“I once had boys in the army. Now I have none. The two youngest are dead. I have one remaining—a poor wretch, who is hardly a soldier now.”
“He is wounded, perhaps?”
“Yes, he is wounded. He has lost both arms.”
The old woman put her bucket of ashes on the ground, removed some grass from her waist-belt and tied a wayward vine branch to a supporting stick, and, standing erect again, she exclaimed:
“He has been wounded as few have been. He has lost his two arms, and in his thigh there is a hole big enough to contain a small bowl of milk. For ten days he was on the verge of death. I went to see him, and I said to him:
“‘Clovis, you are not going to leave me all alone?’—for I must tell you they had been for a long while without a father.
“And he always used to reply:
“‘I’ll be better to-morrow.’
“No one was gentler than this boy.”
We remained silent. One of us at length murmured: