A REARPOST OF WAR
After a year or more of war, even a latter-day war correspondent who gets a personally restricted war office Cook's tour to the front semi-occasionally, may yearn for peace. This is especially true in the case of a regular correspondent with the French army, because to France there come so many senators, statesmen and "molders of neutral opinion," bearing letters from President, King or Prelate, that the regular correspondent has hard work to edge in even his legitimate number of tours.
One morning I awoke early, far from the firing line, safe in my Paris flat. Before breakfast I read the hotel arrivals listed in the newspaper. The names of several molders were there. I knew that all their letters stated definitely what whales they were. I knew that the tour directors would not be able to resist them and that my seat in the next front-going limousine would probably be held in another name. So in the words of the ancient British music-hall classic I decided that "I didn't like war and all that sort of thing."
Twelve hours later I was standing on an old stone jetty that runs out to meet the forty-foot tides on the north coast of Brittany. It was as far away as I could get and still retain an official connection as correspondent with the French army. The tiny hamlet at the end of the jetty has an official name. The name does not matter. There is no railroad, no post office, no telegraph. But the place is known because it was there that Pierre Loti wrote his great story of the Iceland Fisherman. There was nothing to disturb the thoughts, nothing to jar the nerves. All was quiet and peace; of war there was not the slightest suspicion.
The water at the end of the jetty was thirty feet deep, but so clean that one could see through it as through air. I watched a crab waddle along the bottom and disappear under a rock. Then I got out my army glasses and swept the coast. For miles tremendous headlands stuck out in the sea, rolling over treacherous rocks. Before me was the Ile de Bréhat, the ancient home of the pirates, which thrusts an arm far out into the Atlantic—an arm that holds a lighthouse to tell mariners returning from Iceland that they are almost home.
Between the island and the mainland the outgoing tide swirled along at a rate of twelve sea miles per hour. I turned the glasses to the coast where the tiny Breton stone cottages were tucked behind rocks and hills that shelter them from storms and the long and terrible winter. Now they were bowers of color; clusters of roses and geraniums bloomed on garden walls, tall hollyhocks stood sentinel before the doors.
I dropped the glasses and sighed contentedly. Here I had found peace.
Near the old stone jetty a man was swimming. Suddenly he sat bolt upright on the water. His legs spread straight before him and his hands flapped idly at little waves. Occasionally he tugged at a long drooping walrus mustache, then rubbed the salt spray from his lips. He was a long angular individual and from my position on the jetty he appeared to be entirely unclad.