r fellow down, and to deafen one's ears.

One day, after a successful operation, she was tending a young sergeant.
He was a well-built, handsome man, with skin as white as a woman's. He
watched her with curious indifference in his eyes as she busied herself,
trying to make him comfortable, and did nothing to help her.

"Has Mam'selle ever seen a bull fight?" he asked her.

"No," she answered. "I've seen all the horror and cruelty I want to for
the rest of my life."

"Ah," he said, "you would understand if you had. When one of the horses
goes down gored, his entrails lying out upon the sand, you know what they
do, don't you? They put a rope round him, and drag him, groaning, into
the shambles behind. And once there, kind people like you and Monsieur
le Medecin tend him and wash him, and put his entrails back, and sew him
up again. He thinks it so kind of them--the first time. But the second!
He understands. He will be sent back into the arena to be ripped up
again, and again after that. This is the third time I have been wounded,
and as soon as you've all patched me up and I've got my breath again,
they'll send me back into it. Mam'selle will forgive my not feeling
grateful to her." He gave a short laugh that brought the blood into his
mouth.

The village consisted of one long straggling street, following the course
of a small stream between two lines of hills. It was on one of the great
lines of communication: and troops and war material passed through it,
going and coming, in almost endless procession. It served also as a camp
of rest. Companies from the trenches would arrive there, generally
towards the evening, weary, listless, dull-eyed, many of them staggering
like over-driven cattle beneath their mass of burdens. They would fling
their accoutrements from them and stand in silent groups till the
sergeants and corporals returned to lead them to the barns and out-houses
that had been assigned to them, the houses still habitable being mostly
reserved for the officers. Like those of most French villages, they were
drab, plaster-covered buildings without gardens; but some of them were
covered with vines, hiding their ugliness; and the village as a whole,
with its groups, here and there, of fine sycamore trees and its great
stone fountain in the centre, was picturesque enough. It had twice
changed hands, and a part of it was in ruins. From one or two of the
more solidly built houses merely the front