III
"MON GAMIN"
One day when I was in Lorraine, a woman came to me carrying in her hands a boy's cap, and a piece of rope. She was a peasant woman about forty years of age, named Madame Plaid. She said:
"You see, Monsieur, I found him in the fields. He was not in the house when the Germans came here. I thought that my little scamp (mon gamin) was in danger, so I looked everywhere for him. He was fourteen years old, only that, at least he would have been in September, but he seemed to be all of nineteen with his height and his size.
"I asked the Prussians if they had not seen my little scamp. They were leading me off and I feared that they would take me away with them. The Prussians said that somebody had fired on them from my house.
"Your son had a rifle with him and he fired on us, just like the others," they said.
"I answered: 'My little scamp did not do anything, I am sure.'
"'What shirt did he have on?' they asked.
"'A little white shirt with red stripes,' I replied.
"They insisted that he was the one that had fired.
"When the cannonading stopped, the people who had been with me told me that they had seen a young man lying stretched out in the field, but they could not tell who it was. I wanted to see who it was that was lying there dead, and yet I drew back.
"'No,' I said to myself, 'I am too much afraid.'
"But I crossed the field. I saw his cap which had fallen in front of him. I came closer. It was he. He had his hands tied behind his back.
"See. Here is the cord with which he had been killed. For he had not been shot. He had been hanged.
(She held out to us the cord—a coil of small but strong rope.)
"And here is the cap.
(She was holding the gray cap in her two hands.)
"When I saw him, I said to the Prussians:
"'Do the same thing to me now. Without my little scamp I cannot go on. So do the same to me.'
"Three weeks later, I went again to search for my little scamp. I did not find him any more. The French soldiers had buried him with their dead."