Incidentally, the events in this chapter are drawn very closely from an incident in the WW1 diary which future priest Yves Congar wrote as a young French boy living under occupation in Sedan.
This concludes Chapter 1. Chapter 2 will focus on Henri.
Village of Chateau Ducloux, France. May 13th, 1915. Pascal returned home on a Saturday afternoon. Even before his call of, “I’m home!” brought his sisters thundering and squealing down the stairs, he received his first greeting from Yves. The dog had been lying on the entrance rug wondering when someone would think to take him out for a walk. When the young master opened the door, Yves was instantly upon his feet, barking excitedly, and then clambering up to rest his paws on Pascal’s shoulders while showering his face with doggy affection.
It was a sight which caused Philomene a pang when she arrived a moment later to greet her son with her own maternal hugs and kisses. “Not tonight,” she told Grandpere, as Pascal went up to his room to change from his dirty work clothes. “There will be time to tell him tomorrow.”
Louis shrugged. “No longer, then. We’ll have to get it over with.”
It had only been two weeks, and Pascal seemed already to have changed. Could he have become taller? He was certainly browner. And yet there was still so much of the boy about him. He played with his sisters, leading them in the backyard adventures which had been listless without him. And he romped with Yves so happily that Philomene felt it weighing upon her heart.
The dog, only two years younger than Pascal himself, and thus in the children’s mind as established a member of the family as any of them, had become the most difficult resident of the household to maintain. Before the war, the pork butcher, Monsieur Jobart, had often thrown in a pound of scraps for Yves without charge when filling the family’s order for meat. Now meat of any kind was becoming scarce, and there were people who were eager to pay good prices for the scraps which before had gone to Yves and others of his kind. The family had made attempts to adapt him to a diet of beans and potatoes such as they themselves increasingly lived on, but while he happily ate whatever was put before him, such meals seemed always to make an untimely and catastrophic re-appearance from one end of the dog or the other. And so Yves continued to eat meat, even as the family got less and less. Philomene shuddered at the expense, and felt pangs of guilt when she thought of that some people went hungry in the village even as she fed a dog, but when she saw how tenderly the little girls and Pascal clung to the animal who was a constant from the happy and peaceful days before, she had always relented. Now, however, it was out of her hands.
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