Cavalry officers rode in and put their horses in the back yard of the Hotel du Rhin.
Officers of every battalion of the British Army surged along the narrow street—the Street of the Three Pebbles. They were down from the line, while their Division was in reserve, or were passing through on their way to the line. Here, in Amiens, were shops, pretty women, restaurants, cock-tail bars, civilian people, children, roofed houses,—the last outpost of civilised life this side of the filthy fields, and lice, and shell-fire, and sudden death.
Their ghosts walked with Bertram now. He stood at the corner of the rue Amiral Courbet. It was there that he had stood one night, talking to a French girl. It was very dark, for there was no lamp allowed after daylight. She flashed a pocket lamp in his face, and revealed her own, white, with red lips, and black laughing eyes—a pretty witch for a young man down from a battlefield for one night of life.
“Comment ça va, mon chou? La vie est triste, n’cst-ce pas? Il n’y a qu’une consolation, un seul moyen d’oubli. Un peu de rire, un peu d’amour! Qu’est-ce-que tu en penses? Veux-tu?”
A sad life, she said, and only one consolation, one way of forgetfulness. A little laughter, a little love. What did he think about it?
He’d thought a lot about it. He was twenty, then, in 1916. A boy, but doing a man’s job, and with no life insurance for even another week, or another day, up there, beyond Amiens, this side of Contalmaison still in German hands. He agreed with this girl who had come up to him out of the darkness. A little laughter, a little love. Worth having before the next attack. Worth grabbing at on a rainy night in war-time, and perhaps the very last night on earth. Who could tell? Yet something had made him refuse the offer, some fear, or law, or mental prohibition. His mother had whispered a warning to him about “bad women.” His two sisters, Dorothy and Susan, adored him in those days, believed him spotless. He had been brought up in a certain code, which had become part of him, inescapable without stricken conscience, despite the smashing of mental and moral foundations by the earthquake of war.
“Rien à faire!” he had told the girl, not roughly, poor kid, but decidedly. Nothing doing.
“Mais oui, petit officier!”
She had grabbed his belt, pulled him towards her, kissed his face, wet in the rain, with her wet lips.
It was here, at this very corner, in July of 1916!