contributed no suggestions to his brilliant plans. She clung to him,
but she tried to divert his affection. When she spoke it was of small
domestic abuses: the exorbitant prices she had had to pay for food;
the way in which the soldiery had stolen her pots and pans; the
insolence she had experienced when she had lodged complaints against
the men before their officers. And the boy--he wanted to be a poilu.
He kept inventing revenges he would take in battle, if the war lasted
long enough for his class to be called out. As darkness fell they
ceased talking. I began to realise that in three and a half years they
had lost contact. They were saying over and over the things that
had been said already; they were trying to prevent themselves from
acknowledging that they had grown different and separate. The only
bond which held them as a family was their common loneliness and fear
that, if they did not hold together, their intolerable loneliness
would return. When the light was hooded, the boy sank his hand against
his father's shoulder; the woman nestled herself in the fold of his
arm, with her head turned away from him, that he might not kiss her so
often. The man sat upright, his eyes wide open, watching them sleeping
with a kind of impotent despair. They were together; and yet they
were not together. He had recovered them; nevertheless, he had not
recovered them. Those Boches, the devils, they had kept something;
they had only sent their bodies back. All night long, whenever I
woke up as the train halted, the little man was still guarding them
jealously as a dog guards a bone, and staring morosely at the blank
wall of the future.

These were among the lucky ones; the boy and woman had had a man to
meet them. Somewhere in France there was protection awaiting them and
the shelter of a house that was not charity. And yet ... all night
while they slept the man sat awake, facing up to facts. These were