For The Matter Of
That, The Great Victories Of '93 Were Fought Upon Such Unsubstantial
Meals; For The Republicans Fought First And Ate Afterwards, Being In
This Quite Unlike The Ten Thousand.
Sailors I know eat nothing for
some hours - I mean those who turn out at four in the morning; I could
give the name of the watch, but that I forget it and will not be
plagued to look up technicalities.
Dogs eat the first thing they come
across, cats take a little milk, and gentlemen are accustomed to get
up at nine and eat eggs, bacon, kidneys, ham, cold pheasant, toast,
coffee, tea, scones, and honey, after which they will boast that their
race is the hardiest in the world and ready to bear every fatigue in
the pursuit of Empire. But what rule governs all this? Why is
breakfast different from all other things, so that the Greeks called
it the best thing in the world, and so that each of us in a vague way
knows that he would eat at breakfast nothing but one special kind of
food, and that he could not imagine breakfast at any other hour in the
day?
The provocation to this inquiry (which I have here no time to pursue)
lies in the extraordinary distaste that I conceived that morning for
Brule wine. My ham and bread and chocolate I had consumed overnight.
I thought, in my folly, that I could break my fast on a swig of what
had seemed to me, only the night before, the best revivifier and
sustenance possible. In the harsh dawn it turned out to be nothing but
a bitter and intolerable vinegar. I make no attempt to explain this,
nor to say why the very same wine that had seemed so good in the
forest (and was to seem so good again later on by the canal) should
now repel me. I can only tell you that this heavy disappointment
convinced me of a great truth that a Politician once let slip in my
hearing, and that I have never since forgotten. _'Man,'_ said the
Director of the State, _'man is but the creature of circumstance.'_
As it was, I lit a pipe of tobacco and hobbled blindly along for miles
under and towards the brightening east. Just before the sun rose I
turned and looked backward from a high bridge that recrossed the
river. The long effort of the night had taken me well on my way. I was
out of the familiar region of the garrison. The great forest-hills
that I had traversed stood up opposite the dawn, catching the new
light; heavy, drifting, but white clouds, rare at such an hour, sailed
above them. The valley of the Moselle, which I had never thought of
save as a half mountainous region, had fallen, to become a kind of
long garden, whose walls were regular, low, and cultivated slopes.
The main waterway of the valley was now not the river but the canal
that fed from it.
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