“He wants peace in Europe. He wants to prevent another war. Anyhow, England doesn’t forget the heroism of France nor her sufferings.”
“C’est bien!”
She bent to her table, and added up a column of figures.
In the yard an American tourist enquired how long it would take to drive to Château Thierry.
That night Bertram met another woman whom he had known in Amiens in the years of war. It was the chambermaid, and she remembered him.
“Certainly you were one of the young officers who used to stay here in the war?”
He shook hands with her, and said, “I’m the officer whose socks you mended once. You told me about your lover, Jean, who was killed at Verdun. We talked long that night.”
Yes, she remembered him, his very face, those socks she had mended, that talk.
“Tiens! Quel plaisir!”
She was glad to find that he was still alive. A middle-aged woman of plain features, she had not been much of a temptation to young officers down from the line. Yet some of them, deprived of womanhood, for months on end, had made amorous advances even to her, which she had repulsed with loud laughter, in a heavy-handed way. She had mothered some of the younger men, in a peasant way, and had given them good advice about the girls who lured them in the streets, with their flash lamps, like that one at the corner of the rue Amiral Courbet. Her lover, Jean, a butcher, had been killed at Verdun, and she had wept a little in Bertram’s room, and then laughed, and said she supposed men were made to be killed that way, like sheep to be eaten. “C’est la vie.” It was life and war, which would last as long as the Germans were part of the human race.