They were four great fellows with fair complexion, blond beards and blue eyes, who had not grown thin in spite of the fatigue which they had endured already and who also, though in a conquered country, had remained kind and gentle.  Alone with this aged woman, they showed themselves full of consideration, sparing her, as much as they could, all expense and fatigue.  They could be seen, all four of them, making their toilet at the well in their shirt-sleeves in the gray dawn, splashing with great swishes of water their pink-white northern skin, while La Mere Sauvage went and came, preparing their soup.  They would be seen cleaning the kitchen, rubbing the tiles, splitting wood, peeling potatoes, doing up all the housework like four good sons around their mother.

But the old woman thought always of her own son, so tall and thin, with his hooked nose and his brown eyes and his heavy mustache which made a roll of black hair upon his lip.  She asked every day of each of the soldiers who were installed beside her hearth:  “Do you know where the French marching regiment, No. 23, was sent?  My boy is in it.”

They invariably answered, “No, we don’t know, don’t know a thing at all.”  And, understanding 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.