And so they plan to slip back unobserved. If one is at the very door, not more than the proverbial hop, skip and jump away—well, the magnet is very powerful, and even Jove and Governments nod sometimes. And just as the head drops forward and the eyes close, hey presto! they will be over the border, and when the barrier closes down they will be inside, and all the gendarmes in France will not be able to put them out again. If they can't GO home, they will SNEAK home. They will get there if they have to invent an entirely new mode of locomotion, even if they have to live in cellars or shell-holes and eat grass—but there may not be any grass. Didn't Sermaize live in cellars and exist on nothing at all?—live in cellars and grow fond of them? There is one old lady in a jolly little wooden house to-day, who suffers from so acute a nostalgia for her cellar she is afraid to walk past the ruins that cover it. If she did, she declares, the beautiful little wooden house would know her no more. The cellar was as dark and as damp as the inside of a whale, and it gave her a rheumatism of the devil in all her bones, but she lived in it for three years, and in three years one attaches oneself, ma foi, one forms des liaisons. So she sits and sighs while the house-builders meditate on the eternal irony of things, and their pride is as a worm that daws have pecked.
So be sure the refugees will go back just as soon as ever they can go, as the Abbé plans to go, caring little if it is unwise, perhaps not realising that even if Peace were declared to-morrow, many years must pass before the earth can become fruitful again, many years must set behind the hills of Time before new villages, new towns, new cities can spring from the graves of the old.
Personally, I hope that some of these graves will be left just as Germany has made them, that a few villages, an historic town or two will be carefully guarded and preserved, partly because ruin-loving America will pay vast sums to see them, and so help to rebuild others, and partly because—am I a vindictive beast?—I want them to remain, silent, inexorable witnesses of the true inwardness of the German method and the German soul, if anything so degraded as she is can be said to have a soul. "Lest we forget," these ghosts of towns should haunt us for ever, stirring the memory and quickening the imagination, a reproach to conscience, an incorruptible judge of blood-guiltiness, which we should neither pardon nor forget till the fullest reparation has been made, the utmost contrition has been shown. And it must be no lip-service either. By its deeds we must know it. I want to see Germany humbled to the very dust; I want to see Germany in sackcloth and ashes rebuilding what she has destroyed, sending new legions into France, but armed this time with shovel and with pick, with brick and with mortar; I want to see those legions labouring to efface the imprints of the old; I want to see Germany feeding them and paying them—they must not cost France one sou; I want to see her in the white shroud of the penitent, candle in hand, barefoot and bareheaded before the Tribunal of the World, confessing her sins, and expiating them every one in an agony not one whit less poignant than that which she has inflicted upon others. Yes, let the destroyer turn builder. And until she does so let us ostracise her, cut her out of our Book of Life. Who are we that we should associate with the Judas who has betrayed civilisation?
A refugee rarely spoke of the Germans without prefixing the adjective dirty—ces sales Boches—and the Abbé was no exception to the rule; indeed, he was plain-spoken to bluntness on most occasions. His criticisms of our French compositions would have withered the vanity of a Narcissus, and proved altogether too much for one timid soul, who, having endured a martyrdom through two lessons, stubbornly refused to go back any more. Which was regrettable, as on closer acquaintance he proved to be rather a lovable person, with a simplicity of soul that was as rare as it was childlike.
Like the Curé of N., he presumed us Roman Catholic, asked us if England were not rapidly coming into the light, and commented upon the "conversion" of Queen Victoria shortly before her death. Though it shook him, I think he never quite believed our denial of this remarkable story, and have sometimes reproached myself for having deprived him of the obvious comfort it brought him; but he took it all in good part, and subsequently showed us that he could be broad-minded, and tolerant as well.
"Charity knows no creed," he cried, and it was impossible to avoid contrasting his implicit faith in our honesty, his steady confidence that we would never use our exceptional opportunities for winning the confidence and even the affection of the people for any illegitimate purpose, with the deep distrust of the average Irish priest. The hag-ridden fear of Proselytism which clouds every Irish sky dares not show its evil face in France, nor did we ever find even a breath of intolerance tainting our relations with priests or with people.
But then perhaps they, like the Abbé, realise that our error of faith is a misfortune rather than a fault. Having been born that way, we were not wholly responsible. Indeed the Abbé went so far as to assure me that I was not responsible at all.
"Then who is, M. l'Abbé?" I questioned, reading condemnation of some one in his eye.
"Henry the Eighth," he replied, with exquisite conviction, and I gasped. Henry the Eighth!
"Assurement." Had he not a quarrel with his Holiness the Pope, and being greedy for temporal power renounced Catholicism in a fit of rage, and so flung the English people into the profundities of spiritual darkness? We—we other Protestants—are his victims; our error of faith is one for which we shall neither be judged nor punished, but he ... I realised that Henry deserved all my sympathy; he is not having too good a time of it là bas. Of course it was comforting to know that we were blameless, but privately I thought it was rather unfair to poor old Hal, who surely has enough sins of his own to expiate without having those of an obscure bog-trotting Irishwoman foisted upon him as well.