Dazzled by the resplendent purity of his present. hardly even daring to believe my eyes, I see—­an egg!

16

An Idyll

“Really and truly,” said Paradis, my neighbor in the ranks, “believe me or not, I’m knocked out—­I’ve never before been so paid on a march as I have been with this one, this evening.”

His feet were dragging, and his square shoulders bowed under the burden of the knapsack, whose height and big irregular outline seemed almost fantastic.  Twice he tripped and stumbled.

Paradis is tough.  But he had been running up and down the trench all night as liaison man while the others were sleeping, so he had good reason to be exhausted and to growl “Quoi?  These kilometers must be made of india-rubber, there’s no way out of it.”

Every three steps he hoisted his knapsack roughly up with a hitch of his hips, and panted under its dragging; and all the heap that he made with his bundles tossed and creaked like an overloaded wagon.

“We’re there,” said a non-com.

Non-coms. always say that, on every occasion.  But—­in spite of the non-com.’s declaration—­we were really arriving in a twilight village which seemed to be drawn in white chalk and heavy strokes of black upon the blue paper of the sky, where the sable silhouette of the church—­a pointed tower flanked by two turrets more slender and more sharp—­was that of a tall cypress.

But the soldier, even when he enters the village where he is to be quartered, has not reached the end of his troubles.  It rarely happens that either the squad or the section actually lodges in the place assigned to them, and this by reason of misunderstandings and cross purposes which tangle and disentangle themselves on the spot; and it is only after several quarter-hours of tribulation that each man is led to his actual shelter of the moment.

So after the usual wanderings we were admitted to our night’s lodging—­a roof supported by four posts, and with the four quarters of the compass for its walls.  But it was a good roof—­an advantage which we could appreciate.  It was already sheltering a cart and a plow, and we settled ourselves by them.  Paradis, who had fumed and complained without ceasing during the hour we had spent in tramping to and fro, threw down his knapsack and then himself, and stayed there awhile, weary to the utmost, protesting that his limbs were benumbed, that the soles of his feet were painful, and indeed all the rest of him.

But now the house to which our hanging roof was subject, the house which stood just in front of us, was lighted up.  Nothing attracts a soldier in the gray monotony of evening so much as a window whence beams the star of a lamp.

“Shall we have a squint?” proposed Volpatte.

“So be it,” said Paradis.  He gets up gradually, and hobbling with weariness, steers himself towards the golden window that has appeared in the gloom, and then towards the door.  Volpatte follows him, and I Volpatte.