Was it a name or a nickname? I hailed Serval. He came with his long stride, as if he were walking on stilts.
I asked him: “What has become of those people?” And he told me this adventure.
II
“When war was declared, the younger Savage, who was then about thirty-three years old, enlisted, leaving his mother alone in the house. People did not pity the old woman very much, because they knew that she had money.
“So she stayed all alone in this isolated house, so far from the village, on the edge of the woods. She was not afraid, however, being of the same race as her men, a strong, tall, thin, old woman, who seldom laughed, and with whom no one joked. The women of the fields do not laugh much, anyway. That is the men’s business! They have a sad and narrow soul, leading a life which is gloomy and without bright spots.
“The peasant learns a little of the noisy gaiety of the pothouse, but his wife remains serious, with a constantly severe expression of countenance. The muscles of her face never learn the motions of laughter.
“Mother Savage continued her usual existence in her hut, which was soon covered with snow. She came to the village once a week to get bread and a little meat: then she returned to her cottage. As people spoke of wolves, she carried a gun on her shoulder, her son’s gun, rusty, with the stock worn by the rubbing of the hand. She was a curious sight, this tall Savage woman, a little bent, walking with slow strides through the snow, the barrel of the weapon extending beyond the black headdress, which imprisoned the white hair that no one had ever seen.
“One day the Prussians arrived. They were distributed among the inhabitants according to the means and resources of each. The old woman, who was known to be rich, had four soldiers billeted upon her.
“They were four big young men with fair flesh, fair beard, and blue eyes, who had remained stout in spite of the fatigues they had endured, and good fellows even if they were in a conquered territory. Alone with this old woman, they showed themselves full of consideration for her, sparing her fatigue and expense as far as they could do so. All four might have been seen making their toilette at the well in the morning, in their shirtsleeves, splashing their pink and white flesh, the flesh of the men of the north, in the water, on cold snowy days, while Mother Savage came and went preparing their soup. Then they might have been observed cleaning the kitchen, polishing the floor, chopping wood, peeling potatoes, washing the clothes, doing all the household duties, like four good sons around their mother.
“But she thought continually of her own son, the old mother, of her tall, thin boy with his crooked nose, brown eyes, and stiff moustache which made a cushion of black hair on his upper lip. She asked each of the soldiers installed at her hearth:
“ ‘Do you know where the French regiment has gone, the Twenty-third Infantry? My boy is in it.’
“They answered: ‘No, we don’t know anything at all about it.’
“And understanding her grief and worry they, who had mothers at home, rendered her a thousand little services.
“She liked them very well, moreover, her four enemies: for peasants seldom have patriotic hatreds: that is the business of the superior classes. The humble, those who pay the most because they are poor, and because every new burden rests upon them, those who are killed in masses, who form the true cannon fodder because they are numerous, those who, in a word, suffer most cruelly the atrocious miseries of the poor, because they are the weakest and the most unresisting, understand little of those bellicose ardours, the excitable points of honour and those pretended political combinations which exhaust two nations in six months, the victorious as well as the vanquished.
“They said in the country, speaking of Mother Savage’s Germans: ‘There are four who have found a snug berth.’
“Now, one morning, as the old woman was alone in the house, she perceived afar off on the plain a man coming toward her home. Soon she recognized him: it was the postman, charged with distributing letters. He handed her a folded paper, and she drew from their case her spectacles which she used for sewing, and read:
“ ‘Madame Savage, this is to give you sad news. Your son Victor was killed by a cannonball yesterday, which virtually cut him in two. I was very near, as we were side by side in the company and he had asked me to tell you the same day if anything happened to him.
“ ‘I took his watch from his pocket to bring it to you when the war is finished.
“The letter was dated three weeks back.
“She did not weep. She stood motionless, so astounded that she did not yet suffer.
“She thought: ‘Victor is killed!’
“Then little by little the tears came to her eyes and grief overwhelmed her heart. Ideas came to her one by one, frightful, torturing ideas. She would never kiss him again, her big boy, never again. The gendarmes had killed the father, the Prussians had killed the son. He had been cut in two by a cannonball. And it seemed to her that she saw the thing, the horrible thing: the head falling, the eyes open, while he gnawed the end of his big moustache, as he did in moments of anger.
“What had they done with his body afterwards? If they had only sent her boy back to her, as they had her husband, with a bullet in his forehead.
“But she heard a sound of voices. It was the
