"But even if there are some who know, not one will betray. Moreover, he is surely safe from betrayal, dead and buried somewhere under the ruins he himself caused for the sake of his country."
The letter went on to tell of the town so sacrificed: streets and quarters destroyed entirely, not a house anywhere but was more or less injured, the least harmed streets deep in broken glass and blocked with fallen tiles and stones. The whole town was become a place of homeless and wounded and dead.
The young girl kept repeating that no one complained; it was for the sake of their country. The homeless people in the streets said to one another, "It is less than our soldiers suffer in the trenches."
She wrote of things she had seen in that night: a father carrying his boy, of perhaps fifteen years, in his arms, not believing he was dead; a woman they could not get near, under the ruins, alive, her child killed beside her; a woman gone mad, running in the streets, shrieking a man's name; another woman, running also, with her baby in her arms, begging every one she met to mend it, for its head had been cut off.
All the less unhappy people had taken in the homeless; of the inhabitants of all the ruined houses, by the next night less than fifty were left to the care of the town.
The girl wrote: "The people of the town are admirable, the homeless with the rest; we know that the sacrifice is for our country, and we make it gladly. The terrible suffering of the town is offered up for victory and peace."
She went on to tell of little things: "Your room we have given to a mother with three babies; I have Aunt Emeline with me, sleeping in father's room, for mine is not safe—the roof of the next house has fallen against its roof. Father sleeps in the room behind the shop, and in the shop we have found place to take in ten of the destitute. The shock threw most of the books out of their cases, and loosened the cases from the walls, so that we have had to prop them up. The books are heaped out of the way of the mattresses of the homeless. I thought father would worry about the books; you know, he has always felt them to be live things; but he has no thought for them. He is in the Place all day, trying to help clear away the glass and stones. The tower of the church has fallen all across the Place. All the windows in the town are broken, and there is no glass to be had for mending them. We live behind paper windows, in a gloom that does depress one."
The letter went from one subject to another, nervously and rather confusedly. She told of immense blocks of stone, hurled from great distances into the streets; of the fronts of houses ripped out, and the stories dropped or sagging; of Aunt Emeline's poor little belongings all lost—the portrait of great-grandfather; how the enormous factories of —— and —— had served as a screen to protect the town, or else it had been destroyed completely; of one of the little homeless children in the book-shop who kept all the time saying her prayers, "Little Jesus, stay with us; little Jesus, stay with us," and how her name was Cecilette; of the bitter cold that made it all more cruel; and, always, how they were proud to offer up the sacrifice for their country. She sent her love, and her father's, always more and more tenderly. It seemed as if their love for Mariette, of whom they had no word, increased every day. She kept saying over and over how proud the town was, to have made the sacrifice; and what a brave thing for, perhaps, one man alone to have brought about.
That Naughty Little Boy
It was that naughty little boy who was killed, to whose funeral she went this morning in the church of St. Augustin. That naughty little boy—grown up, wandered far, always a "bad case," come home because there was war, and gone out with the rest—is dead magnificently.