"Don't you want the _croix de guerre_?" I cry, astounded at such apathy even from Amieux.
"Don't you suppose your mother would _love_ to have her son decorated?" I feel there must be some absurd misunderstanding between us, the man seems to be talking such nonsense.
"Well, you see, my mother ... my only brother was killed last winter. _Maman_ worries a good deal about me, and I told her, just so she could sleep quietly, you know, I have told her my company isn't near the front at all. I said we were guarding a munitions depot at the rear."
"Well, don't you see, if I get the _croix de guerre_ for being under fire, _maman_ would get to worrying again. So I told my captain I'd rather he'd give it to one of the other fellows."
I had just come from several hours spent with one of the war-blind, one of those among the educated, unresigned war-blind, who see too clearly with the eyes of their intelligence what has happened to them. I had been with him, looking into his sightless face, pitting my strength against the bitterness of his voice; and I was tired, tired to the marrow of my bones, to the tip of every nerve.
But the children had not been out for their walk and the day was that rare thing in a Paris March, a sunshiny one, not to be wasted. "Come, dears," I told them as I entered the apartment, "get on your wraps. We'll all go out for a play while the sun is still high."
I walked along the street between them, my little daughter and my little son, their warm soft hands in mine. The sparrows chattered in the bare trees above us, the sparrows who even in this keen air felt the coming of spring which was foretold by the greening of the grass in the public squares. My children chattered incessantly, like the sparrows. Perhaps they felt the spring too. _I_ did not want to feel the spring. We turned away from the Seine and walked on one side of the open square before Notre Dame.
"Mother, I caught my ball twenty-three times to-day without missing."
"Muvver, I see a white horse, a _big_ white horsie!"
"Mother, do you like arithmetic as well as history? _I_ don't."
"Muvver, I have a little p'tend doggie here, trotting after me, a little brown p'tend doggie."
"Mother, O _mother_, let me tell you what happened at school to-day, during recess!"