Part 4
But there was to be little rest for Georges Cucurou. From that moment, for a whole week, he lived in a sort of waking nightmare. One foot bare, hopping along, hugging the walls of the village, savagely bombarded by German batteries—lying under big trees, watching his retreating regiment leaving him to almost certain capture—limping away on the arm of a stray wounded soldier in desperate haste before the “Bosches” came that ride in a galloping ammunition wagon, bounced and jolted, bouncing into ditches, bumping over stones—and then, after a hurried first-aid dressing, that fearful journey to Ville-sur-Tourbes!
That journey—more than three miles—Georges made along the hard macadam road, crawling on his hands and knees. He had thrown away his knapsack, he had thrown away his rifle. “But,” said Georges, “there was one thing I’d have died before I’d have thrown away—and that was that Prussian helmet!” The last half mile he was carried on horseback, half fainting, behind a friendly chasseur.
That was but an incident, however—the rest of his ordeal became a confused horror of days and days in a ruined farm, with a hundred others suffering like him, without any food, except unsugared tea, with their wounds undressed—at a farm where threatening German shells dropped intermittently, keeping up the constant fear of death. Then—after endless hours, torturing hours when he thought of nothing but his ankle and his stomach, the flying automobiles of the Red Cross! Georges was wafted to a semi-heaven of beds and bandages and women’s kindly hands and faces—warm food—cleanliness; rest—at Châlons!
Georges’s soldiering was over—over, that is, if you except his trip to Toulouse. To some, perhaps, a three days’ railway trip in a crowded compartment with a crushed ankle might be considered an ordeal. But to Georges it was a holiday. He was going home! Home.
XXIII
At the beautiful Renaissance hospital at Toulouse on the Boulevard de Strasbourg, I found Georges Cucurou lying in the corner of a huge hall—a splendid hall it was of carvings and arches and coffer-vaulted ceiling, all hung with flags.
How small his cot looked, there in the corner of that hall, amid paintings and gildings and magnificent cornices! How strange those nurses looked too—white-swathed matrons in flowing draperies, and nuns with flapping wide white headdresses gliding silently along the parqueted floor! How strange and quiet those weak, pale soldiers in the cots, and the patient soldiers sitting about in blue uniforms, and white, and red! But, most of all, how strange _he_ seemed!
No, it was not Coco, any more—not Coco of the free, airy gestures, Coco of the big, innocent eyes; but some one who was content to let his straight-forward words speak for themselves. Not the boy with mobile, parted lips; but some one whose mouth closed firmly, now, when he paused, reflecting seriously before he answered. And, as he spoke of things beyond my ken, he made me, somehow, feel ashamed. Why, it seemed, now, that, having known Death so near, he knew Life itself—he was the wiser, the elder; and I the boy, without experience save of the little arts and playthings of the world....
Well, it was time to go. I took out my notebook to jot down an address, and as I did so I saw his eyes fastened upon my pencil. His face had changed.
Without a word, he reached out his hand for it. I understood—and there came up to me suddenly, a picture of the laughing boy who had pretended to shoot with such a pencil—and ... even to give a bayonet thrust!
He looked at it curiously with a faint smile. “A-mer-i-cain Pencil Compagnie” he read with his queer French accent. Then he pressed in the end, and a little point of lead popped out. He laughed—he sighed. He handed it back. There were tears in his eyes.
“Ah, m’sieur,” he said, “do you remember that day in Paris, last July?” There was a silence. Then—“Why, it seems like ten years since then!”
So, in those two months, War the Creator had done its work. Coco was a man.