“Au revoir, mon camarade! Comme vous-même, je n’aime pas la guerre. Mais, que voulez-vous? Il vient quand il vient!”
He had no love for war, but when it came, it came! Terrible philosophy, upon which no peace could be built, no forward step taken by educated humanity. To this peasant, perhaps to all his kind, war was as inevitable as natural calamities, like rains and droughts, earthquakes, and thunderbolts. And the German was still the German—the Blonde Beast. Les sales Boches!
XL
The hostility—suspicion, even,—of the French people regarding England was to Bertram terrible. They were very friendly to him, all those people whom he visited in their huts or walked with over old battlefields. Some of them were even emotional, as one old woman in an estaminet along the Arras-Doullens road with whom he had been billeted for a time, and who flung her arms about him and kissed him on both cheeks, and wept a little, and laughed, and cooked a chicken for him. But when they spoke about England, it was with doubt, or resentment, or anger; now and then with passion.
He couldn’t get to the root of their grievances. They talked vaguely of England crossing the path of France in Syria. In what way? They didn’t know, but said: “On dit dans les journaux—” It is said in the papers!
They believed, many of them, that the value of the franc was deliberately made low by the artful jugglings of British financiers. They were certain that “Loy-Zhorzhe” was pro-German for corrupt and sinister motives, that British diplomacy was jealous of French victory, and intrigued everywhere to secure a new balance of power in Europe, so that French supremacy should be weighted down by the restoration of Germany.
In any case, England desired to thwart France of the fruits of victory, and was always manœuvring to let Germany off her debts, to prevent France from seizing German industrial cities if Germany defaulted in her payments.
It was idle for Bertram to argue that Lloyd George and the British people were afraid that if Germany were pressed too hard, beyond her power to pay, beyond human nature, she would seek to escape by force, would nourish desires for revenge which would lead ultimately and inevitably to another war. Germany would form an alliance with Russia, or break into such revolutionary chaos that the peace and recovery of Europe would be retarded for more than another generation.
He put these ideas to a French priest as they sat together in a little wooden presbytery near the ruins of a church on the west side of St. Quentin. They had met in a cemetery where British and French soldiers lay buried side by side.
Bertram, standing bare-headed there by the grave of one of his own comrades, was greeted by the priest, a tall, middle-aged man with a bronzed, clean-shaven face, and the scar of some wound down his right cheek.