Grand’mère Bergues stood at the door of the little cottage which, last autumn, had been restored as well as obtainable materials permitted. The moon shone down upon what had been an orchard; but the Germans, before their retreat, had systematically sawed through the trunk of each tree till the tree fell. The French, as quickly as possible, had regrafted the top upon the stump and thus had saved a great many trees; and the new buds upon them, showing that these had survived the winter and would bloom and fruit again, brought to Grand’mère Bergues a sense of triumph over the Boche.
Grand’mère Bergues needed all the triumph she could feel. Her son, Laurent, lay in one of those white-crossed graves of the defenders of Douaumont at Verdun; her own daughter Mathilde, who had married a merchant of Carnières, which was beyond Cambrai, had not been heard of since the first year of the war. Laurent’s wife—well, she had been a young and beautiful woman and Grand’mère Bergues either told nothing of what had been her fate when the Germans came or else she told it again and again in abandon.
“They bound me to the bedpost; and one said—he was a pink-faced pig, with the pink—ugh!—all about his head through his closecropped hair—he said, ‘Remove her.’
“‘No; it is better to let her see. But keep her quiet!’
“So they stuffed in my mouth....”
Ruth well knew the frightful facts; she knew that, three years ago, there had been little Laurent—a baby—too.
“These things,” said Grand’mère Bergues, “you did not believe at first.”
“No,” Ruth said, “we did not.”
“It is not to be wondered at,” the old woman said simply. “The wonderful fact is that now you arrive!”
She trudged along beside Ruth through the ruin of the orchard and halted with her hand upon the bough of an apple tree which was one of those that the French had grafted and saved.