One of the sharpshooters overhears our talk as he passes.  He looks upon us, laughs abundantly in his helmeted turban, and repeats our words with significant shakes of his head:  “Pas Kam’rad, non pas Kam’rad, never!  Cut head off!”

“No doubt they’re a different race from us, with their tent-cloth skin,” Barque confesses, though he does not know himself what “cold feet” are.  “It worries them to rest, you know; they only live for the minute when the officer puts his watch back in his pocket and says, ‘Off you go!’”

“In fact, they’re real soldiers.”

“We are not soldiers,” says big Lamuse, “we’re men.”  Though the evening has grown darker now, that plain true saying sheds something like a glimmering light on the men who are waiting here, waiting since the morning. waiting since months ago.

They are men, good fellows of all kinds, rudely torn away from the joy of life.  Like any other men whom you take in the mass, they are ignorant and of narrow outlook, full of a sound common sense—­which some-times gets off the rails—­disposed to be led and to do as they are bid, enduring under hardships, long-suffering.

They are simple men further simplified, in whom the merely primitive instincts have been accentuated by the force of circumstances—­the instinct of self-preservation, the hard-gripped hope of living through, the joy of food, of drink, and of sleep.  And at intervals they are cries and dark shudders of humanity that issue from the silence and the shadows of their great human hearts.

When we can no longer see clearly, we hear down there the murmur of a command, which comes nearer and rings loud—­“Second half-section!  Muster!” We fall in; it is the call.

“Gee up!” says the corporal.  We are set in motion.  In front of the tool-depot there is a halt and trampling.  To each is given a spade or pickax.  An N.C.O. presents the handles in the gloom:  “You, a spade; there, hop it!  You a spade, too; you a pick.  Allons, hurry up and get off.”

We leave by the communication trench at right angles to our own, and straight ahead towards the changeful frontier, now alive and terrible.

Up in the somber sky, the strong staccato panting of an invisible aeroplane circles in wide descending coils and fills infinity.  In front, to right and left, everywhere, thunderclaps roll with great glimpses of short-lived light in the dark-blue sky.

______

[note 1:] The popular and international name for a French soldier.  Its literal meaning is “hairy, shaggy,” but the word has conveyed for over a century the idea of the virility of a Samson, whose strength lay in his locks.—­Tr.

[note 2:] 6250 miles.

[note 3:] Pourvu que les civils tiennent.  In the early days of the war it was a common French saying that victory was certain—­“if the civilians hold out.”—­Tr.

3

The Return