* * * * *
What else comes out of the blur? The red smile of a comrade who lay grinning at me in a shell hole all one mortal day. I remember no one night, but I remember distinctly Night in the trenches,—the winging bullets, the occasional rocket, the rising, lumbering whirl of a trench mortar, the sudden digging in against the damp wall, a breathless wait, and then, somewhere up the line, an explosion, and a shriek:
“Ah, Jésu!”
* * * * *
But all this is the confusion of drifting fog. Out of the months in the Val de Grace I can see but two faces,—the provocative smile of a nurse, as a doctor whispered in her ear amid the groans and delirium of a Senegalese dying beside me, and another, the face of an old, ugly woman, strangely devoted and untiring,—an old woman on her hands and knees, scrubbing the floors for us, who, I was told, was a Princess of the House of Bourbon.
Only these details come back to me. The war is too near and too inevitable. I wish to escape it, if not entirely, for a brief period. For inaction is what is demoralizing now, inaction and the contemplation of the approaching fact. The moment convalescence ends and I step again into the ranks and feel the touch of a comrade’s shoulder, before that accomplished fact, all will seem obvious again,—but not now. All my instinct now is to put from me this thing that approaches so relentlessly.
* * * * *
Two periods of my life stand out; the calm of the early home days, and the disorder of two years in Paris; two utterly, inexplicably different David Littledales; on whom now I, a third personality, can look with some dispassionate estimate.
IV
October