Just beyond the octroi there is a barbed-wire entanglement across the road. No one can go farther. There are soldiers in the yellow little house of the octroi. The sentinel comes out.
They tell me that the road beyond the barbed-wire entanglement leads straight on, between the poplar trees, as far as any one can see, deep grown in grass. Nearly two years deep in grass. It is nearly two years since any one, yes, any one, has gone a step along that road.
They tell me a thing the sentinel said, that is a hideous thing. I do not know why I want to tell it. I know just how he said it, with bitterness and irony, but as if it were a thing of small matter that would be soon arranged for.
He said, "Just along there, about half-way as far as we can see, begins Germany."
Fifteen Days
Just before the end of the world they were together at the château.
They thought it was to have been for the last time. There had been many things they needed to talk over and arrange together, and why not quietly. They were "done with passion, pain, and anger." They thought to bid one another good-bye when everything was arranged, wishing one another well, and go their different ways.
There were no children, they were hurting no one. They had been hurting one another too long, for ten years—they were both still so young that it seemed to them half a lifetime—and now they thought they would never hurt one another any more. It was an immense relief to each of them to feel that it was over, quite over, dead and done with. But it was not over.
From the first moment of talk of war his one idea was to get himself taken for the army. When he was a boy, a fall in hunting had hurt his spine seriously; he had never been able to do his military service. The trouble had grown worse, and now, with his crooked back and halting step, there was nothing, exactly nothing, it seemed, he could do.
She stayed with him through those days of the utmost nervous tension. How could she leave him then? She understood him so well in his moods, now in despair, now hopeful, now in despair again; disgraced, he would say, worthless, ashamed before his peasants, before the castle servants, who were, all of them, going to join the colours; angry against everything, he had such need of her to tell it all to. He exhausted himself with hurried, futile journeys hither and yonder to find some one whose influence might get him "taken." He spent his nights walking the wide floors up and down, and writing letters to people he thought might "do something." But none of it was of any use. He worried himself ill. He fainted twice in one day, the day the papers told of the taking of the first German flag. It was a flaming white hot day in their country of the Aisne.