The priests
used to tap at my door when I came back from the battlefields all
muddy, with a slime-plastered face, writing furiously, and an old
padre used to plague me like that, saying:
"What news? It goes well, eh? Not too well, perhaps! Alas! it is a
slaughter on both sides."
"It is all your fault," I said once, chaffingly, to get rid of him.
"You do not pray enough."
He grasped my wrist with his skinny old hand.
"Monsieur," he whispered, "after eighty years I nearly lose my faith
in God. That is terrible, is it not? Why does not God give us victory?
Alas! perhaps we have sinned too much!"
One needed great faith for courage then, and my courage (never much to
boast about) ebbed low those days, when I agonized over our losses and
saw the suffering of our men and those foul swamps where the bodies of
our boys lay in pools of slime, vividly colored by the metallic vapors
of high explosives, beside the gashed tree-stumps; and the mangled
corpses of Germans who had died outside their pill-boxes; and when I
saw dead horses on the roads out of Ypres, and transport drivers dead
beside their broken wagons, and officers of ours with the look of
doomed men, nerve-shaken, soul-stricken, in captured blockhouses,
where I took a nip of whisky with them now and then before they
attacked again; and groups of dazed prisoners coming down the tracks
through their own harrowing fire; and always, always, streams of
wounded by tens of thousands.
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