Opposite me was a German officer who had spent the greater part of his life in England; and his flow of words bore irrefutable testimony to the potency of Rhine wine.
“I have lived among you all my life,” he said; “I do not wish to fight against you. I have no quarrel with the English. It is only the French I hate, the bloody French. I would do anything I could to harm them. They hate us and we hate them,” and a man generally speaks the truth when he is drunk.
The end of the evening was less glorious. It was well after eleven before we managed to escape after countless Aufwiedersehens, and no sooner had we got outside the house than we walked straight into a patrol of the Red Guard, by whom we were arrested, and returned to the citadel under an armed escort.
Next morning we were marched down into a train for Metz. All the German officers from the camp and a considerable number of civilians came to see us off. As I leant out of the window, to catch a last glimpse of the cathedral, it was hardly possible to realise that the war was over and that we were going home. It was the day to which we had looked forward for so long, the day of which we had dreamt so much during the cold and loneliness of the nights in France. It had been then immeasurably remote, a flickering uncertain gleam, too far away for any tangible hope. And the mind had fastened upon those nearer probabilities of leave,—a blighty, or a course behind the line. And now that day had really come, I could not grasp its significance. I was almost afraid to look forward, and my mind went back to the earlier days of our captivity, to the hunger and the depression, to the intolerable tedium and irritation. And yet, for all that, a wave of sentimentality partially obscured the sharpness of those memories. We had had some good times there in the citadel; that grey monochrome had not been entirely unrelieved. There had been certain moments worth remembering; and I thought that, when the incidents of the past four years had settled down into their true perspective, I should be able to look back, not without a certain kindliness, towards that unnatural life, that strange world of substitute and sauerkraut.
§ 2
The journey home was protracted by innumerable delays. We left Mainz on November 24th, and it was not until the 5th of December that we arrived in London. We spent five days in Nancy, another three in Boulogne, and the trains behaved as is their wont on the railroads of France. All this rather tended to dispel the glamour of the return.
For one of the chief attractions of leave is its suddenness. One is sitting on the steps of a dugout musing gloomily on the probable chance of a relief, when a runner arrives from Battalion with a chit, “You will proceed on U.K. leave to-night. The train leaves Arras at 8.10 p.m.” And then the world is suddenly haloed with flame. One rushes down the dugout, flings hurried orders to the sergeant, collects all that is least important in one’s kit, scatters an extravagance of largess among the batmen who have collected it, and then races for H.Q. It is all a scramble and a rush. The mess cart is chartered, within a couple of hours one is at the railhead; a night of cramp and discomfort and one is at Boulogne; there is just time for a bath at the E.F.C. Club, and then the boat sails. There is a train waiting at the other end, and the whole business takes only twenty-four hours. It is like a tale from the Arabian Nights. At one moment one is sitting on a firestep, the next one is in London. It embodies the very essence of romance.
But the return of the Gefangener was altogether different. He had plenty of time in which to collect his thoughts, the return to civilised life was marked by slow gradations. At Metz he could get a decent bath, at Nancy a decent dinner. By the time he had reached Boulogne, his odyssey had assumed the most prosaic proportions. There is no doubt about it, for those who had been prisoners only a few months the leave boat was infinitely more exciting.
But there were, of course, compensations. After having lived on tinned meats for eight months, it was a thrilling experience to find a menu that comprised fried sole and grouse, Brussel sprouts and iced grapes. Over my first dinner I took three hours. It was a gluttonous but on the whole a natural exhibition. It also saved us from a further period of confinement.
For when we arrived at Nancy one of the first pieces of intelligence we received, was the news that it would not be possible to provide a train for us within five days. To many ardent spirits this was a sad blow, and one or two adventurers decided that whatever the rest might do, they themselves were not going to wait five days “for any blooming train,” and among these rebels I had rather naturally numbered myself.