Madame, of the cash-desk, sat in the dining-room, for company’s sake, fixing up accounts as though the last day of reckoning had come … as it had. Her hair, with its little curls, was still in perfect order. She had two dabs of color on her cheeks, as usual, but underneath a waxen pallor. She was working out accounts with a young officer, who smoked innumerable cigarettes to steady his nerves. “Von Tirpitz” was going round in an absentminded way, pulling at his long whiskers.
The war correspondents talked together. We spoke gloomily, in low voices, so that the waiters should not hear.
“If they break through to Abbeville we shall lose the coast.”
“Will that be a win for the Germans, even then?”
“It will make it hell in the Channel.”
“We shall transfer our base to St.-Nazaire.”
“France won’t give in now, whatever happens. And England never gives in.”
“We’re exhausted, all the same. It’s a question of manpower.”
“They’re bound to take Albert tonight or tomorrow.”
“I don’t see that at all. There’s still a line …”
“A line! A handful of tired men.”
“It will be the devil if they get into Villers-Bretonneux tonight. It commands Amiens. They could blow the place off the map.”
“They won’t.”
“We keep on saying, ‘They won’t.’ We said, ‘They won’t get the Somme crossings!’ but they did. Let’s face it squarely, without any damned false optimism. That has been our curse all through.”
“Better than your damned pessimism.”
“It’s quite possible that they will be in this city tonight. What is to keep them back? There’s nothing up the road.”
“It would look silly if we were all captured tonight. How they would laugh!”
“We shouldn’t laugh, though. I think we ought to keep an eye on things.”
“How are we to know? We are utterly without means of communication. Anything may happen in the night.”
Something happened then. It was half past seven in the evening. There were two enormous crashes outside the windows of the Hôtel du Rhin. All the windows shook and the whole house seemed to rock. There was a noise of rending wood, many falls of bricks, and a cascade of falling glass. Instinctively and instantly a number of officers threw themselves on the floor to escape flying bits of steel and glass splinters blown sideways. Then someone laughed.
“Not this time!”
The officers rose from the floor and took their places at the table, and lit cigarettes again. But they were listening. We listened to the loud hum of airplanes, the well known “zooz-zooz” of the Gothas’ double fuselage. More bombs were dropped farther into the town, with the same sound of explosives and falling masonry. The antiaircraft guns got to work and there was the shrill chorus of shrapnel shells winging over the roofs.
“Bang! … Crash!”
That was nearer again.
Some of the officers strolled out of the dining room.
“They’re making a mess outside. Perhaps we’d better get away before it gets too hot.”
Madame from the cash-desk turned to her accounts again. I noticed the increasing pallor of her skin beneath the two dabs of red. But she controlled her nerves pluckily; even smiled, too, at the young officer who was settling up for a group of others.
The moon had risen over the houses of Amiens. It was astoundingly bright and beautiful in a clear sky and still air, and the streets were flooded with white light, and the roofs glittered like silver above intense black shadows under the gables, where the rays were barred by projecting walls.
“Curse the moon!” said one officer. “How I hate its damned light!”
But the moon, cold and smiling, looked down upon the world at war and into this old city of Amiens, in which bombs were bursting. Women were running close to the walls. Groups of soldiers made a dash from one doorway to another. Horses galloped with heavy wagons up the Street of the Three Pebbles, while shrapnel flickered in the sky above them and paving-stones were hurled up in bursts of red fire and explosions. Many horses were killed by flying chunks of steel. They lay bleeding monstrously so that there were large pools of blood around them.
An officer came into the side door of the Hôtel du Rhin. He was white under his steel hat, which he pushed back while he wiped his forehead.
“A fellow was killed just by my side,” he said. “We were standing in a doorway together and something caught him in the face. He fell like a log, without a sound, as dead as a doornail.”
There was a flight of midges in the sky, droning with that double note which vibrated like cello strings, very loudly, and with that sinister noise I could see them quite clearly now and then as they passed across the face of the moon, black, flitting things, with a glitter of shrapnel below them. From time to time they went away until they were specks of silver and black; but always they came back again, or others came, with new stores of bombs which they unloaded over Amiens. So it went on all through the night.
I went up to a bedroom and lay on a bed, trying to sleep. But it was impossible. My willpower was not strong enough to disregard those crashes in the streets outside, when houses collapsed with frightful falling noises after bomb explosions. My inner vision foresaw the ceiling above me pierced by one of those bombs, and the room in which I lay engulfed in the chaos of this wing of the Hôtel du Rhin. Many times I said, “To hell with it all … I’m going to sleep,” and then sat up in the darkness at the renewal of that tumult and switched on the electric light. No, impossible to sleep! Outside in the corridor there was a stampede of heavy boots. Officers were running to get into the cellars before the next crash, which might fling them into the dismal gulfs. The thought of that cellar pulled me down like the law of gravity. I walked along the
