“M. Georg Doppel has begged me to translate the accompanying petition, and to give him a letter of introduction to you. In my humble opinion, he has rendered services [I should have liked to add the words ‘extremely onerous’] to many of our comrades. For my own part, I shall gladly contribute to a collection, if you think it well to permit one. “Your affectionate soldier, “GASTON RIOU.” In a very few minutes, M. Langlois arrived. “Here’s a funny business!” he cried, laughing with his mischievous eyes and all his fat and benevolent little body. “This letter of Doppel’s is a pearl! I shall treasure it. And the Parthian shaft-the postscript promising my own release! Doppel is really a most amusing rascal.” “And what are you going to do, monsieur le Médecin-chef? Are you going to allow the collection? “Certainly not. Hasn’t he fleeced us enough already? He ought to have put something by.” “No doubt. But he never thought they would send him to the front. He imagined that he would be able to go on luxuriating at our expense in the neighbouring villages, living like a lord, until the end of the war. The fact is, he is pretty well cleared out!” “Don’t you worry. I’ve been able to make his mind easy. I have just given him a general letter of introduction to the French officers. If you had seen him unbuttoning his tunic and putting away my letter in the pocket of his shirt as if it had been a scapular! To be a prisoner in France will be like heaven to him. I am sure that I have deprived Germany of a rifle.” * * * * * Poor Georg! Poor Bavarian Gil Blas! You are of those who come to terms frankly with their prejudices and their appetites. The service of king, country, and religion; the precepts of morality: he has never had any thought of violating these sacred things. He allows them to float vaguely in his heaven and to widen the horizon of his thought, remote images which it is obvious that people love, familiar lineaments of the region in which he is accustomed to live. The idea has never entered his mind to declare that the idols of his nation are false gods. He endeavours to humbug them, but he believes in them. He is no scoundrel. He lacks the unalloyed selfishness, the whole-hearted scepticism, characteristic of the thoroughgoing knave, the successful brigand, the true diplomatist and dealer in men. His actions are unscrupulous, not so his thoughts. Hedonist, scapegrace, having at bottom the heart of a child, indifferently adapting his practice to his beliefs or his beliefs to his practice, he reveres in good faith, like most Germans, virtue, honour, religion, the prince. With the grandiloquence natural to his race, he embellishes in his own mind the most trifling of his private machinations.