derstanding 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.

They said in the district, in speaking of the Germans of La Mere
Sauvage:

"There are four who have found a soft place."

Now, one morning, when the old woman was alone in the house, she
observed, far off on the plain, a man coming toward her dwelling. Soon
she recognized him; it was the postman to distribute the letters. He
gave her a folded paper and she drew out of her case the spectacles
which she used for sewing. Then she read:

MADAME SAUVAGE: This letter is to tell you sad news. Your boy
Victor was killed yesterday by a shell which almost cut him in two.
I was near by, as we stood next each other in the company, and he
told me about you and asked me to let you know on the same day if
anything happened to him.

I took his watch, which was in his pocket, to bring it back to you
when the war is done.
CESAIRE RIVOT,

Soldier of the 2d class, March. Reg. No. 23.

The letter was dated three weeks back.

She did not cry at all. She remained motionless, so overcome and
stupefied that she did not even suffer as yet. She thought: "There's
Victor killed now." Then little by little the tears came to her eyes and
the sorrow filled her heart. Her thoughts came, one by one, dreadful,
torturing. She would never kiss him again, her child, her big boy, never
again! The gendarmes had killed the father, the Prussians had killed
the son. He had been cut in two by a cannon-ball. She seemed to see the
thing, the horrible thing: the head falling, the eyes open, while he
chewed the corner of his big mustache as he always did in moments of
anger.

What had they done with his body afterward? If they had only let