Our company was in Flanders at the time and we had got unexpectedly a few days leave to Ostend—Meyer, Holthoff, Bryer, Lutgens, myself and some others.
Most of us had never seen the sea before, and these few days—this almost unbelievable interlude between death and death—became one complete surrender to sun and sand and sea.
We spent all day on the beach, we stretched our naked bodies in the sun—for merely to be naked, not laden with pack, rifle and uniform, was already almost peace.
We raced up and down the sands and dashed again into the water; we were conscious of our limbs, our breath, our movements, with all the vigour and intensity that the things of life had at that time—for those hours we forgot everything, and we wanted to forget.
But at night, in the twilight, when the sun was gone and grey shadows from the skyline ran in over the pallid waters, then gradually there mingled with the roar of the surf another tone, which grew louder and finally drowned it—a dull, menacing sound: the bombardment of the Front.
Then it would happen suddenly that a livid silence would interrupt the talk, heads would lift and listen, and out of the merry faces of tired, played-out schoolboys would swiftly leap the hard visages of the soldiers, for an instant touched by a surprise, a sadness in which was implicit all that would never be uttered—courage and bitterness and greed of life, the will to duty, the despair, the hope and the enigmatic sorrow of those appointed early to die.
Then, a few days later, began the great Offensive, and already by the third of July the company had only thirty-two men, and Meyer, Holthoff and Lutgens were dead. . . .
"Robby!"called Pat.
I opened my eyes.
For a moment I had to think where I was.
Always when memories of the war came, one was immediately far away.
With other memories it was not so.
I sat up.
Pat was coming out of the water.
She walked almost directly out of the path of the sun over the water, an immense glory poured over her shoulders, and she was so flooded in light that she appeared almost dark against it.
With every step up the beach she mounted higher into the strong light until the sun of the late evening stood behind her head like a halo.
I jumped up, so unreal, so much as if out of another world did this picture appear to me now—the wide, blue sky, the white lines of foam, and the lovely slender figure against it—as if I alone were in the world and out of the water came stepping the first woman.
For one instant I felt the immense, quiet power of beauty, and knew that it was stronger than all the bloodstained past; that it must be stronger, else the world would collapse, sink down and perish in its own chaos.
And more even than that I felt that I was there, simply there, and that Pat was there, that I lived, that I had escaped the horror, that I had eyes and hands and thoughts and hot pulsing blood, and that all that was a miracle beyond comprehension.
"Robby!" called Pat once again and waved.
I picked up her bathing wrap from the ground and went quickly toward her.
"You have been much too long in the water," said I.
"I'm quite warm," she replied, out of breath.
I kissed her wet shoulder.
"You must be more reasonable at the start."
She shook her head and looked at me radiantly.
"I've been reasonable long enough."
"You think so?"
"Of course.
Much too long.
I mean now to be unreasonable for a change." She laughed and put her wet cheek to my face. "We're going to be unreasonable, Robby.
To think of nothing, absolutely nothing, only of ourselves and the sun and the holidays and the sea."
"Right," said I taking the towel. "But first I'm going to rub you dry.
Where have you been, though, to be so brown already?"
She pulled on her wrap.
"That comes from my reasonable year, when I had to lie on the balcony in the sun for an hour every day.
And go to sleep at eight o'clock at night.
Tonight at eight o'clock I'm going for a swim again."
"We shall see about that," said I. "Man is always large in his intentions.
In execution not so.
Therein lies his charm."
Nothing came of the evening bathe.
We had a walk to the village and a drive in the Citroen through the dusk— then Pat became suddenly tired and wanted to go home.
I had already noticed that often with her—the swift lapsing from radiant vitality into sudden exhaustion.
She had little strength and no reserve at all—and yet she did not give that impression.
She always used every ounce of life force that was in her and appeared inexhaustible in her lithe youthfulness; then suddenly would come a moment when her face would grow pale and her eyes deep with shadows "—then she was done.
She did not become tired gradually, but in one second.
"Let us drive home, Robby," said she, and her dark voice was deeper even than usual.
"Home?
To Fraulein Muller with the gold cross on her bosom?