Page 87 - tender-is-the-night

dream.
After that they got in their car and started back toward
Amiens. A thin warm rain was falling on the new scrubby
woods and underbrush and they passed great funeral pyres
of sorted duds, shells, bombs, grenades, and equipment,
helmets, bayonets, gun stocks and rotten leather, aban-
doned six years in the ground. And suddenly around a bend
the white caps of a great sea of graves. Dick asked the chauf-
feur to stop.
‘There’s that girl—and she still has her wreath.’
They watched as he got out and went over to the girl, who
stood uncertainly by the gate with a wreath in her hand.
Her taxi waited. She was a red-haired girl from Tennessee
whom they had met on the train this morning, come from
Knoxville to lay a memorial on her brother’s grave. There
were tears of vexation on her face.
‘The War Department must have given me the wrong
number,’ she whimpered. ‘It had another name on it. I been
lookin’ for it since two o’clock, and there’s so many graves.’
‘Then if I were you I’d just lay it on any grave without
looking at the name,’ Dick advised her.
‘You reckon that’s what I ought to do?’
‘I think that’s what he’d have wanted you to do.’
It was growing dark and the rain was coming down
harder.
She left the wreath on the first grave inside the gate, and
accepted Dick’s suggestion that she dismiss her taxi-cab
and ride back to Amiens with them.
Rosemary shed tears again when she heard of the mis-

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