eyes, who had not grown thin in spite of the fatigue which they had
endured already and who also, though in a conquered country, had remained
kind and gentle. Alone with this aged woman, they showed themselves full
of consideration, sparing her, as much as they could, all expense and
fatigue. They could be seen, all four of them, making their toilet at the
well in their shirt-sleeves in the gray dawn, splashing with great
swishes of water their pink-white northern skin, while La Mere Sauvage
went and came, preparing their soup. They would be seen cleaning the
kitchen, rubbing the tiles, splitting wood, peeling potatoes, doing up
all the housework like four good sons around their mother.

But the old woman thought always of her own son, so tall and thin, with
his hooked nose and his brown eyes and his heavy mustache which made a
roll of black hair upon his lip. She asked every day of each of the
soldiers who were installed beside her hearth: "Do you know where the
French marching regiment, No. 23, was sent? My boy is in it."

They invariably answered, "No, we don't know, don't know a thing at all."
And, understanding her pain and her uneasiness--they who had
mothers, too, there at home--they rendered her a thousand little
services. She loved them well, moreover, her four enemies, since the
peasantry have no patriotic hatred; that belongs to the upper class
alone. The humble, those who pay the most because they are poor and
because every new burden crushes them down; those who are killed in
masses, who make the true cannon's prey because they are so many; those,
in fine, who suffer most cruelly the atrocious miseries of war because
they are the feeblest and offer least resistance--they hardly
understand at all those bellicose ardors, that excitable sense of honor
or those pretended political combinations which in six months exhaust two
nations, the conqueror with the conquered.