Bertram walked down the next turning to the right, leading to the Cathedral. On the other side was a gap in a row of houses newly roofed. It was boarded round. There, in that gap, had been “Charley’s Bar,” the great cock-tail resort of thousands of young officers who drank quickly because there might not be much time between them and death.
Some of them were still alive, but not many of those who fought in the Somme battles. Izzard was one of them still alive, that fellow in the funny shop at Ottery. He had drunk like a fish in this place before it was knocked to bits by an air bomb in that March of ’18. Bertram had drunk with him, eggnogs, and champagne cock-tails. They had both been thoroughly “blind” on more than one afternoon, and slept themselves sober in the Hotel du Rhin before dining at the Godebert in the rue des Jacobins, where Izzard and he had flirted outrageously with the pretty Marguérite, but without much success as she was coveted by Staff officers, and Brigadiers, and even a Major-General.
It was to the Hotel du Rhin that Bertram now went, still walking with ghosts and ancient memories.
The last time he had been there its stairs and passages were strewn with broken glass, and with several other officers he had sat in a cellar listening to houses falling with tremendous crashes, while a fleet of Gothas overhead played merry hell all through a night which was the blackest in the war.
His machine-gun company had been cut to bits outside Villers Bretonneux. Christy had been wounded in the lung and taken away by the stretcher-bearers. The Germans had made a clean break through and there was very little up the road to bar their way to Amiens. Bertram had been ordered to join up with another crowd for a last stand somewhere near Boves. The crowd had gone missing, it was impossible to search for them at night, and the air-raid over Amiens was the worst thing he’d seen in that way.
It had begun at seven-thirty in the evening, with two explosions outside the windows, smashing them, and filling the dancing-room with splinters. The lady manager was there, doing accounts with a young staff officer. She had yellow hair, and two bright spots of colour on her cheeks, and wonderful courage. Her face was pale beneath the bright spots of colour, but that was her only sign of fear. Joseph, the waiter with the shrill voice and high-pitched laugh, disappeared in the direction of the cellar. The other waiter—what was his name?—an old fellow, with side-whiskers, wandered about cursing the sales Boches.
A frightful and fantastic night, with dead men and dead horses in the street outside. Now like a dream! Since then, Amiens had tidied up its streets, re-built many of its houses—though not the great gap between the rue des Trois Cailloux and the rue des Jacobins.
An orchestra was playing in the Hotel du Rhin. American tourists and French commercial travellers were feeding in the room where Bertram had sat down on that night of tragedy, with three mayors who had lost their towns, and officers who had lost their Divisions, wondering how long it would be before the head of a German column marched into Amiens. An orchestra fiddling jazz tunes to American tourists!
But there, miracle of miracles, was the lady manager with the yellow hair, and Joseph, the shrill-voiced waiter, and the old boy with the side whiskers! Bertram went up to the lady manager, and greeted her with emotion, as one whom he had known in the wonderful years, and as one who remembered.
“Still here, Madame! You remember me, perhaps? That night of the air-raid, and other nights!”