if you stand outside the old fortifications of the town of toul and look eastward toward the german peoples, you see a long even line of hills, very high but not quite mountainous; they end in a sharp dip, and rise again, and terminate in an isolated summit which, like so many of the striking conical peaks of europe, is dedicated to st. michael.
these heights, like all the crests which surround the basin of that entrenched camp, are fortified, both with complete works and with connecting trenches and batteries; save in the gap between the isolated hill and the ridge i have mentioned the guns are everywhere. in this gap, in the hollow of it and upon the hillside, is a little village which, like all the villages on the actual line of the encircling forts, is wholly dominated by the soldiery; these furnish it with all its trade, these give it its few adventures and its manner of life. the peasants are woken summer and winter by the sound of bugles; the heavy firing of practice is a usual thing to them; a profitable commerce with a garrison twice as numerous as the civil population enriches those who work upon their land.
[pg 168]
in this village there lived one of those families which are poor in a country of free men through their own fault; they had land, of course; no rent was asked of them; they were in a community which had now for many ages administered itself, and had for more than a hundred years forgotten the oppression of a territorial class. nevertheless, by some vice of temperament, they lived like slatterns, and if they cultivated at all some tiny patch of their ruined and weedy holding, it was but just so much as would keep their souls within their bodies, and they preferred chance begging and barefoot jobs at the railway-station or in the streets of the town. their house was more a cave than a hut; it was dug out of the hillside, with beaten earth walls, save where the front portion of it jutted out, and was roofed with old bits of corrugated iron borrowed or stolen from the sappers. these were supported by a jumble of ramshackle wood, old railway-sleepers, and here and there were gaps stopped roughly with canvas.
in such a place, surrounded by brothers and sisters of all ages, and the only houseworker to a drunken and worthless mother, lived, by accident, one of those women who have such great power in this world. her ugliness was singular; it had nothing to do with that power save perhaps to enhance it. her hair, which was sparse and crisp, was of a bright, unpleasing red, harsh and offensive; her eyes were green and stood very far apart in her head;[pg 169] her mouth was large and very decided and firm. it is not by any recapitulation of her features (though any one who had once seen them would always remember them) that one can give the impression of her power. this rather proceeded from a gesture, a manner, and a whole being which was the continual outer manifestation of a certain kind of soul. there was strength in all her gestures, an upstanding challenge in the poise of her body whether she worked or walked, and a sort of creative handling of things whenever she grasped them which at once arrested the attention of a man. her excessive poverty and the gross carelessness of her surroundings, by contrast greatly enhanced these things.
the young soldiers cared very little for mysteries; their religion was indifferent to them, their knowledge of the perils and of the adventures of the soul was less than that of children; for those who might have guessed at the mysterious things which everywhere surround our existence, even at twenty-one, had such imaginings drowned and purged out of them by continual labour in the open air, by hours of grooming and of riding, by the deep and glorious fatigue of such a life, by sleep in the night, by hunger and by fellowship. nevertheless, among the more leisured, that is, among the non-commissioned officers, there was one man who fell under the spell. he was handsome, unintelligent, lacking in judgment, and perhaps twenty-five years of age. his father was a large farmer to the north of rheims;[pg 170] he had a very fair allowance from home; he was regular and did his service well; he was, so far as the non-commissioned ranks can be in any army, popular with the men. this fellow felt the spell. he felt it neither deeply nor violently, for his nature was one on which the great emotions could have no play; but he would seek such duties as brought him to the village, he would intrigue to be sent upon any inspection of the reserve forces or with provisions up into the forts, or upon any other business which would give him for a few moments a chance of seeing her at the door of that miserable hovel, and of exchanging half-a-dozen words from the saddle. his leave he would often spend in the inn of that village, some said in her company (but i doubt if this were true); he would have taken her once into nancy to see some public show or other, but she would not go.
between the end of winter and the start for camp, the thing had become as much a habit to him as his own name, and by a sort of code which the regiment observed, his habit was respected and passed by; indeed, to have become so immeshed regarded no one but himself, and the singular net that had been thrown over him was not one which others envied. but there was one who envied him.
when he had been vaguemestre, that is, the sergeant deputed to fetch the letters of the regiment, and often also when he had gone out to note the condition of the reserve horses or upon any[pg 171] other message, he had taken with him one of the two-year men, a belgian who had crossed the frontier to find work in his teens, and was not ill content to have been caught by the conscription, for he was utterly destitute and knew neither father nor mother. this man was dark, short and broad; he was kindly in temper and, one would have said, an animal for stupidity. he was possessed of great physical strength; he was a faithful servant and follower where he was employed. and his sergeant who thus favoured him would often see to it that his service should be lightened in one way or another, and made his life more easy to him than it was to the other drivers of the battery. he was popular, every one helped him, he had done harm to no one, he was always willing. he very rarely spoke, amid all that voluble clatter of young men, and when he did, it was to crack some simple peasant joke or to repeat some old tag of a proverb.
but one day the head of the room who happened to have no stripes and was no more than an older soldier, or, as it was called in that service, "an ancient," found him sitting on his bed and crying. the lout was crying in a gentle but despairing sort of way. the ancient was a rough man, a miner and rather brutal. he would have none of it. and just as he was making things rough for the belgian, the sergeant's voice came down the wooden corridors calling him to saddle the two beasts: and all the belgian did was to refuse. it was a quite unheard-of[pg 172] thing. there was no elasticity in the service; and if any one in authority said "do this," to say "i will not," or even to be slow in obedience, was as grave, or rather as unknown, as is a crime of violence among wealthy men.
now the sergeant, with more womanliness and discernment than one would have thought any one could have shown in such a place, made no noise about it, but came in to see what miracle had happened. he saw the lad sitting there upon his bed with his coarse face full of despair, and he did not in the least understand what could have happened. the eyes of the lad were as full of wonder and of terror and of hopelessness as though he had seen some full tragedy of human life. the sergeant shrugged his shoulders and let him be, and to save his being worried sent him off upon an easy job until he should come round. then taking another man to saddle the two horses and to accompany him, he went off upon his usual round towards the hills, upon some official errand or other which he had managed to secure. but when he got there he found in the village, without leave, and having run and panted through the newly ploughed fields, this belgian fellow, looking like an angry dog, sullen, and with new tears in his eyes, standing outside the door of the hovel.
he ordered him back; he rode his horse after him as the belgian obeyed, and began trudging suddenly away, and said that he would not report it, but that[pg 173] it was a piece of madness, and that if that sort of thing went on it ended in africa.
the belgian said nothing, but plodded off, his enormous strength apparent in every step; and apparent also in the set of his neck and shoulders, and the bending of his head, something of doom. when he got back to quarters he got a ball cartridge from the workroom—no one knows how—he put it in one of the gunner's carbines, which he took from the rack—he had never handled such a weapon before—pulled off the boot from his sockless right foot, put the barrel of the thing in his mouth, and with his toe pressed down the trigger. in this way he killed himself.
i have told the thing exactly as it happened. then many of the young men first knew that our lives are not wholly of our own ordering, or, to put it better, learned that to ride one's destiny needs in the soul of a man a training, a quickness and a constancy like that which, in the body, helps a man to ride a strong horse and to control him.
