There is again a rumour that our regiment is to be sent for a rest into the centre of France. The cooks of the first squadron mention Bourges; those of the ninth, Tours.
Another rumour is that Germany is proposing peace to Russia.
Saturday, 24th October.
As we see from letters and newspapers, civilians share in all the agitation and excitement of the war. We are out of all this. By the aid of successive communiqués, those left behind follow the various incidents of the great war on all the fronts at once. Perhaps, too, they receive the Bulletin des Armées, not a single number of which we have yet seen....
They will not have lost a crumb of information! Whereas for a month and a half we have been moving from quarters to outposts and back again, thinking of nothing but eating and drinking, sleeping and resisting cold. At bottom, nothing more resembles the army on a peace footing than the army on a war footing: fatigue duty, reviews, cleaning and polishing arms, sentry duty, and musters. Nor can the soldier be said to be more serious.... To-morrow, it may be, we shall have to leave the trenches and fight. Good, that is our business, the thing we are here to do. When the moment comes, shall we feel ourselves carried away in a whirl of excitement, as civilians do? Nothing of the kind. We shall crawl along the ground, make a few rushes, perhaps have a fall, though without seeing or understanding anything. And on the morrow, unless we are dead, we shall return to oblivion.
Even courage—and there is such a thing—is but a matter of habit, one might almost say of negligence. We do not excite ourselves about shells; if we did, life would be altogether impossible; the French soldier will not admit that anything should make a complete change in his existence. Accordingly, he comes and goes, gets into and out of scrapes and difficulties as though nothing mattered.
But we do get bored, because present-day warfare is colourless and dull, like our uniforms. Those at home, however, suppose us to be in the thick of it all the time, standing with bayonet fixed and head flung back, ferocious and hirsute, blood-stained and sublime. Is it in this light that history will depict us? I hope not, both for its own sake and for our own.
Now I must be off to clean some potatoes. The battalion is returning to the trenches shortly.