“I’ve seen—­things,” replies the flying-man laboriously.

“I too, I’ve seen some!” the soldier interrupts; “some people couldn’t stick it, to see what I’ve seen.”

“Come and sit here,” says one of the men on the seat to me, making room as he speaks.  “Are you wounded?”

“No; I brought a wounded man here, and I’m going back.”

“You’re worse than wounded then; come and sit down.”

“I was mayor in my place,” explains one of the sufferers, “but when I go back no one will know me again, it’s so long now that I’ve been in misery.”

“Four hours now have I been stuck on this bench,” groans a sort of mendicant, whose shaking hand holds his helmet on his knees like an alms-bowl, whose head is lowered and his back rounded.

“We’re waiting to be cleared, you know,” I am informed by a big man who pants and sweats—­all the bulk of him seems to be boiling.  His mustache hangs as if it had come half unstuck through the moisture of his face.  He turns two big and lightless eyes on me, and his wound is not visible.

“That’s so,” says another; “all the wounded of the Brigade come and pile themselves up here one after another, without counting them from other places.  Yes, look at it now; this hole here, it’s the midden for the whole Brigade.”

“I’m gangrened, I’m smashed, I’m all in bits inside,” droned one who sat with his head in his hands and spoke through his fingers; “yet up to last week I was young and I was clean.  They’ve changed me.  Now, I’ve got nothing but a dirty old decomposed body to drag along.”

“Yesterday,” says another, “I was twenty-six years old.  And now how old am I?” He tries to get up, so as to show us his shaking and faded face, worn out in a night, to show us the emaciation, the depression of cheeks and eye-sockets, and the dying flicker of light in his greasy eye.

“It hurts!” humbly says some one invisible.

“What’s the use of worrying?” repeats the other mechanically.

There was a silence, and then the aviator cried, “The padres were trying on both sides to hide their voices.”

“What’s that mean?” said the astonished zouave.

“Are you taking leave of ’em, old chap?” asked a chasseur wounded in the hand and with one arm bound to his body, as his eyes left the mummified limb for a moment to glance at the flying-man.

The latter’s looks were distraught; he was trying to interpret a mysterious picture which everywhere he saw before his eyes—­“Up there, from the sky, you don’t see much, you know.  Among the squares of the fields and the little heaps of the villages the roads run like white cotton.  You can make out, too, some hollow threads that look as if they’d been traced with a pin-point and scratched through fine sand.  These nets that festoon the plain with regularly wavy marks, they’re the trenches.  Last Sunday morning I was flying over the firing-line.  Between our first lines