He turned to Fortune with a look of command.
“We ought to get busy with that advanced headquarters. There are plenty of big houses in these streets.”
“Ce qu’on appelle unembarras de choix,” said Fortune with his rather comical exaggeration of accent. “And Blear-eyed Bill wants us to go on beating the Boche. I insist on a house with a good piano—German for choice.”
They went off on their quest, and I to my billet, which had been found by the Major of ours, where I wrote the story of how we entered Lille, on a typewriter with a twisted ribbon which would not write quickly enough all I wanted to tell the world about a day of history.
IV
I had the luck to be billeted in Lille at the house of Madame Chéri, in the rue Esquermoise.
This lady was the mother of the girl with the pig-tail and the two children with whom Wickham Brand had made friends on this morning of liberation—the wife of that military officer whom Pierre Nesle had known at Verdun and knew to be killed. It was my luck, because there were children in the house—the pig-tailed girl, Hélène, was more a woman than a child, though only sixteen—and I craved for a touch of home-life and children’s company, after so long an exile in the war-zone always among men who talked of war, thought of it, dreamed of it, year in, year out.
Madame Chéri was, I thought when I saw her first, a beautiful woman, not physically—because she was too white and worn—but spiritually, in courage of soul. Pierre Nesle, our liaison officer, told me how she had received the news of her husband’s death—unflinchingly, without a cry. She knew, she said, in her heart, that he was dead. Some queer message had reached her one night during the Verdun battles. It was no ghost, or voice, but only a sudden cold conviction that her man had been killed. For the children’s sake she had pretended that their father might come back. It gave them something to look forward to. The little ones were always harping on the hope that when peace came this mysterious and glorious man whom they remembered only vaguely as one who had played bears with them, and had been the provider of all good things, would return with rich presents from Paris—tin soldiers, Queen-dolls, mechanical toys. Hélène, the elder girl, was different. She had looked curiously at her mother when the children prattled like that, and Madame Chéri had pretended to believe in the father’s home-coming. Once or twice the girl had said, “Papa may be killed,” in a matter-of-fact way. Yet she had been his devoted comrade. They had been such lovers, the father and daughter, that sometimes the mother had been a little jealous, so she said in her frank way to Pierre Nesle, smiling as she spoke. The war had made Hélène a realist, like most French girls to whom the idea of death became commonplace, almost inevitable, as the ceaseless slaughter of men went on. The German losses had taught them that.