FRENCH OFFICERS
The guns began to speak again among the hills that we dived
into; the air grew chillier as we climbed; forest and wet
rocks closed round us in the mist, to the sound of waters
trickling alongside; there was a tang of wet fern, cut pine,
and the first
breath of autumn when the road entered a tunnel
and a new world--Alsace.
Said the Governor of those parts thoughtfully: "The main
thing was to get those factory chimneys smoking again." (They
were doing so in little flats and villages all along.) "You
won't see any girls, because they're at work in the textile
factories. Yes, it isn't a bad country for summer hotels, but
I'm afraid it won't do for winter sports. We've only a metre
of snow, and it doesn't lie, except when you are hauling guns
up mountains. Then, of course, it drifts and freezes like
Davos. That's our new railway below there. Pity it's too
misty to see the view."
But for his medals, there was
nothing in the Governor to show
that he was not English. He might have come straight from an
Indian frontier command.
One notices this approximation of type in the higher ranks,
and many of the juniors are cut out of the very same cloth as
ours. They get whatever fun may be going: their performances
are as incredible and outrageous as the language in which they
describe them afterward is bald, but convincing, and--I
overheard the tail-end of a yarn told by a child of twenty to
some other babes. It was veiled in the obscurity of the
French tongue, and the points were lost in shouts of laughter
--but I imagine the subaltern among his equals displays just as
much reverence
for his elders and betters as our own boys do.
The epilogue, at least, was as old as both Armies:
"And what did he say then?"
"Oh, the usual thing. He held his breath till I thought he'd
burst. Then he damned me in heaps, and I took good care to
keep out of his sight till next day."
But officially and in the high social atmosphere of
Headquarters their manners and their meekness are of the most
admirable. There they attend devoutly on the wisdom of their
seniors, who treat them, so it seemed, with affectionate
confidence.
