Amelie's stepdaughter is married to a big burly chap by the name of
Georges Godot. He is a thick-necked, red-faced man--in the dynamite
corps on the railroad, the construction department. He is used to
hardships. War is as good as anything else to him. When he came to say
"good-bye" he said, "Well, if I have the luck to come back--so much the
better. If I don't, that will be all right. You can put a placque down
below in the cemetery with 'Godot, Georges: Died for the country '; and
when my boys grow up they can say to their comrades, 'Papa, you know, he
died on the battlefield.' It will be a sort of distinction I am not
likely to earn for them any other way"; and off he went. Rather fine
for a man of that class.

Even the women make no cry. As for the children--even when you would
think that they were old enough to understand the meaning of these
partings they make no sign, though they seem to understand all the rest
of it well enough. There isn't a boy of eight in our commune who cannot
tell you how it all came about, and who is not just now full of stories
of 1870, which he has heard from grandma and grandpa, for, as is
natural, every one talks of 1870 now. I have lived among these people,
loved them and believed in them, even when their politics annoyed me,
but I confess that they have given me a surprise.




IX



August 17, 1914.