sire--the wish of all his strength and all
his life--is to caress her. He would die that he might touch her with
his lips. But she struggles, and utters a choking cry. She is
trembling, and her beautiful face is disfigured with abhorrence.

I go up and put my hand on my friend's shoulder, but my intervention is
not needed. Lamuse recoils and growls, vanquished.

"Are you taken that way often?" cries Eudoxie.

"No!" groans the miserable man, baffled, overwhelmed, bewildered.

"Don't do it again, vous savez!" she says, and goes off panting, and he
does not even watch her go. He stands with his arms hanging, gazing at
the place whence she has gone, tormented to the quick, torn from his
dreams of her, and nothing left him to desire.

I lead him away and he comes in dumb agitation, sniffling and out of
breath, as though he had run a long way. The mass of his big head is
bent. In the pitiless light of eternal spring, he is like the poor
Cyclops who roamed the shores of ancient Sicily in the beginnings of
time--like a huge toy, a thing of derision, that a child's shining
strength could subdue.

The itinerant wine-seller, whose barrow is hunchbacked with a barrel,
has sold several liters to the men on guard duty. He disappears round
the bend in the road, with his face flat and yellow as a Camembert, his
scanty, thin hair frayed into dusty flakes, and so emaciated himself
that one could fancy his feet were fastened to his trunk by strings
through his flopping trousers.

And among the idle poilus of the guard-room at the end of the place,
under the wing of the shaking and rattling signboard which serves as
advertisement of the village, [note 3] a conversation is set up on the
subject of this wandering buffoon.

"He has a dirty neb," says Bigornot; "and I'll tell you what I
think--they've no business to let civvies mess about at the front with
their pretty ringlets, and especially individuals that you don't know
where they come from."

"You're quite crushing, you portable louse," replies Cornet.

"Never mind, shoe-sole face," Bigornot insists; "we trust 'em too much.
I know what I'm saying when I open it."

"You don't," says Canard. "Pepere's going to the rear."

"The women here," murmurs La Mollette, "they're ugly; they're a lot of
frights."

The other men on guard, their concentrated gaze roaming in space, watch
two enemy aeroplanes and the intricate skeins they are spinning. Around
the stiff mechanical birds up