The funeral train would climb the narrow, serpentine road which led to the old town on the hill. Wounded comrades, hobbling along, their feet ill defended from the rough ground by straw slippers, some of them lacking an arm and others an eye, would follow the hearse of the poor, covered with the tricolor, behind the old parents or the young widow in tears; then would come delegates from the municipality and the hospital, then kindly disposed followers, pious people, idlers. The hedges would be growing green; the farms, with flocks of children at the doors and lowing cattle, would be awaking from the sleep of the long winter; one could hear the click of the milk-pail as it was set down upon the ground, the apple-trees in the fields were great tufts of unsullied flowers. When the procession, having climbed the hillside, turned toward the right the town came into view, its hotels and casinos transformed into hospitals with the floating red cross, its church-towers, its long white beach, the boundless sea with its line of English transports, untiringly through all the months, bringing from afar British troops to the land of France. The whole picture melted away into the national flag that covered the body of the little soldier, shot through by a ball on the plains of Picardy. In all this there was a new and incomparable poetry; the self-sacrifice of a man to something that he hardly understands, a notable act in which all desired to participate; and by contract the everlasting unconcern, the utter indifference, of nature. Every one, without exception, was thinking of the end of the war. It was an illusion wrought by the spring, the renaissance of all that lives, the urgent need of peace and happiness that all creatures and plants cry out for beneath the returning sun. Those behind the hearse shook their heads, saying: "What a calamity!" But all were thinking: "It will surely soon be over." They sighed: "My God, grant that this may be the last to go!" Alas, it was only the first springtide of the war! If a prophetic voice should have cried: "In the spring of next year, in the spring of another year, and still of another, this same ceremony will take place, the same hopes will be uttered, the same illusions cherished! For season shall follow upon season, year upon year, only the horror and unhappiness shall be changed, for they shall increase and time shall know them out of all proportions that are called reasonable"--assuredly these good people would have been crushed. As they went down the hill they gathered flowers along the roadside. The soldiers stopped in the wine-shops where they were given cider, and all returned to their places at once moved, saddened, and enriched by hopes, as is always the case when a new victim has succumbed. Spring passed, and summer, and autumn.