My companions did not look unfavorably on me, but I was no more than another to them.  In intervals among the occupations of the rest-camp, I wandered spiritless, blotted out by the common soldiers’ miserable uniform, familiarly addressed by any one and every one, and stopping no glance from a woman, by reason of the non-coms.

I should never be an officer, like the Trompsons’ son.  It was not so easy in my sector as in his.  For that, it would be necessary for things to happen which never would happen.  But I should have liked to be taken into the office.  Others were there who were not so clearly indicated as I for that work.  I regarded myself as a victim of injustice.

* * * * * *

One morning I found myself face to face with Termite, Brisbille’s crony and accomplice, and he arrived in our company by voluntary enlistment!  He was as skimpy and warped as ever, his body seeming to grimace through his uniform.  His new greatcoat looked worn out and his boots on the wrong feet.  He had the same ugly, blinking face and black-furred cheeks and rasping voice.  I welcomed him warmly, for by his enlistment he was redeeming his past life.  He took advantage of the occasion to address me with intimacy.  I talked with him about Viviers and even let him share the news that Marie had just written to me—­that Monsieur Joseph Boneas was taking an examination in order to become an officer in the police.

But the poacher had not completely sloughed his old self.  He looked at me sideways and shook in the air his grimy wrist and the brass identity disk that hung from it—­a disk as big as a forest ranger’s, perhaps a trophy of bygone days.  Hatred of the rich and titled appeared again upon his hairy, sly face.  “Those blasted nationalists,” he growled; “they spend their time shoving the idea of revenge into folks’ heads, and patching up hatred with their Leagues of Patriots and their military tattoos and their twaddle and their newspapers, and when their war does come they say ‘Go and fight.’”

“There are some of them who have died in the first line.  Those have done more than their duty.”

With the revolutionary’s unfairness, the little man would not admit it.  “No—­they have only done their duty,—­no more.”

I was going to urge Monsieur Joseph’s weak constitution but in presence of that puny man with his thin, furry face, who might have stayed at home, I forebore.  But I decided to avoid, in his company, those subjects in which I felt he was full of sour hostility and always ready to bite.

Continually we saw Marcassin’s eye fixed on us, though aloof.  His new bestriped personality had completely covered up the comical picture of Petrolus.  He even seemed to have become suddenly more educated, and made no mistakes when he spoke.  He multiplied himself, was attentiveness itself and found ways to expose himself to danger.  When there were night patrols in the great naked cemeteries bounded by the graves of the living, he was always in them.