The misery of the succeeding days would have been intolerable if there had been time to think of it. But day and night there was no respite for Troy's service; and, being by this time a practised hand, he had to be continually on the road.
On the second day he received orders to evacuate the wounded from an American base hospital near the Marne. It was actually the old battleground he was to traverse; only, before, he had traversed it in the wake of the German retreat, and now it was the allied troops who, slowly, methodically, and selling every inch dear, were falling back across the sacred soil. Troy faced eastward with a heavy heart....
IX
The next morning at daylight they started for the front.
Troy's breast swelled with the sense of the approach to something bigger than he had yet known. The air of Paris, that day, was heavy with doom. There was no mistaking its taste on the lips. It was the air of the Marne that he was breathing....
Here he was, once more involved in one of the great convulsions of destiny, and still almost as helpless a spectator as when, four years before, he had strayed the burning desert of Paris and cried out in his boy's heart for a share in the drama. Almost as helpless, yes—in spite of his four more years, his grown-up responsibilities, and the blessed uniform thanks to which he, even he, a poor little ambulance-driver of eighteen, ranked as a soldier of the great untried army of his country. It was something—it was a great deal—to be even the humblest part, the most infinitesimal cog, in that mighty machinery of the future; but it was not enough, at this turning-point of history, for one who had so lived it all in advance, who was so aware of it now that it had come, who had carried so long on his lips the taste of its scarcely breathable air.
As the ambulance left the gates of Paris, and hurried eastward in the grey dawn, this sense of going toward something new and overwhelming continued to grow in Troy. It was probably the greatest hour of the war that was about to strike—and he was still too young to give himself to the cause he had so long dreamed of serving.
From the moment they left the gates the road was encumbered with huge grey motor-trucks, limousines, torpedoes, motor-cycles, long trains of artillery, army kitchens, supply wagons, all the familiar elements of the procession he had so often watched unrolling itself endlessly east and west from the Atlantic to the Alps. Nothing new in the sight—but something new in the faces! A look of having got beyond the accident of living, and accepted what lay over the edge, in the dim land of the final. He had seen that look in the days before the Marne....
Most of the faces on the way were French: as far as Epernay they met their compatriots only in isolated groups. But whenever one of the motor-trucks lumbering by bore a big U.S. on its rear panel Troy pushed his light ambulance ahead and skimmed past, just for the joy of seeing the fresh young heads rising pyramid-wise above the sides of the lorry, hearing the snatches of familiar song—"Hail, hail, the gang's all here!" and "We won't come back till it's over over there!"—and shouting back, in reply to a stentorian "Hi, kid, beat it!", "Bet your life I will, old man!"