“Mon père,” he said, “you speak like a soldier, and not like a priest. Surely you of all men should believe in the forgiveness of enemies—wasn’t it ninety times nine?—and the blessings promised to the peacemakers.”
“I spoke as a Frenchman as well as a priest,” was the answer. “I have seen the flower of French youth swept down by the sales Boches. I have seen the beauty of their mother, France, blasted, as in those fields outside. I have seen our women outraged by the brutality of the enemy. It is because of these things, and because I believe in the justice of God that I demand the full punishment of an infamous people. I warn you, sir, that if Great Britain endeavours to thwart that divine justice, France will regard her also as an enemy.”
“The dead listen to us, mon père,” said Bertram, simply. “Outside this window their bodies lie together. It is too soon for any Frenchman to speak of England as an enemy.”
“It is too soon for England to behave as such,” said the priest.
For several hours they talked, this Frenchman and Englishman, these two soldiers of the Great War, this priest and layman. At the end of that time, Bertram knew that no words in any language or with any eloquence, could ever reconcile their opposing views. The priest believed in “the sword of France” as the means of peace in Europe. Bertram believed in reconciliation, the progress of commonsense, the education of democracy, the spirit of peace in the hearts of common folk.
“Illusion!” said the priest again. “Illusion! In the heart of man, and especially in the heart of Germany, is hatred, evil, greed, brutality, fear, rivalry. So it has been. So it will always be, despite the grace of God, and the teaching of Jesus Christ. We have to guard against these natural passions. We have to uphold justice by force. We must never be weakened by a craven fear of war. Worse than war is cowardice or dishonour. Worse than hatred is the betrayal of friendship. May England be true to France!”
“May France remember England’s sacrifice!” said Bertram, “and our dead that lie in her soil.”
The priest answered his farewell in a friendly way, gripping his hand first, as a comrade, and then giving him a priest’s blessing. But when Bertram trudged away from the presbytery to a wooden estaminet a mile away, he was enormously distressed in spirit. This priest, Jeanne, the chambermaid, the young farmer near his old dug-out, a commercial traveller from Paris, the Mayor of Arras, scores of friendly people he met along the old roads of war and on the old battlefields, had talked in the same strain, used the same kind of argument, lamented the ill-will or the “treachery” of England; or if not of England, then of “Loy-Zhorzhe,” who seemed to them not so much a human personality as an evil power.
What hope was there for peace in Europe, if France pursued her policy of force, to crush Germany and keep her weak? What chance for the “Comrades of the Great War,” lounging about Labour Exchanges in London, marching in processions of unemployed, with banners saying, “We Want Work”?
There would be no work until Great Britain could sell her goods in the markets of Europe. Those markets could never buy if Germany were thrust into such ruin as that of Austria. Germany, perhaps allied with Russia, would struggle like a wild beast. The “sword of France” would not be strong enough to keep her weak for ever. Then France would call to England again. Would the roads have to be tramped again by battalions of boys from England, Scotland, Ireland, going up to the fields of death?