He had wished to be a soldier because all the young fellows in his club were leaving for the war.  Furthermore, he felt greatly flattered that his latest sweetheart, seeing him in uniform, should devote a few tears of admiration and astonishment to him.  He had felt the necessity of producing a touching effect upon all the ladies that had danced the tango with him up to the week before.  Besides that, the millions of his grandfather, “the Galician,” held rather tight by his father, the Creole, were slipping through his hands.

“This experience is lasting too long, Captain.”

In the beginning he had believed in a six months’ war.  The shells didn’t trouble him much; for him the terrible things were the vermin, the impossibility of changing his clothing, and being deprived of his daily bath.  If he could ever have supposed!...

And he summed up his enthusiasm with this affirmation: 

“I am fighting for France because it is a chic country.  Only in Paris do the women know how to dress.  Those Germans, no matter how much they try, will always be very ordinary.”

It was not necessary to add anything to this.  All had been said.

The three recalled the hellish months suffered recently in the Dardanelles, in a space of three miles conquered by the bayonet.  A rain of projectiles had fallen incessantly upon them.  They had had to live underground like moles and, even so, the explosion of the great shells sometimes reached them.

In this tongue of land opposite Troy through which had slipped the remote history of humanity, their shovels, on opening the trenches, had stumbled upon the rarest finds.  One day Blanes and his companions had excavated pitchers, statuettes, and plates centuries old.  At other times, when opening trenches that had served as cemeteries for Turks, they had hacked into repulsive bits of pulp exhaling an insufferable odor.  Self-defense had obliged the legionaries to live with their faces on a level with the corpses that were piled up in the vertical yard of removed earth.

“The dead are like the truffles in a pie,” said the South American.  “An entire day I had to remain with my nose touching the intestines of a Turk who had died two weeks before....  No, war is not chic, Captain, no matter how much they talk of heroism and sublime things in the newspapers and books.”

Ulysses wished to see the three musketeers again before leaving Salonica, but the battalion had broken camp and was now situated several kilometers further inland, opposite the first Bulgarian lines.  The enthusiastic Blanes had already fired his gun against the assassins of Roger de Flor.

In the middle of November the Mare Nostrum arrived at Marseilles.  Its captain always felt a certain admiration upon doubling Cape Croisette, and noting the vast maritime curves opening out before the prow.  In the center of it was an abrupt and bare hill, jutting into the sea, sustaining on its peak the basilica and square-sided tower of Notre-Dame-de-la-Garde.