“Have you an idea that your sister is in Lille?”
“No,” he said. “No. At least not more than the faintest hope. She is behind the lines somewhere—anywhere. She went away from home before the war—she was a singer—and was caught in the tide.”
“No news at all?” I asked.
“Her last letter was from Lille. Or rather a postcard with the Lille stamp. She said, ‘I am amusing myself well, little brother.’ She and I were good comrades. I look for her face in the crowds. But she may be anywhere—Valenciennes, Maubeuge—God knows!”
A shout of “Vive la France!” rose from a crowd of people surging up the street. Pierre Nesle was in the blue uniform of the chasseur à pied, and the people in Lille guessed it was theirs because of its contrast to our khaki, though the “horizon bleu” was so different from the uniforms worn by the French army of ’14. To them now, on the day of liberation, Pierre Nesle, our little liaison officer, stood for the Armies of France, the glory of France. Even the sight of our khaki did not fill them with such wild enthusiasm. So I lost him again as I had lost the little American doctor in the surge and whirlpool of the crowd.
II
I was building up in my mind the historic meaning of the day. Before nightfall I should have to get it written—the spirit as well as the facts, if I could—in time for the censors and the despatch-riders. The facts? By many scraps of conversation with men and women in the streets I could already reconstruct pretty well the life of Lille in time of war. I found many of their complaints rather trivial. The Germans had wanted brass and had taken it, down to the taps in the washing-places. Well, I had seen worse horrors than that. They had wanted wool and had taken the mattresses. They had requisitioned all the wine but had paid for it at cheap rates. These were not atrocities. The people of Lille had been short of food, sometimes on the verge of starvation, but not really starved. They complained of having gone without butter, milk, sugar; but even in England these things were hard to get. No, the tragedy of Lille lay deeper than that. A sense of fear that was always with them. “Every time there was a knock at the door,” said one man, “we started up in alarm. It was a knock at our hearts.” At any time of the day or night they were subject to visits from German police, to searches, arrests, or orders to get out of their houses or rooms for German officers or troops. They were denounced by spies, Germans, or debased people of their own city, for trying to smuggle letters to their folk in other towns in enemy occupation, for concealing copper in hiding-places, for words of contempt against the Kaiser or the Kommandantur, spoken at a street-corner between one friend and another. That consciousness of being watched, overheard, reported and denounced, poisoned the very atmosphere of their lives, and the sight of the field-grey men in the streets, the stench of them—the smell was horrible when German troops marched back from the battlefields—produced a soul-sickness worse than physical nausea. I could understand the constant fret at the nerves of these people, the nagging humiliation,—they had to doff hats to every German officer who swaggered by—and the slow-burning passion of people, proud by virtue of their race, who found themselves controlled, ordered about, bullied, punished for trivial infractions of military regulations, by German officials of hard, unbending arrogance. That must have been abominable for so long a time; but as yet I heard no charges of definite brutality, or of atrocious actions by individual enemies. The worst I had heard was that levy of the women for forced labour in unknown places. One could imagine the horror of it, the cruelty of it to girls whose nerves were already unstrung by secret fears, dark and horrible imaginings, the beast-like look in the eyes of men who passed them in the streets. Then the long-delayed hope of liberation—year after year—the German boasts of victory, the strength of the German defence that never seemed to weaken, in spite of the desperate attacks of French and British, the preliminary success of their great offensive in March and April when masses of English prisoners were herded through Lille, dejected, exhausted, hardly able to drag their feet along between their sullen guards—by Heaven, these people of Lille had needed much faith to save them from despair. No wonder now, that on the first day of liberation, some of them were wet-eyed with joy, and others were lightheaded with liberty.
In the Grande Place below the old balustraded Town Hall I saw young Cyril Clatworthy, one of the Intelligence crowd, surrounded by a group of girls who were stroking his tunic, clasping his hands, pushing each other laughingly to get nearer to him. He was in lively conversation with the prettiest girl whom he kept in front of him. It was obvious that he was enjoying himself as the central figure of this hero-worship, and as I passed the boy (twenty-four that birthday, he had told me a month before), I marvelled at his ceaseless capacity for amorous adventure, with or without a moment’s notice. A pretty girl, if possible, or a plain one if not, drew him like a magnet, excited all his boyish egotism, called to the faun-spirit that played the pipes of Pan in his heart. It was an amusing game for him with his curly brown hair and Midshipman Easy type of face. For the French girls whom he had met on his way—little Marcelle on Cassel Hill, Christine at Corbie on the Somme, Marguérite in the hat-shop at Amiens (what became of her, poor kid?), it was not so amusing when he “blew away,” as he called it, and had a look at life elsewhere.