And now?
Six years have gone by, only six years, and what a long and strange and
varied romance might be woven out of the lives of those two hundred
college comrades! I have seen many of them since we graduated, and have
had news of many others, and I have a way of passing them in review one
after another, and questioning them mentally; and what I see and hear
fills me with a wonder not unmixed with sadness. And here they all are.
The first that I see are a group of brown, broad-shouldered, bearded
men, whom I do not recall just at first; but when they smile at me I
recognize the slender fair boys who used to look so girlish.
"Is it really you?" I exclaim, and they answer, "Yes," with a deep
sonorous note so different from the boyish voices I had expected to
hear, that I start back involuntarily.
And these others? Their features are not changed, to be sure, their
figures are as robust and well set-up as ever, but the smile has
vanished, there is no brightness in the eye.
"What has happened to you?" I ask; and they answer, "Nothing."
Ah, how much better that some misfortune should have befallen them than
that the years alone, and only six short years, should have had the
power so sadly to transform them!
Here are others. Good God! One, two, three, five of them; let me look
again; yes--gray-headed! What--at twenty-seven! Tell me--what happened?
They shrug their shoulders and pass on.
Then I see a long file of my own friends, some of them the wildest of
the class, one with a baby in his arms, one with a child by the hand,
another leading two. What? So-and-so married? So-and-so a pere de
famille? Who would have thought it?
Here come others; some, with bowed heads and reddened eyes, sign to me
sadly in passing. There is crape upon their sleeves.
Others, with heads high and flashing eyes, point exultantly to their
breasts. Our college dream, the military medal--ah, lucky fellows!
And here are some, moving slowly, and so pale, so emaciated, that I
hardly know them. Ah me! The surgeon's knife has probed those splendid
statuesque limbs, once bared with such boyish pride on the banks of the
Panaro; the surgeon's knife, seeking for German bullets, while the
blood streamed and the amputated limbs dropped from the poor maimed
trunks. Alas, poor friends! But at least they have remained with us,
rewarded for their sacrifice by the love and gratitude of all.
But what's become of so-and-so?
He died on the march through Lombardy.
And so-and-so?
Killed by a mitrailleuse at Monte Croce.
And my friend so-and-so?
He died of a rifle-bullet, in the hospital at Verona.
And the fellow who sat next to me in class?
HE died of cholera in Sicily.
Enough--enough!
So they all pass by, fading into the distance, while my fancy hastens
back over the road they have travelled, seeking traces of their passage
--how many and what diverse traces!
Here, books and papers scattered on the floor, half-finished projects
of battles, an overturned table, a smoking candle-end, tokens of a
studious vigil. There, broken chairs, fragments of glasses, the remains
of a carouse. Farther on, an expanse of waste ground, two bloody
swords, deep footprints, the impress of a fallen body. Here, a table
covered with a torn green cloth and strewn with cards and dice; yonder,
in the grass, a scented love-letter and a knot of faded violets. Over
there a graveyard cross, with the inscription: To my Mother. And
farther on more cards, cast-off uniforms, women's portraits, tailors'
bills, bills of exchange, swords, flowers, blood. What a vast tapestry
one can weave with those few broken and tangled threads! What loves,
what griefs, what struggles, follies, and disasters one divines and
comprehends! Many a high and generous impulse too; but how much more of
squandered opportunity and effort!
And even if nothing had been squandered, if, in those six years, not a
day, not an hour, had been stolen from our work, if we had not opened
our hearts to any affections but those that exalt the mind and give
serenity to life, a great and dear illusion must still have been lost
to us; an illusion that in vanishing has taken with it much of our
strength and hope; the illusion of that distant rose-colored horizon,
edged with the black profiles of gigantic mountains, legion after
legion hurling itself upon the enemy with flying banners and the sound
of martial music!
A lost war.
And if we had not lost that illusion, would not some other have
vanished in its place?