People who but yesterday were soft and torpid, expanded under the
extraordinary light when fate threw them into the infernal vortex of
the war, the light of Death, the game with Death; Maxime, a spoiled
child, delicate, overparticular, who in ordinary times took care
of himself like a fine lady, found an unexpected flavour in the
privations and trials of his new life, and wondering at himself he
boasted of it in his charming, vainglorious letters which delighted
the hearts of his parents.

Neither affected to be cast in the mould of one of Corneille's heroes,
and the thought of immolating their child on the altar of a barbaric
idea would have filled them with horror; but the transfiguration
of their petted boy suddenly become a hero, touched them with a
tenderness never before felt. In spite of their anxiety, Maxime's
enthusiasm intoxicated them, and it made them ungrateful toward their
former life, that peaceful affectionate existence, with its long
monotonous days. Maxime was amusingly contemptuous of it, calling it
absurd after one had seen what was going on "out there."

"Out there" one was glad to sleep three hours on the hard ground, or
once in a month of Sundays on a wisp of straw, glad to turn out at
three o'clock in the morning and warm up by marching thirty kilometres
with a knapsack on one's back, sweating freely for eight or ten hours
at a time.... Glad above all to get in touch with the enemy, and rest
a little lying down under a bank, while one peppered the boches....
This young Cyrano declared that fighting rested you after a march, and
when he described an engagement you would have said that he was at a
concert or a "movie."

The rhythm of the shells, the noise when they left the gun and when
they burst, reminded him of the passage with cymbals in the divine
scherzo of the Ninth Symphony. When he heard overhead as from an
airy music-box the buzzing of these steel mosquitoes, mischievous,
imperious, angry, treacherous, or simply full of amiable carelessness,
he felt like a street boy rushing out to see a fire. No more fatigue;
mind and body on the alert; and when came the long-awaited order
"Forward!" one jumped to one's feet, light as a feather, and ran to
the nearest shelter under the hail of bullets, glad to be in the open,
like a hound on the scent. You crawled on your hands and knees, or on
your stomach, you ran all bent doubled-up, or did Swedish gymnastics
through the underbrush ... that made