VI
IN THE WOODS
Tuesday, September 22nd.
I start a few letters, fingers frozen, nose wet:
"I do not know how I look; but to tell the truth, my powers of resistance have astonished even myself. It is strange and marvellous how every one among us appears to possess a faculty for adapting himself to the immediate circumstances. Our hard life has hardened us and will keep us so, for however long it may continue. At the present moment, it would seem as if we had been born to wage war, to sleep in the open no matter what the weather, to eat when, where, and what we can, also as much as we can. You have a cloth on your table? Spoons, forks, all kinds of forks—for the oysters, the fruits, the snails, and so on? You even have a clean plate for each course—isn't it funny? Glasses are placed before you of all shapes and sizes, so fragile that a pressure of the hand would break them. And you drink your coffee—I have a vague memory that this is so—out of a fine glass which is not the same as that from which you drink your tea, for example! But how complicated all that is! We others have our pocket-knife, our mugs, and our fingers! I assure you they are quite sufficient…."
An interruption. A woman appears, thin and dirty, pushing before her a little yellow-haired girl, whose eyes are red-rimmed and tear-stained. The doctor having been consulted, prescribes for colic.
"And what do I owe you for that, doctor?" asks the woman.
"Nothing at all, madam."
But she draws from beneath her apron a dusty bottle. "I must 'recompinse' you somehow. There is not very much in it, but what there is tastes good. It is good: oh, but indeed it is!"
It is Toul wine, dry, thin and somewhat sharp. A brawn, turned out on to a plate, gives us an excellent lunch.
In the afternoon we pass to the observation trench. We overtake a group of lame men, without weapons, coats open, almost all of them limping along with a stick. Among them I recognize a friend of pre-war days. We shake hands and speak eagerly and with pleasure of common memories, before approaching the inevitable regrets. As he belonged to a regiment which was compelled to give way before the Boches, I asked him how it had come about. He shrugged his shoulders despondently.