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By Root 4635 0

at all. Then she saw the cart, her own or theirs, her husband standing beside the horse's head while the six American soldiers slid the coffin into the cart, and she turned to the American sergeant and said Thank you' in French and suddenly and a little awkwardly he removed his hat and shook her hand, quick and hard, then the other sister's and put his hat back on without once looking at or offering to touch the girl, and she went on around the cart to where her husband stood-a broad strong man in corduroy, not as tall as she and definitely older. They embraced, then all four of them turned to the cart, huddling for a moment in that indecision, as people will. But not for long; there would not be room for all four of them on the seat but the girl had already solved that, climbing up over the shafts and the seat and into the body of the cart, to crouch beside the coffin, huddled into the shawl, her face worn and sleepless and definitely needing soap and water now.

'Why, yes, sister,' Marya, the older sister, said in her voice of happy astonishment, almost of pleasure as though at so simple a solution: Til ride back there too,' So the husband helped her up onto the shaft, then over the seat, where she sat also on the opposite side of the coffin. Then Marthe mounted strongly and without assistance to the seat, the husband following with the lines.

They were already on the edge of the city, so they did not need to pass through it, merely around it. Though actually there was no city, no boundaries enclosing a city from a countryside because this was not even a war zone: it was a battle zone, city and countryside fused and indistinguishable one from the other beneath one vast concentration of troops, American and French, not poised, but neither as though transfixed, suspended beneath, within that vast silence and cessation-all the clutter of battle in a state of arrestment like hypnosis: motionless and silent transport, dumps of ammunition and supplies, and soon they began to pass the guns squatting in batteries, facing eastward, still manned but not poised either, not waiting: just silent, following the now silent line of the old stubborn four-year salient-so that now they were seeing war or what six days ago had been war-the shell-pocked fields, the topless trees some of which this spring had put out a few green and stubborn shoots from the blasted trunks-the familiar land which they had not seen in almost four years but which was familiar still, as though even war had failed to efface completely that old verity of peaceful human occupation. But they were skirting the rubble of what had been Vienne-la-pucelle before it seemed to occur to her that there still might be dread and fear; it was only then that she said to the husband in a voice that did not even reach the two others in the body of the cart: The house,'

'The house was not damaged,' the husband said. 'I dont know why. But the fields, the land. Ruined. Ruined. It will take years. And they wont even let me start now. When they gave me permission to come back yesterday, they forbade me to work them until they have gone over them to locate the shells which might not have exploded,'

And the husband was right because here was the farm, the land pitted (not too severely; some of the trees had not even been topped) with shell craters where she herself had worked beside her husband in the tense seasons and which had been the life of the brother in the cheap coffin behind her in the cart and which was to have been his some day whom she had brought back to sleep in it. Then the house; the husband had been right; it was unmarked save for a pock of small holes in one wall which was probably a machine-gun burst, the husband not even looking at the house but getting down from the cart (a little stiffly; she remarked for the first time how his arthritis seemed to have increased) to go and stand looking out over his ruined land. Nor did she enter the house either, calling him by name; then she said: 'Come now. Let's finish this first,' So he returned and entered the house; apparently