NOVEMBER ELEVENTH
November came, and I helped the parish priest of Somaine to give Holy
Communion to the vast crowds of his people who received on All Saints
Day. In return, he helped me with the confessions of my men, for now
nearly all the members of the Fourteenth Battalion and very many of the
Thirteenth were French-speaking soldiers. I was beginning to feel that
all were ready spiritually for more battles when November 11th arrived
and we learned that hostilities had ceased.
If this were fiction, I might write a lengthy description of how the
troops went wild with joy, etc., etc.; but as it is the truth, I am
constrained to say we took it in a strangely quiet manner. We could
only look at each other and say: “Well, it’s over at last!” and we
would add, “thank God!” Perhaps we were dazed by the good news. Perhaps
it was that the terrible experience of war had left us incapable of
expressing our emotion. Perhaps these verses from “The Citizen of No
Man’s Land,” by Roselle Mercier Montgomery, express the strange tension
that had come to us during the war:
Why is it that, although we settle down
And live the lives we lived, a strange unrest,
A something, haunts us as we work or play--
A restlessness too vague to be exprest?
Is it that we who, out there, walked with Death
And knew the fellowship of Fear and Pain,
Are citizens for aye of No Man’s Land
And never shall be as we were again?
To those of us who played the game out there,
And saw brave men who failed to win lose all
Where Fate was dealer, Life and Death the stake,
Shall other games forevermore seem small?
’Tis true that home is dear and love is sweet,
And pleasant are our friends to be among,
Yet, something lacks to us from No Man’s Land--
Is it that no one here can speak our tongue?
We cannot tell them what befell us there,
For well we know they cannot understand;
So each sits quiet by his own hearth fire,
And sees therein the sights of No Man’s Land!
* * * * *
They feel our strangeness, too--those at one side
Who chatter of the things of every day;
They mark our silences, our strange reserve,
“Ah, he is changed!” they shake their heads and say.
They say the dead return not, but I think
We know, who have come back from No Man’s Land,
How ghosts must feel, who walk familiar ways
And yet find no one there to understand!