“Confound the luck!” Jean stammered.  “It is not worth speaking of, but it’s vexatious all the same, to be here getting one’s head broken for other folks, when those other folks are at home, smoking their pipe in comfort.”

“Yes, that’s so,” Maurice replied, with a wild look.  “Why should it be I rather than someone else?”

It was the revolt of the individual Ego, the unaltruistic refusal of the one to make himself a sacrifice for the benefit of the species.

“And then again,” Jean continued, “if a fellow could but know the rights of the matter; if he could be sure that any good was to come from it all.”  Then turning his head and glancing at the western sky:  “Anyway, I wish that blamed sun would hurry up and go to roost.  Perhaps they’ll stop fighting when it’s dark.”

With no distinct idea of what o’clock it was and no means of measuring the flight of time, he had long been watching the tardy declination of the fiery disk, which seemed to him to have ceased to move, hanging there in the heavens over the woods of the left bank.  And this was not owing to any lack of courage on his part; it was simply the overmastering, ever increasing desire, amounting to an imperious necessity, to be relieved from the screaming and whistling of those projectiles, to run away somewhere and find a hole where he might hide his head and lose himself in oblivion.  Were it not for the feeling of shame that is implanted in men’s breasts and keeps them from showing the white feather before their comrades, every one of them would lose his head and run, in spite of himself, like the veriest poltroon.

Maurice and Jean, meanwhile, were becoming somewhat more accustomed to their surroundings, and even when their terror was at its highest there came to them a sort of exalted self-unconsciousness that had in it something of bravery.  They finally reached a point when they did not even hasten their steps as they made their way through the accursed wood.  The horror of the bombardment was even greater than it had been previously among that race of sylvan denizens, killed at their post, struck down on every hand, like gigantic, faithful sentries.  In the delicious twilight that reigned, golden-green, beneath their umbrageous branches, among the mysterious recesses of romantic, moss-carpeted retreats, Death showed his ill-favored, grinning face.  The solitary fountains were contaminated; men fell dead in distant nooks whose depths had hitherto been trod by none save wandering lovers.  A bullet pierced a man’s chest; he had time to utter the one word:  “hit!” and fell forward on his face, stone dead.  Upon the lips of another, who had both legs broken by a shell, the gay laugh remained; unconscious of his hurt, he supposed he had tripped over a root.  Others, injured mortally, would run on for some yards, jesting and conversing, until suddenly they went down like a log in the supreme convulsion.  The severest wounds were hardly felt at the moment they were received; it was only at a later period that the terrible suffering commenced, venting itself in shrieks and hot tears.