It was a sad, melancholy smell, telling of corruption and death. It was the first breath of autumn, and I shivered a little. Must there be another winter of war? The old misery of darkness and dampness was creeping up through the splendor of September sunshine.
Those soldiers did not seem to smell it, or, if their nostrils were keen, to mind its menace--those soldiers who came marching down the road, with tanned faces. How fine they looked, and how hard, and how cheerful, with their lot! Speak to them separately and every man would "grouse" at the duration of the war and swear that he was "fed up" with it. Homesickness assailed them at times with a deadly nostalgia. The hammering of shell-fire, which takes its daily toll, spoiled their temper and shook their nerves, as far as a British soldier had any nerves, which I used to sometimes doubt, until I saw again the shell-shock cases.
But again I heard their laughter and an old song whistled vilely out of tune, but cheerful to the tramp of their feet. They were going back to the trenches after a spell in a rest-camp, to the same old business of whizz-bangs and pip-squeaks, and dugouts, and the smell of wet clay and chloride of lime, and the life of earth-men who once belonged to a civilization which had passed. And they went whistling on their way, because it was the very best thing to do.
One picked up the old landmarks again, and got back into the "feel" of the war zone. There were the five old windmills of Cassel that wave their arms up the hill road, and the estaminets by which one found one's way down country lanes--"The Veritable Cuckoo" and "The Lost Corner" and "The Flower of the Fields"--and the first smashed roofs and broken barns which led to the area of constant shell-fire. Ugh!
So it was still going on, this bloody murder! There were some more cottages down in the village, where we had tea a month before. And in the market-place of a sleepy old town the windows were mostly broken and some shops had gone into dust and ashes. That was new since we last passed this way.
London was only seven hours away, but the hours on leave there seemed a year ago already. The men who had come back, after sleeping in civilization with a blessed sense of safety, had a few minutes of queer surprise that, after all, this business of war was something more real than a fantastic nightmare, and then put on their moral cloaks against the chill and grim reality, for another long spell of it. Very quickly the familiarity of it all came back to them and became the normal instead of the abnormal. They were back again to the settled state of war, as boys go back to public schools after the wrench from home, and find that the holiday is only the incident and school the more enduring experience.