s,
looked at his black fingernails with the melancholy desperation of a
prophet contemplating his country in ruins. Blanes, the son of a
middle-class citizen, used to admire him for his more distinguished
family. The day of the mobilization he had gone to Paris in an
automobile of fifty horse-power to enroll as a volunteer; he and his
chauffeur had enlisted together. Then he had donated his luxurious
vehicle to the cause.

He had wished to be a soldier because all the young fellows in his club
were leaving for the war. Furthermore, he felt greatly flattered that
his latest sweetheart, seeing him in uniform, should devote a few tears
of admiration and astonishment to him. He had felt the necessity of
producing a touching effect upon all the ladies that had danced the
tango with him up to the week before. Besides that, the millions of his
grandfather, "the Galician," held rather tight by his father, the
Creole, were slipping through his hands.

"This experience is lasting too long, Captain."

In the beginning he had believed in a six months' war. The shells
didn't trouble him much; for him the terrible things were the vermin,
the impossibility of changing his clothing, and being deprived of his
daily bath. If he could ever have supposed!...

And he summed up his enthusiasm with this affirmation:

"I am fighting for France because it is a _chic_ country. Only in Paris
do the women know how to dress. Those Germans, no matter how much they
try, will always be very ordinary."

It was not necessary to add anything to this. All had been said.

The three recalled the hellish months suffered recently in the
Dardanelles, in a space of three miles conquered by the bayonet. A rain
of projectiles had fallen incessantly upon them. They had had to live
underground like moles and, even so, the explosion of the great shells
sometimes reached them.

In this tongue of land opposite Troy through which had slipped the
remote history of humanity, their shovels, on opening the trenches, had
stumbled upon the rarest finds. One day Blanes and his companions had
excavated pitchers, statuettes, and plates centuries old. At other
times, when opening trenches that had served as cemeteries for Turks,
they had hacked into repulsive bits of pulp exhaling an insufferable
odor. Self-defense had obliged the legionaries to live with their faces
on a level with the corpses that were piled up in the vertical yard of
removed earth.

"The dead are