Our lieutenant, who was very young, seemed to be an amiable, good-natured fellow.  “He’s a good little lad,” said the grateful men; “there’s some that frighten you when you speak to them, and they solder their jaws up.  But him, he speaks to you even if you’re stupid.  When you talk to him about you and your family, which isn’t, all the same, very interesting, well, he listens to you, old man.”

* * * * * *

St. Martin’s summer greatly warmed us as we tramped into a new village.  I remember that one of those days I took Margat with me and went with him into a recently shelled house. (Margat was storming against the local grocer, the only one of his kind, the inevitable and implacable robber of his customers.) The framework of the house was laid bare, it was full of light and plaster, and it trembled like a steamboat.  We climbed to the drawing-room of this house which had breathed forth all its mystery and was worse than empty.  The room still showed remains of luxury and elegance—­a disemboweled piano with clusters of protruding strings; a cupboard, dislodged and rotting, as though disinterred; a white-powdered floor, sown with golden stripes and rumpled books, and with fragile debris which cried out when we trod on it.  Across the window, which was framed in broken glass, a curtain hung by one corner and fluttered like a bat.  Over the sundered fireplace, only a mirror was intact and unsullied, upright in its frame.

Then, become suddenly and profoundly like each other, we were both fascinated by the virginity of that long glass.  Its perfect integrity lent it something like a body.  Each of us picked up a brick and we broke it with all our might, not knowing why.  We ran away down the shaking spiral stairs whose steps were hidden under deep rubbish.  At the bottom we looked at each other, still excited and already ashamed of the fit of barbarism which had so suddenly risen in us and urged our arms.

“What about it?  It’s a natural thing to do—­we’re becoming men again, that’s all,” said Margat.

Having nothing to do we sat down there, commanding a view of the dale.  The day had been fine.

Margat’s looks strayed here and there.  He frowned, and disparaged the village because it was not like his own.  What a comical idea to have built it like that!  He did not like the church, the singular shape of it, the steeple in that position instead of where it should have been.

Orango and Remus came and sat down by us in the ripening sun of evening.

Far away we saw the explosion of a shell, like a white shrub.  We chuckled at the harmless shot in the hazy distance and Remus made a just observation.  “As long as it’s not dropped here, you might say as one doesn’t mind, eh, s’long as it’s dropped somewhere else, eh?”

At that moment a cloud of dirty smoke took shape five hundred yards away at the foot of the village, and a heavy detonation rolled up to where we were.