A thousand horses strained at their bridles while their thousand riders in great fur busbies loomed up almost like giants. A thousand pennons stirred in the morning air while the sun burning through the mists glinted on the tips of as many lances. The crack Belgian cavalry divisions had been gathered here just behind the firing-lines in readiness for a sortie; the Lancers in their cherry and green and the Guides in their blue and gold making a blaze of color.
It was as if in a trance we had been carried back to a tourney of ancient chivalry—this was before privations and the new drab uniforms had taken all glamour out of the war. As we gazed upon the glittering spectacle the order from the commander came to us:
"Back, back out of danger!"
"Forward!" was the charge to the Lancers.
The field-guns rumbled into line and each rider unslung his carbine. Putting spurs to the horses, the whole line rode past saluting our Stars and Stripes with a "Vive L'Amerique." Bringing up the rear two cassocked priests served to give this pageantry a touch of prophetic grimness.
And yet as the cavalcade swept across the fields thrilling us with its color and its action, the nearby peasants went on spreading fertilizer quite as calm and unconcerned as we were exhilarated.
"Stupid," "Clods," "Souls of oxen," we commented, yet a protagonist of the peasant might point out that it was perhaps as noble and certainly quite as useful to be held by a passion for the soil as to be caught by the glamour of men riding out to slaughter. And Zola puts this in the mind of his peasants.
"Why should I lose a day? Soldiers must fight, but folks must live.
It is for me to keep the corn growing."
Deep down into the soil the peasant strikes his roots. Urban people can never comprehend when these roots are cut away how hopelessly-lost and adrift this European peasant in particular becomes. Wicked as the Great War has seemed to us in its bearing down upon these innocent folks, yet we can never understand the cruelty that they have suffered in being uprooted from the land and sent forth to become beggars and wanderers upon the highroads of the world.