while?

I SAW him first, my middle-aged man, one afternoon on the boards of an
improvised stage in the sand-dunes of Belgium. On that last thin strip
of the shattered kingdom English and French and Belgians were grimly
massed. He was a Frenchman, and he was cheering up his comrades. With
shining black hair and volatile face, he played many parts that day. He
recited sprightly verses of Parisian life. He carried on amazing
twenty-minute dialogues with himself, mimicking the voice of girl and
woman, bully and dandy. His audience had come in stale from the
everlasting spading and marching. They brightened visibly under his
gaiety. If he cared to make that effort in the saddened place, they
were ready to respond. When he dismissed them, the last flash of him was
of a smiling, rollicking improvisator, bowing himself over to the
applause till his black hair was level with our eyes.

And then next day as I sat in my ambulance, waiting orders, he trudged
by in his blue, "the color of heaven" once, but musty now from nights
under the rain. His head of hair, which the glossy black wig had
covered, was gray-white. The sparkling, pantomimic face had dropped into
wrinkles. He was patient and old and tired. Perhaps he, too, would have
been glad of some one to cheer him up. He was just one more
territorial--trench-digger and sentry and filler-in. He became for me
the type of all those faithful, plodding soldiers whose first strength
is spent. In him was gathered up all that fatigue and sadness of men for
whom no glamour remains.

They went past me every day, hundreds of them, padding down the Nieuport
road, their feet tired from service and their boots road-worn--crowds of
men beyond numbering, as far as one could see into the dry, volleying
dust and beyond the dust; men coming toward me, a nation of them. They
came at a long, uneven jog, a cluttered walk. Every figure was sprinkled
and encircled by dust--dust on their gray temples, and on their wet,
streaming faces, dust coming up in puffs from their shuffling feet, too
tired to lift clear of the heavy roadbed. There was a hot, pitiless sun,
and every man of them was shrouded in the long, heavy winter coat, as
soggy as a horse blanket, and with thick leather gaiters, loose,
flapping, swathing their legs as if with bandages. On the man's back was
a pack, with the huge swell of the blanket rising up beyond the neck and
generating heat-waves; a loaf of tough black bread fastened up