He was a young Frenchman, a cavalry lieutenant, trim and slim, with a pleasant smile and obstinate blue eyes that I liked. He looked as if he could hold on tight when it was worth his while. He had had a leg smashed, poor devil, in the first fighting in Flanders, and had been dragging on for weeks in the squalid camp-hospital where I found him. He didn’t waste any words on himself, but began at once about his family. They were living, when the war broke out, at their country-place in the Vosges; his father and mother, his sister, just eighteen, and his brother Alain, two years younger. His father, the Comte de Réchamp, had married late in life, and was over seventy: his mother, a good deal younger, was crippled with rheumatism; and there was, besides--to round off the group--a helpless but intensely alive and domineering old grandmother about whom all the others revolved. You know how French families hang together, and throw out branches that make new roots but keep hold of the central trunk, like that tree--what’s it called?--that they give pictures of in books about the East. Jean de Réchamp--that was my lieutenant’s name--told me his family was a typical case. “We’re very _province_,” he said. “My people live at Réchamp all the year. We have a house at Nancy--rather a fine old hôtel--but my parents go there only once in two or three years, for a few weeks. That’s our ‘season.’...Imagine the point of view! Or rather don’t, because you couldn’t....” (He had been about the world a good deal, and known something of other angles of vision.) Well, of this helpless exposed little knot of people he had had no word--simply nothing--since the first of August. He was at home, staying with them at Réchamp, when war broke out. He was mobilised the first day, and had only time to throw his traps into a cart and dash to the station. His depot was on the other side of France, and communications with the East by mail and telegraph were completely interrupted during the first weeks. His regiment was sent at once to the fighting line, and the first news he got came to him in October, from a communiqué in a Paris paper a month old, saying: “The enemy yesterday retook Réchamp.” After that, dead silence: and the poor devil left in the trenches to digest that “_retook_”! There are thousands and thousands of just such cases; and men bearing them, and cracking jokes, and hitting out as hard as they can. Jean de Réchamp knew this, and tried to crack jokes too--but he got his leg smashed just afterward, and ever since he’d been lying on a straw pallet under a horse-blanket, saying to himself: “_Réchamp retaken_.”