She wanted some more bacon, and cut into the peasant bread, made of pure wheat, brown but succulent, and demanded from the gnarled giant an account of the war of 1870. It was brief.
“What’s to say? It wasn’t a very pretty sight … I remember everybody falling all around me and dying in their own blood. Me, nothin’ … not a bullet, not a bayonet. I was left standing, and them on the ground … who knows why?’
He fell into an indifferent silence, and the faces of the women around us darkened. Until then, no mother deprived of her sons, no sister accustomed to double work without her brother, had spoken of the war or those missing, or groaned under the weariness of three years….
Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette (28 January 1873 – 3 August 1954)