A Son at the Front by Edith Wharton

He followed his guide up the steep flights, which seemed to become buoyant and lift him like waves. It was as if the muscle that always dragged back his lame leg had suddenly regained its elasticity. He floated up as one mounts stairs in a dream. A smell of disinfectants hung in the cold air, and once, through a half-open door, a sickening odour came: he remembered it at Châlons, and Fortin's murmured: "Gangrene-ah, if only we could get them sooner!"

How soon had they got _his_ boy, Campton wondered? The letter, mercifully sent by hand to Paris, had reached him on the third day after George's arrival at the Doullens hospital; but he did not yet know how long before that the shell-splinter had done its work. The nurse did not know either. How could she remember? They had so many! The administrator would look up the files and tell him. Only there was no time for that now.

On a landing Campton heard a babble and scream: a nauseating scream in a queer bleached voice that might have been man, woman or monkey's. Perhaps that was what the French meant by "a white voice": this voice which was as featureless as some of the poor men's obliterated faces! Campton shot an anguished look at his companion, and she understood and shook her head. "Oh, no: that's in the big ward. It's the way they scream after a dressing."

She opened a door, and he was in a room with three beds in it, wooden pallets hastily knocked together and spread with rough grey blankets. In spite of the cold, flies still swarmed on the unwashed panes, and there were big holes in the fly-net over the bed nearest the window. Under the net lay a middle-aged bearded man, heavily bandaged about the chest and left arm: he was snoring, his mouth open, his gaunt cheeks drawn in with the fight for breath. Campton said to himself that if his own boy lived he should like some day to do something for this poor devil who was his roommate. Then he looked about him and saw that the two other beds were empty.

He drew back.

The nurse was bending over the bearded man. "He'll wake presently-I'll leave you"; and she slipped out. Campton looked again at the stranger; then his glance travelled to the scarred brown hand on the sheet, a hand with broken nails and blackened finger-tips. It was George's hand, his son's, swollen, disfigured but unmistakable. The father knelt down and laid his lips on it.

"What was the first thing you felt? " Adele Anthony asked him afterward: and he answered: "Nothing."

"Yes-at the very first, I know: it's always like that. But the first thing _after_ you began to feel anything?"

He considered, and then said slowly: "The difference."

"The difference in _him_?"

"In him-in life-in everything."

Miss Anthony, who understood as a rule, was evidently puzzled. "What kind of a difference?"

"Oh, a complete difference. " With that she had to be content.

The sense of it had first come to Campton when the bearded man, raising his lids, looked at him from far off with George's eyes, and touched him, very feebly, with George's hand. It was in the moment of identifying his son that he felt the son he had known to be lost to him forever.

George's lips were moving, and the father laid his ear to them; perhaps these were last words that his boy was saying.

"Old Dad-in a motor?"

Campton nodded.

The fact seemed faintly to interest George, who continued to examine him with those distant eyes.

"Uncle Andy's?"

Campton nodded again.