d-trimmed KEPI, and lays a deaf ear on Carre's
chest with an air of authority.

Carre's leg has been sacrificed. The whole limb has gone, leaving a huge
and dreadful wound level with the trunk.

It is very surprising that the rest of Carre did not go with the leg.

He had a pretty hard day.

O life! O soul! How you cling to this battered carcase! O little gleam
on the surface of the eye! Twenty times I saw it die down and kindle
again. And it seemed too suffering, too weak, too despairing ever to
reflect anything again save suffering, weakness, and despair.

During the long afternoon, I go and sit between two beds beside
Lerondeau. I offer him cigarettes, and we talk. This means that we say
nothing, or very little.... But it is not necessary to speak when one
has a talk with Lerondeau.

Marie is very fond of cigarettes, but what he likes still better is that
I should come and sit by him for a bit. When I pass through the ward,
he taps coaxingly upon his sheet, as one taps upon a bench to invite a
friend to a seat.

Since he told me about his life at home and his campaign, he has not
found much to say to me. He takes the cakes with which his little shelf
is laden, and crunches them with an air of enjoyment.

"As for me," he says, "I just eat all the time," and he laughs.

If he stops eating to smoke, he laughs again. Then there is an agreeable
silence. Marie looks at me, and begins to laugh again. And when I get
up to go, he says: "Oh, you are not in such a great hurry, we can chat a
little longer!"

Lerondeau's leg was such a bad business that it is now permanently
shorter than the other by a good twelve centimetres. So at least it
seems to us, looking down on it from above.

But Lerondeau, who has only seen it from afar by raising his head a
little above the table while his wounds are being dressed, has noticed
only a very slight difference in length between his two legs.

He said philosophically:

"It is shorter, but with a good thick sole...."

When Marie was better, he raised himself on his elbow, and he understood
the extent of his injury more clearly.

"I shall want a VERY thick sole," he remarked.

Now that Lerondeau can sit up, he, too, can estimate the extent of the
damage from above; but he is happy to feel life welling up once more in
him, and he concludes gaily:

"What I shall want is not a sole, but a little bench."

But Carre is ill, terribly ill.

That valiant soul of his seems des