I led Poterloo away:  “You exaggerate, old chap; you’re getting absurd notions, come.”  We had walked very slowly and were still at the foot of the hill.  The fog was becoming like silver as it prepared for departure.  Sunshine was very near.

* * * * * *

Poterloo looked up and said, “We’ll go round by the Carency road and go in at the back.”  We struck off at an angle into the fields.  At the end of a few minutes he said to me, “I exaggerate, you think?  You say that I exaggerate?” He reflected.  “Ah!” Then he added, with the shaking of the head that had hardly left him all the morning, “What about it?  All the same, it’s a fact—­”

We climbed the slope.  The cold had become tepidity.  Arrived on a little plateau—­“Let’s sit here again before going in,” he proposed.  He sat down, heavy with the world of thought that entangled him.  His forehead was wrinkled.  Then he turned towards me with an awkward air, as if he were going to beg some favor:  “Tell me, mate, I’m wondering if I’m right.”

But after looking at me, he looked at everything else, as though he would rather consult them than me.

A transformation was taking place in the sky and on the earth.  The fog was hardly more than a fancy.  Distances revealed themselves.  The narrow plain, gloomy and gray, was getting bigger, chasing its shadows away, and assuming color.  The light was passing over it from east to west like sails.

And down there at our very feet, by the grace of distance and of light, we saw Souchez among the trees—­the little place arose again before our eyes, new-born in the sunshine!

“Am I right?” repeated Poterloo, more faltering, more dubious.

Before I could speak he replied to himself, at first almost in a whisper, as the light fell on him—­“She’s quite young, you know; she’s twenty-six.  She can’t hold her youth in, it’s coming out of her all over, and when she’s resting in the lamp-light and the warmth, she’s got to smile; and even if she burst out laughing, it would just simply be her youth, singing in her throat.  It isn’t on account of others, if truth were told; it’s on account of herself.  It’s life.  She lives.  Ah, yes, she lives, and that’s all.  It isn’t her fault if she lives.  You wouldn’t have her die?  Very well, what do you want her to do?  Cry all day on account of me and the Boches?  Grouse?  One can’t cry all the time, nor grouse for eighteen months.  Can’t be done.  It’s too long, I tell you.  That’s all there is to it.”

He stops speaking to look at the view of Notre-Dame-de-Lorette, now wholly illuminated.

“Same with the kid; when she found herself alongside a simpleton that doesn’t tell her to go and play with herself, she ends by wanting to get on his knee.  Perhaps she’d prefer that it was her uncle or a friend or her father—­perhaps—­but she tries it on all the same with the only man that’s always there, even if it’s a great hog in spectacles.