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.

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 her have her boy back as they had brought back her husband—­with the bullet in the middle of the forehead!

But she heard a noise of voices.  It was the Prussians returning from the village.  She hid her letter very quickly in her pocket, and she received them quietly, with her ordinary face, having had time to wipe her eyes.