ones for the
officers, naturally, just as the officers' mess is of better quality
than that of the common soldiers. But always there are plenty of women.
Never wives, who mean responsibility, but just women, who only mean
distraction and amusement, just as food and wine. So wives are
forbidden, because lowering to the morale, but women are winked at,
because they cheer and refresh the troops. After the war, it is hoped
that all unmarried soldiers will marry, but doubtless they will not
marry these women who have served and cheered them in the War Zone.
That, again, would be depressing to the country's morale. It is rather
paradoxical, but there are those who can explain it perfectly.

No, no, I don't understand. It's because everything has two sides. You
would be surprised to pick up a franc, and find Liberty, Equality, and
Fraternity on one side, and on the other, the image of the Sower
smoothed out. A rose is a fine rose because of the manure you put at its
roots. You don't get a medal for sustained nobility. You get it for the
impetuous action of the moment, an action quite out of keeping with the
trend of one's daily life. You speak of the young aviator who was
decorated for destroying a Zeppelin single-handed, and in the next
breath you add, and he killed himself, a few days later, by attempting
to fly when he was drunk. So it goes. There is a dirty sediment at the
bottom of most souls. War, superb as it is, is not necessarily a
filtering process, by which men and nations may be purified. Well, there
are many people to write you of the noble side, the heroic side, the
exalted side of war. I must write you of what I have seen, the other
side, the backwash. They are both true. In Spain, they bang their silver
coins upon a marble slab, accepting the stamp upon both sides, and then
decide whether as a whole they ring true.

Every now and then, Armand, the orderly, goes to the village to get a
bath. He comes back with very clean hands and nails, and says that it
has greatly solaced him, the warm water. Then later, that same evening,
he gets permission to be absent from the hospital, and he goes to our
village to a girl. But he is always as eager, as nervous for his wife's
letter as ever. It is the same with Simon, the young surgeon. Only Simon
keeps himself pretty clean at all times, as he has an orderly to bring
him pitchers of hot water every morning, as many as he wants. But Simon
has a girl in the village, to whom