"You must
excuse...."
"Perhaps I appear flippant to him. But I am grave, too, grave as he, and
I long to go, and the car and I, we are trustworthy. I do, indeed, know
the way to Verdun."
He went in again, and for answer the porter brought out the bags, and
Colonel Dellahousse followed, carrying a sealed black bag with care
under his arm. She was sure he had said to the Frenchman: "But what sort
of a woman is she? One does not want to have difficulties." And as sure,
too, that the other had answered: "I know the English. They let their
women do this sort of thing. I think it will be all right."
She no longer felt defiant towards the spoken and unspoken criticism she
met everywhere: "What kind of women can these be whose men allow them to
drive alone with us for hours, and sometimes days?" but had begun to
apologise for it even to herself, while it sometimes caused her
bewilderment.
She drove them back through the waking town and out by the Verdun gates,
and soon up on to the steep heights above the town among frozen fields
and grasslands white with frost. The big stone tombs of 1870 stuck out
of a light ground fog like sails upon a grey sea, and it was not long,
at Jeandelize, before the 1914 graves began, small isolated wooden
crosses. They touched the brink of the battlefields; a rain of dead
gunfire began along the sides of the road, shell-holes with hairy edges
of dried thistles and, at the bottom of each, green moss stiffened with
ice.
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