Rabot did not smoke. When cigarettes were handed round he would join in with the others and play with them for a moment, moving his great thin fingers, deformed and emaciated. Long illness seems to rob the fingers of manual labourers of all beauty and significance: directly they lose their hardness and their healthy appearance they look like nothing at all in the world. I think that Rabot would have willingly offered his good cigarettes to his neighbours; but it is so difficult to talk sometimes, especially to give something to some one. The cigarettes got slowly covered with dust on the table, and Rabot lay flat on his back, quite thin and straight, like a bit of straw carried away by the torrent of war, and understanding nothing of what was happening all around him. One day a staff officer came into the ward and went up to Rabot. “That is the man,” he said. “Well, I have brought him the Military Medal and the Croix de Guerre.” He made Rabot sign a little paper and left him alone with his playthings. Rabot did not laugh. He put the case out on the bedclothes in front of him, and he looked at it from nine o’clock in the morning till three in the afternoon. At three the officer returned, and said: “I made a mistake. The decorations were not for Rabot, but for Raboux.” Then he took the jewel-case, tore up the receipt, and went away. Rabot cried from three o’clock in the afternoon till nine o’clock in the evening. Then he went to sleep. The next morning he began to cry again. M. Gossin, who is a good Director, went to Headquarters and came back with a medal and a cross just like the last; he even made Rabot sign another paper. Rabot stopped crying. But his face was still haunted by a shadow--the shadow of a constant dread, as if he feared that one day or other they would come and take away all his treasures. Some weeks passed. I often looked at Rabot’s face, and I tried to imagine what laughter would make of it. I imagined and looked in vain; it was obvious that Rabot did not know how to laugh, and that his face was not made that way. It was then that the lady in green arrived. She came in one fine morning through one of the doors, like everybody else. On the other hand, she was not like everybody else: she was more like an angel, a queen, or a doll. She was not dressed like the nurses who worked in the wards, or like the mothers and wives who came to visit their wounded husbands and sons. She was not even like the women one meets in the streets. She was much more beautiful, much more majestic. She made one think of the fairies of one’s childhood, or of those splendid forms one sees on great coloured calendars under which the artist has written “Reveries,” or “Melancholy,” or “Poetry.” She was surrounded by well-dressed, good-looking officers, who attended to her slightest word, and who lavished on her the most extravagant compliments. “Come in, then, Madame,” said one of them, “since you wish to see some of our wounded.”...