It would not be right, in a book so full of bloodshed that I am afraid the reader may weary of it, to suppress a little adventure in which I played a somewhat comic part. When our battalion in the winter had been the guests of the King of Q⸺, I had, as a newly commissioned officer, to inspect the guard for the first time. As I was leaving the place in search of a small guard posted in a railway station, I lost myself, and had to ask the way at a little cottage standing alone. The only occupant was a seventeen-year-old girl called Jeanne, whose father had died not long before. She now kept house there alone. After giving me the information I asked, she smiled and said: “Vous êtes bien jeune. Je voudrais avoir votre avenir.” I gave her the name of Jeanne d’Arc, because of the martial spirit that inspired these words, and when I was back in the trenches I often thought of the bare and lonely cottage.
One evening, at Croisilles, I suddenly had the impulse to ride over there. I had a horse saddled, and the town was soon behind me. It was an evening of May, as though designed for a romantic excursion. The clover lay in dark red billows over the meadows, whose hedges were white with may and the chestnuts were like giant candelabra standing lit up in the dusk before the villages. I rode through Bullecourt and Ecoust without ever dreaming that two years later I should be going over the top in an attack on the ruins of these very villages that now lay so peacefully with their ponds and the hills behind.
At the little station where I had inspected the guard, civilians were still unloading gas-containers. I stayed watching them a while, and next the cottage gleamed out at me between its lilacs and red hawthorn, with its dark red tiles and the round lumps of moss. I knocked on the shutters, for they were already closed.
“Qui est lá?”
“Bon soir, Jeanne d’Arc!”
I was given as friendly a welcome as I could have hoped. When I had tied up my horse I went in, and was invited to supper: eggs, white bread, and butter, which was most appetizingly put on a cabbage-leaf. My small hostess meanwhile displayed that ease of manner that one finds so often in France among quite simple girls.
So far there would have been no fault to find, but later, when I was leaving, a military policeman flashed a torch at me and asked for my credentials. My talk with the civilians, the care with which I had observed the unloading of the gas-drums, and the unfamiliarity of my appearance in a district where there were few soldiers billeted, had all combined to awake a suspicion of espionage. Of course, I had forgotten my paybook, and so I was haled before the King of Q⸺, who was as usual still in conclave at the round table.
King and court alike behaved towards me with humour and discretion, and I was welcomed as one of the company. This time I saw the King in another light. The hour was late, and he discoursed of primeval tropical forests in which he had been employed for years laying a railway. He spoke well and vividly. We saw coast towns, with low white buildings gleaming out over the sea, caravans vanishing within forests aswoon with heat, blue butterflies spreading their iridescent wings, and clusters of crimson orchids blooming in festoons from trees that hung over mighty torrent-beds.
The strange figure of the King was indeed a sign that even the strictest army organization cannot so entirely mop up the personal element in life that nothing remains of man but his functions. Here was an oddity luxuriating from the grey soil of the war, and I was too little of the soldier pure and simple to be annoyed at it.
Hence too came the charm of my little adventure, to which there were other chapters to be added. Its charm lay in the contrast between its tender rural colours and the brazen background. The little pleasures that life offered borrowed an unimagined enhancement from the unceasing thunder of the guns and from the destiny whose oppression never left one’s mind. The colours were more affecting. The wish to knit oneself with life in enjoyment was more urgent. For the thought crept into everybody’s mind: “Perhaps this is the last spring you will see.” This gave an indescribable intensity to every expression of life, and after such an experience one can understand the peculiar wish of Stendhal, “La perfection de la civilisation serait de combiner tous les plaisirs délicats du 19me siècle avec la présence plus fréquente du danger.” Or, as Schiller expresses it in a manlier way without the taint of decadence:
“Be the summons tomorrow, yet today let us taste
The crest of each moment too precious to waste.”
On the 16th of June we were dismissed to our units after a brief address by the general, from which we learned that the enemy were getting ready for a big offensive on the western front, and that the left flank of it would be just opposite our part of the line.
It was clear to us after joining the regiment that something was in the air, for we were told by the others
