Read an Excerpt

Six days in the trenches alternated with a three days' interval of rest "either billeted in the stables and haylofts of the village or encamped hi the woods and around the chateau." Thus the winter of 1914r-15 wore away, with little to break its monotony. The heaviest fighting was all to the northward. One gathers from his poem "The Aisne" that at Craonne he took part in the repulse of a serious enemy attack; but there is no mention of this in the letters before me. On March 12, 1915, he writes to his mother in fierce indignation over something that has appeared in an American paper as to life in the Foreign Legion. The writer of the "disgraceful article," he says, "like many others of his type, was long ago eliminated from our ranks, for a person buoyed up by no noble purpose is the first to succumb to the hardships of the winter that we have been through. ... If his lies did nothing worse than belittle his comrades, who are here for motives that he is unable to conceive, it would be only dishonourable. But when it comes to throwing discredit on the French Government, that in all its treatment of us has been generous beyond anything that one would think possible, it is too shameful for any words to characterize." With the coming of spring, there was of course some mitigation of the trials of the winter. Here is an almost idyllic passage from a letter to his sister, written on the fly-leaves of Les Confessions de J. J. Rousseau, Geneve, MDCCLXXXII: We put in a very pleasant week here—nine hours of guard at night in our outposts up on the hillside; in the daytime sleep, or foraging in the ruined villages, loafing in the pretty garden of the chateau, or reading up in thelibrary. We have cleaned this up now, and it is an altogether curious sensation to recline here in an ea...