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Updated: May 11, 2025
Softly, on the little table next his comrade's bed, Salvette has placed a bottle of vin de Lunel and a loaf of bread, a pretty Christmas loaf, where the twig of holly is planted straight in the centre. Bernadou opens his eyes encircled with fever.
His comrade asks which: "The Host," or "The Three Kings," or "St. Joseph Has Told Me"? "No; I like the 'Shepherds' best. We chant that always at home." "Then, here's for the 'Shepherds." And in a low voice, his head between the curtains, Salvette began to sing.
Then, without a word to his comrade, Salvette loosens his tunic to take out the post-order, and when old Cahn comes, as he does every morning to make his tour of the aisles, after long debates and discussions under the breath, he thrusts into the Jew's hands the slip of paper, worn and yellow, smelling of powder and dashed with blood. From that moment Salvette assumed an air of mystery.
Salvette feels the gathering haste, the mystery of a religious feast crossing the hours of sleep, the hanging forth in the dark village of the blind light of lanterns and the illumination of the windows of the church. "Are you asleep, Bernadou?"
And Salvette lifts him up with the tenderness of a mother. He fills the goblets, cuts the bread, and then they drink and talk of Provençe. Little by little Bernadou grows animated and moved by the occasion, the white wine, the remembrances! With that child-like manner which the sick find in the depths of their feebleness he asks Salvette to sing a Provençal Noël.
They had nothing, neither money nor watches. Salvette still held hidden in the seam of his mantle a post-order for forty francs. But that was for the day when they should be free and the first halt they should make in a cabaret of France. That was sacred; not to be touched! But poor Bernadou is so sick. Who knows whether he will ever be able to return?
But the wounded boy rested immovable, and the little twig of holly lying across the rigid cloth, seemed already the green palm they place upon the pillows of the dead. Salvette understood at last. Then, in tears, a little weakened by the feast and by his grief, he raised in full voice, through the silence of the room, the joyous refrain of Provençe,
These two Frenchmen are named Salvette and Bernadou. They are infantrymen from the same village of Provençe, enrolled in the same battalion, and wounded by the same shell. But Salvette had the stronger frame, and already he begins to grow convalescent, to take a few steps from his bed towards the window. Bernadou, though, will never be cured.
"Ah, my poor Salvette, what a sad Christmas we are going to have this year! If only we had money to buy a little loaf of white bread and a flask of claret wine! What a pleasure it would be before passing away forever to sprinkle once again the Yule-log, with thee!" And, in speaking of white bread and claret wine, the eyes of the sick youth glistened with pleasure. But what to do?
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