Now It Can Be Told Part 38

"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 h.e.l.l 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 man-power."

"They're bound to take Albert to-night or to-morrow."

"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 to-night. 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 d.a.m.ned false optimism. That has been our curse all through."

"Better than your d.a.m.ned 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 to-night. 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 Hotel 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 gla.s.s. Instinctively and instantly a number of officers threw themselves on the floor to escape flying bits of steel and gla.s.s splinters blown sideways. Then some one 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 anti-aircraft guns got to work and there was the shrill chorus of shrapnel sh.e.l.ls winging over the roofs.

"Bang!... Cras.h.!.+"

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 d.a.m.ned 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 Hotel 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 door-nail."

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 pa.s.sed 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 will-power 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 Hotel du Rhin. Many times I said, "To h.e.l.l 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 corridor, now deserted, and saw a stairway littered with broken gla.s.s, which my feet scrunched. There were no lights in the bas.e.m.e.nt of the hotel, but I had a flash-lamp, going dim, and by its pale eye fumbled my way to a stone pa.s.sage leading to the cellar. That flight of stone steps was littered also with broken gla.s.s. In the cellar itself was a mixed company of men who had been dining earlier in the evening, joined by others who had come in from the streets for shelter. Some of them had dragged down mattresses from the bedrooms and were lying there in their trench-coats, with their steel hats beside them. Others were sitting on wooden cases, wearing their steel hats, while there were others on their knees, and their faces in their hands, trying to sleep. There were some of the town majors who had lost their towns, and some Canadian cavalry officers, and two or three private soldiers, and some motor-drivers and orderlies, and two young cooks of the hotel lying together on dirty straw. By one of the stone pillars of the vaulted room two American war correspondents-Sims and Mackenzie-were sitting on a packing-case playing cards on a board between them. They had stuck candles in empty wine-bottles, and the flickering light played on their faces and cast deep shadows under their eyes. I stood watching these men in that cellar and thought what a good subject it would be for the pencil of Muirhead Bone. I wanted to get a comfortable place. There was only one place on the bare stones, and when I lay down there my bones ached abominably, and it was very cold. Through an aperture in the window came a keen draft and I could see in a square of moonlit sky a glinting star. It was not much of a cellar. A direct hit on the Hotel du Rhin would make a nasty mess in this vaulted room and end a game of cards. After fifteen minutes I became restless, and decided that the room upstairs, after all, was infinitely preferable to this damp cellar and these hard stones. I returned to it and lay down on the bed again and switched off the light. But the noises outside, the loneliness of the room, the sense of sudden death fluking overhead, made me sit up again and listen intently. The Gothas were droning over Amiens again. Many houses round about were being torn and shattered. What a wreckage was being made of the dear old city! I paced up and down the room, smoking cigarettes, one after another, until a mighty explosion, very close, made all my nerves quiver. No, decidedly, that cellar was the best place. If one had to die it was better to be in the company of friends. Down I went again, meeting an officer whom I knew well. He, too, was a wanderer between the cellar and the abandoned bedrooms.

"I am getting bored with this," he said. "It's absurd to think that this filthy cellar is any safer than upstairs. But the dugout sense calls one down. Anyhow, I can't sleep."

We stood looking into the cellar. There was something comical as well as sinister in the sight of the company there sprawled on the mattresses, vainly trying to extract comfort out of packing-cases for pillows, or gas-bags on steel hats. One friend of ours, a cavalry officer of the old school, looked a cross between Charlie Chaplin and Ol' Bill, with a fierce frown above his black mustache. Sims and Mackenzie still played their game of cards, silently, between the guttering candles.

I think I went from the cellar to the bedroom, and from the bedroom to the cellar, six times that night. There was never ten minutes' relief from the drone of Gothas, who were making a complete job of Amiens. It was at four in the morning that I met the same officer who saw me wandering before.

"Let us go for a walk," he said. "The birds will be away by dawn."

It was nothing like dawn when we went out of the side door of the Hotel du Rhin and strolled into the Street of the Three Pebbles. There was still the same white moonlight, intense and glittering, but with a paler sky. It shone down upon dark pools of blood and the carca.s.ses of horses and fragments of flesh, from which a sickly smell rose. The roadway was littered with bits of timber and heaps of masonry. Many houses had collapsed into wild chaos, and others, though still standing, had been stripped of their wooden frontages and their walls were scarred by bomb-splinters. Every part of the old city, as we explored it later, had been badly mauled, and hundreds of houses were utterly destroyed. The air raid ceased at 4.30 A.M., when the first light of dawn came into the sky....

That day Amiens was evacuated, by command of the French military authorities, and the inhabitants trailed out of the city, leaving everything behind them. I saw the women locking up their shops-where there were any doors to shut or their shop still standing. Many people must have been killed and buried in the night beneath their own houses-I never knew how many. The fugitives escaped the next phase of the tragedy in Amiens when, within a few hours, the enemy sent over the first high velocities, and for many weeks afterward scattered them about the city, destroying many other houses. A fire started by these sh.e.l.ls formed a great gap between the rue des Jacobins and the rue des Trois Cailloux, where there had been an arcade and many good shops and houses. I saw the fires smoldering about charred beams and twisted ironwork when I went through the city after the day of exodus.

XVII

It was a pitiful adventure to go through Amiens in the days of its desolation, and we who had known its people so well hated its loneliness. All abandoned towns have a tragic aspect-I often think of Douai, which was left with all its people under compulsion of the enemy-but Amiens was strangely sinister with heaps of ruins in its narrow streets, and the abominable noise of high-velocity sh.e.l.ls in flight above its roofs, and cras.h.i.+ng now in one direction and now in another.

One of our sentries came out of a little house near the Place and said:

"Keep as much as possible to the west side of the town, sir. They've been falling pretty thick on the east side. Made no end of a mess!"

On the way back from Villers-Bretonneux and the Australian headquarters, on the left bank of the Somme, we ate sandwiches in the public gardens outside the Hotel du Rhin. There were big sh.e.l.l-holes in the flower-beds, and trees had been torn down and flung across the pathway, and there was a broken statue lying on the gra.s.s. Some French and English soldiers tramped past. Then there was no living soul about in the place which had been so crowded with life, with pretty women and children, and young officers doing their shopping, and the business of a city at work.

"It makes one understand what Rome was like after the barbarians had sacked and left it," said a friend of mine.

"There is something ghastly about it," said another.

We stood round the Hotel du Rhin, shut up and abandoned. The house next door had been wrecked, and it was scarred and wounded, but still stood after that night of terror.

One day during its desolation I went to a banquet in Amiens, in the cellars of the Hotel de Ville. It was to celebrate the Fourth of July, and an invitation had been sent to me by the French commandant de place and the English A. P. M.

It was a beau geste, gallant and romantic in those days of trouble, when Amiens was still closely beleaguered, but safer now that Australians and British troops were holding the lines strongly outside, with French on their right southward from Boves and Hangest Wood. The French commandant had procured a collection of flags and his men had decorated the battered city with the Tricolor. It even fluttered above some of the ruins, as though for the pa.s.sing of a pageant. But only a few cars entered the city and drew up to the Town Hall, and then took cover behind the walls.