The three hours came to an end. Enrico rose and saluted me formally. He was so glad to have seen me; I was very good to bring his mother all the way from Rome; and he and the comrades would much enjoy my excellent cigarettes. “A riverderci!” Then he turned to his mother and without any self-consciousness bent to her open arms....
When the signora joined me farther down the road she was clear-eyed but sombre.
“Can you understand,” she said softly, “how when I have him in my arms and think of all I have done for him, his education, his long sickness, all, all—and what he means to me and his father and little Bianca—and then I think how in one moment it may all be over for always, all that precious life—O God what are women made for!... We shall have to hurry, my friend, to get to the station.”
I glanced back once more at the slim figure just going around the bend of the road at a run, so as not to exceed his leave—a mere boy and such a nice boy, with his brilliant, eager eyes, so healthy and clean and joyous, so affectionate, so completely what any mother would adore. And he might be going “up north” any day now to fight the Austrians.
“Signora,” I asked, “do you believe in war?”
“They all say this war has to be,” she said dully. “Oh, I don’t know!... It is a hard world to understand!... I try to remember that I am only one of hundreds of thousands of Italian women.... I hope I shall see him once more before they take him away. My God!”
That afternoon the expert who had been sent to Rome by a foreign newspaper to watch the critical situation carefully put down his empty teacup and pronounced his verdict:
“Yes, this time it looks to me really like war. They have gone too far to draw back. Some of them think they are likely to get a good deal out of the war with a small sacrifice—everybody likes a bargain, you know!... Then General Cadorna, they say, is a very ambitious man, and this is his chance. A successful campaign would make him.... But I don’t know. It would be quite a risk, quite a risk.”