georges, having commenced his regular three years’ military service in october, 1913,7 got leave to visit his aunt who was keeping a pension in paris.
how shy and confused he was when i came down to the dining-room that day and surprised him while he was examining his too-faint mustache with great seriousness before the mirror! charming, i thought him, instantly; a clean, jolly sort of boy, quite too young for that ridiculous soldier’s uniform.
his aunt introduced him (with her arm about his shoulder and a tweak of his ear) by his nickname, “coco”; and, after he got used to my being a foreigner, he began to talk, using his big brown eyes and his free, expressive hands quite as much as his tongue. knowing a little of the midi, i attempted an imitation of the patois. coco threw back his head and laughed with abandon. that broke the ice, and we became great friends.
he was so curious about everything american that i took him up to my salon to8 see my typewriter; also my neckties and fancy socks.
“but what’s this?” asked coco, reading with his funny french pronunciation, “a-mer-i-cain pencil compagnie.” it was a novelty, a “perpetual” pencil of the self-sharpening sort, with a magazine filled with little points like cartridges. when i gave it to him, it pleased coco immensely.
“just like a rifle!” he exclaimed, as he amused himself by pressing the end and ejecting the bits of lead. he went through the manual of arms with it, laughing; he did a mock bayonet thrust or two, and then aimed it at me in fun, like a child. “pan!” he cried; “that’s the way we shoot germans!” the contrast of his red pantaloons and blue coat with the round, innocent face and lips parted like a girl’s was absurd. why, he was more like those doll soldiers you see at toyshops with curly hair! with his fresh9 pink cheeks and big brown eyes he seemed no more than sixteen years old.
in the evening we all went out on the crowded boulevard, where, it being a fête day, they were dancing in front of the open-air band stands. it was a long time before i ceased to think of coco as jolly, flushed, exuberant, dancing the tango on the corner by the sorbonne with his pretty young aunt, as excited and happy as only a lad can be who has come up from a provincial town to see the metropolis for the first time on a holiday.
that was on the 14th of july of 1914. next day he went back to his caserne at montauban.
in two weeks war was declared!
coco, our own blithe coco, would have to go to the front—oh, his aunt’s white face that day!—and coco would be in the first line! it seemed like some hideous mistake.10 but already coco, pink-cheeked, laughing, shy, his mother’s only boy, was well on his way toward the german shells and machine guns!
