Back to Life. Philip Gibbs

talking, or singing, or reciting poetry, or railing against French politicians, or laughing almost hysterically at the satires of Charles Fortune—our “funny man”—when he came to our mess. Now he was suffering, as if the priest’s words had probed a wound—though not the physical wound which had nearly killed him in Souchez Wood.

      He stood up from the wooden chair with its widely-curved arms in which he had been sitting stiffly, and spoke to the priest.

      “It is not amusing, mon père, what you tell us, and what we have all guessed. It is one more chapter of tragedy in the history of our poor France. Pray God the war will soon be over.”

      “With victory!” said the old priest. “With an enemy beaten and bleeding beneath our feet. The Germans must be punished for all their crimes, or the justice of God will not be satisfied.”

      There was a thrill of passion in the old man’s voice and his nostrils quivered.

      “To all Frenchmen that goes without saying,” said Pierre Nesle. “The Germans must be punished, and will be, though no vengeance will repay us for the suffering of our poilus—nor for the agony of our women behind the lines, which, perhaps, was the greatest of all.”

      The Abbé Bourdin put his claw-like old hands on the young man’s shoulders and drew him closer and kissed his Croix de Guerre.

      “You have helped to give victory,” he said. “How many Germans have you killed? How many, eh?”

      He spoke eagerly, chuckling with a kind of childish eagerness for good news.

      Pierre Nesle drew back a little and a faint touch of colour crept into his face, and then left it whiter.

      “I did not count corpses,” he said. He touched his left side and laughed awkwardly. “I remember better that they nearly made a corpse of me.”

      There was a moment’s silence, and then my friend spoke in a casual kind of way.

      “I suppose, mon père, you have not heard of my sister being in Lille by any chance? Her name was Marthe. Marthe Nesle.”

      The Abbé Bourdin shook his head.

      “I do not know the name. There are many young women in Lille. It is a great city.”

      “That is true,” said Pierre Nesle. “There are many.”

      He bowed over the priest’s hand, and then saluted.

      “Bon jour, mon père, et merci mille fois.”

      So we left, and the Abbé Bourdin spoke his last words to me: “We owe our liberation to the English. We thank you. But why did you not come sooner? Two years sooner, three years. With your great army?”

      “Many of our men died to get here,” I said. “Thousands.”

      “That is true. That is true. You failed many times, I know. But you were so close. One big push—eh? One mighty effort? No?”

      The priest spoke a thought which I had heard expressed in the crowds. They were grateful for our coming, immensely glad, but could not understand why we had tried their patience so many years. That had been their greatest misery, waiting, waiting.

      I spoke to Pierre Nesle on the doorstep of the priest’s house.

      “Have you an idea that your sister is in Lille?”

      “No,” he said. “No. At least not more than the faintest hope. She is behind the lines somewhere—anywhere. She went away from home before the war—she was a singer—and was caught in the tide.”

      “No news at all?” I asked.

      “Her last letter was from Lille. Or rather a postcard with the Lille stamp. She said, I am amusing myself well, little brother.’ She and I were good comrades. I look for her face in the crowds. But she may be anywhere—Valenciennes, Maubeuge—God knows!”

      A shout of “Vive la France!” rose from a crowd of people surging up the street. Pierre Nesle was in the blue uniform of the chasseurs à pied, and the people in Lille guessed it was theirs because of its contrast to our khaki, though the “horizon bleu” was so different from the uniforms worn by the French army of ’14. To them now, on the day of liberation, Pierre Nesle, our little liaison officer, stood for the armies of France, the glory of France. Even the sight of our khaki did not fill them with such wild enthusiasm. So I lost him again as I had lost the little American doctor in the surge and whirlpool of the crowd.

II

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      I was building up in my mind the historic meaning of the day. Before nightfall I should have to get it written—the spirit as well as the facts, if I could—in time for the censors and the despatch-riders. The facts? By many scraps of conversation with men and women in the streets I could already reconstruct pretty well the life of Lille in time of war. I found many of their complaints rather trivial. The Germans had wanted brass and had taken it, down to the taps in the washing-places. Well, I had seen worse horrors than that. They had wanted wool and had taken the mattresses. They had requisitioned all the wine but had paid for it at cheap rates. These were not atrocities. The people of Lille had been short of food, sometimes on the verge of starvation, but not really starved. They complained of having gone without butter, milk, sugar; but even in England these things were hard to get. No, the tragedy of Lille lay deeper than that. A sense of fear that was always with them. “Every time there was a knock at the door,” said one man, “we started up in alarm. It was a knock at our hearts.” At any time of the day or night they were subject to visits from German police, to searches, arrests, or orders to get out of their houses or rooms for German officers or troops. They were denounced by spies, Germans or debased people of their own city, for trying to smuggle letters to their folk in other towns in enemy occupation, for concealing copper in hiding-places, for words of contempt against the Kaiser or the Kommandatur, spoken at a street corner between one friend and another. That consciousness of being watched, overheard, reported and denounced poisoned the very atmosphere of their lives, and the sight of the field-grey men in the streets, the stench of them—the smell was horrible when German troops marched back from the battlefields—produced a soul-sickness worse than physical nausea. I could understand the constant fret at the nerves of these people, the nagging humiliation—they had to doff hats to every German officer who swaggered by—and the slow-burning passion of people, proud by virtue of their race, who found themselves controlled, ordered about, bullied, punished for trivial infractions of military regulations, by German officials of hard, unbending arrogance. That must have been abominable for so long a time; but as yet I heard no charges of definite brutality, or of atrocious actions by individual enemies. The worst I had heard was that levy of the women for forced labour in unknown places. One could imagine the horror of it, the cruelty of it to girls whose nerves were already unstrung by secret fears, dark and horrible imaginings, the beast-like look in the eyes of men who passed them in the streets. Then the long-delayed hope of liberation—year after year—the German boasts of victory, the strength of the German defence that never seemed to weaken, in spite of the desperate attacks of French and British, the preliminary success of their great offensive in March and April, when masses of English prisoners were herded through Lille, dejected, exhausted, hardly able to drag their feet along between their sullen guards—by heaven, these people of Lille had needed much faith to save them from despair! No wonder now that on the first day of liberation some, of them were wet-eyed with joy, and others were lightheaded with liberty.

      In the Grande Place below the old balustraded Town Hall I saw young Cyril Clatworthy, one of the Intelligence crowd, surrounded by a group of girls who were stroking his tunic, clasping his hands, pushing each other laughingly to get nearer to him. He was in lively conversation with the prettiest girl, whom he kept in front of him. It was obvious that he was enjoying himself as the central