“How do you like it, now you’re here?” I asked.
He looked at me heavily. “Like it? It’s hell!” he said.
“Have you been in active service?” I used my usual cowardly evasive phrase.
“Yes, ma’am, I’ve killed some of ’em,” he answered me with brutal, courageous directness. He looked down at his hands as he spoke, big, calloused farmer’s hands, crooked by holding the plough-handles. As plainly as he saw it there, I saw the blood on them, too. His stern, dark, middle-aged face glowered down solemnly on those strong farmer’s hands. “It’s dirty work, but it’s got to be done,” he said, gravely, “and I ain’t a-going to dodge my share of it.”
A very dark-eyed, gracefully-built young soldier came loitering by now, and stopped near us, ostensibly to look at the passing troops, but evidently in order to share in the phenomenon of a talk in English with an American woman. I took him into the conversation with the usual query, “How do you do, and how do you like being in France?”
He answered with a strong Italian accent, and I dived into a dusty mental corner to bring out my half-forgotten Italian. In a moment we were talking like old friends. He had been born in Italy, yes, but brought up in Waterbury, Connecticut. His grandfather had been one of Garibaldi’s Thousand, so of course he had joined the American army and come to France among the first.
“Well, there are more than a Thousand of you this time,” I said, looking at the endless procession defiling before us.
“Si, signora, but it is a part of the same war. We are here to go on with what the Thousand began.”
Yes, that was true, John Brown’s soul and Garibaldi’s, and those of how many other fierce old fighting lovers of freedom were marching on there before my eyes, carried like invisible banners by all those strong young arms.
An elderly woman in well-brushed dowdy black came down the street toward us, an expression of care on her face. When she saw me she said, “Well, I’ve found you. They said you were in town to-day. Won’t you come back to the house with me? Something important. I’m terribly troubled with some American officers—oh, the war!”