Never before in the history of the world had such crowds gathered together as now in Brussels, Ghent or Liège. French and English soldiers walked the same streets, khaki and sky-blue mingling. These two races had met before, not as friends, in some of these towns—five centuries and more before in history. But here also were men from Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, and the New World which had come to the old world on this adventure, paying back something to the old blood and the old ghosts because of their heritage, yet strangely aloof on the whole from these continental peoples, not understanding them, despising them.
The English soldier took it all as it came, with that queer adaptability of his to any environment or any adventure, with his simple human touch.
“Better than the old Ypres salient,” said one of them, grinning at me after a game of Kiss-in-the-Ring at Verviers. He wiped the sweat from his face and neck, and as he raised his arm I saw by his gold stripes that he had been three times wounded. Yes, that was better than the old Hell. He roared with laughter when one of his comrades went into the ring with a buxom girl while the crowd danced round him, holding hands, singing, laughing, pulling him this side and that.
The man who had just left the ring spoke to me again in a confidential way.
“My wife wouldn’t like it if she’d seen me just then. I shan’t tell ’er. She wouldn’t understand. Nobody can understand the things we’ve done, the things we’ve thought, nor the things we’ve seen, unless they’ve been through with us ... and we don’t understand, neither!”
“Who does?” I asked, to express agreement with him, but he took my words as a question to be answered.
“P’raps Gord knows. If so ’E’s a Clever One,’E is!... I wish I ’ad ’alf ’Is sense.”
He drifted away from me with a gurgle of laughter at a girl who pushed his cap on one side.
Along the kerbstone of the market-place some transport-wagons were halted, and the drivers were cooking their evening meal over a charcoal stove, as though on one of the roads of war, while a crowd of Belgians roared with laughter at their by-play with clasp-knives, leaden spoons, and dixies. One of them was a cockney humourist—his type was always to be found in any group of English soldiers—and was performing a pantomime for the edification of the onlookers, and his own pleasure.
A woman standing on the edge of this scene touched me on the sleeve.