"Well Alfred, we are all traveling the same road together now. Death walks at everyone's side. But they who have died on the battlefield, they have sown in their own ashes the seeds of Redemption." And the speaker's voice rose, so that we felt startled at its suddenness. "They will yet fight as avenging spirits. They are about us now. When Heaven is too full of them they will descend, and destroy the enemy. La Patrie is Eternal;" that was Privat Deschat.
This last apostrophe awkwardly dampened the moment's happiness, and we went into the house slowly and silently, as if to the summons of an obsequy. When Deschat mentioned the descending spirits I saw Gabrielle quail and draw Dora to her side in a trembling spasm of alarm.
Slowly we entered the house. I shuddered in a momentary realization that its master and mistress were no longer sanctioning its hospitality. But how peaceful and comforting it all was! I felt embraced by the manifold tendernesses of form and picture and color and furnishment. Around the table of the dining room that evening in the cheerful splendor of the old oil lamp, with the shadows, grotesquely friendly, moving over the walls, we sat together, while Hortense and Julie outdid themselves in overloading the table with les pièces precieuses de la cuisine. I hardly dared to taste these delicacies. It seemed a profanation. Those suffering patient men at the front, so often almost starving! It was an impiety against patriotism to feast so lavishly.
I touched almost nothing, buried in sombre memories. The regalement was darkened by my abrupt disillusionment, and I could not easily rehearse my experience. I begged them to excuse me—another time I would go through it all, but just then—Ah surely they understood. There were so many reasons for hesitation, for suspense, for silence. They were most sympathetic, and I, who was to have been the raconteur, sat now almost moodily amongst them, and listened to the news of the neighborhood, as one and the other kept up the trivial narration.
How the Uhlans had been seen by little Mimette Collot prancing along a highway toward Cabrelet, how the thunders from the constant attrition eastward, between the armies, had kept them all awake at night; how the English soldiers had visited them and they had turned their pantries inside out to welcome and refresh them; how a taube had wheeled and droned above them, like some colossal bumble bee, and how it dropped one bomb in a pasturage, and had killed a young mother cow and her calf; how good Mother Webbe—she at the crossroads where you go east toward Landrecies and Mons—had given a young English soldier on a motorcycle a full glass of vin de prunes, and he had fallen from his cycle along the roadside "dead-drunk"—un ivrogne jusque mort—; the dear soul had thought it was only vin ordinaire; how the men had deserted the country-side to enlist, and the old men and the women, the boys and girls, had taken their places; how the Diligence had a woman driver now, and how she dressed in man's clothes, and how bitter she was with the horses, just to seem more mannish—comme un homme.
They told how the troops had filled the roads moving eastward, and with them the long files of ambulances, of ammunition vans, of cannon carriages; how when the news came of our victory the church bells were rung, bonfires were made in the streets, and processions of boys and girls went up and down the roads singing the Marseillaise.
But somehow the spirit of our reunion dragged and drooped, and I suppose it was all my fault. The oppression of despair had seized me. I could not escape a sense of doom, not exactly my own, or the country's, but some vague awfulness of desolation, approaching with black pestilence—breathing power, to desecrate and ravage the earth. It kept me dumb. And all of this uneasy and ungracious apathy or morose grief, had developed since I entered the house—where at first the happiness of refuge seemed so inexpressible.
When I bade them "Good night," I said some stumbling words about my disappointment with myself, and promised to make amends. I needed rest. My body and soul, my mind were ill at ease. And so they left me, that clear star-lit night as the rising wind, threatening frosts or snow, rocketed upward with gusty roars from the house-tops, and rushed away with a wail that almost sounded to me as the incorporeal echo of those ravenous moans and cries, those palpitating shrieks, that I had heard sweep across the battlefield, and that, as the hours waned died away in death.
I recovered my strength but slowly, and there were recurrent lapses into periods of frightful depression, nervousness, and I fear irritability, that tried the devoted soul of Gabrielle, who remained unchanged in her devotion, and unceasing in her soothing ministrations. We often talked about the strange apparitions, and the voices, and the weaving and winnowed lights, but there was no return to Gabrielle of these visitations. She had gained in strength, her old time loveliness of face bloomed again, and, delighted with my companionship, she withheld—if indeed they assaulted her at all, or essayed to—the disembodied souls. Gabrielle was utterly transparent and confessed everything. I know that for at least seven months, there literally was no return of the manifestations. Because they seemed to have vanished entirely we permitted ourselves to talk them over freely, and it amused me. The terrifying thought though often arose, in the minds of both of us, that the discharged multitudes of spirits, shot almost into eternity, clung to the earth. Their gathering increasing shades haunted the loved earth, and their affections, somehow still retained for the living, nursed in them a rising anger at the continuance of the slaughters.