With this realisation, Bertram felt as though he were the sole survivor of the war, the only man left alive from that great massacre. None of those people around him had had anything to do with it. In the smoking-carriage where he took a corner seat, were two prosperous-looking Jews with big cigars, two American business men, too old to have been in the last push, an elderly Frenchman, who bought Le Matin and the Cri de Paris.
Along the corridor, and in other carriages were groups of people going to Paris, or beyond Paris to other parts of Europe, where the sun was shining and life “gay.” They were “smart” people, still able to afford the pleasures of life, in spite of the downfall of foreign markets, stagnant trade, unemployment, high taxes. They had forgotten the war and its agonies.
No one in his carriage bothered to look out of the window as they neared Amiens, where one could still see on a far hillside a line of earthworks, which had been thrown up hurriedly as a last line of defence after the Germans had broken through on March 21st and come very close to the old city—as close as Villers Bretonneux on the high ground outside.
Bertram did not travel as far as Paris, though he was tempted to go as far, because Joyce was there. It was at Amiens that he left the train, as the beginning of his wanderings through the old places of war, to find out what the people there were thinking, how they were living, according to Bernard Hall’s instructions.
A crowd of ghosts walked with him up the rue des Trois Cailloux—the Street of the Three Pebbles. They were the Comrades of the Great War, who had crowded that street when great battles were being fought, year after year, in the fields of the Somme. He remembered them mostly on rainy days. It seemed always to be raining in Amiens, in war time. The officers wore trench-coats plastered with mud and chalk. The men staggered under their packs. The rain beat down on their tin hats.
French poilus—Fusiliers Marins, Chasseurs, infantry of the line, Zouaves, sloped up and down, staring into the shops, drinking porto blanc and fouler liquids in little drinking dens strictly against the law.
English Tommies walked with little French girls down the narrow side streets, went with them into dark old houses up cut-throat alleys.
Australian soldiers slouched around with hard, lean, leathery faces, looking for trouble and often finding it.
Crowds of Jocks with muddy knees, wet kilts, tin hats, slanted over Harry Lauder faces, wandered about in a grim mirthless way.
Staff officers motored into the town from Army Headquarters, or Corps, or Division.