His mind was busy in the gestation of his impressions and observations since he had crossed the frontier.  Definitely he knew that he was not afraid of bullets or shell fire, and in this fact he found no credit whatever.  The lion and the tiger and the little wild pigs of South America who will charge a railroad train are brave.  But it took some courage to bear Pilzer’s abuse in silence, he was thinking, while he was conscious that out of all that he had seen and felt in the conflict of multitudinous angles of view was coming something definite, which would result in personal action, fearless of any consequences.

The thing that held him back from a declaration of self was the pale faces around him; his comrades of the barracks and manoeuvres.  He loved them; he thought, student fashion, that he understood them.  He liked being their humorist; he liked to win their glances of affection.  The fortitude to endure their contempt, their enmity, their ostracism would not save those dear to him in his distant provincial home from humiliation and heart-break.  There was the rub:  his father and mother and his sweetheart.  He was an only son.  His sweetheart was a goddess to his eyes.  What purpose is there in the rebellion of a grain of sand on the seashore, in the insubordination of one of five million soldiers?  Hadn’t Westerling answered all doubts with the aphorism, “It is a mistake for a soldier to think too much”?

Thus pondering, in the company of the stars, Hugo, who had so many thoughts of his own that he led a double life, awaited the dawn.  When the church spire became outlined in the rosy, breaking light of the east, he thought how much it was like the church spire of his own town.  He saw that he was in what had been a beautiful, tenderly cared-for old garden before soldiery had ruthlessly trampled its flowers.

Raising his head to a level with the terrace wall—­the second terrace was low—­he could see the piles of sand-bags on the first terrace only twenty feet away and an old house that belonged to the garden.  The location appealed to him as his glance swept over plain and mountains glistening with dew.  It must be glorious to come down from the veranda at daybreak or day’s end to look at the flowers at your feet and the horizon in the distance.

“Could little White Liver sleep away from home and mamma?  Did he long for mamma to tuck him among the goose feathers, with a sweet biscuit in his paddy?” inquired Pilzer awakening.

Hugo looked around at Pilzer in his quizzical fashion.

“Jake, you are unnecessarily uprooting an aster with the toe of your boot,” he said.

Pilzer had a torrent of abuse ready to his tongue’s end when Fracasse interrupted with a hoarse, whispered warning: 

“Silence, Pilzer!  You talk too much.”

Now the irascible Pilzer had a further grudge against Hugo for having made him the object of a reprimand.

“You!” he whispered, when the captain’s back was turned, calling Hugo a foul name.