XXX
December 17, 1916
Well, we did not keep our first division of dragoons as long as we expected. They had passed part of their three weeks out of the trenches at Nanteuil, and on the journey, so it seemed to us as though they were hardly settled down when the order came for them to return. They were here only a little over a week.
I had hardly got accustomed to seeing the Aspirant about the house, either writing, with the cat on his knees, or reading, with Dick sitting beside him, begging to have his head patted, when one evening he came in, and said quietly: "Well, madame, we are leaving you in a day or two. The order for the relève has come, but the day and hour are not yet fixed."
But during the week he was here I got accustomed to seeing him sit before the fire every evening after dinner for a little chat before turning in. He was more ready to talk politics than war, and full of curiosity about "your Mr. Wilson," as he called him. Now and then he talked military matters, but it was technique, and the strategy of war, not the events. He is an enthusiastic soldier, and to him, of course, the cavalry is still "la plus belle arme de France." He loved to explain the use of cavalry in modern warfare, of what it was yet to do in the offensive, armed as it is today with the same weapons as the infantry, carrying carbines, having its hand-grenade divisions, its mitrailleuses, ready to go into action as cavalry, arriving like a flash au galop, over ground where the infantry must move slowly, and with difficulty, and ready at any time to dismount and fight on foot, to finish a pursuit begun as cavalry. It all sounded very logical as he described it.
He had been under bombardment, been on dangerous scouting expeditions, but never yet in a charge, which is, of course, his ambitious dream. There was an expression of real regret in his voice when he said one evening: "Hélas! I have not yet had the smallest real opportunity to distinguish myself."
I reminded him that he was still very young.
He looked at me quite indignantly as he replied: "Madame forgets that there are Aspirants no older than I whose names are already inscribed on the roll of honor."
You see an elderly lady, unused to a soldier's point of view, may be very sympathetic, and yet blunder as a comforter.
The relève passed off quietly. It was all in the routine of the soldiers' lives. They did not even know that it was picturesque. It was late last Friday night that an orderly brought the news that the order had come to move on the morning of the eleventh—three days later,—and it was not until the night of the fifteenth that we were again settled down to quiet.
The squad we had here moved in two divisions. Early Monday morning—the eleventh—the horses were being saddled, and at ten o'clock they began to move. One half of them were in full equipment. The other half acted as an escort as far as Meaux, from which place they led back the riderless horses.
The officers explained it all to me. The division starting that day for the trenches dismounted at Meaux, and took a train for the station nearest to the Forêt de Laigue. There they had their hot soup and waited for night, to march into the trenches under cover of the darkness. They told me that it was not a long march, but it was a hard one, as it was up hill, over wet and clayey ground, where it was difficult not to slip back as fast as they advanced.
On arriving at the trenches they would find the men they were to relieve ready to march out, to slip and slide down the hill to the railway, where they would have their morning coffee, and await the train for Meaux, where they were due at noon next day—barring delays.
So, on the afternoon of the twelfth, the men who had acted as escort the day before led the horses to Meaux, and just before four o'clock the whole body arrived on the hill.
This time I saw men right out of the trenches. They were a sorry sight, in spite of their high spirits. The clayey yellow mud of three weeks' exposure in the trenches was plastered on them so thick that I wondered how they managed to mount their horses. I never saw a dirtier crowd. Their faces even looked stiff.
They simply tumbled off their horses, left the escort to stable them, and made a dash for the bath-house, which is at the foot of the hill, at Joncheroy. If they can't get bathed, disinfected, and changed before dark, they have to sleep their first night in the straw with the horses, as they are unfit, in more ways than I like to tell you, to go into anyone's house until that is done, and they are not allowed.
These new arrivals had twenty-four hours' rest, and then, on Thursday, they acted as escort to the second division, and with that division went the Aspirant, and the men they relieved arrived Friday afternoon, and now we are settled down for three weeks.
Before the Aspirant left he introduced into the house the senior lieutenant, whom he had been replacing in the command on my hill, a man a little over thirty—a business man in private life and altogether charming, very cultivated, a book-lover and an art connoisseur. He is a nephew of Lêpine, so many years préfet de police at Paris, and a cousin of Senator Reynault, who was killed in his aeroplane at Toule, famous not only as a brave patriot, but as a volunteer for three reasons exempt from active service—a senator, a doctor, and past the age.
I begin to believe, on the testimony of my personal experiences, that all the officers in the cavalry are perfect gentlemen. The lieutenant settled into his place at once. He puts the coal on the fire at night. He plays with the animals. He locks up, and is as quiet as a mouse and as busy as a bee.
This is all my news, except that I am hoping to go to Paris for
Christmas, and to go by the way of Voulangis. It is all very uncertain.
My permission has not come yet.
It is over a year since we were shut in. My friends in Paris call me their permissionaire, when I go to town. In the few shops where I am known everyone laughs when I make my rare appearances and greets me with: "Ah, so they've let you out again!" as if it were a huge joke, and I assure you that it does seem like that to me.
The soldiers in the trenches get eight days' permission every four months. I don't seem to get much more,—if as much.