Back to Life - Philip Gibbs

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was very frightened with some unknown fear, and held tight to the banister as she went upstairs. There was a glimmer of light on the landing. It was from a candle which had almost burnt out and was guttering in a candlestick placed on the topmost stair. A grotesque figure was revealed by the light—Schwarz, the German officer, in his pyjamas, with a helmet on his head and unlaced boots on his feet. The loose fat of the man, no longer girded by a belt, made him look like a mass of jelly as he had his shoulder to the door, shoving and grunting as he tried to force it open. He was swearing to himself in German, and, now and then, called out softly in French, in a kind of drunken German-French: “Ouvrez, kleines Madchen, ma jolie Schatz. Ouvrez donc.”

      Madame Chéri was paralysed for a moment by a shock of horror; quite speechless and motionless. Then suddenly she moved forward and spoke in a fierce whisper.

      “What are you doing, beast?”

      Schwarz gave a queer snort of alarm.

      He stood swaying a little, with the helmet on the back of his head. The candlelight gleamed on its golden eagle. His face was hotly flushed and there was a ferocious look in his eyes. Madame Chéri saw that he was drunk.

      He spoke to her in horrible French, so Pierre Nesle told me, imitating it savagely, as Madame Chéri had done to him. The man was filthily drunk, and declared that he loved Hélène and would kill her if she did not let him love her. Why did she lock her door like that? He had been kind to her. He had smiled at her. A German officer was a human being, not a monster. Why did they treat him as a monster, draw themselves away when he passed, become silent when he wished to speak with them, stare at him with hate in their eyes? The French people were all devils, proud as devils.

      Another figure stood on the landing. It was Edouard—a tall, slim figure, with a white face and burning eyes, in which there was a look of fury.

      “What is happening, maman?” he said coldly. “What does this animal want?”

      Madame Chéri trembled with a new fear. If the boy were to kill that man, he would be shot. She had a vision of him standing against a wall. …

      “It is nothing,” she said. “This gentleman is ill. Go back to bed, Edouard. I command you.”

      The German laughed stupidly.

      “To bed, shafskopf. I am going to open your sister’s door. She loves me. She calls to me. I hear her whisper, ‘Ich liebe dich!’ ”

      Edouard had a stick in his hand. It was a heavy walking-stick which had belonged to his father. Without a word he sprang forward, raised his weapon, and smashed it down on the German’s head. It knocked off Schwarz’s helmet, which rolled from the top to the bottom of the staircase, and hit the man a glancing blow on the temple. He fell like a log. Edouard smiled, and said, “Très bien.” Then he rattled the lock of his sister’s door and called out to her: “Hélène. … Have no fear. He is dead. I have killed him.”

      It was then that Madame Chéri had her greatest fear. There was no sound from Hélène. She did not answer any of their cries. She did not open the door to them. They tried to force the lock, as Schwarz had done, but, though the lock gave at last, the door would not open, kept closed by some barricade behind it. Edouard and his mother went out into the yard, and the boy climbed up to his sister’s window and broke the glass to go through. Hélène was lying in her nightdress on the bedroom floor, unconscious. She had moved a heavy wardrobe in front of the door, by some supernatural strength which came from fear. Then she had fainted. … To his deep regret, Edouard had not killed the German.

      Schwarz had crawled back to his bedroom when they went back into the house, and next morning wept to Madame Chéri and implored forgiveness. There had been a little banquet, he said, and he had drunk too much.

      Madame Chéri did not forgive. She called at the Kommandantur, where the General saw her and listened to her gravely. He did not waste words.

      “The matter will be attended to,” he said.

      Captain Schwarz departed that day from the house in the Rue Esquermoise. He was sent to a battalion in the line and was killed somewhere near Ypres.

       Table of Contents

      Wickham Brand paid his promised visit to the Chéri family, according to his pledge to Hélène, whom he had met in the street the previous day, and he had to drink some of the hidden wine, as I had done, and heard the story of its concealment and of Madame’s oath about the secret hoard of copper. I think he was more disconcerted than I had been by that avowal, and told me afterwards that he believed no Englishwoman would have sworn to so deliberate a lie.

      “That’s because the English are not so logical,” I said, and he puzzled over that.

      He was greatly taken with Hélène, as she with him, but he risked their friendship in an awkward moment when he expressed the hope that the German offer of peace (the one before the final surrender) would be accepted.

      It was Madame Chéri who took him up on that, sharply, and with a kind of surprised anguish in her voice. She hoped, she said, that no peace would be made with Germany until French and British and American troops had smashed the German armies, crossed the German frontier, and destroyed many German towns and villages. She would not be satisfied with any peace that came before a full vengeance, so that German women would taste the bitterness of war as Frenchwomen had drunk deep of it, and until Germany was heaped with ruins as France had been.

      Wickham Brand was sitting with the small boy on his knees, and stroked his hair before answering.

      “Dites, donc!” said Hélène, who was sitting on the hearthrug, looking up at his powerful profile, which reminded me always of a Norman knight, or, sometimes, of a young monk worried about his soul and the devil.

      He had that monkish look now when he answered.

      “I don’t know,” he said. “I have felt like that often. But I have come to think that the sooner we get blood out of our eyes the better for all the world. I have seen enough dead Germans—and dead English and dead French—to last a lifetime. Many of the German soldiers hate the war, as I know, and curse the men who drove them on to it. They are trapped. They cannot escape from the thing they curse, because of their discipline, their patriotism——”

      “Their patriotism!” said Madame Chéri.

      She was really angry with Brand, and I noticed that even Hélène drew back a little from her place on the rug and looked perplexed and disappointed. Madame Chéri ridiculed the idea of German patriotism. They were brutes who liked war except when they feared defeat. They had committed a thousand atrocities out of sheer joy in bestial cruelty. Their idea of patriotism was blood-lust and the oppression of people more civilised than themselves. They hated all people who were not savages like themselves.

      Wickham Brand shook his head.

      “They’re not all as bad as that. I knew decent people among them before the war. For a time, of course, they went mad. They were poisoned by the damnable philosophy of their leaders and teachers.”

      “They liked the poison,” said Madame Chéri. “They lapped it up. It is in their blood and spirits. They are foul through and through.”

      “They are devils,” said Hélène. She shuddered as though she felt very cold.

      Even the small boy on Brand’s knees said: “Sales Boches!”

      Brand groaned in a whimsical way.

      “I have said all those things a thousand times! They nearly drove me mad. But now it’s time to stop the river of blood—if the German army will acknowledge defeat. I would not go on a day after that, for our own sakes—for

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