The Garage
There are twelve convalescents installed after a fashion in the garage half-way down the field path. They are so nearly well that they can make up their beds and sweep out their rooms and wash at the pump and go down to eat at the canteen of the hospital Sainte Barbe. They go to the Clinique there every second or third or fourth day. An orderly comes up from there once in a while with clean linen for them. And that is all they need be troubled about. They are quite comfortable and very forlorn.
They spend their days hanging out of the windows of the loft over the garage or sitting about the big board table of the space underneath, where the motors used to be kept.
Most of them are men from cities who do not know what to do with the country, and the three or four who are country boys know so well what to do with vines and fields, that the vines and fields they may not labour, so close about them here, only worry them. They are the men who get most cross and quarrelsome over the games of cards at the board table.
They all quarrel more or less. Sometimes I wonder, how can men who are so splendid, so simply, steadily, dumbly splendid, who have been through so much, seen death so close, and life so close, quarrel like this over nothing at all. But most times I understand.
The crickets trill all the hot noons in the grass, and the droning of the bees sounds very hot. Like clouds of white butterflies drift over the path, make little drifting butterfly shadows on the path. There is a most wonderful smell of clover in the heat. Down under the fields there are heaped together the crowded old rust-red and burnt umber and golden roofs of the town. And all away beyond there is the valley, opened out, long road and river, to high, far distances of mountains and snows.
I go and sit with my friends about the big board table, in the place where the motors used to be kept. I play cards with my friends, the twelve convalescents. I play badly, for I hate cards, but they like to have a guest. They try to arrange the game so that I may win. They want me to win; they think that I will enjoy it better. If they knew how bored I am they would be dreadfully upset. I wish I loved cards and could play well, to please them.
Towards evening they are certain to be cross with one another.
One after the other they will soon be going back to the Front, all of them. There is not one of them who will go unwillingly. They have been there, they know what it is, but there is not one who will grumble when he goes back, or fail when he faces that again. Every one of them, when he goes back, will say the same thing. "Of course I must go back, all the comrades are there." "Tous les copains sont là-bas." But in the meantime they quarrel.
From the doors of the garage, wide, one sees the sunset among the mountains. The bats flit across and the owls call. The dusk comes, velvet-thick and soft, with smells of fields and vineyards and of the town's hearth fires, and with the myriad voices of cigale and frog and sleepy bird, and with the small life noises of the town. Gathering up, and folding in, the night comes.
There is electric light in the garage that my friends are very proud of indeed. A huge naked bulb dangles from a cord over the table where we sit playing cards.