Back to Life. Philip Gibbs

from his high, furrowed forehead from which at the temples the hair had worn thin, owing to worry or a steel hat. His long, lean face, deeply tanned, but powdered with white dust, had an expression of tenderness which gave him a kind of priestly look, though others would have said “knightly” with, perhaps, equal truth. Anyhow, I could see that for a little while Brand was no longer worrying about the casualty lists and the doom of youth, and was giving himself up to an exaltation that was visible and spiritual in Lille in the day of liberation.

      The few of us who went first into Lille while our troops were in a wide are 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 non-combatant and a man of peace! I’m horrified at my own blood-thirstiness. 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.”

      “Bandits! Assassins!” grumbled the old lady. “Dirty people!”

      “Vivent les Anglais!” shouted the crowd, surging about the little man with the beard.

      The American doctor spoke in English in a large explanatory way.

      “I’m American. Don’t you go making any mistake. I’m an Uncle Sam. The Yankee boys are further south and fighting like hell, poor lads. I don’t deserve any of this ovation, my dears.”

      Then in French, with a strong American accent, he shouted: “Vive la France!’Rah! ‘Rah! ‘Rah!”

      “Merci, merci, mon Général!” said an old woman, making a grab at the little doctor’s Sam Brown belt and kissing him on the beard. The crowd closed round him and bore him away. …

      I met another of our crowd when I went to a priest’s house in a turning off the Rue Royale. Pierre Nesle, our liaison officer—a nice simple fellow, who had always been very civil to me—was talking to the priest outside his door, and introduced me in a formal way to a tall, patrician-looking old man in a long black gown. It was the Abbé Bourdin, well known in Lille as a good priest and a patriot.

      “Come indoors, gentlemen,” said the old man. “I will tell you what happened to us, though it would take four years to tell you all.”

      Sitting there in the priest’s room, barely furnished, with a few oak chairs and a writing-desk littered with papers, and a table covered with a tattered cloth of red plush, we listened to a tragic tale, told finely and with emotion by the old man into whose soul it had burned. It was the history of a great population caught by the tide of war before many could escape, and placed under the military law of an enemy who tried to break its spirit. They failed to break it in spite of an iron discipline which denied them all liberty. For any trivial offence by individuals against German rule the whole population was fined or shut up in their houses at three in the afternoon. There were endless fines, unceasing and intolerable robberies under the name of “perquisitions.” That had not broken the people’s spirit. There were worse things to bear—the removal of machinery from the factories, the taking away of the young men and boys for forced labour, and then, the greater infancy of that night when machine-guns were placed at the street corners and German officers ordered each household to assemble at the front door and chose the healthy-looking girls by the pointing of a stick and the word, “You—you!” for slave-labour—it was that—in unknown fields far away.

      The priest’s face blanched at the remembrance of that scene. His voice quavered when he spoke of the girls’ screams—one of them had gone raving mad—and of the wailing that rose among their stricken families. For a while he was silent, with lowered head and brooding eyes which stared at a rent in the threadbare carpet, and I noticed the trembling of a pulse on his right temple above the deeply-graven wrinkles of his parchment skin. Then he raised his head and spoke harshly.

      “Not even that could break the spirit of my people. They only said, ‘We will never forget and never forgive!’ They were hungry—we did not get much food—but they said, ‘Our sons who are fighting for us are suffering worse things. It is for us to be patient.’ They were surrounded by German spies—the secret police—who listened to their words and haled them off to prison upon any pretext. There is hardly a man among us who has not been in prison. The women were made to do filthy work for German soldiers, to wash their lousy clothes, to scrub their dirty barracks, and they were insulted, humiliated, tempted, by brutal men.”

      “Was there much of that brutality?” I asked.

      The priest’s eyes grew sombre.

      “Many women suffered abominable things. I thank God that so many kept their pride and their honour. There were, no doubt, some bad men and women in the city—disloyal, venal, weak, sinful—may God have mercy on their souls; but I am proud of being a Frenchman when I think of how great was the courage, how patient was the suffering of the people of Lille.”

      Pierre Nesle had listened to that monologue with a visible and painful emotion. He became pale and flushed by turns, and when the priest spoke about the forcible recruitment of the women a sweat broke out on his forehead, and he wiped it away with a handkerchief.

      I see his face now in profile, sharply outlined against some yellowing folios in a bookcase behind him, a typical Parisian face in its sharpness of outline and pallid skin, with a little black moustache above a thin, sensitive mouth. Before