Some distant sound had roused her, and now it drew nearer—footsteps and voices; men cheering and singing of ‘la gloire’ and ‘la mort.’ Nearer still they came, tramping along the pavement, till they were almost under her open window.
Then she was aware of a discordant note in that gallant chorus. One voice, raised in terror and remonstrance, was trying to dominate those other voices that were obviously shouting it down.
‘J’ai peur! Mon Dieu, camarades, j’ai peur!’
The words reached her distinctly now. But the rest, unheeding, sang louder than ever of ‘la mort’ and ‘la gloire.’
Possibly they were sorry for him. The coward is the unhappiest of men. Yet he too, being ‘enfant de la patrie,’ must go, even as others went; and Helen Forsyth, hearing him go, found the tears streaming down her face—not for the coercion of one reluctant citizen, but for the unending horror and misery of it all: the fear and the anguish and the calculated cruelty that were so infinitely worse than death.
Sheila, sleeping the profound sleep of healthily exhausted youth, stirred not an eyelash even when the noise was at its height. But for Helen that pitiful interlude had put an end to rest and had opened the door to nightmare memories and her own most private fears.
Since the letter that greeted her, there had been one barren field post-card. Even that was ten days old. And away there, in the trenches, the struggle seemed to wax fiercer every hour.
The blank parallelogram of her window gleamed pale grey before, in spite of herself, she fell asleep.
The strain of Mark’s sudden silence told upon the others also. It was tacitly assumed that postal arrangements were disorganised. Each hoped that the rest believed in that consoling fiction; but privately, they were sceptics all.
Helen continued to post his paper and her own thick envelope every other day in the hope that he was still to be found somewhere in the terrible maze of trenches that drew England’s best and bravest as a magnet draws steel.