He laughed softly, a laugh so cold, that Paul Guitry felt as if ice water had suddenly been spilled on his spine.
"Hell," he went on, "has no tortures which French men, and women, and little children have not suffered. You say that if you had been in my boots you must long since have gone mad? well, it is because I have been able to think of all the others who are in my boots that I have kept my sanity. It has not been easy. It is not as if my imagination alone had been tortured. Just as I have the sense that my village is there—" he pointed with his sensitive hand, "so I have the sense of what has happened there. I KNOW that she is alive," he concluded, "and that she would rather be dead."
There was another silence. The Idiot's nostrils dilated and he sniffed once or twice.
"The coffee is coming," he said. "Listen. If I am killed in the advance, find her, will you—Jeanne Bergère? And say what you can to comfort her. It doesn't matter what has happened, her love for me is like the North Star—fixed. When she knows that I am dead she will wish to kill herself. You must prevent that. You must show her how she can help France. Aha!—The cannon!"
From several miles in the rear there rose suddenly a thudding percussive cataract of sound. The earth trembled like some frightened animal that has been driven into a corner.
The Idiot leaped to his feet, his eyes joyously alight.
"It is the voice of God," he cried.
If indeed it was the voice of God, that other great voice which is of Hell, made no answer. The German guns were unaccountably silent.
On the stroke of four, the earth still trembling with the incessant concussions of the guns, the French scrambled out of their trenches and went forward. But no sudden blast of lead and iron challenged their temerity. A few shells, but all from field pieces, fired perfunctorily as it were, fell near them and occasionally among them. It looked as if Fritz wasn't going to fight.
The wire guarding the first line of German trenches had been so torn and disrupted by the French cannon, that only here and there an ugly strand remained to be cut. The trench was empty.