But for the most part she had felt frozen, torpid, a cog in the vast
military machine of France, dedicating herself like hundreds of other
women to the succor of men she never saw. That extraordinary abominable
experience at the front was overlaid, almost forgotten. And such news as
one had in Paris was quite enough to exercise the mind....There had been
the downfall of the Russian dynasty...the still more sinister downfall of
the true revolutionists...the Bolshevik monster projecting its murderous
shadow over all Europe, exposing the instability of the entire social
structure....
VII
Was it? Could such an experience ever be forgotten? The grass might grow
over the dead on the battlefields, but the corruption fed the wheat, and
the peogle of France ate the bread. This uninvited thought had intruded
itself the first time she had driven by the Marne battlefields and seen the
numberless crosses in the rich abundant fields.
She smiled, a small, secret, ruthless smile....That was her residue:
ruthlessness. She may have left behind her in the turbulent war-zone the
savage elementary lust for living at any cost, but she had ineradicably
learned the value of life, its brevity at best, the still more tragic
brevity of youth; she had a store of hideous memories which could only be
submerged first in the performance of duty if duty were imperative; then,
duty discharged and finished, in the one thing that during its brief time
gave life any meaning, made this earthly sojourn bearable.
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