"The Germans back here? Never! Why at the rate we're going now it will be all over before Spring and you'll see what a price my paper will fetch just as soon as peace comes!"
Peace! Peace! the word was on every lip, the thought in every heart, and yet every intelligence, every energy was bent on the prosecution of the most hateful warfare ever known. In all the universe it seemed to me that the wild animals were the only creatures really exempt from preoccupation about the fray. It might be war for man and the friends of man, but for them had come an unexpected reprieve, and even the more wary soon felt their exemption from pursuit. Man was so busy fighting his own kind that a wonderful armistice had unconsciously arisen between him and these creatures, and so birds and beasts, no longer frightened by his proximity, were indulging in a perfect revel of freedom.
During the first weeks of the conflict, the "cotton-tails," always so numerous on our estate, were simply terrified by the booming of the guns. If even the distant bombardment assumed any importance, they would disappear below ground completely, for days at a time. My old foxhound was quite disconcerted. But like all the rest of us they soon became accustomed to it, and presently displayed a self assurance and a familiarity undreamed of, save perhaps in the Garden of Eden.
VIEW OF CHATEAU-THIERRY
It became a common sight to see a brood of partridges or pheasants strutting along the roadside like any barnyard hen and chickens, and one recalled with amazement the times when stretching themselves on their claws they would timidly and fearfully crane their necks above the grass at the sound of an approaching step.
At present they are not at all sure that man was their worst enemy. The Government having decreed that there shall be no game shooting in the army zone, weazels, pole cats and even fox have become very numerous, and covey of quail that once numbered ten and fifteen, have singularly diminished by this incursion of wild animals, not to mention the hawks, the buzzards and the squirrels.
One Autumn morning I appeared at our gateway just in time to see a neighbour's wife homeward bound, the corpses of four white hens that Maître Renard had borrowed from their coop, dangling from her arm. Her husband heard her coming, and on learning the motive of her wails, the imprecations brought down on the head of that fox were picturesquely profane to say the least. Presently the scene grew in violence, and then finally terminated with the assertion that the whole tragedy was the result of the Kaiser's having thrown open the German prisons and turned loose his vampires on France.
Be that as it may, there was certainly no more enchanting way of obtaining mental and physical relaxation than in wandering through those wonderful woodlands that abound in our vicinity, and which breathed so many inspirations to the Master of Fable, who at one time was their keeper. How I wish that good La Fontaine might have seen his dumb friends under present circumstances. What fantasies would he not have woven about them.