he same
story... The war has not changed them much. One can recognise them all."

Are you sure that you recognise them? You have just been looking at
them, are you sure that you have seen them?

Under their bandages are wounds you cannot imagine. Below the wounds,
in the depths of the mutilated flesh, a soul, strange and furtive, is
stirring in feverish exaltation, a soul which does not readily reveal
itself, which expresses itself artlessly, but which I would fain make
you understand.

In these days, when nothing retains its former semblance, all these men
are no longer those you so lately knew. Suffering has roused them from
the sleep of gentle life, and every day fills them with a terrible
intoxication. They are now something more than themselves; those we
loved were merely happy shadows.

Let us lose none of their humble words, let us note their slightest
gestures, and tell me, tell me that we will think of them together, now
and later, when we realise the misery of the times and the magnitude of
their sacrifice.

THE STORY OF CARRE AND LERONDEAU

They came in like two parcels dispatched by the same post, two clumsy,
squalid parcels, badly packed, and damaged in transit. Two human forms
rolled up in linens and woollens, strapped into strange instruments, one
of which enclosed the whole man, like a coffin of zinc and wire.

They seemed to be of no particular age; or rather, each might have
been a thousand and more, the age of swaddled mummies in the depths of
sarcophagi.

We washed, combed, and peeled them, and laid them very cautiously
between clean sheets; then we found that one had the look of an old man,
and that the other was still a boy.

Their beds face each other in the same grey room. All who enter it
notice them at once; their infinite misery gives them an air of kinship.
Compared with them, the other wounded seem well and happy. And in this
abode of suffering, they are kings; their couches are encircled by the
respect and silence due to majesty.

I approach the younger man and bend over him.

"What is your name?"

The answer is a murmur accompanied by an imploring look. What I hear
sounds like: Mahihehondo. It is a sigh with modulations.

It takes me a week to discover that the boyish patient is called Marie
Lerondeau.

The bed opposite is less confused. I see a little toothless head. From
out the ragged beard comes a peasant voice, broken in tone, but touching
and almost melod