orgettable scene when my
brother-in-arms, Poterloo, whose heart was so full of hope, vanished
with his arms outstretched in the flame of a shell.

We arrive at last on the summit, which is marked as with a signal by a
wounded and frightful man. He is upright in the wind, shaken but
upright, enrooted there. In his uplifted and wind-tossed cape we see a
yelling and convulsive face. We pass by him, and he is like a sort of
screaming tree.

* * * * *

We have arrived at our old first line, the one from which we set off
for the attack. We sit down on a firing-step with our backs to the
holes cut for our exodus at the last minute by the sappers. Euterpe,
the cyclist, passes and gives us good-day. Then he turns in his tracks
and draws from the cuff of his coat-sleeve an envelope, whose
protruding edge had conferred a white stripe on him.

"It's you, isn't it," he says to me, "that takes Biquet's letters
that's dead?"--"Yes."--"Here's a returned one; the address has hopped
it."

The envelope was exposed, no doubt, to rain on the top of a packet, and
the address is no longer legible among the violet mottlings on the
dried and frayed paper. Alone there survives in a corner the address of
the sender. I pull the letter out gently--"My dear mother"--Ah, I
remember! Biquet, now lying in the open air in the very trench where we
are halted, wrote that letter not long ago in our quarters at
Gauchin-l'Abbe, one flaming and splendid afternoon, in reply to a
letter from his mother, whose fears for him had proved groundless and
made him laugh--"You think I'm in the cold and rain and danger. Not at
all; on the contrary, all that's finished. It's hot, we're sweating,
and we've nothing to do only to stroll about in the sunshine. I laughed
to read your letter--"

I return to the frail and damaged envelope the letter which, if chance
had not averted this new irony, would have been read by the old peasant
woman at the moment when the body of her son is a wet nothing in the
cold and the storm, a nothing that trickles and flows like a dark
spring on the wall of the trench.

Joseph has leaned his head backwards. His eyes close for a moment, his
mouth half opens, and his breathing is fitful.

"Courage!" I say to him, and he opens his eyes again.

"Ah!" he replies, "it isn't to me you should say that. Look at those
chaps, there, they're going back yonder, and you too, you're going
back. It all has to go on for you