We all felt as proud of him as if he belonged to us. I was told that he had been sent into the first-line trenches--only two hundred yards from the German front--during the bombardment, "to encourage and comfort his men" (I quote), and that a bomb had exploded over the trench and knocked a hole in his steel helmet.
I don't know which impressed me most--the idea of a lad of twenty having so established the faith in his courage amongst his superior officers as to be safe as a comfort and encouragement for the men, or the fact that, if the army had had those steel casques at the beginning of the war, many lives would have been saved.
The Aspirant came in with the second detachment the night before last--the eighth. The regiment was in and all quartered before he appeared.
We had begun to fear something had happened to him, when he turned up, freshly shaved and clean, but with a tattered overcoat on his arm, and a battered helmet in his hand.
Amélie greeted him with: "Well, young man, we thought you were lost!"
He laughed, as he explained that he had been to make a toilet, see the regimental tailor, and order a new topcoat.
"I would not, for anything in the world, have had madame see me in the state I was in an hour ago. She has to see my rags, but I spared her the dirt," and he held up the coat to show its rudely sewed-up rents, and turned over his helmet to show the hole in the top.
"And here is what hit me," and he took out of his pocket a rough piece of a shell, and held it up, as if it were very precious. Indeed, he had it wrapped in a clean envelope, all ready to take up to Paris and show his mother, as he is to have his leave of a week while he is here.
I felt like saying "Don't," but I didn't. I suppose it is hard for an ambitious soldier of twenty to realize that the mother of an only son, and that son such a boy as this, must have some feeling besides pride in her heart as she looks at him.
So now we are settled again, and used to the trotting of horses, the banging of grenades and splitting of mitrailleuses. From the window as I write--I am up in the attic, which Amélie calls the "atelier," because it is in the top of the house and has a tiny north light in the roof--that being the only place where I am sure of being undisturbed-- I can see horses being trained in the wide field on the side of the hill between here and Quincy. They are manoeuvring with all sorts of noises about them--even racing in a circle while grenades and guns are fired.