They
knew the meaning of it, and the women knew. Some of them became
quite pale, with others faces flushed. Their eyes were grave, but with
a queer fire in them as the verses rang out. ... It seemed to me as I
stood there in this hall, filled with stale smoke and woman's scent,
that I smelt blood, and gunpowder, and heard through the music of
the Marseillaise the shouts of hoarse voices, charging with the
bayonet, the screams of wounded, and then the murmur of a
battlefield when dawn comes, lighting the tattered flags of France.
20
The soldiers of France in that strange land called la-bas had one
consolation which should have helped them a little--did help them, I
think, more than a little--to endure the almost intolerable misery of
their winter quarters at the front in one of the wettest half years within
living memory. They stood in the waterlogged trenches, shivering and
coughing, they tramped through cotton-wool mists with heavy
overcoats which had absorbed many quarts of rain, they slept at
nights in barns through which the water dripped on to puddled straw,
or in holes beneath the carts with dampness oozing through the clay
walls, or in boggy beetroot fields under a hail of shrapnel, and their
physical discomfort of coldness and humidity was harder to bear than
their fear of death or mutilation.
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