. . Arras
was being shelled again, as I saw it many times in those long years of
war.
The darkness of all the towns in the war zone was rather horrible.
Their strange, intense quietude, when the guns were not at work, made
them dead, as the very spirit of a town dies on the edge of war. One
night, as on many others, I walked through one of them with a friend.
Every house was shuttered, and hardly a gleam came through any crack.
No footstep, save our own, told of life. The darkness was almost
palpable. It seemed to press against one's eyeballs like a velvet
mask. My nerves were so on edge with a sense of the uncanny silence
and invisibility that I started violently at the sound of a quiet
voice speaking three inches from my ear.
"Halte! Qui va la?"
It was a French sentry, who stood with his back to the wall of a house
in such a gulf of blackness that not even his bayonet was revealed by
a glint.
Another day of war came. The old beauty of the world was there, close
to the lines of the bronzed cornfields splashed with the scarlet of
poppies, and the pale yellow of the newly cut sheaves, stretching away
and away, without the break of a hedge, to the last slopes which met
the sky.
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