“Same thing, brought up to date. It’s shell shock. Memory all right, nerves and brain speeded up like a maniac; he’s come back obsessed with the idea he must kill. First night he was brought in, before we knew what the matter was, he knifed the two Germans in his ward. Since then we’ve kept him safe between these two Australians, but he has their nerves almost shattered.” The chief smiled grimly.
To Sheila it seemed diabolically logical. What was more natural in this business of war than that when one’s reason went over the top it should grip the mad desire to kill? But the horror of it! She turned back to the day’s work white and sick at heart. For twenty-four hours she accepted it as inevitable. At the end of that time her memory was harkening back to the bashful boy of the French liner, the boy who could smile like a lost cherub, who looked at her with the fineness of soul that made her companionship a willing gift. Had that fine, simple part of him been blown to eternity and could eternity alone bring it back? And what of the years before him, the years such a physique was bound to claim? Did it mean a mad-cell with a keeper?
At the end of a third day the old Leerie of the San was walking through the wards of the hospital with her lamp trimmed and burning, casting such a radiance on that eager face that the men turned in their cots to catch the last look of her as she passed; and after she had gone blinked across at one another as if to say: “Did you see it? Did you feel it? And what was it, anyway?”
She was looking for some one; and she found him with a leg shot off, playing a mouth-organ in the farthest corner of one ward. He was a Chasseur Alpin; he had been wounded in the same charge as Monsieur Satan. Sheila was searching for cause and effect and she prayed this man might help her find them. As she sat down on the edge of the cot she thanked her particular star for a speaking knowledge of French. “Bon jour, mon ami. I have come for your help. C’est pour Capitaine Fauchet.”
The mouth-organ dropped to the floor. The eyes that had been merely pleasantly retrospective gathered gloom. “Mais, que voulez-vous? All the others say it is hopeless. Tell me, ma’am’selle, what can I do?”
“I don’t know—I hardly know what any of us can do. But we must try something. We know so little about shell shock, so often the impossible happens. Tell me, were you with him?”
The soldier hitched himself forward and leaned over on one elbow. “Toujours, ma’am’selle, always I am with him. Listen. I can tell you. I was born in the little town of Tourteron where Bertrand Fauchet was born—and where Nanette came to live with her brother Paul and their uncle, the good abbé. I was not of their class; but we all played together as children and even then Bertrand loved Nanette. The year war came they were betrothed. I am not tiring ma’am’selle?”
“No. Go on.”
“We both enlisted in the Chasseurs Alpins. They made Bertrand a lieutenant, then a captain—he was a man to lead. And how kind, how good to his men! That was before he had won his nom de guerre—before they called him Monsieur Satan. If there was a danger he would see it first and race for it, to get ahead of his men. He would give them no orders that he would not fill with them; and always so pitying for the prisoners. ‘Treat them kindly, mes garçons,’ he would cry; and what mercy he would show! Mon Dieu! I have seen him, when his mouth was cracking with the thirst, pour the last drop from his canteen down the throat of a dying Boche, or share the last bread in his baluchon with a wounded prisoner. And the many times he has crept into No Man’s Land to bring in a blessé we could hear moaning in the dark; and when it turned out a Boche, as so often it did, he would carry him with the same tenderness. That was Bertrand Fauchet when war began. Once I ask him, ‘Why are you so careful with the Boches?’ and he smiled that little-boy smile of his and say: ‘Why not? We are still gentlemen if we are at war. And listen, François—some day our little Tourteron may fall into Boche hands. I would have them know many kindnesses from us before that happens.’
“Eh bien, Tourteron did fall into their hands, ma’am’selle, and there it has been until a fortnight ago. The German ranks swept it like a sea and made it their own, as they made the houses, the cattle, the orchards, the maids, quite their own. You comprehend? After that Bertrand fight like the devil and pray like the saint. Then one day a Boche stabs Paul—Nanette’s brother Paul—as he stoops to succor him. Fauchet sees; and he hears the tales that come across the trenches to us. The abbé is crucified to the chapel door because he gives sanctuary to the young girls; Père Fauchet is shot in the Square with other anciens for example. After that Capitaine Fauchet gives us the order ‘no mercy,’ and we kill in battle and out. Ma’am’selle shudders—mais, que voulez-vous? He is Monsieur Satan now; but I still think he prays.