The "Great Event" had at last come to break the monotony of our barrack life, and no one thought of anything else. It was almost as if a sort of blindness prevented us from looking ahead and confined each man's attention to the preparations for departure. This indifference astonished me, and yet I myself shared it.
Was it decision or courage? To a certain extent, perhaps.... Did we really believe there was going to be war? I am not too sure of it. It was impossible to realize what war would be—to gauge the whole horror of it. And so we were not afraid.
From one of the barrack windows I saw the following scene:
A young man, promptly called up by the general mobilization, had just come out of a house opposite. He was walking backwards, shading his eyes from the sun in order to see the face of some one dear to him who stood at one of the second-floor windows. A fair-haired woman, very young and extremely pale, watched him with longing eyes from behind the muslin curtains, doubtless afraid to let him see her distraught face and tear-stained cheeks. She was standing close behind the curtains, her hand on her breast, with the fingers spasmodically stretched out in an attitude eloquent of grief. As he was about to disappear from view in a bend of the road, she suddenly opened the window wide, and showed herself for an instant. The man could not see her. She took two unsteady steps backwards, and sank into an arm-chair, where she sat huddled up, her face in her hands, and her shoulders shaken with sobs. Then, in the semi-darkness of the room, I caught sight of a servant with a Breton cap carrying a baby to her....
At noon we left the barracks in order to take up the quarters which had been assigned to us a little way down the Avenue de Pontlieue.
The 10th and 12th Batteries of the 44th Regiment of Field Artillery were to assemble upon a war footing in the cider-brewery known as Toublanc.
We had nothing to do except shake down straw bedding. A gas-engine was throbbing with an incessant double beat which got on one's nerves after a while. On the doors of the available buildings were crudely chalked the numbers of the regiments to which they were allotted.
The stables were installed in a shed open on one side, at one end of which casks containing harness were piled up. These stables would have been quite comfortable if they had not smelt so horribly owing to the dirty lavatories adjoining them.