He began to sink and once they thought he was gone; but he opened his eyes and spoke again:
“Boys,” he said, “take a tip from me who knows: this thing of dying is nothing to worry about. There's no pain and there's no fear. Why, dying is the easiest thing I've ever done in all my life. You'll find that out for yourselves when your time comes. So cheer up and don't look so glum because I just happen to be the one that's leaving first.”
The end came within five minutes after this. Just before he passed, the liaison officer who was kneeling on the floor holding one of the dying man's hands between his two hands, felt a pressure from the cold fingers that he clasped and saw a flicker of desire in the eyes that were beginning to glaze over with a film. He bent his head close down and in the ghost of a ghost of a whisper, the farewell message of his friend and mine came to him between gasps.
“Listen,” the Major whispered, “Old Blank,”—naming the regimental chaplain—“has pulled off a lot of slouchy funerals in this outfit. Tell him, for me, to give me a good swell one, won't you?”
He went then, with the smile of his little conceit still upon his lips.
That was why the two men whom I met here yesterday rode in to get flowers and wreaths. They told me the Colonel was going to have the regimental band out for the services to-day too, and that a brigadier-general and a major-general of our army would be present with their staffs and that a French general would be present with his staff. So I judge they are giving my friend what he wanted—a good swell one.
The France to which tourists will come after the war will not be the France which peacetime visitors knew. I am not speaking so much of the ruined cities and the razed towns, each a mute witness now to thoroughness as exemplified according to the orthodox tenets of Kul-tur. For the most part these never can be restored to their former semblances—Hunnish efficiency did its damned work too well for the evil badness of it ever to be undone. Indeed I was told no longer ago than last week, when I went through Arras, dodging for shelter from ruin-heap to ruin-heap between gusts of shelling from the German batteries, that it is the intention of the French government to leave untouched and untidied certain areas of wanton devastation, so future generations of men looking upon these hell's quarter-sections, will have before their eyes fit samples of the finished handicraft of the Hun. I am sure this must be true of Arras because in the vicinity of the cathedral—I mean the place where the cathedral was once—signs are stuck up in rubble-piles or fastened to upstanding bits of splintered walls forbidding visitors to remove souvenirs or to alter the present appearance of things in any way whatsoever. I sincerely trust the French do carry out this purpose. Then in the years to come, when Americans come here and behold this spot, once one of the most beautiful in all Europe and now one of the foulest and most hideous, they may be cured of any lingering inclination to trust a people in whose veins there may linger a single trace of the taints of Kaiserism and militarism. However, I dare say that by then our present enemies will have been purged clean of the blight that now is in their blood.
When I say that the France of the future will never be the France which once was a shrine for lovers of beauty to worship at—which was all one great altar dedicated to loveliness—I am thinking particularly of the rural districts and not of the communities. I base my belief upon the very reasonable supposition that after the armies are withdrawn or disbanded—or, as in the case of our foes, killed off or captured or driven back,—the peasants in their task of making the devastated regions fit once more for human habitation, will turn to the material most plentifully at hand and that of which the quickest use can be made. This means then, that instead of rebuilding with masonry and cement and plaster after the ancient modes, they will employ the salvage of military constructions. And by that same sign it means that ugly characterless wooden buildings with roofs of corrugated iron, and all slab-sided and angular and hopelessly plain, will replace the quaint gabled houses that are gone—and gone forever; and that where the picturesque stone fences ran zig-zagging across the faces of the meadows, and likewise where the centuries-old, plastered walls rose about byre and midden and stable-yard, will instead be stretched lines of barbed wire, nailed to wooden posts.
The stuff will be there—in incredible quantities—and it will be cheap and it will be available for immediate use, once the forces of the Allies have scattered. It is only natural to assume therefore that the thrifty country-folk and the citizens of the villages will take it over. For a fact in certain instances they are already doing so. Just the other day, up near the Flanders border in the British-held territory, I saw a half grown boy wriggling through a maze of rusted wire along an abandoned defence line, like Brer Rabbit through the historic brier-patch; and when I drew nearer, curious to know what sort of game he played all alone here in a land where every game except the great game of war is out of fashion, I saw that he was tearing down the strands of the wire, and through the interpreter he told me he was going to enclose his mother's garden with the stuff. Think of a French garden fenced in after the style of a Nebraska ranch yard. Also I have taken note that the peasants are removing the plank shorings from the sides of old, disused trenches and with the boards thus secured are knocking up barns and chicken-sheds and even makeshift dwellings.
Assuredly it will never be the old France, physically. But spiritually, the new France, wearing the scars of her sacrifice as the Redeemer of Mankind wore the nail-marks of His crucifixion, will be a vision of glory before the eyes of men forevermore. I like this simile as I set it down in my note-book. And I mean no irreverence as I liken the barbed wire to the Crown of Thoms and think of two cross-pieces of ugly wood out of a barrack or a rest-billet as being erected into the shape of The Cross.