At the time I tried to put down in words the picture of that scene when, after four years’ slaughter of men, the city, which had seemed a world away, was open to us a few miles beyond the trench-lines; the riven trees, the shell-holes, and the stench of death, and we walked across the canal, over a broken bridge, into that large town where—how wonderful it seemed I—there were roofs on the houses and glass in the windows, and crowds of civilian people waiting for the first glimpse of British khaki.
Even now remembrance brings back to me figures that I saw only for a moment or two, but remain sharply etched in my mind, and people I met in the streets who told me the story of four years in less than four minutes and enough to let me know their bitterness, hatred, humiliations, terrors, in the time of the German occupation.... I have re-read the words I wrote, hastily, on a truculent typewriter which I cursed for its twisted ribbon, while the vision of the day was in my eyes. They are true to the facts and to what we felt about them. Other men felt that sense of exaltation, a kind of mystical union with the spirit of many people who had been delivered from evil powers. It is of those other men that I am now writing, and especially of one who was my friend—Wickham Brand, with the troubled soul, whom I knew in the years of war and afterwards in the peace which was no peace to him.
His, was one of the faces I remember that day, as I had a glimpse of it now and then, among crowds of men and women, young girls and children, who surged about him, kissing his hands and his face when he stooped a little (he was taller than most of them) to meet the wet lips of some half-starved baby held up by a pallid woman of Lille, or to receive the kiss of some old woman who clawed his khaki tunic, or of some girl who hung on to his belt. There was a shining wetness in his eyes, and the hard lines of his face had softened as he laughed at all this turmoil about him, at all these hands robbing him of shoulder-straps and badges, and at all these people telling him a hundred things together—their gratitude to the English, their hatred of the Germans, their abominable memories. His field-cap was pushed back from his high, furrowed forehead from which at the temples the hair had worn thin, owing to worry or a steel hat. His long, lean face, deeply tanned, but powdered with white dust, had an expression of tenderness which gave him a kind of priestly look, though others would have said “knightly” with, perhaps, equal truth. Anyhow, I could see that for a little while Brand was no longer worrying about the casualty lists and the doom of youth, and was giving himself up to an exaltation that was visible and spiritual in Lille in the day of liberation.
The few of us who went first into Lille while our troops were in a wide are round the city, in touch, more or less, with the German rearguards, were quickly separated in the swirl of the crowd that surged about us, greeting us as conquering heroes, though none of us were actual fighting men, being war correspondents, intelligence officers (Wickham Brand and three other officers were there to establish an advanced headquarters), with an American doctor—that amazing fellow “Daddy” Small—and our French liaison officer, Pierre Nesle. Now and again we met in the streets and exchanged words.
I remember the doctor and I drifted together at the end of the Boulevard de la Liberté. A French girl of the middle-class had tucked her hand through his right arm and was talking to him excitedly, volubly. On his other arm leaned an old dame in a black dress and bonnet who was also delivering her soul of its pent-up emotion to a man who did not understand more than a few words of her French. A small boy dressed as a Zouave was walking backwards, waving a long tricolour flag before the little American, and a crowd of people made a close circle about him, keeping pace.
“Assassins, bandits, robbers!” gobbled the old woman. “They stole all our copper, monsieur. The very mattresses off our beds. The wine out of our cellars. They did abominations.”
“Month after month we waited,” said the girl, with her hand through the doctor’s right arm. “All that time the noise of the guns was loud in our ears. It never ceased, monsieur, until to-day. And we used to say: ‘To-morrow the English will come!’ until at last some of us lost heart—not I, no, always I believed in victory!—and said, ‘The English will never come!’ Now you are here, and our hearts are full of joy. It is like a dream. The Germans have gone!”
The doctor patted the girl’s hand and addressed me across the tricolour waved by the small Zouave.
“This is the greatest day of my life! And I am perfectly ashamed of myself. In spite of my beard and my gig-lamps and my anarchical appearance, these dear people take me for an English officer and a fighting hero. And I feel like one. If I saw a German now I truly believe I should cut his throat. Me—a non-combatant and a man of peace! I’m horrified at my own blood-thirstiness. The worst of it is I’m enjoying it. I’m a primitive man for a time, and find it stimulating. To-morrow I shall repent. These people have suffered hell’s torments. I can’t understand a word the little old lady is telling me but I’m sure she’s been through infernal things. And this pretty girl. She’s a peach, though slightly tuberculous, poor child. My God—how they hate! There is a stored-up hatred in this town enough to burn up Germany by mental telepathy. It’s frightening. Hatred and joy, I feel these two passions like a flame about us. It’s spiritual. It’s transcendental. It’s the first time I’ve seen a hundred thousand people drunk with joy and hate. I’m against hate, and yet the sufferings of these people make me see red so that I want to cut a German throat!”
“You’d stitch it up afterwards, doctor,” I said.