s all my eye and Betty Martin,' he
says. And I says to myself, that's the blinking limit, that is. Now,
then, tell me, you. When the war began, why didn't there begin full
justice for every one, seeing they could have done it and seeing no one
wouldn't have raised no objection just then. Why is it all just the
contrary? And don't believe it's only what's happened to me, but
there's big business men, they say, all of a sudden making a hundred
francs a day extra because of the murdering, and them young men an'
all, and a lot of toffed-up shirkers at the rear that's ten times
stronger than this pack of half-dead Territorials that they haven't
sent home even this morning yet, and they have beanos in the towns with
their Totties and their jewels and champagne, like what Jusserand tells
us!"

I replied that complete justice was impossible, that we had to look at
the great mass of things generally. And then, having said this, I
became embarrassed in face of the stubborn inquisitiveness, clumsily
strict, of this comrade who was seeking the light all by himself!

Following that incident, I often tried, during days of monotony, to
collect my ideas on war. I could not. I am sure of certain points,
points of which I have always been sure. Farther I cannot go. I rely
in the matter on those who guide us, who withhold the policy of the
State. But sometimes I regret that I no longer have a spiritual
director like Joseph Boneas.

For the rest, the men around me--except when personal interest is in
question and except for a few chatterers who suddenly pour out theories
which contain bits taken bodily from the newspapers--the men around me
are indifferent to every problem too remote and too profound concerning
the succession of inevitable misfortunes which sweep us along. Beyond
immediate things, and especially personal matters, they are prudently
conscious of their ignorance and impotence.

One evening I was coming in to sleep in our stable bedroom. The men
lying along its length and breadth on the bundles of straw had been
talking together and were agreed. Some one had just wound it up--"From
the moment you start marching, that's enough."

But Termite, coiled up like a marmot on the common litter, was on the
watch. He raised his shock of hair, shook himself as though caught in
a snare, waved the brass disk on his wrist like a bell and said, "No,
that's not enough. You must think, but think with your own idea, not
o