He was enormously amused at his own efforts to get wounded. No wound, no decoration, was the custom in the French army, as far as the fighting men were concerned. Of course, at the back of the front, any little cock sparrow at Headquarters or the Base, could cover his breast with ribbons. But in the front line the only chance of distinction was a wound. For a long time he’d had the vilest luck. All his friends were wounded—and decorated. He remained without a scratch, and without a medal. The Colonel regarded him suspiciously, said he bore “a charmed life,” as though he indulged in some private Juju to keep immune from shell-fire and snipers’ bullets, aerial torpedoes, trench mortars, hand grenades, and the whole “bag of tricks.” The situation became serious. He walked in a veritable hail of shrapnel and nothing hit him. He made a home of No-Man’s Land at night, leading patrols, but no, the Boche ignored him. One day, in Arras, a monstrous aerial torpedo made straight for him. “Ah, ha, my friend! At last you are going to do my trick!” But the sacré torpedo was a dud, and fell at his very feet without exploding! Quelle mauvaise chance! What infernal bad luck! However, fortune’s wheel turned at last, and in the battle of the Somme, on the right of the British, he lost his arm and leg and gained the Médaille Militaire, and the Croix de Guerre.
Bertram joined in his gay laughter. This little French aristocrat was not posing, nor indulging in vainglorious boasting. He had loved the adventure of war, and found in it compensations for all its abominations and its tragedy of great death. A thousand years of ancestry had given him this instinct of war. Its spirit belonged to his blood. He was of the same race and quality as Amadis de Gaul, Roland, Bertrand du Guesclin, the Sieurs de Morny, the Knights of Froissart’s noble Chronicles. Old Christy would have voted for his death—theoretically—as a “carrier” of the war-microbe, as some people are typhoid carriers, infecting all who come in contact with them.
“Then you don’t agree with Le Feu, by Barbusse, as a true picture of the war from the poilu’s point of view?” asked Bertram.
Armand de Vaux “went off,” like a trench mortar. He denounced that book—the most terrible picture of war’s horror, which Bertram had read before writing his own—as the work of a traitor to France, as revolutionary propaganda of the vilest kind, an outrage upon the valour of the French soldier.
Bertram was silent, not caring to risk a dispute at this table, but pretty Mme. de Montauban expressed her own opinion.
“I had a nephew at Souchez and Notre Dame de Lorette—Pierre, as you remember? He tells me that Barbusse has given an exact picture of those trenches in the winter of ’15. The men were not relieved, month after month. They lived and ate and slept and died, in mud and filth. Some of them went mad, and others walked out into No-Man’s Land to end their misery by a German bullet. You remember only the amusing side of war, Vicomte! It is your temperament. In my hospital at Neuilly I saw too much tragedy to believe in your romance.”
“Bah!” said the Vicomte de Vaux. “Tragedy? Death? They are part of life, in peace as well as war. ‘A little laughter, a little love . . . and then good night!’ What more can we ask, except a good fight? Vive la Guerre!”
Mme. de Montauban laughed, and shook her head.
“That is the language of the eighteenth century. You speak that tongue, I know. You belong to that period. But for us moderns there is no truth in it. War has nearly destroyed our dear France. Another—and we die!”
“We shall have another,” said Armand de Vaux. “I shall weep to be out of it, with only one leg and one arm.”