I
The change was not affected without whispering. The spirit both of the troops who were going back of the lines to rest and of those who had zigzagged up through two miles of communication trenches to take their places was excellent.
"What is the name of this country?" asked one of the new comers.
"If it had a name, that is all that remains. We are somewhere in Picardy. The English are off there not very far. Their cannon have different voices from ours. Good Luck!"
His gray, faded uniform seemed to melt into the night. The New Comer stepped on to the firing platform and poked his head over the parapet. A comrade pulled at his trousers leg.
"Come down, Idiot," he said, "Fritz is only twelve yards away."
The Idiot came down, sniffing the night air luxuriously.
"We are somewhere in Picardy," he said. "I know without being told. It is like going home."
A sergeant approached, his body twisted sideways because the trench was too narrow for his shoulders.
"Have you a watch?"
The Idiot had.
Under his coat, so that the enemy should not perceive the glow, the sergeant flashed his electric torch and compared the watches.
"Yours leads by a minute," he said. "The advance will be at four o'clock. there will be hot coffee at three. Good luck."
He passed on, and the comrades drew a little closer together. The sergeant's words had made the Idiot very happy.
"In less than two hours!" he said.
"I thought there was something in the wind," said Paul Guitry.
"If we advanced only three kilometers," said the Idiot, "the village in which I was born would be French again. But there will be great changes."
"You were born at Champ-de-Fer?"
"It is directly opposite us."
"You cannot know that."
"I feel it," said the Idiot. "Wherever I have been stationed I have felt it. Sometimes I have asked an officer to look for Champ-de-Fer on his field map, and when he has done so, I have pointed, and said 'Is it in that direction?' and always I have been right."
"Did your family remain in the village?"
"I don't know. But I think so, for from the hour of the mobilization until now, I have not heard from them."
"Since the hour of the mobilization," said Paul Guitry, "much water has flowed under the bridges. I had just been married. My wife is in Paris. I have a little son now. I saw them when I had my eight days' leave. And it seems that again I am to be a father. It is very wonderful."
"I was going to be married," said the Idiot simply.
There was a short silence.
"If I had known," said Paul Guitry, "I would not have boasted of my own happiness."
"I am not the only French soldier who has not heard from his sweetheart since the mobilization," said the Idiot. "It has been hard," he said, "but by thinking of all the others, I have been able to endure."
"She remained there at Champ-de-Fer?"
"She must have, or else she would have written to me."
Paul Guitry could not find anything to say.
"Soon," said the Idiot, "we shall be in Champ-de-Fer, and they will tell me what has become of her."
"She will tell you herself," said Paul Guitry with a heartiness which he did not feel. The Idiot shrugged his shoulders.
"We have loved each other," he said, "even since we were little children. Do you know why I am called the Idiot? It is because I do not go with women, when I have the chance. But I don't mind. They cannot say that I am not a real man, for I have the military medal and I have been mentioned twice in the orders of the day."
To Paul Guitry, a confirmed sinner as opportunity offered, the
Idiot's statement contained much psychic meat.
"It must be," he said, "that purity tempts some men, just as impurity tempts others."
"It is even simpler," said the Idiot; but he did not explain. And there was a long silence.
Now and then Paul Guitry glanced at his companion's profile, for the night was no longer inky black. It was a simple direct young face, not handsome, but full of dignity and kindness; the line of the jaw had a certain sternness, and the wide and delicately molded nostril indicated courage and daring.
Paul Guitry thought of his wife and of his little son, of his eight days' leave, and of its consequences. He tried to imagine how he would feel, if for two years his wife had been in the hands of the Germans. Without meaning to, he spoke his thought aloud:
"Long since," he said, "I should have gone mad."
The Idiot nodded.
"They say," he said, "that in fifty years all this will be forgotten; and that we French will feel friendly toward the Germans."
He laughed softly, a laugh so cold, that Paul Guitry felt as if ice water had suddenly been spilled on his spine.
"Hell," he went on, "has no tortures which French men, and women, and little children have not suffered. You say that if you had been in my boots you must long since have gone mad? well, it is because I have been able to think of all the others who are in my boots that I have kept my sanity. It has not been easy. It is not as if my imagination alone had been tortured. Just as I have the sense that my village is there—" he pointed with his sensitive hand, "so I have the sense of what has happened there. I KNOW that she is alive," he concluded, "and that she would rather be dead."
There was another silence. The Idiot's nostrils dilated and he sniffed once or twice.
"The coffee is coming," he said. "Listen. If I am killed in the advance, find her, will you—Jeanne Bergère? And say what you can to comfort her. It doesn't matter what has happened, her love for me is like the North Star—fixed. When she knows that I am dead she will wish to kill herself. You must prevent that. You must show her how she can help France. Aha!—The cannon!"
From several miles in the rear there rose suddenly a thudding percussive cataract of sound. The earth trembled like some frightened animal that has been driven into a corner.
The Idiot leaped to his feet, his eyes joyously alight.
"It is the voice of God," he cried.
If indeed it was the voice of God, that other great voice which is of Hell, made no answer. The German guns were unaccountably silent.
On the stroke of four, the earth still trembling with the incessant concussions of the guns, the French scrambled out of their trenches and went forward. But no sudden blast of lead and iron challenged their temerity. A few shells, but all from field pieces, fired perfunctorily as it were, fell near them and occasionally among them. It looked as if Fritz wasn't going to fight.
The wire guarding the first line of German trenches had been so torn and disrupted by the French cannon, that only here and there an ugly strand remained to be cut. The trench was empty.
"The Boche," said Paul Guitry, "has left nothing but his smell."
Rumor spread swiftly through the lines. "We are not to be opposed.
Fritz has been withdrawn in the night. His lines are too long.
He is straightening out his salients. It is the beginning of the
end."
There was good humor and elation. There was also a feeling of admiration for the way in which Fritz had managed to retreat without being detected.
The country over which the troops advanced was a rolling desert, blasted, twisted, swept clear of all vegetation. What the Germans could not destroy they had carried away with them. There remained only frazzled stumps of trees, dead bodies and ruined engines of war.
Paul Guitry and the Idiot came at last to the summit of a little hill. Beyond and below at the end of a long sweep of tortured and ruined fields could be seen picturesquely grouped a few walls of houses and one bold arch of an ancient bridge.
The Idiot blinked stupidly. Then he laughed a short, ugly laugh.
"I had counted on seeing the church steeple. But of course they would have destroyed that."
"Is it Champ-de-Fer?" asked Guitry.
At that moment a dark and sudden smoke, as from ignited chemicals began to pour upward from the ruined village.
"It was," said the Idiot, and once more the word was passed to go forward.