He would not think himself into any defeatism.
The first thing was to win the war.
If we did not win the war everything was lost.
But he noticed, and listened to, and remembered everything.
He was serving in a war and he gave absolute loyalty and as complete a performance as he could give while he was serving.
But nobody owned his mind, nor his faculties for seeing and hearing, and if he were going to form judgments he would form them afterwards.
And there would be plenty of material to draw them from.
There was plenty already.
There was a little too much sometimes.
Look at the Pilar woman, he thought.
No matter what comes, if there is time, I must make her tell me the rest of that story.
Look at her walking along with those two kids.
You could not get three better-looking products of Spain than those.
She is like a mountain and the boy and the girl are like young trees.
The old trees are all cut down and the young trees are growing clean like that.
In spite of what has happened to the two of them they look as fresh and clean and new and untouched as though they had never heard of misfortune.
But according to Pilar, Maria has just gotten sound again.
She must have been in an awful shape.
He remembered a Belgian boy in the Eleventh Brigade who had enlisted with five other boys from his village.
It was a village Of about two hundred people and the boy had never been away froni the village before.
When he first saw the boy, out at Hans' Brigade Staff, the other five from the village had all been killed and the boy was in very bad shape and they were using him as an orderly to wait on table at the staff.
He had a big, blond, ruddy Flemish face and huge awkward peasant hands and he moved, with the dishes, as powerfully and awkwardly as a draft horse.
But he cried all the time.
All during the meal he cried with no noise at all.
You looked up and there he was, crying.
If you asked for the wine, he cried and if you passed your plate for stew, he cried; turning away his head.
Then he would stop; but if you looked up at him, tears would start coming again.
Between courses he cried in the kitchen.
Every one was very gentle with him.
But it did no good.
He would have to find out what became of him and whether he ever cleared up and was fit for soldiering again.
Maria was sound enough now.
She seemed so anyway.
But he was no psychiatrist.
Pilar was the psychiatrist.
It probably had been good for them to have been together last night.
Yes, unless it stopped.
It certainly had been good for him.
He felt fine today; sound and good and unworried and happy.
The show looked bad enough but he was awfully lucky, too.
He had been in others that announced themselves badly.
Announced themselves; that was thinking in Spanish.
Maria was lovely.
Look at her, he said to himself.
Look at her.
He looked at her striding happily in the sun; her khaki shirt open at the neck.
She walks like a colt moves, he thought.
You do not run onto something like that.
Such things don't happen.
Maybe it never did happen, he thought.