The birds, that always came to life at dusk and dawn, began to sing, flying home from somewhere.  Claude and Hicks sat down between the mounds and began to smoke while the sun dropped.  Lines of dead trees marked the red west.  This was a dreary stretch of country, even to boys brought up on the flat prairie.  They smoked in silence, meditating and waiting for night.  On a cross at their feet the inscription read merely:  Soldat Inconnu, Mort pour La France.

A very good epitaph, Claude was thinking.  Most of the boys who fell in this war were unknown, even to themselves.  They were too young.  They died and took their secret with them,—­what they were and what they might have been.  The name that stood was La France.  How much that name had come to mean to him, since he first saw a shoulder of land bulk up in the dawn from the deck of the Anchises.  It was a pleasant name to say over in one’s mind, where one could make it as passionately nasal as one pleased and never blush.

Hicks, too, had been lost in his reflections.  Now he broke the silence.  “Somehow, Lieutenant, ‘mort’ seems deader than ‘dead.’  It has a coffinish sound.  And over there they’re all ‘tod,’ and it’s all the same damned silly thing.  Look at them set out here, black and white, like a checkerboard.  The next question is, who put ’em here, and what’s the good of it?”

“Search me,” the other murmured absently.

Hicks rolled another cigarette and sat smoking it, his plump face wrinkled with the gravity and labour of his cerebration.  “Well,” he brought out at last, “we’d better hike.  This afterglow will hang on for an hour,—­always does, over here.”

“I suppose we had.”  They rose to go.  The white crosses were now violet, and the black ones had altogether melted in the shadow.  Behind the dead trees in the west, a long smear of red still burned.  To the north, the guns were tuning up with a deep thunder.  “Somebody’s getting peppered up there.  Do owls always hoot in graveyards?”

“Just what I was wondering, Lieutenant.  It’s a peaceful spot, otherwise.  Good-night, boys,” said Hicks kindly, as they left the graves behind them.

They were soon finding their way among shell holes, and jumping trench-tops in the dark,-beginning to feel cheerful at getting back to their chums and their own little group.  Hicks broke out and told Claude how he and Dell Able meant to go into business together when they got home; were going to open a garage and automobile-repair shop.  Under their talk, in the minds of both, that lonely spot lingered, and the legend:  Soldat Inconnu, Mort pour La France.

XI

After four days’ rest in the rear, the Battalion went to the front again in new country, about ten kilometers east of the trench they had relieved before.  One morning Colonel Scott sent for Claude and Gerhardt and spread his maps out on the table.