One tries to fathom certain faces that show up in provocative relief among this menagerie of shadows, this aviary of reflections.  But one cannot.  They are visible, but you can see nothing in the depth of them.

* * * * * *

“Ten o’clock already, friends,” says Bertrand.  “We’ll finish the camel’s humps off to-morrow.  Time for by-by.”  Each one then slowly retires to rest, but the jabbering hardly pauses.  Man takes all things easily when he is under no obligation to hurry.  The men go to and fro, each with some object in his hand, and along the wall I watch Eudore’s huge shadow gliding, as he passes in front of a candle with two little bags of camphor hanging from the end of his fingers.

Lamuse is throwing himself about in search of a good position; he seems ill at ease.  To-day, obviously. and whatever his capacity may be, he has eaten too much.

“Some of us want to sleep!  Shut them up, you lot of louts!” cries Mesnil Joseph from his litter.

This entreaty has a subduing effect for a moment, but does not stop the burble of voices nor the passing to and fro.

“We’re going up to-morrow, it’s true,” says Paradis, “and in the evening we shall go into the first line.  But nobody’s thinking about it.  We know it, and that’s all.”

Gradually each has regained his place.  I have stretched myself on the straw, and Marthereau wraps himself up by my side.

Enter an enormous bulk, taking great pains not to make a noise.  It is the field-hospital sergeant, a Marist Brother, a huge bearded simpleton in spectacles.  When he has taken off his greatcoat and appears in his jacket, you are conscious that he feels awkward about showing his legs.  We see that it hurries discreetly, this silhouette of a bearded hippopotamus.  He blows, sighs, and mutters.

Marthereau indicates him with a nod of his bead, and says to me, “Look at him.  Those chaps have always got to be talking fudge.  When we ask him what he does in civil life, he won’t say ’I’m a school teacher’ he says, leering at you from under his specs with the half of his eyes, ‘I’m a professor.’  When he gets up very early to go to mass, he says, ’I’ve got belly-ache, I must go and take a turn round the corner and no mistake.’”

A little farther off, Papa Ramure is talking of his homeland:  “Where I live, it’s just a bit of a hamlet, no great shakes.  There’s my old man there, seasoning pipes all day long; whether he’s working or resting, he blows his smoke up to the sky or into the smoke of the stove.”

I listen to this rural idyll, and it takes suddenly a specialized and technical character:  “That’s why he makes a paillon.  D’you know what a paillon is?  You take a stalk of green corn and peel it.  You split it in two and then in two again, and you have different sizes.  Then with a thread and the four slips of straw, he goes round the stem of his pipe—­”

The lesson ceases abruptly, there being no apparent audience.