CHAPTER XII
BELATED BOONS
I
There is no one day of which you can say: "My youth ended then. On the Monday the ball of my vision had eagles that flew unabashed to the sun. On the Tuesday it hadn't." The season of rapture goes out like a tide that has turned; a time has come when the mud flats are bare; but, long after the ebb has set in, any wave that has taken a special strength of its own from some combination of flukes out at sea may cover them up for a moment—may even throw itself far up the beach, making as if to recapture the lost high-water mark. So the youth of our war had its feints at renewal, hours of Indian summer when there was wine again in the air; in the "bare, ruined choirs" a lated golden auriole would strike up once more for a while, before leaving.
Because hope does spring eternal the evening before a great battle must always make fires leap up in the mind. The calm before Thermopylæ, the rival camps on the night before Agincourt, the ball before Waterloo—not without reason have writers of genius, searching for glimpses of life in its most fugitive acme of bloom, the poised and just breaking crest of the wave, gone to places and times of the kind. For there the wits and the heart may be really astir and at gaze, and the common man may have, for the hour, the artist's vision of life as an adventure and challenge, lovely, harsh, fleeting, and strange. The great throw, the new age's impending nativity, Fate with her fingers approaching the veil, about to lift—a sense of these things is a drug as strong as strychnine to quicken the failing pulse of the most heart-weary of moribund raptures.
We all had the dope in our wine on the night of August 7, 1918. At daybreak our troops to the east of Amiens would second the first blow of Foch at the German salient towards Paris, the giant arm that was now left sticking out into the air to be hit; its own smashing blow had been struck without killing; its first strength was spent; the spirit behind it was cracking; now, in its moment of check, of lost momentum, of risky extension, now to have at it and smash it. The bull had rushed right on to gore us and missed; we had his flank to stab now.
Someone who dined at the mess had just motored from Paris, through white dust and sunshine and, everywhere, quickly turned heads and eager faces. He had been in the streets all the night of the enemy's last mighty lunge at the city. He spoke of the silent crowds blackening the boulevards through the few hours of midsummer darkness; other crowds on the sky-line of roofs, all black and immobile, the whole city hushed to hear the bombardment, and staring, staring fixedly east at the flame that incessantly winked in the sky above Château-Thierry—history come to life, still enigmatic, but audible, visible, galloping through the night. Poor old France, tormented and stoical, what could not the world forgive her? Then he had seen the news come the next day to these that had thus watched as the non-combatants watched from the high walls of Troy; and how an American had broken down uncontrollably on hearing how his country's Third Division had bundled the Germans back into the Marne: "We are all right! By God, we are all right!" he had cried, a whole new nation's secret self-distrust before a supercilious ancient world changing into a younger boy's ecstasy of relief in the thought that now he has jolly well given his proofs and the older boys will not sneer at him now, and he never need bluff any more. Good fellows really, the Yanks; most simple and human as soon as you knew them. One seemed to know everyone then, for that evening.
II
Night came on cloudless and windless and braced with autumn's first astringent tang of coolness. Above, as I lay on my back in the meadow, the whole dome had a stir of life in its shimmering fresco, stars flashing and winking with that eager air of having great things to impart—they have it on frosty nights in the Alps, over a high bivouac. We were all worked up, you see. Could it be coming at last, I thought as I went to sleep—the battle unlike other battles? How many I had seen outlive their little youth of groundless hope, from the approach along darkened roads through summer nights, the eastern sky pulsating with its crimson flush, the wild glow always leaping up and always drawing in, and the waiting cavalry's lances upright, black and multitudinous in road-side fields, impaling the blenching sky just above the horizon; and then, in the bald dawn, the backward trickles of wastage swelling into great streams or rather endless friezes seen in silhouette across the fields, the trailing processions of wounded, English and German, on foot and on stretchers, dripping so much blood that some of the tracks were flamboyantly marked for miles across country; and then the evening's reports, with their anxious efforts to show that we had gained something worth having. Was it to be only Loos and the Somme and Arras and Flanders and Cambrai, all over again?