you will allow me to say so, my comrade, suffering together.
We spent too many days wishing for the end of the fever, examining the
wound, searching after the deeply rooted cause of the disaster--both
tremulous, you from the effort to bear your pain, I sometimes from
having inflicted it.

We spent so many days, do you remember, oh, body without a soul ... so
many days fondly expecting the medal you had deserved. But it seems that
one must have given an eye or a limb to be put on the list, and you, all
of a sudden, you gave your life. The medal had not come, for it does not
travel so quickly as death.

So many days! And now we are together again, for the last time.

Well! I came for a certain purpose. I came to learn certain things at
last that your body can tell me now.

I open the case. As before, I cut the dressings with the shining
scissors. And I was just about to say to you, as before: "If I hurt you,
call out."

XXVII

At the edge of the beetroot field, a few paces from the road, in the
white sand of Champagne, there is a burial-ground.

Branches of young beech encircle it, making a rustic barrier that shuts
out nothing, but allows the eyes and the winds to wander at will.
There is a porch like those of Norman gardens. Near the entrance four
pine-trees were planted, and these have died standing at their posts,
like soldiers.

It is a burial-ground of men.

In the villages, round the churches, or on the fair hill-sides, among
vines and flowers, there are ancient graveyards which the centuries
filled slowly, and where woman sleeps beside man, and the child beside
the grandfather.

But this burial-ground owes nothing to old age or sickness. It is the
burial-ground of young, strong men.

We may read their names on the hundreds of little crosses which repeat
daily in speechless unison: "There must be something more precious than
life, more necessary than life... since we are here."

THE DEATH OF MERCIER

Mercier is dead, and I saw his corpse weep.... I did not think such a
thing possible. The orderly had just washed his face and combed his grey
hair.

I said: "You are not forty yet, my poor Mercier, and your hair is almost
white already."

"It is because my life has been a very hard one, and I have had so many
sorrows. I have worked so hard... so hard! And I have had so little
luck."

There are pitiful little wrinkles all over his face; a thousand
disappointments have left indelible