Fortune is good to me. A white house with sunlit façade attracts my attention. On a garden seat near the door an old man sits, placidly warming himself in the sunshine. No complications bar the way to complete mutual understanding. He invites me to step into a perfect little kitchen; and there his daughter-in-law makes me an omelette never to be forgotten. This is followed by smoked ham, which she cuts specially for me. I eat like a glutton; near my left hand reposes a long baton of new bread, to which I help myself at will. Again and again the old man replenishes my glass with Toul wine, rosy, sparkling and dry. The fresh ham on my plate has a sheen; before me, near my glass, in which the bubbles foam, there is a stone jar of golden jam.
And when the ham at last only too obviously reveals the force and verve of my attack, when the jam-pot is half emptied, I light my pipe with a sigh of deep satisfaction. It is I who have enjoyed these delicacies, I alone. Through half-closed eyes I watch the blue smoke mounting to the rafters, swamped in a sensation of physical well-being, and evoke a picture of my comrades back in the valley, sitting down to the eternal stew and cooked rice—something of remorse, I must confess it, mingles with my self-satisfaction!
Thursday, October 1st.
We received a surprise yesterday evening on returning to our quarters—the regimental band has been playing Two-Steps and dreamy valses on the village green. We had just unbuckled our straps before the barns when the first strains burst forth. The immediate effects of this unwonted clamour were somewhat remarkable. Less than a minute after one of the men had cried "There's a band!" the German centre had been broken! A minute later and we had made eighty thousand prisoners. By the time I arrived on the scene, the Russians were in Berlin. Outside the saw-mill I met an old dame who informed me with an air of great mystery: "That the Kaiser was dead of a stroke, but no one would be allowed to say anything about it until to-morrow!"
On investigation, however, I learn that this concert is not intended to celebrate a manifestation of national joy, but is the result of an idea of our Major. Battalion orders handed to me as I leave duly enlighten me. I read that: "The appearance of the regiment is slovenly" … that it "shows only too plainly the effects of a prolonged stay in the wooded regions where man displays a tendency to revert to a condition of nature" … that "it is essential to return by degrees to a more healthy and regulated style of living." So apparently a reasonable ration of music, Two-Steps and dreamy valses, is destined to tame for ever that ancestral savagery in us which the war has awakened.
And this morning at daybreak we are departing from the village once again to bury ourselves in those wooded regions where man becomes a wolf!
It is misty and the leading files of the battalion vanish from sight in a white cloud. The company preceding us is no more than a moving mass in which only the rifle barrels swaying above a crowd of heads can be distinguished. At a lesser distance forms are visible, all dull grey, but it is only when quite near that we can recognize different colours in the uniforms and see the men's breath as white puffs which quickly dissolve.
Amblonville, Mouilly, and then a narrow ravine. The slope we are mounting is covered with shrubs, hazel, cherry trees, dwarf oaks and a few big trees; at the bottom of the ravine is a lake of greenness which has retained its freshness despite the autumn. In it countless shell-holes form miniature archipelagos. The opposite slope is covered with a thinly-sown wood of pines.
The fog has disappeared and unveiled the sky. Idly I watch several of our men lounging near the pines. Three of them are sitting playing cards and smoking, two others standing behind them watch the game closely, commenting from time to time. A little higher up the slope a man is lying flat on his stomach, supporting his chin on his hands, and reading absorbedly, digging his toes in the soil the while.
I was watching, and I saw in all its brutal horror the thing that came to pass. A shell swept over the edge of the hollow, passing so close above us that we felt its breath in our faces, and dropped plumb in the centre of the peaceable group of card-players. We heard them cry aloud; then beheld two of them running madly. In the crater made by the shell the black smoke hung, and drifted for some time; little by little it disappeared. And when it was gone we saw a human trunk in bloody rags hanging between two branches of a pine. A second wounded man lay on the earth beside the mutilated legs of his comrade, and he was waving his arms and screaming. The stretcher-bearers came up at full speed.