Before long the train will be in the station. His wife will be there with his mother, his father, and others who are dear. They will take him in their arms. They will hold him, they will press him to their hearts. He will feel the sweet thrill of their touch; he will receive their caresses, will hear the familiar voices. His heart beats fast. A feeling of faintness sweeps over him; he puts his hand before his eyes. He speaks to his neighbor. He laughs. He drinks a little, he smokes. He suddenly feels smothered. It must be his great-coat which bothers him; he pulls it off. He holds imaginary conversations with himself. He gesticulates. He recounts what he has seen, what he has done, what he has said; the death of his comrades, the frightful wounds of his dearest friends. He strives to classify his recollections; he yawns, he gives it up. The battle still crowds his brain, obsesses him, holds him, fills his entire consciousness. The other men are like himself. Some laugh, some sing, some sleep.
The special train rolls away—passes stations, traverses pleasant country, arrives at towns, whistles, snorts, runs smoothly, flies over the rails, carries him on and on. The man is dumb with amazement: a field where reapers are binding the grain enchants him; a glimpse of a garden where a woman is hanging up washing moves him to tenderness. A house intact astonishes him. The panorama passes before his window, is gone, is repeated. It is not yet the country, the province, where he was born, but that is approaching. Familiar names are seen at the stopping-places along the track. In an hour the train will reach his station. He can no longer sit still. He rises, fusses with his clothing, sits down, gets up again. The train no longer is going fast enough. It is stopping. What for? Now it goes again. Good. There it is stopping again! This is deadly. Villainous train! Villainous trip! Villainous life!
At last it is his own country, his own town, his own station ... and the train is stopping! Yes, the family are all there, running to meet him. The man leaves the carriage; he falls into their arms; he leans on their shoulders. Tears are on his cheeks; his mind is benumbed, he can only look. There is father, there is mother, there is wife and child.
“Well, well! How are you?”
“Ah, yes, all right,”—somewhat abstractedly.
He pulls himself together, recovers his strength and composure. He stands erect, proudly. He is bruised, stained, and dirty; a dreadful object, at once repulsive and sublime. He is in the midst of his doting, distracted family, who forget all the questions they had planned to ask about himself and the war, and can only ask: “Are you hungry? are you thirsty? are you warm?” He does not know if he is or not. He feels no need of anything. He goes with them. He recognizes the land, the road, the trees, and the houses. He breathes deeply. What delicious air! He is hurried along. As he passes the neighbors exclaim:
“There he is!”
He is safe and whole, he is brave and noble. He wears on his breast the Croix de Guerre. He is petted. He is washed and cleaned and mended and taken out for a promenade. He tries to tell his story, but he tells it badly: he has not the words for it. He knows not how to express all the misery endured, the bodily suffering, the horror of the battle. He tells little fragments of stories, and already he is forgetting the most terrible features. The struggle which was beyond all comprehension seems small when he tries to recount it. It becomes nothing more than a local fight with grenades, a patch of ground occupied in the night, a brook crossed—a thing of shadow and of mystery. It is no longer grandiose. It really was a catastrophe: it becomes a mere fist fight. However, they listen, they ask questions. He must repeat and go into detail. And he, who has escaped the jaws of death, who by a miracle has come out of the destruction, who feels with strangeness the new pulses of life, he runs about to see his friends, he shakes the burden from his thought, he amuses himself—and finally is aware that the time has passed like a flash of lightning and he must again depart. Then the anguish again lays hold upon him; for that which he could not tell clearly he knows only too well. No fibre of his being has forgotten it. His flesh creeps at the thought of entering again the bath of blood, of noise, of war; the long vigils in the trench, the whistle of the shells, the infantry attack.
He goes to join his regiment. He is loaded with delicacies, tobacco, and presents. He has new socks on his feet and a new sweater on his back. He is made over, he is a man again. He is sad, but he goes: there is no other way.
Once more he is at the front with all its horrors. He is in a sector of great commotion, where ruins pile upon ruins; where the very earth under his feet explodes; where a fresh drive is being pushed; where no minute is without its danger. There is the patrol toward the enemy’s lines, the life underground, the sky shot with airplanes, the shrapnel overhead and the mine under feet. There is the torpedo coming with its ugly growl; there are all the changing forms in which death beckons—the Grim Monster which prowls and shrieks; there is the agony renewed.