Section 6
With the dawn that awakening went about the earth. I have told how
it came to me, and how I walked in wonder through the transfigured
cornfields of Shaphambury. It came to every one. Near me, and for
the time, clear forgotten by me, Verrall and Nettie woke--woke near
one another, each heard before all other sounds the other's voice
amidst the stillness, and the light. And the scattered people who
had run to and fro, and fallen on the beach of Bungalow village,
awoke; the sleeping villagers of Menton started, and sat up in
that unwonted freshness and newness; the contorted figures in the
garden, with the hymn still upon their lips, stirred amidst the
flowers, and touched each other timidly, and thought of Paradise.
My mother found herself crouched against the bed, and rose--rose
with a glad invincible conviction of accepted prayer. . . .
Already, when it came to us, the soldiers, crowded between the
lines of dusty poplars along the road to Allarmont, were chatting
and sharing coffee with the French riflemen, who had hailed them
from their carefully hidden pits among the vineyards up the slopes
of Beauville. A certain perplexity had come to these marksmen, who
had dropped asleep tensely ready for the rocket that should wake
the whirr and rattle of their magazines. At the sight and sound of
the stir and human confusion in the roadway below, it had come to
each man individually that he could not shoot. One conscript, at
least, has told his story of his awakening, and how curious he thought
the rifle there beside him in his pit, how he took it on his knees
to examine. Then, as his memory of its purpose grew clearer, he
dropped the thing, and stood up with a kind of joyful horror at
the crime escaped, to look more closely at the men he was to have
assassinated. "Braves types," he thought, they looked for such
a fate. The summoning rocket never flew. Below, the men did not
fall into ranks again, but sat by the roadside, or stood in groups
talking, discussing with a novel incredulity the ostensible causes
of the war. "The Emperor!" said they; and "Oh, nonsense! We're
civilized men. Get some one else for this job! . . . Where's the
coffee?"
The officers held their own horses, and talked to the men frankly,
regardless of discipline. Some Frenchmen out of the rifle-pits came
sauntering down the hill. Others stood doubtfully, rifles still in
hand. Curious faces scanned these latter. Little arguments sprang
as: "Shoot at us! Nonsense! They're respectable French citizens."
There is a picture of it all, very bright and detailed in the
morning light, in the battle gallery amidst the ruins at old Nancy,
and one sees the old-world uniform of the "soldier," the odd caps
and belts and boots, the ammunition-belt, the water-bottle, the
sort of tourist's pack the men carried, a queer elaborate equipment.
The soldiers had awakened one by one, first one and then another.
I wonder sometimes whether, perhaps, if the two armies had come
awake in an instant, the battle, by mere habit and inertia, might
not have begun. But the men who waked first, sat up, looked
about them in astonishment, had time to think a little. . . .
