“They’re plugging the bottom of the village,” Orango laconically certified.

Margat, still ruminating his grievance, cried, “’Fraid it’s not on the grocers it’s dropped, that crump, seeing he lives right at the other end.  More’s the pity.  He charges any old price he likes and then he says to you as well, ’If you’re not satisfied, my lad, you can go to hell.’  Ah, more’s the pity!”

He sighed, and resumed.  “Ah, grocers, they beat all, they do.  You can starve or you can bankrupt, that’s their gospel; ’You don’t matter to me, I’ve got to make money!’”

“What do you want to be pasting the grocers for,” Orango asked, “as long as they’ve always been like that?  They’re Messrs. Thief & Sons.”

After a silence, Remus coughed, to encourage his voice, and said, “I’m a grocer.”

Then Margat said to him artlessly, “Well, what about it, old chap?  We know well enough, don’t we, that here on earth profit’s the strongest of all.”

“Why, yes, to be sure, old man,” Remus replied.

* * * * * *

One day, while we were carrying our straw to our billets, one of my lowly companions came up and questioned me as he walked.  “I’d like you to explain to me why there isn’t any justice.  I’ve been to the captain to ask for leave that I’d a right to and I shows him a letter to say my aunt’s shortly deceased.  ‘That’s all my eye and Betty Martin,’ he says.  And I says to myself, that’s the blinking limit, that is.  Now, then, tell me, you.  When the war began, why didn’t there begin full justice for every one, seeing they could have done it and seeing no one wouldn’t have raised no objection just then.  Why is it all just the contrary?  And don’t believe it’s only what’s happened to me, but there’s big business men, they say, all of a sudden making a hundred francs a day extra because of the murdering, and them young men an’ all, and a lot of toffed-up shirkers at the rear that’s ten times stronger than this pack of half-dead Territorials that they haven’t sent home even this morning yet, and they have beanos in the towns with their Totties and their jewels and champagne, like what Jusserand tells us!”

I replied that complete justice was impossible, that we had to look at the great mass of things generally.  And then, having said this, I became embarrassed in face of the stubborn inquisitiveness, clumsily strict, of this comrade who was seeking the light all by himself!

Following that incident, I often tried, during days of monotony, to collect my ideas on war.  I could not.  I am sure of certain points, points of which I have always been sure.  Farther I cannot go.  I rely in the matter on those who guide us, who withhold the policy of the State.  But sometimes I regret that I no longer have a spiritual director like Joseph Boneas.

For the rest, the men around me—­except when personal interest is in question and except for a few chatterers who suddenly pour out theories which contain bits taken bodily from the newspapers—­the men around me are indifferent to every problem too remote and too profound concerning the succession of inevitable misfortunes which sweep us along.  Beyond immediate things, and especially personal matters, they are prudently conscious of their ignorance and impotence.