e passes the end of his
stick under the chin of the corpse and breaks off a sort of slab of mud
in which the head was set, a slab that looked like a beard. Then he
picks up the dead man's helmet and puts it on his head, and for a
moment holds before the eyes the round handles of his famous scissors
so as to imitate spectacles.

"Ah!" we all cried together, "it's Cocon!"

When you hear of or see the death of one of those who fought by your
side and lived exactly the same life, you receive a direct blow in the
flesh before even understanding. It is truly as if one heard of his own
destruction. It is only later that one begins to mourn.

We look at the hideous head that is murder's jest, the murdered head
already and cruelly effacing our memories of Cocon. Another comrade
less. We remain there around him, afraid.

"He was--"

We should like to speak a little, but do not know what to say that
would be sufficiently serious or telling or true.

"Come," says Joseph, with an effort, wholly engrossed by his severe
suffering, "I haven't strength enough to be stopping all the time."

We leave poor Cocon, the ex-statistician, with a last look, a look too
short and almost vacant.

"One cannot imagine--" says Volpatte.

No, one cannot imagine. All these disappearances at once surpass the
imagination. There are not enough survivors now. But we have vague idea
of the grandeur of these dead. They have given all; by degrees they
have given all their strength, and finally they have given themselves,
en bloc. They have outpaced life, and their effort has something of
superhuman perfection.

* * * * *

"Tiens, he's just been wounded, that one, and yet--" A fresh wound is
moistening the neck of a body that is almost a skeleton.

"It's a rat," says Volpatte. "The stiffs are old ones, but the rats
talk to 'em. You see some rats laid out--poisoned, p'raps--near every
body or under it. Tiens, this poor old chap shall show us his." He
lifts up the foot of the collapsed remains and reveals two dead rats.

"I should like to find Farfadet again," says Volpatte. "I told him to
wait just when we started running and he clipped hold of me. Poor lad,
let's hope he waited!"

So he goes to and fro, attracted towards the dead by a strange
curiosity; and these, indifferent, bandy him about from one to another,
and at each step he looks on the ground. Suddenly he utters a cry of
distress. With his hand he beckons us