“I am no child!” he cried, between choking attacks of nausea. “I am as old as the rest—older than some. Let me go! Let me go back! I am a soldier of France!”
For all his brave words, his trembling legs gave way under him, and he fell again and rolled over on his stomach, hiding his face in his hands, a whimpering, vomiting child, helpless with pain and with fear.
“He speaks true! He speaks true!” yelled the old woman. Now she was on her feet, her lean face red and swollen with a vast rage. “I saw them—I saw them—I saw those others as I was dragging this one in. He speaks true, I tell you. There was a captain—he could not have been more than fifteen. And his sword—it was as long as he was, nearly. There are soldiers out there like this one, whose arms are not strong enough to lift the guns to their shoulders. They are children who fight outside—children in the garb of men!”
The widow, who continually wept, sprang forward. She had quit weeping and a great and terrible fury looked out of her red-lidded eyes. She screeched in a voice that rose above the wails of the rest:
“And it was for this, months ago, that they took away from me my little Pierre! Mother of God, they fight this war with babies!”
She threw herself down on all fours and, wriggling across the floor upon her hands and knees, gathered up the muddied, booted feet of the boy soldier and hugged them to her bosom.
In the middle of the circle the old woman stood, gouging at her hair with her hands.
“It is true!” she proclaimed. “They are sending forth our babies to fight against strong men.”
The palsied man twisted himself up to her. He shook his head to and fro, as if in dissent of what she declared. He pointed toward the north; then at the sobbing boy at his feet; then north again; then at the boy; and, so doing, he many times and very swiftly nodded his head. Then he repeated the same gesticulations with his arms that he had made at the time of giving the first alarm of the approach of the enemy. Finally he stooped his back and shrank up his body and hunched in his shoulders in an effort to counterfeit smallness and slightness, all the while gurgling in a desperate attempt to make himself understood. All at once, simultaneously his audience grasped the purport of his pantomime.
“The Germans that you saw, they were children too—children like this one?” demanded the old woman, her voice all thickened and raspy with her passion. “Is that what you mean?”