The Irony of Fate By M. Sadsawska, Civic Guard, Motorcyclist of the 1st Line Regiment
We were occupying the Dixmude Sector. Our trenches were hollowed out in the road which skirts the Yser, and the Regiment was sheltering in the centre of a vast horseshoe-shaped curl, traced by the river among the meadow grasses. The scenery was dolefully sad. Beyond a row of century-old trees, or rather of poor trunks of trees bewailing their scathed branches, which seemed to be mounting guard around our shelters, the ruins of a railway bridge stood out, half hidden in the water. On the embankment, surrounded by broken and twisted telegraph poles, and festoons of wires and cables all mixed up, lay a powerful locomotive, which had been overturned, so that its wheels were in the air. The melancholiness of the site did not disturb our equanimity at all. We were full of hopefulness and quite ready to march on towards the piles of fallen roofs, gaping houses, and tottering walls of strange shapes, which now constituted Dixmude, our old Flemish city. In the misty twilight, it seemed to us as though the poor town were stretching out its mutilated arms to us, and as though the murmur of the wind in the ruins were hailing us.
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"Courage, courage, come!" it seemed to say.
Alas! the few hundred yards of verdure, which our thoughts and our wishes cleared only too willingly, hid the entrenchments and the redoubts of the enemy. Every night, the bravest of our men started out patrolling, endeavouring to discover the barbed wire, the ambushes, and the traps set for us. Sergeant Renson had specially distinguished himself for his daring and his sang-froid. He was naturally of an adventurous nature and was an excellent soldier. In spite of his mature age, he had joined the colours as a volunteer at the very beginning of the war.
He was anxious to find out whether some information he had obtained on a preceding expedition was exact, as it was very difficult on these ink-black nights to distinguish the real from the imaginary. He, therefore, expressed a wish to carry out a reconnaissance alone, and by daylight, in the direction of the enemy's lines. "I am not afraid of death," he said to his chiefs. "I have always lived in my own way and I now want to carry out this plan. I am free to risk my own skin and, as I am forty-two years old, I should not be any great loss." He was finally allowed to do as he wished............