ck with troops, furrowed by
gun-carriages whose dying horses broke and crushed the ranks.

They succeeded at last in putting themselves under shelter. The cry of
treason arose from the groups. Old soldiers seemed once more resolved,
but the recruits refused to go on. "Let them go and be killed," they
said, indicating the officers; "that's their profession. As for me I
have children; it's not the State that will take care of them if I die!"
And they envied the fate of those who were slightly wounded and the sick
who were allowed to take refuge in the ambulances.

"Ah, how afraid one gets, and, then, how one holds in the ear the voices
of men calling for their mothers and begging for something to drink,"
he added, shivering all over. He paused, and, looking about the corridor
with an air of content, he continued: "It's all the same, I am very
happy to be here; and then, as it is, my wife can write to me," and he
drew from his trousers pocket some letters, saying with satisfaction:
"The little one has written, look!" and he points out at the foot of
the paper under his wife's labored handwriting, some up-and-down strokes
forming a dictated sentence, where there were some "I kiss papas" in
blots of ink.

We listened twenty times at least to that story, and we had to suffer
during mortal hours the repetitions of that man, delighted at having a
child. We ended by stopping our ears and by trying to sleep so as not to
hear him any more.

This deplorable life threatened to prolong itself, when one morning
Francis, who, contrary to his habit, had been prowling around the whole
of the evening before in the courtyard, says to me: "I say, Eugene, come
out and breathe a little of the air of the fields." I prick my ears.
"There is a field reserved for lunatics," he continued; "that field is
empty; by climbing onto the roofs of the outhouses, and that is easy,
thanks to the gratings that ornament the windows, we can reach the
coping of the wall; we jump and we tumble into the country. Two steps
from the wall is one of the gates of Evreux. What do you say?"

I say--I say that I am quite willing to go out, but how shall we get
back?

"I do not know anything about that; first let us get out, we will plan
afterward. Come, get up, they are going to serve the soup; we jump the
wall after."

I get up. The hospital lacked water, so much so that I was reduced to
washing in the seltzer water which the sister had had sent to me. I take
m