ng one another. Poor brutes!"

The night between Tuesday and Wednesday was most terrible of all, and
Jean, who was beginning to feel seriously alarmed for Maurice's feverish
state, made him wrap himself in an old blanket that they had purchased
from a zouave for ten francs, while he, with no protection save his
water-soaked capote, cheerfully took the drenching of the deluge which
that night pelted down without cessation. Their position under the
poplars had become untenable; it was a streaming river of mud, the water
rested in deep puddles on the surface of the saturated ground. What
was worst of all was that they had to suffer on an empty stomach, the
evening meal of the six men having consisted of two beets which they had
been compelled to eat raw, having no dry wood to make a fire with, and
the sweet taste and refreshing coolness of the vegetables had quickly
been succeeded by an intolerable burning sensation. Some cases of
dysentery had appeared among the men, caused by fatigue, improper food
and the persistent humidity of the atmosphere. More than ten times
that night did Jean stretch forth his hand to see that Maurice had not
uncovered himself in the movements of his slumber, and thus he
kept watch and ward over his friend--his back supported by the same
tree-trunk, his legs in a pool of water--with tenderness unspeakable.
Since the day that on the plateau of Illy his comrade had carried him
off in his arms and saved him from the Prussians he had repaid the debt
a hundred-fold. He stopped not to reason on it; it was the free gift of
all his being, the total forgetfulness of self for love of the other,
the finest, most delicate, grandest exhibition of friendship possible,
and that, too, in a peasant, whose lot had always been the lowly one of
a tiller of the soil and who had never risen far above the earth,
who could not find words to express what he felt, acting purely from
instinct, in all simplicity of soul. Many a time already he had taken
the food from his mouth, as the men of the squad were wont to say; now
he would have divested himself of his skin if with it he might have
covered the other, to protect his shoulders, to warm his feet. And
in the midst of the savage egoism that surrounded them, among that
aggregation of suffering humanity whose worst appetites were inflamed
and intensified by hunger, he perhaps owed it to his complete abnegation
of self that he had preserved thus far his tranquillity of mind