As I was turning into bed I caught a glimpse through the barrack window of the two Gothic towers of the cathedral, standing high above the city as if in the act of blessing and guarding it.
All was quiet: the silence was only broken from time to time by the cry of the swallows as they skimmed through the clear air.
War, I repeated to myself, it is foolish even to think of, and this talk of war is but the outcome of some disordered pessimistic minds; and with that I went to sleep on my hard little webbed bed ... for the last time.
Towards midnight I woke with a start, as though someone had shaken me roughly. Yet all was still: the barracks were rapt in sleep. Near by me only the loud and heavy breathing of the twelve men who made up the number occupying the room could be heard, as I lay on my back, wide awake, waiting, for I now felt that the signal would surely come which should turn the barracks into a very hive of bees.
Five minutes passed—perhaps ten—then a deafening bugle call which made the very walls vibrate, calling first the first squadron, growing in volume as it called the second, louder still the third, like the roar of some beast of prey as it summoned ours; then it died away as it got farther off across the barrack square where the fifth squadron was quartered.
The sleepy troopers, half awake, sat up in their beds with a start—“Hulloa!—what? What is the matter?... Are we really mobilising?”
Then followed the sound of heavy boots in the corridors, heavy knocks on the doors, the silence of the night was a thing of the past and had given place to deafening clatter.
In a few seconds every man was on his feet without any clear idea as to what was forward. The sergeant-major called to me: “Mallet—run and warn the officers of the squadron to strap on their mess tins with their equipment and assemble in barracks as quickly as possible.”
So it’s serious, is it? and in a flash the truth, the very reverse of what I had been trying to believe, forced itself upon me and paralysed all other power of thought. Whether it breaks out to-morrow or in a month’s time, it is war—relentless war—that I seem to see like a living picture revealed.
The impression masters my mind as I turn each corner of the dark streets and open spaces, and the cathedral with its twin towers, so peacefully standing there, is transformed into a giant fortress watching over the safety of the country-side.