I don't know why I write of him in the past tense, for I have always the most amusing letters from him, from there. He is near Verdun. This morning I got from him a little snapshot a copain had made of him, down on all-fours in the bottom of his trench feeding a baby pig out of a bottle.
Wednesday, February 9th
Post Card
Boinet is very happy to-day. He has news of his people at last. Since he left them in the first days, all through these months and months, it has been as if they had been simply swept away out of the world.
Everything that Boinet loved was swept away by the great black wave of the war. Into what depth of the end of all things all his life has been swept away! He has been imagining and imagining. He says, all the time in the trenches he was tortured by imagining things that might have happened to his three little sisters. Boinet is twenty-two, and the three sisters were younger than he, and beautiful, he says. Odd, how one speaks always in the past tense of people whom the war has taken into its dark spaces. Boinet tells how he loved his mother, as if it were a thing of another life.
And here is his post card saying that they are all quite well, and signed by every one of them.
For nearly a year Boinet has been in the hospital, Number 16. He has troubled about his horrible burns scarcely at all, but we have thought he would go mad torturing himself with imagining things that might have happened to his people.
By means of an agency here, and the Mairie at Tourcoing, it was possible, at last, for his people to send him a post card of six lines.
It came this morning; I have had to read it to him about fifty times over.
It says that they are all very well, and for him to give news of Pierre, the husband of his sister Josette, and it is signed with all their dear, dear names, Père, Mère, Josette, Marie, Cloton.