I saw that she was smiling.  And following the course of the look that smiled, I saw Farfadet a little way behind us, and he was smiling too.  Then she slipped away into the dark foliage, carrying the twin smile with her.

Thus was the understanding revealed to me between this lissom and dainty gypsy, who was like no one at all, and Farfadet, conspicuous among us all—­slender, pliant and sensitive as lilac.  Evidently—!

Lamuse saw nothing, blinded and borne down as he was by the load he had taken from Farfadet and me, occupied in the poise of them, and in finding where his laden and leaden feet might tread.

But he looks unhappy; he groans.  A weighty and mournful obsession is stifling him.  In his harsh breathing it seems to me that I can hear his heart beating and muttering.  Looking at Volpatte, hooded in bandages, and then at the strong man, muscular and full-blooded, with that profound and eternal yearning whose sharpness he alone can gauge, I say to myself that the worst wounded man is not he whom we think.

We go down at last to the village.  “Let’s have a drink,” says Fouillade.  “I’m going to be sent back,” says Volpatte.  Lamuse puffs and groans.

Our comrades shout and come running, and we gather in the little square where the church stands with its twin towers—­so thoroughly mutilated by a shell that one can no longer look it in the face.

5

Sanctuary

The dim road which rises through the middle of the night-bound wood is so strangely full of obstructing shadows that the deep darkness of the forest itself might by some magic have overflowed upon it.  It is the regiment on the march, in quest of a new home.

The weighty ranks of the shadows, burdened both high and broad, hustle each other blindly.  Each wave, pushed by the following, stumbles upon the one in front, while alongside and detached are the evolutions of those less bulky ghosts, the N.C.O.’s.  A clamor of confusion, compound of exclamations, of scraps of chat, of words of command, of spasms of coughing and of song, goes up from the dense mob enclosed between the banks.  To the vocal commotion is added the tramping of feet, the jingling of bayonets in their scabbards, of cans and drinking-cups, the rumbling and hammering of the sixty vehicles of the two convoys—­fighting and regimental—­that follow the two battalions.  And such a thing is it that trudges and spreads itself over the climbing road that, in spite of the unbounded dome of night, one welters in the odor of a den of lions.

In the ranks one sees nothing.  Sometimes, when one can lift his nose up, by grace of an eddy in the tide, one cannot help seeing the whiteness of a mess-tin, the blue steel of a helmet, the black steel of a rifle.  Anon, by the dazzling jet of sparks that flies from a pocket flint-and-steel, or the red flame that expands upon the lilliputian stem of a match, one can see beyond the vivid near relief of hands and faces to the silhouetted and disordered groups of helmeted shoulders, swaying like surges that would storm the sable stronghold of the night.  Then, all goes out, and while each tramping soldier’s legs swing to and fro, his eye is fixed inflexibly upon the conjectural situation of the back that dwells in front of him.