In addition to his great love for her as a father he added his worship of the departed one. He limited his life to his grief, and made his house a memorial chapel where every object was a votive offering to his absent beloved and a relic of the ever-present dead. He adorned the little girl with her mother’s modest jewelry, and cut her clothes from those she had worn.
Through this double love which he poured out on this child, she became his only reason for existence, his whole life.
The little girl was ten years old to-day. Brought up in the seclusion of the tabernacle, she had taken up her rôle conscientiously. She was quieter than most children of her age, and attentive to her father’s slightest wish. As she grew up she developed into the very image of her mother, and the poor man began to live again as in a dream the days of his happy past.
When war broke out the implacable mobilization tore him from the fireside he had never left before. Living alone as they did, they had no friends and knew of no relatives.
He went, trusting the house to her and all their modest property, only recommending her to the watch of a neighbor, of a concierge.
But fortified by example, she suddenly grew up through the grief of this weighty separation, and the girl was already sufficient for the rôle as guardian of the hearth.
Ever since he had left she had written each week the letter which he waited for impatiently and which he read and re-read during the following days.
This morning he seemed more cheerful. It was not only the joy of finding himself in the open air again, of having finished with the constant danger of being buried alive, but also because now the bombardment had died down the officer with the mail would be able to bring to-day the letters which we had not received for six days.
The child had not failed to write a single time on the promised date and he knew that back in the rear a letter from his daughter was waiting for him and would come to-day. This thought made him cheerful.
At the relief I went with him into the front line trench. It was riddled with shell holes. Our barbed wire entanglements were almost destroyed, but the trench was not entirely ruined, and sandbags quickly put it in good shape again. An immense heap of bricks and smoking ruins cut off our view in front.