Questions and Answers
The wounds in the road are kept filled up. As the road is wounded, every day, they fill the wounds up and smooth them over. Because, in case of an advance or a retreat, the way must be kept open and clear.
This I have been told, for I cannot go to see.
They tell me how the work of the fields goes on around the wounds of the fields. There is no need, of course, to tend the wounds of the fields. Sometimes in the ploughing the blade of the plough strikes against an unexploded shell that the grass had hidden, and the old horse is killed, or the yoke of oxen, and the old peasant.
Sometimes the soldiers, back at repose, help with the work of the fields.
I ask, are the larks singing over the fields? But, of course. And are there magpies in the road? Why, yes.
When a shell bursts in the fields, they say, it is scarcely frightful at all, the spaces are so wide. It seems far from you, and you think of it as just something of the world's—scream of wind, lightning, that strikes perhaps; not an enemy thing at all.
Do the bees drone on just the same in the clover? They say they are absurd things that I want to know.
But I think of the clover growing tall and sweet about the little tilted wooden crosses, of which the fields are so full; and of the bees droning their golden, sleepy song, there, like that.