Chapter XCVII
November Eleventh
November came, and I helped the parish priest of Somaine to give Holy Communion to the vast crowds of his people who received on All Saints Day. In return, he helped me with the confessions of my men, for now nearly all the members of the Fourteenth Battalion and very many of the Thirteenth were French-speaking soldiers. I was beginning to feel that all were ready spiritually for more battles when November 11th arrived and we learned that hostilities had ceased.
If this were fiction, I might write a lengthy description of how the troops went wild with joy, etc., etc.; but as it is the truth, I am constrained to say we took it in a strangely quiet manner. We could only look at each other and say: “Well, it’s over at last!” and we would add, “thank God!” Perhaps we were dazed by the good news. Perhaps it was that the terrible experience of war had left us incapable of expressing our emotion. Perhaps these verses from “The Citizen of No Man’s Land,” by Roselle Mercier Montgomery, express the strange tension that had come to us during the war:
Why is it that, although we settle down
And live the lives we lived, a strange unrest,
A something, haunts us as we work or play—
A restlessness too vague to be exprest?
Is it that we who, out there, walked with Death
And knew the fellowship of Fear and Pain,
Are citizens for aye of No Man’s Land