speaking, with every
appearance of apathy and exhaustion. The one was a boy, perhaps
nineteen, with a sunken, hairless, grey-white face under his peaked
cap--never surely was face so grey! He sat with his long grey-blue
overcoat open at the knees, and his long emaciated hands nervously
rubbing each other between them. Intensely forlorn he looked, and I
remember thinking: "That boy's dying!" This was Bidan.

The other's face, in just the glimpse I had of it, was as if carved out
of wood, except for that something you see behind the masks of driven
bullocks, deeply resentful. His cap was off, and one saw he was
grey-haired; his cheeks, stretched over cheekbones solid as
door-handles, were a purplish-red, his grey moustache was damp, his
light blue eyes stared like a codfish's. He reminded me queerly of those
Parisian _cochers_ one still sees under their shining hats, wearing an
expression of being your enemy. His short stocky figure was dumped
stolidly as if he meant never to move again; on his thick legs and feet
he wore mufflings of cloth boot, into which his patched and stained
grey-blue trousers were tucked. One of his gloved hands was stretched
out stiff on his knee. This was Poirot.

Two more dissimilar creatures were never blown together into our haven.
So far as I remember, they had both been in hospital about six months,
and their ailments were, roughly speaking, Youth and Age. Bidan had not
finished his training when his weak constitution gave way under it;
Poirot was a Territorial who had dug behind the Front till rheumatism
claimed him for its own. Bidan, who had fair hair and rather beautiful
brown eyes over which the lids could hardly keep up, came from
Aix-en-Provence, in the very south; Poirot from Nancy, in the
northeast. I made their acquaintance the next morning.

The cleaning of old Poirot took, literally speaking, days to accomplish.
Such an encrusted case we had never seen; nor was it possible to go,
otherwise than slowly, against his prejudices. One who, unless taken
exactly the right way, considered everyone leagued with Nature to get
the better of him, he had reached that state when the soul sticks its
toes in and refuses to budge. A coachman--in civil life--a socialist, a
freethinker, a wit, he was the apex of--shall we say?--determination.
His moral being was encrusted with perversity, as his poor hands and
feet with dirt. Oil was the only thing for him, and I, for one, used oil
on him morall