I
Because 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 heard 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.