As for Pat, we hadn’t an idea in what sort of shape we might find him. Once, Mr. K. told me, he had come upon Pat in one of his visits to the Saint Thiebault infirmary. Pat was lying on a cot with his eyes closed and a sanctified look of patient suffering upon his face. “Why what’s wrong with you, Pat?” “Ssh!” Pat squinted about to see that neither doctor nor orderly was within ear-shot, then an Irish grin spread over his impudent features. “Nothin’ at all,” he whispered joyously, “just nothin’ at all!” But this time we found Pat’s ailment real enough. He was in the “bone ward” with a badly broken wrist. “How did it happen?” we inquired. “Sure an’ it happened this way,” and he told us both the official and the confidential versions. Confidentially, Pat’s wrist had been broken by a blow from an M. P.’s billy in an after-payday argument at Saint Thiebault. Officially it had been broken two days later in the barracks by an accidental knock from a gun-barrel. _Pat had hiked and drilled with a broken wrist for two solid days in order to be able to claim that he had been disabled in the line of duty!_ After the second day, convinced that the encounter with the M. P. was sufficiently a matter of past history to be discredited, Pat had reported at Sick Call with his trumped-up tale and had as usual gotten by. Now as he lay on his cot he was occupying himself by conjuring up visions of the party to which he and his buddy were going to treat that M. P. just as soon as he (Pat) should get his hospital discharge. As we talked I noticed a lad who was walking about the ward with his right hand done up in bloody bandages. He looked self-conscious and embarrassed as if he half hoped, half feared to be recognized. I caught Pat’s eye, his voice dropped to a whisper. “That’s Philip R. Don’t you remember him?” Of course! I smiled at Philip, but he turned away and wouldn’t come to speak to me. Mr. K. went over to him; they talked for a long while in undertones. Later I heard the whole pitiful story. He had been drinking, the terror that was haunting him had suddenly gripped. He had taken his rifle and shot himself through his right hand, mutilating it, in order that he might not be sent to the front. Placed under arrest on suspicion, his nerve had utterly given way. He had made a full confession. It was likely to go hard with him. While Mr. K. was listening to Philip, Pat was telling me about the regiment of southern negro engineers who had come to Bazoilles to help build the new hospital. Every time there was an air-raid alarm, Pat declared, they knelt down and prayed by companies. I emptied out my _musette_ bag onto Pat’s cot. Pat looked at the oranges, dates, chocolates and cigarettes that we had brought, then took a squint along the hungry-looking ward. “Well, I guess I’ll get a taste,” he said.