chap's better than us."

Gradually it came about that we of the squad used to consult Termite on
any sort of subject, with a simplicity which made me smile--and
sometimes even irritated me. That week, for instance, some one asked
him, "All this firing--is it an attack they're getting ready?"

But he knew no more than the rest.

CHAPTER XII

THE SHADOWS

We did not leave for the trenches on the day we ought to have done.
Evening came, then night--nothing happened. On the morning of the
fifth day some of us were leaning, full of idleness and uncertainty,
against the front of a house that had been holed and bunged up again,
at the corner of a street. One of our comrades said to me, "Perhaps we
shall stay here till the end of the war."

There were signs of dissent, but all the same, the little street we had
not left on the appointed day seemed just then to resemble the streets
of yore!

Near the place where we were watching the hours go by--and fumbling in
packets of that coarse tobacco that has skeletons in it--the hospital
was installed. Through the low door we saw a broken stream of poor
soldiers pass, sunken and bedraggled, with the sluggish eyes of
beggars; and the clean and wholesome uniform of the corporal who led
them stood forth among them.

They were always pretty much the same men who haunted the inspection
rooms. Many soldiers make it a point of honor never to report sick,
and in their obstinacy there is an obscure and profound heroism.
Others give way and come as often as possible to the gloomy places of
the Army Medical Corps, to run aground opposite the major's door.
Among these are found real human remnants in whom some visible or
secret malady persists.

The examining-room was contrived in a ground floor room whose furniture
had been pushed back in a heap. Through the open window came the voice
of the major, and by furtively craning our necks we could just see him
at the table, with his tabs and his eyeglass. Before him, half-naked
indigents stood, cap in hand, their coats on their arms, or their
trousers on their feet, pitifully revealing the man through the
soldier, and trying to make the most of the bleeding cords of their
varicose veins, or the arm from which a loose and cadaverous bandage
hung and revealed the hollow of an obstinate wound, laying stress on
their hernia or the everlasting bronchitis beyond their ribs. The
major was a good sort and, it seemed, a good doctor.