Page:Wounded Souls.djvu/19

 on their souls—but I am proud of being a Frenchman when I think of how great was the courage, how patient was the suffering of the people of Lille."

Pierre Nesle had listened to that monologue with a visible and painful emotion. He became pale and flushed by turns, and when the priest spoke about the forcible recruitment of the women a sweat broke out on his forehead, and he wiped it away with a handkerchief. I see his face now in profile, sharply outlined against some yellowing folios in a bookcase behind him, a typical Parisian face in its sharpness of outline and pallid skin, with a little black moustache above a thin, sensitive mouth. Before I had seen him mostly in gay moods—though I had wondered sometimes at the sudden silences into which he fell and at a gloom which gave him a melancholy look when he was not talking, or singing, or reciting poetry, or railing against French politicians, or laughing, almost hysterically, at the satires of Charles Fortune—our "funny man"—when he came to our mess. Now he was suffering as if the priest's words had probed a wound—though not the physical wound which had nearly killed him in Souchez Wood.

He stood up from the wooden chair with its widely-curved arms in which he had been sitting stiffly, and spoke to the priest.

"It is not amusing, mon père, what you tell us, and what we have all guessed. It is one more chapter of tragedy in the history of our poor France. Pray God the war will soon be over."

"With victory!" said the old priest. "With an enemy beaten and bleeding beneath our feet. The Germans must be punished for all their crimes, or the justice of God will not be satisfied."

There was a thrill of passion in the old man's voice and his nostrils quivered.