“All the same, isn’t it chaps like you that prevented France from being prepared?”

“There’s not enough chaps like me to prevent anything; and if there’d been more, there wouldn’t have been any war.”

“It’s not to us, it’s to the Boches and the others that you must say that.”

“It’s to all the world,” said Termite; “that’s why I’m an internationalist.”

While Termite was slipping away somewhere else his questioner indicated by a gesture that he did not understand.  “Never mind,” he said to us, “that chap’s better than us.”

Gradually it came about that we of the squad used to consult Termite on any sort of subject, with a simplicity which made me smile—­and sometimes even irritated me.  That week, for instance, some one asked him, “All this firing—­is it an attack they’re getting ready?”

But he knew no more than the rest.

CHAPTER XII

THE SHADOWS

We did not leave for the trenches on the day we ought to have done.  Evening came, then night—­nothing happened.  On the morning of the fifth day some of us were leaning, full of idleness and uncertainty, against the front of a house that had been holed and bunged up again, at the corner of a street.  One of our comrades said to me, “Perhaps we shall stay here till the end of the war.”

There were signs of dissent, but all the same, the little street we had not left on the appointed day seemed just then to resemble the streets of yore!

Near the place where we were watching the hours go by—­and fumbling in packets of that coarse tobacco that has skeletons in it—­the hospital was installed.  Through the low door we saw a broken stream of poor soldiers pass, sunken and bedraggled, with the sluggish eyes of beggars; and the clean and wholesome uniform of the corporal who led them stood forth among them.

They were always pretty much the same men who haunted the inspection rooms.  Many soldiers make it a point of honor never to report sick, and in their obstinacy there is an obscure and profound heroism.  Others give way and come as often as possible to the gloomy places of the Army Medical Corps, to run aground opposite the major’s door.  Among these are found real human remnants in whom some visible or secret malady persists.

The examining-room was contrived in a ground floor room whose furniture had been pushed back in a heap.  Through the open window came the voice of the major, and by furtively craning our necks we could just see him at the table, with his tabs and his eyeglass.  Before him, half-naked indigents stood, cap in hand, their coats on their arms, or their trousers on their feet, pitifully revealing the man through the soldier, and trying to make the most of the bleeding cords of their varicose veins, or the arm from which a loose and cadaverous bandage hung and revealed the hollow of an obstinate wound, laying stress on their hernia or the everlasting bronchitis beyond their ribs.  The major was a good sort and, it seemed, a good doctor.  But this time he hardly examined the parts that were shown to him and his monotonous verdict took wings into the street.  “Fit to march—­good—­consultation without penalty."[1]