is with all these foreigners over-running her!  Do you suppose they are going to leave after the war?  Not much.  All these Algerians and Senegals and Anamites—­not to speak of the Belgians and English and Americans...there won’t be any Frenchmen left alive, and France will be populated by foreigners...That’s what we have to look forward to for all the reward of our blood.  They keep promising help, but they don’t bring it.  We have to go back and go back!  I tell you, Ma’ame, three years is too long A time!  No man can stand three years of war!  It makes you into somebody else... you’ve died so many times you’re like a walking corpse...isn’t that just how you feel?’ he appealed to his companion, who said impassively,

“’No, damn you, that isn’t a bit how I feel.  I just say to myself, “It’s war” and “That’s the way war is,” and I don’t try to make anything out of it the way you do.  That’s silly!  You just have to stick it out.  Understanding it hasn’t anything to do with it.’

“The first one went off on another tack...still wilder and more incoherent.  ’It’s the capitalists...that’s what it is...they saw that the people...the proletariat...that’s me,’ with a thump of his fist on his chest, ’had begun to see too clearly how things were going and so they stirred up this hornet’s nest to blind everybody...for in war even more than in peace (and that’s saying a good deal)...it’s the proletariat that bears the burdens.  Who do you think is in the trenches now...is the bourgeois class?  No!  It’s the labouring class.  One by one, the bourgeois have slipped out of it.  Got themselves the fat jobs at the rear, work in hospitals... anything but to stay out in the front-line trenches with us poor rats of working-people!  Isn’t that so?’

“He appealed to his companion, who answered again very calmly (it was extraordinary how they didn’t seem to mind differing diametrically from each other.  I suppose they had the long habit of arguing together).  ’No, it’s not so!  In my company there are as many bourgeois as labouring men.’

“The first man never paid the least attention to these brief denials of everything he was saying.  ’It’s the proletariat that always pays...isn’t it so, Ma’ame!  Peace or war, old times or new, it’s always the poor who pay all the debts!  And they’re doing it to such a tune now in France that there won’t be any left, when the war is over... oh, it’s got to stop.  There’s no use talking about it...and it will, too, one of these days...who cares how it stops!  Life...any sort of life...is better than anything else.’

“At this the other soldier said, ’Don’t pay any attention to him, Madame, he always goes on so...but he’ll stick it out just the same.  We all will.  That’s the nature of the Frenchman, Madame.  He must have his grievance.  He must grumble and grumble but when it’s necessary, he goes forward just the same...Only he has to talk such a lot before!’