few words, we dive our heads into the bolsters.

There was not much conversation to be drawn from our comrades. The two
artillerymen and the hussar were too sick to talk. The dragoon swore by
the name of heaven, saying nothing, got up every instant, enveloped
in his great white mantle, and went to the wash-bowls, whose sloppy
condition he reported by means of his bare feet. There were some old
saucepans lying about in which the convalescents pretended to cook,
offering their stew in jest to the sisters.

There remained, then, only the soldier of the line: an unfortunate
grocer's clerk, father of a child, called to the army, stricken
constantly by fever, shivering under his bedclothes.

Squatting, tailor-fashion, on our bed, we listen to him recount the
battle in which he was picked up. Cast out near Froeschwiller, on a
plain surrounded with woods, he had seen the red flashes shoot by in
bouquets of white smoke, and he had ducked, trembling, bewildered by the
cannonading, wild with the whistling of the balls. He had marched,
mixed in with the regiments, through the thick mud, not seeing a single
Prussian, not knowing in what direction they were, hearing on all sides
groans, cut by sharp cries, then the ranks of the soldiers placed in
front of him, all at once turned, and in the confusion of flight he had
been, without knowing how, thrown to the ground. He had picked himself
up and had fled, abandoning his gun and knapsack, and at last, worn
out by the forced marches endured for eight days, undermined by fear,
weakened by hunger, he had rested himself in a trench. He had remained
there dazed, inert, stunned by the roar of the bombs, resolved no longer
to defend himself, to move no more; then he thought of his wife, and,
weeping, demanded what he had done that they should make him suffer so;
he picked up, without knowing why, the leaf of a tree, which he kept,
and which he had about him now, for he showed it to us often, dried and
shriveled at the bottom of his pockets.

An officer had passed meanwhile, revolver in hand, had called him
"coward," and threatened to break his head if he did not march. He had
replied: "That would please me above all things. Oh, that this would
end!" But the officer at the very moment he was shaking him on to his
feet was stretched out, the blood bursting, spurting from his neck. Then
fear took possession of him; he fled and succeeded in reaching a
road far off, overrun with the flying, bla