The few of us who went first into Lille while our troops were in a wide arc round the city, in touch more or less with the German rearguards, were quickly separated in the swirl of the crowd that surged about us, greeting us as conquering heroes, though none of us were actual fighting-men, being war-correspondents, Intelligence officers (Wickham Brand and three other officers were there to establish an advanced headquarters), with an American doctor—that amazing fellow “Daddy” Small—and our French liaison officer, Pierre Nesle. Now and again we met in the streets and exchanged words.
I remember the Doctor and I drifted together at the end of the Boulevard de la Liberté. A French girl of the middle-class had tucked her hand through his right arm and was talking to him excitedly, volubly. On his other arm leaned an old dame in a black dress and bonnet who was also delivering her soul of its pent-up emotion to a man who did not understand more than a few words of her French. A small boy dressed as a Zouave was walking backwards, waving a long tricolour flag before the little American, and a crowd of people made a close circle about him, keeping pace.
“Assassins, bandits, robbers!” gobbled the old woman. “They stole all our copper, monsieur. The very mattresses off our beds. The wine out of our cellars. They did abominations.”
“Month after month we waited,” said the girl with her hand through the Doctor’s right arm. “All that time the noise of the guns was loud in our ears. It never ceased, monsieur, until to-day. And we used to say, ‘To-morrow the English will come!’ until at last some of us lost heart—not I, no, always I believed in victory!—and said, ‘The English will never come.’ Now you are here, and our hearts are full of joy. It is like a dream. The Germans have gone!”
The Doctor patted the girl’s hand, and addressed me across the tricolour waved by the small Zouave.
“This is the greatest day of my life! And I am perfectly ashamed of myself. In spite of my beard and my gig-lamps and my anarchical appearance, these dear people take me for an English officer and a fighting hero! And I feel like one. If I saw a German now I truly believe I should cut his throat. Me—a noncombatant and a man of peace! I’m horrified at my own bloodthirstiness. The worst of it is I’m enjoying it. I’m a primitive man for a time, and find it stimulating. To-morrow I shall repent. These people have suffered hell’s torments. I can’t understand a word the little old lady is telling me, but I’m sure she’s been through infernal things. And this pretty girl. She’s a peach, though slightly tuberculous, poor child. My God—how they hate! There is a stored-up hatred in this town enough to burn up Germany by mental telepathy. It’s frightening. Hatred and joy, I feel these two passions like a flame about us. It’s spiritual. It’s transcendental. It’s the first time I’ve seen a hundred thousand people drunk with joy and hate. I’m against hate, and yet the sufferings of these people make me see red so that I want to cut a German throat!”
“You’d stitch it up afterwards, Doctor,” I said.
He blinked at me through his spectacles, and said:
“I hope so. I hope my instinct would be as right as that. The world will never get forward till we have killed hatred. That’s my religion.”