Page:Wounded Souls.djvu/44

 Even the small boy on Brand's knees said:

"Sales Boches!"

Brand groaned, in a whimsical way.

"I have said all those things a thousand times! They nearly drove me mad. But now it's time to stop the river of blood—if the German army will acknowledge defeat. I would not go on a day after that, for our own sakes—for the sake of French boys and English. Every day more of war means more dead of ours, more blind, more crippled, and more agony of soul. I want some of our boyhood to be saved."

Madame Chéri answered coldly.

"Not before the Germans have been punished. Not before that, if we all die."

Hélène sprang up with a passionate gesture.

"All German babies ought to be strangled in their cradles! Before they grow up to be fat, beastly men."

She was thinking of Schwarz, I imagine. It was the horror of remembrance which made her so fierce. Then she laughed, and said:

"O là là, let us be glad because yesterday we were liberated. Do not quarrel with an English officer, maman. He helped to save us."

She put her hands on Wickham Brand's shoulders and said:

"Merci, mon capitaine!"

So the conversation turned and Wickham won them back by his courtesy, and by a tribute to the courage of French civilians behind the lines, of whom he told many haunting stories.

But when I walked round with him to his mess—we were going round later to see Eileen O'Connor—he referred back to the incident.

"Daddy Small is right." (He referred to the little American doctor.) "The hatred of these people is tran