This little exploit filled the whole fort with glee.
From the look-out this morning, or let us say from your acacias, the country was exquisitely beautiful. The position of the valleys was indicated by diaphanous bands of blue vapour. They rose softly as far as the border of the pines and vanished there. Birds flew through the silent air, shining in the sunlight. I heard the ploughmen crying “hue” to their horses. Beyond the oak coppice which adjoins the glacis on the Wegstetten side, a great herd of oxen was grazing.
All at once a company of Bavarian soldiers appeared upon the military road from behind the eastern redoubt. The men, recruits of the 1914 class, clad in blue tunic, and drill trousers tucked into their boots, bore no arms. They sang loudly as they marched, scanning the rhythm:
Lieb’ Vaterland, magst ruhig sein,
Fest steht und treu die Wacht am Rhein![18]
Half way up the incline, between the forest and the fort, they halted. The captain, without dismounting, made them a speech. From a distance it sounded like barking. He stressed his syllables so vigorously that fragments reached my ears notwithstanding the distance. The word Heimat, home, came again and again, like a refrain. Then they intoned the national anthem:
Heil dir im Siegerkranz,
Herrscher des Vaterlands![19]
They began to manœuvre. The company broke into two parts. One section took up a position in the bushes in front of the wood. The other section went back along the road as far as the glacis, to the oak coppice. The men stood there for a moment. A fat sergeant, the only one wearing the grey-blue uniform of active service, signed to them to fire at me. I could clearly make out his head, set upon a short, thick neck like that of a pig. He made gestures to signify his hostility. I shrugged my shoulders. Then his section, turning away from me, advanced in open formation across the ploughed fields, making as though to attack the men in the bushes.
I ran down the steep slope. A footpath I am fond of runs along it half way up. Were it not for the high wall of the escarp rising parallel with the grassy counterscarp, it would be possible to believe oneself in a peaceable valley in the open country. Here and there, beside the footpath, a few trees are growing—a young oak, stunted and gnarled, some dwarf poplars, a raspberry bush, a hawthorn. Across the ditch, capping the masonry and hiding the view of the plain, is the grassy covering of the first glacis, thickly set with wild rose-trees reddened with hips and haws, and displaying at intervals the silver and golden tints of beautiful little birches. Beyond the two slopes there is nothing to be seen, nothing but the sky. This morning the blue was of a tender liquid tint. At a great altitude tiny clouds were visible, blushing in the dawn.