e left shoulder.

The ward was full, I could not change the sergeant's place, and yet I
should have liked to let him be alone all day with his own pain.

Now Lecolle is better; he feels better without much exuberance, with a
seriousness which knows and foresees the bufferings of Fate.

Lecolle was a stenographer "in life." We are no longer "in life,"
but the good stenographer retains his principles. When his wounds are
dressed, he looks carefully at the little watch on his wrist. He moans
at intervals, and stops suddenly to say:

"It has taken fifty seconds to-day to loosen the dressings. Yesterday,
you took sixty-two seconds."

His first words after the operation were:

"Will you please tell me how many minutes I was unconscious?"

XII

I first saw Derancourt in the room adjoining the chapel. A band of
crippled men, returning from Germany after a long captivity, had just
been brought in there.

There were some fifty of them, all looking with delighted eyes at
the walls, the benches, the telephone, all the modest objects in this
waiting-room, objects which are so much more attractive under the light
of France than in harsh exile.

The waiting-room seemed to have been transformed into a museum of
misery: there were blind men, legless and armless men, paralysed men,
their faces ravaged by fire and powder.

A big fellow said, lifting his deformed arm with an effort:

"I tricked them; they thought to the end that I was really paralysed.
I look well, but that's because they sent us to Constance for the last
week, to fatten us up."

A dark, thin man was walking to and fro, towing his useless foot after
him by the help of a string which ran down his trouser leg; and he
laughed:

"I walk more with my fist than with my foot. Gentlemen, gentlemen, who
would like to pull Punch's string?"

All wore strange costumes, made up of military clothing and patched
civilian garments.

On a bench sat fifteen or twenty men with about a dozen legs between
them. It was among these that I saw Derancourt. He was holding his
crutches in one hand and looking round him, stroking his long fair
moustache absently.

Derancourt became my friend.

His leg had been cut off at the thigh, and this had not yet healed; he
had, further, a number of other wounds which had closed more or less
during his captivity.

Derancourt never talked of himself, much less of his misfortune. I knew
from his comrades that he had fought near Longw