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And every now and then comes the bursting of a shell immediately overhead, and the rattle of its fragments on the roof of the bomb-proof dug-out. Think what it must have meant to this eager, ardent, pleasure-loving spirit to sit out, day after day, in a chill, sodden, verminous trench, a grand orchestral concert of this music of human madness!
The solitude of sentry-duty evidently comes to him as something of a relief. "It may," he says, "be all that is melancholy if the night is bad and the winter wind moans through the pines"; but it also "brings moments of exaltation, if the cloud-banks roll back, if the moonlight breaks over the windless hills, or the heavens blaze with the beauty of the northern stars."
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The sentinel has ample time for reflection. Alone under the stars, war in its cosmic rather than its moral aspect reveals itself to him. . . . He thrills with the sense of filling an appointed, necessary place in the conflict of hosts, and, facing the enemy's crest, above which the Great Bear wheels upward to the zenith, he feels, with a sublimity of enthusiasm that he has never before known, a kind of companionship with the stars.
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Six days in the trenches alternated with a three days' interval of rest "either billeted in the stables and haylofts of the village or encamped in the woods and around the chateau." Thus the winter of 1914-15 wore away, with little to break its monotony. The heaviest fighting was all to the northward. One gathers from his poem "The Aisne" that at Craonne he took part in the repulse of a serious enemy attack; but there is no mention of this in the letters before me.
On March 12, 1915, he writes to his mother in fierce indignation over something that has appeared in an American paper as to life in the Foreign Legion. The writer of the "disgraceful article", he says, "like many others of his type, was long ago eliminated from our ranks, for a person buoyed up by no noble purpose is the first to succumb to the hardships of the winter that we have been through. . . . If his lies did nothing worse than belittle his comrades, who are here for motives that he is unable to conceive, it would be only dishonourable. But when it comes to throwing discredit on the French Government, that in all its treatment of us has been generous beyond anything that one would think possible, it is too shameful for any words to characterize."
With the coming of spring, there was of course some mitigation of the trials of the winter. Here is an almost idyllic passage from a letter to his sister, written on the fly-leaves of 'Les Confessions de J. J. Rousseau', Geneve, MDCCLXXXII:
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