utpost duty, staring through the mist
and rain, and listening for the slightest sound of an approaching
enemy, or a man crouching beneath a ledge of earth, waiting for the
quiet words of En avant! which would make him scramble up and go
into a storm of shells with a fair chance of being cut to bits by flying
scythes. But in truth the sentiment that came welling up to those men
at the front was of infinite comfort and kept alight a flame in them
which no winter wind could douse. That sentinel on his stomach,
gripping a cold rifle with numbed hands, and cursing silently the fate
which had brought him to this agony, checked the fear that Avas
creeping up to his heart--was that a line of Boches stealing through
the mist?--when he thought that the women he knew, the folk in the
Normandy village, the old cure, and all the spirit of France had made
a hero of him and expected him to bear himself bravely, and in
imagination stood beside him to share his vigil. In order not to spoil
the image they had made of him, to live up to their ideals of him he
must hold on and kill these little devils of fear, and die, if need be, as
a gallant soldier of France. It would be fine to come back with a stripe
on his arm, perhaps with the military medal on his breast... But oh,
the pain in those frozen feet of his! and the coldness of this bed of
mud!

Poor devils! hundreds of them have told me their stories and at the
end of a tale of misery have said: "I do not complain, you know. It's
war, and I am glad to do my duty for the sake of France." And yet
sometimes, when they thought back, to the homes they had left, and
their old ways of civil life, they had moments of weakness in which all
the strength of their souls seemed to ebb away.

"It's fatal to think of one's life before the war," said a young
Frenchman who sat with me at the table of a little cafe not far from
the front. He was a rich young man, with a great business in Paris
which had been suspended on the first day of mobilization, and with a
pretty young wife who had just had her first baby. Now he was a
simple soldier, and for nine months he had not seen Paris or his
home or his pretty wife. The baby's eyes were grey-blue, it seemed,
but he had not been able to test the truth of that description.

"As a rule," he said, "one doesn't think back to one's old life. A great
gulf lies between us and the past and it is as though one had been
born again just to be a soldier in this war.