Not a muscle moved in the Catholic Despois' impassive face. If Landri had not been acquainted with his real thought, he might have believed that the peculiarly painful character of this expedition was a matter of indifference to the old trooper, who began at once to give him detailed orders concerning the equipment of the men. It was not until they rose, after half an hour of professional conversation, that he let certain words escape him which proved how his heart was beating under his undecorated tunic. It was unhoped-for good fortune, that he was not given the command of the detachment on this occasion. But as he was incapable of selfish exultation, so he gave no thought to his own interests. His expression had grown even more gloomy since the other had made that declaration which left no room for doubt. As he accompanied his visitor to the door, he detained him in front of a mediocre engraving, the Last Cartridge. He was neither a collector with the taste of an Altona, nor a connoisseur of art like a Bressieux, was poor Captain Despois. He was something higher in the scale of human culture,--a good soldier. All the martyrdom of the army, of the army forced by shameless politicians into such tragedies of the conscience, quivered in the tone in which, calling his lieutenant's attention to that wretched lithograph of a scene of disaster, but of an heroic disaster and face to face with the enemy, he repeated simply the famous line:-- "Heureux ceux-là qui mouraient dans ces fêtes!" [Footnote 4: If they persist, these cannibals, In making heroes of us, They'll soon learn that our bullets Are for our own generals.] VI THE WILL It was not quite eight o'clock the next morning when Landri and his dragoons came in sight of Hugueville-en-Plaine, so named to distinguish it from Hugueville-en-Montagne. It is a large village, three leagues from Saint-Mihiel on the map and as the crow flies. The network of roads in those ramparts of the Forest of Argonne stretches the twelve kilometres to seventeen. An extensive wood bounds the village on the east, so that the sixty men of the little detachment were able to approach unseen. It was another typical day of early autumn, with a pale blue sky, veiled by transparent clouds, like the preceding Monday, when Valentine Olier's lover stopped his automobile at the door of Saint-François-Xavier, to pay a surreptitious visit to his friend. In his black overcoat, with his helmet on his head, the officer, who had led his two platoons for the last two hours through clumps of elms and aspens at first, and then, as the ground rose higher and higher, through thickets of oak and beech, recalled with poignant sadness that other day, so near--only four times twenty-four hours--which seemed to him so far away! He had lived more in those four days than in his twenty-nine years of childhood, adolescence and youth.