Home Fires in France Part 6

"But is it _true_ ... all he says?" I ask, shivering a little.

"Oh yes, true enough, and more than he says or any one can ever say.

But, but ..." He searches for a metaphor and finds it with a smile.

"See, Paul is like a man with a fearful toothache! He can't think of anything else. But that doesn't mean there isn't anything else."

I ask him: "But you, who have been through all that Paul sees, what do _you_ find, besides?" He hesitates, smiling no longer, and finally brings out in a low tone: "When a mother gives birth to a child, she suffers, suffers horribly. Perhaps all the world is now trying to give birth to a new idea, which we have talked of, but never _felt_ before; the idea that all of us, each of us, is responsible for what happens to all, to each, that we must stick together for good...." He picks up his steel helmet, and looks at us with his dim, patient, indomitable smile.

"It is like a little new baby in more ways than one, that new idea. It has cost us such agony; and it is so small, so weak, so needing all our protection ... and then also, because ..." his sunken eyes are prophetic, "because it is _alive_, because it will grow!"

IV

I glance at my calendar in dismay. Is it possible that three months have gone, and that it is time for Amieux to have another "permission"? How long the week of his furlough always seems, how the three months between race away! Of course we have the greatest regard for Amieux. We feel that his uniform alone (he is a _cha.s.seur alpin_ who has been a first-line fighter since the Battle of the Marne) would ent.i.tle him to our services, but more than that, his personality commands our respect, sound, steady, quiet Amieux whose st.u.r.dy body is wounded in one place after another, who is repaired hastily in the nearest hospital and uncomplainingly goes back to the trenches, his sleeve decorated with another one of the V-shaped marks which denote wounds. The only trouble with Amieux as a household hero is a total dearth of subjects of conversation. You see, he is a gla.s.s-blower by profession. We often feel that if we were not as ignorant of gla.s.s-blowing as Amieux is of everything else, we could get on famously with him. As it is ...

"_Oh bon jour_, M. Amieux," I say, jumping to my feet, "welcome back to the rear! All well?"

"Yes, madame," he says with as ponderous an emphasis on the full-stop as that of any taciturn New England farmer.

"Well, has it been hard, the last three months?" I ask.

"No, madame."

I draw a long breath.

"Do the packages we send, the chocolate, the cigarettes, the soap--do they reach you promptly?"

"Yes, madame. Thank you, madame."

The full-stop is more overpowering with each answer.

I resort to more chatter, anything to fill that resounding silence.

"Here we have been so busy! So many more American volunteers are coming over for the Ambulance service, my husband has not a free moment. The children never see him. My little daughter is doing well in school. She begins to read French now. Of course the little son doesn't go to school, but he is learning to speak French like a French baby. It has been so cold here. There has been so little coal. You must have heard, the long lines waiting to get coal ..." I stop with almost a shrug of exasperation. As well talk to a basalt statue as to Amieux, impa.s.sive, his rough red hands on his knees, his _musette_ swollen with all the miscellaneous junk the poilu stuffs into that nondescript receptacle, his cap still firmly on his head ... formal manners are not specialties of Amieux. And then I notice that one leg is thrust out, very stiff and straight, and has a big bulbous swelling which speaks of a bandage under the puttees.

I glance at it. "Rheumatism? Too much water in the trenches?"

He looks down at it without a flicker on his face. "No, madame, a wound."

"Really? How did it happen this time?"

He looks faintly bored. They always hate to tell how they were wounded.

"Oh, no particular way. A sh.e.l.l had smashed up an _abri_, and while I was trying to pull my captain out from under the timbers another sh.e.l.l exploded near by."

"Did you save the captain?"

"Oh yes. He was banged up around the head. He's all right now."

"Were you there with him? How did it happen you weren't buried under the wreck too?"

"I wasn't there. I was in a trench. But I saw. I knew he was there."

I am so used to Amieux's conversational style that I manage even through this arid narration to see what had happened. "Do you mean to say that you left the trench and went out under sh.e.l.l-fire to rescue your captain! And they didn't give you a decoration! It's outrageous not recognizing such bravery!"

He shuffles his feet and looks foolish. "The captain wanted to have me cited all right. He's a _chic type_, but I said he'd better not."

"Don't you want the _croix de guerre_?" I cry, astounded at such apathy even from Amieux.

"Oh, I wouldn't mind. It's my mother."

"Don't you suppose your mother would _love_ to have her son decorated?"

I feel there must be some absurd misunderstanding between us, the man seems to be talking such nonsense.

"Well, you see, my mother ... my only brother was killed last winter.

_Maman_ worries a good deal about me, and I told her, just so she could sleep quietly, you know, I have told her my company isn't near the front at all. I said we were guarding a munitions depot at the rear."

"Well ..." I am still at a loss.

"Well, don't you see, if I get the _croix de guerre_ for being under fire, _maman_ would get to worrying again. So I told my captain I'd rather he'd give it to one of the other fellows."

V

I had just come from several hours spent with one of the war-blind, one of those among the educated, unresigned war-blind, who see too clearly with the eyes of their intelligence what has happened to them. I had been with him, looking into his sightless face, pitting my strength against the bitterness of his voice; and I was tired, tired to the marrow of my bones, to the tip of every nerve.

But the children had not been out for their walk and the day was that rare thing in a Paris March, a sunshiny one, not to be wasted. "Come, dears," I told them as I entered the apartment, "get on your wraps.

We'll all go out for a play while the sun is still high."

I walked along the street between them, my little daughter and my little son, their warm soft hands in mine. The sparrows chattered in the bare trees above us, the sparrows who even in this keen air felt the coming of spring which was foretold by the greening of the gra.s.s in the public squares. My children chattered incessantly, like the sparrows. Perhaps they felt the spring too. _I_ did not want to feel the spring. We turned away from the Seine and walked on one side of the open square before Notre Dame.

"Mother, I caught my ball twenty-three times to-day without missing."

"Muvver, I see a white horse, a _big_ white horsie!"

"Mother, do you like arithmetic as well as history? _I_ don't."

"Muvver, I have a little p'tend doggie here, trotting after me, a little brown p'tend doggie."

"Mother, O _mother_, let me tell you what happened at school to-day, during recess!"

Through the half-heard ripple of clear little voices, there came upon me one of those thunder-claps of realization which, since the beginning of the war, have brought wiser and stronger people than I to the brink of insanity--realization for an instant (longer than an instant would carry any one over the brink) that the war is really going on, realization of what the war really means, one glimpse of the black abyss. I felt very sick, and stood still for an instant, because my knees shook under me....

But those wiser and stronger ones had not little children of their own to draw them away from that black gulf.... I was pulled at by impatient little hands, lucid, ineffably pure eyes were turned up to mine, the clear little voices grew louder, "Muvver, muvver, I'm losing my mitten!"

"Mother, why are you standing still? _This_ isn't a good place to play!

There! A little nearer the big church is some sand. And a bench for you."

How could I go on this everyday commonplace life, eating, drinking, sleeping, caring for the children, cheering them ... in such a wicked and imbecile world! I looked up and down the bare, sun-flooded square.

All about me were other women, caring for little children. And for the most part, those other women were in mourning. But they were there under that cruel, careless sunshine, caring for their children, cheering them....

I put the little mitten on; I walked forward to the bench, the little singing voices died away to a ripple again. "Oh, this is fine! See, little brother, here is a cave already. Let me have that stick!" "No, me! _Me!_"