“I’m telling you.  Do it or don’t do it—­doesn’t matter a damn to me.”

Besides what is real and written, there is bigger news, but still more dubious and imaginative—­the division is going to be relieved, and sent either to rest—­real rest, for six weeks—­or to Morocco, or perhaps to Egypt.

Divers exclamations.  They listen, and let themselves be tempted by the fascination of the new, the wonderful.

But some one questions the post-orderly:  “Who told you that?”

“The adjutant commanding the Territorial detachment that fatigues for the H.Q. of the A.C.”

“For the what?”

“For Headquarters of the Army Corps, and he’s not the only one that says it.  There’s—­you know him—­I’ve forgotten his name—­he’s like Galle, but he isn’t Galle—­there’s some one in his family who is Some One.  Anyway, he knows all about it.”

“Then what?” With hungry eyes they form a circle around the story-teller.

“Egypt, you say, we shall go to?  Don’t know it.  I know there were Pharaohs there at the time when I was a kid and went to school, but since—­”

“To Egypt!” The idea finds unconscious anchorage in their minds.

“Ah, non,” says Blaire, “for I get sea-sick.  Still, it doesn’t last, sea-sickness.  Oui, but what would my good lady say?”

“What about it?  She’ll get used to it.  You see niggers, and streets full of big birds, like we see sparrows here.”

“But haven’t we to go to Alsace?”

“Yes,” says the post-orderly, “there are some who think so at the Pay-office.”

“That’d do me well enough.”

But common sense and acquired experience regain the upper hand and put the visions to flight.  We have been told so often that we were going a long way off, so often have we believed it, so often been undeceived!  So, as if at a moment arranged, we wake up.

“It’s all my eye—­they’ve done it on us too often.  Wait before believing—­and don’t count a crumb’s worth on it.”

We reoccupy our corner.  Here and there a man bears in his hand the light momentous burden of a letter.

“Ah,” says Tirloir, “I must be writing.  Can’t go eight days without writing.”

“Me too,” says Eudore, “I must write to my p’tit’ femme.”

“Is she all right, Mariette?”

“Oui, oui, don’t fret about Mariette.”

A few have already settled themselves for correspondence.  Barque is standing up.  He stoops over a sheet of paper flattened on a note-book upon a jutting crag in the trench wall.  Apparently in the grip of an inspiration, he writes on and on, with his eyes in bondage and the concentrated expression of a horseman at full gallop.

When once Lamuse—­who lacks imagination—­has sat down, placed his little writing-block on the padded summit of his knees, and moistened his copying-ink pencil, he passes the time in reading again the last letters received, in wondering what he can say that he has not already said, and in fostering a grim determination to say something else.