tcher on which lies a
big body wrapped in a coarse winding sheet. The two men are weary, and
set the stretcher down carefully in the mud.

"Is it Fumat?"

"Yes. He has just died, very peacefully."

"Where are you going?"

"There is no place anywhere for a corpse. So we are taking him to the
chapel in the burial-ground. But he is heavy."

"We will give you a hand."

Philippe and I take hold of the stretcher. The men follow us in silence.
The body is heavy, very heavy. We drag our sabots out of the clay
laboriously. And we walk slowly, breathing hard.

How heavy he is!... He was called Fumat... He was a giant. He came from
the mountains of the Centre, leaving a red-tiled village on a hill-side,
among juniper-bushes and volcanic boulders. He left his native place
with its violet peaks and strong aromatic scents and came to the war
in Artois. He was past the age when men can march to the attack, but he
guarded the trenches and cooked. He received his death-wound while he
was cooking. The giant of Auvergne was peppered with small missiles.
He had no wound at all proportionate to his huge body. Nothing but
splinters of metal. Once again, David has slain Goliath.

He was two days dying. He was asked: "Is there anything you would like?"
And he answered with white lips: "Nothing, thank you." When we were
anxious and asked him "How do you feel?" he was always quite satisfied.
"I am getting on very well." He died with a discretion, a modesty, a
self-forgetfulness which redeemed the egotism of the universe.

How heavy he is! He was wounded as he was blowing up the fire for the
soup. He did not die fighting. He uttered no historic word. He fell at
his post as a cook.... He was not a hero.

You are not a hero, Fumat. You are only a martyr. And we are going
to lay you in the earth of France, which has engulfed a noble and
innumerable army of martyrs.

The shadow of the trees sweeps like a huge sickle across space. An acrid
smell of cold decay rises on the night. The wind wails its threnody for
Fumat.

"Open the door, Monsieur Julien."

The lout pushes the door, grumbling to himself. We lay the body on the
pavement of the chapel.

Renaud covers the corpse carefully with a faded flag. And suddenly, as
if to celebrate the moment, the brutal roar of guns comes to us from
the depths of the woods, breaks violently into the chapel, seizes and
rattles the trembling window-panes. A hundred times over, a whole nation
of canno