In that High Street of Amiens one day I saw a crowd gathered round an Australian, so tall that he towered over all other heads. It was at the corner of the rue de Corps Nu sans Teste, the Street of the Naked Body without a Head, and I suspected trouble. As I pressed on the edge of the crowd I heard the Australian ask, in a loud, slow drawl, whether there was any officer about who could speak French. He asked the question gravely, but without anxiety. I pushed through the crowd and said:
“I speak French. What’s the trouble?”
I saw then that, like the French poilu I have described, this tall Australian was in the grasp of a French agent de police, a small man of whom he took no more notice than if a fly had settled on his wrist. The Australian was not drunk. I could see that he had just drunk enough to make his brain very clear and solemn. He explained the matter deliberately, with a slow choice of words, as though giving evidence of high matters before a court. It appeared that he had gone into the estaminet opposite with four friends. They had ordered five glasses of porto, for which they had paid twenty centimes each, and drank them. They then ordered five more glasses of porto and paid the same price, and drank them. After this they took a stroll up and down the street, and were bored, and went into the estaminet again, and ordered five more glasses of porto. It was then the trouble began. But it was not the Australian who began it. It was the woman behind the bar. She served five glasses more of porto and asked for thirty centimes each.
“Twenty centimes,” said the Australian. “Vingt, Madame.”
“Mais non! Trente centimes, chaque verre! Thirty, my old one. Six sous, comprenez?”
“No comprennye,” said the Australian. “Vingt centimes, or go to hell.”
The woman demanded the thirty centimes; kept on demanding with a voice more shrill.
“It was her voice that vexed me,” said the Australian. “That and the bloody injustice.”
The five Australians drank the five glasses of porto, and the tall Australian paid the thirty centimes each without further argument. Life is too short for argument. Then, without words, he took each of the five glasses, broke it at the stem, and dropped it over the counter.
“You will see, sir,” he said, gravely, “the justice of the matter on my side.”
But when they left the estaminet the woman came shrieking into the street after them. Hence the agent de police and the grasp on the Australian’s wrist.
“I should be glad if you would explain the case to this little Frenchman,” said the soldier. “If he does not take his hand off my wrist I shall have to kill him.”
“Perhaps a little explanation might serve,” I said.
I spoke to the agent de police at some length, describing the incident in the café. I took the view that the lady was wrong in increasing the price so rapidly. The agent agreed gravely. I then pointed out that the Australian was a very large-sized man, and that in spite of his quietude he was a man in the habit of killing Germans. He also had a curious dislike of policemen.
“It appears to me,” I said, politely, “that for the sake of your health the other end of the street is better than this.”
The agent de police released his grip from the Australian’s wrist and saluted me.
“Vous avez raison, monsieur. Je vous remercie. Ces Australiens sont vraiment formidables, n’est-ce pas?”
He disappeared through the crowd, who were smiling with a keen sense of understanding. Only the lady of the estaminet was unappeased.
“They are bandits, these Australians!” she said to the world about her.
The tall Australian shook hands with me in a comradely way.
“Thanks for your trouble,” he said. “It was the injustice I couldn’t stick. I always pay the right price. I come from Australia.”
I watched him go slouching down the rue des Trois Cailloux, head above all the passersby. He would be at Pozières again next day.
VII
I was billeted for a time with other war correspondents in an old house in the rue Amiral Courbet, on the way to the river Somme from the Street of the Three Pebbles, and with a view of the spire of the cathedral, a wonderful thing of delicate lines and tracery, graven with love in every line, by Muirhead Bone, and from my dormer window. It was the house of Mme. de la Rochefoucauld, who lived farther out of the town, but drove in now and then to look at this little mansion of hers at the end of a courtyard behind wrought-iron gates. It was built in the days before the Revolution, when it was dangerous to be a fine lady with the name of Rochefoucauld. The furniture was rather scanty, and was of the Louis Quinze and Empire periods. Some portraits of old gentlemen and ladies of France, with one young fellow in a scarlet coat, who might have been in the King’s Company of the Guard about the time when Wolfe scaled the Heights of Abraham, summoned up the ghosts of the house, and I liked to think of them in these rooms and going in their sedan-chairs across the little courtyard to high mass at
