Now It Can Be Told

little colonel was reading The Times in the salon. We passed the open door, and saw over the paper his high forehead puckered with perplexity as to the ways of the world. But he did not raise his head or drop The Times at the sound of our entry. I took the boy upstairs to my room and guided him inside. He said, “Thanks awfully,” and then lay down on the floor and fell into so deep a sleep that I was scared and thought for a moment he might be dead. I went downstairs to chat with the little colonel and form an alibi in case of trouble. An hour later, when I went into my room, I found the boy still lying as I had left him, without having stirred a limb. He was a handsome fellow, with his head hanging limply across his right arm and a lock of damp hair falling across his forehead. I thought of a son of mine, who in a few years would be as old as he, and I prayed God mine might be spared this boy’s tragedy⁠ ⁠… Through the night he slept in a drugged way, but just at dawn he woke up and stretched himself, with a queer little moan. Then he sat up and said:

“Where am I?”

“In a billet at Amiens. You lost your horse last night and I brought you here.”

Remembrance came into his eyes and his face was swept with a sudden flush of shame and agony.

“Yes⁠ ⁠… I made a fool of myself. The worst possible. How can I get back to Pozières?”

“You could jump a lorry with luck.”

“I must. It’s serious if I don’t get back in time. In any case, the loss of that horse⁠—”

He thought deeply for a moment, and I could see that his head was aching to the beat of sledgehammers.

“Can I wash anywhere?”

I pointed to a jug and basin, and he said, “Thanks, enormously.”

He washed hurriedly, and then stared down with a shamed look at his muddy uniform, all creased and bedraggled. After that he asked if he could get out downstairs, and I told him the door was unlocked.

He hesitated for a moment before leaving my room.

“I am sorry to have given you all this trouble. It was very decent of you. Many thanks.”

The boy was a gentleman when sober. I wonder if he died at Pozières, or farther on by the Butte de Warlencourt⁠ ⁠… A week later I saw an advertisement in an Amiens paper: “Horse found. Brown, with white sock on right foreleg. Apply⁠—”

I have a fancy it was the horse for which we had searched in the rain.

XII

The quickest way to the cathedral is down a turning on the right-hand side of the Street of the Three Pebbles. Charlie’s bar was on the left-hand side of the street, always crowded after six o’clock by officers of every regiment, drinking egg-nogs, Martinis, Bronxes, sherry cobblers, and other liquids, which helped men marvelously to forget the beastliness of war, and gave them the gift of laughter, and made them careless of the battles which would have to be fought. Young staff-officers were there, explaining carefully how hard worked they were and how often they went under shellfire. The fighting officers, English, Scottish, Irish, Welsh, jeered at them, laughed hugely at the latest story of mirthful horror, arranged rendezvous at the Godebert restaurant, where they would see the beautiful Marguerite (until she transferred to la cathédrale in the same street) and our checks which Charlie cashed at a discount, with a noble faith in British honesty, not often, as he told me, being hurt by a “stumor.” Charlie’s bar was wrecked by shellfire afterward, and he went to Abbeville and set up a more important establishment, which was wrecked, too, in a fierce air raid, before the paint was dry on the walls.

The cathedral was a shrine to which many men and women went all through the war, called into its white halls by the spirit of beauty which dwelt there, and by its silence and peace. The great west door was screened from bomb-splinters by sandbags piled high, and inside there were other walls of sandbags closing in the sanctuary and some of the windows. But these signs of war did not spoil the majesty of the tall columns and high roof, nor the loveliness of the sculptured flowers below the clerestory arches, nor the spiritual mystery of those great, dim aisles, where light flickered and shadows lurked, and the ghosts of history came out of their tombs to pace these stones again where five, six, seven centuries before they had walked to worship God, in joy or in despair, or to show their beauty of young womanhood⁠—peasant girl or princess⁠—to lovers gazing by the pillars, or to plight their troth as royal brides, or get a crown for their heads, or mercy for their dead bodies in velvet-draped coffins.

Our soldiers went in there, as many centuries before other English soldiers, who came out with Edward the Black Prince, by way of Crécy, or with Harry the King, through Agincourt. Five hundred years hence, if Amiens cathedral still stands, undamaged by some new and monstrous conflict in a world of incurable folly, the generation of that time will think now and then, perhaps, of the English lads in khaki who tramped up the highway of this nave with their field-caps under their arms, each footstep leaving the imprint of a wet boot on the old flagstones, awed by the silence and the spaciousness, with a sudden heartache for a closer knowledge, or some knowledge, of the God worshiped there⁠—the God of Love⁠—while, not far away, men were killing one another by high explosives, shells, hand-grenades, mines, machine-guns, bayonets, poison-gas, trench-mortars, tanks, and, in close fighting, with short daggers like butchers’ knives, or clubs with steel knobs. I watched the faces of the men who entered here. Some of them, like