I had not gone far, not a quarter of a mile, along my road leaving the
town, when I thought I would stop and rest a little and make sure that
I had started propitiously and that I was really on my way to Rome; so
I halted by a wall and looked back at the city and the forts, and drew
what I saw in my book. It was a sight that had taken a firm hold of my
mind in boyhood, and that will remain in it as long as it can make
pictures for itself out of the past. I think this must be true of all
conscripts with regard to the garrison in which they have served, for
the mind is so fresh at twenty-one and the life so new to every
recruit as he joins it, he is so cut off from books and all the
worries of life, that the surroundings of the place bite into him and
take root, as one's school does or one's first home. And I had been
especially fortunate since I had been with the gunners (notoriously
the best kind of men) and not in a big place but in a little town,
very old and silent, with more soldiers in its surrounding circle than
there were men, women, and children within its useless ramparts. It is
known to be very beautiful, and though I had not heard of this
reputation, I saw it to be so at once when I was first marched in, on
a November dawn, up to the height of the artillery barracks. I
remembered seeing then the great hills surrounding it on every side,
hiding their menace and protection of guns, and in the south and east
the silent valley where the high forests dominate the Moselle, and the
town below the road standing in an island or ring of tall trees. All
this, I say, I had permanently remembered, and I had determined,
whenever I could go on pilgrimage to Rome, to make this place my
starting-point, and as I stopped here and looked back, a little way
outside the gates, I took in again the scene that recalled so much
laughter and heavy work and servitude and pride of arms.