ear
him again, 'Tiens! is that a pint of wine there? Well, you'll see if I
don't speak! Result--he said nothing at all. You'll say, 'But he got
killed.' True, but previously he had God's own time to do it two
thousand times if he'd dared."

"All that, it makes me ill," growled Blaire, sullen, but with a flash
of fury.

"We others, we've seen nothing--seeing that we don't see anything--but
if we did see--!"

"Old chap," Volpatte cried, "those depots--take notice of what I
say--you'd have to turn the Seine, the Garonne, the Rhone and the Loire
into them to clean them. In the interval, they're living, and they live
well, and they go to doze peacefully every night, every night!"

The soldier held his peace. In the distance he saw the night as they
would pass it--cramped up, trembling with vigilance in the deep
darkness, at the bottom of the listening-hole whose ragged jaws showed
in black outline all around whenever a gun hurled its dawn into the sky.

Bitterly said Cocon: "All that, it doesn't give you any desire to die."

"Yes, it does," some one replies tranquilly. "Yes, it does. Don't
exaggerate, old kipper-skin."

------------

[note 1:] Thirty or thirty-one years old in 1914.--Tr.

[note 2:] A-shape badges worn on the left arm to indicate the duration
of service at the front.--Tr.

[note 3:] Soldiers voluntarily enlisted in ordinary times for three.
four, or five years. Those enlisted for four or five year' have the
right to choose their arm of the service, subject to conditions.--Tr.

X

Argoval

THE twilight of evening was coming near from the direction of the
country, and a gentle breeze, soft as a whisper, came with it.

In the houses alongside this rural way--a main road, garbed for a few
paces like a main street--the rooms whose pallid windows no longer fed
them with the limpidity of space found their own light from lamps and
candles, so that the evening left them and went outside, and one saw
light and darkness gradually changing places.

On the edge of the village, towards the fields, some unladen soldiers
were wandering, facing the breeze. We were ending the day in peace, and
enjoying that idle ease whose happiness one only realizes when one is
really weary. It was fine weather, we were at the beginning of rest,
and dreaming about it. Evening seemed to make our faces bigger before
it darkened them, and they shone with the serenity of nature.

Sergeant Suilhard came to me, took my