But I did not forget, and remembered every word later, when I heard his laughter on Armistice night.
A despatch-rider stood outside the door in his muddy overalls and Brand went to get his message. It was from Pierre Nesle.
“I am mad with joy that you have found Marthe! Alas! I cannot get back for a week. Tell her that I am still her devoted comrade and loving brother.—Pierre.” Brand handed me the slip and said, “Poor devil!” I went back to my billet in Madame Chéri’s house, and she made no allusion to our conversation in the afternoon, but was anxious, I thought, to assure me of her friendship by special little courtesies, as when she lighted my candle and carried it upstairs before saying good-night. Hélène was learning English fast and furiously, and with her arm round her mother’s waist said, “Sleep well, sir, and very good dreams to you!” which I imagine was a sentence out of her text-book.
XV
They were great days—in the last two weeks before the Armistice! For me, and for many men, they were days of exultation, wild adventure, pity, immense hope, tremendous scenes uplifted by a sense of victory; though for others, the soldiers who did the dirty work, brought up lorry columns through the mud of the old battlefields far behind our new front line, carried on still with the hard old drudgery of war, they were days not marked out by any special jubilation, or variety, or hope, but just like all the others that had gone before since first they came to France.
I remember little scenes and pictures of those last two weeks as they pass through my mind like a him drama; episodes of tragedy or triumph which startled my imagination, a pageantry of men who had victory in their eyes, single figures who spoke to me, told me unforgettable things, and the last dead bodies who fell at the very gate of peace.
One of the last dead bodies I saw in the war was in the city of Valenciennes, which we entered on the morning of November 3rd. Our guns had spared the city which was full of people, but the railway station was an elaborate ruin of twisted iron and broken glass. Rails were torn up and sleepers burnt. Our airmen, flying low day after day during the German retreat, had flung down bombs, which had torn the fronts off the booking-offices and made match-wood of the signal-boxes and sheds. For German soldiers detraining here it had been a hellish place, and the fire of our flying-men had been deadly accurate. I walked through the ruin out into the station square. It was empty of all life, but one human figure was there all alone. It was the dead body of a young German soldier, lying with outstretched arms, on his back, in a pool of blood. His figure formed a cross there on the cobblestones, and seemed to me a symbol of all that youth which had been sacrificed by powers of monstrous evil. His face was still handsome in death, the square, rough-hewn face of a young peasant.
There was the tap-tap-tap of a German machine-gun somewhere on the right of the square. As I walked forward all my senses were alert to the menace of death. It would be foolish, I thought, to be killed at the end of the war—for surely the end was very near? And then I had a sudden sharp thought that perhaps it would be well if this happened. Why should I live when so many had died? The awful job was done, and my small part in it. I had seen it through from start to finish, for it was finished but for a few days of waiting. It might be better to end with it, for all that came afterwards would be anticlimax. I remember raising my head and looking squarely round at that staccato hammering of the German machine-gun, with an intense desire that a bullet might come my way. But I went on untouched into the town.... As in Courtrai, a fury of gun-fire overhead kept the people in their houses. Our field batteries were firing over the city and the enemy was answering. Here and there I saw a face peering out of a broken window, and then a door opened, and a man and woman appeared behind it with two thin children. The woman thrust out a skinny hand and grasped mine, and began to weep. She talked passionately, with a strange mingling of rage and grief.