"Ca marche, la guerre? Il y a du progres?"
British officers came also, with dispatches from headquarters, and
two soldiers with loaded rifles in the back seats of cars that had been
riddled with bullets and pock-marked with shrapnel.
Two of these men told their tale to me. They had left the trenches the
previous night to come on a special mission to Paris, and they
seemed to me like men who had been in some torture chamber and
suffered unforgettable and nameless horrors. Splashed with mud,
their faces powdered with a greyish clay and chilled to the bone by
the sharp shrewd wind of their night near Soissons and the motor
journey to Paris, they could hardly stand, and trembled and spoke
with chattering teeth.
"I wouldn't have missed it," said one of them, "but I don't want to go
through it again. It's absolutely infernal in those trenches, and the
enemy's shell-fire breaks one's nerves."
They were not ashamed to confess the terror that still shook them,
and wondered, like children, at the luck--the miracle of luck--which
had summoned them from their place in the firing-line to be the escort
of an officer to Paris, with safe seats in his motor-car.
8
For several weeks of the autumn while the British were at Soissons,
many of our officers and men came into Paris like this, on special
missions or on special leave, and along the boulevards one heard all
accents of the English tongue from John o' Groats to Land's End and
from Peckham Rye to Hackney Downs.
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