Читать книгу To Fight Alongside Friends: The First World War Diaries of Charlie May - David Crane - Страница 51

Today we have had a regular old-time Sunday. With the exception that for church there has been no parade. And this morning Worthy and I took advantage of the leisure to ride out down the Doullens road. About two miles from here we turned into a wood with the idea of cutting across country till we found some other road to bring us back. It was pleasant in the wood. It smelt clean and fresh in there and the sunlight made a witching chequer on the brown floor of fallen leaves, which here and there was not brown at all but green, where the new grass peeped through.

We followed a cart track at first but this ’ere long petered out and we were compelled to continue along a tiny, winding way that game, or chance wayfarers or both had made. And further on this too became ill-defined and difficult to see so that we had continually to stop and part the branches to decide which way it held. I said ‘This is like the rides one reads about, where men get lost in woods but follow some such slender track from instinct and are rewarded in the end by chancing on some fairy cottage where dwells a princess.’ Worthy laughed, no doubt thinking me the ass I am. But lo, a few yards further and the track widened slightly and there on its edge stood a tiny cottage wherein a little fire burned. And on its threshold stood two tiny children hand in hand looking up at us with wide, staring eyes.

It was quite in keeping with the story, quite unreal, quite romantic, quite French. How the cottage comes there, how its owner lives and how he gets into contact with his fellows I do not know. He lives in a fairyland all his own. And I prefer to think of it like that.