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By Root 4637 0

one for the other but in bartering one had trafficked them both away? I didn't know, we didn't know: only that he had refused, declined, and still in that way I told you of, less of refusal than negation, so that we just thought he wasn't ready yet, that he still wanted a little more of that young man's bachelor and tieless freedom which he had only regained-re-gained? found-yesterday when he doffed the uniform. So we could wait too and we did; more time passed but we still thought there was enough of it, since marriage is long enough to have plenty of room for time behind it. Then-suddenly, with no warning to us who knew only work and bread, not politics and glory-it was and whether there had been time enough or not or he had been right to wait or not didn't matter. Because he didn't wait now Wednesday NigM either; he was gone that first week in the old uniform still stinking of the mothballs from the garret trunk but even that was no quicker nor faster than we were; you know where the farm is-was (no: still is since it will have to still be there in order to be a basis for what you will finally grant us) so I dont need to tell you how we left it either, since a part of your trade is coping with the confused and anguished mass of the civilian homeless in order to make room for your victories.

'He didn't even wait to be called by his class. A stranger might have guessed it to be a young bachelor accepting even war as a last desperate cast to escape matrimony, but that stranger would be wrong of course, as he himself proved two years later. But we knew better. He was a Frenchman now. All France asked of him in re-turn for that dignity and right and that security and independence was his willingness to defend it and them, and he had gone to do that. Then suddenly all France (all Western Europe too for that matter) was loud with your name; every child even in France knew your face because you would save us-you, to be supreme of all, not to command our armies and the armies of our allies because they did not need to be commanded, since the terror and the threat was their terror and threat too and all they needed was to be led, comforted, reassured and you were the one to do that because they had faith in you, believed in you. But I knew more. Not better: just more; I had only to match almost any newspaper with this-' again she moved slightly the closed hand lying in the other palm '-and now I knew not only who you were but what you were and where you were. No no, you didn't start this war just to further prove him as your son and a Frenchman, but rather since this war had to be, his own destiny, fate would use it to prove him to his father. You see? You and he together to be one in the saving of France, he in his humble place and you in your high and matchless one and victory itself would be that day when at last you would see one another face to face, he rankless still save for the proven bravery and constancy and devotion which the medal you would fasten to his breast would symbolise and affirm.

'It was the girl of course; his revenge and vengeance on you which you feared: a whore, a Marseille whore to mother the grandchildren of your high and exalted blood. He told us of her on his leave in the second year. We-I-said no of course too, but then he had that of you also; the capacity to follow his will always. Oh yes, he told us of her: a good girl, he said, leading through her own fate, necessity, compulsions (there is an old grandmother) a life which was not her life. And he was right. We saw that as soon as he brought her to us. She is a good girl, now anyway, since then anyway, maybe always a good girl as he believed or maybe only since she loved him. Anyway, who are we to challenge him and her, if what this proves is what love can do: save a woman as well as doom her? But no matter now. You will never believe, perhaps you dare not risk it, chance it, that he would never have made any claim on you: that this whore's children would bear not his father's name but my father's. You would never believe that they would never