Our conversation was interrupted by a figure that slipped out of the darkness of some doorway, hesitated before us, and then spoke in French.

“You are English officers? May I speak with you?”

It was a girl, whom I could see only vaguely in the darkness—she stood in the shadow of a doorway beyond the moonlight—and I answered her that I was English and my friend American.

“Is there any way,” she asked, “of travelling from Lille, perhaps to Paris? In a motor car, for example? To-night?”

I laughed at this startling request, put so abruptly. It was already nine o’clock at night!

“Not the smallest chance in the world, mademoiselle! Paris is far from Lille.”

“I was stupid,” said the girl. “Not all the way to Paris, but to some town outside Lille. Any town. There are motor cars always passing through the streets. I thought if I could get a little place in one——”

“It is difficult,” I said. “As a matter of fact, it is forbidden for officers to take civilians except in case of saving them from danger—in shelled places.”

She came suddenly out of the shadow into the moonlight, and I saw that she was a girl with red hair and a face strangely white. I knew by the way she spoke—the accent—as well as by the neatness of her dress, that she was not a working-girl. She was trembling painfully, and took hold of my arm with both her hands.

“Monsieur, I beg of you to help me. I beseech you to think of some way in which I may get away from Lille to-night. It is a matter of extreme importance to me.”

A group of young men and women came up the street arm-in-arm, shouting, laughing, singing the “Marseillaise.” They were civilians, with two of our soldiers among them, wearing women’s hats.

Before I could answer the girl’s last words, she made a sudden retreat into the dark doorway, and I could see dimly that she was cowering back.

Dr. Small spoke to me. “That girl is scared of something. The poor child has got the jim-jams.”

I went closer to her and heard her breathing. It was quite loud. It was as though she were panting after hard running.

“Are you ill?” I asked.

She did not answer until the group of civilians had passed. They did not pass at once, but stood for a moment looking up at a light burning in an upper window. One of the men shouted something in a loud voice—some word in argot—which I did not understand, and the women screeched with laughter. Then they went on, dancing with linked arms, and our two soldiers in the women’s hats lurched along with them.

“I am afraid!” said the girl.

“Afraid of what?” I asked.

I repeated the question—“Why are you afraid, mademoiselle?”—and she answered by words which I had heard a million times since the war began as an explanation of all trouble, tears, ruin, misery.

“C’est la guerre!”

“Look out!” said the little doctor. “She’s fainting.”

She had risen from her cowering position and stood upright for a moment, with her hand against the doorpost. Then she swayed, and would have fallen if the doctor had not caught her. Even then she fell, indeed, though without hurt, because he could not support her sudden weight—though she was of slight build—and they sank together in a kind of huddle on the doorstep.

“For the love of Mike!” said Dr. Small. He was on his knees before her now, chafing her cold hands. She came to in about a minute, and I leaned over her and asked her where she lived, and made out from her faint whisper that she lived in the house to which this doorway belonged, in the upper room where the light was burning. With numbed fingers—“cold as a toad,” said “Daddy” Small—she fumbled at her bodice and drew out a latchkey.

“We had better carry her up,” I said, and the doctor nodded.

The front door opened into a dimly-lit passage, uncarpeted, and with leprous-looking walls. At one end was a staircase with heavy banisters. The doctor and I supported the girl, who was able to walk a little now, and managed to get her to the first landing.

“Where?” I asked, and she said, “Opposite.”

It was the front room looking on to the street. A lamp was burning on the round table in the centre of the room, and I saw by the light of it the poverty of the furniture and its untidiness. At one end of the room was a big iron bedstead with curtains of torn lace, and on the wooden chairs hung some soiled petticoats and blouses. There was a small cooking-stove in a corner, but no charcoal burned in it, and I remember an ebony-framed mirror over the mantelpiece. I remember that mirror vividly. I remember, for instance, that a bit of the ebony had broken off, showing the white plaster underneath, and a crack in the right-hand corner of the looking-glass.

Probably my eyes were attracted to it because of a number of photographs stuck into the framework. They were photographs of a girl in a variety of stage costumes; and glancing at the girl, whom the doctor had put into a low arm-chair, I saw that they were of her. But with all the tragic difference between happiness and misery; worse than that—between unscathed girlhood and haggard womanhood. This girl with red hair and a white waxen face was pretty still. There was something more than prettiness in the broadness of her brow and the long tawny lashes that were now veiling her closed eyes as she sat with her head back against the chair, showing a long white throat. But her face was lined with an imprint of pain, and her mouth, rather long and bow-like, was drawn with a look of misery.

The doctor spoke to me—in English, of course.

“Half-starved, I should say. Or starved.”

He sniffed at the stove and the room generally.

“No sign of recent cooking.”

He opened a cupboard and looked in.

“Nothing in the pantry, sonny. I guess the girl would do with a meal.”

I did not answer him. I was staring at the photographs stuck into the mirror, and saw one that was not a girl’s portrait. It was the photograph of a young French lieutenant. I crossed the room and looked at it closer, and then spoke to the little doctor in a curiously unexcited voice, as one does in moments of living drama.

“This girl is Pierre Nesle’s sister.”

“For the love of Mike!” said the little doctor, for the second time that night.

The girl heard the name of Pierre Nesle and opened her eyes wide, with a wondering look.

“Pierre Nesle? That is my brother. Do you know him?”

I told her that I knew him well and had seen him in Lille, where he was looking for her, two days ago. He was now in the direction of Courtrai.

The girl was painfully agitated and uttered pitiful words.

“Oh, my little brother!” she murmured. “My dear little comrade!” She rose from her chair, steadying herself with one hand on the back of it, and with feverish anxiety said that she must go at once. She must leave Lille.

“Why?” I asked. “Why do you want to leave Lille?”

“I am afraid!” she answered again, and burst into tears.

I turned to the doctor and translated her words.

“I can’t understand this fear of hers—this desire to leave Lille.”

Dr. Small had taken something off the mantelpiece—a glass tube with some tablets—which he put in his pocket.

“Hysteria,” he said. “Starvation, war-strain, and—drugs. There’s a jolly combination for a young lady’s nerves! She’s afraid of herself, old ghosts, the horrors. Wants to run away from it all, forgetting that she carries her poor body and brain with her. I know the symptoms—even in little old New York in time of peace.”

He had his professional manner. I saw the doctor through his soldier’s uniform. He spoke with the authority of the medical man in a patient’s bedroom. He ordered me to go round to my mess and bring back some food, while he boiled up a kettle and got busy. When I returned, after half-an-hour, the girl was more cheerful. Some of the horrors had passed from her in the doctor’s company. She ate some of the food I had brought in a famished way, but after a few mouthfuls sickened at it and would eat no more. But a faint colour had come into her cheeks and gave her face a touch of real beauty. She must have been extraordinarily attractive before the war—as those photographs showed. She spoke of Pierre with adoration. He had been all that was good to her before she left home (she hated her mother!) to sing in cabarets and cafÉ concerts.

“I cannot imagine Pierre as a lieutenant!” she remarked, with a queer little laugh.

Dr. Small said he would get some women in the house to look after her in the night, but she seemed hostile to that idea.

“The people here are unkind. They are bad women here. If I died they would not care.”

She promised to stay in the house until we could arrange for Pierre to meet her and take her away to Paris. But I felt the greatest pity for the girl when we left her alone in her miserable room. The scared look had come back to her face. I could see that she was in terror of being alone again.

When we walked back to our billets the doctor spoke of the extraordinary chance of meeting the girl like that—the sister of our liaison officer. The odds were a million to one against such a thing.

“I always feel there’s a direction in these cases,” said Daddy Small. “Some Hand that guides. Maybe you and I were being led to-night. I’d like to save that girl, Marthe.”

“Is that her name?”

“Marthe de MÉricourt, she calls herself, as a singing-girl. I guess that’s why Pierre could not hear of her in this town.”

Later on the doctor spoke again.

“That girl is as much a war victim as if she had been shell-shocked on the field of battle. The casualty lists don’t say anything about civilians, not a darned thing about broken hearts, stricken women, diseased babies, infant mortality—all the hell of suffering behind the lines. May God curse all war devils!”

He put his hand on my shoulder and said in a very solemn way: “After this thing is finished—this grisly business—you and I, and all men of goodwill, must put our heads together to prevent it happening again. I dedicate whatever life I have to that.”

He seemed to have a vision of hope.

“There are lots of good fellows in the world. Wickham Brand is one of ‘em. Charles Fortune is another. One finds them everywhere on your side and mine. Surely we can get together when peace comes and make a better System somehow!”

“Not easy, doctor.”

He laughed at me.

“I hate your pessimism!... We must get a message to Pierre Nesle.... Good-night, sonny!”

On the way back to my billet I passed young Clatworthy.

He was too engrossed to see me, having his arm round a girl who was standing with him under an unlighted lamp-post. She was looking up into his face on which the moonlight shone—a pretty creature, I thought.

“Je t’adore!” she murmured, as I passed quite close; and Clatworthy kissed her.

I knew the boy’s mother and sisters, and wondered what they would think of him if they saw him now with this little street-walker. To them Cyril was a white knight sans peur et sans reproche. The war had not improved him. He was no longer the healthy lad who had been captain of his school, with all his ambition in sport, as I had known him five years before. Sometimes, in spite of his swagger and gallantry, I saw something sinister in his face, the look of a soiled soul. Poor kid! He, too, would have his excuse for all things:

“C’est la guerre!”

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