All this had happened to me in especial in that melting-pot up in the eastern hills, and to thirty thousand others that year in their separate crucibles.
In the process things had passed which would seem to you incredible if I wrote them all down. I cared little in what vessel I ate, or whether I had to tear meat with my fingers. I could march in reserve more than twenty miles a day for day upon day. I knew all about my horses; I could sweep, wash, make a bed, clean kit, cook a little, tidy a stable, turn to entrenching for emplacement, take a place at lifting a gun or changing a wheel. I took change with a gunner, and could point well. And all this was not learnt save under a grinding pressure of authority and harshness, without which in one's whole life I suppose one would never properly have learnt a half of these things—at least, not to do them so readily, or in such unison, or on so definite a plan. But (what will seem astonishing to our critics and verbalists), with all this there increased the power, or perhaps it was but the desire, to express the greatest thoughts—newer and keener things. I began to understand De Vigny when he wrote, "If a man despairs of becoming a poet, let him carry his pack and march in the ranks."
Thus the great hills that border the Moselle, the distant frontier, the vast plain which is (they say) to be a battlefield, and which lay five hundred feet sheer below me, the far guns when they were practising at Metz, the awful strength of columns on the march moved me. The sky also grew more wonderful, and I noticed living things. The Middle Ages, of which till then I had had but troubling visions, rose up and took flesh in the old town, on the rare winter evenings when I had purchased the leisure to leave quarters by some excessive toil. A man could feel France going by.
It was at the end of these six months, when there was no more darkness at roll-call, and when the bitter cold (that had frozen us all winter) was half forgotten, that the spring brought me this excellent news, earlier than I had dared to expect it—the news that sounds to a recruit half as good as active service. We were going to march and go off right away westward over half a dozen horizons, till we could see the real thing at Chalons, and with this news the world seemed recreated.
Seven times that winter we had been mobilised: four times in the dead of the night; once at midday, once at evening, and once at dawn. Seven times we had started down the wide Metz road, hoping in some vague way that they would do something with us and give us at least some manoeuvres, and seven times we had marched back to barracks to undo all that serious packing and to return to routine.
Once, for a week in February, the French and German Governments, or, more probably, two minor permanent officials, took it into their silly heads that there was some danger of war. We packed our campaign saddles every night and put them on the pegs behind the stalls; we had the emergency rations served out, and for two days in the middle of that time we had slept ready. But nothing came of it. Now at least we were off to play a little at the game whose theory we had learnt so wearily.
And the way I first knew it would easily fill a book if it were told as it should be, with every detail and its meaning unrolled and with every joy described: as it is, I must put it in ten lines. Garnon (a sergeant), three others, and I were sent out (one patrol out of fifty) to go round and see the reserve horses on the farms. That was delight enough, to have a vigorous windy morning with the clouds large and white and in a clear sky, and to mix with the first grain of the year, "out of the loose-box."
We took the round they gave us along the base of the high hills, we got our papers signed at the different stables, we noted the hoofs of the horses and their numbers; a good woman at a large farm gave us food of eggs and onions, and at noon we turned to get back to quarters for the grooming. Everything then was very well—to have ridden out alone without the second horse and with no horrible great pole to crush one's leg, and be free—though we missed it—of the clank of the guns. We felt like gentlemen at ease, and were speaking grandly to each other, when I heard Garnon say to the senior of us a word that made things seem better still, for he pointed out to a long blue line beyond Domremy and overhanging the house of Joan of Arc, saying that the town lay there. "What town?" said I to my Ancient; and my Ancient, instead of answering simply, took five minutes to explain to me how a recruit could not know that the round of the reserve horses came next before camp, and that this town away on the western ridge was the first halting-place upon the road. Then my mind filled with distances, and I was overjoyed, saving for this one thing, that I had but two francs and a few coppers left, and that I was not in reach of more.
When we had ridden in, saluted, and reported at the guard, we saw the guns drawn up in line at the end of the yard, and we went into grooming and ate and slept, hardly waiting for the morning and the long regimental call before the réveillé; the notes that always mean the high road for an army, and that are as old as Fontenoy.