"Look here, corporal; you're making fun of it--isn't it true what I said?" "There's a little truth in it, but you're too slashing on the poor boys, and you'd be the first to make a song about it if you had to go without papers. Oui, when the paper-man's going by, why do you all shout, 'Here, here'?" "And what good can you get out of them all?" cries Papa Blaire. "Read 'em by the tubful if you like, but do the same as me--don't believe 'em!" "Oui, oui, that's enough about them. Turn the page over, donkey-nose." The conversation is breaking up; interest in it follows suit and is scattered. Four poilus join in a game of manille, that will last until night blacks out the cards. Volpatte is trying to catch a leaf of cigarette paper that has escaped his fingers and goes hopping and dodging in the wind along the wall of the trench like a fragile butterfly. Cocon and Tirette are recalling their memories of barrack-life. The impressions left upon their minds by those years of military training are ineffaceable. Into that fund of abundant souvenirs, of abiding color and instant service, they have been wont to dip for their subjects of conversation for ten, fifteen, or twenty years. So that they still frequent it, even after a year and a half of actual war in all its forms. I can hear some of the talk and guess the rest of it. For it is everlastingly the same sort of tale that they get out of their military past;--the narrator once shut up a bad-tempered N.C.O. with words of extreme appropriateness and daring. He wasn't afraid, he spoke out loud and strong! Some scraps of it reach my ears-- "Alors, d'you think I flinched when Nenoeil said that to me? Not a bit, my boy. All the pals kept their jaws shut but me; I spoke up, 'Mon adjudant,' I says, 'it's possible, but--'" A sentence follows that I cannot secure--"Oh, tu sais, just like that, I said it. He didn't get shirty; 'Good, that's good,' he says as he hops it, and afterwards he was as good as all that, with me." "Just like me, with Dodore, 'jutant of the 13th, when I was on leave--a mongrel. Now he's at the Pantheon, as caretaker. He'd got it in for me, so--" So each unpacks his own little load of historical anecdote. They are all alike, and not one of them but says, "As for me, I am not like the others." * * * * *