His wife and I looked at each other.
He smiled down at her, as if it were only for her one need be sorry. "We have had six perfect days," he said, "and you know it must be—the others are there."
I have written those words many times over. But they are the words one hears every day. As the men go back, each one of them from the however different circumstances of his life, that is all they seem to find to say about it. It does not make a fine phrase, but it has come to mean for me a beautiful thing. Behind the great sweep of battles it is one of the things I shall always be glad to have known.
I find myself wanting to put each saying of it away with other memories in this book that for two years has kept me company.
Two years ago—so long ago that I find myself saying, once upon a time—there was a small square tower room that had three windows, narrow and deep-set, the loopholes of ancient defences. Once upon a time the three windows stood open to the night and the garden, and to a sense, somehow, of the friendly crowding up of the little town about the rampart walls, and to the country lying away beyond, sweet in the dark with forest and field.
I know that where war has passed strangers can look into broken houses and see all that was intimate and small and dear betrayed with ruin of stones and lives, and that, like that, people who do not care may glance in passing into the wreck of the north tower room.
The tower had stood for so long, keeping watch over that road to Paris—how strange to think it will keep watch no more! It had looked down, in its long time, on much of war, and held its own through three besiegings—and now it is fallen.
Now it is fallen, the strong tower, in a land that is laid waste, from which peace has been taken away, and joy, out of the plentiful fields.
Already that night was passed beyond the end of the world.
In the morning of that day, the morning of that last Sunday of peace, I had stood in my window over the garden and seen the sunshine, thick and golden after rain, on wet sweet things, lawns and little formal stately paths and box edges and clipped yews, roses and heliotrope and petunias. And I had not known. I had seen the close, soft dream-sky of France full of white clouds above the tops of trees that were green and golden, or sometimes as dark as purple and black. And I had not known.