sment and confusion.

Coming very close to him, I say loudly:

"Your comrades are calling you to dinner, my boy."

"Yes, yes," he replies, "but because they know I am deaf, they sometimes
try to play tricks on me."

His cheeks flush warmly as he makes this impromptu confidence. Then
he makes up his mind to sit down, after interrogating me with his most
affectionate smile.

X

Once upon a time, Paga would have been called un type; now he is un
numero. This means that he is an original, that his ways of considering
and practising life are unusual; and as life here is reduced entirely to
terms of suffering, it means that his manner of suffering differs from
that of other people.

From the very beginning, during those hard moments when the wounded
man lies plunged in stupor and self-forgetfulness, Paga distinguished
himself by some remarkable eccentricities.

Left leg broken, right foot injured, such was the report on Paga's
hospital sheet.

Now the leg was not doing at all well. Every morning, the good head
doctor stared at the swollen flesh with his little round discoloured
eyes and said: "Come, we must just wait till to-morrow." But Paga did
not want to wait.

Flushed with fever, his hands trembling, his southern accent exaggerated
by approaching delirium, he said, as soon as we came to see him.

"My wish, my wish! You know my wish, doctor."

Then, lower, with a kind of passion:

"I want you to cut it off, you know. I want you to cut this leg. Oh! I
shan't be happy till it is done. Doctor, cut it, cut it off."

We didn't cut it at all, and Paga's business was very successfully
arranged. I even feel sure that this leg became quite a respectable limb
again.

I am bound to say Paga understood that he had meddled with things which
did not concern him. He nevertheless continued to offer imperative
advice as to the manner in which he wished to be nursed.

"Don't pull off the dressings! I won't have it. Do you hear, doctor?
Don't pull. I won't have it."

Then he would begin to tremble nervously all over his body and to say:

"I am quite calm! Oh, I am really calm. See, Michelet, see, Brugneau, I
am calm. Doctor, see, I am quite calm."

Meantime the dressings were gradually loosening under a trickle of
water, and Paga muttered between his teeth:

"He's pulling, he's pulling.... Oh, the cruel man! I won't have it, I
won't have it."

Then suddenly, with flaming cheeks:

"That's right. That's right