He blinked at me through his spectacles and said: “I hope so. I hope my instinct would be as right as that. The world will never get forward till we have killed hatred. That’s my religion.”
“Bandits! Assassins!” grumbled the old lady. “Dirty people!”
“Vivent les Anglais!” shouted the crowd, surging about the little man with the beard.
The American doctor spoke in English in a large explanatory way.
“I’m American. Don’t you go making any mistake. I’m an Uncle Sam. The Yankee boys are further south and fighting like hell, poor lads. I don’t deserve any of this ovation, my dears.”
Then in French, with a strong American accent, he shouted: “Vive la France!’Rah! ‘Rah! ‘Rah!”
“Merci, merci, mon Général!” said an old woman, making a grab at the little doctor’s Sam Brown belt and kissing him on the beard. The crowd closed round him and bore him away....
I met another of our crowd when I went to a priest’s house in a turning off the Rue Royale. Pierre Nesle, our liaison officer—a nice simple fellow, who had always been very civil to me—was talking to the priest outside his door, and introduced me in a formal way to a tall, patrician-looking old man in a long black gown. It was the Abbé Bourdin, well known in Lille as a good priest and a patriot.
“Come indoors, gentlemen,” said the old man. “I will tell you what happened to us, though it would take four years to tell you all.”
Sitting there in the priest’s room, barely furnished, with a few oak chairs and a writing-desk littered with papers, and a table covered with a tattered cloth of red plush, we listened to a tragic tale, told finely and with emotion by the old man into whose soul it had burned. It was the history of a great population caught by the tide of war before many could escape, and placed under the military law of an enemy who tried to break its spirit. They failed to break it in spite of an iron discipline which denied them all liberty. For any trivial offence by individuals against German rule the whole population was fined or shut up in their houses at three in the afternoon. There were endless fines, unceasing and intolerable robberies under the name of “perquisitions.” That had not broken the people’s spirit. There were worse things to bear—the removal of machinery from the factories, the taking away of the young men and boys for forced labour, and then, the greater infancy of that night when machine-guns were placed at the street corners and German officers ordered each household to assemble at the front door and chose the healthy-looking girls by the pointing of a stick and the word, “You—you!” for slave-labour—it was that—in unknown fields far away.