The Little Maître d'Hotel
Our little worried grey butler is gone.
His class has been called out, the class of Quatre-vingt-douze.
It appears he was only forty-three.
I had thought he was sixty at least. It must be because he has been anxious all his life that he seems so old.
He was terribly worried and anxious when he talked to me, the night before he went, about the old father and mother he must leave. He would be going probably only somewhere back of the lines to guard a bridge or a railway, but for him it meant—who knows what darkly, helplessly imagined things? He talked a great deal in a high-pitched voice—standing there, very white in his proper livery—of bayonet attacks, of the coal he had managed to get in for the old people, of dying for France, and of his mother's rheumatism, and of the cow they had had to sell.