This was where she had planted her tent and lived with Jean through a fortnight of sunny days, in utter abandonment to a delight that arose from the earth or fell down from the magnificent sky. Children had been playing about; excited little dogs had been barking to coax them to throw a pebble into the sea. They had ceased their indolent repose only to plunge into the sea, swimming side by side with delight.
To-day the beach was abandoned, and seemed to stretch away, gray and monotonous, to the end of the world. Odette seated herself under the shelter of the dune and uttered the beloved name of Jean. The raging wind carried it, like a flake of foam, toward that distant Havre where a number of transports were lying in the roadstead. The coachman who brought her from the train had pointed them out to her: they had brought over British troops; an average of fifty to fifty-five vessels was arriving every day. The war! Here, too, here again, when she had hardly left the train, she had been reminded of it.
Nevertheless, the hours passed and no one spoke of it, to her at least. The monotonous sound of the sea soothed her, and the sea, notwithstanding the troop-ships over there, seemed like something grand, entirely foreign to all the human butchery. Odette rested her eyes on the limitless plain, ever restless and sad. But this sadness was allied to her own, and at the same time something immense, majestic, and superhuman seemed to enter the depths of her still rudimentary consciousness of the dawn of a new time. She would have remained there for hours if the approach of evening had not rendered intolerable the sense of despair suggested by the scene, and if the rain had not begun to fall in torrents.
Odette took one of the paths leading back to the town.
Hardly had she reached it when she was surprised to see through the driving wind and rain that buffeted her, many illuminated buildings where she had expected only the shadows of a sleeping city. That was the Casino, which she had lately seen shut up by boards! And that was the Grand Hotel, all twinkling with light! She had to round the corner of the latter to reach her cottage, and by degrees as she approached it she saw a swarm of human beings, became aware of a commotion in the vast building which had seemed so funereal. Men with bandaged heads, with arms in slings, men walking on crutches; and the white head-dresses and red crosses of nurses; it was a hospital. The wind brought its odors to her—the smell of tincture of iodine, of cooking and an indescribable unsavoriness.
She drew near, passed beneath the windows. The sight was not so heart-breaking as she would have expected. The nurses, some of them young, wore a smile; if certain wounded men were stretched out, inert, others, seated on their beds, were quietly chatting, calling across to one another; a great burst of boyish laughter took her by surprise, while at the same moment she saw, close-pressed to the window-pane, directly under the electric light, the pitiful, waxen face of a sort of Lazarus rising from the tomb. She became aware that the other building, opposite, was equally crowded; she saw at the door an orderly in uniform, and the inscription on white linen: "Supplementary Hospital." She had thought to flee from the war; everything was bringing it to her. The pavilion that she had selected, with its green lawns, its poplars, its pergolas, was situated not far from these hospitals. All day long she would see only men who had been in the war!
Somewhat disheartened, she returned home. It was not what she had expected to find here. Two telegrams were awaiting her; she opened them listlessly—no news could be of serious moment to her. Both of them announced the death of young men whom she knew intimately, old friends of her husband; the first, an aviator crushed under his machine; the second, killed on the banks of the Yser.
The next morning several letters brought to her details of this twofold loss. The first of these young men, whom she remembered to have had at her house not three months before, had joined in aerial conflict with an enemy machine, at an altitude of two thousand metres; despairing of overcoming it by shots of grape, he had dashed upon it, crushing his own screw, but had also seen his adversary wrecked as they fell to earth together. It was one of the first exploits of the kind; its effect upon the imagination was great. The other victim of the day, an officer by profession, after having his shoulder crushed and his useless arm bound to his body by withes, had continued for an hour to command his company, until a bomb had scattered him in fragments.
Odette shuddered. The heroism touched her, as it touched every one; but these fine deeds, these multiplied deaths, overshadowed the case of her husband, blotted it out; the death of Lieutenant Jacquelin was fading from the general memory; other deaths were making more of a stir than his; as the war became more and more furious it seemed to relegate its earlier stages to a long-past time, somewhat inferior to the later tragedy. Lieutenant Jacquelin had been killed in the first days of the war, of a war still fought in old-fashioned way. The miseries of the trenches under the autumn rains was another sort of war, one which alone seemed to be true war. The headlong rush of the enemy on the Yser, of which people were better informed than of the earlier invasion at the Marne, arrested and absorbed the public mind. Odette felt this, and though she was determined that no thought of glory should mingle with her grief, the idea of glory and of the gigantic struggle that was going on did penetrate her mind in spite of herself, by reason of the diminution which the prestige of her own hero was suffering. She had never dreamed of finding a cause of pride in what he had done; one single thought had absorbed her: that her Jean, her love, was dead. In her wounded pride she was hurried into saying to herself: "He died nobly, he had a beautiful death, he too!" Yet the universal chorus seemed to reply: "Since him, others have done better."
She wrote to her newly widowed friends in words of exaggerated praise, affecting not to speak at all of her personal sorrow. It was a gratuitous effusion of temper, for the widows did not find her praises at all extravagant, and never observed Odette's reserve as to her own case.