“Mademoiselle,” said Toinette later, “do you think you will meet the little English soldier, Monsieur Trevor, in Paris?”
“Dans la guerre on ne se revoit jamais,” said Jeanne.
But there was more of personal decision than of fatalism in her tone.
So Jeanne waited for a day or two until the regiment marched away, and then, with heavy heart, set out for Paris. She wrote, indeed, to Phineas, and weeks afterwards Phineas, who was in the thick of the Somme fighting, wrote to Doggie telling him of her departure from Frélus; but regretted that as he had lost her letter he could not give him her Paris address.
And in the meantime the house of Gaspard Morin was shuttered and locked and sealed; and the bureaucratically minded old Postmaster of Frélus, who had received no instructions from Jeanne to forward her correspondence, handed Doggie’s letters and telegrams to the aged postman, a superannuated herdsman, who stuck them into the letter-box of the deserted house and went away conscious of duty perfectly accomplished.
Then, at last, Doggie, fit again for active service, went out with a draft to France, and joined Phineas and Mo, almost the only survivors of the cheery, familiar crowd that he had loved, and the grimness of battles such as he had never conceived possible took him in its inexorable grip, and he lost sense of everything save that he was the least important thing on God’s earth struggling desperately for animal existence.
Yet there were rare times of relief from stress, when he could gropingly string together the facts of a pre-Somme existence. And then he would curse Phineas lustily for losing the precious letter.
“Man,” Phineas once replied, “don’t you see that you’re breaking a heart which, in spite of its apparent rugosity and callosity, is as tender as a new-made mother’s? Tell me to do it, and I’ll desert and make my way to Paris and——”
“And the military police will see that you make your way to hell via a stone wall. And serve you right. Don’t be a blithering fool,” said Doggie.
“Then I don’t know what I can do for you, laddie, except die of remorse at your feet.”