【英文文学】War the Creator

【英文文学】War the CreatorChapter 1BECAUSE he was my friend, because he was so lovable, because he suffered much, I want to try to tell the story of a boy who, in two months, became a man. My hero is Georges Cucurou, the son of a shoe-maker of Toulouse. I happened to see him first just before the war began, and not again until after he had been wounded; and the change in him was then so great that I could not rest until I had learned how it had been brought about. Georges is but one of the thousands who have gone into that furnace of patriotism; in France such experiences as his are commonplace now, but when I heard6 his story I got a glimpse of war in a new aspect. Before, I had thought of it only as stupid, destructive, dire; now, in his illumined face, I saw the work of War the Creator.His narrative is concerned with only the first six weeks of the fighting, and mostly with that terrible retreat from Belgium, so bitter in its disappointments, so trying to the flamboyant courage of the French. Hardly had they rallied along the Marne and begun to pursue the enemy when Georges was wounded and invalided home. It was there in the hospital that I got his history; and from those talks, and his notebook, and his letters to his aunt, I have reconstructed the trials and emotions of this lad of twenty.Chapter 2Georges, having commenced his regular three years military service in October, 1913,7 got leave to visit his aunt who was keeping a pension in Paris.How shy and confused he was when I came down to the dining-room that day and surprised him while he was examining his too-faint mustache with great seriousness before the mirror! Charming, I thought him, instantly; a clean, jolly sort of boy, quite too young for that ridiculous soldiers uniform.His aunt introduced him (with her arm about his shoulder and a tweak of his ear) by his nickname, “Coco”; and, after he got used to my being a foreigner, he began to talk, using his big brown eyes and his free, expressive hands quite as much as his tongue. Knowing a little of the Midi, I attempted an imitation of the patois. Coco threw back his head and laughed with abandon. That broke the ice, and we became great friends.He was so curious about everything American that I took him up to my salon to8 see my typewriter; also my neckties and fancy socks.“But whats this?” asked Coco, reading with his funny French pronunciation, “A-mer-i-cain Pencil Compagnie.” It was a novelty, a “perpetual” pencil of the self-sharpening sort, with a magazine filled with little points like cartridges. When I gave it to him, it pleased Coco immensely.“Just like a rifle!” he exclaimed, as he amused himself by pressing the end and ejecting the bits of lead. He went through the manual of arms with it, laughing; he did a mock bayonet thrust or two, and then aimed it at me in fun, like a child. “Pan!” he cried; “thats the way we shoot Germans!” The contrast of his red pantaloons and blue coat with the round, innocent face and lips parted like a girls was absurd. Why, he was more like those doll soldiers you see at toyshops with curly hair! With his fresh9 pink cheeks and big brown eyes he seemed no more than sixteen years old.In the evening we all went out on the crowded Boulevard, where, it being a fête day, they were dancing in front of the open-air band stands. It was a long time before I ceased to think of Coco as jolly, flushed, exuberant, dancing the Tango on the corner by the Sorbonne with his pretty young aunt, as excited and happy as only a lad can be who has come up from a provincial town to see the metropolis for the first time on a holiday.That was on the 14th of July of 1914. Next day he went back to his caserne at Montauban.In two weeks war was declared!Coco, our own blithe Coco, would have to go to the frontoh, his aunts white face that day!and Coco would be in the first line! It seemed like some hideous mistake.10 But already Coco, pink-cheeked, laughing, shy, his mothers only boy, was well on his way toward the German shells and machine guns!Chapter 3The French do nothing without a flavoring of sentiment. Rhetoric flowers in the official proclamations; it makes one laugh even to read the textbooks for soldiers, they are so strewn with fine, resounding phrases; and so, of course, it was quite impossible for Cocos regiment to get away without one of those stirring, gesticulative speeches by the colonel.It was at the Toulouse railway stationparents in tears. The girls gazed admiringly. Gossipy veterans of 70, seeing themselves reincarnated in these fresh young soldiers, patronized them egregiously with advice. Coco and the other lads listened, but11 did not hear; they were smiling at the girls sticking bouquets in their rifle barrels.“Look back for the last time at your homes and your loved ones,” cried the colonel, with all his badges on his breast, “and shed the tear without which our high sacrifice would not ha