"I see that you aren't pitying us. Well, for my part I tell you that I have had enough of this war, and that I despise it! Do you understand? I despise it. Ugh! ugh! and ugh!"
Odette returned home along the darkening streets, thinking of Mme. de Blauve, the terrible. She felt much indulgence for Mme. de Blauve, the terrible.
[XII]
Odette had bought a newspaper. During the night the Germans had made a series of massed attacks, debouching upon Malancourt from three directions at once. Our troops had evacuated the devastated village "while keeping its outlets."
Once again she tried to take refuge in her memories of love. But this evening the portraits of Jean that she saw around her did not speak to her of love. She felt that Jean, if he were there, would not talk of love that evening, but would turn away like an overwrought man to whom the beloved one insists upon saying: "Kiss me!" She could distinctly see the gesture which, however, she had seldom known. She could almost hear Jean saying: "My little love, I am anxious.... It is not that I lack confidence, but they are advancing step by step; it is disquieting, disquieting. You will think me cruel, but I should be glad to go back there. I would rather be there, do you see?" If he had been with her on permission he would have gone back! What torture! And she said to herself: "If he had not been killed the second month he would have been killed since then: twenty months without respite under the shells!"
Days passed; the German attack upon Verdun wrought upon the great public of France a great silence. No noise, not an exclamation, no excesses in Paris; an imposing calm; a quiet crowd upon the boulevards, perfect order even on Sunday; almost gayety around the men who were home on leave who went about surrounded by young women in short skirts, Anamite caps or toques borrowed from the Palais, painfully walking on extravagantly high heels! Between four o'clock and seven every one was reading the newspaper. They were sold all through the city, not with loud shouts as if all Europe had been put to fire and sword, as when celebrated trials were going on; now that Europe actually was put to fire and sword, with less uproar than after the Auteuil races. In almost every heart the sublimity of the French struggle, the universal respect which it evoked throughout the world, overcame apprehension, stifled the sense of uncounted losses, and dominated that crater on the banks of the Meuse, in eruption over an extent of thirty-five kilometres, its lava overwhelming a whole countryside.
Odette was invited to dine with officers who had returned from that hell, who were going back to it; and these men talked futilities like every one else: partly from kindliness, partly for their own pleasure, or in courteous resumption of the decorum of former days. Between two witticisms they would relate an episode such as no story of the age of fable could offer. Many of them were men who two years before had danced the tango, whom strait-laced old twaddlers had in those days held up to opprobrium. Thus Odette met again a young fellow of twenty-four, a captain, an officer of the Legion of Honor, lacking several fingers, wounded in the leg and the breast. He had the same simplicity, the same childlike grace, as in the old time at the Casino in Surville, and yet he had taken part in actions infinitely more grand than those of the Homeric heroes or of the wars of Cæsar or Alexander.
He kissed a lady's hand, and that same evening went back to the jaws of the volcano. And that same week the word came that after having been three times buried alive in the undermined earth, his young body had been blown to atoms on Hill 304.
[XIII]
The next morning, her friend La Villaumer having come to see her, she introduced a subject which had been tormenting her.