CHAPTER XX. THE CALL OF THE CUCKOO
SEEKING for the thrills that experience had taught me would nevertheless probably not be forthcoming anywhere in this so-called quiet sector, I went that same day with a young American officer to a forward post of command, which was another name for a screened pit dug in the scalp of a fair-sized hillock, immediately behind our foremost rifle pits. Sitting here upon the tops of our steel helmets, which the same make fairly good perches to sit on when the ground is muddied, we could look through periscope glasses right into the courtyard of a wrecked château held by the enemy. Upon this spot some of the guns behind us were playing industriously. We could see where the shells struck—now in the garden, now near the shattered outbuildings, now ripping away a slice of the front walls or a segment of the roof of the château itself; and we could see too, after the dust of each hit had somewhat lifted, the small gray figures of Germans scurrying about like startled ants.
A mile away, about, were those Germans, and yet to all intents and purposes they might have been twenty miles away; for as things stood, and with the forces that they had at this point, it would have taken them days or perhaps weeks to bridge the gap between their lines and ours, and it would have taken us as long to get to where they were. For you see both forces had abundance of artillery, but each was holding its front lines with small groups of infantry. To sit there and peer into their defences was like looking into a distant planet peopled by men thinking different thoughts from ours, and swayed by different ambitions and moved by impulses all running counter to those of our breed.
Nevertheless, I must confess that the sensation of crouching in that hole in the ground, spying upon the movements of those dwellers of that other small world, while high above us the shells passed over, shrieking their war-whoops as they travelled from or toward our back lines, very soon lost for me the savour of interest, just as it had lost it a month before when I did the same thing in front of Noyon, or two weeks before near Verdun, or as afterward it was to do when I repeated the experience near Rheims.
So after a bit my companion and I fell to enjoying the beauties of the day. In front of us lay a strip of gentle pasture slope not badly marred by shell craters, and all green except where lovely wide slashes of a bright yellow flower cut across it like rifts of fallen sunshine. The lower reaches of air were filled with the humming of bees, and every minute the skylarks went singing up into the soft skies as though filled with a curiosity to find out what those wailing demons that sped crisscrossing through the heavens might be. Presently from a thicket behind us sounded a bell-like bird note with a sort of melodious cluck in it. I had never heard that note before except when uttered by wooden clocks of presumably Swiss manufacture, but I recognised it for what it was.
“Listen,” said my companion: “that's the second time within a week I've heard it. A French liaison officer was with me then, and he said that for three years now the cuckoo had been silent, and he said that the French country people believed that since the cuckoo had begun calling again it was a sign the war would soon be over—that the cuckoo was calling for peace on earth.”
“I wonder if he was right,” I said.
“Well, he was right so far as he personally was concerned. This war for him was nearly over. Night before last he was riding back to division headquarters in a side car, and a shell dropped on him at a crossroads and he and the driver were killed.”