Dawn—I do not know why—is always a sad hour. And on the mornings of battle this inherent sadness is rendered more poignant by the dread of the terrible and perhaps final experiences which the day just born may hold in store. Regrets and fears become linked in a vicious circle of thought from which there is no escape.
One's only desire is to live—to return alive in the evening—but to conquer first, to prevent the enemy from reaching our homes, above all to protect the weak and loved ones behind us, in France, whose lives are even more precious to us than our own. To conquer! And still live to-night!
The battery again took up position near the holocaust of the farm, which was still burning, and the wagons returned to their gully.
My wrist was giving me considerable pain, and the medical officer wanted to send me behind the lines on sick-leave, but I preferred to rest with the wagons a few days longer and then return to my gun.
The rain began to fall in torrents. On the edge of a lucerne-field one of our horses, which we had to abandon yesterday, was rolling in its death agony. The straw we had brought with us, hashed up by the wheels of the vehicles and by the hoofs of the horses, and mingled with the water and mud which had collected in the clayey hollow, formed a kind of noisome quicksand into which we sank ankle-deep.
The men did not open their lips except to swear or complain. No more dead wood was to be found in the copses; all had been consumed yesterday and the day before. We could not light a fire. Some passing gunners told us that there were still some faggots in a farm near the water-tanks, and we at once hurried thither. On the plain the corpses were no longer lying among the loose sheaves. On one side of the Tracy road, which was now nothing more than a swamp, the earth had been dug up in the middle of the field of mangel-wurzels and two crosses roughly fashioned out of planks marked the grave.
The farm to which we had come in our quest for wood had been arranged as a first-aid post. The buildings surrounded a yard, in the centre of which, near the dung-heap, were ranged up several green-tilted carts marked with the red cross. In one corner a heap of cotton-wool and some blood-stained bandages and compresses were slowly burning.
In the stable and cow-sheds one could see, through the half-open doors, the recumbent forms of sick and wounded lined up on the straw underneath the empty troughs and mangers. Some hospital orderlies in canvas clothing were busy making soup. A medical officer stalked stiffly by in his white smock. Not a cry of pain was to be heard.