Upon the approach of their Chief, the soldiers formed themselves in line, their heads being on a level with the waist of those passing over the planks.  Desnoyers ran his eye hungrily over the file of men.  Where could Julio be? . . .

He noticed the individual contour of the different redoubts.  They all seemed to have been constructed in about the same way, but their occupants had modified them with their special personal decorations.  The exteriors were always cut with loopholes in which there were guns pointed toward the enemy, and windows for the mitrailleuses.  The watchers near these openings were looking over the lonely landscape like quartermasters surveying the sea from the bridge.  Within were the armories and the sleeping rooms—­three rows of berths made with planks like the beds of seamen.  The desire for artistic ornamentation which even the simplest souls always feel, had led to the embellishment of the underground dwellings.  Each soldier had a private museum made with prints from the papers and colored postcards.  Photographs of soubrettes and dancers with their painted mouths smiled from the shiny cardboard, enlivening the chaste aspect of the redoubt.

Don Marcelo was growing more and more impatient at seeing so many hundreds of men, but no Julio.  The senator, complying with his imploring glance, spoke a few words to the chief preceding him with an aspect of great deference.  The official had at first to think very hard to recall Julio to mind, but he soon remembered the exploits of Sergeant Desnoyers.  “An excellent soldier,” he said.  “He will be sent for immediately, Senator Lacour. . . .  He is on duty now with his section in the first line trenches.”

The father, in his anxiety to see him, proposed that they betake themselves to that advanced site, but his petition made the Chief and the others smile.  Those open trenches within a hundred or fifty yards from the enemy, with no other defence but barbed wire and sacks of earth, were not for the visits of civilians.  They were always filled with mud; the visitors would have to crawl around exposed to bullets and under the dropping chunks of earth loosened by the shells.  None but the combatants could get around in these outposts.

“It is always dangerous there,” said the Chief.  “There is always random shooting. . . .  Just listen to the firing!”

Desnoyers indeed perceived a distant crackling that he had not noted before, and he felt an added anguish at the thought that his son must be in the thick of it.  Realization of the dangers to which he must be daily exposed, now stood forth in high relief.  What if he should die in the intervening moments, before he could see him? . . .