Around us the others are enjoying themselves like brothers reunited. Graby is begging Ménard to sing the American _Row! Row! Row!_ I long to take my companion out on to the slopes, and there, amid the silence, to let him talk at length, to listen, and to make him feel that I share his dreams, that France is the friend of every nation that yearns for freedom. * * * * * The Pole makes no accusations against France. She has deceived his people, but he loves her just the same. He believes in her, despite her faults, as the great champion of justice. Ménard is singing. The French and the Russians are taking up in chorus the refrain, “Row! Row! Row!” Elbows on knees, head in hands, expression disdainful, my Pole says no more, but sits like a colossus, making the best of his impotence. The Russians have suddenly started a new air. A tenor sings the first phrase in solo. A bass joins in. Then the other voices take up their parts. It is beautiful, with a rough, serious, wild beauty. I ask the title. _The Song of the War against Japan._ Then they give some love songs. It seems to me that all voice the same music, a powerful and melancholy, and yet simple music, with the sweet notes of infinite submission. I think of a grand Gregorian chant encompassing all the pleasures and all the wrongs of earth in an atmosphere of the eternal. The strains have a bourdon of lamentation, like that of a woman spent with suffering asking sympathy and consolation. * * * * * Next day the Bavarians of the guard could hardly believe their eyes. In the courts, in the ditches, everywhere, among basins and heaps of underclothing, quite a tribe of naked little fathers were glistening in the sunshine. How thin they were! To what skeletons they had been reduced by two months in Germany. Smiling, making awkward little gestures, each one of them allowed himself to be manipulated by a Frenchman, who soaped him all over, rubbed him down, pummelled him, dried him, and finally dressed him as a French infantryman. “Now, then, we must wash your duds. Come along.” And the French mamma led his great little Slav to the well, helped him to pump some water, arranged him a bench. Then both set to work and scrubbed. In the evening, when the roll was called, the _Hauptmann_ exclaimed: “But where on earth are the Russians?” “There they are,” answered Junot, sergeant-major of No. 46. “But what is the meaning of this masquerade?” “Mon commandant, their clothes are drying on the slopes, and you see they could not attend muster in a loin cloth.”