“But what’s this?” asked Coco, reading with his funny French pronunciation, “A-mer-i-cain Pencil Compagnie.” It was a novelty, a “perpetual” pencil of the self-sharpening sort, with a magazine filled with little points like cartridges. When I gave it to him, it pleased Coco immensely.
“Just like a rifle!” he exclaimed, as he amused himself by pressing the end and ejecting the bits of lead. He went through the manual of arms with it, laughing; he did a mock bayonet thrust or two, and then aimed it at me in fun, like a child. “Pan!” he cried; “that’s the way we shoot Germans!” The contrast of his red pantaloons and blue coat with the round, innocent face and lips parted like a girl’s was absurd. Why, he was more like those doll soldiers you see at toyshops with curly hair! With his fresh pink cheeks and big brown eyes he seemed no more than sixteen years old.
In the evening we all went out on the crowded Boulevard, where, it being a fête day, they were dancing in front of the open-air band stands. It was a long time before I ceased to think of Coco as jolly, flushed, exuberant, dancing the Tango on the corner by the Sorbonne with his pretty young aunt, as excited and happy as only a lad can be who has come up from a provincial town to see the metropolis for the first time on a holiday.
That was on the 14th of July of 1914. Next day he went back to his caserne at Montauban.
In two weeks war was declared!
Coco, our own blithe Coco, would have to go to the front—oh, his aunt’s white face that day!—and Coco would be in the first line! It seemed like some hideous mistake. But already Coco, pink-cheeked, laughing, shy, his mother’s only boy, was well on his way toward the German shells and machine guns!
III
The French do nothing without a flavoring of sentiment. Rhetoric flowers in the official proclamations; it makes one laugh even to read the textbooks for soldiers, they are so strewn with fine, resounding phrases; and so, of course, it was quite impossible for Coco’s regiment to get away without one of those stirring, gesticulative speeches by the colonel.
It was at the Toulouse railway station—parents in tears. The girls gazed admiringly. Gossipy veterans of ’70, seeing themselves reincarnated in these fresh young soldiers, patronized them egregiously with advice. Coco and the other lads listened, but did not hear; they were smiling at the girls sticking bouquets in their rifle barrels.