The smart society of G.H.Q. was best seen at the Officers’ Club in Montreuil, at dinnertime. It was as much like musical comedy as any stage setting of war at the Gaiety. A band played ragtime and light music while the warriors fed, and all these generals and staff officers, with their decorations and armbands and polished buttons and crossed swords, were waited upon by little W.A.A.C.’s with the G.H.Q. colors tied up in bows on their hair, and khaki stockings under their short skirts and fancy aprons. Such a chatter! Such bursts of lighthearted laughter! Such whisperings of secrets and intrigues and scandals in high places! Such careless-hearted courage when British soldiers were being blown to bits, gassed, blinded, maimed, and shell-shocked in places that were far—so very far—from G.H.Q.!
XI
There were shrill voices one morning outside the gate of our quarters—women’s voices, excited, angry, passionate. An orderly came into the mess—we were at breakfast—and explained the meaning of the clamor, which by some intuition and a quick ear for French he had gathered from all this confusion of tongues.
“There’s a soldier up the road, drunk or mad. He has been attacking a girl. The villagers want an officer to arrest him.”
The colonel sliced off the top of his egg and then rose. “Tell three orderlies to follow me.”
We went into the roadway, and twenty women crowded round us with a story of attempted violence against an innocent girl. The man had been drinking last night at the estaminet up there. Then he had followed the girl, trying to make love to her. She had barricaded herself in the room, when he tried to climb through the window.
“If you don’t come out I’ll get in and kill you,” he said, according to the women.
But she had kept him out, though he prowled round all night. Now he was hiding in an outhouse. The brute! The pig!
When we went up the road the man was standing in the center of it, with a sullen look.
“What’s the trouble?” he asked. “It looks as if all France were out to grab me.”
He glanced sideways over the field, as though reckoning his chance of escape. There was no chance.
The colonel placed him under arrest and he marched back between the orderlies, with an old soldier of the Contemptibles behind him.
Later in the day he was lined up for identification by the girl, among a crowd of other men.
The girl looked down the line, and we watched her curiously—a slim creature with dark hair neatly coiled.
She stretched out her right hand with a pointing finger.
“Le voilà! … c’est l’homme.”
There was no mistake about it, and the man looked sheepishly at her, not denying. He was sent off under escort to the military prison in St.-Omer for court-martial.
“What’s the punishment—if guilty?” I asked.
“Death,” said the colonel, resuming his egg.
He was a fine-looking fellow, the prisoner. He had answered the call for king and country without delay. In the estaminet, after coming down from the salient for a machine-gun course, he had drunk more beer than was good for him, and the face of a pretty girl had bewitched him, stirring up desire. He wanted to kiss her lips … There were no women in the Ypres salient. Nothing pretty or soft. It was hell up there, and this girl was a pretty witch, bringing back thoughts of the other side—for life, womanhood, love, caresses which were good for the souls and bodies of men. It was a starved life up there in the salient … Why shouldn’t she give him her lips? Wasn’t he fighting for France? Wasn’t he a tall and proper lad? Curse the girl for being so sulky to an English soldier! … And now, if those other women, those old hags, were to swear against him things he had never said, things he had never done, unless drink had made him forget—by God! supposing drink had made him forget? He would be shot against a white wall. Shot dead, disgracefully, shamefully, by his own comrades! O Christ! and the little mother in a Sussex cottage! …
XII
Going up to Kemmel one day I had to wait in battalion headquarters for the officer I had gone to see. He was attending a court martial. Presently he came into the wooden hut, with a flushed face.
“Sorry I had to keep you,” he said. “Tomorrow there will be one swine less in the world.”
“A death sentence?”
He nodded.
“A damned coward. Said he didn’t mind rifle-fire, but couldn’t stand shells. Admitted he left his post. He doesn’t mind rifle-fire! … Well, tomorrow morning.”
The officer laughed grimly, and then listened for a second.
There were some heavy crumps falling over Kemmel Hill, rather close, it seemed, to our wooden hut.
“Damn those German gunners” said the officer. “Why can’t they give us a little peace?”
He turned to his papers, but several times while I talked with him he jerked his head up and listened to a heavy crash.
On the way back I saw a man on foot, walking in front of a mounted man, past the old hill of the Scherpenberg, toward the village of Locre. There was something in the way he walked, in his attitude—the head hunched forward a little, and his arms behind his back—which made me turn to look at him. He was manacled, and tied by a rope to the mounted man. I caught one glimpse of his face, and then turned away, cold and sick. There was doom written on his face, and in his eyes a captured look. He was walking to his wall.
XIII
There were other men who could not stand shellfire. It filled them with an animal terror and took all willpower
