Читать книгу Wounded Souls - Philip Gibbs - Страница 13

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It was Frederick E. Small, the American doctor, attached to Brand’s crowd, who was with me on a night in Lille before the Armistice, when by news from the Colonel we were stirred by the tremendous hope—almost a certainty—that the end of the war was near. I had been into Courtrai, which the enemy had first evacuated and then was shelling. It was not a joyous entry like that into Lille. Most of the people were still down in their cellars, where for several days they had been herded together until the air became foul. On the outskirts I had passed many groups of peasants with their babies and old people, trudging past our guns, trekking from one village to another in search of greater safety, or standing in the fields where our artillery was getting into action, and where new shell craters should have warned them away, if they had had more knowledge of war. For more than four years I had seen, at different periods, crowds like that—after the first flight of fugitives in August of ’14, when the world seemed to have been tilted up and great populations in France and Belgium were in panic-stricken retreat from the advancing edge of war. I knew the types, the attitudes, the very shape of the bundles, in these refugee processions, the haggard look of the mothers pushing their perambulators, the bewildered look of old men and women, the tired sleepy look of small boys and girls, the stumbling dead-beat look of old farm-horses dragging carts piled high with cottage furniture. As it was at the beginning so it was at the end—for civilians caught in the fires of war. With two other men I went into the heart of Courtrai and found it desolate, and knew the reason why when, at the corner of the Grande Place, a heavy shell came howling and burst inside a house with frightful explosive noise followed by a crash of masonry. The people were wise to keep to their cellars. Two girls not so wise made a dash from one house to another and were caught by chunks of steel and killed close to the church of St. Martin, where they lay all crumpled up in a clotted pool of blood. A man came up to me, utterly careless of such risks, and I hated to stand talking to him with the shells coming every half-minute overhead.

There was a fire of passion in his eyes, and at every sentence he spoke to me his voice rose and thrilled as he denounced the German race for all they had done in Courtrai, for their robberies, their imprisonments, their destruction of machinery, their brutality. The last Commandant of Courtrai was von Richthofen, father of the German aviator, and he was a hard, ruthless man and kept the city under an iron rule.

“All that, thank God, is finished now,” said the man. “The English have delivered us from the Beast!” As he spoke another monstrous shell came overhead, but he took no notice of it, and said, “We are safe now from the enemy’s evil power!” It seemed to me a comparative kind of safety. I had no confidence in it when I sat in the parlour of an old lady who, like Eileen O’Connor in Lille, had been an Irish governess in Courtrai, and who now, living in miserable poverty, sat in a bed-sitting room whose windows and woodwork had been broken by shell-splinters. “Do you mind shutting the door, my dear?” she said. “I can’t bear those nasty bombs.” I realised with a large, experienced knowledge that we might be torn to fragments of flesh, at any moment, by one of those nasty “bombs,” which were really eight-inch shells, but the old lady did not worry, and felt safe when the door was shut.

Outside Courtrai, when I left, lay some khaki figures in a mush of blood. They were lads whom I had seen unloading ammunition that morning on the bank of the canal. One had asked me for a light, and said, “What’s all this peace-talk?... Any chance?” A big chance, I had told him. Home for Christmas, certain sure this time. The boy’s eyes had lighted up for a moment, quicker than the match which he held in the cup of his hands.

“Jesus! Back for good; eh?”

Then the light went out of his eyes as the match flared up.

“We’ve heard that tale, a score of times. ‘The Germans are weakening. The Huns ’ave ’ad enough!...’ Newspaper talk. A man would be a mug——”

Now the boy lay in the mud, with half his body blown away.... I was glad to get back to Lille for a spell, where there were no dead bodies in the roads. And the Colonel’s news, straight from G.H.Q., which—surely—were not playing up the old false optimism again!—helped one to hope that perhaps in a week or two the last boys of our race, the lucky ones, would be reprieved from that kind of bloody death, which I had seen so often, so long, so heaped up in many fields of France and Flanders, where the flower of our youth was killed.

Dr. Small was excited by the hope brought back by Colonel Lavington. He sought me out in my billet, chez Madame Chéri, and begged me to take a walk with him. It was a moonlight night, but no double throb of a German air-engine came booming over Lille. He walked at a hard pace, with the collar of his “British warm” tucked up to his ears, and talked in a queer disjointed monologue, emotionally, whimsically. I remember some of his words, more or less—anyhow the gist of his thoughts.

“I’m not worrying any more about how the war will end. We’ve won! Remarkable that when one thinks back to the time, less than a year ago, when the best thing seemed a draw. I’m thinking about the future. What’s the world going to be afterwards? That’s my American mind—the next job, so to speak.”

He thought hard while we paced round our side of the Jardin d’Eté where the moonlight made the bushes glamourous, and streaked the tree-trunks with a silver line.

“This war is going to have prodigious effect on nations. On individuals, too. I’m scared. We’ve all been screwed up to an intense pitch—every nerve in us is beyond the normal stretch of nature. After the war there will be a sudden relaxing. We shall be like bits of chewed elastic. Rather like people who have drugged themselves to get through some big ordeal. After the ordeal their nerves are all ragged. They crave the old stimulus though they dread it. They’re depressed—don’t know what’s the matter—get into sudden rages—hysterical—can’t settle to work—go out for gaiety and get bored. I’ve seen it many times in bad cases. Europe—yes and America too—is going to be a bad case. A neurotic world—Lord, it’ll take some healing!”

For a time his thoughts wandered round the possible terms of peace and the abasement of Germany. He prophesied the break-up of Germany, the downfall of the Emperor and of other thrones.

“Crowns will be as cheap as twenty cents,” he said. He hoped for the complete overthrow of Junkerdom—“all the dirty dogs,” as he called the Prussian war-lords and politicians. But he hoped the Allies would be generous with the enemy peoples—“magnanimous” was the word he used.

“We must help the spirit of democracy to rise among them,” he said. “We must make it easy for them to exorcise the devil. If we press them too hard, put the screw on to the torture of their souls (defeat will be torture to a proud people), they will nourish a hope of vengeance and go back to their devil for hope.”

I asked him whether he thought his President would lead the world to a nobler stage of history.

He hesitated at that, groped a little, I thought, among old memories and prejudices.

“Why,” he said, “Wilson has the biggest chance that ever came to a human being—the biggest chance and the biggest duty. We are rich (too darned rich) and enormously powerful when most other peoples are poor and weak—drained of wealth and blood. That’s our luck, and a little bit perhaps our shame, though our boys have done their bit all right and are ready to do more, and it’s not their fault they weren’t here before—but we’re hardly touched by this war as a people, except spiritually. There we’ve been touched by the finger of Fate. (God, if you like that better!) So with that strength behind him the President is in a big way of business. He can make his voice heard, stand for a big idea. God, sonny, I hope he’ll do it! For the world’s sake, for the sake of all these suffering people, here in this city of Lille and in a million little towns where people have been bashed by war.”

I asked him if he doubted Wilson’s greatness, and the question embarrassed him.

“I’m loyal to the man,” he said. “I’ll back him if he plays straight and big. Bigness, that’s what we want. Bigness of heart as well as bigness of brain. Oh, he’s clever, though not wise in making so many enemies. He has fine ideas and can write real words. Things which speak. True things. I’d like to be sure of his character—its breadth and strength, I mean. The world wants a Nobleman, bigger than the little gentlemen of politics; a Leader calling to the great human heart of our tribes, and lifting them with one grand gesture out of the mire of old passions and vendettas and jealousies to a higher plane of—commonsense. Out of the jungle, to the daylight of fellowship. Out of the jungle.”

He repeated those words twice, with a reverent solemnity. He believed that so much emotion had been created in the heart of the world that when the war ended anything might happen if a Leader came—a new religion of civilisation, any kind of spiritual and social revolution.

“We might kill cruelty,” he said. “My word, what a victory that would be!”