Pierre Nesle inspired him to sing a little old French chanson of Pierrot disconsolate.
Pierre had just motored down from Lille—a long journey—and was blue with cold, as he said, warming his hands at the charcoal stove. He laughed at Fortune’s jesting, begged a cigarette from Harding, apologised for keeping on his “stink-coat” for a while until he had thawed out—and I admired the boy’s pluck and self-control. It was the first time I had seen him since he had gone to Lille to see his sister. I knew by the new lines about his eyes and mouth, by a haggard, older look he had that he had seen that sister of his—Marthe—and knew her tragedy.
It was to Brand’s room that he went after midnight, and from Brand, a day later, I heard what had happened. Lie had begun by thanking Brand for that rescue of his sister in Lille, in a most composed and courteous way. Then suddenly that mask fell from him, and he sat down heavily in a chair, put his head down on his arms upon the table, and wept like a child, in uncontrollable grief. Brand was immensely distressed and could not think of any word to comfort him. He kept saying, “Courage! Courage!” as I had said to Madame Chéri when she broke down about her boy Edouard, as the young Baronne had sent word to Eileen from her prison death-bed, and as so many men and women had said to others who had been stricken by the cruelties of war.
“The boy was down and out,” said Brand. “What could I say? It is one of those miseries for which there is no cure. He began to talk about his sister when they had been together at home, in Paris, before the war. She had been so gay, so comradely, so full of adventure. Then he began to curse God for having allowed so much cruelty and men for being such devils. He cursed the Germans, but then, in most frightful language, most bitterly of all he cursed the people of Lille for having tortured a woman who had been starved into weakness, and had sinned to save her life. He contradicted himself then, violently, and said ‘It was no sin. My sister was a loyal girl to France. In her soul she was loyal. So she swore to me on her crucifix. I would have killed her if she had been disloyal.’ ... So there you are! Pierre Nesle is broken on the wheel of war, like so many others. What’s the cure?”
“None,” I said, “for his generation. One can’t undo the things that are done.”
Brand was pacing up and down his bedroom, where he had been telling me these things, and now, at my words, he stopped and stared at me before answering.
“No. I think you’re right. This generation has been hard-hit, and we shall go about with unhealed wounds. But the next generation?... Let’s try to save it from all this horror! If the world will only understand——”
The next day we left Verviers, and crossed the German frontier on the way to the Rhine.