Odette, soapy brush in hand, forcing back all repugnance, doing as others did, was helping to soothe agonies which humanity seems never before to have known or dreamed of. The most shocking duties no longer repelled her. The very effort which she was compelled to make, by the contrast between what she was seeing and doing and what life had formerly offered her, pressed the character of the catastrophe to her mind which lacked capacity to conceive of it. "Is it, then, so great?" she would wonder. And even: "Is there after all anything great?" For no soul in the world had taught her this. The inevitable contrast with her past life, all for herself, for her individual satisfaction, seemed to dishonor her memories, even of happiness, making them almost trivial. This, indeed, was the opinion of Mme. de Calouas, but not that of Amelia, whom in her solitude it became sometimes necessary to oppose.
"Madame adopts the ideas of those around her," the maid would say; "it is all very well, but Madame may believe me: the good time, and the true time, was before all this, when the poor men were not preparing to be made into hash."
[IX]
Who would have believed it a year ago? Odette took the inclination to follow to the cemetery the pitiful funerals of dead soldiers, not because it offered her a pretext for a walk into the country in the free air, for she had done that—she, so susceptible to cold—all through the black winter. But before everything else she was thinking that she had not followed her husband to the grave. After all that she had endured, still reverent of century-old rites, not to have followed the body of her husband in a funeral car to his last abode seemed to her to have failed in a sovereign duty. Alas! her husband's body had been carried in no funeral car, no one had followed him to the grave! She did not permit herself to dwell upon these heartrending details, but in accompanying the mortal remains of the soldiers she felt that she was to a certain degree acquitting herself of an indispensable duty that had not been rendered to Jean. Then the ceremony at the church moved her. The panoply of war mingling with hymns and words of peace, the tumult of battle set over against the sacerdotal acts of the priest, and the prayers for the eternal rest of the soul that had known to the uttermost the horror of earthly chaos, combined in some way to deaden the pain of mind, senses, and heart.
The funeral train would climb the narrow, serpentine road which led to the old town on the hill. Wounded comrades, hobbling along, their feet ill defended from the rough ground by straw slippers, some of them lacking an arm and others an eye, would follow the hearse of the poor, covered with the tricolor, behind the old parents or the young widow in tears; then would come delegates from the municipality and the hospital, then kindly disposed followers, pious people, idlers. The hedges would be growing green; the farms, with flocks of children at the doors and lowing cattle, would be awaking from the sleep of the long winter; one could hear the click of the milk-pail as it was set down upon the ground, the apple-trees in the fields were great tufts of unsullied flowers. When the procession, having climbed the hillside, turned toward the right the town came into view, its hotels and casinos transformed into hospitals with the floating red cross, its church-towers, its long white beach, the boundless sea with its line of English transports, untiringly through all the months, bringing from afar British troops to the land of France. The whole picture melted away into the national flag that covered the body of the little soldier, shot through by a ball on the plains of Picardy. In all this there was a new and incomparable poetry; the self-sacrifice of a man to something that he hardly understands, a notable act in which all desired to participate; and by contract the everlasting unconcern, the utter indifference, of nature.
Every one, without exception, was thinking of the end of the war. It was an illusion wrought by the spring, the renaissance of all that lives, the urgent need of peace and happiness that all creatures and plants cry out for beneath the returning sun. Those behind the hearse shook their heads, saying: "What a calamity!" But all were thinking: "It will surely soon be over." They sighed: "My God, grant that this may be the last to go!" Alas, it was only the first springtide of the war! If a prophetic voice should have cried: "In the spring of next year, in the spring of another year, and still of another, this same ceremony will take place, the same hopes will be uttered, the same illusions cherished! For season shall follow upon season, year upon year, only the horror and unhappiness shall be changed, for they shall increase and time shall know them out of all proportions that are called reasonable"—assuredly these good people would have been crushed.
As they went down the hill they gathered flowers along the roadside. The soldiers stopped in the wine-shops where they were given cider, and all returned to their places at once moved, saddened, and enriched by hopes, as is always the case when a new victim has succumbed.
Spring passed, and summer, and autumn.
Odette never spoke of her husband's death, though she was always thinking of it. She had found neither officer nor soldier who had known him. The death of Lieutenant Jacquelin in the early days of the war was a disappearance like so many others, in a chain of events that had no common measure. A man would fall, another man would take his place; nearly all the officers by profession were dead, and there were officers still.
"What is a man?" a common soldier asked her one day on the beach.