ire...."

Maville remarks calmly: "Yes, things like that will happen sometimes."

Silence again. The tempest shakes the windows with a furious hand. The
room is faintly illuminated by a candle which has St. Vitus' dance.
Rousselot, our little orderly, knits away industriously in the circle
of light. I smoke a pipe at once acrid and consoling, like this minute
itself in the midst of the infernal adventure.

Before going away, I think of Croquelet, the silent, whose long
silhouette I see at the end of the room. "He sleeps all the time," says
Mulet, "he sleeps all day." I approach the stretcher, I bend over it,
and I see two large open eyes, which look at me gravely and steadily in
the gloom. And this look is so sad, so poignant, that I am filled with
impotent distress.

"You sleep too much, my poor Croquelet."

He answers me with his rugged accent, but in a feeble voice:

"Don't listen to him; it's not true. You know quite well that I can't
sleep, and that you won't give me a draught to let me get a real nap.
This afternoon, I read a little.... But it wasn't very interesting....
If I could have another book...."

"Show me your book, Croquelet."

He thrusts out his chin towards a little tract. I strike a match, and I
read on the grey cover: "Of the Quality of Prayers addressed to God."

"All right, Croquelet, I'll try to get you a book with pictures in it.
How do you feel this evening?"

"Ah! bad! very bad! They're thawing now...."

He has had frost-bite in his feet, and is beginning to suffer so much
from them that he forgets the wound in his side, which is mortal, but
less active.

IV

I have come to take refuge among my wounded to smoke in peace, and
meditate in the shadow. Here, the moral atmosphere is pure. These men
are so wretched, so utterly humiliated, so absorbed in their relentless
sufferings that they seem to have relinquished the burden of the
passions in order to concentrate their powers on the one endeavour: to
live.

In spite of their solidarity they are for the time isolated by their
individual sufferings. Later on, they will communicate; but this is the
moment when each one contemplates his own anguish, and fights his own
battle, with cries of pain....

They are all my friends. I will stay among them, associating myself with
all my soul in their ordeal.

Perhaps here I shall find peace. Perhaps all ignoble discord will call a
truce on the threshold of this empire.

But a short d