ressed him. To grumbles against the fatigues which shatter,
the waiting which exhausts, the disillusion which destroys, against
misery and the blows of cold and rain, he answered violently, "Can't
you see it's for France? Why, hell and damnation! As long as it's for
France----!"

One morning when we were returning from the trenches, ghastly in a
ghastly dawn, during the last minutes of a stage, a panting soldier let
the words escape him, "I'm fed up, I am!"

The adjutant sprang towards him, "Aren't you ashamed of yourself, hog?
Don't you think that France is worth your dirty skin and all our
skins?"

The other, strained and tortured in his joints, showed fight. "France,
you say? Well, that's the French," he growled.

And his pal, goaded also by weariness, raised his voice from the ranks.
"That's right! After all, it's the men that's there."

"Great God!" the adjutant roared in their faces, "France is France and
nothing else, and you don't count, nor you either!"

But the soldier, all the while hoisting up his knapsack with jerks of
his hips, and lowering his voice before the non-com's aggressive
excitement, clung to his notion, and murmured between his puffings,
"Men--they're humanity. That's not the truth perhaps?"

Marcassin began to hurry through the drizzle along the side of the
marching column, shouting and trembling with emotion, "To hell with
your humanity, and your truth, too; I don't give a damn for them. _I_
know your ideas--universal justice and 1789[1]--to hell with them, too.
There's only one thing that matters in all the earth, and that's the
glory of France--to give the Boches a thrashing and get Alsace-Lorraine
back, and money, that's where they're taking you, and that's all about
it. Once that's done, all's over. It's simple enough, even for a
blockhead like you. If you don't understand it, it's because you can't
lift your pig's head to see an ideal, or because you're only a
Socialist and a confiscator!"

[Footnote 1: Outbreak of the French Revolution.--Tr.]

Very reluctantly, rumbling all over, and his eye threatening, he went
away from the now silent ranks. A moment later, as he passed near me,
I noticed that his hands still trembled and I was infinitely moved to
see tears in his eyes!

He comes and goes in pugnacious surveillance, in furies with difficulty
restrained, and masked by a contraction of the face. He invokes
Deroulede, and says that faith comes at will, like the re