Part 5 (1/2)

The voice stops abruptly. In the resultant silence I move uneasily.... I find Deschamps' talk heartbreaking enough, but his silences terrify me.

I try to arouse him from his bleak brooding reverie....

”You had hares too, didn't you, and hens, and a pig...? That must have helped out with the living.”

He comes to himself with a start. ”Oh, it was my wife who kept the animals. She has such a hand for making them thrive. They were like her other children. Those little chicks, they never died, always prospered, grew so fat. We always had one or two to sell when she went to town to market. Angele used to dress them herself, so that we could have the feathers. Then she put them in one of the neat baskets she made from the willow sprouts on the side of our little stream, with a clean white cloth over them, as clean as her neckerchief. Angele is as neat as a nun, always. Our house shone with cleanness ...” He breaks off abruptly.

”I have shown you the photograph of Angele and Raoul, haven't I, madame?”

I hold out my hand and gaze again, as I have so many times before, into the quiet eyes of the young peasant woman with the st.u.r.dy little boy at her side. ”She is very pretty, your wife,” I say, ”and your little boy looks so strong and vigorous.”

”I hear,” he said with a great heave of his broad chest, now so sunken, ”that the Boches have taken all the livestock away from the owners, all the hens and pigs and hares, and sent them to Germany. Perhaps Raoul and Angele have not enough to eat ... perhaps there is even no house there now ... a cousin of mine saw a refugee from his own region ... who had seen the place where his house had been!... it had been sh.e.l.led, there was ...” His mouth sets hard in an angry line of horror.

I bestir myself. This is the sort of talk Deschamps must not be allowed.

”M. Deschamps,” I say, ”I shall be writing soon to that group of American friends who gave the money for your articulated arm. Have you any message to send them? I think they are planning to send some more money to help you....”

He waves it away with a great gesture. ”Money can't do anything for me,”

he says bitterly, adding quickly: ”Not of course that I am not very, very grateful for the so-costly artificial arm. It means I can earn their living again, if ever Angele....”

I break in once more: ”But I promised them a statement of all your case, you know, the dates and places and everything. Could you just run over them again...?”

But I do not listen as he goes wearily over the old story as familiar to me now as to him: mobilized the first day, was in the Battle of the Marne, advanced to B----, was wounded there in the leg, taken to a hospital in an American ambulance, cured, returned to the trenches; wounded in the shoulder, taken to the hospital, cured, returned to the trenches ... all this time with no news whatever from his family, knowing that his region was occupied by the invaders, hearing stories of how the women and children were treated.... Fought during the winter of 1914-15, wounded in three places in June, 1915, taken to the hospital where his arm was amputated. While there, heard indirectly that his wife and child were still alive. As soon as the articulated arm (paid for out of my blessed fund of American money) allowed him to work, he had begun to learn the tinner's trade, since a one-armed man could no longer be a miner. Now he had pa.s.sed his apprentices.h.i.+p and could soon be ready to earn his living.

I knew all this laborious, heroic, commonplace story already, and looked through it at the hospital pallor on the haggard face, at the dreadful soft whiteness of the hands so obviously meant to be hard and brown, at the slack looseness of the great frame, at a man on the point of losing his desire to live....

”What use is it to earn money when not a cent can I send to them up there, when I can hear nothing from Angele beyond that line on a post-card once in three months? Madame, you have education, _why_ will they not allow a wife to write to her husband?”

I have only the old answer to the old question: ”We suppose they are afraid of spies, of people sending information to France.”

”But why do they _keep_ Angele there? Why don't they let women go to their husbands? What harm can that do? Why do they make it a h.e.l.l on earth for them and then refuse to let them go?”

I had for this only the usual murmur: ”A few _are_ allowed to come away.”

He struck his hands together. ”So few! When they last said they would allow some women and children to come to France, only a fifteenth part of those who asked for leave were allowed to come. Why? Why? What has Angele to do with the war?”

He gets up for the restless pacing about our little living-room which always ends his visits. ”I think I shall go mad, madame. I am there in the hospital, two hundred of us in one great room ... oh, they are kind enough to us, we have enough to eat. But we are not children. It is not enough to have food and a roof. Two hundred men there ... what a life ... for fourteen months! Nothing to work for, nothing to live for, no home, no family, not even a chance to go back to the trenches. The other men drink as much as they can get money for. I never drank in my life. Madame, do you suppose it would make me sleep to drink?”

”See here, M. Deschamps,” I say, moving to my desk, ”I will write again to the Spanish Emba.s.sy. I will tell them again about Angele and Raoul, they will send the request to the German authorities in your town ...

perhaps _this_ time ...” It is a perilous stimulant to administer to a sick heart, but what other have I? So I sit, swallowing the lump in my throat, and once more make out the application which never has any result.

”There,” I say, putting it into an envelope with hands that are not very steady--”there, my friend, you mail that. And now you must go, or the night-nurse will scold you for being late.”

He reaches for his cap, his old shabby cap with the bullet hole through it, and stands fumbling with it, his head hanging. He towers above me, gaunt, powerful, as pitiably defenseless as any little child. I wink back the tears which threaten to come, shake his hand hard, and tell him to be sure to come again the next time he has the ”_cafard_”. He nods absently and shuffles to the door. ”You will pardon me, madame ... but when I think that my little Raoul has perhaps not enough to eat, and I am not ...”

He has gone his lonely way to the hospital bed which is all he has for home. I go back to the cool dark bedroom and look down at my sleeping children.

There is no reason for it ... why should I feel guilty to see them rosy and safe?

II

When I come in from the street, very tired, after a talk with a war-widow about ways and means for taking care of her children, I find him in the living-room, the hearty, broad-faced fellow, smiling, giving me his great, farm-laborer's hand, thanking me for the last package of goodies ... as though he had not just come through the inferno of the attack at M----. ”The package never arrived at a better moment,” he said gaily. ”We had been on awfully short rations for three days ... in a sh.e.l.l-hole, you know.” I know that I do not know it all, but it is futile to try to draw fine distinctions with Groissard, cheeriest and simplest of ”permissionnaires,” always the same, always open-faced and clear-eyed, always emanating quiet confidence and always seeing it about him. If there are any tired or disheartened or apprehensive or perplexed soldiers in the army, they pa.s.s unperceived of Groissard's honest eyes.