I was not conscious till afterward how funny
it all was. I must have been a good deal like an excited duck, and
Amelie like a hen with a duckling. When she was not twitching my sash
straight, she was running about after me with dry shoes and stockings,
and a chair, for fear "madame was getting too tired"; and when she was
not doing that she was clapping my big garden hat on my head, for fear
"madame would get a sunstroke." The joke was that I did not know it was
hot. I did not even know it was funny until afterward, when the whole
scene seemed to have been by a sort of dual process photographed
unconsciously on my memory.
When the boys were all washed and shaved and combed,--and
they were so larky over it,--we were like old friends. I did not know
one of them by name, but I did know who was married, and who had
children; and how one man's first child had been born since he left
England, and no news from home because they had seen their mail wagon
burn on the battlefield; and how one of them was only twenty, and had
been six years in the army,--lied when he enlisted; how none of them had
ever seen war before; how they had always wanted to, and "Now," said the
twenty-years older, "I've seen it--good Lord--and all I want is to get
home," and he drew out of his breast pocket a photograph of a young girl
in all her best clothes, sitting up very straight.
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