CHAPTER VIII FIAM GOES TO THE WAR

Fiam had been with me about a month when I was ordered to go to the war.

You know, this was just the time when a great war had broken out between Japan and another empire, and I was ordered to go out and describe what I saw there. While writing up the important events that sent two armies to the front I couldn’t stop to narrate the adventures of my little friend, and so I never put a word about Fiam in any of my writings. Besides, grown people are so incredulous!

The war took place in a part of China called Manchuria. In order to get there you have first to travel by railroad to a seaport, then on a ship to China, then on horseback or afoot, crossing plains and mountains for about a hundred miles, and so to the field of battle.

In telling his story Fiam had shown so much fear of war that I hadn’t dared to tell him where we were going. He fairly flooded me with questions.

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“Why do we travel so much?” he asked me one day in the train when I had put him up on my collar so that he could see the country out of the window. I made him look at it well so that he could give me a description of it, as, in fact, he did.

“We are traveling to amuse ourselves,” I replied.

“Beautiful amusement,” he grumbled, “to be carried by this monster spitting out smoke. It seems to me like going back to that great house where I was split up and cut to pieces. Look up there,” he added after a few moments. “What lovely country! See the roof of that temple through the trees, and that wonderful field of flowers. Let us stop here.”

“We can’t.”

“Why not, if we are traveling to amuse ourselves?”

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“Yes, but the amusement will come further on.”

Fiam gave a soft whistle—it was his way of sighing. Then he crept down on my shirt to find the silk waterfall and rest a while in a fold; but he couldn’t find any tie. I was wearing a kind of uniform similar to that of the soldiers.

“Why are you dressed this way?” he asked in a surprised tone, tapping me on my chin.

“It is the fashion in my country.”

He whistled again, and going down from button to button he reached my knees.

“Why do you wear these great boots?” he said, looking down at my feet, stretching himself out cautiously as if he were an Alpine climber hanging over a precipice.

“It is the fashion in my country.”