“Très bien,” says the monitor. But you go over and lean against a tent pole silent, and without a smile. You know what your comrades do not know—that “a fool there was,” and he lives by a fool’s luck. And you swear an oath to yourself and the dear old world that you’ll never be caught like that again.
Most everyone has the experience sooner or later and almost everyone lives to be a wiser and more prudent man, not excluding
Your son,
Dins.
February 13, 1918.
Dear Family:
We are right here among the pines. Great forests of splendid Norways stretch away over the rolling sandy country, broken only by the clearing around some old manor château with its radiating vistas and its towers standing white amidst the green. Would you think that France with its dense population and old culture would be covered with great forests, almost primeval in the abandon of their growth? Throw in a few lakes and it would be Wisconsin.
Yesterday I cut the noonday roll-call and succeeded in losing myself as an excuse. As I swung along the road, I could feel the spirit of the blazed trail humming in the pine boughs; and my breath came deep. Here was a clearing with the logs fallen and the smallest branches cut and tied in neat sheaves—there, off to the right, was a hill which mounted above the tree tops. I climbed to the top and saw the stretch of woods on all sides with here and there a rock-strewn, barren stretch of sand. Going down the other side, a pheasant clapped up from under foot and made me start. As my eyes glanced along the trail ahead of my wandering feet, I saw many deer tracks. They say that since the war, wolves are not infrequent; and have we not heard of wolves in the streets of Paris not many decades ago? Now and then a rabbit bobbed out of sight. It soothed me and yet made me homesick. Out there in the open woods with the gentle spirit of the mighty pines, I could not help despairing at the question, “What good is war?”
Today we had an accident. A machine had mounted to fifty meters when it stopped climbing and started to lose speed. It turned to come back to the piece, but slipped sideways and fell in “vrille,” and crashed headlong to the ground. The tail broke backward and the motor gave a final groan, as in a death struggle. Men covered their eyes. It was a quarter of a mile away. All started to run, and I was first there. The pilot, a little Frenchman with whom I had been exchanging French, had crawled out on top of the wreck. He sat shut in by the wreckage. There was a whimper on his face. I climbed up on the wreckage and held him in my arms. He called me by name and then managed to tell me that his arm was broken. Well, you can imagine how relieved I was. I handed him out to the others who had arrived by this time. The doctor came up and cut the clothes away from his arm. There was no bruise nor blood, and as he began to regain his color, we tried to divert his mind. About the first thing he asked for was a piece of the propeller for a souvenir. Well, we put him on a stretcher and into the captain’s car and went to the hospital in a little town, Senlis, some two miles away. He seemed to prefer me to all his French friends. The hospital was a nice old Catholic institution, with old Sisters and young Red Cross nurses. We left him contented and resigned to his lot of another two or three months before reaching the Front.
The village in which we found the hospital has been heavily shelled in the early days of the war. Every third or fourth house was a monumental ruin to the price of war, but by some happy chance the two beautiful cathedrals of the town had been spared, yet the ruins seemed very old and the vines which formerly climbed the walls now fell about the broken stones and trailed through the blind windows, giving the whole an aged aspect; and between these ruins were the untouched abodes of unconscious inhabitants.