During that terrible retreat, Georges, had been a part of a working, fighting machine, tried to his utmost in mind and body. He had been hammered, hammered into shape. Hunger and fatigue had hardened him. Every day his nerves had been getting more tough and strong. If his duty consisted of retreating, digging, sleeping three or four hours a day, going without meat and often Without water or wine, he could do it.

On a post card, scrawled in haste from somewhere (no postmark, no date, no indica63tion of any locality being permitted), he wrote to his aunt:

Dear Aunt: If we keep on retreating like this, we may perhaps get to Paris. I should be very glad to see you, of course, but I hope not. There must soon be an end of all this digging and digging, and victory will be ours. I am afraid you wouldn’t recognize your Georges.

Indeed, she wouldn’t have recognized him, but, not only because for weeks he had the dirt caked in his hands and hair and ears, and his uniform hung on him in rags, but partly too because already in his face there was beginning to show something more unlike the old Coco we had known than all that change in his outward self could make him. He had learned patience, perseverance, caution, confidence in his officers, and faith in the ulti64mate victory. He was uplifted by that great wave of high idealism that was transforming France.

Why that steady retreat, further and further south? Georges and Georges’s company, now that they were tempered by experience, now that they were raging to attack, couldn’t understand. But still they retreated and retreated. Back to Suippes they came.

It was a queer entrance that regiment made into Suippes. On the road, they had overtaken a troop of refugees who, utterly exhausted, could travel no further. The peasants had a panic of alarm at sight of the column, thinking that the Germans were already upon them. It was hard work reassuring them; and it ended in a comedy, the soldiers taking a hand at the migration. Old women were mounted in the handcarts they had been trying to pull and were given a ride into town. Soldiers unharnessed the don65keys and put the children on their backs. They pushed at the wagons, they helped along the graybeards, they carried babies in their arms. Georges, I think, must have begun to realize that he had grown up when he, a veteran now, marched into Suippes, carrying a big basket for a lad of fifteen who looked up to his soldier protector admiringly, and ca............