I wanted to write of the fragrance of delicate years that abode in my tower room; of the dim, cloudy mirror over the mantel that had reflected so many stories; of how the writing-table stood in the north window, and had nothing but a bowl of sweet-peas and my travelling-desk things on it; and that the window was open, and how all the wet, sweet, quite cold night came in; and that, over the tops of the dark trees, and between the dark cloud masses, I could see all the stars of the Lyre, Vega, blue-white, very big and near, all more brilliant, I thought, than ever I had known them before. I wanted to explain how, somehow, one felt the village, down under the rampart walls, though it slept and made no sound, and how friendly its presence was as it lay so close, protecting and protected, about its ancient burg.
Now the houses are roofless, and the rampart walls are broken. The tower is fallen. Nothing is left unchanged there, to-night, but the shining down of the August stars.
I had dreamed of the hoofbeats of galloping horses and crash of great wheels and of thunder. And all that came, and does not cease. I had dreamed of blood on the castle stairs, dripping and dripping. And they say that there was one night especially, when the castle was so full of wounded men, that there was nowhere left to lay them in any of the rooms, or in the lower halls. They carried them as they were brought in up the stairs to lie on the floor of the Long Gallery. And the blood ran down the stairs.
There was fighting, over and over, up and down, those big square cobbles of the streets and of the market place, and from the doors and windows and roofs of those little houses.
The people of the streets and houses are gone, who knows where, with their poor small bundles, fled long ago, before the hoofbeats and wheels and thunder.
Across these things, how absurd to remember the sweet-peas there were, that Sunday night, in a bowl on a writing-table!
It was very hot in the ward to-day; the flies buzzed horridly up and down the window-panes.
It was a very bad day in the ward. Thirty-four was very low. He had a hæmorrhage yesterday, and all day he seemed to be sinking. It was to-day he received his Croix de Guerre. The captain came up to the ward with another officer and gave it to him, and read his citation out, standing by the bed. But he seemed scarcely to know.
Several other decorations were given also to-day, downstairs in the Salle de Jeu. We had much to do in our ward, and I could not go down.