She had once thrown herself over the
bed of a politely protesting poilu, covering his helpless body with her
own, as a shell from a taube came through the roof.
That had been a wonderful, a noble and exalted (not to say exhilarating)
period; a period that made her almost grateful for a war that revealed to
her such undreamed of possibilities in her soul. She might smile at it in
satiric wonder in the retrospect, but at least it was ineradicable in her
memory.
If it could but have lasted! But it had not. Insensibly she accepted
suffering, sacrifice, pity, as a matter of course, even as danger and
death. It had been the romance of war she had experienced in spite of its
horrors, and no romance lives after novelty has fled. For months nothing
seemed to affect her bodily resistance to fatigue, and as exaltation
dropped, as the monotony of nursing, even of danger, left her mind more and
more free, as war grew more and more to seem, the normal condition of life,
more and more she became conscious of herself.
II
Life at the front is very primitive. Social relations as the world knows
them cease to exist. The habits of the past are almost forgotten. It is
death and blood; shells shrieking, screaming, whining, jangling; the boom
of great guns as if Nature herself were in a constant electrical orgasm;
hideous stench; torn bodies, groans, cries, still more terrible silences of
brave men in torment; incessant unintermittent danger.
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