If it ran down, if he let it run down, what in the world would not happen?
The battles might be lost to France. His mother might die. And then whatever could he say to his father?
In the days he used to hurry home from everything, to the watch. And in the nights he used to sit up in bed to listen for its ticking. He would stay awake for hours in the nights, afraid it might stop and he not know. Often in the nights he would cry from the tiredness of having to keep awake and listen. But in the days he would forget the watch, sometimes, for a little.
To-day he was happy because of the goldfish.
Hospital, Friday, October 15th
Just these days the people of several of the men have been coming from far to see them.
Way off, in some little town of Brittany or the Béarn, or Provence, there had arrived word that the soldier this or that had been wounded thus or so, and was at the hospital. Upon months and months of waiting in dreadful, helpless ignorance, the shock had come as a relief almost.
But how strange and terrible a thing the journey was to people who could understand so little what they must do. Where to go, what to do. Perhaps they were people who had never ventured beyond the town where the diligence stopped, who never had taken a train. They did not know what the Champagne meant. They did not know where Paris was. The departure was a tremendous thing. A tearing up of roots and cutting with a knife. Then the journey, confused and terrifying. Then the great city, and the great hospital.
There is a moment when it seems as if it were a stranger, the boy lying there, in the bed that is one of such a long row of beds. His people stand, a little dazed, down by the door. The long ward, the two long rows of beds against its walls, the stretcher-beds down the middle of it; and all those boys who lie so still—how strange it seems to them! And their boy, who does not wave his hand or shout to them, who scarcely lifts his head—his smile has changed, has come to be quite a different smile.