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, impassive, 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 shell had smashed up an abri, and while I was trying to pull my captain out from under the timbers another shell 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 shell-fire to rescue your captain! And they didn't give you a decoration! It's outrageous not recognizing such bravery!"