Elle coupa la toile en deux et les mit chacun dans son suaire, puis elle leur posa un baiser sur le front, en disant chaque fois:
—Pour la mère, mon cher enfant.
. . .
Nous nous tûmes quand le Général eut ainsi parlé et il n’était pas le seul à avoir des larmes dans les yeux. Une prière d’amour se formait dans nos cœurs pour la France.
Maurice Barrès
de l’Académie Française
1915
THE BROTHERS
[TRANSLATION]
I’m not fond of telling this story, said the General, because each time, like the old fool I am, it brings tears to my eyes ... but the best of France is in it.
It’s about two boys, astonishingly gifted, full of heart and brains, that nobody could meet without liking. I knew them when they were tiny little fellows. At the time war broke out, the younger one, François, had just passed his examinations for St. Cyr. He had no time to enter; he was rushed along in the wholesale promotion and made second lieutenant then and there. Fancy what it meant to him—epaulettes and battles at nineteen! His elder brother, Jacques, a boy of twenty,—a really remarkable fellow in his studies, was hard at work in the Law School, where he had taken honors. He went off to the front as second lieutenant, too.
The two brothers were thrown together for the first time in the same brigade of the “iron division,” as it was called—the younger in the 26th of the line, the other in the 27th. They were quartered in a ruined village, and each day they met, making themselves liked everywhere and enjoying a great popularity with the soldiers on account of their youth and friendliness.