“We were all three sitting side by side ... though I had told the adjutant that corner was not a good place. ...  They had just brought us a ration of soup with a little bit of meat that was all covered with white frost.  Then bullets began to arrive by the dozen, and we avoided them as well as we could, and the earth flew about, and we were laughing, because we had an idea that among all those bullets there was not one that would find its billet.  And then they stopped firing, and we came back to sit on the ledge.  There were Chagniol and Duc and I, and I had them both to the right of me.  We began to talk about Giromagny, and about Danjoutin, because that’s the district we all came from, and this went on for about half an hour.  And then, all of a sudden, a bullet came, just a single one, but this time it was a good one.  It went through Chagniol’s head, then through Duc’s, and as I was a little taller than they, it only passed through my neck. ...”

“And then?”

“Then it went off to the devil!  Chagniol fell forward on his face.  Duc got up, and ran along on all fours as far as the bend in the trench, and there he began to scratch out the earth like a rabbit, and then he died.  The blood was pouring down me right and left, and I thought it was time for me to go.  I set off running, holding a finger to each side of my neck, because of the blood.  I was thinking:  just a single bullet!  It’s too much!  It was really a mighty good one!  And then I saw the adjutant.  So I said to him:  ’I warned you, mon adjutant, that that corner was not a good place!’ But the blood rushed up into my mouth, and I began to run again.”

There was a silence, and I heard a voice murmur with conviction: 

“You were jolly lucky, weren’t you?”

Mulet, too, tells his story: 

“They had taken our fire ...  ‘That’s not your fire,’ I said to him.  ‘Not our fire?’ he said.  Then the other came up and he said:  ‘Hold your jaw about the fire ...’  ‘It’s not yours,’ I said.  Then he said:  ‘You don’t know who you’re talking to.’  And he turned his cap, which had been inside out ...  ‘Ah!  I beg your pardon,’ I said, ‘but I could not tell ...’  And so they kept our fire. ...”

Maville remarks calmly:  “Yes, things like that will happen sometimes.”

Silence again.  The tempest shakes the windows with a furious hand.  The room is faintly illuminated by a candle which has St. Vitus’ dance.  Rousselot, our little orderly, knits away industriously in the circle of light.  I smoke a pipe at once acrid and consoling, like this minute itself in the midst of the infernal adventure.

Before going away, I think of Croquelet, the silent, whose long silhouette I see at the end of the room.  “He sleeps all the time,” says Mulet, “he sleeps all day.”  I approach the stretcher, I bend over it, and I see two large open eyes, which look at me gravely and steadily in the gloom.  And this look is so sad, so poignant, that I am filled with impotent distress.