In the Days of the Comet

With the dawn that awakening went about the earth.  I have told how it came to me, and how I walked in wonder through the transfigured cornfields of Shaphambury.  It came to every one.  Near me, and for the time, clear forgotten by me, Verrall and Nettie woke—­woke near one another, each heard before all other sounds the other’s voice amidst the stillness, and the light.  And the scattered people who had run to and fro, and fallen on the beach of Bungalow village, awoke; the sleeping villagers of Menton started, and sat up in that unwonted freshness and newness; the contorted figures in the garden, with the hymn still upon their lips, stirred amidst the flowers, and touched each other timidly, and thought of Paradise.  My mother found herself crouched against the bed, and rose—­rose with a glad invincible conviction of accepted prayer. . . .

Already, when it came to us, the soldiers, crowded between the lines of dusty poplars along the road to Allarmont, were chatting and sharing coffee with the French riflemen, who had hailed them from their carefully hidden pits among the vineyards up the slopes of Beauville.  A certain perplexity had come to these marksmen, who had dropped asleep tensely ready for the rocket that should wake the whirr and rattle of their magazines.  At the sight and sound of the stir and human confusion in the roadway below, it had come to each man individually that he could not shoot.  One conscript, at least, has told his story of his awakening, and how curious he thought the rifle there beside him in his pit, how he took it on his knees to examine.  Then, as his memory of its purpose grew clearer, he dropped the thing, and stood up with a kind of joyful horror at the crime escaped, to look more closely at the men he was to have assassinated.  “Brave types,” he thought, they looked for such a fate.  The summoning rocket never flew.  Below, the men did not fall into ranks again, but sat by the roadside, or stood in groups talking, discussing with a novel incredulity the ostensible causes of the war.  “The Emperor!” said they; and “Oh, nonsense!  We’re civilized men.  Get some one else for this job! . . .  Where’s the coffee?”

The officers held their own horses, and talked to the men frankly, regardless of discipline.  Some Frenchmen out of the rifle-pits came sauntering down the hill.  Others stood doubtfully, rifles still in hand.  Curious faces scanned these latter.  Little arguments sprang as:  “Shoot at us!  Nonsense!  They’re respectable French citizens.”  There is a picture of it all, very bright and detailed in the morning light, in the battle gallery amidst the ruins at old Nancy, and one sees the old-world uniform of the “soldier,” the odd caps and belts and boots, the ammunition-belt, the water-bottle, the sort of tourist’s pack the men carried, a queer elaborate equipment.  The soldiers had awakened one by one, first one and then another.  I wonder sometimes whether, perhaps, if the two armies had come awake in an instant, the battle, by mere habit and inertia, might not have begun.  But the men who waked first, sat up, looked about them in astonishment, had time to think a little. . . .