We stay motionless, or move slowly in the little space we have, aghast at so much misery.  “Whose is the paper?”

“It’s mine,” says Becuwe.

“What does it say?  Ah, zut, one can’t read in this darkness!”

“It says they’ve done everything necessary now for the soldiers, to keep them warm in the trenches.  They’ve got all they want, and blankets and shirts and brasiers and fire-buckets and bucketsful of coal; and that it’s like that in the first-line trenches.”

“Ah, damnation!” growl some of the poor prisoners of the barn, and they shake their fists at the emptiness without and at the newspaper itself.

But Fouillade has lost interest in what they say.  He has bent his long Don Quixote carcase down in the shadow, and outstretched the lean neck that looks as if it were braided with violin strings.  There is something on the ground that attracts him.

It is Labri, the other squad’s dog, an uncertain sort of mongrel sheep-dog, with a lopped tail, curled up on a tiny litter of straw-dust.  Fouillade looks at Labri, and Labri at him.  Becuwe comes up and says, with the intonation of the Lille district, “He won’t eat his food; the dog isn’t well.  Hey, Labri, what’s the matter with you?  There’s your bread and meat; eat it up; it’s good when it’s in your bucket.  He’s poorly.  One of these mornings we shall find him dead.”

Labri is not happy.  The soldier to whom he is entrusted is hard on him, and usually ill-treats him—­when he takes any notice of him at all.  The animal is tied up all day.  He is cold and ill and left to himself.  He only exists.  From time to time, when there is movement going on around him, he has hopes of going out, rises and stretches himself, and bestirs his tail to incipient demonstration.  But he is disillusioned, and lies down again, gazing past his nearly full mess-tin.

He is weary, and disgusted with life.  Even if he has escaped the bullet or bomb to which he is as much exposed as we, he will end by dying here.  Fouillade puts his thin hand on the dog’s head, and it gazes at him again.  Their two glances are alike—­the only difference is that one comes from above and the other from below.

Fouillade sits down also—­the worse for him!—­in a corner, his hands covered by the folds of his greatcoat, his long legs doubled up like a folding bed.  He is dreaming, his eyes closed under their bluish lids; there is something that he sees again.  It is one of those moments when the country from which he is divided assumes in the distance the charms of reality—­the perfumes and colors of l’Herault. the streets of Cette.  He sees so plainly and so near that he hears the noise of the shallops in the Canal du Midi, and the unloading at the docks; and their call to him is distinctly clear.

Above the road where the scent of thyme and immortelles is so strong that it is almost a taste in the mouth, in the heart of the sunshine whose winging shafts stir the air into a warmed and scented breeze, on Mont St. Clair, blossoms and flourishes the home of his folks.  Up there, one can see with the same glance where the Lake of Thau, which is green like glass, joins hands with the Mediterranean Sea, which is azure; and sometimes one can make out as well, in the depths of the indigo sky, the carven phantoms of the Pyrenees.