But he forgets his resentment when a girl with dancing black eyes grasps his hand and that of one of his French colleagues and begins dancing down the street with them.
Out of the gathering twilight, stars of light suddenly flare—electric lights, search-lights, gas lights, lanterns. Paris, which has lived in darkness for four years, suddenly bursts into an orgy of colored lights—glitters like an enchanted city.
Into the city of lights and shadows, the sea of exultant humanity, they drift. They are part of the city, of the world suddenly grown mad with joy. Throughout France other men and women are celebrating like this. In England, in America, in Italy, in Belgium. Peace. Victory. The end of Tyranny. Freedom for all!
II
Of all this, Robert Hamilton, first lieutenant of infantry, was unaware.
In a crowded ward of the American hospital, on Rue de Saint Jacques, he was just emerging from ether. High explosive had shattered one of his ribs and had come within an ace of sending the jagged bone into his heart. A skilful surgeon had cut away bits of bone, substituted a plate of silver and stitched the skin back again. Of this also, Hamilton, of course, knew nothing. His last memory was of leading a wave toward a trench. Running ahead of the wave, running at a dog trot, with a rifle held at high port across his body, running through mud and shell holes, running into a grotesquely lighted night, with lights and rockets that screamed overhead and exaggerated every irregularity of the ground, that sent ghastly shadows staggering across the field and outlined the opposing trenches. Running, still running.
In the back of Hamilton’s brain something burned—a light, a flame, a pain, an idea. It was all that lived of that complex being—Hamilton. It was all that lived of his hopes and fears, his loves and prejudices, his habits and thoughts. A childhood in Corinth, a youth at prep school, four years of training at Harvard, generations of culture, all lay concentrated in a little feeble flame that was flickering, flickering.
The flame grew outward and shattered into other flames. The light expanded, throbbing. The pain grew sharper. Hamilton was beginning to think. Before he had simply been conscious of his existence.
Now he was running forward again through the grotesquely lighted field of battle. Running, running, with rockets and Verey lights and flames forming a pattern in his brain.
Then sounds throbbing through his consciousness—forming another pattern. Cries, shouts, the booming of cannon, the whirring of shells and unseen wings, singing.