“There is still the gun.”
“If the gun gets rusty?”
“Then the tiger gets its meal. He’s a fool who lets his gun get rusty.”
“If it breaks, and he has not money to buy another?”
“That is unfortunate! The tiger wins.”
He was a fatalist. Also he assumed that the German by nature was a tiger. Was that true? Bertram thought of all the German prisoners he’d seen in time of war, some he had helped to capture—simple, straw-haired young peasants, who hated war, and loved peace, and the arts and crafts and labours of peace, not soldiers by instinct and passion, like the French, but soldiers by coercion, by discipline, by sentiment; brave, efficient, obedient, but without fire. They were not “tigers,” as far as he had seen them, but rather sheepish fellows. It was not utterly impossible that they might abandon the hope of revenge against France, if France would abandon her passion of hate, her uttermost demands of punishment and payment, her pound of flesh.
It was useless to argue with this peasant-farmer, though he had a clear intelligence, and, like most Frenchmen of his class, a surprising gift of words.
“England is a good friend,” he said, at the end of this conversation. “There must never be cause of quarrel between England and France. The very dead would rise out of these fields to protest.”
It was here, by Havrincourt Château that English and Scots had advanced on a day of November in 1917, with Tanks leading the way towards Cambrai. Now it was quiet in the fields, and birds were singing, and no smoke clouds burst in Bourlon Wood.
The young Frenchman shook hands with him and smiled.