How long ago was that? I—.

“Captain!”

“What’s up?”

“Er ... nothing. I thought I had seen something.”

I don’t like Dutertre seeing things....

Of school, yes. When you are a little boy, in boarding school, they get you up too early. They get you up at six o’clock. It is cold. You rub your eyes, and you hate class long before the bell rings. You think how wonderful it would be if you were ill and were waking up in the infirmary, where the matron would be ready with a hot cup of camomile with lots of sugar in it. The infirmary becomes a kind of paradise in your mind.

I was like that; and naturally, the first time that I caught cold I coughed much more than was called for. And I awoke in the infirmary to the sound of the bell ringing for the others. But that bell punished me for cheating. It changed me into a wraith. It rang out the passing of living hours—hours of class with its austerity, of play-time with its tumult, of the refectory with its warmth. For those who were alive, who were not, like me, in the infirmary, it sounded the realities of an enviable existence filled with jubilations, disappointments, severities, triumphs. And I lay robbed, forgotten, sick of insipid camomiles, of the sweaty bed, the blank hours.

Nothing comes of a sortie you have got out of.

 

Of course there are days like this when a sortie brings no satisfaction. It is too evident that we are playing a game that we call war. We are playing Cops and Robbers. We are abiding scrupulously by the rules of conduct prescribed by the history books and the rules of tactics prescribed by the war manuals. Last night, for example, I drove up to the aerodrome in a motorcar. The sentry, obedient to the rules, presented his bayonet. My car might as easily have been a German tank. We are playing at presenting bayonets to German tanks. But the tanks are playing their own game.

How can we possibly be enthusiastic about these grim charades, in which we play the part of supernumeraries, when we are asked to play on till we are killed? Death is a bit too serious for a charade. Who can dress with enthusiasm for such a part? Nobody ... Even Hochedé who is a sort of saint, a man who has reached that state of permanent grace which surely is the final consummation of man—even Hochedé took refuge in silence. All of us dressed in silence, grumpily—and not because we were heroically modest. That grumpiness concealed no inner exaltation. It told its own story. And I knew what it meant. It was the grumpiness of an agent who is mystified by the instructions of an absentee owner, yet remains faithful to him.