"Never have I known Paul to write like that. Always he said I will come." Her heart was full of foreboding, and next time I saw her she took out the letter with shaking hands. Paul was dead.
"He knew," she said, as she wept bitterly; "he knew when he took his commission."
A reconnaissance from which all his men got back safely, Paul last of all, crawling on hands and knees ... raises himself to take a necessary observation ... a sniper ... a swift bullet ... a merciful death ... and an old heart bleeding from a wound that will never heal.
"If we see Death in front of us we care no more for it than we do for that." A Zouave held a glass of lemonade high above the canteen counter. "For that is the honour of the regiment. Death?" he shrugged. "One will die, sans doute. At Verdun, on the Somme, n'importe! My copain here has been wounded twice. And I? I had two brothers, they are both in your cemetery here. Yes, killed at Verdun, M'amzelle; I was wounded. Some day I suppose that we, nous aussi...." Again he shrugged. "Will you give me another lemonade?"
He and his companion wore the fourragère, the cord of honour, given to regiments for exceptional gallantry in the field. They had been at Vaux. And what marvels of endurance and sheer pluck the Zouaves exhibited there are matters now of common knowledge. Personally, I nourish a calm conviction that but for them and their whirlwind sacrifice Verdun must have fallen.
IV
Fatalists? Yes. But a thousand other things besides. It is useless to try and offer you the poilu in tabloid form, he refuses to be reduced to a formula. The pessimist of to-day is the inconsequent child of to-morrow. You pity him for his misfortunes, and straightway he makes you yearn to chastise him for his impertinence. His manners—especially in the street—like the Artless Bahdar's, "are not always nice." He can be, and all too often is, frankly indecent; indeed there are hours when you ask yourself wildly whether indecency is not just a question of opinion, and whether standards must shift when frontiers are crossed, and a new outlook on life be acquired as diligently and as open-mindedly as one acquires—or strives to!—a Parisian accent.
It is, of course, in the canteen that he can be studied most easily. There you see him in all his moods, and there you need all your wits about you if you are not to be put out of court a hundred times a day. Canteens are, as we have seen, accidental luxuries on the French front. They took root in most inhospitable soil. As happy hunting-grounds for the pacifists and anti-war agitators they were feared, their value as restoratives (I speak temperamentally, not gastronomically) being practically unknown. But once known it was recognised. The canteen at Bar-le-Duc, for instance, has been the means of opening up at least two others, though the opinion of one General, forcibly expressed when it was in process of installation, filled its promoters with darkest gloom.
"There will not be an unsmashed bowl, cup or plate in a week. The men will destroy everything." And therein proved himself a false prophet, for the men destroyed nothing—except our faith in that General's knowledge of them!
Once, indeed, we did see them in unbridled mood, and many and deep were the complications that followed it. It was New Year's Eve, and as I crossed the station yard I could hear wild revelry ascending to the night. (Perhaps at this point it would be as well to say that the canteen was not run by or connected in any way with our Society, and that I and two members of the coterie worked there as supernumeraries in the evenings when other work was done. The fourth and by no means last member was one of the fairy godmothers whose magic wand had waved it into being.) Going in, I found it as usual in a fog of smoke, and thronged with men. Now precisely what befell it would take too long to relate, but I admit you to some esoteric knowledge. The evening, for me, began with songs sung in chorus, passed swiftly to solos which blistered the air, and which would have been promptly silenced had not Authority warned us "to leave the men alone, they are in dangerous mood to-night." (A warning with which one helper, at least, had no sympathy.) It may safely be assumed that there was much in those songs which we did not understand, but, judging by what we did, ignorance was more than bliss, it was the topmost pinnacle of discretion.