rds
were all full. Still, there was no danger, no front line trenches, for
he was mobilized as _infirmier_, as nurse in a military hospital. He
stood six feet tall, which is big for a Frenchman, and he was big in
proportion, and he was twenty-five years old, and ruddy and strong. Yet
he was obliged to wait upon a little screaming man, five feet two,
whose nose had been shot away, exchanged for the _Medaille Militaire_
upon his breast, who screamed out to him: "Bring me the basin,
_embusque_!" And he had brought it. If he had not brought it, the little
screaming man with no nose and the flat bandage across his face would
have reported him to the _Medecin Chef_, and in time he might have been
transferred to the front line trenches. Anything is better than the
front line trenches. Fouquet knew this, because the wounded men were so
bitter at his not being there. The old men were very bitter. At the end
of the summer, they changed the troops in this sector, and the young
Zouaves were replaced by old men of forty and forty-five. They looked
very much older than this when they were wounded and brought into the
hospital, for their hair and beards were often quite white, and besides
their wounds, they were often sick from exposure to the cold, winter
rains of Flanders. One of these old men, who were nearly always
querulous, had a son also serving in the trenches. He was very rude to
Fouquet, this old man. Old and young, they called him _embusque_. Which
meant that they were jealous of him, that they very much envied him for
escaping the trenches, and considered it very unjust that they knew no
one with influence who could have protected them in the same way. But
Fouquet was very sick of it all. Day in and day out, for eighteen
months, or since the beginning of the war, he had waited upon the
wounded. He had done as the commonest soldier had ordered him, clodding
up and down the ward in his heavy wooden _sabots_, knocking them against
the beds, eliciting curses for his intentional clumsiness. There were
also many priests in that hospital, likewise serving as _infirmiers_.
They too, fetched and carried, but they did not seem to resent it. Only
Fouquet and some others resented it. Fouquet resented the war, and the
first line trenches, and the field hospital, and the wounded men, and
everything connected with the war. He was utterly bored with the war.
The hole in the hedge and the _estaminet_ beyond was all that saved him.

There w