in it at all. Otherwise,
everybody would be. The nursemaid strolling the streets of Paris would
be, too, since there are the Taubes and the Zeppelins, as that
pudding-head said that the pal was talking about just now."

"In the first expedition to the Dardanelles, there was actually a
chemist wounded by a shell. You don't believe me, but it's true all the
same--an officer with green facings, wounded!"

"That's chance, as I wrote to Mangouste, driver of a remount horse for
the section, that got wounded--but it was done by a motor lorry."

"That's it, it's like that. After all, a bomb can tumble down on a
pavement, in Paris or in Bordeaux."

"Oui, oui; so it's too easy to say, 'Don't let's make distinctions in
danger!' Wait a bit. Since the beginning, there are some of those
others who've got killed by an unlucky chance; among us there are some
that are still alive by a lucky chance. It isn't the same thing, that,
seeing that when you're dead, it's for a long time."

"Yes," says Tirette, "but you're getting too venomous with your stories
of shirkers. As long as we can't help it, it's time to turn over. I'm
thinking of a retired forest-ranger at Cherey, where we were last
month, who went about the streets of the town spying everywhere to rout
out some civilian of military age, and he smelled out the dodgers like
a mastiff. Behold him pulling up in front of a sturdy goodwife that had
a mustache, and he only sees her mustache, so he bullyrags her--'Why
aren't you at the front, you?'"

"For my part," says Pepin, "I don't fret myself about the shirkers or
the semi-shirkers, it's wasting one's time; but where they get on my
nerves, it's when they swank. I'm of Volpatte's opinion. Let 'em shirk,
good, that's human nature; but afterwards they shouldn't say, 'I've
been a soldier.' Take the engages, [note 3] for instance--"

"That depends on the engages. Those who have offered for the infantry
without conditions, I look up to those men as much as to those that
have got killed; but the engages in the departments or special arms,
even in the heavy artillery, they begin to get my back up. We know 'em!
When they're doing the agreeable in their social circle, they'll say,
'I've offered for the war.'--'Ah, what a fine thing you have done; of
your own free will you have defied the machine-guns! '--'Well, yes,
madame la marquise, I'm built like that!' Eh, get out of it, humbug!"

"Oui, it's always the same tale. They wouldn't be ab