How supple their movements are.
"Un moment—" They disappear and throw us bits of clothing which we gladly wrap round ourselves.
Then we are allowed in.
A small lamp burns in their room, which is warm and smells a little of perfume.
We unwrap our parcels and hand them over to the women.
Their eyes shine, it is obvious that they are hungry.
Then we all become rather embarrassed.
Leer makes the gestures of eating, and then they come to life again and bring out plates and knives and fall to on the food, and they hold up every slice of livered sausage and admire it before they eat it, and we sit proudly by.
They overwhelm us with their chatter;—we understand very little of it, but we listen and the words sound friendly.
No doubt we all look very young.
The little brunette strokes my hair and says what all French women say:
"La guerre—grand malheur—pauvres garcons–––"
I hold her arm tightly and press my lips into the palm of her hand.
Her fingers close round my face.
Close above me are her bewildering eyes, the soft brown of her skin and her red lips.
Her mouth speaks words I do not understand.
Nor do I fully understand her eyes; they seem to say more than we anticipated when we came here.
There are other rooms adjoining.
In passing I see Leer, he has made a great hit with the blonde.
He's an old hand at the game.
But I—I am lost in remoteness, in weakness, and in a passion to which I yield myself trustingly.
My desires are strangely compounded of yearning and misery.
I feel giddy, there is nothing here that a man can hold on to.
We have left our boots at the door, they have given us slippers instead, and now nothing remains to recall for me the assurance and self-confidence of the soldier; no rifle, no belt, no tunic, no cap.
I let myself drop into the unknown, come what may—yet, in spite of all, I feel somewhat afraid.
The little brunette contracts her brows when she is thinking; but when she talks they are still.
And often sound does not quite become a word but suffocates or floats away over me half finished; an arch, a pathway, a comet.
What have I known of it—what do I know of it?—The words of this foreign tongue, that I hardly understand, they caress me to a quietness, in which the room grows dim, and dissolves in the half light, only the face above me lives and is clear.
How various is a face; but an hour ago it was strange and it is now touched with a tenderness that comes, not from it, but from out of the night, the world and the blood, all these things seem to shine in it together.
The objects in the room are touched by it and transformed, they become isolated, and I feel almost awed at the sight of my clear skin when the light of the lamp falls upon it and the cool, brown hand passes over it.
How different this is from the conditions in the soldiers' brothels, to which we are allowed to go, and where we have to wait in long queues.
I wish I never thought of them; but desire turns my mind to them involuntarily and I am afraid for it might be impossible ever to be free of them again.
But then I feel the lips of the little brunette and press myself against them, my eyes close, I want it all to fall from me, war and terror and grossness, in order to awaken young and happy; I think of the picture of the girl on the poster and, for a moment, believe that my life depends on winning her.
And if I press ever deeper into the arms that embrace me, perhaps a miracle may happen. . . .
So, after a time we find ourselves reassembled again.
Leer is in high spirits.
We pull on our boots and take our leave warmly.
The night air cools our hot bodies.
The rustling poplars loom large in the darkness.
The moon floats in the heavens and in the waters of the canal.
We do not run, we walk beside one another with long strides.
"That was worth a ration-loaf," says Leer.
I cannot trust myself to speak, I am not in the least happy.
Then we hear footsteps and dodge behind a shrub.
The steps come nearer, close by us.
We see a naked soldier, in boots, just like ourselves; he has a package under his arm, and gallops onward.
It is Tjaden in full course.
He has disappeared already.
We laugh.
In the morning he will curse us.