Saturday, June 24th
The boy with the almond-shaped eyes is dead. He died day before yesterday. I have been ill and not at the hospital these days, and I did not know. I went back to the hospital only this afternoon.
His father and mother arrived too late, this morning. They had had scarcely time to reach the farm in Normandy, when one of the house doctors, a kind man, wrote to tell them to come back. At the bureau they made a mistake in the address they gave the doctor, and his letter was returned to him in the post the day before the boy died. The doctor telegraphed then, but it was too late.
I do not know who told the father and mother when they came this morning. I do not know where they are to-day—this day so terrible for them in the great strange city. I would have liked to find them. Madame Marthe says they were surely allowed to go and see their boy, where he is, but not to stay with him.
I think of them, peasant people, confused and strange in city streets, frightened, belonging to no one, terribly alone, with nowhere to go in their grief. Where are they gone in their grief? They, to whom nothing has ever been explained, who are so unable to tell or to ask.