“Your stuff is admirable, and much quoted.”
There was endless material in the “reconstruction” of Picardy and Artois—the human “stuff” which Hall wanted. Bertram had only to sit down to table in any little estaminet, mostly built of wood, amidst a group of huts, in this country of ghosts (as it was to him) to hear in the casual conversation of peasants the aftermath of war’s enormous tragedy to France.
Young peasants, once soldiers of France, told tales of hair-raising horror about the trenches of Verdun, or Vermelles, or any part of the battle front, with a simplicity, and matter-of-fact remembrance, beyond all eloquence or art in tragic effect. Some of them had been prisoners in German camps, and their long servitude, monotonous in starvation and misery, had been worse than trench-life.
Women who had been caught behind the German lines, in Lille, Valenciennes, elsewhere, told of their years of anguish, and inflamed again the passion of the men who listened. Reference to death recurred in casual discourse with continual iteration. “Before Jean was killed,” “since my man’s death,” “when my boy fell in the assault on Souchez,” a score of times in any half hour of gossip over a flask of vin ordinaire.
The loss of homes and fortunes, the difficulty and illusion of this “reconstruction” which was used as a spellword by the French Government, as though the word alone would rebuild houses and churches and flourishing farmsteads, the sadness of women bereft of fathers, husbands, sons, brothers, lovers, by the immense slaughter of French manhood, and the abiding hate of France for Germany, were revealed to Bertram with intimate and distressful detail, as he sat in the corner of any tavern, or talked with any group of men and women in field or market-place.
It came to his mind that here was material for a new “Sentimental Journey” which might live in history because of the tales of Armageddon, but he renounced the idea for himself, beyond his brief sketches for Bernard Hall, because of his desire to get to Paris. It was not the lure of Paris in June, nor that joyous anticipation which had belonged to “three days’ Paris leave” in the old days of war, but the urgent, irresistible, almost sickening desire to see Joyce again.
During this time of loneliness, for he was alone with his soul despite his wayside conversations, some fretfulness of spirit passed from him. He seemed to see things with more clarity. His thoughts struck deeper into the essential meaning of life. Contact again with the devastation of war, the sharp realities of the immense heritage of woe left by those murderous years, his conversation with the ghosts of youth, crowding about him in those little forests of wooden crosses, in those quiet fields where the noise of death had once been very loud, seemed to kill the nagging of his own selfish instincts, to rebuke his egotism.
How trivial was the failure or success of his own life! What did it matter in the balance of history, in the destiny of peoples? He had no right to life at all, except by a fluke of luck, or the grace of God. So many of his friends lay here in French soil, as young as he, and younger. That he was alive, glad to hear the lark singing again above these fields (even as they had sung above the noise of gunfire), with the warmth of the sun in his face, was so much to the good, after all, that he could pay back for that only by service and the dedication of life to things beyond himself. He might, by some small grain of truth, by the force of mere desire, by written word or spoken word, help the chance of peace, so that these fields need not be strewn again with dead boys. To that attempt he was dedicated. It was the meaning of his future life, if it had any purpose.
After the mental storms of the last few months, the quarrel with Joyce, his mother’s death, the tragedy of Susan, and of Digby, he seemed to have aged by twenty years in understanding and experience. A little by Janet Welford’s help, and perhaps more than he could estimate, he had risen above the weakness of self-pity, the most miserable disease, incurable, if allowed to go too far.
It had been all foolishness and pettiness,—that quarrel with Joyce. She was hardly more than a child, even now, and he had dealt with her as though she were a woman of mature views and settled philosophy. He had taken her too seriously. They had both been too serious about their “opinions”—as if they mattered!