I went through Albert many scores of times to the battlefields beyond, and watched its process of disintegration through those years, until it was nothing but a wild scrap heap of read brick and twisted iron, and, in the last phase, even the Golden Virgin and her Babe, which had seemed to escape all shell-fire by miraculous powers, lay buried beneath a mass of masonry. Beyond were the battlefields of the Somme where every yard of ground is part of the great graveyard of our youth.
So Amiens, as I have said, was not far away from the red heart of war, and was clear enough to the lines to be crowded always with officers and men who came out between one battle and another, and by “lorry-jumping” could reach this city for a few hours of civilized life, according to their views of civilization. To these men—boys, mostly—who had been living in lousy ditches under hell fire, Amiens was Paradise, with little hells for those who liked them. There were hotels in which they could go get a bath, if they waited long enough or had the luck to be early on the list. There were streets of shops with plate-glass windows unbroken, shining, beautiful. There were well-dressed women walking about, with kind eyes, and children as dainty, some of them, as in High Street, Kensington, or Prince's Street, Edinburgh. Young officers, who had plenty of money to spend—because there was no chance of spending money between a row of blasted trees and a ditch in which bits of dead men were plastered into the parapet—invaded the shops and bought fancy soaps, razors, hair-oil, stationery, pocketbooks, knives, flash-lamps, top-boots (at a fabulous price), khaki shirts and collars, gramophone records, and the latest set of Kirchner prints. It was the delight of spending, rather than the joy of possessing, which made them go from one shop to another in search of things they could carry hack to the line—that and the lure of girls behind the counters, laughing, bright-eyed girls who understood their execrable French, even English spoken with a Glasgow accent, and were pleased to flirt for five minutes with any group of young fighting-men—who broke into roars of laughter at the gallantry of some Don Juan among them with the gift of audacity, and paid outrageous prices for the privilege of stammering out some foolish sentiment in broken French, blushing to the roots of their hair (though captains and heroes) at their own temerity with a girl who, in another five minutes, would play the same part in the same scene with a different group of boys.
I used to marvel at the patience of these girls. How bored they must have been with all this flirtation, which led to nothing except, perhaps, the purchase of a bit of soap at twice its proper price! They knew that these boys would leave to go back to the trenches in a few hours and that some of them would certainly be dead in a few days. There could be no romantic episode, save of a transient kind, between them and these good-looking lads in whose eyes there were desire and hunger, because to them the plainest girl was Womanhood, the sweet, gentle, and feminine side of life, as opposed to the cruelty, brutality, and ugliness of war and death. The shopgirls of Amiens had no illusions. They had lived too long in war not to know the realities. They knew the risks of transient love and they were not taking them—unless conditions were very favorable. They attended strictly to business and hoped to make a lot of money in the shop, and were, I think, mostly good girls—as virtuous as life in war-time may let girls be—wise beyond their years, and with pity behind their laughter for these soldiers who tried to touch their hands over the counters, knowing that many of them were doomed to die for France and England. They had their own lovers—boys in blue somewhere between Vaux-sur-Somme and Hartmanns—weilerkopf—and apart from occasional intimacies with English officers quartered in Amiens for long spells, left the traffic of passion to other women who walked the streets.
II
The Street of the Three Pebbles—la rue des Trois Cailloux—which goes up from the station through the heart of Amiens, was the crowded highway. Here were the best shops—the hairdresser, at the left-hand side, where all day long officers down from the line came in to have elaborate luxury in the way of close crops with friction d'eau de quinine, shampooing, singeing, oiling, not because of vanity, but because of the joyous sense of cleanliness and perfume after the filth and stench of life in the desolate fields; then the booksellers' (Madame Carpentier et fille) on the right-hand side, which was not only the rendezvous of the miscellaneous crowd buying stationery and La Vie Parisienne, but of the intellectuals who spoke good French and bought good books and liked ten minutes' chat with the mother and daughter. (Madame was an Alsatian lady with vivid memories of 1870, when, as a child, she had first learned to hate Germans.) She hated them now with a fresh, vital hatred, and would have seen her own son dead a hundred times—he was a soldier in Saloniki—rather than that France should make a compromise peace with the enemy. She had been in Amiens, as I was, on a dreadful night of August of 1914, when the French army passed through in retreat from Bapaume, and she and the people of her city knew for the first time that the Germans were close upon them. She stood in the crowd as I did—in the darkness, watching that French column pass with their transport, and their wounded lying on the baggage wagons, men of many regiments mixed up, the light of the street lamps shining on the casques of cuirassiers with their long horsehair tails, leading their stumbling horses, and foot soldiers, hunched under their packs, marching silently with dragging steps. Once in a while one of the soldiers left the ranks and came on to the sidewalk, whispering to a group of dark shadows. The crowds watched silently, in a curious, dreadful silence, as though stunned. A woman near me spoke in a low voice, and said, “Nous sommes perdus!” Those were the only words I heard or remembered.
That night in the station of Amiens the boys of a new class were being hurried away in truck trains, and while their army was in retreat sang “La Marseillaise,” as though victory were in their hearts. Next day the German army under von Kluck entered Amiens, and ten days afterward passed through it on the way to Paris. Madame Carpentier told me of the first terror of the people when the field-gray men came down the Street of the Three Pebbles and entered their shops. A boy selling oranges fainted when a German stretched out his hand to buy some. Women hid behind their counters when German boots stamped into their shops. But Madame Carpentier was not afraid. She knew the Germans and their language. She spoke frank words to German officers, who saluted her respectfully enough. “You will never get to Paris... France and England will be too strong for you... Germany will be destroyed before this war ends.” They laughed at her and said: “We shall be in Paris in a week from now. Have you a little diary, Madame?” Madame Carpentier was haughty with them. Some women of Amiens—poor drabs—did not show any haughtiness, nor any pride, with the enemy who crowded into the city on their way toward Paris. A girl told me that she was looking through the window of a house that faced the Place de la Gare, and saw a number of German soldiers dancing round a piano-organ which was playing to them. They were dancing with women of the town, who were laughing and screeching in the embrace of big, blond Germans. The girl who was watching was only a schoolgirl then. She knew very little of the evil of life, but enough to know that there was something in this scene degrading to womanhood and to France. She turned from the window and flung herself on her bed and wept bitterly...
I used to call in at the bookshop for a chat now and then with Madame and Mademoiselle Carpentier, while a crowd of officers came in and out. Madame was always merry and bright in spite of her denunciations of the “Sale Boches—les brigands, les bandits!” and Mademoiselle put my knowledge of French to a severe but pleasant test. She spoke with alarming rapidity, her words tumbling over one another in a cascade of volubility delightful to hear but difficult to follow. She had a strong mind—masterly in her methods of business—so that she could serve six customers at once and make each one think that her attention was entirely devoted to his needs—and a very shrewd and critical idea of military strategy and organization. She had but a poor opinion of British generals and generalship, although a wholehearted admiration for the gallantry of British officers and men; and she had an intimate knowledge of our preparations, plans, failures, and losses. French liaison-officers confided to her the secrets of the British army; and English officers trusted her with many revelations of things “in the wind.” But Mademoiselle Carpentier had discretion and loyalty and did not repeat these things to people who had no right to know. She would have been far more efficient as a staff officer than many of the young gentlemen with red tabs on their tunics who came into the shop, flipping beautiful top-boots with riding-crops, sitting on the counter, and turning over the pages of La Vie for the latest convention in ladies' legs.
Mademoiselle was a serious musician, so her mother told me, but her musical studies were seriously interrupted by business and air raids, which one day ceased in Amiens altogether after a night of horror, when hundreds of houses were smashed to dust and many people killed, and the Germans brought their guns close to the city—close enough to scatter high velocities about its streets—and the population came up out of their cellars, shaken by the terror of the night, and fled. I passed the bookshop where Mademoiselle was locking up the door of this house which had escaped by greater luck than its neighbors. She turned as I passed and raised her hand with a grave gesture of resignation and courage. “Ils ne passeront pas!” she said. It was the spirit of the courage of French womanhood which spoke in those words.