The priest’s face blanched at the remembrance of that scene. His voice quavered when he spoke of the girls’ screams—one of them had gone raving mad—and of the wailing that rose among their stricken families. For a while he was silent, with lowered head and brooding eyes which stared at a rent in the threadbare carpet, and I noticed the trembling of a pulse on his right temple above the deeply-graven wrinkles of his parchment skin. Then he raised his head and spoke harshly.
“Not even that could break the spirit of my people. They only said, ‘We will never forget and never forgive!’ They were hungry—we did not get much food—but they said, ‘Our sons who are fighting for us are suffering worse things. It is for us to be patient.’ They were surrounded by German spies—the secret police—who listened to their words and haled them off to prison upon any pretext. There is hardly a man among us who has not been in prison. The women were made to do filthy work for German soldiers, to wash their lousy clothes, to scrub their dirty barracks, and they were insulted, humiliated, tempted, by brutal men.”
“Was there much of that brutality?” I asked.
The priest’s eyes grew sombre.
“Many women suffered abominable things. I thank God that so many kept their pride and their honour. There were, no doubt, some bad men and women in the city—disloyal, venal, weak, sinful—may God have mercy on their souls; but I am proud of being a Frenchman when I think of how great was the courage, how patient was the suffering of the people of Lille.”
Pierre Nesle had listened to that monologue with a visible and painful emotion. He became pale and flushed by turns, and when the priest spoke about the forcible recruitment of the women a sweat broke out on his forehead, and he wiped it away with a handkerchief.
I see his face now in profile, sharply outlined against some yellowing folios in a bookcase behind him, a typical Parisian face in its sharpness of outline and pallid skin, with a little black moustache above a thin, sensitive mouth. Before I had seen him mostly in gay moods—though I had wondered sometimes at the sudden silences into which he fell and at a gloom which gave him a melancholy look when he was not talking, or singing, or reciting poetry, or railing against French politicians, or laughing almost hysterically at the satires of Charles Fortune—our “funny man”—when he came to our mess. Now he was suffering, as if the priest’s words had probed a wound—though not the physical wound which had nearly killed him in Souchez Wood.
He stood up from the wooden chair with its widely-curved arms in which he had been sitting stiffly, and spoke to the priest.
“It is not amusing, mon père, what you tell us, and what we have all guessed. It is one more chapter of tragedy in the history of our poor France. Pray God the war will soon be over.”
“With victory!” said the old priest. “With an enemy beaten and bleeding beneath our feet. The Germans must be punished for all their crimes, or the justice of God will not be satisfied.”