Poor Barque's head droops. His face, bloodless as a slum child's, is underlined by a red goatee that punctuates his hair like an apostrophe: "Yes, it's true, when you come to think of it. What's a soldier, or even several soldiers?--Nothing, and less than nothing, in the whole crowd; and so we see ourselves lost, drowned, like the few drops of blood that we are among all this flood of men and things." Barque sighs and is silent, and the end of his discourse gives a chance of hearing to a bit of jingling narrative, told in an undertone: "He was coming along with two horses--Fs-s-s--a shell; and he's only one horse left." "You get fed up with it," says Volpatte. "But you stick it," growls Barque. "You've got to," says Paradis. "Why?" asks Marthereau, without conviction. "No need for a reason, as long as we've got to." "There is no reason," Lamuse avers. "Yes, there is," says Cocon. "It's--or rather, there are several." "Shut it up! Much better to have no reason, as long as we've got to stick it." "All the same," comes the hollow voice of Blaire, who lets no chance slip of airing his pet phrase--"All the same, they'd like to steal the very skin off us!" "At the beginning of it," says Tirette, "I used to think about a heap of things. I considered and calculated. Now, I don't think any more." "Nor me either." "Nor me." "I've never tried to." "You're not such a fool as you look, flea-face," says the shrill and jeering voice of Mesnil Andre. Obscurely flattered, the other develops his theme-- "To begin with, you can't know anything about anything." Says Corporal Bertrand, "There's only one thing you need know, and it's this; that the Boches are here in front of us, deep dug in, and we've got to see that they don't get through, and we've got to put 'em out, one day or another--as soon as possible." "Oui, oui, they've got to leg it, and no mistake about it. What else is there? Not worth while to worry your head thinking about anything else. But it's a long job." An explosion of profane assent comes from Fouillade, and he adds, "That's what it is!" "I've given up grousing," says Barque. "At the beginning of it, I played hell with everybody--with the people at the rear, with the civilians, with the natives, with the shirkers. Yes, I played hell; but that was at the beginning of the war--I was young. Now, I take things better." "There's only one way of taking 'em--as they come!" "Of course! Otherwise, you'd go crazy. We're dotty enough already, eh, Firmin?" Volpatte assents with a nod of profound conviction. He spits, and then contemplates his missile with a fixed and unseeing eye. "You were saying?" insists Barque. "Here, you haven't got to look too far in front. You must live from day to day and from hour to hour, as well as you can." "Certain sure, monkey-face. We've got to do what they tell us to do, until they tell us to go away." "That's all," yawns Mesnil Joseph.