LES TRAVAILLEURS DE LA GUERRE
The boy soldier is willing to make any day his last if it is a good
day. It is not so with the middle-aged man. He is puzzled by the
war. What he has to struggle with more than bodily weakness is the
malady of thought. Is the bloody business worth while?
I SAW him first, my middle-aged man, one afternoon on the boards of an
improvised stage in the sand-dunes of Belgium. On that last thin strip
of the shattered kingdom English and French and Belgians were grimly
massed. He was a Frenchman, and he was cheering up his comrades. With
shining black hair and volatile face, he played many parts that day. He
recited sprightly verses of Parisian life. He carried on amazing
twenty-minute dialogues with himself, mimicking the voice of girl and
woman, bully and dandy. His audience had come in stale from the
everlasting spading and marching. They brightened visibly under his
gaiety. If he cared to make that effort in the saddened place, they
were ready to respond. When he dismissed them, the last flash of him was
of a smiling, rollicking improvisator, bowing himself over to the
applause till his black hair was level with our eyes.
And then next day as I sat in my ambulance, waiting orders, he trudged
by in his blue, "the color of heaven" once, but musty now from nights
under the rain. His head of hair, which the glossy black wig had
covered, was gray-white.
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