"To all Frenchmen that goes without saying," said Pierre Nesle. "The Germans must be punished, and will be, though no vengeance will repay us for the suffering of our poilus—nor for the agony of our women behind the lines, which perhaps was the greatest of all."
The Abbé Bourdin put his claw-like old hands on the young man's shoulders and drew him closer and kissed his Croix de Guerre.
"You have helped to give victory," he said. "How many Germans have you killed? How many, eh?"
He spoke eagerly, chuckling, with a kind of childish eagerness for good news.
Pierre Nesle drew back a little and a faint touch of colour crept into his face, and then left it whiter.
"I did not count corpses," he said. He touched his left side and laughed awkwardly. "I remember better that they nearly made a corpse of me."
There was a moment's silence, and then my friend spoke in a casual kind of way.
"I suppose, mon père, you have not heard of my sister being in Lille? By any chance? Her name was Marthe. Marthe Nesle."
The Abbé Bourdin shook his head.
"I do not know the name. There are many young women in Lille. It is a great city."
"That is true," said Pierre Nesle. "There are many." He bowed over the priest's hand, and then saluted.
"Bon jour, mon père, et merci mille fois."
So we left, and the Abbé Bourdin spoke his last words to me:
"We owe our liberation to the English. We thank you. But why did you not come sooner? Two years sooner, three years. With your great army?"
"Many of our men died to get here," I said. "Thousands."
