"
The enemy did not often allow the young gentleman to sleep, and
about the windmill the shells were bursting.
They reached one Sunday morning almost as far as the little twelfth-
century church to which the young officer had stepped down from his
windmill to hear Mass in the middle of a crowd of soldiers chanting
the office, recited by a soldier, accompanied by a harmonium played
by another soldier. The windows were shattered, and a beautiful old
house next to the church lay in ruins.
The officer spent lonely hours in the windmill in charge of the
telephone exchange, from which the batteries were worked. The men
in the trenches and the gun-pits pitied his loneliness, and invented a
scheme to cheer him up. So after dark, when the cannonade
slackened, he put the receiver to his ears and listened to a Tyrolese
ballad sung by an orderly, and to the admirable imitation of a barking
dog performed by a sapper, and to a Parisian chanson delightfully
rendered by the aviator.
"Bonne nuit, maman," wrote the officer of artillery at the end of each
letter from his windmill.
8
The front did not change its outline on the map, except by
hairbreadths, for months at a stretch, yet at many points of the line
there were desperate battles, a bayonet charge now and then, and
hours of frightful slaughter, when men saw red and killed with joy.
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