A medal for gallantry?  Which one of us would not have won it?  Lose the battle?  But could Italians be defeated?  Death—­but who feared to die?  And did anybody ever die at nineteen?  Who could tell what strange and marvellous adventures awaited us, what sights we should see!  Perhaps some foreign expedition; a war in the East; was not the Eastern question still stirring?  We wandered in imagination over seas and mountains, we saw the marshalling of fleets and armies, we glowed with impatience, we cried out within ourselves, “Only give us time to pass our examinations, and we’ll be there too!”

And then the examinations took place, and on a beautiful July morning the doors of the ducal palace were thrown open and we were told to go forth and seek our destiny.  And with a great cry we dashed out, and scattered ourselves like a flight of birds over the length and breadth of Italy.

V.

And now?

Six years have gone by, only six years, and what a long and strange and varied romance might be woven out of the lives of those two hundred college comrades!  I have seen many of them since we graduated, and have had news of many others, and I have a way of passing them in review one after another, and questioning them mentally; and what I see and hear fills me with a wonder not unmixed with sadness.  And here they all are.

The first that I see are a group of brown, broad-shouldered, bearded men, whom I do not recall just at first; but when they smile at me I recognize the slender fair boys who used to look so girlish.

“Is it really you?” I exclaim, and they answer, “Yes,” with a deep sonorous note so different from the boyish voices I had expected to hear, that I start back involuntarily.

And these others?  Their features are not changed, to be sure, their figures are as robust and well set-up as ever, but the smile has vanished, there is no brightness in the eye.

“What has happened to you?” I ask; and they answer, “Nothing.”

Ah, how much better that some misfortune should have befallen them than that the years alone, and only six short years, should have had the power so sadly to transform them!

Here are others.  Good God!  One, two, three, five of them; let me look again; yes—­gray-headed!  What—­at twenty-seven!  Tell me—­what happened?  They shrug their shoulders and pass on.

Then I see a long file of my own friends, some of them the wildest of the class, one with a baby in his arms, one with a child by the hand, another leading two.  What?  So-and-so married?  So-and-so a pere de famille?  Who would have thought it?

Here come others; some, with bowed heads and reddened eyes, sign to me sadly in passing.  There is crape upon their sleeves.

Others, with heads high and flashing eyes, point exultantly to their breasts.  Our college dream, the military medal—­ah, lucky fellows!