His class has been called out, the class of Quatre-vingt-douze.
It appears he was only forty-three.
I had thought he was sixty at least. It must be because he has been anxious all his life that he seems so old.
He was terribly worried and anxious when he talked to me, the night before he went, about the old father and mother he must leave. He would be going probably only somewhere back of the lines to guard a bridge or a railway, but for him it meant—who knows what darkly, helplessly imagined things? He talked a great deal in a high-pitched voice—standing there, very white in his proper livery—of bayonet attacks, of the coal he had managed to get in for the old people, of dying for France, and of his mother's rheumatism, and of the cow they had had to sell.
The Garage
There are twelve convalescents installed after a fashion in the garage half-way down the field path. They are so nearly well that they can make up their beds and sweep out their rooms and wash at the pump and go down to eat at the canteen of the hospital Sainte Barbe. They go to the Clinique there every second or third or fourth day. An orderly comes up from there once in a while with clean linen for them. And that is all they need be troubled about. They are quite comfortable and very forlorn.
They spend their days hanging out of the windows of the loft over the garage or sitting about the big board table of the space underneath, where the motors used to be kept.
Most of them are men from cities who do not know what to do with the country, and the three or four who are country boys know so well what to do with vines and fields, that the vines and fields they may not labour, so close about them here, only worry them. They are the men who get most cross and quarrelsome over the games of cards at the board table.
They all quarrel more or less. Sometimes I wonder, how can men who are so splendid, so simply, steadily, dumbly splendid, who have been through so much, seen death so close, and life so close, quarrel like this over nothing at all. But most times I understand.
The crickets trill all the hot noons in the grass, and the droning of the bees sounds very hot. Like clouds of white butterflies drift over the path, make little drifting butterfly shadows on the path. There is a most wonderful smell of clover in the heat. Down under the fields there are heaped together the crowded old rust-red and burnt umber and golden roofs of the town. And all away beyond there is the valley, opened out, long road and river, to high, far distances of mountains and snows.