They all burst out again in rapid, high-keyed, excited voices, longing above everything else for a listener, leaning forward over the table toward me, their healthy faces flushed with their ardor, talking hurriedly because there was so much to say, their tense young voices a staccato clatter of words which brought to me in jerks, horribly familiar war-pictures, barrage-fires meeting, advancing over dead comrades, hideous hand-to-hand combats—all chanted in those eager young voices.
I felt the heavy pain at the back of the head which presages a wave of mortal war-sickness.
In a pause, I asked, perhaps rather faintly, “And you like it? You are not ever homesick?”
The boy with the melon spoke for them all. He stretched out his long arms, his hands clenched to knotty masses of muscles; he set his jaw, his blue eyes were like steel, his beautiful young face was all aflame. “Oh, you just get to love it!” he cried, shaking with the intensity of his feeling. “You just love it! Why, I neveh want to go home! I want to stay over heah and go right on killin’ Boches all my life!”
At this I felt sicker, stricken with the collective remorse over the war which belongs to the older generation. I said good-by to them and left them to their child-like ecstasy over their peaches and melons.
The artillery had passed. The street was again solidly filled with dusty, heavily laden young men in khaki, tramping silently and resolutely forward, their brown steel casques, shaped like antique Greek shepherd hats, giving to their rounded young faces a curious air of classic rusticity.
An older man, with a stern, rough, plain face stood near me. “How do you do?” I asked. “Can you tell me which troops these are and where they are going?” I wondered what confident and uninformed answer I would receive this time.
Showing no surprise at my speech, he answered, “I don’t know who they be. You don’t never know anything but your own regiment. The kids always think they do. They’ll tell you this and they’ll tell you that, but the truth is we don’t know no more than Ann—not even where we are ourselves, nor where we’re going, most of the time.”
His accent made me say: “I wonder if you are not from my part of the country. I live in Vermont, when I’m at home.”
“I’m from Maine,” he said soberly, “a farmer, over draft age of course. But it looked to me like a kind o’ mean trick to make the boys do it all for us, so I come along, too.” He added, as if in partial explanation, “One of my uncles was with John Brown at Harper’s Ferry.”