“Decorate you!  I should think they might.  Medals are cheap.  Everybody over there is getting medals.  You feed their men and risk your life and your reputation, and they give you a thing to pin on.  It’s cheap at the price.”

And later on those were Harvey’s very words.  But to be fair to him they were but the sloughing of a wound that would not heal.

That evening Henri came again.  He was, for the first time, his gay self again—­at least on the surface.  It was as though, knowing what he was going into, he would leave with Sara Lee no feeling, if he never returned, that she had inflicted a lasting hurt.  He was everywhere in the little house, elbowing his way among the men with his cheery nonsense, bantering the weary ones until they smiled, carrying hot water for Sara Lee and helping her now and then with a bad dressing.

“If you would do it in this fashion, mademoiselle,” he would say, “with one turn of the bandage over the elbow—­”

“But it won’t hold that way.”

“You say that to me, mademoiselle?  I who have taught you all you know of bandaging?”

They would wrangle a bit, and end by doing it in Sara Lee’s way.

He had a fund of nonsense that he drew on, too, when a dressing was painful.  It would run like this, to an early accompaniment of groans: 

“Pierre, what can you put in your left hand that you cannot place in the right?  Stop grunting like a pig, and think, man!”

Pierre would give a final rumble and begin to think deeply.

“I cannot think.  I—­in my left hand, monsieur le capitaine?”

“In your left hand.”

The little crowd in the dressing room would draw in close about the table to listen.

“I do not know, monsieur.”

“Idiot!” Henri would say.  “Your right elbow, man!”

And the dressing was done.

He had an inexhaustible stock of such riddles, almost never guessed.  He would tell the answer and then laugh delightedly.  And pain seemed to leave the little room when he entered it.

It was that night that Henri disappeared.

XVII

There was a question to settle, and it was for Henri to do it.  Two questions indeed.  One was a matter of engineering, and before the bottom fell out of his world Henri had studied engineering.  The second was more serious.

For the first, this thing had happened.  Of all the trenches to be held, the Belgians had undeniably the worst.  Properly speaking they were not trenches at all, but shallow gutters dug a foot or two into the saturated ground and then built man-high with bags of earth or sand.  Here and there they were not dug at all, but were purely shelters, against a railway embankment, of planks or sandbags, and reinforced by rails from the deserted track behind which they were hidden.