naturally he fell back on everyday matters.  Questions of general interest and political news came first, but they might as well have read the morning paper aloud.  “The Crushing of the Huns,” “The Triumph of the Right,” filled Clerambault’s thoughts and speeches, while he served as acolyte, and filled in the pauses with cum spiritu tuo.  All the time each was waiting for the other to begin to talk.

They waited so long that the end of his leave came.  A little while before he went, Maxime came into his father’s study resolved to explain himself: 

“Papa, are you quite sure?” ...

The trouble painted on Clerambault’s face checked the words on his lips.  He had pity on him and asked if his father was quite sure at what time the train was to leave and Clerambault heard the end of the question with an only too visible relief.  When he had supplied all the information—­that Maxime did not listen to—­he mounted his oratorical hobby-horse again and started out with one of his habitual idealistic declamations.  Maxime held his peace, discouraged, and for the last hour they spoke only of trifles.  All but the mother felt that the essential had not been uttered; only light and confident words, an apparent excitement, but a deep sigh in the heart—­“My God! my God! why hast thou forsaken us?”

When Maxime left he was really glad to go back to the front.  The gulf that he had found between the front and rear seemed to him deeper than the trenches, and guns did not appear to him as murderous as ideas.

As the railway carriage drew out of the station he leaned from the window and followed with his eyes the tearful faces of his family fading in the distance, and he thought: 

“Poor dears, you are their victims and we are yours.”

The day after his return to the front the great spring offensive was let loose, which the talkative newspapers had announced to the enemy several weeks beforehand.  The hopes of the nation had been fed on it during the gloomy winter of waiting and death, and it rose now, filled with an impatient joy, sure of victory and crying out to it—­“At last!”

The first news seemed good; of course it spoke only of the enemy’s losses, and all faces brightened.  Parents whose sons, women whose husbands were “out there” were proud that their flesh and their love had a part in this sanguinary feast; and in their exaltation they hardly stopped to think that their dear one might be among the victims.  The excitement ran so high that Clerambault, an affectionate, tender father, generally most anxious for those he loved, was actually afraid that his son had not got back in time for “The Dance.”  He wanted him to be there, his eager wishes pushed, thrust him into the abyss, making this sacrifice, disposing of his son and of his life, without asking if he himself agreed.  He and his had ceased to belong to themselves.  He could not conceive that it should be otherwise with any of them.  The obscure will of the ant-heap had eaten him up.