“See here, young feller, I begin to understand this war. There are two kinds of people: the Form-fillers, administrative species, who have the authority and who let the _poilus_ be killed administratively and the boats sunk administratively. When the Forms have all been filled in and their responsibility well covered up, they rub their hands and don’t care a damn for anybody. And then there are the others: folks like you and me and some millions of poor devils. We drudge and wear out our skins without needing to fill up any Forms, but we are the ones that keep the business going and who will win the war. No one thanks us, but if France keeps her end up, it is because of us in the ships and the trenches. On land they haven’t yet managed to get heavy artillery like the Germans, so where the Boches send a shell of large calibre, we put a _poilu_ and the blood of our _poilus_ compensates for the inferiority of our artillery. At sea it’s the same thing, except that the submarine takes the place of the heavy artillery, and the ships which go to the bottom take the place of the _poilus_ who get dished. All that isn’t good copy for the newspapers, but it’s the truth just the same. It will go on and on, but in the end we shall be obliged to do as the Germans do instead of scoffing at them.” Fourgues is generally right, and the things he says come to pass six or eight months later, so when you tell him he is a pessimist, he has only to say, “Wait and see!” And when his predictions are realized, the people who said they never would be have forgotten what he told them in the first place, and they brag of how they had been predicting this for a long time! Then he gets into a rage and announces some more things which astonish them and they repeat that it can’t be so because the newspapers are saying quite the opposite. Five or six months later, behold Fourgues again in the right!