  “The quarter-master had spent a feverish day gathering what comforts he could for the returning braves, fussing about like a good housewife expecting the return of her lord. Begging and borrowing and by less legitimate means accumulating those things that would make it something of a home-coming—the return to this spot—desolate and shell shriven by the shells of three years and the bombs of last night, but at the worst a haven of effeminate ease to the home-comers. “The cooks had worked with an energy that is explained by the fact that love and kindness are best expressed in the primitive world by food and, sentimental though it sounds, they wanted to show both of those things. Those profane slushies were the representatives of that fundamental and admirable human instinct to comfort the stricken with food, to gorge the tired hero. “The strays began to arrive alter midnight, in ones and twos and threes, directed by the battalion guides posted on the route, and from then onward the groups thickened and dispersed and gathered again around the cookers that shone like lode stars in the gloom. They came down the road out of the night asking for A company, B company, C company, leaning well forward to balance the light pack on the shoulders, the silent, the garrulous, the boisterous and the grim, and presenting their dixies for stew on the right, tea on the left. . . . “. . . all with a tendency to group about in the sociable area of the cookers where they stood, dropping brief words in confirmation of the narratives of the garrulous few, weary to exhaustion, eager for food and for rest, but for the while content with the negative joys of being merely out of it. “It is now that are told stories that will perhaps never be told again, for on his return from the line slowly but surely the civilian habit of mind reasserts itself, standards that are based on the sanctity of human life and which are at variance with the grim necessities of the hop-over, assume their normal control. I assume that in many cases good soldiers will no more talk in the decencies of civil life of things they have had to do in war than they will |
|
