III
That was in the last phase of the war, but the Street of the Three Pebbles had been tramped up and down for two years before then by the British armies on the Somme, with the French on their right. I was never tired of watching those crowds and getting into the midst of them, and studying their types. All the types of young English manhood came down this street, and some of their faces showed the strain and agony of war, especially toward the end of the Somme battles, after four months or more of slaughter. I saw boys with a kind of hunted look in their eyes; and Death was the hunter. They stared into the shop windows in a dazed way, or strode along with packs on their backs, looking neither to the right nor to the left, and white, haggard faces, as expressionless as masks. Tomorrow or the next day, perhaps, the Hunter would track them down. Other English officers showed no sign at all of apprehension or lack of nerve-control, although the psychologist would have detected disorder of soul in the rather deliberate note of hilarity with which they greeted their friends, in gusts of laughter, for no apparent cause, at “Charlie’s bar,” where they would drink three cocktails apiece on an empty stomach, and in their tendency to tell tales of horror as things that were very funny. They dined and wined in Amiens at the “Rhin,” the “Godebert,” or the “Cathédrale,” with a kind of spiritual exaltation in good food and drink, as though subconsciously they believed that this might be their last dinner in life, with good pals about them. They wanted to make the best of it—and damn the price. In that spirit many of them went after other pleasures—down the byways of the city, and damned the price again, which was a hellish one. Who blames them? It was war that was to blame, and those who made war possible.
Down the rue des Trois Cailloux, up and down, up and down, went English, and Scottish, and Irish, and Welsh, and Canadian, and Australian, and New Zealand fighting-men. In the winter they wore their trench-coats all splashed and caked up to the shoulders with the white, chalky mud of the Somme battlefields, and their top-boots and puttees were plastered with this mud, and their faces were smeared with it after a lorry drive or a tramp down from the line. The rain beat with a metallic tattoo on their steel hats. Their packs were all sodden.
French poilus, detrained at Amiens station for a night on their way to some other part of the front, jostled among British soldiers, and their packs were a wonder to see. They were like traveling tinkers, with pots and pans and boots slung about their faded blue coats, and packs bulging with all the primitive needs of life in the desert of the battlefields beyond civilization. They were unshaven, and wore their steel casques low over their foreheads, without gaiety, without the means of buying a little false hilarity, but grim and sullen-looking and resentful of English soldiers walking or talking with French cocottes.
IV
I saw a scene with a French poilu one day in the Street of the Three Pebbles, during those battles of the Somme, when the French troops were fighting on our right from Maricourt southward toward Roye. It was like a scene from Gaspard. The poilu was a middle-aged man, and very drunk on some foul spirit which he had bought in a low café down by the river. In the High Street he was noisy, and cursed God for having allowed the war to happen, and the French government for having sentenced him and all poor sacré poilus to rot to death in the trenches, away from their wives and children, without a thought for them; and nothing but treachery in Paris:
“Nous sommes trahis!” said the man, raising his arms. “For the hundredth time France is betrayed.”
A crowd gathered round him, listening to his drunken denunciations. No one laughed. They stared at him with a kind of pitying wonderment. An agent de police pushed his way between the people and caught hold of the soldier by the wrist and tried to drag him away. The crowd murmured a protest, and then suddenly the poilu, finding himself in the hands of the police, on this one day out of the trenches—after five months—flung himself on the pavement in a passion of tears and supplication.
“Je suis père de famille! … Je suis un soldat de France! … Dans les tranchées pour cinq mois! … Qu’est-ce que mes camarades vont dire, ’cré nom de Dieu? et mon capitaine? C’est emmordant après toute ma service comme brave soldat. Mais, quoi donc, mon vieux!”
“Viens donc, saligaud,” growled the agent de police.
The crowd was against the policeman. Their murmurs rose to violent protest on behalf of the poilu.
“C’est un héros, tout de même. Cinq mois dans les tranchées! C’est affreux! Mais oui, il est soûl, mais pour-quoi pas! Après cinq mois sur le front qu’est-ce que cela signifie? Ça n’a aucune importance!”
A dandy French officer of Chasseurs Alpins stepped into the center of the scene and tapped the policeman on the shoulder.
“Leave him alone. Don’t you see he is a soldier? Sacred name of God, don’t you know that a man like this has helped to save France, while you pigs stand
