“A good night for a German air raid,” said one of the officers.
“Yes, a lovely night for killing women in their sleep,” said the other man.
The people of Amiens were sleeping, and no light gleamed through their shutters.
XIII
Coming away from the cathedral through a side-street going into the rue des Trois Cailloux, I used to pass the Palais de Justice—a big, grim building, with a long flight of steps leading up to its doorways, and above the portico the figure of Justice, blind, holding her scales. There was no justice there during the war, but rooms full of French soldiers with smashed faces, blind, many of them, like that woman in stone. They used to sit, on fine days, on the flight of steps, a tragic exhibition of war for passersby to see. Many of them revealed no faces, but were white masks of cotton-wool, bandaged round their heads. Others showed only the upper parts of their faces, and the places where their jaws had been were tied up with white rags. There were men without noses, and men with half their scalps torn away. French children used to stare through the railings at them, gravely, with childish curiosity, without pity. English soldiers gave them a passing glance, and went on to places where they might be made like this, without faces, or jaws, or noses, or eyes. By their uniforms I saw that there were Chasseurs Alpins, and Chasseurs d’Afrique, and young infantrymen of the line, and gunners. They sat, without restlessness, watching the passersby if they had eyes to see, or, if blind, feeling the breeze about them, and listening to the sound of passing feet.
XIV
The prettiest view of Amiens was from the banks of the Somme outside the city, on the east side, and there was a charming walk along the towpath, past market-gardens going down to the river on the opposite bank, and past the gardens of little chalets built for love-in-idleness in days of peace. They were of fantastic architecture—these Cottages where well-to-do citizens of Amiens used to come for weekends of boating and fishing—and their garden gates at the end of wooden bridges over backwaters were of iron twisted into the shapes of swans or flowers, and there were snails of terra-cotta on the chimney-pots, and painted woodwork on the walls, in the worst taste, yet amusing and pleasing to the eye in their green bowers. I remember one called Mon Idée, and wondered that any man should be proud of such a freakish conception of a country house. They were abandoned during the war, except one or two used for casual rendezvous between French officers and their light o’ loves, and the towpath was used only by stray couples who came out for loneliness, and British soldiers walking out with French girls. The market-gardeners punted down the river in long, shallow boats, like gondolas, laden high with cabbages, cauliflowers, and asparagus, and farther upstream there was a boathouse where orderlies from the New Zealand hospital in Amiens used to get skiffs for an hour’s rowing, leaning on their oars to look at the picture of the cathedral rising like a mirage beyond the willows and the encircling water, with fleecy clouds above its glittering roof, or lurid storm-clouds with the red glow of sunset beneath their wings. In the dusk or the darkness there was silence along the banks but for a ceaseless throbbing of distant gunfire, rising sometimes to a fury of drumming when the French soixante-quinze was at work, outside Roye and the lines beyond Suzanne. It was what the French call la rafale des tambours de la mort—the ruffle of the drums of death. The winding waters of the Somme flowed in higher reaches through the hell of war by Biaches and St.-Christ, this side of Péronne, where dead bodies floated in slime and blood, and there was a litter of broken bridges and barges, and dead trees, and ammunition-boxes. The river itself was a highway into hell, and there came back upon its tide in slow-moving barges the wreckage of human life, fresh from the torturers. These barges used to unload their cargoes of maimed men at a carpenter’s yard just below the bridge, outside the city, and often as I passed I saw human bodies being lifted out and carried on stretchers into the wooden sheds. They were the bad cases—French boys wounded in the abdomen or lungs, or with their limbs torn off, or hopelessly shattered. It was an agony for them to be moved, even on the stretchers. Some of them cried out in fearful anguish, or moaned like wounded animals, again and again. Those sounds spoiled the music of the lapping water and the whispering of the willows and the song of birds. The sight of these tortured boys, made useless in life, took the color out of the flowers and the beauty out of that vision of the great cathedral, splendid above the river. Women watched them from the bridge, straining their eyes as the bodies were carried to the bank. I think some of them looked for their own men. One of them spoke to me one day.
“That is what the Germans do to our sons. Bandits! Assassins!”
“Yes. That is war, Madame.”
She put a skinny hand on my arm.
“Will it go on forever, this war? Until all the men are killed?”
“Not so long as that, Madame. Some men will be left alive. The very old and the very young, and the lucky ones, and those behind the lines.”
“The Germans
