“We could finish the war here all right.”

Barque is affected by the words, nor very far from believing them.  “After all, it will finish some day, what!”

“After all!” repeat the others.

“To be sure, one never knows,” says Paradis.  He says this weakly, without deep conviction.  It is, however, a saying which leaves no room for reply.  We say it over again, softly, lulling ourselves with it as with an old song.

* * * * * *

Farfadet rejoined us a moment ago.  He took his place near us, but a little withdrawn all the same, and sits on an overturned tub, his chin on his fists.

This man is more solidly happy than we are.  We know it well, and he knows it well.  Lifting his head he has looked in turn, with the same distant gaze, at the back of the old man who went to seek his treasure, and at the group that talks of going away no more.  There shines over our sensitive and sentimental comrade a sort of personal glamour, which makes of him a being apart, which gilds him and isolates him from us, in spite of himself, as though an officer’s tabs had fallen on him from the sky.

His idyll with Eudoxie has continued here.  We have had the proofs; and once, indeed, he spoke of it.  She is not very far away, and they are very near to each other.  Did I not see her the other evening, passing along the wall of the parsonage, her hair but half quenched by a mantilla, as she went obviously to a rendezvous?  Did I not see that she began to hurry and to lean forward, already smiling?  Although there is no more between them yet than promises and assurances, she is his, and he is the man who will hold her in his arms.

Then, too, he is going to leave us, called to the rear, to Brigade H.Q., where they want a weakling who can work a typewriter.  It is official; it is in writing; he is saved.  That gloomy future at which we others dare not look is definite and bright for him.

He looks at an open window and the dark gap behind it of some room or other over there, a shadowy room that bemuses him.  His life is twofold in hope; he is happy, for the imminent happiness that does not yet exist is the only real happiness down here.

So a scanty spirit of envy grows around him.  “One never knows,” murmurs Paradis again, but with no more confidence than when before, in the straitened scene of our life to-day, he uttered those immeasurable words.

7

Entraining

The next day, Barque began to address us, and said:  “I’ll just explain to you what it is.  There are some i—­”

A ferocious whistle cut his explanation off short, on the syllable.  We were in a railway station, on a platform.  A night alarm had torn us from our sleep in the village and we had marched here.  The rest was over; our sector was being changed; they were throwing us somewhere else.  We had disappeared from Gauchin under cover of darkness without seeing either the place or the people, without bidding them good-by even in a look, without bringing away a last impression.