“Your name?”

“Yes; you’ll call yourself Leonard Carlotti, that’s all.  ’Tisn’t a big job.  What harm can it do you?  Straight off, you’ve no more convictions.  They won’t hunt you out, and you can be as happy as I should have been if this bullet hadn’t gone through my magazine.”

“Oh Christ!” said the other, “you’d do that?  You’d—­that—­well, old chap, that beats all!”

“Take it.  It’s there in my pocket-book in my greatcoat.  Go on, take it, and hand yours over to me—­so that I can carry it all away with me.  You’ll be able to live where you like, except where I come from, where I’m known a bit, at Longueville in Tunis.  You’ll remember that?  And anyway, it’s written down.  You must read it, the pocket-book.  I shan’t blab to anybody.  To bring the trick off properly, mum’s the word, absolutely.”

He ponders a moment, and then says with a shiver “I’ll p’raps tell Louise, so’s she’ll find I’ve done the right thing, and think the better of me, when I write to her to say good-by.”

But he thinks better of it, and shakes his head with an heroic effort.  “No—­I shan’t let on, even to her.  She’s her, of course, but women are such chatterers!”

The other man looks at him, and repeats, “Ah, nome de Dieu!”

Without being noticed by the two men I leave the drama narrowly developing in this lamentable corner and its jostling and traffic and hubbub.

Now I touch the composed and convalescent chat of two poor wretches—­“Ah, my boy, the affection he had for that vine of his!  You couldn’t find anything wrong among the branches of it—­”

“That little nipper, that wee little kid, when I went out with him, holding his tiny fist, it felt as if I’d got hold of the little warm neck of a swallow, you know.”

And alongside this sentimental avowal, here is the passing revelation of another mind:  “Don’t I know the 547th!  Rather!  Listen, it’s a funny regiment.  They’ve got a poilu in it who’s called Petitjean, another called Petitpierre, and another called Petitlouis.  Old man, it’s as I’m telling you; that’s the kind of regiment it is.”

As I begin to pick out a way with a view to leaving the cavern, there is a great noise down yonder of a fall and a chorus of exclamations.  It is the hospital sergeant who has fallen.  Through the breach that he was clearing of its soft and bloody relics, a bullet has taken him in the throat, and he is spread out full length on the ground.  His great bewildered eyes are rolling and his breath comes foaming.  His mouth and the lower part of his face are quickly covered with a cloud of rosy bubbles.  They place his head on a bag of bandages, and the bag is instantly soaked with blood.  An attendant cries that the packets of lint will be spoiled, and they are needed.  Something else is sought on which to put the head that ceaselessly makes a light and discolored froth.  Only a loaf can be found, and it is slid under the spongy hair.