They were great days—in the last two weeks before the Armistice! For me, and for many men, they were days of exultation, wild adventure, pity, immense hope, tremendous scenes uplifted by a sense of victory; though for others, the soldiers who did the dirty work, brought up lorry columns through the mud of the old battlefields far behind our new front line, carried on still with the hard old drudgery of war, they were days not marked out by any special jubilation, or variety, or hope, but just like all the others that had gone before since first they came to France.

I remember little scenes and pictures of those last two weeks as they pass through my mind like a him drama; episodes of tragedy or triumph which startled my imagination, a pageantry of men who had victory in their eyes, single figures who spoke to me, told me unforgettable things, and the last dead bodies who fell at the very gate of peace.

One of the last dead bodies I saw in the war was in the city of Valenciennes, which we entered on the morning of November 3rd. Our guns had spared the city which was full of people, but the railway station was an elaborate ruin of twisted iron and broken glass. Rails were torn up and sleepers burnt. Our airmen, flying low day after day during the German retreat, had flung down bombs, which had torn the fronts off the booking-offices and made match-wood of the signal-boxes and sheds. For German soldiers detraining here it had been a hellish place, and the fire of our flying-men had been deadly accurate. I walked through the ruin out into the station square. It was empty of all life, but one human figure was there all alone. It was the dead body of a young German soldier, lying with outstretched arms, on his back, in a pool of blood. His figure formed a cross there on the cobblestones, and seemed to me a symbol of all that youth which had been sacrificed by powers of monstrous evil. His face was still handsome in death, the square, rough-hewn face of a young peasant.

There was the tap-tap-tap of a German machine-gun somewhere on the right of the square. As I walked forward all my senses were alert to the menace of death. It would be foolish, I thought, to be killed at the end of the war—for surely the end was very near? And then I had a sudden sharp thought that perhaps it would be well if this happened. Why should I live when so many had died? The awful job was done, and my small part in it. I had seen it through from start to finish, for it was finished but for a few days of waiting. It might be better to end with it, for all that came afterwards would be anticlimax. I remember raising my head and looking squarely round at that staccato hammering of the German machine-gun, with an intense desire that a bullet might come my way. But I went on untouched into the town.... As in Courtrai, a fury of gun-fire overhead kept the people in their houses. Our field batteries were firing over the city and the enemy was answering. Here and there I saw a face peering out of a broken window, and then a door opened, and a man and woman appeared behind it with two thin children. The woman thrust out a skinny hand and grasped mine, and began to weep. She talked passionately, with a strange mingling of rage and grief.

“Oh, my God!” she said, “those devils have gone at last! What have they not made us suffer! My husband and I had four little houses—we were innkeepers—and last night they sent us to this part of the town and burnt all of them.” She used a queer word in French. “Last night,” she said, “they made a devil’s charivari and set many houses on fire.”

Her husband spoke to me over his wife’s shoulder.

“Sir, they have stolen everything, broken everything, ground us down for four years. They are bandits and robbers.”

“We are hungry,” said the thin girl.

By her side the boy, with a white pinched face, echoed her plaint.

“We have eaten our bread and I am hungry.”

They had some coffee left, and asked me to go inside and drink it with them, but I could not wait.

The woman held my wrist tight in her skinny hands.

“You will come back?” she asked.

“I will try,” I said.

Then she wept again and said: “We are grateful to the English soldiers. It is they who saved us.”

That is one out of a hundred little scenes that I remember in those last two weeks when, not without hard fighting, for the German machine-gun rearguards fought bravely to the end, our troops entered many towns and villages, and liberated many thousands of poor people. I remember the girls of a little town called Bohain who put on their best frocks and clean pinafores to welcome us. It was not until a little while that we found they were starving and had not even a crust of bread in all the town. Then the enemy started shelling, and some of the girls were killed, and many were suffocated by gas shells. That was worse in St. Amand, by Valenciennes, where all the women and children took refuge in the cellars. The German batteries opened fire with yellow cross shell as our guns passed through. Some of our men, and many of their horses, lay dead in the streets as I passed through; but worse things happened in the cellars below the houses. The heavy gas of the yellow cross shells filtered down to where the women and their babies cowered on their mattresses. They began to choke and gasp, and babies died in the arms of dying mothers.... Dr. Small, our American, went with a body of English doctors and nurses to the rescue of St. Amand. “I’ve seen bad things,” he told me. “I am not weak in the stomach—but I saw things in those cellars which nearly made me vomit.”

He put a hand on my shoulder and blinked at me through his glasses.

“It’s no good cursing the Germans. As soon as your troops entered the village they had a right to shell. That’s war. We should do the same. War’s war. I’ve been cursing the Germans in elaborate and eccentric language. It did me good. I feel all the better for it. But all the same I was wrong. It’s war we ought to curse. War which makes these things possible among civilised peoples. It’s just devilry. Civilised people must give up the habit. They must get cured of it. You have heard of typhoid-carriers? They are people infected with the typhoid microbe who spread the disease. When peace comes we must hunt down the war-carriers, isolate them, and, if necessary, kill them.”

He waved his hand to me and went off in an ambulance filled with suffocated women.

I met Brand in Valenciennes five days after our liberation of the city, when our troops were making their formal entry with band and banners. He came up to me and said, “Have you heard the news?” I saw by his face that it was good news, and I felt my heart give a lurch when I answered him.

“Tell me the best.”

“Germany is sending plenipotentiaries, under a white flag, to Foch. They know it is unconditional surrender.... And the Kaiser has abdicated.”

I drew a deep breath. Something seemed to lift from my soul. The sky seemed to become brighter, as though a shadow had passed from the face of the sun.

“Then it’s the end?... The last battle has been fought!”

Brand was staring at a column of troops—all young fellows of the 4th Division. His eyes were glistening, with moisture in them.

“Reprieved!” he said. “The last of our youth is saved!”

He turned to me suddenly, and spoke in the deepest melancholy.

“You and I ought to be dead. So many kids were killed. We’ve no right to be alive.”

“Perhaps there is other work to do,” I answered him, weakly, because I had the same thought.

He did not seem sure of that.

“I wonder!... If we could help to save the next generation.”

In the Place d’Armes of Valenciennes there was a great crowd, and many of our generals and staff officers on the steps and below the steps of the HÔtel de Ville. Brand and I caught a glimpse of Colonel Lavington, looking very gallant and debonair, as usual. Beside him was Charles Fortune, with his air of a staff officer dreadfully overworked in the arrangement of victory, modest in spite of his great achievements, deprecating any public homage that might be paid him. This careful mask of his was slightly disarranged for a moment when he winked at me under the very nose of the great general whom he had set to music—“Blear-eyed Bill, the Butcher of the Boche,” who stood magnificent with his great chest emblazoned with ribbons. The Prince of Wales was there, shifting from one leg to another, chatting gaily with a group of staff officers. A bevy of French girls advanced with enormous bouquets and presented them to the Prince and his fellow officers. The Prince laughed and blushed like a schoolboy, sniffed at the flowers, did not know what to do with them. The other officers held the bouquets with equal embarrassment, with that strange English shyness which not even war could cure.

Some officers close to me were talking of the German plea for armistice.

“It’s abject surrender!” said one of them.

“The end!” said another, very solemnly. “Thank God!”

“The end of a dirty business!” said a young machine-gun officer. I noticed that he had three wound-stripes.

One of them, holding a big bouquet, began to dance, pointing his toes, cutting abbreviated capers in a small space among his comrades.

“Not too quick for me, old dears! Back to peace again!... Back to life! Hooray!”

The colours of many flags fluttered upon the gables of the Place d’Armes, and the balconies were draped with the Tricolour, the Union Jack, and the Stars and Stripes. Old citizens wore tall hats saved up for this day, and girls had taken their lace from hiding-places where the Germans had not found it, and wore it round their necks and wrists for the honour of this day. Old women in black bonnets sat in the centre of window-places and clapped their hands—their wrinkled, hard-working old hands—to every British soldier who passed, and thousands were passing. Nobody heard a word of the speeches spoken from the Town Hall steps, the tribute of the councillors of Valenciennes to the glory of the troops who had rescued their people from servitude under a ruthless enemy, nor the answer of Sir Henry Home, the Army Commander, expressing the pride of his soldiers in the rescue of that fair old city, and their admiration for the courage of its people. Every word was overwhelmed by cheering. Then the pipers of a Highland Division, whose fighting I had recorded through their years of heroic endurance, played a march tune, and the music of those pipes was loud in the square of Valenciennes and in the hearts of its people. The troops marched past, and thousands of bayonets shone above their steel helmets....

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