XXXI
January 10, 1917
I went to Paris, as I told you I hoped to do. Nothing new there. In spite of the fact that, in many ways, they are beginning to feel the war, and there is altogether too much talk about things no one can really know anything about, I was still amazed at the gaiety. In a way it is just now largely due to the great number of men en permission. The streets, the restaurants, the tea-rooms are full of them, and so, they tell me, are the theatres.
Do you know what struck me most forcibly? You'll never guess. It was that men in long trousers look perfectly absurd. I am so used to seeing the culotte and gaiters that the best-looking pantaloons I saw on the boulevards looked ugly and ridiculous.
I left the officer billeted in my house to take care of it. The last I saw of him he was sitting at the desk in the salon, his pipe in his mouth, looking comfortable and cosy, and as if settled for life. I only stayed a few days, and came home, on New Year's Eve, to find that he had left the night before, having been suddenly transferred to the staff of the commander of the first army, as officier de la liaison, and I had in his place a young sous-officier of twenty-two, who proves to be a cousin of the famous French spy, Captain Luxe, who made that sensational escape, in 1910, from a supposed-to-be-impregnable German military prison. I am sure you remember the incident, as the American papers devoted columns to his unprecedented feat. The hero of that sensational episode is still in the army. I wonder what the Germans will do with him if they catch him again? They are hardly likely to get him alive a second time.
I wonder if the German books on military tactics use that escape as a model in their military schools? Do you know that in every French military school the reconnaisance which Count Zeppelin made in Alsace, in the days of 1870, when he was a cavalry officer, is given as a model reconnaissance both for strategy and pluck? I did not, until I was told. Oddly enough, not all that Zeppelin has done since to offend French ideas of decency in war can dull the admiration felt by every cavalry officer for his clever feat in 1870.
Last Thursday,—that was the 4th,—we had our second relève.
The night before they left some of the officers came to say au revoir, and to tell me that the Aspirant, who had been with me in December, would be quartered on me again—if I wanted him. Of course I did.
Then the senior lieutenant told me that the regiment had suffered somewhat from a serious bombardment the days after Christmas, that the Aspirant had not only shown wonderful courage, but had had a narrow escape, and had been cité à l'ordre du jour, and was to have his first decoration.
We all felt as proud of him as if he belonged to us. I was told that he had been sent into the first-line trenches—only two hundred yards from the German front—during the bombardment, "to encourage and comfort his men" (I quote), and that a bomb had exploded over the trench and knocked a hole in his steel helmet.
I don't know which impressed me most—the idea of a lad of twenty having so established the faith in his courage amongst his superior officers as to be safe as a comfort and encouragement for the men, or the fact that, if the army had had those steel casques at the beginning of the war, many lives would have been saved.
The Aspirant came in with the second detachment the night before last—the eighth. The regiment was in and all quartered before he appeared.
We had begun to fear something had happened to him, when he turned up, freshly shaved and clean, but with a tattered overcoat on his arm, and a battered helmet in his hand.
Amélie greeted him with: "Well, young man, we thought you were lost!"
He laughed, as he explained that he had been to make a toilet, see the regimental tailor, and order a new topcoat.
"I would not, for anything in the world, have had madame see me in the state I was in an hour ago. She has to see my rags, but I spared her the dirt," and he held up the coat to show its rudely sewed-up rents, and turned over his helmet to show the hole in the top.
"And here is what hit me," and he took out of his pocket a rough piece of a shell, and held it up, as if it were very precious. Indeed, he had it wrapped in a clean envelope, all ready to take up to Paris and show his mother, as he is to have his leave of a week while he is here.
I felt like saying "Don't," but I didn't. I suppose it is hard for an ambitious soldier of twenty to realize that the mother of an only son, and that son such a boy as this, must have some feeling besides pride in her heart as she looks at him.
So now we are settled again, and used to the trotting of horses, the banging of grenades and splitting of mitrailleuses. From the window as I write—I am up in the attic, which Amélie calls the "atelier," because it is in the top of the house and has a tiny north light in the roof—that being the only place where I am sure of being undisturbed— I can see horses being trained in the wide field on the side of the hill between here and Quincy. They are manoeuvring with all sorts of noises about them—even racing in a circle while grenades and guns are fired.
In spite of all that, there came near being a lovely accident right in front of the gate half an hour ago.
The threshing-machine is at work in front of the old grange on the other side of the road, just above my house. The men had come back from breakfast, and were starting the machine up just as two mounted soldiers, each leading two horses, rode out of the grange at Amélie's, and started down the hill at a trot. The very moment the horses were turning out to pass the machine,—and the space was barely sufficient between the machine and the bank—a heedless man blew three awful blasts on his steam whistle to call his aids. The cavalry horses were used to guns, and the shrill mouth whistles of the officers, but that did not make them immune to a steam siren, and in a moment there was the most dangerous mix-up I ever saw. I expected to see both riders killed, and I don't know now why they were not, but neither man was thrown, even in spite of having three frightened horses to master.
It was a stupid thing for the man on the machine to do. He would have only had to wait one minute and the horses would have been by with a clear road before them if they shied. But he "didn't think." The odd thing was that the soldiers did not say an ugly word. I suppose they are used to worse.
You have been reproaching me for over a year that I did not write enough about the war. I do hope that all this movement about me interests you. It is not war by any means, but the nearest relation to it that I have seen in that time. It is its movements, its noise, its clothes. It is gay and brave, and these men are no "chocolate soldiers."