Suddenly a whistle sounded. There was a rattle of arms as the men unstacked their guns and fell into line, then hundreds of hobnailed boots marked time on the hard road, and the 65th swung along to the waiting camions, over the same route I had seen Captain Simpson and the Yorkshire boys take, just before sundown, on that hot September day in 1914.
As I stood watching them all the stupendousness of the times rushed over me that you and I, who have rubbed our noses on historical monuments so often, have chased after emotions on the scenes of past heroism, and applauded mock heroics across the footlights, should be living in days like these, days in which heroism is the common act of every hour. I cannot help wondering what the future generations are going to say of it all; how far-off times are going to judge us; what is going to stand out in the strong limelight of history? I know what I think, but that does not help yet.
Do you know that I had a letter from Paris this week which said: "I was looking over your letters written while we were tied up in London, in August, 1914, and was amused to find that in one of them you had written 'the annoying thing is, that, after this is over, Germany will console herself with the reflection that it took the world to beat her.'" It is coming truer than I believed in those days,—and then I went back to dishwashing.
You never saw such a looking kitchen as I found. Léon, the officers' cook—a pastry cook before he was a soldier—was a nice, kindly, hard- working chap, but he lacked the quality dear to all good house- keepers—he had never learned to clean up after himself as he went along. He had used every cooking utensil in the house, and such a pile of plates and glasses! It took Amélie and me until two o'clock to clean up after him, and when it was done I felt that I never wanted to see food again as long as I lived. Of course we did not mind, but Amélie had to say, every now and then, "Vive l'armée!" just to keep her spirits up. Anyway it was consoling to know that they have more to eat than we do.
The American corps had to leave one of their boys behind in our ambulance, very ill with neuritis—that is to say, painfully ill. As the boys of the American corps are ranked by the French army as officers this case is doubly interesting to the personnel of our modest hospital. First he is an American—a tall young Southerner from Tennessee. They never knew an American before. Second, he is not only an honorary officer serving France, he is really a lieutenant in the officers' reserve corps of his own State, and our little ambulance has never sheltered an officer before.
The nurses and the sisters are falling over one another to take care of him—at least, as I always find one or two of them sitting by his bed whenever I go to see him, I imagine they are.
The amusing thing is that he says he can't understand or speak
French, and swears that the only words he knows are:
Oui, oui, oui,
Non, non, non,
Si, si, si,
Et voilà,
Merci!
which he sings, in his musical southern voice, to the delight of his admiring nurses. All the same, whenever it is necessary for an interpreter to explain something important to him, I find that he has usually got the hang of it already, so I've my doubts if he has as little French as he pretends. One thing is sure his discharge will leave a big void in the daily life of the ambulance.
This is growing into a long letter—in the quiet that has settled on us I seem to have plenty of time—and the mood—so, before I close, I must say something in reply to your sad sentence in your last letter—the reply to mine of December regarding our first big cantonnement. You say "Oh! the pity of this terrible sacrifice of the youth of the world!! Why aren't the middle-aged sent first—the men who have partly lived their lives, who leave children to continue the race?" Ah, dear old girl —you are indeed too far off to understand such a war as this. Few men of even forty can stand the life. Only the young can bear the strain. They not only bear it, they thrive on it, and, such of them as survive the actual battles, will come out of it in wonderful physical trim. Of course there are a thousand sides to the question. There are hospitals full of the tuberculous and others with like maladies, but those things existed before the war, only less attention was paid to them. It is also a serious question—? getting more serious the longer the war goes on—as to how all these men will settle into civil life again —how many will stand sedentary pursuits after years in the open, and how they will settle back into the injustices of class distinctions after years of the equality of the same duty—fighting for their country. Still if the victory is decisive, and the army is satisfied with the peace conditions, I imagine all those things will settle themselves.