Silence follows the recorded opinions that proceed from these dried and tanned faces, inlaid with dust. This, evidently, is the credo of the men who, a year and a half ago, left all the corners of the land to mass themselves on the frontier: Give up trying to understand, and give up trying to be yourself. Hope that you will not die, and fight for life as well as you can. "Do what you've got to do, oui, but get out of your own messes yourself," says Barque, as he slowly stirs the mud to and fro. "No choice"--Tulacque backs him up. "If you don't get out of 'em yourself, no one'll do it for you." "He's not yet quite extinct, the man that bothers about the other fellow." "Every man for himself, in war!" "That's so, that's so." Silence. Then from the depth of their destitution, these men summon sweet souvenirs--"All that," Barque goes on, "isn't worth much, compared with the good times we had at Soissons." "Ah, the Devil!" A gleam of Paradise lost lights up their eyes and seems even to redden their cold faces. "Talk about a festival!" sighs Tirloir, as he leaves off scratching himself, and looks pensively far away over Trenchland. "Ah, nom de Dieu! All that town, nearly abandoned, that used to be ours! The houses and the beds--" "And the cupboards!" "And the cellars!" Lamuse's eyes are wet, his face like a nosegay, his heart full. "Were you there long?" asks Cadilhac, who came here later, with the drafts from Auvergne. "Several months." The conversation had almost died out, but it flames up again fiercely at this vision of the days of plenty. "We used to see," said Paradis dreamily, "the poilus pouring along and behind the houses on the way back to camp with fowls hung round their middles, and a rabbit under each arm, borrowed from some good fellow or woman that they hadn't seen and won't ever see again." We reflect on the far-off flavor of chicken and rabbit. "There were things that we paid for, too. The spondu-licks just danced about. We held all the aces in those days." "A hundred thousand francs went rolling round the shops." "Millions, oui. All the day, just a squandering that you've no idea of, a sort of devil's delight." "Believe me or not," said Blaire to Cadilhac, "but in the middle of it all, what we had the least of was fires, just like here and everywhere else you go. You had to chase it and find it and stick to it. Ah, mon vieux, how we did run after the kindlings!" "Well, we were in the camp of the C.H.R. The cook there was the great Martin Cesar. He was the man for finding wood!" "Ah, oui, oui! He was the ace of trumps! He got what he wanted without twisting himself." "Always some fire in his kitchen, young fellow. You saw cooks chasing and gabbling about the streets in all directions, blubbering because they had no coal or wood. But he'd got a fire. When he hadn't any, he said, 'Don't worry, I'll see you through.' And he wasn't long about it, either."