He stood up, discouraged; then changing his idea, and lighted from below by his lamp so that he flamed in the evening, he extended his tawny-edged arm and struck me on the shoulder.  “We said war, war, all along.  Very well, we’ve got war, haven’t we?”

In our room I said to Marie, “Only three days left.”

Marie came and went and talked continually round me, all the time sewing zinc buttons onto the new pouch, stiff with its dressing.  She seemed to be making an effort to divert me.  She had on a blue blouse, well-worn and soft, half open at the neck.  Her place was a great one in that gray room.

She asked me if I should be a long time away, and then, as whenever she put that question she went on, “Of course, you don’t a bit know.”  She regretted that I was only a private like everybody.  She hoped it would be over long before the winter.

I did not speak.  I saw that she was looking at me secretly, and she surrounded me pell-mell with the news she had picked up.  “D’you know, the curate has gone as a private, no more nor less, like all the clergy.  And Monsieur the Marquis, who’s a year past the age already, has written to the Minister of War to put himself at his disposition, and the Minister has sent a courier to thank him.”  She finished wrapping up and tying some toilet items and also some provisions, as if for a journey.  “All your bits of things are there.  You’ll be absolutely short of nothing, you see.”

Then she sat down and sighed.  “Ah,” she said, “war, after all, it’s more terrible than one imagines.”

She seemed to be having tragic presentiments.  Her face was paler than usual; the normal lassitude of her features was full of gentleness; her eyelids were rosy as roses.  Then she smiled weakly and said, “There are some young men of eighteen who’ve enlisted, but only for the duration of the war.  They’ve done right; that’ll be useful to them all ways later in life.”

* * * * * *

On Monday we hung about the house till four o’clock, when I left it to go to the Town Hall, and then to the station.

At the Town Hall a group of men, like myself, were stamping about.  They were loaded with parcels in string; new boots hung from their shoulders.  I went up to mix with my new companions.  Tudor was topped by an artilleryman’s cap.  Monsieur Mielvaque was bustling about, embarrassed—­exactly as at the factory—­by the papers he held in his hand; and he had exchanged his eyeglasses for spectacles, which stood for the beginning of his uniform.  Every man talked about himself, and gave details concerning his regiment, his depot, and some personal peculiarity.

“I’m staying,” says the adjutant master-at-arms, who rises impeccably in his active service uniform, amid the bustle and the neutral-tinted groups; “I’m not going.  I’m the owner of my rank, and they haven’t got the right to send me to join the army.”