"It's you, isn't it," he says to me, "that takes Biquet's letters
that's dead?"--"Yes."--" Here's a returned one; the address has
hopped it."
The envelope was exposed, no doubt, to rain on the top of a packet,
and the address is no longer legible among the violet mottlings on
the dried and frayed paper. Alone there survives in a corner the
address of the sender. I pull the letter out gently--"My dear
mother"--Ah, I remember! Biquet, now lying in the open air in the
very trench where we are halted, wrote that letter not long ago in
our quarters at Gauchin-l'Abbe, one flaming and splendid
afternoon, in reply to a letter from his mother, whose fears for him
had proved groundless and made him laugh--"You think I'm in the cold
and rain and danger. Not at all; on the contrary, all that's
finished. It's hot, we're sweating, and we've nothing to do only to
stroll about in the sunshine. I laughed to read your letter--"
I return to the frail and damaged envelope the letter which, if
chance had not averted this new irony, would have been read by the
old peasant woman at the moment when the body of her son is a wet
nothing in the cold and the storm, a nothing that trickles and flows
like a dark spring on the wall of the trench.
Joseph has leaned his head backwards. His eyes close for a moment,
his mouth half opens, and his breathing is fitful.
"Courage!" I say to him, and he opens his eyes again.
"Ah!" he replies, "it isn't to me you should say that.
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