One of Ours - Willa Cather (great book club books .TXT) 📗

only to listen to her breathing and to look at her white, perspiring face to feel how weak she was. Draggled, mud to the knees, she was trying to nurse her baby, half hidden under an old black shawl. She didn’t look like a tramp woman, but like one who had once been able to take proper care of herself, and she was still young. The children were tired and discouraged. One little boy wore a clumsy blue jacket, made from a French army coat. The other wore a battered American Stetson that came down over his ears. He carried, in his two arms, a pink celluloid clock. They all looked up and waited for the soldiers to do something.

Claude approached the woman, and touching the rim of his helmet, began: “Bonjour, Madame. Qu’est que c’est?”

She tried to speak, but went off into a spasm of coughing, only able to gasp, “ ’Toinette, ’Toinette!”

’Toinette stepped quickly forward. She was about eleven, and seemed to be the captain of the party. A bold, hard little face with a long chin, straight black hair tied with rags, uneasy, crafty eyes; she looked much less gentle and more experienced than her mother. She began to explain, and she was very clever at making herself understood. She was used to talking to foreign soldiers⁠—spoke slowly, with emphasis and ingenious gestures.

She, too, had been reconnoitering. She had discovered the empty farmhouse and was trying to get her party there for the night. How did they come here? Oh, they were refugees. They had been staying with people thirty kilometers from here. They were trying to get back to their own village. Her mother was very sick, presque morte, and she wanted to go home to die. They had heard people were still living there; an old aunt was living in their own cellar⁠—and so could they if they once got there. The point was, and she made it over and over, that her mother wished to die chez elle, comprenez-vous? They had no papers, and the French soldiers would never let them pass, but now that the Americans were here they hoped to get through; the Americans were said to be toujours gentils.

While she talked in her shrill, clicking voice, the baby began to howl, dissatisfied with its nourishment. The little girl shrugged. “Il est toujours en colère,” she muttered. The woman turned it around with difficulty⁠—it seemed a big, heavy baby, but white and sickly⁠—and gave it the other breast. It began sucking her noisily, rooting and sputtering as if it were famished. It was too painful, it was almost indecent, to see this exhausted woman trying to feed her baby. Claude beckoned his men away to one side, and taking the little girl by the hand drew her after them.

“Il faut que votre mère⁠—se reposer,” he told her, with the grave caesural pause which he always made in the middle of a French sentence. She understood him. No distortion of her native tongue surprised or perplexed her. She was accustomed to being addressed in all persons, numbers, genders, tenses; by Germans, English, Americans. She only listened to hear whether the voice was kind, and with men in this uniform it usually was kind.

Had they anything to eat? Vous avez quelque chose à manger?

“Rien. Rien du tout.”

Wasn’t her mother trop malade à marcher?

She shrugged; Monsieur could see for himself.

And her father?

He was dead; mort à la Marne, en quatorze.

“At the Marne?” Claude repeated, glancing in perplexity at the nursing baby.

Her sharp eyes followed his, and she instantly divined his doubt. “The baby?” she said quickly. “Oh, the baby is not my brother, he is a Boche.”

For a moment Claude did not understand. She repeated her explanation impatiently, something disdainful and sinister in her metallic little voice. A slow blush mounted to his forehead.

He pushed her toward her mother, “Attendez là.”

“I guess we’ll have to get them over to that farmhouse,” he told the men. He repeated what he had got of the child’s story. When he came to her laconic statement about the baby, they looked at each other. Bert Fuller was afraid he might cry again, so he kept muttering, “By God, if we’d a-got here sooner, by God if we had!” as they ran back along the ditch.

Dell and Oscar made a chair of their crossed hands and carried the woman⁠—she was no great weight. Bert picked up the little boy with the pink clock; “Come along, little frog, your legs ain’t long enough.”

Claude walked behind, holding the screaming baby stiffly in his arms. How was it possible for a baby to have such definite personality, he asked himself, and how was it possible to dislike a baby so much? He hated it for its square, tow-thatched head and bloodless ears, and carried it with loathing⁠ ⁠… no wonder it cried! When it got nothing by screaming and stiffening, however, it suddenly grew quiet; regarded him with pale blue eyes, and tried to make itself comfortable against his khaki coat. It put out a grimy little fist and took hold of one of his buttons. “Kamerad, eh?” he muttered, glaring at the infant. “Cut it out!”

Before they had their own supper that night, the boys carried hot food and blankets down to their family.

VIII

Four o’clock⁠ ⁠… a summer dawn⁠ ⁠… his first morning in the trenches.

Claude had just been along the line to see that the gun teams were in position. This hour, when the light was changing, was a favourite time for attack. He had come in late last night, and had everything to learn. Mounting the firestep, he peeped over the parapet between the sandbags, into the low, twisting mist. Just then he could see nothing but the wire entanglement, with birds hopping along the top wire, singing and chirping as they did on the wire fences at