“Two jets of blood were now spurting like two faucets from my leg, the big artery was cut. _Ça y est._ In five minutes I’ll be dead, I thought, and there came a fainting away and a thinking not on God, but on still untasted joys of the flesh and life—not even on my mother’s grief; and waking up after years, it seemed, and calling for water, and Dueso bending over me, after a frantic twisting at his _cravate_, and a frantic pulling and tightening of it about my leg, with one hand and his teeth, and then a pleasant, happy fainting away. A delicious sensation of ease invaded me, and I said to myself, ‘_Ce n’est que ça, mourir?_’ (‘Is death only this?’) I have seen so many men die, and whatever their agonies, if long or short, minutes or hours or days, as it may happen, just before dying something gentle and simple takes place.” E. O’S.—“The inevitable dust to dust, the natural law fulfilling itself?” De G.—“It may be. This _rictus de la mort_, I haven’t seen it, though I have heard men screaming and cursing and praying in the trenches as they got their blow, and watched their agonies, but before death something else, softer, always happens. Unless it comes too suddenly. I remember once being on the dunes in Belgium, and against the yellow sand men were sitting in red trousers and _chechias_, and one was telling a tale of laughter when a shell burst. In a moment the blood of his brains was flowing red upon the yellow sand, and then it got blue, and then it sank and was no more, like the laughing man himself from whom it flowed, and his tale of laughter.... About nine o’clock we were brought in. Dueso had been lying with his head under my armpit, and his feet still on the dead man, and we would both come out of a faint from time to time and ask for water. “Dueso! ah, Dueso! for a human being _il est plus chic que moi_. He had been in jail for various reasons not very _chic_, and I was warned against him when I took him for my orderly, but to him I owe my life. Now he is in Salonique, _cité à l’armée_, knows how to live in those regions, hard as nails, originally from Tunis; a dark man, with dark mustache and very big white teeth.” E. O’S.—“One thinks so often how little the common soldier, defending honors and riches that he doesn’t share, has to gain. There is nothing for him, in fact, except to step out into anonymous death; at a given moment to make the sacrifice of his life, or his eyes or his limbs, knowing nothing of war except its horror, rarely any glory, sometimes a mention or a medal, oftener not. But,” I continued, after we had sat silent for a while, “who will carry it all on? Few like yourself are left, and it is not enough. France is bleeding white—France, whose sons are heroes, not fathers!”