mattoni

Our little town was like the pool of Bethesda never had I seen such a multitude of impotent folk. The lame, the halt, and the blind congregated here as if awaiting some miracle. I met them everywhere Zouaves, Turcos, French infantry of the line, in every stage of infirmity. Our town was indeed but one vast hospital orderly, subdued, and tenebrous. Every hotel but our own was closed to visitors and flew the Red Cross flag, displaying on its portals the register of wounded like a roll-call. The streets at night, with their lights extinguished, were subterranean in their darkness, and the single café, faintly illuminated, looked like some mysterious grotto within which the rows of bottles of cognac and Mattoni gleamed like veins of quartz and felspar. We were, indeed, a race of troglodytes, and we were all either very young or very old. Our adolescence was all called up to the colours. There was never any news beyond a laconic bulletin issued from the Mairie at dusk, the typescript duplicates of which, posted up at street-corners, we read in groups by the light of a guttering candle, held up against the wall, and husbanded from the wind, by a little old woman of incredible age with puckered cheeks like a withered apple and hands like old oak. We were not very near the zone of war, yet not so far as to escape its stratagems. Only a day or two before an armoured motor-car, with German officers disguised in French uniforms, paid us a stealthy visit, and, after shooting three gendarmes in reply to their insistent challenge, ended its temerarious career one dark night by rushing headlong over the broken arch of a bridge into the chasm beneath. After that the rigour of our existence was, if anything, accentuated; much was "défendu," and many things which were still lawful were not expedient. Every one talked in subdued tones it was only the wounded who were gay, gay with an amazing insouciance. True, there were the picture postcards in the shops I had forgotten them nothing more characteristically macabre have I ever seen. One such I bought one morning a lively sketch of a German soldier dragging a child's wooden horse behind him, and saluting his officer with, "Captain, here is the horse I have slain the horseman" ("Mon Gabidaine, ch'ai dué le cavalier, foil

John Hartman Morgan - Leaves from a Field Note-Book