An icy moonless night.  From the bottom of the hollow boyau one could see the cold sky and the fixed stars.  Bullets rattled on the hard ground.  Maxime and his friend sat huddled up in the trench, smoking with their chins on their knees.  The lad had come back that day from Paris.  He was depressed, would not answer questions, shut himself up in a sulky silence.  The other had left him all the afternoon to bear his trouble alone.  Now here in the darkness he felt that the moment had come, and sat a little closer, for he knew that the boy would speak of his own accord.  A bullet over their heads glanced off, knocking down a lump of frozen turf.

“Hullo, old gravedigger,” said the other, “don’t get too fresh.”

“Might as well make an end of it now,” said Maxime.  “That’s what they all seem to want.”

“Give the boche your skin for a present?  I’ll say you’re generous!”

“It’s not only the boches; they all have a hand in it.”

“Who, all?”

“All of them back there where I come from, in Paris, friends and relations; the people on the other side of the grave, the live ones.—­As for us, we are as good as dead.”

In the long silence that followed they could hear the scream of a shell across the sky.  Maxime’s comrade blew out a mouthful of smoke.  “Well, youngster,” he said, “it didn’t go right, back there this time, did it?—­I guessed as much!”

“I don’t know why.”

“When one is hurt, and the other isn’t, they haven’t much to say to one another.”

“Oh, they suffer too.”

“Not the same.  You can’t make a man know what a toothache is unless he feels it.  Can’t be done.  Go to them all snuggled up in their beds, and make them understand how it is out here!...  It’s nothing new to me.  I didn’t have to wait for the war.  Always have lived like this.  But do you believe when I was working in the soil, sweating all the fat off my bones, that any of them bothered their heads about me?  I don’t mean that there’s any harm in them, nor much good, either, but like anybody else, they don’t see how it is.  To understand a thing properly you’ve got to take hold of it yourself, take the work, and the hurt.  If not, and that’s what it is, you know—­might as well make up your mind—­no use trying to explain.  That’s the way things are, and we can’t do anything about it.”

“Life would not be worth living, if it were as bad as that.”

“Why not, by gosh?  I’ve stuck it out all this time, and you’re just as good as me, better, because you’ve got more brains and can learn.  That’s the way to get on, the harder it is the more it teaches you.  And then when you’re together, like us here, and things are rocky, it’s not a pleasure, exactly, but it ain’t all pain.  The worst is to be off by yourself; and you’re not lonesome, are you, boy?” Maxime looked him in the face, as he answered: 

“I was back there, but I don’t feel it here with you.”