at Amiens that he left the train, as the beginning of his wanderings through the old places of war, to find out what the people there were thinking, how they were living, according to Bernard Hall’s instructions.
A crowd of ghosts walked with him up the rue des Trois Cailloux—the Street of the Three Pebbles. They were the Comrades of the Great War, who had crowded that street when great battles were being fought, year after year, in the fields of the Somme. He remembered them mostly on rainy days. It seemed always to be raining in Amiens, in war time. The officers wore trench-coats plastered with mud and chalk. The men staggered under their packs. The rain beat down on their tin hats.
French poilus—Fusiliers Marins, Chasseurs, infantry of the line, Zouaves, sloped up and down, staring into the shops, drinking porto blanc and fouler liquids in little drinking dens strictly against the law.
English Tommies walked with little French girls down the narrow side streets, went with them into dark old houses up cut-throat alleys.
Australian soldiers slouched around with hard, lean, leathery faces, looking for trouble and often finding it.
Crowds of Jocks with muddy knees, wet kilts, tin hats, slanted over Harry Lauder faces, wandered about in a grim mirthless way.
Staff officers motored into the town from Army Headquarters, or Corps, or Division.
Cavalry officers rode in and put their horses in the back yard of the Hotel du Rhin.
Officers of every battalion of the British Army surged along the narrow street—the Street of the Three Pebbles. They were down from the line, while their Division was in reserve, or were passing through on their way to the line. Here, in Amiens, were shops, pretty women, restaurants, cock-tail bars, civilian people, children, roofed houses,—the last outpost of civilised life this side of the filthy fields, and lice, and shell-fire, and sudden death.
Their ghosts walked with Bertram now. He stood at the corner of the rue Amiral Courbet. It was there that he had stood one night, talking to a French girl. It was very dark, for there was no lamp allowed after daylight. She flashed a pocket lamp in his face, and revealed her own, white, with red lips, and black laughing eyes—a pretty witch for a young man down from a battlefield for one night of life.
“Comment ça va, mon chou? La vie est triste, n’cst-ce pas? Il n’y a qu’une consolation, un seul moyen d’oubli. Un peu de rire, un peu d’amour! Qu’est-ce-que tu en penses? Veux-tu?”
A sad life, she said, and only one consolation, one way of forgetfulness. A little laughter, a little love. What did he think about it?
He’d thought a lot about it. He was twenty, then, in 1916. A boy, but doing a man’s job, and with no life insurance for even another week, or another day, up there, beyond Amiens, this side of Contalmaison still in German hands. He agreed with this girl who had come up to him out of the darkness. A little laughter, a little love. Worth having before the next attack. Worth grabbing at on a rainy night in war-time, and perhaps the very last night on earth. Who could tell? Yet something had made him refuse the offer, some fear, or law, or mental prohibition. His mother had whispered a warning to him about “bad women.” His two sisters, Dorothy and Susan, adored him in those days, believed him spotless. He had been brought up in a certain code, which had become part of him, inescapable without stricken conscience, despite the smashing of mental and moral foundations by the earthquake of war.
“Rien à faire!” he had told the girl, not roughly, poor kid, but decidedly. Nothing doing.
“Mais oui, petit officier!”
She had grabbed his belt, pulled him towards her, kissed his face, wet in the rain, with her wet lips.
It was here, at this very corner, in July of 1916!
Bertram walked down the next turning to the right, leading to the Cathedral. On the other side was a gap in a row of houses newly roofed. It was boarded round. There, in that gap, had been “Charley’s Bar,” the great cock-tail resort of thousands of young officers who drank quickly because there might not be much time between them and death.
Some of them were still alive, but not many of those who fought in the Somme battles. Izzard was one of them still alive, that fellow in the funny shop at Ottery. He had drunk like a fish in this place before it was knocked to bits by an air bomb in that March of ’18. Bertram had drunk with him, eggnogs, and champagne cock-tails. They had both been thoroughly “blind” on more than one afternoon, and slept themselves sober in the Hotel du Rhin before dining at the Godebert in the rue des Jacobins, where Izzard and he had flirted outrageously with the pretty Marguérite, but without much success as she was coveted by Staff officers, and Brigadiers, and even a Major-General.
It was to the Hotel du Rhin that Bertram now went, still walking with ghosts and ancient memories.
The last time he had been there its stairs and passages were strewn with broken glass, and with several other officers he had sat in a cellar listening to houses falling with tremendous crashes, while a fleet of Gothas overhead played merry hell all through a night which was the blackest in the war.
His machine-gun company had been cut to bits outside Villers Bretonneux. Christy had been wounded in the lung and taken away by the stretcher-bearers. The Germans had made a clean break through and there was very little up the road to bar their way to Amiens. Bertram had been ordered to join up with another crowd for a last stand somewhere near Boves. The crowd had gone missing, it was impossible to search for them at night, and the air-raid over Amiens was the worst thing he’d seen in that way.
It had begun at seven-thirty in the evening, with two explosions outside the windows, smashing them, and filling the dancing-room with splinters. The lady manager was there, doing accounts with a young staff officer. She had yellow hair, and two bright spots of colour on her cheeks, and wonderful courage. Her face was pale beneath the bright spots of colour, but that was her only sign of fear. Joseph, the waiter with the shrill voice and high-pitched laugh, disappeared in the direction of the cellar. The other waiter—what was his name?—an old fellow, with side-whiskers, wandered about cursing the sales Boches.
A frightful and fantastic night, with dead men and dead horses in the street outside. Now like a dream! Since then, Amiens had tidied up its streets, re-built many of its houses—though not the great gap between the rue des Trois Cailloux and the rue des Jacobins.
An orchestra was playing in the Hotel du Rhin. American tourists and French commercial travellers were feeding in the room where Bertram had sat down on that night of tragedy, with three mayors who had lost their towns, and officers who had lost their Divisions, wondering how long it would be before the head of a German column marched into Amiens. An orchestra fiddling jazz tunes to American tourists!
But there, miracle of miracles, was the lady manager with the yellow hair, and Joseph, the shrill-voiced waiter, and the old boy with the side whiskers! Bertram went up to the lady manager, and greeted her with emotion, as one whom he had known in the wonderful years, and as one who remembered.
“Still here, Madame! You remember me, perhaps? That night of the air-raid, and other nights!”
She shook hands with him, and pretended to remember his face, though thousands of young officers had passed through this hotel in the years of war.
“What memories, monsieur! Unforgettable to us, though others have forgotten!”
“Amiens is almost restored,” he said.
“There’s still much to be done.”
“How strange it must be for you, now that there are no British soldiers in France! This hotel used to be stuffed with officers of ours.”
“We get tourists to see the battlefields. English officers come up like you, and say ‘Do you remember me, madame?’ Sometimes I’m tempted to say, ‘Do you remember the agony of France in those years of war?’ ”
“Why that, Madame? We cannot forget.”
She shrugged her shoulders and smiled bitterly.
“Your Lloyd George forgets. He makes friends with the Germans. He wishes to let them off their punishment. He will let them get strong again, so that one day they will come back and crush us.”
Bertram laughed.
“He wants peace in Europe. He wants to prevent another war. Anyhow, England doesn’t forget the heroism of France nor her sufferings.”
“C’est bien!”
She bent to her table, and added up a column of figures.
In the yard an American tourist enquired how long it would take to drive to Château Thierry.
That night Bertram met another woman whom he had known in Amiens in the years of war. It was the chambermaid, and she remembered him.
“Certainly you were one of the young officers who used to stay here in the war?”
He shook hands with her, and said, “I’m the officer whose socks you mended once. You told me about your lover, Jean, who was killed at Verdun. We talked long that night.”
Yes, she remembered him, his very face, those socks she had mended, that talk.
“Tiens! Quel plaisir!”
She was glad to find that he was still alive. A middle-aged woman of plain features, she had not been much of a temptation to young officers down from the line. Yet some of them, deprived of womanhood, for months on end, had made amorous advances even to her, which she had repulsed with loud laughter, in a heavy-handed way. She had mothered some of the younger men, in a peasant way, and had given them good advice about the girls who lured them in the streets, with their flash lamps, like that one at the corner of the rue Amiral Courbet. Her lover, Jean, a butcher, had been killed at Verdun, and she had wept a little in Bertram’s room, and then laughed, and said she supposed men were made to be killed that way, like sheep to be eaten. “C’est la vie.” It was life and war, which would last as long as the Germans were part of the human race.
Now she leaned on her broom, talking to Bertram about the changes since the war. Prices were high. It was hard for poor people to live. The bourgeoisie were making plenty of money, but the Government was ruined, she was told. The Germans evaded their payments. Anyhow, no German gold came to the people who were trying to build up their cottages again in the battlefields. She had a cousin at Lens. A mother of six. They had no water, no gas, no stone for building, no money for reconstruction. Three years after war they were still miserable. Victory had not brought happiness to France, nor safety. The Boches would come back again one day. It would begin all over again. A pity they weren’t all killed when the French and English had the chance! Now the English hated the French, and loved the Germans, for some reason!
“What makes you think that?” asked Bertram.
“It is true, is it not?” asked this woman, Jeanne, quite simply.
She was surprised, and incredulous, when he told her that she was mistaken, and that the English loved France still, and desired to help her.
“What gives you the idea that England hates France?”
She said she read Le Matin, which told her so. It was the same in the Journal d’Amiens. Everybody spoke about it—especially les garçons, who were always talking politics. She didn’t understand these things, but she picked up her news from the others. It was public opinion. No one could go against public opinion. C’est formidable, l’opinion publique!