As he never can tell anything without acting it out, he was very comic
when he told about the battle in which the Prussian Guard was wiped
out. He is in the artillery, and he acted out the whole battle. When he
got to the point where the artillery was ordered to advance, he gave
an imitation of himself scrambling on to his gun, and swaying there,
as the horses struggled to advance over the rough road ploughed
with shell, until they reached the field where the Guard had fallen.
Then he imitated the gesture of the officer riding beside the guns, and
stopping to look off at the field, as, with a shrug, he said: "Ah, les
beaux gars" then swung his sabre and shouted: "En avant!"
Then came the imitation of a gunner hanging on his gun as the gun-
carriage went bumping over the dead, the sappers and pétrole
brigade coming on behind, ready to spray and fire the field, shouting:
"Allez aux enfers, beaux gars de Prusse, et y attendre votre kaiser!"
It was all so humorous that one was shocked into laughter by the
meeting of the comic and the awful. I laughed first and shuddered
afterward. But we do that a great deal these days.
I don't think I told you that I had found a wonderful woman to help me
one day in the week in the garden. Her name is Louise, and she was
born in the commune, and has worked in the fields since she was
nine years old. She is a great character, and she is handsome--very
tall and so straight--thirty-three, married, with three children,--never
been sick in her life. She is a brave, gay thing, and I simply love to
see her striding along the garden paths, with her head in the air,
walking on her long legs and carrying her body as steadily as though
she had a bucket of water on her head. It is beautiful.
Well, Louise has a brother named Joseph, as handsome as she is,
and bigger. Joseph is in the heavy artillery, holding a mountain-top in
Alsace, and, would you believe it, he has been there twenty months,
and has never seen a German.
Of course, when you think of it, it is not so queer, really. The heavy
artillery is miles behind the infantry, and of course the gunners can't
see what they are firing at--that is the business of the officers and the
eyes of the artillery--the aeroplanes. Still, it is queer to think of
firing big guns twenty months and never seeing the targets. Odder
still, Joseph tells me he has never seen a wounded or a dead
soldier since the war began. Put these little facts away to ponder on.
It is a war of strange facts.