But he scowled.  We were short of the sacred fire, in his opinion, and that distressed him.  To grumbles against the fatigues which shatter, the waiting which exhausts, the disillusion which destroys, against misery and the blows of cold and rain, he answered violently, “Can’t you see it’s for France?  Why, hell and damnation!  As long as it’s for France——!”

One morning when we were returning from the trenches, ghastly in a ghastly dawn, during the last minutes of a stage, a panting soldier let the words escape him, “I’m fed up, I am!”

The adjutant sprang towards him, “Aren’t you ashamed of yourself, hog?  Don’t you think that France is worth your dirty skin and all our skins?”

The other, strained and tortured in his joints, showed fight.  “France, you say?  Well, that’s the French,” he growled.

And his pal, goaded also by weariness, raised his voice from the ranks.  “That’s right!  After all, it’s the men that’s there.”

“Great God!” the adjutant roared in their faces, “France is France and nothing else, and you don’t count, nor you either!”

But the soldier, all the while hoisting up his knapsack with jerks of his hips, and lowering his voice before the non-com’s aggressive excitement, clung to his notion, and murmured between his puffings, “Men—­they’re humanity.  That’s not the truth perhaps?”

Marcassin began to hurry through the drizzle along the side of the marching column, shouting and trembling with emotion, “To hell with your humanity, and your truth, too; I don’t give a damn for them. I know your ideas—­universal justice and 1789[1]—­to hell with them, too.  There’s only one thing that matters in all the earth, and that’s the glory of France—­to give the Boches a thrashing and get Alsace-Lorraine back, and money, that’s where they’re taking you, and that’s all about it.  Once that’s done, all’s over.  It’s simple enough, even for a blockhead like you.  If you don’t understand it, it’s because you can’t lift your pig’s head to see an ideal, or because you’re only a Socialist and a confiscator!”

[Footnote 1:  Outbreak of the French Revolution.—­Tr.]

Very reluctantly, rumbling all over, and his eye threatening, he went away from the now silent ranks.  A moment later, as he passed near me, I noticed that his hands still trembled and I was infinitely moved to see tears in his eyes!

He comes and goes in pugnacious surveillance, in furies with difficulty restrained, and masked by a contraction of the face.  He invokes Deroulede, and says that faith comes at will, like the rest.  He lives in perpetual bewilderment and distress that everybody does not think as he does.  He exerts real influence, for there are, in the multitudes, whatever they may say, beautiful and profound instincts always near the surface.

The captain, who was a well-balanced man, although severe and prodigal of prison when he found the least gap in our loads, considered the adjutant animated by an excellent spirit, but he himself was not so fiery.  I was getting a better opinion of him; he could judge men.  He had said that I was a good and conscientious soldier, that many like me were wanted.