We all had the dope in our wine on the night of August 7, 1918. At daybreak our troops to the east of Amiens would second the first blow of Foch at the German salient towards Paris, the giant arm that was now left sticking out into the air to be hit; its own smashing blow had been struck without killing; its first strength was spent; the spirit behind it was cracking; now, in its moment of check, of lost momentum, of risky extension, now to have at it and smash it. The bull had rushed right on to gore us and missed; we had his flank to stab now.
Someone who dined at the mess had just motored from Paris, through white dust and sunshine and, everywhere, quickly turned heads and eager faces. He had been in the streets all the night of the enemy’s last mighty lunge at the city. He spoke of the silent crowds blackening the boulevards through the few hours of midsummer darkness; other crowds on the skyline of roofs, all black and immobile, the whole city hushed to hear the bombardment, and staring, staring fixedly east at the flame that incessantly winked in the sky above Château-Thierry—history come to life, still enigmatic, but audible, visible, galloping through the night. Poor old France, tormented and stoical, what could not the world forgive her? Then he had seen the news come the next day to these that had thus watched as the noncombatants watched from the high walls of Troy; and how an American had broken down uncontrollably on hearing how his country’s Third Division had bundled the Germans back into the Marne: “We are all right! By God, we are all right!” he had cried, a whole new nation’s secret self-distrust before a supercilious ancient world changing into a younger boy’s ecstasy of relief in the thought that now he has jolly well given his proofs and the older boys will not sneer at him now, and he never need bluff any more. Good fellows really, the Yanks; most simple and human as soon as you knew them. One seemed to know everyone then, for that evening.
II
Night came on cloudless and windless and braced with autumn’s first astringent tang of coolness. Above, as I lay on my back in the meadow, the whole dome had a stir of life in its shimmering fresco, stars flashing and winking with that eager air of having great things to impart—they have it on frosty nights in the Alps, over a high bivouac. We were all worked up, you see. Could it be coming at last, I thought as I went to sleep—the battle unlike other battles? How many I had seen outlive their little youth of groundless hope, from the approach along darkened roads through summer nights, the eastern sky pulsating with its crimson flush, the wild glow always leaping up and always drawing in, and the waiting cavalry’s lances upright, black and multitudinous in roadside fields, impaling the blenching sky just above the horizon; and then, in the bald dawn, the backward trickles of wastage swelling into great streams or rather endless friezes seen in silhouette across the fields, the trailing processions of wounded, English and German, on foot and on stretchers, dripping so much blood that some of the tracks were flamboyantly marked for miles across country; and then the evening’s reports, with their anxious efforts to show that we had gained something worth having. Was it to be only Loos and the Somme and Arras and Flanders and Cambrai, all over again?
Thought must have passed into dream when I was awakened by some bird that may have had a dream too and had fallen right off its perch in a bush near my head, with a disconcerted squeak and a scuffling sound among dry leaves. Opening my eyes, I found that a thickish veil was drawn over the stars. When I sat up the veil was gone; my eyes were above it; a quilt of white mist, about a foot thick, had spread itself over the meadow. Good! Let it thicken away and be shoes of silence and armour of darkness at dawn for our men. Soon night’s habitual sounds brought on sleep again. An owl in the wood by the little chalk stream would hoot, patiently wait for the answering call that should come, and then hoot again, and listen again. The low, dry, continuous buzz of an aeroplane engine, more evenly humming than any of ours, droned itself into hearing and softly ascended the scale of audibility; overhead, as the enemy passed, was slowly drawn across the sky from east to west a line of momentarily obscured stars, each coming back into sight as the next one was deleted. In the east the low, slow grumbling sound of a few guns from fifty miles of front seemed, in its approach to quietude, like the audible breath of a sleeper. The war was taking its rest.
Some sort of musing half-dream about summer heaths, buzzing with bees, was jarred by the big blunted sound, distant and dull, of wooden boxes tumbling down wooden stairs, “off,” as they do in a farce. Of course—that night-bomber unloading on St. Omer, Abbeville, Étaples, some one of the usual marks. But now there was something to wake for. Not a star to be seen. I jumped up and found the mist thick to my armpits, and rising. Oh, good, good! Our men would walk safe as the attacking Germans had walked in the mist of that lovely and fatal morning in March. I slept hard till two o’clock
