brother officers. They washed their dirty linen in private.
Just the colonel's hard, dry words.
"Adieu! The Forty-Third does not want you. Nor does the army. Nor does France."
And his mother—haughty, stone-faced, thin-lipped, dry-eyed—had echoed the simple words.
"The Puy de Dôme does not want you. Your family does not want you." A little pause. "I do not want you, my son."
She had settled his debts, and it had ruined her. She had paid his passage to America. Now he was here, in the little gray room on East Eleventh, looking at the strangers who crowded the streets, and thinking of France, of his mother, of his regiment.
He picked up the afternoon paper. He studied the contents, though he knew them by heart.
They were fighting—fighting under the walls of Lille. They were hanging on by their teeth.
One report mentioned the Forty-Third Infantry, cut to pieces in a gallant charge. There were three lines devoted to the colonel—"Killed in action."
It was the colonel who had told him:
