Page:Wounded Souls.djvu/177

 been distinguished visitors in time of peace. The head-*waiter handed us the menu and regretted that there was not much choice of food, though they had scoured the country to provide for us. He and six other waiters spoke good English, learnt in London, and seemed to have had no interruption in their way of life, in spite of war. They were not rusty in their art, but masters of its service according to tradition. Yet they had all been in the fighting-ranks until the day of armistice, and the head-waiter, a man of forty, with hair growing grey, and the look of one who had spent years in a study rather than in front-line trenches after table management, told me that he had been three times wounded in Flanders, and in the last phase had been a machine-gunner in the rearguard actions round Grevilliers and Bapaume. He revealed his mind to me between the soup and the stew—strange talk from a German waiter!

"I used to ask myself a hundred thousand times, 'Why am I here—in this mud—fighting against the English whom I know and like? What devil's meaning is there in all this? What are the evil powers that have forced us to this insane massacre?' I thought I should go mad, and I desired death."

I did not argue with him, for the same reason that Brand and I did not argue with the woman behind the counter who had lost four sons. I did not say "Your War Lords were guilty of this war. The evil passion and philosophy of you German people brought this upon the world—your frightfulness." I listened to a man who had been stricken by tragedy, who had passed through its horrors, and was now immensely sad.

At a small table next to us was the boy who had led the first cavalry patrol, and two fellow-officers. They were not eating their soup. They were talking to the