The elder brother comes back from the door, a dim, patient smile on his lips. "Oh, Paul, poor boy! He takes it hard! He takes it hard!" he murmurs. "Who would think to hear him that he is accounted the best _brancardier_ in his section? He is the one always sent out to do the impossible, and he always goes, silently, and does it. After this last engagement, he had shown such _bravoure_, they wanted to have him cited again, to give him the palms to wear above his _croix_. But he said he had had his share, that others had done as much as he, and he persuaded them to give the _croix_ to one of the other _brancardiers_, a stevedore from Marseilles who can't read or write. You are perhaps not surprised to know that he is adored by his comrades." "But is it _true_ ... all he says?" I ask, shivering a little. "Oh yes, true enough, and more than he says or any one can ever say. But, but ..." He searches for a metaphor and finds it with a smile. "See, Paul is like a man with a fearful toothache! He can't think of anything else. But that doesn't mean there isn't anything else." I ask him: "But you, who have been through all that Paul sees, what do _you_ find, besides?" He hesitates, smiling no longer, and finally brings out in a low tone: "When a mother gives birth to a child, she suffers, suffers horribly. Perhaps all the world is now trying to give birth to a new idea, which we have talked of, but never _felt_ before; the idea that all of us, each of us, is responsible for what happens to all, to each, that we must stick together for good...." He picks up his steel helmet, and looks at us with his dim, patient, indomitable smile. "It is like a little new baby in more ways than one, that new idea. It has cost us such agony; and it is so small, so weak, so needing all our protection ... and then also, because ..." his sunken eyes are prophetic, "because it is _alive_, because it will grow!" IV I glance at my calendar in dismay. Is it possible that three months have gone, and that it is time for Amieux to have another "permission"? How long the week of his furlough always seems, how the three months between race away! Of course we have the greatest regard for Amieux. We feel that his uniform alone (he is a _chasseur alpin_ who has been a first-line fighter since the Battle of the Marne) would entitle him to our services, but more than that, his personality commands our respect, sound, steady, quiet Amieux whose sturdy body is wounded in one place after another, who is repaired hastily in the nearest hospital and uncomplainingly goes back to the trenches, his sleeve decorated with another one of the V-shaped marks which denote wounds. The only trouble with Amieux as a household hero is a total dearth of subjects of conversation. You see, he is a glass-blower by profession. We often feel that if we were not as ignorant of glass-blowing as Amieux is of everything else, we could get on famously with him. As it is ...