To a young Guardsman, with his undeveloped mustache on
his upper lip, her demonstrations were embarrassing.
It was one of the paradoxes of the war that beauty lived but a mile or
two away from hideous squalor. While men in the lines lived in dugouts
and marched down communicating trenches thigh-high, after rainy
weather, in mud and water, and suffered the beastliness of the
primitive earth-men, those who were out of the trenches, turn and turn
about, came back to leafy villages and drilled in fields all golden
with buttercups, and were not too uncomfortable in spite of
overcrowding in dirty barns.
There was more than comfort in some of the headquarters where our
officers were billeted in French chateaux. There was a splendor of
surroundings which gave a graciousness and elegance to the daily life
of that extraordinary war in which men fought as brutally as in
prehistoric times. I knew scores of such places, and went through
gilded gates emblazoned with noble coats of arms belonging to the days
of the Sun King, or farther back to the Valois, and on my visits to
generals and their staffs stood on long flights of steps which led up
to old mansions, with many towers and turrets, surrounded by noble
parks and ornamental waters and deep barns in which five centuries of
harvests had been stored.
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