* * * * * *

One day, after morning parade, when the company was breaking off, a Parisian of our section went up to Marcassin and asked him, “Adjutant, we should like to know if we are going away.”

The officer took it in bad part.  “To know?  Always wanting to know!” he cried; “it’s a disease in France, this wanting to know.  Get it well into your heads that you won’t know!  We shall do the knowing for you!  Words are done with.  There’s something else beginning, and that’s discipline and silence.”

The zeal we had felt for going to the front cooled off in a few days.  One or two well-defined cases of shirking were infectious, and you heard this refrain again and again:  “As long as the others are dodging, I should be an ass not to do it, too.”

But there was quite a multitude who never said anything.

At last a reinforcement draft was posted; old and young promiscuously—­a list worked out in the office amidst a seesaw of intrigue.  Protests were raised, and fell back again into the tranquillity of the depot.

I abode there forty-five days.  Towards the middle of September, we were allowed to go out after the evening meal and Sundays as well.  We used to go in the evening to the Town Hall to read the despatches posted there; they were as uniform and monotonous as rain.  Then a friend and I would go to the cafe, keeping step, our arms similarly swinging, exchanging some words, idle, and vaguely divided into two men.  Or we went into it in a body, which isolated me.  The saloon of the cafe enclosed the same odors as Fontan’s; and while I stayed there, sunk in the soft seat, my boots grating on the tiled floor, my eye on the white marble, it was like a strip of a long dream of the past, a scanty memory that clothed me.  There I used to write to Marie, and there I read again the letters I received from her, in which she said, “Nothing has changed since you were away.”

One Sunday, when I was beached on a seat in the square and weeping with yawns under the empty sky, I saw a young woman go by.  By reason of some resemblance in outline, I thought of a woman who had loved me.  I recalled the period when life was life, and that beautiful caressing body of once-on-a-time.  It seemed to me that I held her in my arms, so close that I felt her breath, like velvet, on my face.

We got a glimpse of the captain at one review.  Once there was talk of a new draft for the front, but it was a false rumor.  Then we said, “There’ll never be any war for us,” and that was a relief.

My name flashed to my eyes in a departure list posted on the wall.  My name was read out at morning parade, and it seemed to me that it was the only one they read.  I had no time to get ready.  In the evening of the next day our detachment passed out of the barracks by the little gate.

CHAPTER XI