“Out of my own garden,” he replied, with a faint lifting of the blond mustache.
The young soldier looked like a grown-up baby, Barbara thought, with his fair curly hair, his pink cheeks and his china-blue eyes.
“You see there are long hours here in the trenches when we men have so little to do, one suffers the grand ennui,” he explained to Eugenia. “So my friends and I have made a garden. If you have a minute more to spare will you come and see?”
Obediently the two girls followed until the soldier led them to the opening in the trench that led up to the outside world. Already Nona and Mildred and the young officer had disappeared.
But there like a sunken garden about four feet below the earth were two beds of bright old-fashioned flowers and small stunted evergreens. The gardeners had left a pathway of earth in the center of the trench, just as one might in any ordinary garden.
Barbara rubbed her eyes. She was pretending to be overcome with surprise, but in reality felt the tears coming. For some reason she could not explain it struck her as terribly pathetic that the soldiers, hiding in these trenches for such tragic work, should spend their spare hours making the dark world beautiful.
Eugenia was bent upon understanding the situation.
“Did you actually plant seeds here in such a place and under such conditions and make them grow?” she demanded. “Whatever made you think they would blossom?”
The French soldier smiled. He seemed rather to enjoy the questioning, since it showed the proper interest and admiration for his work.
“I brought back the first plant from our garden when I had been at home on sick leave,” he explained proudly. “Then without thinking or expecting the flower to live, I thrust my plant into the earth where there was a little sunlight. Then the pauvre petite grew and flourished and so I wrote home for others. Later my comrades grew interested. They brought water for my plants and saved their tobacco ashes to put around them. Then they too asked that more plants be sent them. Some we found by the wayside in our walks through the woods. We have been lucky because no German shell has dared destroy our garden.”