If I should announce such ideas in the rigid formalism of my Littledale home, I would be regarded, I know, as an intellectual pariah. But I am not seeking to impose my ideas on others. I am setting them down in a moment of intellectual luxury, for my own self-education; that is, as I perceive them through this vista of isolation, when old commonplaces come into a new significance.
* * * * *
To-day there is a great yearning inside me, allied with a new feeling of homesickness. I long to go to the home that is denied me. The air which I have breathed these long two years has been extraordinarily vital. I have lived with humanity at its keenest. With all the sodden realism of war, with all its inconsistencies of detail, its mingled brutality and heroism, it has been a privilege to have known its rare moments of exaltation. I have known my kind as they are, as my friends in the courtyard below are,—inconsistent and frail, selfish, avaricious, sunk in mere animal passions of living; but I have seen a sudden flaming vision of sacrifice exalt them above the brute, as I have known Christian and Pagan to offer themselves on the cross of their own suffering that their race might go on living.
III
September
Sunday evening.
This morning I attended Mass with Coustic and Valentin, who are very religious. (The others are not.) I like the solemnity and the calm of the old Cathedral, the footsteps that slip past lost in the obscurity, the candle-points that punctuate the darkness without illuminating it, the sense of repose, beauty, meditation. Yet, every time I enter a church now and see the cross, my memory returns to another crucifixion, to a man who was not divine, yet who never flinched in his sacrificial agony.
* * * * *
His name was Jules Fromentin, and a worse rascal did not exist in the company. He had been a deserter in the Argentine, but he had his code. And, somewhere in the bottom of his muddied philosophy was the love of France. He caught the first steamer, claimed foreign citizenship, and enlisted in the Legion. One night, in the spring of 1915, when we held the trenches at the foot of the Notre Dame de Lorette slopes, working towards Ablain St. Nazaire, a scouting detail was caught between the lines and wiped out. Fromentin, alone, wounded to the death, was left hanging on an advanced section of our barbed wire, to which he had struggled. To attempt a rescue was humanly impossible. We had made an advance the night before, and another was expected. The Boches, on the qui vive, kept the night luminous with rockets and drooping flares. No head could have appeared for an instant above the trench in the illuminated night. At that, only the authority of our commander held us in. I can remember still our feeling of horror and of rage as we crouched helplessly in the whipped-around trench and listened with the cold sweat starting up our backs. Fromentin was singing,—a ribald marching song, an unprintable thing, salacious and vilifying the Boches. From time to time a bullet reached home. Then the song ceased, and a defiant voice cried:
“Touché! Vive la France!”