We don't want to talk much after coming on the river: neither do we....
It has darkened palpably when we turn to enter the village, an hour after. The hedged lanes are dark under the poplar-groves. The latticed windows of the cottages are brilliant patchwork of light. The glow-worms are in the road-side grass and in the hedges. We pluck them to put them in our hats. Thérèse weaves all manner of wistful fancies about them. We pass under the Henry VIII. _église_ to the house, and enter quietly.
Thérèse sits at the piano without stupid invitation, and sings some of the lovely French folk-songs, and (by a special dispensation) some German, that are almost as haunting. The old man watches his daughter with a sort of fearful adoration, as though this creature, whose spirit gleams through the fair flesh of her, were too fine a thing for him to be father of.
Between the songs we talk. There is cake and wine--that and the common-sensed sallies of _Mme. la Comtesse_ to restrain the romance and the sensuousness of the warm June Normandy night.
I left at midnight. We said an _au revoir_ under the porch; and far down the road came floating after the dawdling wheel a faint "_Au 'voir ... à Dimanche_"--full of a sweet and friendly re-invitation to all this. I registered an acceptance with gratitude for the blessings of Heaven, and wandered on along the white night road for Rouen. Why hasten through such a night? Rouen would have been pardoned for being _twice_ ten miles distant. The silent river, the gleaming road, the faintly rustling trees, and the warm night filled with the scents of the Forêt de Roumare, forbade fatigue and all reckoning of hours.... And that was the blessed conclusion of most Sabbath evenings for three months.
_Sunday, --th._--This morning a Taube came over our village, dropping bombs. They all fell in the neighbouring wood. Our aircraft defences made a fervent response, but ineffectual.
At 6.30 this evening I counted eighteen of our 'planes flying home. They have a facetious trick of shutting off their engines high and far from home and floating down on resistance. It's curious watching a 'plane suddenly dissociated from the raucous buzz of its engine.
To-night the whole eastern sky is illuminated as though by summer lightning in which there are no intervals--an unintermittent flap-flap. The din is tremendous and heart-shaking. This is war--"and no error." Anzac was hard. The country was rough and untenable--a hell, in our strip, of lice, stinks, flies, mal-nutrition and sudden death. Food was repulsive, and even so you did not get as much as you desired. You got clean in the Ægean at peril of your life. Here, on the other hand, is fighting-space gentle and smiling--a world of pastures, orchards, streams, groves, and white winding roads, with room to sanitate and restrain plagues. There is an over-generous ration of food that tempts you to surfeit; Expeditionary Force canteens, as well stocked as a London grocer's, as far up as the riskiest railhead; snug farmhouse billets, with un-infested straw; hot baths behind the lines; cinemas for resting battalions. But Anzac never knew the relentlessness of this offensive fighting. There we faced an enemy with whom fighting was a hobby, taken sportingly, if earnestly. Here we wrestle at sweaty and relentless grips with a foe to whom the spirit of sport is strange and repulsive, and who never had a sense of humour; who fights hating blindly and intensely. Most days you could not jab a pin between the gun-belches. You feel the whole world is being shaken, and, if this goes on for long, will crumble in a welter of blood and hate. It cannot last at this rate: that's the assurance that rises day by day and hour by hour within you. But the assurance is melancholy: how much of either side is going to survive the intensity of it? What will be the state, when all is over, of the hardly-victorious?