Now she leaned on her broom, talking to Bertram about the changes since the war. Prices were high. It was hard for poor people to live. The bourgeoisie were making plenty of money, but the Government was ruined, she was told. The Germans evaded their payments. Anyhow, no German gold came to the people who were trying to build up their cottages again in the battlefields. She had a cousin at Lens. A mother of six. They had no water, no gas, no stone for building, no money for reconstruction. Three years after war they were still miserable. Victory had not brought happiness to France, nor safety. The Boches would come back again one day. It would begin all over again. A pity they weren’t all killed when the French and English had the chance! Now the English hated the French, and loved the Germans, for some reason!
“What makes you think that?” asked Bertram.
“It is true, is it not?” asked this woman, Jeanne, quite simply.
She was surprised, and incredulous, when he told her that she was mistaken, and that the English loved France still, and desired to help her.
“What gives you the idea that England hates France?”
She said she read Le Matin, which told her so. It was the same in the Journal d’Amiens. Everybody spoke about it—especially les garçons, who were always talking politics. She didn’t understand these things, but she picked up her news from the others. It was public opinion. No one could go against public opinion. C’est formidable, l’opinion publique!
XXXIX
For several weeks Bertram wandered about the old places, mostly a-foot, or getting lifts in country carts, once or twice taking a train which crawled from Arras to Lens, and from Bapaume to Péronne.
He had wayside conversations with peasant men and women, young farmers who had been poilus, commercial travellers from Paris and Lille, mayors of towns wiped off the map, but now on the sites of their old mairies in wooden huts, superintending la reconstruction which, so far, didn’t seem to amount to very much.
He passed the night in wooden estaminets in fields where once British youth had been swept with fire year after year—Ypres, Hooge, St. Julien, Dickebusch, Souchez, Neuville Vitesse, many other places haunted surely by boys he had passed along the roads.