“That’s chance, as I wrote to Mangouste, driver of a remount horse for the section, that got wounded—­but it was done by a motor lorry.”

“That’s it, it’s like that.  After all, a bomb can tumble down on a pavement, in Paris or in Bordeaux.”

“Oui, oui; so it’s too easy to say, ’Don’t let’s make distinctions in danger!’ Wait a bit.  Since the beginning, there are some of those others who’ve got killed by an unlucky chance; among us there are some that are still alive by a lucky chance.  It isn’t the same thing, that, seeing that when you’re dead, it’s for a long time.”

“Yes,” says Tirette, “but you’re getting too venomous with your stories of shirkers.  As long as we can’t help it, it’s time to turn over.  I’m thinking of a retired forest-ranger at Cherey, where we were last month, who went about the streets of the town spying everywhere to rout out some civilian of military age, and he smelled out the dodgers like a mastiff.  Behold him pulling up in front of a sturdy goodwife that had a mustache, and he only sees her mustache, so he bullyrags her—­’Why aren’t you at the front, you?’”

“For my part,” says Pepin, “I don’t fret myself about the shirkers or the semi-shirkers, it’s wasting one’s time; but where they get on my nerves, it’s when they swank.  I’m of Volpatte’s opinion.  Let ’em shirk, good, that’s human nature; but afterwards they shouldn’t say, ‘I’ve been a soldier.’  Take the engages, [note 3] for instance—­”

“That depends on the engages.  Those who have offered for the infantry without conditions, I look up to those men as much as to those that have got killed; but the engages in the departments or special arms, even in the heavy artillery, they begin to get my back up.  We know ’em!  When they’re doing the agreeable in their social circle, they’ll say, ’I’ve offered for the war.’—­’Ah, what a fine thing you have done; of your own free will you have defied the machine-guns! ’—­’Well, yes, madame la marquise, I’m built like that!’ Eh, get out of it, humbug!”

“Oui, it’s always the same tale.  They wouldn’t be able to say in the drawing-rooms afterwards, ’Tenez, here I am; look at me for a voluntary engage!’”

“I know a gentleman who enlisted in the aerodromes.  He had a fine uniform—­he’d have done better to offer for the Opera-Comique.  What am I saying—­’he’d have done better?’ He’d have done a damn sight better, oui.  At least he’d have made other people laugh honestly, instead of making them laugh with the spleen in it.”

“They’re a lot of cheap china, fresh painted, and plastered with ornaments and all sorts of falderals, but they don’t go under fire.”

“If there’d only been people like those, the Boches would be at Bayonne.”

“When war’s on, one must risk his skin, eh, corporal?”

“Yes,” said Bertrand, “there are some times when duty and danger are exactly the same thing; when the country, when justice and liberty are in danger, it isn’t in taking shelter that you defend them.  On the contrary, war means danger of death and sacrifice of life for everybody, for everybody; no one is sacred.  One must go for it, upright, right to the end, and not pretend to do it in a fanciful uniform.  These services at the bases, and they’re necessary, must be automatically guaranteed by the really weak and the really old.”