One of Ours - Willa Cather (great book club books .TXT) 📗

beginning of the war. Her grandfather was killed in the war of 1870. Hers was a family of soldiers, but not one of the men would be left to see the day of victory.

She looked so tired that Claude knew he had no right to stay. Long shadows were falling in the garden. It was hard to leave; but an hour more or less wouldn’t matter. Two people could hardly give each other more if they were together for years, he thought.

“Will you tell me where I can come and see you, if we both get through this war?” he asked as he rose.

He wrote it down in his notebook.

“I shall look for you,” she said, giving him her hand.

There was nothing to do but to take his helmet and go. At the edge of the hill, just before he plunged down the path, he stopped and glanced back at the garden lying flattened in the sun; the three stone arches, the dahlias and marigolds, the glistening boxwood wall. He had left something on the hilltop which he would never find again.

The next afternoon Claude and his sergeant set off for the front. They had been told at Headquarters that they could shorten their route by following the big road to the military cemetery, and then turning to the left. It was not advisable to go the latter half of the way before nightfall, so they took their time through the belt of straggling crops and hayfields.

When they struck the road they came upon a big Highlander sitting in the end of an empty supply wagon, smoking a pipe and rubbing the dried mud out of his kilts. The horses were munching in their nosebags, and the driver had disappeared. The Americans hadn’t happened to meet with any Highlanders before, and were curious. This one must be a good fighter, they thought; a brawny giant with a bulldog jaw, and a face as red and knobby as his knees. More because he admired the looks of the man than because he needed information, Hicks went up and asked him if he had noticed a military cemetery on the road back. The Kiltie nodded.

“About how far back would you say it was?”

“I wouldn’t say at all. I take no account of their kilometers,” he replied dryly, rubbing away at his skirt as if he had it in a washtub.

“Well, about how long will it take us to walk it?”

“That I couldn’t say. A Scotsman would do it in an hour.”

“I guess a Yankee can do it as quick as a Scotchman, can’t be?” Hicks asked jovially.

“That I couldn’t say. You’ve been four years gettin’ this far, I know verra well.”

Hicks blinked as if he had been hit. “Oh, if that’s the way you talk⁠—”

“That’s the way I do,” said the other sourly.

Claude put out a warning hand. “Come on, Hicks. You’ll get nothing by it.” They went up the road very much disconcerted. Hicks kept thinking of things he might have said. When he was angry, the Sergeant’s forehead puffed up and became dark red, like a young baby’s. “What did you call me off for?” he sputtered.

“I don’t see where you’d have come out in an argument, and you certainly couldn’t have licked him.”

They turned aside at the cemetery to wait until the sun went down. It was unfenced, unsodded, and a wagon trail ran through the middle, bisecting the square. On one side were the French graves, with white crosses; on the other side the German graves, with black crosses. Poppies and cornflower ran over them. The Americans strolled about, reading the names. Here and there the soldier’s photograph was nailed upon his cross, left by some comrade to perpetuate his memory a little longer.

The birds, that always came to life at dusk and dawn, began to sing, flying home from somewhere. Claude and Hicks sat down between the mounds and began to smoke while the sun dropped. Lines of dead trees marked the red west. This was a dreary stretch of country, even to boys brought up on the flat prairie. They smoked in silence, meditating and waiting for night. On a cross at their feet the inscription read merely:

Soldat Inconnu, Mort pour La France.

A very good epitaph, Claude was thinking. Most of the boys who fell in this war were unknown, even to themselves. They were too young. They died and took their secret with them⁠—what they were and what they might have been. The name that stood was La France. How much that name had come to mean to him, since he first saw a shoulder of land bulk up in the dawn from the deck of the Anchises. It was a pleasant name to say over in one’s mind, where one could make it as passionately nasal as one pleased and never blush.

Hicks, too, had been lost in his reflections. Now he broke the silence. “Somehow, Lieutenant, ‘mort’ seems deader than ‘dead.’ It has a coffinish sound. And over there they’re all ‘tod,’ and it’s all the same damned silly thing. Look at them set out here, black and white, like a checkerboard. The next question is, who put ’em here, and what’s the good of it?”

“Search me,” the other murmured absently.

Hicks rolled another cigarette and sat smoking it, his plump face wrinkled with the gravity and labour of his cerebration. “Well,” he brought out at last, “we’d better hike. This afterglow will hang on for an hour⁠—always does, over here.”

“I suppose we had.” They rose to go. The white crosses were now violet, and the black ones had altogether melted in the shadow. Behind the dead trees in the west, a long smear of red still burned. To the north, the guns were tuning up with a deep thunder. “Somebody’s getting peppered up there. Do owls always hoot in graveyards?”

“Just what I was wondering, Lieutenant. It’s a peaceful spot, otherwise. Good night, boys,” said Hicks