It was peaceful, in a
way, but, at the heart of the calm, a menace. So we overlaid the tension
with casual petty acts. We made an informal pool of our resources in
tobacco, each man sharing with his neighbor, till nearly every one of us
was puffing away, and deciding there was nothing to this German attack,
after all. A smoke makes just the difference between sticking it out or
acting the coward's part.
Each one of us in a lifetime has a day of days, when external event is
lively, and our inner mood dances to the tune. Some of us will perhaps
always feel that we spent our day on October 21, 1914. For we were
allowed to go into a town that fell in that one afternoon and to come
out again alive. It was the afternoon when Dixmude was leveled from a
fair upstanding city to a heap of scorched brick and crumbled plaster.
The enemy guns from over the Yser were accurate on its houses.
We received our first taste of the dread to come, while we were yet a
little way out. In the road ahead of us, a shell had just splashed an
artillery convoy. Four horses, the driver, and the splintered wood of
the wagon were all worked together into one pulp, so that our car
skidded on it. We entered the falling town of Dixmude. It was a thick
mess into which we rode, with hot smoke and fine masonry dust blowing
into the eyes. Houses around us crumpled up at one blast, and then shot
a thick brown cloud of dust, and out of the cloud a high central flame
that leaped and spread.
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