CHAPTER XXXII
THE LIBERATION OF LILLE
FROM the Boulevard des Capucines to the Avenue de l'Opéra there is a convenient short-cut through the Rue Daunou. Newspaper men and other Americans do not always use the Rue Daunou for the short-cut. It is better known as the way to the Chatham bar. I ought to know nothing about the Chatham bar. My acquaintance with that corner should be limited to the Restaurant Volney and ladies' days at my husband's club opposite. But I do know the Chatham bar and for a perfectly respectable reason. It is where my old uncle used to be found when the clerk at his hotel said that he was not in. The uncle makes me think of a friend of his and a table with a little brass disk in the center of it to commemorate assiduous attendance through a long period of years in the Chatham bar. And the uncle's friend makes me think of the liberation of Lille. Association of ideas is a strange thing.
Herbert and I sat one evening in the autumn of 1915 before a big map with my uncle's friend. His fingers lay upon the Flanders portion of what we had come to call "the front." Bubbling over with excitement, he exclaimed,
"They have broken through here, I tell you, day before yesterday. I always knew that when Kitchener's army was ready the trick would be turned. Of course the censorship is holding up the news, but everybody knows it. A sharp bombardment that overwhelmed the Boches, and then the break through. The Boches were routed. Talk about not being able to storm trenches! The cavalry has passed Lille. At this moment Lille is liberated. The British must be there in force."
"But," objected my husband, "this is too good to be true. They could not hold back news like that, you know. If the British are in Lille, the war is over."
"Of course it is over," insisted my uncle's friend. "We shall have peace by Christmas."
Mr.—well I won't tell you his name—let us say Mr. Smith, was hardly to blame for taking the wish for the fact. The rumor of a big break through the Flanders front was everywhere in Paris. Fourteen months of war had been enough. The French had waited a year for the British to form an army. Why shouldn't it be true that now the end had come?
Alas! we were to wait three years more before the lines in Flanders were crossed; we were to have many costly disappointments like that of Neuve-Chapelle. But when the moment finally did come, the liberation of Lille was to mean the beginning of the end.
In October, 1919, when I came back to Paris from the Little Gray Home, I returned to a city where there was a feeling of victory in the air. The most conservative had lost their habitual pessimism. The most resigned, who had come to accept the war as a fatality that would never end as long as there were men to fight, began to revise their opinions. The most suspicious, who wagged their heads over communiqués no matter what the authorities said, felt that after all we were making "some progress." Each day the list of liberated communes grew longer. But until some big city was abandoned, Parisians were afraid of having to pay too big a price to break down the Boche resistance. After all, they had proved themselves stubborn fighters. They might elect to make a long "last ditch" combat on lines of which we did not know the existence. But if they abandoned Lille, that would mean the intention of falling back to the Meuse. Genuine optimism is as hard to instil as it is to dispel. In retrospect, many writers are now asserting that Parisians knew the Boches were beaten after the failure of their last July offensive from the Vesle to the Marne. But this is not true. Relief over the failure to reach Paris did not mean certainty of the imminent collapse of Ludendorf's war machine.
When summertime was over, and darkness came suddenly from one day to the next, Herbert and I resumed our walks at nightfall. During the war we had lost our interest in buildings as memorials of the past. Contemporary history had crowded out ante-bellum associations. The Eiffel Tower was not a gigantic monstrosity, a relic of the Exposition. It was a wireless-telegraphy station, the ear, the eye, the voice of Paris. Tramping by the Champs de Mars, we saw the sentinels in their faded blue coats of the fifth year and felt sorry for the men up there always listening in the pitiless cold. Crossing the Pont Alexandre III, we forgot the splendor of the Czars and thought of Nicholas in the hands of the Bolsheviki. The Grand Palais no longer recalled brilliant Salons. We thought of the blind in the hospital there and of the re-education of mutilated poilus. The picture inside was a one-armed soldier learning to run a typewriter, and a man with both legs amputated sitting on a low bench, the light of renewed hope in his eyes: for he had found out that he could still do a man's work in the world by becoming a cobbler. The newspaper building, whose cellar windows used to fascinate us, was the place where we waited for the posting of the communiqué. The Invalides was no longer just Napoleon's tomb. It was the place where you went to see your friends decorated and where you strolled about the central court to show your children aeroplanes and cannon captured from the Germans. And you were saddened by the thought that when the last veterans of the Crimea and Soixante-Dix and colonial wars disappeared, there would be thousands of others to take the vacant places.