Back to Life. Philip Gibbs

now they could not tell me all she had done. But she had risked death every day for four years. Every day. Truly it was a miracle she was not caught.

      Listening to them, I missed some of Eileen O’Connor’s own words to Brand, and saw only the wave of her hand as she disappeared into the crowd.

      It was Brand who told me that he and I and Fortune had been invited to spend the evening with her, or an “hour or so. I saw that Wicky, as we called him, was startled by the meeting with her, and was glad of it.

      “I knew her when we were kids,” he said. “Ten years ago—perhaps more. She used to pull my hair! Extraordinary, coming face to face with her in Lille, on this day of all days.”

      He turned to Fortune with a look of command.

      “We ought to get busy with that advanced headquarters. There are plenty of big houses in these streets.”

      “Ce qu’on appelle un embarras de choix,” said Fortune, with his rather comical exaggeration of accent. “And Blear-eyed Bill wants us to go on beating the Boche. I insist on a house with a good piano—German for choice.”

      They went off on their quest, and I to my billet, which had been found by the major of ours, where I wrote the story of how we entered Lille on a typewriter with a twisted ribbon, which would not write quickly enough all I wanted to tell the world about a day of history.

IV

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      I had the luck to be billeted in Lille at the house of Madame Chéri, in the Rue Esquermoise.

      This lady was the mother of the girl with the pig-tail and the two children with whom Wickham Brand had made friends on this morning of liberation—the wife of that military officer whom Pierre Nesle had known at Verdun and knew to be killed. It was my luck, because there were children in the house—the pig-tailed girl, Hélène, was more a woman than a child, though only sixteen—and I craved for a touch of home life and children’s company after so long an exile in the war-zone, always among men who talked of war, thought of it, dreamed of it, year in, year out.

      Madame Chéri was, I thought, when I saw her first, a beautiful woman, not physically—because she was too white and worn—but spiritually, in courage of soul. Pierre Nesle, our liaison officer, told me how she had received the news of her husband’s death—unflinchingly, without a cry. She knew, she said, in her heart that he was dead. Some queer message had reached her one night during the Verdun battles. It was no ghost, or voice, but only a sudden cold conviction that her man had been killed. For the children’s sake she had pretended that their father might come back. It gave them something to look forward to. The little ones were always harping on the hope that, when peace came, this mysterious and glorious man, whom they remembered only vaguely as one who had played bears with them and had been the provider of all good things, would return with rich presents from Paris—tin soldiers, queen-dolls, mechanical toys. Hélène, the elder girl, was different. She had looked curiously at her mother when the children prattled like that and Madame Chéri had pretended to believe in the father’s homecoming. Once or twice the girl had said, “Papa may be killed,” in a matter-of-fact way. Yet she had been his devoted comrade. They had been such lovers, the father and daughter, that sometimes the mother had been a little jealous, so she said, in her frank way, to Pierre Nesle, smiling as she spoke. The war had made Hélène a realist, like most French girls, to whom the idea of death became commonplace, almost inevitable, as the ceaseless slaughter of men went on. The German losses had taught them that.

      I had the colonel’s dressing-room—he had attained the grade of colonel before Verdun, so Pierre told me—and Madame Chéri came in while I was there to see that it was properly arranged for me. Over his iron bedstead (the Germans had taken the woollen mattress, so that it had been replaced by bags of straw) was his portrait as a lieutenant of artillery, as he had been at the time of his marriage. He was a handsome fellow, rather like Hélène, with her delicate profile and brown eyes, though more like, said Madame Chéri, their eldest boy, Edouard.

      “Where is he?” I asked, and that was the only time I saw Madame Chéri break down utterly.

      She began to tell me that Edouard had been taken away by the Germans, among all the able-bodied men and boys who were sent away from Lille for digging trenches behind the lines, in Easter of ’16, and that he had gone bravely, with his little pack of clothes over his shoulder, saying, “It is nothing, maman. My father taught me the word courage. In a little while we shall win, and I shall be back. Courage, courage!”

      Madame Chéri repeated her son’s words proudly, so that I seemed to see the boy with that pack on his shoulder and a smile on his face. Then, suddenly, she wept bitterly, wildly, her body shaken with a kind of ague, while she sat on the iron bedstead with her face in her hands.

      I repeated the boy’s words.

      “Courage, courage, madam!”

      Proudly she wailed out in broken sentences:—

      “He was such a child! … He caught cold so easily! … He was so delicate! … He needed mother-love so much! … For two years no word has come from him!” In a little while she controlled herself and begged me to excuse her. We went down together to the dining-room, where the children were playing and Hélène was reading; and she insisted upon my drinking a glass of wine from the store which she had kept hidden from the Germans in a pit which Edouard had dug in the garden in the first days of the occupation. The children were delighted with that trick, and roared with laughter.

      Hélène, with a curl of her lip, spoke bitterly.

      “The Boche is a stupid animal. One can dupe him easily.”

      “Not always easily,” said Madame Chéri. She opened a secret cupboard behind a bookcase standing against the panelled wall.

      “I hid all my brass and copper here. A German police officer came, and said, ‘Have you hidden any copper, madame?’ I said, ‘There is nothing hidden.’ ‘Do you swear it?’ he asked. ‘I swear it,’ I answered very haughtily. He went straight to the bookcase, pushed it on one side, tapped the wall, and opened the secret cupboard’, which was stuffed full of brass and copper. ‘You are a liar, madame,’ he said, ‘like all Frenchwomen.’ ‘And you are an insolent pig, like all Germans,’ I remarked. That cost me a fine of ten thousand francs.”

      Madame Chéri saw nothing wrong in swearing falsely to a German. I think she held that nothing was wrong to deceive or to destroy any individual of the German race, and I could understand her point of view when Pierre Nesle told me of one thing that had happened which she never told to me. It was about Hélène.

      A German captain was billeted in the house. They ignored his presence, though he tried to ingratiate himself. Hélène hated him with a cold and deadly hatred. She trembled if he passed her on the stairs. His presence in the house, even if she did not see him but only heard him move in his room, made her feel ill. Yet he was very polite to her, and said, “Guten gnadiges Fràulein,” whenever they met. To Edouard, also, he was courteous and smiling, though Edouard was sullen. He was a stout little man, with a round rosy face and little bright eyes behind big black-rimmed glasses, an officer in the Kommandantur, and formerly a schoolmaster. Madame Chéri, was polite to him, but cold, cold as ice. After some months, she found him harmless, though objectionable, because German. It did not seem dangerous to leave him in the house one evening when she went to visit a dying friend—Madame Vailly. She was later than she meant to be—so late that she was liable to arrest by the military police if they saw her flit past in the darkness of the unlit streets. When she came home she slipped the latch-key into the door and went quietly into the hall. The children would be in bed and asleep. At the foot of the stairs a noise startled her. It was a curious creaking, shaking noise, as of a door being pushed by some heavy weight, then banged by it. It was the door at the top