“We’ve heard that tale, a score of times. ‘The Germans are weakening. The Huns ’ave ’ad enough!...’ Newspaper talk. A man would be a mug——”
Now the boy lay in the mud, with half his body blown away.... I was glad to get back to Lille for a spell, where there were no dead bodies in the roads. And the Colonel’s news, straight from G.H.Q., which—surely—were not playing up the old false optimism again!—helped one to hope that perhaps in a week or two the last boys of our race, the lucky ones, would be reprieved from that kind of bloody death, which I had seen so often, so long, so heaped up in many fields of France and Flanders, where the flower of our youth was killed.
Dr. Small was excited by the hope brought back by Colonel Lavington. He sought me out in my billet, chez Madame Chéri, and begged me to take a walk with him. It was a moonlight night, but no double throb of a German air-engine came booming over Lille. He walked at a hard pace, with the collar of his “British warm” tucked up to his ears, and talked in a queer disjointed monologue, emotionally, whimsically. I remember some of his words, more or less—anyhow the gist of his thoughts.
“I’m not worrying any more about how the war will end. We’ve won! Remarkable that when one thinks back to the time, less than a year ago, when the best thing seemed a draw. I’m thinking about the future. What’s the world going to be afterwards? That’s my American mind—the next job, so to speak.”
He thought hard while we paced round our side of the Jardin d’Eté where the moonlight made the bushes glamourous, and streaked the tree-trunks with a silver line.
“This war is going to have prodigious effect on nations. On individuals, too. I’m scared. We’ve all been screwed up to an intense pitch—every nerve in us is beyond the normal stretch of nature. After the war there will be a sudden relaxing. We shall be like bits of chewed elastic. Rather like people who have drugged themselves to get through some big ordeal. After the ordeal their nerves are all ragged. They crave the old stimulus though they dread it. They’re depressed—don’t know what’s the matter—get into sudden rages—hysterical—can’t settle to work—go out for gaiety and get bored. I’ve seen it many times in bad cases. Europe—yes and America too—is going to be a bad case. A neurotic world—Lord, it’ll take some healing!”
For a time his thoughts wandered round the possible terms of peace and the abasement of Germany. He prophesied the break-up of Germany, the downfall of the Emperor and of other thrones.
“Crowns will be as cheap as twenty cents,” he said. He hoped for the complete overthrow of Junkerdom—“all the dirty dogs,” as he called the Prussian war-lords and politicians. But he hoped the Allies would be generous with the enemy peoples—“magnanimous” was the word he used.
“We must help the spirit of democracy to rise among them,” he said. “We must make it easy for them to exorcise the devil. If we press them too hard, put the screw on to the torture of their souls (defeat will be torture to a proud people), they will nourish a hope of vengeance and go back to their devil for hope.”