Margat's looks strayed here and there. He frowned, and disparaged the village because it was not like his own. What a comical idea to have built it like that! He did not like the church, the singular shape of it, the steeple in that position instead of where it should have been. Orango and Rémus came and sat down by us in the ripening sun of evening. Far away we saw the explosion of a shell, like a white shrub. We chuckled at the harmless shot in the hazy distance and Rémus made a just observation. "As long as it's not dropped here, you might say as one doesn't mind, eh, s'long as it's dropped somewhere else, eh?" At that moment a cloud of dirty smoke took shape five hundred yards away at the foot of the village, and a heavy detonation rolled up to where we were. "They're plugging the bottom of the village," Orango laconically certified. Margat, still ruminating his grievance, cried, "'Fraid it's not on the grocers it's dropped, that crump, seeing he lives right at the other end. More's the pity. He charges any old price he likes and then he says to you as well, 'If you're not satisfied, my lad, you can go to hell.' Ah, more's the pity!" He sighed, and resumed. "Ah, grocers, they beat all, they do. You can starve or you can bankrupt, that's their gospel; 'You don't matter to me, _I've_ got to make money!'" "What do you want to be pasting the grocers for," Orango asked, "as long as they've always been like that? They're Messrs. Thief & Sons." After a silence, Rémus coughed, to encourage his voice, and said, "I'm a grocer." Then Margat said to him artlessly, "Well, what about it, old chap? We know well enough, don't we, that here on earth profit's the strongest of all." "Why, yes, to be sure, old man," Rémus replied. * * * * * * One day, while we were carrying our straw to our billets, one of my lowly companions came up and questioned me as he walked. "I'd like you to explain to me why there isn't any justice. I've been to the captain to ask for leave that I'd a right to and I shows him a letter to say my aunt's shortly deceased. 'That's all my eye and Betty Martin,' he says. And I says to myself, that's the blinking limit, that is. Now, then, tell me, you. When the war began, why didn't there begin full justice for every one, seeing they could have done it and seeing no one wouldn't have raised no objection just then. Why is it all just the contrary? And don't believe it's only what's happened to me, but there's big business men, they say, all of a sudden making a hundred francs a day extra because of the murdering, and them young men an' all, and a lot of toffed-up shirkers at the rear that's ten times stronger than this pack of half-dead Territorials that they haven't sent home even this morning yet, and they have beanos in the towns with their Totties and their jewels and champagne, like what Jusserand tells us!"