"How do you reconcile your theories of fraternity to what you have to do?"
"I do not have to reconcile my theories to my office; I am furthering my theories."
"How so?"
"By combating the Boches. Without them we might have realized our idea of universal peace and fraternity. Voilà l'ennemi! The race is a poisonous race, serpents, massacreurs! I wish I could smother as many of them every day as I did yesterday."
During my service I did not meet another soldier whose hatred of the
Germans was comparable to that of this advocate of universal love.
I left the trenches just at dusk. Above the dreadful depression in No
Man's Land shone a bronzy sky against which the trees raised their
haggard silhouettes. There was hardly a sound in the whole length of The
Wood. A mist came up making haloes round the rising winter stars.
Chapter VI
The Germans Attack
The schoolmaster (instituteur) and the schoolmistress (institutrice) of Montauville were a married couple, and had a flat of four rooms on the second story of the schoolhouse. The kitchen of this fiat had been struck by a shell, and was still a mess of plaster, bits of stone, and glass, and a fragment had torn clear through the sooty bottom of a copper saucepan still hanging on the wall. In one of the rooms, else quite bare of furniture, was an upright piano. Sometimes while stationed at Montauville, I whiled away the waits between calls to the trenches in playing this instrument.
It was about nine o'clock in the morning, and thus far not a single call had come in. The sun was shining very brightly in a sky washed clear by a night of rain, the morning mists were rising from the wood, and up and down the very muddy street walked little groups of soldiers. I drew up the rickety stool and began to play the waltz from "The Count of Luxembourg." In a short time I heard the sound of tramping on the stairs voices. In came three poilus—a pale boy with a weary, gentle expression in his rather faded blue eyes; a dark, heavy fellow of twenty-five or six, with big wrists, big, muscular hands, and a rather unpleasant, lowering face; and a little, middle-aged man with straightforward, friendly hazel eyes and a pointed beard. The pale, boyish one carried a violin made from a cigar box under his arm, just such a violin as the darkies make down South. This violin was very beautifully made, and decorated with a rustic design. I stopped playing.