His was one of the faces I remember that day, as I had a glimpse of it now and then, among crowds of men and women, young girls and children, who surged about him, kissing his hands, and his face when he stooped a little (he was taller than most of them) to meet the wet lips of some half-starved baby held up by a pallid woman of Lille, or to receive the kiss of some old woman who clawed his khaki tunic, or of some girl who hung on to his belt. There was a shining wetness in his eyes, and the hard lines of his face had softened as he laughed at all this turmoil about him, at all these hands robbing him of shoulder-straps and badges, and at all these people telling him a hundred things together--their gratitude to the English, their hatred of the Germans, their abominable memories. His field-cap was pushed back from his high furrowed forehead from which at the temples the hair had worn thin, owing to worry or a steelhat. His long lean face deeply tanned, but powdered with white dust, had an expression of tenderness which gave him a kind of priestly look, though others would have said “knightly” with perhaps equal truth. Anyhow I could see that for a little while Brand was no longer worrying about the casualty-lists and the doom of youth and was giving himself up to an exultation that was visible and spiritual in Lille in the day of liberation. The few of us who went first into Lille while our troops were in a wide arc round the city, in touch more or less with the German rearguards, were quickly separated in the swirl of the crowd that surged about us, greeting us as conquering heroes, though none of us were actual fighting-men, being war-correspondents, Intelligence officers (Wickham Brand and three other officers were there to establish an advanced headquarters), with an American doctor--that amazing fellow “Daddy” Small--and our French liaison officer, Pierre Nesle. Now and again we met in the streets and exchanged words. I remember the Doctor and I drifted together at the end of the Boulevard de la Liberté. A French girl of the middle-class had tucked her hand through his right arm and was talking to him excitedly, volubly. On his other arm leaned an old dame in a black dress and bonnet who was also delivering her soul of its pent-up emotion to a man who did not understand more than a few words of her French. A small boy dressed as a Zouave was walking backwards, waving a long tricolour flag before the little American, and a crowd of people made a close circle about him, keeping pace. “Assassins, bandits, robbers!” gobbled the old woman. “They stole all our copper, monsieur. The very mattresses off our beds. The wine out of our cellars. They did abominations.”