The advance of the Allied Armies towards the Rhine was by definite, slow stages, enabling the German Army to withdraw in advance of us with as much material of war as was left to them by the conditions of the Armistice. On that retreat of theirs they abandoned so much that it was clearly impossible for them to resist our demands by fighting again, however hard might be the peace terms. Their acceptance of the Armistice drawn up by Marshal Foch with a relentless severity in every clause, so that the whole document was a sentence of death to the German military system, proved that they had no more “fight” in them. It was the most abject and humiliating surrender ever made by a great nation in the hour of defeat, and an acknowledgment before the whole world that their armies had broken to bits, in organisation and in spirit.

On the roads for hundreds of kilometres out from Mons and Le Cateau, past Brussels and LiÈge and Namur, was the visible proof of the disintegration and downfall of what had been the greatest military machine in the world. Mile after mile and score after score of miles, on each side of the long straight roads, down which, four years before, the first German Armies had marched in endless columns after the first brief check at LiÈge, with absolute faith in victory, there lay now abandoned guns, trench mortars, aeroplanes, motor lorries, motor cars and transport wagons. Those monstrous guns which had pounded so much of our young flesh to pulp, year after year, were now tossed into the ditches, or overturned in the wayside fields, with broken breech-blocks or without their sights.

It was good to see them there. Field-guns, upturned, thrust their muzzles into the mud, and Belgian peasant-, boys made cock-shies of them. I liked to see them at that game. Here also was the spectacle of a war machine which had worn out until, like the “one-hoss shay,” it had fallen to pieces. Those motor lorries, motor cars, and transport wagons were in the last stage of decrepitude, their axles and spokes all rusty, their woodwork cracked, their wheels tied round with bits of iron in the place of tyres. Everywhere were dead horses worn to skin and bones before they had fallen. For lack of food and fats and rubber and labour the German material of war was in a sorry state before the failure of their man-power in the fighting fields after those years of massacre brought home to them the awful fact that they had no more strength to resist our onslaughts.

One of those who pointed the moral of all this was the little American doctor, Edward Small, and he found an immense satisfaction in the sight of those derelict wrecks of the German war-devils. He and I travelled together for some time, meeting Brand, Harding, and other friends, in towns like LiÈge and Namur. I remember him now, standing by a German howitzer—a colossus—sprawling out of a ditch. He chuckled in a goblin way, with his little grey beard thrust up by a muffler which he had tied over his field-cap and under his chin. (It was cold, with a white mist which clung damply to our faces.) He went so far in his pleasure as to pick up a big stone (like those Belgian boys) and heave it at the monster.

“Fine!” he said. “That devil will never again vomit out death upon men crouching low in ditches—fifteen miles away. Never again will it smash through the roofs of farmhouses where people desired to live in peace, or bash big holes in little old churches where folk worshipped through the centuries—a loving God!... Sonny, this damned thing is symbolical. Its overthrow means the downfall of all the machinery of slaughter which has been accumulated by civilised peoples afraid of each other. In a little while, if there’s any sense in humanity after this fearful lesson, we shall put all our guns on to the scrap-heap and start a new era of reasonable intercourse between the peoples of the world.”

“Doctor,” I answered, “there’s a mighty big ‘If’ in that long sentence of yours.”

He blinked at me with beads of mist on his lashes.

“Don’t you go wet-blanketing my faith in a step-up for the human race! During the next few months we’re going to re-arrange life. We are going to give Fear the knock-out blow.... It was Fear that was the cause of all this horrible insanity and all this need of sacrifice. Germany was afraid of being ‘hemmed in’ by England, France and Russia. Fear, more than the lust of power, was at the back of her big armies. France was afraid of Germany trampling over her frontiers again. Russian Czardom was afraid of revolution within her own borders and looked to war as a safety-valve. England was afraid of the German Navy and afraid of Germans at Calais and Dunkirk. All the little Powers were afraid of the big Powers and made their beastly little alliances as a life insurance against the time when they would be dragged into the dog-fight. Now, with the German bogey killed—the most formidable and frightful bogey—Austria disintegrated, Russia groping her way with bloodshot eyes to a new democracy, a complete set of fears has been removed. The spirits of the peoples will be uplifted, the darkness of fear having passed from them. We are coming out into the broad sunlight of sanity, and mankind will march to better conquests than those of conscript armies. Thank God, the United States of America (and don’t you forget it!) will play a part in this advance to another New World.”

It was absurd to argue with the little man in a sodden field on the road to LiÈge. Besides, though I saw weak links in his chain of reasoning, I did not want to argue.

I wanted to believe also that our victory would not be a mere vulgar triumph of the old kind, one military power rising upon the ruins of its rival, one great yell (or many) of “Yah—we told you so!” but that it would be a victory for all humanity, shamed by the degradation of its orgy of blood, in spite of all pride in long-enduring manhood, and that the peoples of the world, with one common, enormous, generous instinct, would cry out, “The horror has passed! Never again shall it come upon us.... Let us pay back to the dead by contriving a better way of life for those who follow!” The chance of that lay with living youth, if they would not allow themselves to be betrayed by their old men. That also was a mighty “If,” but I clung to the hope with as passionate a faith as that of the little American doctor....

The way to the Rhine lay through many cities liberated from hostile rule, through many wonderful scenes in which, emotion surged like a white flame above great crowds. There was a pageantry of life which I had never before seen in war or in peace, and those of us who went that way became dazed by the endless riot of colour, and our ears were tired by a tumult of joyous sound. In Brussels, Bruges, Ghent, LiÈge, Namur, Venders, banners waved above every house. Flags—flags—flags of many nations and designs, decorated the house-fronts, were draped on the balconies, were entwined in the windows, came like flames above the heads of marching crowds. Everywhere there was the sound of singing by multitudes, and through those weeks one song was always in the air, triumphant, exultant, intoxicating, almost maddening in its effect upon crowds and individuals—the old song of liberty and revolt: “La Marseillaise.” With it, not so universal, but haunting in constant refrain between the outbursts of that other tune, they sang “La BrabanÇonne” of Belgium and quaint old folk-songs that came to life again with the spirit of the people. Bells pealed from churches in which the Germans had left them by special favour. The belfry of Bruges had not lost its carillon. In Ghent, when the King of the Belgians rode in along flower-strewn ways, under banners that made one great canopy, while cheers swept up and around him to his grave, tanned, melancholy face, unchanged by victory—so I had seen him in his ruined towns among his dead—I heard the great boom of the cathedral bell. In Brussels, when he rode in later, there were many bells ringing and clashing, and wild cheering, which to me, lying in an upper room after a smash on the Field of Waterloo, seemed uncanny and inhuman, like the murmur of innumerable ghost-voices. Into these towns, and along the roads through Belgium to the Meuse, bands were playing and soldiers singing, and on each man’s rifle was a flag or a flower. In every city there was carnival. It was the carnival of human joy after long fasting from the pleasure of life. Soldiers and civilians, men and women, sang together, linked arms, danced together through many streets, in many towns. In the darkness of those nights of Armistice one saw the eyes of people sparkling, laughing, burning; the eyes of girls lit up by inner fires, eager, roving, alluring, untamed; and the eyes of soldiers, surprised, amused, adventurous, drunken, ready for any kind of fun; and sometimes in those crowds, dead eyes, or tortured eyes, staring inwards and not outwards, because of some remembrance which came like a ghost between them and carnival.

In Ghent there were other sounds besides music and laughter, and illuminations too fierce and ruddy in their glow to give me pleasure. At night I heard the screams of women. I had no need to ask the meaning of them. I had heard such screams before, when Pierre Nesle’s sister Marthe was in the hands of the mob. But one man told me, as though I did not know.

“They are cutting off some ladies’ hair. Six of them—the hussies! They were too friendly with the Germans, you understand? Now they are being stripped, for shame. There are others, monsieur. Many, many, if one only knew. Hark at their howling!”

He laughed heartily, without any touch of pity. I tried to push my way nearer to try by some word of protest to stop that merry sport with hunted women. The crowds were too dense, the women too far away. In any case no word of mine would have had effect. I went into a restaurant and ordered dinner, though not hungry. Brand was there, sitting alone till I joined him. The place was filled with French and Belgian officers and womenfolk. The swing-door opened and another woman came in and sat a few tables away from ours. She was a tall girl, rather handsome, and better dressed than the ordinary bourgeoisie of Ghent. At least, so it seemed to me when she hung up some heavy furs on the peg above her chair.

A waiter advanced towards her, and then, standing stock-still, began to shout, with a thrill of fury in his voice. He shouted frightful words in French, and one sentence which I remember now.

“A week ago you sat here with a German officer!”

The Belgian officers were listening gravely. One of them half-rose from his chair with a flushed, wolfish face. I was staring at the girl. She was white to the lips, and held on to a brass rail as though about to faint. Then, controlling herself instantly, she fumbled at the peg, pulled down her furs and fled through the swing-door... She was another Marthe.

Somebody laughed in the restaurant, but only one voice. For a moment there was silence, then conversation was resumed, as though no figure of tragedy had passed. The waiter who had denounced the woman swept some crumbs off a table and went to fetch some soup.

Brand did not touch his food.

“I feel sick,” he said.

He pushed his plate away and paid the bill.

“Let’s go.”

He forgot to ask whether I wanted to eat—he was absent-minded in that way—but I felt like him, and avoiding the Grande Place we walked by hazard to a part of the city where some fires were burning. The sky was reddened and we smelt smoke, and presently felt the heat of flames.

“What new devilry?” asked Brand. “Can’t these people enjoy peace? Hasn’t there been enough violence?”

“Possibly a bonfire,” I said, “symbolical of joy and warmth after cold years!”

Coming closer, I saw that Brand was right. Black figures like dancing devils were in the ruddy glare of a savage fire up a side street of Ghent. In other streets were other fires. Close to where we stood was an old inn, called the Hotel de la Demie-Lune—the Hotel of the Half-Moon—and its windows had been heaved out, and inside the rooms Belgian soldiers and citizens were flinging out tables and chairs and planks and wainscoting to feed the bonfire below, and every time the flames licked up to the new fuel there were shouts of joy from the crowd.

“What does it mean?” asked Brand, and a man in the crowd told us that the house had been used as the headquarters of a German organisation for “Flemish Activists”—or Flamagands, as they were called—whose object was to divide the Walloons, or French-speaking Belgians, from the Flemings, in the interests of Germany.

“It is the people’s revenge for those who have tried to sow seeds of hatred among-them,” said the man.

Other people standing by spoke disapprovingly of the scene.

“The Germans have made too many fires in this war,” said an elderly man in a black hat with a high crown and broad brim, like a portrait by Franz Hals. “We don’t want to destroy our own houses now the enemy has gone. That is madness.”

“It seems unnecessary!” said Brand.

As we made our way back we saw the light of other fires, and heard the noise of smashing glass and a splintering of woodwork. The mob was sacking shops which had traded notoriously with the Germans. Out of one alley a man came running like a hunted animal. We heard his breath panting as he passed. A shout of “Flamagand! Flamagand!” followed him, and in another second a mob had caught him. We heard his death-cry before they killed him like a rat.

Never before in the history of the world had such crowds gathered together as now in Brussels, Ghent or LiÈge. French and English soldiers walked the same streets, khaki and sky-blue mingling. These two races had met before, not as friends, in some of these towns—five centuries and more before in history. But here also were men from Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, and the new world which had come to the old world on this adventure, paying back something to the old blood and the old ghosts because of their heritage, yet strangely aloof on the whole from these continental peoples, not understanding them, despising them.

The English soldier took it all as it came, with that queer adaptability of his to any environment or any adventure, with his simple human touch.

“Better than the old Ypres salient,” said one of them, grinning at me after a game of kiss-in-the-ring at Venders. He wiped the sweat from his face and neck, and as he raised his arm I saw by his gold stripes that he had been three times wounded. Yes, that was better than the old hell. He roared with laughter when one of his comrades went into the ring with a buxom girl while the crowd danced round him, holding hands, singing, laughing, pulling him this side and that.

The man who had just left the ring spoke to me again in a confidential way.

“My wife wouldn’t like it if she’d seen me just then. I shan’t tell ‘er. She wouldn’t understand. Nobody can understand the things we’ve done, the things we’ve thought, nor the things we’ve seen, unless they’ve been through with us... and we don’t understand, neither!”

“Who does?” I asked, to express agreement with him, but he took my words as a question to be answered.

“P’raps Gord knows. If so, ‘E’s a clever One, ‘E is!... I wish I ‘ad ‘alf ‘Is sense.”

He drifted away from me with a gurgle of laughter at a girl who pushed his cap on one side.

Along the kerbstone of the market-place some transport wagons were halted, and the drivers were cooking their evening meal over a charcoal stove, as though on one of the roads of war, while a crowd of Belgians roared with laughter at their by-play with clasp-knives, leaden spoons, and dixies. One of them was a cockney humorist—his type was always to be found in any group of English soldiers—and was performing a pantomime for the edification of the onlookers and his own pleasure.

A woman standing on the edge of this scene touched me on the sleeve.

“Are you going forward to the Rhine, mon lieutenant?”

I told her “yes,” and that I should soon be among the Germans.

She gave a little tug to my sleeve, and spoke in a kind of coaxing whisper.

“Be cruel to them, mon lieutenant! Be hard and ruthless. Make them suffer as we have suffered. Tread on their necks so that they squeal. Soyez cruel.”

Her face and part of her figure were in the glow from the charcoal fire of the transport men, and I saw that she was a little woman, neatly dressed, with a thin, gentle, rather worn-looking face. Those words, “Soyez cruel!” gave me a moment’s shock, especially because of the soft, wheedling tone of her voice.

“What would you do,” I asked in a laughing way, “if you were in my place?”

“I dream at nights of what I would like to do. There are so many things I would like to do for vengeance. I think all German women should be killed to stop them breeding. That is one thing.”

“And the next?” I asked.

“It would be well to kill all German babies. Perhaps the good God will do it in His infinite wisdom.”

“You are religious, madame?”

“We had only our prayers,” she said, with piety.

A band of dancing people bore down upon us and swept us apart. From a high balcony an Italian who had been a prisoner of war sang “La Marseillaise,” and though these people’s ears had been dinned with it all day, though their throats were hoarse with singing it, they listened to it now, again, as though it were a new revelation. The man sang with passion in his voice, as powerful as a trumpet, more thrilling than that. The passion of four years’ agony in some foul prison-camp inspired him now, as he sang that song of liberty and triumph.

“Allons, Enfants de la patrie!

Le jour de gloire est arrivÉ!”

The crowd took up the song again, and it roared across the square of Venders until another kind of music met and clashed with it, and overwhelmed it with brazen notes. It was the town band of Venders, composed of twenty-five citizens, mostly middle-aged and portly—some old and scraggy, in long frock-coats and tall pot-hats. Solemnly, with puffed cheeks, they marched along, parting the waves of people as they went, as it seemed, by the power of their blasts. They were playing an old tune called “Madelon”—its refrain comes back to me now with the picture of that carnival in Venders, with all those faces, all that human pressure and emotion—and behind them, as though following the Pied Piper (twenty-five pied pipers!) came dancing at least a thousand people, eight abreast, with linked arms or linked hands. They were young Belgian boys and girls, old Belgian men and women, children, British soldiers, American soldiers, English, Scottish, Irish, Canadian, Australian, Russian, and Italian ex-prisoners of war just liberated from their prison-camps, new to liberty. They were all singing that old song of “Madelon,” and all dancing in a kind of jig. Other crowds, dancing and singing, came out of side-streets into the wide Grande Place, mingled, like human waves meeting, swirled in wild, laughing eddies. Carnival after the long fasting.

Brand clutched me by the arm and laughed in his deep, hollow voice.

“Look at that old satyr!... I believe Daddy Small is Pan himself!”

It was the little American doctor. He was in the centre of a row of eight in the vanguard of a dancing column. A girl of the midinette type—pretty, impudent, wild-eyed, with a strand of fair hair blowing loose from her little fur cap—was clinging to his arm on one side, while on the other was a stout, middle-aged woman with a cheerful Flemish face and mirth-filled eyes. Linked up with the others they jigged behind the town band. Dr. Small’s little grey beard had a raffish look. His field cap was tilted back from his bony forehead. His spectacles were askew. He had the happy look of careless boyhood. He did not see us then, but later in the evening detached himself from the stout Flemish lady, who kissed him on both cheeks, and made his way to where Brand and I stood under the portico of a hotel.

“Fie, doctor!” said Brand. “What would your old patients in New York say to this Bacchanalian orgy?”

“Sonny,” said the doctor, “they wouldn’t believe it. It’s incredible!”

He wiped the perspiration from his brow, threaded his fingers through his grey beard, and laughed in that shrill way which was his habit when excited.

“My word, it was good fun! I became part of a people’s joy. I had their sense of escape from frightful things. Youth came back to me. Their songs danced in my blood. In spite of my goggles and my grey beard that buxom lady adored me as though I were the young Adonis. The little girl clasped my hand as though I were her younger brother. Time rolled back from the world. Old age was touched with the divine elixir. In that crowd there is the springtime of life, when Pan played on his pipes through pagan woods. I wouldn’t have missed it for a million dollars!”

That night Brand and I and some others (Charles Fortune among them) were billeted in a small hotel which had been a German headquarters a few days before. There was a piano in the billiard room, and Fortune touched its keys. Several notes were broken but he skipped them deftly and improvised a musical caricature of “Daddy” Small dancing in the carnival. He, too, had seen that astonishing vision, and it inspired him to grotesque fantasies. In his imagination he brought a great general to Venders—“Blear-eyed Bill, the Butcher of the Boche”—and gave him a pas seul in the Grande Place, like an elephant gambolling in green fields and trumpeting his joy.

Young Harding was moody, and confided to me that he did not like the idea of crossing the German frontier and going to Cologne.

“There will be dirty work,” he said, “as sure as fate. The Huns will begin sniping and then we shall have to start reprisals. Well, if they ask for it I hope we shall give it them. Without mercy, after all they have done. At the first sign of treachery I hope the machine-guns will begin to play. Every time I see a Hun I shall feel like slitting his throat.”

“Well, you’ll get into a murderous state of mind,” I answered him. “We shall see plenty, and live among them. I expect they will be tame enough.”

“Some poor devils of ours will be murdered in their beds,” said Harding. “It makes my blood boil to think of it. I only hope we shan’t stand any nonsense. I’d like to see Cologne Cathedral go up in flames. That would be a consolation.”

Charles Fortune broke away from his musical fantasy of “Blear-eyed Bill” and played a bar or two of the “Marseillaise” in ragtime. It was a greeting to Pierre Nesle, who came into the room quietly in his kÉpi and heavy motor-coat, with a salute to the company.

“Bon soir, petit Pierre!” said Fortune, “qu’il y a, done—quoi?—avec ta figure si sombre, si mÉlancolique, d’une tristesse pitoyable——”

Pierre Nesle inspired him to sing a little old French chanson of Pierrot disconsolate.

Pierre had just motored down from Lille—a long journey—and was blue with cold, as he said, warming his hands at the charcoal stove. He laughed at Fortune’s jesting, begged a cigarette from Harding, apologised for keeping on his “stink-coat” for a while until he had thawed out—and I admired the boy’s pluck and self-control. It was the first time I had seen him since he had gone to Lille to see his sister. I knew by the new lines about his eyes and mouth, by a haggard, older look he had that he had seen that sister of his—Marthe—and knew her tragedy.

It was to Brand’s room that he went after midnight, and from Brand, a day later, I heard what had happened. He had begun by thanking Brand for that rescue of his sister in Lille, in a most composed and courteous way. Then suddenly that mask fell from him and he sat down heavily in a chair, put his head down on his arms upon the table and wept like a child in uncontrollable grief. Brand was immensely distressed and could not think of any word to comfort him. He kept saying, “Courage! Courage!” as I had said to Madame ChÉri when she broke down about her boy Edouard, as the young Baronne had sent word to Eileen from her prison death-bed, and as so many men and women had said to others who had been stricken by the cruelties of war.

“The boy was down and out,” said Brand. “What could I say? It is one of those miseries for which there is no cure. He began to talk about his sister when they had been together at home, in Paris before the war. She had been so gay, so comradely, so full of adventure. Then he began to curse God for having allowed so much cruelty and men for being such devils. He cursed the Germans, but then, in most frightful language, most bitterly of all he cursed the people of Lille for having tortured a woman who had been starved into weakness, and had sinned to save her life. He contradicted himself then, violently, and said, ‘It was no sin. My sister was a loyal girl to France. In her soul she was loyal. So she swore to me on her crucifix. I would have killed her if she had been disloyal.’... So there you are! Pierre Nesle is broken on the wheel of war, like so many others. What’s the cure?”

“None,” I said, “for his generation. One can’t undo the things that are done.”

Brand was pacing up and down his bedroom, where he had been telling me these things, and now, at my words, he stopped and stared at me before answering.

“No. I think you’re right. This generation has been hard hit, and we shall go about with unhealed wounds. But the next generation?... Let’s try to save it from all this horror! If the world will only understand——”

The next day we left Venders and crossed the German frontier on the way to the Rhine.