It was Frederick E. Small, the American doctor attached to Brand’s crowd, who was with me on a night in Lille, before the armistice, when by news from the colonel we were stirred by the tremendous hope—almost a certainty—that the end of the war was near. I had been into Courtrai, which the enemy had first evacuated and then was shelling. It was not a joyous entry like that into Lille. Most of the people were still down in their cellars, where for several days they had been herded together until the air became foul. On the outskirts I had passed many groups of peasants with their babies and old people, trudging past our guns, trekking from one village to another in search of greater safety, or standing in the fields where our artillery was getting into action, and where new shell craters should have warned them away, if they had had more knowledge of war. For more than four years I had seen, at different periods, crowds like that, after the first flight of fugitives in August of ‘14, when the world seemed to have been tilted up and great populations in France and Belgium were in panic-stricken retreat from the advancing edge of war. I knew the types, the attitudes, the very shape of the bundles, in these refugee processions, the haggard look of the mothers pushing their perambulators, the bewildered look of old men and women, the tired sleepy look of small boys and girls, the stumbling dead-beat look of old farm horses dragging carts piled high with cottage furniture. As it was at the beginning so it was at the end—for civilians caught in the fires of war. With two other men I went into the heart of Courtrai and found it desolate, and knew the reason why, when, at the corner of the Grande Place, a heavy shell came howling and burst inside a house with frightful explosive noise, followed by a crash of masonry. The people were wise to keep to their cellars. Two girls, not so wise, made a dash from one house to another, and were caught by chunks of steel and killed close to the church of St. Martin, where they lay all crumpled up in a clotted pool of blood. A man came up to me, utterly careless of such risks, and I hated to stand talking to him with the shells coming every half-minute overhead.
There was a fire of passion in his eyes, and at every sentence he spoke to me his voice rose and thrilled as he denounced the German race for all they had done in Courtrai, for their robberies, their imprisonments, their destruction of machinery, their brutality. The last Kommandant of Courtrai was von Richthofen, father of the German aviator, and he was a hard, ruthless man, and kept the city under an iron rule.
“All that, thank God, is finished now,” said the man. “The English have delivered us from the beast!” As he spoke, another monstrous shell came overhead, but he took no notice of it, and said, “We are safe now from the enemy’s evil power!” It seemed to me a comparative kind of safety. I had no confidence in it when I sat in the parlour of an old lady who, like Eileen O’Connor, in Lille, had been an Irish governess in Courtrai, and who now, living in miserable poverty, sat in a bed-sitting-room whose windows and woodwork had been broken by shell-splinters. “Do you mind shutting the door, my dear?” she said. “I can’t bear those nasty bombs.” I realised with a large, experienced knowledge that we might be torn to fragments of flesh at any moment by one of those nasty “bombs,” which were really eight-inch shells; but the old lady did not worry, and felt safe when the door was shut.
Outside Courtrai, when I left, lay some khaki figures in a mush of blood. They were lads whom I had seen unloading ammunition that morning on the bank of the canal. One had asked me for a light, and said, “What’s all this peace talk?... Any chance?” A big chance, I had told him. Home for Christmas, certain sure this time. The boy’s eyes had lighted up for a moment, quicker than the match which he held in the cup of his hands.
“Jesus! Back for good, eh?”
Then the light went out of his eyes as the match flared up.
“We’ve heard that tale a score of times. ‘The Germans are weakening. The Huns ‘ave ‘ad enough!...’ Newspaper talk. A man would be a mug——”
Now the boy lay in the mud, with half his body blown away.... I was glad to get back to Lille for a spell, where there were no dead bodies in the roads. And the colonel’s news, straight from G.H.Q.—which, surely, were not playing up the old false optimism again!—helped one to hope that, perhaps, in a week or two the last boys of our race, the lucky ones, would be reprieved from that kind of bloody death which I had seen so often, so long, so heaped up, in many fields of France and Flanders, where the flower of our youth was killed.
Dr. Small was excited by the hope brought back by Colonel Lavington. He sought me out in my billet, Madame Chéri, and begged me to take a walk with him. (It was a moonlight night, but no double throb of a German air-engine came booming over Lille.) He walked at a hard pace, with the collar of his “British warm” tucked up to his ears, and talked in a queer disjointed monologue, emotionally, whimsically. I remember some of his words, more or less—anyhow, the gist of his thoughts, “I’m not worrying any more about how the war will end. We’ve won! Remarkable, that, when one thinks back to the time, less than a year ago, when the best thing seemed a draw. I’m thinking about the future. What’s the world going to be afterwards? That’s my American mind—the next job, so to speak.”
He thought hard while we paced round our side of the Jardin d’Eté, where the moonlight made the bushes glamorous and streaked the tree trunks with a silver line.